Witches, black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, spiders, cowboys and vampires lurked outside Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles this week in the latest group effort by striking actors to spook the major Hollywood studios into agreeing to their demands and bringing an end to the work stoppage that has haunted the entertainment industry for months.
The performers union, SAG-AFTRA, hosted two Halloween pickets on Tuesday, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble!” at Netflix and “Spooky Solidarity Day” at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank.
Check out who they dress up as on this spooky picket line at Netflix.
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1.Abby Rizo, left and Mika Dyo came dressed as actor Pedro Pascal, based on a photo of Pascal himself picketing.2.Isaac Burks dressed as a mariachi.
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1.Martin Perea, who is not a member of SAG-AFTRA but said he felt compelled to come out and show his support, dressed up as union President Fran Drescher’s iconic TV show character, “The Nanny.”2.Jeffrey Johnson wears a costume of his own creation, “Captain Black,” from his 2017 film of the same name.
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1.Thando Skwatsha, wearing his best “baby” costume.2.Adrian Dev, a strike captain, channeled his alter ego, Randy “Macho Man” Savage.
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1.Cameron Laventure, right, as Link from “The Legend of Zelda” and Ari Fromm as Todd, with their dog as Mr. Peanutbutter, from “BoJack Horseman.”2.Stevie Nelson as Rosie the Picketer.
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1.Mykle McCoslin, a national board member from Texas, dressed as an L.A. woman.2.Da’rrel Hobbs came as the “South Park” character Token dressed as a Vulcan from “Star Trek.”
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1.Bennie Arthur, a strike captain, dressed as a ’70s guy.2.Strike captain Heather L. Tyler doubling as a witch.
Central Coast environmentalists are celebrating ExxonMobil’s recent decision to scrap plans to replace miles of pipeline through Santa Barbara County, key to revitalizing a local network of petroleum energy production shuttered since the catastrophic 2015 Refugio oil spill.
But at the same time, the oil giant has raised fresh concerns, saying it is instead exploring the possibility of repairing existing, damaged pipeline.
The years-long effort by oil companies to replace two major segments of pipeline could have allowed the company to restart offshore oil platforms along Santa Barbara County’s coast and an onshore processing plant. These possibilities have been long reviled by local environmental groups and some residents, especially after the catastrophic 2015 spill, which continues to loom large in the region.
“This [pipeline] replacement has been hanging over the community’s head for five years now,” said Jonathan Ullman, director of the Sierra Club’s Santa Barbara-Ventura chapter. “I was very happy to hear this news; it felt like their withdrawal signified that the writing was on the wall that they could not continue.”
Ullman said the construction project — had it been approved — had major implications for the environment, wildlife and public health, with heightened risks of oil spills and increased fossil fuel emissions.
The 2015 spill, caused by “extensive” corrosion on a section of pipeline, hemorrhaged more than 140,000 gallons of crude oil along the Gaviota Coast, much of which ended up in the ocean and along the region’s prized coastline, closing Refugio and El Capitan state beaches for weeks and affecting countless seabirds and marine life. Oil heavily coated a stretch of Santa Barbara County’s coast, with small tar balls reaching as far south as Redondo Beach in Los Angeles County.
Officials for Pacific Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of Texas-based ExxonMobil, wrote to Santa Barbara County leaders that it had found “the potential environmental impacts associated with the major construction of a second pipeline unnecessary and avoidable,” according to an Oct. 24 letter, withdrawing its proposal from the county’s permitting process.
The letter, however, also opened the door for another complicated fight in Santa Barbara County, with Exxon officials announcing that the oil giant would change its focus from building replacement pipeline to trying to restore old, damaged pipeline.
“Recent inspections and analysis affirms … the existing pipeline can be responsibly restarted,” the letter said. It also mentioned that during the replacement pipeline’s environmental review, “staff from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicated that restart of the existing pipeline is likely the Least Environmentally Damaging Practical Alternative under the Federal Clean Water Act.”
Exxon officials did not release additional information about those reviews but clarified that any “formal decision on the [Least Environmentally Damaging Practical Alternative] cannot be made until the entire environmental review and permitting process is completed.”
Exxon officials did not respond to questions from The Times requesting further details about such an undertaking, including any analysis of environmental impacts.
“Pacific Pipeline Company and ExxonMobil have assets that we intend to leverage to deliver reliable energy to Californians and others,” Exxon spokesperson Julie King said in a statement.
Kelsey Gerckens Buttitta, a spokesperson for Santa Barbara County, said Exxon and its subsidiaries do not have any current applications under review regarding the pipeline, noting that another recent proposal to upgrade multiple valves along the line was not approved this summer. However, any plans to restart the lines would fall under the jurisdiction of the California State Fire Marshal, she said, making it clear that county officials would still be paying attention.
“The County does have concerns with the integrity of restarting the existing pipeline but we are confident in the California State Fire Marshall’s ability to ensure that these concerns are addressed through their review authority,” Buttitta said in a statement.
Environmental groups also shared overwhelming concerns about Exxon’s portrayal of restoring the existing pipeline, which was found to be heavily corroded in 2015.
“At this stage of the climate crisis, building new oil infrastructure is reckless, to say the least,” said Maggie Hall, deputy chief counsel at the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit law firm that advocates for environmental protection in Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.
“However, restarting a corroded and compromised pipeline that already caused one massive oil spill is even worse,” she said in a statement. “There is no way for the pipeline owners to credibly claim it will be safe. If this pipeline is allowed to restart, it’s not a question of if, but when, it will be responsible for another catastrophe.”
Ullman said he is hopeful that Exxon continuing to show interest in further construction in Santa Barbara County is simply a ploy by the company to keep investors interested, because he doesn’t believe such a plan could be successful.
“That pipeline cannot be repaired,” Ullman said. “It must be abandoned for the safety of the people who travel on the Gaviota Coast, but also for the massive amount of wildlife and sea life that’s there now.”
The ruptured pipeline that created the 2015 spill was built in 1987 and extended about 11 miles along the Gaviota Coast. It is part of a larger oil transport network that expands into Kern County, which Exxon had hoped to rebuild almost entirely, for a total of more than 120 miles through Santa Barbara County.
With the replacement project now halted, Ullman hopes to see the existing lines — still not in operation — removed.
“We’re still dealing with the consequences and the threats,” Ullman said. “The Gaviota Coast is really a special place … and worth protecting.”
Earlier this year, mortgage interest rates came off their 2022 highs and settled in the 6% range, providing a small break for those in the housing market.
That respite is now over. In recent weeks, rates have shot back above 7% and are now rapidly approaching 8%. The recent surge threatens to scramble the economic calculus for both buyers and sellers.
If you’ve put a pause on your decision to buy or sell a home because of high rates, The Times would like to speak with you. Please fill out the form below.
Nearly 40 years ago, long before the latest conflagration between Israel and Hamas militants, a bomb ripped through the Santa Ana office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, taking the life of the group’s regional director, Palestinian American activist Alex Odeh.
The FBI labeled the bombing a terrorist attack and early on identified the Jewish Defense League as “the possible responsible group.” At the time, the JDL was the focus of numerous state and federal investigations and had gained notoriety as an underground network of radical militants, espousing a violent form of Jewish nationalism that mainstream Jewish leaders rejected.
The FBI never formally charged anyone in Odeh’s death, but for years the agency’s investigation focused on Robert Manning, a burly ex-boxer from Los Angeles, and his wife, Rochelle, both JDL adherents.
With the Odeh probe still underway, Manning was convicted in 1993 of an unrelated murder: a 1980 mail-bomb attack that killed Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary. Manning was sentenced to life in prison. And in the ensuing decades, the Odeh case largely went cold.
Since becoming eligible for parole in 2001, Manning tried — and failed — seven times to win release. He appealed the most recent rejection, and on Oct. 3, an appellate board overturned the decision in accordance with a federal law that mandates parole for inmates who have served 30 years of a life sentence and are deemed unlikely to reoffend.
Now 71, Manning is on track to be paroled in July from a federal penitentiary in Phoenix.
The appellate board found that Manning’s “almost spotless record during his 32 years of incarceration made it unlikely he would reoffend.” The decision also took into account Manning’s age and health concerns, according to a U.S. Parole Commission spokesperson.
Paul Batista, an attorney representing Manning, declined to comment and did not make his client available for interview. At a past parole hearing, Manning detailed plans to live with his sister in Los Angeles and sell his prison artwork online if he won release.
Among Arab American leaders, news of Manning’s parole has aggravated the painful wound of Odeh’s still unsolved death, and for some, has reinforced a belief that the American judicial system let them down.
“It was a gut punch,” said Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights group created in 1980 to combat anti-Arab stereotypes. “If Manning was truly reformed, then he would cooperate and give law enforcement names of the individuals he worked with or the individuals that he knows were involved in the Odeh assassination. He’s done none of that.”
Ayoub learned of Manning’s parole through the Justice Department’s victim notification system, an alert service for federal crime victims. The decision came just days before the committee hosted its annual memorial banquet for Odeh in Garden Grove.
Founded by controversial Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL emerged in New York City in 1968 in the wake of the Six Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. Its members embraced a self-appointed mission to aggressively combat antisemitism with swaggering slogans like “every Jew a .22” that over time evolved into terror campaigns against their perceived enemies.
Five terror attacks in 1985 alone led the FBI to warn Arab Americans that they were in a “zone of danger” from an unnamed group taking aim at the “enemies of Israel.”
