Los Angeles

The Guardian’s review of records found:

Out of nine “assault” and “impeding” felony cases the justice department filed immediately after the start of the protests and promoted by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges. In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video. One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester. One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government’s most high-profile cases.

That got the adrenaline pumping!

4.5 according to USGS.

Don’t forget to fill out a felt report.

https://archive.ph/Y2rb6

Two staff members from an Ontario surgery center have been charged with allegedly interfering with U.S. immigration officers trying to detain landscapers who ran into the center to escape. Jose de Jesus Ortega, a 38-year-old Highland resident, was arrested Friday morning and is expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Riverside, according to a U.S. attorney’s office Central District of California news release. Officials are still looking for the other suspect, Danielle Nadine Davila, 33, of Corona. Both are charged with assaulting a federal officer and conspiracy to prevent by force and intimidation a federal officer from discharging his duties, authorities said. According to video obtained by KTLA-TV, staffers at the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center earlier this month told two agents to leave because they didn’t have a warrant to go onto the property. The agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement were trying to detain 30-year-old Denis Guillen-Solis and two other landscapers who had been working outside and ran into the surgical center when the agents showed up.

Building on the popularity of the seasonal $15 Summer Day Pass promotion, first introduced in 2022, Metrolink will now offer a year-round $15 weekday fare option, called the SoCal Day Pass, which provides unlimited rides on the day of purchase. On Saturdays and Sundays, the price of the SoCal Day Pass will drop to $10 to match the current weekend rate. Up to three kids ages 17 and under will continue to ride free with a fare-paying adult on weekends.

Metrolink is also introducing a new $5 L.A. Zone Day Pass, available seven days a week, that is good for unlimited single-day travel between eight select stations in and around Downtown Los Angeles, including LA Union Station, Cal State LA, Commerce, Montebello/Commerce, Glendale, Burbank-Downtown and both stations serving the Hollywood Burbank Airport.

I hope these new fares stick, I’m definitely going to be taking advantage and going some places I haven’t been before because the train ticket price felt too much for what was essentially a whim.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/22118804

The mother of a U.S. citizen taken into custody during a chaotic immigration enforcement interaction in a retail parking lot on Tuesday is pleading for answers as her son remains unaccounted for nearly 24 hours later.

Adrian Andrew Martinez, 20, was tackled and forcibly detained by several U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in a parking lot near the 8600 block of Washington Boulevard. According to his mother, Myra Martinez, Adrian Martinez had clocked in for his shift at Walmart around 5 a.m. and went on a break at approximately 8 a.m. when ICE agents were reportedly seen in the vicinity.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31498992

smh

This shit sucks. Be safe if you're protesting tomorrow. WEAR A MASK. They are using facial recognition. DO NOT GO ALONE. Take a friend/s.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31615310

CBP also said in a statement that its air and marine operations were “not engaged in the surveillance of first amendment activities”, but that they are “providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers”.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday posted a video on X that the agency said was DHS drone footage and bore a CBP air and marine operations watermark. It included zoomed in clips of protestors on the streets.

CBP’s confirmation of its drone usage comes after the LA Times also reported that an LAPD helicopter flying over protesters announced to them, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” The Guardian US contacted the LAPD and has not heard back.

This is not the first time the DHS has flown drones over protests. In 2020, the DHS dispatched drones over at least 15 cities across the US where people gathered to protest about the murder of George Floyd and logged more than 270 hours of surveillance footage. The LAPD has also ramped up surveillance in response to first amendment activity. During the city’s George Floyd protests, LAPD sent requests to Amazon for Ring doorbell footage that specifically sought videos of the protests.

Key takeaways

In cooperation with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, a multidisciplinary team at UCLA will isolate the contaminants on firefighter jackets and assess their effects on human cells.

Firefighters at one station will wear the jackets in rotation for two months, then send them back to researchers, unwashed and coated with debris from their firefights.

Once the chemists isolate the gases and PM from the jackets, Gomperts will test their effects on human cells.

The code should be added automatically before checkout, but if it isn’t, use BIKEMONTH25

After making a big deal out of how my husband needed to listen to the alert and drop and cover, we get a tiny rattle about 15 seconds later… 🤦‍♂️

Klein had already been talking with EdTrust, a nonprofit dedicated to removing racial and economic barriers to education, about developing a more detailed national map to illustrate all the ways extreme weather disrupts learning. Then the L.A. wildfires broke out in early January...

More than 750,000 kids went to more than 1,000 schools that were closed for as few as two days or more than 10 days in January, they found.

“Three out of four kids impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires are socioeconomically disadvantaged,” Klein said. “Two out of five kids impacted by the wildfires are multilingual learners and one out of 10 is a student with disabilities.”

The report is not peer-reviewed and makes no claim to being comprehensive, Klein said. But it’s important to compile statistics like this, he said, because some students have specific needs that are seriously affected by the interruption to classroom learning. They need to return to learning and a stable school setting most urgently, he said.

