You may have been late returning a library book, but how about 50 years late?A customer recently returned some books to the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a shocking note. The library shared the note and photos of the books returned: “2001 A Space Odyssey” “The Origin of Species and Descent of Man” and “A Field Guide to the Mammals.”The library branch shared the photos with the note left, reading, “I checked these books out as a 16 year old back in 1976. Fascinated by science, nature and the future, I was eager to learn more. As time went by, these books got “misplaced” and never returned. All fines and late fees were paid long ago. But, I’ve found these books, and believe it’s time to return them now. Again, sorry it took so long to bring them back.”
You may have been late returning a library book, but how about 50 years late?
A customer recently returned some books to the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a shocking note.
The library shared the note and photos of the books returned: “2001 A Space Odyssey” “The Origin of Species and Descent of Man” and “A Field Guide to the Mammals.”
The library branch shared the photos with the note left, reading, “I checked these books out as a 16 year old back in 1976. Fascinated by science, nature and the future, I was eager to learn more. As time went by, these books got “misplaced” and never returned. All fines and late fees were paid long ago. But, I’ve found these books, and believe it’s time to return them now. Again, sorry it took so long to bring them back.”
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You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
You may have been late returning a library book, but how about 50 years late?A customer recently returned some books to the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a shocking note. The library shared the note and photos of the books returned: “2001 A Space Odyssey” “The Origin of Species and Descent of Man” and “A Field Guide to the Mammals.”The library branch shared the photos with the note left, reading, “I checked these books out as a 16 year old back in 1976. Fascinated by science, nature and the future, I was eager to learn more. As time went by, these books got “misplaced” and never returned. All fines and late fees were paid long ago. But, I’ve found these books, and believe it’s time to return them now. Again, sorry it took so long to bring them back.”
You may have been late returning a library book, but how about 50 years late?
A customer recently returned some books to the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a shocking note.
The library shared the note and photos of the books returned: “2001 A Space Odyssey” “The Origin of Species and Descent of Man” and “A Field Guide to the Mammals.”
The library branch shared the photos with the note left, reading, “I checked these books out as a 16 year old back in 1976. Fascinated by science, nature and the future, I was eager to learn more. As time went by, these books got “misplaced” and never returned. All fines and late fees were paid long ago. But, I’ve found these books, and believe it’s time to return them now. Again, sorry it took so long to bring them back.”
This content is imported from Facebook.
You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
Babblejit “Bubbly” Kaur and her husband, Amarjit Singh, celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary in Long Beach in late November. The pair cradled a mint-frosted cake in their hands and beamed as their daughter, Joti, snapped pictures.
The couple endured a lot in those years, more than 30 of which have been spent in the U.S., after they fled religious persecution in India.
They arrived in 1994 with three young children and little money, facing a daunting asylum process. But the couple found their niche, operating a beloved Indian restaurant for decades, and saw their children through college.
This year had already been tough for the family. Singh was diagnosed with cancer and Kaur was laid off from her cashier job at Rite Aid, where she’d worked for decades, after the company closed in October. But the biggest hurdle for the family would come only days after the couple’s anniversary, on Dec. 1, when Kaur was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a routine fingerprinting appointment and eventually taken to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
Joti Kaur, the couple’s youngest daughter, collapsed at work when she heard the news.
“I tell her, ‘Anytime you’re thinking of me, I was already thinking of you,” she said from the patio of her Long Beach apartment. “You’re literally the only thing I can think about, and getting you out of there.”
Amarjit Singh, left, and Babblejit Kaur celebrate their 41st wedding anniversary just days before she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Dec. 1, 2025.
(Joti Kaur)
Kaur had an approved green card, but the government had not yet released it, said Harman Singh, her eldest son. The family’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus complaint early last week requesting the court review the legality of Kaur’s detention.
Kaur and her husband operated a restaurant, Natraj Cuisine of India, for decades and became familiar and beloved faces in the coastal city. When she wasn’t working at Rite Aid, she’d be greeting customers at Natraj, alongside her husband, who also took charge in the kitchen as needed. Community members came out in droves to support the family, setting up a GoFundMe that has garnered over $26,000 and a Change.org petition with over 1,600 signatures.
Within days of her arrest, a popular Long Beach food group on Facebook had posted the news and caught the attention of Congressman Robert Garcia, who represents the state’s 42nd Congressional District, including Long Beach.
Garcia has filed a petition to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes immigration applications, requesting the expedited release of Kaur’s green card given the urgency of her husband’s care. His office has also sent requests to ICE and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center for her release.
The congressman said Kaur’s detainment is one of many cases across the country where “we’re encouraging people to do things the right way and to show up to appointments, and then we’re detaining them at appointments that we invited them to.”
“The Long Beach community is outraged about this,” he said. “It’s absolutely crazy and inhumane. It’s no way to treat people.”
Kaur’s arrest was carried out by FBI agents, Laura Eimiller, the agency’s media coordinator confirmed to The Times, as “part of our ongoing assistance to ICE relative to immigration enforcement.”
One of the main tactics of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration in recent months has been detaining people at appointments during their asylum or visa proceedings and, in some cases, deporting them.
His mother’s absence has left an immeasurable gap in their family, Harman Singh said. They’ve had to pick up where she left off, handling bills and navigating their father’s cancer treatment. In a way, he said, it felt like mourning a loved one’s death, only “they’re physically still here in the world, you just can’t reach out to them.”
“This vacuum, this gap, it’s all over America,” Harman Singh said. “This is not just our story.”
Babblejit Kaur and two of her children eat dinner together.
(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)
Kaur and Singh had been joined at the hip since they wed in 1984, the same year violence against Sikhs, their religious community, erupted in India. India’s Punjab state was a Sikh kingdom before the British took over, and the community had long been fighting for a separate Sikh state in the region.
In 1984, tensions came to a head when a siege, ordered by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the holiest site in Sikhism, turned deadly. In retaliation, two Sikh bodyguards assassinated her. Hindu mobs then went on a rampage, killing thousands of Sikhs, in what the California Legislature has labeled a genocide.
Large swaths of the Sikh community began to flee India. His parents watched as people around them — friends, cousins, neighbors — were disappeared and later found dead, Harman Singh said.
They left for the U.S. a decade later. Now, their son said, they’re facing persecution similar to that from which their parents fled all those years ago.
“This was supposed to be the place where you have freedom to live without fear … but it’s sort of turning into that nightmare again,” Harman Singh said. “We’re just repeating what our parents ran away from.”
Today, the Sikh diaspora, who have mostly settled in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, are still targeted. Canadian-Indian relations were strained after the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil in 2023. The Canadian government alleges India’s government was behind the slaying, claims New Delhi has denied.
In August 2024, a truck transporting a Sikh political leader came under fire in Sacramento. In 2023, U.S. officials announced they had foiled an assassination attempt connected to the Indian government against a Sikh activist.
Natraj Cuisine of India on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, was like a fourth child to Kaur and Singh.
Singh first worked as a waiter at the old Laguna Beach location before transferring to Long Beach. Eventually, they became the face of the restaurant, often working more than 12-hour days. The couple managed the restaurant’s daily operations until their departure in 2020.
The couple were the faces of Natraj Cuisine of India in Long Beach for decades.
(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)
“The best way to describe my mom, she will feed everybody in this room and the neighbors before she feeds herself,” Joti Kaur said. “That was their love language, feeding us, the community, and anyone they could.”
Kaur worked at Natraj whenever she wasn’t picking up a shift at Rite Aid and would head to the restaurant during her lunch breaks.
The couple left the restaurant just weeks before COVID-19 hit in 2020. They recently became involved in another restaurant, Royal Indian Curry House, which is still in development.
“They were looking forward to help doing that and getting back into serving meals, because that’s what they love to do,” Joti Kaur said.
Singh depends on his wife for nearly everything, their children said. She took the lead in getting the family settled in the U.S., learning English, getting a driver’s license and even figuring out how to hook up Harman Singh’s PlayStation.
When Singh was diagnosed with cancer, his wife once again took charge. The family looked to her whenever a crucial decision needed to be made.
The day of her appointment, she felt something was wrong.
“She called me that morning and she was anxious,” Joti Kaur said. “I wish I would’ve stayed on the phone with her a little bit longer. She already knew something wasn’t right.”
Harman Singh, who now lives in Sacramento, was also on edge, having seen the countless cases of immigrants detained at government-set appointments.
Fingerprinting appointments had become common practice for the family, who have been tangled in a web of asylum proceedings since they landed at a New York airport in 1994. The two oldest children, including Harman Singh, have since become naturalized citizens. Joti Kaur and her dad have green cards. The only one left waiting was Kaur.
The government already had Kaur’s fingerprints on file, which is why the family was puzzled when they received notice of this appointment.
“You have a hearing coming up and it’s like, if they don’t go, they’re in trouble. If they go, they’re in trouble,” Harman Singh said. “They set it up in such a way that they’re going to get the result they want.”
Now, for the first time in decades, Kaur and Singh have been forced to sleep in separate beds,their children said, and neither gets much sleep at all.
“That was hard enough, just knowing that he’s gonna be battling cancer, but Mom was by his side,” Harman Singh said. “Now there’s just a sense of loneliness that they both have. We are helpless, and we can’t do anything to fix that.”
The couple got married in India, and later immigrated with their three children to the United States in 1994.
(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)
The lights in the Adelanto ICE Processing Center never turn off, which is enough to keep most awake. It’s the noises, often cries from newly arrived detainees, however, that keep Kaur up, often well past 2 in the morning.
