California

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday vetoed legislation that would have phased out a range of popular consumer products, including nonstick pots and pans, that contain synthetic chemicals with potential links to cancer.

“I appreciate the efforts to protect the health and safety of consumers, and while this bill is well-intentioned, I am deeply concerned about the impact this bill would have on the availability of affordable options in cooking products,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “I believe we must carefully consider the consequences that may result from a dramatic shift of products on our shelves.”

The legislation would have prohibited the selling or distributing of cookware with intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, by 2030. It phased out PFAS in products for infants and children, ski wax, dental floss, food packaging and cleaning products starting in 2028. Previously used items would have been exempt.

Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who introduced the legislation, Senate Bill 682, said he will continue to work on the issue moving forward.

“We are obviously disappointed,” he said. “We know there are safer alternatives — [but] I understand there were strong voices on both sides on this topic.”

Allen previously explained he introduced the bill to help protect the state’s water supply from contamination.

A study released in 2023 by the U.S. Geological Survey found tap water in urban areas of Southern and Central California is more likely to contain PFAS than the drinking water in most of the nation’s other regions.

“The water agencies, sanitation agencies and local governments are faced with increasingly impossible-to-meet standards just to keep the water supply for our constituents clean,” Allen said during a Senate committee meeting in April. “They’re facing the costs while the producers who keep pushing these products out on the market are not being held accountable.”

PFAS are commonly dubbed “forever chemicals” because of their well-established longevity. They are linked to adverse health effects, including liver enzyme changes and kidney and testicular cancer, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The chemicals have been used for decades to prevent food from sticking to pans or packaging, or to make materials more resistant to stains. California has taken steps in recent years to ban their use in certain items, like cosmetics and menstrual products.

Dozens of organizations weighed-in on Allen’s bill, with the Sierra Club, California Health Coalition Advocacy and the League of California Cities supporting the legislation.

The Chemical Industry Council of California and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance were among those opposed.

Steve Burns, president of the sustainability alliance, was especially concerned by the provision barring the distribution of the banned products.

“California is the entry point for nonstick cookware and other products that come into the Port of Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Oakland, and then get distributed throughout the country,” he told The Times. “They go to warehouses, distribution centers and get loaded up on rail or usually trucks — so there’s a lot of jobs in the California economy that depend on products that have Teflon.”

Burns said science hasn’t shown that all PFAS are harmful and argued California should have studied the issue further. He pointed to Illinois, which recently passed similar legislation but ultimately nixed the line banning nonstick cookware. An amendment instead directs the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to assess scientific data on fluoropolymers, the type of PFAS used in nonstick pots and pans.

Several states have recently moved toward restricting items with PFAS. Last January, Minnesota became the first state to ban PFAS in cookware. The Cookware Sustainability Alliance filed a lawsuit arguing the law discriminated against out-of-state commerce. A judge dismissed the suit in August.

The sustainability alliance has shared letters of opposition on its website from several prominent chefs and culinary personalities, including cook and television host Rachael Ray and Mark Dommen, the chef at Hestan, a new restaurant in Napa slated to open later this year.

Dommen explained the legislation would have placed an unfair burden on restaurants and food service providers.

“Non-stick cookware is essential to our daily operations and eliminating these products without a viable alternative would drive up costs, disrupt our supply chain, and put California restaurants at a competitive disadvantage,” Dommen wrote.

Ray, who has a cookware line, argued easy-clean cookware helps families eat healthier by making it easier to prepare meals without extra oils or fats.

Her letter drew a gentle rebuke from actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo, who implored Ray on social media to reconsider her stance and said her advocacy on behalf of the cookware industry was putting the bill in jeopardy.

“Some of us have so much PFAS in our blood that we face a far greater risk of developing cancer,” he wrote in a recent letter shared on X. “Let’s work together to get PFAS out of the everyday products we bring into our home.”

Scientific studies about the health effects of PFAS will continue, according to the CDC.

“Ongoing research has identified associations between PFAS exposure and several health impacts,” the agency’s website states. “There are many factors that can influence the risk of these effects, such as exposure, individual factors and other health determinants. Research is ongoing to understand the mechanisms of PFAS toxicity.”

Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — Though raging thousands of miles to the east, the entrenched stalemate in Washington over federal spending and the ensuing government shutdown has thrust California’s expansive healthcare policies into the center of the pitched, partisan debate.

The Trump administration and the Republican leaders in Congress continue to use California, and the benefits the state has extended to eligible immigrants regardless of their legal status, as a cudgel against Democrats trying to extend federal subsidies for taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage.

President Trump claimed recently that Democrats “want to have illegal aliens come into our country and get massive healthcare at the cost to everybody else.” Democrats called Trump’s assertion an absolute lie, accusing Republicans of wanting to slash federal healthcare benefits to Americans in need to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy.

“California has led the nation in expanding access to affordable healthcare, but Donald Trump is ripping it away,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

In return for their votes to reopen the government, Democratic leaders in Congress want to reverse Medicaid cuts made in Republicans’ tax and spending bill passed this summer and continue subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, a program long targeted by Republicans. The subsidies, which come in the form of a tax credit, help lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

Can immigrants in the country illegally enroll in federal healthcare programs?

No. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicare, or coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to KFF, an independent health research organization.

Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco) held a virtual town hall last week in which he highlighted the “misinformation” about immigrants and healthcare.

“I just want to be completely clear that federal funding does not pay for health insurance for undocumented immigrants, period,” Mullin said.

Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, said the debate is really over “who can benefit from the federal dollars that are flowing to all states, including California,” to help lower costs for health insurance.

Covered California serves as a marketplace exchange for state residents seeking healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, allowing them to select from name-brand insurance providers and choose from a variety of coverage plans. The vast majority of Californians receive federal subsidies to lower their premiums, including many middle-income families who had become eligible when Congress expanded the financial assistance in 2021.

Those expanded subsidies will expire at the end of the year, and Democrats are demanding that they be extended as part of any deal to reopen the government before they vote in favor of what is known as a continuing resolution, or a temporary funding bill to keep the federal government running.

“From the very beginning, undocumented or illegal — whatever terminology you want to use — individuals were never eligible for those tax credits, never eligible for those cost-sharing reductions, and in fact, and not even eligible to come onto a marketplace and buy coverage if they paid the full costs,” Altman said.

California does offer state healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants

Through Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program, some medical coverage is offered, regardless of immigration status. The majority of that money comes from the state.

H.D. Palmer, deputy director for external affairs at the California Department of Finance, said the cost to provide Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants in the current fiscal year is just over $12.5 billion.

State money accounts for $11.2 billion and the remaining difference is reimbursed with federal funding because it’s used to cover emergency services, Palmer explained.

“Under current law, hospitals that receive Medicaid are required to provide emergency care, including labor and delivery, to individuals regardless of their citizenship status,” he said. “That goes back to a budget law that was approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan.”

The 1986 law is called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, and allows for emergency healthcare for all persons.

Some Republicans have raised other concerns about the state’s use of managed care organization taxes.

The MCO tax is a federally allowable Medicaid funding mechanism that imposes a tax on health insurance providers that charge fixed monthly payments for services and is based on the number of people enrolled in plans each month. The revenue from the tax can then be used to support Medicaid expenditures with federal matching funds.

Critics say California exploits a so-called loophole: By increasing the MCO tax, and subsequently bringing in more matching federal funds, California can then put more of its own state money toward healthcare for undocumented immigrants.

“We are bringing in all those additional federal dollars and then reallocating other money away so that we can provide about $9.6 billion for Medi-Cal for undocumented and illegal immigrants,” said Assemblymember David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno). “The MCO tax was never supposed to be weaponized in that process.”

White House officials also contend that California could not afford to put resources toward benefits for undocumented immigrants if it had not received the extra federal money — a claim Newsom disputes.

“What the president is saying, he’s lying,” Newsom said at a recent event. “Speaker [Mike] Johnson’s lying. They’re lying to the American people. It’s shameful. … I guess they’re trying to connect their displeasure with what California and many other states do with state resources in this space, and that is a very separate conversation.”

California is not alone in offering such healthcare to immigrants in the country illegally

A “small but growing” number of states offer state-funded coverage to certain groups of low-income people regardless of immigration status, according to KFF.

California became the first state in the nation last year to offer healthcare to all low-income undocumented immigrants, an expansion spearheaded by Newsom.

Newsom has since partially walked back that policy after the costs exceeded expectations. Starting in January, most adult Medi-Cal applications will be blocked — although current enrollees can continue to renew — and some adults will be required to pay monthly premiums. Undocumented minors under age 19, who became eligible for Medi-Cal nearly a decade ago, will not be affected by the changes.

The upcoming changes to the state’s policies and the enrollment freeze will help decrease the overall costs, which are projected to fall to about $10.1 billion during the next fiscal year, according to the California Department of Finance.

While the governor’s shift angered his most progressive allies and renewed speculation that he is tacking to the political middle ahead of his expected run for president in 2028, the Democratic-led Legislature approved the Medi-Cal eligibility changes in June.

Public opinion on the issue may also be changing.

Fifty-eight percent of adults in California were opposed to providing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, according to a poll released in June from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. This was a notable shift, as previous surveys from the institute conducted between 2015 to 2023 showed the majority approved.

Who would lose coverage if the tax credits end and Medicaid cuts aren’t reversed?

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans this summer, ends healthcare subsidies that were extended during the pandemic and makes other cuts to programs. According to the White House, the bill “contains the most important America First healthcare reforms ever enacted.”

“The policies represent a comprehensive effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse to strengthen the healthcare system for the most vulnerable Americans, ensuring that taxpayer dollars are focused on American citizens and do not subsidize healthcare for illegal immigrants,” the White House said in a statement on Oct. 1.

Among other things, the law limits Medicare and other program eligibility to certain groups, including green card holders, effective July 2025. Other lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and asylees, are no longer eligible, according to KFF.

It’s estimated that the eligibility restrictions will result in about 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants becoming uninsured, reduce federal spending by about $131 billion and increase federal revenue by $4.8 billion as of 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, a broader group of lawfully present immigrants, including refugees, will lose access to subsidized coverage through the ACA marketplace by January 2027.

Covered California’s Altman estimated that there are about 119,000 immigrants in California who are covered and would lose eligibility for financial assistance.

More broadly, Altman and other healthcare experts predict that healthcare premiums will skyrocket if the ACA tax credits expire.