“To many Jews in North America, they were seen as heinous crimes,” said Alon Burstein, an Israel Institute Fellow and visiting assistant professor in UC Irvine’s political science department. “On the other hand, it was also seen as the first time — with the exception of the state of Israel — that Jews were standing up militantly and saying ‘never again.’ ”
Manning grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Los Angeles, where he dropped out of Fairfax High School at 17. He joined the Army only to leave a year later on a “not able to adjust” discharge. He worked variously as a private investigator, machinist and draftsman.
Manning joined the JDL’s West Coast chapter in 1971 and soon ran afoul of the law. He was convicted in the 1972 bombing of an Arab activist’s Hollywood home, and sentenced to three years’ probation after disavowing his JDL affiliation in court.
After the case, he left for Israel, where he renewed his JDL ties and continued to travel back and forth to the U.S.
Federal authorities considered Manning a suspect in four political bombings in 1985, including the one that killed Odeh. One attack killed a suspected Nazi in Paterson, N.J.; another bomb exploded outside the home of a suspected Nazi in Brentwood, N.Y., and a third injured two police officers trying to defuse a bomb sent to an Arab American group in Boston.
But the attack Manning served time for — Wilkerson’s mail-bomb murder — did not appear political in nature. Two years after Manning’s 1993 conviction, a Los Angeles federal jury convicted real estate agent William Ross of paying Manning to carry out the attack. Prosecutors said Ross intended the bomb for Wilkerson’s boss, who had sued Ross over the sale of a Manhattan Beach house, costing him thousands of dollars.
Manning’s wife, Rochelle, whom prosecutors also implicated in the bombing, died in an Israeli prison in 1994 while fighting extradition to the U.S.
With Manning in prison for the Wilkerson murder, the FBI continued to question him in the Odeh bombing. At his last three parole hearings, the Odeh family and representatives of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee were recognized as victims of Manning and allowed to argue against his release.
During a Nov. 2020 hearing, Manning explicitly denied involvement in the Odeh bombing and challenged the government to bring a case. “If they say I’m the top subject, then charge me for it, and I’ll go to court and prove my innocence,” he said.
Last year, Manning sued the government for allowing the Odeh family and the Arab committee to participate in his parole hearings. A judge dismissed the suit in February.
Odeh’s eldest daughter, Helena, said being recognized as victims at Manning’s parole hearings had brought her family some comfort. Now, with him set to be paroled, even that half-measure of justice seems to be slipping away.
“It does seem like we’re taking a step back,” Helena said. “But we’re going to continue to fight for justice and hope that my dad’s murder is solved. He didn’t deserve to die the way that he did.”
Odeh was seen as a polite, soft-spoken voice of moderation in his day. He was a poet and lecturer at Coastline College in Orange County, as well as West Coast director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He held an unwavering commitment to Palestinian statehood as a prerequisite for peace in the Mideast.
With the Israel-Hamas war exploding anew, Helena said she is thinking of her father more often than usual.
“I wonder what he would do or say in this situation,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t want innocent people getting hurt all around.”
A rare occurrence unfolded Sunday morning on the Arroyo Seco Parkway: No cars were allowed.
Instead, the stretch of the 110 Freeway that snakes its way through South Pasadena and Northeast Los Angeles — usually crammed with motorists — was people-powered and reserved for pedestrians, bicyclists and anyone else who wanted to explore the area from a new perspective.
Hosted by Active San Gabriel Valley and presented by Metro, the free, family-friendly event shut down six miles of the freeway and local streets from 7 to 11 a.m. Pedestrians and bicyclists took over the roads, similar to the open-streets concept behind the car-free CicLAvia events. The emphasis for ArroyoFest is on foot traffic and allowing people to explore the neighborhoods of Lincoln Heights, Cypress Park, Highland Park, Hermon, South Pasadena and Pasadena.
Thousands of bicyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders, walkers and runners enjoy the Arroyo Seco Parkway (110 Freeway) during 626 Golden Streets ArroyoFest, a sequel to the first ArroyoFest held 20 years ago.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
People enjoy the route by foot and on bike at ArroyoFest, in which the 110 Freeway — the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway — was closed off to cars from roughly its connection with Interstate 5 to its terminus in Pasadena.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Thousands traverse the Arroyo Seco Parkway (110 Freeway) during ArroyoFest, a sequel to the first such event held 20 years ago.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Rollerbladers Jenny Renderos, left, of Panorama City and Veronica Rico of Pacoima pose for a photo in the middle of the 110 Freeway during 626 Golden Streets ArroyoFest.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
An aerial early morning view of the participants in ArroyoFest, which shut down six miles of the 110 Freeway to automotive traffic. The first ArroyoFest was held 20 years ago.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Alex Trepanier, 35, rides his pennyfarthing, the same bike he rode 20 years ago at ArroyoFest when he was a teenager.
The Arroyo Seco Parkway was busy in both directions on Sunday morning — without a car in sight.
For four glorious hours, cyclists and pedestrians had a chance to safely explore six miles of the 110 Freeway between Los Angeles and Pasadena, a stretch of roadway that opened in 1940 and typically carries more 100,000 daily motorists who brave its winding turns and scary entrance ramps.
Aside from events such as Sunday’s 626 Golden Streets ArroyoFest and other bike celebrations, such as CicLAvia, cycling in L.A. County is not for the faint of heart. The road network was built for automobiles. Bicyclists are often left to vie for space alongside cars on congested, poorly maintained streets. Fatal bike crashes are an intractable problem in the county, and efforts to build dedicated bike lanes have been spotty.
A recent report from advocacy group BikeLA, found that 85% of L.A.’s bicycle fatalities happened on roads that didn’t have dedicated bike lanes. “Our infrastructure is failing bicyclists” across the county, said Eli Akira Kaufman, executive director of BikeLA.
This was the reality for the cyclists who joined the crowd of thousands in Northeast L.A. on Sunday. A Times reporter and photographer spoke with bike riders and asked two questions: What do you love about cycling in L.A. and what would you change about it?
Here’s what they told us.
Lawrence Sanchez, 41, of Highland Park is a civil engineer who often rides through Griffith Park and Angeles Crest.
“If biking was safer, more people would be encouraged to do it. Most people I know avoid cycling here because they don’t feel safe.”
— Lawrence Sanchez
Alex Trepanier, 35, of Alhambra rode the same antique bike — called a pennyfarthing — to ArroyoFest 20 years ago. He said has more than 600 bikes in his collection, including a bike built by the Wright brothers.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country where you can ride your bike 350 days a year without getting wet. I wish more people would do it to lower our traffic and keep our emissions down.”
— Alex Trepanier
Rachel and Manny Wong, of Glendale, cruised the 110 Freeway on Sunday on e-bikes with their daughters Joey, 5, and Frankie, 3. Rachel, 45, commutes by bike to her job as a fifth-grade teacher at Morengo Elementary School in South Pasadena.
“It’s just fun to go different places and be outside. But sometimes it is a little scary when there’s a lot of cars. And that makes me a little nervous, especially with the girls.”
— Rachel Wong
John Engelke, 54, and his son, Liam, 12, of Silver Lake enjoy riding together along the L.A. River bike path.
“I love that L.A. River bike trail. I think that’s the best bike trail in the whole region. It’s peaceful, it’s quiet. It gets you away from the vehicles. I wish that bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in Los Angeles was better.”
— John Engelke
Nathalie Winiarksi, 58, of Glendale teaches bicycle safety courses at the L.A. Unified School District and BikeLA.
“L.A is beautiful and so diverse — we have it all. Biking around just makes it fun. It would be great if people knew the rules of the road better and that goes for not only cyclists, but all road users.”
— Nathalie Winiarksi
Jorge Aviles, 37, of Los Angeles began riding regularly during the pandemic and has had friends killed or injured in bike crashes.
“The beauty of having a bike is that you can go to multiple cities, neighborhoods and experience different cultures. One of the things that I pride myself on is safety, and I don’t ride by myself because I’ve had friends die. So for me … I would love more bike lanes, more biking communities and more maps that just show where the safe routes are.”
— Jorge Aviles
Michelle Benn, 59, and Alicia Benn, 54, of Altadena would like to more bike lanes built in their neighborhood.
“When you’re in a car you don’t get a chance to see the beautiful homes out here and different trails.”
— Michelle Benn
Diego Chavez, 39, of Wilmington is a data analyst who enjoys riding in Long Beach where there are separated bike lanes with barriers between car lanes and cyclists.
“I wish there were more isolated bike lanes versus when you’re riding with traffic — that would be a lot safer. You still got to be cautious and look over your shoulder often when you’re riding with traffic.”
— Diego Chavez
Raul Salinas, 63, of Pasadena rode the first ArroyoFest in 2003 with his twin boys and returned to participate in its sequel two decades later.
“Biking brings you back to nature. It gets you in tune with, you know, what Los Angeles might have been like years ago when it was slower. If they could make it where people are not afraid to get out of the car, that would be great.”
Four children younger than 10 were found in a Lancaster home suffering from severe lacerations, and two of them have died, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The children were found early Sunday in a bedroom of the home by deputies who were responding to a child abuse call.
The youngsters are siblings, said Sheriff’s Lt. Daniel Vizcarra, and two of them were expected to survive.
The children’s father, Prospero Serna of San Bernardino, was detained by investigators as a “person of interest,” sheriff’s officials said.
Vizcarra said deputies were still reeling from what they encountered in the bedroom in the 1800 block of East Avenue J-2 as investigators worked to piece together key details.
“It was traumatic for everyone involved,” he said. “They are children and truly innocent victims who don’t deserve anything like this.”
The call, which was received at 11:50 p.m., stated that there was “child abuse in progress,” Vizcarra said. The children’s mother directed deputies to an apartment, where they found all four children in a bedroom with lacerations. Vizcarra said the mother did not have any visible injuries.
