Decimation (from Latin decimatio ‘removal of a tenth) was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.
A pro-Israeli counterprotester was arrested Thursday morning by UCLA police, weeks after he allegedly assaulted occupants of a campus protest encampment with a wooden pole.
According to the UCLA Police Department, detectives interviewed witnesses and victims and reviewed security camera footage from the pro-Palestinian demonstration to identify the suspect, who was not affiliated with the campus and allegedly among a group who violently attacked students, faculty and staff on April 30.
The 18-year-old man was detained at a business in Beverly Hills and booked for felony assault with a deadly weapon, police said. He is currently being held in Los Angeles County jail on $30,000 bail. This appears to be the first arrest of a counterprotester.
A law enforcement source confirmed to The Times that the man is Edan On, who was identified by CNN last week as a counterprotester wearing a white hoodie and a mask in widely shared images and videos that showed him repeatedly hitting a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole. On is also listed on the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department arrest log.
“The UCLA Police Department is committed to investigating all reported acts of violence and is actively working to identify the other perpetrators of violence associated with any protest or counter-protest activities between April 25, 2024, and May 2, 2024,” the Police Department said in a statement. “The investigations are ongoing.”
A group of student reporters were among those attacked by counterprotesters on April 30. The violence prompted an independent review of the university’s actions and law enforcement’s response to the campus unrest. Universities across the country have been disrupted by protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Campus Police Chief John Thomas was removed from his post and reassigned, officials said earlier this week, after he was criticized for security failures that led to violence at a pro-Palestinian encampment. And UCLA Chancellor Gene Block was interrogated by members of Congress Thursday over his handling of complaints regarding campus antisemitism.
Jade Stevens stands at the edge of a snowy cliff and takes in the jaw-dropping panorama of the Sierra.
Peaks reaching more than a mile high form the backdrop to Bear Valley, a kaleidoscope of green pastures mixed with ponderosa pines, firs, cedars and oak trees.
Stevens, 34, is well aware that some of her fellow Black Americans can’t picture themselves in places like this. Camping, hiking, mountain biking, snow sports, venturing to locales with wild animals in their names — those are things white people do.
As co-founder of the 40 Acre Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land conservancy, she’s determined to change that perception.
Darryl Lucien snowshoes near Lake Putt.
The nonprofit recently secured $3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy to purchase 650 acres of a former logging forest north of Lake Tahoe. It will be a haven for experienced Black outdoor lovers and novices alike.
The land trust, almost by necessity, has both an environmental and a social mission, Stevens says as she leads a tour of the parcels straddling Interstate 80.
The most obvious goal for the property is to help the state reach a target of protecting 30% of its open space by 2030 — as part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s overall climate and conservation initiative.
Given that Black Americans historically have not enjoyed equal access to national parks and wilderness recreation areas — and have often been deprived of the chance to steward large open spaces because of discriminatory land policies — the purchase carries immense cultural importance too.
The group’s name derives from Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s unfulfilled promise to grant some emancipated slaves “40 acres and a mule” to help them start over after the Civil War.
An avid cyclist, Stevens is part of a growing movement among environmentalists, outdoor enthusiasts and naturalists who believe that safeguarding the ecosystem, promoting wellness and confronting historical injustices go hand-in-hand.
Although surveys show that Black people care as much about climate change and protecting the environment as other Americans, these issues aren’t necessarily top of mind in a era when racial strife, police violence and economic inequities command more attention.
Lake Putt is the main attraction among the the 40 Acre League’s recently purchased parcels.
How can you heed the call of the wild when life in your own backyard presents so many challenges? Stevens, a marketing professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills who lives in a historically Black neighborhood in Los Angeles — 385 miles to the south — can appreciate why some might feel this way.
The 70-mile drive from Sacramento, the state capital, feels like a journey to another dimension, one where Black people make up only about 1% of the population.
A Trump 2024 sign greets you upon leaving Sacramento’s suburbs and entering Placer County. Winding past Gold Rush-era towns, forests and rocky outcroppings, the elevation soon rises to 3,000 feet, 4,000 feet and finally 5,000 feet.
At Emigrant Gap, Stevens sits at the edge of Lake Putt and smiles like a woman on top of the world. The lake is the main attraction among the conservancy’s parcels and it’s the body of water motorists see on the right as they head toward Nevada.
The water is so still you can see a perfect reflection of the snow-capped ridges.
Jade Stevens walks over a bridge in Emigrant Gap.
This is also an ideal spot for Stevens to envision all that the 40 Acre group wants to do on this land, from helping to protect species such as southern long-toed salamanders and foothill yellow-legged frogs to helping humans who don’t see themselves as nature or wildlife lovers develop a new appreciation for California’s fragile ecosystem.
“These plants, everything here, they all rely on each other,” she says. “I haven’t brought my family out here yet, but just from them seeing what I’m doing, it’s already sparking conversation.”
Trudging in snowshoes alongside Stevens is Darryl Lucien,an attorney for the 40 Acre group who has acted as a liaison between the nonprofit and officials in local and state government.
The land trust isn’t as disconnected from Black Californians as some might think, Lucien says.
Next to the lake, a spillway flows into a stream that the Department of Water Resources refers to as Blue Canyon Creek.
Blue Canyon Creek runs through land recently purchased by the 40 Acre Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land conservancy.
Waters from Blue Canyon Creek eventually flow into the North Fork of the American River, then the Sacramento River, and then the California delta, where some flows will be channeled into the State Water Project, “which eventually finds its way down to Los Angeles,” Lucien says.
A look of racial pride washes over Lucien, 38, when he contemplates the possibility that these waters might reach the homes of Black Angelenos.
“Little do they know their water starts on Black land,” he says. “You’re standing at the source, baby.”
It has been less than a year since state Assemblymember Mike Gipson, a Democrat from South L.A. County and an early champion of the nonprofit, presented the group with a check to purchase the land. The planned habitat restoration will take time, but Stevens already has other big ideas.
Gazing across the lake to the southern shore, Stevens sees a location for a nature center that can hold environmental education classes and double as a rentable lodge for gatherings.
She daydreams about installing a pier for fishing, lookout points along the shore and adult treehouses for glamping among conifers so tall they don’t fit in a camera’s viewfinder.
Just beyond the southern shore there are old timber-company clearings which could someday be converted into trails that hikers can use to reach the adjacent Tahoe National Forest.
“This is an area where a lot of community building will take place,” Stevens says. “We’re hoping that everyone finds at least one thing that makes them feel welcome on this property.”
The 40 Acre Conservation League has secured $3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy to purchase 650 acres of a former logging area north of Lake Tahoe.
“Welcome” is not a word that has historically greeted Black people in the nation’s rural spaces and wilderness parks, says KangJae “Jerry” Lee, a social and environmental justice researcher and assistant professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.
Lee notes the irony that most Black Americans descend from enslaved Africans who were stolen from their homelands specifically for their expertise in land stewardship and farming. Engaging with the outdoors was anything but a foreign concept.
“Some of them had better skill sets than the European colonists,” Lee says.
Black people built whole towns in the Great Plains and the West — including Allensworth, in Tulare County — though many were overrun by white mobs, seized or suffered decline due to a lack of equal access to resources such as water.
Some of the first rangers stationed at Yosemite and Sequoia national parks were Black, yet the reality is that the national park system was originally designed as way for white visitors to enjoy nature’s splendor, Lee says.
In response, Black-owned resorts catering to an African American clientele sprang up in the early 20th century — including in Val Verde, a “black Palm Springs” an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles; at Lake Elsinore near Riverside; and at Manhattan Beach.
The parks ostensibly welcome all today, but studies show that Black Americans are among the least likely of any racial group to visit them.
“Black people inherently had a deep, deep connection to the land,” Lee says.”That relationship has been severed over centuries.”
Stevens reflects on this painful history as she talks about the group’s plan to acquire other lands throughout California, including open spaces closer to L.A.
Recreation and conservation aren’t the only imperatives at Emigrant Gap.
Stevens pulls out a copy of a handwritten letter she received from a Black man from L.A. who is an inmate at San Quentin. He saw a TV report about the land purchase and felt inspired by its mission. He writes about how exposure to nature and recreation can help steer Black and brown teens away from gangs and violence, and out of the criminal justice system. Stevens agrees.
The property will be a small-business incubator too. The nonprofit intends to help Black and brown entrepreneurs develop sustainable, outdoor-oriented ventures such as hiking excursions — fostering generational wealth in the process.
“How we get back to this truth of appreciating nature, being connected to the outdoors, is our story to tell,” Stevens says.
One local ally wants to help the group shift the narrative around Black people and nature — Cindy Gustafson, who sits on the Placer County Board of Supervisors.
Gustafson also serves on the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, which awarded the league $750,000 to help purchase the land.
The 40 Acre League’s Jade Stevens, left, and Darryl Lucien walk along an earthen dam at Lake Putt.
Gustafson, who is white, appreciates the league’s desire to help Northern Californians manage forested lands, which have been devastated in recent years by deadly and costly wildfires. Fires have grown more and more severe due to rising global temperatures, posing a greater risk to flora, fauna and residents in cities and rural areas alike.
“Many of us haven’t had the experiences or the background to understand the nature of these forests and how important they are to our climate, our environment,” Gustafson says. “Having new stewards is really important, as is diversity. It’s a sign of hope for me in these divisive times. … Taking care of this land takes us all.”
Stevens seems undaunted by the challenge of persuading reluctant Black Californians to view Emigrant Gap as a setting where they can celebrate their culture while learning about the ecosystem.
First came the all-night parties and music blaring from a neighbor’s house in Long Beach that kept Andy Oliver up at night.
Then there were the “smoke outs,” when visitors enjoying refuge from hostile cannabis laws in their home states blazed marijuana throughout the day, sending clouds of hazy smoke into Oliver’s sanctuary, his house in the city’s College Estates neighborhood.
The final straw was on Jan. 2, when a shooting victim climbed over his fence, bleeding and looking for shelter.
In each case, the source of Oliver’s grief were tourists staying in an unhosted short-term rental next door. Such rentals are listed by homeowners who are not present during the guest’s stay, as with Airbnb.
“All this happened over a year’s time, and it was beginning to be too much,” Oliver, 50, said. “This is a residential area, and something had to be done.”
Fast-forward four months, and Oliver has successfully petitioned Long Beach’s Community Development Department to ban short-term rentals within College Estates. His win also spawned nine similar petitions around the city.
“I don’t have the final count, but there are something like 755 homes, and we just got enough signatures,” Oliver said. “I heard it was close and I don’t have confirmation of the final vote, but I was informed [last week] that we succeeded.”
Oliver’s victory was the culmination of nearly a year of work, which included trying the city’s complaint hotline, speaking with a councilmember and, ultimately, founding an online advocacy group, the Long Beach Safe Neighborhood Coalition.
For months, coalition members commiserated on the social media site Nextdoor over their frustrations with the short-term rentals, gathering momentum for a ban.
