The Brief

Curled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass by a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon inadvertently took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media on August 5 by a fellow Olympic athlete, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke finals, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.

In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on subpar sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village — namely, heat. Last week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his alfresco nap stirred an already roiling pot of concerns around the impact of extreme weather on this year’s summer games. (The Italian Swimming Federation denied that Ceccon’s nap was related to conditions in the Olympic village.)

In the weeks leading up to the Paris Olympics, weather forecasters and athletes alike feared that the games could become the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 Tokyo events, where high humidity and 90-degree-Fahrenheit days led 100 athletes to seek medical attention for heat illnesses; even more nonathletes followed suit. A punishing heat dome settled over Paris on July 29, lasting for four days and spiking temperatures to highs of 97 degrees F as the first week of the games were underway.

During the scorching weather, national teams rushed to keep their athletes in tip-top shape, renting air conditioners for their bedrooms in the Olympic Village and offering them ice vests. The Australian Olympic Committee even invested in state-of-the-art monitors to record on-the-ground temperature, radiation, humidity, and wind speed, resulting in personalized recommendations to help their athletes manage heat risks. For some outdoor sports, like tennis and soccer, new protocols for additional rest breaks were triggered as temperatures surpassed predetermined safety thresholds.

Climate change is driving up the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Rings of Fire II, a report on Olympic heat released before this year’s games began on July 26, found that average summer temperatures in Paris have warmed by 3.1 degrees Celsius, or about 5.6 degrees F, since 1924, the last time the City of Light hosted the games.

“Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, an academic project that studies climate change impacts on meteorology, on July 31. “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3 degrees C cooler and much safer for sport.”

Just a few degrees can make a big difference for athletes. In warm temperatures, the body is less able to shed the heat it generates, which can impact performance and health: A 2023 study of marathon and racewalking athletes found that a 2.7 degrees F increase in core body temperature could result in up to 20 percent slower performance times. And as the body tries to cool down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms are pushed too hard, they lead to dangerous health risks — such as dehydration, organ failure, and heart attacks. And the longer a heat wave drags on, the more deadly the impacts become.

Extreme heat affects a wide range of sports. The Rings of Fire report, a collaboration between the British Association for Sustainable Sport and the Australian climate advocacy group Frontrunners, documented stories from elite athletes across 15 sports on how extreme temperatures had impacted their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe said he was “practically paralytic” after a heat stroke that left him vomiting and motionless during a competition in Budapest. For Yusuke Suzuki, a Japanese racewalker, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.

“Going forward, I don’t see this being any less of a problem,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who contributed to the report. While Tipton is encouraged by the changes he sees taking place across sports to protect athletes and fans from extreme heat — such as water breaks and cooling stations — he also cautions against losing sight of the importance of mitigating the direct cause of climate change: humans burning fossil fuels.

The organizers of the Paris Olympics would seem to agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee made unprecedented sustainability promises like slashing the greenhouse gas emissions of recent Olympics in half. But, along with a 60 percent plant-based menu, the decision to cut energy use by building Olympic Village dorms with geothermal cooling, rather than air conditioning, has become a main source of athletes’ complaints about the accommodations. Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, told The Guardian that the fans offered in dorm rooms weren’t enough. “You can feel it is too hot in the room,” she said.

Japan's Kaito Kawabata lies down after competing in the men's 4x400--meter relay at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

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Antonin Thuillier

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“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023 about the decision to eschew air-conditioning. But as temperature projections and concerns climbed, eventually, the organizers caved and ordered 2,500 air-conditioning units for teams willing to pay for them. Some, like the Korean swim team, have opted to stay in hotels. Unequal access to such comforts have raised concerns of two-tier games.

Experts agree that air-conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Being able to cool down at night is a significant part of managing heat risk,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heat waves often come with higher nighttime temperatures that prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical strain of competition can increase risks.

There are other ways that athletes can mitigate the dangers of competing in high temperatures.

“The best thing you can do is prepare ahead of the games by acclimatizing your body to the conditions,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on how global warming is changing sports. She says that each sport comes with unique risk factors, such as time spent on exposed pavement, or duration of play. But for any athlete to properly sync their body before competition, she says, exercising in the heat is crucial. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it pushes the boundaries of when they feel the impacts. It makes a big, big difference.”

