Is anyone in charge of Los Angeles?
Politico, EMILY SCHULTHEIS: "Many of Los Angeles’s leaders had hoped to spend 2025 preparing the city to host the next summer Olympics and instead found themselves engulfed by a series of unanticipated crises, from devastating wildfires to a destabilizing immigration crackdown. But rather than working together, the city’s leading pressure groups are at each other’s throats in a spiraling grudge match.
After Mayor Karen Bass enacted a new minimum wage that would guarantee tourism workers $30 per hour in time for the 2028 games, airline and hotel companies began working to repeal the law via referendum. A labor union that had lobbied for the wage bill immediately retaliated with four ballot initiatives targeting the travel industry, including to require voter approval for new stadiums and meeting centers. Local chamber of commerce heads then countered with an initiative that would slash the gross-receipts tax paid by city-based companies."
s Southern California prepared to avoid a ‘Day Zero’ water crisis?
LA Times, IAN JAMES: "Over the last century, Southern California has grown and thrived by accessing water from faraway sources including the Colorado River, the Eastern Sierra’s streams and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Massive aqueducts transport water through deserts, farmlands and mountains to sustain 19 million people across six counties. But these traditional sources of water are projected to become less reliable as global warming shrinks the West’s mountain snowpack and unleashes more intense droughts."
Nation’s capital awaits Trump’s next move as federal takeover threat looms
LAT, ASHRAF KHALIL/LINDSAY WHITEHURST: "Around 2 a.m., noisy revelers emerging from clubs and bars packed the sidewalks of U Street in Washington, many of them seeking a late-night slice or falafel. A robust but not unusual contingent of city police cruisers lingered around the edges of the crowds. At other late-night hot spots, nearly identical scenes unfolded.
What wasn’t apparent in Friday’s earliest hours: any sort of security lockdown by a multiagency flood of uniformed federal law enforcement officers. That’s what President Trump had promised Thursday, starting at midnight, in the administration’s latest move to impose its will on the nation’s capital."
5 things to know as Newsom and Trump go back to court over the National Guard in LA
CALMatters, MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN: "Did the U.S. military illegally engage in civilian law enforcement when they were deployed to Los Angeles in June under the orders of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta say yes. Trump’s Department of Justice says no. The three-day trial to answer this question is scheduled to commence today at 10 a.m. in a California federal district court, with implications for the country as Trump continues to signal a desire to deploy troops to patrol domestic city streets."
WWII veteran, 109, among close to 50 at nation’s largest ‘Spirit of ’45’ event, in SD
Times of San Diego, CHRIS STONE: Listed as the second-oldest World War II veteran in California, Ervin Wendt, 109, entered a Balboa Park pavilion to resounding applause Sunday.
It wasn’t just his age that garnered the response, but his military service in one of World War II’s hardest fought engagements — the Battle of Midway. He’s reputed to be the only survivor of that 1942 clash memorialized by Hollywood."
This candidate for California governor has a potential conflict of interest in her own home
CALMatters, ALEXEI KOSEFF: "If former state Senate leader Toni Atkins is elected governor next year, she would oversee a state contract that puts money in her own pocket.
Following a directive from Gov. Gavin Newsom to develop state-owned properties for affordable housing, the California Department of General Services in 2020 hired a consulting firm to help prioritize sites, conduct market research and evaluate applications from contractors."
California governor’s race wide open, with voters still undecided
SacBee, NICOLE NIXON: "With Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis officially out of the running for governor, here’s a look at who’s still in, who’s got the most money and what polls are saying:
First, the race is still up for any candidate to win. For months, polls have shown that a huge chunk of Californians are undecided. An Emerson College poll released Friday showed 38% of voters haven’t made up their mind yet. That’s down from 54% in April but still a significant block of voters."
