It doesn’t seem that long ago.

It all began one early fall morning on a street corner in Hollywood, our camera’s across the street from Paramount Studios as writers hit the picket lines. At the time, no one could have known that 100 days, 37,000 jobs and more than 2-billion dollars later, the strike would be over. We mentioned at the time the possibility that actors may be in the same situation, now we have arrived at the time.

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The issue seems simple, but there’s a bit of a curve ball involved. Simply put, the actors want future and new media rights and compensation, more money for actors making less than $100,000 a year and a stronger pension. Negotiations with SAG (The Screen Actors Guild) are going nowhere, but the other and smaller actors union AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), has signed a deal that is currently being voted on. SAG leaders are urging people to oppose the deal because they feel a better deal can be reached. Currently 44,000 men and women are members of both unions, with results of the vote expected in about 7 days.

Meantime, the SAG contract expires tonight and leaders say they haven’t even called for a strike vote yet. Studio heads at this point say television production will go on and movies are wrapping up. Will new ones begin to shoot?

How long will shows shoot without a contract? Can the two unions work together? All these questions and many others are yet to be answered. Some actors are already taking sides, while others like George Clooney are calling for unity.

So today, we sit in Culver City. Sony Studios seems busy as normal, but the looming possibility of a strike has everyone passing by asking us what we think will happen and others worry about another stoppage and more lost wages…within the industry and many jobs indirectly supported on the outside.

Secession isn’t being taken lightly in these parts.  Usually the topic here involves whether the mercury hits 120 or not, but not these days.

Nestled in the Mojave desert, Needles is rimmed by the Colorado River and Interstate 40. A short drive away sits the boomtowns of Laughlin Nevada and Bullhead City Arizona. I got here in a roundabout way.

The crew came out early to attend a city council meeting on he possible secession, I flew into Las Vegas and then drove the 97 miles across pure blankness. In fact, the drive may have lasted less than two hours, but it felt like it took a day.

The heat sears the through the air conditioning and even though I am inside the car, I can easily tell the desert outside bakes. The sand across the stretch reminds me of Kuwait in some ways. A white dirty type of sand with little or low vegetation. A warm wind blows across this hardened land with little to stop it. As I come down the hill into Laughlin and cross the Colorado, the oasis is only a couple of streets deep and lines the river on both sides. The water here moves swift and down the road in Needles, boats stop their engines and float at a good clip in the crisp and swift river waters.

We’ve come here because some people in Needles California want to become Needles Nevada, or even Needles Arizona. They feel because the county seat is more than 200 miles away and the Grand Canyon and Silver State’s are so close, it might be better to move. Regulation across the river is easier, taxes are lower and other communities are booming…while Needles just nestles.

Of course secession is unlikely, but maybe it’ll at least get Arnold to town, or some pro growth help to get this western outpost back in the game. Here are some pictures of the area and a video explanation/interview/Adamreport.

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Because of the fires I didn’t get to post the ‘Sports on Sunday’ feature, so bear with me while I reminisce a bit. It still seems like just yesterday, walking into the hallowed grounds, bag thrown over my shoulder and dreams of a championship in our eyes.

We had gone on an incredible run, entering the series with a 44-11 record, with many of those losses close games. Ranked third in the country, Pepperdine got seeded third in a regional. A slap in the face and just another motivation for us because that meant the NCAA had put at least 16 teams ahead of us and we were ranked third in the country. We came to Omaha and they seeded us 7th…another affront.

Matched up against perennial powerhouse Wichita State, we shut em down and then went on to sweep through Omaha. I have so many memories. For example, once we beat the ‘Shockers’ the people of Nebraska jumped on board, joining the mom’s, dad’s and grads who had made the trek half way across country to root for the little school that could. We weren’t supposed to be there….”a nice program on the west coast, but not a national champion”, as one coach had said. Despite all the opposition, we knocked em out with some of the most memorable moments in series history. Pilling up on the mound will forever be etched in my mind, as will getting drenched in the bull pen while warming up against the Texas Longhorns.

The Lone Star faithful loved to toss the peanuts and drinks over the side of the wall as I got ready for games 2 and 3. I also learned to tell every college kid I know who plays the game….if you are blessed enough to win it all….don’t be one of the first to the mound, you’ll end up on the bottom of the pile….I know from experience. It hurts. Go Dogs!! (Can’t go wrong with this one, both Fresno and Georgia have the same nicknames!)

