Sacramento, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today announced the following appointments.

Los Angeles, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. will attend the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Board Meeting tomorrow and will later join Austin Beutner, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, for a conversation on the state’s drought as part of a new event series sponsored by the Times called “The California Conversation.”

Sacramento, California - The California Department of Food and Agriculture is currently working on a pair of Japanese Beetle eradication projects in Sacramento County, in the communities of Carmichael and Fair Oaks. The beetle has been called perhaps the most devastating pest of urban landscape plants and turf grasses in the eastern United States; that region is generally infested with the pest, while California is not. The Japanese Beetle poses a double-barreled threat - grubs remain underground, feeding on grasses, while adults roam above the surface, feeding on roughly 300 species of plants and trees, including fruit trees.

Los Angeles, California - A scientist with a distinguished career in cancer diagnostics, Amy Ross Ph.D. ’86 was elected to the USC Board of Trustees.

Los Angeles, California - UCLA Anderson Forecast’s second quarterly report in 2015 for the United States indicates that the nation’s economic growth, for the second year in a row, was slowed due to inclement weather experienced during the first quarter of the year. The U.S. is expected to return to a 3 percent GDP growth rate by the third quarter, and that pace should hold through the end of 2016.

Stanford, California - If countries and farmers make adjustments in what crops they grow and where, then the effects of climate change on the global economy may not be as severe as feared, a Stanford economist says.