“The common theme that we kept running into was that this was a big deal for many residents and almost all of us got the runaround from the city of Long Beach,” Oliver said. “They didn’t seem to care.”
As short-term rentals have spread, the responses across Southern California have varied.
Currently, there are 626 non-primary short-term rentals registered in the city, according to the Community Development Department.
Jean Young, a 67-year-old technical writer, is among those with a short-term rental.
“I’m a part-time writer, and the income from rentals just smooths out the rough edges and has been wonderful,” she said.
Young splits her time between her three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Long Beach’s affluent Bixby Knolls neighborhood and one in the sprawling senior living community at Leisure World in Seal Beach, where she spends three or four months out of the year.
She began renting out a part of her Long Beach home 11 years ago to JetBlue and Southwest flight attendants in town between shifts, then turned it into a place of refuge for traveling nurses during COVID-19. Now Young hosts physical therapists and medical residents.
Sometimes she rents out the entire place.
“My son has since moved on to college and my mother passed away, so there’s all this room in my house to share,” she said. “It would be sad to lose that ability.”
Young said she understands the backlash from community members. The Jan. 2 shooting next to Oliver’s home on Kallin Avenue was “horrible” and an “abomination,” she said, but a citywide ban would ultimately be “damaging.”
Oliver said he initially tried other means.
He called the city’s hotline to complain about his neighbor’s rental, “but nothing was ever enforced.”
He reached out to a city councilmember and the city attorney.
Eventually, he had to go grassroots.
“There were two previous petition drives that failed, so I wasn’t sure if we would have success,” he said.
But whenever he was discouraged, he would think back to his encounters with rowdy neighbors.
In December, he said he spoke with a bunch of 20-somethings from Texas staying at his neighbor’s house, because the “insane amount of marijuana they were smoking” was floating into his home.
“They said recreational marijuana wasn’t allowed in Texas and they were going to take advantage of their time here,” he said.
Just a few weeks later, on Jan. 2, a man standing in front of an unhosted short-term rental in the 800 block of Kallin Avenue was shot in the lower body by an unknown gunman, according to Long Beach Police.
The home had been listed on Peerspace, an online marketplace for hourly rentals, Oliver said. The shooting is still under investigation.
The victim tried to climb Oliver’s fence and smeared blood on the gate as he crossed into the yard.
“My house was closed for hours due to an investigation,” he said.
As momentum for Oliver’s petition grew, help came from unexpected places.
Better Neighbors LA, a self-described coalition of hosts, tenants, housing activists, hotel workers and community members, footed Oliver’s $1,050 petition ban fee with the city.
“BNLA is happy to support neighbors like Andy in Long Beach as well as people and groups across Los Angeles County who want reasonable regulations on an out-of-control industry that affects their neighborhoods,” the group said in a statement.
Oliver said the group is also funding efforts to ban unhosted short-term rentals in nine other Long Beach communities, including El Dorado Park, Naples and South of Conant, where resident Stephen Carr is leading an effort.
Carr, a freelance photographer, said the ban was necessary after his neighbor’s home listed on Airbnb “turned into a hotel.”
He said one weekend last summer, guests in town for an electronic dance music festival stayed up every night.
“The music is blaring. There’s screaming and drunkenness spilling out into the front and back lawns till 3 a.m.,” he said. “One of the guests actually apologized the next day, but then they partied again till 4 a.m.”
Carr said he called the police, but they would only issue warnings. He also tried the city’s complaint hotline, but never received a call back.
Eventually, he found Oliver on Nextdoor and linked up with Better Neighbors LA, which he said funded his $1,050 petition fee.
“There’s no regulation, no help coming from anywhere,” Carr said.
For their part, the sites that host short-term rentals in Long Beach such as Airbnb, Peerspace and Vrbo, say they have outlets for residents to voice their concerns and point out problems.
Airbnb cited a city report in April that said the majority of its operators were “meeting compliance standards” and that there was “proactive and reactive” enforcement against violations.
The hosting site has a Community Disturbance Policy that bans parties and events that are disruptive, open-invite and that invite excessive noise, visitors, trash, littering and smoking, among other issues.
Neighbors witnessing issues or violations are encouraged to reach out to Airbnb’s support staff, a company spokesperson said.
Peerspace, meanwhile, said its sites rent out venues on an hourly basis including homes, photo studios, storefronts and banquet halls.
The company said it takes neighbor concerns seriously and asks anyone experiencing complications to reach out to its Trust and Safety team. It also said it had no listing for the home on Kallin Avenue on Jan. 2, when the shooting victim climbed into Oliver’s backyard.
A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy says he was fired after refusing to take part in law enforcement gang activity, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Federico Carlo, the ex-lawman behind the suit, alleges he was wrongly accused of giving a Nazi salute and sharing a sexually explicit photo, then “abruptly terminated” by a “tattooed Regulator deputy gang member” who is now the acting commander overseeing training and personnel.
The acting commander, Capt. John Pat Macdonald, did not respond to a request for comment, and the department did not answer questions about whether he has or had a Regulator tattoo.
“The department has not officially received this claim but strives to provide a fair and equitable working environment for all employees,” officials wrote in an emailed statement to The Times. “Any act of retaliation, harassment, and discrimination will not be tolerated and is a violation of the department’s policy and values.”
Neither Carlo nor his attorney offered comment for this story. Carlo sued the county and is asking for unspecified damages.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has long been plagued by allegations that some of its highest-ranking officials sport tattoos representing exclusionary deputy subgroups. Last month, former Undersheriff Tim Murakami admitted under oath that he once had a tattoo associated with an East Los Angeles Station group known as the Cavemen.
Last year, the news site Capital & Main reported that current Undersheriff April Tardy admitted to having a station tattoo that some in the department said signified the V Boys deputy gang. And in 2022, Larry Del Mese, chief of staff to former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, publicly admitted membership in the Grim Reapers.
Yet last week sheriff’s officials told The Times the issue is “not reflective of the entire department” and pointed out that there are “multiple investigations related to deputy gangs” currently underway, and that a new anti-gang policy is being negotiated with the deputy labor unions.
For decades, the Sheriff’s Department has been bedeviled by allegations about gangs of deputies running roughshod over certain stations and floors of the jail. The groups are known by monikers such as the Executioners, the Vikings and the Regulators, and their members often bear the same sequentially numbered tattoos.
The group at the center of Carlo’s lawsuit, the Regulators, is typically affiliated with the Century Sheriff’s Station in Lynwood. It is one of the older deputy subgroups in the department, and it is commonly represented by the symbol of a skeleton in a cowboy hat. In recent years there have been some indications — including in a Rand Corp. study commissioned by county lawyers — that the group is no longer actively adding new members. Late last year, though, oversight officials spotted a Regulators sticker outside the Century Regional Detention Facility next door to the station.
The suit filed in late February traces Carlo’s problems back to 2005, when, he alleges, a deputy who was then the leader of the Regulators labeled him a “rat” because he refused to lie on probable cause reports.
A few years later, the suit says, two other alleged Regulators flunked Carlo out of training for the airborne division, which, he alleges, “had everything to do” with the fact that he “was not a member of a deputy gang and refused to violate the law.”
By mid-2019, Carlo was working at the department’s Emergency Vehicle Operations Center in Pomona as an instructor. He clashed with some of the other instructors who he said were risking safety by cutting corners to save time. After he complained and asked to be moved to another shift, tension started building between him and some of the other instructors — one of whom challenged him to a fight, according to the lawsuit. Later, that same deputy allegedly created disturbances, once by disrupting a class Carlo was teaching and another time by nearly crashing a patrol car into another deputy.
Eventually, Carlo reported the problems to his superiors. During a meeting with his lieutenant in 2022, Carlo allegedly told him that there had been “numerous vehicle collisions” caused by instructors, and that he’d even been hurt in one such crash himself. According to the lawsuit, when Carlo questioned why the lieutenant hadn’t done more to supervise the training, the lieutenant ordered him to rewrite the unit’s safety guidelines and give a briefing to the whole unit on them.
That March, according to the lawsuit, Carlo found out that a complaint had been filed against him alleging he’d made a Nazi salute when speaking about a sergeant with a German-sounding name.
A few weeks later, the suit says, Carlo was temporarily transferred out of the unit, as officials investigated the complaint. Near the end of summer, Carlo’s lieutenant called to tell him he’d be coming back to the training center — only to reverse course a few days later because another complaint had been filed against him, this time for sexual harassment.
It emerged that after the unit briefing that Carlo’s lieutenant instructed him to do earlier that year, two of the deputies who attended started talking and allegedly realized Carlo had shown them both an explicit picture on his phone. They said he’d implied it was an image of him and a female sergeant, according to the lawsuit. One of the deputies was the instructor who’d previously challenged Carlo to a fight.
“This was false,” the suit said. “No such photo ever existed.”
Though in 2022 officials closed the complaint about the Nazi salute — an accusation Carlo also denied — they kept investigating the sexual harassment complaint, according to the suit. In 2023, after what the lawsuit described as “years of retaliation, harassment [and] discrimination,” Carlo was fired.
“On April 13, 2023, plaintiff was terminated under false pretenses,” the suit says. “Captain Pat [Macdonald], the supervisor who made the decision on plaintiff’s termination, is a tattooed Regulator deputy gang member.”
Department officials confirmed to The Times that Carlo “separated from the department” last April after an internal investigation. But they did not comment on the accusations about Macdonald’s alleged Regulators tattoo, and they did not answer questions as to whether he is still believed to have it.
The Regulators have long been the subject of misconduct allegations. Nearly two decades ago, The Times reported on allegations that members of the group extorted money from other deputies, acted like gang members and controlled shift scheduling and administration at the station.
Deputies with Regulators tattoos told The Times then that they didn’t do anything inappropriate and had been unfairly maligned. They said their ink represented a close-knit group of deputies who worked hard.
“It’s like the all-stars of a baseball team,” one tattooed deputy said at the time. “You get the best.”
A six-table restaurant in Seaside, Florida, named Lazy Daze Cafe is to blame. The 1991 restaurant opening was the first from Kevin Boehm, who 12 years later would, along with Rob Katz, go on to establish Boka Restaurant Group. Boehm, then a University of Illinois student, was encouraged to drop out to pursue his dreams by his future famous writer roommate, Dave Eggers.
“It was a two-person operation: myself and my girlfriend at the time, Theresa. Small menu, small wine list, centered around fresh fish from the gulf, a few pastas, sandwiches, and salads at lunch,” says Boehm. I’ve always thought of it as my bachelor’s and master’s education in restaurants, as every responsibility rested on both our shoulders.”
Boehm went on to open other spots, including Indigo in Springfield, before meeting Katz, a Vancouver, British Columbia, native who moved to Chicago to work in the trading pits. Katz became a nightlife impresario, opening up places like the Elbo Room in Lakeview.
