Los Angeles Times (Sunday)
Agents’ killing of another protester roils Minneapolis
MINNEAPOLIS — Federal immigration officers shot and killed a man Saturday in Minneapolis, drawing hundreds of protesters onto frigidly cold streets in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier. Family members identified the man who...
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Lawmakers split over calls to ‘abolish ICE’
WASHINGTON — “Abolish ICE.” Democratic lawmakers and candidates for office around the country are increasingly returning to the phrase, popularized during the first Trump administration, as they react to the current administration’s forceful...
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A company town looks to remake itself — one house sale at a time
SCOTIA, Calif. — The last time Mary Bullwinkel and her beloved little town were in the national media spotlight was not a happy period. Bullwinkel was the spokesperson for the logging giant Pacific Lumber in the late 1990s, when reporters flooded into...
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In Caracas, fear and uncertainty
CARACAS, Venezuela — It was about 2 a.m. Saturday Caracas time when the detonations began, lighting up the sullen sky like a postNew Year’s fireworks display. “¡Ya comenzó!” was the recurrent phrase in homes, telephone conversations and social media...
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HIS LONG CAMPAIGN FOR A BATTLEFIELD PARTNER
CHICAGO — Barely half an hour had passed since the f light landed at O’Hare International Airport, and the Army combat veteran’s palms were already sweating. Spencer Sullivan, 38, situated himself at the front of a crowd of people waiting near the...
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Hollywood in turmoil as AI enters the scene
Kevin Hart is almost impossible to avoid. The stand-up comic turned actor has spent the past decade as one of Hollywood’s most bankable and visible stars, headlining megahits like the “Jumanji” films alongside a steady output of comedies and animated...
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CORRUPTION, THEFT RIFE AT COUNTY FAIRS
Like many of California’s fairs, the one in Humboldt County is a cherished local institution, beloved for its junk food, adorable baby animals and exhibits of local arts and crafts. Rock star chef Guy Fieri, who grew up in town, even turns up to host...
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Castro Theatre getting a second act at a pivotal time
At the start of the pandemic, when live entertainment was shut down across California, Gregg Perloff — chief executive of Another Planet Entertainment — told his team to use the downtime to find a new project that excited them. They quickly set about...
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Life in California’s fields: ‘The American dream eats us alive’
The American squatted in the dirt, struggling to free the cantaloupe from its prickly stem, almost toppling over. On either side, men bent at the waist, clearing fruit with one quick sweep of the knife and moving on to the next. The American fell...
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CHILDREN TOILING IN TOXIC FIELDS
The summer sun burned through the clouds in the Salinas Valley, where a bounty of berries and leafy green vegetables grows across this rich farmland renowned as the “Salad Bowl of the World.” Jose, a quiet 14-year-old, was squatting and bending over...
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A complex pattern of land use and ownership poses obstacles for the post-oil future of Baldwin Hills
Fifteen property owners hold portions of the undeveloped Baldwin Hills. Property in the oil field is owned by individuals and companies that could seek to develop their land.
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Migrant retakes life’s reins in Mexico
On an overcast morning in September, Hector Alessandro Negrete left his beloved Los Angeles — the city he was brought to at 3 months old — and headed down Interstate 5 to Mexico, the only country where he held a passport. It was a place that, to him,...
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Can a fence fix MacArthur Park?
On a brisk sunny morning in MacArthur Park recently, children played on a jungle gym as an open-air drug market operated nearby. Beside the park’s lake — which has witnessed more than a few bodies pulled from its murky depths — vendors prepared stuffed...
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‘No Kings’ protests draw huge crowds
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Southern California on Saturday for “No Kings” demonstrations against President Trump, portraying the commander in chief as an aspiring monarch as he continues to engage in what critics argue...
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A dangerous wait for water trucks during Palisades fire
When fire hydrants ran dry in the first hours of the Palisades fire, firefighters faced confusion and costly delays in getting vital water trucks into the area to help fight the destructive blaze, new city documents revealed. It took some time for...
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THE ROAD TO REBUILDING
On a hill in Sonoma County, François Piccin yearns to return home. In fall 2017, Piccin and his wife lost their ranch house when the Tubbs fire roared through Northern California’s famed wine region. Contractors found themselves in high demand and...