Former President Obama, speaking on stand-up comedian Marc Maron’s final podcast on Monday, said the Trump administration’s policies are a “test” of whether universities, businesses, law firms and voters — including Republicans — will take a stand for the nation’s founding principles and values.

“If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you are a Hispanic man and you’re frustrated about inflation, and so you decided, ah, you know what, all that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter. ‘I’m just mad about inflation,’” Obama said. “And now your sons are being stopped in L.A. because they look Latino and maybe without the ability to call anybody, might just be locked up, well, that’s a test.”

In a more than hourlong discussion with Maron on the wildly popular “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast, the former Democratic president said current events could jolt Americans.

“It’d be great if we weren’t tested this way, but you know what? We probably need to be shaken out of our complacency,” he said.

Obama also criticized some Democrats’ messaging as he touched on significant issues facing Californians and discussed the state of the nation’s democracy, core convictions and the weakening of institutional norms.

After Los Angeles-based Maron joked, “We’ve annoyed the average American into fascism,” Obama responded, “You can’t just be a scold all the time.

“You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too, and that life’s messy,” Obama said in the interview, which recently took place in the former president’s Washington, D.C., office.

Faulting language used by some liberals as “holier than thou,” Obama argued that Democrats could remain true to their principles while respecting those with whom they disagreed.

“Saying, ‘Right, I’ve got some core convictions [and] beliefs that I’m not going to compromise. But I’m also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure and so insightful that there’s not the possibility that maybe I’m wrong on this, or that other people, if they don’t say things exactly the way I say them or see things exactly the way I do, that somehow they’re bad people,’” he said.

Obama’s remarks come as the Democratic Party faces a reckoning after losing the presidential election in 2024, in part because of declining support from the party’s base, notably minority voters.

Maron, a comedian and actor, launched his “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast and radio show in 2009. Interviews with guests such as actor Robin Williams, comedian Louis C.K., filmmaker Kevin Smith and “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels often took place at his Highland Park home.

Obama’s 2015 interview in Maron’s garage became the podcast’s most popular episode at the time — downloaded nearly 740,000 times in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

On Monday, the former president criticized institutions for capitulating to President Trump’s demands. His words come as USC leaders are debating whether to agree to a White House proposal to receive favorable access to federal funding if they align with Trump’s agenda.

“If you’re a university president, say, well, you know what? This will hurt if we lose some grant money in the federal government, but that’s what endowments are for,” Obama said. “Let’s see if we can ride this out, because what we’re not going to do is compromise our basic academic independence.”

There’s something about Thai cuisine that is warm and welcoming.

Perhaps it’s the fire that bird’s eye chili brings to a dish, or maybe the bold punchiness of tom yum soup.

My colleague and food critic Bill Addison referred to Thai as “a pillar cuisine of Los Angeles.”

And why not?

The city boasts the world’s largest Thai population outside of Thailand. Those who open restaurants open our palates to a diverse range of flavors and sensations from their micro-regional cooking styles.

Addison is wary of using the term “best.” Instead, he crafted a list of his 15 favorite Thai restaurants in Los Angeles. Here, we’ll highlight a handful of those choices, in Addison’s own words.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Anajak Thai (Sherman Oaks)

If you’ve had any passing interest in Los Angeles dining culture this decade, you probably know the story: Anajak Thai was founded in 1981 by chef Ricky Pichetrungsi, whose recipes merge his Thai upbringing and Cantonese heritage, and his wife Rattikorn.

In 2019, when Pichetrungsi suffered a stroke, the couple’s son Justin left a thriving career as an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering to take over the restaurant.

It changed his life, and it changed Los Angeles, with Justin’s creative individualism — specifically his Thai Taco Tuesday phenomenon.

That’s when the menu crisscrosses fish tacos lit up by chili crisp and limey nam jim with wok-fragrant drunken noodles and Dungeness crab fried rice. Add what has become one of L.A.’s great wine lists, and the restaurant has catapulted into one of the city’s great dining sensations.

The restaurant closed for a couple of months over the summer for a renovation, revealing a brighter, significantly resituated interior — and introducing an open kitchen and a second dining room — in August.

The menu didn’t radically alter: It’s the same multi-generational cooking, tracing the family heritage, leaning ever-further into freshness, perfecting the details in familiar dishes.

Fried chicken sheathed in rice flour batter and scattered with fried shallots, the star of the Justin-era menu, remains, as does the sublime mango sticky rice that Rattikorn makes when she can find fragrant fruit in season and at its ripest.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Ayara Thai (Westchester)

Owner Andy Asapahu grew up in a Thai-Chinese community in Bangkok.

Anna Asapahu, his wife, was raised in Lampang, a small city in the verdant center of northern Thailand.

They melded their backgrounds into a sprawling multi-regional menu of soups, salads, noodles and curries when they opened Ayara in Westchester in 2004.

Their daughters Vanda and Cathy oversee the restaurant these days, but Anna’s recipe for khao soi endures as the marquee dish.

Khao soi seems to have become nearly as popular in Los Angeles as pad Thai. This one is quintessential: chicken drumsticks braised in silky coconut milk infused with lemongrass and other piercing aromatics, poured over egg noodles, sharpened with shallots and pickled mustard greens and garnished with lime and a thatch of fried noodles.

The counterpoints are all in play: a little sweetness from palm sugar and a lot of complexity from fish sauce, a bump of chile heat to offset the richness.

Pair it with a standout dish that reflects Andy’s upbringing, like pad pong kari, a stir-fry of curried shrimp and egg with Chinese celery and other vegetables, smoothed with a splash of cream and served over rice. The restaurant has a spacious dining room.

Note that lunch is technically carry-out only, though the family sets up the patio space outside the restaurant for those who want to stick around.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

Holy Basil (Atwater Village)

Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat and Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon run two wholly different Holy Basils.

Downtown’s Santee Passage food hall houses the original, a window that does a brisk takeout business cranking out Arpapornnopparat’s visceral, full-throttle interpretations of Bangkok street food.

His pad see ew huffs with smokiness from the wok. The fluffy-crackly skin of moo krob pops and gives way to satiny pork belly underneath. Douse “grandma’s fry fish and rice” with chile vinegar, and in its sudden brightness you’ll understand why the dish was his childhood favorite.

Their sit-down restaurant in Atwater Village is a culmination of their ambitions. The space might be small, with much of the seating against a wall between two buildings, but the cooking is tremendous.

Arpapornnopparat leaps ahead, rendering a short, revolving menu of noodles, curries, chicken wings, fried rice and vegetable dishes that is more experimental, weaving in elements of his father’s Chinese heritage, his time growing up in India and the Mexican and Japanese flavors he loves in Los Angeles.

One creation that shows up in spring but I wait for all year: fried soft-shell crab and shrimp set in a thrilling, confounding sauce centered around salted egg yolk, browned butter, shrimp paste and scallion oil. In its sharp left turns of salt and acid and sultry funk, the brain longs to consult a GPS. But no map exists. These flavor combinations are from an interior land.

If you enjoyed those selections, check out the full list here. Happy dining.

The week’s biggest stories

(Carlin Stiehl/For the Times)

Palisades fire and other blazes

Trump administration policies and reactions

Crime, courts and policing

More big stories

This week’s must-reads

More great reads

For your weekend

(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

Going out

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L.A. Affairs

Get wrapped up in tantalizing stories about dating, relationships and marriage.

Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

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Karim Doumar, head of newsletters
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How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected]. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

After consecutive losses, the Chargers are at an inflection point. Can they take advantage of a get-right game against a 1-4 team that’s just as banged up as the Chargers are?

A big challenge will be moving forward with the running game now that rookie Omarion Hampton has joined Najee Harris on injured reserve. The opportunity to pick up lots of yards is there, as Miami’s front seven have been hopelessly porous against the run.

“Time to shine, step up,” Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh said.

Back in 2020, the Dolphins used the No. 5 pick on quarterback Tua Tagovailoa and the Chargers used No. 6 on Justin Herbert. A decade before that, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross tried to hire Harbaugh as Miami’s coach.

How the Chargers can win: Run the ball. Even with their top two running backs out, the Chargers can trample a defense that gave up 206 yards rushing last week to little known Rico Dowdle. Contain tight end Darren Waller, one of Miami’s few bright spots. Force Tagovailoa to improvise; he can struggle when he’s out of rhythm.

How the Dolphins can win: Get De’Von Archane the ball in space; he can do damage when he gets out on the edge. Make Herbert one dimensional by containing the Chargers’ ground attack. Protect Tagovailoa, whose strengths are his timing and anticipation. He thrives on offensive structure.

Truly Adams of Moreno Valley is racing Formula 4 cars in France even though he’s not old enough to obtain a driver’s license in California.

The 15-year-old freshman who’s enrolled in online classes at Epic Charter School in Corona became the first American driver to finish on the podium at the Feed Racing Volant F4 finals last month, taking third place in a field of international contenders at Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours, one of France’s top F1 racetracks.

Truly Adams races in the Feed Racing Volant F4 Finals in France.

(Troy Adams Coaching)

Adams is bilingual in English and Spanish and learning French to help further his desired career in racing. He’s won kart races in Spain and was the fastest driver at the Mexico F4 Series test. He’s preparing for the 2026 French Formula 4 season next year, which is the path toward being a Formula 1 driver. Entry into the series requires $300,000 in funding, so he’s seeking sponsorships and partnerships.

“I love racing cars because of the thrill of it, passing cars, getting passed, going 130 mph in the straightaway,” he said.

His father, Troy, serves as his driving coach. His mother, Kara, is his driver when he’s in Southern California. In the last year, he’s traveled throughout the United States and to France, Portugal, Spain and Italy for competitions.

“I played every sport growing up — soccer, football, basketball, golf, tennis, rugby, swimming,” he said. “I tried to play the guitar. I tried to play piano. I tried to play everything.”

Racing cars turned out to be what he was most successful at. He has his own YouTube channel highlighting some of his early experiences. Now he uses Instagram @Truly_theTruth.

He said he has begun studying for his California driving test in September of 2026.

Asked what he might tell the instructor in the car, he said, “I’ll tell him I’m a professional race car driver and do you want to go more than the speed limit?”

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

On the campaign trail eight years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom famously promised to support the construction of 3.5 million new homes in California by the end of this year. He’ll probably fall short by millions, but his latest move reaffirms the effort.

Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 into law Friday. The historic bill, which looks to add density to transit hubs across California, is one of the most ambitious state-imposed housing efforts in recent memory.