She’s lucky if she gets a couple of hours of sleep a night, her children said.
Joti Kaur with her mother.
(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)
The guilt creeps into both children at all hours of the day. Joti Kaur often feels it late at night, when she’s curled up under the covers of her bed and is suddenly reminded of how cold her mom must be. Her brother feels it every time he puts on a jacket or turns on the hot water in the shower.
Every family dinner Joti Kaur missed or phone calls she cut short when her mother was still home add to the guilt.
“I wish I could take it back and go to those dinners and have spent that time, because now, I don’t know when the next dinner is going to be with her,” she said.
A light amid the worry, however, is the community that her mother has built at the detention center. She’s met women of all ages and from all walks of life, one as old as 85.
When Harman Singh arrived at Adelanto to visit his mom for the first time in early December, he heard the women inside erupt in cheers. The noise felt jarring in such a cold facility.
But it’s what the women do for one another every time one of them gets bonded out, his mother told him.
“There’s just a sense of camaraderie. They’re like, ‘We’re in this together,’ which I’m very grateful for,” Harman Singh said. “She has girls to talk to. She goes, ‘If they weren’t there, I would just be in depression right now.’”
His mother has connected with two Indian women. The trio often pray together, and ration whatever milk they get that day to make tea. One is younger, and has started calling Kaur mama.
Authorities this past week announced the arrest of a 76-year-old man in the 1987 killing of Margit Schuller, a 34-year-old mother found shot outside a laundromat near her home at the Palmetto Apartments.Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner on Wednesday said Cortez Sabino Lake, a former Navy corpsman stationed at Parris Island, who lived in the same apartment complex at the time, was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder. Lake is being held pending a bond hearing.Schuller was last seen between 8:15 and 8:45 a.m. on Nov. 1, 1987, folding clothes inside the complex laundromat. Her 12-year-old daughter later found her under a tree outside. Investigators determined Schuller had been shot inside the laundromat and crawled outside. A second blood trail leaving the scene indicated the assailant was injured.Cold case investigator Bob Bromage said DNA taken from that trail in 1987 was first profiled in 2005 and uploaded to CODIS, but produced no hits. In 2019, forensic genealogy and a composite analysis by Parabon Nanolabs helped narrow the focus. Investigators recently obtained Lake’s DNA – first through noncooperative means and then via a court-ordered sample – which matched in the “septillions,” Bromage said. Detectives also recovered the murder weapon in 1989 at a construction site on U.S. 21 and matched it to a casing found in the laundromat. Bromage said investigators believe sexual assault was the motive based on evidence at the scene.Lake, who lived at Battery Creek Apartments in 1987 and later worked more than three decades at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, was not named as a suspect at the time, Bromage said. The Sheriff’s Office is asking anyone who knew Lake in the late 1980s – particularly residents of Battery Creek or Palmetto Apartments – to come forward with information. Tips can be provided to investigators or through Crime Stoppers.Schuller worked as a cardiac care nurse. Her husband, Jozsef, a Navy corpsman, was deployed for training in San Diego when the killing occurred. They were both originally from Hungary and immigrated to the U.S. in 1982.
BEAUFORT, S.C. —
Authorities this past week announced the arrest of a 76-year-old man in the 1987 killing of Margit Schuller, a 34-year-old mother found shot outside a laundromat near her home at the Palmetto Apartments.
Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner on Wednesday said Cortez Sabino Lake, a former Navy corpsman stationed at Parris Island, who lived in the same apartment complex at the time, was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder. Lake is being held pending a bond hearing.
Schuller was last seen between 8:15 and 8:45 a.m. on Nov. 1, 1987, folding clothes inside the complex laundromat. Her 12-year-old daughter later found her under a tree outside. Investigators determined Schuller had been shot inside the laundromat and crawled outside. A second blood trail leaving the scene indicated the assailant was injured.
Cold case investigator Bob Bromage said DNA taken from that trail in 1987 was first profiled in 2005 and uploaded to CODIS, but produced no hits. In 2019, forensic genealogy and a composite analysis by Parabon Nanolabs helped narrow the focus. Investigators recently obtained Lake’s DNA – first through noncooperative means and then via a court-ordered sample – which matched in the “septillions,” Bromage said.
Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office
Detectives also recovered the murder weapon in 1989 at a construction site on U.S. 21 and matched it to a casing found in the laundromat. Bromage said investigators believe sexual assault was the motive based on evidence at the scene.
Lake, who lived at Battery Creek Apartments in 1987 and later worked more than three decades at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, was not named as a suspect at the time, Bromage said. The Sheriff’s Office is asking anyone who knew Lake in the late 1980s – particularly residents of Battery Creek or Palmetto Apartments – to come forward with information. Tips can be provided to investigators or through Crime Stoppers.
Schuller worked as a cardiac care nurse. Her husband, Jozsef, a Navy corpsman, was deployed for training in San Diego when the killing occurred. They were both originally from Hungary and immigrated to the U.S. in 1982.
Consumer confidence is dropping. The national debt is $38 trillion and climbing like the yodeling mountain climber in that “The Price is Right” game. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling and the U.S. is getting more and more restless as 2025 comes to a close.
What’s a wannabe strongman to do to prop up his regime?
Attack Latin America, of course!
U.S. war planes have bombed small ships in international waters off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia since September with extrajudicial zeal. The Trump administration has claimed those vessels were packed with drugs manned by “narco-terrorists” and have released videos for each of the 10 boats-and-counting it has incinerated to make the actions seem as normal as a mission in “Call of Duty.”
“Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media and who just ordered an aircraft carrier currently stationed in the Mediterranean to set up shop in the Caribbean. It’ll meet up with 10,000 troops stationed there as part of one of the area’s biggest U.S. deployments in decades, all in the name of stopping a drug epidemic that has ravaged red America for the past quarter century.
This week, Trump authorized covert CIA actions in Venezuela and revealed he wants to launch strikes against land targets where his people say Latin American cartels operate. Who cares whether the host countries will give permission? Who cares about American laws that state only Congress — not the president — can declare war against our enemies?
It’s Latin America, after all.
The military buildup, bombing and threat of more in the name of liberty is one of the oldest moves in the American foreign policy playbook. For more than two centuries, the United States has treated Latin America as its personal piñata, bashing it silly for goods and not caring about the ugly aftermath.
“It is known to all that we derive [our blessings] from the excellence of our institutions,” James Monroe concluded in the 1823 speech that set forth what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially told the rest of the world to leave the Western Hemisphere to us. “Ought we not, then, to adopt every measure which may be necessary to perpetuate them?”
Our 19th century wars of expansion, official and not, won us territories where Latin Americans lived — Panamanians, Puerto Ricans, but especially Mexicans — that we ended up treating as little better than serfs. We have occupied nations for years and imposed sanctions on others. We have propped up puppets and despots and taken down democratically elected governments with the regularity of the seasons.
The culmination of all these actions were the mass migrations from Latin America that forever altered the demographics of the United States. And when those people — like my parents — came here, they were immediately subjected to a racism hard-wired into the American psyche, which then justified a Latin American foreign policy bent on domination, not friendship.
Nothing rallies this country historically like sticking it to Latinos, whether in their ancestral countries or here. We’re this country’s perpetual scapegoats and eternal invaders, with harming gringos — whether by stealing their jobs, moving into their neighborhoods, marrying their daughters or smuggling drugs — supposedly the only thing on our mind.
That’s why when Trump ran on an isolationist platform last year, he never meant the region — of course not. The border between the U.S. and Latin America has never been the fence that divides the U.S. from Mexico or our shores. It’s wherever the hell we say it is.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro Urrego addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23 at U.N. headquarters.
(Pamela Smith / Associated Press)
That’s why the Trump administration is banking on the idea that it can get away with its boat bombings and is salivating to escalate. To them, the 43 people American missile strikes have slaughtered on the open sea so far aren’t humans — and anyone who might have an iota of sympathy or doubt deserves aggression as well.
That’s why when Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of murder because one of the strikes killed a Colombian fisherman with no ties to cartels, Trump went on social media to lambaste Petro’s “fresh mouth,” accuse him of being a “drug leader” and warn the head of a longtime American ally he “better close up these killing fields [cartel bases] immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
The only person who can turn down the proverbial temperature on this issue is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who should know all the bad that American imperialism has wrought on Latin America. The U.S. treated his parents’ homeland of Cuba like a playground for decades, propping up one dictator after another until Cubans revolted and Fidel Castro took power. A decades-long embargo that Trump tightened upon assuming office the second time has done nothing to free the Cuban people and instead made things worse.
Instead, Rubio is the instigator. He’s pushing for regime change in Venezuela, chumming it up with self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and cheering on Trump’s missile attacks.
“Bottom line, these are drug boats,” Rubio told reporters recently with Trump by his side. “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”
You might ask: Who cares? Cartels are bad, drugs are bad, aren’t they? Of course. But every American should oppose every time a suspected drug boat launching from Latin America is destroyed with no questions asked and no proof offered. Because every time Trump violates yet another law or norm in the name of defending the U.S. and no one stops him, democracy erodes just a little bit more.
This is a president, after all, who seems to dream of treating his enemies, including American cities, like drug boats.
Few will care, alas. It’s Latin America, after all.
MEXICO CITY — For decades, Colombia and the United States have been devoted allies, sharing military intelligence, a robust trade relationship and a multibillion-dollar fight against drug trafficking.
Now that is all at risk as the U.S. ramps up deadly airstrikes off Colombia’s coast and the leaders of both nations trade scathing verbal attacks.
