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The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to allow Southern California Edison to hike customer bills by nearly 10% next month, and there may be more increases to come.

Edison’s plan would boost the average residential bill by $17 a month or about $200 a year, the commission said. The monthly bill for a customer using 500 kilowatts would jump from $171 to $188 on Oct. 1.

The five commissioners are scheduled to vote Thursday on the PUC administrative law judge’s proposal. It’s just one of multiple rate hikes Edison has asked the commission to approve in the coming year.

Scores of angry customers have written to the commission since Edison proposed the hike, asking the panel to deny it.

Some customers have pointed out that even as Edison has charged more for tree trimming and equipment upgrades meant to make its system safer and more reliable, its electric lines continue to spark fires.

The company now faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the Jan. 7 Eaton fire, which killed at least 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena. Video captured the fire igniting under an Edison transmission tower. The investigation into the fire’s cause is continuing.

“Please, do not let SCE pass their damages on to their customers,” Sara Green, a Crestline resident, wrote to the commission. “Let them cut executive salaries and forgo dividends, rather than pass this on unilaterally to every customer.”

Other customers have complained about increasing outages, including the preventative blackouts the company uses to try to stop its equipment from sparking fires in hot, windy weather.

William Pilling, a resident of Rovana, a small unincorporated community near Bishop, told the commission last month that he and his neighbors were experiencing “highly frequent service interruptions.”

“This is the very definition of unreliable service,” Pilling wrote. ”We are now being asked to pay more per unit for a lower quality good.”

David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said in an interview that the company was sensitive to concerns about rising rates. “We know that rate changes are challenging for customers,” he said.

“The cost of action is high, but the cost of inaction is higher,” Eisenhauer said. The increases, he said, were needed to support “a reliable and resilient electric grid that is ready to enable the clean energy transition.”

The proposed 10% hike is the result of what the commission calls a general rate case, where the agency allows utilities to propose how much they need to spend to operate and maintain the electrical grid for the next four years.

After months of hearings and debate, an administrative law judge recommended that the commission allow Edison to spend $9.8 billion on those costs this year — 13.7% more than the amount authorized for last year, according to the release. The proposal is less than the nearly $10.5 billion that Edison had initially requested.

Under the plan, Edison will get additional increases for inflation — and customers will see corresponding hikes — for each year through 2028, the commission said.

Edison says it has increased its spending aimed at preventing wildfires, including by undergrounding lines, installing new insulated wires and increasing equipment inspections in areas with high fire risk. The company has also increased the trimming of trees and other vegetation growing near its equipment.

Eisenhauer said that since 2019 wildfire-related investments have helped drive up rates.

He added that demand for electricity is “growing faster than it has in decades” leading to higher costs. In addition, he said, “threats to grid safety and reliability are becoming more frequent and more costly.”

Since 2014, Edison’s rates have risen by 80% — more than twice the rate of inflation, the commission’s public advocates office said in a May report.

More than 860,000 Edison customers — or 19% of the total — are behind in paying their electric bills, the report said. The average unpaid balance was $957.

The proposed 10% hike is one of several increases Edison has asked the commission to approve, or that state officials have already greenlighted.

In November, customers who use little electricity, like those living in small apartments or those owning solar panels, will see higher bills when the company begins adding a $24 monthly fixed charge, according to a recent Edison release.

In return, the price per kilowatt hour will fall, leading to possible savings for those using more power. For example, a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatts per month — double the average — will see their bill decline to $355 from $380, according to the release.

The commission designed the new monthly charge, which applies to customers of the state’s three largest for-profit electric companies, so that revenue increases from the new fees match the loss from the lower price per kilowatt hour.

The new fee was created under a bill pushed through the state Legislature in 2022 by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The utilities asked for the change in how electricity was billed to encourage Californians to switch to electric-powered vehicles and home appliances.

Edison also expects to raise rates for the damages from two catastrophic wildfires that investigators found the utility’s equipment sparked.

It has asked the commission for a nearly 2% increase to cover $5.4 billion in damages from the 2018 Woolsey fire, which killed three people and destroyed more than 1,600 homes and other structures in Malibu and nearby communities.

Earlier this year, the commission agreed Edison could increase rates by less than 1% to collect $1.6 billion from customers for damages from the 2017 Thomas fire. The blaze burned more than 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties and left barren hillsides that helped set off mudslides in Montecito that killed 23 people. The commission must still sign off on final approval of the hike.

Eisenhauer said that under state law utilities are allowed to shift fire damages to customers if they have operated their system prudently and reasonably. He said the two fires were “largely driven by unprecedented and extreme weather events and other factors outside SCE’s control.”

In another proposal, Edison has asked the commission to raise customer bills by 2.1% to increase profits going to its investors, according to its customer notice. The plan would increase its cost of capital — the rate that helps determine how much profit it earns when it builds electric lines and other infrastructure.

The utility asked for the increase in investor profits after its stock price plummeted in January when lawyers claimed its transmission line had ignited the Eaton fire. The company told the commission that because of California’s high risk of wildfire, it needed to earn higher profits to encourage investors to continue holding its stock and to bolster its credit rating.

Despite Edison’s rapidly rising spending on insulated wires, tree trimming and other fire prevention work, its equipment sparked 178 fires last year — up from 90 in 2023.

Company executives said most of those ignitions were small fires that did not spread. The number of fires each year, they said, depends on the weather. Last year, heavy rain and then hot weather, they said, left more dried vegetation.

Edison has said its increased fire prevention work will decrease the number of times that it must shut off power to communities in hot, windy weather to stop lines from sparking fires.

Yet the company said at an Aug. 19 meeting that it expects the number of days of preventative power shutoffs to increase by 20% to 40% this year and that the number of customers subject to them could be twice as high.

Eisenhauer explained that the number of preventative shutoffs was expected to rise because the utility recently lowered the wind speed thresholds that trigger them. The company also added 47,000 more customers to areas believed to have high fire risk, which are subject to the preventative shutoffs, he said.

At the August meeting, Edison executives touted the success of the company’s fire prevention work.

In a presentation, Timothy O’Toole, an Edison board member and head of its safety and operations committee, noted the devastation the January fires caused in and around Los Angeles.

“Nonetheless, we remain very proud and confident in the progress we’ve made,” he said.

O’Toole said the utility’s fire prevention work had “created ever greater protection for our communities and our customers.”

Later in the meeting, Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, questioned O’Toole’s repeated praise of the company’s work to prevent fires.

“Your tone sounded defensive and justifying the progress that’s made as opposed to acknowledging the humility of what an event like the January fires I would think would bring,” she said to O’Toole.

The public can comment on the proposed hike at the meeting on Thursday or in the docket for the case.

The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.

I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.

“Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody’s worried.”

The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.

“We’re still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”

Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.

There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.

And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywall, Nickelsburg told me, it “means you finish homes much more slowly, and that means fewer people are employed.”

Now look, I’m no economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country we were headed for a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been in his best interest to stifle the state with the largest economy in the nation.

Especially when many national economic indicators aren’t exactly rosy, when we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of groceries and consumer goods, and when the labor statistics were so embarrassing he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with another one, only to see more grim jobs numbers a month later.

I had just one economics class in college, but I don’t recall a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washers, elder-care workers, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other people whose only crime — unlike the violent offenders we were allegedly going to round up — is a desire to show up for work.

Now here, let me give you my email address. It’s [email protected].

And why am I telling you that?

Because I know from experience that some of you are frothing, foaming and itching to reach out and tell me that illegal means illegal.

So go ahead and email me if you must, but here’s my response:

We’ve been living a lie for decades.

People come across the border because we want them to. We all but beg them to. And by we, I mean any number of industries — many of them led by conservatives and by Trump supporters — including agribusiness, and hospitality, and construction, and healthcare.

Why do you think so many employers avoid using the federal E-Verify system to weed out undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.

In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and they can’t stop introducing bills by the dozens to mandate wider use of E-Verify. But the most recent one, like all the ones before it, just died.

Why?

Because the tough talk is a lie and there’s no longer any shame in hypocrisy. It’s a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity to admit what’s clear — that the Texas economy is propped up in part by an undocumented workforce.

At least in California, six Republican lawmakers all but begged Trump in June to ease up on the raids, which were affecting business on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Please do some honest work on immigration reform instead, they pleaded, so we can fill our labor needs in a more practical and humane way.

Makes sense, but politically, it doesn’t play as well as TV ads recruiting ICE commandos to storm the streets and arrest tamale vendors, even as the barbarians who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops enjoy their time as presidentially pardoned patriots.

Small businesses, restaurants and mom and pops are being particularly hard hit, says Maria Salinas, chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those who survived the pandemic were then kneecapped again by the raids.

With the Supreme Court ruling, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this is going to come back harder than before.”

From a broader economic perspective, the mass deportations make no sense, especially when it’s clear that the vast majority of people targeted are not the violent criminals Trump keeps talking about.

Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, noted that we’re in the midst of a demographic transformation, much like that of Japan, which is dealing with the challenges of an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.

“We’ll lose almost a million working-age Americans every year in the next decade just because of aging,” Peri told me. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will demand a lot of services in … home healthcare [and other industries], but there will be fewer and fewer workers to do these types of jobs.”

Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, has been studying these trends for years.

“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Each year, the worker-to-retiree ratio decreases, and it will continue to do so. This means we’re headed for a critical shortage of working people who pay into Social Security and Medicare even as the number of retirees balloons.

If we truly wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, we should “send all ICE workers to the border. But if you take people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there’s an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”

At the Pasadena Home Depot, where day laborers still gather despite the risk of raids, three men held out hope for work. Two of them told me they have legal status. “But there’s very little work,” said Gavino Dominguez.

The third one, who said he’s undocumented, left to circle the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.

Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was loading concrete and other supplies into his truck. He told me he lost one fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They came back because they’re desperate and need to pay their bills.

“The housing shortage in California was already terrible before the fires, and now it’s 10 times worse,” said real estate agent Brock Harris, who represents a developer whose Altadena rebuilding project was temporarily slowed after a visit from ICE agents in June.

