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  • ‘It’s happening everywhere’: 1 in 3 ICE detainees held in overcrowded facilities, data show

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    WASHINGTON — Mattresses on the floor, next to bunk beds, in meeting rooms and gymnasiums. No access to a bathroom or drinking water. Hourlong lines to buy food at the commissary or to make a phone call.

    These are some of the conditions described by lawyers and the people held at immigrant detention facilities around the country over the last few months. The number of detained immigrants surpassed a record 60,000 this month. A Los Angeles Times analysis of public data shows that more than a third of ICE detainees have spent time in an overcapacity dedicated detention center this year.

    In the first half of the year, at least 19 out of 49 dedicated detention facilities exceeded their rated bed capacity and many more holding facilities and local jails exceeded their agreed-upon immigrant detainee capacity. During the height of arrest activity in June, facilities that were used to operating with plenty of available beds suddenly found themselves responsible for the meals, medical attention, safety and sleeping space for four times as many detainees as they had the previous year.

    “There are so many things we’ve seen before — poor food quality, abuse by guards, not having clean clothes or underwear, not getting hygiene products,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, a coalition that aims to abolish immigrant detention. “But the scale at which it’s happening feels greater, because it’s happening everywhere and people are sleeping on floors.”

    Shah said there’s no semblance of dignity now. “I’ve been doing this for many years; I don’t think I even had the imagination of it getting this bad,” she added.

    Shah said conditions have deteriorated in part because of how quickly this administration scaled up arrests. It took the first Trump administration more than two years to reach its peak of about 55,0000 detainees in 2019.

    Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the allegations about inhumane detention conditions false and a “hoax.” She said the agency has significantly expanded detention space in places such as Indiana and Nebraska and is working to rapidly remove detainees from those facilities to their countries of origin.

    McLaughlin emphasized that the department provides comprehensive medical care, but did not respond to questions about other conditions.

    Groups of people in white clothes outdoors, some with hands outstretched

    Detainees do stretches outdoors as a helicopter flies overhead at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome detention center in Miami on July 4, 2025.

    (Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press)

    At the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the maximum number of detainees in a day in 2024 was 615, four more than the rated bed capacity of 611. In late June of this year, the detainee population reached 1,961, more than three times the capacity. The facility, which is near the Everglades, spent 161 days in the beginning of the year with more people to house than beds.

    Miami attorney Katie Blankenship of the legal aid organization Sanctuary of the South represents people detained at Krome. Last month, she saw nine Black men piled into a visitation room, surrounded with glass windows, that holds a small table and four chairs. They had pushed the table against the wall and spread a cardboard box flat across the floor, where they were taking turns sleeping.

    The men had no access to a bathroom or drinking water. They stood because there was no room to sit.

    Blankenship said three of the men put their documents up to the window so she could better understand their cases. All had overstayed their visas and were detained as part of an immigration enforcement action, not criminal proceedings.

    Another time, Blankenship said, she saw an elderly man cramped up in pain, unable to move, on the floor of a bigger room. Other men put chairs together and lifted him so he could rest more comfortably while guards looked on, she said.

    Blankenship visits often enough that people held in the visitation and holding rooms recognize her as a lawyer whenever she walks by. They bang on the glass, yell out their identification numbers and plead for help, she said.

    “These are images that won’t leave me,” Blankenship said. “It’s dystopian.”

    Krome is unique in the dramatic fluctuation of its detainee population. On Feb. 18, the facility saw its biggest single-day increase. A total of 521 individuals were booked in, most transferred from hold rooms across the state, including Orlando and Tampa. Hold rooms are temporary spaces for detainees to await further processing for transfers, medical treatment or other movement into or out of a facility. They are to be used to hold individuals for no more than 12 hours.

    On the day after its huge influx, Krome received a waiver exempting the facility from the requirement to log hold room activity. But it never resumed the logs. Homeland Security did not respond to a request for an explanation of the exception.

    After reaching their first peak of 1,764 on March 16, the trend reversed.

    Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) visited Krome on April 24. In the weeks before the visit, hundreds of detainees were transferred out. Most were moved to other facilities in Florida, some to Texas and Louisiana.

    “When those lawmakers came around, they got rid of a whole bunch of detainees,” said Blankenship’s client Mopvens Louisdor.

    The 30-year-old man from Haiti said conditions started to deteriorate around March as hundreds of extra people were packed into the facility.

    Staffers are so overwhelmed that for detainees who can’t leave their cells for meals, he said, “by the time food gets to us, it’s cold.”

    Also during this time, from April 29 through May 1, the facility underwent a compliance inspection conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office of Detention Oversight. Despite the dramatic reduction in the population, the inspection found several issues with crowding and meals. Some rooms exceeded the 25-person capacity for each and some hold times were nearly double the 12-hour limit. Inspectors observed detainees sleeping on the hold room floors without pillows or blankets. Staffers had not recorded offering a meal to the detainees in the hold rooms for more than six hours.

    Sanitary and medical attention were also areas of concern noted in the inspection. In most units, there were too many detainees for the number of toilets, showers and sinks. Some medical records showed that staffers failed to complete required mental and medical health screenings for new arrivals, and failed to complete tuberculosis screenings.

    Detainees have tested positive for tuberculosis at facilities such as the Anchorage Correctional Complex in Alaska and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. McLaughlin, the Homeland Security assistant secretary, said that detainees are screened for tuberculosis within 12 hours of arrival and that anyone who refuses a test is isolated as a precaution.

    “It is a long-standing practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody,” she said. “This includes medical, dental, and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”

    Facility administrators built a tented area outside the main building to process arriving detainees, but it wasn’t enough to alleviate the overcrowding, Louisdor said. Earlier this month, areas with space for around 65 detainees were holding more than 100, with cots spread across the floor between bunk beds.

    Louisdor said a young man who uses a wheelchair had resorted to relieving himself in a water bottle because staffers weren’t available to escort him to the restroom.

    During the daily hour that detainees are allowed outside for recreation, 300 people stood shoulder to shoulder, he said, making it difficult to get enough exercise. When fights occasionally broke out, guards could do little to stop them, he said.

    The line to buy food or hygiene products at the commissary was so long that sometimes detainees left empty-handed.

    Louisdor said he has bipolar disorder, for which he takes medication. The day he had a court hearing, the staff mistakenly gave him double the dosage, leaving him unable to stand.

    Since then, Louisdor said, conditions have slightly improved, though dormitories are still substantially overcrowded.

    In California, detainees and lawyers similarly reported that medical care has deteriorated.

    Tracy Crowley, a staff attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said clients with serious conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer don’t receive their medication some days.

    Cells that house up to eight people are packed with 11. With air conditioning blasting all night, detainees have told her the floor is cold and they have gotten sick. Another common complaint, she said, is that clothes and bedding are so dirty that some clients are getting rashes all over their bodies, making it difficult to sleep.

    A person in a cap, white T-shirt and jeans, seen from behind, stands looking at a colorful mural

    Luis at Chicano Park in San Diego on Aug. 23, 2025.

    (Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

    One such client is Luis, a 40-year-old from Colombia who was arrested in May at the immigration court in San Diego after a hearing over his pending asylum petition. Luis asked to be identified by his middle name out of concern over his legal case.

    When he first arrived at Otay Mesa Detention Center, Luis said, the facility was already filled to the maximum capacity. By the time he left June 30, it was overcrowded. Rooms that slept six suddenly had 10 people. Mattresses were placed in a mixed-use room and in the gym.

    Luis developed a rash, but at the medical clinic he was given allergy medication and sleeping pills. The infection continued until finally he showed it over a video call to his mother, who had worked in public health, and she told him to request an anti-fungal cream.

    A pair of clasped hands

    Luis was held at Otay Mesa Detention Center after his May arrest. It was at capacity when he arrived but by the time he left in June, it was overcrowded, he said.

    (Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

    Other detainees often complained to Luis that their medication doses were incomplete or missing, including two men in his dorm who took anti-psychotic medication.

    “They would get stressed out, start to fight — everything irritated them,” he said. “That affected all of us.”

    Crowley said the facility doesn’t have the infrastructure or staff to hold as many people as are there now. The legal system also can’t process them in a timely manner, she said, forcing people to wait months for a hearing.

    The administration’s push to detain more people is only compounding existing issues, Crowley said.

    “They’re self-imposing the limit, and most of the people involved in that decision-making are financially incentivized to house more and more people,” she said. “Where is the limit with this administration?”

    Troops in fatigues standing near a covered truck

    Members of the California National Guard load a truck outside the ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, Calif., on July 11, 2025.

    (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP/Getty Images)

    Other facilities in California faced similar challenges. At the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, the number of detainees soared to 1,000 from 300 over a week in June, prompting an outcry over deteriorated conditions.

    As of July 29, Adelanto held 1,640 detainees. The Desert View Annex, an adjacent facility also operated by the GEO Group, held 451.

    Disability Rights California toured the facility and interviewed staffers and 18 people held there. The advocacy organization released a report last month detailing its findings, including substantial delays in meal distribution, a shortage of drinking water, and laundry washing delays, leading many detainees to remain in soiled clothing for long periods.

    In a letter released last month, 85 Adelanto detainees wrote, “They always serve the food cold … sometimes we don’t have water for 2 to 7 hours and they said to us to drink from the sink.”

    At the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., Rodney Taylor, a double amputee, was rendered nearly immobile.

    Taylor, who was born in Liberia, uses electronic prosthetic legs that must be charged and can’t get wet. The outlets in his dormitory were inoperable, and because of the overcrowding and short-staffing, guards couldn’t take him to another area to plug them in, said his fiancee, Mildred Pierre.

    “When they’re not charged they’re super heavy, like dead weight,” she said. It becomes difficult to balance without falling.

    Pierre said the air conditioning in his unit didn’t work for two months, causing water to puddle on the floor. Taylor feared he would slip while walking and fall — which happened once in May — and damage the expensive prosthetics.

    Last month, Taylor refused to participate in the daily detainee count, telling guards he wouldn’t leave his cell unless they agreed to leave the cell doors open to let the air circulate.

    “They didn’t take him to charge his legs and now they wanted him to walk through water and go in a hot room,” Pierre recalled. “He said no — he stood his ground.”

    Several guards surrounded him, yelling, Pierre said. They placed him in solitary confinement for three days as punishment, she said.

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    Andrea Castillo, Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee

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  • 70 new food items each week? South Korea is the convenience store capital of the world

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    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.

    A detail of a person cooling down noodles in a DIY cone made from the ramyon bowl cover.

    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.

    People shop and eat in the dining area at a CU convenience store in Seoul.

    Shoppers prepare their dinner at one of the self-serve machines in the dining area at a CU ramyon convenience store.
    Ye Yan and her girlfriend, Quan Chuxi, eat ramyon, kimchi and sausage at a CU convenience store.

    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.

    The GS25 convenience store is collaborating with FC Seoul, a South Korean football club, in the Hongdae neighborhood.

    Mirrors reflect people shopping and eating at a GS25 convenience store.
    A teenage boy drinks a beverage in the dining area at a GS25 convenience store.

    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 a boy band decorate the windows of a convenience store.

    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.

    ***

    A woman walks by a building with a sign that reads GS25 x FC Seoul at night.

    “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.

    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].”

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    Max Kim

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  • Commentary: Why Trump’s death penalty threat is dangerous to all of us

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    President Trump declared Tuesday that federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., should seek the death penalty for murders committed in the capital, claiming without explanation that “we have no choice.”

    “That’s a very strong preventative,” he said of his decision. “I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country, but we have it.”

    Trump’s pronouncement is about much more than deterring killings, though. With speed and brazenness, Trump seems intent on creating a new, federal arrest and detention system outside of existing norms, aimed at everyday citizens and controlled by his whims. The death penalty is part of it, but stomping on civil rights is at the heart of it — ruthlessly exploiting anxiety about crime to aim repression at whatever displeases him, from immigration protesters to murderers.

    This administration “is using the words of crime and criminals to get themselves a permission structure to erode civil rights and due processes across our criminal, legal and immigration systems in ways that I think should have everyone alarmed,” Rena Karefa-Johnson told me. She’s a former public defender who now works with Fwd.us, a bipartisan criminal justice advocacy group.

    Authoritarians love the death penalty, and have long used it to repress not crime, but dissent. It is, after all, both the ultimate power and the ultimate fear, that the ruler of the state holds the lives of his people in his hands.

