MEXICO CITY — The imprisonment of a cartel member in the U.S. has dashed hopes in Mexico for justice in one of the country’s most notorious slayings — the death of acclaimed journalist Javier Valdez, who was gunned down in broad daylight two blocks from his newspaper office in the cartel-embattled city of Culiacán.
The brazen assassination in 2017 of Valdez — a tireless chronicler of cartel violence and politicians’ links to organized crime — sparked international condemnation. The slaying dramatized the perils faced by journalists in Mexico, where scores have been slain in recent years.
Valdez’s assassination remains the most notorious killing of a Mexican journalist in decades.
While two gunmen are serving prison terms in Mexico, authorities here have long sought the extradition from the United Stares of the alleged mastermind: Dámaso López Serrano, a former Sinaloa cartel capo and the son of a close associate of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the imprisoned co-founder of the Sinaloa syndicate.
Mexican authorities and fellow journalists say López Serrano likely ordered the hit because the journalist had mocked the young narco mercilessly in Ríodoce, the weekly co-founded by Valdez.
On May 8, 2017, Valdez wrote a scathing column dismissing López Serrano as a “junior” party-boy and fake “weekend” pistolero who moved around ostentatiously with 20 bodyguards, “excelled at chit-chat but not business,” and failed to fill the shoes of his father.
One week later, on May 15, assassins forced Valdez, 50, from his car at midday and shot him at least a dozen times in downtown Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. His body was left on the street amid shell casings; his signature Panama hat was streaked with blood.
López Serrano, a godson of El Chapo, fled inter-mob bloodletting a few months later and surrendered to U.S. authorities along the border in Calexico, California. He later pleaded guilty to trafficking tons of cocaine and other narcotics into the United States. He was never charged in U.S. courts with the murder of Valdez.
He is the son of Dámaso López Núñez, the El Chapo confidante known as El Licenciado, or The Lawyer. The son’s mob handle is Mini Lic. His father and El Chapo are both serving life terms in U.S. prisons.
López Serrano served only five years in U.S. custody on the trafficking conviction. According to media accounts and Mexican officials, he agreed to become a cooperating witness for U.S. prosecutors pursuing other traffickers.
López Serrano was released from federal custody after serving his term and allowed to remain in the United States. However, the FBI re-arrested him in 2024 in connection with a scheme to distribute fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia sentenced López Serrano to five years in prison on the fentanyl rap, to be followed by five years of supervised release.
The new sentence dismayed those who hoped López Serrano would soon be brought back to Mexico to stand trial.
“It’s painful and outrageous to know that the person who ordered Javier’s murder will continue avoiding his deserved punishment in Mexico,” Griselda Tirana, the journalist’s widow, wrote on Facebook.
She has long been at the forefront of efforts to pressure Washington to hand over López Serrano.
But there is a serious hurdle: U.S. prosecutors have viewed López Serrano as too valuable a source on the Mexican underworld to ship him back south, according to Mexico’s former Atty. Gen. Alejandro Gertz Manero, who said he pressed the extradition demand with counterparts in Washington.
“They said he was a protected witness of the government of the United States and he was giving them a lot of information,” Gertz Manero told reporters in December 2024, after López Serrano was arrested in the fentanyl scheme. “And, because of that, they couldn’t help us.”
In May, journalists, human rights activists and others gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City on the anniversary of Valdez’s killing, demanding that López Serrano be sent to Mexico to face justice.
That same month, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexican authorities would “insist” on the extradition of López Serrano.
The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on the case.
Advocates say they plan to continue pressing the U.S. government, even though many lack optimism that Washington will ever relent.
“We are going to keep demanding — as we have since the assassination of Javier — that everyone, including the mastermind of this crime, be punished,” said Roxana Vivanco, news editor at Ríodoce, Valdez’s former publication. “We hope that, this time around, once he finishes his sentence in the United States he will be returned to Mexico to be judged for the killing of Javier.”
As casualties mount among Mexican media personnel — and their assailants go free — many in Mexico view the case as a litmus test. The central question: Will there ever come a time when justice will prevail — and impunity will recede — in cases of Mexican journalists targeted by organized crime, corrupt politicians and others?
To date, the Valdez investigation has followed a distressing pattern: Hired trigger-men are sent to prison, their arrests lauded by Mexican authorities, while the “intellectual authors,” or masterminds, remain free.
“If this, the most high-profile case isn’t solved, then we cannot hold our breaths for resolutions in less high-profile cases,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexican representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press advocacy group.
“So this is a really, really important case,” Hootsen added. “We really need for this man to be extradited to Mexico eventually and stand trial.”
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
Scott Adams, whose comic strip “Dilbert” satirized a certain kind of workplace culture for more than 30 years before its author was canceled because of his comments on race, died Tuesday morning after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 68.
The announcement came via Adams’ YouTube channel, where he livestreamed daily until Monday morning.
“Hi everyone. Unfortunately this isn’t good news. Of course he waited until just before the show started, but he’s not with us anymore,” his ex-wife, Shelly Adams, said through tears Tuesday morning.
The cartoonist, whose extremely dry humor and heterodox political beliefs were on public display in recent years on his daily livestream “Coffee With Scott Adams,” spoke directly to his audience almost up to his death, getting some help from friends in his final days. .
“Some of you have already guessed, so this won’t surprise you at all, but I have the same cancer Joe Biden has,” he said on his May 19, 2025, livestream. “I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it. Well, longer than he’s admitted having it.”
He noted that he and the former commander in chief both had “the bad kind” of prostate cancer.
“There’s something you need to know about prostate cancer,” he said. “If it’s localized and it hasn’t left your prostate, it’s 100% curable. But if it leaves your prostate and spreads to other parts of your body … it is 100% not curable.”
As May, Adams had been using a walker and dealing with terrible pain because, he said, the cancer had spread to his bones. Saying that the disease was “already intolerable,” he added, “I can tell you that I don’t have good days.” He said during a December show that he was “paralyzed” from the waist down in the sense that even though he had sensation, he couldn’t move any of those muscles.
Given all that, he said, “my life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.” But Adams outlived that prediction, livestreaming from his hospital bed during a stay for radiation treatment before Christmas and picking up again from his bed at home after that. Each show started off with the “simultaneous sip,” where Adams invited anyone watching to join him in a communal sip from the beverage of their choosing before he launched into reviewing the news of the day.
Born Scott Raymond Adams on June 8, 1957, in Windham, N.Y., to a postal clerk father and a real estate agent mother, he started drawing cartoons when he was 6. Adams was valedictorian at Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School, received his bachelor’s in economics from Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and then moved to California, where he earned a master’s in business administration at UC Berkeley.
He proceeded to work for years at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell, holding the types of generic corporate office jobs his comic strip would use as fodder. While he was at PacBell, he awakened daily before dawn to try to figure out an alternative career. Cartooning won out.
“Dilbert,” which launched in 1989, went from running in a handful of papers to, at its peak, appearing in more than 2,000 outlets in 57 countries and 19 languages. Adams received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award, the industry’s highest honor, in 1997. Page-a-day “Dilbert” calendars were top sellers for years, with more than 20 million calendars and “Dilbert” books in print.
The comic took satirical aim at a micromanaged white-collar workplace and eventually grew into an empire that included a short TV series (mostly written by Adams), dozens of books and ubiquitous merchandise.
Dilbert, the strip’s surrogate for Adams, interacted with characters including the Pointy-Haired Boss, the boss’ secretary Carol, co-worker Wally, who was trying to get fired so he would get severance, the competent but underappreciated Alice, hardworking but naive intern Asok, the clueless CEO, the evil HR chief Catbert and Dogbert, the smartest dog in the world.
In addition to his numerous comic compilations, Adams’ books included business writing like “How to Lose Almost Every Time and Still Win Big” and “Win Bigly.”
Adams married girlfriend Shelly Miles, a mother of two, in 2006, and the marriage lasted eight years. The two remained friends after their 2014 divorce, with Shelly ultimately reading Scott’s final message to viewers.
In 2018, Adams learned that his stepson Justin, whom he said he had “raised from the age of 2,” was dead of an overdose at 18 after years of battling addiction. Adams fought back tears as he explained in his livestream that Justin’s decision-making abilities had suffered after a head injury sustained in a bike accident when he was 14.
The cartoonist’s political views have been all over the map — he once called himself “a libertarian, minus the crazy stuff.” In 2016, he declared, “I don’t vote and I am not a member of a political party.” More recently he veered toward support for President Trump, whom he considered a great persuader of people.
Then in February 2023, remarks Adams made on his podcast were interpreted as racist, leading to serious consequences in his career.
During a midweek livestream, Adams had riffed off the results of a poll that asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” Among Black respondents, 26% disagreed and 21% said they were not sure — a total of 47% who didn’t think it was OK to be white.
(The seemingly innocuous phrase “It’s OK to be white” had been co-opted in 2017 for an online trolling campaign aimed at baiting liberals and the media, the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement at the time. The phrase also has a history of use among white supremacists.)
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people … that’s a hate group. And I don’t want anything to do with them,” Adams said in his usual deadpan delivery. “And based on how things are going, the best advice I could give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. ’Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
He continued, still deadpan, “So I think it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like, I’ve been doing it all my life and the only outcome is I get called a racist.”
Within days, amid backlash about Adams’ comments, “Dilbert” was dropped by a number of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Then his syndicator, which had provided “Dilbert” to outlets that published the comic, shed him as a client entirely. And Penguin Random House slammed the door shut when it nixed publication of his book “Reframe Your Brain,” which would have come out that fall, and removed his back catalog from its offerings.
Adams discussed his own cancellation after the fact, saying a few days later on his livestream that he had been using hyperbole, “meaning an exaggeration,” to make a point. He said the stories that reported his comments had used a trick: “The trick is just to use my quote and to ignore the context which I helpfully added afterwards.”
But he said that nobody would disagree with his two main points, which had been to “treat all individuals as individuals, no discrimination” and “avoid anything that statistically looks like a bad idea for you personally.” He also disavowed racists.
Adams wound up self-publishing “Reframe Your Brain” in August 2023 with a dedication that read, “For the Simultaneous Sippers (Thank you for saving me.).”
Even after his excommunication from the mainstream, Adams’ weekday morning livestreams regularly garnered tens of thousands of views on YouTube and were also viewable on Rumble, where the cartoonist had gone to avoid speech restrictions on YouTube at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The description on one of his video accounts read, “If you enjoy learning how to be more effective in life while catching up with the interesting news, this is the channel for you.”
Ever since the Trump immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, local leaders and community activists have criticized agents for sometimes making it difficult to identify them as federal law enforcement officials or refusing to identify themselves at all.
Now, an unexpected new group has expressed its own concerns: the FBI.
Citing a string of incidents in which masked criminals posing as immigration officers robbed and kidnapped victims, the FBI recently issued a memo suggesting agents clearly identify themselves while they’re in the field.
The FBI explained its reasoning in a three-page document sent to police agencies across the country last month.
In the memo, the FBI says that criminals impersonating law enforcement “damages trust” between them and the community and that law enforcement has an “opportunity” to better coordinate with their local, state and federal partners. It calls for informational campaigns to educate the public about impostors and for agents to show their identification when asked while out in the field.
Undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens have been detained by masked people on city streets, in hospitals, courthouses, and outside schools and places of worship over the last several months. California has banned the use of masks among law enforcement agencies, but on Tuesday a cadre of masked agents gathered in an offsite Dodger Stadium parking lot while carrying out more raids.
A man seeking asylum from Colombia is detained by federal agents as he attends his court hearing in immigration court in New York City.
(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
The FBI’s memo, obtained through a records request by the national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People, was prepared by the New York field office and first reported by Wired magazine. It details several instances where people impersonated immigration agents.
In Florida, a man pretending to be an ICE agent kidnapped a woman who was in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. The suspect approached the woman on April 21, claimed he was there to pick her up and showed her his shirt that read ICE, the FBI said. The woman got in the suspect’s car and he drove her to an apartment complex, but she was able to escape.
In August, three men in black clothing and wearing vests robbed a New York restaurant and stole from their ATM. The suspects also beat the employees and tied them up. One of the employees willingly surrendered to the suspects when they heard them identify themselves as immigration agents, the FBI said.
The FBI also pointed to an April social media post where a man wearing a black jacket with an ICE patch stood outside a hardware store to intimidate day laborers. An image circulating on social media matching the description of the incident showed the man also wearing a red Trump hat.
“I don’t know if there is federal law that requires a standard police uniform,” David Levine, a professor of law at UC San Francisco said. “It’s good practice to have a distinguishing uniform. Because when you have federal agents dressing as ruffians, with scarves over their faces and glasses in a paramilitary fashion, then it’s so much easier for people to impersonate them.”
The FBI’s national press office did not respond to requests for comment, citing the government shutdown in an automated email response.
U.S. Border Patrol march after a show of force outside the Japanese American National Museum where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a press conference on Aug. 14 in Los Angeles.
Levine says it’s a person’s constitutional right under the 4th Amendment to ask a masked, federal agent to identify themselves.
“It takes a cool head under a tense moment to ask someone, ‘What’s your name? I can’t see your badge? Can you identify yourself?’” Levine said. “It’s practically impossible to ask all of that when you’re being thrown to the ground. But you do have the right to ask.”
There are plenty of examples of people impersonating law enforcement in California in recent years.
In April 2018, Luis Flores-Mendoza of Santa Ana was sentenced to eight months in prison for posing as a federal immigration officer in an attempt to extort $5,000 from a woman, who reported him to the police. The following month, Matthew Ryan Johnston of Fontana was sentenced to two years in federal prison for impersonating an ICE agent. In 2023 and 2024, police in Southern California announced arrests in two separate cases where men were accused of impersonating police to conduct traffic stops.