With building permits beginning to flow, Harris said, “for these guys to slow down or shut down job sites is more than infuriating. You’re going to see fewer people willing to start a project.”

Most people on a job site have legal status, Harris said, “but if shovels never hit the ground, the costs are being borne by everybody, and it’s slowing the rebuilding of L.A.”

Lots of bumps on the road to the golden age of prosperity.

[email protected]

SACRAMENTO — In howling winds and choking smoke during the January fires that devastated Altadena and Pacific Palisades, more than 1,100 incarcerated firefighters cleared brush and dug fire lines, some for wages of less than $30 per day.

Those firefighters could soon see a major raise. On Thursday, California lawmakers unanimously approved a plan to pay incarcerated firefighters the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour while assigned to an active fire, a raise of more than 700%.

“Nobody who puts their life on the line for other people should earn any less than the federal minimum wage,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), before the Thursday vote.

Bryan’s legislation, Assembly Bill 247, would take effect immediately if signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom’s office said he typically does not comment on pending legislation. But in July, he signed a budget that set aside $10 million for incarcerated firefighter wages.

Working at one of the state’s 35 minimum-security fire camps is a voluntary and coveted job, giving inmates a chance to spend time outside prison walls, help their communities and get paroled more quickly.

Incarcerated firefighters don’t wield hoses, but clear brush and dig containment lines while working on front-line hand crews and do work such as cooking and laundry to keep fire camps running.

Prison fire crews at times make up more than 1 in 4 of the firefighters battling California’s wildfires, and have drawn international praise during major wildfire seasons. After the January fires in Los Angeles, celebrity Kim Kardashian called them “heroes” who deserved a raise.

The state’s 2,000 or so incarcerated firefighters earn $5.80 to $10.24 per day at fire camps, and an extra $1 an hour during active wildfires, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That means the lowest-paid firefighters earn $29.80 per 24-hour shift and the highest-paid, $34.24.

Higher wages are not only a key way to recognize the life-risking contributions made by incarcerated firefighters, backers said, but could also help inmates build up some savings before they are paroled, or more quickly pay restitution to their victims.

Republican lawmakers who backed the plan emphasized the life-changing nature of finding work with meaning.

“When we talk about anti-recidivism, when we talk about programs that work, this is one of the absolute best,” said Assemblymember Heath Flora (R-Ripon).

Flora said he worked alongside incarcerated and formerly incarcerated firefighters during 15 years as a volunteer firefighter, and said they were “some of the hardest working individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.”

Bryan originally had proposed a $19 hourly wage, similar to the wage earned by entry-level firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. During the summer’s budget negotiations, that wage was trimmed to $7.25.

A lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs’ Assn., which opposed the bill, told lawmakers in July that incarcerated firefighters already are “receiving compensation in different ways.” Prison workers assigned to hand crews have their sentences reduced by two days for each day they serve on an active fire.

State Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R-Murrieta), who co-sponsored the bill, cautioned in July that paying higher wages could lead to hiring fewer incarcerated firefighters overall.

The cost to the state will depend on the number of inmate crews staffed and the severity of the fire season.

From 2020 to 2024, inmate firefighters spent 1,382,117 hours fighting fires for $1 per hour, according to a bill analysis by legislative staff. The state would have paid about $10 million in wages — or about $8.6 million more — had the federal minimum wage been in place over those five fire seasons, analysts said.

Years with more fire activity would be more expensive for the state. In 2020, the largest wildfire season in modern history, the state spent about $2.1 million on inmate firefighter wages at $1 per hour, which would have cost $15 million under the new bill language.

The bill follows years of effort to help improve the working conditions of inmate firefighters.

The number of inmates working on fire crews has shrunk by more than half since 2005, from a peak of about 4,250 that year to slightly less than 2,000 this year, according to the corrections department.

The number fell off sharply after the California policy known as realignment in 2011, which shifted many people who were convicted of nonserious, nonviolent and nonsexual offenses from California state prisons to county jails.

California bars people with a felony conviction from receiving an emergency medical technician, or EMT, certification for a decade after their release from prison. There is a lifetime ban for those convicted of two or more felonies.

In 2020, Newsom signed a bill allowing formerly incarcerated firefighters who were convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual offenses to appeal a court to expunge their criminal records and waive their parole time.

The Legislature this week also passed AB 218, by Assemblymembers Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) and Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles), which would require prison officials to draft rules by 2027 to recommend incarcerated firefighters for resentencing.

A number of other bills dealing with fire issues are still pending in the Legislature in its final week of the year. Those include:

• AB 226, which would allow the California FAIR Plan, the state’s home insurer of last resort, to increase its capacity to pay out claims by issuing bonds or seeking a line of credit.
• AB 1032, which would require healthcare insurers to cover 12 visits a year with a licensed behavioral health provider, including mental health and substance abuse counselors, to residents affected by wildfires.

The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday released a report touting a decline in shootings by officers in 2024, even as officials acknowledged this year’s numbers show the trend reversing with a major uptick in incidents of deadly force.

LAPD officers opened fire on 29 people last year, compared with 34 in 2023 — a sign, the report’s authors maintained, that the department’s efforts to curb serious uses of force are having an effect.

Already in 2025, however, LAPD officers have surpassed the total number of shootings recorded last year, with police opening fire at least 31 times in less than nine months.

Teresa Sánchez-Gordon, who on Tuesday was announced as the Police Commission’s new president, said she was struck by the fact that during encounters with people exhibiting signs of mental illness last year, officers sometimes shot instead of first deploying weapons meant to incapacitate.

“Why can we not increase that … use of that less-lethal means?” asked Sánchez-Gordon.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell told the commission that the use of Tasers and launchers that shoot hard foam projectiles was “foremost on everybody’s minds.”

But oftentimes, he said, encounters with people in crisis unfold so quickly and unpredictably that officers are left with little time to consider other tools. He noted that the vast majority of shootings stem from 911 calls, rather than “proactive policing,” which he said underscores “the reactive nature of these events.”

The timing of Tuesday’s report seemed incongruous amid mounting public anger over a recent rise in police shootings, including a continued pattern of officers killing people who appear to be in the midst of some behavioral crisis.

The report also noted a rising number of shootings last year in which officers mistakenly believe someone is armed, an increasingly common scenario that has also been cause for recent concern.

In July, LAPD officers fatally shot a man sitting inside a utility van on the city’s Eastside after, they said, he ignored repeated commands to drop what turned out to be a toy Airsoft gun, which resembled a real rifle. The dead man’s fiancee said he had dealt with mental health issues in the past.

In recent weeks, the commission has pushed McDonnell to do more to curb the number of shootings.

Last year, the Southeast, North Hollywood and Harbor patrol areas saw the biggest jumps in the number of police shootings, while 77th Street, Foothill, Rampart and Newton divisions recorded the biggest decreases.

The shootings cut across racial lines. Roughly 55% of those shot by officers were Latino, with Black and white people each accounting for around 21% of the incidents, with the remaining 3% involving Asians.

More than half of the officers who fired their weapons were Latino, which is roughly in line with the department’s racial makeup. A quarter of the officers were white, with Asian officers responsible for 11% of the shootings.

From 2023 to 2024, the number of officers injured in shootings rose from eight to 11, according to the report.

The rise in police shootings has been a regular point of contention for the police critics and social justice advocates who show up to speak at the commission’s weekly meetings.

On Tuesday, Melina Abdullah, a prominent civil rights leader who has long been critical of the department’s history of excessive force against communities of color, accused the commission of failing to take seriously its role as police shootings continue to rise.

“I don’t know how this oversight body is not overseeing and demanding something different,” she said.

The recent report found that officers fired nearly twice as many bullets last year as they did in 2020. On average, LAPD officers fired more than 10 rounds per shooting.

In addition to the decline in police shootings last year, the department’s report revealed that so-called non-categorical uses of force — LAPD speak for the deployment of a Taser or beanbag shotgun or incidents that result in serious but non-life-threatening injuries — dipped slightly to 1,451 from 1,503.

The decline came amid a drop in both crime and the number of people who came into contact with the LAPD in 2024.

There was also a significant decline in shootings of people with knives, swords and other edged weapons. Preventing those types of confrontations from turning deadly has been a point of emphasis by the department and the commission in recent years. In February, LAPD officers faced criticism after they shot and killed a transgender woman holding a knife at a Pacoima motel room after she called 911 to report that she had been kidnapped.

Much like with most crime statistics, experts caution against reading too much into year-over-year fluctuations. But department statistics show that despite the recent uptick, police shootings are still down considerable from their highs in the early 1990s and make up only a small fraction of all public encounters every year.

Seniors in some parts of the country say they are being denied COVID-19 vaccinations amid an ongoing spike in cases, leading to rising frustration over new Trump administration policies that are making it harder to get the shots.

Matthew D’Amico, 67, of New York City, said a Walgreens declined to administer COVID-19 vaccines to him and his 75-year-old wife on Friday because they didn’t have a prescription. They’re trying to get vaccinated ahead of a trip.

“I can’t believe we can’t get” the vaccine, D’Amico said in an interview. “I’ve been inoculated a number of times and never had to get a prescription. And it’s just very frustrating that this is where we are.”

He’s not alone in his exasperation. Under the leadership of the vaccine skeptic Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., federal agencies have effectively made it more difficult to get vaccinated against COVID-19 this year. The Food and Drug Administration has only “approved” COVID-19 vaccines for those age 65 and up, as well as younger people with underlying health conditions.

That means across the country, people younger than 65 interested in getting the COVID-19 vaccine must now either consult with a healthcare provider or “attest” to a pharmacy that they have an underlying health condition. It’s a potential hurdle that can make getting the vaccine more difficult and, some health experts worry, prompt even more Americans to eschew getting vaccinated.

As D’Amico can attest, though, being part of a group for whom the COVID vaccine is “approved” doesn’t necessarily guarantee easy access.

“For me to go to my primary [healthcare provider] now and get a prescription, it’s just kind of ridiculous,” D’Amico said.

At least some people younger than 65 are encountering pharmacy staff asking probing questions about their medical conditions.

That happened Friday at a CVS in Orange County, according to 34-year-old Alex Benson, who takes medication that can suppress his immune system.

