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SACRAMENTO — California has spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking, and yet it can still be found in every city and town, hiding in plain sight.

Whether it’s online, on places such as Figueroa Street in L.A. or Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, or even in the hotel rooms where our World Cup guests stayed, there are thousands of women and girls being sexually exploited in California right now, despite all that money and all the resources it has purchased.

“The reality is that few threats to a woman’s safety are as brutal or as overlooked as sex trafficking,” First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said Monday, sitting with her husband, the governor, in a tiny second-floor dance studio built for survivors of trafficking.

Siebel Newsom was there to watch Newsom sign an executive order that was driven by her work as an advocate for survivors of trafficking. On its surface, the order may not sound like much and isn’t likely to make the news. It calls for most of the major state agencies to come up with a plan within 60 days to work together to curb trafficking and help survivors.

Hardly an earth-shattering demand. But believe it or not, one of the biggest barriers that our state faces, in this great age of technology and always-on connection, is that there is little collaboration between the folks fighting traffickers.

Yes, we have about 35 task forces statewide working on this issue and sometimes they run joint operations. But more often, those fighting trafficking live in their own silos, doing their own work, and often failing or refusing to share even scant details with other jurisdictions.

The same holds true for the many organizations that work with survivors, most of which have come on the scene only in the last few decades as sex trafficking morphed from a crime in which children were viewed as complicit to one in which we understand that they are victims.

Those organizations often do great work, but they too often do it alone. A survivor — or a girl being trafficked and looking for escape — has no easy way to find someone to help her. It’s largely luck, the right outreach person in the right place at the right time, or a cop who has taken the time and care to know what the resources are.

“We are so fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She’s a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting the predators — traffickers and buyers alike — who daily trade cash for the use of a human body, willing or not.

Bock points out that while those fighting against trafficking lack collaboration, the opposite is true of the criminals. Up and down the state, they are organized. A trafficker might pick up his victim in one city, only to transport her to another city to meet buyers. Victims are moved often, and even sold or traded to other traffickers.

Once a victim crosses a jurisdictional line, everything that happened on the other side of it too often gets lost in the nowhere land of bureaucracy and red tape. A move from Los Angeles to Riverside, and the girl might as well be in Taiwan, as Bock puts it.

“We need to stop asking whose case is this, and rather ask how do we solve this case together? How do we solve the problem together?” Bock said. “Collaboration recovers children sooner, links investigation, dismantles trafficking organizations and holds traffickers accountable. A trafficker should never escape accountability because critical information was sitting in another agency’s database.”

So while Newsom’s demand for a 60-day plan might not sound like much, it goes to the heart of what ails the system.

“Traffickers collaborate every day,” Bock said. “Traffickers have built networks to exploit children. We must build stronger networks to protect them.”

Newsom drew a parallel to the plague of retail theft that captivated the state not long ago, and which the state has successfully combated. Though careful to draw the obvious line that stealing a tube of toothpaste is a far cry from sexually exploiting a child, he pointed out similarities — online platforms that turned a blind eye, a lack of coordination between agencies, criminals that knew how to exploit not just victims, but systems.

Now he’s looking for that kind of “momentum,” to solve this most stubborn of abuses.

“For the last few years, I thought I could buy my way out of this,” Newsom said with a shocking bit of honesty, pointing to all that budget money that has been invested. But, he said, he’s clear now that it’s not a money problem. It’s a people problem.

“How is that possible? “ the governor wondered. The executive order, he said, is about saying “enough of just good intentions … we’re not delivering fundamental results.”

A report at the end of 60 days isn’t results. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.

That’s crucial. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I’ve got two teenage daughters and I know just how vulnerable girls are, in the best of circumstances.

With all our resources and good intentions, California can’t continue to let predators win simply because they’re more organized.

Gunshots, water cannon and tear gas have been used by Kenya’s police in the central town of Nanyuki, where hundreds of protesters lit fires and hurled stones at law enforcement officers as they demonstrated against a quarantine centre for US citizens exposed to Ebola.

Tuesday’s violence came as the proposed quarantine centre at the town’s Laikipia Air Base has caused anger among Kenyans who accuse the United States of shifting the risks of caring for people exposed to the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda onto Kenya.

Kenya has never recorded a case of Ebola, and many residents oppose bringing potential carriers of the virus into the country.

The centre is designed to have 50 isolation beds, run by US staff, and was nearing completion late last week.

