Today’s Headlines: New shows’ triumphs give the Emmys a pulse

By Elvia Limón and Jason Sanchez

Hello, it’s Tuesday, Sept. 13, and here are the stories you shouldn’t miss today:

TOP STORIES

It was a good night for HBO at the 74th Emmy Awards

Times reporters flooded the zone to cover the biggest night in television. HBO was the big winner, with 11 Emmys including best drama for “Succession.” There were also victories for “Ted Lasso,” “Ozark” and “Saturday Night Live.” But, writes TV critic Lorraine Ali, it was the triumph of new shows such as “Abbott Elementary,” “Squid Game” and “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” that gave the ceremony a pulse and showed the way forward.

Here’s the list of winners.

Among memorable moments: “Abbott Elementary” star Sheryl Lee Ralph — also a Tony-nominated singer — sang a powerful impromptu rendition of Dianne Reeves’ “Endangered Species.” And “The White Lotus” star Jennifer Coolidge danced off Emmys’ attempt to play her off stage.

More on the 2022 Emmys

• The Emmy Awards telecast might have been pushed a night from its usual Sunday time slot, but the looks that came across the gold-colored carpet made it well worth the wait.
• Who was the person behind the voice announcing the different categories and presenters? That would be comedian and writer Sam Jay, Kenan Thompson’s “Saturday Night Live” colleague.
• “Squid Game” made history multiple times over at the Emmys. It was the first Korean series, and the first TV series not in English, to win a major Primetime Emmy Award.
  

Illegal weed shops are booming in plain sight

The continuing success of illegal cannabis shops and the struggles of legal ones in the heart of L.A.’s Eastside offers a stark illustration of how California’s legalization of marijuana has gone wrong. Far from being eradicated, the black market is booming in plain sight, luring customers away from aboveboard retailers with their cheaper — if untested and unregulated — product.

Unlicensed dispensaries have become hotbeds of crime. Sometimes the operators are the perpetrators, authorities say, selling cocaine and methamphetamine alongside cannabis. At other times, they are the victims. In August 2021, a man was gunned down in the doorway of the illegal dispensary he ran in East Los Angeles.

Authorities have made little progress in curbing the cannabis black market. Prosecutions are rare, according to court records, and shop employees say some dispensaries don’t even wait a day to reopen after being shut down by the police.

L.A. County reported the nation’s first confirmed MPX death

A Los Angeles County resident has died from MPX — the nation’s first confirmed fatality linked to the disease, public health officials said. Officials publicly reported the death Thursday but said the precise cause was as yet undetermined. Further investigation by county and federal health agencies found the death was from MPX, also known as monkeypox. Another possible fatality due to the disease was reported in Texas in late August, but officials there have not definitively stated that MPX was the cause.

More about MPX

• The virus has wreaked financial havoc on workers who have little paid time off to recover. Healing can take weeks — much longer than the three days of sick leave that California generally requires from employers.

The White House is warning against declaring Ukrainian victory prematurely

Biden administration officials are attempting to tamp down overly optimistic expectations following Ukraine’s significant gains against Russia in recent days. Ukraine claims to have retaken thousands of square miles of Russian-occupied territory in an offensive that began last week. Moscow acknowledged a “regrouping,” which others saw as a retreat.

But in Washington, Pentagon, White House and State Department officials urged caution. They were reluctant to endorse a Ukrainian sense of triumph this early in the battle. U.S. officials said the back-and-forth trade of gains and retreats by Russians and Ukrainians was likely to continue despite the Ukrainian push.

More politics

• Ukraine scored its biggest victories in months in the country’s northeast. But can that help break a bloody stalemate?
• Former President Trump’s legal team said in a court filing that classified materials should not be excluded from the special master’s review of documents found during an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate.
• A high-level United States delegation invited Mexico to participate in a push to shift semiconductor production from Asia to North America and expand the production of electric vehicles.

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

That’s dinner? Grasshoppers jump around after sunrise. Read: “Are grasshoppers as delicious as ham? Mexico’s insect hunters would like you to find out.”

(Luis Antonio Rojas / For The Times)

CALIFORNIA

Few people are going to L.A. cooling centers. Why? To address scorching heat, the city opened up nine cooling centers with extended hours, later adding two more. But only about 2,256 Angelenos visited between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9 — about 21 visitors per center per day. Homelessness advocates and politicians said that lack of need wasn’t the reason centers weren’t being used; they say there aren’t enough centers or ways for people to get to them.

Nine French bulldog puppies were stolen from a Northridge home. The owner said he left the puppies at his home with a friend Sunday afternoon when two masked men entered the residence and stole the dogs, according to the LAPD. Bulldogs, especially French bulldogs, have soared in popularity in recent years. The high demand for the dogs has made them more prone to theft in California and across the country, as they can go for a steep price on the black market.

A judge denied a hospital release for the nurse in the deadly Windsor Hills crash. The woman charged in the crash poses a threat to public safety and must continue to be held in jail as her case moves forward, an L.A. County Superior Court judge ruled. The decision came after Nicole Linton’s attorneys argued that their client — who is charged with six counts of murder — should be moved to UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where they said she could be further evaluated for mental health issues and possible epilepsy.

Rapper PnB Rock was fatally shot during a robbery at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. Rock, 30, whose real name was Rakim Allen, had been at the restaurant with his girlfriend, who’d posted a location-tagged photo in a since-deleted Instagram post. Sources told The Times that Rock was targeted for his jewelry.