Besides just protecting himself, he wanted to get vaccinated as he has family members who are at high risk should they get COVID — his mother is immunocompromised, and his mother-in-law had open-heart surgery on Thursday night.

Benson said an employee asked why he thought he was eligible for the vaccine.

“They asked me for either a prescription or they wanted to know … why I felt I needed the vaccination,” Benson said. At one point, a staffer offered to call his doctor to get an authorization for the vaccine.

Benson said he was alarmed by the questions, and started to “feel kind of some desperation to plead my case to the pharmacist.” Another CVS staffer later came over and said further answers weren’t necessary and simply attesting he was eligible was good enough. He eventually got the vaccine.

Still, he felt the experience was dismaying.

“I think easy access should be the policy,” Benson said. “I tend not to get too political, but it seems just rather juxtaposed to me that an anti-regulation administration is using regulation in this way. They’re supposed to be removing barriers to healthcare.”

The vaccine chaos comes as COVID-19 is either increasing or starting to hit its late summer peak. According to data released Friday, there are now 14 states with “very high” levels of coronavirus detected in their wastewater — California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii and Alaska, as well as the District of Columbia.

Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, the regional physician chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser Permanente Southern California, said data continue to show an increase in coronavirus cases.

“Over this past week, we’ve seen an increase in the number of outpatient COVID cases, and even a smattering of inpatient cases,” Hudson said. “It appears that we may be nearing the top of the wave, but it may be another two weeks or so until we truly know if we’re there.”

The rate at which coronavirus lab tests are confirming infection also continues to rise statewide and in the Los Angeles area. For the week ending Aug. 30, California’s COVID test positivity rate was 12.83%, up from 7.05% for the week ending Aug. 2. In L.A. County, the positive test rate was 14.83%, up from 9.33%.

Other data, however, suggest some areas may have reached their summer COVID peak.

In Orange County, the COVID positive test rate was 13.1%. That’s below the prior week’s rate of 18%, but still higher than the rate for the week that ended Aug. 2, which was 10.8%.

In San Francisco, the test positivity rate has been hovering around 9% for the last week of reliable data available. It’s up from 7% a month earlier.

In addition, wastewater data in L.A. County show coronavirus levels declined slightly from the prior week.

“It’s too early to know if this decrease in wastewater viral concentrations is the first sign that COVID-19 activity is peaking or is regular variation typical of this data source,” the L.A. County Department of Public Health said.

COVID hospital admissions in California are increasing — with the latest rate of 3.93 admissions per 100,000 residents, up from 2.38.

But they remain relatively low statewide and in L.A. County. The number of L.A. County residents seeking care for COVID-related illness, or who have been hospitalized, “is quite a bit lower than during summer surges in 2023 and 2024,” the public health department said.

A relatively mild summer wave, however, could mean that the annual fall-and-winter COVID wave might be stronger. In July, the state Department of Public Health said that scientists anticipate California would see either a stronger summer COVID wave or a more significant winter wave.

The current confusion over federal COVID vaccine policy has been exacerbated by the chaos at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where Kennedy earlier this year fired everyone on the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and orchestrated the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez just 29 days after she was confirmed to the post by the Senate.

Some of Kennedy’s handpicked replacements on the ACIP have criticized vaccines and spread misinformation, according to the Associated Press. And the new interim CDC director — Jim O’Neill, a Kennedy deputy — is a critic of health regulations and has no training in medicine or healthcare, the AP reported.

The CDC hasn’t issued its own recommendations on who should get vaccinated, and that inaction has resulted in residents of a number of states needing to get prescriptions from a healthcare provider for at least the next couple of weeks. In some cases, that’s true even for seniors, as D’Amico found out.

As of Friday, CVS said people need a prescription to get a COVID-19 vaccine, sometimes depending on their age, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia.

CVS couldn’t even offer the COVID-19 at its pharmacies in Nevada as of Friday; they were only available at the company’s MinuteClinic sites, according to spokesperson Amy Thibault.

CVS said it expects to offer COVID-19 vaccines without prescriptions at its pharmacies in New Mexico, Nevada, New York and Pennsylvania “soon,” due to recent regulatory changes in each state.

“Right now, all patients in all states need to attest to being eligible for the vaccine in order to schedule an appointment online,” Thibault said. If an adult says they have no underlying health conditions, but do have a prescription from a healthcare provider for “off-label” use of the vaccine, they can get the shot, Thibault confirmed.

On Thursday, Hawaii joined California, Washington and Oregon in launching the West Coast Health Alliance: an interstate compact meant to provide science-based immunization guidance as an alternative to the CDC.

“Together, these states will provide evidence-based immunization guidance rooted in safety, efficacy, and transparency — ensuring residents receive credible information free from political interference,” according to a statement from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

The statement suggested that the Trump administration was essentially “dismantling” the CDC.

“The absence of consistent, science-based federal leadership poses a direct threat to our nation’s health security,” the statement said. “To protect the health of our communities, the West Coast Health Alliance will continue to ensure that our public health strategies are based on best available science.”

It was not immediately clear, however, whether the formation of the West Coast Health Alliance would make it easier for people to get COVID-19 vaccines at the nation’s largest pharmacy retailers, where many people get their shots.

Mainstream medical groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are also offering their own recommendations to advise individuals and families on what vaccines they should get.

The American job market, a pillar of U.S. economic strength since the pandemic, is crumbling under the weight of President Trump’s erratic economic policies.

Uncertain about where things are headed, companies have grown increasingly reluctant to hire, leaving agonized job seekers unable to find work and weighing on consumers who account for 70% of all U.S. economic activity. Their spending has been the engine behind the world’s biggest economy since the COVID-19 disruptions of 2020.

The Labor Department reported Friday that U.S. employers — companies, government agencies and nonprofits — added just 22,000 jobs last month, down from 79,000 in July and well below the 80,000 that economists had expected.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3% last month, also worse than expected and the highest since 2021.

“U.S. labor market deterioration intensified in August,’’ Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at BMO Capital Market, wrote in a commentary, noting that hiring was “slumping dangerously close to stall speed. This raises the risk of a harder landing for consumer spending and the economy in the months ahead.’’

Alexa Mamoulides, 27, was laid off in the spring from a job at a research publishing company and has been hunting for work ever since. She uses a spreadsheet to track her progress and said she’s applied for 111 positions and had 14 interviews — but hasn’t landed a job yet.

“There have been a lot of ups and downs,” Mamoulides said. “At the beginning I wasn’t too stressed, but now that September is here, I’ve been wondering how much longer it will take. It’s validating that the numbers bear out my experience, but also discouraging.’’

The U.S. job market has lost momentum this year, partly because of the lingering effects of 11 interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve’s inflation fighters in 2022 and 2023.

But the hiring slump also reflects Trump’s policies, including his sweeping and ever-changing tariffs on imports from almost every country, his crackdown on immigration and purges of the federal workforce.

Also contributing to the job market’s doldrums are an aging population and the threat that artificial intelligence poses to young, entry-level workers.

After revisions shaved 21,000 jobs off June and July payrolls, the U.S. economy is creating fewer than 75,000 jobs a month so far this year, less than half the 2024 average of 168,000 and not even a quarter of the 400,000 jobs added monthly in the hiring boom of 2021-2023.

When the Labor Department put out a disappointing jobs report a month ago, an enraged Trump responded by firing the economist in charge of compiling the numbers and nominating a loyalist to replace her.

“The warning bell that rang in the labor market a month ago just got louder,” Olu Sonola, head of U.S economic research at Fitch Rates, wrote in a commentary. “It’s hard to argue that tariff uncertainty isn’t a key driver of this weakness.”

Trump contends that his protectionist policies are meant to help American manufacturers. But factories shed 12,000 workers last month and 38,000 so far this year. Many manufacturers are hurt, not helped, by Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and other imported raw materials and components.

Construction companies, which rely on immigrant workers vulnerable to stepped-up immigration raids under Trump, cut 7,000 jobs in August, the third straight drop. The sweeping tax-and-spending bill that Trump signed into law July 4 delivered more money for immigration officers, making threats of massive deportations more plausible.

The federal government, its workforce targeted by Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency team, cut 15,000 jobs last month. Diane Swonk, chief economist at the tax and consulting firm KPMG, said the job market “will hit a cliff in October, when 151,000 federal workers who took buyouts will come off the payrolls.’’

And any job gains made last month were remarkably narrow: Healthcare and social assistance companies — a broad category including hospitals and day-care centers — added nearly 47,000 jobs in August and now account for 87% of the private sector jobs created in 2025.

Democrats were quick to pounce on the report, arguing it is evidence that Trump’s policies were damaging the economy and hurting ordinary Americans.

“Americans cannot afford any more of Trump’s disastrous economy. Hiring is frozen, jobless claims are rising, and the unemployment rate is now higher than it has been in years,” said Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. “The president is squeezing every wallet as he chases an illegal tariff agenda that is hiking costs, spooking investment and stunting domestic manufacturing.″

Trump’s sweeping import taxes — tariffs — are taking a toll on businesses that rely on foreign suppliers.

Trick or Treat Studios in Santa Cruz, for instance, gets 50% of its supplies from Mexico, 40% from China and the rest from Thailand. The company, which makes ghoulish replica masks of such horror icons as Chucky the doll from the “Child’s Play” movies as well as costumes, props, action figures and games, has seen its tariff bill rise to $389,000 this year, said co-founder Christopher Zephro. He was forced to raise prices across the board by 15%.

In May, Zephro had to cut 15 employees, or 25% of his workforce. That marked the first time he’s had to lay off staff since he started the company in 2009. ″That’s a lot money that could have been used to hire more people, bring in more product, develop more products,” he said. “We had to do layoffs because of tariffs. It was one of the worst days of my life.”

Josh Hirt, senior economist at the financial services firm Vanguard, said that the tumbling payroll numbers also reflect a reduced supply of workers — the consequence of an aging U.S. population and a reduction in immigration. “We should get more comfortable seeing numbers below 75,000 and below 50,000’’ new jobs a month, he said. “The likelihood of seeing negative [jobs] numbers is higher,’’ he said.