Two of the children were taken to a hospital, where they died. Two are in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries. Vizcarra said he could not release the children’s exact ages.
“We don’t know what weapon was used at this point,” Vizcarra said.
Social service officials have been notified, Vizcarra said. It is not yet known whether the children or adults had come to their attention before Saturday’s fatal incident.
The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services said in a statement Sunday that state law “prohibits confirming or commenting on whether a child or family has been involved with the department.” The department has faced intense scrutiny in recent years over its handling of a series of highly publicized deaths and injuries to children on its watch.
“As a workforce dedicated to the safety and well-being of Los Angeles County’s children and families, we are deeply disturbed and saddened to learn of the deaths of two young children in the City of Lancaster and injuries sustained by two others as reported by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” the department said in a statement.
Officials urged anyone with information about the incident to contact the sheriff’s homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500. Anonymous tips can be made to Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477).
“Friends” star Matthew Perry was found dead Saturday in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home, law enforcement sources said. He was 54.
Authorities responded about 4 p.m. to his home, where he was discovered unresponsive. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, did not cite a cause of death. There was no sign of foul play, the sources added. A representative for Perry did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide detectives are investigating the death. The cause of death will be determined at a later date by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
“We are devastated by the passing of our dear friend Matthew Perry,” Warner Bros. Television Group, which produced “Friends,” said in a statement. “Matthew was an incredibly gifted actor and an indelible part of the Warner Bros. Television Group family. The impact of his comedic genius was felt around the world, and his legacy will live on in the hearts of so many. This is a heartbreaking day, and we send our love to his family, his loved ones, and all of his devoted fans.”
Saturday evening yellow-and-black LAPD crime scene tape blocked off the entrance to Bluesail Drive, a tony street just off the Pacific Coast Highway at the crest of a hill with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean.
Shortly after 7 p.m., as multiple helicopters whirred overhead, Perry’s mother, Suzanne, and her husband, broadcaster Keith Morrison, joined the journalists and LAPD officers on the scene. Morrison declined to comment.
The police were barring journalists from passing the crime scene tape onto Bluesail. An LAPD officer at the scene said he had no information and that he did not know when any would be forthcoming.
Perry, the son of actor John Bennett Perry and Suzanne Marie Langford, onetime press secretary of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was born in 1969 and grew up between Montreal and Los Angeles after his parents separated when Perry was 1.
He got his start as a child actor, landing guest spots on “Charles in Charge” and “Beverly Hills 90210” and playing opposite River Phoenix in the film “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” in the 1980s and early 1990s.
But his big break came when he was cast in “Friends” — originally titled “Friends Like Us” — a sitcom about six single New Yorkers navigating adulthood that premiered on NBC in 1994.
The series soon became a juggernaut, the anchor of the network’s vaunted Thursday-night “Must-See TV” lineup, and turned Perry and his castmates Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer into mega-stars almost overnight. At its high-water mark — for a 1996 Super Bowl episode and the 2004 series finale, the series notched more than 50 million live viewers; by its end, cast members were earning more than $1 million an episode.
As Chandler Bing, the handsome, wisecracking roommate of LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani and, later, love interest of Cox’s fastidious Monica Geller, Perry distinguished himself in a crackling ensemble cast. With his dry delivery he created a catchphrase with a mere turn of inflection, based on banter he’d shared with childhood friends: Could he be any more Chandler?
Soon, he was attached to major stars like Julia Roberts and appearing in prominent films such as 1997 rom-com “Fools Rush in,” opposite Salma Hayek, and 2000 ensemble mob comedy “The Whole Nine Yards” with Bruce Willis.
There was a dark side to the life of one of television’s most beloved funnymen, however. In his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry recounted his lifelong struggle with addiction to alcohol and opioids. He wrote that he had his first drink at 14, but didn’t recognize the signs of alcoholism until 21. Since then, he estimated, he’d spent more than $7 million on efforts to get sober, including multiple stints in rehab. His substance abuse also led to a number of serious health issues, including a five-month hospitalization in 2018 following a colon rupture that left him, he wrote, with a 2% chance to live through the night.
And it was fueled, he acknowledged during a “Friends” reunion special in 2021, by the pressure to land the joke in front of a live studio audience night after night.
“Nobody wanted to be famous more than me,” Perry told The Times in April, discussing “Big Terrible Thing” at the Festival of Books. “I was convinced it was the answer. I was 25, it was the second year of ‘Friends,’ and eight months into it, I realized the American dream is not making me happy, not filling the holes in my life. I couldn’t get enough attention. … Fame does not do what you think it’s going to do. It was all a trick.”
Though Perry estimated he had relapsed “60 or 70 times” since first getting sober in 2001, he maintained a steady presence on American television, playing key parts in backstage dramedy “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and therapy sitcom “Go On,” and making a steady stream of guest appearances on acclaimed shows such as “The West Wing” and “The Good Wife.” Since his near-death experience in 2018, Perry had found solace in friendships, writing and regular games of pickleball.
Indeed, for all his success as an actor and, more recently, a bestselling memoirist, Perry told The Times in April that his work was not the center of what he hoped would be his legacy.
Pressed to name how he’d like to be remembered, he said: “As a guy who lived life, loved well, lived well and helped people. That running into me was a good thing, and not something bad.”
Times staff writers Connor Sheets and Meg James contributed to this report.
Thousands of people waving the black, green, red and white Palestinian flag and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” gathered at Pershing Square on Saturday afternoon to protest Israel’s escalating air and ground war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The event began with a series of speakers who decried the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Israeli bombing attacks since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants launched their bloody incursion into Israel, and called for an end to what they termed an Israeli occupation of the densely populated enclave on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
The crowd then began marching slowly down the middle of 6th Street, attracting hundreds more people who had arrived to show their support by joining the event led by groups that included the Palestinian Youth Movement, an independent, grassroots organization of Palestinian and Arab youths.
Demonstrators carry a gigantic black, green, red and white Palestinian flag in showing their support for Palestinians at Pershing Square in downtown L.A. on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Among them was Salah Odeh, of Pasadena, who said he was supposed to have joined his University of La Verne teammates in a game on Saturday but decided that the situation in his home country is “bigger than football.”
He said it’s imperative that the people of Gaza be given humanitarian aid and that Palestinian fighters receive military assistance in the face of Israel’s bombing campaign in recent weeks.
“People are offering their prayers, and that’s good — but we need physical help. We need military assistance,” said Odeh, who wore a black-and-white keffiyeh on his head, a Palestinian flag around his neck like a cape, and a pro-Palestine shirt and necklaces.
Gaza, he added, “is an open-air prison where everyone has been given the death penalty simply because they are Palestinian.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march down 6th Street in downtown L.A. on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Many of the demonstrators were heartened by the size of Saturday’s protest, which they view as an indication that younger generations are rejecting media narratives that they say unfairly seem to portray all Palestinian people as terrorists.
Negar Mizani, of Los Angeles, was accompanied by her husband and 3-year-old daughter in their third street demonstration since the war erupted on Oct. 7 with an attack on Israel by Hamas militants.
She shared an impassioned plea. “We would like for the Israeli apartheid to end — and a cease-fire,” she said. “It’s about recognition of the humanity of the people of Gaza.”
Nearby, Roy Nashef, of Los Angeles, held up a sign calling on the media to differentiate between Hamas and the residents of Gaza. “I’m just here to grieve with everyone else,” he said.
The war has led protesters on both sides to take to the streets across California and around the world.
A week ago, thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered at Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, then began marching down Hill Street chanting and carrying signs denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”
Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered two weeks earlier near the Israeli Consulate in West L.A. to condemn the bombardment of Gaza.
The next day, thousands marched to the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in solidarity with Israel. Los Angeles is home to the second-largest Jewish community in America, with more than 500,000 members, and while views on the conflict run the gamut, many have found themselves reeling by the events that have unfolded in recent weeks.
The latest bloodshed began Oct. 7 when Hamas launched its incursion into Israel, killing more than 1,400 people — mostly civilians — and taking more than 200 hostages. Since then, Israel has launched a barrage of airstrikes across Gaza that have destroyed neighborhoods as Hamas militants fire rockets into Israel.
On Saturday, Palestinian officials published the names of 6,747 Palestinians killed and pleaded for help in a humanitarian crisis, with more than 1 million people displaced.
Israeli officials said 230 hostages are still being held in Gaza by Hamas. On Saturday night, Netanyahu said that the military had opened a “second stage” in the war by expanding the bombardment and sending ground troops into Gaza.
Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.
Until a few days ago, Michael Schneider truly believed that his nonprofit, Streets For All, had solid enough political support to pursue what was certain to be an unpopular idea in L.A.: a study of whether it makes sense to rip up a Westside freeway and replace it with affordable housing and a humongous park.
He was a man about town, excitedly touting the letters and statements of “immense enthusiasm” from elected officials.
Like from the office of Mayor Karen Bass, who called the Marina Freeway — a three-mile, lightly trafficked stretch of Route 90 that was left unfinished after a plan to link it to Orange County was abandoned in the 1970s — a “freeway to nowhere.”
And from state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), who described Schneider’s idea as “a forward-thinking project that would help alleviate L.A.’s need[s].”
Indeed, as someone who drives the Marina Freeway all the time, I’ve long thought there had be a higher and better use for the land than a mere shortcut from Marina del Rey to the 405 Freeway and over to South L.A. And so I was excited to hear that Streets For All was applying for a federal grant to study it for two years, tracking everything from environmental impacts to traffic to the opinions of nearby residents like me.
Now, though, my excitement as well as Schneider’s has given way to familiar feelings of frustration. True to form for NIMBY-indulging Los Angeles, the political support he believed was solid has suddenly turned porous.