President Trump called Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter and Colombia’s first leftist president, an “illegal drug dealer.” Petro called Trump “rude” and accused the U.S. of murder, saying an American strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat had killed a Colombian fisherman in Colombian waters.
Petro has decried the massive buildup of U.S. troops, warships and jets in the Caribbean, which, he charges, aims to force a change of governments in neighboring Venezuela.
Relations between the nations hit their lowest point in memory Monday as the Colombian government recalled its ambassador to the United States, and Trump vowed to suspend all U.S. aid to Colombia and impose new tariffs on imports from the South American nation.
“Petro does nothing to stop” drug trafficking, Trump charged on his social media site, “despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long term rip off of America.”
The Colombian leader, Trump warned, “better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
A coca leaf collector, or raspachin, works at a plantation in Catatumbo, Colombia, in 2022.
(Raul Arboleda / AFP/Getty Images)
Petro has defended his record in deterring drug trafficking despite rising production in Colombia of coca plants, the raw material in cocaine. He has said the rampant consumption of illicit drugs in the United States and Europe is behind the bloody drug war in Latin America.
Meanwhile, the U.S. said Sunday that it had blown up yet another boat, this one allegedly associated with a Colombian rebel group. Petro said the boat in fact belonged to a “humble family.”
The growing binational crisis threatened to further destabilize a region already on edge over the U.S. military strikes. Some analysts said it threatened to embolden the same drug traffickers Trump claims to be targeting.
“In a fight between the world’s largest drug producer and the world’s largest drug consumer, only organized crime wins,” former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said at a forum in Barcelona, Spain. “As long as we have two presidents who insult each other on Twitter every day, [combating crime] will be more difficult.”
Colombia is facing its worst security crisis in a decade, with armed groups competing for control over drug trafficking, illegal gold mining and other illicit economies in the years since militants with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, gave up their arms in a peace deal with the Colombian government in 2016.
If the U.S. ends its military and other aid to Colombia, the effect could be disastrous, said Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for the Andes region at the International Crisis Group, a think tank.
The Colombian military, which has long been fortified by U.S. training, weapons and other aid, is so skilled that its members are paid by the U.S. to teach anti-narcotics operations in other parts of the world, she said. “If the United States was truly interested in combating organized crime and drug trafficking,” she said, “why would they alienate the one partner in the region who is capable and willing to help?”
“The U.S.-Colombia relationship has for many years transcended personal politics because both sides understood how important it was,” Dickinson continued. “Now the wisdom of the relationship that held it together for so long and made it so productive for both countries is being thrown out the window, and we’re losing decades of progress.”
Relations between the nations have been unraveling since January, when Trump returned to the White House for a second term.
After Petro refused to receive U.S. military flights of deported migrants, Trump threatened tariffs. Petro at first vowed retaliatory tariffs but backed down and agreed to accept the migrants to avert a trade war.
More recently, the State Department announced it was revoking Petro’s visa after an appearance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York where he decried U.S. support for Israel and called for American soldiers to disobey Trump and “obey the orders of humanity.”
The massing of U.S. forces in the Caribbean has further strained the relationship.
The Trump administration has stationed roughly 10,000 troops and a fleet of ships and aircraft in the Caribbean, the largest U.S. military buildup in the region in decades.
Although the force is ostensibly aimed at interrupting the drug trade, it is widely believed to be an effort to drive out Venezuela’s left-leaning autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, who, critics say, has plunged his nation into an economic and political crisis.
Petro warned against U.S. meddling in Venezuela in a post on X on Monday, saying Washington was after the nation’s expansive oil reserves.
“The Venezuelan people do not want invasions, blockades, or threats against them,” he wrote. “They do not like dictators, not domestic or foreign.”
Last month, the Trump administration decertified Colombia as partner in the war on drugs, a move that could cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid, much of it for anti-drug efforts.
Petro’s spat with Trump has sparked intense controversy in Colombia, which is starkly divided ahead of next year’s presidential election. (Petro is constitutionally barred from seeking reelection.)
Petro’s supporters praised him for standing up to a global bully. But his critics said he has imperiled Colombia’s economy. The United States is Colombia’s top trading partner; it sent nearly $10 billion in exports to the U.S. in the first eight months of this year.
Petro’s provocative attitude with the Trump administration contrasts with that of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, a leftist who has sought to accommodate Trump to avoid punishing tariffs on Mexican exports to the United States. But many worry that Mexico could also be in the Trump administration’s military crosshairs, as it is the major supplier of fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S. market.
An Elk Grove high school teacher was arrested on Wednesday, accused of having an illegal sexual relationship with a minor student that began a decade ago. The Elk Grove Police Department said David Collins, 38, was arrested after former students reported sexual offense allegations to the Elk Grove Unified School District. Collins is a teacher at Laguna Creek High School. A staff list on the school’s website shows he teaches science.The police department said once the allegations were made, Collins was placed on administrative leave. Elk Grove police said detectives found that sometime between 2015 and 2018, Collins was engaged in a sexual relationship with the minor victim, who was a student at the time. Officials said investigators served a search warrant at Collins’ Sacramento home on Wednesday morning, and Collins was taken into custody. He was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail for oral copulation with a person under 18 years old and penetration by a foreign object with a victim under 18 years old. Collins is being held without bail. He is set to appear in court on Friday.In a letter shared with parents, the school district said Collins had not been on campus this school year. The district declined to share any additional comment with KCRA 3 due to the active investigation. Anyone with information about the investigation is urged to contact the Elk Grove Police Department at 916-478-8112.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
ELK GROVE, Calif. —
An Elk Grove high school teacher was arrested on Wednesday, accused of having an illegal sexual relationship with a minor student that began a decade ago.
The Elk Grove Police Department said David Collins, 38, was arrested after former students reported sexual offense allegations to the Elk Grove Unified School District. Collins is a teacher at Laguna Creek High School. A staff list on the school’s website shows he teaches science.
The police department said once the allegations were made, Collins was placed on administrative leave.
Elk Grove police said detectives found that sometime between 2015 and 2018, Collins was engaged in a sexual relationship with the minor victim, who was a student at the time.
Officials said investigators served a search warrant at Collins’ Sacramento home on Wednesday morning, and Collins was taken into custody. He was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail for oral copulation with a person under 18 years old and penetration by a foreign object with a victim under 18 years old.
Collins is being held without bail. He is set to appear in court on Friday.
In a letter shared with parents, the school district said Collins had not been on campus this school year.
The district declined to share any additional comment with KCRA 3 due to the active investigation.
Anyone with information about the investigation is urged to contact the Elk Grove Police Department at 916-478-8112.
Former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine received the endorsement of a prominent Democratic women’s group on Monday that backs candidates who support abortion rights. The organization could provide significant funding and grass-roots support to boost Porter’s 2026 gubernatorial campaign.
“Katie Porter has spent her career holding the powerful accountable, fighting to lower costs and taking on Wall Street and Trump administration officials to deliver results for California’s working families,” said Jessica Mackler, president of EMILY’s List. “At a time when President Trump and his allies are attacking Californians’ health care and making their lives more expensive, Katie is the proven leader California needs.”
The organization’s name stands for Early Money Is Like Yeast, a reference to the importance of early fundraising for female candidates. It was founded four decades ago to promote Democratic women who support legal abortion. The group has raised nearly $950 million to help elect such candidates across the country, including backing Porter’s successful congressional campaign to flip a GOP district in Orange County.
“There’s nothing that Donald Trump hates more than facing down a strong, powerful woman,” Porter said. “For decades, EMILY’s List has backed winner after winner, helping elect pro-choice Democratic women to public office. They were instrumental in helping me flip a Republican stronghold blue in 2018, and together I’m confident we will make history again.”
It’s unclear, however, how much the organization will spend on Porter’s bid to be California’s first female governor. There are multiple critical congressional races next year that will determine control of the House that the group will likely throw its weight behind.
At the moment, Porter, a UC Irvine law professor who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate last year, has a small edge in the polls among the multitude of Democrats running for the seat. The primary is in June.
FBI Director Kash Patel says the bureau is cutting ties with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has tracked domestic extremism and racial and religious bias for decades.It comes after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and increased attention on the group he founded, Turning Point USA. SPLC included it as a “case study in the hard right” in its report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.”Video above details the charges against the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s death.Patel said on Friday that the FBI would sever its relationship with the SPLC, asserting that the organization had been turned into a “partisan smear machine” and criticizing it for its use of a “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States. Criticism of the SPLC escalated from some conservatives and prominent allies of President Donald Trump in the weeks after Kirk’s assassination. Prominent figures including Elon Musk condemned the SPLC this week for its descriptions of Kirk and the organization.Many of those political figures were also connected to the group in the Turning Point USA case study.”Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists and a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics,” the SPLC case study states. “While the group was previously dismissed by key figures within the Republican National Committee (RNC), Trump attended several TPUSA events across the country throughout 2024, and several of his nominees have ties to the organization.”The case study characterized the organization as “authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.” It stated that Turning Point USA exploited fear and “embraced aggressive state and federal power to enforce a social order rooted in white supremacy.”The August 2025 Intelligence Project Dispatch also named a leader of Turning Point Action, stating that former Arizona Rep. Austin Smith had been charged with election fraud.Video below: Charlie Kirk’s widow vows to continue his mission after his murderA spokesperson for the SPLC, a legal and advocacy group founded in 1971 as a watchdog for minorities and the underprivileged, did not directly address Patel’s comments in a statement Friday but said the organization has for decades shared data with the public and remains “committed to exposing hate and extremism as we work to equip communities with knowledge and defend the rights and safety of marginalized people.”The FBI also cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish advocacy organization that fights antisemitism. It faced criticism on the right for maintaining a “Glossary of Extremism.” The organization announced this week that it was discontinuing that glossary because a number of entries were outdated and some were being “intentionally misrepresented and misused.”What is the SPLC?The Southern Poverty Law Center was created by lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin in Montgomery in 1971.Civil Rights Activist Julian Bond was named the first president and people from across the country created the financial base for the organization, according to the SPLC website.”In the decades since its founding, the SPLC shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups by winning crushing, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims,” the website states about the organization’s history. “It dismantled vestiges of Jim Crow, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBT community and the disabled, protected low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation, and more.”During the 1980s, the SPLC began monitoring white supremacist activity and what is now known as the Intelligence Project tracks hate and extremist groups across the country. This report is known around the world.
