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It feels impossible that it’s already the end of April, but here in Southern California that means the butterflies are out at the South Coast Botanic Garden and the laughs are in bloom at the Netflix Is a Joke Festival.

This week you can also get a new perspective on plants from author Michael Pollan, make a maraca with your kids ahead of Cinco de Mayo, or if you’re already jealous of everyone’s springtime in Europe Instagrams, head over to Santa Monica for the Accidentally Wes Anderson exhibit.

Visit LAist.com for more to explore, including a look at the studios getting in on the live events industry, drought-friendly plants to put in your garden, and How To L.A. goes deep on whether imported New York tap water makes L.A. pizza better.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill intended to free up state funds for homeless housing that requires sobriety after vetoing a similar effort last year.

For years, California has followed “housing first” principles when it comes to homelessness, which means funding low-barrier programs that don’t require people to jump through extra hoops — such as getting sober — before they are allowed a place to live. But while that works for many people who aren’t ready to kick addictions, it leaves behind people who want to be sober and are struggling to stay that way, said Assemblymember Matt Haney, a Democrat from San Francisco. For them, the only option often is to live in housing surrounded by neighbors who use substances, he said.

Haney’s legislation, Assembly Bill 1556, clarifies that sober housing providers can qualify for state funds, as long as they follow certain rules.

“People working hard to stay sober deserve the choice to live in a home that supports their recovery,” Haney said in a news release. “I’m incredibly grateful to Governor Newsom for signing AB 1556 and for working with us to get this right. This law will finally give Californians in recovery access to safe, stable, drug-free housing while making sure that if someone relapses, they are supported and stay connected to housing and services.”

Under the new law, sober residences that get state funds must have a written policy dictating what to do if someone relapses. The housing provider must give them the option to move into low-barrier housing. If they decline, they can be evicted.

It’s Haney’s third attempt to get state money for sober housing. His first, AB 2479, died in 2024.

His second, AB 255, made it all the way to Newsom’s desk before the governor vetoed it for a surprising reason: According to the governor, Haney’s bill was unnecessary because recent guidelines from the state already allowed state funds to pay for sober housing.

That was a big surprise to Haney, who had never seen those guidelines before. When CalMatters asked the governor’s office for a copy, we received a link to a 20-page document that was dated July 2025, but wasn’t published online until the day after Newsom’s veto.

After reviewing those guidelines, Haney spent a year working more closely with the governor’s office on a new bill. It’s still important, Haney said, because the existing guidelines are unclear: Housing providers still believe state funds are off-limits for sober housing. The proof, he said, is that housing providers still aren’t using them to fund sober-living projects.

There are several differences between the new sober housing law and last year’s failed bill, cost chief among them. Last year’s bill would have set up a new system for the state’s housing department to regulate sober housing, costing millions of dollars in the first year, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s analysis. By contrast, the new sober housing law comes with an expected price tag of about $200,000 per year to fund one staff position, according to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Even so, some housing organizations opposed the new legislation, arguing it will divert scarce housing funds away from the low-barrier models that are proven to work.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The rent, as we all know, is too damn high.

So is California’s poverty rate.

The two things are related.

That’s the not-so-surprising finding of a new analysis published by the Pew Charitable Trusts: If California’s rents dropped to the national average, the state would slash its poverty rate by 30%. The child poverty rate would decline by 36%.

The report is meant to highlight an important, if sometimes overlooked, aspect of poverty: It isn’t just about how much a person makes.

“Anti-poverty programs will be much more effective if we address people’s expenses, and rent is the number-one line item for most Americans,” said Pew researcher Alex Horowitz.

Case in point: CalFresh, the state’s food stamp program, saw an increase of $13.1 billion in benefits between 1989 and 2023. Over that same period, rising rents ate away 78% of that increase, according to the analysis.