Katz wanted to leave nightclubs and Boehm wanted an in to the Chicago restaurant market. The two met through mutual friends in 2002 in Old Town. “We sat for coffee at Nookies, and the meeting was supposed to be 15 minutes. We sat for four hours. We just clicked instantly, felt the same way about hospitality and food, and were both big believers that design was a huge part of the puzzle. We basically shrugged our shoulders and said, ‘Let’s do one. What’s the worst that could happen?’” says Boehm.
Boka Restaurant Group’s Rob Katz (left) and Kevin Boehm.Boka Restaurant Group/Anthony Tahlier
Boehm and Katz were once very much like the ex-GM of their beloved Chicago Cubs, Theo Epstein. Like with Epstein, who won two World Series championships with the Boston Red Sox and one with the Cubs, Boka’s success came in identifying unknown and undervalued top-level talent like Giuseppe Tentori, Lee Wolen, and Gene Kato. Now Boehm and Katz mostly partner with big-name celebrity chefs like Stephanie Izard, Michael Solomonov, and most recently, although it didn’t work out as planned, Daniel Rose.
The real hidden feather in their cap is partnership with designers like Karen Herold of Studio K Creative, as well as AvroKO, who create interiors that beget immersive experiences. Through this formula, Katz and Boehm have earned reputations as empire builders.
The following is a ranking of the restaurants that make up Katz and Boehm’s Chicago empire, from 2003 to present (though their influence now extends to New York and Los Angeles, with noteworthy spots like Laser Wolf Brooklyn and Girl & the Goat LA). We also stuck to restaurants, thus omitting Lazy Bird, Boka’s cocktail bar in the Hoxton hotel. Whether the contender is one of Boka’s OG stalwarts or its clubbier offerings, the paramount criteria for the rankings below was food quality followed by the level of commitment to experiential design and/or original style.
Deciding which of Boka’s stellar lineup of chefs is the greatest is kind of like asking which Avenger is the best. They’re almost impossible to separate. However, if someone put a Global cleaver to my jugular and made me pick, I’m probably choosing Lee Wolen. Wolen is a student of culinary history and a veteran of Eleven Madison Park. Though he runs a three-star restaurant (by choice) in Boka, many of his plates are four-star prix fixe-level studies in impeccable technique. From chefs Meg Galus to Kim Mok, the pastry program at Boka has also always offered a double threat unmatched by almost any other place in town save Daisies (whose chef Joe Frillman worked at two shuttered Boka restaurants, Perennial Virant in Old Town and Balena in Lincoln Park).
Pairing it with a Top Chef and Iron Chef champion like Izard would make McDonald’s a first-tier restaurant. Adding in Boehm and Katz’s business and service acumen and Herold’s creative interiors made G&TG the real inflection point of Boka’s rise in Chicago, and maybe the launching pad for its current celebrity chef-driven multimarket restaurant domination.
The smoky wood-fired oven, which churns out first-class bread you don’t mind being charged for, and the flame-charred walls make you feel like you’re eating inside a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon barrel. I’ve been to Girl & the Goat many times and it seems like I wait months or years between visits. But every time I return to a platter of wood oven-roasted pig face glistening with red wine and maple syrup, gooey with the remains of a breached sunny side egg, I wonder why I waited. At almost 14 years old, few local spots — save sister restaurant Boka, or Alinea and Avec — have stayed on top of their game for so long.
Generally, after you’re assaulted by the pomp and circumstance of a well-designed restaurant, the luster often wears off. Stick around a while and you start inspecting a dining room, notice the smoke alarms, the exit signs, and the cheap paint. You start to feel like you’re in a fake set piece.
Momotaro, though, is more than a restaurant. It’s a story. It’s not reality per se. Certainly never in history has a Japanese salaryman’s office/sushi bar/ 1960s airport lounge as frequented by Don Draper ever existed. And yet, the attention to detail, the pen stroke graffiti in the bathrooms, the bar menu — a vintage split-flap airport departures/arrivals style display — makes up a world so unique that it feels real.
On my first visits, the hot food was the thing, but on subsequent visits, the sushi execution finally caught up with the vision. Silky lithe scrims of toro blanket plump toothsome grains of rice. Outside the city’s omakase stylings there may be no finer place for raw fish in Chicago. Girl & the Goat may have made the empire, but Momotaro is the spot that put Boehm and Katz on par with the best of the mega-restaurateurs.
4. Alla Vita, 564 W. Randolph Street, (312) 667-0104
Alla Vita/Anthony Tahlier
There are hundreds of Italian restaurants in Chicago, but most are of the multigenerational-owned, Frank-Sinatra-got-hammered-in-this-very-booth, red-sauce variety. At Alla Vita, Lee Wolen brings a top chef’s eye to the cuisine, elevating beyond fried calamari with pillowy ricotta gnudi dripping in cacio e pepe cream. You also likely won’t find a more beautiful or stylish dining crowd in Chicago, a reflection of the sleek space that features hanging gardens and gauzy undulating lanterns that mimic the blazing energy weaving through the room.
I remember running over as fast as I could when GT Prime’s namesake Giuseppe Tentori took over the kitchen at Boka after he left as chef de cuisine of Charlie Trotter’s. Tentori had spent nine years working for Trotter, which, based on its exacting standards, is like spending 100 years in most other kitchens. Few, except maybe Matthias Merges, had put in that much time at Trotter’s and lived to tell the story with a great second act.
But Tentori dusted off his shoulder and rode his bicycle/pasta machine, aka “The Black Stallion,” to glory at Boka and then at GT Fish & Oyster. Prime, which features the coolest taxidermy in Chicago (the oryx and sable antelope mounted in the front vestibule are nicknamed Chuck and Tenderloin, respectively) is Tentori’s true masterpiece. At Prime, Tentori took the steakhouse to a clientele beyond expense account folks who buy Louis Vuitton trunks by the busload. By curating small cuts of Japanese A5 wagyu and prime strip loin and mixing them in with silky tagliatelle or world-class lasagna, Tentori made a meat emporium a welcoming place for all real food enthusiasts again. As a bonus (ever since his other spot GT Fish & Oyster closed), you might even find its legendary clam chowder as a special here.
6. Cabra at the Hoxton hotel, 200 N. Green Street, (312) 761-1717
Boka Restaurant Group
The first time I ate at chef Izard’s Cabra, I thought it was some kind of time warp from the 1980s. Everyone on staff seemed to be wearing acid-washed mom jeans. The food wasn’t quite of the era, but it was inconsistent relative to Tanta, the superior Peruvian choice in River North. Since then, a tightening of the menu, focusing on mouthwatering ceviche and delightful chorizo queso dip, has created an infusion of new energy that allowed the brand to extend to Los Angeles.
Duck Duck GoatAnthony Tahlier/Boka Restaurant Group
My love for Izard’s mashup of authentic and American Chinese is deep and endless. Were this a roundup of my subjective personal favorite Boka restaurants, it might be ranked higher. But in this ranking I’m looking for a superior mix of food quality, interior design, innovation, influence, and service, and the food quality and consistency at Duck Duck Goat has wavered in recent years, as with the recent receipt of a soggy Chongqing chicken. Still, as a regular diner, I just want to have fun, and DDG’s set-piece decor makes me feel like I’ve been dropped into Spielberg’s Shanghai in Indiana Jones. (No time for love, Dr. Jones!) And that environment still gives me pure delight.
8. Swift & Sons,1000 W. Fulton Market, (312) 733-9420
Swift & SonsBarry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago
This might be the best-designed of all the Boka restaurants. While I love the story of the Japanese salaryman told through Momotaro, I am foremost a Chicagoan — a faithful denizen of this former hog butcher to the world, one who screams “Da Bears!” and all that. Which is to say, my belly is often full of pork and my mind is truly raptured by the stories of the all-time local greats like Algren, Burnham, Sullivan, Wright, and Gustavus Swift.
The vestibule of this place looks like the abandoned offices of Swift, the great meatpacking magnate, and the interior simultaneously conjures the elegance of the Titanic ballroom and the corporate art deco aesthetic of the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy. You can almost smell the aftershave dripping off the leather bench seating. Though it is the most “steakhouse” of all the Boka restaurants, chef Chris Pandel doesn’t just give you a simple baked potato bigger than a T. rex egg. He’s putting out bacon-larded and horseradish cream-spiked potato and ricotta-stuffed pierogies that would make most babcias jealous. There is creamed spinach on offer, but also chile crisp- and gojuchang aioli-spiked roast brussels sprouts, which is to say, just like GT Prime, Swift & Sons is not a Gibsons knockoff.
9. Cira, inside the Hoxton hotel, 200 N. Green Street, (312) 761-1777
Boka Restaurant Group/Galdones Photography
Hotel restaurants demand all-day rigor, and few chefs are up to the challenge like Chris Pandel. The Hoxton hotel has become a coworking and de facto meeting spot for me over the last few years, and while the central location and comfy lobby play a role, it’s mostly because I know Cira’s gonna sate my cravings any time of day. If it’s early morning, there’s a perfect shakshuka waiting to break my fast. If it’s lunchtime, I’m digging into the crisp cumin- and coriander-perfumed falafel. If work is done and a celebration dinner is in order, I’m ordering a bowl of pistachio ravioli roofed with crisp breadcrumbs and gilded with saffron orange butter.
10. Itoko, 3326 N. Southport Avenue, (773) 819-7672
ItokoBoka Restaurant Group
I can count maybe a handful of dishes I still think about months after I visited a restaurant, but Gene Kato’s octopus at Itoko — a carpaccio flayed out like a giant hibiscus blossom and sprinkled with shiso and red onion slivers, then drizzled with the lifting acidity of ponzu — is one of them. If you’re looking for pristine sushi or perfectly toasted nori hand rolls bulging with king crab in an informal setting, Itoko is the spot in Lakeview.
The Izakaya under Momotaro in Fulton Market has that hidden speakeasy vibe. Even though it’s not invite-only like the Aviary’s the Office, or hidden behind a graffiti wall as with the Violet Hour, like both those spots, Izakaya is a windowless lair where time seems to stand still. You can drink and drink and drink with friends, and even better, sop it up with salty snacks like sweet soy-pepper glazed tebasaki wings or a big bowl of chicken curry. The design magic of AvroKO is in full force, as the space feels the kind of place John Wick might stop by to plot his next assassination over shots of sake.
Stroller parent-friendly salads and crispy chicken sandwiches are usually the domain of a Chick-fil-A, not a super chef like Wolen. But add in perfect mahogany-crusted rotisserie chicken and incredible consistency, and this might be one of Boka’s most dependable and delicious spots. The only thing keeping it from ranking higher is its informal nature.
13. Little Goat, 3325 N. Southport Avenue, (773) 819-7673
Little Goat Diner has moved to Lakeview.Boka Restaurant Group/Keni Rosales
In the move from the more spacious OG location on Randolph, Little Goat lost square footage, but gained more character. The new vibe, a kind of retro Fonzie-meets-midcentury modern, is actually more creative than the original. But what it’s gained in design, it’s lost in consistency of service and food quality. Stick to Izard’s classics like the This Little Piggy, a sesame cheddar egg biscuit sandwich stuffed with Sichuan pork sausage, or the okonomiyaki packed with bacon and bonito crunch, and you’ll still be satisfied.