Video above details the charges against the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s death.
Patel said on Friday that the FBI would sever its relationship with the SPLC, asserting that the organization had been turned into a “partisan smear machine” and criticizing it for its use of a “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
Criticism of the SPLC escalated from some conservatives and prominent allies of President Donald Trump in the weeks after Kirk’s assassination. Prominent figures including Elon Musk condemned the SPLC this week for its descriptions of Kirk and the organization.
Many of those political figures were also connected to the group in the Turning Point USA case study.
“Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists and a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics,” the SPLC case study states. “While the group was previously dismissed by key figures within the Republican National Committee (RNC), Trump attended several TPUSA events across the country throughout 2024, and several of his nominees have ties to the organization.”
The case study characterized the organization as “authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.” It stated that Turning Point USA exploited fear and “embraced aggressive state and federal power to enforce a social order rooted in white supremacy.”
The August 2025 Intelligence Project Dispatch also named a leader of Turning Point Action, stating that former Arizona Rep. Austin Smith had been charged with election fraud.
Video below: Charlie Kirk’s widow vows to continue his mission after his murder
A spokesperson for the SPLC, a legal and advocacy group founded in 1971 as a watchdog for minorities and the underprivileged, did not directly address Patel’s comments in a statement Friday but said the organization has for decades shared data with the public and remains “committed to exposing hate and extremism as we work to equip communities with knowledge and defend the rights and safety of marginalized people.”
The FBI also cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish advocacy organization that fights antisemitism. It faced criticism on the right for maintaining a “Glossary of Extremism.” The organization announced this week that it was discontinuing that glossary because a number of entries were outdated and some were being “intentionally misrepresented and misused.”
What is the SPLC?
The Southern Poverty Law Center was created by lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin in Montgomery in 1971.
Civil Rights Activist Julian Bond was named the first president and people from across the country created the financial base for the organization, according to the SPLC website.
“In the decades since its founding, the SPLC shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups by winning crushing, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims,” the website states about the organization’s history. “It dismantled vestiges of Jim Crow, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBT community and the disabled, protected low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation, and more.”
Four of America’s nominally closest allies — Britain, Australia, France and Canada — disgraced themselves this week by recognizing a so-called Palestinian state. In so doing, these nations didn’t merely betray their Western civilizational inheritance. They also rewarded terrorism, strengthened the genocidal ambitions of the global jihad and sent a chilling message: The path to international legitimacy runs not through the difficult work of building up a nation-state and engaging in diplomacy, but through mass murder, the weaponization of transnational institutions and the erasure of historical truth.
The Trump administration has already denounced this craven capitulation by our allies. There should be no recognition of an independent Palestinian state at this moment in history. Such a recognition is an abdication not only of basic human decency, but also of national interest and strategic sanity.
The global march toward recognition of an independent Palestinian state ignores decades of brutal facts on the ground as well as the specific tide of blood behind this latest surge. It was less than two years ago — Oct. 7, 2023 — that Hamas launched the most barbaric anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust: 6,000 terrorists poured into Israel, massacring roughly 1,200 innocent people in acts of unconscionable depravity — systematic rape, torture, kidnapping of babies. The terrorists livestreamed their own atrocities and dragged more than 250 hostages back to Gaza’s sprawling subterranean terror dungeons, where dozens remain to this day.
Many gullible liberal elites wish to believe that the radical jihadists of Hamas do not represent the broader Palestinian-Arab population, but that is a lie. Polls consistently show — and anecdotal videos of large street crowds consistently demonstrate — that Hamas and like-minded jihadist groups maintain overwhelming popularity in both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (what the international community refers to as the West Bank). These groups deserve shame, scorn and diplomatic rebuke — not fawning sympathy and United Nations red carpets.
The “government” in Gaza is a theocratic, Iranian-backed terror entity whose founding charter drips with unrepentant Jew-hatred and whose leaders routinely celebrate the wanton slaughter of innocent Israelis as triumphs of “resistance.” Along with the kleptocratic Palestinian Authority dictatorship in Ramallah, this is who, and what, Group of 7 powers like Britain and France have decided to reward with an imprimatur of legitimate statehood.
There is no meaningful “peace partner,” and no “two-state” vision to be realized, amid this horrible reality. There is only a sick cult of violence, lavishly funded from Tehran and eager for widespread international recognition as a stepping stone toward the destruction of Israel — and the broader West for which Israel is a proxy.
For decades, Western leaders maintained a straightforward position: There can be no recognition of a Palestinian state outside of direct negotiations with Israel, full demilitarization and the unqualified acceptance of Israel’s right to exist in secure borders as a distinctly Jewish state. The move at the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state torches that policy, declaring to the world that savagery and maximalist rejectionism are the currency of international legitimacy. By rewarding unilateralism and eschewing direct negotiation, these reckless Western governments have proved us international law skeptics right: The much-ballyhooed “peace process” agreements, such as the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, are not worth the paper they were written on.
In the wake of Oct. 7, these nations condemned the massacre, proclaimed solidarity with Israel and even briefly suspended funding for UNRWA, the U.N. aid group for the Palestinian territories, after agency employees were accused of participating in the attack. Yet, under the relentless drumbeat of anti-Israel activism and diplomatic cowardice, they have now chosen to rehabilitate the Palestinian-Arab nationalist cause — not after the leaders of the cause renounced terrorism, but while its most gruesome crimes remained unpunished, its hostages still languish in concentration camp-like squalor and its leaders still clamor for the annihilation of Israel.
Trump should clarify not only that America will not join in this dangerous, high-stakes charade, but also that there could very well be negative trade or diplomatic repercussions for countries that recognize an independent Palestinian terror state. The reason for such consequences would be simple: Undermining America’s strongest ally in the Middle East while simultaneously creating yet another new terror-friendly Islamist state directly harms the American national interest. There is no American national interest — none, zero — in the creation of a new Palestinian state in the heart of the Holy Land. On the contrary, as the Abraham Accords peace deals of 2020 proved, there is plenty of reason to embolden Israel. Contra liberal elites, it is this bolstering of Israel that fosters genuine regional peace.
The world must know: In the face of evil, America does not flinch, does not equivocate and does not reward those who murder our friends and threaten the Judeo-Christian West. As long as the Jewish state stands on the front lines of civilization, the United States must remain at its side, unwavering, unbowed and unashamed. Basic human decency and the American national interest both require nothing less.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
Archive | Sacramento survivor helps create memorial for 1972 plane crash at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor
The accident was horrific. *** Korean Air *** War jet leaving an air show at Executive Airport crashed into *** fireball, skidding across Freeport Boulevard, slamming into Ferrell’s ice cream parlor. The date September 24, 1972. The death toll 22 killed, 12 of them children. This is the site today. It will soon be the headquarters for Sacramento’s police and fire departments. It will also be *** memorial site thanks to one survivor. I just kind of thought, gee, I wonder if anything’s ever been done, but I just didn’t have enough courage to go back. It hurt too much. Kerry McCluskey and her twin sister were just *** few months shy of their 4th birthday when their babysitter took. For ice cream, Kerry suffered *** broken leg. Her identical twin sister Christy was killed. Initially, Kerry fought City Hall, asking the city to abandon its plans to use the building. The city stuck to its choice, noting that since the crash, runway 1230 has been shortened, the airport moving the landing and takeoff areas farther away from Freeport Boulevard. From the start, the city has Hesitation to commit to *** memorial. My thought was, why isn’t there *** memorial already? Why didn’t we do something? And clearly if other people want to have it, it’s time to do it. The plans for the memorial located near where the former ice cream parlor’s front door was will include *** patio area, benches, and *** plaque. The city has asked Kerry to come up with what the memorial should say. She’s already asked her 4 year old daughter to draw angels for the plaque. It’s an awesome responsibility, but I feel privileged and honored at the same time. The city has already committed $20,000 to the project. Carrie would like to raise more, hoping to add *** fountain and *** rose bush for every victim. This donation was left on her doorstep. If all goes as planned, this memorial will be in place by September of this year, marking the 30th anniversary of this horrific crash. In Sacramento, Tana Castro, KCRA 3 reports.
Archive | Sacramento survivor helps create memorial for 1972 plane crash at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor
As part of our 70th anniversary, KCRA 3 is taking a look through our archives at various community stories we covered over the decades.Wednesday marks 53 years since the Canadair Sabre Korean War-era jet crashed into Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Sacramento after failing to take off from Sacramento Executive Airport during an air show. Twenty-two people were killed, including 12 children, after the jet skidded across Freeport Boulevard and slammed into the shop on Sept. 24, 1972. In the video clip above from 2002, our coverage focused on survivor Carrie McCluskey’s efforts to secure a memorial at the site, which is now the Sacramento police headquarters.| RELATED | These are lessons learned after the air disaster at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Sacramento
As part of our 70th anniversary, KCRA 3 is taking a look through our archives at various community stories we covered over the decades.