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ICE keeps its detainees on the move
At 3:25 in the morning of July 24, Milagro Solis Portillo was woken up and booked out of B-18, ICE’s basement detention facility in the downtown L.A. courthouse. She was not told where she was headed as she was put onto a commercial flight along with...
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A fresh set of downs for Pali High
Twenty-four days after the worst wildfire in L.A. history burned their stadium, members of the Palisades Charter High School football team stretched and twisted on a middle school field in Santa Monica. To the north, a sickly orange haze hung along the...
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Fresh water is disappearing and much of the world is getting drier
For more than two decades, satellites have tracked the total amounts of water held in glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, soil and the world’s vast natural reservoirs underground — aquifers. An extensive global analysis of that data now reveals fresh...
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Rebound in aerospace sector propels the region’s economy
In a giant Long Beach warehouse near where Boeing used to build the C-17 cargo jet, Vast is fabricating what could be the first commercial space station to circle Earth. Just up the road in El Segundo, Varda Space Industries has grown molecular...
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HOW A ‘GOOD FIRE’ WENT BAD IN GRAND CANYON
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — When lightning sparked a small fire amid the stately ponderosa pines on the remote North Rim of the Grand Canyon last month, national park officials treated it like a good thing. Instead of racing to put the fire...
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Separated by a border for decades, they finally get their embraces
José Antonio Rodríguez held a bouquet in his trembling hands. It had been nearly a quarter of a century since he had left his family behind in Mexico to seek work in California. In all those years, he hadn’t seen his parents once. They kept in touch...
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San Francisco wonders how its AI gold rush will pan out
On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city’s waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum. Visitors made shadow puppets for AI to identify, used AI to generate songs, asked chatbots...
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Reform fades as violence rises
CELAYA, Mexico — On a sunny spring day last year, a young attorney named Gisela Gaytán kicked off her campaign for mayor in this gritty Mexican city. Under her blouse she wore a ballistic vest. Celaya had become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war,...
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A BORDER TRANSFORMED BY CRACKDOWN, TARIFFS
Juan Ortíz trudged through 100-degree heat along the U.S.-Mexico border, weighed down by a backpack full of water bottles that he planned to leave for migrants trying to cross this rugged terrain. Only there hadn’t been many migrants of late. When...
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Driver crashes into crowd outside club, injuring 30
A patron who had been tossed out of a popular East Hollywood nightclub early Saturday later intentionally smashed his car into a crowd outside the venue, injuring 30 people — seven critically — before being pulled out of his vehicle and shot by a...
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A NEW MYSTERY IN PETERSON CASE
For the true-crime-loving public, the Innocence Project and Scott Peterson occupy opposite ends of the moral spectrum. The project helps free the wrongly convicted, while Peterson is a philandering Modesto fertilizer salesman convicted two decades ago...
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BOATERS WANT THEIR WHITEWATER BACK
KERNVILLE, Calif. — It started out like a typical whitewater rafting trip on the North Fork of the Kern River. Boaters paddled through churning rapids, gliding past boulders and crashing through breaking waves. But after a few miles, as they...
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Picking back up with her active life, age be damned
Lee Calvert’s new bedroom glowed with the dappled sunlight of a latespring afternoon. Just outside her window, she could see hot-pink rhododendron flowers and the stately redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Despite the beauty, it was a view — and a...
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U.S. attacks Iranian nuclear sites
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Saturday that the U.S. military struck three sites in Iran, directly joining Israel’s effort to decapitate the country’s nuclear program in a risky gambit to weaken a longtime foe amid Tehran’s threat of reprisals that...
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Trump stages military parade as millions unite to decry him
WASHINGTON — Thousands of President Trump’s supporters descended on the nation’s capital Saturday for a parade marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, a rare spectacle of military hardware and uniformed soldiers filing down...
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ICE raids across L.A. spur protests
Fallout from aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles continued Saturday, with fierce pushback from protesters, open sparring between L.A. leadership and federal officials and the Trump administration vowing to send the...
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A life of violence led him to God
At St. Francis Medical Center, a Lynwood trauma hospital serving poor, mostly Latino parts of southeast Los Angeles, Father Cesar Galan begins his shift as chaplain in the intensive care unit. Moving from bedside to bedside, he listens to patients’...
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Five years after Floyd protests, L.A. paying for police tactics
As mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd raged across Los Angeles in late May 2020, the LAPD had an unexpected problem. After a week of demonstrations, officers had fired so many “less-lethal” crowd control projectiles made of rubber...