    Though we are far from such atrocities, Spain’s purge of “communists” and other dissenters under Francisco Franco, Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Philippines (though the death penalty remains illegal there) and the routine executions, even of journalists, under the repressive rulers in Saudi Arabia are chilling examples.

    What each of those regimes shares in common with this moment in America is the rhetoric of making a better society — often by purging perceived threats to order — even if that requires force, or the loss of rights.

    Suddenly, violent criminals become no different than petty criminals, and petty criminals become no different than immigrants or protesters. They are all a threat to a nostalgic lost glory of the homeland that must be restored at any cost, animals that only understand force.

    “We have no choice.”

    The result is that the people become, if not accustomed to masked agents and the military on our streets, too scared to protest it, fearful they will become the criminal target, the hunted animal.

    Already, the National Guard in D.C. is carrying live weapons. With great respect to the women and men who serve in the Guard, and who no doubt individually serve with honor, they are not trained for domestic law enforcement. Forget the legalities, the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act, which should prevent troops from policing American citizens, and does prevent them from making arrests.

    Who do we want these soldiers to shoot? Who have they been told to shoot? A kid with a can of spray paint? A pickpocket? A drug dealer? A flag burner? A sandwich thrower?

    We don’t even know what their orders are. What choices they will have to make.

    But we do know that police do not walk around openly holding their guns, and certainly do not stroll with rifles. For civilian law enforcement, their guns are defensive weapons, and they are trained to use them as such.

    Few walking by these troops, even the most law abiding, can fail to feel the power of those weapons at the ready. It is a visceral knowledge that to provoke them could mean death. That is a powerful form of repression, meant to stop dissent through fear of repercussion.

    It is a power that Trump is building on multiple fronts. After declaring his “crime emergency” in D.C., Trump mandated a serious change in the mission of the National Guard.

    President Trump with members of law enforcement and National Guard troops in Washington on Aug. 21, 2025.

    (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

    He ordered every state to train soldiers on “quelling civil disturbances,” and to have soldiers ready to rapidly mobilize in case of protests. That same executive order also creates a National Guard force ready to deploy nationwide at the president’s command — presumably taking away states’ rights to decide when to utilize their troops, as happened in California.

    Trump has already announced his intention to send them to Chicago, called Baltimore a “hellhole” that also may be in need and falsely claimed that, “in California, you would’ve not had the Olympics had I not sent in the troops” because “there wouldn’t be anything left” without their intervention.

    Retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, a former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, told ABC that “the administration is trying to desensitize the American people to get used to American armed soldiers in combat vehicles patrolling the streets of America. “

    Manner called the move “extremely disturbing.”

    Add to that Trump’s desire to imprison opponents. In recent days, the FBI raided the home of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, a Republican who has criticized Trump, especially on his policy toward Ukraine. Then Trump attempted to fire Lisa D. Cook, a Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve board, after accusing her of mortgage fraud in another apparent attempt to bend that independent agency to his will on the economy.

    On Wednesday, Trump wrote on social media that progressive billionaire George Soros and his son Alex should be charged under federal racketeering laws for “their support of Violent Protests.”

    “We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more, never giving it so much as a chance to “BREATHE,” and be FREE,” Trump wrote. “Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country! That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends. Be careful, we’re watching you!”

    Consider yourselves threatened, West Coast friends.

    But of course, we are already living under that thunder. Dozens of average citizens are facing serious charges in places including Los Angeles for their participation in immigration protests.

    Whether they are found guilty or not, their lives are upended by the anxiety and expense of facing such prosecutions. And thousands are being rounded up and deported, at times seemingly grabbed solely for the color of their skin, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguably the most Trump-loyal law enforcement agency, sees its budget balloon to $45 billion, enough to keep 100,000 people detained at a time.

    Despite Trump’s maelstrom of dread-inducing moves, resistance is alive, well and far from futile.

    A new Quinnipiac University national poll found that 56% of voters disapprove of the National Guard being deployed in D.C.

    This week, the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. for a second time failed to convince a grand jury to indict a man who threw a submarine sandwich at federal officers — proof that average citizens not only are sane, but willing to stand up for what is right.

    That comes after a grand jury three times rejected the same kind of charge against a woman who was arrested after being shoved against a wall by an immigration agent.

    Californians will decide this in November whether to redraw their electoral maps to put more Democrats in Congress. Latino leaders in Chicago are protesting possible troops there. People are refusing to allow fear to define their actions.

    Turns out, we do have a choice.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching

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    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

    I was conferencing with a group of students when I heard the excitement building across my third grade classroom. A boy at the back table had been working on his catapult project for over an hour through our science lesson, into recess, and now during personalized learning time. I watched him adjust the wooden arm for what felt like the 20th time, measure another launch distance, and scribble numbers on his increasingly messy data sheet.

    “The longer arm launches farther!” he announced to no one in particular, his voice carrying the matter-of-fact tone of someone who had just uncovered a truth about the universe. I felt that familiar teacher thrill, not because I had successfully delivered a physics lesson, but because I hadn’t taught him anything at all.

    Last year, all of my students chose a topic they wanted to explore and pursued a personal learning project about it. This particular student had discovered the relationship between lever arm length and projectile distance entirely through his own experiments, which involved mathematics, physics, history, and data visualization.

    Other students drifted over to try his longer-armed design, and soon, a cluster of 8-year-olds were debating trajectory angles and comparing medieval siege engines to ancient Chinese catapults.

    They were doing exactly what I dream of as an educator: learning because they wanted to know, not because they had to perform.

    Then, just recently, I read about the American Federation of Teachers’ new $23 million partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train educators how to use AI “wisely, safely and ethically.” The training sessions would teach them how to generate lesson plans and “microwave” routine communications with artificial intelligence.

    My heart sank.

    As an elementary teacher who also conducts independent research on the intersection of AI and education, and writes the ‘Algorithmic Mind’ column about it for Psychology Today, I live in the uncomfortable space between what technology promises and what children actually need. Yes, I use AI, but only for administrative work like drafting parent newsletters, organizing student data, and filling out required curriculum planning documents. It saves me hours on repetitive tasks that have nothing to do with teaching.

    I’m all for showing educators how to use AI to cut down on rote work. But I fear the AFT’s $23 million initiative isn’t about administrative efficiency. According to their press release, they’re training teachers to use AI for “instructional planning” and as a “thought partner” for teaching decisions. One featured teacher describes using AI tools to help her communicate “in the right voice” when she’s burned out. Another says AI can assist with “late-night lesson planning.”

    That sounds more like outsourcing the foundational work of teaching.

    Watching my student discover physics principles through intrinsic curiosity reminded me why this matters so much. When we start relying on AI to plan our lessons and find our teaching voice, we’re replacing human judgment with algorithmic thinking at the very moment students need us most. We’re prioritizing the product of teaching over the process of learning.

    Most teachers I talk to share similar concerns about AI. They focus on cheating and plagiarism. They worry about students outsourcing their thinking and how to assess learning when they can’t tell if students actually understand anything. The uncomfortable truth is that students have always found ways to avoid genuine thinking when we value products over process. I used SparkNotes. Others used Google. Now, students use ChatGPT.

    The problem is not technology; it’s that we continue prioritizing finished products over messy learning processes. And as long as education rewards predetermined answers over curiosity, students will find shortcuts.

    That’s why teachers need professional development that moves in the opposite direction. They need PD that helps them facilitate genuine inquiry and human connection; foster classrooms where confusion is valued as a precursor to understanding; and develop in students an intrinsic motivation.

    When I think about that boy measuring launch distances with handmade tools, I realize he was demonstrating the distinctly human capacity to ask questions that only he wanted to address. He didn’t need me to structure his investigation or discovery. He needed the freedom to explore, materials to experiment with, and time to pursue his curiosity wherever it led.

    The learning happened not because I efficiently delivered content, but because I stepped back and trusted his natural drive to understand.

    Children don’t need teachers who can generate lesson plans faster or give AI-generated feedback, but educators who can inspire questions, model intellectual courage, and create communities where wonder thrives and real-world problems are solved.

    The future belongs to those who can combine computational tools with human wisdom, ethics, and creativity. But this requires us to maintain the cognitive independence to guide AI systems rather than becoming dependent on them.

    Every time I watch my students make unexpected connections, I’m reminded that the most important learning happens in the spaces between subjects, in the questions that emerge from genuine curiosity, in the collaborative thinking that builds knowledge through relationships. We can’t microwave that. And we shouldn’t try.

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

    For more news on AI in education, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.

    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

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    Timothy Cook, Chalkbeat

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  • Lyle Menendez denied parole, will remain in prison along with younger brother Erik

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    SACRAMENTO — A day after his younger brother was denied release, Lyle Menendez also saw California parole officials reject his bid for freedom, ruling he will remain behind bars for now for the 1989 shotgun murders of his parents.

    The parole board grilled Menendez, 57, over his efforts to get witnesses to lie during his trials, the lavish shopping sprees he and his brother Erik, 54, took after their parents’ killings, and whether he felt relief after the murders.

    “I felt this shameful period of those six months of having to lie to relatives who were grieving,” Menendez told the board. “I felt the need to suffer. That it was no relief.”

    As the elder brother, Menendez said he at times felt like the protector of Erik, but that he soon realized the murders were not the right way out of sexual abuse they were allegedly suffering at the hands of their parents.

    “I sort of started to feel like I had not rescued my brother,” he said. “I destroyed his life. I’d rescued nobody.”

    The closely watched hearing for Lyle Menendez, one of the most well-known inmates currently in the state’s prison system, was thrown into disarray Friday afternoon after audio of his brother’s parole hearing on Thursday was publicly released.

    The audio, published by ABC 7, sparked anger and frustration from the brothers’ relatives and their attorney, who accused the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation of leaking the audio and tainting Lyle’s hearing.

    A CDCR spokesperson confirmed the audio was “erroneously” issued in response to a records request, but did not elaborate or immediately respond to additional questions from The Times.

    “I have protected myself, I have stayed out of this, I have not had a relationship with two human beings because I was afraid, and I came here today and I came here yesterday and I trusted that this would only be released in a transcript,” said Tiffani Lucero-Pastor, a relative of the brothers. “You’ve misled the family.”

    Heidi Rummel, Lyle Menendez’s parole attorney, also criticized CDCR, accusing the agency of turning the hearing into a “spectacle.”

    “I don’t think you can possibly understand the emotion of what this family is experiencing,” she said. “They have spent so much time trying to protect their privacy and dignity.”

    After the audio was published, Rummel said family members who planned to testify decided not to speak after all, and said she would be looking to seal the transcripts of Friday’s hearing.

    Parole Commissioner Julie Garland said regulations allowed for audio to be released under the California Public Records Act. Transcripts of parole hearings typically become public within 30 days of a grant or denial, under state law.

    During his first-ever appeal to the state parole board, Lyle Menendez was questioned over his credibility.

    Garland referred to Menendez’s appeal to get witnesses to lie, plans to escape, and lies to relatives about the killings as a “sophistication of the web of lies and manipulation you demonstrated.”

    Menendez said he had no plan at the time, there was just “a lot of flailing in what was happening.”

    “Even though you fooled your entire family about you being a murderer, and you recruited all these people to help you … you don’t think that’s being a good liar?” Garland asked.

    Menendez said the remorse he felt after the crimes perhaps helped create a “strong belief” he didn’t have anything to do with the killings.

    Dmitry Gorin, a former Los Angeles County prosecutor, said the board’s decision denying parole was consistent with past decisions involving violent crimes.

    “Although this is a high-profile case, the parole board rejecting the release demonstrates that it seeks to keep violent offenders locked up because they still pose a risk to society,” Gorin said. “Historically, the parole board does not release people convicted of murder, and this case is no different.

    He called the decision a win for Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman, who has opposed the brothers’ release.

    The brothers were initially sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for the killings of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez, but after qualifying for resentencing they gained a chance at freedom.

    Many family members have supported their cause, but the gruesome crime and the brothers’ conduct behind bars led to pushback against their release.

    The killings occurred after the brothers purchased shotguns in San Diego with a false identification and shot their parents in the family living room.

    The bloody crime scene was compared by investigators to a gangland execution, where Jose Menendez was shot five times, including once in the back of the head. Evidence showed their mother had crawled, wounded, on the floor before the brothers reloaded and fired a final, fatal blast.