State officials have sounded the alarm as well because of the Trump administration’s approach.
Earlier this year, after federal immigration raids in the Central Valley, two Fresno men were accused of posing as federal immigration agents and recording themselves harassing local businesses. The Fresno Police Department said the pair, who wore wigs and black tactical vests with letters deliberately covered up so they read “Police” and “ICE,” confronted people at nearly a dozen businesses. The department said the men appeared to have done it for social media purposes and declined to release their names.
Raymond Cruz, 56, places a sign on part of a “No Ice” mural in Inglewood on July 1.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
In March, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta issued a warning to Californians about the rise of ICE impersonators and scammers looking to take “advantage of the fear and uncertainty created by Trump’s mass deportation policies. “
“Let me be clear: If you seek to scam or otherwise take advantage of California’s immigrant communities, you will be held accountable,” Bonta said.
In June, two additional local cases popped up that weren’t included on the FBI memo.
In one, Huntington Park police arrested a man who they suspected of posing as a Border Patrol agent. Police said the man possessed an unlicensed handgun and copies of U.S. Homeland Security removal notices and a list of radio codes for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Huntington Park Police Chief Cosme Lozano speaks at a press conference after a 23-year-old man from Los Angeles was arrested by Huntington Park Police on suspicion of impersonating a law enforcement officer.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
In the other, police in Los Angeles County arrested a man driving a decommissioned police cruiser with control lights and a siren. Authorities allege he had cocaine, a forged Homeland Security investigator’s badge and a pellet gun in his car.
In a statement, Property of the People Executive Director Ryan Shapiro said, “It’s rich the FBI thinks ICE has a PR problem in immigrant communities because of impersonators, while masked and militarized ICE agents are waging a daily campaign of terror against those very communities.”
“Anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” a senior Homeland Security official said.
“Anyone who comes into immediate contact with an individual whom they believe is impersonating an immigration officer, or any law enforcement officer, should immediately contact their local law enforcement agency,” the official said.
Kash Patel, director of the FBI, left, President Trump, center, and Pam Bondi, U.S. attorney general, during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15.
(Jo Lo Scalzo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In a statement to The Times, the office of Mayor Karen Bass said it’s unacceptable for law enforcement officers to operate without properly identifying themselves.
“The Mayor has been supportive of state legislation that would require immigration officers to identify themselves as well as make it a crime for law enforcement officers to wear a face covering while performing their duties, except for specific circumstances such as protection from hazardous smoke.”
Los Angeles Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, whose district includes MacArthur Park, Cypress Park and Pico Union, said the FBI’s memo simply confirms what locals have known all along, even as they create “confusion, fear, chaos and real danger.”
“Now even the FBI, under an administration that has aggressively expanded unconstitutional immigration enforcement, has confirmed that when agents don’t clearly identify themselves, it opens the door for violent impersonators to prey on vulnerable families,” Hernandez said in a statement. “That’s exactly why I co-authored the council motion requiring the LAPD to verify the identity of anyone claiming to be a law enforcement officer, and to strengthen penalties for impersonating an officer. When even Trump’s FBI is warning that unidentified agents put us at risk, it’s a clear sign that this problem can’t be ignored any longer.”
Still, not everyone thinks agents will heed the FBI’s advice. Even if agents were to begin identifying themselves during sweeps, the distrust stemming from the raids in the summer will stay with community members for some time, advocates say.
“I don’t expect them to all of a sudden start walking around with no mask or start walking around and identifying themselves,” said Leo Martinez of VC Defensa, a coalition of local groups dedicated to protecting the immigrant and refugee populations of Ventura County. “More than anything, I think it’s a way for the FBI to put a little bit of distance between themselves and the ICE agents in the public relations sphere, but not really on the ground.”
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum ruled out a new “war on drugs” as a response to the assassination of a regional mayor who was shot at a Day of the Dead celebration, a brazen killing that has sparked national outrage.
“Returning to the war against el narco is not an option,” Sheinbaum told reporters Monday, referring to the bloody anti-crime offensive launched almost two decades ago. “Mexico already did that, and the violence got worse.”
The president spoke as the nation was reeling from the killing Saturday of Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan in the west-central state of Michoacán, which has become an organized-crime battleground. She condemned the assassination as “vile” and vowed to track down his killers.
While Mexican mayors and other local officials are frequent cartel targets — scores have been assassinated in recent years as gangs fight for control of city halls, budgets and police forces — the killing of Manzo struck a nerve nationwide.
A crowd in Uruapan, Mexico, mourns Mayor Carlos Manzo, who was fatally shot over the weekend during a Day of the Dead celebration in the city.
(Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)
Manzo, 40, gained notoriety as an outspoken proponent of taking a hard-line against the cartels that have overrun many regions of Mexico. According to Manzo, police and prosecutors coddle criminals ill-deserving of legal protections.
Manzo’s unyielding stance won him considerable popularity in a nation where polls show security remains citizens’ major concern — despite Sheinbaum’s frequent citing of official figures showing that homicides and other violent crimes are decreasing.
“The murder of the mayor is a clear signal of what we all know but what the government of President Sheinbaum denies: The country is governed by narco-traffickers,” Felipe Rosas Montesinos, 45, a flower salesman in Mexico City, said. “And if anyone challenges el narco, like the mayor of Uruapan did, they will kill him.”
Added Gilberto Santamaría, 37, a mechanic: “This makes one feel defeated, losing hope that anything will ever change.”
Manzo — who split with Sheinbaum’s ruling, center-left Morena party — was among a number of voices across Latin America who have called for more aggressive tactics to combat crime. Some labeled Manzo the “Mexican Bukele,” after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has locked up tens of thousands of alleged gang members, many without due process, according to human rights advocates.
The mayor’s killing “feels like a terror movie in which the bad guys win,” said María Guadalupe Rodríguez, 51, a nurse. “The sad part is that it’s not a movie: It’s what we live with in Mexico.”
A day after Manzo’s killing, protesters filled the streets of Uruapan and Morelia, the capital of Michoacán state. Many condemned Sheinbaum and her Morena party for what they called a permissive attitude toward crime.
While the protests were mostly peaceful, authorities said, some demonstrators broke into the state government palace in Morelia and trashed offices and other installations. Police responded with tear gas and arrested at least eight vandalism suspects.
Manzo was shot multiple times Saturday at a candlelight Day of the Dead festival that he was attending with his family in downtown Uruapan. One suspect was killed and two accomplices arrested, police said.
The killing was a well-planned cartel hit, Security Minister Omar García Harfuch told reporters. The suspects managed to circumvent Manzo’s contingent of bodyguards, García Harfuch said. Authorities were investigating which of the area’s many mobs were behind the slaying.
Uruapan, a city of more than 300,000, is situated in the verdant hills of Michoacán, where most of Mexico’s avocados are grown. The lucrative industry — “green gold” generates $3 billion annually in exports to the United States — has for years been the target of a patchwork of armed groups who extort money from growers, packers, truckers and others.
Almost 20 years ago, then-President Felipe Calderón chose Michoacán as the launching pad for a nationwide war on drugs, deploying troops to combat the growing power of cartels. That strategy is widely believed to have had the unintended consequence of increasing violence: Gangs acquired ever-more powerful weapons to match the firepower of the armed forces, while cartel infighting accelerated as police captured or killed capos.
Upon taking office in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised a different approach, saying the military deployment had turned Mexico into a “graveyard.” He instructed troops to refrain from direct confrontations with cartels, when possible, and vowed to attend to poverty and other underlying social-economic social forces behind the violence.
Critics labeled López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy a disaster, as violent crime spiked.
Sheinbaum, a protege of López Obrador, embraced her predecessor’s approach but sought to improve Mexico’s intelligence-gathering and investigatory powers and strengthen the rule of law. Her government has aggressively arrested thousands of cartel suspects, several dozen of whom were sent to the United States to face trial.
For Manzo, however, Sheinbaum’s strategy was a rebranded incarnation of “hugs not bullets.”
The war on drugs, experts say, did nothing to cut the flow of cocaine, synthetic opiates like fentanyl and other substances to the United States, the world’s major consumer. And Mexico’s cartels, by all accounts, have only gotten stronger in recent years, despite the take-down of numerous kingpins.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.
Kai Trump, President Trump’s eldest granddaughter, a high school senior and University of Miami commit, has secured a sponsor invitation to play in an LPGA Tour event Nov. 13-16.
The 18-year-old will compete in the Annika at Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Fla. She currently attends the Benjamin School in Palm Beach and is ranked No. 461 on the American Junior Golf Assn. rankings. She also competes on the Srixon Medalist Tour on the South Florida PGA. Her top finish was a tie for third in July.
“My dream has been to compete with the best in the world on the LPGA Tour,” Trump said in a statement. “This event will be an incredible experience. I look forward to meeting and competing against so many of my heroes and mentors in golf as I make my LPGA Tour debut.”
Sponsor invitations have long been used to attract attention to a tournament through a golfer who is from a well-known family or, in recent years, has a strong social media presence. Kai Trump qualifies on both counts.
She is the oldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr. and his ex-wife, Vanessa, and has nearly 8 million followers combined on Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube and X. In addition to posting her own exploits on and off the course, she creates videos playing golf with her grandpa and chronicled their visit to the Ryder Cup.
She also recently launched her own sports apparel and lifestyle brand, KT.
“Kai’s broad following and reach are helping introduce golf to new audiences, especially among younger fans,” said Ricki Lasky, LPGA chief tour business and operations officer, in a statement.
The oldest of the president’s 11 grandchildren, Kai became known nationally when she made a speech in support of her grandfather’s campaign at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Her parents divorced in 2018, and her mother has been dating Tiger Woods for about a year.
Fullerton police said they discovered the bodies of four people inside a residence after a friend reported they had overdosed and were not breathing.
Authorities said they were called to an apartment in the 100 block of Wilshire Avenue at 11:01 a.m. on Tuesday and the bodies were discovered.
“There is no immediate threat to the public,” the police said in a statement.
Two women console each other after learning of the deaths of four softball teammates.
(KTLA-TV Channel 5)
Detectives have launched a death investigation. Authorities have not confirmed the identities of the deceased, but a friend of the group told KTLA-TV Channel 5 that they were all part of the same softball team.
Police did not confirm the deaths were a result of a drug overdose and could not immediately be reached for additional comment on Wednesday.
But drug use has become a growing concern in the county in recent years.
In Orange County, the rate of death due to opioid overdose nearly tripled from 2017 to 2021, from 7.9 deaths per 100,000 to 23.2. The largest increase occurred during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the overdose rate rising 88% between 2019 and 2020, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.
For decades, rolling blackouts and urgent calls for energy conservation were part of life in California — a reluctant summer ritual almost as reliable as the heat waves that drove them. But the state has undergone a quiet shift in recent years, and the California Independent System Operator hasn’t issued a single one of those emergency pleas, known as Flex Alerts, since 2022.
Experts and officials say the Golden State has reached a turning point, reflecting years of investment in making its electrical grid stronger, cleaner and more dependable. Much of that is new battery energy storage, which captures and stores electricity for later use.
In fact, batteries have been transformative for California, state officials say. In late afternoon, when the sun stops hitting solar panels and people are home using electricity, batteries now push stored solar energy onto the grid.
California has invested heavily in the technology, helping it mature and get cheaper in recent years. Battery storage in the state has grown more than 3,000% in six years — from 500 megawatts in 2020 to more than 15,700 megawatts today.
“There is no question that the battery fleet that has grown rapidly since 2020, along with the state’s expanding portfolio of other supply and demand-side resources, has been a real game changer for reliability during summer periods of peak demand,” said Elliot Mainzer, CAISO’s president and chief executive.
It was only five years ago that a record-shattering heat wave pushed the grid to its limit and plunged much of the state into darkness. In the wake of that event, California’s energy leaders vowed to take action to make the grid more resilient.
Since then, CAISO has overseen a massive build-out of new energy and storage resources, including more than 26,000 megawatts of new capacity overall, which has also helped make the grid more stable, Mainzer said. The state hasn’t seen rolling blackouts since 2020.
“Extreme weather events, wildfires and other emergencies can pose reliability challenges for any bulk electric system,” he said. “But the CAISO battery fleet, along with the additional capacity and close coordination with state and regional partners, have provided an indisputable benefit to reliability.”
Solar panels and battery storage units at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County on Nov. 25, 2024.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Already, batteries have enabled the grid to operate with dramatic decreases in the use of planet-warming fossil fuels. Now they’re becoming a more cost-effective and reliable replacement for aging gas-fired power plants, according to Maia Leroy, founder of the California energy consulting firm Lumenergy LLC and co-author of a recent report on the rise of battery storage over gas generation in California.
“Historically, Flex Alerts have always come through in summertime when it’s super hot and everyone is cranking their AC,” Leroy said. “But also in the summertime, we’re seeing that gas plants underperform because combustion doesn’t work well with ambient heat. So when we’re able to shift that need from having to use gas plants to something more stable, dispatchable and flexible like battery storage, then we’re able to meet that demand in the summer without having to rely on those underperforming gas plants.”
Battery energy storage is not without challenges, however. Lithium-ion batteries — the most common type used for energy storage — typically have about four to six hours of capacity. It’s enough to support the grid during peak hours as the sun sets, but can still leave some gaps to be filled by natural gas.
Nikhil Kumar, program director with the energy policy nonprofit GridLab, said the technology already exists for longer-duration batteries, including through different chemistries such as iron-air batteries, which release energy through oxidation, and flow batteries, which store energy in liquid chemicals that flow through a reactor.
Those batteries are not yet as mature and can be more expensive and larger than their lithium-ion counterparts, Kumar said. But a recent GridLab report indicates that equation is changing, with the average cost of a new gas plant often on par with four-hour lithium-ion batteries and only slightly less expensive than longer-duration battery technologies.
