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The US president says he is looking for a solution to ‘bad things’ happening in Gaza, including starvation. Donald Trump also predicted progress on Ukraine-Russia peace talks “in two or three weeks”, as he talked to reporters on the final day of his Middle East tour.

DOWNIEVILLE, Calif. — Patrice Miller, 71, lived by herself in a small yellow house beneath towering mountain peaks on the edge of a burbling river in this Sierra County village. She doted on her cats and her exotic orchids, and was known to neighbors for her delicious homemade bread. One fall afternoon in 2023, after Miller had failed for several days to make her customary appearance at the town market, a store clerk asked authorities to check on her.

A short time later, a sheriff’s deputy found Miller’s lifeless body in her kitchen. Her right leg and left arm had been partially gnawed off. On the floor around her were the large paw prints of a bear.

Months after her death, officials would make a stunning disclosure, revealing that an autopsy had determined that Miller had likely been killed by the animal after it broke into her home. It marked the first known instance in California history of a fatal bear attack on a human.

But amid the contentious politics around black bears and other apex predators in California, not everyone accepts the official version of how she died.

“We don’t believe the bear did it,” said Ann Bryant, executive director of the Bear League in the Tahoe Basin. “And I will go on record as saying that. … We’ve never had a bear kill anybody.”

The story of Miller’s grisly end — and the increasingly heated battles around predators in California — have come roaring into the state Capitol this spring. Lawmakers representing conservative rural districts in the state’s rugged northern reaches argue that their communities are under attack, and point to Miller as one example of the worst that can happen. One solution they have pushed is changing the law to allow people to set packs of hunting dogs after bears to haze them. A similar measure has been floated — for now unsuccessfully — to ward off mountain lions considered a threat.

Wildlife conservation advocates are aghast. They say turning dogs on bears is barbaric and won’t make anyone safer. They contend the proposed laws don’t reflect a scientifically backed approach to managing wild populations but instead are pro-hunting bills dressed up in the guise of public safety. The real solution, they say, is for humans living near bears to learn to safely co-exist by not leaving out food or otherwise attracting them.

“These people are using [Miller’s death] to try to start hounding bears again,” said Bryant, who maintains that Miller, who was in poor health, must have died before the bear came into her home and devoured her. “She would roll in her grave if she knew that in her death people would create a situation where people were going to mistreat bears, because she loved bears.”

In a recent report, the Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates there are now 60,000 black bears roaming California and notes a marked increase in reports of human-bear conflicts.

(John Axtell / Nevada Department of Wildlife)

Founded in 1849, Downieville, population 300, is one of California’s oldest towns, and also one of its quaintest. Colorfully painted wooden buildings sit at the junction of two rivers, beneath majestic pines and mountain peaks.

Along with tourists, who flood in in the summer for rafting and mountain biking, the town also receives frequent visits from bears and mountain lions. More recently, wolves have arrived with deadly force, snatching domesticated cattle off the open pastures that stretch across the plains on the other side of the mountains east of town.

Miller wound up here about a decade ago, at the end of a rich, complicated life. She had worked in an oil refinery, and also as a contractor. She was a master gardener, expert at transplanting Japanese maples, according to her neighbor, Patty Hall. She was a voracious reader and a skilled pianist. But she also struggled with a variety of serious ailments and substance abuse, according to neighbors and officials.

Longtime residents in the area were used to the challenges of living among wild animals. But in the summer of 2023, Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher said he started getting an overwhelming number of calls about problem bears.

“We had three or four habituated bears that were constantly here in town,” said Fisher. “They had zero fear. I would say, almost daily, we were having to go out and chase these bears away, haze them.”

But bears have a sharp sense of smell, a long memory for food sources and an incredible sense of direction. If a tourist tosses them a pizza crust or the last bits of an ice cream cone, or leaves the lid off a trash can, they will return again and again, even if they are relocated miles away.

That summer, Fisher said, no matter what he did, the bears kept lumbering back into town. It was unlike anything he had experienced, he said, and he had grown up in Downieville. “A police car with an air horn or the siren, we would push the bear up out of the community. Fifteen minutes later, they were right back downtown,” he said.

Founded in 1849, Downieville, population 300, is one of California’s oldest towns and also one of its quaintest.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

And then there were the bears harassing Miller and her neighbors.

“There were three bears,” recalled Hall, who lives just up the hill from the home Miller rented. “Twice a night they would walk up and down our [porch] stairs. The Ring cameras were constantly going off.”

Fisher said some of Miller’s neighbors complained that she was part of the lure, because she was not disposing of her garbage properly. Some also alleged she was tossing food on her porch for her cats — and that the bears were coming for it. Miller’s daughter later told sheriff’s officials that bears were “constantly trying” to get into her house, and that “her mother had physically hit one” to keep it out. One particular bear, which Miller had nicknamed “Big Bastard,” was a frequent pest.

Fifty miles from Downieville, in the Lake Tahoe Basin, the Bear League was getting calls about Miller, too. The organization, which Bryant founded more than two decades ago, seeks to protect bears by helping residents coexist with them. This includes educating people about locking down their trash and helping to haze bears away from homes.

“We got calls [from her neighbors] that told us she had been feeding the bears, tossing food out to them, and let them come into her house,” Bryant said. She added that some thought, erroneously, that the Bear League was a government organization, and “maybe we had the ability to enforce the law” against feeding bears.

Hall, Miller’s friend, told The Times that Miller was not feeding bears. Still, the problems continued.

Eventually, officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife were called and told Miller she could sign a “depredation permit,” after which authorities could kill bears trying to get into her house. But Miller declined to do so, Fisher said.

In early November, Miller stopped showing up around town, prompting calls for a welfare check.

A little before 3 p.m. on Nov. 8, 2023, Deputy Malcolm Fadden approached Miller’s home, which was a short walk from the sheriff’s office. The security bars on the kitchen window had been ripped off. The window itself had been busted from the outside.

“I knocked on the door,” Fadden wrote in his report, but got no answer.

Patrice Miller was found dead in her rental cottage in November 2023. Bear advocates take issue with an autopsy report that said she probably was killed in a bear attack.

(Jessica Garrison / Los Angeles Times)

Through the window, he saw blood streaked across the living room floor. He took out his gun and burst into the house, where he was greeted by a giant pile of bear scat. He found Miller in the kitchen, her half-eaten body surrounded by food and garbage, which, Fadden wrote, had been “apparently scattered by bears.”

Fisher was horrified. Already frustrated at what he saw as the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s lackluster response to the escalating bear incursions that summer, now he wanted the bear that had fed on Miller to be trapped and killed.

He said the department told him that for the bear to be killed, “the person who lives at the house has to sign the [depredation] permit.” Fisher said he responded: “How many times do I have to tell you the person who lives at that house was eaten by the bear?”

This was the start of a long-running conflict between the sheriff and agency officials that would complicate the release of the autopsy findings about Miller’s death, and also convince Fisher that more aggressive steps were needed to protect his community.

Eventually, Fisher managed to get a depredation permit for the bear that had fed on Miller; his deputies tracked down her landlord, who as the homeowner could sign it. Wildlife officials set up a trap near Miller’s house, and in short order, a bear was caught.

But, according to Fisher, officials initially said it wasn’t the same bear. They said DNA tests showed that the bear who had eaten her was male, and the bear they had caught appeared to be female. They intended to release the bear, he said.

Fisher padlocked the cage, and threatened to call the media. In response, he said, wildlife officials sent a biologist, who determined the bear in the trap was male. It was shot that night.

At that point, few people, including Fisher, believed that the bear had actually killed Miller, as opposed to feeding on her after she died of natural causes. Though there are recorded instances of fatal black bear maulings in other U.S. states, they are rare, and there had been no reports of one in California. Fisher issued a news release saying that the death was under investigation, but that “it is believed that Patrice Miller passed away before a bear, possibly drawn by the scent or other factors, accessed the residence.”

After performing an autopsy, however, the pathologist on contract with Sierra County came to a different conclusion. She issued a report that found that Miller had “deep hemorrhage of the face and neck“ as well as “puncture injuries (consistent with claw ‘swipe’ or ‘slap’).” These injuries, she noted, were “characteristics more suggestive of a vital reaction by a living person.” In short: The pathologist found that Miller was probably killed by the bear.

Because of Fisher’s feud with Fish and Wildlife, that autopsy report, dated Jan. 4, 2024, wouldn’t become public for months.

Fisher said the state agency was refusing to provide him with copies of the DNA analysis of the bear that had been trapped in Miller’s yard. He wanted to see for himself that it matched the DNA evidence collected at her home, saying he hated the thought that a bear that had feasted on a person might still be roaming his town.

“I requested DNA from Fish and Wildlife, and they refused to provide it to me,” he said. “So I withheld the coroner’s report. We stopped talking.”

He said he verbally told department officials that the pathologist believed Miller had been killed by the bear — a seemingly noteworthy development. He said that officials responded: “I guess we’ll see when we get the report.”

In an email to The Times, state wildlife officials confirmed that Fisher had verbally shared the results of the autopsy report, but said they felt they needed to see the report to do their “due diligence before making an announcement about the first fatal bear attack in California.” The agency had sent an investigator to the scene after Miller’s death, who like Fisher and his deputies, thought the evidence suggested she had died of natural causes, said agency spokesperson Peter Tira.

By the time Fisher got the autopsy report, it was deep winter in the mountains, and bear activity decreased. Then came spring, and along with the blossoms, the bears came back to Downieville.

Bears were knocking over trash cans and breaking into cars. In May, residents on Main Street reported that a bear had broken into multiple houses, including one incursion that involved a bear standing over 82-year-old Dale Hunter as he napped on his couch.