“All Californians deserve an affordable place to live — close to jobs, schools, and opportunity. Housing near transit means shorter commutes, lower costs, and more time with family. When we invest in housing, we’re investing in people — their chance to build a future, raise a family, and be part of a community,” Newsom said in a statement.

The sweeping bill — which takes effect July 1, 2026 — upzones areas across California, overriding local zoning laws to allow taller, denser projects near transit hubs such as subway stops, light rail stops and bus stops with dedicated lanes.

Developers will be permitted to build up to nine-story residential buildings adjacent to subway stops, seven stories within a quarter-mile of them and six stories within a half-mile. The bill will also allow residential buildings that reach five to eight stories near light rail and dedicated bus lanes, depending on how close a piece of property is to a particular station or bus stop.

It’s the second major housing reform Newsom has greenlighted this year. In June, he signed a landmark bill that streamlines housing construction and cuts through the regulatory red tape brought by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Newsom’s decision caps months of debate and weeks of pleas from residents, advocacy groups and cities imploring him to either sign or veto.

It’s a huge win for YIMBY groups and developers, who claim the quickest way to address California’s housing crisis is to build housing — especially near transit stops to encourage public transportation and cut down on car pollution.

“With his signature on SB 79, Governor Newsom cements his legacy as one of the most transformative pro-housing leaders in California history,” California YIMBY Chief Executive Brian Hanlon said in a statement. “Now we begin the work of making sure its provisions are fully and fairly implemented.”

It’s a blow for some cities, including Los Angeles, which claim that the bill brings a one-size-fits-all approach to a problem that needs local control. Mayor Karen Bass asked Newsom to veto the bill, and the L.A. City Council passed a motion opposing it.

Now, the chaotic scramble begins as cities, developers and residents try to figure out who is affected by the bill — and who is exempted.

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced the legislation in January, emphasizing the need for immediate action to address the housing crisis. But as the bill wound its way through the Legislature, a host of amendments, exemptions and carve-outs were added in order to secure enough votes to pass through the Assembly and Senate.

What was left was a wordy, at-times confusing bill. Wiener’s spokesperson Erik Mebust acknowledged that it’s “incredibly challenging to visualize.”

First, the bill’s scope was narrowed from all of California to only counties with at least 15 passenger rail stations, leaving only eight: Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Sacramento.

The biggest impact will probably be felt in Los Angeles, which has an estimated 150 transit stops covered by the bill, according to the city’s preliminary assessment.

Transit hubs are being targeted for taller, denser housing

Senate Bill 79 would override local zoning laws, allowing buildings of five to nine stories in areas close to many public transit stops in Los Angeles, according to the city’s preliminary analysis. Still, some properties would be eligible for exemptions or a multi-year delay.

Distance from transit hub

Los Angeles Dept. of City Planning

Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES

Next, lawmakers added several deferral options, allowing cities to postpone implementation in selected areas until approximately 2030 — one year after they must submit their latest plan for spurring new housing construction and accommodating growth.

For the next five years, cities can exempt properties in high-risk fire areas, historic preservation zones and low-resource areas — an attempt to mitigate the bill’s effect on gentrification in low-income neighborhoods.

Transit stops and fire zones

Under Senate Bill 79, cities can seek a delay in upzoning for areas located in very high fire hazard severity zones. In northeast Los Angeles, these zones overlap with transit stops in multiple places.

Distance from transit hub

Los Angeles Dept. of City Planning, California Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection

Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES

In addition, to eke out votes from lawmakers representing smaller cities, SB 79 zones shrank to a quarter-mile in cities with fewer than 35,000 residents, compared with a half-mile everywhere else.

Known as the “Beverly Hills carve-out,” the amendment shrinks the upzoning responsibility for certain small, affluent cities around Southern California including Beverly Hills and South Pasadena. As a result, the eligibility map gets weird.

For example, the law will only affect a quarter-mile area surrounding South Pasadena’s Metro A Line station, but a half-mile in its adjacent communities — Pasadena and L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood. In L.A.’s Beverly Grove neighborhood, the law covers properties within a half-mile of the Metro D Line subway, but in Beverly Hills right next door, it only affects areas within a quarter-mile.

Before Newsom signed it into law, Los Angeles City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky called it unfair.

“Beverly Hills gets off the hook, and Los Angeles is left holding the bag,” she said in a statement.

Other oddities abound. For example, a city can exempt a particular property that is half a mile from a transit station as the crow flies but has physical barriers — railroad tracks, freeways — that make it more than a mile away on foot.

Several online maps attempted to show which areas would be upzoned under SB 79, but no one has produced a parcel-specific overview. L.A. planning officials recently published a draft map showing the places that they believe would be upzoned under SB 79. But they cautioned that the online tool is for “exploratory purposes only” — and that a binding eligibility map will eventually be published by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Cities, developers and homeowners will have to wait for clarity until that map is published. In the meantime, YIMBY groups are hoping the bill spurs multi-family development in L.A., which has waned in recent years due to unprofitable economics and regulatory uncertainty.

“A lot of people don’t want California to change, but California is changing whether they want it to or not,” said Matt Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The question is whether we allow those changes to be sustainable and affordable, or chaotic and costly.”

As California voters receive mail ballots for the November special election, which could upend the state’s congressional boundaries and determine control of the House, billionaire hedge-fund founder Tom Steyer said Thursday he will spend $12 million to back Democrats’ efforts to redraw districts to boost their party’s ranks in the legislative body.

The ballot measure was proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats after President Trump urged Texas leaders to redraw their congressional districts before next year’s midterm election. Buttressing GOP numbers in Congress could help Trump continue enacting his agenda during his final two years in office.

“We must stop Trump’s election-rigging power grab,” Steyer said in a statement. “The defining fight through Nov. 4 is passing Proposition 50. In order to compete and win, Democrats can’t keep playing by the same old rules. This is how we fight back, and stick it to Trump.”

Steyer’s announcement makes him the biggest funder of pro-Proposition 50 efforts, surpassing billionaire financier George Soros, who has contributed $10 million to the effort.

Steyer founded a hedge fund whose investments included massive fossil fuel projects, but after he learned of the environmental consequences of these financial decisions, he divested and has worked to fight climate change. Steyer has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Democratic candidates and causes and more than $300 million on his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

Steyer plans to launch a scathing ad Thursday night that imagines Trump watching election returns on Nov. 4 and furiously throwing fast food at a television when he sees Proposition 50 succeeding.

“Why did you do this to Trump?” the president asks. The ad then shows a fictional TV anchor saying that the ballot measure’s success makes it more likely that Trump will be investigated for corruption and that the records of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein will be released. “I hate California,” Trump responds.

The advertisement is scheduled to start airing Thursday night during “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The late-night show was in the spotlight after it was briefly suspended by Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC last month under pressure from the Trump administration because of a comment Kimmel made about the slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The esoteric process of redistricting typically occurs once every decade after the U.S. Census to account for population shifts. The maps, historically drawn in smoke-filled backrooms, protected incumbents and created bizarrely shaped districts, such as the “ribbon of shame” along the California coast.

In recent decades, good-government advocates have fought to create districts that are logical and geographically compact and do not disenfranchise minority voters. At the forefront of the effort, California voters passed a 2010 ballot measure to create an independent commission to draw the state’s congressional boundaries.

But this year, Trump and his allies urged leaders of GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to boost Republicans’ prospects in next year’s midterm election. The House is closely divided, and retaining Republican control is crucial to Trump’s ability to enact his agenda.

California Democrats, led by Newson, responded in kind. The state Legislature voted in August to call a special election in November to decide on redrawn districts that could give their party five more seats in the state’s 52-member congressional delegation, the largest in the nation.

Supporters of Proposition 50 have vastly outraised the committees opposing the measure. Steyer’s announcement came one day after Charles Munger Jr., the largest donor to the opposition, spoke out publicly for the first time about why he had contributed $32 million to the effort.

“I’m fighting for the ordinary voter to have an effective say in their own government,” Munger told reporters. “I don’t want Californians ignored by the national government because all the districts are fortresses for one party or the other.”

A longtime opponent of gerrymandering, the bow-tie-wearing Palo Alto physicist bankrolled the 2010 ballot measure that created the independent commission to draw California’s congressional districts.

Munger, the son of a billionaire who was the right-hand man of investor Warren Buffett, declined to comment about whether he planned to give additional funds.

“I neither confirm nor deny rumors that involve the tactics of the campaign,” Munger told reporters. “Talk to me after the election is over.”

Brooke Knowles knew she wanted the black puppy posted on the Facebook page of a self-described home breeder of Coton De Tulears. He looked like he’d have an outgoing personality.

She put down a nonrefundable deposit and drove to Temecula to pick him up. She paid about $2,000 and named him Ted.

Before she even left for home, Ted vomited and had diarrhea on the grass outside. He was lethargic, his chest soaked with drool.

A closer look later at the paperwork provided by the seller revealed something else unsettling: Ted wasn’t bred in California. He had been imported from a kennel in Utah.

“I thought that I was getting a dog that had been bred at his home,” Knowles said in a series of interviews with The Times. “This poor puppy, he was so traumatized.”

On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of animal welfare bills into state law that will restrict puppy sales and strengthen protections for buyers like Knowles. The bills were introduced as a result of a Times investigation last year that detailed how designer dogs are trucked into California from out-of-state commercial breeders and resold by people saying they were small, local operators.

The three bills Newsom signed into law are:

• Assembly Bill 519 by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) bans online marketplaces where dogs are sold by brokers, which is defined as any person or business that sells or transports a dog bred by someone else for profit. That includes major national pet retailers, including PuppySpot, as well as California-based operations that resell puppies bred elsewhere. The law applies to dogs, cats and rabbits under a year old. It does not apply to police dogs or service animals and provides an exemption for shelters, rescues and 4H clubs.
• AB 506 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) voids pet purchase contracts involving California buyers if the seller requires a nonrefundable deposit. The law also makes the pet seller liable if they fail to disclose breeder details and medical history.
• Senate Bill 312 by state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange) requires pet sellers to share health certificates with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which would then make them available without redactions to the public.

The bills were supported by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said they are “an important step in shutting down deceptive sales tactics of these puppy brokers.”

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and it’s time to shine a light on puppy mills,” Newsom said in a statement. “Greater transparency in pet purchases will bring to light abusive practices that take advantage of pets in order to exploit hopeful pet owners. Today’s legislation protects both animals and Californians by addressing fraudulent pet breeding and selling practices.”