That includes Bass: “I do not support the removal or demolition of the 90 Freeway,” she said in a statement last week. “I’ve heard loud and clear from communities who would be impacted and I do not support a study on this initiative.”
L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park agrees with her. After conducting a very unscientific poll of her Westside constituents, she wrote in her newsletter that: “The 11th District does not support the demolition of the 90 Freeway. Your voice is why Mayor Bass rescinded her initial support.”
L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell told me that, despite rumors to the contrary, she never decided to back a study or tearing down the Marina Freeway, which abuts her district in the unincorporated neighborhood of Ladera Heights. “But it’s a moot point now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Smallwood-Cuevas said she still supports a feasibility study, but cautioned this week that it can’t be at “the expense of transparent community-driven input and analysis.”
Similarly, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Culver City) said he’s never opposed to research. But there’s a difference between studying the impact of removing the freeway and, referring to several renderings of what Schneider envisions as Marina Central Park, “proposing an alternative design and resolution without a study having been completed.”
Streets for All, a local non-profit is proposing turning the 90 freeway, one of L.A. County’s shortest, and unfinished freeways, into a large public park with nearly 4,000 housing units.
(Courtesy of SWA / Streets For All)
“The 90 Freeway,” Bryan assured me, “is not going anywhere.”
It’s problematic that, at a time when roughly 75,000 people are sleeping in the streets countywide and vehicle emissions are exacerbating the effects of climate change, Los Angeles can’t summon the unified political will even to study — STUDY! — whether to replace a freeway with housing.
Equally problematic is the reason why.
I’m not talking about the blame that some have placed on Streets For All for being overzealous with its messaging and tactics. Or that, according to others, elected officials were too quick to surrender to the fears of their constituents, some of whom wrongly believe the removal of the Marina Freeway is imminent.
I’m talking about the fundamental disagreement in Los Angeles over the role and importance of community outreach. How much of it is enough? How soon should it be done? How much weight should it be given? And to what end?
These unanswered questions are ultimately why political support crumbled for studying the Marina Freeway, and it’s a troubling harbinger.
Most residents understandably want a say — or the say — in what happens to their neighborhood, whether it’s affordable housing on what’s now a freeway or a homeless shelter on what’s now a parking lot.
But given the size of the unhoused population and the scale of the housing construction needed to address it and lower rental prices for everyone else, I increasingly believe L.A.’s political leaders can’t keep putting so much stock in the opinions of residents. Not all development projects that are worthwhile or necessary will be popular.
“For so long, the loudest voices have usually derailed things,” Schneider said. “And all I’m saying is the loudest voices aren’t always the most correct voices.”
::
People don’t like change.
This is a truism that has led NIMBYs to file an untold number of frivolous lawsuits up and down the state of California.
It also has led Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature to repeatedly roll back local control over land use decisions — the latest being a law that lets nonprofit colleges and religious institutions bypass most local permitting and environmental review rules and rezone their land to build housing.
Even Bass, who has made homelessness her top issue, has pushed to cut through red tape and streamline the construction of housing and shelters, trying to extend the pipeline for unhoused Angelenos who have been moved into hotels through her Inside Safe program.
But the mayor said she’s still a big believer in “doing the hard work” of community outreach. She explained why when I shared my skepticism.
“This goes back to my days at Community Coalition,” she said. “We used to fight when the city tried to impose development on South L.A. without including South L.A., which is why you would think that I would say build everywhere, anywhere. But I don’t feel that way.”
Instead, she wants to get people involved in the process and build in ways that are in line with what each community wants.
“If I took a position that said, ‘steamroll everybody, just get housing done,’ we would tear the city apart,” Bass said, adding that residents would likely be against development for no reason other than it was forced upon them.
This is a big reason why she decided against supporting a study of the Marina Freeway. In talking to residents, she told me she heard only complaints — about the possibility of more traffic and longer commutes, and from Black people in South L.A., about losing a convenient corridor to Marina del Rey and the beach.
But most of all, Bass said she heard consternation that there had been no community outreach.
This came up in an online petition that went viral last month — even though it was packed with misleading assertions — written by Daphne Bradford, an education consultant from Ladera Heights who is running for supervisor against Mitchell in the March primary election.
“Ladera Heights is not just any neighborhood; it holds the distinction of being the 3rd most affluent African American community in the nation,” Bradford wrote, channeling her inner NIMBY. “Our community has worked hard to create a safe and prosperous environment for our families, and we believe that our voices should be heard when decisions are made that will affect us directly.”
Schneider sighed when I asked him about the petition.
“The whole point of the feasibility study is we would have almost two years of community outreach,” he said. “We’re a small nonprofit, we don’t have the resources to do the community outreach before getting the grant money.”
In the meantime, rumors about the Marina Freeway have overwhelmed the facts, and many residents have dug in their heels in opposition to whatever they think is happening. Mitchell suspects one reason for this is that Streets For All didn’t “do outreach the way we define outreach.”
The Marina Freeway, an unfinished three-mile stretch of road from Marina del Rey, is one of Los Angeles’ shortest thoroughfares. Now a local nonprofit is suggesting turning it into a large public park and thousands of affordable homes.
(Rendering courtesy of SWA / Streets For All)
“It can’t be 10 a.m. on a weekday, one meeting at the community center,” she told me. “You really have to get creative, partner with communities and not be afraid to reach out to people who will oppose you.”
But community outreach is a thorny issue, Mitchell acknowledges. Again, people don’t like change. And too many people want to “pull the drawbridge up” behind themselves and not let new housing into their neighborhoods.
“When people say outreach, they mean, ‘You didn’t ask me. And then when you asked me, you didn’t do what I said,’” Mitchell said. “That can’t be the expectation. But I do believe that every effort should be made to make sure that impacted communities are aware.”
Eventually, though, everyone will have to get used to the idea that our neighborhoods will look a little different to accommodate the housing that Los Angeles needs.
“These are really difficult decisions that we all kind of have to make,” Mitchell said.
::
Which brings me back to the Marina Freeway.
Despite the Streets For All being abandoned by much of the political establishment in Los Angeles, Schneider said its plan to conduct a feasibility study isn’t dead.
“We live in a democracy. You can’t stop somebody from studying something in the public space. That’s just not possible,” he said. “If we’re awarded the federal grant, we will do it. If we need to raise the money privately, we’ll do it. But we’re committed to exploring the idea because it’s worth exploring.”
Whether that study leads to removing the freeway and building thousands of units of affordable housing in Marina Central Park is another matter.
It’s a huge political decision, Schneider admits. One that will ultimately — undoubtedly and unfortunately — hinge on community outreach. After all, this is L.A.
Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesse Carrasco had just a few details from dispatch when he pulled up to Cook’s Corner the evening of Aug. 23.
Minutes earlier, John Snowling had walked into the beloved bar in Trabuco Canyon and opened fire, killing three and wounding six others, including his estranged wife.
Carrasco was among the first deputies to arrive, and he quickly formulated a plan. He would park out front and run inside to find the shooter, he recalled in an interview this week.
It would have been a mistake. Perhaps a fatal one.
Unbeknownst to responding law enforcement, Snowling had already made his way into the parking lot — clutching two pistols and firing as patrons fled around him. Had Carrasco, 32, followed his initial instincts, he likely would have run right into the gunman, he said.
But a chance meeting with Nelson Rosales prompted him to change course. The way Carrasco tells it, Rosales probably saved his life.
In the two months since, Carrasco has spent time reflecting on the horror that unfolded that night. His thoughts kept returning to Rosales.
Rosales, 29, had gone to the bar that night to meet up with friends for a motorcycle ride through the canyon.
But as he approached the bar on his blue Yamaha motorcycle, he saw a panicked woman waving for him to stop.
Then he heard the gunshots. He watched as people fell to the ground outside the rough-hewn bar. Rosales, a jailer for the city of South Gate, quickly took cover behind a telephone pole and watched the gunman.
A man writes a message in chalk at a memorial to victims of the mass shooting at Cook’s Corner in Trabuco Canyon.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Patrol cars screamed down Santiago Canyon Road. Rosales broke cover and ran toward them, waving his arms.
“It’s a male, blue shirt … he’s in that gray pickup with the door open,” Rosales responds.
“Gray pickup with the door open,” Carrasco repeats before speeding ahead.
Within seconds of Carrasco exiting his patrol car, he and other deputies came under fire and had to take cover.
What followed was a firefight lasting more than five minutes.
During the exchange of gunfire, it was challenging for deputies to keep eyes on Snowling, a retired Ventura Police Department sergeant, Carrasco said.
“His tactics were very similar to ours,” Carrasco said. “He wasn’t just standing in the open, he was moving from car to car. We could only see the top half of his body every now and then and it was just for a split second.”
Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesse Carrasco, who responded to the Cook’s Corner shooting in August, chats with Nelson Rosales about motorcycles. Carrasco met with Rosales to thank him for helping deputies identify the gunman.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
On Thursday, Carrasco and Rosales met officially for the first time inside a conference room at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department office in Lake Forest. It was a moment Carrasco had been waiting for — a chance to thank Rosales for his actions that night.
At first, he struggled to find the words.
“We’re just grateful for you. If it wasn’t for you, things could have been completely different. And I wouldn’t be able to sit here and say that all the deputies made it out,” he said.
Rosales remained stoic but nodded as he listened.
Others fled, the deputy continued, but “you left cover to come tell me where he was. And I don’t know what drove you to do that, but I really appreciate you doing it.”
Sheriff’s Commander Kirsten Monteleone called Rosales a “guardian angel” for the deputies. Officials gave him a department challenge coin, a token of appreciation.