A few days later, a bear tried to break into the cafeteria at Downieville High School while students were at school.

Fisher declared the bear a threat to public safety. Fish and Wildlife eventually issued a depredation permit, and the bear was shot.

That led to a story in the Mountain Messenger, the local paper. In it, the sheriff dropped a bombshell: “Miller was mauled to death after a black bear entered her home,” the paper reported. The story went on to say that the sheriff had made “numerous attempts” to inform Fish and Wildlife “about Miller’s death and more recent dangerous situations.”

After the story ran, state Sen. Megan Dahle, a Lassen County Republican who at the time served in the Assembly, set up a conciliatory meeting between Fish and Wildlife and Fisher. They have been meeting regularly ever since, Fisher said.

Fisher got his DNA results confirming that the bear trapped in Miller’s yard was the same bear that had eaten her. And Fish and Wildlife officials finally got a copy of the pathology report, which said Miller was probably alive when she encountered the bear.

The revelation made headlines around the state. “We’re in new territory,” Capt. Patrick Foy of Fish and Wildlife’s law enforcement division told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bryant and other bear advocates found the release of such a significant finding so long after the fact confounding.

“I absolutely do not believe it,” Bryant said. If the bear had killed her, Bryant added, “the evidence should have been so clear, like immediately.”

“We don’t believe the bear did it,” Ann Bryant, executive director of the Bear League, says of Patrice Miller’s death. “We’ve never had a bear kill anybody.”

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

The Downieville saga unfolded as bears seemed to be making news all over California.

To many, it seemed there were just many more bears encroaching on human settlements. A Fish and Wildlife report released last month estimated there are now 60,000 black bears roaming the Golden State, roughly triple the figure from 1998, the last time the department issued a bear management plan. That’s the highest population estimate for anywhere in the contiguous U.S., although the report also suggests that California’s bear population has been stable for the last decade.

In the Lake Tahoe area, where 50,000 people live year-round and tens of thousands more crowd in on busy tourist weekends, bears were breaking into houses and raiding refrigerators; they were bursting into ice cream shops and strolling along packed beaches.

State and local officials went into overdrive, trying to teach residents and tourists how to avoid attracting bears. The state set money aside for distribution of bear-proof trash cans and “unwelcome mats” that deliver a jolt of electricity if bears try to break into homes.

The Bear League will loan Tahoe Basin residents “unwelcome mats” that deliver a little jolt of electricity to bears if they try to break into homes.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

The Bear League stepped up its efforts. From a small office on Bryant’s property, the organization’s 24-hour hotline was ringing, and volunteers were rushing out with paintball guns to haze bears and to advise people on how to bear-proof their houses.

The tensions continued to escalate, nonetheless, between people who wanted to protect bears at all costs and those who wanted some problem bears trapped and relocated — or killed. In 2024, after a homeowner in the Tahoe area fatally shot a bear he said had broken into his home, many people were outraged that the Department of Fish and Wildlife declined to file charges.

Advocates also complained that the state has fallen behind in its efforts to help people and bears coexist. In recent years, the state had hired dedicated staff to help people in bear country, but the money ran out and some of those people were laid off, said Jennifer Fearing, a wildlife advocate and lobbyist.

“We have the tools to minimize human-wildlife conflict in California,” Fearing said. “We need the state to invest in using them.”

In Sierra County, the sheriff had come to a different conclusion. “We’ve swung the pendulum too far on the environmental side on these apex predators,” Fisher said.

Earlier this year, Fisher found common cause with newly elected GOP Assemblymember Heather Hadwick. “Mountain lions, bears and wolves are my biggest issue. I get calls every day about some kind of predator, which is crazy,” said Hadwick, who represents 11 northern counties.

In February, she introduced a bill, AB 1038, that would allow hunters to sic trained dogs on bears to chase them through the woods, but not kill them. While California has a legal hunting season for bears, it is strictly regulated; the use of hounds to aid the chase has been banned since 2013.

Hadwick argued that hounding bears would increase their fear of humans, which she said some are starting to lose: “We’re keeping them in the forest, where they belong.”

Bears have a long memory for food sources and an incredible sense of direction. If a tourist tosses them a pizza crust or leaves the lid off a trash can, they will return again and again.

(California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

Wildlife advocates showed up in force last month to oppose Hadwick’s bill in an Assembly committee hearing. Sending hounds after bears is cruel, they said. Plus, hounding bears in the woods would have no impact on the bears knocking over neighborhood trash cans and sneaking into ice cream stores.

Fisher testified in favor of the bill, and spoke of Miller’s death.

Lawmakers listened, some with stricken looks on their faces. But in a Legislature controlled by Democrats, Hadwick did not garner enough votes to send her bill on to the full Assembly; it became a two-year bill, meaning it could come back next year.

Fisher returned to Sierra County, where he has continued to advocate for locals to have more power to go after predators. The current situation, he said, is “out of control.”

BATON ROUGE, La. — A legal challenge against a first-of-its-kind measure that recategorized two widely used abortion-inducing drugs as “controlled dangerous substances” in Louisiana can move forward, a judge ruled Thursday.

Baton Rouge-based Judge Jewel Welch denied the Louisiana attorney general’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed last year by opponents of the law, who argue that the reclassification of the pills is unconstitutional and could cause needless and potentially life-threatening delays in treatment during medical emergencies.

Attorneys for defendants in the suit, including Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill, argued that the lawsuit was premature. But attorneys for the plaintiffs, who include a doctor and pharmacist, said that since the law took effect in October, the measure has impacted how the plaintiffs handle and obtain the drugs on a “regular basis.”

A hearing date for the challenge has not yet been set.

Louisiana became the first state to heighten the classification of misoprostol and mifepristone, which have critical reproductive healthcare uses in addition to being used as a two-drug regimen to end pregnancies.

Passage of the measure by the GOP-dominated Legislature marked a new approach in conservative efforts to restrict access to abortion pills. In 2023, nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the country were medication abortions.

Now labeled as “Schedule IV drugs,” the pills are in the same category as the opioid tramadol and other substances that can be addictive. Under the new classification, there are more stringent storage requirements and extra steps to obtain the drugs. Testifying against the legislation, doctors stressed the drugs would be stored in locked containers or elsewhere that may result in slower access during emergency situations where every second is vital.

In the legal challenge, which was filed in October, plaintiffs say the law may slow access to “lifesaving treatment for people experiencing obstetrical emergencies” and make it “significantly harder” for people to “obtain proven, effective remedies necessary for their treatment and care.” Plaintiffs are asking the judge for a permanent injunction, ultimately to halt the law.

The legislation spawned from antiabortion groups and a Republican state senator’s effort to prevent coerced abortion and make it more difficult for bad actors to obtain the drugs. The lawmaker pointed to the case of his sister in Texas who in 2022 was slipped seven misoprostol pills by her husband without her knowledge; she and the baby survived. Over the past 15 years, news outlets have reported on similar cases — none in Louisiana — but the issue does not appear widespread.

“The Louisiana Legislature spoke loud and clear last year that they stand for life and are against this controlled substance being prescribed without a prescription from a doctor,” Murrill said ahead of the hearing.

Prior to the reclassification, a prescription was still needed to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol in Louisiana. Before the change, medical personnel told the Associated Press that in hospitals the drugs — which are also used to treat miscarriages, induce labor and stop bleeding — were often stored in an OB-GYN unit in a “hemorrhage box” in the room, on the delivery table or in a nurse’s pocket, to ensure almost-immediate access in common emergency situations.

With the heightened classification also comes increased charges. If someone knowingly possesses mifepristone or misoprostol without a valid prescription for any purpose, they could be fined up to $5,000 and sent to jail for one to five years. The law carves out protections for pregnant women who obtain the drug without a prescription to take on their own.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the Birthmark Doula Collective, an organization of people trained to provide pregnancy care before, during and after birth; Nancy Davis, a woman who was denied an abortion in Louisiana and traveled out of state for one after learning her fetus would not survive; and a woman who said she was turned away from two emergency rooms instead of being treated for a miscarriage.

Louisiana currently has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, which includes abortions via medication.

Cline writes for the Associated Press.

On the most basic level, “Stick” is about a prematurely washed-up golfer who takes a teen prodigy under his wing and on the road. Off they go in an RV to hit some big amateur tournaments, accompanied by the kid’s mother and the old pro’s irascible buddy. The kid gets to fall in love with a free-spirited lass. Adventures are had. Lessons are learned.

But very little about golf takes place on a basic level (except maybe in “Caddyshack”). The sport is rife with metaphors. Lay up or go for broke? (see also, “Tin Cup.”) Keep your cool under pressure or lose it in the sand trap? So it makes sense that “Stick,” premiering June 4 on Apple TV+, uses the game of golf to take a swing at the game of life.

The wash-up, Pryce Cahill (played by Owen Wilson), seeks redemption. Years back, he flipped out on the course, and his life has been in free fall since — he and his wife (Judy Greer) are getting a divorce, and their home is being sold. But then he meets the 17-year-old prodigy, Santi (newcomer Peter Dager), who he sees as the key to a second chance. Santi, meanwhile, knows he’s good; when he pummels a ball, it sounds like a sonic boom. But his first coach was his hard-ass, now-vanished dad, and Santi now has trouble taking golf seriously or respecting his elders.

These human elements intrigued series creator Jason Keller far more than anything that might happen on the links. “I love golf, but I’m not good at it,” he said. “I am routinely frustrated by it.”

Owen Wilson, left, Judy Greer and Peter Dager in a scene from “Stick.”