Hannah Mason, a public health lecturer at James Cook University and lead author of a 2024 paper analyzing the impacts of extreme heat on mass sporting events, said that other factors — including the availability of shade and existing health conditions — should be considered in athletes’ heat preparedness plans. For example, Paralympic athletes often use equipment, like wheelchairs, that can trap more heat.

Britain's Jack Draper cools himself with a bag of ice during a break in play.

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Tipton, Orr, and Mason all agreed that, eventually, the escalating dangers of climate change will leave Olympics organizers with no option but to change the timing of summer games to happen during months with cooler weather. The good news, Tipton says, is that teams and athletic federations have started taking the risk of heat more seriously. “We’re seeing the nature of sports change in terms of the rules, regulations, and permissible cooling strategies,” he said.

According to Mason, more top-down rulemaking on safety limits will be crucial for managing risk. With the high stakes and pressure of competition, she says athletes are often unwilling to back out even when conditions become dangerously hot.

“If it’s a few degrees too hot, they’re not going to back out,” she said. “We need policies to fall back on so that we don’t put these decisions in the hands of athletes that have spent their whole life training for that event.”

The labor market is finding its footing.

U.S. employers added jobs for the third month in a row in May, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department. Job gains for March and April were also revised significantly higher.

Restaurants and bars added 48,000 jobs last month as summer approached, while construction companies and local governments were also hiring. Healthcare, which has been a steady source of employment gains, added another 35,000 jobs.

Banks and insurance companies, meanwhile, cut jobs. The financial sector overall cut 22,000 jobs in May.

Overall, the report shows hiring has picked up steam this spring after anemic job growth last year. Over the last three months, employers have added an average of 188,000 jobs each month.

Meanwhile, the workforce grew slightly in May as 83,000 people began working or looking for work, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.

Despite the uptick in hiring, employers are not having to offer big wage increases to attract workers. Average wages in May were up just 3.4% from a year ago. That's likely not enough to keep pace with inflation — with prices for the 12 months ending in April up 3.8%.

Prices have been rising rapidly since the U.S. launched its war with Iran just over three months ago. And now, with signs that the job market is stabilizing, the Federal Reserve, under new chair Kevin Warsh, is likely to focus its attention on getting inflation under control.

That makes it unlikely the central bank will cut interest rates any time soon, despite pressure to do so from President Trump.

The Labor Department is set to report on May inflation next week, providing Fed policymakers with another key data point ahead of its next policy meeting in mid-June.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Young California voters are on track to make up a larger share of the 2026 primary electorate compared to the 2022 primary, according to an analysis of ballots counted so far by Political Data Intelligence.

As of Thursday, voters aged 18–34 accounted for 13% of all ballots counted. That’s a 4 percentage point increase from the 2022 primary at this time.

One factor is that there are nearly 2 million more people in this age group registered than in 2022.

Paul Mitchell, a vice president at PDI, said this is due in part to a change in policy that automatically re-registers California voters when they move from county-to-county.

“Young people have benefited from their registrations staying alive when they are constantly shuffling around the state,” Mitchell said.

Yet, the returns show that while more young people are voting, their turnout rate is still slightly lower than in 2022. (There’s a longstanding trend of young people voting at lower rates than older voters.)

Mitchell said that may change by the time all the ballots are counted.

 ”Those late voters were very heavily young people,” Mitchell said. “That could mean… if this pattern continues, a higher final turnout for young people.”

High school seniors vote for the first time in South L.A.

Among those late voters was a group of students at South L.A.’s Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School. About 40 seniors walked with their teachers Tuesday afternoon to a Washington Park vote center to cast a ballot for the first time. Nearly two dozen additional students signed up as poll workers.

The school’s government and economics teacher, Joel Snyder, has made civic engagement a key part of the curriculum since the school opened in 2006.

“ I think about how to make the pitch to them that democracy is important in their lives and is a public good,” Snyder said.

Here’s what the students said motivated them to vote, edited for length and clarity. LAist is not publishing their last names because some discuss the immigration status of their family members.

Jose, senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Katherine, a senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Mariana Dale

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Natalia, senior Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Mariana Dale

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Martha, senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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A group of students waits for their turn to vote at Washington Park in the Florence Graham neighborhood.