Lawmakers said new laws close loopholes that emerged after California in 2019 banned the sale of commercially bred dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores. That retail ban did not apply to online sales, which surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Times’ investigation found that in the years after the retail ban took effect, a network of resellers stepped in to replace pet stores, often posing as local breeders and masking where puppies were actually bred. Some buyers later discovered they had purchased dogs from sellers using fake names or disposable phone numbers after their pets became ill or died.

Times reporters analyzed the movement of more than 71,000 dogs coming into California since 2019 by requesting certificates of veterinary inspection, which are issued by a federally accredited veterinarian listing where the animal came from, its destination and verification that it is healthy enough to travel.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture has long received those health certificates from other states by mistake — the records are supposed to go to county public health departments — and, in recent years, made it a practice to immediately destroy them. Dog importers who were supposed to submit the records to counties largely failed to do so.

The Times obtained the records by requesting the documents from every other state. In the days following the story’s publication, lawmakers and animal advocates called on the state’s Food and Agriculture Department to stop “destroying evidence” of the deceptive practices by purging the records. The department began preserving the records thereafter, but released them with significant redactions.

In one instance, the state redacted the name and address of a person with numerous shipments of puppies from Ohio. The Times obtained the same travel certificates without redactions from the Ohio Department of Agriculture. The address listed on the records is for a Home Depot in Milpitas. The phone number on some of those travel certificates belongs to Randy Kadee Vo.

The Times’ reporting last year found Vo’s name and various Bay Area addresses, including a warehouse, were listed as the destination for 1,900 dogs imported into California since 2019. At the time, he disputed that number but declined to say how many he had imported. People who bought puppies from Vo told The Times that they were told they were buying puppies that were locally bred.

Shortly after The Times questioned Vo about the imports, a different name, along with the Home Depot address, began appearing on health certificates with his phone number. Vo did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times identified hundreds of records detailing other sellers with names that appear to be fake or addresses that go to unaffiliated businesses, shopping centers and commercial mailbox offices.

While the new laws were championed by animal welfare groups, some have questioned how adequately the laws will be enforced by state officials — particularly when it comes to policing out-of-state facilities selling online and then shipping puppies directly California buyers.

“Enforcement will now fall on nonprofits like ours to monitor and report issues that we see, in hopes that the agencies act,” said Mindi Callison, head of the Iowa-based anti-puppy-mill nonprofit Bailing Out Benji.

Callison said lawmakers should next turn their focus to requiring California breeders to be licensed, similar to standards in Iowa, Missouri and other states. California does not have a statewide licensing program, instead relying on local jurisdictions for oversight. While some cities and counties require breeders to be licensed and inspected, little information is available online to help consumers vet them.

“There is a higher risk of dogs being kept in inhumane conditions in states where there are no regulations to follow and have no eyes on them,” Callison said.

Opponents of the legislation argued that California’s previous attempts to cut off the supply from puppy mills by banning pet store sales only fueled an unregulated marketplace — and warned banning brokers will do the same.

“Eliminating these brokers will not reduce demand for pets; it will simply force more Californians into unregulated, riskier marketplaces,” said Alyssa Miller-Hurley of the Pet Advocacy Network, which represents breeders, retailers and pet owners, in a letter opposing the legislation.

For consumers like Knowles, the lack of transparency when buying her puppy Ted has been long-lasting and costly. More than a year after Knowles took the puppy to her home in Long Beach, he developed stomach issues that got so bad he wound up in the emergency room. She also had doubts that her puppy was a purebred Coton De Tulear as advertised.

She said a pet DNA test confirmed those suspicions and connected her with other people whose dogs were purchased from the same seller. The test results said one of the dogs share the same amount of DNA as people do with their full siblings – and that they’re mutts.

“We call him the most expensive rescue dog we’ve ever had,” Knowles said of Ted, who is now on a restrictive diet. “Our group started to call our dogs ‘Fauxtons,’ since they weren’t Cotons.”

Knowles sued the seller, Tweed Fox of Carlsbad Cotons, over the test results showing Ted was not a purebred puppy, but said she lost.

“Really the core issue is … masquerading to be something you’re not,” she said.

Fox told The Times that he began sourcing from a Utah company during the Covid pandemic, when the demand for puppies spiked beyond the number he was able to breed at home.

He thought the Utah puppies were purebreds because they came with the proper registration paperwork, but said that “turned out not to be the case.” He said he did not mislead customers because he was in fact a home breeder, and only advertised the out-of-state puppies as Coton de Tulears, “which is what I thought I was purchasing.”

“You only can breed so many in a home,” he said. “I thought I was providing equal quality puppies at the time, and apparently, I wasn’t at that point, except for my own home bred.”

Fox said he has since moved to Dallas, where he breeds and sells Cotons. While the California broker law won’t impact him now that he’s left the state, he said he refuses to buy anyone else’s puppies for resale.

“I only sell my own,” he said. “I’m not in the business to cheat people out of anything.”

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law Thursday that will make it illegal to declaw a cat in California, a practice that lawmakers and animal advocates argued is outdated and inhumane.

Assembly Bill 867 by Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-San José) bars veterinarians from performing the procedure, which involves amputating the first bone in each of a cat’s toes or severing its tendons so that it can’t extend its claws. California law previously required the procedure to be performed by veterinarians, but will now limit it to cases of medical necessity.

“Many countries have already outlawed this inhumane practice,” said Lee, who called declawing a “barbaric” mutilation to make life more convenient for pet owners.

While most owners do not declaw their cats, the practice has been used by some to prevent the animal from scratching people, furniture or other pets. Various polling has found that roughly a quarter of cats are declawed, but it has fallen out of favor among veterinarians and pet owners in recent years. The nation’s largest veterinary provider, Mars Veterinary Health, said it does not support elective declawing.

“Feline scratching and nail sharpening are normal behaviors and the removal of nails has been shown to lead to chronic pain and, in some cases, to cause long-term behavioral issues,” the company said in a statement on its website.

The California Veterinary Medical Assn., which represents veterinarians, opposed the bill, saying it sets a dangerous precedent to limit the scope of one profession.

“When our veterinarians are telling us that they’re performing the procedure, it’s usually because the elderly patient is usually on chemotherapy, on a blood thinner … and they can’t risk being scratched,” Grant Miller, director of regulatory affairs at CVMA, said during a legislative hearing.

Miller said surveys of their members found 80% of veterinarians no longer declaw cats, evidence he argued shows they’ve adequately policed themselves. He said AB 867 limits instances that should be considered legitimate reasons for declawing.

“If the owner is coming in and saying we can’t keep our cat because it keeps scratching us, can you do something, we believe that that’s qualification to consider the procedure, but only after all other alternatives have been exhausted,” he added.

The bill includes an exemption for cats that need the procedure out of medical necessity, including to address a recurring infection or a condition that jeopardizes the animal’s health. But, it does not include procedures to make a cat easier to handle, to avoid scratching people or furniture or for any other cosmetic reason.

West Hollywood became the first jurisdiction in the country in 2003 to pass a ban on declawing cats. Other cities have since passed similar restrictions, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Burbank, Culver City, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, according to an analysis of the bill.

New York was the first state to ban declawing in 2019, while dozens of other countries have made the practice illegal.

Lee, the bill’s author, said his hope is that the number of cats declawed in California will shrink to zero.

“You can trim the nails just like our nails,” he said. “You can do many different things.”

The most extreme, he added, is declawing.

When federal prosecutors arrested a man Wednesday for setting a small fire that reignited days later into the deadly Palisades blaze, they suggested the arrest largely settled the matter of blame.

“A single person’s recklessness caused one of the worst fires Los Angeles has ever seen,” Bill Essayli, acting United States attorney for Central California, said as he announced the arrest of Jonathan Rinderknecht, a 29-year-old Uber driver.

But the new details they offered about the cause of the fire only added to residents’ anger and dismay about how city officials handled the fire that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,700 structures across Pacific Palisades and Malibu. It also renewed calls for City Hall to be held accountable.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades was going through maintenance and empty during the Palisades fire. Photographed on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Until this week, the focus of Palisades residents has been on a reservoir that was supposed to be a key source of water for the neighborhood being dry and other issues related to the fire response. But federal investigators concluded Wednesday that L.A. firefighters thought they had put out the small fire Rinderknecht allegedly set Jan. 1 only for it to smolder and burn underground and then rekindle in heavy winds Jan. 7.

This latest revelation is fueling debate over whether the city of L.A. or the state of California can be found civilly liable for its role in the fire.

Already, a flurry of complaints have been filed over the last 10 months accusing various L.A and California officials of failing to prepare for and respond to the fire.

Most legal experts agree that cases against government entities are tough because California law gives public officials broad immunity from failing to provide fire protection. Some argue that a criminal case against Rinderknecht could ultimately hurt residents’ civil complaints.

“Now those civil cases are dead in the water, because you have an arsonist,” said Neama Rahmani, president of the L.A.-based law firm West Coast Trial Lawyers, which is handling Eaton fire cases against Edison.

“That ultimately means that the already weak civil cases against the government became even weaker,” he said, “because now you have the person who’s really at fault for all this.”

EPA crews comb the ruins for hazardous material at a home on Miami Way, that was burned in the Palisades Fire, Thursday, February 6, 2025.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

But lawyers suing the government on behalf of Pacific Palisades residents disagree, and maintain that Rinderknecht’s arrest does not undermine their case.

Just hours after federal law enforcement officials announced Rinderknecht’s arrest, attorneys representing thousands of Palisades fire victims filed a new master complaint against the city of L.A. and the state of California, plus about a dozen new defendants, including Southern California Edison, Charter Communications and AT&T.

“We never allege that the state or the city started the Palisades fire,” said Alexander “Trey” Robertson, an attorney representing 3,300 Palisades fire victims. Rather, he said, their case against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the California Department of Parks and Recreation hinged on the lack of preparations in advance of the fire and the response after the fire started. “That has nothing to do with what started the Lachman fire,” he said. “It is what transpired after that fact.”

The 198-page complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, was not a response to Rinderknecht’s arrest or the new details provided by federal prosecutors. Wednesday just happened to be the deadline a judge set for lawyers to file an omnibus complaint on behalf of 10,000 residents and business owners.

Robertson noted that his complaint did not include the Los Angeles Fire Department: California government code gives it broad immunity against claims of negligent firefighting.