(Apple)

Frustration, of course, is a universal quality. So is disappointment. These are the elements that pushed Keller, who wrote the screenplay for the 2019 movie “Ford v Ferrari,” to create “Stick.”

“Long before the story was set on a golf course, I was really interested in exploring a character who had not lived up to expectations,” he said. “I was interested in characters that had great promise but ultimately didn’t achieve that promise. What happens to somebody afterward? How do they react to that? Do they let themselves be defined by not achieving that level, or do they try to reconcile that? Does it motivate them to excel in other areas of their life?”

Wilson, who also readily admits his golf game isn’t the strongest — “My dad and my brothers played, but I was always intimidated by it” — sees another key parallel to life: As much as you seek perfection, you can never achieve it.

“There’s a little bit of a chess thing with golf, in that you can never really master it,” he said. “That can feel like life too. People talk about Tiger Woods winning the Masters by like 12 strokes and deciding his swing isn’t quite right. Pryce talks about how the game takes and takes and takes. I think people feel that way about life as well.”

Mariana Treviño, the Mexican actor who plays Santi’s mom, Elena, agrees that “Stick” is about dealing with hardships. “Elena is in a moment in her life where she had a big disappointment,” she said. “Her family broke down. Sometimes in life when something very strong happens to you, you just kind of shut out from the world. You think that you’re going to protect that wound by just not moving too much from a place, or not directly confronting something that is painful.”

“Long before the story was set on a golf course, I was really interested in exploring a character who had not lived up to expectations,” said “Stick” creator Jason Keller.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

If this all sounds a tad serious, “Stick” really isn’t. As with most anything starring Wilson, whose Texas/California cool works just fine in the series’ Indiana setting (Keller hails from Indianapolis), “Stick” feels easy and breezy even when it gets into heavy-ish themes. The tone suggests a riff on “Ted Lasso” but with golf instead of soccer.

Wilson and Marc Maron, who plays Pryce’s grumpy, long-suffering best bud (who is dealing with grief of his own), keep up the steady banter of two guys who know each other’s foibles and try to resist the urge to poke them. Zero, Santi’s new friend and life guru played by Lilli Kay, is a self-described “genderqueer, anticapitalist, postcolonial feminist,” and the series manages to have fun with her without making fun of her.

Elena, meanwhile, is mildly suspicious of the whole endeavor, but she finds the aging white golfers amusing. She also likes the cash Pryce has thrown her way for the privilege of coaching her son.

Put them all together in an RV, and on a series of golf courses, and you’ve got the makings of a modern family comedy. Except most of the “family” aren’t related.

“They’re a sort of a found family, and they are all very different personalities,” Keller said. “But ultimately they are what each other needed, and none of them knew it. I think that’s the beauty and the fun and the heart of the show. We’re watching a group of people that don’t fit together at first, and then they realize they needed each other. I hope that warmth and the feel-good element of that is felt by audiences.”

“They’re a sort of a found family, and they are all very different personalities,” said Jason Keller about the characters. “But ultimately they are what each other needed, and none of them knew it.” Lilli Kay, left, Mariana Treviño, Judy Greer and Marc Maron in “Stick.”

(Apple)

But that sense of major disappointment, and the question of how to turn the page, still lingers over the story. Keller is intimately acquainted with that kind of challenge.

He was 25, newly arrived in Hollywood, when doctors discovered a benign brain tumor. It was successfully removed, but the subsequent nerve damage meant Keller had to retrain his brain to let him walk again. Now 56, he says he “didn’t realize what a gift that hard experience was. I became very grateful for being physically healthy.”

Keller used that sink-or-swim experience to write his “Stick” characters. “Everybody has a point in their life that just brought them to their knees,” he said. “It could be a divorce or the death of a loved one. We all face these personal tragedies or challenges. What do you do with them after you go through ’em and survive ’em? That’s the real question.”

Even Santi, the youngest character in “Stick,” has been burned by life. “He’s scared, and he has every reason to be,” Dager said. “His father left him.” And he responded by building a hard shell and walking with a swagger.

Dager embraced the whole package. “I fell in love with his past but also his soul and the way he protects himself with the humor he uses as a defense mechanism,” Dager said. “And then once we get to know him and he starts to fall in love and he starts to trust people, you really see the kid. You see who he actually wants to be.”

And if you do happen to be a golfer, if you know a birdie from an eagle, an iron from a wood, “Stick” doesn’t skimp on the sports stuff. It might even inspire you to go out to the garage and excavate that moldering set of clubs. Or not.

“The golfers I’ve shown it to have connected to it and appreciated it at the level of the sport,” Keller said. “And the others who have seen it who are not golfers seem to be responding to it at a purely emotional character level. I think they’re connecting to it. We’ll see if we got it right. I hope we did.”

The radiation containment domes at Arizona’s Palo Verde Generating Station were, truth be told, pretty boring to look at: giant mounds of concrete, snap a picture, move on. The enormous cooling towers and evaporation ponds were marginally more interesting — all that recycled water, baking in the Sonoran Desert.

You know what really struck my fancy, though? The paintings on conference room walls.

There were five of them, each representing one of the far-flung Southwestern cityscapes powered by Palo Verde. Two showcased Arizona: one for the Phoenix metro area — saguaro cacti and ocotillo in the foreground, freeway and skyscrapers in the background — and one for the red-rock country to the north. Another showed downtown Albuquerque. A fourth portrayed farm fields in El Paso, likely irrigated with water from the Rio Grande.

Then there was an image that may have looked familiar to Southern Californians: Pacific Coast Highway, twisting through a seaside neighborhood that looks very much like Malibu before the Palisades fire.

A painting of Pacific Coast Highway winding through Southern California, on display at Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

That’s right: If you live in Los Angeles County, there’s a good chance your computer, your phone, your refrigerator and your bedside lamp are powered, at least some of the time, by nuclear reactors.

The city of L.A., Southern California Edison and a government authority composed of cities including Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena all own stakes in Palo Verde, the nation’s second-largest power plant. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, the plant was L.A.’s single largest energy source, supplying nearly 14% of the city’s electricity. The reactors supplied just over 9% of Edison’s power.

During a tour last month, I walked past the switchyard, a tangle of poles and wires where energy is transferred to power lines marching west and east. When all three reactors are running, the yard can transfer “the equivalent of half of the peak [electric demand] of the state of California on its hottest day,” according to John Hernandez, vice president of site services for utility company Arizona Public Service, which runs the plant.

“So it is a massive, massive switchyard,” Hernandez said.

For all the heated debate over the merits of nuclear energy as a climate change solution, the reality is it’s already a climate change solution. Nuclear plants including Palo Verde generate nearly one-fifth of the nation’s electricity, churning out 24/7, emissions-free power. Shutting down the nuclear fleet tomorrow would cause a giant uptick in coal and gas combustion, worsening the heat waves, wildfires and storms of the climate crisis.

Phasing out the nation’s 94 nuclear reactors over a period of decades, on the other hand, might be manageable — and there’s a case to be made for it. Extracting uranium for use as nuclear fuel has left extensive groundwater contamination and air pollution across the Southwest, especially on tribal lands, including the Navajo Nation.

“When we talk about nuclear, thoughts often go toward spent fuel storage, or the safety of reactors themselves,” said Amber Reimondo, energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. “But I think an often overlooked piece…has been the impacts to those who are at the beginning of the supply chain.”

Reimondo participated in a panel that I moderated at Palo Verde, part of the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. She noted that the nation’s only active conventional uranium mill — where uranium is leached from crushed rock — is located in Utah, just a few miles from the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation.

Waste ponds at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa uranium mill in southeastern Utah.

(Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Even during the Biden years, Reimondo said, it was tough to overcome bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear energy and “get folks to take seriously the impacts that [tribal] communities are feeling” from mining and milling.

“We just haven’t reached a place in this country where we are listening to these folks,” she said.

That dynamic has remained true during the second Trump administration. Just this week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said his agency would fast-track permitting for a uranium mine proposed by Anfield Energy in Utah’s San Juan County, completing the environmental review — which would normally take a year — in just 14 days.

Burgum and President Trump, like Biden-era officials before them, say it’s unwise for the U.S. to rely on overseas suppliers for nearly all its uranium. But many environmental activists, even some who are fans of nuclear, believe running roughshod over Indigenous nations and public lands is disgraceful. And counterproductive.

Victor Ibarra Jr., senior manager for nuclear energy at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said rebuilding the U.S. nuclear power supply chain will require local buy-in — on the front end, where uranium is mined, and on the back end, where spent fuel is stored. Thus far, political opposition has derailed every attempt to build a permanent fuel storage site, meaning nuclear waste is piling up at power plants across the country.

If there’s any hope for more uranium mining and power plants, Ibarra said, it will involve a lot of conversations — conversations that lead to less pollution, and fewer mistakes like those made during the 20th century.

“I think it’s really unfortunate that the nuclear industry has behaved the way it has in the past,” he said.

The benefits of nuclear reactors are straightforward: They generate climate-friendly electricity around the clock, while taking up far less land than solar or wind farms. If building new nuclear plants were cheap and easy — and we could solve the lingering pollution and safety concerns — then doing so would be a climate no-brainer.

If only.

The only two nuclear reactors built in the U.S. in decades came online at Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and cost $31 billion, according to the Associated Press. That was $17 billion over budget.

Units 1 and 2 at the Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Ga., seen in 2024.

(Mike Stewart / Associated Press)

Meanwhile, efforts to build small modular reactors have proved more expensive than large nuclear plants.

“It would really be quite unprecedented in the history of engineering, and in the history of energy, for something that is much smaller to have a lower price per megawatt,” said Joe Romm, a senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. “We try to make use of the economies of scale.”