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California is notoriously slow at counting ballots, which means it may take a while before voters have results for some significant races. A big one is the L.A. mayor's race with Nithya Raman gaining some ground on Spencer Pratt in the race for second place.

Here are five other races we're watching.

Complete results for L.A. County and Orange County >>

L.A. City Council, District 9

Jose Ugarte maintains his lead ahead of Estuardo Mazariegos as of Thursday night. The two leave four other Latino candidates far behind in this race.

For the first time since 1963, L.A.'s District 9 will not be represented by a Black councilmember.

L.A. County Sheriff

Incumbent Robert Luna and former sheriff Alex Villanueva are holding on to their places in the two top spots. Luna maintains a significant lead — about 20 percentage points — over Villanueva.

If you're getting déjà vu, that's because the two went head-to-head once before in the 2022 General Election.

L.A. County Measure ER

Voters are still on track to reject L.A. County's attempt to raise sales taxes by half a percent.

The increase was expected to have generated $1 billion to backfill funding gaps left by federal cuts to Medi-Cal.

Orange County Board of Supervisors, District 5

Incumbent Katrina Foley is still falling just short of regaining her top spot from Diane Dixon. Unless Dixon receives more than 50% of the votes, the two will face off in the November election.

U.S. House, District 32

Incumbent Rep. Brad Sherman and Republican Larry Thompson are likely to square off in November for the race to represent District 32 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Sherman maintains a tight lead.

District 32 spans from the western San Fernando Valley to the coastal cities.

Tracking your ballot

You can track the status of your ballot through California's BallotTrax website.

If your mail-in ballot has any problems (like a missing or mismatched signature), your county registrar must contact you to give you a chance to fix it.

Ask us a question

A potent carcinogen may have spread to communities as far as nine miles downwind of the Eaton and Palisades fire burn zones during debris clean-up, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature.

A team of researchers has been studying the air pollution effects of clearing the remains of more than 16,000 homes and businesses destroyed in the 2025 fires.

Scientists with UCLA and UC Davis drove through Altadena and Pacific Palisades in an electric vehicle with mobile air monitors periodically over about seven months after the fires. They measured nanoparticles of hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6, within the cleanup areas. Paint, auto parts, electronics and fire retardant are possible sources, but more study is needed to understand where the chromium came from, the researchers said. They also detected other airborne metals, including lead and arsenic.

The researchers used computer modeling to understand how far those airborne particles may have spread beyond the immediate burn zones. About 3 million people live in the areas that could have been exposed, according to the scientists’ models.

The highest concentrations of nanoparticles — particles less than 1/1,000th the width of a human hair — were measured in March 2025, about two months into the debris removal effort in both burn zones. But the toxicity declined as time passed.

“ The good news is that some of those toxic metals, they were converted back to less toxic forms over time,” said Michael Kleeman, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis and lead author of the study. “So in the months after the wildfire, the threat from this sort of decayed away.”

In communities outside the burn zones, concentrations diluted further as the plume moved downwind, Kleeman said. By eight months after the fires, the researchers measured that heavy metal concentrations had fallen to background levels for the L.A. basin.

The research highlights how “even after the fire is over, the danger isn't gone,” Kleeman said.

An aerial view of properties cleared of fire debris in Altadena in July 2025.

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Cleared lots in the Palisades Fire burn zone stretch into the distance.

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Qian Weizhong

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How concerned should you be? 

The researchers and outside experts emphasized to LAist that the study’s findings do not prove widespread contamination of homes, businesses or the environment.

“ I hope we can get a message of caution out there, but not panic,” said Kleeman.

Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University post-disaster environmental risk researcher who was not involved in the study, said the research is far from proving what, if any, harm to human health could occur, especially because no indoor testing was carried out.

“Drawing a line from street-level detections to indoor exposure, without confirming that the [chromium-6] outdoors entered homes at levels posing health risks, is a significant leap,” he said.

Whelton, who carried out soil testing in the L.A. fire burn scars, said he worries the paper could needlessly sow fear because so many open questions remain. He has argued for funding and establishing more comprehensive contaminant testing at the individual household level in the wake of such destructive fires — the most definitive way to know your personal risk.

“The bottom line: detecting nanoparticles in outdoor air does not mean harm occurred to 3-plus million people living and working inside buildings,” Whelton told LAist.

