Major funding for KPBS Evening Edition has been made possible in part by Bill Howe family of companies providing San Diego with plumbing, heating, air restoration and flood services for over 45 years.

Call one 800 Bill Howe or visit Bill howe.com.

And by the Conrad Prebys Foundation.

Darlene Marcos Shiley and by the following.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Powerful waves are hitting Southern California.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm John Carroll in for Maya Trabulsi.

The conditions are fueled by Hurricane Genevieve, located off the west coast of Mexico.

KPBS video journalist Matthew Bowler says the surf and high temps could mean danger for swimmers.

And another busy week for lifeguards.

That's retired San Diego firefighter Ryan Ybarra shooting the Ocean Beach Pier.

It's a dangerous, illegal maneuver.

Yeah.

Don't do it.

Tell everyone not to do it.

The large, powerful swell hitting Southern California from Hurricane Genevieve makes it even more dangerous.

San Diego Lifeguard Chief James Gartland says south facing beaches like Windansea and blacks are seeing the most powerful swells and putting more pressure on San Diego's lifeguards.

Windansea for example, they made 107 rescues on Saturday last week.

So what we're looking at is 5 to 7ft of surf, maybe even eight nine feet.

That's Alex Tardy with weather echo.

He says not only are the waves big, but the coming heat wave could set records the whole entire southwest.

We could be seeing record high temperatures.

So we're talking maybe 115 in our deserts, perhaps even 120 hitting 120 in Palm Springs.

Chief Gartland says the heat could draw large crowds at San Diego's beaches this coming weekend.

He wants people to stay safe, swim at a beach with a lifeguard, swim in a designated swimming area.

And when you get to that beach, ask that lifeguard, where's a good, safe, good, safe place to swim?

And where should you go?

Ibarra says he's been surfing the ocean beach breaks since he could walk.

He warns new surfers to move further north, like, hey man, you're going to become a statistic.

And it's pretty gnarly out here.

Matthew Bowler, KPBS news.

Overnight lows still the upper 60s, but hey, it's not like the other night when we had a low of 70.

We're going to see the heat really crank up though for the rest of the week and through the weekend, I'll break down exactly what to expect, who has what types of heat alerts, and some other hazards that you need to keep an eye on.

Coming up, A sandag study that offers a glimpse of plans for redeveloping downtown la mesa's trolley station got the once over from the la mesa City Council Tuesday night.

KPBS East County reporter Elaine Alfaro has the details.

The trolley line that runs through La Mesa's downtown parallel to Spring Street, might someday tower above or burrow underground.

That's according to a sandag study that lays out options for future redevelopment.

It comes as the regional transportation agency expects trolley service to double over the next decade.

One possibility is an aerial design that puts the tracks above the city.

Another would put them below street level, and a third is a combo design that put some tracks at street level and others above.

The Sandag official at last night's meeting acknowledged that all of these options are still very much on the drawing board.

There's still a long path ahead and a lot more work to be done to any of these ideas forward.

They each come with high price tags.

Sandags estimated cost for the aerial design is about $569 million.

The below ground option would be almost $741 million.

Vice Mayor Loren Cazares made it clear the city will not be taking action any time soon.

I think it's great that we're looking into options, for the future.

That being said, I like with that price tag, obviously, it's not something that we're going to be moving on, right the second.

The next step is for the city to identify potential funding.

Mayor Mark Arapostathis said that could take a while.

We'll let our great grandchildren know about this.

Elaine Alfaro, KPBS News Elaine Alfaro focuses on stories in East County for KPBS.

You can find more from her at kpbs.org and on all of our platforms.

County health officials are getting the word out on a cluster of salmonella cases linked to a grocery store in the East County.

There are 13 confirmed and probable cases since June 21st.

All are traced back to Ramona Family's natural market.

The county says four people have been hospitalized.

They believe the cases involve mayonnaise that was made with raw, unpasteurized eggs.

The county says the market's owner is working with them and has stopped using the eggs in its deli products.

A person was shot by San Diego police this morning in San Ysidro.