Wednesday marks 53 years since the Canadair Sabre Korean War-era jet crashed into Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Sacramento after failing to take off from Sacramento Executive Airport during an air show. Twenty-two people were killed, including 12 children, after the jet skidded across Freeport Boulevard and slammed into the shop on Sept. 24, 1972.
In the video clip above from 2002, our coverage focused on survivor Carrie McCluskey’s efforts to secure a memorial at the site, which is now the Sacramento police headquarters.
THE EXCITEMENT. GUYS HAVING FUN SAY YEEHAW! THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF THINGS TO DO OR SEE INSIDE THE GATES OF THE LODI GRAPE FESTIVAL. IT’S ACTUALLY A FAMILY TRADITION. WE’VE BEEN GOING. I’VE BEEN GOING HERE SINCE I WAS LITTLE. THAT’S HOW IT’S BEEN FOR YEARS. IT’S JUST SOMETHING THAT, LIKE, TRULY MEANS A LOT TO US. IT’S SHOWTIME. THE FESTIVAL DATES BACK TO THE 1930S. ARE WE READY? FOR MANY, THE OUTING IS A TRADITION. WE HAVE LOTS OF MEMORIES HERE. THIS IS THE LAVA. THIS GROUP SAYS THEY’VE BEEN COMING HERE FOR DECADES. AND I HAVE EVERY ONE OF THEM. AND THEY HAVE THE PINS TO PROVE IT. THEY STOPPED MAKING THEM, LIKE TEN YEARS AGO. BUT I HAVE EVERY SINGLE ONE. IT USED TO BE WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP, YOU GOT AS FAR AS THE BEER BOOTH, AND THAT’S THAT’S WHERE ALL THE PARENTS STOP THOSE LONG LINES STILL MARK THE BOOTHS WHERE YOU CAN BUY DRINKS, AND WHILE MANY WILL DRINK THE WINE, CATCHING ME DOUBLE — THE GRAPES. WANT TO BECOME WINE VERY BADLY? THEY DO. SOME WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO MAKE IT. SINCE WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF 100,000 ACRES OF CALIFORNIA’S NICEST GRAPES, IT’S A GOOD IDEA THAT YOU SHOULD MAKE SOME WINE. THE GRAPES AND THE WINE INDUSTRY IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE COMMUNITY, AND WE WANT TO PROMOTE THAT THE BEST WE CAN. MARK ARMSTRONG IS THE CEO OF THE LODI GRAPE FESTIVAL. I’VE BEEN THE MANAGER 34 YEARS. I’M STILL THE NEW GUY. HE SAYS HE’S PROUD TO PUT THE FOUR DAY EVENT ON FOR THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO COME EVERY YEAR. IT’S LIKE HOMECOMING FOR EVERYBODY. IT’S A CELEBRATION OF THE GRAPE HARVEST AND SOMETHING FOR LODI FAMILIES TO LOOK FORWARD TO. EVERY YEAR. AND IT IS A FOUR DAY FESTIVAL, SO YOU CAN STILL COME IF YOU PLAN TO. THEY RECOMMEND BUYING YOUR TICKETS ONLINE. THAT WAY YOU CAN GET THE BEST DEAL IN LODI, PEYTON HEADLEE KCRA THREE NEWS. IT RUNS FROM NOON TO MIDNIGHT TOMORROW AND SATURDAY NOON TO 11 ON SUNDAY. THERE’S LIVE MUS
‘It’s like a homecoming for everybody’: Lodi Grape Festival celebrates decades of tradition
The Lodi Grape Festival in Northern California kicks off its four-day celebration, drawing thousands to enjoy food, wine, and entertainment.
The Lodi Grape Festival in Northern California has begun its four-day celebration, marking the harvest season for wine grapes and drawing thousands of attendees to enjoy the festivities.The festival is filled with entertainment, food, vendors, grape murals, wine tasting, and so much more.”It’s actually a family tradition. I’ve been going here since I was little,” Monica Izaguirre said. “It’s just something that, like, truly means a lot to us.”For many families, the outing is a tradition that dates back decades. “It used to be when we were growing up, you got as far as the beer booths, and that’s where all the parents stopped,” Karen Brown Anderson said. “We’d get ride tickets and they go, okay, you’ve got a half hour and then come back here.”While many drink the wine that the festival offers, one booth will teach you how to make it.”Since we’re in the middle of 100,000 acres of California’s nicest grapes, it’s a good idea that you should make some wine,” Randy Savig with the Lodi Amateur Vintners Association said. “We make wine amateurish to start out with, and then some get very good at it. We have over, I think it’s 18 wineries in our Lodi area that they have started with our club and now they are a commercial winery.”Mark Armstrong, CEO of the Lodi Grape Festival, said the festival dates back to the 1930s. He emphasized the importance of the grape and wine industry to the community. “The grapes and the wine industry is the lifeblood of the community. And we want to promote that the best we can,” he said. Armstrong, who has managed the festival for 34 years, expressed pride in hosting the event for tens of thousands of attendees. “It’s like a homecoming for everybody,” he said.Tickets are still available. Armstrong said he recommends you buy tickets online for the best deals. The festival runs from noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday, and noon to 11 p.m. on Sunday, featuring live music acts including Tyler Rich and “We the Kings.”See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
LODI, Calif. —
The Lodi Grape Festival in Northern California has begun its four-day celebration, marking the harvest season for wine grapes and drawing thousands of attendees to enjoy the festivities.
The festival is filled with entertainment, food, vendors, grape murals, wine tasting, and so much more.
“It’s actually a family tradition. I’ve been going here since I was little,” Monica Izaguirre said. “It’s just something that, like, truly means a lot to us.”
For many families, the outing is a tradition that dates back decades.
“It used to be when we were growing up, you got as far as the beer booths, and that’s where all the parents stopped,” Karen Brown Anderson said. “We’d get ride tickets and they go, okay, you’ve got a half hour and then come back here.”
While many drink the wine that the festival offers, one booth will teach you how to make it.
“Since we’re in the middle of 100,000 acres of California’s nicest grapes, it’s a good idea that you should make some wine,” Randy Savig with the Lodi Amateur Vintners Association said. “We make wine amateurish to start out with, and then some get very good at it. We have over, I think it’s 18 wineries in our Lodi area that they have started with our club and now they are a commercial winery.”
Mark Armstrong, CEO of the Lodi Grape Festival, said the festival dates back to the 1930s. He emphasized the importance of the grape and wine industry to the community.
“The grapes and the wine industry is the lifeblood of the community. And we want to promote that the best we can,” he said.
Armstrong, who has managed the festival for 34 years, expressed pride in hosting the event for tens of thousands of attendees.
“It’s like a homecoming for everybody,” he said.
Tickets are still available. Armstrong said he recommends you buy tickets online for the best deals.
The festival runs from noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday, and noon to 11 p.m. on Sunday, featuring live music acts including Tyler Rich and “We the Kings.”
A school-aged child in Los Angeles County has died from a rare complication of measles after contracting the disease in infancy, the county public health department announced Thursday.
The child — who was not old enough to be vaccinated at the time of infection — died from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a fatal progressive brain disorder that strikes roughly one in 10,000 people infected with measles in the U.S. Doctors believe the risk is as high as one in every 600 children who contract measles as a baby.
The disorder typically develops two to 10 years after initial infection, even when — as in this child’s case — the patient recovers fully from measles. The disease begins with seizures, cognitive decline and involuntary muscle spasms, and progresses to dementia, coma and eventually death.
“Most pediatricians in the U.S. have never seen a child with SSPE because we’ve been vaccinating kids against measles for decades,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a New York-based pediatric infectious-disease specialist and author of the book, “Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health could not release further details on the child’s age, gender or location due to patient privacy laws, a spokesperson said.
The department could only confirm that the child acquired measles before becoming eligible for an MMR vaccination.
“This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” county health officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a statement. “Infants too young to be vaccinated rely on all of us to help protect them through community immunity.”
Children typically receive their first MMR dose when they are 12 to 15 months old and a second dose between the ages of 4 and 6 years.
An early first dose from the age of 6 to 11 months is recommended for babies traveling internationally or through an international hub. Infants under the age of 6 months are too young to receive the MMR shot, according to guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Very young babies rely on antibodies acquired during gestation and herd immunity to protect them from measles, which killed roughly 400 children every year in the U.S. before the combined MMR vaccine’s introduction in 1971.
Measles was “eliminated” in the U.S. in 2000, meaning the disease was rare enough and immunity widespread enough to prevent local transmission if an errant case popped up.
For 25 years, parents in the U.S. have been able to trust that herd immunity will keep infants safe from measles until they are old enough to be vaccinated.
This recent death may be a signal that social contract is beginning to break.
Childhood immunization rates have been slowly but steadily falling nationwide, from 95% in the years before the COVID pandemic to below 93% in the 2023-24 school year.
In California, one of five U.S. states that banned all non-medical vaccine exemptions, the vaccination rate that year was 96.2%. California is also one of only 10 states with a kindergarten measles vaccination rate exceeding the 95% threshold experts say is necessary to achieve herd immunity.
But if current vaccination rates hold steady over the coming decades, measles will once again be endemic in the U.S. within 25 years, two Stanford University researchers found in a study published earlier this year.