Swift & Sons Tavern is across from Wrigleyville.Swift & Sons Tavern
Except for the nearby Mordecai, this is probably one of the best restaurants in Wrigleyville. Then again, that’s a lot like being the tallest kindergartener: Everything is relative to the competition. Thronged on Cubs game days, service sometimes suffers. Not as serious as its brother, the bigger original Swift, informal eats like fried cheese curds or an Italian beef stuffed with shaved rib-eye are the moves here.
820 W Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60607 312 888 3455
Irvine Rep. Katie Porter has repeatedly attacked her top Democratic rival in California’s 2024 Senate race, Burbank Rep. Adam B. Schiff, for accepting campaign contributions from oil, pharmaceutical, financial and other influential special interests trying to sway federal policy in Washington.
She prided herself on not taking donations from corporate political action committees, unlike Schiff, who along with Republican former baseball All-Star Steve Garvey is leading in the polls as Tuesday’s primary election fast approaches.
“Representative Schiff may have prosecuted big oil companies before he came to Congress, but when he got to Congress he cashed checks from companies like [British Petroleum] — from fossil fuel companies,” she said at a debate in January.
“I have delivered results on climate in my few years in Congress.”
Schiff, who took $2,000 total from the BP North American Employee PAC in 2004 and 2006, responded curtly during that debate. Schiff said he used some of the millions he raised through the years to help Porter in her congressional campaigns.
“I gave that money to you, Katie Porter, and the only response was thank you, thank you, thank you.”
The Times analyzed campaign finance reports from three election cycles when Porter and Schiff overlapped in Congress to see if the candidates’ claims were true. Both have been prodigious fundraisers for their own campaigns, raising tens of millions of dollars, while also starting political action committees that they used to support other candidates.
Here’s what we found:
Defense, tech and pharmaceutical companies donated money to Schiff
Schiff’s committees reported 377 contributions from corporate PACs, according to a Times analysis. The Schiff for Congress campaign committee received 357 contributions and Frontline USA, his leadership PAC, reported 20, totaling $636,625 and $75,000, respectively.
The more than 80 corporate PAC donors included defense, tech and telecommunications companies, which were the industries that gave the most to his committee.
The corporate PAC representing Comcast Corp. and NBCUniversal contributed more than $40,000. Schiff also received money from committees representing Wells Fargo and Amgen, among many others, during his House elections.
“I didn’t realize how much dirty money you’ve took until I was running against you,” Porter said at that same debate.
“You need to own your record.”
A majority of corporate PAC donations to Frontline USA came from groups representing defense companies, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Frontline also received donations from PACs representing Amazon, Universal Music Group and Centene Corp. — a large insurer.
Schiff donated over $50,000 to Porter
A Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records found that throughout her election and reelection campaigns for the House of Representatives, Porter received $54,675 in campaign contributions from Schiff’s two committees.
The majority of this money came from individual donors who used Frontline USA as a conduit to donate to Porter’s campaign; the PAC gave more than $33,000 in contributions to Porter’s races in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
In May 2020, Schiff texted Porter after a fundraiser about one donation, according to messages Schiff’s campaign shared with The Times.
“Hi Katie, sending $5,475 more from my friends Dick and Lois Gunther. Keep up the great work and see you soon,” Schiff wrote on May 14, 2020.
“Thank you so much Adam. Your (sic) are great! I’m doing handwritten thank yous that mention you to these folks,” she wrote back days later.
“(I do a lot of handwritten notes and like to acknowledge the source).”
Frontline USA reported two earmarked donations for Porter from the couple in May 2020 totaling the amount. The couple also sent $5,600 to Porter’s campaign three months earlier.
Schiff’s campaign estimates that the Senate candidate helped Porter raise close to $240,000 since she first ran in 2018. Much of this money, according to Schiff’s campaign, came from fundraising solicitations he sent on her behalf and fundraisers he hosted.
It’s hard to avoid corporate money in politics
Schiff’s corporate donations, which Porter hates, flow into a much larger pool of cash that’s made up of individual donations. The money is indistinguishable when it’s donated to Porter but reflects how money from corporate special interests can make its way into the accounts of someone who decries them.
Porter’s congressional contests were high-priced affairs, and the majority of the millions she raised came from individual contributors. She has refused to accept campaign donations from corporate PACs throughout her political career. When Schiff entered the Senate contest last year, he promised to not take money from these groups, too.
The majority of fundraising by Schiff’s committees similarly comes from individual contributions. For Frontline USA, contributions from non-political party committees — including corporate PACs, along with labor, trade and other groups — comprised 11% and 3% of its total receipts for the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, respectively.
“Part of my job was to help elect Democrats — help them get reelected,” Schiff said about his national fundraising work.
When asked about Schiff’s fundraising history, Porter didn’t see trying to help Democrats as a good justification for taking money from special interests actively trying to influence Congress.
After winning in 2018, Porter created her own leadership political committee called Truth to Power PAC, which has raised a little more than $1 million since its inception. Most of the money came from individual donors, and close to $630,000 was doled out to candidates across the country who were in competitive races, according to Porter senior advisor Nathan Click.
It didn’t take money from corporate political action committees.
“Katie didn’t have to reach her hand out to the likes of BP oil or defense contractors or corporate payday lenders in order to help her Democratic colleagues, but Adam did,” Click said.
When Pastor Frank Wulf thinks about his congregation being unable to worship in their home of 100 years, he is reminded of the Old Testament scripture of the Israelites in exile.
Wulf’s church, Echo Park United Methodist Church on North Alvarado Street and Reservoir Street in northeast Los Angeles, is not currently safe for occupation. The century-old dome over the church’s bell tower was damaged by the recent atmospheric rivers that pounded California, and structural engineers say it could topple into the church and lead to a snowball effect of collapses that could injure people inside the structure.
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1.Pieces of a collapsed roof lay on the floor below the golden dome that sits atop Echo Park United Methodist Church. 2.Notices are taped to the doors at Echo Park United Methodist Church, which has been a community beacon for 100 years. 3.Rain damaged and moldy walls inside Echo Park United Methodist Church, which has been a community beacon for 100 years.(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
But just as the Israelites did when the Persians let them back into the land of Israel, Wulf says they will rebuild.
“The church is really not a building but a community of people, a community that’s cared for each other over a long period of time,” Wulf said.
Wulf’s congregation has been out of its historic home since Feb. 1, the pastor said.
That came after the first pounding storm of the season led to the partial collapse of the tower, exposing the wood that holds up the golden dome.
The wood had badly deteriorated: There was dry rot, termites and water damage.
The first structural engineer who inspected the building told Wulf and his team that the church was not a safe place for groups to congregate.
The evacuation of the building affects not just the 40 or 45 people who attend Sunday services, but also the others in the community whom the church serves.
Wulf said services for homeless Angelenos, such as showers outside the building and free food, have had to be paused.
He also had to inform the 12-step groups for people struggling with alcoholism or other substance use disorders that they could not meet at the church, at least for now.
Pastor Frank Wulf of Echo Park United Methodist Church in one of the rooms severely damaged by the recent heavy rainfall.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The church had been building temporary shelter for migrants bused to Los Angeles from Texas. It was supposed to welcome four families to live in the space in mid-February, but it had to halt that program as well.
“Our primary commitment is to keep everyone safe,” the church team said in a statement on a GoFundMe page they posted to raise money for the work needed to reopen.
Wulf has not decided yet if they will repair the century-old building.
“Would this be the appropriate time to perhaps take the whole building down and start from scratch?” he asked.
A player can find tons of cute or capable Pals on a tour through Palworld’s Palpagos Islands, but in order to fill out their Paldeck, they’ll need to dabble with breeding. Breeding is a surprisingly deep part of Palworld, and it’s quickly become a rabbit hole — or a Caprity hole, if you will — for my group on our shared server.
Once I got past the original hook of “What if survival game, but Pokémon?” in Palworld, I was surprised to find that I was still engaged. I’m on a server with my friends, and we all handle different roles. I pump up my carry weight and bring Pals who could help haul, and I’m constantly loading up with tons of ore to smelt into valuable ingots. My buddies Jake and Matt pitch in, too; Jake is a forward scout, whereas Matt runs what we politely call “Pal Resources.”
Pal Resources is the name for our breeding camp. Now that we have the ability to build ranches and bake delicious cakes, Matt is off to the races. It’s entirely possible to just casually dabble in breeding, but we are now entirely engrossed by the process. There are three main reasons to breed. The first is that by combining two seemingly unrelated Pals, a third Pal can be born. If you want to fill out your Paldeck and be a proper collector, breeding is essentially mandatory.
But while creating new Pals was a fun trick, what really snagged us was perfecting our existing roster. For instance, the Relaxaurus is an adorable dope of a dinosaur — but with the power of Pal Resources, we were able to create an electric variant who keeps our infrastructure running. Breeding can create new elemental types of existing Pals.
Image: Pocketpair
Sometimes, this offers utility. Sometimes, it’s just nice to have a little bit of variety in my life. Why roll around with one bouncy, cuddly Kingpaca like an absolute fool when I can have two Kingpacas, one of which is an Ice type?
Matt also discovered that you can breed two of the same Pals together, and their traits will pass down to their offspring. This is the third, and arguably the most potent, reason to get into breeding. Sometimes, the process doesn’t work out — nobody needs a pyromaniac Pal running around endangering the whole base. But if you have a diet-loving, burly-bodied workaholic Pal — boy howdy, you don’t even need to get on the platform and cruelly command your Pals to get to work.
Our bases are now staffed by a set of Pals, all several generations deep into breeding, who tend to our every need. Have a large work order to complete? Don’t even bother; Anubis will run over and finish that for you in seconds. Hungry? Why not go into the fridge, chilled by a tiny hedgehog, and grab yourself 500 omelets? Such a bounty is nothing to us.
Pal breeding reminds me of the Chao Gardens from Sonic Adventure 2, which served as a place to bring and hatch eggs, and then raise the ensuing Chao. What is meant to be a side thing has now become a full game in and of itself, where we dutifully bake cakes and cart massive eggs to and fro, all in the service of building our empire on the Palpagos Islands. As for the Pals that don’t make the cut — don’t worry about it. We’ve found a big, open field where they can run, and play, and definitely don’t get put into the Goodbye Tube to get turned into meat sluice to strengthen our A-team. That simply doesn’t happen! It’s fine.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has gone viral for shoplifting at Target. Well, sort of.
The governor didn’t actually steal anything. But as he tells it, he did witness someone blatantly walking out of a Sacramento-area store with an armload of stolen stuff, presumably right in front of his own intimidating-looking security detail. And when Newsom asked why no one was taking action, the clerk told him it was the governor’s fault.
Newsom has made it too easy to steal, he said the clerk told him — before realizing who he was and freaking out.