This is video from our news partner, KGTV.

Happened around seven on Del Sur Boulevard.

SDPD says the initial call was about a car theft.

Police say the wounded person was sitting in the passenger seat of a car that drove in the direction of an officer.

That's when the shooting occurred.

The person is expected to survive.

A second person in the car was detained.

And anti-theft system is supposed to make your car safer from thieves.

But researchers at UC San Diego found a glitch in one local system that could affect millions of cars in Southern California.

KPBS North County reporter Alexander Nguyen has tips on how to reset the system, to be sure it's working properly.

Imagine parking your car in a secure location with the doors locked, with an anti-theft system activated and returning to find the door open and your belongings gone.

Or even worse, your car stolen.

That's a possibility if you have the Karr security systems installed.

About half of the people that have it installed don't actually know that they have it in their car.

UC San Diego computer science professor Aaron Schulman and his team discovered the vulnerability in 2018.

They were studying card skimming technology that thiefs were using and found something was off.

They were using Bluetooth actually to pull the credit card numbers from these skimmers.

So we were actually searching all around for them, and we found both these skimmers and this weird device that was becoming super prominent starting in 2017.

It took a few years before researchers found the source.

This is actually an alarm system or a security system that is actually deployed in vehicles.

Nishant Bhaskar is the coauthor on the study.

He says it was not just a few cars, but millions of cars in Southern California.

And the Bluetooth signal was coming from Carlsbad based Karr Security Systems.

It's an alarm installed in cars sold at most dealerships throughout Southern California.

We reverse engineer the application that is used by the company to access these cars.

With that, they were able to lock, unlock the car and honk the horns even while someone was driving the car.

They were able to do that because Karr security uses a universal key to access its system.

It would be like using one, two, three, four as your passcode.

That essentially made it so that we could create a another version of that app ourselves, and use that to unlock every single vehicle that has the security system.

This problem affects more than 2 million cars, but in dealerships like this one.

Whether you opt to have that system activated or not.

This is one of the biggest vulnerabilities of a Bluetooth device that has ever happened in terms of scale.

After being contacted by UCSD Karr studied the issue and made adjustments.

In a statement, the company says the vulnerability presented is highly complex and presents a low risk to consumers.

To install the patch, user needs to download the Car Security app to see if your vehicle is affected.

Check for the sticker with the words Karr or SWDS on your window, or look for this device under the dash.

Alexander Nguyen, KPBS news.

The Navy decommissioned the USS Fort Worth today in San Diego after just 14 years.

The ship served only half its expected lifespan.

KPBS military reporter Andrew Dyer says design flaws led to reliability issues.

Naval Base San Diego is the only place the USS Fort Worth has been in almost five years.

Design flaws in the ship's engineering system too expensive to repair, also doomed several other littoral combat ships early.

The Fort Worth entered service in 2012.

It's the eighth littoral combat ship to decommission early.

Commander Dana Canby is the ship's last captain.

He says despite its short life, the Fort Worth was one of the first littoral combat ships to really open the Pacific.

We're the first one that made port visits to Vietnam.

We are the first ones to test overseas, maintenance and repair practices in Japan and in Singapore.

And so, as the Navy really explored the, multi crew concept, we helped shape a lot of that doctrine for the Navy, sir.

Despite being stuck, pier side can be says the crew of his ship were able to deploy on other ships on the waterfront.

They were able to earn qualifications and advance in their careers.

You do not join the Navy to decommission ships.

You join the Navy to take ships to sea.

Dignitaries at Wednesday's ceremony talked about the ship's close relationship with its namesake city.

The Navy brought several Fort Worth Bay sailors to San Diego for the occasion.

Like Petty Officer First Class Selina Dickinson, the Navy reservist, says she comes to San Diego often for her drill duties, duties that included time on the Fort Worth.

I've enjoyed working with them, and they have truly shown, you know, the camaraderie as being from Fort Worth.

So it's been a great time working with them.

She says she's sad to see the ship go, but happy that its crew will be able to continue on other vessels.