Economists are also beginning to worry that artificial intelligence is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found “substantial declines in employment for early-career workers” — ages 22-25 — in fields most exposed to AI. The unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 24 rose last month to 10.5%, the Labor Department reported Friday, the highest since April 2021.

Job seeker Mamoulides is sure that competition from AI is one of the reasons she’s having trouble finding work.

“I know at my previous company, they were really embracing AI and trying to integrate it as much as they could into people’s workflow,” she said. “They were getting lots of [Microsoft] ‘Copilot’ licenses for people to use. From that experience, I do think companies may be relying on AI more for entry-level roles.”

Some relief may be coming.

The weak August numbers make it all but certain that the Federal Reserve will cut its benchmark interest rate at its next meeting, Sept. 16-17. Under Chair Jerome Powell, the Fed has been reluctant to cut rates until it sees what effect Trump’s import taxes have on inflation. Lower borrowing costs could — eventually, anyway — encourage consumers and businesses to spend and invest.

Vanguard’s Hirt expects the Fed to reduce its benchmark rate — now a range of 4.25% to 4.5% — by a full percentage point over the next year and says it might cut rates at each of its next three meetings.

Trump has repeatedly pressured Powell to lower rates and has sought to fire one Fed governor, Lisa Cook, over allegations of mortgage fraud. Cook denies the allegations, which she contends are a pretext for the president to gain control over the central bank.

Trump blamed Powell again for slowing jobs numbers Friday in a social media post, saying that “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should have lowered rates long ago. As usual, he’s ‘Too Late!’”

The July 4 budget bill also “included a big wallop of front-loaded spending on defense and border security, as well as tax cuts that will quickly flow through to household and business after-tax incomes,” Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank, wrote in a commentary.

But the damage that has already occurred may be difficult to repair.

James Knightley, an economist at ING, noted that the University of Michigan’s consumer surveys show that 62% of Americans expect unemployment to rise over the next year. Only 13% expect it to fall. Only four times in the last 50 years of surveys has the employment outlook been so bleak.

“People see and feel changes in the jobs market before they show up in the official data — they know if their company has a hiring freeze or the odd person here or there is being laid off,” Knightley wrote. “This suggests the real threat of outright falls in employment later this year.”

Wiseman, D’Innocenzio and Lewis write for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

Bob Anderson — physician, pilot, executive — is nothing if not a perfectionist.

He’s owned his fair share of recreational vehicles and disliked each of them uniquely. There was the Earth Roamer (anemic axles, in his opinion), the $350,000 Newmar land yacht (complex emissions technology) and a 25-foot Airstream trailer (lots of propane). Yet Anderson, 81, keeps buying camping rigs. And he’s hoping the next one will be his last.

This fall, he’ll take delivery of a Lightship AE.1 Cosmos, an RV as similar to an Airstream as a Tesla Roadster is to a Pontiac Firebird.

What separates the Lightship from the rest of Anderson’s letdowns is its propulsion system and design: The rig has two electric motors, so it can drive itself while hitched to the vehicle towing it, and the entire top half tucks down for better aerodynamics while underway. With these two hacks, the vehicle towing the Lightship will feel virtually no weight most of the time. On the interstate, Anderson’s hybrid pickup truck will theoretically get its standard 27 miles per gallon, rather than the 12.5 miles it manages with the Airstream behind it.

“It’s going to change everything in the RV world,” Anderson says.

This year may well be an inflection point for the RV industry, when serious alternatives are emerging to the gas-guzzling rigs chugging between national parks.

In addition to the Lightship, the Pebble Flow — another towable camper with an electric drivetrain — will hit the road. Meanwhile, a host of electric vans will finally be stamped out in high volumes, most notably Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz , the latest iteration of the brand’s storied bus. Even incumbent Thor Inc., which is to RVs what Apple is to smartphones, is putting the final touches on its first hybrid rig.

“It’s certainly a huge milestone,” says McKay Featherstone, head of global innovation at Thor Inc. “People can finally go and buy these things and experience this technology.”

Last year, Americans bought 637,000 RVs, many of which burned a gallon of gas every six to 15 miles traveled. These rigs will stay on the road for about 200,000 miles, belching copious amounts of carbon dioxide.

Electric RVs promise to make the summer road trip vastly cleaner, more convenient and quiet.

Among other things, electric models will help the RV industry shake off what the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association refers to as a “Covid hangover.” The group is forecasting a slight increase in total US sales this year, in part because of the growing number of electric options.

“The vibes, if you will, are good,” says spokeswoman Monika Geraci. “And there does seem to be an appetite there.”

In a Venn diagram of folks who love camping and folks who are climate-concerned, there’s quite a bit of overlap. That may partially explain why, of the roughly 58 million American households that go camping every year, only 12 million of them own an RV.

Yet it’s not like RV drivers don’t care about the climate. “Obviously, these people love the outdoors,” explains Featherstone at Thor, “and that does translate into people who want a lighter footprint.”

In fact, some of the same people who long avoided camping rigs and their sizable clouds of emissions are now at the helm of RV startups. These folks could never find a camper green enough for their liking, so they set out to make one.

Lightship was launched by two Tesla alumni after a disappointing RV journey. Co-founder Toby Kraus says the company is getting plenty of interest from RV newbies who strive to keep a low carbon footprint, but the company has been surprised at the number of orders from everyday drivers and who don’t care about the climate benefits.

Anderson is one of the latter: He pays little mind to his personal carbon footprint. What thrills him is the idea of spending less money on gas and having an RV that doesn’t have to churn a combustion engine to run the air conditioning and refrigerator.

In that regard, Lightspeed is borrowing a page from the Tesla playbook.

“The reason Tesla was successful is not because it was sustainable,” Kraus explains. “It’s because the product was awesome. It was clean tech by Trojan Horse.”

With the glow of ambient light tucked behind ceiling fabric, the interior of the Lightship Ae.1 feels like the first-class cabin of a commercial jet. An induction cooktop is built into the counter, a heat pump quietly cycles air and everything on the rig is controlled by an app. Lightship plans to eventually sell smaller, more affordable models, but its launch vehicle costs a heady $250,000.

The Pebble Flow parks a little further down market with its founders edition priced at $175,000. Co-founder Bingrui Yang spent much of his career working at Apple on the iPhone and, aesthetically, the rig travels the same lane. With a bed that folds up against the wall and Starlink internet service, the interior is geared for Zoom calls as much as napping in nature, reflecting the rise of remote work.

“This is the right time for this product,” Yang says.

The market is also shifting in ways that may further favor electric models. Since 2021, the average age of US RV customers has dropped from 53 to 49, while the share of the market making more than $100,000 a year climbed from 29% to 33%.

“It’s not your grandma and grandpa anymore,” Geraci says. “It’s a different consumer, and they’re looking for more technology.”

While expensive, the new electric towables change the standard RV economics; because they can propel themselves much of the time, they can be towed with less horsepower and pair nicely with electric vehicles, machines for which towing has been Kryptonite due to range issues.

There are also alternatives on the horizon to the hulking, three-bedroom motor coach. These vehicles make up one out of every 10 RVs sold, yet they get some of the worst gas mileage of any non-commercial vehicle, hoovering up a gallon of gas every six or seven miles.

Thor is putting the finishing touches on a hybrid vehicle — dubbed simply “Test Vehicle” — that doesn’t look markedly different from its gas-burning products. But refinements in design make it about 20% more aerodynamic. The 210 kilowatt-hours of battery power under the hood along with a gas generator for charging give it somewhere around 500 miles of range.

On long trips, it will burn roughly half as much fuel as a similar-sized internal combustion rig and offer even better range on short jaunts. Thor will start taking orders in the fall and producing the vehicles by year-end.

Still, there’s a huge chunk of the camper market for whom even a towable is too much. Last year, Americans bought 8,300 camper vans as well as an untold number converted minivans and commercial vans to handle s’mores and sleeping duty.

These folks also have a bevy of new choices. In the first half of the year, Americans bought 2,500 ID.Buzzes. Many of those rigs will be pressed into minimalist camping service, and aftermarket shops are helping kit them out.

That includes Peace Vans in Seattle, which counts both Macklemore and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron as clients. For the Buzz, the company built three different camping configurations. Owner Harley Stitner expects to complete about 1,000 retrofits in the next few years.

Sam Shapiro launched Grounded RVs after six months on the road in 2020 en route to a job at SpaceX. “Before that, I don’t think I’d ever even been in an RV,” he says. “There’s this irony of having this experience to embrace nature, yet you’re sitting there at a campground running a combustion engine, creating exhaust, making noise.”

At its factory in Detroit, Grounded is essentially taking the chassis of an electric General Motors BrightDrop van, topping it with the shell of a Class B motorhome and adding its own solar array and battery management software. The rigs can travel about 300 miles on a charge. As with other electric campers, buyers will pay a premium: $195,000, nearly double what a gas-burning rig of the same size runs.

Last year, Grounded shipped 15 of its machines; this year, it’s aiming for 50. Roughly half of Grounded customers are RV rookies.

“They’ve been waiting for something like this to come along,” Shapiro says. “So many of our customers have said they never want to own a gas-powered vehicle again.”

Stock writes for Bloomberg.

Two major digital platforms — YouTube and Hulu + Live TV — have agreed to carry C-SPAN two months after the nonprofit organization made a public plea for wider distribution.

Changing industry economics have taken a toll on C-SPAN, prompting the U.S. Senate to urge streaming companies to begin offering customers the privately funded television service, which has provided nonpartisan gavel-to-gavel television coverage of congressional hearings and roll call votes for decades.

“All television providers, including streaming services, should make delivery of C-SPAN a priority so Americans can watch Congress in action, in real time,” senators said in their June resolution.

On Wednesday, C-SPAN announced separate distribution agreements with YouTube and Hulu + Live TV.

The agreements expand “access to C-SPAN’s unfiltered coverage of U.S. government for millions of subscribers nationwide, further strengthening the network’s role as an indispensable source of public affairs programming,” C-SPAN said in a statement.

