Daily Business Report: Thursday, December 4, 2025
By Ash Sanders | The Believer
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you, rows of broccoli, lettuce, and alfalfa stretch in every direction. In the fields, farmworkers bend and straighten. The air is sharp with cow dung. A pall of dust hangs over everything.
You are sixty miles north of the Mexican border at Calexico. If you keep going, the landscape will transition from fields to palm trees. You’re driving out of poverty and into money, away from one of the poorest counties in California and toward towns with golf courses and named for oases. Palm Springs. Rancho Mirage.
The left turn is easy to miss, the brown sign a seeming anachronism. BOMBAY BEACH. Surely there is no town here, you think, let alone a beach. But if you continue, you’ll see hints of life. There are saplings on the side of the road—not much to look at yet but there all the same. In the distance, a squat building hangs on under the punishing sun. THE SKI INN, it says on the ’70s-era marquee. LOWEST BAR IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Indeed, you are 223 feet below sea level here, in a depression known as the Salton Sink.
Look up Thursday night to see final ‘supermoon’ of 2025
By Chris Jennewein | Times of San Diego
Thursday night in San Diego.
The Moon will rise at 3:28 p.m., before it’s dark, and be clearly visible in the eastern sky after sunset at 4:42 p.m.
The National Weather Service forecast calls for partly cloudy conditions along the coast in inland, but clear skies over the mountains and deserts.
Firing of Longtime Einstein Principal Sparks Backlash Among Charter’s Community
By Jakob McWhinney | Voice of San Diego
On Monday night, dozens of families, current and even former staff showed up dressed in black for an emergency meeting of the Albert Einstein Academies board – a two-school charter network. It was a vigil of sorts.
Days earlier, Greta Bouterse was unceremoniously fired. Bouterse worked at Einstein for 23 years – about half of that time as principal of the network’s elementary school. For many, confusion about why Bouterse was fired has compounded the anger.
The charter schools’ leadership says she was fired because, unbeknownst to them, she never held an administrative credential that was a requirement for the job.