It's kind of poignant.

I think it is a little sad that, you know, they're being decommissioned.

And like I said, as part of the Fort Worth culture and community, it's bittersweet.

But, you know, it comes with the territory.

The ship will transfer to the Navy's mothball fleet in Bremerton, Washington, where it will be useful to other ships as a source of spare parts.

Andrew Dyer, KPBS news.

State officials were sued this week after changing language for a ballot initiative that would create stricter voter ID rules.

Public matters reporter Kevin Trevellyn and says that's fairly common in California.

Proposition 39 would require Californians to show a government issued ID when casting a ballot in person, or provide the last four digits of an ID number when voting by mail.

Republican San Diego Assembly member Carl DeMaio is a leading supporter of the initiative, which will be on the November ballot.

But he recently told Kcra three that a state official rewrote the initiative's title in summary, to, quote, rig the process so that voters are confused and are prejudiced against voting for the initiative.

Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta's office initially stated the proposition, quote, establishes additional voter identification and citizenship verification requirements.

But earlier this month, they changed that language to.

This prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government issued identification.

A pro voter ID group filed suit Monday saying the new language is misleading and should be changed before the state Prints of Voter Information Guide.

So the attorney general has the first word on this, but not the last words.

Thad Kousser is a political scientist at UC San Diego.

He says California invites these lawsuits by having a Partizan elected official write ballot language that the proponents are saying that, hey, that attorney general is in the other party, they don't like my policy, and they're making the charge that that attorney general is, is is writing, writing an initiative, language summary that, that that puts a barrier in the way to, to adopting this initiative.

Political science studies have shown that the way an initiative is phrased can impact whether voters support it.

So these these court battles, are there are high stakes to them because, because there are there are instances in which that language can matter.

Still, Kousser says well funded outreach campaigns can make the language itself less significant to the outcome of an election.

California consistently tops other states and initiative spending.

And there's a lot of evidence voters are much more.

When they have an initiative that's high spending, they're much more engaged with it.

They're much more informed about it and much more able to cast a ballot that, that connects their, their beliefs with, and their values with that initiative.

So you'll likely see plenty of ads tied to prop 39 this fall as the general election approaches.

Kevin Trevellyn, KPBS news.

Robo taxis are coming to San Diego.

They already operate in other California cities, but there's still work to be done writing their rules of the road.

San Francisco is one of the cities where companies like Waymo are operating.

Leaders there are lending support to a federal bill that would require some safety measures.

Those include a 24 hour hotline to communicate with companies during an emergency, and automatic detours around known emergency situations.

Here's Congressman Kevin Mullin, along with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.

This is an attempt for the federal government to engage on the issue and develop some uniform standards and protocols across the country.

That really puts the onus on these companies to do the right thing.

It would also help ensure that Avs can respond appropriately when streets closed, traffic patterns change, signals fail, or first responders need immediate access.

Waymo says it supports the legislation.

Its vehicles are already being tested in San Diego, with service to the public expected to begin in the coming months.

AAA says local gas prices have jumped every day for the past two weeks now, at an average of $5.72 a gallon.

Prices have been elevated for the past few years, recently driven by conflict in the Middle East.

And yet fewer drivers are choosing to buy electric vehicles.

Ivan Rodriguez looks into what might be keeping demand low.

What could explain the recent slump of EV sales in America?

Part of the reason a rush to buy EVs last year, before the federal $7,500 tax credit expired last October, which inflated that comparison point and distorted the drop off that followed.

Looking to the second quarter, though, sales are actually up 15% and used EVs just hit a record, according to Cox Automotive.

So I think we're getting close to really kind of getting to that bottom and figuring out what that natural demand is.

It's not just the tax credit, either, halted by the federal government.

The Trump administration also scrapped financial penalties for automakers who violated emission rules, which had pushed automakers toward building more EVs.

Legacy automakers have taken tens of billions of dollars in charges against their earnings over the last year to downgrade EV production plans.

Even Tesla, the lone automaker that made a profit selling EVs to Americans, now seems more interested in creating humanoid robots than cars.