    The brothers reported the killings to 911, according to court records. Soon afterward, prosecutors during the trial noted, the two siblings began to spend large sums of money, including buying a Porsche and a restaurant, which was purchased by Lyle. Erik bought a Jeep and hired a private tennis instructor.

    Prosecutors argued it was access to their multimillion-dollar inheritance that prompted the killing after Jose Menendez shared that he planned to disinherit the brothers.

    But during the trials, the Menendez brothers and relatives testified that the two siblings had undergone years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their father.

    In contrast to their frenzy around their trial, Thursday and Friday’s parole hearings were quiet — yet occasionally contentious — affairs.

    A Times journalist was the only member of the public allowed to view the hearing on a projector screen in a room inside the agency’s headquarters outside of Sacramento.

    During the Friday hearing, the parole board quickly dived into the allegations that the brothers were sexually assaulted by their father, which Lyle Menendez said confused and “caused a lot of shame in me.”

    “That pretty much characterized my relationship with my father,” he said, adding that the fear of being abused left him in a state of “hyper vigilance,” even after the abuse stopped and his father began to abuse Erik.

    “It took me a while to realize that it stopped,” Menendez said. “I think I was still worried about it for a long time.”

    Growing up, he said, taking care of his younger brother gave him purpose, and helped to protect him from “drowning in the spiral of my own life.”

    Menendez alleged his mother also sexually abused him, but said he did not share it during his comprehensive risk assessment because he “didn’t see it as abuse really.”

    “Today, I see it as sexual abuse,” he said. “When I was 13, I felt like I was consenting and my mother was dealing with a lot and I just felt like maybe it wasn’t.”

    Board members also questioned Lyle Menendez on why he didn’t mention the possibility they were removed from their parents’ will in their submissions to the board, but Menendez contended their inheritance was not a motive in the killings.

    Instead, he said, it became “a problem afterward” as they worried they would have no money after their parents’ deaths.

    “I believe there was a will that disinherited us somewhere,” he said.

    The result of Thursday’s hearing means Erik can’t seek parole again for three years, a decision that left some relatives and supporters of the younger brother stunned.

    “How is my dad a threat to society,” Talia Menendez, his stepdaughter, wrote on Instagram shortly after the decision was made. “This has been torture to our family. How much longer???”

    In a statement issued Thursday, relatives said they were disappointed by the decision and noted that going through Lyle’s hearing Friday would be “undoubtedly difficult,” although they remained “cautiously optimistic and hopeful.”

    Friends, relatives and former cellmates have touted the brothers’ lives behind bars, pointing to programs they’ve spearheaded for inmates, including classes for anger management, meditation, and helping inmates in hospice care.

    But members of the board questioned both siblings about their violation of rules, zeroing in at times about repeated use of contraband cellphones.

    During the hearing Friday, Lyle said he sometimes used cellphones to keep in touch with family outside the prison. But Deputy Parole Commissioner Patrick Reardon questioned this explanation, and asked why Menendez needed a cellphone if he could make legitimate calls from a prison-issued tablet.

    The rule violation, board members pointed out, had resulted in Menendez being barred from family visits for three years.

    Reardon pointed out that Menendez pleaded guilty to two cellphone violations in November 2024 and in March 2025. Menendez was also linked to three other violations, although another cellmate of his took responsibility for those violations.

    Menendez said the violations occurred when he lived in a dorm with five other inmates, and admitted the use of cellphones was a “gang-like activity.” The group, he said, probably went through at least five cellphones.

    Heidi Rummel, Menendez’s parole attorney, argued in her closing that despite the cellphone issues, Menendez had no violent incidents on his prison record.

    “This board is going to say you’re dangerous because you used your cellphones,” she said. “But there is zero evidence that he used it for criminality, that he used it for violence. He didn’t even lie about it.”

    But members of the board repeatedly focused on what seemed to be issues of credibility. Reardon said at times it felt like Menendez was “two different incarcerated people.”

    “You seem to be different things at different times,” Reardon said during the hearing. “I don’t think what I see is that you used a cellphone from time to time. There seems to be a mechanism in place that you always had a cellphone.”

    Garland asked Menendez about whether he used his position on the Men’s Advisory Council — a group meant to be a liaison on issues between inmates and prison administrators — to manipulate others and gain unfair benefits.

    Menendez said the position gave him access to wall phones, and used the position to help him barter or gain favors.

    Garland also pointed to an assessment that found Menendez exhibited antisocial traits, entitlement, deception, manipulation and a resistance to accept consequences.

    Menendez said he had discussed those issues, but that he didn’t agree he showed narcissistic traits.

    “They’re not the type of people like me self-referring to mental health,” he said, adding that he felt his father displayed narcissistic tendencies and lack of self-reflection. “I just felt like that wasn’t me.”

    Menendez pointed to his work to help inmates in prison who are bullied or mocked.

    “I would never call myself a model incarcerated person,” he said. “I would say that I’m a good person, that I spent my time helping people. That I’m very open and accepting.”

    The parole board applauded Menendez’s work and educational history while in prison, noting he was working on a master’s degree.

    Despite the violations, Menendez argued he felt he had done good work in prison.

    “My life has been defined by extreme violence,” he said, tears visible on his face. “I wanted to be defined by something else.”

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    James Queally, Salvador Hernandez, Richard Winton

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  • Target’s CEO is stepping down as customers turn away

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    Target CEO Brian Cornell, who helped reenergize the company but has struggled to turn around weak sales in a more competitive retail landscape since the COVID pandemic, plans to step down Feb. 1.Minneapolis-based Target said Wednesday that Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke, a 20-year company veteran, will succeed Cornell.Cornell said Fiddelke’s appointment followed several years of board vetting of both internal and external candidates. Fiddelke has overhauled Target’s supply network and expanded the company’s stores and digital services while cutting costs. In May, the company announced that he would lead a new office focused on faster decision-making to help accelerate sales growth.Fiddelke is taking over at a time when Target’s sales are in a funk, its stores are messy and understocked, and it’s losing market share to rivals like Walmart.He said he’s stepping into the role with urgency with three priorities: reclaiming the company’s merchandising authority; improving the shopping experience by making sure shelves are consistently stocked and stores are clean; and investing in technology at the company’s stores and in its supply network.“When we’re leading with swagger in our merchandising authority, when we have swagger in our marketing, and we’re setting the trend for retail, those are some of the moments I think that Target has been at its highest in my 20 years,” he said.The change in leadership was announced Wednesday at the same time that Target reported another quarter of sluggish results. The company’s stock was down more than 8% in pre-market trading.Neil Saunders, a managing director at GlobalData Retail, said Wednesday that he had “mixed feelings” about the appointment.“While we think Fiddelke is talented and has a somewhat different take on things compared to current CEO Brian Cornell, this is an internal appointment that does not necessarily remedy the problems of entrenched groupthink and the inward-looking mindset that have plagued Target for years,” he said.Target reported a 21% drop in net income in the quarter ended Aug. 2. Sales were down slightly and the company reported a 1.9% dip in comparable sales — those from established physical stores and online channels. Target has seen flat or declining comparable sales in eight out of the past 10 quarters including the latest period.Target, which has about 1,980 U.S. stores, has been the focus of consumer boycotts since late January, when it joined rival Walmart and a number of other prominent American brands in scaling back corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.Target’s sales also have languished as customers defect to Walmart and off-price department store chains like TJ Maxx in search of lower prices. But many analysts think Target is stumbling because consumers no longer consider it the place to go for affordable but stylish products, a niche that long ago earned the retailer the jokingly posh nickname “Tarzhay.”In fact, out of 35 merchandise categories that Target tracks, it gained or maintained market share in only 14 during the latest quarter, Fiddelke told reporters Tuesday.Meanwhile, Walmart gained market share among households with incomes over $100,000 as U.S. inflation caused consumer prices to rise rapidly. Lower-income shoppers have driven customer growth at Target, suggesting it may have lost appeal with wealthier customers, according to market research firm Consumer Edge.“It’s probably not the best sign, especially because higher-income consumers continue to hold up a little bit better” during times of economic uncertainty, said Consumer Edge Head of Insights Michael Gunther.In March, members of Target’s executive team told investors they planned to regain the chain’s reputation for selling stylish goods at budget prices by expanding Target’s lineup of store label brands and shortening the time it took to get new items from the idea stage to store shelves. The moves would help the company stay close to trends, executives said.“In a world where we operate today, our guests are looking for Tarzhay,” Cornell told investors. “Consumers coined that term decades ago to define how we elevate the everything everyday to something special, how we had unexpected fun in the shopping that would be otherwise routine.”Before joining Target in 2014, Cornell, 66, spent more than 30 years in leadership positions at retail and consumer-product companies, including as chief marketing officer at Safeway Inc. and CEO at Michaels, Walmart’s Sam’s Club and PepsiCo America Foods. In September 2022, the board extended his contract for three more years and eliminated a policy requiring its chief executives to retire at age 65.When Cornell got to Target, the company was facing a different set of challenges.Cornell replaced former CEO Gregg Steinhafel, who stepped down nearly five months after Target disclosed a huge data breach in which hackers stole millions of customers’ credit- and debit-card records. The theft badly damaged the chain’s reputation and profits.Cornell reenergized sales by having his team rev up Target’s store brands. It now has 40 private label brands in its portfolio. And even before the pandemic, Cornell spearheaded the company’s mission to transform its stores into delivery hubs to cut down on costs and speed up deliveries.Target’s 2017 acquisition of Shipt helped bolster the discounter’s same-day, store-based fulfillment services. Cornell also focused on making its stores better tailored to the local community.The coronavirus pandemic delivered outsized sales for Target as well as its peers as people stayed home and bought pajamas, furnishings and kitchen items. And it continued to see a surge in sales as shoppers emerged from their homes and went to stores. But the spending sprees eventually subsided.As inflation started to spike, Target reported a 52% drop in profits during its 2022 first quarter compared with a year earlier. Purchases of big TVs and appliances that Americans loaded up on during the pandemic faded, leaving the retailer with excess inventory that had to be sold off.In July 2023, as shoppers feeling pinched by inflation curtailed their spending, Target said its comparable sales declined for the first time in six years.Moreover, Target started losing its edge as an authority on style by focusing too much on home furnishings basics, and not enough trendy items, Fiddelke said.A customer backlash over the annual line of LGBTQ+ Pride merchandise Target stores carried that year further cut into sales.Although Walmart retreated from its diversity initiatives first, Target has been the focus of more concerted consumer boycotts. Organizers have said they viewed Target’s action as a greater betrayal because the company previously had held itself out as a champion of inclusion.

    NEW YORK —

    Target CEO Brian Cornell, who helped reenergize the company but has struggled to turn around weak sales in a more competitive retail landscape since the COVID pandemic, plans to step down Feb. 1.

    Minneapolis-based Target said Wednesday that Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke, a 20-year company veteran, will succeed Cornell.

    Cornell said Fiddelke’s appointment followed several years of board vetting of both internal and external candidates. Fiddelke has overhauled Target’s supply network and expanded the company’s stores and digital services while cutting costs. In May, the company announced that he would lead a new office focused on faster decision-making to help accelerate sales growth.

    Fiddelke is taking over at a time when Target’s sales are in a funk, its stores are messy and understocked, and it’s losing market share to rivals like Walmart.

    He said he’s stepping into the role with urgency with three priorities: reclaiming the company’s merchandising authority; improving the shopping experience by making sure shelves are consistently stocked and stores are clean; and investing in technology at the company’s stores and in its supply network.

    “When we’re leading with swagger in our merchandising authority, when we have swagger in our marketing, and we’re setting the trend for retail, those are some of the moments I think that Target has been at its highest in my 20 years,” he said.

    The change in leadership was announced Wednesday at the same time that Target reported another quarter of sluggish results. The company’s stock was down more than 8% in pre-market trading.

    Neil Saunders, a managing director at GlobalData Retail, said Wednesday that he had “mixed feelings” about the appointment.

    “While we think Fiddelke is talented and has a somewhat different take on things compared to current CEO Brian Cornell, this is an internal appointment that does not necessarily remedy the problems of entrenched groupthink and the inward-looking mindset that have plagued Target for years,” he said.

    Target reported a 21% drop in net income in the quarter ended Aug. 2. Sales were down slightly and the company reported a 1.9% dip in comparable sales — those from established physical stores and online channels. Target has seen flat or declining comparable sales in eight out of the past 10 quarters including the latest period.