Schools provide nutrition and a stable environment for students from households where they may not have enough to eat, live in overcrowded or unsafe housing conditions, or lack adequate adult supervision.

Studies show that school closures and chronic absenteeism caused by extreme weather events have an outsize detrimental effect on kids’ academic success. Missing one week of school from extreme weather-related school closures is the equivalent to missing two to three weeks from some other kind of absence or school closure, Klein said.

A 2023 peer-reviewed study in the journal Economics of Education Review found that nearly all students had lower test scores after Hurricane Florence triggered closures in North Carolina elementary and middle schools in 2018.

A recent survey from Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood found that one in two California parents with young children worry about how wildfires, drought, flooding, and extreme heat affect their kids.

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom has once again revealed his true allegiance—not to working people, nor to environmental protection, but to corporate interests.

His latest executive order, which suspends California’s landmark environmental regulations to fast-track utility infrastructure rebuilding in wildfire-affected areas, is a direct attack on democracy, environmental safeguards and working class communities. It is a measure that aligns perfectly with the interests of private energy corporations like Southern California Edison (SCE) while dangerously mirroring the authoritarian methods of the fascistic Trump administration.

In a unanimous vote last Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council has taken a decisive step toward dismantling the LA Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) and shifting control of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to private homeless service providers.

The council’s decision follows two scathing audits that exposed failures in LAHSA’s financial oversight, but the true significance of this move extends far beyond the agency’s mismanagement. At its core, this is not about fixing homelessness; it is about turning the crisis into a lucrative business opportunity for the private sector.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who spearheaded the effort, branded LAHSA a “monstrosity,” citing delayed provider payments and failures to track spending. Yet, rather than addressing the deeper systemic failures of the city’s (and, in fact, the state’s) approach to homelessness, the council is using LAHSA’s dysfunction as a pretext to accelerate the privatization of services. This is not a genuine effort to improve conditions for the nearly 50,000 unhoused individuals in Los Angeles, it is a deliberate strategy to carve up public funding and distribute it among politically connected private contractors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27481391

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/34548573

The California governor has been sending prepaid cell phones to executives throughout his state.

Vaxart was gearing up for a 10,400-participant COVID-19 pill trial

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services is already leading to layoffs in the Bay Area’s biotech industry.

Vaxart, a small South San Francisco company that focuses on oral vaccine research, announced Thursday that it had to lay off 10% of its workers after the U.S. government issued a stop work order on its major COVID-19 vaccine trial. Vaxart had 105 workers at the end of 2024, per a filing, so the cuts are likely to hit around 10 staff members; local biotechs have been shedding staff left and right this year.

The stop work order is a major blow for a company that had already seen its stock price dwindle. Vaxart got a positive reception to the vaccine study’s initial data from a safety board, and was planning to begin a larger trial after the FDA provided input. Instead, the study and company have been thrown into limbo — Vaxart will learn within 90 days whether the trial and its massive contract are canceled for good.

Thousands of California educators and support staff are expected to lose their jobs before the start of the 2025-2026 academic year, with more than 2,300 school employees having received pink slips last week. State law requires districts to send pink slips for the coming academic year by March 15, with final layoff notices given by May 15.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250318132357/https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-03-18/doge-two-dozen-environmental-offices-closure-california

President Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency plans to terminate lease contracts at nearly two dozen California offices relating to science, agriculture and the environment, according to its federal database.

The planned closures include facilities occupied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service, Forest Service and Geological Survey. The terminations follow massive layoffs at NOAA and significant cuts to scientific research funding across federal agencies in recent weeks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/34084346

California's top insurance regulator says he will approve an emergency request from State Farm to raise home insurance rates for roughly a million customers if the company can justify the hike at a public hearing

In response to increasingly dangerous wildfires in the Western United States, Washington State's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has pioneered an "all hands, all lands" wildfire prevention strategy. Launched in 2017, the 20-year forest health strategic plan focuses on restoring forests, fostering community fire resilience, and bolstering firefighting resources. By using forest science and fire risk modeling, the DNR assesses and treats high-risk areas through thinning and prescribed burns, and creates fire breaks. This program is funded by a 2021 state bill that earmarked $125 million per biennium for wildfire mitigation.

The strategy involves extensive collaboration with private landowners, tribes, and the federal government. Since 2017, almost 900,000 acres of forest have been treated, yielding positive results, such as during the 2021 Schneider Springs fire where treated areas survived. The DNR also emphasizes community resilience by creating fire breaks and supporting home hardening efforts. The state has increased its full-time firefighters and air firefighting resources and uses technologies like drones and predictive fire risk modeling. Revenue from forest treatments supports the restoration work, benefiting local economies. While acknowledging the ongoing threat of wildfires, Commissioner Upthegrove stresses the need for continued commitment to saving lives and homes through proactive strategies.