Newsom, who was Christmas shopping with one of his children at the time, said he was outraged. It’s just not true, he said he told the clerk. California has the tenth-toughest laws against retail theft in the nation, he lectured — in a way that must have seemed super weird until she deduced his identity.
“I said: ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ ” Newsom said he asked the clerk.
“She goes, ’Oh, the governor’ ” — he broke off — “swear to God, true story, on my mom’s grave.” He added that the clerk had the temerity to tell him: “The governor lowered the threshold, there’s no accountability. … We don’t stop them because of the governor.”
Newsom told the story this week to a group of mayors from around the state who had gathered on Zoom for a news conference on his mental health initiative, Proposition 1. He and the mayors were chatting among themselves while waiting for San Francisco’s London Breed and San Diego’s Todd Gloria to log on. After relating the anecdote, the governor added that he hoped the two mayors weren’t the only ones not yet signed into the Zoom. “Hopefully, all the reporters weren’t on,” he said.
Too late. The exchange, posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) and then picked up by television and print outlets around the state, quickly went viral — catnip in the heated debate about retail theft and Proposition 47, which reduced some thefts and drug offenses to misdemeanors to reduce mass incarceration. Some critics have blamed Proposition 47 for the rise in thefts.
Newsom himself came out last month calling for legislation to crack down on “professional thieves” without amending Proposition 47, noting that one of the wine stores he owns in San Francisco was robbed at least three times in 2021. He pointed out that Texas’ threshold for felony theft is among those that is higher than California’s.
But those points did little to calm the viral story. The chairwoman of the state Republican Party, Jessica Millan Patterson, quickly jumped into the fray, writing on X: “Shout-out to this store clerk for saying to the governor’s face what every Californian has wanted to say: that he and his radical @CA_Dem buddies are to blame for CA’s surging crime. Sadly, Newsom still didn’t seem to take the hint.”
Newsom’s office declined to identify which Target the encounter occurred at, to keep the media from mobbing the store. They did say the encounter took place in the Sacramento area, around Christmastime, while the governor was shopping with one of his children.
The exchange, the governor said, ended with an attempt at a photo-op.
As the governor was explaining how strict California’s retail theft laws actually are, the clerk, he said, “looks at me, twice. She freaks out. She calls everyone over, wants to take photos.”
“I said, no, I’m not taking a photo,” Newsom said. “We’re having a conversation. Where’s your manager? How are you blaming the governor?”
He added: “Why am I spending $380? Everyone can walk the hell right out.”
The demise of Oakland’s only In-N-Out restaurant due to increasing crime could be the last straw for community members — and possibly a blessing in disguise for local leaders who’ve been pleading for help.
This week, In-N-Out announced that the burger joint near Hegenberger Road, a main route to and from the Oakland International Airport, would close its doors in March.
“Despite taking repeated steps to create safer conditions, our customers and associates are regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft and armed robberies,” Denny Warnick, chief operating officer for the company, said in a statement.
Some Oakland residents believe the crime problem persists at least in part because of Mayor Sheng Thao.
The group Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao, led by a former Alameda County Superior Court judge whom Thao removed from the city’s Police Commission in June, has faulted the mayor for not declaring a state of emergency on crime, not replacing the police chief she fired in February, and missing the application deadline last year when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office offered more than $276 million to cities and counties to fight retail thefts.
On Friday, the group published a notice of intent to recall and plans to start collecting signatures in early February for a petition to put a recall on the ballot. The mayor did not respond to the notice by the legal deadline, the group said on X, formerly Twitter, so the recall petition won’t include any response from Thao to the group’s criticisms.
“After missing the deadline to apply for a retail theft grant worth millions of dollars to assist Oakland in battling crime, she has now failed once again to respond to voters as to why she should not be recalled,” Seneca Scott, spokesperson for the group, said on X. “Mayor Thao must realize that there is no defense for the indefensible. The current state of Oakland is deplorable, and she is directly at fault.”
In a statement to The Times, Thao said, “As mayor, I have prioritized this critical gateway to Oakland and surged police presence and employed technology to deter and respond to criminal behavior.”
Thao said the added public safety resources have led to a reduction in property crimes along the Hegenberger corridor.
“However, more is necessary, and I will be working with regional and state leaders to protect this tourist gateway into Oakland,” she said.
Others in the city believe the current situation is largely the result of state or local laws that they believe impede enforcement, such as Proposition 47 from 2014 and Proposition 57 from 2016. In a statement, the Oakland Latino Chamber of Commerce said In-N-Out’s decision to close its Oakland outlet is sad, but departures like that are happening more and more in their communities.
“Many businesses small and large in the state are suffering from ongoing crime, and a lot of times the police have their hands tied and can’t do much because of a city ordinance or laws that end up protecting criminals instead of the victims,” the statement said.
The chamber said,”when the city, state leaders and prosecutors do very little to stop crime, this is the end result, businesses close and people start giving up.”
Several In-N-Out restaurants have been relocated over the course of its 75-year history. But the Oakland location will be the first the company has had to close.
“We feel the frequency and severity of the crimes being encountered by our customers and associates leave us no alternative,” Warnick said, despite the location being “busy and profitable.” The company can’t ask its customers or employees “to visit or work in an unsafe environment,” Warnick said.
The move drew headlines across the country, in part because it reinforced the argument by some conservative pundits that the liberal Bay Area is being destroyed by crime. The politics surrounding the closure became so intense, the largest group of In-N-Out aficionados on Facebook decided to ban posts about the Oakland closure, SFGate reported.
In an interview, Oakland City Councilmember Treva Reid conceded that her district is reeling from rampant crime, but said she regrets that this caused the company to close its doors. It wasn’t the first, as many local businesses have had to close their operations.
Reid has been dealing with the problem since she took office in January 2021.
What should be a welcoming economic hub for locals and tourists coming into the city from the airport is instead a place where “you have to look all around you when you’re pumping gas,” Reid said.
The community “lives in the midst of all the disparities that you can imagine [and] we carry the weight of that in this district,” she said.
For the last two years the councilmember has been calling on local, regional and state partners to create a regional interagency public safety task force because the current siloed approach isn’t addressing the problem.
The councilmember’s office has been wrestling with the issue from different angles, including adding more foot patrols, securing a commitment from the California Highway Patrol to dedicate overtime hours to the area, increasing efforts to suppress burglaries, and obtaining $1 million for community safety ambassadors.
Reid said the district saw a 40% reduction in crime, and yet “you’ll hear from businesses that it’s not enough.” The councilmember doesn’t contradict them.
“People are showing up in this corridor like [committing crimes] is their everyday job,” she said. “They’re clocking in and clocking out and wreaking havoc in between.”
In bimonthly meetings, Reid gets about 75 business owners at the table with department leaders, faith leaders, the neighborhood council, the police department and the sheriff’s department to figure out what can be done.
“We are a force multiplier of advocacy, to put a demand on our city and county local leaders to get the resources into this corridor to make it look clean and beautiful … and tackle this crime issue,” she said.
In 2023, auto burglaries in the area dropped 23% from the previous year’s total due in part to additional resources deployed by the Oakland Police Department from July through December.
Against this backdrop, Oakland’s 700-person police department has been operating with a vacuum at the top since last February, when Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong was fired for mishandling police misconduct cases. At the end of 2023, the Oakland Police Commission presented Thao with three potential candidates, and she rejected all of them.
Tim Gardner, co-founder of the online publication Oakland Report, criticized the decision to fire Armstrong, saying Armstrong fostered relationships and trust with the community. Thao, he said, has lost that trust.
He’s appealed to the City Council to establish a task force dedicated to improving public safety, with regular reports to the community to track its progress. The council didn’t bite.
“[Councilmember Reid] was the most engaged and responsive of the council members, all the others kind of wanted to avoid it,” he said. “Because to put together a task force that is dedicated to the safety problem, would kind of be an admission that you have a problem.”
Even though Gardner doesn’t live in Reid’s district, he said residents throughout the city need to hold their local leaders accountable to do more to ensure public safety. He said what affects one district, affects them all.
Reid is trying to create a different kind of task force, a regional one that would be held accountable for the situation in her community. In the short term, she said, many people are reaching out to help.
She said she hopes they’ll stay long after the spotlight cast by In-N-Out’s departure fades.
And they’re not going to just sit there and take it.
Protect Huntington Beach — a revolution led by retirees — is waging a spiritedfight against what the group sees as a City Hall attempt to screen, and perhaps ban, library books with sexual content, reel in Pride flags and suppress voting rights.
A posse of six or seven hell-raisers in their 60s, 70s and 80s agreed to meet with me Tuesday night as they geared up before a city council meeting, but before long, the group had grown to 10, then 15, then 20. Some of them were new to activism; others have histories.
“I took my bra off in the ‘60s,” JoAnn Arvizu said proudly.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
“I’ve never done this before,” said Carol Daus, who added that she and her husband, Tony, were out posting signs late one evening. “This is our new hobby, I suppose. It’s midnight, and we’re out driving around. I have a torn meniscus, I’m going up a hill, there’s railroad tracks and for a minute I thought, ‘How crazy are you?’ ”
“We’re dedicated,” said one rebel.
“No, we’re mad,” said Tony Daus.
Former Huntington Beach Mayor Shirley Dettloff, who’s almost 89, didn’t hesitate to join the resistance.
“We’re really the people who built this city, and we’re proud of what we did,” Dettloff said. “And this new council is diminishing all that we worked for.”
Members of Protect Huntington Beach protest outside City Hall before a city council meeting.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Dettloff said there’s long been a conservative strain in the city, which once had a John Birch Society presence and led the mask-resistance forces in the early days of the pandemic. But when she served on the council in the ‘90s, Dettloff said, there was always civil discourse and respectful compromise. The focus was on managing the city for the betterment of residents, not on culture wars.
So what’s changed? Dettloff had a two-word explanation.
“Donald Trump.”
The former president unleashed “a whole new way of politics being done,” Dettloff said. And the current majority on the Huntington Beach City Council — Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark and council members Pat Burns, Casey McKeon and Tony Strickland — has joined the conga line.
As mayor, Dettloff said, she was co-author of a human dignity policy after reports of a skinhead presence in Huntington Beach. But in September, the council voted 4-3 to remove references to hate crimes from the policy, and it added a line saying the city “will recognize from birth the genetic differences between male and female…”
Huntington Beach City Council members from left: Pat Burns, Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, Tony Strickland, and Casey McKeon listen to speakers from Protect Huntington Beach.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
And that wasn’t the only waste of time or insult to civility that set off Dettloff and others. They were steamed about a council discussion on whether to continue observing Black History Month, and about a March election that will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to put three controversial measures before voters.
One would effectively ban the flying of the Pride flag on city property, one would require voters to produce ID and allow drop-box monitoring despite the absence of any evidence of voter fraud, and one would grant more mayoral power in what the Orange County Register warned “can be misused to reduce public access and limit dissent.”