California’s official poverty rate, which currently matches the national average of 10.7%, has always been a misleading stat. Using another official measure that takes into account each state’s housing costs, the percentage of Californians living in poverty rockets up to 17.8% — the second highest rate in the country after Louisiana.

That makes bringing down rents an especially effective anti-poverty program. If the state’s rents fell by 20%, child poverty would decline by roughly a quarter, the report found.

Twenty percent may seem impossibly ambitious in a state where rents often only seem to go in one direction (with some noteworthy exceptions), but that’s roughly how much typical rents declined in Austin and Minneapolis between 2021 and 2025. Pew researchers attribute that feat of affordability to local policy changes that have allowed for more housing construction.

Those policies — allowing for denser housing in cities, reducing parking requirements for new developments, encouraging the construction of ADUs — mirror many of the laws adopted at the state level in California. Those laws have yet to result in a major increasein new housing, but proponents are optimistic that a building boom is on the horizon.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The largest planned deportation program in U.S. history swept up more than 38,000 people in California since February 2025. The federal government purchased detention facilities, in part to avoid scrutiny from local governments. Protests erupted against the detentions and the facilities, and police dispersed those protests with the help of stun grenades.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed a package of immigration bills that Democrats aim to disrupt the deportation program in California, limit the tactics of immigration enforcement agencies and open up federal agents to civil liability. The most significant bills will likely be tested in federal court.

They range from prohibiting immigration agents from using electric shock gloves to creating a bill of rights for people held in detention and extending the state’s power to investigate conditions inside detention centers.

The new laws come in the midst of an escalation in Trump’s deportation plan, with weekly immigration arrests hitting new records across the state.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities,” Newsom said in a written statement. “We will continue protecting our people, upholding the rule of law, and making clear that if the federal government operates in California, we will hold them accountable.”

The most sweeping change would allow anyone to sue federal agents for violations of their constitutional rights. Under federal law, the only legal relief available now to people who sue agents of the U.S. government is a “Bivens” action, named after the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a man successfully sued drug enforcement agents who violated his Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure.

Supporters of the bill, which they call the No Kings Act, say it “closes that accountability gap [by] providing for a clear statutory pathway to sue any official — federal, state, or local — who violates the Constitution.”

“ICE and Border Patrol have terrorized California communities with impunity. That ends today,” Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote the law, said in a written statement after Newsom signed it.

The bill’s opponents, which include dozens of California law enforcement agencies, argue that the law isn’t necessary, and that it will “promote second-guessing of a public employee’s actions made in good faith.”

The actions of immigration enforcement agents — including whether they are acting within their duties when they detain or kill someone, and whether they are following the laws of the state in which they’re operating — are at the center of court battles between California and the Trump administration.

The January fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting the Trump administration’s deportation program in Minneapolis, underscored the stakes for California Democrats who demanded more accountability of federal agents. Dozens of people have been injured in protests, or when the agents misidentify a person as a deportation target.

When an unarmed person in California is shot and killed by a police officer, the state attorney general can investigate the shooting under a 2020 program. Newsom signed a law that duplicates that legislation, but applies it to immigration agents who kill unarmed people.

The state program would face an immediate legal problem stemming from an 1890 U.S. Supreme Court case that forbids states from prosecuting federal law enforcement officers acting in the course of their duties. That case played a critical role earlier this year when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a California law Newsom signed last year that tried to compel masked federal agents to identify themselves.

Other new California laws focus on conditions in immigrant detention centers. Detainees have complained of filthy drinking water, among other issues — most of them confirmed by investigations by counties and civil liberties groups. The private detention facilities provide water for sale in their canteens, but the prices were significantly marked up.

One of the new laws extends California’s authority to investigate private detention centers, a power it uses for annual reviews of medical care inside the facilities.