C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. It relies heavily on revenue generated from license fees paid by cable, satellite and other multi-TV channel operators. But as the number of traditional pay-TV homes continues to shrink, C-SPAN found itself running a troubling financial deficit.

Last year, C-SPAN collected $46.3 million in revenue, a 37% decline from $73 million in 2015. That’s largely because C-SPAN and other basic cable channels were available in more than 100 million homes 10 years ago.

Since then, the number of homes has been cut nearly in half.

The three C-SPAN channels — C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3 — will be added to YouTube TV’s base package of channels this fall, the companies said. The channels will also run on the main YouTube video platform.

In addition, Google-owned YouTube will sponsor the network’s coverage of “America 250” — the celebrations to mark the nation’s founding two and a half centuries ago.

“For nearly half a century, C-SPAN has partnered with cable and satellite providers who recognize the value of our important public service,” C-SPAN Chief Executive Sam Feist said in a statement. “We now look forward to working closely with YouTube to bring C-SPAN’s unfiltered coverage of the democratic process to millions more Americans.”

C-SPAN uses its own cameras in the Capitol, enabling the service to catch the action when government-operated audio and visual equipment is cut off.

Earlier this summer, Feist told The Times that C-SPAN should be able to close its budget gap if YouTube TV and Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu + Live TV would carry its feeds.

Around 20 million households subscribe to such online subscription platforms, known as virtual multichannel video program distributors, which stream broadcast and cable channels.

Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.

Architect Simon Ha was trying to squeeze an apartment building onto a 6,400-square foot lot in Hollywood.

The city of Los Angeles requires two stairways for such buildings, which limited the configurations Ha could use. After racking his brain, he finally came up with a solution.

“It was like designing a Swiss watch,” he said of the 2023 project.

Now, the L.A. City Council is on the brink of allowing just one stairway for buildings of up to six stories, making it easier and cheaper to build on smaller lots — but raising concerns about escape routes in a fire or earthquake.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who introduced the single stairway proposal with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, said she wants to speed up development to address the city’s housing crisis and to encourage the construction of apartments big enough for families. And she believes safety needn’t be sacrificed.

“We’re trying to say, ‘How can we build more safely — and build more overall?’” Raman said in an interview.

Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Until recently, New York, Seattle and Honolulu were among the few American cities that allowed single stairways in buildings of up to six stories. Since 2022, amid a nationwide affordable housing crunch, at least 16 cities and states have proposed or enacted single stairway regulations, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in February.

The double stairway rule, in place in California since 1981, makes it harder to build apartments with more than two bedrooms, urban planners and architects said.

Apartments typically have to be laid out along a long hallway, with windows on only one side of each unit, resulting in less light and ventilation, said Stephen Smith, who is executive director of the Center for Building in North America and one of the single stairway’s biggest advocates.

“For small lots in particular, the second stairway can eat up a huge amount of the building’s footprint,” he said.

A single stair layout without a long hallway could mean more room for larger units

Based on design by Simon Ha

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee LOS ANGELES TIMES

Under state law, L.A. can reduce the number of stairways it requires, as long as it implements other restrictions, such as high-end sprinkler systems. Raman and Yaroslavsky’s proposal for single stairway buildings would limit the number of units per floor to four.

But proponents of double stairways say they are a key safety measure, giving residents two options for fleeing a fire, along with a separate route for firefighters.

Frank Lima, a Los Angeles firefighter and general secretary-treasurer of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters, or IAFF, said the stairways are a life-and-death issue.

“[A single stairway] forces building occupants to go down a stairwell while firefighters go up a stairwell,” Lima said. “That delays fire attack, delays people getting out of a building — when seconds count.”

“When you try to cut corners to save money or make more units, it shouldn’t be at the price of children that die,” Lima said.

The IAFF, which represents firefighters and emergency medical technicians across the U.S. and Canada, has strongly opposed single stairway proposals — “I’d rather call it ‘only one way out,’” Lima said.

On Aug. 20, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to request that city staffers draft a single stairway ordinance.

In a memo to the council, City Planning Director Vincent Bertoni wrote that the single stairway proposal could make a “substantial contribution” to the city’s housing supply.

“The result is that family-sized units — a much needed segment of Los Angeles’ housing stock — are not being produced at the scale required to meet existing and projected needs,” he wrote of the double stairway requirement.

About 14% of rental units in the city are three or more bedrooms, according to the Planning Department.

Zachary Pitts, the Los Angeles director of YIMBY Action, which advocates for more affordable housing, said he had a hard time finding a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Los Angeles.

There were plenty of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, but places big enough for his family of four cost a small fortune.

“We ended up buying a single-family home, since a mortgage was lower than the prices we were being quoted,” Pitts said.

Ha, the architect, said that ditching the double stairway requirement could enable developers to produce “East Coast-style” townhouses like those in New York — a contrast to the “podium-style” buildings now going up in L.A., which generally take up a half or whole block.

Ha has designed buildings from San Francisco to San Diego, though most of his work is in Los Angeles, where he is the architect of many micro-apartment complexes, which contain only studios.

Small parcels of 7,500 square feet or less, where a single stairway would make apartments easier to build, often sit empty for long periods, creating “missing teeth” in the city’s layout, Ha said.

Simon Ha stands inside one of two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments. Architects such as Ha are in support of single stairway reform that would make it easier and cheaper to develop on small lots.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Fire Department declined to comment on the single stairway proposal, saying it is under review by the city fire marshal. The councilmembers behind the proposal say the department has been consulted every step of the way.

Raman said she sees “no reduction in fire safety.”

“New fire safety standards in our building code have made it so new buildings are much safer overall,” she said.

Architect Simon Ha shows the two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The Pew Charitable Trusts study, co-written and researched by Smith of the Center for Building in North America, found that in New York, the rate of fire deaths in single stairway buildings was the same as in other residential buildings.

“This [double stairway] code originates from when people were cooking with open flames, when there were no sprinklers or fire alarms,” Smith said.

City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian voted yes on the Aug. 20 motion to draft a single stairway ordinance, though he had previously expressed reservations about earthquake safety.

Seattle has single stairways but “less than one-tenth the number of seismic activity we have in our region,” he said during a council meeting.

Councilmember Traci Park was the lone no vote.

“Generally in life, when you have more exits and evacuation routes, things are generally more safe,” she said.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an agency inside the Department of Homeland Security that is integral to President Donald Trump’s vision of carrying out the mass deportations he promised during the campaign. Deportation officers within a unit called Enforcement and Removal Operations are the ones who are responsible for immigration enforcement. They find and remove people from the United States who aren’t American citizens and, for a variety of reasons, no longer can stay in the country.

Some might have gone through immigration court and a judge ordered them removed. Or they were arrested or convicted of certain crimes, or they’ve repeatedly entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa. ICE also manages a growing network of immigration detention facilities around the country where it holds people suspected of immigration violations.

Overall, its activities — and how it carries them out — have polarized many Americans in recent months.

After years when the number of deportation officers largely remained even, the agency is now rapidly hiring. Congress this summer passed legislation giving ICE $76.5 billion in new money to help speed up the pace of deportations. That’s nearly 10 times the agency’s current annual budget. Nearly $30 billion is for new staff.

Last week, The Associated Press got a chance to visit the base in southern Georgia where new ICE recruits are trained and to talk to the agency’s top leadership. Here are details about four things ICE is doing that came out of those conversations.

It’s surging hiring

ICE currently has about 6,500 deportation officers, and it is aggressively looking to beef up those numbers. Acting Director Todd Lyons says he wants to hire an additional 10,000 by year’s end.

The agency has launched a new recruiting website, offered hiring bonuses as high as $50,000, and is advertising at career expos. Lyons said the agency has already received 121,000 applications — many from former officers.

New recruits are trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia. That’s a sprawling facility near the coast where federal law enforcement officers — not just ICE agents — from around the country live and train. ICE is looking to more than double the number of instructors who train deportation officers.

Caleb Vitello, who runs training for ICE, says it has cut Spanish-language requirements to reduce training by five weeks, and he’s been looking for ways to streamline the training and have recruits do more at the field offices where they’re assigned.

It’s preparing for conflict

As Trump’s effort to deport millions of people has intensified, violent episodes have unfolded as ICE seeks to arrest people. Critics have said ICE is being too heavy-handed in carrying out arrests while ICE says its people are the ones being attacked.

Vitello said the agency tracks every time officers use force as well as any time someone attacks its officers. According to the agency’s data, from Jan. 21 through Aug. 5 there were 121 reported assaults of ICE officers compared with 11 during the same period last year.

Lyons said that after recent operations in Los Angeles turned violent, ICE is making gas masks and helmets standard issue for new agents. “Right now we’re seeing and we’re having to adapt to all different scenarios that we were never trained for in the past,” he said.

Lyons says the agency is also starting to send out security teams to accompany agents making arrests: “We’re not gonna allow people to throw rocks anymore, because we’re going to have our own agents and officers there to protect the ones that are actually out there making that arrest.”

It’s beefing up specialized units for high-risk situations

About eight deportation officers dressed in military-style camouflage uniforms, helmets and carrying an assortment of weapons stand outside a house yelling “Police! We have a warrant!” before entering and clearing the house.

They are members of a Special Response Team taking part in a demonstration at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. These officers are like a SWAT team — deportation officers with special training to assist in difficult situations. They also accompany detainees the agency deems dangerous when they are deported.

“Everybody is trained to serve a warrant,” Vitello said. “These guys are trained to serve high-risk warrants.”

There are roughly 450 deportation officers with the special training to serve on these teams, and Lyons says they have been deployed to assist with immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and Washington.

He said he’d like to have more such units but wouldn’t put an exact number on how many. Vitello said they’re also in the process of getting more of the specially armored vehicles.

It’s teaching whom agents can arrest — and when

New recruits to ICE receive training on immigration law and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches. Longtime officers get regular refreshers on these topics.

In limited situations, ICE agents are allowed to enter someone’s home. Generally when they’re seeking someone they’re trying to remove from the country, they have an administrative warrant as opposed to a criminal warrant. That administrative warrant doesn’t allow them to enter the house without first getting permission.