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Woman’s death inflames debate over problem bears
Patrice Miller, 71, lived by herself in a small yellow house beneath towering mountain peaks on the edge of a burbling river in this Sierra County village. She doted on her cats and her exotic orchids, and was known to neighbors for her delicious...
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A delicate work-life balance inside America’s ‘salad bowl’
SALINAS, Calif. — Every year, farmers in this fertile valley dubbed the “salad bowl of the world” rely on tens of thousands of workers to harvest leafy greens and juicy strawberries. But with local farmworkers aging — and the Trump administration’s...
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IN CALIFORNIA, LIFE AFTER DEATH ROW
By age 46, Bob Williams had spent more than half his life in isolation, waiting to die on San Quentin’s death row. Williams was 18 when he raped and murdered 40-year-old Mary Breck at her Kern County home in October 1994. The day before, he had broken...
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A pipeline and a lifeline: A glimpse inside San Jacinto Tunnel
Thousands of feet below the snowy summit of Mt. San Jacinto, a formidable feat of engineering and grit makes life as we know it in Southern California possible. The 13-mile-long San Jacinto Tunnel was bored through the mountain in the 1930s by a crew...
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Did lack of cityhood hurt Altadena?
In the first 24 hours of the Eaton fire, Pasadena’s communications director helped activate four different kinds of alerts to keep its residents apprised of evacuation orders, while also hopping on several news programs and doing interviews to share...
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Will the L.A. we know survive Trump’s trade war?
When Fang Chen was growing up in the wealthy city of San Marino in the 1980s, it was still a majority white community, one where locals occasionally exploded into ugly moments of racism at the arrival of new Asian residents. Today, the community is...
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Texas firm pushes to restart Santa Barbara oil drilling
More than 50 years ago, a catastrophic oil spill along Santa Barbara’s coastline served to galvanize the modern environmental movement and also helped usher in one of the state’s strongest conservation laws: the California Coastal Act. Now, as the...
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Once overwhelmed border is nearly empty of migrants
SAN YSIDRO, Calif. — When the humanitarian aid workers decided to dismantle their elaborate tented setup — erected right up against the border wall — they hadn’t seen migrants for a month. A year earlier, when historic numbers of migrants were...
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Emotions churn over these Point Reyes dairies
With fog-kissed streets featuring a buttery bakery, an eclectic bookstore and markets peddling artisanal cheeses crafted from the milk of lovingly coddled cows, Point Reyes Station is about as picturesque as tourist towns come in California. It is...
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Baby great whites swim by, but surfers stay off the menu
On a cool March morning near the Huntington Beach Pier, dozens of surfers sat bobbing on their boards — legs dangling in the water, toes wiggling for warmth — and gazed with questioning eyes at the fishing boat going back and forth a few yards away,...
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‘The stress keeps you up at night’
For weeks after the Eaton fire ravaged her Altadena home, Ivana Lin lived in a constant, overwhelming state of fight or flight. Her body was tense. She barely slept. At one point, she jotted down a to-do list of everything she felt pressure to get...
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Center stage for one night
Striking a distinguished look in a gray suit with coiffed white hair, Vincent Teixeira stepped up to the podium, standing in front of fellow film and TV actors who filled the house at the 99-seat Eastwood Performing Arts Center in East Hollywood. Like...
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Coordinated train heists in the Mojave target Nike sneakers
The thieves stealthily board eastbound freight trains, hiding out until they reach lonely stretches of the Mojave Desert or high plains far from towns. They slash an air brake hose, causing the mile-long line of railcars to screech to an emergency...
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More engines may have helped
The first 911 call came at 10:29 a.m., from a resident of Piedra Morada Drive in Pacific Palisades. Amid high winds, a fire was visible in the distance, the flames flickering over a chaparralchoked ridge. About 11 minutes later, the Los Angeles Fire...
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A failure to learn from mistakes
On a hot, dry November morning in 1961, flames from a trash pile on brushland north of Mulholland Drive were picked up by Santa Ana winds and swept across the canyons of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest enclaves. The apocalyptic scenes that played out —...
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Escape from the Palisades
The dirty brown smoke signaled trouble as it curled skyward near a popular hiking trail above Pacific Palisades on a breezy Tuesday morning in early January. ¶ A luxury real estate agent about to show a 7,200-square-foot mansion on West Sunset...