“I truly feel the information you gave saved some lives because had they gone in the bar they would have ran through the back,” Monteleone told Rosales. “They would have met a suspect with an advantage.”
Taylor Cox, Carrasco’s girlfriend of two years, smiled as she handed Rosales a gold envelope.
He carefully tore open the paper, his hands shaking slightly as he read the note on the card within. It was one of gratitude: for guiding deputies in the right direction. For ensuring Carrasco made it back home.
Rosales took a breath, emotion etched on his face.
He looked up, his voice only slightly more than a whisper.
Los Angeles is home to the second-largest Jewish community in America, with more than 500,000 members. And for the last few weeks, it’s been reeling.
Since the ambush by Hamas militants left more than 1,400 Israelis dead and saw the kidnapping of at least 200 others, Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip from vital resources and launched a barrage of airstrikes.
Jewish Angelenos are largely supportive of Israel, which declared war on Hamas, the local authority in Gaza, following the deadly Oct. 7 attack. Many also disagree with the military assault on Gaza, and are heartbroken over the mounting Palestinian death toll, which has exceeded 7,000, including nearly 3,000 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. About 1.4 million Palestinians have been displaced, and Gaza’s healthcare system is teetering on the brink of collapse as water, fuel and vital medicines are running out, according to the World Health Organization.
The world is watching as Israel mounts an all-out invasion of Gaza.
The war is creating dual tragedies across the Israel-Gaza boundary. And in L.A.’s Jewish community — whose members hail from different backgrounds, ideologies, cultures and religious sects — people are coming together in unique ways.
Amid the anguish and anger, the confusion and conflicts, some have found a new kind of resolve and a newfound community.
Music as a healer
The crowd held its breath at Sinai Temple as Nilli Salem played an extended note on the shofar, an instrument typically made from a ram’s horn and used in important Jewish rituals.
“I really believe that artists are the healers of our time,” Chloe Pourmorady said outside the Westwood synagogue, where about 100 people gathered for a night of solidarity weeks after the initial attack on Israel.
Music is “something beyond words that connects people and brings comfort,” Pourmorady said.
Cantor Marcus Feldman, left, Chloe Pourmorady and Nilli Salem perform at a concert to support Israel at Westwood’s Sinai Temple.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
For many Jews in Los Angeles, there are few degrees of separation between the U.S. and Israel. The extent of death and warfare in the region, considered the Holy Land for Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, has been staggering — and has hit close to home.
Pourmorady had initially planned a musical gathering for friends, but felt compelled to invite the public so the community could dance, sing and cry together.
“Music is being used as a tool for comfort, healing and prayer during this time of great sadness and anguish,” said Cantor Marcus Feldman, who oversees the musical department at Sinai Temple and who sang at the event, which included performances in both Hebrew and English.
Mikey Pauker shared his frustration and anger during the Sinai Temple gathering.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Emotions overtook many that night. Mikey Pauker’s voice broke before he started singing. He told the congregation that in the last few weeks, he’d been called a white supremacist for supporting Israel.
Azar Elihu, a former temple member, said the pain is universal, and she grieves for both sides.
“Even I feel for the Palestinians. I cried so much for the little boy that was killed in Chicago,” she said, referring to 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Muslim boy who was stabbed dozens of times in a deadly attack carried out by his family’s landlord.
But after the musical performance, Elihu said, “This felt like something of a healing.”
How do you talk to your children?
Nicole Guzik, a senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, said that in the weeks following the declaration of war, many in their Jewish community had drawn closer together, checking on one other. They ask: “Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Did you cry today?”
But they are also filled with outrage — and fear — as both antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric abound online and in person.
While some in Israel have called for a full attack on Gaza, including a ground invasion, Sinai Temple congregants say they worry about innocent lives lost.
‘I also don’t want them to be afraid to go to school. I don’t want my daughter to be afraid to wear the Jewish star.’
— Amanda Kogan, of Sinai Temple’s board of directors
“I think what gets lost is that there isn’t a single Jew or Israeli who wants to see a single hair hurt on the head of any innocent civilian,” said Jason Cosgrove, who grew up in the synagogue and said he now finds himself explaining the war in Israel to his 7-year-old daughter and wondering when he will have to discuss antisemitism with her.
“I’m sparing her all of the gory details,” said Cosgrove, who finds himself taking breaks from the news when he can, but who also feels compelled to stay up to date on what’s happening. “I think you obviously can’t bury your head at a time like this.”
Amanda Kogan, who’s on the board of directors at Sinai Temple, also finds herself in the difficult position of trying to explain the war to her children. Her teenage daughter recently attended an event that involved a bus trip in Los Angeles, and the group was accompanied by an armed guard.
“I also don’t want them to be afraid to go to school,” Kogan said. “I don’t want my daughter to be afraid to wear the Jewish star.”
“War is not fair to the innocent people. It’s terrible,” she added. “We’re trying to explain all of this as best we can in a very balanced manner. And no matter what, it’s all horrific.”
Sinai Temple boasts roughly 5,000 members and includes a private Jewish day school with about 600 students, a recreation center and a mental health center that offers counseling to the community.
Duvid Swirsky joins other musicians and cantors in a meditation circle before performing at the Sinai Temple benefit.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Members say their support for Israel is unwavering, and have gathered supplies, including headlamps, tents, blankets and phone chargers to be sent in care packages, which also include notes from children.
But grief hangs heavily over the community.
“As you walk through the halls here, it feels like a house of mourning,” said Senior Rabbi Erez Sherman.
Sherman and Guzik, husband and wife, became senior rabbis about two weeks after the attack on Israel as they worked to console their congregants.
Working for peace
Estee Chandler was a child living in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Syria and Egypt. At the time, she worried every time her parents left their house at night. She would sometimes hear air raid sirens go off and hide with the rest of her family in the unfinished basement of their apartment building.
“Even back then, we had those places to go in. Now, Israelis have safe rooms in their homes,” the 50-year-old said. “[But] Palestinians who are being bombed — they have nothing. They don’t have those rooms to run into. They have no way to protect their children.”
When Chandler awoke to the news that Israel had declared war with Hamas, she started reaching out to friends and family living overseas. Then, she reached out to her colleagues at Jewish Voice for Peace, whose Los Angeles chapter she founded nearly 13 years ago.
“My heart sank thinking about what we were surely going to start seeing in the hours, days and weeks to come, and unfortunately, that has all borne out,” she said.
“I don’t understand how people’s hearts can bleed … for only one-half of the people who are bleeding,” says Estee Chandler, who lived through the 1973 Yom Kippur War and has loved ones in Israel — and friends whose loved ones in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Jewish Voice for Peace and another Jewish organization, IfNotNow, have staged protests outside the White House and the homes of other politicians, demanding a cease-fire. Hundreds have been arrested while protesting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
While working for former President Obama’s 2008 campaign, Chandler said she saw “the intersection between the Israeli lobby and the Democratic Party politics.” She was upset by “a lot of horribly racist things” that were happening and tried to educate herself as much as possible about Israel.
Chandler later discovered Jewish Voice for Peace, which was supporting a movement at UC Berkeley to divest from weapons manufacturers providing arms to Israel. The group contacted Chandler and asked whether she would be interested in starting an L.A. chapter.
The daughter of an Israeli father, Chandler has relatives and friends in Israel and some fighting in the Israel Defense Forces, Israel’s national military. She also has friends whose family members were killed in Gaza by the Israeli airstrikes.
“My concern for my family’s safety and my friends’ safety doesn’t stop at any border,” she said. “It’s not a choice that has to be made. I don’t understand how people’s hearts can bleed in the same situation for only one-half of the people who are bleeding.”
One of Chandler’s friends is L.A. resident Hedab Tarifi, a Palestinian advocate and member of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders. Tarifi has lost 69 family members in the bombings in Gaza.
‘I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can’t breathe. … I have to swallow my pain and my anger, and remind myself that they don’t have a voice while they’re being bombed and massacred.’
— Hedab Tarifi, a Palestinian advocate and member of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders
“I have a roller coaster of emotions,” said Tarifi, who was born in Gaza and moved to L.A. in the mid-1990s.
“I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can’t breathe. I want to cry, but I can’t cry. I’m mad, and at the same time, because I have to be their voice, I have to swallow my pain and my anger, and remind myself that they don’t have a voice while they’re being bombed and massacred,” she said. “I need to pull myself together and be their voice.”
Chandler and other Jewish Voice for Peace supporters want a cease-fire. They have been protesting in Los Angeles and recently attended a county supervisors meeting where a resolution condemning Hamas and supporting Israel was unanimously adopted after tense public comments.
She has been disheartened by media portrayals of the war as simply a battle between Israel and Hamas, noting that the events of Oct. 7 “didn’t come in a vacuum.”
“You can’t say that anything that happened there is unprovoked. You have people who have been living under siege for 75 years, people who’ve been living in a state of constant ethnic cleansing.”
While her support of Palestinian rights may seem unconventional in light of her heritage, Chandler said she wouldn’t be deterred — even if friends and family have opposing views.
“My family loves me anyway,” she said.
‘Never again’
When Mor Haim finally turned on the TV on Oct. 7 — breaking her usual observance of Shabbat — she watched as Hamas trucks bulldozed through a neighborhood in Sderot, an Israeli city near Gaza where she lived until the age of 7. She immediately recognized the street where her cousin lived.
‘I’m scared to talk on the phone in public, [worried that] someone will recognize my accent and say, “Hey, she’s Jewish.” ’
— Mor Haim
“Life was sucked out of me at that second,” said Haim, 31. Luckily, none of her family was killed, but the grief has been no less soul-crushing. The brother of her cousin’s wife went on a run the morning of the ambush, and was killed. Many childhood friends were slain. A friend’s father died shielding his children.