“Right now we should really be trying to up vaccination rates,” Mathew Kiang, an assistant professor of epidemiology and population health, told the Times in April. “If we just kept them the way they are, bad things are going to happen within about two decades.”
Times staff writer Jenny Gold contributed to this report.
For more than two decades, satellites have tracked the total amounts of water held in glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, soil and the world’s vast natural reservoirs underground — aquifers. An extensive global analysis of that data now reveals fresh water is rapidly disappearing beneath much of humanity’s feet, and large swaths of the Earth are drying out.
Scientists are seeing “mega-drying” regions that are immense and expanding — one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China.
There are two primary causes of the desiccation: rising temperatures unleashed by using oil and gas, and widespread overpumping of water that took millennia to accumulate underground.
“These findings send perhaps the most alarming message yet about the impact of climate change on our water resources,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist and professor at Arizona State University who co-authored the study. “The rapid water cycle change that the planet has experienced over the last decade has unleashed a wave of rapid drying.”
Since 2002, satellites have measured changes in the Earth’s gravity field to track shifts in water, both frozen and liquid. What they sent back shows that nearly 6 billion people — three-fourths of humanity — live in the 101 countries that have been losing water.
Large parts of the world are getting drier
Vast swaths of the world are losing fresh water. In addition to the melting of glaciers and ice caps, many regions are getting drier and depleting their groundwater.
Each year, these drying areas have been expanding by an area roughly twice the size of California.
Canada and Russia, where large amounts of ice and permafrost are melting, are losing the most fresh water. The United States, Iran and India also rank near the top, with rising temperatures and chronic overuse of groundwater.
Farms and cities are pulling up so much water using high-capacity pumps that much of the water evaporates and eventually ends up as rain falling over the ocean, measurably increasing sea level rise.
Water flows from a well to irrigate an orchard in Visalia.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that these water losses now contribute more to sea level rise than the more widely understood melting of mountain glaciers or the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets.
The staggeringly rapid expansion of the drying regions was surprising even for the scientists. Famiglietti said it is set to worsen in many areas, leading to “widespread aridification and desertification.”
“We found tremendous growth in the world’s land areas that are experiencing extreme drought,” Famiglietti said. “Only the tropics are getting wetter. The rest of the world’s land areas are drying.”
The wave of drying has prompted many people across the world’s food-growing regions to drill more wells and rely more heavily on pumping groundwater.
The researchers estimate that 68% of the water the continents are losing, not including melting glaciers, is from groundwater depletion. And much of that water is to irrigate crops.
Where aquifer levels decline, wells and faucets increasingly sputter and run dry, people drill deeper and the land can sink as underground spaces collapse.
The loss may be irreversible, leaving current and future generations with less water.
Famiglietti said the potential long-term consequences are dire: Farmers will struggle to grow as much food, economic growth will be threatened, increasing numbers of people will flee drying regions, conflicts over water are already increasing, and more governments will be destabilized in countries that aren’t prepared.
The researchers estimated that the world’s drying regions have been losing 368 billion metric tons of water per year. That’s more than double the volume of Lake Tahoe, or 10 times Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.
All that water, year after year, has become a major contributor to sea level rise, which is projected to cause worsening damages in the coming decades.
Previous studies have shown dropping groundwater levels, dry regions getting drier and these water losses contributing to sea level rise. But the new study shows these changes are happening faster and on a larger scale than previously known.
“It is quite alarming,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an Arizona State research scientist who co-authored the study. “Water touches everything in life. The effects of its irreversible decline are bound to trickle into everything.”
He likened the global situation to a family overspending and drawing down their savings accounts.
“Our bank balance is consistently decreasing. This is inherently unsustainable,” Chandanpurkar said.
The draining of groundwater, often invisible, hides how much arid regions are drawing down their reserve accounts, he said. “Once these trust funds dry out, water bankruptcy is imminent.”
The researchers examined data from two U.S.-German satellite missions, called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE-Follow On.
The scientists ranked California’s Central Valley as the region where the fastest groundwater depletion is occurring, followed by parts of Russia, India and Pakistan.
In other research, scientists have found that the last 25 years have probably been the driest in at least 1,200 years in western North America.
And farming areas that a decade ago appeared in the satellite data as hot spots of drought and groundwater depletion, such as California’s Central Valley and the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the High Plains, have expanded across the Southwest, through Mexico and into Central America.
Researchers identify western U.S. and Central America as one of four ‘mega-drying’ regions
These regions including large parts of Canada and Russia; southwestern North America and Central America; and a giant interconnected drying region spanning from North Africa to Europe, through the Middle East to northern China and Southeast Asia.
The satellite data show that these and other regions are not only shifting to drier conditions on average, but are also failing to “live within the means” of the water they have available, Chandanpurkar said.
“The truth is, water is not being valued and the long-term reserves are exploited for short-term profits,” he said.
He said he hopes the findings will prompt action to address the chronic overuse of water.
In the study, the researchers wrote that “while efforts to slow climate change may be sputtering,” people urgently need to take steps to preserve groundwater. They called for national and global efforts to manage groundwater and “help preserve this precious resource for generations to come.”
In many areas where groundwater levels are dropping, there are no limits on well-drilling or how much a landowner can pump, and there is no charge for the water. Often, well owners don’t even need to have a meter installed or report how much water they’re using.
In California, farms producing vast quantities of nuts, fruits and other crops have drawn down aquifers so heavily that several thousand rural households have had their wells run dry over the last decade, and the ground has been sinking as much as 1 foot per year, damaging canals, bridges and levees.
The state in 2014 adopted a landmark groundwater law that requires local agencies to curb widespread overpumping. But it gives many areas until 2040 to address their depletion problems, and in the meantime water levels have continued to fall.
State officials and local agencies have begun investing in projects to capture more stormwater and replenish aquifers.
Arizona has sought to preserve groundwater in urban areas through a 1980 law, but in much of the state, there are still no limits on how many wells can be drilled or how much water can be pumped. Over the last decade, out-of-state companies and investors have drilled deep wells and expanded large-scale farming operations in the desert to grow hay and other crops.
Famiglietti, who was previously a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has extensively studied groundwater depletion around the world. He said he doesn’t think the leaders of most countries are aware of, or preparing for, the worsening crisis.
“Of all the troubling findings we revealed in the study, the one thing where humanity can really make a difference quickly is the decision to better manage groundwater and protect it for future generations,” Famiglietti said. “Groundwater will become the most important natural resource in the world’s drying regions. We need to carefully protect it.”
José Antonio Rodríguez held a bouquet of flowers in his trembling hands.
It had been nearly a quarter of a century since he had left his family behind in Mexico to seek work in California. In all those years, he hadn’t seen his parents once.
They kept in touch as best they could, but letters took months to cross the border, and his father never was one for phone calls. Visits were impossible: José was undocumented, and his parents lacked visas to come to the U.S.
Now, after years of separation, they were about to be reunited. And José’s stomach was in knots.
He had been a young man of 20 when he left home, skinny and full of ambition. Now he was 44, thicker around the middle, his hair thinning at the temples.
Would his parents recognize him? Would he recognize them? What would they think of his life?
José had spent weeks preparing for this moment, cleaning his trailer in the Inland Empire from top to bottom and clearing the weeds from his yard. He bought new pillows to set on his bed, which he would give to his parents, taking the couch.
Finally, the moment was almost here.
Gerardo Villarreal Salazar, 70, left, is reunited with his grandson Alejandro Rojas, 17.
Leobardo Arellano, 39, left, and his father, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, are reunited after 24 years.
Officials in Mexico’s Zacatecas state had helped his mother and father apply for documents that allow Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. for temporary visits as part of a novel program that brings elderly parents of undocumented workers to the United States. Many others had their visa applications rejected, but theirs were approved.
They had packed their suitcases to the brim with local sweets and traveled 24 hours by bus along with four other parents of U.S. immigrants. Any minute now, they would be pulling up at the East Los Angeles event hall where José waited along with other immigrants who hadn’t seen their families in decades.
José, who wore a gray polo shirt and new jeans, thought about all the time that had passed. The lonely nights during Christmas season, when he longed for the taste of his mother’s cooking. All the times he could have used his father’s advice.
His plan had been to stay in the U.S. a few years, save up some money and return home to begin his life.
But life doesn’t wait. Before he knew it, decades had passed and José had built community and a career in carpentry in California.
Juan Mascorro sings for the reunited families.
He sent tens of thousands of dollars to Mexico: to fund improvements on his parents’ house, to buy machines for the family butcher shop. He sent his contractor brother money to build a two-bedroom house where José hopes to retire one day.
His mother, who likes talking on the phone, kept him informed on all the doings in town. The construction of a new bridge. The marriages, births, deaths and divorces. The creep of violence as drug cartels brought their wars to Zacatecas.
And then one day, a near-tragedy. José’s father, jovial, strong, always cracking jokes, landed in the hospital with a heart that doctors said was failing. He languished there six months on the brink of death.
But he lived. And when he got out, he declared that he wanted to see his eldest son.
A framed artwork depicting the states of California and Zacatecas is a gift for families being reunited.
A full third of people born in Zacatecas live in the U.S. Migration is so common, the state has an agency tasked with attending to the needs of Zacatecanos living abroad. It has been helping elderly Mexicans get visas to visit family north of the border for years.
The state tried to get some 25 people visas this year. But the United States, now led by a president who has vilified immigrants, approved only six.
José had a childhood friend, Horacio Zapata, who also migrated to the U.S. and who hasn’t seen his father in 30 years. Horacio’s father also applied for a visa, but he didn’t make the cut.