“Vote no on all three,” a Register editorial advised, and “encourage the council to get back to governing rather than political theater.”
That’s precisely the message the protesters carried to City Hall on Tuesday evening, where I expected them to clash with political foes. There’s a reason, after all, that four conservatives were elected to the seven-member City Council.
But the several dozen people who gathered outside City Hall were all on the same side of the skirmish, while supporters of book bans and voter suppression apparently stayed home. And roughly 90% of those in attendance were in their 60s and older.
I spotted one Support Huntington Beach lad of 39 years, who was shooting video of the protest, and asked how he ended up in the company of so many people twice his age.
“I saw a group of senior citizens start to step up, and I joined one of their meetings,” said Michael Craigs. “I realized that their presence on social media and video content wasn’t going to reach younger generations, so I volunteered to help with that.”
Cathey Ryder rallied the group with a barb aimed at the City Council majority that wants to crack down on perceived rigged elections.
“If there’s so much fraud and mistrust, how do we know the four of them got elected?” she cracked.
“We will be mailing out 30,000 postcards,” Ryder said. “We will be knocking on doors and leaving campaign literature to between [12,000]and 15,000 voters.”
The crowd then moved indoors to confront the City Council, filling most of the auditorium and some of an adjacent spillover room with a video feed. Of the more than 40 people who signed up to speak, almost all were 65 and older, and all but a few denounced the ballot measures.
“They stink,” said Andy Einhorn.
“The City Council needs to get about the business of running the city,” said Tony Daus, who ripped council and staff for unspecified and unnecessary election costs.
“This is our new hobby, I suppose,” Carol Daus said, referring to her activism. “It’s midnight, and we’re out driving around. I have a torn meniscus, I’m going up a hill, there’s railroad tracks and for a minute I thought, ‘How crazy are you?’ ” Daus of Protect Huntington Beach addresses City Council members in City Hall on Tuesday.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“If I ran a business like this, I’d be fired,” said his wife, Carol, who warned of litigation costs if the state follows through on a threat to block any voter suppression tactics.
Barbara Shapiro opened a gift-wrapped box and pulled out three sausages labeled Measures A, B and C, along with a piece of paper.
“Oh, it’s a bill,” she said in mock surprise. “Oh my gosh. We’re going to be paying millions of dollars for these sausages.”
Two days after the meeting, Carol Daus shared with me some social media feedback from Huntington Beach residents on the other side of this fight.
“So much frosted hair,” said one post, while another referred to Dettloff as a “leftist granny.”
“Maybe they did too much LSD at Berkeley,” said another post.
I was prepared to visit with the other side, but if that’s the level of discourse, maybe I’ll pass.
When I met with Protect Huntington Beach before the council meeting, two people said that if the ballot measures pass, they may move out of the city.
Kathryn Goddard, 82, said she’s staying put.
“I’ve been here 30 years and I feel like my job is to not let this happen,” she said. “This is my town, and I’m going to fight.”
The cul-de-sac ends at the top of a hill with a sweeping view of the San Fernando Valley. From there, Hermano Drive slopes downward, curving left and gradually steepening before snaking right at a precipitous trajectory more reminiscent of a black-diamond ski slope than a suburban neighborhood.
At the bottom is busy Reseda Boulevard, with just a stop sign between the corner of Hermano Drive and the dangerous cross-traffic.
But ever since 2016, the Tarzana enclave has had four other signs that can’t be found on any other road in Los Angeles. Made of metal, there are two on the way up and two on the way down, each declaring: “NO SKATEBOARDING ON STREET & SIDEWALK.”
As skateboarding has gone from a maligned subculture to an Olympic sport, the signs along this hillside lane citing Sec. 56.15.2 of the city’s municipal code — “No person shall ride a skateboard on Hermano Drive” — reflect the contentiousness that occasionally flares up over its more dangerous manifestations.
Aaron Barlava in front of his parents’ home on Hermano Drive in Tarzana.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The ordinance was badly needed, 25-year-old Aaron Barlava, who grew up on Hermano Drive, said while shooting hoops outside his parents’ house one recent afternoon.
“We’d always have groups of kids come up here toward the top of the hill and race down on their skateboards at excessive speeds,” he said. “It’s not for the sake of saying we don’t like skateboarding. … It’s a safety hazard. That is a very steep hill.”
The tucked-away feel of this community of about two dozen homes attracted many of its residents to Hermano Drive. But it also once drew groups of teenagers who saw its topography and knew they had to “bomb” it.
Getting on a board and riding down a hill as fast as possible, known as “bombing a run,” is a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, pursuit. The list of fatal accidents includes two teenagers who died within a few months of each other more than a decade ago in San Pedro, spurring an ordinance that restricted where and how skateboards can be ridden citywide and described bombing hills as “a significant danger.”
But tall hills never stopped beckoning a certain breed of young adrenaline junkies. And about nine years ago, a group of them decided Hermano Drive was a spot worth bombing again and again.
***
When L.A. Councilman Bob Blumenfield started getting calls in 2015 from some Hermano Drive homeowners about groups of teens repeatedly slaloming past, he said, he “went over there and was like, ‘Damn, that does look like a fun run.’”
A self-described “skate rat” in his youth, Blumenfield nevertheless introduced the ordinance to bar skateboarding on the asphalt hill, labeling it an “extremely dangerous activity.” The municipal code, he noted, allows for ordinances restricting skateboarding in public places where skaters have exhibited “a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property.”
Bob Blumenfield at a Sept. 26 Los Angeles City Council meeting.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
For months residents drove a little slower on Hermano, worried the combination of limited visibility and high speeds would eventually result in a skater being run over.
“I had to respond to the real safety concerns that community members had, which is this became the spot where kids would skate down — what they call bombing — and then veer off right at the end of the street,” the councilman said recently. “As you turn onto Reseda Boulevard, you don’t know what’s around the corner.”
In the years before the ordinance went into effect in April 2016, there were reports of multiple skateboarding injuries on the cul-de-sac, Blumenfield said, but there have been none since.
Sasoon Petrosian said he hasn’t seen a single skateboarder on the street since he moved into his house along one of the steepest stretches of Hermano Drive eight years ago.
Cars travel along Reseda Boulevard where it intersects with Hermano Drive, background, in Tarzana.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
“I see cars coming up and driving fast back down, and runners come up here and run back down,” the 43-year-old engineering director said while taking a break from dismantling Christmas decorations on his porch. “I have not seen anybody skate here. [The ordinance] definitely has worked.”
But there have been at least 11 citations issued for skateboarding on the street, according to records obtained from the Los Angeles Police Department via public records request. The department did not provide additional information about the citations or how it enforces the law, which provides for a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for subsequent violations.
While street bombing is no longer as popular as it once was and seems to have been eliminated on Hermano Drive, it’s still a point of contention in some communities.
Last summer, the San Francisco Police Department arrested 32 adults and cited 81 minors during a clash with participants and spectators at an annual skateboarding event dubbed the “Dolores Hill Bomb.” The unsanctioned event draws hundreds of people to the sheer hills near the city’s Mission Dolores Park — where the most daring of them careen down the public roadways at high speed, resulting in injuries and one death in past years.
The department said in a news release that law enforcement action at last year’s bomb was necessary because the gathering had turned into a “riot” after an altercation broke out between attendees and a police sergeant.
***
Skateboarders have long been at odds with police and property owners.
From the vilification they faced in the ‘70s and ‘80s, through the “skateboarding is not a crime” era that continued well into the 2000s, successive generations of boarders were maligned and driven out of many shared public spaces.
But the ascendance of skateboarding from an underground street diversion into a major industry and legitimate sports enterprise coincided with a transformation of its image in suburbs across America.
A 2010 photo of skateboarders “bombing” down Bluebird Canyon in Laguna Beach.
(John W. Adkisson / Los Angeles Times)
The best-selling video game franchise Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, along with ESPN’s X Games and “Jackass” performer Bam Margera brought new generations of kids to skate culture.
Social media and YouTube made it so anyone with a board and a smartphone could share their latest tricks and falls with the world and interact with millions of other skaters doing the same. Then came the widening embrace during the COVID era of the ‘90s and early aughts skater aesthetic. Today, it’s not rare to see teenagers in the Valley wearing vintage Thrasher or Nirvana T-shirts over torn baggy jeans and Airwalks.
With its anointment as an Olympic sport in 2020, skateboarding completed its transition to widespread acceptance. Many young parents who grew up skating themselves now see it as a wholesome way to get their kids out from behind their computer screens, doing something active with other young people.
Late Friday afternoon, Cory Masson’s was one of about two dozen long, gold-bathed shadows that zipped across the graffitied pavement at Pedlow Skate Park in Encino — less than two miles from Hermano Drive. The 9-year-old disappeared straight down into the empty deep end of a smooth cement pool and popped back out on the other end, sticking the landing.
Born in 1977, Cory’s mom, Brenda Masson, grew up in the ‘90s skating in the Valley and “watching our boyfriends get hit in the head with skateboards by security guards.” She wasn’t familiar with Hermano Drive, but she described the fact that skateboarding was specifically banned there as “the oddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Today, she spends long days at the skate park watching her son and chatting with other parents.
“Cory is on the spectrum and I was looking for something for him to do solo,” she said. “I think the skate population has grown exponentially, and there’s way more girls skating. We’ve seen an extreme positive change in it.”
***
Luna Luna, 19, of Reseda, practices a hardflip while skateboarding at Pedlow Skate Park in Encino.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, there’s a rebel streak in the sport that refuses to die.
Martin Garcia said he “grew up bombing hills; that’s just something we did.” Asked what he liked about the death-defying runs, the 27-year-old Van Nuys resident’s eyes lit up as he recalled the feeling.
“It’s sick,” he said. “The fact that it’s dangerous as f—, that’s what attracts people. You go down that hill and escape death four times, it’s like, ‘Wow.’ And your homies are impressed.”
Ramon Black, 37, said he still skates Pedlow frequently. He understands the dangers of treacherous roads, but said he and his friends loved bombing another steep hill in the Valley when they were kids.
“I get why they do it. It’s a safety and liability issue,” Black said in between greeting friends as they rolled by. “When you’re young you don’t care about that stuff, but now that I’m older I know better.”
Eduardo Galvan is a lifelong skater who grew up in Venice, one of the sport’s crucibles. The 59-year-old is now “more of a cruiser” who rides his longboard mostly in the South Bay and runs a company in Tarzana that sells a range of products online, including skateboards.
Galvan said he’d never heard of Hermano Drive, but he doesn’t think the government should determine what spots are too dangerous to skate.
“We’re gonna do it regardless. If you’re a true skater it doesn’t matter, you’re gonna skate anyways,” he said. “This is your freedom.”
A Superior Court judge on Thursday denied bail again for a group of activists dubbed the “Justice 8” who have been in jail for two weeks facing charges stemming from protests in San Bernardino County and elsewhere.