Vitello says the new recruits are taught about the different warrants and how the rules differ. And they’re taught how those who allowed ICE to enter their house can change their mind.

“If somebody says ‘Get out,’ and you don’t have your target, you have to leave,” he said.

Multiple videos on social media have shown ICE officers breaking car windows to pull someone out of a vehicle and arrest that person.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t extend to someone’s vehicle, so Vitello said deportation officers do have the authority to arrest someone in a car or truck. Vitello said in the rare case where a target was in a motor home, officers would talk to the agency’s lawyers first to figure out what protections apply.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that no one is truly safe. That gathering dread fueled some great ’70s paranoid thrillers, such as “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation,” but it’s been difficult to replicate that eeriness in today’s extremely online world, when our devices explain and obfuscate with abandon, conspiracies are lifeblood and we feel persecuted one day, invincibly anonymous the next.

The nifty premise of “Relay,” a new white-knuckle ride from “Hell or High Water” director David Mackenzie, is that a certain type of tech-savvy hero can, if not completely ease your anxiety, at least navigate a secret truce with those out to get you. And Riz Ahmed’s solitary off-the-grid fixer, Ash, who hides in plain sight in bustling New York, can do it without ever meeting or talking to you: His preferred mode of traceless communication is the text-telephone service that hard-of-hearing people use in conjunction with message-relaying operators. Like a ready-made covert operation, it keeps identities, numbers and call logs secret.

For the simple fact that “Relay” is not about an assassin (the movies’ most over-romanticized independent contractor), screenwriter Justin Piasecki’s scenario deserves kudos. Rather, Ash’s broker helps potential whistleblowers escape the clutches of dangerously far-reaching entities — unless, of course, they want to settle for cash. It’s a fascinatingly cynical update: Should we make an uneasy peace with our tormentors? (Hello, today’s headlines.)

Before those questions get their due, however, “Relay” sets itself up with clockwork precision as a straightforward big-city nail-biter about staying one step ahead. Seeking protection from harassment and a return to normal life, rattled biotech scientist Sarah (Lily James) goes on the run with incriminating documents about her former employer. When she’s rebuffed by a high-powered law firm, she’s provided a mysterious number to call. Ash, armed with his elaborate vetting methods, puts Sarah through the paces with rules and instructions regarding burner phones, mailed packages and a detailed itinerary of seemingly random air travel. It doesn’t just test her commitment, though — it’s also a ploy to scope out the corporate goons on her trail: a dogged surveillance team led by Sam Worthington (who should maybe only play bad guys) and Willa Fitzgerald.

As the story careens through airports and post offices and New York’s hidey-holes, the cat-and-mouse chase is dizzyingly enjoyable, worthy of a Thomas Perry novel. We wait for the missteps that threaten everything, of course, and they begin with learning that Ash is a failed whistleblower himself, one who is beginning to question his chosen crusade. Another vulnerability, recognizable in the occasional cracks in Ahmed’s commanding stoicism, is the loneliness of the gig. So when a restive Sarah, on one of their protected calls, gently prods for a smidgen of personality from her mysterious unseen helper, one is inclined to shout, “No feelings! Too risky!”

But that, of course, is the slippery pleasure of “Relay,” which pits individuals against venal institutional might. Flaws are the beating hearts of these movies, triggering the peril that makes the blood pump faster. Some of that effectiveness is undercut by some off-putting music choices, but McKenzie’s command of the material is rock solid, Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography achieves a sleek, moody metallic chill and Matt Mayer’s editing is always fleet. In a year that’s already given us one superlative case of adult peekaboo — Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” — “Relay” proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.

Nearly 300 Los Angeles city employees were saved from being laid off after two major unions signed off on cost-cutting measures.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents more than 8,700 rank-and-file officers, agreed to create a voluntary program in which its members can take days off in exchange for some of the overtime hours they previously worked.

The layoffs would have affected 222 civilian LAPD employees, such as clerks and administrative support workers. No sworn LAPD officers were slated to be laid off, but some would have had to do the work of the civilians who departed.

“We are continuing to do everything we can to bring layoff numbers down and I want everyone to know that we are still working and anticipate this number to get even lower,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “These numbers are not final.”

Meanwhile, the Engineers and Architects Assn. authorized a deal for its 6,000 members to take as many as five unpaid vacation days — in effect furloughs — between Jan. 1 and June 30, which could amount to about a 2% pay cut.

The deal saved the jobs of 63 members who do not work for the Los Angeles Police Department, in roles such as city planner, analyst and civilian investigator.

Some of the LAPD civilian employees who had been in danger of being laid off are represented by the Engineers and Architects Assn., and others are represented by other unions. The Police Protective League represents only sworn officers.

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who oversees labor negotiations at City Hall, said the money freed up by the agreements whittled the number of remaining layoffs to 75. He sent a memorandum to the city’s personnel department on Wednesday to “immediately hold in abeyance the layoff process” for employees represented by the Engineers and Architects Assn., as well as all LAPD employees.

In her proposed budget released in April, Bass called for about 1,600 layoffs as part of a strategy to eradicate a $1-billion shortfall. Weeks later, the City Council made a series of other cost-cutting moves, reducing the number of layoffs by half.

To close the budget shortfall, the council also decided to slow down police hiring — though the mayor and council president later announced that they are looking for money to avoid that outcome.

Since the budget was finalized, hundreds of workers have either left city employment or transferred to positions that are safe from the budget ax, leaving 360 positions targeted for layoff before this week’s agreements, according to a memorandum by Szabo on Aug. 15.

The Police Protective League’s Board of Directors called its agreement with the city a “win-win for all parties.”

“Officer safety is always top of mind for our union and the thought that any additional officers would be pulled away from enforcement duties and moved to non-enforcement duties compelled our union to act,” the board said in a statement. “We worked with the city to create a program that will save money to preserve civilian LAPD jobs while also providing a benefit to our members.”

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the city’s budget committee, said that
“even in a tough budget year, we’ve ensured there will not be a single LAPD civilian layoff.”

“That was always our goal, but it was never guaranteed,” she said. “It was only possible because the Engineers and Architects Assn., the Police Department and City leadership worked in partnership to keep officers on the street and protect public safety.”

Roy Samaan, president of the Engineers and Architects Assn., said his union’s members authorized the agreement with the city in an online vote Sunday.

“We don’t want anyone to lose their jobs,” he said.

People in L.A. and New York better get ready for a sea of ESPN red on their morning and evening commutes.

Walt Disney Co.’s is backing the Thursday launch of its sports media unit’s direct-to-consumer streaming app with a major advertising campaign aimed at captive audiences in their cars and on the railway tracks.

The aggressive four-week push is aimed at telling consumers that ESPN — long one of the pillars of the cable television business — will be available for the first time without a pay TV subscription.

The service, a major initiative since ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro took over the Disney unit in 2018, is a response to the growing number of consumers who are bypassing cable and satellite for streaming video platforms. The trend has decreased the number of pay TV homes receiving ESPN, which is a major source of revenue for the company.

ESPN ad on a Cadillac SUV used for Lyft.

(ESPN)

Consumers can subscribe to the new ESPN streaming app for $29.99 a month. Households already paying to receive ESPN channels through cable or satellite can sign up at no additional cost, enabling up to five people to stream the service on mobile devices and internet-connected TV sets.

“We designed our campaign exactly as we designed our product, which is to serve sports fans anytime, anywhere,” Jo Fox, executive vice president of marketing for ESPN, said in a recent interview. “So we want to make sure we are showing up in as many places as possible.”

The advertising campaign that starts Thursday will feature Lyft-operated Cadillac SUVs wrapped in the company logo and the promotional campaign’s tagline “All of ESPN. All in One Place.”

The vehicles will be concentrated in high-traffic areas near sporting events in Los Angeles and New York, where the U.S. Open tennis tournament will soon begin. The ESPN brand name and logo will also appear on the Lyft app and maps.

Mass transit users won’t be left out, as ESPN will take over the E Line of the New York City subway that travels from the World Trade Center to Queens. The exterior of the train cars will be covered with logos while more specific ad messages will appear on the inside.

The public address announcements at the Spring Street subway station — located near Disney’s downtown Manhattan headquarters — will be delivered by ESPN’s voluble $20-million-a-year man Stephen A. Smith, the co-host of “First Take.”

Signage will also take over electronic screens in New York’s Moynihan Train Hall and Port Authority Bus Terminal and billboards along L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard and adjacent to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

ESPN’s campaign will go beyond the major media centers on the coasts. The streaming service will be featured on TV screens in the home entertainment sections in 4,000 Walmart stores across the country.

ESPN also has a deal with Samsung, which will offer free yearlong subscriptions to the streaming service to customers who purchase a QLED 4K TV at Best Buy or Samsung.com. Best Buy stores will feature the ESPN app in stores as well during the promotion.

ESPN has already been touting its streaming service on air and in paid TV media buys with commercials featuring actor and WWE star John Cena. Cena will soon be an ESPN fixture as the streaming service becomes the new home of major WWE events such as WrestleMania and Royal Rumble, starting in 2026.

The ESPN app will include a number of features that will complement the live sports offerings. Fans will be able to create their own personalized “SportsCenter,” which will use artificial intelligence to provide a short personalized highlight program geared to the user’s favorite teams and events.

NBC Sports pioneered the customized highlight show on its Peacock streaming platform during the 2024 Summer Olympics, using the voice of Al Michaels. The voices of ESPN “SportsCenter” hosts will be used on “SportsCenter for You.”

The app will also offer stats, betting, commerce and fantasy sports information alongside the live game coverage shown on ESPN channels.

A CUSTOM number plate that was only expected to sell at auction for just a few hundred pounds ended up going for an eye-watering sum.

The ordinary-looking plate fetched the hefty price after it caught an attendee’s eye for a very specific reason.

3

3

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At the DVLA auction, the FER 12C registered number plate started out at £300.

But when the hammer fell, it would go for a staggering £35,000. 

It turned out that specific registration was wanted for a rare Ferrari 12Cillindri Spider.

This £336,000 supercar came out last year to mark a 70 year anniversary.