But Robertson argued that the LADWP is liable, because the draining of the Santa Ynez reservoir resulted in fire hydrants running dry and their energized power lines came down on homes and vegetation that ignited additional fires. And the state of California is also liable, he said, because it did not inspect its land in the days between the Lachman and Palisades fires to ensure that no smoldering embers or residual heat remained that could reignite during the predicted Santa Ana wind event.

Robertson said there is case law that holds that a public entity is liable for a “dangerous condition” allowed to exist on its property that causes a fire.

“We allege that the embers from the Lachman Fire which the state allowed to burn for six days on its land (Topanga State Park) constituted a ‘dangerous condition of public property.’ This claim is expressly authorized by statute and not barred by the immunity statutes.”

Rahmani, whose law firm is handling cases against Edison in the Eaton fire, said that would be a very tough ‘dangerous condition’ case.

“What was the dangerous condition here that caused this fire?” he asked. “You’re saying the state has a legal duty. Think of all the hundreds of thousands of square miles of state parks in California to inspect the land. I don’t think any judge would say that there’s a legal duty to inspect forest land for smoldering fire.”

David Levine, a professor of law at UC San Francisco, said Wednesday’s arrest ultimately didn’t seem to change the limited liability public officials have in a fire through government immunity.

“It would be hard to prove liability on that because they’re going to have so much protection due to immunity,” Levine said. “Because these are public entities, they’re not going to be liable for punitive damages.”

Still, Levine said, plaintiff lawyers’ could try to thread the needle by using a ‘dangerous condition’ exception. “The statutes allow for that kind of a claim, but you have to prove it,” he said. “That’s a factual matter that would have to be developed.”

Rahmani said he always thought the cases against government entities in the Palisades fire were weak because California statute gives officials broad immunity from failing to provide fire protection.

“I personally feel that they’re leading people on, giving them hope that does not exist,” Rahmani said.

The emergence of a criminal suspect in the Palisades fire further hindered attorneys’ case, Rahmani said, because judges and juries tend to put all the fault on the criminal, even if there was a claim for negligence. “Because you have an intentional criminal act,” he said, “liability would have to be apportioned between the bad actors.”

Jurors, he said, already tended to be reluctant to put a lot of liability on government defendants. “They’re thinking, ‘Hey, my taxes are gonna go up, who’s gonna pay for all this?’.. That’s why it’s very hard to get massive verdicts against government entities.”

Asked about potential liability for the state or other jurisdictions in the Palisades fire resulting from the reignition of an earlier fire, California Gov. Newsom said, “We will look at the facts and judge on the basis of those facts.”

“When it comes to the issue of fire liability, I know a thing or two, going back to Paradise…” Newsom added. “This is done without political interference. The facts need to be pursued.”

Some lawyers expect that claims will be filed against Uber, Rinderknecht’s employer.

“Obviously, Uber is going to fight that,” Rahmani said. “In terms of someone to go after, Uber seems to me to be the only entity, and that’s gonna be a tough argument.”

Legal experts appear to agree on one thing: Even if Rinderknecht is convicted, he cannot possibly compensate the thousands of residents in the affluent coastal neighborhood of Pacific Palisades who lost loved ones and homes.

“I’ll assume he’s not an heir of Elon Musk or Estee Lauder,” Levine said. “The private and public loss is so vast here. Whatever assets this guy has, I would say, wouldn’t even qualify as a drop in the bucket.”

“Criminal justice — having someone be held accountable — is important,” Rahmani said. “But obviously, as far as money in the bank, it’s not going to be helpful.”

If an arsonist was found responsible in the Eaton fire, Rahmani said, that would have a huge impact on legal claims.

“That would be a home run for Edison,” Rahmani said. “That would save them and the California Fire fund billions of dollars, because then they wouldn’t be a fault. It wouldn’t be their tower. It wouldn’t be the electrical fire. This sort of arson with an accelerant, it would completely change the game, and the value of those claims would go to almost nothing.”

Times Staff Writer Daniel Miller contributed to this report

As someone who spends entirely too much time reading trail reviews posted on outdoors apps, I often wonder what everyone would agree is a five-star hike.

Because sometimes folks puzzle me when they recount their experiences in the L.A. wild.

An AllTrails user categorized Josephine Peak, one of my favorite hikes, as “by far the worst highly rated trail” they’d experienced, as it was essentially just a “gradually inclining fire access road.” No mention of the stunning views, the beautiful plant life or the short drive to the trailhead that leaves you feeling grateful for how close we all live to this magnificence.

I’ve seen people give a trail a one-star review because of something that happened during their hike, like they got stung by a bee or tripped over a rock. I’ve noticed other folks who angrily write how horrendously maintained a trail is, but I know from hiking it that those users didn’t actually take the correct path.

Once, I saw someone post a Craigslist-style missed connection as a review. (I can’t remember how many stars they gave the trail.)

I find the concept of rating trails a bit bizarre, especially when we zoom out and consider our luck. We live in Southern California, where we can hike every day of the year, often for free. In the winter, you can find snow within a short drive of L.A.

In the summer, you can escape the heat by traveling high into Angeles National Forest where the mountain air is cooler. Or by lounging in a cool river under the shade of native sycamores and oaks in the San Gabriel or Santa Monica Mountains. And of course, there’s Griffith Park, with more than 4,210 acres smack-dab in the middle of L.A. where you can hike at all hours of the day for free.

Here’s what I would like to propose: Outside of serious hazards or maintenance issues, the best trail is the one you’re on. That’s the spirit that went into my adventures for this week’s Wild. I wanted to highlight less popular jaunts through our public lands.

The sun peeks through the clouds above the San Gabriel Mountains, as seen from near the top of the Hoyt Mountain trail.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

1. Hoyt Mountain via Grizzly Flat

Distance: About 4.6 miles out and back
Elevation gained: About 1,450 feet
Difficulty: Strenuous
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: Mount Wilson Observatory paved route

Hoyt Mountain is a 4,415(ish)-foot peak in the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains in Angeles National Forest. There are multiple routes to reach it. I chose to start at the Grizzly Flat Trailhead because it is an easier and shorter path to Hoyt Mountain than other options, like starting near the Clear Creek fire station.

You’ll start this trail via Hoyt Mountain Road, a wide dirt fire road. As you climb, notice the increasingly beautiful views. You’ll pass loads of buckwheat and other flowering plants, including California fuchsia, and chaparral yucca bursting out of the mountainside.

About a mile in, Hoyt Mountain Road explodes with green plants and trees, including California bay laurel.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

About two-thirds of a mile in, you’ll come to a split in the trail. Continue north on Hoyt Mountain Road. You’ll observe the trail’s foliage grow thicker about a third of a mile farther in. Take a moment to smell the spicy California bay laurel leaves (my favorite aroma of our local landscape). You’ll also likely see big berry manzanita, thick-leaved yerba santa and sugar bush.

I did notice a lot of animal scat — including bear — on this trail, so keep your eyes peeled for our mammalian neighbors. You will also notice that you can still hear the traffic from Angeles Crest Highway from the trail, but I think the striking panoramic views make up for it.

About 1.8 miles in, you’ll come to a wide, flat area where you might, if more observant than this outdoors journalist, notice three paths. There’s one that leads to a transmission tower, which this reporter may have taken before realizing it was the wrong way. There’s also a wider path, Telephone Trail. If you’re planning to hike to Hoyt Mountain, you’ll want to take the goat trail in between these routes.

The moon rises over the San Gabriel Mountains in Angeles National Forest.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

This narrow, steep path is a fire break and is not an “official” trail. Its steepness reminded me of the scramble from Brand Park up to Mt. Thom. You will need hiking poles and footwear with good traction to help you find purchase on the steep hillside.

There are multiple false summits before reaching Hoyt Mountain. You do have the option — as controversial as it might be to suggest — to just vibe out on one of them. Go all the way to Hoyt Mountain if the spirit (and your legs) moves you.

The Castaic Rock Trail near Castaic Lake leads to a monolith measuring over 200 feet.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

2. Castaic Rock Trail

Distance: 1.3 miles out and back
Elevation gained: About 200 feet
Difficulty: Moderate
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: San Francisquito Creek Trail

The Castaic Rock Trail is a 1.3-mile out-and-back hike near Castaic Lake. It leads to a massive boulder — by some measurements, over 200 feet tall — that is known by many names, including Castaic Rock, Raven’s Roost and Rabbit Rock.

You’ll park on the shoulder of Lake Hughes Road and ascend a short, steep dirt path that quickly flattens out to become a pleasant jaunt through California buckwheat, sagebrush and other native plants. Look around, and you’ll notice panoramic views of Magic Mountain in the southeast and Cobblestone Mountain and Whitaker Peak in the northwest.

The trail meanders to the east side of the rock, where there’s historically been a bench located under the shade of hollyleaf cherry trees. Keep your eyes peeled for snakes and coyotes, as they’re common sights in the area.

Hikers can see sweeping views of L.A. from the Briar Summit Open Space Preserve.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

3. Briar Summit Open Space Preserve

Distance: About a mile out and back
Elevation gained: About 250 feet
Difficulty: On the easier end of moderate
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: Lake Hollywood Trail

The Briar Summit Open Space Preserve is a 52-acre park north of Laurel Canyon that’s full of native plants, including laurel sumac. The preserve offers striking panoramic views of L.A. County that you’ll likely have to yourself (especially if you go on a weekday).

The hike is simple. You will park in the neighborhood near the entrance, taking care to read signage and be respectful of residents. Past the gate, you’ll take a short, steep paved path up until you reach a locked gate. You will quickly be rewarded with views of downtown L.A. to the southeast, the Griffith Park Observatory to the east and multiple mountain ranges in essentially every direction.

Briar Summit was saved from development just over 20 years ago thanks to private donations and public money. “Development of even a few of the property’s five legal lots could have spelled the end [for] all medium- and big-sized mammal species in the range between the Cahuenga Pass and Laurel Canyon,” according to a 2004 news release.

The Briar Summit Open Space Preserve features several spur trails, unofficial paths leading to various dead ends (and adventures) around the 52-acre park.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

There is a spectacular lookout point just a third of a mile in where you can sit on a boulder and observe the city around you. From here, you’ll notice a dirt path leading south. You can take it for a short distance, but it will quickly lead you down a dusty, unstable hill. I wouldn’t recommend taking it downhill unless you’re ready for an intense off-trail workout. There are several unofficial “goat trails” or spurs leading in various directions throughout the preserve. You should follow these with caution, as they’re not regularly maintained.