Prosecutors allege Edin Alex Enamorado and other street vendor advocates have carried out intimidation tactics, showing up at workplaces and homes of people targeted in his social media campaigns, which are intended to publicly shame customers who attack vendors or those who make racist comments.
Enamorado, 36, and seven other activists were arrested Dec. 14 amid what authorities described as a months-long assault investigation after a Sept. 3 protest in L.A. County and another in Victorville on Sept. 24. The investigation grew to involve police from other cities in the Inland Empire, including Upland, Fontana and Pomona, who contended that the suspects were involved in other “violent acts during protests” in those cities.
On his Instagram accounts, which have hundreds of thousands of followers, Enamorado has shared videos of street vendors being harassed, elected officials making racist comments and police making violent arrests.
But San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said after their arrest that the group members had manipulated videos to make themselves look like crusaders. And in doing so, Dicus said, they harassed the subjects of their videos to gain attention, views and financial profit.
“This group is not about substance for the human condition,” Dicus said during a news conference earlier this month, “but rather clickbait for cash.”
Charges against the group include false imprisonment, kidnapping, assault, vandalism and unlawful use of tear gas , according to court documents.
In addition to Enamorado, those arrested were his partner, Wendy Lujan, 40, of Upland; David Chavez, 28, of Riverside; Stephanie Amesquita, 33, of San Bernardino; Gullit Eder Acevedo, 30, of San Bernardino; Edwin Pena, 26, of Los Angeles; Fernando Lopez, 44, of Los Angeles; and Vanessa Carrasco, 40, of Ontario. All have been charged with carrying out violent attacks against three victims, according to court documents.
Luhan was not in court Thursday; she is scheduled to appear next week.
Prosecutors have repeatedly sought to keep the individuals behind bars, saying they pose a danger to the public. Last week, a judge ordered the group held without bail. At a hearing Thursday, the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office made the same argument.
Judge Melissa Rodriguez granted bail to only one defendant: Acevedo. The schoolteacher was ordered to have no contact with anyone else involved the case, including any alleged victims. Acevedo will be required to wear an ankle monitor and stay off social media.
“No contact means no contact,” Rodriguez said.
The rest of the defendants were held without bail after being found to be a danger to the community as well to as the victims in the case. Prosecutors referenced one image of a piñata with a victim’s face superimposed on the object. Another victim fears that protesters will show up at their home and has gone into hiding, according to prosecutors. A new hearing was scheduled for Jan. 3.
Enamorado’s attorney, Nicholas Rosenberg, said outside the courthouse Thursday he did not agree with the judge’s assessment of his client, calling Enamorado an important member of the community.
“Look, the fight is not over,” Rosenberg said.
Carasco’s attorney, Damon Alimouri, called the court’s no-bail decision “outrageous” and unconstitutional.
Enamorado started out as a political organizer but is known for his activism around street vendors. In June, he posted a TikTok video that since has been removed showing the mess created after a pair of food carts were overturned outside a concert at SoFi Stadium.
Enamorado told The Times he did not witness the incident but the vendors told him a stadium worker instructed them to step back off the street and then lost his temper when they ignored his directives. The worker, who SoFi Stadium officials said was employed by a third-party vendor, was later fired.
He and the others in the group face 17 charges in San Bernardino County — the majority of which are felonies — from two September incidents. On Sept. 3, prosecutors say several members chased a security guard into a supermarket and pepper-sprayed him while he was on the ground. They then beat the guard, authorities said. On Sept. 24, Enamorado and the others organized a protest after a viral video showed a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy slamming a girl to the ground during a brawl at a high school football game.
Attorneys representing Enamorado and the other defendants say they were protesting police violence and the harassment of a street vendor at the time.
Times staff writer Jeremy Childs contributed to this report.
The FBI arrested a child Tuesday in connection with dozens of “swatting” incidents targeting synagogues throughout the nation this summer — including two in Orange County.
The agency did not provide the minor’s age, gender or name. The juvenile was taken into custody at home, said spokesperson Laura Eimiller, but the FBI did not identify the city.
The practice of “swatting” refers to when an individual or group of people intentionally misinform law enforcement of a fake threat so that authorities respond to a specified location with tactical units or SWAT teams.
Authorities say the juvenile suspect was arrested on suspicion of two such incidents at Orange County synagogues.
Police also responded to a fake bomb threat in Fullerton on Aug. 12. Law enforcement could be seen entering Temple Beth Tikvah about 45 minutes into a Saturday morning Shabbat service that was streamed on Facebook.
About two minutes later, Rabbi Mati Kirschenbaum asked templegoers to evacuate the building.
Those were just two of the dozens of hoax threats allegedly made against religious, educational and public institutions across the country this summer.
Authorities allege the minor suspect helped a group suspected of reporting false threats against at least 25 synagogues in 13 states between July and August.
The FBI says the juvenile created the server that hosted the swatting network. That server, which has since been taken down, was a safe space for extremist activity, including “the glorification of highly publicized mass killers,” according to the agency.
“The false swatting threats made in this case drained law enforcement resources and caused a negative financial impact on local communities,” an FBI statement said. “Evidence has shown that making false threats can cause significant distress to victims and can cause physical injury to first responders or other victims.”
The Orange County’s district attorney’s office is expected to bring charges against the suspect, according to the FBI.
Dozens of protesters organized by a progressive Jewish activist group calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip blocked the southbound 110 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles for over an hour on Wednesday morning, bringing traffic to a standstill.
Police were notified about the protest just after 9 a.m., according to California Highway Patrol Officer Roberto Gomez. All six southbound lanes were blocked, Gomez said.
Shortly after 10 a.m., CHP officers were detaining the protesters, leading them to over two dozen police cruisers on the freeway. Behind them, a miles-long traffic jam snarled the morning commute through downtown, south of the interchange with the 101 Freeway.
A protester with his arms bound behind his back said “Free Palestine” when asked for comment as officers led him away.
A tow truck was called to remove vehicles left by protesters and blocking traffic on the 110. By around 10:30 a.m., the last protester had been led away and two lanes of traffic had been reopened.
Authorities arrested 75 protesters for failure to comply with a dispersal order, and the freeway was expected to be fully reopened by noon, according to the CHP.
In videos posted by organizers IfNotNow, the protesters stretched across the freeway wearing black shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Not In Our Name” on the front and “Jews Say Cease Fire now” on the back.
American Jews and allies calling for a cease-fire in Gaza block the 110 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles with a seven-foot menorah.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
They sang “cease-fire now” and lighted a seven-foot menorah as cars waited helplessly behind them.
In a statement to the media, the group wrote that its members “demand an end to the financial support of Israel’s occupation and documented war crimes.”
In helicopter video from KCAL News, several angry drivers were seen skirmishing with protesters before law enforcement arrived. A man pinned a protester up against the hood of a car while others yelled. They grabbed and pushed protesters, throwing some of their signs across the freeway.
The protest is one in a string of actions in favor of ending Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in the two months since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
Another protest organized by the group shut down a Hollywood intersection in mid-November, and during President Biden’s visit to Los Angeles last week, over 1,000 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at Holmby Park, across from the site of a fundraiser.
Unite Here Local 11, the union representing hotel workers in Southern California who have been striking on and off for more than five months, said it has reached a tentative contract agreement with the Beverly Hilton that covers more than 500 unionized workers.
The Beverly Hills hotel, longtime host of the annual Golden Globe Awards, is the sixth property to reach a deal with the union. It was among some 60 hotel sites in Los Angeles and Orange counties hit by a series of short rolling strikes after contracts covering more than 15,000 housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, servers, and front desk workers expired June 30.
The union has declined to give specifics on wages and other economic details of the agreements it has reached thus far, and the contracts have not yet been put to a vote by workers. Union spokesperson Maria Hernandez has said that the contracts — once ratified by workers at the various hotels — will raise wages, strengthen pensions and increase investments in healthcare.
The Beverly Hilton announcement comes at the start of Hollywood’s awards season, with Golden Globe nominations expected to be announced Monday morning at the hotel.
“The hotel and union are pleased to announce their deal just before what promises to be an especially celebratory awards season on the heels of the actors’ and writers’ own labor disputes,” the union said in an emailed statement Friday.
Unite Here Local 11 co-President Kurt Petersen praised the hotel as “a leader in Beverly Hills” and urged the city’s other hotels targeted by the strike — the Fairmont Century Plaza and the Beverly Wilshire — to “quickly follow suit.”
“Hotel workers at the Beverly Hilton are eager to kick off the awards season now that Hollywood is back in full swing because they have a contract with a living wage,” Petersen said in the statement.
Peter Hillan, a spokesperson for the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles, said the trade group couldn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Keith Grossman, an attorney representing a group of more than 40 Southern California hotel owners and operators in talks with the union, did not respond to a request for comment. The Beverly Hilton initially was part of that negotiating group but subsequently left the group, a union spokesperson said.
The heated labor dispute has persisted for months. Noisy early morning picket lines, with hotel workers in red union shirts banging drums and blowing horns, have become a familiar scene at many L.A.-area hotels.
Local trade associations representing hotels have criticized the strike as damaging to the regional tourism economy. Workers say they can’t afford to live near their jobs anymore in Southern California’s overheated housing market.
This week marked an escalation in hotel worker protests. Housekeepers, cooks and other workers, as well as staff organizers with Unite Here Local 11, set up camp outside two hotels on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport early Wednesday morning.
Dozens of tents line the sidewalk outside the Sheraton Gateway and Four Points Sheraton LAX; over the tents dangle string lights and clotheslines festooned with laundry, including lacy lingerie and baby onesies. In front of the Sheraton Gateway hangs a large yellow banner reading “Occupy.”
Workers protest in shifts, with some sleeping there overnight. The union hauled in portable toilets for protesting workers, and at night when the temperature drops, union staffers help shivering and bundled-up workers light heat lamps.
Housekeepers interviewed Thursday night said they are frustrated by months of tense negotiations and years of what they describe as heavier workloads for wages that are unlivable.
Sheraton Gateway housekeepers said they make a $19.80 hourly wage. Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Teresa Kamel said that of the hotels in talks with the union, workers near LAX tend to have some of the most depressed wages.
A statue of a USC founder — whose connection to groups that carried out extralegal lynchings raised questions about the statue’s placement — was removed last month for routine maintenance, university officials said.
Judge Robert Widney was one of USC’s founders, and since 2014 an 8-foot bronze statue of him had stood outside the Widney Alumni House.
In an Instagram post, the Daily Trojan reported that Widney’s statue and the plaque were taken down Nov. 28.
In an emailed statement, the university said the statue was removed for “maintenance and cleaning” but did not answer a question on whether it would be returned.
Like many institutions, USC was met with reinvigorated calls to purge its namesake sites tied to racist figures — which included university founders, presidents and athletics coaches — after a police officer murdered George Floyd on camera in 2020. The fury and protests over the killing strengthened a nationwide movement to remove symbols or names associated with racism in public spaces and on school campuses. Monuments, statues and buildings were toppled, dismantled or renamed as organizations, schools and cities reckoned with their pasts.