    Target, which has about 1,980 U.S. stores, has been the focus of consumer boycotts since late January, when it joined rival Walmart and a number of other prominent American brands in scaling back corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

    Target’s sales also have languished as customers defect to Walmart and off-price department store chains like TJ Maxx in search of lower prices. But many analysts think Target is stumbling because consumers no longer consider it the place to go for affordable but stylish products, a niche that long ago earned the retailer the jokingly posh nickname “Tarzhay.”

    In fact, out of 35 merchandise categories that Target tracks, it gained or maintained market share in only 14 during the latest quarter, Fiddelke told reporters Tuesday.

    Meanwhile, Walmart gained market share among households with incomes over $100,000 as U.S. inflation caused consumer prices to rise rapidly. Lower-income shoppers have driven customer growth at Target, suggesting it may have lost appeal with wealthier customers, according to market research firm Consumer Edge.

    “It’s probably not the best sign, especially because higher-income consumers continue to hold up a little bit better” during times of economic uncertainty, said Consumer Edge Head of Insights Michael Gunther.

    In March, members of Target’s executive team told investors they planned to regain the chain’s reputation for selling stylish goods at budget prices by expanding Target’s lineup of store label brands and shortening the time it took to get new items from the idea stage to store shelves. The moves would help the company stay close to trends, executives said.

    “In a world where we operate today, our guests are looking for Tarzhay,” Cornell told investors. “Consumers coined that term decades ago to define how we elevate the everything everyday to something special, how we had unexpected fun in the shopping that would be otherwise routine.”

    Before joining Target in 2014, Cornell, 66, spent more than 30 years in leadership positions at retail and consumer-product companies, including as chief marketing officer at Safeway Inc. and CEO at Michaels, Walmart’s Sam’s Club and PepsiCo America Foods. In September 2022, the board extended his contract for three more years and eliminated a policy requiring its chief executives to retire at age 65.

    When Cornell got to Target, the company was facing a different set of challenges.

    Cornell replaced former CEO Gregg Steinhafel, who stepped down nearly five months after Target disclosed a huge data breach in which hackers stole millions of customers’ credit- and debit-card records. The theft badly damaged the chain’s reputation and profits.

    Cornell reenergized sales by having his team rev up Target’s store brands. It now has 40 private label brands in its portfolio. And even before the pandemic, Cornell spearheaded the company’s mission to transform its stores into delivery hubs to cut down on costs and speed up deliveries.

    Target’s 2017 acquisition of Shipt helped bolster the discounter’s same-day, store-based fulfillment services. Cornell also focused on making its stores better tailored to the local community.

    The coronavirus pandemic delivered outsized sales for Target as well as its peers as people stayed home and bought pajamas, furnishings and kitchen items. And it continued to see a surge in sales as shoppers emerged from their homes and went to stores. But the spending sprees eventually subsided.

    As inflation started to spike, Target reported a 52% drop in profits during its 2022 first quarter compared with a year earlier. Purchases of big TVs and appliances that Americans loaded up on during the pandemic faded, leaving the retailer with excess inventory that had to be sold off.

    In July 2023, as shoppers feeling pinched by inflation curtailed their spending, Target said its comparable sales declined for the first time in six years.

    Moreover, Target started losing its edge as an authority on style by focusing too much on home furnishings basics, and not enough trendy items, Fiddelke said.

    A customer backlash over the annual line of LGBTQ+ Pride merchandise Target stores carried that year further cut into sales.

    Although Walmart retreated from its diversity initiatives first, Target has been the focus of more concerted consumer boycotts. Organizers have said they viewed Target’s action as a greater betrayal because the company previously had held itself out as a champion of inclusion.

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  • Gov. DeSantis announces lawsuit against textbook companies for allegedly overcharging

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    Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a lawsuit against textbook publishers on Tuesday. DeSantis said the lawsuit was filed against McGraw-Hill LLC and Savvas Learning Company LLC. They were accused of systematically overcharging Florida school districts for instructional materials in violation of state law. DeSantis was joined by Attorney General James Uthmeier and Anastasios Kamoutsas, Commissioner of the Florida Department of Education. >> The story will be updated.

    Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a lawsuit against textbook publishers on Tuesday.

    DeSantis said the lawsuit was filed against McGraw-Hill LLC and Savvas Learning Company LLC.

    They were accused of systematically overcharging Florida school districts for instructional materials in violation of state law.

    DeSantis was joined by Attorney General James Uthmeier and Anastasios Kamoutsas, Commissioner of the Florida Department of Education.

    >> The story will be updated.

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  • Contributor: It’s time to save the whales again

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    Diving in a kelp forest in Monterey Bay recently, I watched a tubby 200-pound harbor seal follow a fellow diver, nibbling on his flippers. The diver, a graduate student, was using sponges to collect DNA samples from the ocean floor. Curious seals, he told me, can be a nuisance. When he bags his sponges and places them in his collection net, they sometimes bite into them, puncturing the bags and spoiling his samples.

    Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coming closer than 50 yards to seals and dolphins is considered harassment, but they’re free to harass you, which seems only fair given the centuries of deadly whaling and seal hunting that preceded a generational shift in how we view the world around us.

    The shift took hold in 1969, the year a massive oil spill coated the Santa Barbara coastline and the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, caught fire. Those two events helped spark the first Earth Day, in 1970, and the shutdown of America’s last whaling station in 1971. Protecting the environment from pollution and from loss of wilderness and wildlife quickly moved from a protest issue to a societal ethic as America’s keystone environmental legislation was passed at around the same time, written by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.

    Those laws include the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) , the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), which goes further than the Endangered Species Act (1973) in protecting all marine mammals, not just threatened ones, from harassment, killing or capture by U.S. citizens in U.S. waters and on the high seas.

    All these “green” laws and more are under attack by the Trump administration, its congressional minions and longtime corporate opponents of environmental protections, including the oil and gas industry. Republicans’ disingenuous argument for weakening the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act is that the legislation has worked so well in rebuilding wildlife populations that it’s time to loosen regulations for a better balance between nature and human enterprise. When it comes to marine mammal populations, that premise is wrong.

    On July 22, at a House Natural Resources subcommittee meeting, Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska introduced draft legislation that would scale back the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Among other things, his proposal would limit the ability of the federal government to take action against “incidental take,” the killing of whales, dolphins and seals by sonic blasts from oil exploration, ship and boat strikes or by drowning as accidental catch (also known as bycatch) in fishing gear. Begich complained that marine mammal protections interfere with “essential projects like energy development, port construction, and even fishery operations.”

    Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), the ranking member on the House Resources Committee, calls the legislation a “death sentence” for marine mammals.

    It’s true that the marine mammal law has been a success in many ways. Since its passage, no marine mammal has gone extinct and some species have recovered dramatically. The number of northern elephant seals migrating to California beaches to mate and molt grew from 10,000 in 1972 to about 125,000 today. There were an estimated 11,000 gray whales off the West Coast when the Marine Mammal Protection Act became law; by 2016, the population peaked at 27,000.

    But not all species have thrived. Historically there were about 20,000 North Atlantic right whales off the Eastern Seaboard. They got their name because they were the “right” whales to harpoon — their bodies floated for easy recovery after they were killed. In 1972 they were down to an estimated 350 individuals. After more than half a century of federal legal protection, the population is estimated at 370. They continue to suffer high mortality rates from ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and other causes, including noise pollution and greater difficulty finding prey in warming seas.

    Off Florida, a combination of boat strikes and algal pollution threaten some 8,000-10,000 manatees. The population’s recovery (from about 1,000 in 1979) has been significant enough to move them off the endangered species list in 2017, but since the beginning of this year alone, nearly 500 have died. Scientists would like to see them relisted, but at least they’re still covered by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

    A 2022 study in the Gulf of Mexico found that in areas affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill 12 years earlier, the dolphin population had declined 45% and that it might take 35 years to recover. In the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, loss of sea ice is threatening polar bears (they’re considered marine mammals), bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, ringed seals and harp seals.

    On the West Coast the number of gray whales — a Marine Mammal Act success story and now a cautionary tale — has crashed by more than half in the last decade to fewer than 13,000, according to a recent report by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, the nation’s lead ocean agency, is an endangered species in its own right in the Trump era). Declining prey, including tiny shrimp-like amphipods, in the whales’ summer feeding grounds in the Arctic probably caused by warming water are thought to be a major contributor to their starvation deaths and reduced birth rates.

    The whale’s diving numbers are just one signal that climate change alone makes maintaining the Marine Mammal Act urgent. Widespread marine heat waves linked to a warming ocean are contributing to the loss of kelp forests that sea otters and other marine mammals depend on. Algal blooms off California, and for the first time ever, Alaska, supercharged by warmer waters and nutrient pollution, are leading to the deaths of thousands of dolphins and sea lions.

    What the Trump administration and its antiregulation, anti-environmental-protection supporters fail to recognize is that the loss of marine mammals is an indicator for the declining health of our oceans and the natural world we depend on and are a part of. This time, saving the whales will be about saving ourselves.

    David Helvarg is executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group. His next book, “Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp,” is scheduled to be published in 2026.

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    David Helvarg

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  • Commentary: Can homegrown teens replace immigrant farm labor? In 1965, the U.S. tried

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    I sank into Randy Carter’s comfy couch, excited to see the Hollywood veteran’s magnum opus.

    Around the first floor of his Glendale home were framed photos and posters of films the 77-year-old had worked on during his career. “Apocalypse Now.” “The Godfather II.” “The Conversation.”

    What we were about to watch was nowhere near the caliber of those classics — and Carter didn’t care.

    Footage of a school bus driving through dusty farmland began to play. The title of the nine-minute sizzle reel Carter produced in 1991 soon flashed: “Boy Wonders.”

    The plot: White teenage boys in the 1960s gave up a summer of surfing to heed the federal government’s call. Their assignment: Pick crops in the California desert, replacing Mexican farmworkers.

    “That’s the stupidest, dumbest, most harebrained scheme I’ve heard in my life,” a farmer complained to a government official in one scene, a sentiment studio executives echoed as they rejected Carter’s project as too far-fetched.

    But it wasn’t: “Boy Wonders” was based on Carter’s life.

    Randy Carter’s collection of historical photos and other memorabilia of A-TEAM, a 1965 program that sought to recruit high school athletes to pick crops during the summer.

    (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

    In 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor launched A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower — with the goal of recruiting 20,000 high school athletes to harvest summer crops. The country was facing a dire farmworker shortage because the bracero program, which provided cheap legal labor from Mexico for decades, had ended the year before.

    Sports legends such as Sandy Koufax, Rafer Johnson and Jim Brown urged teen jocks to join A-TEAM because “Farm Work Builds Men!” as one ad stated. But only about 3,000 made it to the fields. One of them was a 17-year-old Carter.

    He and about 18 classmates from University of San Diego High spent six weeks picking cantaloupes in Blythe. The fine hairs on the fruits ripped through their gloves within hours. It was so hot that the bologna sandwiches the farmers fed their young workers for lunch toasted in the shade. They slept in rickety shacks, used communal bathrooms and showered in water that “was a very nice shade of brown,” Carter remembered with a laugh.

    They were the rare crew that stuck it out. Teens quit or went on strike across the country to protest abysmal work conditions. A-TEAM was such a disaster that the federal government never tried it again, and the program was considered so ludicrous that it rarely made it into history books.

    Then came MAGA.

    Now, legislators in some red-leaning states are thinking about making it easier for teenagers to work in agricultural jobs, in anticipation of Trump’s deportation deluge.

    “I used to joke that I’ve written a story for the ages, because we’ll never solve the problem of labor,” Carter said. “I could be dead, and my great-grandkids could easily shop it around.”

    I wrote about Carter’s experience in 2018 for an NPR article that went viral. It still bubbles up on social media any time a politician suggests that farm laborers are easily replaceable — like last month, when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “able-bodied adults on Medicaid” could pick crops, instead of immigrants.

    From journalists to teachers, people are reaching out to Carter anew to hear his picaresque stories from 50 years ago — like the time he and his friends made a wrong turn in Blythe and drove into the barrio, where “everyone looked at us like we were specimens” but was nice about it.

    “They are dying to see white kids tortured,” Carter cracked when I asked him why the saga fascinates the public. “They want to see these privileged teens work their asses off. Wouldn’t you?”

    But he doesn’t see the A-TEAM as one giant joke — it’s one of the defining moments of his life.

    A black and white photo of 11 men dressed in 1960s clothes.