“Batteries are going to get cheaper,” Kumar said. “Gas isn’t.”
The battery storage shift is occurring as the Trump administration takes steps to stifle solar and other forms of renewable energy in favor of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. At the end of September, the administration announced that it would open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired powered plants, which officials said would help strengthen the economy, protect jobs and advance American energy.
During an hourlong news conference on the initiative, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum described wind and solar energy as intermittent sources that are “literally dependent on the weather” — but neither he nor any other official mentioned the growth of battery storage that has made those sources more reliable and more promising.
It’s not a partisan issue. ERCOT, which operates Texas’s electrical grid, has more than 14,000 megawatts of batteries online, a nearly threefold increase from early 2023. California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
Battery storage units at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County on Nov. 25, 2024.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
But Trump has made moves to support the production of batteries in the U.S. Currently, about three-quarters of the world’s batteries are made in China, and Trump’s tariffs — including a proposed 100% tariff on China — have been good for at least one Sacramento-based battery manufacturer, Sparkz.
“The administration wants critical material manufacturing to happen in the U.S.,” said Sanjiv Malhotra, founder and chief executive. “They basically are very much in favor of domestic manufacturing of batteries.”
Sparkz is making lithium-iron batteries that don’t use nickel and cobalt — a composition that has long been an industry darling but that depends on imported metals. Instead, their lithium-iron-phosphate batteries have a supply chain that is entirely based in the U.S., which means they can take advantage of federal tax credits that favor the production of clean energy components made mostly of domestic parts, Malhotra said. The company’s clients include data centers and utilities.
Malhotra added that California has done an excellent job “beefing up” the grid’s storage capacity in the last few years. He said batteries are a major reason why the state hasn’t seen a Flex Alert since 2022.
“The numbers basically tell the story that it was all because of, essentially, energy storage,” he said.
There is still work to do. While the state’s grid has seen improvements, it is more than a century old and was built primarily for gas plants. Experts and officials agree that it needs additional substantial upgrades and reforms to meet current energy demands and goals.
Permitting is also a hurdle, as California typically requires lengthy environmental review for new projects. The state, sometimes controversially, is now speeding review, and recently approved a massive solar and battery storage farm, the Darden Clean Energy Project in Fresno County, through a new fast-track permitting program. It will make enough electricity to power 850,000 homes for four hours, according to the California Energy Commission.
Safety remains a considerable concern. In January, a fire tore through one of the world’s largest battery storage facilities in Moss Landing, Monterey County. The facility housed around 100,000 lithium-ion batteries, which are exceptionally dangerous when ignited because they burn extremely hot and cannot be extinguished with water, which can trigger a violent chemical reaction. The blaze emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese that were measured within miles of the site.
“When you’re dealing with large technologies in general, there’s always going to be some kind of danger,” said Leroy, of Lumenergy. “This points to the big need for diversifying the technologies that we use.”
Other forms of energy, such as oil and coal, also pose considerable health and safety risks including the emission of air pollution — soot, mercury, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide contributing to climate change.
California is in the process of eliminating coal power and expects to be completely coal-free by November. And while natural gas still makes up a large piece of the state’s portfolio, renewables represented nearly 60% of California’s in-state electricity generation in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The numbers continue to trend upward. In the first six months of this year, CAISO’s grid was powered by 100% clean energy for an average of almost seven hours each day.
“We have literally just demonstrated that California is able to run with super clean resources, with backups from natural gas,” said Kumar, of GridLab. “And it works. We don’t have Flex Alerts.”
SEOUL — At a military parade in Beijing featuring China’s next-generation weaponry, another momentous scene was on display: Chinese President Xi Jinping standing side by side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Their joint appearance on Wednesday at a parade commemorating the end of World War II, is the first time that the leaders of the three countries have appeared together in public. It comes amid growing concern about the increasing collaboration of the “axis of upheaval,” a term that denotes China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea and their opposition to the U.S.-led world order.
It marks Kim’s first foray into multilateral diplomacy since assuming power in 2011. While in the past the reclusive leader has tended to avoid overseas trips due to security concerns, he arrived Tuesday in Beijing on a heavily armored train known as “The Sun,” stepping out to a welcome that even Kim’s grandfather Kim Il Sung didn’t get as the last North Korean leader to attend the Victory Day parade in 1959.
“The trip was an undeniable political victory for Kim Jong Un,” said Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korea studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University. “To be seen standing shoulder to shoulder with two superpowers in China is an incredibly powerful image of propaganda to show to North Korean residents.”
Kim’s growing diplomatic ambitions have in recent years involved a defense pact with Russia and the deployment of North Korean soldiers to the war in Ukraine in exchange for technological and military assistance.
In a statement posted on the website of North Korea’s foreign ministry a day before the parade, Vice Minister Pak Myong Ho accused the U.S. and other Western governments of openly inflicting “tyranny” against “countless countries around the world,” while expressing support for a new balance of power led by Beijing.
Experts at South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), a government think tank, say that Kim’s most pressing agenda item in Beijing will be reviving its economic exchange with China, which has slowed in recent years amid Beijing’s frustrations with Pyongyang’s ongoing nuclear missile program.
“In economic matters, the importance of China’s assistance is absolute,” INSS researchers wrote in a report published ahead of the parade.
While Moscow in recent years has reportedly violated U.N. sanctions to provide North Korea with assistance ranging from refined petroleum to military drones, China is by far North Korea’s largest trading partner, accounting for up to 98% of the latter’s exports in 2023, according to an analysis by the Seoul-based Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency.
Noting that trade between North Korea and China currently sits at around 80% of pre-pandemic levels, the INSS researchers highlighted that the shortage of Chinese economic support — and once-steady tourist flows — was being acutely felt in places like the Wonsan Kalma resort, a newly opened beachside vacation destination that Kim called the country’s “greatest achievement” of 2025.
Despite North Korea’s vocal embrace of the so-called “new Cold War” order, Russia and China have been reluctant to do the same, analysts said.
“China doesn’t gain anything by forming a bloc with North Korea,” Park, the professor, said. “Xi Jinping knows all too well that at most, any attempt of this kind will at most be a loose gathering of countries who are positioned against the U.S. without any real power or the cohesiveness of a bloc.”
In a joint statement issued after a meeting in May 2024, Putin and Xi said that the China-Russia partnership is “a more advanced form of interstate interaction compared to the military-political alliances of the Cold War era and not of a bloc or confrontational nature.”
While a trilateral summit between the three leaders is widely regarded as unlikely for this reason, Kim’s appearance in Beijing may, on the other hand, provide the leverage he needs for a potential round two of summits with President Trump.
“I think North Korea may be willing to discuss a rollback of its nuclear program and demanding in return things like a permanent end to any joint U.S.- South Korea military drills or halting the deployment of any strategic assets,” Park said.
Though Trump expressed a willingness to sit down with Kim during a summit with South Korean president Lee Jae Myung last month, Park says that Pyongyang no longer sees the U.S.’ long-standing goal of North Korean denuclearization as a viable starting point — and that Kim’s parade appearance is likely to be seen as yet another vindication of that position.
SEOUL — In many parts of the world, convenience stores are the shops of last resort: cigarettes, sodas and laundry detergent. But in South Korea, you might find single malt whiskies, $800 French wines, 24K gold bars, shampoo and conditioner refill stations, televisions or a dine-in instant noodle bar with more than 200 varieties of ramyon.
A customer might be able to pick up a package, wash and dry their clothes, or sign up for a new debit card.
The stores are best known for their numerous feats of “instant-izing” food, a process in which nearly every conceivable dish is turned into a packaged meal: spaghetti, Japanese udon, fried rice that you squeeze out of a tube. These have turned convenience stores into a $25-billion industry in South Korea and those food products are churned out at a staggering pace: up to 70 new food items hit the shelves each week, effectively offering a live feed of South Korean tastes.
“In South Korea’s food retail market, you go extinct if you’re not quick to change,” says Chae Da-in, who says her obsession with convenience stores is decades old. “It’s all about being diverse and fast.”
Known in the national media and on social media as a “convenience store critic,” Chae is the author of three books on the world of convenience store foods, which has led to TV appearances and newspaper interviews.
Every Friday, she tours a handful of convenience stores near her home to keep up with what’s new. Over the last two decades, she estimates she has consumed at least 800 varieties of convenience store samgak gimbap — rice wrapped in dried seaweed and a grab-and-go staple.
Lee Hee Chul, 21, from Incheon, South Korea, cools down his ramyon in a DIY cone made from the ramyon bowl cover at a CU convenience store in a popular tourist area in Myeongdong.
Shoppers prepare their dinner at one of the self-serve machines in the dining area at a CU ramyon convenience store.
In recent years, Chae has watched her obsession go global. Much like South Korean movies, TV shows and music, South Korean convenience stores have become a cultural sensation.
Specific locations, such as the store that appeared in Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game,” have made the news. On TikTok and YouTube, mukbang — videos of people eating — of South Korean convenience store foods have gathered millions of views.
“Giant cheese sausage,” announces one reviewer in a TikTok video series titled “ONLY Eating Food from a Korean Convenience Store.” The meal also includes blue lemonade that comes in a plastic pouch, a “3XL” spicy tuna mayo samgak gimbap and a carbonara-flavored Buldak (“fire chicken”) noodle cup.
South Korean convenience stores are now expanding into nearby countries such as Mongolia or Malaysia. CU, one of the country’s leading operators with more than 600 stores in Asia, is set to open its first U.S. location in Hawaii later this year.
“The percentage of the Asian population in Hawaii is six times that of the mainland U.S., making it a place where there is a high level of familiarity and positive attitudes toward Korean culture,” said Lim Hyung-geun, the head of overseas operations at BGF Retail, CU’s parent company.
“On top of that, we’re seeing the sustained popularity of Korean culture, such as a Korean food boom among American teenagers and young people in their 20s and 30s, which we believe will be a big boost for CU’s future expansion.”
Lim calls CU’s overseas locations “‘miniature South Koreas’ where people can experience the products that have become popular with the K-wave.
“But as is the case here, K-convenience stores aren’t just a place to experience South Korean culture,” he said. “They are also restaurants, cafes and a general amenity.”
In other words, everything stores that are everywhere and open all the time.
***
The GS25 convenience store is collaborating with FC Seoul, a South Korean football club, in the Hongdae neighborhood.
Like many things South Korea has embraced and spun off into something novel, convenience stores are an import to the country. The first such store was American — the Southland Ice Co., which was founded in Texas in 1927 and changed its name to 7-Eleven in 1946. The first of the 7-Elevens opened for business in Seoul in the 1980s.
Today, South Korea is the convenience store capital of the world. Like the bodegas of New York, they have become part of the fabric of contemporary urban life, multifunctional spaces that can be restaurants or coffee shops or bars with microwaves and outdoor seating. Chae calls them the “oasis of the streets.”
“People hang out in convenience stores,” she said. “They’ve become a social place.”
Part of what makes them such a force in the country is their sheer numbers.
There are around 55,000 convenience stores in South Korea — a country the size of Indiana — amounting to one convenience store for every 940 people. In Seoul, where their numbers have quadrupled in the last 15 years, it sometimes feels like there’s one on every corner.
Much of this has to do with the fact that roughly one in every four workers in South Korea is self-employed, a high number relative to other developed countries. For those in this mom-and-pop economy, which includes older workers pushed into early retirement or others who have been boxed out of the traditional labor market, convenience stores offer the most accessible form of entrepreneurship.
“Compared to the hundreds of thousands it would cost to open another business, the main draw of convenience stores is that you can open one with starting capital as little as 20 million won [$14,000],” said Oh Sang-bong, the head of social policy research at the Korean Labor Institute. “Of course it’s not easy. There are a lot of cautionary tales. But there are success stories, too.”
***
Images of the boy band Tomorrow X Together decorate the windows of the Nice to CU music library convenience store in the Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul.
This profusion has made the convenience store business one of the most fast-paced and competitive in the country — one that moves in lockstep with boom-and-bust social media attention spans.
Hit products generate the kind of buzz you might see only for a limited-edition sneaker or the latest iPhone, necessitating preorders or, when inventories inevitably dry up, leading to scalping.
But the lows are abrupt. When it was first released last year, CU’s “Dubai-style chocolate” — an in-house take on the global TikTok food trend — commanded lines outside of stores and sold out in a day. Four months later, sales had dropped to a sixth of what they were.
“The lifespan of products is now incredibly short because social media fads come and go so quickly,” said Kim, a merchandiser for a leading convenience store franchise who asked to be identified only by his surname because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
“In the past when the market wasn’t so saturated, revenue would naturally rise as everyone opened more stores. But now there are so many stores, and then you’re competing not just with other convenience stores but with e-commerce platforms, coffee shops, restaurants — everybody who’s following the same trend.”
Most of Kim’s job involves scrolling through social media platforms such as TikTok, looking for the next hot-ticket item, such as a distant food trend that shows signs of making landfall.
“It’s brutal. It’s like trying to find the eye of a needle over and over again,“ he said. “If you miss something big and a competitor releases it first? Then you’re getting chewed out by your boss.”
Kwon Sung-jun is a chef who specializes in Italian cuisine and the winner of “Culinary Class Wars,” a hit reality cooking competition released by Netflix last year. He has a ritual of stopping by a convenience store every night after work — even if he doesn’t have anything to buy.
“It’s very useful for staying abreast of any trends in the culinary world,” he said, and his routine proved to be pivotal in winning the $223,000 prize for “Culinary Class Wars.”
In one stage of the competition, contestants were tasked with cooking a dish using ingredients sourced from a true-to-life replica of a convenience store on set. Kwon, 30, handily won with a chestnut tiramisu whipped together from chestnuts, milk, coffee and a package of biscuits.
