http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/california-today-disneyland-marvel.html 2016-10-18 15:56:21 California Today: Disneyland Is Changing a Ride, and People Are Howling Tuesday: A ruckus breaks out over changes at the Disneyland Resort, bilingual education faces a test at the ballot box, and a look back at the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. === Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Let’s turn it over to A few years ago, Disneyland pruned some So imagine the din that has broken out around Disney’s plans to re-theme one of its most popular Anaheim rides. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a haunted 1930s-era hotel with wildly malfunctioning elevators, will close in January and “Un-called for and absurd” is how an online Save the Tower A tempest in a (spinning) teapot? Perhaps. There are sensible reasons for the overhaul. It’s about future plans to turn that entire corner of the two-park Disneyland Resort into a Marvel area. It’s about staying relevant; a vast majority of guests have no connection to “The Twilight Zone,” which was popular on CBS in the 1960s, but they do know “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which took in $773 million at the global box office in 2014. It’s about corporate synergy. Even so, the outcry says something interesting about the property’s relationship with locals and the challenges that Disney faces when making changes (rest assured, some people will yell, and they now have social media as a megaphone). Disney’s magic trick, of course, is to have it both ways: The company’s parks sell nostalgia, but they must also appeal to the Snapchat generation. As a Southern Californian with an annual Disneyland Resort pass, I think the “Galaxy of the Guardians” plans sound interesting. (For the record, the Tower of Terror will live on at Walt Disney World in Florida.) But consider this public advance notice, Disney: Mess with the • In 1998, voters in California restricted • Outbid, out-hustled, outmuscled: • Officials said a man wearing body armor tried to • Speaking in San Diego, the president of one of the nation’s largest police organizations apologized for the past • • Silicon Valley has • “It’s a domino effect for the rest of the nation”: What • • What does • Rainfall has brought the waterfalls back to life in On Monday, we asked readers where we should look for a reporting project on homeless encampments in California. Hundreds of ideas poured into our inbox. Among places mentioned up and down the state were Eureka, Santa Rosa, Modesto, Palm Springs, San Diego and, of course, various parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Megan Kreuz described tent cities in Oakland. “It’s intense and sad,” she wrote. “I wish our city could do more to help.” Kirk Davis said Redding had been “taken over” by homelessness: “Police and mental health services are completely overwhelmed.” And Jenoa Sandlin, who works with homeless veterans in Orange County, said many of her clients live in their cars and shower at gyms where they have memberships. “This is truly an invisible type of homelessness,” she wrote. We’d love to hear more. Tell us: Do you know how to “drop, cover and hold on”? On Thursday, more than 10 million Californians are expected to practice the drill in schools, offices and homes as part of an The timing is appropriate. It was this week in 1989 that the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, killing 63 people, injuring thousands and causing billion of dollars in damages. The shaking began at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, as Americans were tuning in to watch Game 3 of the World Series between the Bay Area rivals, the Giants and the Athletics, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. As a result, it became “probably one of the most watched natural disasters in American history,” said Art Agnos, San Francisco’s mayor at the time, in Perhaps most searing were The Loma Prieta earthquake registered a powerful 6.9 on the Richter scale. The catastrophe, along with the deadly Northridge Earthquake of 1994, also shook up the state’s political establishment. In the decades that followed, untold billions of dollars have been spent to fortify buildings, bridges, schools and other structures across the state. Today, experts say, California is the most earthquake-ready state. However, that doesn’t mean the preparation is adequate, they warn. A patchwork of retrofitting rules means thousands of older buildings have not been strengthened. And even the soundest buildings may prove no match for a monster quake. California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.