Here is a video I found online, you can see me grab my bag out of the bus. Yep…..that was a few years ago. #40

THE LATEST UPDATE….BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEO 

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Sunday afternoon/Evening update

The smoke has filled the Suisun Valley, so thick that we are now wearing face masks and periodically flying embers get into my eyes. We are now going to move about 4 miles or so to our west, over to Green valley Road where the fire is now headed. The road is not long and passes old vineyards, some nice ranches and a couple of neighborhoods tucked into the rolling hills.

This area is a mini version of the wine country and much less travelled by tourists. We make our way up the hillside on several different fire roads, some haven’t been passed in a very long time. At one point we get to the flames, it is a spot fire that blew 3/4 mile away from the front line. After our video we head back down the hill and pass the dozers and some engines that are starting to circle around homes.

We see U-haul trailers arriving and horses that are now wandering with gates open, in case the fire arrives here. The wind is no longer still, but the temperatures are cooler than yesterday, but still warm. This picture is of the fire and of photographer Ken Cavalli.

I saw the little plume of smoke over the eastern hills just before 4pm on Saturday afternoon. If you know Napa, or the wine country, the brown column grew right over Mount George.

My first reaction was like any fire, uh oh, but this one even more so since I know the area so well. In fact the last couple of years I make a habit of driving over Monticello Road into the Green Valley and Suisun Valley areas. The rolling hills filed with oaks and wild land that gets me daydreaming about what Northern California looked like generations ago…now a fire was burning in this same area. to make matters worse, the temperatures were again in the triple digits and a warm wind began to blow. I called the fire in and was told they had just gotten the call.

For the next few hours, as the sun set across the vineyards, we watched as the fire and the cloud of smoke expanded across the sky. Air tankers and helicopters can be seen and a fire engines from across the valley raced down the road headed to the hills above Napa and Solano Counties.

This area hasn’t burned in a very long time and this season is turning into a horror story for many firefighters and people who live in the country. Fire conditions are more like we’d see in late October, the rains just a few weeks away, not in mid June, with an entire summer ahead of us. Here are some pictures I snapped at the Mankas Corner fire headquarters.

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This is one of those ‘Indiana Jones’ type of stores, only this one is entirely true.

This information comes to me from Eric Miller, who represents the firm involved. It is a landmark ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit holding that Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States (Chabad) may pursue its claims in a U.S. federal court against the Russian Federation, the Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communication, the Russian State Library, and the Russian State Military Archive to recover a collection of sacred religious books and archives.

The D.C. Circuit held that a U.S. federal court has jurisdiction over Chabad’s claims to recover an archive of sacred books and manuscripts which were stolen by the Nazis during World War II and then taken by the Soviet Red Army to Moscow in 1945 in violation of international law. In addition, the D.C. Circuit cleared the way for Chabad to pursue its claims against the Russian Federation to recover a library of sacred, irreplaceable religious books which were seized by the Soviets during the Bolshevik Revolution and then retaken by the newly formed Russian Federation in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So what will the Russians do now, will they appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court?

Chabad is represented by Bingham attorneys Seth Gerber, Marshall Grossman and David Salmons, and attorneys Nathan Lewin and Alyza D. Lewin of Lewin & Lewin, LLP, and Wm. Bradford Reynolds of Howrey, LLP.

Storage cards which fit into our camera’s game consoles and cell phones were once sooooo large. I mean, who could deal with cards the size of a postage stamp?

That is old school now, or close to it, as SanDisk has come out with a card that holds 4GB and it’s about the third the size of the original SD card. Of course I am being facetious, all the cards are micro to many of us, but what the size change means is that our devices can get smaller and still hold massive amounts of information.

Here is a picture of the card. Now the card I tested was a 4GB and this picture is a 1GB, but there are micro’s on the market that are already at 8GB. According to SanDisk, the smaller cards are ideal for the growing number of consumers who make their mobile phone—with its built-in music player, digital camera and video player/recorder—the centerpiece of their digital lifestyle.

At 8GB, the new card will allow consumers to listen to more than 2,000 digital songs, or store more than 5,000 high-resolution pictures, or up to 5 hours of high-quality MPEG 4 videos .