A spokesman said: “FER 12C started at just £300 but ended with a final hammer price of £35,000.

“It’s thought it was most likely purchased to use on a Ferrari 12Cillindri Spider.”

The car is a two-seater front-engine, rear-wheel-drive grand tourer.

It was revealed at Miami Beach to mark 70 years of Ferrari on the American market.

The stunning supercar was also given the Compasso d’Oro industrial design award this year.

Other big buys at the DVLA auction included 296 VS – which soared from £2,200 to a staggering £25,010.

Another was 121 O, which began at £2,500 and went for £23,360.

The plate 2 GUD also saw a big jump from £1,200 to £17,830.

Plate dealer Carl Hanley said: “The results from this auction prove that what once felt like a luxury item is now a smart and increasingly popular way for motorists to stand out.

“What’s exciting is the creativity.

“It’s not just about having your name on a plate anymore – it’s about personality, exclusivity, and even legacy.”

If you spend any time on social media, it’s hard to avoid the scorching hot takes about Las Vegas’ recent financial struggles.

Vegas critics say the exorbitant resort fees are brutal, the ever-increasing parking costs are punishing, the comps are few and far between — and did you notice the buffets are vanishing?

In short, Vegas is on a losing streak.

After fighting to bounce back from COVID-19 closures, Sin City is facing financial headwinds as fewer people, particularly Californians, are visiting, playing and ultimately spending money.

My colleague Terry Castleman dived into some theories, but also, as Terry does well, dug into the numbers to tell the tale of Vegas’ sudden crap out.

How do Californians figure into Vegas’ struggle?

Visits to Las Vegas were down 11.3% in June 2025 versus a year earlier, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Traffic on Interstate 15 at the California-Nevada border was down 4.3% over the same period, suggesting fewer visitors doing road trips from the Golden State to Vegas casinos.

The number of air travelers into Las Vegas overall declined 6.3% over the previous June. In 2024, Californians made up more than a fifth of air travelers into Vegas, with nearly half of those coming from the Los Angeles metro area.

A demographic report from the visitors authority estimated that Southern California provided 30% of all visitors to the city in 2024.

Add it all up, and Californians could be responsible for a significant portion of the decline in Vegas tourism.

How do the numbers look internationally?

Tourism within the U.S. is only part of the picture, though, as experts previously predicted we are also seeing a slump in international tourism to the U.S. The convention and visitors authority estimates that 12% of the city’s visitors are international.

A report from the World Travel and Tourism Council projected that the U.S. would lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending in 2025.

“While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign,” Julia Simpson, the council’s president, said in a statement.

The report cited air-travel booking data from March that showed a 15% to 20% drop in expected travel from major tourism sources, including the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada.

What about Mexico and Canada?

Visitors from Canada and Mexico made up more than half of international visitors to Las Vegas in 2024, according to data from the visitors authority.

But President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state and his decision to hit Canada with tariffs have not endeared him to Canadian travelers. Meanwhile, media overseas have been bombarded with stories of capricious denials and detentions of travelers at U.S. border crossings.

Apparently, Mexican and Canadian tourists are not feeling so welcome in the U.S. these days.

What’s next?

“Las Vegas thrives on tourism,” Rep. Steven Horsford wrote last week on X, “but under the Trump slump, the numbers are tanking.” Horsford, a Democrat, represents Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, which includes a portion of Las Vegas.

By many metrics — including visitor totals, convention attendance and room occupancy rates — Las Vegas has not fully recovered from the onset of the pandemic.

In dollar terms, however, Sin City continues to profit even as visitor numbers drop: Clark County, which includes Vegas, collected $1.16 billion in gambling revenue in June 2025, up 3.5% from a year earlier.

So, Vegas’ luck has not run out yet.

For more, check out the full article here.

The week’s biggest stories

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Canyon and Los Angeles-area fires

Trump administration policy and reactions

Crime, courts and policing

In memoriam

More big stories

This week’s must reads

More great reads

For your weekend

(Giordano Poloni / For The Times)

Going out

Staying in

Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

Jim Rainey, staff writer
Diamy Wang, homepage intern
Izzy Nunes, audience intern
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew J. Campa, reporter
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

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.

July 31 (UPI) — The U.S. Senate has approved weapons sales to Israel, despite the fact that a majority of Senate Democrats voted against the measure.

Twenty-seven of the 47 Democrats voted Wednesday in favor of two resolutions to block U.S. military sales to Israel, a change from the historically typical bipartisan support such resolutions are expected to receive.

The resolutions were sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who said in a press release Wednesday that “the members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted to stop sending arms shipments to a Netanyahu government which has waged a horrific, immoral, and illegal war against the Palestinian people.”

“The tide is turning,” he added. “The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.”

Sanders’ resolutions may have failed, but the 27 senators in support is the most he has received in the three times he sponsored them. His first attempt in November of last year received 18 Democratic votes, and a second attempt in April scored 15.

However, 70 senators voted against Sanders’ first resolution that sought to block over $675 million in weapons sales to Israel.

His second resolution, which would have prohibited the sale of thousands of assault rifles, lost more support as it was defeated by a 73-24 margin.

Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., voted in support of Sanders’ resolutions for the first time.

“Tonight I voted YES to block the sale of certain weapons to Israel to send a message to Netanyahu’s government,” she posted to X Wednesday. “This legislative tool is not perfect, but frankly it is time to say ENOUGH to the suffering of innocent young children and families.”

“Tonight, I voted in favor of blocking the Trump Administration from sending more weapons to Israel,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., in an X post Wednesday, after voting yes for the first time.

“My votes tonight reflect my deep frustration with the Netanyahu government’s abject failure to address humanitarian needs in Gaza and send a message to the Trump administration that it must change course if it wants to help end this devastating war,” she concluded.

“The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future,” Sanders further noted in his release.

OCHOPEE, Fla. — Deportation flights from the remote Everglades immigration lockup known as ”Alligator Alcatraz″ have begun and are expected to increase soon, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday.

The first flights operated by the Department of Homeland Security have transferred about 100 detainees from the immigration detention center to other countries, DeSantis said during a news conference near the facility.

“You’re going to see the numbers go up dramatically,” he said.

Two or three flights have already departed, but officials didn’t say where those flights headed.

Critics have condemned the South Florida facility as cruel and inhumane. DeSantis and other Republican officials have defended it as part of the state’s aggressive push to support President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Building the facility in the Everglades and naming it after a notorious federal prison were meant as deterrents, DeSantis and other officials have said.

The White House has delighted in the area’s remoteness — about 50 miles west of Miami — and the fact that it is teeming with pythons and alligators. It hopes to send a message that repercussions will be severe if U.S. immigration laws are broken.

Trump has suggested that his administration could reopen Alcatraz, the notorious island prison in San Francisco Bay. The White House also has sent some immigrants awaiting deportation to a detention lockup in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and others to a megaprison in El Salvador.

The Everglades facility was built in a matter of days over 10 square miles. It features more than 200 security cameras and more than 5 miles of barbed wire. An adjacent runway makes it more convenient for homeland security officials to move detainees in and out of the site.

It currently holds about 2,000 people, with the potential to double the capacity, Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said Friday.

DeSantis wants the U.S. Justice Department to allow an immigration judge on site to speed up the deportation process.

“This was never intended to be something where people are just held,” he said. “The whole purpose is to be a place that can facilitate increased frequency and numbers of deportations.”

Critics have challenged federal and state officials’ contention that the detention center is just run by the state of Florida. Environmental groups suing to stop further construction and expansion demanded Thursday to see agreements or communications between state and federal officials and to visit the site.

Seewer writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mike Schneider contributed to this report.

President Trump has the answer to homelessness.

Forcibly clear the streets.

On Thursday, he signed an executive order to address “endemic vagrancy” and end “crime and disorder on our streets.” He called for the use of “civil commitments” to get those who suffer from mental illness or addiction into “humane treatment.”

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

This comes after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling making it legal for cities to punish people for being homeless, even if they have nowhere to go.

There’s some truth in what he says, and California’s record on housing and homelessness is ripe for criticism. I’ve watched too many people suffer from addiction and mental illness and asked why the help is so slow to arrive. But I also know there are no simple answers for either crisis, and bluster is no substitute for desperately needed resources.

Like a lot of what Trump does, this is another case of grandstanding. In the meantime, the Washington Post reported Thursday that the “Trump administration has slashed more than $1 billion in COVID-era grants administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is proposing to slash hundreds of millions more in agency grants.”

Wendell Blassingame sits at the entrance to San Julian Park in downtown Los Angeles in 2023.

(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

As it happens, I was in the middle of a column on the latest Los Angeles homeless count when news of Trump’s executive order broke. I had just spent time with two homeless women to hear about their predicaments, and none of what Trump is proposing comes close to addressing their needs, which are tragically commonplace.

Namely, they’re living in poverty and can’t afford a place to live.

In his executive order, Trump said that “nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having used hard drugs … in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.”

I don’t know where he got those numbers, but truth and accuracy are not hallmarks of this administration.

No doubt, addiction and mental illness are significant factors, and more intervention is needed.

But that’s more complicated than he thinks, especially given the practical and legal issues surrounding coercive treatment — and it’s not going to solve the problem.

When the latest homeless count in Los Angeles was released, a slight decline from a year ago was regarded by many as a positive sign. But when Eli Veitzer of Jewish Family Service L.A. dug into the numbers, he found something both unsurprising and deeply disturbing.

The number of homeless people 65 and older hadn’t gone down. It had surged, in both the city and county of Los Angeles.

“This isn’t new this year. It’s a trend over the last couple of years,” said Veitzer, whose nonprofit provides meals, housing assistance and various other services to clients. “It’s meaningful, and it’s real, and these people are at the highest risk of mortality while they’re on the streets.”

The numbers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed a 3.4% decrease in the total homeless population in the city, but a 17.6% increase among those 65 and older. The county numbers showed a 3.99% decrease overall, but an 8.59% increase in the 65 and older group.

In the city, the increase over two years was from 3,427 in 2023 to 4,680 this year — up 37%.

