temporarily

After recently announcing major cuts to its youth orchestra, the L.A. Phil has secured additional donor funding to ensure the East L.A. branch of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program will continue at full capacity until the end of the school year.

In an email to the students’ parents last week, the nonprofit organization announced that it would need to “significantly modify” the programming at the Esteban E. Torres High School site “due to unanticipated financial and funding challenges for the organization.” With these proposed changes, the site’s teaching artists were laid off, the younger students’ programming was gutted and practices for the older students were reduced.

The students’ parents and the local community rallied together in response to the cuts, creating a campaign on Instagram and organizing at town hall meetings. After hearing this outcry and receiving additional funds, the L.A. Phil has been able to temporarily preserve the Torres site.

In a statement to The Times on Wednesday, LA Phil President and CEO Kim Noltemy says, “We are thrilled our donors recognized that this funding provides vital access to music education for the East LA community.”

“Joining together, we have and will continue working tirelessly over the coming months to ensure we remain in a position to support this program, because it is more important than ever,” said Noltemy.

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel rehearses with young musicians from around the country participating in the L.A. Phil’s annual YOLA National Program at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2023.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

YOLA has offered a free musical education to students ages 5 through 18 since 2007. Run by the L.A. Phil, the program gives students access to free instruments and the firsthand experience of being in a musical ensemble. YOLA currently operates out of Inglewood, East L.A., Rampart District and Westlake/MacArthur Park. The Torres site, specifically, serves 165 students.

This program has been championed by star conductor Gustavo Dudamel since he first came to L.A. in 2009. Its teaching format is heavily inspired by El Sistema, the publicly funded program where he first learned music in Venezuela. After his 17-year tenure with the L.A. Phil, the conductor will be leaving the orchestra in June to work with the New York Philharmonic.

An L.A. Phil spokesperson told The Times that their ongoing funding challenges come from “fundraising limitations and rising operating costs,” while also maintaining their day-to-day operations, including free/low-cost community programs.

These cuts were originally set to go into effect after Dec. 12, months before Dudamel’s departure. But with these new funds, the instruction and rehearsal time will stay fully operational, and the previously laid-off staff will be reinstated for the remainder of the program.

These tentative revisions were also announced days before the teaching artists voted to unionize, under the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada. There has been some speculation about whether this unionization played a role in these cuts.

In a statement to the Times, the L.A. Phil says it has a long history of “working constructively with unions” and that the cuts were based “solely [on] financial and organizational needs.”

At the end of the 2025-2026 school year, the L.A. Phil Board will evaluate the Torres site to see if it is the “best and most sustainable location for YOLA programming after this school year.” The Philharmonic says in the release that its board “is committed to sustaining a long-term YOLA program in the East LA community.”

In an effort to build a transparent, collaborative community, the Phil has also announced that it will work to create a parent advisory committee where YOLA families will be heard as future decisions are made.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked OpenAI’s use of several monikers, including “Cameos” and “CameoVideo,” for elements of its Sora artificial intelligence video generation products and marketing.

U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee on Friday issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the San Francisco AI giant from using names that are part of an ongoing trademark dispute.

The Northern California judge also set a Dec. 19 hearing to delve further into the matter.

The lawsuit was brought late last month by Chicago-based tech business Baron App, which also goes by the name of its product, Cameo. The eight-year-old firm sued OpenAI, alleging trademark infringement and unfair competition.

In its Oct. 28 lawsuit, Baron said it has secured several U.S. Trademark Registrations for its Cameo product, which enables fans to engage celebrities to make personalized videos to wish friends a happy birthday or other greetings.

Snoop Dogg, Tony Hawk, Jon Bon Jovi and Donald Trump Jr. are among celebrities who have participated, connecting with fans through Cameo, the company said in its complaint against Open AI. Cameo said its posts have been popular, attracting more than 100 million views in the past year.

The legal dispute began after OpenAI announced an update to its text-to-video tool Sora in September. The update included the launch of a new Sora feature that it called Cameos.

OpenAI’s fall product update gave consumers on the Sora app the ability to scan their faces and allow others to manipulate their facial images in AI-generated environments. YouTube influencer and boxer Jake Paul, who is an investor in OpenAI, participated in OpenAI’s Cameos’ rollout. In less than five days, the Sora app hit more than 1 million downloads.

“OpenAI is now using Cameo’s own mark, CAMEO, to compete directly with Cameo,” Baron wrote in its lawsuit against OpenAI.

Lawyers for the two companies argued their positions in a Tuesday hearing.

Lee’s decision forbids OpenAI and its “officers, directors and employees from using the mark ‘Cameo,’ or any other mark that includes or is confusingly similar to ‘Cameo,’ ” according to her order. “Defendants are ordered to show cause why a preliminary injunction should not [be] issue[d].”

The temporary restraining order expires Dec. 22.

“While the court’s order is temporary, we hope that OpenAI will agree to stop using our mark permanently to avoid any further harm to the public or Cameo,” Cameo CEO Steven Galanis said in a Saturday statement. “We would like nothing more than to put this behind us so that we can focus our full attention on bringing talent and fans together as we head into the holidays.”

An OpenAI spokesperson responded in a statement: “We disagree with the complaint’s assertion that anyone can claim exclusive ownership over the word ‘cameo’, and we look forward to continuing to make our case to the court.”

The move comes as OpenAI has faced blowback in Hollywood as images of celebrities and dead newsmakers were manipulated without their consent.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas’ 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court’s conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle.

The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If the ruling holds for now, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.