“I came up with the idea in 30 seconds,” he said. “Because I had a mental list of what convenience stores have, I also planned substitute options for each of the key ingredients like chestnut, cream and so on.”
Since winning the competition, he has avoided convenience stores; just two weeks after that episode aired, CU released a mass-produced version of his tiramisu, with Kwon’s face on the packaging.
“It’s a little embarrassing to see those photos of myself,” he said.
***
“Most of the tourists come looking for products related to Korean movies or TV shows like dalgona[a traditional Korean candy] because they saw it on ‘Squid Game,’” says Kim Hye-ryeon, the owner of a GS25 in the Hongdae district of Seoul.
All of this makes running a convenience store no easy feat, says Kim Hye-ryeon, the 52-year-old owner of a GS25 in Seoul’s Hongdae district.
Because franchisees are responsible for picking out their own inventory from the company catalog, which is updated three times a week, running a successful convenience store is less about the labor of stocking shelves and cashing out customers than keeping up with the frenetic cycle of food trends.
“Whenever there’s a popular item, the owners who are a step ahead buy up all the stock so sometimes I can’t get any for my store,” she said. “You have to know what’s popular with young people at all times.”
In recent years, as South Korea’s cultural footprint has expanded, the assignment has gotten even more complicated. Streets that were once quiet are now popular thoroughfares for tourists staying in the guesthouses and Airbnbs that have opened in the area. Global tastes must be accounted for, too.
A customer heads for the exit at a GS25 convenience store.
“There’s been a noticeable increase since the pandemic,” she said. “Before, it was mostly Chinese or Japanese tourists, but now it’s from all over, especially Americans and Europeans.”
From behind the counter, she has been keeping mental notes of what this international consumer base is buying, noting, for example, how her Muslim customers carefully study the labels to check whether the item is halal.
“Most of the tourists come looking for products related to Korean movies or TV shows like dalgona [a traditional Korean candy] because they saw it on ‘Squid Game,’” she said. “They also really like ice creams, especially bingsu [Korean shaved ice].”
President Trump’s decision to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington has California officials on high alert, with some worrying that he intends to activate federal forces in the Bay Area and Southern California, especially during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Trump said that his use of the National Guard to fight crime could expand to other cities, and suggested that local police have been unable to do the job.
Legal experts say it is highly unusual and troubling for forces to be deployed without a major crisis, such as civil unrest or a natural disaster. The Washington deployment is another example of Trump seeking to use the military for domestic endeavors, similar to his decision to send the National Guard to Los Angeles in June, amid an immigration crackdown that sparked protests, experts said.
Washington has long struggled with crime but has seen major reductions in recent years.
Officials in Oakland and Los Angeles — two cities the president mentioned by name — slammed Trump’s comments about crime in their cities. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said in a statement that the president’s characterization wasn’t rooted in fact, but “based in fear-mongering in an attempt to score cheap political points.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it “performative” and a “stunt.”
Trump has said he would consider deploying the military to Los Angeles once again to protect the 2028 Olympic Games. This month, he signed an executive order that named him chair of a White House task force on the Los Angeles Games.
The White House has not said specifically what role Trump would play in security arrangements.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who sits on the city panel overseeing the Games, acknowledged last week that the city is a “little nervous” about the federal government’s plans for securing the event.
Congress recently approved $1 billion for security and planning for the Games. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security declined to explain to The Times how the funds will be used.
Padilla said her concern was based on the unpredictable nature of the administration, as well as recent immigration raids that have used masked, heavily armed agents to round up people at Home Depot parking lots and car washes.
“Everything that we’re seeing with the raids was a real curveball to our city,” Padilla said during a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum event. It dealt “a real curveball to [efforts] to focus on the things that folks care about, like homelessness, like transportation … economic development,” she said.
Bass, appearing on CNN this week, said that using the National Guard during the Olympics is “completely appropriate.” She said that the city expects a “federal response when we have over 200 countries here, meaning heads of state of over 200 countries. Of course you have the military involved. That is routine.”
But Bass made a distinction between L.A. Olympics security and the “political stunt” she said Trump pulled by bringing in the National Guard and the U.S. Marines after protests over the federal government’s immigration crackdown. That deployment faces ongoing legal challenges, with an appeals court ruling that Trump had the legal authority to send the National Guard.
“I believed then, and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case, and I think D.C. is a test case as well,” Bass said. “To say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want, and I’m the commander in chief, and I can use the troops whenever we want.”
On Monday, Trump tied his action to what has been a familiar theme to him: perceived urban decay.
“You look at Chicago, how bad it is, you look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore —they’re so far gone,” he said. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said officers and agents deployed across the District of Columbia have so far made 23 arrests for offenses including homicide, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, lewd acts, reckless driving, fare evasion and not having permits. Six illegal handguns were seized, she said.
Citing crime as a reason to deploy National Guard troops without the support of a state governor is highly unprecedented, experts said. The National Guard has been deployed to Southern California before, notably during the 1992 L.A. riots and the civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.
“It would be awful because he would be clearly violating his legal authorities and he’d be sued again by the governor and undoubtedly, by the mayors of L.A. and Oakland,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University. “The citizens in those cities would be up in arms. They would be aghast that there are soldiers patrolling their streets.”
The District of Columbia does not have control over its National Guard, which gives the president wide latitude to deploy those troops. In California and other states, the head of the National Guard is the governor and there are legal limits on how federal troops can be used.
The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, largely bars federal troops from being used in civilian law enforcement. The law reflects a tradition dating to the Revolutionary War era that sees military interference in American life as a threat to liberty and democracy.
“We have such a strong tradition that we don’t use the military for domestic law enforcement, and it’s a characteristic of authoritarian countries to see the military be used in that way,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and a constitutional law expert. “That’s never been so in the United States, and many are concerned about the way in which President Trump is acting the way authoritarian rulers do.”
Whether the troops deployed to Los Angeles in June amid the federal immigration raids were used for domestic law enforcement in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is central in the trial underway this week in federal court in San Francisco.
If Trump were to send troops to California, Banks said, the only legal lever he could pull would be to declare an insurrection and invoke the Insurrection Act.
Unlike in D.C., Trump wouldn’t be able to federalize police departments in other parts of the country. There are circumstances where the federal government has put departments under consent decrees — a reform tool for agencies that have engaged in unlawful practices — but in those cases the government alleged specific civil rights violations, said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California sheriff’s deputy and legal counsel on policing.
“You are not going to be able to come in and take over because you say crime is rising in a particular place,” he said.
Oakland Councilman Ken Houston, a third-generation resident who was elected in 2024, said his city doesn’t need the federal government’s help with public safety.
Oakland has struggled with crime for years, but Houston cited progress. Violent crimes, including homicide, aggravated assault, rape and robbery are down 29% so far this year from the same period in 2024. Property crimes including burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny also are trending down, according to city data.
“He’s going by old numbers and he’s making a point,” Houston said of Trump. “Oakland does not need the National Guard.”
Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.
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Hannah Fry, Dakota Smith, Richard Winton, Andrea Castillo
A residential skyscraper has been approved in the South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, though it’s unclear how soon construction will begin.
The City Council last week signed off on a proposed 51-story apartment tower at 11th and Olive streets, a few blocks east of Crypto.com Arena and the L.A. Live entertainment district.
New York developer Mack Real Estate Development declined to talk about the planned tower, but documents filed with the city show a tall tower with 536 rental units and ground floor spaces for bars, restaurants and other retail uses. It would have parking for 581 vehicles both underground and above ground.
The site at 1105 S. Olive St. is now a surface parking lot.
When asked when construction of the project might begin, a representative for Mack Real Estate said the company had no comment.
Even though demand for housing is high in Los Angeles, it’s challenging to construct ground-up multi-unit housing in the current financial climate, urban development consultant Hamid Behdad said.
Costs have risen and grown more unpredictable on multiple fronts, Behdad said, raising uncertainty for developers about whether they will be able to rent or sell new units profitably after completing them.
Labor costs have also been increasing in recent years, Behdad said, and the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have added a destabilizing effect on the construction labor pool.
Some developers who have downtown projects approved but not built are trying to sell them to other developers or investors, he said.
“Nothing is easy,” Behdad said.
South Park, though, is one of downtown’s most vibrant neighborhoods where thousands of new residences have been built in recent years, said Nick Griffin, executive director of the privately funded Downtown Center Business Improvement District, a nonprofit coalition of more than 2,000 property owners.
There is “a demonstrable underlying demand for housing more across the city and region, but specifically in downtown with the occupancy rate at a pretty steady 90% or so,” he said.
The location of Mack Real Estate’s planned project has already proved desirable to developers, Griffin said.
“There have already been several significant projects built along that stretch and there are another four large-scale projects within a couple of blocks, so you’re you’re talking about a significant residential hub” that stands to attract new residents and more development, he said.
Griffin said he hopes developers like Mack Real Estate are getting their projects ready for market conditions to change in the next six months to two years.
“Financial conditions are going to align themselves at some point in the not too distant future,” he said, “and they want to have their projects teed up and ready to go.”
California’s surgeon general has unveiled a new initiative to reduce maternal mortality and set a goal of halving the rate of deaths related to pregnancy and birth by December 2026.
Health officials say that more than 80% of maternal deaths nationwide are preventable. California has achieved a much lower rate of such deaths than the U.S., but maternal mortality resurged in recent years amid the COVID-19 pandemic, state data show.
“We have the lowest rate in the country. Now we can do better,” California Surgeon General Dr. Diana E. Ramos said in an interview.
Ramos was joined in announcing the effort Tuesday by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In California, leading causes of such deaths include heart disease, bleeding, “behavioral health” issues such as mental illness and substance use, and infection. More than a fifth of pregnancy-related deaths in California occur the day of delivery, but the majority happen in the days, weeks and months that follow, according to state data.
The crisis has been especially stark among Black women, who have faced a maternal mortality rate more than three times that of white women in California. In Los Angeles County, there has been a public outcry in recent years over the deaths of women like April Valentine, 31, and Bridgette Burks, 32 — Black mothers who left behind devastated families.
Health researchers have faulted numerous factors for the higher rates of maternal mortality among Black women, including the physical effects on the body of enduring years of racism; higher rates of diabetes and other chronic conditions that increase risk; and inequities in the care received by Black patients.
California officials said they are also concerned about rising rates of maternal mortality among Latinos and Asian/Pacific Islander communities in the state.
The “Strong Start & Beyond” initiative, officials said, would help patients understand potential risks before they become pregnant and prompt earlier action to address hazards such as heart disease. It would also alert Californians to doula services and other programs intended to support people before, during and after birth.
Ramos said California had reached the lowest rate of maternal mortality in the nation through its system of reviewing maternal deaths and other efforts centered on hospitals, physicians and other healthcare professionals. Up until now, “the focus has been primarily on the healthcare setting,” she said.
But “if we keep on doing the same thing — just focusing on the healthcare team — we’re going to get the same results,” Ramos said. Health officials and experts decided they needed to bolster that work, “and that’s why we’re bringing in the patient.”
“It seems so simple, but oftentimes, the pregnant person doesn’t feel like they have a voice or they have the information they need to make informed decisions,” Ramos said.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said in a statement accompanying the launch of the new effort that “reducing maternal mortality isn’t a ‘should,’ it’s a ‘must.’ California gets it.”
The planned strategies outlined in the California Maternal Health Blueprint, released Tuesday, include a new questionnaire that patients can take at home to assess their risk of pregnancy complications and get recommendations for next steps based on their results.
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, Ramos said she found that it was often at their first prenatal appointment that a patient would first hear, “You’re going to be a high-risk patient.’ And more times than not, patients would say … ‘I wish I would have known that I could have done X, Y or Z to decrease my risk.’”
California officials also want all medical facilities in the state to use an existing screening tool for gauging the risk levels of pregnant patients.
Ramos said those results could help guide where patients go for births. Hospitals with limited resources could refer patients with a higher risk of complications — such as someone who “is going to be at risk for hemorrhage, is going to be at risk for ICU admission” — to the medical facilities best equipped to handle them.
The new effort comes as pregnant patients may face dwindling choices for hospital births: Nationally, roughly 1 in 25 obstetric units closed in 2021 and 2022, according to a March of Dimes report.
Under “the modern fee-for-service healthcare model … hospitals must fund round-the-clock capacity but are only reimbursed when their facilities and staff are in action,” wrote Dr. Anna Reinert, an assistant professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, in a recent op-ed.
“So if not enough deliveries are happening, expenses outweigh reimbursement. This drives hospitals to get out of the baby delivery business altogether,” Reinert wrote.
California has faced a wave of such closures in the last decade, including at many hospitals in Los Angeles County. A CalMatters analysis found that such closures had disproportionately affected Black, Latino and low-income communities. Among the latest hospitals to announce it would shut down a labor and delivery unit is USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale, which plans to halt maternity care on Nov. 20.
Hidden in the rugged Sierra Nevada amid sprawling pine forests, Havilah was once a bustling mining town where stamp mills pulverized rock from the region’s mines and prospectors panned for precious metals in the late 19th century.
In its heyday, the town’s main drag featured saloons, dance halls, inns and gambling houses. Townsfolk witnessed midday gunfights, manhunts for wanted murders and stagecoach robberies, and they wagered gold dust on horse races, according to Los Angeles Times archives.
But for nearly a century, long after the feverish search for gold subsided, Havilah had been considered something of a ghost town, with only about 150 residents. Foundations were all that remained of most of its historic buildings when fire swept through the town July 26.
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Roy Fluhart, whose ancestors had homesteaded in the area around the Great Depression, had tried to preserve the town’s rich history. As president of Havilah’s historical society, he and his relatives helped curate the courthouse with historic documents and photographs, antique mining tools and other artifacts from the region’s past.