“Even though I’m far away, I feel as if I’m physically there,” said Haim, a dual Israeli American citizen who lives in Woodland Hills.
Since that night, Haim said, she’s had panic attacks and has been unable to sleep well.
She said she tries to go about her daily life for the sake of her four young children. She’s found solace baking challah with friends and family or just sitting in silence with others who share her pain.
For Mor Haim, who lived near Gaza in Sderot, Israel, as a child, the Hamas attack hit too close to home.
But the images from that day are seared in her mind, and she is afraid.
“I’m scared for my safety. I’m scared for my children’s safety,” she said. “I’m scared to talk on the phone in public, [worried that] someone will recognize my accent and say, ‘Hey, she’s Jewish.’”
“We’ve kind of been in hiding,” she said.
Haim wants people to understand why the attack on Israel — carried out on the holiday of Simchat Torah, a day meant for rejoicing — cannot be ignored.
She said no one wants innocent people to die — “not our people and not their people in Gaza.”
But Jewish people can’t stand idly by, and Israelis must fight to defend their country, their people, she said.
“We said ‘never again’ when we went through the Holocaust. And this is the never again,” she said. “It feels like we’re screaming our life out and nobody’s hearing us.”
David A. Lehrer, a longtime leader in Los Angeles’ Jewish community and attorney who helped draft the state’s hate crime laws, has died. He was 75.
He collapsed Wednesday at his Los Feliz home and could not be revived, his family said in a statement.
Lehrer worked for almost 30 years in the West Coast office of the Anti-Defamation League, joining the ADL in 1975 as a civil rights attorney and later being promoted to regional director.
He also led legislative efforts to outlaw tax-subsidized discrimination at private social clubs, including the Jonathan Club, and confronted neo-Nazi and other extremist groups in the West.
Lehrer, a lifelong resident of Los Feliz, was an active longtime member of Temple Israel of Hollywood “and will be greatly missed by all who knew, worked with and loved him,” his family said.
Lehrer was a first-generation Angeleno, born to parents who fled Europe to escape antisemitism.
His mother, Gertrude “Trudy” Lehrer, escaped Vienna in 1938 just after Kristallnacht, or “the Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazis burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes and killed Jewish people in Germany and Austria.
“Had she not gotten the visa for the United States, undoubtedly she would have perished in Austria and [in] the concentration camp,” Lehrer said in a tribute video for his mother’s 100th birthday.
Lehrer died a year after his mother, who was a week shy of her 103rd birthday when she died in the same home, his family said.
He was born Oct. 12, 1948, to Trudy and Irving Abraham Lehrer. He decided he wanted to be an attorney around 13, when he read “My Life in Court,” a 1961 memoir by trial attorney Louis Nizer.
“He never changed his mind — he just wanted to be a lawyer,” his younger brother, Michael, said Friday.
After graduating from UCLA School of Law in 1973, Lehrer joined a private firm where, a few years into it, he realized he was unhappy, his brother said.
“He realized, ‘Why am I spending my time working to defend people and things I don’t really care about?’” Michael said.
As an attorney at ADL, Lehrer appealed to the California Coastal Commission in 1985 to decline the request of the Jonathan Club — which leased 58,000 square feet of public land for its beachfront location — to improve its Santa Monica property unless the club enforced a nondiscrimination policy.
After a three-year legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state court’s decision, which had agreed the coastal panel was within its purview to demand the club enforce such a policy. The decision affected other wealthy social clubs around Los Angeles with a history of accepting only white Christian men.
“It’s a part of the process of eliminating this last vestige of institutional bigotry, the country club and the downtown club, that are small enclaves of discrimination,” Lehrer told The Times in 1988.
Longtime Times columnist Al Martinez wrote during the case that he’d known Lehrer many years and observed his fervent dedication to civil rights.
“He can identify an antisemite in a room full of liberals while blindfolded, picking the racist out by only his vibrations, like a tiger shark selects its next meal,” Martinez wrote in 1985.
In 1998, Lehrer was one of the first Jewish leaders to work with Muslim leaders and developed a code of ethics with them in 1998 to promote civil debate.
After 27 years with the ADL, Lehrer was fired in 2001, a controversial move by the organization’s New York leadership — with whom Lehrer had political and personal disagreements — that was decried by many faith leaders in L.A., The Times reported. (He, privately and recently, made up with the man who fired him, his family said.)
“Probably he is paying the price for the more balanced view he took toward Muslims,” Aslam Abdullah, vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said at the time.
Lehrer bounced back quickly, working with community activist Joe Hicks to form Community Advocates, a nonprofit focused on race and human relations. The organization published articles, led programs and helped develop educational curricula aimed at promoting tolerance, his family said in a statement.
In 2017, Lehrer was alarmed by the rhetoric of President Trump and his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, and also disappointed that the Jewish community wasn’t raising its voice against the Trump administration’s outrageous policies, said former county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who knew Lehrer for 50 years.
Lehrer, Yaroslavsky and other prominent Jewish leaders launched Jews United for Democracy and Justice, an organization focused on protecting the country’s constitutional democracy.
The group produced “America at a Crossroads,” a weekly online discussion hosting prominent experts and L.A. journalists.
On Thursday, attorney and longtime activist Janice Kamenir-Reznik, his co-host, opened the show in honor of Lehrer.
Kamenir-Reznik said more than 1,000 viewers emailed her after hearing of Lehrer’s death, noting that many told her that although they’d never met him, they felt as if they’d lost a beloved friend.
“David was a magnificent tapestry of the most positive human characteristics,” Kamenir-Reznik said. “He was soft yet tough, bold yet humble, always ready to speak truth to power, to call out injustice and false information, and he was wise beyond measure.”
Lehrer was aware of the enormous threats to the U.S. Constitution and democracy — but unwilling to yield to despair about the future, she said.
Before every program, he asked moderators and guests to try to end each program with at least a drop of hope and optimism.
“Because he couldn’t bear leaving you, our audience, depressed and hopeless,” Kamenir-Reznik said.
In addition to his brother, Lehrer is survived by his wife, Ariella; his children Eli, Jonah, Rachel and Leah; a sister, Shelah; and nine grandchildren.
Los Angeles police detectives found and reunited a Boyle Heights teen with her family after she had been missing for nearly two weeks, the girl’s sister confirmed Friday afternoon.
Michelle Giselle Lopez, 15, disappeared on Oct. 12 after being dropped off for class at Downtown Magnets High School.
Hollenbeck Division detectives, whose area includes Los Angeles’ Eastside, called Lopez’s mother on Wednesday evening and reunited the mother with her daughter at the station, according to the girl’s sister, Nataly Jaqueline Arias, 27.
“It’s been a crazy last few days and we were finally able to sleep yesterday,” Arias said. “We finally feel like she’s safe and resting.”
Since the reunion, the family has spent the last couple of days at the home of a relative outside of Los Angeles County and avoiding media contact, Arias said.
“We want to try our best to make her feel like her old self,” Arias said of Michelle. “She’s starting to eat again and talk and feel more and more like that.”
Arias said Michelle hasn’t shared what happened since she went missing on Oct. 12. On that day, Michelle’s mother arrived on campus to pick up her son, Carlos, and Michelle at 3 p.m. but never met up with her daughter. The mother filed a missing person report that day.
Arias also said that detectives have provided no details on what may have occurred.
An LAPD spokesperson only confirmed that Michelle had been found and returned to family members, but said no other information about the search was available.
Police Cmdr. Lillian L. Carranza, of the Central Division, tweeted that Hollenbeck investigators “exhausted every lead until the [missing] person was located and safely returned to the family.”
Arias said that her sister was likely “going to need a lot of therapy” and that the family was working to “give her everything she needs.”
Early in the week, Arias expressed frustration with the lack of progress in the case.
She thanked members of the public and media for “pressuring the authorities to finally follow every lead.”
“Without that support, I don’t know how much attention this story would have got,” Arias said.
The family created a GoFundMe account earlier this week that Arias previously said would be used to hire a private investigator. The account raised more than $5,300 and was disabled.
The family said the money would now be used to provide Michelle with “therapy and any resources she may need to overcome this ordeal.”
The strongest Santa Ana wind event of the season is forecast to increase the risk of wildfire danger across Southern California, as well as the potential for power shutoffs.
Fire weather conditions are forecast from late Saturday through Monday night due to Santa Ana winds along with low humidity, according to the National Weather Service. A fire weather watch was issued for Los Angeles and Ventura counties, warning of dry conditions in the region and widespread single-digit humidity. The strongest winds are expected Sunday, when gusts of 35-50 mph will be common, with isolated gusts of up to 60 mph in mountain and foothill locations.
Dry and breezy offshore winds will last into Tuesday, which could extend critical fire weather conditions across L.A.
In Northern California, the weather service also issued a red flag warning for portions of the Bay Area for Saturday and Sunday, starting earlier for elevations above 1,000 feet. Gusty offshore winds and relative low humidity will increase critical fire weather conditions for the North Bay, East Bay, Santa Clara hills and mountains and the San Mateo coast.
Southern California Edison’s team notified customers that the high winds and dry vegetation could increase the possibility of Public Safety Power Shutoffs in order to keep communities safe from fires that are ignited by downed power lines.
“We know that shutoffs significantly affect our customer’s daily lives and create hardships for them,” officials said in the announcement. “We’re working to limit the scope of possible shutoffs to only the areas that are facing the highest threat of wildfire and we are taking actions to keep our customers informed.”
The utility has notified 150,240 customers that they could be subject to shutoffs from Sunday until Tuesday. If a shutoff is necessary, the utility will try to restore powers to customers as soon as it’s deemed safe and after crews have inspected power lines.