Those setbacks haven’t stopped wealthy investors including billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos from bankrolling efforts to bring down the cost of small modular reactors, in hopes that mini-nuclear plants will someday join solar panels and wind turbines as crucial tools in replacing planet-warming fossil fuels.

I hope they succeed. But I’m not going to spend much time worrying about it.

Like I said earlier: Love it or hate it, nuclear is already a huge part of the nation’s power mix, including here in L.A. We’ve lived with it, almost always safely, for decades — at Palo Verde, at Washington state’s Centralia Generating Station, at the Diablo Canyon plant on California’s Central Coast. Nuclear, for all its flaws, is hardly the apocalyptic threat to humanity that its most righteous detractors make it out to be.

It’s also not the One True Solution to humanity’s energy woes, as many of its techno-optimist devotees claim it to be. There’s a reason that solar, wind and batteries made up nearly 94% of new power capacity built in the U.S. last year: They’re cheap. And although other technologies will be needed to help solar and wind phase out fossil fuels, some researchers have found that transitioning to 100% clean energy is possible even without nuclear.

So what’s the answer? Is nuclear power good or bad?

I wish it were that simple. To the extent existing nuclear plants limit the amount of new infrastructure we need to build to replace fossil fuels: good. To the extent we’re unable to eliminate pollution from uranium mining: bad. To the extent small reactors might give us another tool to complement solar and wind, alongside stuff like advanced geothermal — good, although we probably shouldn’t spend too much more taxpayer money on it yet.

Sorry not to offer up more enthusiasm, or more outrage. The climate crisis is a big, thorny problem that demands nuance and thoughtful reflection. Not every question can be answered with a snappy soundbite.

Before leaving Palo Verde, I stopped by the conference room for a last look at the paintings: Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. California. It was strange to think this plant was responsible for powering so many different places.

It was strange to think the uranium concealed beneath those domes could power so many different places.

A painting of metro Phoenix, on display at Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

For almost 30 years, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 has been a forgotten headline. Now, the BBC are shining a light on the tragedy – leaving Connor Swindells lost for words.

December 21, 1988. A routine transatlantic flight from Heathrow to JFK ends in catastrophe. Pan Am Flight 103 explodes mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

It was the deadliest terrorist attack on US citizens before 9/11, yet for many – including some of the cast of BBC One’s gripping new series The Bombing Of Pan Am 103 – the tragedy has become a forgotten headline.

“I didn’t know much about it before,” says Sex Education actor Connor Swindells, 28, who plays a Scottish detective. “The filming process was really informative.”

His co-star, Suits’ Patrick J Adams, 43, says, “I was seven years old when it happened and living in the UK at the time. As soon as I heard a series was being made about the events, I thought, ‘How has this never happened before?’”

In the six-part series, also coming to Netflix, Connor and Patrick play opposing forces in the aftermath of the bombing. Connor steps into the role of DS Ed McCusker, the detective leading the case on home soil.

Patrick portrays his American counterpart and rival, FBI special agent Dick Marquise. As Scotland and the US wrangle for control of the investigation in a bid to seek answers, political friction and personal grief collide.

READ MORE: Shopper ‘couldn’t go a day without a spot’ before using dermatologist-approved serum

The series doesn’t shy away from the geopolitical tensions that followed the bombing. While the FBI got involved assuming there would be cooperation, they were met with resistance from the Scottish authorities.

“I thought the FBI would be welcomed to any investigation,” says Patrick. “But this happened on Scottish soil – it belonged to them. There was friction despite everyone wanting the same thing.”

That complexity was front and centre for Connor, who found the emotional weight of his role intense. “This is a story that must be handled with care,” he says. “It’s been a real lesson in trying to do justice to the truth every single day, which is how it should be.”

Joining Patrick and Connor are Merritt Wever as FBI victim services director Kathryn Turman and Eddie Marsan as explosives expert Tom Thurman. Like Connor, Merritt knew little about the tragedy before filming.

“It wasn’t on my radar,” she says. “But once I started speaking to people, so many had connections.” Eddie, however, remembers it vividly. “It was a terrible moment in history,” he says.

Kathryn went on to reshape the FBI from the inside out once the investigation was closed. “She saw that, back in 1988, these big investigative institutions lacked a framework for putting families first in the wake of these disasters.

She helped transform the Department of Justice and FBI, essentially giving them a heart,” says Merritt. Writer Jonathan Lee hopes the series does justice to the enormity of the event – and its continued relevance.

“It was the biggest crime scene the world had ever seen at the time,” he says. “They had to piece together the communication lines across borders, beliefs and individual agendas. It’s a lesson we’re constantly learning and unlearning.”

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

Imagine you’re on a cruise ship for a four-day excursion to the Bahamas. You’ve got your swimsuit, an adult beverage, and you’re ready to relax. As you make your way to the pool deck, you’re hit with the sound of distorted guitars and in-your-face vocals as legendary L.A. punk band X rips through “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene.”

That was the scene on Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise, which set sail from Miami on May 9-13 on board Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Norwegian Gem, and the 1,800 or so passengers were in punk rock heaven.

The lineup featured an array of SoCal-based bands, including Social Distortion, L7, Rocket From the Crypt, the Lords of Altamont and the Dollyrots. They were joined by dozens of other performers across the rock ’n’ roll spectrum, from the hard-stomping Fleshtones to the incorrigible Supersuckers, to Tommy Stinson’s Bash & Pop, to the ageless Linda Gail Lewis — younger sister of music icon Jerry Lee Lewis.

As John Doe of X said, “bands you never thought you’d see on a boat.”

The festival-at-sea concept isn’t new. Sixthman, the company that ran the cruise, has been organizing festivals since 2001 and offers more than 25 curated cruise experiences. Upcoming sailings include Keeping the Blues Alive at Sea Alaska, Chef’s Making Waves Boston, Rock the Bells Cruise and Headbangers Boat.

In many ways, the first Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise is an offshoot of Sixthman’s Outlaw Country Cruise, which completed its ninth sailing earlier this year. It was a somewhat somber celebration because both its architect, SiriusXM’s Jeremy Tepper, and its ambassador, Mojo Nixon, died suddenly in 2024.

That cruise drew an eclectic mix of performers such as Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Dave Alvin, who share musical DNA with many of the artists on the Underground Garage Cruise and vice versa. For example, Alvin’s former band the Blasters played alongside X during L.A.’s first wave of punk, and Social Distortion’s Mike Ness was often in the front row watching them play.

“Jeremy and Mojo were incredibly close,” Alvin said. “They were like soulmates in a weird way. Cultural, artistic soulmates.”

One surprise guest on the Outlaw Country Cruise was Jello Biafra, who released the album “Prairie Home Invasion” with Mojo Nixon in 1994. He played with Nixon’s backing band the Toadliquors during an emotional tribute to his late friend.

“It’s hard,” Biafra said, “because there is a little bit of a pall over this whole event, because Mojo isn’t here, and everybody’s got their memories bubbling up. I have plenty of that.”

Many of the performers, including some who’d never taken a cruise before, had reservations about what the Underground Garage Cruise would be like.

“I thought there was going to be a lot of crazy drunkenness,” said Donita Sparks of L7. “I was thinking it was a booze cruise, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of that. I haven’t seen a single fight. I’ve seen people laughing and hugging and rocking out to the music. I’ve just seen a lot of joyousness.”

John Reis, vocalist and guitarist of Rocket From the Crypt, was concerned about seasickness and feeling “trapped” but neither proved to be an issue, and he found it easy to “succumb to the vibe.”

“We don’t take certain things all that seriously,” Reis said of Rocket From the Crypt, “and festivals can be very regimented. There’s often a lot of stress involved, mainly with the people putting on the shows. The cruise isn’t like that at all. It’s way more casual.”

Even Ness of Social Distortion was seemingly won over by the cruising lifestyle. “Ease into the day, do what you want. No traffic, no hassles,” Ness said from the stage.

X performs on Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise

(Eli Johnson)

Punks of a certain age are all too familiar with the phenomenon of looking forward to a show but, once it’s time to actually leave the house, losing all enthusiasm to drive across town, find parking and wait for opening bands to wrap up their sets. On the Underground Garage Cruise, all shows are a short walk away and run from an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes. No openers. No encores.

Although some shows overlap, unlike most festivals, the bands play several times throughout the course of the cruise. So if you missed a band’s performance on the spacious pool deck, you could catch them later at the 850-seat Stardust Theater or one of the more intimate lounges that provide a clublike setting.

That means you can choose where and when you want to see the band — even early in the afternoon.

“We’ve been doing this a long time,” Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers told the crowd at the band’s 1:15 p.m. gig. “But never this early,” quipped bandmate “Metal” Marty Chandler.

Fans cram the deck of the cruise to watch their favorite bands play on a trip sailing from Miami to the Bahamas

(Rich Johnson)

Performers participated in events offstage as well: autograph signings, a wine tasting with the Dictators, a poker tournament with the Slim Jim Phantom Trio and interview sessions that will eventually make their way to the Little Steven’s Underground Garage channel on SiriusXM. An interview with Mike Ness ended with a surprise short set by Social Distortion, accompanied by keyboardist Ben Alleman on the accordion.

There are, of course, drawbacks to the cruise experience. If you’re not having a good time at a festival, you can always leave and go home. Obviously, you can’t do that on a cruise ship. There are also larger concerns with the cruise industry itself, from the impact these behemoth ships have on the environment to the low wages paid to foreign workers, who do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning.