Here’s my take:

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My first border story for Fox News six years or so ago brought our crew to this exact location. I still have a picture of us straddling the border while standing on a cattle crossing. The area has changed in recent months, a transition from a 4-string barbed wire fence, to a vehicle barrier which consists of metal pilings filled with cement. Both the Border Patrol and the Indian Nation agree that numbers have likely been cut in half, but that still leaves thousands of illegals and means thousands of pounds of drugs make it across here every day. Here is one of my live reports from today. We are streaming over our MAC computer to bring this live report. Can you tell?

And here are a couple of pictures I grabbed along this stretch of the border. It’s a tough find actually when heading from the north. We actually head south of Sells, Arizona and at a curve take a dirt road which heads to the cattle crossing and a legal/unguarded entry point into the United States. The area is rough and hot. The desert is unforgiving here as temperatures this time of the year seem to sear the skin. Triple digits are common, but water is not. I see tons of garbage that ruins the environment, almost all of it coming from illegal traffic. I have done that story several times before. While both sides of this issue, the Tohono O’odham and Customs and Border Protection sometimes disagree, they do admit that there is no simple solution. Here also is a picture of Keith hanging on to a truck to get a picture of one of our interviews in his element.

 Mike rimer calls himself a ‘Cactus Cop’, much to the chuckle sometimes of those he meets. But in this region of the country and to those who sanctify succulents, busting poachers who thrive on saguaros for example, can be as important as catching thief nabbing a diamond necklace. You see, they can stand nearly 50-feet tall and in other cases, hug the arid sands of the Sonoran Desert that stretches from southwest Arizona into Mexico. Each one of these cacti, a prickly testament to a life without much water. But while thriving in some of the most difficult conditions on earth, cactus now face something more dangerous than urban sprawl…poachers who dig them out of the ground for prices into the thousands of dollars.

According to Rimer, these modern day rustlers wrap the cacti in carpet or heavy rugs/blankets to protect themselves and the dig up the roots and walk away with the whole thing. Across the border, stealing ocotillos , saguaros, barrel cacti among others has become an epidemic, with some areas of the desert nearly picked clean. Mexico has cracked down by stopping all exportation, but that’s if you catch the thieves. And the people buying these stolen succulents aren’t just Americans looking to spruce up the front yard, but more often foreigners from as far away as Japan and Germany. Here’s a behind the scenes video and a picture I snapped last night. The video is with Tony Apricella of Cherry Landscape here in Tucson. He is an artist in the yard and he knows his cacti!

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We are now down along the border south of Tucson for a couple of stories. I will expand on each story as we present it live, with the first one on cactus wranglers airing all day Wednesday. It is warm here per a normal June day and the desert is a arid and beautiful as ever. Meantime, I get a regular update from Customs and Border Protection Tucson Sector and they had a couple of interesting pictures from a recent rescue and bust. It seems marijuana smuggling is only getting bigger and I’ll ask agents about this on Thursday for our Friday live reports. This SUV was packed with 100-bundles of dope and the driver was caught as he attempted to take a back road and avoid a checkpoint. The rescue came as illegal immigrants try to cross the desert at the most dangerous time of the year. Temperatures here are consistently triple digits and the land is unforgiving. This man was carried out of a canyon by agents and then flown to a hospital. Both photos were taken by Agents in the Field and show some of the good work being done on our southern border. 

Many of you new to this blog may not know that I am a huge baseball fan and have covered many a story that crosses over to the news side of things. So when I find a baseball story that becomes news I do my best to cover it and this one takes the cake for our national pastime. Last year we covered military opening day with the San Diego Padres and no other professional team goes as far as they do to support our men and women in uniform. While covering the Padres on this occasion and a few others, we became friends with their PR staff’s which include George Stieren and Warren Miller. They just had their colleague Erik Meyer send me the story and video of 11-year-old Brad Warnick, joined on the mound by mother Irene and 8-year-old sister Ashley, who thought they were just representing the USS Midway Museum in San Diego in honor of their fathers service in the Navy. BUT…..dressed in full Padres catching gear behind the plate was Petty Officer 1st Class Rick Warnick, their father & husband. Petty Officer Warnick is part of the crew currently deployed on the USS Nimitz, scheduled to return next month. Warnick was flown home early to surprise his family on the field through cooperative efforts of the USS Midway Museum and the Navy. This video is what it’s all about.

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UPDATE: Rick Warnick has left a great note on this blog, so scroll down to find it. Also, his wife had found out the night before and kept the kids out of the loop. Watch closely, you’ll see the emotion in the Brad and Ashley’s eyes.