Horacio was crestfallen. A few years back, his mother died in Mexico. He had spent his life working to help get her out of poverty, and then never had a chance to say goodbye. He often thought about what he would give to share one last hug with her. Everything. He would give everything.
He and his wife had come with José to offer moral support. He put his arm around his friend, whose voice shook with nerves.
Horacio Zapata, 48, hoped his father would be able to come to Los Angeles through the reunion program, but his visa request was denied.
East L.A. was normally bustling, filled with vendors hawking fruit, flowers and tacos. But on this hot August afternoon, as a car pulled up outside the event hall to deposit José’s parents and the other elderly travelers, the streets were eerily quiet.
Since federal agents had descended on California, apprehending gardeners, day laborers and car wash workers en masse, residents in immigrant-heavy pockets like this one had mostly stayed inside.
The thought crossed José’s mind: What if immigration agents raided the reunion event? But there was no way he was going to miss it.
Suddenly, the director of the Federation of Zacatecas Hometown Assns. of Southern California, which was hosting the reunion, asked José to rise. Slowly, his parents walked in.
Of course they recognized one another. His first thought: How small they both seemed.
José Antonio Rodríguez and his mother, Juana Contreras Sánchez, wipe tears from their eyes after being reunited.
José gathered his mother in an embrace. He handed her the flowers. And then he gripped his father tightly.
This is a miracle, his father whispered. He’d asked the Virgin for this.
His father, whose heart condition persists, was fatigued from the long journey. They all took seats. His father put his head down on the table and sobbed. José stared at the ground, sniffling, pulling up his shirt to wipe away tears.
A mariachi singer performed a few songs, too loudly. Plates of food appeared. José and his parents picked at it, mostly in silence.
At the next table, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, addressed his middle-aged son as muchachito — little boy.
In the coming days, José and his parents would relax into one another’s company, go shopping, attend church. Most evenings, they would stay up past midnight talking.
José Antonio Rodríguez holds a bouquet of flowers for his mother and father.
Eventually, the parents would head back to Zacatecas because of the limit on their visas.
But for now, they were together, and eager to see José’s home. He took them by the arms as he guided them out into the California sun.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory, combined with the Republican takeover of the Senate, may extend conservative control of the Supreme Court for another two decades.
For much of the last four years, progressives focused their energies on proposals to expand the size of the court or impose term limits on the current justices. These ideas to restructure the court depended on Democrats winning sweeping power in both the White House and the Senate.
Instead, Republicans will be in charge and positioned to preserve the conservative grip on the high court long after Trump leaves Washington.
The two oldest justices are also its most conservative jurists. Clarence Thomas, 76, joined the court 33 years ago and would become the longest-serving justice in the court’s history early in 2028. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., appointed in 2006, is 74.
If Vice President Kamala Harris had won the election, there was little chance they would have chosen to retire and have their seats filled by a liberal.
But conservative analysts think it is quite likely Alito or Thomas or both will retire during Trump’s second term.
Ed Whelan, who writes regularly in the National Review, said he expects Alito will leave first.
“I certainly have no inside knowledge. But I’d bet big on it,” he said.
He thinks the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while Trump was in office will persuade Thomas and Alito they should not stay too long. She resisted calls from liberals to step down during President Obama’s last term, betting Hillary Clinton would succeed him in 2016. Instead Trump won, and a liberal seat flipped to a conservative.
Retirements by Alito or Thomas would allow Trump to appoint one or two far younger conservatives, likely selecting from those he appointed to the federal appeals courts during his first term.
Once confirmed, they could potentially sit for 30 years.
If Democrats had kept control of the Senate, they could have blocked Trump nominees they considered extreme. But Trump and his legal advisers will not face that hurdle.
In his first term, Trump appointed three conservative justices with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
When Justice Antonin Scalia died early in 2016, McConnell prevented Obama from filling his seat.
Early in 2017, Trump chose Neil M. Gorsuch, who is now 57, to fill Scalia’s seat. When Ginsburg died weeks before the 2020 election, McConnell cleared the way for Trump’s quick appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is now 52.
Along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, 59, they cast the key votes to overturn the right to abortion in 2022, and in July, to give Trump and other presidents a broad immunity from criminal charges for their actions while in office.
All three of them can expect to serve another 20 years on the court.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the sixth conservative, will turn 70 in January. The oldest of the court’s three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, had her 70th birthday in June.
While neither of them are seen as likely candidates to step down in the next four years, Trump could appoint another young conservative if either of them retired.
President Biden will leave office having made a historic but singular appointment in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black woman.
Clergy sex abuse scandals have rocked Catholic churches across the world, but few places have seen the financial toll of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.
With a record $880-million settlement with victims announced this week, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has now paid out more than $1.5 billion.
The bill reflects its rank as the largest archdiocese in the nation, with more than 4 million members, and a California law that gave accusers more time to file suit.
But attorneys and others who have been involved in more than two decades of litigation say it also is an indication of the failures of church leaders to identify molesting priests and prevent them from committing more crimes.
Some of those priests, after undergoing treatment at residential centers, were shuffled to new parishes, frequently in immigrant neighborhoods where the abuse would continue.
With the latest settlements, the number of people alleging abuse now stands at nearly 2,500.
But the true number could be much higher, lawyers say.
One reason for the size of L.A.’s payout is that the California Legislature in 2019 opted to give adults more time to file lawsuits over childhood sexual abuse, which prompted more survivors to come forward. This extended the amount of time available for litigation compared with other states, which were also roiled by abuse scandals.
“The L.A. archdiocese is not an anomaly,” attorney Mike Reck said. “It’s larger and been subject to more litigation and so we have found out a lot more about how it operated. I am not sure the archdiocese is worse than other places. I think we just don’t know as much about other dioceses.”
The abuse — and efforts to cover it up — dates back decades.
It reaches into the highest levels of the church. Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, the second-in-command to two cardinals and a well-known leader who was the inspiration for Robert De Niro‘s character in the movie “True Confessions,” was accused after his death of abuse.
Troves of church documents that served as a road map for the cover-up placed extreme scrutiny on Cardinal Roger Mahony, whose handling of clergy abuse has been roundly criticized.
Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles for more than two decades, was a youthful and high-profile leader who used his position atop the diocese in the 1980s and 1990s to champion social and economic justice, among other causes large and small. But his legacy was obliterated after it was revealed that he supervised the reassignment of numerous priests who admitted to or were accused of molesting young children.
With the behavior left unchecked, the number of victims within the largest archdiocese in the United States grew exponentially.
“The real fault lies at the feet of Roger Mahony,” said attorney John Manly, who for decades has represented victims of sexual abuse. “He could have come here in 1986 and made the change. Instead, he chose to conceal it from the public, the media and, more importantly, law enforcement.”
The culture of secrecy and the practice of shifting accused priests between parishes rather than alerting law enforcement — a feature of the scandal that played out in dioceses across the country — was also a persistent issue in Los Angeles. Delayed enforcement against the accused priests allowed them to move between locations and abuse other children, victims’ advocates say.
The list of abusers within the Archdiocese in Los Angeles includes more than 500 names, according to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
“There has been a continuous, uninterrupted flow of hundreds of perpetrators in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” said Patrick Wall, an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and a former Benedictine monk.
Mahony could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mahony wrote in a letter in 2013 that he had made “mistakes” in handling sexual abuse, but added that he followed the procedures that were in place at dioceses across the country: to remove priests from active ministry if there was reasonable suspicion that abuse had occurred and refer them to a residential treatment center.
He did not know at the time, he wrote, that “following these procedures was not effective, and that perpetrators were incapable of being treated in such a way that they could safely pursue priestly ministry.”
“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” he wrote.
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez in 2013 temporarily relieved Mahony of all public duties over his mishandling of the sex abuse scandal, a move that was unprecedented at the time in the American Catholic Church.
Mahony, now in his late 80s, lived for several years on the campus of a parish in the San Fernando Valley. After his retirement, he vowed to devote more time to immigration reform, a lifelong passion for him that stems from his experiences with migrant workers in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley during his years in the Fresno and Stockton diocese.
The church’s own records, shielded by an army of lawyers for decades, revealed an orchestrated conspiracy to prevent authorities from learning of criminal behavior.
In memos written in 1986 and 1987, Msgr. Thomas Curry, then the archdiocese’s advisor on sex abuse cases, proposed ways to prevent police from investigating priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused children. Curry suggested to Mahony that the diocese prevent the priests from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid a criminal investigation.
Msgr. Peter Garcia admitted to church officials to preying on undocumented children in predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes. After he was discharged from a treatment center, Mahony told him to stay away from California to avoid legal repercussions, according to internal church files.
“I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors,” the archbishop wrote to the treatment center’s director in July 1986.
Garcia left the priesthood in 1989 and was never prosecuted. He died in 2009.
Another priest, Father Michael Baker — one of the church’s most prolific abusers — had been accused of molesting at least 40 boys during his decades in the priesthood. In 2007, Baker pleaded guilty in criminal court to abusing two boys. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released in 2011 based on the time he’d served in county jail and good behavior.
Two brothers alleged that Baker began abusing them at St. Hilary Catholic Church in Pico Rivera in 1984 when they were 5 and 7, according to court records. The boys’ family moved to Mexico in 1986, but Baker, over the next 13 years, flew them to Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Arizona, where the abuse allegedly continued until 1999, at least once in the priest’s rectory in Los Angeles County, court records show.
Records show that Mahony knew about Baker’s sexual abuse of boys decades before it came to light publicly.
In 1986, Baker first broached the topic in a note to the cardinal after Mahony appealed for priests to report inappropriate behavior, according to internal church records.