Regardless of where you go, I hope you have a five-star time out there — whatever that means to you!

A speaker shares information with visitors during an Indigenous People’s Day celebration at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area. L.A. County Parks and Recreation will host multiple Indigenous People’s Day celebrations in October.

(L.A. County Parks)

3 things to do

1. Celebrate Indigenous People’s Day around L.A.
Several Indigenous People’s Day celebrations are scheduled throughout mid-October in L.A. County. The 5th Tuxuunga Indigenous Peoples Day is scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday at 12400 Big Tujunga Canyon Road in Tujunga. The event will include live music, dancing, storytelling and hands-on workshops. Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, the ancestral village of Mapipinga, will host a fireside gathering and celebration from 3 to 7 p.m. Sunday. Visitors can listen to live music and storytelling around the campfire. The San Dimas Canyon Nature Center will co-host two events with the San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians Gabrieleno/Tongva: a tribal history and native seed planting event from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday and a tribal history and necklace-making workshop from 5 to 7 p.m. Oct. 17. The Stoneview Nature Center will co-host its celebration with the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians — Kizh Nation from noon to 3 p.m. Oct. 18, an event that will include a nature walk and drum circle. Learn more at the Instagram pages linked above.

2. Sow seeds in Ascot Hills in L.A.
The Ascot Hills Park Green Team will host its monthly restoration event from 8 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday. Volunteers should meet at the park’s nursery on the west end of the gravel parking area. The work will include collecting and sowing California buckwheat and other native plant seeds. Learn more at the group’s Instagram page.

3. Nurture oak trees in Topanga
The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains needs volunteers from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday to help restore native oak woodlands at Trippet Ranch. Volunteers will water trees, yank weeds and apply mulch as well as potentially plant new acorns as needed. Learn more and register at eventbrite.com.

The must-read

Wild horses gather near Benton, Calif.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Wild horses grazing in the Mono Lake area are the source of a heated debate among environmentalists, Indigenous leaders and animal rights activists, and the government over how to best manage the herds so they don’t decimate the land. “This year, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management approved a plan to round up and remove hundreds of wild horses roaming beyond the roughly 200,000 acres designated for them along the California and Nevada border,” Times staff writer Lila Seidman wrote. “No date has been set, but it could be as soon as this fall.” Environmentalists argue the move is necessary to save the otherworldly landscape at Mono Lake, but local tribes and nonprofits point out the government’s method of rounding up horses — hiring contractors with helicopters to drive them into stables — is dangerous, and even deadly, to the horses. “They’re going to run them down with helicopters and genocide them, just like they ran down us,” Rana Saulque, vice chairwoman for the Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute tribe, said through tears.

This is yet another debate occurring around California about the best use and management plan of our public lands.

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

Want to help scientists understand our local wildlife? You can do just that by participating in the L.A. Nature Quest, which runs through the month of October. First, download iNaturalist, a citizen scientist app, on your smartphone. Next, simply go outside and start observing what plants and animals are in your neighborhood. Take good care to notice indicator and invasive species. After you’re finished snapping photos, upload your finds to the L.A. Nature Quest 2025 project on iNaturalist. Thanks for doing your part to protect our native species.

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

Five-plus years ago, during the early days of COVID-19, we sent the first edition of Boiling Point. I wrote then that there would “always be people who say it’s the wrong time to talk about carbon emissions, or water pollution, or the extinction crisis.” But even amid a deadly pandemic and stay-at-home orders, I argued, it was more important than ever to keep the climate crisis front and center.

The same is true now — yes, even amid the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on democracy and dissent and immigrants. Which is why, even though I’m leaving the L.A. Times, Boiling Point will continue.

Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the L.A. Times. Tuesday was my last day.

But I’m not done telling stories about climate. And neither are my wonderful friends and colleagues.

I’m not quite ready to share my own plans yet. If you want to keep following my work, please send me an email at [email protected], and I promise to keep you updated. I’m excited for what comes next.

It’s a bittersweet moment, though. Working at The Times has been one of the great privileges of my life; thank you for inviting me into your inboxes, and making time to read my stories when you could have been scrolling or streaming. I’m grateful for our dialogue, our debates, our disagreements. I hope we’ll have many more.

Just as importantly, I hope you’ll continue to follow and support the L.A. Times, especially our environment team.

With no disrespect to any other news outlet, we have the best climate reporters in the business: Tyrone Beason. Tony Briscoe. Noah Haggerty. Ian James. Sandra McDonald. Melody Petersen. Corinne Purtill. Susanne Rust. Lila Seidman. Hayley Smith. Rosanna Xia. If you’re not reading them, you’re doing it wrong.

Starting next week, several of my colleagues will take turns writing Boiling Point. It’ll look a little different than it does now, with a combination of analysis and news roundup. Each edition will have a unique focus, based on the reporter’s expertise: Ian James will cover water, for instance, while Lila Seidman will tackle wildlife and Tony Briscoe will handle air quality. You’ll get a wide range of thoughtful perspectives.

The newsletter will still arrive in your inbox every Thursday. It’ll still be worth opening.

Just like climate, journalism is more important now than ever. Local journalism especially.

Thank you for everything. Onward.

ONE MORE THING

On the southern end of Del Mar, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.

(John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)

For nostalgia’s sake, here are some of my favorite environmental stories and series the L.A. Times has produced during my seven years here — including, no shame, one of my own:

A reporter kept a diary of her plastic use. It was soul-crushing

Colorado River in Crisis: A Times series on the Southwest’s shrinking water lifeline

Fishing the L.A. River is more than a quarantine hobby. For some, it’s therapy

Is it ethical to have children in the face of climate change?

Repowering the West: Energy-hungry cities are reshaping the landscape, again

The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim

The L.A. Times investigation into extreme heat’s deadly toll

Uncovering the toxic soil lurking in L.A.’s burn zones

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

SACRAMENTO — California is challenging President Trump’s grip on the state’s National Guard, telling a federal court the White House used claims of unrest in Los Angeles as a pretext for a deployment that has since expanded nationwide — including now sending troops to Illinois.

The Trump administration deployed 14 soldiers from California’s National Guard to Illinois to train troops from other states, according to a motion California filed Tuesday asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to end the federal government’s control of its National Guard.

Trump’s decision to move California troops who had been sent to Portland on Sunday and redeploy them to Illinois escalates tensions in the growing fight over who controls state military forces — and how far presidential power can reach in domestic operations.

Federal officials have told California they intend to issue a new order extending Trump’s federalization of 300 members of the state’s Guard through Jan. 31, according to the filing.

“Trump is going on a cross-country crusade to sow chaos and division,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. “His actions — and those of his Cabinet — are against our deeply held American values. He needs to stop this illegal charade now.”

Officials from California and Oregon sought a restraining order after Trump sent California Guard troops to Oregon on Sunday. Trump deployed the California Guard soldiers just a day after a federal judge temporarily blocked the president’s efforts to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.

That prompted Judge Karin Immergut to issue a more sweeping temporary order Sunday evening blocking the deployment of National Guard troops from any other state to Oregon.

California’s own lawsuit against Trump challenging the deployment in Los Angeles since June resulted in Senior District Judge Charles R. Breyer blocking the administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using” the state’s troops to engage in civilian law enforcement.

The new motion filed Tuesday in that case by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta asks the 9th Circuit to vacate its earlier stay that allowed federalization to continue under strict limits on what they can do. California argues that the Guard’s federalized troops are now being used for missions outside the limited purposes the court allowed — drug raids in Riverside County, a show-of-force operation in MacArthur Park and deployments into other states.

“The ever-expanding mission of California’s federalized Guard bears no resemblance to what this Court provisionally upheld in June,” the state wrote in the filing. “And it is causing irreparable harm to California, our Nation’s democratic traditions, and the rule of law.”

Illinois leaders have also gone to court to attempt to block Trump from sending troops to Chicago. Trump has responded by saying that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker should be jailed.

California Sen. Alex Padilla is among the highest-ranking Latinos in U.S. politics today, but it took a pair of handcuffs to make him famous.

How’s that for a comment on America 2025?

Padilla, you may remember, was tackled and cuffed by federal officers after attempting to ask a question of Homeland Security Czarina Kristi Noem at an L.A. news conference in June, when the National Guard first made its appearance on our streets. Noem later claimed Padilla “lunged” at her — which he did not — using the classic Trumpian technique of erasing reality with blame, especially when it comes to brown people.

Padilla told me that “from day one of this administration, I have tried to speak truth to power,” and if getting tackled forced people to “have no choice but to now start paying attention … that could be helpful, because the general public knows it’s wrong.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi recycled the incident on Tuesday when Padilla attempted to question her during a congressional hearing, voicing concern about the weaponization of the Department of Justice. Bondi refused to answer multiple questions, instead invoking the Noem defense.

“I find it interesting that you want order … in this proceeding now,” Bondi said. “You sure didn’t have order when you stormed Secretary Noem at a press conference in California, did you?”

Again, no storming, no lunging, not even a feint. Really, if anything can be said of Padilla, it’s that he’s a guy who likes order. An MIT-trained engineer, he’s known for being calm to the point of boring — in the best of ways. Who wouldn’t want a bit of boring in their politics today, if it’s seasoned with compassion and common sense?

Calm, of course, does not mean a lack of conviction. As the government shutdown limps to the end of its first full week, Padilla took a few minutes to fill me in on why Democrats shouldn’t back down, and why he won’t — whether the issue is healthcare, immigration or the collision of the two, which is at the heart of this shutdown.

Republicans would like voters to believe that undocumented immigrants are throwing parties in our emergency rooms, racking up free services while shoving U.S. citizens out to the sidewalk. In reality, there’s not a lot of good data on how many ER visits involve undocumented folks because doctors are more focused on saving lives than checking immigration status. But one Texas study found that about 2% of all hospital visits in a three-month period involved people without documentation. That’s in a state with a high number of undocumented folks, so take it for what it’s worth — hardly a scourge.

Padilla and Democrats would like to stay focused on an actual crisis — healthcare premiums for low- and middle-income folks are about to skyrocket in coming weeks if Congress doesn’t keep the Obama-era subsidies that make the premiums affordable. Padilla wants voters to understand how dire this is.

“This is not a what-might-happen-next-year concern … this is a now concern,” Padilla told me.

“Open enrollment is opening,” he said. “People are setting their premiums and have to make choices of where to sign up for healthcare and at the cost right now, and so it does need to be immediately addressed.”