“We lost everything,” Fluhart said. “The sad part is, the museum was an archive, and it’s lost now. Son of a gun. … We didn’t really have time to get anything out.”
It wasn’t just the town’s history that was lost.
Havilah resident Bo Barnett, wearing the same clothes he had on when fleeing , recounts escaping the Borel fire. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Bo Barnett, whose house was destroyed, managed to escape with his dogs and the clothes on his back. Barnett, whose wife died a month ago, expressed remorse that he didn’t have time to collect her ashes.
“Fire was raining down upon us,” Barnett said, as his eyes welled with tears. “I wasn’t sure what I was driving into. My tires were melting on the road. It was horrible.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spent much of his childhood in the sparsely populated mining community of Dutch Flat in Placer County, lamented the loss of a fellow gold rush community on Tuesday. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a ball cap, he toured the wreckage in Havilah, walking up to the remnants of the town museum and pulling a novelty Uncle Sam coin bank from the blackened rubble.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom toured Havilah after the fire, finding an artifact in the wreck of the courthouse museum.
“Towns wiped off the map — places, lifestyles, traditions,” Newsom said at a news conference. “That’s what this is really all about. At the end of the day, it’s about people, it’s about history, it’s about memories.”
In recent years, devastating wildfires have obliterated some of California’s gold rush towns, erasing the history of one of the most significant eras in 19th century America. Havilah joins the likes of Paradise and Greenville, small communities that saw influxes of prospectors, followed by population exodus and, more recently, devastation.
Havilah credits its origin to Asbury Harpending — a Kentuckian who plotted to seize California and its gold to support the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1864, Harpending, indignant after his conviction for high treason, ventured to present-day Kern County’s Clear Creek region. He found deposits of gold and christened the area Havilah, after a gold-rich land in the book of Genesis.
Although Harpending had no land rights, he established a sprawling mining camp and sold parcels to incoming miners in what many believed could be a second gold rush. In 1866, Havilah became the seat of the newly established Kern County, a title it held for eight years until Bakersfield became the principal city. He stayed only two years but made a fortune: $800,000.
“I was literally chased from absolute poverty into the possession of nearly a million dollars,” Harpending wrote in his autobiography. “I discovered a great mining district and founded a thriving town. And if the matter of paternity is ever brought up in court, it will probably be proved to the satisfaction of a jury that I am the father of Kern County.”
A 1905 article in the Los Angeles Times details a shooting reminiscent of a Wild West film.
(Los Angeles Times archive / newspapers.com)
As gold became harder to find, people deserted Havilah, and its buildings fell into disrepair. Those who remained attempted to commemorate the community’s mining legacy and pioneer heritage. In 1966, for the centennial of Havilah’s founding, residents finished building the replica courthouse. They later built a replica of the town’s schoolhouse, which doubled as a community center.
Historical markings along Caliente-Bodfish Road indicate buildings that once existed: barbershop, a blacksmith, the Grand Inn and a livery stable. Some large plaques also pay tribute to historic events such as the last stagecoach robbery in Kern County in 1869, in which a gunman made off with $1,700 in coinage and gold bullion.
Wesley Kutzner, a historical society member and Fluhart’s uncle, helped build the replica courthouse alongside his parents and other locals. Although the historical society couldn’t afford fire insurance, Kutzner said he has resolved to clean up the property and rebuild, the same way the community did nearly 60 years ago.
“The plan is to rebuild,” Kutzner said. “It’s going to be a community effort. It’s going to be a tough road home, but we’ll get it done.”
One resident who plans to rebuild is Sean Rains. He left Bakersfield two years ago and moved to Havilah with his girlfriend and their pit bull, seeking the tranquility of the mountains. Rains, a miner and countertop fabricator, had also been one of the few people holding onto hope of finding buried treasure in Havilah.
In his front yard, Rains kept a shaker table and other equipment to sift soil for flecks of gold.
It was “nothing to make us rich,” he said, but he did find some.
“They say it’s everywhere,” Rains said. “It’s just a matter of whether it’s enough to make it worth your while.”
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1.Sean Rains moved to Havilah two years ago and had taken up panning for gold with a shaker table in his frontyard.2.A roadside scene in Havilah.3.Film canisters lay melted on the floor of the Havilah museum, just some of the artifacts lost in the Borel fire.
Rains was also recruited into the historical society. He read old letters in which a sheriff had remarked that the town’s only pastimes were robbing stagecoaches and horse racing. Another recalled how pioneers hauled their carriages over the mountainous terrain by rope.
The historical society had recently installed a water hose at the replica schoolhouse. Because Rains lived nearby, he was asked to help defend the schoolhouse if there was ever a fire.
“I gave them my word,” he said.
So once Rains saw fire crest the mountaintop behind his home and swiftly descend into the valley, he rushed next door to start up the schoolhouse’s water pump. He sprayed down the building and extinguished embers under its front porch.
He eventually turned his attention to his own one-story house, dousing it until the trees in his yard caught fire. He, his girlfriend and their dog sped away in his pickup truck.
“It was licking our heels on the way out of here,” Rains recalled. “It was right on top of us. The winds were crazy in that thing, going in all different directions. It was sucking branches right off the trees. The whole mountain was engulfed.”
Rains returned to town the next morning, walking along Caliente-Bodfish Road to see what was left of Havilah.
The valley’s pines and oaks were charred, and much of the landscape was covered in white ash. Rains’ two-bedroom home was burned to its cobblestone foundation. Two cars he had been restoring were scorched husks. His two ATVs were reduced to skeletal frames.
The county of Los Angeles has tentatively agreed to buy the Gas Company Tower, a prominent office skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, for $215 million in a foreclosure sale.
The price is a deep discount from its appraised value of $632 million in 2020, underscoring how much downtown office values have fallen in recent years.
The Board of Supervisors must still approve the deal, which county real estate officials quietly but aggressively negotiated. If completed, the purchase could move workers and public services out of existing county offices, including the well-known Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which dates to 1960, according to multiple people familiar with the transaction who requested they not be named in order to discuss the confidential negotiations.
The county has begun the due diligence process of examining the property for possible structural problems or other issues before finalizing the transaction, which could take two to three months to complete, the sources said.
In a statement to The Times, the county said that it had submitted a nonbinding “letter of interest” for the tower.
“Because we are seeing once-in-a-generation price reductions for commercial real estate in the downtown area, as responsible stewards of public funds, the County is doing its due diligence and evaluating the possibility of acquiring property in the Civic Center area, such as the Gas Company Tower,” the statement said.
Supervisor Janice Hahn, who is the daughter of longtime supervisor Kenneth Hahn, said in a separate statement to The Times that she is not fully on board with the acquisition.
“I am uncomfortable with the County moving forward purchasing this skyscraper until I understand the CEO’s full plan which I have yet to see. I am definitely against moving County services away from Los Angeles’ only Civic Center,” she said.
The Gas Company Tower represents “a generational investment opportunity to acquire a trophy asset at an exceptional basis,” Andrew Harper, a broker with the real estate firm JLL, said in May when JLL was hired to market the property. JLL declined to comment Tuesday on the pending sale.
The 52-story tower at 555 W. 5th St. was widely considered one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings when it was completed in 1991. It has about 1.4 million square feet of space on a 1.4-acre site at the base of Bunker Hill.
In recent years the downtown office market has turned against landlords as many tenants reduced their office footprint in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became more common for employees to work remotely.
Last year, the owner of the Gas Company Tower, an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., defaulted on its debt and the property was put in receivership, in which a court-appointed representative took custody of the building to help creditors recover funds they lent to Brookfield. The building has roughly $465 million in outstanding loans.
Elevated interest rates have weighed on prices by making it difficult for building owners to refinance debt and pushing them into quick sales or foreclosures. Some downtown L.A. office tenants have expressed concern in recent years that the streets feel less safe than they did before the pandemic and have left for other local office centers including Century City.
The Gas Company Tower was renovated in 2023 and the tower currently is more than half leased to tenants including Southern California Gas Co., financial consulting firm Deloitte and law firm Latham & Watkins, according to real estate data provider CoStar.
Office vacancy in downtown Los Angeles was more than 30% in the second quarter, real estate brokerage CBRE said, more than triple the level typically considered to be a healthy balance between tenant and landlord interests.
Falling office values downtown are catching the attention of buyers seeking to grab property at a low point in the market, said Petra Durnin, a real estate analyst at Raise Commercial Real Estate who is not involved in the deal.
“Unfortunate situations can create opportunities for others with the cash,” Durnin said. “Downtown has been through boom and bust cycles before and always reinvented itself.”
A nearby 52-story office tower formerly owned by Brookfield at 777 S. Figueroa St. is set to be sold at the significantly discounted price of $120 million, or $117 a square foot, the Commercial Observer reported. It came close to selling for about $145 million a few months ago but the deal fell apart.
In its statement to The Times, the county said it was eyeing the Gas Company Tower as an alternative to seismically retrofitting its downtown properties. The county owns 33 facilities that engineers say are vulnerable to collapse during a major earthquake, including the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which has been the headquarters of Los Angeles County government for six decades, home to the offices of hundreds of employees and the five county supervisors.
Last year, the county pledged to upgrade all 33 vulnerable buildings within the decade, an ambitious undertaking that experts say would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The former Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which helped lead an economic revival on a historic stretch of Broadway a decade ago, has reopened as a minimal-service operation akin to Airbnb, following a strategy that has become increasingly common for struggling hotels in recent years.
Now called Stile Downtown Los Angeles by Kasa, the 1920s-vintage hotel tower has resumed limited operations after shutting down nearly six months ago. Downtown hotels were particularly hard-hit by the pandemic, and some have changed owners or operators.
Ace Hotel Group had operated the 182-room hotel near Broadway and Olympic Boulevard since it opened in 2014, even as its ownership changed twice over the years. The chic brand made the Ace a destination for travelers as well as local residents who patronized its buzzy rooftop bar and restaurants.
South Korea-based AJU Continuum, which bought the hotel in 2019, announced last week that it had brought in Kasa Living Inc. to operate the property.
Kasa, which is based in San Francisco and has a national presence, “offers the consistency of a major hotel chain with the convenience and character of a modern short-term rental,” AJU Continuum said in a statement.
Ace Hotel said upon its departure that the Broadway hotel would be operated in the future as “a limited-service, rooms-only operation, managed via a tech platform.”
The limited-service model under which guests typically receive codes to get into their rooms via their phones is “basically an Airbnb on steroids,” said Donald Wise, a hotel investment banker at Turnbull Capital Group. “You’re not going to someone’s house or a condo, but to a box that has no more or less service than an Airbnb would have.”
The independent United Theater on Broadway, which is connected to the hotel, will continue to operate as an open venue hosting concerts, performances and special events, AJU Continuum said. The hotel will have a rooftop wine bar but no restaurants.
The site has had multiple identities since it was built in 1927. Constructed with backing from film luminaries Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, it originally was meant in part to provide a theater for the United Artists movie production company they founded.
The Spanish Gothic theater was designed by C. Howard Crane and the tower by Walker & Eisen, the team behind other local landmarks including the Fine Arts Building downtown and the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills. It held offices for rent and a theater where United Artists pictures premiered, starting with Pickford’s film “My Best Girl.”
Other prominent occupants of the property through the years include California Petroleum Corp., Texaco and flamboyant preacher Gene Scott, whose broadcasts were heard nationally. He died in 2005.
The opening of the Ace in 2014 was a pivotal point in the residential renaissance of downtown that helped spur growth nearby, said Nick Griffin, executive vice president of DTLA Alliance, formerly the Downtown Center Business Improvement District.
“It was evocative of that particular moment in downtown, arriving as a kind of a hipster paradise,” he said. “That area of Ninth and Broadway was a particularly hip area with fashion and hotels at the intersection of the Historic Core, the fashion district and the downtown center.”
Two other boutique hotels created in historic buildings followed the Ace to the neighborhood: the Hoxton Downtown LA and Downtown L.A. Proper. Both are also on Broadway.
Short-term rentals in former traditional hotels and apartment buildings have been popping up downtown as business owners work to find financial equilibrium, Griffin said.
“The new model of short-term rentals is sort of indicative of this moment in downtown as we continue to evolve and innovate coming out of the pandemic.”
Griffin’s improvement district reported that average downtown hotel occupancy, which plunged during the pandemic, has reached nearly 69%, up a percentage point from a year ago. That’s close to what is usually considered a healthy rate but down from late 2019 when occupancy was closer to 80% and average room rates were higher.
“The downtown Los Angeles market is still lagging, hasn’t recovered fully to the numbers that were pre-COVID,” said consultant Alan Reay of Atlas Hospitality Group. “We are definitely starting to see more distress among owners.”
Challenges for hotel owners include a reduction in business travelers to downtown offices as more people work from home. They also face high interest rates on their loans and rising labor costs.
Limited service hotels such as Stile may produce more profit for their owners while also lowering rates for guests who don’t mind having fewer services, Reay said.
Independent presidential candidate Cornel West named Cal State Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah as his running mate on Wednesday, saying that her commitment to social justice and to prioritizing the needs of poor Americans embodied the values of his candidacy.
“I wanted to to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of [civil rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said on Tavis Smiley’s Los Angeles radio program.
Abdullah is well-known figure in local political circles: She co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and has been a fixture in recent years at protests and acts of civil disobedience on issues including police funding and the war in the Gaza Strip.
West’s choice means at least three women from California are running for vice president — Abdullah, Vice President Kamala Harris and Nicole Shanahan, selected by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Former President Trump has not announced his choice for running mate.) The three candidates reflect the wide spectrum of backgrounds the state has to offer, with Harris coming up in the rough-and-tumble of Bay Area politics, Shanahan steeped in the Silicon Valley and Abdullah representing leftist and progressive grassroots activism.