John Doe said he was conflicted about the gig. “As you grow up, you do things for love or money, right? This is for money. But I love the band X.”

Then there’s the elephant in the room: the perception that cruises aren’t for kids; they’re for elderly people.

A lot of these old punks are, well, old. And if you were in the pit with bands like X, Social Distortion and L7 when they were first making waves, then so are you.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Rock ’n’ roll is like jazz now,” said Eddie Spaghetti. “Essentially, it’s become a niche art form for older people because most kids don’t like rock ’n’ roll anymore.”

As fans age, their bodies may break down but their passion for the music of their youth remains the same. But a lot of music fans, this writer included, deal with disability, health and/or mobility issues that can put a damper on the typical festival experience. Sixthman, however, excelled at making sure every passenger felt welcome.

For instance, all of the venues on the Underground Garage Cruise had an abundance of ADA seating, with staff designated to assist those who requested it. One staff member I spoke with told me she scans the crowds during the shows and looks for people who might benefit from extra assistance.

That kind of personal attention goes a long way toward explaining why fans, performers and staff members alike think of these cruises as a community. There’s a camaraderie on these trips that you won’t find at your typical festival.

The people you meet at the show aren’t just festivalgoers; they’re your neighbors and sometimes your breakfast companions. The intimidating-looking punk rocker covered in tattoos is a lot more approachable when eating pancakes with his partner at the buffet.

This camaraderie isn’t what leads most fans to sail on a music cruise, but it’s one of the reasons they return year after year. During the Outlaw Country Cruise in February, passengers assembled for a group photo for those who’d sailed on all nine Outlaw Country Cruises.

That camaraderie is important to the musicians too. Everyone I talked to raved about the shows they’d seen. Jonny Two Bags of Social Distortion told me that when he received the schedule, he highlighted the bands he wanted to see — just like any fan. He was especially excited to see Bash & Pop, who he’d played with in the early ’90s.

L7 performs at Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise

(Rich Johnson)

Donita Sparks of L7 had fond memories of playing with the Supersuckers in the early ’90s. “We used to sleep on the Supersuckers’ floor in Seattle,” Sparks said, “and we would have a dance party every night.”

That excitement for what L7’s Jennifer Finch called “the buffet of bands” is infectious. It’s also why Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise will sail again next April, to Cozumel, Mexico.

“We’re all alive,” Sparks said. “We’re here and we’re still rocking.”

Jim Ruland is the L.A. Times bestselling author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records” and of the novel “Make It Stop.”

THE HUMBLE crab stick has been popular since the 80s tossed in salad, now they seem to have had a resurgence as people add them to ramen or seafood boils.

The food has often been used as a cheap alternative to crabs but fans are vowing to never eat them again.

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It comes after foodies have just realised how the crab sticks, also known as imitation crab, are really made.

After seeing the process of how the red and white sticks are processed some have dubbed them the ‘hot dog of the ocean.’

It comes after a Thai crab stick factory revealed their manufacturing secrets through a YouTube video, reports the Mirror.

It showed the transformation from unappetising grey blocks to the familiar red-and-white striped sticks seen in shops.

Initially resembling massive, grey, concrete-like slabs, the frozen fish meat blocks undergo several stages before becoming edible.

They’re first pulverised by machinery into a mushy mix, then carried along a conveyor belt where salt and various spices are infused.

Next ice, vegetable oil, and sugars are blended in.

The footage shows factory workers funnelling the mixture through a tube, which turns it into a grey paste which is then shaped and coloured to achieve the iconic crab stick appearance.

The Thai factory boasts being the globe’s largest, churning out 40,000 tons of fish sticks annually – that’s quadruple the weight of the Eiffel Tower. It sells to more than 37 nations.

But it seems the video has put people off of the snack.

Taking to Reddit, people shared their disgust after witnessing the video.

One person wrote: “Hot dogs of the sea”.

Another commented: “The only ingredient I could identify was the ice”.

Humorously addressing the unappetising mush, a comment read: “Everything ok hun? You’ve hardly touched your grey.”

A fourth penned: “Bet that place smells wonderful”.

Another person noted: “If the title hadn’t specified they were making crab sticks, or in fact any type of food, I would’ve gotten to 1:38 before I realised that they weren’t making some sort of industrial building material.”

Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t expect to be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence debate in Hollywood. But she didn’t have a choice.

The Oscar-winning actor recently called out Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on social media, saying the company ignored her requests to take down a fake AI-generated advertisement on Instagram that had been on the platform for months.

The ad, which used footage from an interview Curtis gave to MSNBC about January’s Los Angeles area wildfires, manipulated her voice to make it appear that she was endorsing a dental product, Curtis said.

“I was not looking to become the poster child of internet fakery, and I’m certainly not the first,” Curtis told The Times by phone Tuesday morning.

The ad has since been removed.

What happened to Curtis is part of a larger issue actors are dealing with amid the rise of generative AI technology, which has allowed their images and voices to be altered in ways they haven’t authorized. Those changes can be wildly misleading.

Images and likenesses of celebrities including Tom Hanks, Taylor Swift and Scarlett Johansson have been manipulated through AI to promote products and ideas they never actually endorsed.

AI technology has made it easier for people to make these fake videos, which can proliferate online at a speed that is challenging for social media platforms to take down. Some are calling on social media firms to do more to police misinformation on their platforms.

“We are standing at the turning point, and I think we need to take some action,” Curtis said.

Curtis first became aware of the fake AI ad about a month and a half ago when a friend asked her about the video. The “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “Halloween” actor then flagged the ad for her agents, lawyers and publicists, who directed her to send a cease and desist letter to Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.

Nothing happened.

“It’s like a vacuum,” Curtis said. “There are no people. You can’t reach anybody. You have an email, you send an email, you never get anything back.”

Two weeks later, another friend flagged the same fake AI video. When Curtis wrote to her team, they assured her they went through the proper channels and they did everything they could do, she said.

“I went through the proper channels,” Curtis said. “There should be a methodology to this. I understand there’s going to be a misuse of this stuff, but then there’s no avenue of getting any satisfaction. So then it’s lawlessness, because if you have no way of rectifying it, what do you do?”

Curtis was concerned about the nefarious ways that people could alter the voices and images of other people, including Pope Leo XIV, who has identified AI as one of the challenges facing humanity. What if someone used AI to attribute ideas to the pope that he didn’t actually support?

Inspired by the danger of that possibility, she made her scathing Instagram post, tagging Zuckerberg, after she was unable to directly message him.

“My name is Jamie Lee Curtis and I have gone through every proper channel to ask you and your team to take down this totally AI fake commercial for some bulls— that I didn’t endorse,” Curtis wrote in her post on Monday. “… I’ve been told that if I ask you directly, maybe you will encourage your team to police it and remove it.”

The post generated more than 55,000 likes.

“I’ve done commercials for people all my life, so if they can make a fake commercial with me, that hurts my brand,” Curtis said in an interview. “If my brand is authenticity, you’re co-opting my brand for nefarious gains in the future.”

After she posted, a neighbor shared with her an email of someone at Meta who could help her. Curtis emailed that person (whom she declined to name), copied her team and attached the Instagram posts. Within an hour of sending the email, the fake AI ad was taken down, Curtis said.

“It worked!” Curtis wrote on Instagram on Monday in all caps. “Yay internet! Shame has [its] value! Thanks all who chimed in and helped rectify!”

Meta on Monday confirmed the fake ad was taken down.

“They violate our policies prohibiting fraud, scams and deceptive practices,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone in an email.

As the technology continues to become more widely available, there are efforts underway at tech companies to identify AI-generated content and to take down material that violates standards.

Organizations like actors guild SAG-AFTRA are also advocating for more laws that address AI, including deep fakes. Both the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 hinged in part on demands for more protections against job losses from AI.

Curtis said she would have wanted the fake AI ad to be taken down immediately and would like to see technology companies, not just Meta, come up with safeguards and direct access to people policing “this wild, wild west called the internet.”

“It got the attention, but I’m also a public figure,” Curtis said. “So how does someone who’s not a public figure get any satisfaction? I want to represent everyone. I don’t want it to just be celebrities. I wanted to use that as an example to say this is wrong.”

Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He’s anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn.

These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party.

Here’s how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them.

“We have people that are aristocratically living in another world,” Worsley said. “Maybe they work for you, but you haven’t really lived with them and understand they’re not criminals. They are good people. They’re family people. They’re religious people. They are great Americans…. So I think that’s a problem if you don’t live with them and you’re making policy.”

If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents.

“The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers,” Worsley said. “The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers.”

Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent.

“We are employers … and we don’t have a workforce. We need this workforce,” Worsley said. “And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over.”

A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley doesn’t favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The “lines between countries” should mean something, he said. But now that America’s borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump’s major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it’s past time to address another part of the immigration equation.

“What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border,” Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. “We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border.”

The immigration issue was Worsley’s impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his “poisoning the blood of our country” Sturm und Drang.

Worsley, speaking at a 2017 legislative meeting in Phoenix, entered electoral politics to fight anti-immigrant policies

(Bob Christie / Associated Press)

Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.)

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. “I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there,” Worsley said.

Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can’t empathize “unless you’ve actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them,” Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. “And I think that’s a problem.”

He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House.

“It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before,” Worsley said. “And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating.”

He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, “The Horseshoe Virus,” about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country’s long history of anti-immigrant movements.

He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona’s late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board’s chairman in January.

He’s still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, “I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican.”

That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years.

It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught.

“Once you’ve secured the border and you don’t have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what’s the pragmatic solution so that this doesn’t happen again?” Worsley asked. “We’re hopeful that’s where we’re going next.”