‘Uncharted territory’: Newsom and UC go to battle against Trump’s UCLA sanctions
LA Times, JAWEED KALEEM: "Two weeks ago, UCLA was optimistic. For months, it had successfully avoided clashes with President Trump as university leaders declined to publicly criticize him by name over his battle to remake American higher education, first raging against several Ivy League schools.
The morning of July 29, UCLA announced it had settled a federal lawsuit with students who accused it of discrimination, paying more than $2 million to Jewish civil rights groups and millions more in legal fees. University leaders hailed the action as “real progress” to combat antisemitism. Privately, they pointed the Trump administration to the agreement, eager to convince federal officials they had made good with Jewish communities."
The Micheli Minute for August 11, 2025
Capitol Weekly, STAFF: "Lobbyist, professor, and author Chris Micheli offers a quick look at what’s coming up this week in Sacramento."
Fast-forward 25 years: Sharing hopes and dreams for a future Los Angeles
LA Times, THOMAS CUREN: "Los Angeles is a city built upon amnesia and denial. Graded and paved, bought and sold, it bears little likeness to Tovaangar, the home for the first people who, for thousands of years, walked its valleys and chaparral-clad basins and paddled its broad shorelines.
Eventually, they were overtaken, falling silent to the noisy ambitions of foreigners and settlers who set about transforming this vast floodplain with imported water and orchards and homes. Branding their creation paradise, they never questioned their improbable aspirations."
‘The safest place to be’: When fleeing fire is no longer an option
LA Times, NOAH HAGGERTY: "...But fires in California explode faster than ever due to a warming climate, flammable brush overtaking native species and more human-caused ignitions during high winds. Fires overtaking, in mere minutes, communities that take hours to evacuate are prompting a growing number of wildfire safety and emergency response experts to argue that fire refuge policies like Pepperdine’s may be the only way to keep everyone in a vicious fire’s path alive.
Fire researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — a federal science lab tasked with developing science-based standards, including for fire safety — visited Paradise in Northern California 11 times after the 2018 Camp fire and interviewed more than 150 first responders, local officials and residents."
L.A. passed a $30 minimum wage for tourism workers. Then came the warring ballot measures
LA Times, DAVID ZAHNISER and SUHAUNA HUSSAIN: "It’s the summer of the burn-it-down ballot measure in Los Angeles.
For the past three months, labor unions and business groups have been locked in a protracted fight over a law, approved by the City Council in May, hiking the minimum wage for hotel employees and workers at Los Angeles International Airport to $30 per hour by 2028."
Will Sacramento County adopt grand jury’s financial elder abuse recommendations?
SacBee, ROSALIO AHUMADA: "Sacramento County Adult Protective Services’ internal reporting systems do not require consistent data entry. That means the agency cannot reliably provide the number of financial elder abuse cases referred to law enforcement, track those referrals or follow-up to learn how those cases concluded.
A grand jury investigating how reports of financial elder abuse are documented, investigated and prosecuted in Sacramento County found that authorities aren’t doing enough to investigate and prosecute financial elder abuse in Sacramento County."
Trump asks SCOTUS to allow profiling in California ICE raids
Chronicle, BOB EGELKO: "The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow officers to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants in Southern California because of how they look, what language they’re speaking and what kind of work they’re doing, factors that federal judges have found to be baseless and discriminatory.
Last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong, upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California,” D. John Sauer, the Justice Department’s solicitor general, said Thursday in a filing with the Supreme Court. “This Court should end this attempted judicial usurpation of immigration-enforcement functions” and suspend the injunction while the case is argued in the lower courts, Sauer wrote."
As California’s behavioral health workforce buckles, help is years away
LAT, CHRISTINE MAI-DUC: "This spring, the Good News Rescue Mission, which runs the only emergency homeless shelter in Shasta County, received a game-changing, $17.8-million state grant to build a 75-bed residential treatment facility in a region where thousands struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.
Now comes the hard part — recruiting and hiring 10 certified substance use counselors and about a dozen other staff members to work at the new site, about 170 miles north of the state capital."