I think all those things really had manufacturers step back and say, okay, what makes sense?

We need to be profitable.

How should we shift our timeline?

In addition, we're starting to see consumers buy traditional hybrids.

How can we make our powertrain more flexible so that we can easily adjust to consumer demand depending on the powertrain?

Sales continue to rise in the rest of the world, most prominently in China, but also in Europe.

Most other countries still have EV incentives, and drivers there pay higher prices for gasoline or diesel.

I'm Ivan Rodriguez reporting.

KPBS has a special series all about how we're using technology, especially when it comes to young people.

It's called Screen Time.

You can find the series at kpbs.org.

And as a podcast, the series focuses on the challenges around raising kids in the age of smartphones.

A new episode was posted this week to the KPBS YouTube page.

The use of AI is another thorny tech issue.

One example is playing out at a prestigious university in Mexico.

There are questions over how AI might have been used by students for an entrance exam.

As Valeria Leone reports, Mexico's president is now weighing in on the controversy.

This is one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious universities.

I'm at Mexico's National autonomous university, UNAM.

That's now at the center of a growing controversy over alleged AI cheating on their admissions exams for the first time in the university's history.

The entrance exam was taken online instead than in person, and after the results were released, many rejected students who start complaining about this unusually high scores.

The accusation have sparked protests by students and parents demanding a full investigation.

Even Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, urged UNAM to conduct a full investigation.

In an unprecedented move, UNAM announced it will review the exam results before confirming the final admissions list.

The decision comes just two weeks before classes are scheduled to begin, leaving thousands of students uncertain about whether they'll be admitted.

How does this decision affect you?

More than 150,000 people took the exam, but only 15% secured a place.

The UNAM is a tuition free public university, often seen as a life changing opportunity for many young Mexicans.

Valerio Leon, CNN, Mexico City.

Well, the heat is on as high pressure moves right back in the next couple of days, but we also have some high surf to talk about, so could see some coastal flooding because of that.

And then along the coast with night and morning low clouds.

So it's not just the heat that we have to think about.

Let's talk about everything kind of step by step here.

So overall overnight lows 75 in Burgo Springs 65 for Mount Laguna which is the same in Oceanside, a few degrees warmer in San Diego and Chula Vista.

As we take you to our highs for tomorrow, 112 in Borrego Springs we're in the 80s in Mount Laguna, mid 90s for Ramona, pushing 90 in Escondido and then upper 70s along the coast there.

Now here's our heat alerts.

A lot of us under that extreme heat warning going into effect Thursday morning, lasting all the way through the day on Monday.

Those of you under the heat advisory, it's the same messaging, it's different levels of heat alerts but saying about the same thing.

It's dangerous heat.

And for some of you this is even going to break record highs.

So make sure you are staying hydrated.

You are keeping up with the electrolytes, getting in the shade as much as you can, getting the air conditioning as much as you can.

If you have to be outside for extended periods of time, then there's the high surf advisory.

This is through 5 p.m.

on Saturday, so keep that in mind for everybody along the coast here going all the way up through Santa Monica, but Chula Vista, San Diego, Oceanside, everybody included in this.

We're talking 5 to 8ft, waves at certain points.

All right.

Taking a look at our five day outlook overall well we get back into the 80s by Friday along the coast, 83 Saturday.

And then we start to take our way down degree by degree as we head into next week.

Further inland.

89 for your Thursday 96 by the time we get to Saturday and then some gradual cooling.

So it's continuing that roller coaster that we've been on the last couple of weeks, all because of that high pressure expanding, shrinking, strengthening, weakening, shifting to the east, shifting to the west.

You know, the drill in the summer into our mountain regions.

81 for your Thursday.

We get to the mid 80s Saturday and Sunday and then cool down a little bit for your Monday and then into the desert.

I mean, it's a couple degrees, but 112 115 we're just getting hotter and hotter.

We cool it back down to 110 by Monday.

But I don't know.

Do you notice the difference between 115 and 110?