It’s long overdue.

Homeless encampments are dirty. And ugly. And seem, to those who venture near them and even to some who live there, unsafe.

They are also — sadly, wrongly — places of last resort for those whose second, third and even fourth chances haven’t panned out, sometimes through their own mistakes, sometimes because they’re so far down just staying alive is a battle. Though we tend to toss homelessness in the soup pot along with mental illness and drug use, the terrifying fact is that nearly half of the folks living on our streets are over the age of 50 and wound up there because a bit of bad luck left them unable to pay the rent.

“At the end of the day, we have a homelessness crisis because we don’t have enough housing,” Margot Kushel said. She’s a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. There’s really no one in the state who understands encampments and their residents better.

Which is why I am deeply disheartened by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push Monday to encourage cities and counties to outlaw encampments — even providing a handy-dandy boilerplate ordinance for local governments to pass. It moves California one step closer to criminalizing homelessness, no matter how softly or deftly he packages that truth.

Or how politically expedient it may be.

“It is time to take back the streets. It’s time to take back the sidewalks. It’s time to take these encampments and provide alternatives,” Newsom said. “It simply cannot continue. It cannot be a way of life living out on the streets, in sidewalks, in what almost become permanent structures, impeding foot traffic, impeding our ability for our kids to walk the streets and strollers, or seniors with disabilities and wheelchairs, even navigating their sidewalks. We cannot allow that to continue.”

From a political perspective, that tirade is spot on. The clock is already ticking on the 2026 midterms, which coincide with the end of his tenure as California’s leader. Not only is Newsom eyeing the horizon for his next move, presidential or not, but Democrats are eyeing the condition of California and whether Trump and his supporters will be able to once again use it as the example of everything that’s wrong with America, as they did in both 2020 and 2024.

Even Kushel, who near daily hears the heartbreaking reasons people are homeless, knows encampments aren’t the answer.

“I do think the encampments are a disaster,” she said. “I want them gone too.”

But, not at the cost of making things worse, which is what breaking them down without a place to put people does. Newsom’s draft ordinance makes nice talk about not criminalizing folks, but also doesn’t require more than “every reasonable effort” to provide shelter to those being displaced — knowing full well that we don’t have enough shelter beds.

It also talks nice about not throwing out people’s belongings, unless maybe they have bugs or feces on them — which, let’s be real, they might — in which case, the dumpster it is, even if that bundle may contain your identification or medications.

That constant loss, constant movement, not only sets people back even more, it also breaks trust and pushes people further out of sight and out of society. So by the time there are shelter beds or treatment centers, you’ve lost cooperation from the people you want to help. Homelessness becomes even more dystopian, if more invisible.

“I actually worry that making people move every day, threatening them with arrest, all of those things make the problem worse and not better,” Kushel said.

Some might recall that this new age of compassionate crackdowns began last year after the Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass vs. Johnson that it wasn’t cruel or unusual punishment to outlaw camping in public spaces — allowing municipalities to cite or arrest those who did. Newsom’s office took the side of the city of Grants Pass, Ore., filing a brief in support of more enforcement powers. Since then, Newsom — sometimes personally with camera crews in tow — has cleared more than 16,000 encampments on state lands.

Some cities have followed suit with tough laws of their own, including San José. But other cities have resisted, much to Newsom’s dismay.

In Grants Pass, things didn’t go exactly as planned. There’s currently an injunction against its enforcement on camping laws after Disability Rights Oregon sued the city. Tom Stenson, the group’s deputy legal director, told me that the organization has seen how the anti-camping laws have been hard on folks with physical or mental impairments, many of whom are older.

As the housing crunch hit that state, the low-rent places where his plaintiffs lived “disappeared, and then there is just nowhere for them to go, and it just forces them right into homelessness,” he said.

California’s struggle around homelessness has been a black eye and a contentious soft spot for years, and even the most sympathetic of Californians are tired of the squalor and pain. A recent poll by Politico and the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at UC Berkeley found that about 37% of voters support arresting folks if they refuse to accept shelter, and that number jumped for male voters and Republicans.

Homelessness is, without a doubt, “the issue that defines more anger and frustration of Californians than any other,” as Newsom put it.

On the same day Newsom put out his legal template for clearing encampments, he also announced $3.3 billion in funding for 124 mental health facilities around the state. It’s money from last year’s Proposition 1, passed by voters, that will add 5,000 residential treatment beds and more than 21,000 outpatient slots to our struggling system of mental health and substance abuse treatment.

The grants include $65 million for Los Angeles to refurbish the Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk into a psychiatric subacute facility for transitional-age youths, a big and glaring need for the region.

To steal from the history lesson Newsom gave, in 1959 this state had 37,000 mental health beds in locked facilities, the kind that inspired “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Not ideal.

So the state did away with them, through a series of necessary reforms. But it never built the community-based system that was promised. California is now down to 5,500 locked beds and a bunch of overcrowded, understaffed, outdated jails and prisons that have become our de facto mental health treatment centers, along with the streets. Not ideal.

This investment in a robust community care system that provides both substance abuse and mental health treatment in one place is a huge win for all Californians, and will be a game changer — in about 10 years. Newsom optimistically showed pretty renderings of facilities that will be built with the funds, one even expected to open next year. But folks, building takes time.

Still, Newsom should receive all credit due for taking on a problem ignored for decades and doing something meaningful around it. I’ve seen him act thoughtfully, carefully and forcefully on the issue of homelessness.

Which makes this encampment right-wing swing all the more obviously political, and unworthy of our policy.

Despite those encampments, homelessness in California is actually getting better, though you have to wade through the numbers to see it. There were 187,000 people living without homes in the state last year, according to federal data, a record. About 70% of those people were living unsheltered, more than 45,000 in the city of Los Angeles.

Although the sheer number of people living without homes is overwhelming, it represented an increase of about 3% — compared with an increase of about 18% nationally. Across the country, but not in California, families were the group with the largest single-year increase.

So what we are doing, with policies that prioritize housing and meeting people where they are, is working. What Newsom has done to build a community care system is overdue and revolutionary.

But the fact remains that California does not have enough housing. Clearing encampments may be a political solution to an ugly problem.

But without a place to move people, it’s just optics.

It has been almost 3,150 days — more than 8½ years — since Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in Paris. On Tuesday, she finally gets to testify against the suspects.

By the fall of 2016, the Kim Kardashian West train had been speeding through the celebrity landscape like a bullet for years, running down anyone in its way and leaving everyone else in the dust. She was everything everywhere all at once, all the time. She had been married, then divorced, then had babies, then got married again. She broke the internet. And that fame train seemed destined to circle the globe in perpetuity.

Then came Paris Fashion Week. What could go wrong?

In the early-morning hours of Oct. 3, 2016, the Kim K. train suddenly derailed: A party of men entered Kardashian’s two-story Paris pad, armed with guns and zip ties and hunting for jewels. Specifically, Kardashian’s jewels, which she had flaunted on social media.

What happened in the Paris apartment?

Shortly after 2 a.m. local time, Kardashian was reportedly lying in bed clad only in a robe when she heard people stomping up the stairs in her two-story apartment at the Hôtel de Pourtalès. It turned out the men had been directed there by the night concierge, who said he had been threatened at gunpoint. She caught a glimpse of two of the guys, rolled off the bed and tried to call her bodyguard before her phone was taken from her.

Her wrists were zip-tied and duct-taped, and she was grabbed by the ankles — at which point, she told the police, she thought she was going to be raped. Instead, her assailants bound her ankles with duct tape and carried her to the bathtub, as Kardashian screamed for them to take her money and jewelry but please spare her life, because she was at that point the mother of two children.

The men did not speak English but kept saying, “Ring, ring,” she told police. After Kardashian told them where to find the massive diamond — a recent gift from then-husband Kanye West that she had been showing off on social media — they duct-taped her mouth.

Kardashian was left lying helplessly on the bathroom floor as the robbers left with their haul. A friend who was staying in a downstairs bedroom heard the commotion and called the reality star’s bodyguard, who had been out with her sisters Kourtney Kardashian and Kendall Jenner at a club nearby and quickly returned to the hotel.

Did people believe Kardashian’s story?

The internet-posting public did not believe her, at least at first. Self-styled pundits immediately suggested she had staged the whole thing for publicity — as if she couldn’t get that on her own simply by waking up and snapping a selfie. The reality star quickly sued MediaTakeout.com for libel after it said she made up the story, lied about the assault and filed a fraudulent insurance claim. Police, meanwhile, quickly dismissed the notion that Kardashian was lying because she was so badly shaken up, but seriously investigated whether it was an inside job. (The night concierge and the bodyguard are slated to testify at trial.)

The libel lawsuit was settled within weeks, CNN reported, with the website issuing a retraction and acknowledging that Kardashian had in fact been robbed at gunpoint.

When did authorities arrest and charge the suspects?

Arrests came Jan. 10, 2017, when 17 people were taken into custody in multiple raids around Paris. Kardashian’s chauffeur was among those arrested, but he was released after questioning. By 2021, the suspects had been narrowed to 12 people who were slated to stand trial. One suspect, however, has died since being questioned, and another has been excused from the trial because he is 81 and has advanced Alzheimer’s, the BBC reported.

In fact, French media has been referring to the main suspects as the Grandpa Robbers, due to their advanced ages — the eldest defendant is 78. They didn’t really know who Kardashian was at the time of the robbery but were reportedly told she was “a rapper’s wife.” Ten suspects remain on the hook, including one woman. Of those, five went into Kardashian’s apartment during the robbery. The rest are accused of aiding and abetting.

What have the suspects been doing since then?