Santa Anas are easterly winds that develop due to high pressure over the Great Basin area in Utah and Nevada and pass into Southern California. They warm up and accelerate as they pass over the mountains, resulting in strong gusts through the mountain and valley regions.
Californians can keep their power on during the blackouts by buying a backup generator, installing solar panels or powering their homes with electric vehicles.
The move comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles alleged that Cruise withheld from regulators video footage of a Cruise robotaxi dragging a person down a city street.
The future for the company is uncertain. Its parent company, General Motors, has lost $1.9 billion on Cruise so far this year, including a $732-million loss in the third quarter, according to its latest earnings report. Competitor Ford shut down its Argo robotaxi unit in 2022, concluding that the possibility of far-off profits weren’t worth the enormous cash drain.
The California DMV gave two reasons for suspending Cruise’s license this week: concerns about safety and claims that the company withheld from regulators video footage that showed a Cruise robotaxi drag an already injured woman 20 feet across street pavement before emergency workers could reach her.
“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust,” Cruise said in a statement online Thursday night. “Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise.”
Cruise vehicles with humans behind the wheel will continue to operate. Until this week, the company had been operating driverless services in San Francisco, Phoenix, Miami, Houston and Austin, Texas.
Cruise needs to be “extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety” as it rebuilds public trust, a spokeswoman told The Times.
(1/3) The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust. Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.
The incident marks a dark chapter in the emerging history of the automated vehicle industry. Whether Cruise’s actions will harm the industry’s reputation, or only its own, remains to be seen.
Robotaxi companies claim that autonomous vehicles are already safer than cars driven by humans. Officials in San Francisco say they’re having trouble getting these companies to provide adequate data to prove that. But Cruise is dealing with more than safety in this case — it’s dealing with allegations that it misled regulators and the media in ways that might erode public trust.
On Oct. 2, a car with a human behind the wheel hit a woman who was crossing at the intersection of 5th and Market streets in San Francisco against a red light. The pedestrian slid over the hood and into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, with no human driver. She became pinned under the car, and was later taken to a hospital.
Cruise quickly called the crash tragic but said that the robotaxi stopped as it was supposed to and that a human driver couldn’t have reacted as quickly.
What Cruise did not say, and what the DMV revealed Tuesday, is that after sitting still for an unspecified period of time, the robotaxi began moving forward at about 7 mph, dragging the woman with it for 20 feet.
Cruise had shown a video of the incident to reporters but barred them from posting it publicly. (Because of that restriction, The Times turned down Cruise’s offer.) The video shown to reporters ended with the robotaxi sitting motionless, but did not include the vehicle dragging the woman.
The DMV said Cruise showed it the same abbreviated video, and only later did the agency see the full version. The two sides are fighting about that version of events. Cruise told reporters it showed the DMV the full video from the start.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the DMV said it stands by the facts outlined in the orders of suspension.
Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt
(Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Controversy has surrounded the company for months, after San Francisco’s fire chief lit into Cruise and another robotaxi company, Waymo, for interfering with firetrucks and emergency workers. Police said robotaxis were getting in their way too.
Dozens of such incidents have been reported, including robotaxis blocking an ambulance from exiting a firehouse, driving onto fire hoses and parking themselves there, bursting through police tape and getting tangled in downed utility wires. Cruise robotaxis sometimes gather together up to a dozen at a time to block pedestrians and other cars at busy intersections, a phenomenon whose cause remains a mystery, at least to the public.
Nonetheless, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxi fares, voted to allow a massive expansion of robotaxi service across San Francisco. Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt soon started talking about big plans for explosive growth, including the introduction next year of a six-passenger pod-like vehicle with no steering wheel called the Origin. “The goal is to get to scale as quickly as we can in terms of the total number of AVs to make this business profitable and sustainable,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September.
Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, is also planning to grow its fleets and move into new cities. It has already launched in Santa Monica and will soon expand to Los Angeles. Los Angeles officials are trying to get a close look at company plans, but are stymied by state law that gives cities little authority over robotaxi operations.
Other robotaxi companies are also gearing up to expand, including Zoox and Motional. Those companies are likely to draw more scrutiny in the wake of Cruise’s setback, said Bryant Walker Smith, an automated vehicle law expert at the University of South Carolina.
Alain Kornhauser, who heads the autonomous vehicle engineering program at Princeton, said the dragging incident is indeed tragic but it’s something that can be fixed. “The problem is, I don’t think anybody who’s writing code thought about a person being trapped under the car,” he said. “Now they can do something like mount a camera to make sure there’s no one under the car before it moves.”
People will be forgiving of odd robotaxi behavior if they trust the companies involved, he said. “But this covering-up business and not being forthright” does long-term damage to public acceptance, he said. “Didn’t we learn from Watergate that the coverup can be worse than the crime? They could be apologetic. They could say, ‘We’re not going to do that again.’”
In a bizarre crash-turned-robbery, four men in ski masks robbed a luxury car Tuesday afternoon after they intentionally rammed into the car on the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles, according to the California Highway Patrol.
A black Dodge caravan, occupied by the four men in black ski masks, intentionally crashed into a black Alfa Romeo, disabling the vehicle around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday on the eastbound 10 Freeway, near Arlington Avenue, CHP investigators said in a news release. Officials said the men were armed with a hammer and a crowbar and jumped into a white Chevrolet Malibu and sped away after the robbery.
A Ford Mustang was also struck during the crash.
The suspects all ran out of the Dodge caravan toward the disabled vehicle, which the driver had evacuated, video from the incident showed. The driver was kneeling with his hands in the air as the men first looked in his driver door, then went to his trunk.
It wasn’t immediately clear what the men took from the vehicle, but a video from the scene sounded like the men yelled something about getting “dope.”
It appears an air bag went off in the victim’s vehicle.
CHP officers did not report any injuries from the incident. No one has been arrested, CHP spokesperson Roberto Gomez said Thursday.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted Naasón Joaquín García on two child pornography counts, in yet another legal challenge for the head of the Mexico-based La Luz del Mundo megachurch who is already serving a 17-year state prison sentence for sexually abusing girls from his congregation.
García was indicted this week on a single count of production of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography. The indictment comes in connection with sexual acts allegedly committed by García on a 16-year-old victim whom he “knowingly employed, used, persuaded, induced, enticed, and coerced” and recorded, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Five videos were discovered on an iPad seized by authorities during García’s arrest on state charges at LAX in June 2019.
If convicted of both federal charges, García could face up to 40 years in prison, the release said.
Garcia, who is considered by congregants to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, pleaded guilty last year to committing acts of sexual abuse against girls from his community and was sentenced as part of last-minute plea agreement with Los Angeles County prosecutors.
He is expected to make his initial appearance in federal court in the next few weeks.
The 54-year-old previously served as a minister for the evangelical church in Santa Ana and in 2014 took over the church in Mexico. Garcia’s father and grandfather previously led the church, which was founded in 1926 and claims to have more than 5 million followers in about 50 countries across the globe.
Despite his guilty plea in state court, Garcia has maintained almost universal support within the church. His backers denounced the case as an attempt to tarnish his reputation and promised to continue supporting Garcia during his incarceration.
The church leader addressed them via phone from prison last September, saying “he did not see the bars that separate me from you,” according to an Associated Press report.
At the time of Garcia’s plea deal, some alleged survivors of sexual abuse in the church called it a “slap to the face,” even as prosecutors hailed the outcome. Some said they felt Garcia was treated leniently and worried about the potential chilling effect on other victims who may be reluctant to report assaults after watching how others had become targets of intimidation and harassment by church loyalists.
A docu-series released last year explored the history and power of the church, interviewing former church members who described enduring years of abuse in silence at the hands of La Luz leaders.
Sea otter 841 — the surfboard biting stealing mammal who became a national sensation this summer — has given birth to fluffy baby pup.
On Wednesday afternoon, she was seen far off the Santa Cruz coast, rolling and spinning in the kelp and waves with a little otter pup on her belly.
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Mark Woodward, her No. 1 fan and most dedicated chronicler, said he spotted the pup for the first time Tuesday afternoon.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I think I let out a yelp when I saw it.”
Sea otter 841 chews on a surfboard after chasing off its owner in July in Santa Cruz.
(Mark Woodward)
Woodward, a social media influencer who goes by the tag @NativeSantaCruz on Twitter, Instagram and Threads, said that as recently as Friday, 841 had been been swimming, lolling and feeding solo.
The pup’s birth, which has yet to be officially confirmed by state and federal wildlife authorities, may explain 841’s unusually aggressive behavior toward multiple surfers — at least one whom abandoned their board and saw it carted off by the slick-haired cousin of the skunk and weasel. The gestational period for otters is roughly six months, and during this period, hormonal changes can cause the animal to become aggressive, experts say.
Emerson Brown, a spokesman for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, said he and the “aquarium team” could not comment on the situation.
He said they’d “seen tweets, like everyone, but can’t confirm anything based on those images. We are waiting on confirmation from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.”
A spokeswoman for the federal agency said they were deploying someone to the area Thursday to confirm existence of the pup.
“While wildlife biologists suspected sea otter 841 may [have been] pregnant earlier this year, they were unable to verify the pregnancy without capturing the sea otter to perform a full health evaluation,” said Ashley McConnell, Communications Team Leader in the Ventura Fish and Wildlife Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Hormonal surges related to pregnancy have been known to cause aggressive behavior in female southern sea otters. … There are currently no plans to attempt capture.”
She’d given birth twice before. Her first pup survived; the second, born this spring, did not.
Gena Bentall, director and Senior Scientist with Sea Otter Savvy — a local research and environmental organization — said she and her organization were “not participating in or supporting any media publicity around 841. We do not feel it is in her best interest.”