“It’s striking. But that’s about all that we have in common,” Abdullah said when Smiley noted that she and Harris had Bay Area roots and both attended Howard University.
During the broadcast, Abdullah recalled first meeting West when she was as an undergraduate student at Howard, and said she revered his influence on American political thought.
“It felt as though God was speaking to me, and I said ‘yes,‘” she said of receiving his call last week.
She noted that theirs was the first presidential ticket in the U.S. to include a Muslim, and Smiley pointed out that it was the first all-Black ticket.
“Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” said Abdullah, 52, referring to Trump and President Biden, the presumptive major-party nominees. “The world tries to tell us that we’re tethered to certain ideas that we don’t have to be tethered to. We can be expansive, and imaginative.”
West, an academic, author and activist, said alternative voices are needed to represent the anger of Americans frustrated by wars abroad and a lack of investment in communities at home. Lacking the infrastructure of a mainstream political party, West is collecting signatures to appear on ballots across the country. According to his website, he is now on the ballot only in Alaska, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah.
Selecting a vice presidential candidate is a key part of the process of making the ballot in many states.
“Trump is leading the country toward a second Civil War. Biden is leading the world toward World War III,” West told Smiley, with whom he co-hosted a radio program a decade ago. “That’s the choice you have if you only are tied to the duopoly. That’s what it comes down to. We are providing an alternative. … We ain’t on nobody’s plantation.”
Cal State L.A. campus police remove Melina Abdullah, who is known for her activism, from a protest during a 2022 Los Angeles mayoral debate.
(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
In recent years, Abdullah has spoken out against police shootings and increases in the Los Angeles Police Department budget. She has regularly appeared at Police Commission meetings, and as The Times wrote in 2015, has turned “normally dry public hearings into hours-long confrontations that frequently devolve into officers clearing demonstrators from the room.”
She has long pushed for abolishing the police and prisons, and in 2020 was a forceful opponent of then-Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey’s reelection campaign, and a supporter of current Dist. Atty. George Gascón.
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During that race, Lacey’s husband, David, was charged with assault after he was accused of waving a gun at Abdullah and other protesters when they appeared outside the couple’s Granada Hills home early one morning. (The case was dismissed after he finished a diversion program.)
In 2022, Abdullah was forcibly removed from a mayoral debate on Cal State L.A.’s campus. She and Karen Bass, who has been mayor of Los Angeles since that election, have a decades-long relationship.
In 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Abdullah was a central figure in organizing large rallies in Los Angeles. More than a decade ago, along with Patrisse Cullors and others, she built what would grow to become the Black Lives Matter movement and later the nonprofit Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
Abdullah also is the founder of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Inc., which made waves in 2022 by accusing the foundation and one of its executives, Shalomyah Bowers, of “fraudulently [raising] money from unsuspecting donors” and diverting it to benefit Bowers and his consulting firm.
Bowers and the foundation vigorously denied the allegations and sought the dismissal of a lawsuit that asked for $10 million in damages. L.A. Superior Court Judge Stephanie Bowick agreed to toss out the lawsuit in June 2023.
In her ruling, Bowick wrote that part of the lawsuit’s “allegations are so confusing and unintelligible it cannot even be determined what” was being alleged.
The judge earlier this year ordered Abdullah’s group to pay more than $374,000 in legal fees and costs to the foundation, Bowers and his consulting group.
Smiley asked about these legal fights, and Abdullah said that as nonprofits, the various chapters that belong to Black Lives Matter Grassroots wouldn’t be endorsing anyone in the 2024 race.
“Some people might see it as baggage, but I actually see the work and experience of organizing and the kind of authenticity of our work as being something that actually fuels this campaign,” she said. “I know that as we move forward, organizing is essential.”
Ali Zacharias recalled desperately clinging to the hood of the getaway car as it sped through downtown Los Angeles. Inside the vehicle was the thieves’ precious cargo: Onyx, her French bulldog and “buddy.”
Zacharias said her only thought was, “I’m not leaving this car. … I held on to the windshield wipers, thinking they wouldn’t drive if I was on the car.”
They did.
“Before I know it, we’re going like 40 miles per hour,” she said. She rode atop the hood for a short way before the car swerved and she rolled off. She was bruised and cut but not badly hurt, she said in an interview with The Times on Sunday.
But as Zacharias stood watching the car disappear, she felt bereft. Onyx was gone.
Onyx, a French bulldog with one blue eye and one green eye, was stolen from his owner in downtown L.A. on Jan. 18.
(Ali Zacharias)
The terrifying scene was caught on video, which was later posted on Instagram and has since gone viral.
Since the Jan. 18 incident, Zacharias has been victimized a second time, by a scammer playing on her desperation to find Onyx. The individual led her on a “goose chase” Sunday to extract $50 — for “gas money,” the person claimed — she told The Times.
Los Angeles police are investigating the incident but could not be reached for comment Sunday.
French bulldogs are one of the most popular small-breed dogs in the world, according to the American Kennel Club, “especially among city dwellers.” They’re known for their square heads, “bat” ears and charming disposition. Expensive and in high demand, the dogs have been a favorite target of thieves in recent years in the L.A. area.
Zacharis’ heartbreak began when the West Hollywood woman, who says she manufactures clothes, was on a lunch break with Onyx at a Whole Foods in downtown Los Angeles on Grand Avenue near 8th Street. Onlookers were watching the 44-year-old interact with her dog. The black-and-white-speckled French bulldog is a little over a year old and has different colored eyes, the left blue and the right green.
“They were watching me feed him meatballs and white fish. … I spoil him.”
He ducked under the table where she was sitting; she let him go as he explored. The next thing she knew, she said, a woman had picked up Onyx and was walking away with him.
Onyx is a little over a year old.
(Ali Zacharias)
“I thought it was a misunderstanding,” Zacharias said, so she followed, calling out to the woman, who got into a white Kia Forte. And still, she “didn’t punch into the fact that my dog was stolen. … I wasn’t in that mode.”
So she attempted to follow the woman into the car, which held four people, before being pushed out. They locked the door. Zacharias said she realized they were “about to drive off with my dog, so I stood in front of the car, and I was holding my hands up, like, ‘Stop, do not go,’ and they drove into me and I fell onto the hood.”
When she tried to describe to loved ones what had happened, they weren’t able to appreciate it, she said — until Saturday, when she said she became aware of video circulating on social media that showed those terrifying moments on the hood of the car.
“I get wind of this video on Instagram, and it changed my whole world,” she said, “because I had felt completely alone.”
The video, taken by witness Harrison Pessy, has drawn a lot of interest from news outlets and social media channels, and Zacharias said she hoped that would help police solve the case.
“I hope the next story about this is a reunification story.”
A poster promising a reward has been circulated in the theft of a French bulldog in downtown L.A. on Jan. 18.
You can sense it in the ubiquitous “Help Wanted” posters in artsy shops and restaurants, in the ranks of university students living out of their cars and in the outsize percentage of locals camping on the streets.
This seaside county known for its windswept beauty and easy living is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in home-starved California. Santa Cruz County, home to a beloved surf break and a bohemian University of California campus, also claims the state’s highest rate of homelessness and, by one measure based on local incomes, its least affordable housing.
Leaders in the city of Santa Cruz have responded to this hardship in a land of plenty — and to new state laws demanding construction of more affordable housing — with a plan to build up rather than out.
Many Santa Cruz business owners back the city’s plan for high-rise development, saying the city needs more affordable housing for servers and retail workers.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A downtown long centered on quaint sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue has boomed with new construction in recent years. Shining glass and metal apartment complexes sprout in multiple locations, across a streetscape once dominated by 20th century classics like the Art Deco-inspired Palomar Inn apartments.
And the City Council and planning department envision building even bigger and higher, with high-rise apartments of up to 12 stories in the southern section of downtown that comes closest to the city’s boardwalk and the landmark wooden roller coaster known as the Giant Dipper.
“It’s on everybody’s lips now, this talk about our housing challenge,” said Don Lane, a former mayor and an activist for homeless people. “The old resistance to development is breaking down, at least among a lot of people.”
In recent years, Santa Cruz has approved development of modern multistory housing complexes, part of a broader effort to add housing stock.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Said current Mayor Fred Keeley, a former state assemblyman: “It’s not a question of ‘no growth’ anymore. It’s a question of where are you going to do this. You can spread it all over the city, or you can make the urban core more dense.”
But not everyone in famously tolerant Santa Cruz is going along. The high-rise push has spawned a backlash, exposing sharp divisions over growth and underscoring the complexities, even in a city known for its progressive politics, of trying to keep desirable communities affordable for the teachers, waiters, firefighters and store clerks who provide the bulk of services.
A group originally called Stop the Skyscrapers — now Housing for People — protests that a proposed city “housing element” needlessly clears the way for more apartments than state housing officials demand, while providing too few truly affordable units.
City officials say the plan they hope to finalize in the coming weeks, with its greater height limits, only creates a path for new construction. The intentions of individual property owners and the vicissitudes of the market will continue to make it challenging to build the 3,736 additional units the state has mandated for the city.
“We’ve talked to a lot of people, going door to door, and the feeling is it’s just too much, too fast,” said Frank Barron, a retired county planner and Housing for People co-founder. “The six- and seven-story buildings that they’re building now are already freaking people out. When they hear what [the city is] proposing now could go twice as high, they’re completely aghast.”
Frank Barron is among the activists who say the City Council’s development plans are out of character for the laid-back beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Monheit, a former state water official and another Housing for People co-founder, calls 12-story buildings “completely out of the human scale,” adding: “It’s out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
Housing for People has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the March 2024 ballot that, if approved, would require a vote of the people for development anywhere in the city that would exceed the zoning restrictions codified in the current general plan, which include a cap of roughly seven or eight stories downtown.
The activists say that they are trying to restore the voices of everyday Santa Cruzans and that city leaders are giving in to out-of-town builders and “developer overreach laws.”
The nascent campaign has generated spirited debate. Opponents contend the slow-growth measure would slam on the brakes, just as the city is overcoming decades of construction inertia. They say Santa Cruz should be a proud outlier in a long string of wealthy coastal cities that have defied the state’s push to add housing and bring down exorbitant home prices and rental costs.
Diana Alfaro, who works for a Santa Cruz development company, said many of the complaints about high-rise construction sound like veiled NIMBYism.
“We always hear, ‘I support affordable housing, but just not next to me. Not here. Not there. Not really anywhere,’ ” said Alfaro, an activist with the national political group YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] Action. “Is that really being inclusive?”
Zav Hershfield, a renters’ rights activist, advocates rent control caps and housing developments owned by the state or cooperatives.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The dispute has divided Santa Cruz’s progressive political universe. What does it mean to be a “good liberal” on land-use issues in an era when UC Santa Cruz students commonly triple up in small rooms and Zillow reports a median rent of $3,425 that is higher than San Francisco’s?
Beginning in the 1970s, left-leaning students at the new UC campus helped power a slow-growth movement that limited construction across broad swaths of Santa Cruz County. Over the decades, the need for affordable housing was a recurring discussion. The county was a leader in requiring that builders who put up five units of housing or more set aside 15% of the units at below-market rates.
But Mayor Keeley said local officials gave only a “head nod” to the issue when it came to approving specific projects. “Well, here we are, 30 or 40 years later,” Keeley said, “and these communities are not affordable.”
Santa Cruz County, known for its windswept beauty and easy living, is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in California.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Today, with 265,000 residents, the county is substantially wealthy and white.
An annual survey this year found Santa Cruz County pushed past San Francisco to be the least affordable rental market in the country, given income levels in both places. And many observers say UC Santa Cruz students contend with the toughest housing market of any college town in the state.
State legislators have crafted dozens of laws in recent years to encourage construction of more homes, particularly apartments, across the state. While California has long required local governments to draft “housing elements” to demonstrate their commitment to affordable housing, state officials only recently passed other measures to actually push cities to put the plans into practice.
Under the new regulations, regional government associations draw up a Regional Housing Needs Assessment, designating how many housing units — including affordable ones — should be built during an eight-year cycle. The state Department of Housing and Community Development can reject plans it deems inadequate.
For years 2024 to 2031, Santa Cruz was told it should build at least 3,736 units, on top of its existing 24,036.
For decades, Santa Cruz culture has centered on quaint shops and restaurants along sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz and other cities have been motivated, at least in part, by a heavy “stick”: In cases when cities fail to produce adequate housing plans, the state’s so-called “builder’s remedy” essentially allows developers to propose building whatever they want, provided some of the housing is set aside for low- or middle-income families. In cities like Santa Monica and La Cañada-Flintridge, builders have invoked the builder’s remedy to push ahead with large housing projects, over the objections of city leaders.
The Santa Cruz City Council resolved to avoid losing control of planning decisions. A key part of their plan envisions putting up to 1,800 units in a sleepy downtown neighborhood of automobile businesses, shops and low-rise apartments south of Laurel Street. Initial concepts suggested one block could go as high as 175 feet (roughly 16 stories), but council members later proposed a 12-story height limit, substantially taller than the stately eight-story Palomar, which remains the city’s tallest building.
City planners say focusing growth in the downtown neighborhood makes sense, because bus lines converge there at a transit center and residents can walk to shops and services.
“The demand for housing is not going away,” said Lee Butler, the city’s director of planning and community development, “and this means we will have less development pressure in other areas of the city and county, where it is less sustainable to grow.”
Santa Cruz planning director Lee Butler advocates concentrating new development downtown, rather than building in areas where growth is less sustainable.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A public survey found support for a variety of other proposed improvements to make the downtown more attractive to walkers, bikers and tourists. Among other features, the plan would concentrate new restaurants and shops around the San Lorenzo River Walk; replace the fabric-topped 2,400-seat Kaiser Permanente Arena, which hosts the Santa Cruz Warriors (the G-league affiliate of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors), with a bigger entertainment and sports venue; and better connect downtown with the beach and boardwalk.