Where do UC alumni land jobs? See the full list of companies for every campus
The Chronicle, HANNA ZAKHARENKO: "UC grads like to stick around.
Over 70% of UC alumni live and work in California. While the most common employer for graduates is the UC schools themselves, big, California-based companies like Google and Kaiser Permanente hire hundreds of graduates from across the nine schools."
Free AI training comes to California colleges — but at what cost?
CALMatters. ADAM ECHELMAN: "As artificial intelligence replaces entry-level jobs, California’s universities and community colleges are offering a glimmer of hope for students: free AI training that will teach them to master the new technology.
“You’re seeing in certain coding spaces significant declines in hiring for obvious reasons,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday during a press conference from the seventh floor of Google’s San Francisco office."
To tackle homelessness, Los Angeles moves to centralize its response
LAT, ANDREW KHOURI: "The request came in June.
A staff member for Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath emailed the county’s newly established Emergency Centralized Response Center, asking for a cleanup of a reoccurring homeless encampment along a rail line in the San Fernando Valley."
California weather shift: Here’s when cooler conditions will arrive
The Chronicle, ANTHONY EDWARDS: "Extreme heat warnings and advisories will stay in effect Monday as a heat wave continues in the San Joaquin Valley, far Northern California and inland valleys and deserts of Southern California.
Many of those warnings and advisories will expire Tuesday as the high-pressure system off the coast weakens. But the cooldown will be gradual, and temperatures will only drop a few degrees with each passing day."
California Supreme Court hands victory to rooftop solar panel owners
CALMatters, MALENA CAROLLO: "The California Supreme Court today sided with environmental groups in a case seen as pivotal for the proliferation of rooftop solar power in California.
In a unanimous vote, justices told a lower court to revisit a ruling that upheld reduced payments to solar panel owners for selling excess power back to utility companies. Justices did not rule on whether the changes to the solar program were legal, requiring the court of appeals to determine this."
This 30-year Bay Area highway project is almost completed. Will it ease traffic?
The Chronicle, RACHEL SWAN: "Take a drive up Highway 101 from San Francisco. Pass the tawny hills and blue inlets of Marin County, and peer out your driver-side window. There, you’ll glimpse the future: miles of freshly paved carpool lane, set to open within weeks.
It’s the culmination of a 30-year rebuild of the highway to ease travel from Windsor, deep in Wine Country, to San Rafael and downtown San Francisco. Politicians and planners tout this project as the largest ever in North Bay history. Vintners and real estate developers hope it will transform the region. Commuters just want to see it completed."
Bay Area transit ridership is still hurting — but there are bright spots
The Chronicle, DANIELLE ECHEVERRIA: "More than five years after the pandemic dramatically reshaped commuting patterns, the Bay Area’s largest transit systems have yet to recover to pre-pandemic ridership levels as the agencies work to adjust to new passenger habits.
But for some systems at some times, ridership is notably robust."
CA railroad museum’s restored steam engine allows visitors to ‘ride history’
SacBee, WILLIAM MELHADO: "The first thing you might notice about the restored locomotive departing from Old Sacramento is the billowing cloud of steam pouring out of the shiny, black engine, stamped with the name Granite Rock Co. on its side.
The cacophony of bells and whistles, announcing the train’s departure, will also catch your attention, Ty Smith said Saturday morning just as those iconic sounds drowned out the California State Railroad Museum director’s voice."
This Sacramento pool shaped Land Park, memories of residents in the early 1900s
SacBee, GRAHAM WOMACK: "Most people who drive by Congregation B’nai Israel on Riverside Boulevard might not know that decades ago, the land was used wholly differently.
Today, the southern portion of the property comprises a parking lot and buildings formerly used by Brookfield School until its relocation in 2014. Interstate 5 spans the western edge of the temple’s property, with the Sacramento River on the other side of the highway."
