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Newsom touts Bloomberg News endorsement of economic policies
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Artemis II moon mission crew with pilot from SoCal sets record By Joe Taglieri joet@beaconmedianews.com
By Joe Taglieri joet@beaconmedianews.com
NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover Jr. | Photo courtesy of NASA
T Gov. Gavin Newsom. | Photo courtesy of California Governor/Facebook
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rmed with a glowing column by a leading publication in the financial press that praised California's economic performance amid tenuous times at the national and global levels, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday fired back at critics behind headlines tracking the state's failings on a number of pressing issues. Wildfires, droughts, floods, mass transportation, aging roads, education, homelessness, unaffordable housing, widening inequality and poverty — plus the exodus of billionaires, corporate headquarters and longtime residents — top the list of oft-repeated critiques against the termed-out governor who is considering
a run for the U.S. presidency in 2028. According to the governor's office, "Under the Newsom administration, the California economy has continued to dominate, despite Trump’s failed economic policies and sustained political attacks by Murdoch’s right-wing media machine against the Golden State." As Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News editor in chief emeritus, recently wrote: “Of all the prevailing media narratives around Gavin Newsom, the one that is most conspicuous by its absence is how under its two-term governor California became the top performing economy not just among its 49 siblings but also any
developed nation. No wonder Elon Musk quietly sought Newsom’s help when the world’s richest man sought to move a bunch of Tesla Inc. engineers back to the state after relocating them to Texas." Under the headline "Who Knew ‘Slick’ Gavin Newsom Was Such an Economic Maestro?" Winkler expounds on a long list of economic accomplishments since the governor's election in 2019, noting that California with population of 39 million people just supplanted Japan with 123 million as the world's fourth-largest economy. The Bloomberg column reported that after Newsom
took office, the state's gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of U.S. output. This outpaced major economies including China, which expanded 32%, and Germany's 16% GDP growth. The Trump administration questioned Bloomberg's conclusions, noting the recent exodus of people and businesses from the state. “If California’s economy was doing so well under Gavin Newsom’s watch, millions of Californians would not have fled to GOP-led states like Texas and Florida over the past 10 years,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said
See Economic policies Page 10
he Artemis II mission and its crew with a Southern California native at the helm were on their way back home on Tuesday after flying around the far side of the moon and the farthest distance from Earth that humans have ever traveled. The spaceflight surpassed Apollo 13's previous distance record set in 1970 at 248,655 miles. Artiemis II set the record during its lunar flyby Monday, according to NASA. At its farthest point, the astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft will have traveled 252,756 miles, before looping back toward Earth, establishing the new record for human spaceflight. The lunar loop took six hours and was the highlight of NASA's first mission to the moon since the Apollo era. Artemis II sent three Americans and a Canadian into lunar orbit as a step See Artemis II Page 31
toward a planned landing near the moon's south pole within two years. The spacecraft is more than halfway done with its mission and was on a return trajectory toward Earth, with splashdown expected Friday off San Diego, NASA reported. The mission launched Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover was born in Pomona, went to Ontario High School and graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Glover is the pilot of the Orion spacecraft and is the first person of color on a lunar-mission crew. Glover spent more than five months aboard the International Space Station in 2020-21, traveling there aboard SpaceX's first full crew rotation flight by a U.S. commercial spacecraft. That work made him the first Black