    An old photo belonging to Randy Carter shows, seated at bottom right, his boss at the time, Francis Ford Coppola. “Everyone in this photo won an Academy Award except me,” Carter said.

    (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

    Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Carter moved to San Diego his sophomore year of high school. He always took summer jobs at the insistence of his working-class Irish mother. When the feds made their pitch in the spring of 1965, “there wasn’t exactly a rush to the sign-up table,” Carter recalled. What’s more, coaches at his school, known as University High, forbade their athletes to join. But he and his pals thought it would be the domestic version of the Peace Corps.

    “You’re a teenager and think, ‘What the hell are we going to do this summer?’” he said. “Then, ‘What the hell. If nothing else, we’ll go into town every night. We’ll meet some girls. We’ll get cowboys to buy us beer.’”

    Carter paused for dramatic effect. “No.”

    The University High crew was trained by a Mexican foreman “who in retrospect must have hated us because we were taking the jobs of his family.” They worked six days a week for minimum wage — $1.40 an hour at the time — and earned a nickel for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 cantaloupes.

    “Within two days, we thought, ‘This is insane,’” he said. “By the third day, we wanted to leave. But we stayed, because it became a thing of honor.”

    Nearly everyone returned to San Diego after the six-week stint, although a couple of guys went to Fresno and “became legendary in our group because they could stand to do some more. For the rest of us, we did it, and we vowed never to do anything like that as long as we live. Somehow, the beach seemed a little nicer that summer.”

    Carter’s wife, Janice, walked in. I asked how important A-TEAM was to her husband.

    She rolled her eyes the way only a wife of 53 years could.

    “He talks about it almost every week,” she said as Randy beamed. “It’s like an endless loop.”

    University High’s A-TEAM squad went on to successful careers as doctors, lawyers, businessmen. They regularly meet for reunions and talk about those tough days in Blythe, which Carter describes “as the intersection of hell and Earth.”

    As the issue of immigrant labor became more heated in American politics, the guys realized they had inadvertently absorbed an important lesson all those decades ago.

    Before A-TEAM, Carter said, his idea of how crops were picked was that “somehow it got done, and they [Mexican farmworkers] somehow disappeared.”

    “But when we now thought about Mexicans, we realized we only had to do it for six weeks,” he continued. “These guys do it every day, and they support a family. We became sympathetic, to a man. When people say bad things about Mexicans, we always say, ‘Don’t even go there, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

    Carter’s experience picking cantaloupes solidified his liberal leanings. So did the time he tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 1969 during Operation Intercept, a Nixon administration initiative that required the Border Patrol to search nearly every car.

    The stated purpose was to crack down on marijuana smuggling. Instead, Carter said, it created an hours-long wait and “businesses on both sides of the border were furious.”

    In college, Carter cheered the efforts of United Farm Workers and kept tabs on the fight to ban el cortito, the short-handled hoes that wore down the bodies of California farmworkers for generations until a state bill banned them in 1975.

    By then, he was working as a “junior, junior, junior” assistant to Francis Ford Coppola. Once he built enough of a resume in Hollywood — where he would become a longtime first assistant director on “Seinfeld,” among many credits — Carter wrote his “Boy Wonders” script, which he described as “‘Dead Poets Society’ meets ‘Cool Hand Luke.’”

    It was optioned twice. Henry Winkler’s production company was interested for a bit. So was Rhino Records’ film division, which explains why the soundtrack features boomer classics from the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Motown. But no one thought audiences would buy Carter’s straightforward premise.

    One executive suggested it would be more believable if the high schoolers ran over someone on prom night and became crop pickers to hide from the cops. Another suggested exploding toilets to funny up the action.

    “The mantra in Hollywood is, ‘Do something you know about,’” he said. “But that was the curse of it not getting made — because no one else knew about it!”

    A farm field with rows of water, with mountains in the background.

    Colorado River water irrigates a farm field in Blythe in 2021.

    (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

    Carter continues to share his experience, because “as a weak-kneed progressive, I always fancied we could change the situation … and that some sense of fair play could bubble up. I’m still walking up that road, but it seems more distant.”

    A few weeks ago, federal immigration agents raided the car wash he frequents.

    “You don’t even have to rewrite stories from years ago,” he said. “You could just reprint them, because nothing changes.”

    I asked what he thought about MAGA’s push to replace migrant farmworkers with American citizens.

    “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to go to Dodger Stadium, grab someone from the third row of the mezzanine section, and they can play the violin at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.’ OK, you can do that, but it’s not going to work,” he said. “I don’t get why they don’t try to solve the problem of fair conditions and inadequate pay — why is that never an option?”

    What about a reboot of A-TEAM?

    “It could work,” Carter replied. “I was with a group of guys that did it!”

    Then he considered how it might play out today.

    “If Taylor Swift said it was great, you’d get people. Would they last? If they had decent accommodations and pay, maybe. But it would never happen with Trump. His solution is, ‘You don’t pay decent wages, you get desperate people.’”

    He laughed again.

    “Here’s a crazy program from the 1960s that’s not off the map in 2025. We’re still debating the issue. Am I crazy, or is the world crazy?”

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    Gustavo Arellano

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  • Column: Kamala Harris won’t cure what ails the Democratic Party

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    William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term.

    Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.)

    Everyone else since Harrison’s era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don’t like losers.

    These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House.

    But history isn’t what she should worry about. It’s the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. It’s net favorability ( 30 points) is nearly triple the GOP’s (11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump’s unpopularity with Democrats should be having the opposite effect, 63% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the party.

    Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party — both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he’s in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, “Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.”

    It’s not all Harris’ fault. Indeed, the lion’s share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again.

    Harris’ dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn’t monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is visceral desire to win. That’s awkward for a politician best known for losing.

    Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew.

    Of course, most Democrats don’t see her race and gender as a problem, and in the abstract they shouldn’t. Indeed, every VP pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition.

    So Harris’ problem isn’t her race or sex; it’s her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn’t lose because of low Democratic turnout, she lost because she’s uncompelling to a changing electorate.

    Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. With the exception of reproductive rights, her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups, at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Biden’s insistence she not distance herself from him.

    Such clubby deference to the establishment combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies — learned from years of San Francisco and California politics — makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

    Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network’s decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrow-casts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate.

    “I don’t want to go back into the system. I think it’s broken,” Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the “naïve” and “feckless” lack of “leadership” and the “capitulation” of those who “consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.”

    That’s all catnip to Colbert’s ideologically committed audience. But that’s not the audience Democrats need to win. And that’s why, if Democrats nominate her again, she’ll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won’t be “Who was the 48th president of the United States?”

    @JonahDispatch

    Insights

    L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.

    Perspectives

    The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.

    Ideas expressed in the piece

    • The Democratic Party faces historic unpopularity, with a net favorability 30 points lower than Republicans, driven by widespread dissatisfaction among its own base over losses to Trump and perceived ineffectiveness in opposing his policies[1].
    • Kamala Harris’ political challenges stem from internal Democratic factions: progressives blame her for insufficient fight while centrists view her as emblematic of leftward shifts on cultural issues, both detractors united by a desire to win[1].
    • Harris’s VP selection was viewed as a diversity-driven symbolic gesture by Biden, limiting her ability to build broader appeal beyond traditional Democratic coalitions, as seen in her 2024 loss[1].
    • Her communication style is criticized as overly generic and focus-group-driven, lacking authenticity required to attract Trump voters, while her ties to Biden and reluctance to distance herself from his leadership are seen as electoral liabilities[1].
    • Historical precedents suggest candidates who lose once rarely regain viability in subsequent elections, with Harris’ potential 2028 bid viewed skeptically in light of this pattern[1].
    • Democratic messaging under Harris risks pandering to niche progressive audiences (e.g., her Colbert interview appeal) rather than expanding outreach to swing voters, exacerbating perceptions of elitism[1].

    Different views on the topic

    • Harris remains a strong potential front-runner in the 2026 California governor’s race, with analysts noting her viability despite a crowded field and lingering questions about Biden’s health influencing her decision-making[1].
    • The Democratic Party is actively reassessing its strategy post-2024, focusing on reconnecting with working-class voters and addressing core issues like affordability and homelessness, suggesting a shift toward pragmatic problem-solving[1].
    • Harris’ announcement to forgo the governor’s race has been interpreted as positioning for a 2028 presidential bid, reflecting her ability to navigate political calculations with long-term ambition[2].
    • Internal criticisms, such as Antonio Villaraigosa’s demand for transparency on Biden’s health, reflect broader party debates about leadership accountability rather than a rejection of Harris’ Senate or VP legacy[1].
    • Other rising Democratic voices, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gov. Tim Walz, embody alternatives to Harris’ messaging, indicating the party’s capacity to diversify leadership beyond established figures[2].

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    Jonah Goldberg

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  • Contributor: Let’s Los Angelize L.A.

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    Almost since the first suburbs were built in Los Angeles, there have been worries that adding density would “Manhattanize” L.A., rendering it so crowded with new vertical development as to be unrecognizable to longtime residents. In the 1980s, as battles over growth heated up, one local slow-growth group dubbed itself Not Yet New York.

    But Los Angeles has always been a city with a knack for reshaping itself by looking to its own architectural past. In particular, medium-density designs such as bungalow courts and dingbat apartments have welcomed waves of newcomers for more than a century while becoming architectural emblems of upward mobility and a particularly Southern Californian design sensibility — informal and optimistic.

    We have never needed a return to that kind of development more than now, in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires, even as public discussion has focused mostly on rebuilding exactly what was lost. With affordability pressures as intense as ever, now is the time not to Manhattanize but, once again, to Los Angelize L.A.

    As longtime advocates for design excellence and policies to boost housing production, we believe there is nothing more Angeleno than the reinvention of the so-called R1 neighborhood, the single-family zone that first emerged in L.A. with the Residential District Ordinance of 1908. R1 zoning shifted into overdrive in 1941 when tract houses emerged to replace the bean fields of Westchester, near what is now Los Angeles International Airport.

    It wasn’t until 2016, with the appearance of a new state law allowing accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, that the R1 neighborhood evolved in any meaningful way. Even the most ardent champions of ADUs — aka granny flats or casitas — couldn’t have foreseen how widely popular they’d become. Today, about one-fifth of new housing permits in California and a whopping one-third in the city of L.A. are ADUs.

    Still, the granny flat is no silver bullet. The housing affordability crisis in Los Angeles demands a more ambitious approach than adding new residential development one small unit at a time. State laws allowing as many as 10 apartments on a single-family lot have been on the books for several years now. But homeowners and developers have been slow to take advantage of them, and many California cities have dragged their feet in making them truly usable.

    The result has been a stalemate, with Los Angeles among the cities struggling to take the important step past the ADU to begin producing additional missing-middle housing in real volume, even as rents and home prices continue to climb. The city‘s Low-Rise LA design challenge was organized in 2020 to help break this logjam. Many of the winners incorporated design lessons clarified by the COVID-19 pandemic, when we learned that second, third and fourth units in R1 zones might offer not just rental income or an extra bedroom but the flexibility to quarantine or work from home while building stronger ties with extended family and neighbors.

    A new initiative — Small Lots, Big Impacts — organized by cityLAB-UCLA, the Los Angeles Housing Department and the office of Mayor Karen Bass builds on Low-Rise LA with a focus on developing small, often overlooked vacant lots, of which there are more than 25,000 across the city, according to cityLAB’s research. The goal is straightforward: to demonstrate a range of ways that Los Angeles can grow not by aping the urbanism of other cities but by producing more of itself.

    Rendering of Shared Step with a small gathering in the front yard


    Different views of the “Mini Towers Collective” and the “Shared Steps” proposals. Both favor shared outdoor space balanced with individual architectural identity.     (courtesy of cityLAB UCLA)

    Winners of this design competition, announced at the end of May, placed six or more housing units on a single site, sometimes dividing it into separate lots. One proposal created rowhouses, slightly cracked apart to identify individual homes and entrances as they cascade along an irregular site. A communal yard opens to the street in another project, with roof gardens between separated, two-story homes atop ADUs that can be rented or joined back to each of several main houses on the site. Other designs show that vertical architecture, in the form of handsome new residential towers from three to seven stories, can comfortably coexist with L.A.’s low-rise housing stock when the design is thoughtful enough.

