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80 people sick after attending LA Times food tasting festival
Painful cramps, nausea and vomiting were some of the symptoms some attendees experienced after attending a food festival held to celebrate Southern California’s best restaurants.
Mark Kapczynski was one of the 80 people who became sick after a norovirus outbreak.
“It was pretty painful, probably the most painful experience I have ever had,” he said.
Kapczynski is still recovering from catching the highly contagious stomach bug at a place he never expected.
“Certainly never thought it was the 101 event — these restaurants are too good couldn’t possibly be that,” he said.
Kapczynski said he and his wife attended the Los Angeles times 101 Best Restaurants event earlier this month, a food-tasting festival celebrating what the newspaper’s editors rank are the 101 best places to eat in Southern California.
“We visited Providence, which I mean they are a world-class restaurant serving fresh oysters and clams with different sauces and I ended up having two plates very quickly,” Kapczynski said.
Kapczynski said he felt bloated immediately after eating the oysters. By the next day, his symptoms got worse.
“The abdomen pain has just had just had me curled up in a ball and tremendous chills — just couldn’t get comfortable,” he said.
Kapczynski isn’t the only one who got sick from eating oysters. The LA County Department of Public Health is now investigating a norovirus outbreak. So far, they have identified 80 cases. Emergency room physician Dr. Ali Jamehdor said the illness isn’t a typical stomach bug.
“Oysters seem to really hit patients hard when they come into the ER they’re very, very ill,” he said. “Vomiting, diarrhea, significant abdominal cramping and it’s all due to a bug called vibrio. It’s a very specific bacteria that’s specific to oysters and causes an illness that hits people very, very hard.”
Providence, one of LA’s most celebrated restaurants said the oysters came from farms near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Health inspectors at the event signed off on all handling and serving regulations.
“The nature of norovirus is such that it would be undetectable to the vendor, the restaurant or the health inspectors who were onsite given that norovirus does not affect the appearance, odor or flavor of the shellfish,” the restaurant wrote in a statement.
The California Department of Public Health issued a statewide alert on Canadian oysters 10 days after the event. The warning said the shellfish could make people sick.
KCAL News reached out to the LA Times but has not heard back yet. The FDA says people infected with the virus can experience symptoms for 12 to 48 hours.
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Washington — The Senate on Friday confirmed President Biden’s 234th nominee to the federal judiciary, matching the number of judges approved for lifetime appointment to the nation’s courts during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term.
The confirmation of Benjamin Cheeks to the federal district court in Southern California by a 49 to 47 vote led Mr. Biden to tie the number of his predecessor’s judicial appointments. The president is on track to surpass Trump’s confirmations to the federal bench before the year’s end, with the Senate teeing up the nomination of Serena Murillo to the federal district court in Central California.
As he nears the end of his presidency, Mr. Biden will close out his four years in office having appointed one Supreme Court justice, 45 judges to the federal appeals courts, 186 to the district courts and two to the Court of International Trade. His selection of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made history, since she is the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.
Mr. Biden has also selected a record number of public defenders to serve as federal judges on the appeals courts, and his nominees are the most diverse compared to those tapped by his predecessors.
There’s been heightened focus on the judiciary by presidents in recent years as gridlock in Congress has led to unilateral executive actions on a variety of issues touching on American life. But often those efforts give way to legal challenges, leaving courts as the final deciders in disputes over hot-button policies.
While Mr. Biden will likely end his presidency with more judicial appointments than Trump, he did not see the same level of success as his predecessor in putting his stamp on the Supreme Court. Jackson replaced Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the court’s liberal wing, following his retirement in 2022.
But Trump named three justices to the high court, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett replaced the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal member, which locked in a 6-3 conservative supermajority.
Mr. Biden also trails Trump in appointments to the 13 courts of appeals, ending his presidency with 45 judges approved to those courts, compared to Trump’s 54.
But Trump had an advantage when he took office in 2017, inheriting 17 appellate court vacancies after the Republican-led Senate blocked then-President Barack Obama’s nominees in the last two years of his term. When Mr. Biden started his presidency, there were just two open seats on the courts of appeals.
With a second Trump term on the horizon, some judges who announced their plans to retire have reversed course as it became clear their replacements wouldn’t be confirmed before Jan. 3, when Republicans will assume control of the Senate.
Judge James Wynn of the 4th Circuit notified Mr. Biden last week that he would no longer assume senior status, a form of semi-retirement, and the White House withdrew the nomination of his possible successor, North Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park.
North Carolina’s Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, opposed Park’s nomination, and Tillis lambasted Wynn’s decision to walk back his retirement, calling it “brazenly partisan” and driven by Trump’s election.
Two district court judges appointed by Democratic presidents, Judges Max Cogburn and Algenon Marbley, also rescinded their plans to take senior status following Trump’s victory, according to Reuters.
The reversals come after Senate Democrats reached a deal with Republicans to allow for swifter consideration of Mr. Biden’s district court picks. GOP senators — with Trump’s backing — had been working to slow the pace of judicial confirmations during the lame-duck session, but under the deal, they would forego procedural roadblocks on district court nominees if Democrats would not bring four remaining appellate court nominations up for a vote.
There will be four current or future vacancies on the courts of appeals for Trump to fill after he takes office and more than 30 on the district courts, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Between 60 and 80 people are injured Friday after a car crashed into a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, a spokesman for the local rescue service told AFP.
According to the emergency service, several people were “severely” injured, the spokesman said. German media reported one person had died, although that was not yet confirmed by authorities.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.