Here are some of the immigration-related bills Newsom signed into law:

• Civil lawsuits against federal agents: Senate Bill 747, the so-called No Kings Act, allows civil lawsuits against officers over alleged civil rights violations.
• Banning electric shock gloves: Assembly Bill 2760 prohibits federal agents from using electric shock gloves. Lawmakers advanced the bill quickly in response to reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought thousands of the weapons.
• Civil rights for detainees: SB 942 declares a bill of rights of people held in immigrant detention centers, including access to healthcare and healthy food.
• State investigations: SB 1399 extends a law that empowers state agencies to investigate conditions in immigrant detention centers.
• 911 calls: SB 423 requires government agencies to release details of emergency calls coming from immigrant detention centers. The bill was prompted by CalMatters’ reporting on alleged sexual assaults at Otay Mesa Detention Center.
• Access to state property: AB 1807 prohibits immigration agents from using state-owned property.
• Shooting investigations: AB 1806 requires state prosecutors to investigate shootings by federal immigration agents.
• Crowd control: SB 937 forbids law enforcement agencies from using flash-bang grenades to break up protests.

CalMatters reporter Wendy Fry contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A federal judge has now granted Paramount’s settlement agreement with 12 states that sued over the company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, allowing the companies to soon close their $81 billion mega merger.

In a Wednesday order, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that the proposed consent decree was a “fair, reasonable, and good faith approach to address the competitive harms” alleged by the states’ lawsuit. Paramount previously called the antitrust challenge the last hurdle ahead of closing its Warner merger, and signaled that it aims to close its Warner acquisition as soon as early October.

Shortly after Martínez-Olguín’s ruling on Wednesday afternoon, the company announced that Ynon Kreiz — current chief executive at toy giant Mattel — will join Paramount on Oct. 5 and serve as co-CEO alongside David Ellison of the combined company.

A Paramount-Warner marriage will bring together two of Hollywood’s last five legacy studios. HBO Max, a library full of titles including “Harry Potter” and cable networks such as CNN will also find themselves under the same roof with CBS, the likes of the “Top Gun” franchise and the Paramount+ streaming service.

Top prosecutors from 12 states — led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta — sued in July with an initial goal of blocking the merger altogether. They alleged a Paramount-Warner combo would “extinguish competition” and lead to fewer choices for consumers, particularly movie theatergoers and cable customers.

Last week, the states agreed to settle these claims through new commitments from Paramount, including pledges to increase film production in the U.S. over the next five years, commit millions of dollars to a fund aimed at supporting workers displaced by the merger and establish new editorial monitoring of CNN and CBS.

When announcing the deal on Sept. 21, Bonta said the settlement was about “protecting people’s careers, the lives they’ve built here in California, the livelihoods their families rely on,” while maintaining it was not a vote of support for the merger.

Many critics of the tie-up, however, quickly decried the deal as capitulating to corporate pressure and said the proposed terms were too weak. Martínez-Olguín didn’t greenlight the terms right away — maintaining at a hearing on Thursday that the court isn’t merely a “rubber stamp” on a settlement of this kind and that she, like many others, still had questions.

The judge granted outside critics of the settlement — including members of the Block The Merger coalition and the League of United Latin American Citizens — a brief window to share their opposition with the court through amicus briefs. She also instructed Paramount and the settling states to respond to a letter from Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who called for a more thorough review of the deal.

By Wednesday’s order, however, she concluded that the hopes for settlement terms to go further “do not rise to the level of legal violations upon which the Court can reject the parties’ negotiated resolution.”

The Block the Merger coalition on Wednesday maintained the settlement was a “toothless” deal.

“Allowing the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to move forward with no meaningful structural remedies will cost jobs, mute creativity, weaken independent journalism, and damage our First Amendment rights,” Block the Merger said in a statement. But, the coalition added, “if there is one discernible benefit to the approval of this corporate takeover, it’s that people are now wide awake and paying attention –- and their anger is not going to fade away.”

The Writers Guild of America, which had filed its own suit shortly after the states in July, also reached a settlement agreement with Paramount last week — concluding that it couldn’t continue its legal fight alone.