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Decades of Black history lost
The four-bedroom home on Highview Avenue that Olsen J. Rogers bought in 1963 was a far cry from the Texas farm given to his family by the man who enslaved his grandmother. The two-bedroom house along East Altadena Drive was purchased by William “BJ”...
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A TOWN DECIMATED WITHIN THE FIRST 12 HOURS OF FLAMES
For those who first saw the flames from the Eaton fire, they looked small, even manageable. But the winds in Eaton Canyon were clocked at 59 mph, sending a “shower of sparks” across the mountain. Rocketing embers lofted by hurricane-force winds would...
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CAN THE SOUL OF ALTADENA SURVIVE?
For some, Altadena’s draw has been the seclusion it offers, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, straddling the line between urban and wild. For others, it’s been the community where Black residents sought refuge decades ago amid the...
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When cancer sets a killer free
At a hearing in the summer, San Diego County Superior Court Judge John Thompson wrestled with the decision before him. “There are very few things that I find now after sitting on the bench for 36 years that are difficult. This is one of them,” he...
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Untested pesticides in pot brands
For Santa Cruz County cannabis farmers battling infestations of aphids, one chemical in particular worked wonders. Those in the know were effusive in their praise of pymetrozine to save their high-dollar weed crops from the destructive, sap-sucking...
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HE’S STILL ON DEATH ROW. DID LIES PUT HIM THERE?
One by one, in the summer of 1984, teenage girls vanished off the streets of this historic town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Denise Galston disappeared first. She was a skinny 14-year-old with a shy smile and trusting disposition despite a...
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A MAMMOTH NEED FOR IMMIGRANT WORKERS
If all the service workers born in Mexico stayed home from their jobs for just one day in this thriving resort town perched high in California’s Sierra Nevada, the humming tourist economy would probably face-plant harder than a first-time skier on an...
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A MOJAVE GOLD RUSH SPURS A LAND BOOM
It’s a brisk day in Johannesburg, a tiny mining town tucked among the Rand Mountains in the Mojave Desert. The landscape is vast and rugged, a mishmash of rock, dirt and creosote bushes, swaths of gray and brown under a deep blue sky. The terrain...
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From political outsider to Cabinet pick
He had written more than 20 books, drew healthy audiences speaking across America and attracted coverage from the country’s top newspapers and magazines. Still, by the height of the pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he felt muzzled. Facebook and...
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‘The Love Boat’ faces an unhappy ending in a lonely Stockton slough
Under a nearly full moon at the end of May, a 70-year-old cruise ship with a wild and enigmatic history sank in a lonely back channel in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. In the months since, the recriminations and finger-pointing have risen...
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Housing groups hit by ‘mansion tax’ bill
Since the “mansion tax” took effect last April, a bevy of groups have aired their grievances. Developers claim the tax eats into their profit margins, stifling new housing projects. Commercial property owners say their sales of warehouses and retail...
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‘Drill, baby, drill!’ and climate change denial
As a candidate, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly professed his love of clean air and water, but he also dismissed climate change as a hoax, railed against zero emission electric vehicles and expressed contempt for the environmental regulations...
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Economic anxiety high for Nevada voters
LAS VEGAS — Retiree Madonna Raffini recently shopped for groceries for herself and her 96-year-old mother. “I went into Walmart, of all places, and looked at the meat — little teeny steaks. Two of them, less than a quarter-inch thick, $18.99. That’s...
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PLENTY OF OPEN SPACE, BUT NOWHERE TO LIVE
Emily Markstein, a sinewy rock climber and skier who has spent seven years living and working in the Sierra resort town of Mammoth Lakes, opens a large sliding door and welcomes a stranger into her home. One of the gleaming multimillion-dollar...
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Baby food pouches popular, but experts see long-term risks
Every week, Caitlin Scuttio stops by Target and piles her cart with pureed food pouches for her 4-year-old and twin 18-month-old sons. In goes a 24-pack of unsweetened applesauce. Then a 24-pack of the fruit and veggie blend. And finally, the yogurt...
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Farms fight a pesky almond moth with sex, radiation, ‘mummies’
In a windowless shack on the far outskirts of Fresno, an ominous red glow illuminates a lab filled with X-ray machines, shelves of glowing boxes, a quietly humming incubator and a miniature wind tunnel. While the scene looks like something straight...
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