In June 2020, after years of demands for the university to take action, USC removed the Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs, which was named after Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the university’s fifth president.He was also a leading figure in California’s eugenics movement. A bust of Von KleinSmid was also removed from campus after a unanimous vote from the board of trustees’ executive committee.
In 2021, the building was renamed in honor of Joseph Medicine Crow, a Native American alumnus who wrote influential works about Indigenous history and culture.
Over the summer, the university renamed the field at the Trojans’ track stadium in honor of athlete and alumna Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympics history. The space had previously been named after Dean Cromwell, a former USC track coach who was criticized for anti-Black views and antisemitic actions.
But Widney was also tied to the Home Guard Vigilance Committee in the late 1800s. At the time, vigilante groups in Los Angeles often targeted Native Americans and people of color, according to multiple historians.
A professor and historian at UC Merced told The Times in 2020 that Robert Widney was “most certainly” supportive of extralegal lynchings. Widney’s statue came under sharper scrutiny after the university stripped Von KleinSmid’s name from the landmark building.
Widney’s brother, Joseph Widney, was USC’s second president. He expressed racist views in his writing, including that Black and white people “cannot live together as equals.” Historian Torres-Rouff described the racial beliefs Joseph Widney espoused in his book as “repugnant,” citing them in a 2018 article asking universities “to confront their past, not omit it.”
Times staff writer Tomás Mier contributed to this report.
Throughout the summer, the Progressive Change Institute, a prominent grassroots organization aligned with Democrats, teamed up with the White House to promote President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. The group helped organize events across the country, including in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, to publicize one of the president’s most popular proposals: a crackdown on unnecessary or hidden consumer charges popularly known as “junk fees.”
The institute was encouraged by how much positive local-media coverage the events generated, taking it as a sign that a concerted campaign could lift the president’s lackluster approval ratings ahead of his reelection bid. Its leaders were eying a second round of activity this fall to amplify Biden’s record on lowering prescription-drug and child-care costs.
Since October 7, however, those plans are on hold. Many progressives are protesting the administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, which began after Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and has left more than 16,000 dead, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry. On perhaps no other issue is the gap between Democratic leaders and young progressives wider than on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “It’s just a reality that the Middle East crisis is a superseding priority for many activists and takes oxygen out of the room on other issues the White House needs to break through on,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “We’ve let that be known.”
Biden had hoped to extend a fragile week-long truce that the United States helped broker between Israel and Hamas, during which Hamas returned dozens of hostages it had captured on October 7 in exchange for the release of three times as many Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But now that cease-fire has ended. And the president’s advocating unconditional aid to Israel and his embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims have fractured the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to reassemble in order to beat Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner for 2024.
The president had won over many of his critics on the left—the institute’s campaign arm, for example, had backed one of his more progressive rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the 2020 Democratic primary before supporting Biden—with his run of domestic legislative victories during his first two years in office, including a major climate bill last year. Now left-wing groups that worked to persuade and turn out key constituencies in 2020, especially young and nonwhite voters, are participating in demonstrations against the president’s Middle East policy rather than selling his economic message.
“Our public communications have been transformed by this moment,” says Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, which initially endorsed Warren and then Bernie Sanders in 2020 but spent the general-election campaign mobilizing progressive voters for Biden in swing-state cities such as Phoenix, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.
The Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group associated with the Green New Deal, has never been a big fan of Biden. But its leaders worked with the White House over the summer as the administration developed the American Climate Corps, an initiative to train 20,000 young people for jobs in the clean-energy industry. When Biden announced the program in September, the Sunrise Movement hailed it as “a visionary new policy.” Two months later, the group joined activists holding a hunger strike outside the White House in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s offensive. Given the president’s stance, “we cannot explain his policy to our generation, and that makes it very difficult for any of his administration’s good deeds to resonate,” Michele Weindling, the Sunrise Movement’s political director, told me.
Young people in particular have soured on the president, a big factor in poll results showing Biden trailing Trump in a potential 2024 general election. Voters under the age of 30 backed Biden by 24 points in 2020, according to exit polls; some surveys over the past few weeks show Biden and Trump nearly tied among the same cohort.
“Man, it is jaded right now among this generation,” Elise Joshi, the 21-year-old executive director of Gen-Z for Change, a group of social-media activists that organized under the banner of “TikTok for Biden” during the 2020 campaign, told me. Young voters’ disenchantment with the president predates October 7; they have long been more likely than older people to rate the economy poorly, and the Biden administration’s approval earlier this year of oil and natural-gas projects in Alaska and West Virginia frustrated younger climate activists. But anger toward the president erupted once Israel began shelling Gaza. “There’s been a surge since October 7,” Joshi said. “When it comes to Gaza, there’s little optimism that there’s much of a difference between the Democratic and the Republican Party.”
Biden, along with his party’s most powerful members of Congress, have broadly supported Israel’s war against Hamas despite their discomfort with Netanyahu’s conservative government. That stance is in accord with polls of the general public, but not with the views of more liberal voters. In protests on college campuses and elsewhere, left-wing demonstrators have denounced Israel as an apartheid state waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing—or worse—against the Palestinians. “Instead of using the immense power he has as president to save lives, he’s currently fueling a genocide,” Weindling said of Biden.
When the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC)—the political affiliate of the Progressive Change Institute—surveyed more than 4,000 of its members in early November, just 8 percent said they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government, and more than two-thirds wanted Biden to do more “to stop the killing of civilians.” In Biden’s support for Israel, many young progressives see a Democratic president giving cover to a far-right leader whose bid to weaken Israel’s judiciary sparked enormous protests only a few months ago. “There is a serious disconnect between arguing that you are a bulwark against authoritarianism at home and then aligning with authoritarians abroad,” Mitchell told me.
When asked for comment, the Biden campaign touted the continuing support of a wide array of “groups and allies from across our 2020 coalition” that it considers essential to reelecting the president next year and have not been reluctant to help the campaign over the past two months. In addition to the immigrant-advocacy group America’s Voice and the abortion-rights PAC Emily’s List, those groups include youth-led organizations who say that, as the election nears, opposition to Trump among Gen Z will easily outweigh concerns about Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “Joe Biden and Donald Trump are like night and day for young people,” Santiago Mayer, the 21-year-old founder of the Gen Z group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “I can’t really be convinced that both of these candidates have an equal chance of winning over young people.”
In a national Harvard University poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released yesterday, just 35 percent of respondents said they approved of Biden’s performance overall. And only 25 percent said they trusted Biden to handle the Israel-Hamas war, less than the 29 percent who said they trusted Trump on the issue. But this survey had better news for the president than other recent polls: In a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 matchup, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and that advantage grew to 24 points among those who said they will definitely vote next year.
NextGen America, a young voter group founded by the billionaire Tom Steyer, endorsed Biden’s reelection over the summer. Its president, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, pointed out that polls show that young voters prioritize inflation, climate change, and the prevalence of gun violence over foreign policy. But she told me that the level of opposition to Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war was significant. “We encourage the administration to listen to the concerns that young people have on this issue,” Ramirez said.
Biden has shifted his rhetoric in the past couple of weeks, acknowledging the high civilian death toll in Gaza and intensifying pressure on Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and agree to a pause in the fighting. Last Tuesday, he angered pro-Israel hawks with a post on X (formerly Twitter) quoting a passage from a speech he had recently delivered. In context, it was a push for a two-state solution, but devoid of that context, many read it as a push for an extension of the cease-fire in which he appeared to equate Israel’s military offensive with a campaign of terror. “To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek,” the president wrote. “We can’t do that.”
Pro-Palestinian progressives told me they view the change in language, as well as Biden’s involvement in brokering the short-lived truce, as evidence that their activism is working. But their goal is a permanent cease-fire that will allow Palestinians to return to—and in many cases, rebuild—their homes in Gaza and resume their push for statehood.
None of the activists I interviewed was certain about how lasting the political damage Biden has suffered among progressives will be. Elise Joshi said she had seen a rise in young people vowing on TikTok not to vote for Biden. “We’re almost certain that we’re going to have the same 2020 choices,” she said. “But whether we’re excited to vote or have people who don’t feel comfortable showing up or feeling too jaded to show up to vote is dependent on this administration.”
The election, however, is still nearly a year away. And interest groups often warn about their voters staying home partly as a way to pressure a presidential administration to change course. Should the war end in the coming weeks or months, the issue is likely to fade from the headlines by Election Day. Groups like the PCCC and the Working Families Party aren’t threatening to withhold support for the Democratic ticket when the alternative is Trump. In previous presidential races, early polls have shown tighter-than-expected margins for Democrats among young and nonwhite voters only for those groups to come back around as the election neared. “It’s not Will the coalition show up? It’s At what rate?” Mitchell told me. “Today,” he continued, “I’m looking at a fraying coalition that needs to come together.”
This article originally stated that the Working Families Party initially endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. In fact, the party endorsed Elizabeth Warren before endorsing Sanders.
Los Angeles police have launched an investigation into a protest Thursday at the Brentwood home of the president of a pro-Israeli lobbying group, with footage on social media showing them igniting smoke devices in the street and spattering fake blood on the property.
The incident, which police are investigating as a possible hate crime, is the latest in Los Angeles after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to bombard and invade Gaza, the Palestinian enclave that Hamas controls.
The crisis has roiled Los Angeles, home to large populations of both Jews and Palestinians. On Nov. 1, Canter’s Deli, an iconic Jewish restaurant in the Fairfax District, was defaced with antisemitic messages spray-painted below a mural depicting the history of Jews in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Police Department officers responded Thursday morning to the 11900 block of Foxboro Drive, where a group of protesters were causing a “disturbance,” according to a statement posted on X. Police made no arrests at the scene, but were investigating the incident as suspected vandalism, assault with a deadly weapon and a hate crime.
The statement did not name the owner of the home that was targeted. Officer Melissa Ohana, an LAPD spokeswoman, said the department doesn’t identify victims of crimes.
But in a post on X, Mayor Karen Bass appeared to identify the victim as Michael Tuchin, a Los Angeles attorney and president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.
“I’ve spoken with Michael Tuchin and Chief [Michel] Moore about yesterday’s disturbing incident,” Bass wrote. “Hate and violence will not be tolerated in our City. LAPD will continue to work with city and business leaders to keep Angelenos safe.”
Tuchin didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
A video posted by the People’s City Council – Los Angeles showed a group of people standing outside a home that the organization identified as Tuchin’s, holding a banner that read, “F— your holiday baby killer.” A red liquid had been poured on the driveway. Small white bundles were scattered on the driveway and front lawn.
Footage posted by Sam Yebri, a former City Council candidate, showed smoke billowing in the street as people yelled and a siren droned.
Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said a person contacted the department at 10:37 a.m. about an unspecified incident in the 11900 block of Foxboro Drive. During the call, it was determined that the police and not the Fire Department should respond, Humphrey said. No fire units were dispatched to the scene.
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