In case you think this is partisan show, far-right MAGA cheerleader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) agrees with Padilla. That’s when you know things are getting weird.

“Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Greene wrote on social media, breaking with her party on the issue.

That’s about the only thing that Padilla and Greene may ever agree on. Padilla is the son of immigrants who met in L.A. and later obtained legal status. He was born in Southern California, making birthright citizenship core to his identity at a moment when Trump is asking the Supreme Court to end it. His isn’t just an immigrant story, it’s a California story, and it’s never far from his mind.

He was recently asked if he regretted fighting with the Biden administration over proposed immigration reform that lacked pathways for immigrants, especially Dreamers and others who have been in the United States for years if not decades, to become citizens. Would it have been better to sell them out, leave them in limbo, but fix the border before Trump could exploit it?

“Of course not,” Padilla told me. Rather than shrink under attack, Padilla said he’s holding his ground.

California is one of a handful of states that does in fact offer healthcare to undocumented people, though budget shortfalls forced Gov. Gavin Newsom to scale back that plan.

No federal dollars are used for that undocumented healthcare — it’s solely state money. And Padilla supports it.

“There are some states that choose to use state funding to provide that care, and I agree with that, because it’s much smarter, from a public health standpoint, to help prevent people from getting sick or treat people early on, not administer healthcare, certainly not primary care, through emergency rooms,” he said.

Padilla said it’s rich that the very workers deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic, the workers who kept food on tables, deliveries going, and cared for our young and our elderly, are now “the primary target of Trump’s massive deportation agenda. So whether it’s in the vein of the healthcare question, whether it’s in the vein of the indiscriminate raids by ICE and other federal agencies, that’s the cruel irony.”

The Trump administration raised Padilla’s profile inadvertently, but the newfound fame has had a somewhat unexpected consequence: Frequent speculation that he may run for governor when Newsom terms out in 2026.

Padilla said he hasn’t “made a decision on that and not making any announcements right now.”

Instead, he’s focusing on helping to pass California’s Proposition 50, which would rig election maps to potentially create five more Democratic seats in the midterm elections, with the hopes of taking control of at least one house of Congress, an effort he says is “critical to reining in this out-of-control administration.”

On a blue-sky afternoon, kayakers paddle past dozens of sea lions lolling in the sun and make a beeline toward the sea otters lounging on beds of eel grass at Elkhorn Slough on California’s central coast. The playful predators not only generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue, but their voracious appetite for destructive species has revived this sprawling estuary while making the region’s carbon-sequestering kelp forests more resistant to climate change.

The U.S. government determined in 2022 that reintroducing sea otters to their historic range on the West Coast would be a boon to biodiversity and climate resilience, laying out a road map to restoration that would cost up to $43 million.

But as the Trump administration moves to slash funding for wildlife programs, a nonprofit co-founded by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is stepping in to raise nearly that amount to finance and coordinate what would be a complicated, years-long effort to connect isolated populations of sea otters. So far it’s raised more than $1.4 million of its $40-million target.

“We are coming in at a time when we’ve seen these dramatic cuts from the federal government and conservationists are facing major funding gaps,” says Paul Thomson, chief programs officer at the Wildlife Conservation Network, the San Francisco nonprofit that launched the Sea Otter Fund earlier this year. In August, a veteran U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, Jen Miller, left the government to run the fund.

Sea otters prey on invasive green crabs, which fostered the return of eel grass at Elkhorn Slough.

(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)

The initiative could be a harbinger of a future where private donors assume a more prominent role in financing and advancing wildlife restoration as climate impacts multiply.

While philanthropies have helped fund sea otter work, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which listed the Southern sea otter in California as threatened in 1977, assumes the cost of the species’ recovery as well as funding state and private research. “Sea otter recovery and supporting healthy coastlines go hand in hand, including finding ways to support the needs of our local fisheries,” a Wildlife Service spokesperson said in a statement, noting the agency has funded ongoing research.

Future support is uncertain, though, as the Trump administration proposes eliminating programs that underwrite sea otter science, including grants for state endangered species programs.

Understanding otter networks

Sea otters once inhabited the Pacific Rim from Japan to Mexico. By the turn of the 20th century, hunters had wiped out 99% of the population to satisfy demand for the animal’s pelt, known as “soft gold” for its luxurious warmth.

Since then, scientists successfully reintroduced otters to Alaska, British Columbia and Washington State, but that leaves a nearly thousand-mile stretch of coast from central California through Oregon without the animals.

“Adding sea otters completely changes the configuration of the food web and that has profound consequences for the structure of the nearshore ecosystem,” says Tim Tinker, an independent sea otter scientist who does research for the University of California at Santa Cruz.

He’s developing computer models to simulate the myriad factors that will determine where and which animals should be reintroduced, as well as risks and survival rates. Future versions of the model could also project the potential impact on fisheries.

The Sea Otter Fund is financing Tinker’s work, recruiting him to model restoration scenarios, the kind of research he previously has conducted with government funding. It’s the latest animal fund from the Wildlife Conservation Network, co-founded in 2002 by former software entrepreneur Charles Knowles. Ongoing campaigns fund the recovery of African elephants, lions, pangolins and other animals.

Michelle Staedler studies sea otters at Elkhorn Slough.

(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)

The fund also underwrites marine biologist Michelle Staedler’s position on an Elkhorn Slough research team run out of UC Santa Cruz. “We’re really trying to understand the sea otters’ social networks,” she says.

Charting otters’ social graph is key to future restoration efforts. Past reintroductions have involved capturing random sea otters in the wild and relocating up to hundreds at a time, which resulted in high mortality of resettled animals. Of the 140 otters relocated off Southern California’s San Nicolas Island between 1987 and 1990 in a federally funded project, only about 15 animals initially survived. More than a quarter of the transported otters swam more than 150 miles back home.

Scientists say any future reintroductions will be highly targeted, selecting sea otters that are part of social groups whose bonds make them more likely to stay put and thrive. To lay that groundwork, Staedler spends a day on Elkhorn Slough twice a week, motoring through the estuary on an electric skiff to record the genders, locations, relationships, interactions, diets and caloric intake of tagged otters.

“Elkhorn Slough serves as a petri dish and the research work there will be critical for doing restoration,” says Knowles. State funding for that project has expired, however, and the Sea Otter Fund is considering replacing the loss.

Staedler keeps records of the sea otters on Elkhorn Slough.

(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)

“This wave has been building”

Elkhorn Slough is California’s second-largest estuary, and the 7-mile-long outlet to Monterey Bay also serves as a real-time laboratory for how sea otters can rehabilitate degraded coastal ecosystems and benefit local economies.

In the early 1990s, invasive green crabs that made their way there destroyed eel grass meadows that serve as habitats for fish, shellfish, sea turtles and birds. Then a few sea otters began to venture in just as the Monterey Bay Aquarium began to release rehabilitated orphaned otters there. They feasted on the green crabs, consuming an estimated 120,000 of them a year, according to a 2024 paper.

As crab numbers plummeted, the eel grass returned and spawned an aquatic Serengeti. Today, there’s more than 120 sea otters at the estuary, which has fostered local ecotourism businesses that rent kayaks to visitors and take them on otter-spotting excursions, generating $5 million in revenues annually and creating more than 300 jobs, according to a 2023 study.

Kayakers approach a sea otter in Elkhorn Slough.

(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)

Sea otters also have kept kelp-eating purple urchins in check on the central California coast when one of its other predators, the sunflower sea star, died off during a marine heat wave a decade ago. On California’s otter-less North Coast, the loss of sunflower sea stars wiped out more than 90% of the region’s kelp forests, triggering the collapse of fisheries.

But the competition that relocated otters’ prodigious appetites could pose to Northern California and Oregon commercial shellfish fishers worries Lori Steele, executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Assn. “It’s very difficult to really fully understand and account for the potential damage to a shellfish population that a very small number of sea otters could do,” she says.

The Wildlife Service found that impacts on fishing communities pose the biggest risk of sea otter introduction. If relocation moves forward, the agency will conduct an extensive review and consultations with state and federal agencies and tribal groups.

Until then, Jen Miller, the senior manager of the Sea Otter Fund, aims to keep the money for the work flowing. “It feels like this wave has been building and building and with just the right resources could crest to surf sea otter restoration to success,” she says.

Woody writes for Bloomberg.

It was late Sunday evening when President Trump got thumped with a court loss — again — by California.

No, a federal judge ruled, Trump cannot command the California National Guard to invade Portland, Ore. At the request of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and others, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut broadened a temporary restraining order that had blocked Oregon’s National Guard from being used by the federal government. It now includes not just California’s troops but troops from any state. At least for the next two weeks.

It’s the kind of legal loss Trump should be used to it by now, especially when it comes to the Golden State. Since Trump 2.0 hit the White House this year with Project 2025 folded up in his back pocket, the state of California has sued the administration 42 times, literally about once a week.

While many of those cases are still pending, California is racking up a series of wins that restored more than $160 billion in funding and at least slowed down (and in some cases stopped) the steamrolling of civil rights on issues including birthright citizenship and immigration policy.

“We have won in 80% of the cases,” Bonta told me. “Whether it be a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, and more and more now permanent final injunctions after the whole trial court case is done.”

I’ll take it. We all need some positive news. I don’t often write just about the good, but in these strange days, it’s helpful to have a reminder that the fight is always worth having when it comes to protecting our rights. And, despite the partisan Supreme Court, the reason that we are still holding on to democracy is because the system still works, albeit like a ’78 Chevy with the doors rusting off.

While Gov. Gavin Newsom has made himself the face of California’s fights against Trump, taking on a pugnacious and audacious attitude especially on social media, the day-in, day-out slugging in those battles is often done by Bonta and his team in courtrooms across the country.

It’s hard to recall, but months ago, Newsom called a special session of the Legislature to give Bonta a $25-million allowance to defend not just California but democracy. And in a moment when many of us fear that checks and balances promised in the Constitution have turned out to be little more than happy delusions, Bonta has a message: The courts are (mostly) holding and California’s lawyers aren’t just fighting, they’re winning.

“We can do things that governors can’t do,” Bonta said. “No role and no moment has been more important than this one.”

Bonta told me that he often hears that Trump is disregarding the courts, so “what’s the point of litigation at all? What’s the point of a court order at all? He’s just going to ignore them.”

