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The cross on this hilltop is the fourth one to stand here. The first three all came to bad ends. 🌅

A wooden cross went up in 1913. It was stolen in 1923, reinstalled, and then burned. Its sturdier replacement, a stucco-over-wood structure from 1934, was knocked flat by windstorms in 1952. The one standing now was dedicated in 1954 and designed by architect Donald Campbell to outlast both weather and vandals: 29 feet of prestressed concrete with a 12-foot arm spread, mounted on a 14-foot base — 43 feet in all.

What most visitors don't realize is that nearly everything else up here is much younger. Beginning in the 1990s, the Mount Soledad Memorial Association built six concentric walls of black granite radiating out from the base. They now carry more than 1,700 plaques honoring individual veterans, and new ones are still being added.

The hill also spent 27 years in court. Litigation that began in 1989 finally ended after the memorial association purchased the land and the cross from the Department of Defense in July 2015 for $1.4 million, resolving the constitutional question by taking the ground private. The case formally closed in September 2016.

Best view in La Jolla, and the most argued-over acre in the county.

San Diego's first freeway was deliberately built to be beautiful, and that decision is the only reason Highway 163 still looks like this. 🌿

Construction started in 1942 and the road opened in 1948 as part of U.S. 395 — the first freeway in San Diego County and one of the first in California. But through Balboa Park the engineers didn't cut a trench. They built to parkway standards: two roadways drifting apart at slightly different elevations, long gentle curves, rounded curbs, no billboards, and eucalyptus closing overhead into a green tunnel.

The bridge crossing high above it is older than the road by more than thirty years. The Cabrillo Bridge was completed in 1914 for the Panama-California Exposition — seven arches, a 450-foot main span, standing about 120 feet above the canyon floor, and the first multiple-arched cantilever bridge built in California. Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, made the inaugural crossing.

So for thirty-four years those arches spanned a canyon with no freeway under them at all. In 2002 the state designated the Balboa Park stretch a California Historic Parkway, which is why, to this day, nobody can hang a sign on it.

Most cities paved their prettiest canyon. San Diego paved it carefully.

An off-duty sheriff's office K-9 has died after running from fireworks and getting hit by a vehicle that fled the scene in Clovis, California, on Saturday night. K-9 Santi was a five-year-old Belgian Malinois who served with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office for four years. https://abc7news.com/story/sheriffs-office-9-killed-hit-run-being-spooked-fireworks/19458566/

Trump says 500,000 children receive first $1,000 Trump account deposits
Source: Reuters

Trump says 500,000 children receive first $1,000 Trump account deposits - NewsBreak WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Monday the government had deposited the first $1,000 into more than 500,000 "Trump Accounts,"