    A key goal of the competition was to produce new models for homeownership. When land costs are subdivided and parcels built out with a collection of compact homes, including units that can produce rental income or be sold off as condos, a different approach to housing affordability comes into focus. Those who have been shut out of the housing market can begin to build wealth and contribute to neighborhood stability.

    The traditional R1 paradigm, in addition to limiting housing volume, suffers from a rigid, gate-keeping sort of logic: If you can’t afford to buy or rent an entire single-family home in an R-1 L.A. neighborhood, that part of town is inaccessible to you. Many of the winning designs, by contrast, create compounds flexible enough to accommodate a range of phases in a resident’s life. In one development, there may be units perfect for single occupants (a junior ADU), young families (a ground-level unit with a private yard), and empty-nesters (a home with a rooftop garden). As with the granny flat model, construction can proceed in phases, with units added over time as circumstances dictate.

    Having served on the Small Lots, Big Impacts jury, we see signs of hope in its rendering of L.A.’s future. The real proof lies in the initiative’s second phase, set for later this year, when the city’s Housing Department will issue an open call, based on the design competition, to developer-architect teams who will build housing on a dozen small, city-owned vacant parcels, with tens of thousands of privately owned infill lots ready to follow suit. If the winning schemes are built, Los Angeles will once again demonstrate the appeal and resiliency of its architectural DNA. Manhattan: Eat your heart out.

    Dana Cuff is a professor of architecture, director of cityLAB-UCLA and co-author of the 2016 California law that launched ADU construction. Christopher Hawthorne, former architecture critic for The Times, is senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture. He served under Mayor Eric Garcetti as the first chief design officer for Los Angeles.

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    Dana Cuff and Christopher Hawthorne

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  • ‘I’m not going anywhere’: For one Altadena fire survivor, the math makes sense to rebuild

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    Jennie Marie Mahalick Petrini has a big decision on her hands.

    For Petrini, the night of Jan. 7 brought total loss. The Eaton fire decimated her quaint home in the northwest corner of Altadena near Jane’s Village, reducing her sanctuary to a pile of rubble.

    “I have a spiritual connection to that house,” she said. “It was the only place I felt safe.”

    Now, like thousands of others, she’s crunching the numbers on whether to sell her burned lot and move on, or stay and rebuild.

    For many, it makes more sense to sell. Experts estimate a rebuild could take years, and navigating contractors, inspectors and governmental red tape, all while recovering from a traumatic incident, just isn’t worth the effort. It’s the reason why lots are hitting the market daily.

    But for Petrini — for reasons both emotional and financial, a melding of head and heart — staying is the only realistic option.

    Breaking down the math

    Petrini, 47, bought her Altadena home, where she lived with her partner and two daughters, for $705,000 in 2019. Built in 1925, it’s 1,352 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on a thin lot of just over 5,300 square feet.

    She was able to refinance her loan during the pandemic, lowering the interest rate to 2.75% on a $450,000 mortgage. The move brought her mortgage payments from $3,600 down to $3,000 — a relative steal, and only slightly more than the $2,800 rent she has been paying for a Tujunga apartment since the fire.

    The property was insured by Farmers, which sprang into action following the fire, sending the first of her payouts on Jan. 8.

    Petrini received $380,000 for the dwelling, an extra 20% for extended damage equating to roughly $70,000, and $200,000 for personal property. She used the $200,000 payout to cover living expenses such as a second car, medical bills and a bit of savings, and also tucked away $50,000 to use toward rebuilding.

    She estimates that even the thriftiest rebuild will cost around $700,000, and right now, she can cover around $500,000: the $380,000 and $70,000 insurance payouts, plus $50,000 of the personal property payout she stashed for a rebuild.

    To cover the extra $200,000, she received a Small Business Administration loan up to $500,000 with an interest rate of 2.65%, which can be used for property renovations. Once she starts pulling from that loan, she estimates she’ll pay around $1,000 per month, which, combined with her $3,000 mortgage, totals roughly $4,000.

    It’s a hefty number, but still far cheaper than selling and starting over.

    “I could sell the lot for $500,000, take my insurance payout and buy something new, but my house was valued at $1.2 million,” she said. “So even if I put $500,000 down on a new house, to get something similar, I’d have a $700,000 mortgage with a much higher interest rate.”

    As it stands, if she cashed out, she’d be renting for the foreseeable future in the midst of a housing crisis where rents rise and some landlords take advantage of tenants, especially in times of crisis. Price gouging skyrocketed as thousands flooded the rental market in January, leading to bidding wars for subaverage homes. To secure her Tujunga rental, Petrini, through her insurance, had to pay 18 months of rent up front — a total of more than $50,000.

    “It sounds so lucrative: sell the land, pay off my mortgage and be debt-free. But then my children wouldn’t have a home,” she said.

    Bigger than money

    Jennie Marie Mahalick Petrini, from left, and her daughters, Marli Petrini, 19, and Camille Petrini, 12, look over the lot where their home stood before the Altadena fire. It was the first time the daughters had looked through the lot.

    (Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)

    While the math makes sense, Petrini has bigger reasons for staying: she’s emotionally tied to the lot, the community and the people within it.

    Altadena is a safe haven for her. She bought her home after escaping a domestic violence situation in 2017. The seller had higher offers, but ended up selling to Petrini after she wrote a letter explaining her circumstances.

    It’s also the place where she got sober after abusing stimulants to stay awake and keep things running as a single mom.

    “When I was getting sober, I’d go for walks five times a day through the neighborhood,” she said. The trees, the animals, the flowers, the variety of houses. It was — is — a special place.”

    Petrini once worked as the executive director of operations at Occidental College, but took a break in 2023 to focus on her children and her health. She and a daughter both have Type 1 diabetes.

    Petrini hasn’t been employed since, and her parents helped her pay the mortgage before the fire. She acknowledges that she’s operating from a place of privilege, but said accepting help is crucial when recovering from something.

    “Even being unemployed, I just knew I’d be okay here,” she said. “I would trade potting soil to a man who owned a vegan restaurant in exchange for food. You always get what you need here.”

    Getting crafty

    For Petrini, speed is the name of the game. Experts estimate rebuilding could take somewhere between three and five years or even longer, but she’s hoping to break ground in August and finish by next summer.

    In addition to nonprofits, she’s also reaching out to appliances manufacturers and construction companies. The goal is to stitch together a house with whatever’s cheap — or even better, free. She recently received 2,500 square feet of siding from Modern Mill.

    “I’m not looking for a custom-built mansion, but I also don’t want an IKEA showroom box house,” she said. “My house was 100 years old, and I want to rebuild something with character.”

    To help with costs, she’s also hoping to use Senate Bill 9 to split her lot in half. She’d then sell the other half of the property to her contractor, a friend, for a friendly price of $250,000.

    Jennie Marie Mahalick Petrini is diving into the complicated process of staying in Altadena and rebuilding her property.

    Jennie Marie Mahalick Petrini is diving into the complicated process of staying in Altadena and rebuilding her property.

    (Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)

    To speed up the process, she’s opting for a “like-for-like” rebuild — structures that mirror whatever they’re replacing. For such projects, L.A. County is expediting permitting timelines to speed up fire recovery.

    So Petrini’s new house will be the exact same size as the old one: 1,352 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. She submitted plans in early June and expects to get approval by the end of the month.

    For the design, she turned to Altadena Collective, an organization collaborating with the Foothill Catalog Foundation that’s helping fire victims in Jane’s Village rebuild the English Cottage-style homes for which the neighborhood is known. For customized architectural plans, project management and structural engineering, Petrini paid them $33,000 — roughly half of what she would’ve paid someone else, she said.

    “I’m going with whatever’s quickest and most efficient. If we run out of money, who needs drywall,” she said. “I want my house to be the first one rebuilt.”

    It doesn’t have to be perfect. Petrini and her daughters have been compiling vision boards of their dream kitchen and bathrooms, but she knows sacrifices will be made.

    “It’s gonna be a scavenger hunt to get this done. We’re gonna use any material we can find,” she said. “But it’ll have a story. Just like Altadena.”

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    Jack Flemming

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  • ‘Do not despair,’ Harris tells supporters as she concedes the election

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    WASHINGTON —  Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday acknowledged her defeat to President-elect Donald Trump in a speech marked by emotion as well as a resolve to never give up the fight for a more just union.

    “My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve,” Harris told supporters at Howard University, her alma mater.

    Harris’ 12-minute speech, behind bulletproof glass in front of the brick, flag-lined Frederick Douglas Memorial Hall, took place less than 24 hours on the site where her supporters had gathered to celebrate what they had hoped would be the election of the first female president.

    On Tuesday night, revelers were dancing to 1990s hip-hop but grew somber as states began falling for Trump. On Wednesday, supporters and staffers embraced, wiped away tears and questioned whether this nation would ever elect a woman, notably a Black woman, president.

    “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But … hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

    Harris, typically stoic from her days as a prosecutor, displayed flashes of disappointment and sadness after telling the crowd that she was proud of the whirlwind campaign they ran over 107 days after President Biden announced he would not seek reelection.

    “Now, I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it,” she said, with a wry chuckle. “But we must accept the results of this election.”

    The crowd booed when she said that she had spoken with Trump earlier in the day to congratulate him. But as she continued speaking, they soon returned to cheering as she described the peaceful transition of power, which she pledged to assist him with, as a bedrock of democracy.

    “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” Harris said, her voice quivering. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time, in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States.”

    She did not mention that, before the election, Trump and other leading Republicans had hedged on whether they would accept the results, saying they would have to see if the balloting was conducted fairly and properly.

    However, these statements were clearly an allusion to the former president’s refusal to accept the 2020 election outcome and the ensuing insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress worked to certify the electoral college vote.

    Harris said that while she accepted the election results, she refused to concede the fight for freedom, opportunity and fairness that girded her campaign.

    “That is a fight I will never give up,” she said.

    She implored young people not to give up on fighting for their ideals because of her loss.

    “Do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands,” Harris said. “This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.”

    She concluded with one of her favorite adages — that the stars can only be seen when the night sky is dark. “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time,” she said. “For the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America. If it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion … stars, the light, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.”

    After Harris concluded speaking and walked back into Memorial Hall, the music stopped playing as crews began dismantling the stage.

    Several current members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically Black sorority Harris joined at Howard, gathered in a circle. The young women, wearing dresses in various shades of pink, one of the sorority’s colors, softly sang their national hymn.

    “Through the years as we struggle // With main and with might // To capture a vision fair // There is one thing that spurs us // To victory’s height // With a fellowship sincere and rare // O, Alpha Kappa Alpha // Dear Alpha Kappa Alpha”

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    Seema Mehta

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  • Live fact-checks from Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally

    Live fact-checks from Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally

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    We’re live fact-checking former President Donald Trump’s 5 p.m. ET rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Follow along here.

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  • Clippers subjected Kawhi Leonard to ‘unsafe and illegal treatment,’ ex-trainer says

    Clippers subjected Kawhi Leonard to ‘unsafe and illegal treatment,’ ex-trainer says

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    Kawhi Leonard’s tenure with the Clippers has been marred by numerous injuries, and his status for this season remains in doubt.

    As the organization plays its opening season in the newly completed Intuit Dome, a new complication has arisen: A lawsuit filed Thursday by a former trainer alleges unsafe treatment of the franchise’s star player.

    Randy Shelton was the strength and conditioning coach at San Diego State and worked closely with Leonard during the player’s time with the Aztecs. The lawsuit says the Clippers began their pursuit of Leonard — using Shelton as an intermediary — in 2017, two years before Leonard joined the team.

    Following a devastating ankle injury for Leonard during the Western Conference finals in 2016, Clippers assistant general manager Mark Hughes emphasized discretion as he sought out the San Antonio Spurs star’s private health information through Shelton, the lawsuit states.

    Hughes and Shelton spoke around 15 times by phone and seven times in person, Shelton says. The offer: a job as the Clippers’ strength and conditioning coach if the team could persuade Leonard to join.

    The team got its wish, with Leonard and Shelton joining in the 2019 offseason. From there, Shelton was relegated to the sidelines as a new assistant coach, Todd Wright, took over his responsibilities, the lawsuit says.

    Shelton’s remaining job was to take care of Leonard, a task that the suit claims deliberately was made more difficult as the team excluded Shelton from meetings and “withheld necessary medical treatment and information that impacted Leonard’s training and health.”

    Leonard’s health woes continued. He suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament in the 2021 playoffs, and Shelton set a recovery target of two years — a timetable the Clippers were unwilling to accept, he says.