Spectators flocked to the Santa Cruz coastline in the summer to catch a glimpse of sea otter 841. The creature had been unusually aggressive toward surfers and even stole a board from one.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
Woodward wasn’t surprised by Bentall’s response. After the media blitz this summer, he said, he saw several boaters and kayakers harrassing the otter, getting too close and potentially stressing her out and threatening her safety.
“People need to know they should give her space,” Woodward said, citing federal regulations that require boats to keep a distance of 60 feet.
“To help give sea otters and their pups the best chance at survival in the wild, it’s important for members of the public to give them and their pups space, especially when recreating on the water,” said McConnell, noting that sea otters are protected by the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and California state law.
She said a violation of these laws could result in penalties, including fines up to $100,000 and potential jail time of up to one year.
News of the pup — which was posted on the site formerly known as Twitter, by Woodward and Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of Environmental Studies at San Jose State University — was greeted with amazement by many.
Zach Friend, a Santa Cruz County supervisor, said: “It’s beautiful to see the expansion of Team Otter. Hopefully she will be given the space she deserves to raise our newest, and already famous, Santa Cruz County resident.”
However, Joon Lee, an Apple software engineer from San Jose — whose board was attacked by 841 in July — said that while the news was “amazing” he’d still want to make sure that she had stopped “attacking or getting on top of surfboards before I go out to the water.”
Last summer, after he’d been aggressively attacked, he developed a slight case of lutraphobia — a fear of otters — which squelched his desire to surf.
A sign warns beachgoers that an aggressive sea otter is “in the area,” in July.
(Mark Woodward)
Woodward said he’s excited to watch 841 raise the little pup; since first spotting her in June, he’s become a local expert on sea otter behavior and biology — noting that sea otter moms have to leave their pups on the ocean’s surface when they dive to the bottom for shellfish and other meals.
“Feeding and caring for a pup requires significant energy reserves,” said Fish and Wildlife’s McConnell.
She said that unlike whales and seals, which have a thick layer of blubber, sea otters rely on their thick fur coat and super-high metabolic rate to stay warm. The average adult sea otter has to actively forage and eat 20 to 30 percent of its body mass in food each day just to meet its energy requirements.
“That’s why it’s incredibly important for sea otters to conserve their energy, and why they are often seen resting on their backs on the water’s surface when they are not foraging — their survival, and the survival of their pups, depends on it,” she said.
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Humanity is on course to transgress multiple global “tipping points” that could lead to irreversible instability or the complete collapse of ecological and institutional systems, a United Nations report warned Wednesday.
The third annual Interconnected Disaster Risks report from the U.N. University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn, Germany, found that drastic changes will occur if urgent actions are not taken around six moments when sociological systems are no longer able to buffer risks.
The tipping points include several issues that California is confronting head-on — groundwater depletion, rising insurance costs, extreme heat and species extinction. The other threats are melting glaciers and space debris. According to U.N. officials, “when one system tips, other systems may also be pushed over the edge.”
“The very practical consequence will be that much more people will live under very precarious conditions — so loss of life, loss of livelihood and loss of opportunities,” said Zita Sebesvari, deputy director at the U.N. University Institute and one of the lead authors of the report. “It does have cascading impacts.”
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The tipping points are growing increasingly interconnected through global supply chains, trade and communications networks, the report says. Those links offer greater opportunity for cooperation, “but also expose us to greater risks and unpleasant surprises” from ripple effects when one element begins to crumble.
An aerial view of the Port of Long Beach in February.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“We are moving perilously close to the brink of multiple risk tipping points,” the report says. The good news is that it is not too late to make changes to avoid or at least delay the worst possible outcomes.
According to the analysis, groundwater depletion is one problem with major potential consequences. Roughly 2 billion people worldwide rely on groundwater as a primary source, but 21 of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are already being depleted faster than they can be replenished.
The tipping point for groundwater occurs when existing wells are not sufficient to reach the water table and access to groundwater becomes prohibitively expensive or problematic, the report says.
By that criterion, California is already on the cliff’s edge, as industrial agriculture and other uses are sapping supplies so quickly that more than 5,700 wells are currently dry and thousands more are at risk, according to state data. Groundwater depletion is also contributing to land subsidence, with some areas sinking as quickly as 1 foot per year.
At the end of the Coachella Canal, Colorado River water is routed to ponds that are designed to replenish groundwater.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Surpassing the tipping point could have dire consequences not just for local communities but for global food production, the report says. In California, officials are attempting to rectify this through the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act — a landmark piece of legislation that seeks to limit groundwater use, but with a timeline for implementation that could take decades.
“The long-term vision is to balance out the infiltration and recharging of groundwater with the taking out of groundwater,” Sebesvari said. “At least California does have a management plan, which is quite outstanding, I must say, because many places in this group don’t have that.”
But groundwater is only one of a handful of tipping points facing California and the globe. Unbearable heat driven by climate change is also an element of concern. The U.N. report estimates that roughly 500,000 excess deaths were attributed to extreme heat annually between 2000 and 2019, and that 30% of the global population is exposed to deadly heat conditions at least 20 days per year.
This year, the planet experienced its hottest summer on record, with global surface temperatures in August 2.25 degrees above the 20th century average. Simultaneous heat waves plagued Europe, China and the Southwest, where Phoenix experienced a record 31 consecutive days of temperatures at or above 110 degrees.
Sebesvari said extreme heat is one area where adaptation, as opposed to mitigation, may be warranted, since places such as Pakistan and parts of India are regularly surpassing the threshold for livability. In Los Angeles, officials are already exploring adaptation measures such as the installation of cool pavement, the planting of trees and a possible city mandate requiring air conditioning in all rental units.
Meanwhile, Californians continue to face the looming threat of un-insurability. That tipping point will occur when the cost of hazards becomes so high that insurance is no longer accessible or affordable, leaving people without an economic safety net when disaster strikes.
Flames erupt from a home in Laguna Niguel, where a May 2022 brush fire spread to an oceanside neighborhood.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
California came perilously close to that point earlier this year when insurance giants State Farm, Allstate and USAA pulled out of the state, citing rising wildfire risks and other mounting threats.
In September, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara struck a deal to bring them back to California in exchange for a number of concessions, including the possibility of much higher premiums.
But the fix only served to underscore a burgeoning global crisis spurred by a sevenfold increase in the cost of disasters globally since the 1970s, according to the U.N. report. Last year, global economic losses from disasters totaled $313 billion.
The report arrives just weeks ahead of COP28 — an annual international climate conference that will be held in Dubai — and in the wake of the scorching summer that spurred dire warnings from scientists about the worsening effects of climate change.
It also echoes a major study published in September in the journal Science Advances, which found that the planet has crossed six of nine boundaries that suggest “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”
While the U.N. report is largely focused on irreversible socioeconomic tipping points, the Science Advances study examined planetary systems such as ozone depletion and ocean acidification that are mostly reversible, but could alter living conditions on Earth if pushed far enough, according to Katherine Richardson, the study’s lead author.
Though the findings are distinct, Richardson said she agreed with the U.N.’s assessment. Its framework is “likely a better way to communicate the urgency of the existential crisis we have created for ourselves as it can directly be translated to people’s immediate condition and wealth,” she said.
In addition to groundwater depletion, rising insurance costs and extreme heat, the U.N. report highlights melting glaciers, ecosystem collapse and space debris as systems nearing precipices.
Wildlife officials conduct a count of dead fall-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River in January 2022.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
This summer, global sea ice coverage reached a record low — about 550,000 square miles less than the previous low set in August 2019, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The continued melting of ice and glaciers driven by human-caused global warming will have negative effects on freshwater availability for humans and other species, the U.N. report says.
Ecosystem collapse is similarly underway, with accelerating extinctions driven by land use changes, climate change, pollution and invasive species.
More than 400 vertebrate species have gone extinct in the last 100 years, and nearly a million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction, the U.N. report says. That includes several California species such as Delta smelt, Chinook salmon, California condors, gray wolves and mountain lions. California trees are also dying at a record pace due to drought, wildfires, bark beetle infestation and other threats.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed 21 species from the U.S. Endangered Species Act due to extinction, including a fruit bat, two types of fish, eight types of mussels and 10 birds.
Finally, there is space debris — the only non-terrestrial threat outlined in the report. There are roughly 8,300 satellites in orbit and nearly 35,000 other tracked objects circling the Earth. Many are used for global communications, early warning systems, weather monitoring and other purposes that help connect people and reduce disaster risk.
A tipping point will occur when there is such a critical density of objects in orbit that one collision could set off a chain reaction and take those systems offline, the report says.
Though there has been a push for space to be seen as a “global commons,” no such international agreement has been reached. (In fact, then-President Trump in 2020 issued a statement saying that the United States “does not view space as a global commons.”)
While each tipping point is a potential threat in and of itself, the interconnection between them is key to the report, according to Jack O’Connor, senior expert at the U.N. University Institute and one of the lead authors. He likened the systems to towers of wooden blocks, like in the game Jenga.
“We and our behaviors are slowly removing pieces one by one from the base, until at some point the system can no longer cope with the growing instability and it collapses,” O’Connor told reporters Wednesday.
He and other officials said their hope is that policymakers, world leaders and the public will factor the findings into decisions moving forward in order to prevent a worst-case scenario. It is important to consider the rights and opportunities of future generations in current planning processes, they said.
“Our report is not saying that we are doomed to cross these risk tipping points, but rather it’s supposed to empower us to see the paths that we have ahead of us, and to take steps toward a better future,” O’Connor said. “We are still driving the car. And we still have a choice.”
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