NATION-WORLD

Pakistan’s prime minister says his flooded country is facing food shortages. Flooding left the impoverished country’s agriculture belt underwater, says Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif. More than 660,000 people, including women and children, are living at relief camps and in makeshift homes after being displaced by the floods.

A second Alex Jones trial is set to begin. A jury will begin hearing evidence today to decide how much conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should pay the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for calling the massacre a hoax, since he already has been found liable for damages to them. Last month, a Texas jury ordered Jones to pay $49.3 million to the parents of one of the students killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn. Jones’ lawyer has said an appeal is planned.

Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz suffered fetal alcohol damage, a psychologist said. Attorneys for Florida school shooter Cruz began building their case that his birth mother’s alcohol abuse left him with severe behavioral problems that eventually led to his 2018 murder of 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

A comedic match made in heaven. Comedy can be cruelly fleeting; one generation’s belly laugh is often the next one’s blank stare. But Steve Martin and Martin Short, now in their 70s, have become hot again. The two were each nominated for an Emmy for their Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building.”

Don’t expect political debates on “Sherri.” Instead, “The View” alum Sherri Shepherd is offering lighter fare and leaning into her stand-up comedy background. Her new series premiered on Fox and in syndication, taking over the long-held time slot of “The Wendy Williams Show,” which she guest hosted since last year when the titular host stepped away amid health concerns.

Stagecoach announced its 2023 festival lineup. The annual country music festival at Indio’s Empire Polo Club will star Luke Bryan, Kane Brown and Chris Stapleton.

BUSINESS

After California’s new fast-food labor law was signed, the opposition cranked up. A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Labor Day signing of AB 257, which could raise the minimum wage for franchise restaurant workers as high as $22 next year, critics filed a referendum seeking to block it until the matter could be put before voters. The International Franchise Assn. and the National Restaurant Assn. have spearheaded a renewed effort to block AB 257 from taking effect.

OPINION

What can save restaurants? Try hospitality. Despite the myriad suggestions for saving indoor restaurant dining, somebody forgot to mention hospitality, the unquantifiable element that attracts us to one food palace or neighborhood joint or food truck over another. Hospitality is a relationship, not a delivery system, and the quicker we all step up, customers and employees alike, the better things will be for our favorite restaurants.

SPORTS

USC’s Brett Neilon keeps it cool. There’s a reason USC offensive line coach Josh Henson calls four-year starting center Brett Neilon “Mr. Steady.” As the team struggled to win games, the offensive lineman dutifully and consistently met with reporters after each game, absorbing questions about the latest blowout and trying to make sense of the inexplicable fall of Trojan football. In his final season with the Trojans, Neilon hopes to make the last turn of his roller-coaster college career a great one.

The Rams and Matthew Stafford are still sore from their opener, and now the line has to shuffle. The seven sacks Rams quarterback Stafford took in the season-opening 31-10 loss to the Buffalo Bills should not faze the 34-year-old as he prepares to play against the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday at SoFi Stadium. But Stafford’s rebound attempt will come behind an offensive line reconfigured because of injuries. Not an ideal situation for the defending Super Bowl champions.

ONLY IN L.A.

A postcard, with a 1903 postmark, from Patt Morrison’s collection shows a family on its farm in Hynes.

Where did L.A.’s phantom towns vanish to? Some were actual burgs that grew and dwindled, were annexed or swallowed up, writes Times columnist Patt Morrison. Some were “dream towns” imagined by real estate developers, planned and platted and sold, but never born. Bearing some fanciful names like Ivanhoe and Wahoo, some were sold off with hopes and prices higher than their survival odds. Others were peddled almost as cynically as Florida swamplands: “ocean view” cities nearly 30 miles from the ocean, and other “view” towns whose vistas were desert desolation.

Patt tells the stories of several of those towns, including Hynes. “The onetime town of Hynes is now the city of Paramount — well, half of it. Hynes was a riverside dairy town and — hard as it is to believe now — the hay capital of the world, at least by bragging measurement. With the neighboring town of Clearwater, it threw annual hay and dairy festivals.”

FROM THE ARCHIVES

The park includes a lighthouse, built in 1870. Point Reyes is the second foggiest place in North America, after Grand Banks, Newfoundland.

(Vani Rangachar / Los Angeles Times)

Sixty years ago today, Point Reyes National Seashore was established. The Times wrote in 2016 that “without the designation, the peninsula here … may not have fared as well as it has,” considering that it is less than 50 miles from the Bay Area and its about 8 million people. President Kennedy signed the bill designating it as a park service seashore on Sept. 13, 1962.

“Winter is peak season for birds at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco,” The Times wrote in 2002. “Drakes Estero, a multi-fingered bay, is patrolled by canvasback, ruddy and American wigeon ducks. Great blue herons, willets, godwits and other shorebirds feed along the mudflats. Scores of white pelicans visit annual near the mouth of the bay.” Offshore waters, protected by two national marine sanctuaries, draw seals, whales and other creatures.

Drought has affected the park in recent years. A wildfire struck the park in 2020, and one-third of its tule elk population died over the 2020 winter. Activists stepped up demands for the removal of an 8-foot-high fence that keeps the elk off cattle ranches and, they said, cuts them off from sources of water.

Times staff writer Amy Hubbard contributed to this report.

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