    Upon Leonard’s return for the 2022-23 season, the team promised a minutes restriction and that the forward would not play back-to-back games but failed to uphold that promise, Shelton claims. After the first two games, Leonard complained of knee swelling and inflammation, and an MRI revealed cartilage damage.

    The lawsuit says Leonard was “given biologics to band-aid the problem” instead of allowing the player the necessary time to heal. Less than a month later, in November 2022, Leonard returned to play and suffered two ruptured ligaments in his ankle within a week.

    Again, Shelton claims, the team demanded productivity, circumventing Shelton’s advice and withholding information from him. Shelton says the team began to force him out shortly thereafter.

    As Leonard battled through these injuries and the team’s record suffered, his minutes per game increased from 32 in December 2022 to 35 in January and 38 in February.

    This heavier load, which included one set of back-to-back games in March and April 2023, helped lead the team to a playoff berth. In the first round against Phoenix, Leonard tore his meniscus and suffered cartilage damage on his repaired ACL, requiring another surgery.

    After the injury, Shelton complained to the team. He said, according to the lawsuit, that “the mishandling of Kawhi Leonard’s injury and return-to-play protocol has been mind-blowing,” and that “the disregard for his recovery process is unacceptable.”

    The Clippers conducted an internal investigation, which concluded in June 2023 and found no wrongdoing. In July, President Lawrence Frank fired Shelton without cause, according to Shelton.

    Last season, Leonard again suffered a breakdown that necessitated another surgery. Shelton blames the team for pushing Leonard too hard.

    “The Clippers place revenue and winning above all else, even the health and safety of their ‘franchise’ player in Leonard,” the lawsuit says.

    Leonard missed the Olympics and is out to start the season. His return date is unclear.

    The Clippers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    In a statement provided to Chris Haynes, the NBA reporter who first reported on the lawsuit, the Clippers said: “Mr. Shelton’s claims were investigated and found to be without merit. We honored Mr. Shelton’s employment contract and paid him in full. This lawsuit is a belated attempt to shake down the Clippers based on accusations that Mr. Shelton should know are false.”

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    Terry Castleman

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  • Kaiser mental health professionals in Southern California go on strike

    Kaiser mental health professionals in Southern California go on strike

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    Psychologists, therapists and other mental health professionals who work for Kaiser Permanente across Southern California went on strike Monday morning, protesting that the healthcare organization had failed to address enduring problems that hamper its mental health care.

    The National Union of Healthcare Workers said that nearly 2,400 mental health workers had launched their job action after Kaiser management had turned down proposals that the union said would stanch employee turnover and improve care. The NUHW contract for the workers expired Sept. 30.

    “Unless we strike, our coworkers are going to keep leaving,” San Diego psychologist Josh Garcia said in a union statement before the walkout, “and our patients are going to keep struggling in an underfunded, understaffed system that doesn’t meet their needs.”

    Ahead of the strike, Kaiser said it had made strong proposals to improve wages, benefits and preparation time for therapists. It faulted the union for “slow walking the negotiation process,” saying that any strike was “because NUHW leadership chose this path — rather than a path to an agreement.”

    The strike comes one year after Kaiser agreed to a $200-million settlement with California regulators who found that patients were subjected to excessive wait times for therapy appointments. Kaiser agreed to pay a $50-million penalty and spend $150 million over five years to improve its mental health care.

    Kaiser said that even before the state settlement, it had started ramping up mental health care spending. The organization said it had spent more than $1 billion to expand its mental health care in recent years and increased its Southern California mental health workforce by more than 30%.

    As the healthcare organization was seeing “throughout California, throughout the nation, this mental health crisis, we knew that we needed to act quickly,” said Rhonda Chabran, its vice president of behavioral health and wellness for Southern California and Hawaii.

    Union leaders said problems have persisted. In a recent letter to the state, NUHW alleged Kaiser was continuing to violate California law, which sets timelines for providing mental health care, and that “these failures are widespread.” NUHW said in its surveys of the Kaiser mental health workers in Southern California, 62% of respondents said their departments lacked enough staff to provide timely and appropriate care.

    The union said it was pushing for higher wages, better benefits and more guaranteed time to handle duties outside of patient appointments. NUHW members lamented that unlike in Northern California, where the union said that Kaiser therapists are now guaranteed seven hours a week to handle tasks such as preparing treatment plans, Southern California therapists with Kaiser may only get two hours a week to do so.

    “There’s a lot of things that we need to do in preparing for a visit: Developing appropriate treatment plans. Writing letters for our clients … They do not give us the time to do that,” said Lisa Delgadillo, a Kaiser psychiatric social worker in Fontana. “People think therapy is just talking to people, but it’s more than that.”

    Kassaundra Gutierrez-Thompson, a psychiatric counselor, said she sees a dozen or more patients a day in a Kaiser virtual therapy program meant for “mild to moderate” patients. The sessions each last a half hour, she said, but scheduling and other tasks cut into that time.

    Gutierrez-Thompson likened it to being a factory worker. “It’s really hard to stay a good therapist in this system,” she said. “We have to make choices like, ‘Do I make eye contact, or do I finish this note?’”

    NUHW has also proposed a series of raises totaling more than 30% over four years. Union leaders said the wage hikes were needed to bring their compensation in line with other health professionals at Kaiser.

    Kaiser said that its Southern California therapists already have generous benefits and compensation, with wages that are above market rates, and that it had offered raises at the bargaining table totaling more than 18%. It also said it had offered more time for duties outside of face-to-face appointments, but that the union proposal could pull therapists away from seeing patients for a significant chunk of their working week.

    The healthcare system said it had plans in place to minimize possible disruptions from the walkout, which has no defined length. Because Kaiser relies not only on employees but “an external network of contracted providers” for mental health care, it estimated that 60% of its patients receiving mental health and addiction services are currently getting care from providers who will not be participating in the NUHW strike.

    If their regular provider is on strike, Kaiser said, “patients will have the opportunity to be seen by another professional in our extensive network of highly qualified, licensed therapists.”

    Union leaders urged the state to keep tabs on how Kaiser was providing care during the strike, pointing out that the state Department of Managed Health Care found it had canceled appointments for tens of thousands of patients during a walkout by Northern California therapists two years ago.

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    Emily Alpert Reyes

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  • L.A. Catholic church covered up molesting priests for decades. The price: $1.5 billion and so much pain

    L.A. Catholic church covered up molesting priests for decades. The price: $1.5 billion and so much pain

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    Clergy sex abuse scandals have rocked Catholic churches across the world, but few places have seen the financial toll of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

    With a record $880-million settlement with victims announced this week, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has now paid out more than $1.5 billion.

    The bill reflects its rank as the largest archdiocese in the nation, with more than 4 million members, and a California law that gave accusers more time to file suit.

    But attorneys and others who have been involved in more than two decades of litigation say it also is an indication of the failures of church leaders to identify molesting priests and prevent them from committing more crimes.

    Some of those priests, after undergoing treatment at residential centers, were shuffled to new parishes, frequently in immigrant neighborhoods where the abuse would continue.

    With the latest settlements, the number of people alleging abuse now stands at nearly 2,500.

    But the true number could be much higher, lawyers say.

    One reason for the size of L.A.’s payout is that the California Legislature in 2019 opted to give adults more time to file lawsuits over childhood sexual abuse, which prompted more survivors to come forward. This extended the amount of time available for litigation compared with other states, which were also roiled by abuse scandals.

    “The L.A. archdiocese is not an anomaly,” attorney Mike Reck said. “It’s larger and been subject to more litigation and so we have found out a lot more about how it operated. I am not sure the archdiocese is worse than other places. I think we just don’t know as much about other dioceses.”

    The abuse — and efforts to cover it up — dates back decades.

    It reaches into the highest levels of the church. Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, the second-in-command to two cardinals and a well-known leader who was the inspiration for Robert De Niro‘s character in the movie “True Confessions,” was accused after his death of abuse.

    Troves of church documents that served as a road map for the cover-up placed extreme scrutiny on Cardinal Roger Mahony, whose handling of clergy abuse has been roundly criticized.

    Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles for more than two decades, was a youthful and high-profile leader who used his position atop the diocese in the 1980s and 1990s to champion social and economic justice, among other causes large and small. But his legacy was obliterated after it was revealed that he supervised the reassignment of numerous priests who admitted to or were accused of molesting young children.

    With the behavior left unchecked, the number of victims within the largest archdiocese in the United States grew exponentially.

    “The real fault lies at the feet of Roger Mahony,” said attorney John Manly, who for decades has represented victims of sexual abuse. “He could have come here in 1986 and made the change. Instead, he chose to conceal it from the public, the media and, more importantly, law enforcement.”

    The culture of secrecy and the practice of shifting accused priests between parishes rather than alerting law enforcement — a feature of the scandal that played out in dioceses across the country — was also a persistent issue in Los Angeles. Delayed enforcement against the accused priests allowed them to move between locations and abuse other children, victims’ advocates say.

    The list of abusers within the Archdiocese in Los Angeles includes more than 500 names, according to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

    “There has been a continuous, uninterrupted flow of hundreds of perpetrators in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” said Patrick Wall, an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and a former Benedictine monk.

    Mahony could not immediately be reached for comment.

    Mahony wrote in a letter in 2013 that he had made “mistakes” in handling sexual abuse, but added that he followed the procedures that were in place at dioceses across the country: to remove priests from active ministry if there was reasonable suspicion that abuse had occurred and refer them to a residential treatment center.

    He did not know at the time, he wrote, that “following these procedures was not effective, and that perpetrators were incapable of being treated in such a way that they could safely pursue priestly ministry.”

    “Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” he wrote.

    Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez in 2013 temporarily relieved Mahony of all public duties over his mishandling of the sex abuse scandal, a move that was unprecedented at the time in the American Catholic Church.

    Mahony, now in his late 80s, lived for several years on the campus of a parish in the San Fernando Valley. After his retirement, he vowed to devote more time to immigration reform, a lifelong passion for him that stems from his experiences with migrant workers in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley during his years in the Fresno and Stockton diocese.

    The church’s own records, shielded by an army of lawyers for decades, revealed an orchestrated conspiracy to prevent authorities from learning of criminal behavior.

    In memos written in 1986 and 1987, Msgr. Thomas Curry, then the archdiocese’s advisor on sex abuse cases, proposed ways to prevent police from investigating priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused children. Curry suggested to Mahony that the diocese prevent the priests from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid a criminal investigation.

    Msgr. Peter Garcia admitted to church officials to preying on undocumented children in predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes. After he was discharged from a treatment center, Mahony told him to stay away from California to avoid legal repercussions, according to internal church files.

    “I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors,” the archbishop wrote to the treatment center’s director in July 1986.

    Garcia left the priesthood in 1989 and was never prosecuted. He died in 2009.

    Another priest, Father Michael Baker — one of the church’s most prolific abusers — had been accused of molesting at least 40 boys during his decades in the priesthood. In 2007, Baker pleaded guilty in criminal court to abusing two boys. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released in 2011 based on the time he’d served in county jail and good behavior.

    Two brothers alleged that Baker began abusing them at St. Hilary Catholic Church in Pico Rivera in 1984 when they were 5 and 7, according to court records. The boys’ family moved to Mexico in 1986, but Baker, over the next 13 years, flew them to Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Arizona, where the abuse allegedly continued until 1999, at least once in the priest’s rectory in Los Angeles County, court records show.

    Records show that Mahony knew about Baker’s sexual abuse of boys decades before it came to light publicly.

    In 1986, Baker first broached the topic in a note to the cardinal after Mahony appealed for priests to report inappropriate behavior, according to internal church records.

    “During the priest retreat … you provided us with an invitation to talk to you about the shadow that some of us might have,” Baker wrote. “I would like to take you up on the invitation.”

    At a spiritual retreat in December 1986, Baker made a full confession and was transferred to a treatment facility in New Mexico. The police were not notified, and no effort was made to contact the children who had been abused, according to church records.

    Baker returned to ministry in the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1987, church records show. At the time, Mahony informed Baker that he was not permitted to be left alone with a child, but records show that Baker violated this directive on at least three occasions, all of which were observed by archdiocesan personnel.

    Baker remained in the ministry until 2000, when he was defrocked, church records show. In 2002, as the clergy abuse scandal came to light, The Times revealed that the archdiocese secretly paid $1.3 million to two of Baker’s victims two years before.