“During the priest retreat … you provided us with an invitation to talk to you about the shadow that some of us might have,” Baker wrote. “I would like to take you up on the invitation.”
At a spiritual retreat in December 1986, Baker made a full confession and was transferred to a treatment facility in New Mexico. The police were not notified, and no effort was made to contact the children who had been abused, according to church records.
Baker returned to ministry in the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1987, church records show. At the time, Mahony informed Baker that he was not permitted to be left alone with a child, but records show that Baker violated this directive on at least three occasions, all of which were observed by archdiocesan personnel.
Baker remained in the ministry until 2000, when he was defrocked, church records show. In 2002, as the clergy abuse scandal came to light, The Times revealed that the archdiocese secretly paid $1.3 million to two of Baker’s victims two years before.
In a world that rewards short-term thinking and instant gratification, staying true to a long-term mission is becoming increasingly rare. In this personal reflection, I share the challenges and rewards of dedicating 15 years to The Emotion Machine, and why fighting the temptation of rapid success is key to building something truly meaningful and lasting.
When I first started this website in 2009, I told myself it was a lifelong project that I could continue to build on until the day I died. Fifteen years later, I still stubbornly hold onto this belief, but I underestimated the difficulty of this commitment.
Our current society does not reward long-term thinking. We are taught to live in the moment, take what is right in front of you, and indulge in what is comfortable and convenient; not in what is meaningful, but hard.
This short-term attitude has taken over all of our society from business to politics to relationships.
It’s rare to see someone think on a long timeline, especially 10, 20, 50, or 100 years into the future. In many ways, our brains aren’t wired to think on this scale; but we’re capable of doing it, and developing real foresight and concern about the future is a necessary ingredient to almost all human greatness.
But who is really thinking about the future today?
Companies focus on their daily stock prices and quarterly earnings, politicians focus on their election seasons, new relationships are just one swipe away on a dating app, and modern work has become increasingly focused on gigs and temporary contracts.
Today, it’s rare to see anyone committed to anything for over 10 years, whether it’s a career, a relationship, a creative hobby, or a personal goal.
It’s not completely our faults. Our current world incentives this short-term thinking by promoting hedonism (“give pleasure now”), materialism (“money is the most important thing”), and nihilism (“nothing really matters because eventually I’ll die.”)
All of these beliefs and attitudes come together to create an epidemic of shortsightedness and selfishness, which ultimately lead to a lack of real meaning and purpose. This is not just an individual problem, but a systemic problem that permeates our society and institutions on almost every level.
Where are the long-term visions?
Our society lacks long-term vision and it manifests itself in countless ways. One example I know from firsthand experience is short-term thinking within the online creator “self help” spaces.
As someone who has been writing and sharing content for over a decade, I’ve seen thousands of other websites, blogs, and social media accounts come and go. Many of them get really hyped up on some version of “become your own boss” or “I’m going to be an influencer”-type mindset, and then give up after a couple months of disappointment.
One fundamental problem is they weren’t ever emotionally invested in what they were building. Their work wasn’t driven by a long-term vision or deep-seated convictions, they were solely interested in what they perceived as an easy and convenient way to get popular or make money.
Once again, materialism shows its weakness. Money can be a bad motivator – even a destructive one – when it clashes with certain goals that require you to think beyond a mere trader mindset to achieve. If you are only motivated by money, then you are at the whims of money. If you are motivated by something deeper, then it takes more than money (or lack of) to stop you.
This same attitude reveals itself within a lot of startup and tech companies. Many of today’s entrepreneurs start new companies or new projects just so they can sell it to a bigger corporation in a couple years. They don’t build things from cradle-to-grave anymore. They don’t care about creative ownership of their projects, or what happens to what they’ve built when it reaches the marketplace, they just see these projects as vehicles for quick bucks and rapid exits.
Fighting the allure of rapid and cheap success
Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to abandon the mission of this website for quick personal gain, but I chose not to.
I’ve rejected numerous money-making opportunities because I felt they jeopardized the integrity of the website, from paid sponsorships, to SEO backlinks, to advertisements, to having tempting offers to buy the website outright.
In theory, I could sell this website overnight and it would be a massive financial relief to me, especially as costs of living increase and more people experience economic hardship and debt-based living.
These are difficult temptations I wrestle with. This world incentives short-term thinking and immediate rewards. I have to remind myself on a daily basis what my core values are.
I imagine my life if I sold this website. Sure, it takes care of financial problems and it gives me more free time. I definitely have other goals and passions that I could put more energy into like music or screenwriting, but it’s also walking away from fifteen years of blood, sweat, and tears. That’s an emotional investment that is hard to rebuild with anything.
Most importantly, there’s more work to do. I still have hundreds of ideas and drafts for future articles that I need to write and publish. There’s still more to say – and I feel like I’d be doing a disservice to the world if I didn’t say it.
I look around the self help space today and believe my work still adds something special and valuable.
Building an evergreen website
Fifteen years isn’t that long compared to the timescale I’m thinking on.
All of the content on this site is designed to be evergreen, so someone can read an article a hundred years into the future and still take something valuable from it. In contrast, the majority of content on the internet that is focused on news, pop culture, or current events is barely relevant after a week.
From an intergenerational perspective, The Emotion Machine could be a website that exists long after my death if I can find someone to pass it down to as a successor at some point. I would love for it to be an ongoing project. Our tagline is “Self Improvement in the 21st Century” so I’m at least thinking on a one hundred year scale. I’ll have to remember to update that in 2100.
To be completely honest, I’m proud of the work accomplished here so far, even when I feel it isn’t fully appreciated. This site has a vast library of articles, quizzes, and worksheets, and while I find that most people (including monthly members) don’t fully take advantage of these resources, I know they stand on their own as evergreen education for whomever is willing to learn.
A lifetime commitment
This article is a declaration to myself more than anything. It’s been a tough year so far and I needed to remind myself what really matters to me and why I invest my energy in the things I do. People like you also help keep me going, especially those that join and support this work. Thank you.
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Pizzamania, a beloved pizza restaurant and a staple in Whittier for more than 50 years, burned down Tuesday morning in a blaze that the owner believes might have been intentionally set.
The pizza joint and four other businesses were damaged after a fire was reported at 2:25 a.m. in the one-story strip mall in the 13500 block of Telegraph Road, Los Angeles County fire officials said.
Firefighters arrived to find the five businesses engulfed in flames. The blaze was extinguished by 3:04 a.m.
Patrons and passersby posted images of the fire on social media, and expressed grief over the loss of the restaurant that has been a fixture in the community for decades.
“NOOOOOOO!!!!” one person posted on Instagram, followed by a series of crying emojis.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Fire Department said the cause of the fire is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“Someone came by and torched it,” said Warren Haines, one of the co-owners of the restaurant.
Video cameras from the restaurant were destroyed in the fire, but Haines said video from one of the neighboring businesses showed what looked like someone intentionally setting the fire.
Haines, who started the restaurant in 1973 with his business partner, Jim Barrit, said the person appeared to have targeted Pizzamania.
Investigators were searching the area for more surveillance images, he said.
Officials with the Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to inquiries about the fire.
The fire put about 50 employees at the restaurant out of work, he said.
“I’m pissed off,” he said. “It takes the wind out of your sail.”
Just hours after the fire, Haines said his son, who handles social media for the restaurant, had received more than 700 emails from patrons devastated about the news and wondering how they could help.
He said he was moved by their outreach and understands that Pizzamania was an icon in the community for decades.
“They call, and half of them are in tears,” he said. “It means everything to me.”
Haines said he’s reeling over the fire but intends to keep Pizzamania alive.
“We’re an institution,” he said. “I intend to rebuild.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was met with chants of “Karen! Karen!” after she described Vice President Kamala Harris as a role model who would fight to protect children at Monday’s opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
Bass told the energized crowd in Chicago that she and Harris worked together on youth homelessness and fixing the child welfare system more than a decade ago when Bass headed the California Assembly and Harris was a state prosecutor.
“Our bond was forged years ago, by a shared commitment to children,” said Bass, who has known Harris, 59, for nearly two decades. “A belief that it is everybody’s responsibility to care for every child, no matter where they come from or no matter who their parents are.”
Bass, 70, a well-known advocate for children who created the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth while in Congress, also used her short speech Monday to describe Harris’ work as California attorney general to help youths in the juvenile justice system.
“I know Kamala,” Bass said. “And she feels the importance of this work in her bones. When Kamala meets a young person, you can feel her passion. You can feel her heart. And you can feel her fearlessness.
“That is what defines a commitment to children: being willing to fight fiercely for every child. And trust me, Kamala has done that her entire life.”
Bass grinned at the crowd and appeared to relish her moment in the spotlight. She chuckled as she talked about how she and Harris made history and when Harris, the first female vice president, swore her in after Bass became the first woman to become L.A. mayor in 2022.
Ahead of the swearing-in, “we knew we were sending a message to young girls everywhere: that they too can lead,” Bass said.
Also, Harris and Bass have opened up to reporters about their respective families. Harris is a stepmother and refers to herself as “Momala,” while Bass has three adult stepchildren.
Other Californians who spoke during the convention’s opening night included U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Reps. Maxine Waters and Robert Garcia, and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr.
Before Harris was chosen to be then-candidate Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, Bass was also viewed as a possible pick for the ticket. But some assumed Harris’ political consultants were behind a perceived effort to knock Bass off the list of potential candidates.
Still, the buzz around Bass being a possible vice president brought her national attention. A year later, Bass launched her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles.