Reliable research has shown that among older adults who become homeless, the primary reason is the combination of poverty and high housing costs, rather than mental illness or addiction.

A man smokes inside a tent on Los Angeles’ Skid Row in March 2020.

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

“They or their spouse lost their job, they or their spouse got sick, their marriage broke up or their spouse or parent died,” Dr. Margot Kushel of UC San Francisco’s Homelessness and Housing Initiative was telling me several hours before Trump’s executive order was issued.

Her team’s landmark study, released two years ago (and covered by my colleague Anita Chabria), found that nearly half the state’s homeless residents were 50 and older, and that participants in the study reported a median monthly household income of $960.

“The results … confirm that far too many Californians experience homelessness because they cannot afford housing,” Kushel said at the time.

Among the older population, Veitzer said, the jump in homelessness comes against the backdrop of federal and local budget cuts that will make it harder to reverse the trend. And harder for nonprofits, which rely in part on public funding, to keep providing group meals, home-delivered meals, transportation, social services and housing support.

“Every provider I’ve talked to in the city of L.A. is cutting meal programs,” Veitzer said. “We’re going to have to close two of our 13 meal sites, and last year we closed three. We used to have 16, and now we’re down to 11.”

On Wednesday, I went to one of the sites that’s still up and running on Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of the 405, and met Jane Jefferies, 69. She told me she’s been camping in her vehicle since February when living with her brother became impossible for various reasons. She now pulls into a Safe Parking L.A. lot each night to bed down.

Jefferies said she collects about $1,400 a month in Social Security, which isn’t enough to get her into an apartment. At the senior center, she uses her own equipment to make buttons that she sells on the Venice boardwalk, where she can make up to $200 on a good weekend.

But that’s still not enough to cover the cost of housing, she told me, and she’s given up on government help.

“All the funding has been cut, and I don’t know if it’s because a lot of the city and state funding is subsidized by the federal government. We all know Trump hates California,” she said.

As Veitzer put it: “There’s nowhere near enough low-income senior housing in L.A. County. Wait lists open up periodically,” with far more applicants than housing units. “And then they close.”

His agency delivers a daily meal to Vancie Davis, 73, who lives in a van at Penmar Park in Venice. Her next-door neighbor is her son, Thomas Williamson, 51, who lives in his car.

Davis was in the front seat of the van when I arrived, hugging her dog, Heart. Her left leg was amputated below the knee two years ago because of an infection, she told me.

Davis said she and another son were living in a trailer in Oregon, but the owner shut off the utilities and changed the locks. She said she reached out to Williamson, who told her, “I’ve got a van for you, so you’ll have a place to live, but it’s going to be rough. And it is. It’s very, very rough.”

I’ve heard so many variations of stories like these over the years, I’ve lost count.

The magnitude that exists in the wealthiest nation in history is a disgrace, and a sad commentary on an economic system and public policy that have served to widen, rather than narrow, the inequity gap.

On Thursday, Trump’s executive order on homelessness grabbed headlines but will do nothing for Jane Jefferies or Vancie Davis and for thousands like them. We know the interventions that can work, Kushel said, but with deep cuts in the works, we’re moving in the wrong direction.

Davis’ son Thomas told Times photographer Genaro Molina about another person who lives in a vehicle and has been a neighbor of theirs in the parking lot.

She wasn’t there Wednesday, but we’ll check back.

It’s a 91-year-old woman.

[email protected]

Motorists are expected to make 13.9 million trips over the coming days as we start the school summer holidays and here is a list of the roads which are likely to have most congestion

Brits are being warned of the roads to avoid as the UK is expected to see the biggest number of car trips over the coming days since records began.

Drivers are planning 13.9 million midweek journeys from today until Thursday according to new data from INRIX. School holidays are beginning this week with many pupils breaking up for the summer tomorrow and it means many families will be hitting the roads for tourist hotspots. The new data estimates that 2.3 million trips will be made on UK roads today, while a further 2 million are expected on the next three days. And unusually this year many people are trying to get away before waiting until the weekend.

“This year, a larger number of drivers than ever expect to head off on holiday at some point this week, rather than wait until the weekend to get away – with an additional 5.6m journeys likely at some point between Monday and Thursday,” states the RAC, which has released the INRIX data.

And the midweek travel chaos is only the beginning as there is also likely to be plenty more mayhem on the roads come the weekend and further into the holiday period.

According to INRIX the M40 northbound between J12 for Gaydon and the M42 exit at J3A in the West Midlands could see mid-morning delays of up to 40 minutes on Tuesday.

Later on, queues of up to 50 minutes are likely from 4pm on the M1 northbound from J12 to J16 through Northamptonshire and on the M4 westbound from J22 for the Pilning Interchange near Severn Beach across the Prince of Wales Bridge to J26 for Newport.

The queues are set to continue through Wednesday afternoon as people attempt to get away before the weekend. The M1 northbound from J22 near Leicester to J26 for Nottingham, near the Peak District, may face 40-minute delays as early as 3pm.

INRIX is predicting early-evening queues of 50 minutes along the M25 anticlockwise from J4 for Sevenoaks to the Dartford Crossing, as holiday traffic clashes with rush-hour commuters.

Then for the weekend the RAC is recommending that people start as early or as late as possible to avoid the worst of the traffic. This means either before 10am or after 7pm.

RAC mobile servicing and repairs team leader Nick Mullender said: “Normally the weekend bears the brunt of getaway traffic but this year we’re expecting ‘midweek mayhem’ as schools finish for summer.

“We typically see a peak on ‘Frantic Friday’ when holidaymakers share the roads with commuters heading home, but our figures indicate these trips will now be spread across several days with millions more weekday journeys planned. To avoid the worst of the traffic, travel outside peak times and steer well clear of morning and evening rush hours.

“Saturday is expected be the single busiest day for summer traffic with many drivers travelling long distances to get to their holiday destination. If a getaway journey involves hours in the car, it’s essential to be well rested and fresh for the trip. If possible, share the driving with another passenger to ensure concentration levels stay high, while those travelling with children should pack plenty of entertainment to keep them occupied and minimise questions of “are we there yet?”. Water, snacks and phone chargers are essential!

“Before setting off, drivers should do whatever they can to avoid their vehicles letting them down, like checking oil and coolant levels as well as the condition and tread on all tyres. There’s also still time to book an RAC Mobile Mechanic who can carry out a wide range of repairs at home or work, as well conducting a full or interim service.”

PHILADELPHIA — Mike Trout arrived in Philadelphia in time to catch the unveiling of a new target in the deepest part of the ballpark — the 2026 All-Star Game logo, complete with the Liberty Bell in the center of the design.

The Angels slugger has something to aim for in Philly.

As a home run target? No, the oversized symbol that celebrates next year’s All-Star Game is raised well beyond the center-field wall and out of reach to even Schwarbombs in Ashburn Alley, closer to the retired numbers on the bricks at Citizens Bank Park.

As a potential destination for next season? Making the All-Star Game is more on the nose for Trout, an 11-time selection who hasn’t been picked to play for the American League since 2023.

Yet each time Trout plays in Philadelphia, just over 40 miles from the slugger’s New Jersey hometown, talk tends to drift from All-Star Games, his injuries, his upcoming career milestones — he’s closing in on 400 homers and 1,000 RBIs — or a rare Angels’ push at the postseason, and lands right on the possibility he’ll one day suit up for the Phillies.

“I hear it all the time,” Trout said with a laugh outside the Angels’ clubhouse on Friday. “Right now, I’m enjoying myself with this team in here. These guys come to the ballpark every day and play hard. It’s hard not for me to see it, because I see it and hear it all the time.”

He’ll settle for at least a crack at the 2026 All-Star Game.

“It would definitely mean a lot,” Trout said.

Mike Trout stands on the field during a game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on July 13.

(Jessie Alcheh / Associated Press)

Trout entered the start of a three-game series against the Phillies having the kind of season that has defined most of his last five seasons in California. When he’s healthy, he’s on. He has a .283 batting average, .433 on-base percentage and .478 slugging percentage with eight home runs and 23 RBIs in 41 games since he came off the injured list on May 30. Otherwise, it’s more stints on the IL. This season, he was hampered by a bone bruise on his left knee that cost him time.

Trout was the designated hitter on Friday night against the NL East champion Phillies, who could certainly use a right-handed bat with pop in the outfield as they make their own playoff run. He did some light pregame work in the outfield (“get my feet under me”) and hoped he’d return to right field in the near future. Trout said his knee did feel “a lot better” after four days off and off his feet over the All-Star break.

“I’m just happy to be in the lineup, contributing,” he said. “Years past, it’s just come to the ballpark, not be able to at least hit. That’s been frustrating, that’s been tough.”

He again expected a full house of fans from his hometown of Millville, N.J., on hand to root him on as the three-time AL MVP started the game with 395 career home runs and 995 career RBIs.

“To think about it, it’s just how fast it’s going,” Trout said. “Just trying to enjoy every minute of it. The milestones are awesome. I’m looking forward to hopefully getting them.”

Trout would have blown by those numbers years ago had it not been for his injuries that have allowed him to play more than 82 games only once since 2019.

“Things happen,” he said.

There are no guarantees he’ll chip away at those numbers over the weekend — Trout has never gone deep at Citizens Bank Park.

Trout has kept his ties to the area as he blossomed into one of baseball’s great sluggers; his family still lives in the area, he collaborated with Tiger Woods on a new golf course, and yes, the Eagles season-ticket holder still bleeds kelly green.

The Angels were 47-49 headed into Friday, but only four games out of a wild-card spot. Trout played in three career playoff games in 2014. The Angels’ 47 wins are the most for the franchise at the All-Star break since it had 49 in 2018.

“The team in there right now, we’ve got a great mindset,” he said. “We’ve got a great group in there. We pass the baton at the plate. We’re tough outs.”

None tougher at his best than Trout. He’s trying to become the 20th player in baseball history to hit his first 400 home runs with one franchise.

“This guy is a superstar,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “I saw him when he first came up and he hit the ball as far as you could think. He runs down the first base line, it sounds like a horse, just big and strong and fast.”

Gelston writes for the Associated Press.