But, he said, the administration has been following judges’ rulings — so far. While there have been instances, especially around deportations, that knock on the door of lawlessness, at least for California, Trump is “following all of our court orders,” Bonta said.

“We’re making a difference,” he said.

A few days ago, the U.S. Department of Education was forced to send out a final chunk of funds it had attempted to withhold from schools. Bonta, in a multistate lawsuit, successfully protected that money, which schools need this year to help migrant children and English learners, train teachers, buy new technology and pay for before- and after-school programs, among other uses.

That’s a permanent, final ruling — no appeals.

Another recent win saw California land a permanent injunction against the feds when it comes to stopping their payments for costs associated with state energy projects. That a win both for the climate and consumers, who benefit when we make energy more efficiently.

Last week, Bonta won another permanent injunction, blocking the Trump administration’s effort to tie grants related to homeland security to compliance with his immigration policies. Safety shouldn’t be tied to deportations, especially in California, where our immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding community members.

Those are just a few of Bonta’s victories. Of course, Trump and his minions aren’t happy about them. Stephen Miller, the shame of Santa Monica, seems to have especially lost his marbles over the National Guard ruling. On social media, Miller seems to be attacking the justice system, and attorneys general such as Bonta.

“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

Never mind that the Oregon judge who issued the National Guard ruling is a Trump appointee.

“Their goal, I think, is to chill and pause and worry judges; to chill and pause and worry the press; to chill and pause and worry attorneys general who stand up for the rule of law and for democracy, who go to court and fight for what’s right and fight for the law,” Bonta said.

Bonta expects the administration, far from learning any lessons or harboring self-reflection during this mad dash toward autocracy, to continue full speed ahead.

“We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see it fast, and we’re going to see it escalate,” he said. “None of that is good, including putting military in American cities or, you know, Trump treating them like his royal guard instead of the National Guard.”

Even when the Trump administration loses, “they always have this like second move and maybe a third, where they are always trying to advance their agenda, even when they’ve been blocked by a court, even when they’ve been told that they’re acting unlawfully or unconstitutionally,” he said.

On Monday, Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent the court’s ruling on the National Guard, a massive escalation of his effort to militarize American cities.

But California remains on a winning streak, much to Trump’s dismay.

It’s my bet that as long as our judges continue to honor the rule of law, that streak will hold.

For my final day, I wanted to do something I’d never done before: swim straight out to sea. When I do open water swimming, I swim parallel to shore. This would be different. No markers. No sight line. Just the horizon. The currents. The waves. On top of this, we would be swimming from Bolinas, a quaint fishing town that is famously hostile to visitors and removes its signs to keep them out. This is where the Bolinas Lagoon opens out to the open ocean. Seals gather here, and the sharks supposedly come here to feast on the seals. I didn’t know if this was just a rumor to keep out-of-town surfers away, but the Farallon Islands just 20 miles south of Point Reyes are the winter playground for some of the world’s largest great white sharks. For this endeavor I enlisted the help of my friend, Greg, a local.

We wore wetsuits. He gave me a cozy neoprene hat to wear over my cap and goggles to keep my head warm. He also provided me with a special anti-shark amulet that I wore on my wrist like a watch. Developed in Australia, these wrist magnets repel the sharks, he said, and “feel like a punch in the nose” to the sharks if they get too close. Sounded good to me!

The day dawned foggy, but the low blanket of mist that hugged the land the day before had lifted. I was terrified of swimming straight out and losing sight of land. Greg assured me that even in dense fog you know where land is by sensing the direction of the waves. That may be true, but I wasn’t ready to swim by the feel of the currents yet. Greg also wore tiny flippers that looked like duck feet and a neon bubble attached to his waist to carry our valuables and make us visible to boats. We agreed to swim out 15 minutes.

The waves were big. The surfers were already out at a local spot known as the “patch.” We dove through the waves, swimming hard between. The water visibility was nil — just a blur of yellow, brown and eventually black. We wouldn’t be able to see a seal or shark if it swam right beneath us. I didn’t like the feeling.

But my friend was beside me. Finally my shallow, panicked breath slowed, my stroke evened out and I settled in. Out past the waveline we stopped. The early-morning sea was glassy and smooth. It felt viscous, velvety and otherworldly. Pelicans and terns swooped and dove around us. Surprisingly, once we swam out, I could see the land encircled us with long arms. Stinson Beach stretched out to the right, Bolinas to the left. We would not lose our way. We swam farther out. Every few strokes we stopped to take in the view. We were just specks in the ocean, as tiny as a velella or an anchovy, part of a big, watery world.

Out here my perspective changed. I realized we could swim forever and still see the shore. We lay on our backs and let the swells gently lift us, then fall. The words of my father, a second-generation submariner, often recited when I was a child, drifted through my head: “Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep.” We swam to where the glassiness ended and the wind rippled the surface, 14 minutes out.

The magic of the open water experience was better shared. No GoPro or camera can capture the vastness of the ocean for someone back on shore. Or what it feels like to ride the slow heaving of the ocean, pulsing like the heartbeat of the world. We came ashore in a big set, swimming frantically in, then turning to face the waves so we didn’t get wiped out. We swam until our feet touched the sandy bottom and crawled out happy but exhausted.

My body carried the rocking of the ocean for the rest of the day. I could close my eyes and be back there, gently rising and falling under the low, gray sky. I held onto that feeling as long as I could.

My friend promised me that by next year, he would have more bodies of water and more secret swims. Already he had come up with new watering holes I never knew existed. But for me, the quest had been a success. Being in water every day helped me regain my equilibrium. Surfers say the ions in salt water make you happy. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’m 60% water and I felt I had moistened my dry skin, lightened the pull of gravity on my aging body and shed some of the heaviness of the first six months of the year.

When I first went to my therapist many years ago, she told me the story of the selkies. At the time I was feeling overwhelmed with work, marriage and motherhood. Much of our work has been my journey back to myself. After my vacation, I told her of my adventure. She said, “You were able to put your pelt back on. You’re spending more time in your seal suit.” Yes. On land and in the water. I am. Sometimes the metaphor is the medicine.

THIS is the terrifying moment a helicopter crashes onto a freeway just feet away from shocked drivers in California.

Three people on board are in a critical condition after the Airbus lost control before plunging towards the busy road and smashing into the ground.

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Footage showed the chopper flying low above Highway 50 near Howe Avenue in Sacramento.

Within seconds it started plummeting towards the ground with huge plumes of smoke seen billowing across the highway as it smashed.

Pictures from after the crash shows the medical helicopter upside down in the middle of the road.

Smashed glass and debris can be seen strewn across the highway as firefighters and cops surround the wreckage.

Motorist Davyd Bychkoviak was driving past just after 7pm local time (3am UK time) as the helicopter spiralled through the air.

Mr Bychkoviak said: “I’m still shaking. It was a brush with death.

“The helicopter crashed inches away from me. The dust kicked up into my face, and I could feel the wind of the propellers in the car.

“If it had crashed on the road there would have been multiple fatalities.”

The Sacramento Fire Department and Federal Aviation Administration said the helicopter went down on the eastbound lanes of Highway 50 near Howe Avenue.

They added that it was a helicopter that provides air medical services.

REACH Air Medical Services later confirmed to ABC7 news that three of its crew were hurt in the crash.

Captain Justin Sylvia, from the Sacramento Fire Department, confirmed three people were “transported in critical condition” to local hospitals.

These included two females and a male made up of a pilot, nurse and paramedic.

No patient was on board at the time of the disaster, Captain Sylvia added.

Speaking at a press conference today he said: “There was one victim that was trapped underneath the helicopter… [with] the help of just civilians that were standing around, they were able to lift part of that helicopter out and get that victim out.

“There’s a pretty large debris field around that at this point.

“The lucky portion for us, I’d say, is the fact that the helicopter did not catch on fire.”

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CHICAGO — Illinois and Chicago filed a lawsuit Monday aiming to stop President Trump’s administration from sending hundreds of National Guard troops to the city, just as troops prepared to deploy and hours after a federal judge blocked troops from being sent to Portland, Oregon.

The quickly unfolding developments come as the administration portrays the Democrat-led cities as war-ravaged and lawless and amid Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Officials in both cities have disputed the president’s characterizations, saying military intervention isn’t needed and it’s federal involvement that’s inflaming the situation.

The legal challenge comes after Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said some 300 of the state’s guard troops were to be federalized and deployed to the nation’s third-largest city, along with 400 others from Texas.

The lawsuit alleges that “these advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous.”

“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the lawsuit says.

Pritzker said the potential deployment amounted to “Trump’s invasion” and called on Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to block it. Abbott pushed back and said the crackdown was needed to protect federal workers who are in the city as part of the president’s increased immigration enforcement.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson confirmed in a weekend statement that Trump authorized using Illinois National Guard members, citing what she called “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness” that local leaders have not quelled.

In Chicago, the sight of armed Border Patrol agents making arrests near famous landmarks amplified concerns from residents already uneasy after an immigration crackdown that began last month. Agents have targeted immigrant-heavy and largely Latino areas.

Protesters have frequently rallied near an immigration facility outside the city, and federal officials reported the arrests of 13 protesters on Friday near the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview.

The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that federal agents shot a woman Saturday morning on the southwest side of Chicago. A department statement said it happened after Border Patrol agents patrolling the area “were rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.”

No law enforcement officers were seriously injured, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

In Portland, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut granted a temporary restraining order sought by Oregon and California to block the deployment of guard troops from those states to the city.

There has been a sustained and low-level protest outside the Portland ICE facility, but it’s been less disruptive than the downtown clashes of 2020 when demonstrations erupted after George Floyd’s killing.

Immergut, a first-term Trump appointee, seemed incredulous that the president moved to send National Guard troops to Oregon from neighboring California and then from Texas on Sunday.

“Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order?” she said. “Why is this appropriate?”

Local officials have suggested that many of the president’s claims and social media posts about Portland appear to rely on images from 2020. Under a new mayor, the city has reduced crime, and downtown has seen fewer homeless encampments and increased foot traffic.

Most violent crime around the U.S. has actually declined in recent years, including in Portland, where a recent report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found that homicides from January through June decreased by 51% this year compared to the same period in 2024.

Since the start of his second term, Trump has sent or talked about sending troops to 10 cities, including Baltimore; Memphis, Tennessee; the District of Columbia; New Orleans; and the California cities of Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A federal judge in September said the administration “willfully” broke federal law by deploying guard troops to Los Angeles over protests about immigration raids.

Press writes for the Associated Press.