Business owners say they favor the housing plan for a couple of reasons: They hope new residents will bring new commerce, and they want some of the affordable apartments to go to their workers, who frequently commute well over an hour from places such as Gilroy and Salinas.
Restaurateur Zach Davis called the high cost of housing “the No. 1 factor” that led to the 2018 closure of Assembly, a popular farm-to-table restaurant he co-owned.
“How do we keep our community intact, if the people who make it all happen, the workers who make Santa Cruz what it is, can’t afford to live here anymore?” Davis asked.
One opponent calls the plan to add high-rises to the city’s picturesque downtown “out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s plan indicates that 859 of the units built over the next eight years will be for “very low income” families. But the term is relative, tied to a community’s median income, which in Santa Cruz is $132,800 for a family of four. Families bringing home between $58,000 and $82,000 would qualify as very low income. Tenants in that bracket would pay $1,800 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in one recently completed complex, built under the city’s requirement that 20% of units be rented for below-market rents.
The people pushing for high-rise development say expanding the housing supply will stem ever-rising rents. Opponents counter that the continued growth of UC Santa Cruz, which hopes to add 8,500 students by 2040, and a new surge of highly paid Silicon Valley “tech bros” looking to put down roots in beachy Santa Cruz would quickly gobble up whatever number of new units are built.
“They say that if you just build more housing, the prices will come down. Which is, of course, not true,” said Gary Patton, a former county supervisor and an original leader in the slow-growth movement. “So we’ll have lots more housing, with lots more traffic, less parking, more neighborhood impacts and more rich people moving into Santa Cruz.”
Leaders on Santa Cruz’s political left say new construction only touches one aspect of the housing crisis. Some of the leaders of Tenant Sanctuary, a renters’ rights group, would like to see Santa Cruz tamp down rents by creating complexes owned by the state or cooperatives and enacting a rent control law capping annual increases.
“No matter what they build, we need housing where the price is not tied to market swings and how much money can be squeezed out of a given area of land,” said Zav Hershfield, a board member for the group.
The up-zoning of downtown parcels has won the support of much of the city’s establishment, including the county Chamber of Commerce, whose chief executive said exorbitant housing prices are excluding blue-collar workers and even some well-paid professionals. “The question is, do you want a lively, vital, economically thriving community?” said Casey Beyer, CEO of the business group. “Or do you want to be a sleepy retirement community?”
The town clock is one of several landmarks in the beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Just days after the anti-high-rise measure qualified for the March ballot, the two sides began bickering over what impact it would have.
Lane, the former mayor, and two affordable housing developers wrote an op-ed for the Lookout Santa Cruz news site that said the ballot measure is crafted so broadly it would apply to all “development projects.” They contend that could trigger the need for citywide votes for projects as modest as raising a fence from 6 feet to 7 feet, adding an ADU to a residential property or building a shelter for the homeless, if the projects exceed current practices in a given neighborhood.
The authors accused ballot measure proponents of faux environmentalism. “If we don’t go up,” they wrote, “we have less housing near jobs — and more people driving longer distances to get to work.”
The ballot measure proponents countered that their critics were misrepresenting facts. They said the measure would not necessitate voter approval for mundane improvements and would come into play in relatively few circumstances, for projects that require amendments to the city’s General Plan.
While not staking out a formal position on the ballot measure, the city’s planning staff has concluded the measure could force citizen votes for relatively modest construction projects.
The two sides also can’t agree on the impact of a second provision of the ballot measure. It would increase from 20% to 25% the percentage of “inclusionary” (below-market-rate) units that developers would have to include in complexes of 30 units or more.
The ballot measure writers say such an increase signals their intent to assure that as much new housing as possible goes to the less affluent. But their opponents say that when cities try to force developers to include too many sub-market apartments, the builders end up walking away.
Santa Cruz’s housing inventory shows that the city has the potential to add as many as 8,364 units in the next eight years, when factoring in proposals such as the downtown high-rises and UC Santa Cruz’s plan to add about 1,200 units of student housing. That’s more than double the number required by the state. But the Department of Housing and Community Development requires this sort of “buffer,” because the reality is that many properties zoned for denser housing won’t get developed during the eight-year cycle.
As with many aspects of the downtown up-zoning, the two sides are at odds over whether incorporating the potential for extra development amounts to judicious planning or developer-friendly overkill.
Joyful, left, and Valerie Christy, right, jam for fun and a few dollars in downtown Santa Cruz.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s voters have rejected housing-related measures three times in recent years. In 2018, they decisively turned down a rent control proposal. Last year, they said no to taxing owners who leave homes in the community sitting empty. But they also rejected a measure that would have blocked a plan to relocate the city’s central library while also building 124 below-market-rate apartment units.
The last time locals got this worked up about their downtown may have been at the start of the new millennium, when the City Council considered cracking down on street performers. That prompted the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, another local landmark, to print T-shirts and bumper stickers entreating fellow residents to “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.”
Santa Cruzans once again are being asked to consider the look and feel of their downtown and whether its future should be left to the City Council, or voters themselves. The measure provokes myriad questions, including these: Can funky, earnest, compassionate Santa Cruz remain that way, even with high-rise apartments? And, with so little housing for students and working folks, has it already lost its charm?
When she met a jagged-eared German shepherd puppy named Pickles at the Palmdale Animal Care Center, rescuer Alyssa Benavidez thought the former stray was being overlooked by adopters and wanted to find him a home.
To draw attention to the playful 10-month-old, Benavidez recorded videos of Pickles to post online — in a red bandanna with heart designs, rolling on his back for belly rubs, a red rose rope toy in his mouth.
The shelter, though, did not give her a deadline when she emailed to ask how much time she’d have to work on his exit plan before he would be put down.
A day after her inquiry, on Valentine’s Day, Pickles was euthanized.
Shelter volunteer Alyssa Benavidez managed to rescue German shepherds Cupid, foreground, and Mindy to foster while they await permanent homes. Others were put down before she could save them.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The Palmdale shelter, the newest of seven run by Los Angeles County, was touted when it opened in 2016 as a state-of-the-art facility that would relieve overcrowding and reduce the number of dogs being euthanized at the nearby Lancaster shelter.
But the two shelters now euthanize more dogs — and at a higher rate — than other county facilities, as well as those operated by Los Angeles, Long Beach and other municipalities, a Times investigation found.
Together, the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters’ dog euthanasia rates have nearly doubled in recent years — from about 15% in 2018 to 28% through this August. They’re on track this year to kill dogs at nearly twice the average rate of the other five county-run facilities.
A lucky pooch is led out of the Palmdale shelter’s kennels to meet a new foster.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The Palmdale and Lancaster statistics are especially striking compared with those in the city of L.A., which has six shelters with dog euthanasia rates that range from 3% to 11%.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has pressed the Department of Animal Care and Control to reduce euthanasia at its shelters. But department director Marcia Mayeda said in a June report to the board that severe staffing shortages were hampering efforts to provide basic animal care and bring down euthanasia numbers.
The Palmdale and Lancaster shelters euthanized 1,576 dogs in the first eight months of this year, accounting for 60% of those put down at the county’s seven shelters.
“We’re so understaffed at both care centers that I can’t say that one is markedly better or worse than the other,” Mayeda said in an interview. “They’re both really suffering.”
Department records show that more dogs are being euthanized across the entire county shelter system because space is limited and there aren’t enough being rescued or adopted to compensate for those coming in.
Visitors look over lists of available animals at Los Angeles County’s Palmdale Animal Care Center. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Fliers describe dogs available for adoption at Palmdale Animal Care Center. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
At the Palmdale shelter in particular, limited public access to kennels may be a factor. Most dogs are kept in an area that the public can visit only with a staff or volunteer escort. People wanting information about dogs available for adoption can view a corkboard pinned with the animals’ photos, but those are often dark or of poor quality. The time from when dogs enter the shelter until they’re euthanized for lack of space or interest is briefer than at other shelters, The Times found.
The Times analyzed documents obtained through public records requests on more than 14,600 dogs euthanized since 2018 in the seven shelters operated by the county — which has contracts with 45 cities to provide animal care andcontrol services. The reasons cited for killing the dogs were that they were too sick or injured to treat, or too dangerous to be safely adopted; that there was not sufficient kennel space to house the animals; and that there was no interest from potential adopters.
Some of the many dogs that have been euthanized at the Palmdale shelter amid overcrowding and other issues.
(L.A. County Animal Care and Control)
The Palmdale shelter euthanized 981 of its 3,429 impounded dogs last year, and is on track to reach those numbers again this year: Through August, the shelter had put down 765 of the 2,694 dogs that had entered.
Lancaster has surpassed last year’s figures, having euthanized 811 of 2,895 dogs that came in through August of this year. Last year, it put down 738 of the 3,718 dogs impounded.
The two shelters each took in more than 330 dogs a month on average through August this year, making them the highest-intake county shelters.
Under department policy, euthanasia cannot be performed while the facility is open to the public without explicit permission, unless the animal is injured or suffering. Time stamps on records reviewed by The Times appear to show that euthanasias were performed during those hours for nonmedical reasons at most county shelters.
Palmdale and Lancaster, in particular, consistently entered time stamps that appear to show animals were being put down during public hours — some months, dozens of times — since the shelters reopened for walk-ins in May of last year. The number of euthanasias performed during those hours at the Baldwin Park shelter could not be determined because many of its time stamps were missing from records.
Animal Care and Control Deputy Director Raul Rodriguez said that veterinary staff often update computer records after completing all procedures, so the time stamp may not accurately reflect the time of euthanasia. He said he could not say for certain when the procedures were carried out in specific cases.
Department records also show the two Antelope Valley shelters failed to follow their own department’s process to enlist help from rescue groups before putting a dog down. But the guidelines have been haphazard and have evolved.
For example, it has long been the department’s practice to ask those organizations whether they can take dogs that are most at risk.
But only in January did the department adopt a policy requiring shelters to reach out to rescue groups. And a department spokesperson said it was not until February that shelter staff members were briefed on the new requirement.
Now, Mayeda said, “if there is an error, it would be an anomaly.”
The Times reviewed a number of cases at the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters that showed no indication that rescue requests were made. The paper’s request for complete records of such rescue requests for all of the county shelters is pending.
Mayeda said she could not recall any disciplinary actions against staff at the Palmdale or Lancaster shelters based on not complying with the new policy.
In April, Mayeda instructed shelters to send three requests to rescue agencies before an adoptable dog is put down.
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Babs and Bugs were two stray Belgian Malinois picked up Jan. 21 and kenneled together at the Palmdale shelter.
The 1-year-old dogs were euthanized less than two weeks later, recorded one minute apart during walk-in hours, to make room for other dogs coming in, according to shelter records.
The shelter did not send out rescue requests, known as “pleas,” for either dog even though Palmdale’s behavior team had approved the two for adoption — with restrictions, according to the records. Bugs was required to go to an adults-only home with no other dogs, Babs to one with no children under high school age.
Raul Rodriguez, deputy director of the Department of Animal Care and Control, attributes Palmdale’s high euthansia rate in part to its high intake of dogs and small size relative to county shelters such as Baldwin Hills’.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Rodriguez, who oversees three northern L.A. County shelters, including Palmdale and Lancaster, said Babs and Bugs were euthanized because they showed behavioral problems during their time in the shelter, lunging at other dogs through their cages and then each other.
Some experts who work with rescue dogs argue it’s unfair to judge a dog’s behavior in a loud, stressful shelter environment, saying it doesn’t reflect how it would do in a loving home.
“To me, the easy way out is to euthanize — and I think that is unacceptable,” said L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the Antelope Valley.
She added: “I think that we need to hold administration more accountable,” and “rather than react, be more proactive” in saving animals.
Restrictions adopted during the pandemic to reduce overcrowding prioritized the intake of dogs that were sick, injured or dangerous to the public, Rodriguez said. He said euthanasia decisions are made at weekly meetings among top shelter officials, including members of the behavior, medical and management teams. They review a list of dogs and make decisions based on how long they’ve been housed, as well as their behavior and medical history.
He attributed the higher euthanasia ratesat the Palmdale shelter to its small size: It has 68 dog kennels, but through August this year had taken in more dogs than larger shelters, including Baldwin Park, which has more than 190 dogkennels, and Downey, which has 180.
Department officials said more dogs than usual were coming into the Lancaster shelter, which has 176 kennels — blaming the influx partly on the closure earlier in the pandemic of the Mojave shelter about 30 miles away in Kern County. Strays that once would have been taken there are now being brought to Lancaster, they said.
A dog is returned to its kennel at the county’s Lancaster Animal Care Center after a play date with a prospective adopter.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The number of dog deaths at the Palmdale shelter has angered some local officials, who also complained about a $400,000 increase last fiscal year in county charges to manage shelter and animal control services. The city’s total annual budget for shelter services ended up at $1.4 million.
Palmdale city officials earlier this year hired two animal shelter consulting firms, Animal Arts and Team Shelter USA, to provide recommendations on how to better serve the community, including what it would take to open a new city-owned shelter or pet resource center.
Their report, provided to Palmdale officials in September, has not yet been released publicly.
“It’s hard to stomach, to pay so much money to euthanize,” Palmdale City Councilman Austin Bishop said earlier this year. “The cost is going up every year, and services keep going down.”
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When it opened, the Palmdale facility — equipped with all indoor kennels, a spaying and neutering clinic, a grooming room and turf play yards outside — was hailed as a model for other shelters.
“I want everyone to know that we’re gonna do 100% adoption. … Our goal is to really have a ‘no kill at all’” shelter, Barger said at the facility’s one-year anniversary event.