The average levels of chromium-6 detected in the air during debris cleanup in March were well below limits set for workplaces by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, but above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency long-term screening levels for homes, according to the study.

Still, those comparisons are imperfect because the particles measured were far smaller than what’s used for current health standards — meaning they can more easily travel throughout the body, Kleeman said.

“We don't know for sure what the concerning level should be,” he said.

Workplace standards, for example, are set for healthy adults working eight-hour shifts, “rather than for sensitive populations such as young children, pregnant individuals, older adults, or people with chronic illness,” said Jun Wu, an environmental health scientist and professor at UC Irvine’s School of Public Health, who also was not involved with the study.

More comprehensive study is needed to get at what true exposures may, or may not, have occurred, the Kleeman and outside researchers emphasized.

“This is a single, novel finding based on limited sampling, with the downwind reach estimated by modeling,” Wu said, “so broader monitoring is the natural next step.”

Where the nanoparticles may have spread

The broadest potential plume was from the Palisades Fire, spreading as far as the southern San Fernando Valley to the north and Beverly Hills and West Hollywood to the east. Kleeman said computer modeling of prevailing winds show the plume being pushed toward central L.A.

“Santa Monica, Venice and moving toward central L.A. took the brunt of the plume,” Kleeman said.

Prevailing winds didn’t spread the plume quite as far in communities near the Eaton Fire, with modeling showing northeast Pasadena being the primary community affected.

A map from the study showing the ZIP codes where a airborne chromium-6 may have spread during debris removal.

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Courtesy UCLA / UC Davis

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Many unknowns remain about the public health effects of catastrophic fires in urban areas — and how far those risks may drift beyond the burn zone.

“More work is needed to understand how widespread and persistent these particles were, how exposure varied by location and cleanup activity, and what the health risks were for nearby residents,” said Sina Hasheminassab, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the study.

Additionally, the study raises questions about how to better protect people’s health not only during, but also after destructive urban fires, said Wu.

“Much of our attention goes to the smoke during the active fire, but this study points to the cleanup and recovery phase,” she said. “This time window deserves just as much attention as the fire period itself.”

For example, some survivors whose homes survived never left during debris removal — some cited concerns about not being able to afford another place to stay without upfront insurance payouts, as well as worries about looting.

The study notes that workers in the burn zones faced the highest risk.

“Based on our field observations, many workers in the debris cleanup zone did not wear masks despite California requirements to provide approved air purifying respirators to workers,” the researchers wrote.

Crews remove wildfire debris on hillside property in Pacific Palisades last year. Researchers note in a recent study that many workers they saw weren't using respiratory protection.

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Charles Delano

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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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Survivors push for policy to protect public health after wildfires

Nicole Maccalla’s home in Altadena was damaged but ultimately survived the Eaton Fire. She and her two teenagers moved back in nearly six months after the fire, while debris removal was ongoing. Her daughter’s school nearby was also reopened just a month after the fires.

“ I know I was exposed. I know my kids were exposed,” Maccalla told LAist. “I'm not really sure what to do with that, to be honest.”

“Our entire community is really now guinea pigs,” she added. “It’s deeply concerning.”

Nicole Maccalla, with her kids, Seb and AJ. Their Altadena home survived the Eaton Fire but suffered serious smoke damage.

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Courtesy Nicole Maccalla

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Maccalla, a data scientist and member of Eaton Fire Residents United, helped guide ongoing research by scientists like Kleeman to better understand the levels of contamination after the fires.

She said this study is a warning.

“ I think in the future, we need to move a little slower in fire recovery. The goal should not be speed. The goal should be health and safety,” Maccalla said. “We rushed it, and I hope that we learn from this mistake.”

She and fellow survivors see some hope in a new bill they helped inform. AB 1642, or the Wildfire Environmental Safety and Testing Act, is making its way through the California Legislature.

The bill, written by Assemblymember John Harabedian, would establish the first statewide health standards for testing and cleaning up debris in and outside standing homes, schools, businesses and other structures after a wildfire.

Maccalla urged fellow survivors worried about the results of this study to prioritize caring for their mental and physical wellbeing.

“The stress of all of this is just going to be an added component that will be another contributor to us getting sick long term,” she said. “So many of us are still in survival mode. It's time, I think, to start taking care of ourselves a little bit.”