If you're saying yes, then great.

Look forward to Monday for KPBS news.

I'm Accuweather's Anna Azallion.

This week we got early polling on the 48th district congressional race in East County.

You can read more about it at kpbs.org.

The race is getting attention beyond San Diego.

Our public media partner, KQED, touched on the race and what it means for control of Congress.

Here's more from them.

There is another district you did look at two down in San Diego.

This is Republican San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond versus San Diego City Council member Marni von Wilpert.

Wilpert is the Democrat Desmond's the Republican similar finding in that race.

Although this this is an open seat.

So it was a more, you know, competitive primary, I would say, for both Republicans and Democrats.

So Maya Desmond does have more money in the bank, right?

But von Wilpert did have a more, you know, serious challenge on her flank.

Oh, yeah.

She had a great fundraising quarter this quarter.

I think I was just looking at my story.

I think it was 3 to 1 that she out fundraise.

Desmond, even though she was locked in a pretty, at times gnarly primary fight with, her opponent, Amar Campanajar.

A three time, you know, attempted candidate in this district.

And I think this I was going to say loser.

But then I thought, you know, maybe I should be nice.

But, no, she had a great fundraising quarter.

And if I, if I were her team, you know, I would be touting that, you know, up and down all all over my, my press releases.

Which have been and we should say, you know, both of these districts were shored up for Democrats under proposition 50, another one that was really, shored up and is considered solidly Democratic is up near Sacramento, where sitting Republican Representative Kevin Kiley became an independent.

Right.

He was a representative for, Republican.

He became an independent.

He moved to districts.

He's trying to hang on.

I thought it was really interesting that he's far outraised his Democratic opponent, Doctor Richard Pan.

I mean, this is a district Harris won by seven.

It has.

Democrats had a plus five advantage.

And the current, configuration.

Does Kiley have any chance here?

Let me put it this way.

If Democrats are losing districts that Kamala Harris won by seven points, it's time to put the bag on your head.

It's the old New Orleans Saints fan paper bag over your head like I, I think just from talking to folks in both parties, it's really in California down to like a three district, three competitive district when you're really talking about like the map for November, it's the 13th district in Merced and Modesto with Adam Gray, Kevin Lincoln, it's the Valadao district and Bakersfield.

And then then it's the one you just mentioned, the 48th district, in San Diego and Palm Springs.

Like, that's really where the energy is going to be in a really consolidated battlefield.

Like, I think we can't say this enough.

This is not no matter how views are on Trump, this is not 2018 like Democrats are not no matter how good their night is, they're not winning 40 seats like I think, both because of the math and because of how unpopular the Democrats are, just writ large, even among their own voters.

I think it's redistricting.

Yeah, it's the fact that, like Democrats have won the districts where people don't like Trump, they've won the suburban districts where people, Mitt Romney voters, have turned against Trump.

The map of what they're actually fighting for is so much smaller.

I've gone back to this stat from Cook Political Report that I absolutely love Democrats.

In 2006 big wave election, they win 31 seats, 2018 big wave election they win 41 seats.

So 31 seats, 41 seats.

This year, if they won every single district that Trump won by less than ten points, which is not happening.

That would be like the most amazing night ever.

They'd win 28 seats.

So the ceiling is just so much lower for Democrats this year, and it's why there really will have to be, I think, from party leadership expectation setting, what is a great night.

It's probably ten maybe 15 pick up.

So it's just a very different year.

That was a portion of the latest episode of Political Breakdown from KQED, the Bay area's public media station.

Find more of their work at KQED.org, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Of course, you can find tonight's stories on our website, kpbs.org.

Thank you so much for joining us, everybody.

I'm John Carroll.

Have yourself a great evening.

Major funding for KPBS Evening Edition has been made possible in part by Bill Howe, family of companies providing San Diego with plumbing, heating, air restoration and flood services for over 45 years.

Call one 800 Bill Howe or visit Bill howe.com.

And by the Conrad Prebys Foundation, Darlene Marcos Shiley and by the following.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.