One suspect, Yunice Abbas, told a French outlet in 2022 that since Kardashian “was throwing money away, I was there to collect it, and that was that. Guilty? No, I don’t care. I don’t care.”

Now 71, Abbas, one of two suspects whose DNA was found at the crime scene, has said he plans to apologize when he’s in court. He also says he was unarmed and acted as a lookout on the ground floor of the hotel.

“I saw one of her shows where she threw her diamond in the pool in that episode of ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’” he told Vice in 2022. “I thought, ‘She’s got a lot of money. This lady doesn’t care at all.’”

The alleged mastermind behind the plot, Aomar Ait Khedache, wrote an apology letter to Kardashian from prison in 2017, saying he regretted his actions and realized the psychological damage he caused. “Old Omar” has admitted tying up Kardashian but denies being the brains behind the operation.

The other suspects, including Ait Khedache’s son Harminy, have maintained their innocence.

What happened to the jewelry?

About $6 million worth of jewelry was stolen, or maybe it was $10 million worth, depending on which of the many accounts can be trusted. Kardashian and ex-husband Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, reportedly submitted insurance claims worth $5.6 million. In the 8½ years since the robbery, only one piece has been recovered: a diamond cross on platinum that the suspects lost as they escaped on bicycles. Its value was estimated at just over $33,000, per Vanity Fair.

An 18.8-carat diamond ring — which was a gift to Kardashian from Ye — a yellow-gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, seven Cartier and Hermès bracelets and three gold-and-diamond grills were all in the haul, VF reported. Anything that was unique, like the stone in that diamond ring, has likely been broken down into pieces and resold, a jewelry-theft expert told People in 2016.

What happens next?

Kardashian is set to testify in Paris on Tuesday afternoon — around 5 a.m. in California. She will be questioned first by the judge, according to the New York Post, then by her attorneys, then by the prosecutors, and finally by the defendants’ attorneys.

In mid-April, a Kardashian attorney confirmed to the AP that she would testify at the trial, which started April 28 and is scheduled to run until May 23. But until she appears on the stand, the statement said, the reality mogul is “reserving her testimony for the court and jury and does not wish to elaborate further at this time.”

That sounds like it’s French for “no comment.”

The dining room ceiling, adorned with an unexpected burst of orange floral wallpaper, breathes new life into the 100-year-old house. Similarly, the living room’s coral, pink and green wallpaper, the den’s bold blue and yellow stripes, and the red pattern-filled speakeasy lounge are delightful surprises that keep you guessing what’s next.

Standing beneath a glittering tiered chandelier in her pink “cloffice,” designer Dani Dazey shares the essence of her colorful style: “From the wallpaper to the artwork, my home is a reflection of me right now,” she explains. “It’s a personal and hip twist on traditional design.”

Rather than embrace rustic farmhouse style or minimalist Midcentury Modern design as is often the case in Los Angeles, Dazey has taken the Highland Park home she shares with husband Phillip Butler and given it an over-the-top maximalist spin.

Dani Dazey and her husband Phillip Butler stand in the living room of their home, which connects to the adjacent dining room and alcove. Dazey designed the colorful furnishings, wallpaper, textiles and many of the artworks. “I am very pro printed furniture,” she said. “I’m a very big fan of matching my colors and having a tight color palette.”

Their home is proof, as Dazey outlines in her new book, “The Maximalist: Colorful Interiors for Bold Living,” out May 20, that our homes should make us happy by reflecting who we are. In Dazey’s case, that translates to bold color, lush textures and retro vibes.

“Throughout my career, my core message has been to empower people to be who they are and not be afraid to embrace the things they love,” said Dazey, 34.

From the outside, the couple’s home exudes a subtle charm. However, stepping through the front door unveils a captivating burst of vibrant color and Dazey’s signature flower prints, all surprisingly harmonious.

“I worked as an apparel graphic designer and I applied all that to interior design,” she said. “I know how to put all these things together and make them look nice.”

Dazey designed the kitchen to look like an old Italian villa.

“Curtains help the rooms not feel too cluttered and crazy,” said Dazey. “I can make everything very cohesive. The fifth wall — the ceiling — it makes a big difference.”

The “fifth walls,” as Dazey calls the ceilings, are painted bright orange, red and turquoise blue. Floors are lined with vibrant green checkerboard patterns and wall-to-wall carpet. Likewise, the lawn in the back is decked out in checkerboard artificial turf. The speakeasy lounge, accessible through a hidden door sliding bookcase, is a ‘70s-inspired sanctuary with a modular sofa, curtains and wallpaper in the same floral pattern. Underneath the living room ceiling, Dazey has created a plant-filled ledge that cascades over the dining room, adding a touch of nature to the vibrant spaces.

Dazey outfitted the chairs, modular sofa from Joybird, wallpaper and curtains in the same ‘70s-inspired pattern.

Everyone — including the couple’s two dogs, Franklin and Yuki, who luxuriate on a pink velvet daybed in the sun — is happy here.

“Living in a maximalist space brings me joy,” said Butler, who handles operations for Dazey’s interior design business and their Airbnb and Peerspace rentals. “Even just looking at the ceiling makes me happy.”

Like the Madonna Inn, where the couple recently hosted their wedding, their home is “fun and quirky and anything but traditional,” Dazey said. “As a creative person, you get burned out by doing the same thing over and over again.”

The couple discovered the 2,300-square-foot, two-story home on a 3-acre lot two years ago. Dazey said there wasn’t a lot of interest in the house, as it featured an unusual floor plan with a separate apartment on the first floor with its own entrance. “The house blew us away,” she said, “but the strange floor plan confused us.”

The house they purchased for $1.75 million was “turnkey,” and Dazey had fun adding skylights to the beamed ceilings in the living room and redoing the kitchen to feel like an old Italian villa. The couple worked quickly over six months so that Dazey could share her projects on social media. “Much of our work comes from social media so having a project to share was helpful. That’s a big part of our job — creating these spaces.”

Dazey transformed the gravel driveway into an outdoor living space with turf, a cowboy pool and chaise lounges.

Her efforts paid off. The entrepreneurial couple now rents their home, along with a pink California bungalow and a bungalow in Palm Springs, for celebrity photo shoots and music videos. (Janelle Monáe, Camille Cabello and James Marsden have all been featured in their rental homes.)

It’s a unique side hustle, and the couple’s success is impressive. “They are such fun, wacky rentals,” Dazey said. “Between our Palm Springs Airbnb and L.A. photo shoots, we made $30,000 last month — our biggest month ever.”

Added Butler: “People tell us their kids love our houses.”

The home’s unconventional layout allows the couple to reside in the adaptable space downstairs while renting out the top floor for photo shoots. Following the recent fires in Los Angeles, they were able to provide housing for families in need on a monthly basis. “It’s been rewarding to be able to help in this way,” Dazey shared.

Dazey brightened the home’s first floor suite, which felt like a basement, with colorful textiles, wallpaper, stripes and FLOR tiles.

Dazey grew up in Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. Her parents were creative, encouraging Dazey and her sister to be “colorful and engage in art and pursue” their passion. Not surprisingly, the family had a raspberry-colored kitchen. “My mom just painted the cabinets in her condo bright yellow,” Dazey said. “It’s wacky. I appreciate it.”

After studying fashion design, she made a name for herself in Los Angeles as a fashion designer for Dazey LA and, most recently, as an interior designer. She started her clothing line with $4,000. Over eight years it took off on social media and she eventually sold to stores including Anthropologie. “There were a few years where it nearly grossed a million dollars in revenue,” she said. “It helped me purchase the Palm Springs house.” Still, she is best known for her collaboration with drag performer and singer Trixie Mattel on the design of the Trixie Motel in Palm Springs.“Trixie’s aesthetic is similar to mine,” Dazey said with a laugh. “We both love bright colors and florals and retro design.”

Dazey prefers to work on the pink velvet daybed that fits the alcove off of the living room like a glove.

The collaboration opened doors for Dazey, including an opportunity to design her first collection of home textiles and wallcoverings for Spoonflower and a furniture line for Joybird, which are featured in her home. It also attracted clients who appreciate her fun-loving aesthetic. She has since worked for Andy Hurley of Fall Out Boy and TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney. “I’ve been lucky to work for cool, interesting people,” Dazey said. “I think that people with a quirky sense of style and taste are interesting and dynamic.”

Despite her colorful interiors, Dazey knows what it’s like to struggle in a sterile work environment. “I used to work as an apparel graphic designer in a corporate office and didn’t feel inspired as a creative person,” she said. “When I went out on my own, I worked in coffee shops and I loved it.”

Today, she works out of a wall-to-wall pink velvet alcove covered in floral pink wallpaper and dog hair.

Dazey, pictured with Butler and their dogs Franklin and Yuki, believes in designing spaces that make people happy.

“I’ve designed some office spaces since then and try to make offices feel like a living room,” she said. “It can affect you creatively and inhibit your productivity. Now that I work from home, I love it.”

When asked what it’s like living with a maximalist, Butler said he trusts his wife’s instincts. “She went running with color when we got our first place together in Beachwood Canyon. It took a little arm twisting, but it all made sense when I saw it all come together. I learned to trust her process. There hasn’t been a single project where it hasn’t worked for me.”

Dazey, having shifted her focus from fashion design to creating happy interiors, sees the two processes as deeply transformative. “In my creative journey, whether it’s fashion or interiors, I’ve discovered the power of self-expression. It’s about defining who you are and sharing that with the world. The right outfit can change your entire day, just as the act of decorating your home can significantly impact your comfort, productivity and happiness. I love relaying that message — self-expression is more meaningful than aesthetics.”