Construction has continued despite a temporary halt order from Kenya’s High Court and vocal opposition from local politicians.

President William Ruto’s government has pledged to press ahead with the project, arguing that Kenya owes Washington for years of financial and technical support.

The US has committed $13.5m to support Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts.

Indonesian authorities have shut down several screenings of a new documentary about alleged human rights abuses in Papua, including Indigenous land seizures. Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington explains the controversy.

May 24 (UPI) — Tens of thousands of Orange County, Calif., residents remained evacuated Sunday as officials nervously watched the condition of a failing, 34,000-gallon tank containing dangerous chemicals.

Orange County fire officials said a visual inspection of the overheated tank in Garden Grove, Calif., late Saturday showed it has potentially developed a crack, which could reduce the possibility of a catastrophic explosion but increase the likelihood of a massive spill of liquid methyl metacrylate.

“Right now, we’re vetting and validating that information,” Orange County Fire Authority Interim Chief T.J. McGovern said in a video update of the tense situation at the GKN Aerospace facility, located about 33 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The discovery of a potential crack in the tank “could change the trajectory and our strategy for this event,” he said.

A crack in the tank “may avoid the two concerns that we all had,” Calif. State Sen. Tom Umberg told KCBS-TV. “One was an explosion, the other was a leak of liquid material vaporizing into a toxic fume, a toxic plume.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday transmitted a request to President Donald Trump to declare a federal emergency in support ongoing response operations in Orange County.

The request came a day after the governor’s proclamation of a state of emergency as officials raised the alarm about the possibility of a catastrophic explosion and a major release of toxins.

“California doesn’t wait for disaster to unfold, we act early to protect lives and communities,” Newsom said. “Working together with our local and federal partners, we’re strengthening our ability to respond quickly and effectively in Garden Grove and across the surrounding communities and ensuring that first responders have the resources they need to keep people safe.”

The state says it has already activated its emergency operations center, deployed mutual aid resources and has pre-positioned emergency personnel — including fire, law enforcement and medical teams — in the area around the GKN Aerospace facility, which is just 7 miles west of the Disneyland amusement park.

Nearly 50,000 Orange County residents remained under mandatory evacuation orders on Sunday as an interagency response team eyed the malfunctioning tank, which holds methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a flammable, toxic and highly volatile substance used in the production of acrylic plastics.

Residents were evacuated Friday after a chemical vapor leak was spotted coming from the tank, which has a malfunctioning valve and is unable to be neutralized. Officials say the valve has seized due to a chemical reaction with the MMA.

Water cooling by firefighters has so far kept the tank’s temperature stable and no injuries have been reported.

No unusual readings of toxic material have yet been detected in the area.

The evacuation zone is in a densely populated area of Orange County and has multiple public facilities including schools, hospitals, nursing homes, fire and law enforcement stations.

A unified command has been established between Orange County Fire Authority, Garden Grove Police Department and Orange County Health Care Agency to deal with the emergency.

SAN DIEGO — The crack of the bat reverberated throughout Petco Park. The crowd let out a collective, “Oh.” And Shohei Ohtani started his trot around the bases.

Padres center fielder Jackson Merrill made a valiant effort to bring back the home run. But after leaping and stretching his entire torso over the top of the wall, the ball fell just out of his reach.

Ohtani, hitting while pitching for the first time in almost four weeks, had homered on the first pitch of the game.

Manager Dave Roberts has held Ohtani out of the batting order for each of his last three starts on the mound, in what’s become a start-by-start decision. But Wednesday, he handled pitching and hitting duties, with immediate positive feedback.

“Obviously it’s a big series, and with the way he’s swinging the bat, I feel it gives us the best chance to win,” Roberts said before the game. “And last week, giving him a couple days off to reset, I thought that was beneficial. We’re on the heels of an off day [Thursday]. So I think all that in total, it just made sense to have him hit today.”

Roberts has also witnessed a “recharged” Ohtani on this trip, as evident on the basepaths and in the batter’s box.

Roberts and Ohtani differ in how much they credit his offensive turnaround to the two-day break from hitting that Roberts gave the two-way phenom last week, versus the progress he was already showing. But Ohtani entered Wednesday with four doubles and 10 hits total in five games against the Angels and Padres.

“I think he’s getting there,” Roberts said before the game. “I wouldn’t say he’s back; I think he’s getting there.”