Kat Ramsburg greets her new foster dog at the Palmdale Animal Care Center.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Benavidez, who in addition to working with rescue groups is also a shelter volunteer, said that is far from how things have turned out.
“It’s a death camp there,” she said.
Patricia Saucedo, a longtime Palmdale resident, was one of the shelter’s first volunteers. She now “networks” dogs, posting their photos, videos and personality descriptions online to help find them homes.
She remembers Palmdale’s promise and the expectation that preceded it.
“It really just kind of backfired,” Saucedo said, criticizing the shelter’s design and size. Too many dogs are hidden away behind too many doors, and the shelter is understaffed, she said.
As of June, there were 13 animal control attendants, animal control officers and clerks at the Palmdale shelter and 18 in Lancaster. But county animal welfare officials said in a report that month that the two shelters would need more than triple the number of staff in the next five years to reduce euthanasia.
According to the report, Palmdale would need 39 more staff positions and Lancaster 44. The rest of the county shelters are similarly short-staffed, the report said.
Mayeda, the county animal department’s director, said she did not expect the board to approve all of those positions.
“They asked me what I needed, and this is what we need,” she said, adding that they’ll do their best with what they have. She said that the euthanasia rate in the Antelope Valley is still lower than it was more than a decade ago in 2010.
The county purchased about six acres from Palmdale to build the shelter, but used only a fraction of the land for the $20-million, 25,500-square-foot building, one of the smaller of the seven shelters. Much of the land sits unused.
After The Times began asking questions about the Palmdale shelter’s euthanasia rates, the Board of Supervisors passed a motion, written by Barger, asking that the department look into expanding the facility, saying its limited housing capacity was inadequate to serve the region.
Star was euthanized at the Palmdale shelter right before Patricia Saucedo posted a profile of the terrier online, recommending her as “super sweet, mellow and affectionate.” Shelter records said Star had tried to bite staff members.
Saucedo recalled an early case that, for her, caused concern about euthanasia decisions: Star, a 7-year-old terrier with one ear, was surrendered to Palmdale in June 2018 by her owner.
“This little lady is Palmdale Shelter’s longest resident,” Saucedo wrote on her Facebook page, Paws of Sunshine, about seven weeks later. “Super sweet, mellow and affectionate. She’s a bit shy when you first meet her, but once you spend some time with her and give her some love, you can see what a happy girl she truly is.”
She paired Star’s description with photos and a video of a small, scruffy terrier jumping up onto a bench to sit beside her for chest scratches.
An hour before the post published, Star had been euthanized for her behavior, according to shelter records, which said she was fearful and noted several instances when she tried to bite staff.
Saucedo thought Star had been timid, but not aggressive.
She was stunned that Star was put down, she said, because she seemed so adoptable.
Two of the many dogs of all ages that have landed at the Lancaster Animal Care Center.(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
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Some rescue groups, volunteers and animal advocates say the shelter system’s public visiting hours can discourage prospective adopters. Before August, the seven county facilities were open for appointments and walk-ins only a certain number of hours each day. Visitors are now allowed to walk in from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, but shelters are no longer open Sundays or on Wednesday evenings for prospective adopters who work during typical business hours, something Mayeda attributed to staffing shortages.
“The responsibility doesn’t lie just with the animal shelters and the animal rescues,” says Kery German, Palmdale’s public safety supervisor, seen speaking with with City Councilman Austin Bishop. The city now has a low-cost spay and neuter program to help address the boom in the area’s dog population.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
But the operating hours don’t fully explain why euthanasia rates are higher at the Antelope Valley shelters.
Kery German, the city of Palmdale’s public safety supervisor, says some of the difference may be due to the nature of the dog population in the area. She and others who work with shelters said shepherds, huskies, bully breeds and other large dogs that have bigger litters are more popular in rural Antelope Valley communities than in city centers.
Those rural areas also have become dumping grounds for unwanted animals from elsewhere. That, German said, along with irresponsible backyard breeders and owners who don’t have their pets fixed, results in more homeless animals. The city has started a low-cost spay and neuter program to help remedy the problem, and since June last year has altered about 1,400 animals.
“The responsibility doesn’t lie just with the animal shelters and the animal rescues,” she said.
Data from the county’s Department of Animal Care and Control show pit bulls and German shepherds are the most common breeds put down at most county shelters — and they’re euthanized at even higher rates in the Antelope Valley.
In May 2022, a senior animal services department staff member complained to top officials about kill practices in Palmdale and Lancaster, including the euthanization of dogs for what were cited as behavioral reasons, according to an email reviewed by The Times. The staffer did not respond to requests for comment.
“I’ve noted that Palmdale and Lancaster have a disproportionately large amount of euthanasias labeled as behavior,” the senior staffer wrote, adding that they had decided to look more closely at the numbers for those shelters. “I find it to be significantly concerning.”
The staff member wrote that a “large amount of animals” are either never assessed or are approved for public adoption but then euthanized for behavioral reasons. The staffer created a list of 58 animals, a majority of them dogs, euthanized at the two shelters from February through April 2022.
Tundra had been cleared for adoption before he was put down, reportedly because he couldn’t be kenneled with other dogs and the Palmdale shelter was too full to give him his own.
One of those dogs, a gray and white Siberian husky named Tundra, had been approved for public adoption with no restrictions, but Palmdale shelter records indicate he was euthanized due to aggressive behavior, with no requests sent to rescue groups on his behalf.
The department’s behavior team described him as tense around other dogs but friendly with handlers, and medical staff wrote that he did not appear aggressive.
“Fearful tense did ok going slow NO signs of aggression,” a veterinary technician wrote the day he came in.
Rodriguez, the department’s deputy director, said Tundra could not be kenneled with other dogs and the shelter was full, so he was euthanized.
Asked about the staff member’s email, Chief Deputy Director Danny Ubario, Mayeda’s second in command, said that both shelters were at capacity at the time and that dogs were put down for a “combination” of reasons, though the records system only allows a single justification to be entered.
“We did look at it,” Mayeda said of the staffer’s complaint. “I don’t think that there [were] any errors or mischaracterizations or misuse of the system.”
The number of dogs euthanized due to a limited number of kennels has increased in Palmdale and Lancaster. Department records show the Palmdale shelter put down more than 330 dogs last year due to space constraints or because all other options to find them homes had failed — the most at any shelter. The shelter had already surpassed that number as of August this year.
In Lancaster, the number of dogs euthanized for those reasons was on track to more than double — from 231 for all of last year to 422 through August of this year, the records show.
One of them was Blue, an 11-month-old mutt with white socks and pointy ears. In February, networker Danielle Vogt sent an email to the Lancaster shelter about Blue and another pup for whom she hoped to find foster homes.
Blue was euthanized at the Lancaster Animal Care Center.
Increasingly anxious after not hearing back for a week, Vogt decided to foster Blue herself. That’s when she learned Blue had been euthanized a day earlier. No rescue requests had been sent on Blue’s behalf.
Devastated, Vogt alerted Barger’s office. Shelter staff explained the oversight by saying that Vogt had provided the wrong animal ID number in her inquiry.
“We recognize that we can do better based on what transpired with Blue,” Ubario wrote to her, adding that the shelter had put into place a new protocol to better monitor emails.
Kristin Loch, who works at a rescue in the Santa Clarita Valley, said she fields calls daily from owners who need help giving up their dogs.
She typically sends them to county shelters in Castaic or Agoura rather than to the Palmdale location despite the longer drive, because the dogs will have a better chance of leaving the shelter alive, she said.
The Times identified several dogs featured at adoption events or online that were euthanized within days.
Stormy was deemed “unable to place” and euthanized two days after the Palmdale shelter posted the young husky’s photos online.
In February, the Palmdale shelter posted three photos on Instagram of Stormy, a 1½-year-old Siberian husky with black-and-white fur who had entered a month earlier because her owner was moving.
Two days after the post went up, Stormy was euthanized, according to department records. The reason given: unable to place.
::
Since January, county shelters have been required to reach out at least once to rescue organizations for most dogs facing euthanasia. The policy change came after Bowie, a 4-month-old terrier at the Baldwin Park shelter, was put down without any rescue requests, sparking outrage from many rescue groups and the public.
Earlier this year, state Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Corona) introduced a bill named after Bowie that would have required California shelters to provide at least a 72-hour public notice on their websites before euthanizing adoptable animals. It did not pass, but Essayli said he plans to reintroduce similar legislation.
The euthanasia of Bowie, 4 months, at the Baldwin Park Animal Care Center drew outrage and inspired county policy changes on reaching out to rescues, as well as state legislation named for the pup.
(Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control)
The inconsistency of the plea system has frustrated some rescue workers, who say the Palmdale shelter doesn’t always indicate which dogs are in most urgent need.
The German shepherd Teo, for example, entered the shelter the first week of January. On Feb. 4, the shelter sent out what was marked a “1st rescue plea” in an email to rescue groups, which suggested others would follow.
Teo was euthanized three days later.
Rodriguez said the dog had been on his second round of medication to combat a contagious upper respiratory infection, and that factored into the decision to put him down.
Benavidez has volunteered at the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters since 2017, walking and playing with animals, introducing dogs to potential adopters, cleaning kennels and preparing food.
She had been monitoring Angel, a 2-year-old black German shepherd, who was kenneled in the back at the Palmdale shelter, in an area that required an escort.
She said she expected to see a rescue plea, but it never came. She later learned he’d been euthanized because there was no longer space for him.
Benavidez wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to save Angel. The personwho turned him in told shelter officials her mother would adopt Angel if he became a candidate for euthanasia, according to department records.
Shelter records don’t mention efforts to contact the woman or her mother, whose names were redacted.
Rodriguez said it was erroneous to assume from the records that no outreach had been made, but also acknowledged that any attempt to reach the family would have been noted.
He added that Angel’s behavior — he had lunged at other dogs and had to be kenneled alone — factored into why a rescue request wasn’t sent for him, even though the behavior team had approved him for adoption.
The Times also found mistakes in several emails from the Palmdale shelter to rescue groups and networkers and on its website — including deadlines listed that had already passed or dogs marked with the wrong identification number or breed.
One email was marked as both a second and third plea, and the deadline to save the dogs had come and gone two days before it was sent out. Another message included a photo of a 1½-year-old black pit bull, but described a 7-year-old Siberian husky.
Rodriguez said the Palmdale shelter has had to rely more on public adoptions because overburdened rescue groups are pulling out fewer dogs than before the pandemic. According to figures provided by the department, groups rescued 303 dogs from Palmdale in 2022, compared with 898 dogs in 2018.
Sixteen kennels at the facility, though freely accessible to the public, are behind a door, next to a sign that says “Dog adoptions,” and visitors may not realize they can enter.
That was the case on a July afternoon, when Kayzanique Palms and her brother came to the shelter hoping to interact with the pups but left thinking they could only see photos of its dogs. They didn’t know until a reporter told them that there were two rows of kennels they could walk through behind the marked door. The rest of the kennels require an escort.
Dog rescuer Alyssa Benavidez shows a frame from her video of Pickles, a 10-month-old German shepherd that was put down at the Palmdale animal shelter.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Pickles, the German shepherd puppy who was euthanized on Valentine’s Day, was in one of the publicly accessible kennels when Benavidez first saw him. Shelter staff had recommended in his file that he be placed in a home with no other dogs, though Benavidez saw him kenneled with another dog in the shelter with no apparent issues. She remembered worrying that a note like that would deter adopters.
She emailed the kennel sergeant, asking when time would be up for Pickles and another dog as she hastened to find them homes.
In an email exchange reviewed by The Times, the kennel sergeant, Nelson Gonzalez, said that Pickles had already had a rescue plea sent out and that he’d been featured as pet of the week by the Board of Supervisors.
“He didn’t give me a direct answer,” Benavidez said. “They put the dog down the next day.”
Gonzalez did not respond to a request for comment.
In California, the Hayden Act, a set of animal welfare laws approved in 1998, requires that in most cases a shelter must release a dog to a rescue group that has requested it, rather than putting it to sleep. Benavidez said she wasn’t given that opportunity.
A department spokesperson said that because the networker never asked for more time or said she had someone ready to take Pickles home, and because the facility was full, the dog was put down.
“That one really killed me, because I felt like there was something that I could’ve done, but they didn’t really give me a chance,” Benavidez said.
George LeVines, The Times’ deputy director for data and graphics, contributed to this report.
At least three people were killed by speeding or inebriated drivers in South Los Angeles on Thursday, marking the deadliest Thanksgiving Day in the community in recent years, according to police and media reports.
“In 28 years, this is the worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever seen,” Det. Ryan Moreno of the LAPD’s South Traffic Division told KNBC-TV Channel 4. Moreno responded to the three accidents.
In total, nine fatal accidents occurred in the LAPD South Traffic Division in less than two weeks, according to police.
The first incident on occurred about 5:30 a.m. Thursday near the intersection of 18th and Figueroa streets in Harbor Gateway, according to police and NBC. A driver suspected of being drunk and traveling more than 100 mph hit a car with three women inside, killing a 24-year-old single mother of a 5-year-old boy.
Just after 1 p.m., another suspected drunk driver pulled out of a liquor store on Western Avenue near 83rd Street and crashed into a speeding motorist, who then struck and killed Alma Letecia Aragon, 26, as she walked with her 8-year-old daughter, authorities said. The child remained in critical condition on Friday.
“It’s looking right now, [that] it’s going to take a miracle [for] this girl to pull out,” Moreno said to NBC. “We’re all praying for her that she makes it.”
A few blocks away, on Western Avenue and 73rd Street, police responded about 11 p.m. to a speeding driver under the influence of marijuana who authorities said struck and killed a homeless man.
“All of these cases range from manslaughter, to possibly murder,” Moreno told NBC. “It’s people just now, self-entitled, thinking, they can do whatever they want.”