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    Richard Winton, Hannah Fry

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  • Maybe it’s time to change up high school to improve student attendance 

    Maybe it’s time to change up high school to improve student attendance 

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    Key points:

    In 2015, as head of a small N-12 school in upstate New York, I learned that Gen Z was predicted to be the first generation of U.S. students who wouldn’t see college as the automatic next step after high school. This insight sparked a year-long project to redesign our high school model. Yet, when I presented my plan for more personalized, applied learning pathways to my faculty, they balked at departing from the ‘tried and true.’

    Fast forward to today, and we’re facing a crisis far more urgent than I could have imagined. Students aren’t just questioning the value of college–they’re questioning the value of showing up to high school at all.

    Students are casting a silent vote against the current high school model

    Recent data from YouthTruth paints a stark picture: During the 2022-23 school year, over a quarter of students were chronically absent across 41 states, with high schools reporting an average 31 percent chronic absence rate. This isn’t just a number–it’s a silent referendum. Our students are voting with their feet, and voting “no” to the current high school experience.

    The consequences of student disengagement and chronic absenteeism are far-reaching:

    • Lower academic performance and decreased likelihood of graduation
    • Reduced future earning potential
    • Increased risk of involvement in the criminal justice system

    Even more concerning is what YouthTruth calls the “support gap.” While 48 percent of students in 2022-23 cited depression, stress, or anxiety as obstacles to learning (up from 39 percent in spring 2020), only 41 percent reported having an adult at school they could talk to about these issues (down from 46 percent pre-pandemic).

    This gap persists despite significant attention to youth mental health issues. It’s a stark reminder that awareness alone is not enough–we need action.

    These big picture changes will transform our high schools.

    When I couldn’t get my colleagues on board with reinventing high school in 2015, it was because the change felt too big and too radical. Today’s data emphasizes that we no longer have the luxury of incremental change. Here are the key areas where we need to focus our long-term efforts:

    1. Student-led redesign: Establish task forces that give students real power to audit current school practices and propose changes.
    2. Data-driven engagement: Implement systems to track not just attendance, but also participation and enthusiasm in classes, using this data to inform school policies and practices.
    3. Family-school partnerships: Create dedicated teams to build and maintain strong, ongoing relationships between schools and families through two-way school-home communication.
    4. Flexible learning models: Redesign school schedules to allow for later start times, block scheduling, or other flexible arrangements that better accommodate student needs and learning styles.
    5. Integrated real-world learning: Develop comprehensive programs that partner with local businesses and organizations to offer internships, apprenticeships, and project-based learning opportunities.
    6. Restorative justice culture: Implement school-wide restorative practices to replace punitive discipline systems, fostering a more supportive and equitable school community.

    As Jonah Schenker, superintendent of Ulster BOCES in New York, wisely notes, “We have a responsibility–because of the nature of BOCES and the flexibility we have–to create a bit of an incubator for some of the areas where we know education needs to change so that we can show by example, point them to other systems making those changes, or create offerings that bring that change in.”

    These small steps will kick-start engagement right away.

    While systemic change is crucial, we can’t wait for perfect conditions to start improving student engagement. Here are five simple yet impactful actions schools can implement right away to begin moving the needle in positive ways:

    1. Start every day with a check-in: Begin each school day with a brief, structured check-in session. This could be during homeroom or first period. Use this time for students to share how they’re feeling, what they’re looking forward to, or any concerns they have. This simple practice can significantly boost students’ sense of belonging and connection to the school community.
    2. Implement “Feedback Fridays”: Set aside time every Friday for students to provide feedback on their learning experiences that week. This could be through a quick survey, a class discussion, or written reflections. Use this feedback to make real-time adjustments to teaching methods and school policies. This shows students that their voices matter and can lead to tangible changes.
    3. Create a “passion project” hour: Dedicate one hour per week where students can work on self-directed projects related to their personal interests or career aspirations. This gives students autonomy over their learning and helps them see the relevance of school to their lives and futures.
    4. Establish a peer mentoring program: Pair older students with younger ones for weekly mentoring sessions. This can help build community across grade levels, provide leadership opportunities for older students, and give younger students additional support and guidance.
    5. Invite local professionals for lunch-and-learn sessions: Once a month, invite professionals from various fields to have lunch with students and share about their careers. This can be done virtually if necessary. These sessions can help students see the connection between their education and future career possibilities and may spark new interests.

    These steps don’t require a complete overhaul of the school system, but they can start to shift the culture towards one of greater engagement, relevance, and student voice. They lay the groundwork for more comprehensive changes and send a clear message to students that their school is committed to evolving to meet their needs. Importantly, schools should regularly share the progress and outcomes of these initiatives with families, fostering a sense of partnership and shared commitment to student success.

    Remember, the goal is progress, not perfection. Every step towards greater student engagement is a step in the right direction.

    The writing is on the wall–or rather, in the empty seats of our classrooms. Our students are telling us through their absences that the current system isn’t working. It’s time we listen and act. By engaging students, families, and communities in reimagining the high school experience, we can create schools that students not only attend but actively choose to be part of. The future of our education system–and the success of an entire generation–depends on our willingness to make this change.

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    Dr. Kara Stern, SchoolStatus

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  • Ryan Garcia off the hook after reimbursing Beverly Hills hotel $15,000 for vandalism damage

    Ryan Garcia off the hook after reimbursing Beverly Hills hotel $15,000 for vandalism damage

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    Mercurial boxer Ryan Garcia caught a break Tuesday when a judge dismissed a misdemeanor vandalism charge against him over the objections of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

    Judge James P. Cooper III granted a civil compromise at the L.A. Airport Courthouse, noting that Garcia had paid restitution of approximately $15,000 to the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria hotel for damage stemming from an incident June 8 in which he allegedly damaged property in his room and the hallway.

    Garcia had no criminal record and was hospitalized after his arrest, but L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón said in a news release after the arrest that the popular lightweight boxer would be held accountable.

    “While we are grateful no injuries were reported in this incident, reckless behavior that damages property shows a blatant and unacceptable disregard for the safety and peace of our community,” Gascón said.

    Garcia, 26, responded with a post on social media: “No way I’m going to jail.”

    Turns out he was correct because, as the judge noted in open court, Garcia’s payment of full restitution prompted the Waldorf Astoria to decline to pursue the matter further.

    Cooper cautioned Garcia from the bench before dismissing the case, saying, “I have seen athletes lose their money, very quickly, because people always want to be around you to party when you have the money. But when that money’s gone, your friends are no longer around and they no longer have their hands out because your money’s gone. And you can look at Mike Tyson. It happened to Muhammad Ali. It happens to a lot of people in your field.”

    The incident marked the low point in a series of events that began with a stunning achievement, an upset over Devin Haney in April in which Garcia knocked down the World Boxing Council super lightweight titleholder three times en route to a majority decision. Haney retained his title because Garcia was 3.2 pounds overweight at the time of the fight.

    Eleven days later, the Voluntary Anti-Doping Assn. determined that Garcia had tested positive for Ostarine, a performance-enhancing drug that can stimulate muscle growth, the day before and the day of the fight. Garcia responded with mixed signals, first saying through his lawyers that he was the victim of contaminated supplements, then unleashing a rant on social media that seemed close to a confession.

    “Let’s go we positive. Positive vibes bruh. Yess so happy,” Garcia wrote in posts that have since been deleted. “I F***ING LOVE STEROIDS. I don’t care I’ll never make money again with boxing. Your loss not mine for setting me up lol joke’s on y’all. I will swallow all steroids.”

    The New York State Athletic Commission suspended Garcia for one year, fined him $1.2 million and ordered him to forfeit his $1-million purse. Garcia, who grew up in Victorville, is eligible to fight again in New York in April if he passes a drug test.

    Garcia said several times on social media before news of the suspension that he was retiring from boxing and later posted that he wanted to talk to UFC president Dana White about joining that organization.

    “I really hope boxing good without me,” Garcia posted. “I fought everyone and was willing to. They have turned there [sic] back on me. I’m innocent. I stand by that I don’t care what everyone says. Gun yo my head I say I didn’t take PED’s.”

    Now, however, Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) says he’s training for a potential rematch with Haney (31-0, 15KOs).

    “We training every day. We got to be ready so when Devin Haney wants that fade again. We already beat his a— one time. If we do it twice, no debating anymore,” Garcia told Cool Kicks.

    Haney’s father, Bill, responded by saying Garcia would need to pass a drug test before a rematch can be discussed. The two camps can jaw about it for a while because Garcia’s suspension doesn’t end until April 20.

    Garcia’s erratic behavior has continued since the hotel incident. The World Boxing Council expelled him in July after he used racial slurs against Black people and disparaged Muslim and Jewish people on social media. He also attacked the inclusion of LGBTQ+ music and pop culture performers during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics with a string of profane social media posts.

    In court, however, the judge focused on Garcia fulfilling his restitution to the hotel in dismissing the vandalism charge.

    “The court issues a lot of restitution orders and I will say that in 95% of them the victim never receives satisfaction,” Cooper said from the bench. “And I think in this situation, where the defendant has made full restitution, in a weird sort of way he’s sort of shown a lot of remorse for what happened and I think he gets the benefit of his bargain.”

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    Steve Henson

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  • Maryland researcher’s insight into regenerating tissue leads to TIME innovator list – WTOP News

    Maryland researcher’s insight into regenerating tissue leads to TIME innovator list – WTOP News

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    Research into the immune system’s ability to encourage severely injured tissue to regenerate has landed a Maryland researcher on a TIME list of 2024 innovators.

    NIH researcher Kaitlyn Sadtler in her Bethesda, Md. lab.(WTOP/Neal Augenstein)

    Research into harnessing the ability of the body’s immune system to encourage severely injured tissue to regenerate has landed a Maryland researcher on a TIME magazine list of 2024 innovators.

    The TIME100 Next list recognizes today’s most influential and innovative leaders.

    During a WTOP visit to the laboratory she leads at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, researcher Kaitlyn Sadtler, explained its goal is to understand the immune system’s role in wound healing and how it could be leveraged by medical technology to regenerate tissue.

    “Our laboratory works on traumatic injury and the intersection of trying to build those broken tissues back,” said Sadtler, who grew up in Frederick — 40 miles from the National Institutes of Health campus where she works in Bethesda.

    Researchers are still trying to fully understand and predict how the immune system will react. Currently, introducing medical devices, including pacemakers, knee replacements as well as chin and breast implants can elicit hostile immune responses.

    However, in other cases immune responses can stimulate healing.

    Sadtler said her lab’s research is “not just preventing the infection that might occur, but actually building those tissues.”

    As an example, she said after a car crash, understanding the immune system could help regenerate skeletal muscles. Her research includes “learning the different materials that surgeons use to help reconstruct and regrow those tissues and organ, and how we can make better materials, to help us regenerate.”

    Sadtler said the current standard of care for people with soft tissue injuries, including skin and muscle injuries, is to use grafts and transfers. That treatment requires surgeons to cause another injury, while trying to treat the larger one.

    “The general goal with biomaterials and bioengineering is to be able to avoid stuff like that, and put in materials that will help use our immune cells to grow the tissue back, without having to take it from somewhere else on your body,” she said.

    The lab’s research includes finding ways to complete a repair, while steering the immune system toward stimulating reparative processes.

    As an example, Sadtler displayed a small container of polyethylene, a plastic used to make orthopedic implants that can trigger long-term inflammation and scarring as small pieces of it are shed into surrounding tissues. Often those implants need to be removed and replaced.

    Another small bottle contained decellularized small intestinal submucosa — pig tissue that has been stripped of its cells, leaving behind mostly collagen. While natural biomaterials might not be suitable for all medical applications, she said researchers are learning about the possibilities.

    “If we can design materials that our immune system likes, won’t reject and will accept into body, we can avoid those issues” of inflammation and scarring.

    Sadtler said the study of the immune system’s role in regenerating tissue is ongoing from the lab setting, ranging from a Petri dish to preclinical trials, including Sadtler’s group study on stimulating the regeneration of leg muscles in mice, published last year in the journal Nature Materials.

    “We want to make therapies for humans,” said Sadtler. “There have been clinical products that have been put into people, and these are used in hospital around the globe that are growing those tissues back.”

    With her lab’s current research on the body’s immune system, “we’re trying to improve on those materials, and learn from the ones that work and get them to work better.”

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    Neal Augenstein

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