“The Maximalist” features 16 of Dazey’s design projects, including several that have never been seen before, such as a colorful mansion in Alabama.

The Dazey Dream House tips & tricks

(Excerpted from “The Maximalist: Colorful Interiors for Bold Living,” Abrams).

The old one-two punch

When mixing prints, I always like to think of a primary and secondary print. The primary is the main character print, which is more complex and illustrative. The secondary is the companion print — something less bold and usually a different scale.

Get some plants already!

A houseplant adds color and makes a space feel more homey without making any drastic changes to any of the walls. Plants breathe literal life into a space and help it feel complete. If your rooms don’t have any greenery in them, get yourself to your local plant shop — stat!

Make your home a gallery

This house is bursting with my personal design — and it feels so good. People are often hesitant to display their own artwork, but I say use the walls of your home to broadcast your creativity.

Stripes cut sweetness

I designed some almost-old-fashioned floral wallpapers for this house, but they’re often purposefully paired with a stripe. A strong, graphic pattern, like a stripe or a check, has the power to temper the sweetness of a floral-y-print.

Double the fun

Half walls abound in this home because I wanted to max out my opportunities for pattern and color play. Adding a half wall to a room in your home is a great way to start experimenting with design on a more complex level.

Appreciate the bedroom set

Matching bedroom sets have a very 1980s reputation (and not in a good way!), but if the furniture is cool, a coordinate set can be a smart strategy to help a maximalist bedroom feel more uniform.

Reconsider wall-to-wall

I am predicting a carpet comeback. People love rugs, so why not consider a completely carpeted room? Everything in design circles back around, and I think wall-to-wall is due to be done in a new way.

After conducting an investigation into Los Angeles County’s faulty emergency alerts during the deadly January wildfires, U.S. Congressman Robert Garcia issued a report Monday calling for more federal oversight of the nation’s patchwork, privatized emergency alert system.

The investigation was launched by Garcia and more than a dozen members of L.A.’s congressional delegation in February after L.A. County sent a series of faulty evacuation alerts on Jan. 9, urging people across a metropolitan region of 10 million to prepare to evacuate. The faulty alerts came two days after intense firestorms erupted in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

The alerts, which were intended for a small group of residents near Calabasas, stoked panic and confusion as they were blasted out repeatedly to communities as far as 40 miles away from the evacuation area.

The new report, “Sounding the Alarm: Lessons From the Kenneth Fire False Alerts,” alleged that a technical flaw by Genasys, the software company contracted with the county to issue wireless emergency alerts, caused the faulty alert to ping across the sprawling metro region.

It also found that, contrary to accounts of L.A. County officials at the time, multiple echo alerts then went out as cellphone providers experienced overload due to the high volume and long duration of the alerts. Confusion was compounded, the report said, by L.A. County’s vague wording of the original alert.

“It’s clear that there’s still so much reform needed, so that we have operating systems that people can rely on and trust in the future,” Garcia told The Times.

The Times was reaching out to Genasys and county officials for response to the report.

A Long Beach Democrat who sits on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Garcia said the stakes were incredibly high.

“We’re talking about loss of life and property, and people’s confidence in our emergency notification systems,” he said. “People need to be able to trust that if there’s a natural disaster, that they’re going to get an alert and it’s going to have correct information, and we have to provide that level of security and comfort across the country.”

To improve emergency warning alert systems, the report urges Congress and the federal government to “act now to close gaps in alerting system performance, certification, and public communication.”

“The lessons from the Kenneth Fire should not only inform reforms,” the report states, “but serve as a catalyst to modernize the nation’s alerting infrastructure before the next disaster strikes.”

The report makes several recommendations. It calls for more federal funding for planning, equipment, training and system maintenance on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, the national system that provides emergency public alerts through mobile phones using Wireless Emergency Alerts and to radio and television via the Emergency Alert System.

It also urges FEMA to fully complete minimum requirements and improve training to IPAWS that Congress mandated in 2019 after the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent out a false warning of an incoming missile attack to millions of residents and vacationers. Five years after Congress required “the standardization, functionality, and interoperability of incident management and warning tools,” the report said, FEMA has yet to finish implementing certification programs for users and third-party software providers. The agency plans to pilot a third-party technology certification program this year.

The report also presses the Federal Communications Commission to establish performance standards and develop measurable goals and monitoring for WEA performance, and ensure mobile providers include location-aware maps by the December 2026 deadline.

But the push for greater oversight is certain to be a challenge at a time when President Trump and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are pushing for FEMA to be dismantled.

In the last few days, the Trump administration fired FEMA’s acting head, Cameron Hamilton, after he told U.S. lawmakers he does not support eliminating the agency. Noem told U.S. Congress members at a hearing last week that Trump believes the agency has “failed the American people, and that FEMA, as it exists today, should be eliminated in empowering states to respond to disasters with federal government support.”

Garcia described the Trump administration’s dismantling of FEMA as “very concerning.”

“We need to have stable FEMA leadership,” Garcia told The Times. “The recent reshuffling and changes that are happening, I hope, do not get in the way of actually making these systems stronger. We need stability at FEMA. We need FEMA to continue to exist. … The sooner that we get the investments in, the sooner that we complete these studies, I think the more safe people are going to feel.”

Garcia said his office was working on drafting legislation that could address some of these issues.

“We really need to push FEMA and we need to push the administration — and Congress absolutely has a role in making sure these systems are stronger,” Garcia said. “Ensuring that we fully fund these systems is critical. … There’s dozens of these systems, and yet there’s no real kind of centralized rules that are modern.”

According to FEMA, more than 40 different commercial providers work in the emergency alert market. But further steps need to be taken, an agency official said, to train local emergency managers and regulate the private software companies and wireless providers that play a pivotal role in safeguarding millions of Americans during severe wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and active shooter incidents.

“Ongoing efforts are needed to increase training with alerting authorities, enhance standardization with service providers, and further collaboration with wireless providers to improve the delivery of Wireless Emergency Alerts to the public,” Thomas Breslin, acting associate administrator of FEMA’s Office of National Continuity Programs, said in a letter to Garcia.

Genasys, a San Diego-based company, said in a recent SEC filing that its “ALERT coverage has expanded into cities and counties in 39 states.” “The vast majority of California” is covered by its EVAC system, it said, which continues “to grow into the eastern United States, with covered areas expanding into Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee.”

Genasys also noted that its ALERT system is an “interactive, cloud-based” software service, raising the possibility of communication disruption. “The information technology systems we and our vendors use are vulnerable to outages, breakdowns or other damage or interruption from service interruptions, system malfunction, natural disasters, terrorism, war, and telecommunication and electrical failures,” it said in its SEC filing.

As part of its investigation into how evacuation warnings were accidentally sent to nearly 10 million L.A. County residents during the L.A. fires, Garcia received responses from Genasys, L.A. County, FEMA and the FCC.

The report said a L.A. County emergency management worker saved an alert correctly with a narrowly defined polygon in the area near the Kenneth fire. But the software did not upload the correct evacuation area polygon to IPAWS, possibly due to a network disruption, the report said. The Genasys system also did not warn the L.A. County emergency management staffer that drafted the alert a targeted polygon was missing in the IPAWS channel before it sent the message, the report found.

Genasys has since added safeguards to its software, but the report noted that Genasys did not provide details about the incident. . It suggested the independent after-action review into the Eaton and Palisades fire response “further investigate Genasys’ claims of what caused the error, and how a network disruption would have occurred or could have blocked the proper upload of a polygon into the IPAWS distribution channel.”

The report commended L.A. County for responding quickly in canceling the alert within 2 minutes and 47 seconds and issuing a corrected message about 20 minutes later, stating the alert was sent “in ERROR.”

But it also criticized the county’s wording of the original alert as vague. Some confusion could have been avoided, it said, if the emergency management staffer who wrote the alert had described the area with more geographic specificity and included timestamps.

The report also found that a series of false echo alerts that went out over the next few days were not caused by cellphone towers coming back online after being knocked down because of the fires, as L.A. County emergency management officials reported. Instead, they were caused by cellphone networks’ technical issues.

One cellphone company attributed the duplicate alerts to a result of “overload, due to high volume and long duration of alerts sent during fires.” While the report said the company installed a temporary patch and was developing a permanent repair, it is unclear if other networks have enabled safeguards to make sure they do not face similar problems.

The report did not delve into the critical delays in electronic emergency alerts sent to areas of Altadena. When flames erupted from Eaton Canyon on Jan. 7, neighborhoods on the east side of Altadena got evacuation orders at 7:26 p.m., but residents to the west did not receive orders until 3:25 a.m. — hours after fires began to destroy their neighborhoods. Seventeen of the 18 people confirmed dead in the Eaton fire were on the west side.

Garcia told The Times that the problems in Altadena appeared to be due to human error, rather than technical errors with emergency alert software. Garcia said he and other L.A. Congress members were anxious to read the McChrystal Group’s after-action review of the response to the Eaton and Palisades fires.

Local, state and federal officials all shared some blame for the problems with alerts in the L.A. fire, Garcia said. Going forward, Congress should press the federal government, he said, to develop a reliable regulatory system for alerts.

“When you have so many operators and you don’t have these IPAWS requirements in place, that is concerning,” Garcia said. “We should have a standard that’s federal, that’s clear.”

Garcia told The Times that emergency alerts were not just a Southern California issue.

“These systems are used around the country,” he said. “This can impact any community, and so it’s in everyone’s best interests to move forward and to work with FEMA, to work with the FCC, to make sure that we make these adjustments and changes. I think it’s very critical.”

Times staff writer Paige St. John contributed to this report.