The Brief

Nine months had passed since a wildfire destroyed Mark Johnson's southern California home, and he was still waiting for State Farm to pay his claim. Desperate for a resolution, Johnson asked the insurer in October to negotiate a settlement so his family could rebuild.

"I was on the verge of leaving money on the table," Johnson recalls, "just to get some kind of assurance of what we could move forward with."

Then, just before Thanksgiving, a State Farm representative told him the money was on its way.

"Needless to say, it was a huge relief," Johnson says, fighting back tears.

Johnson isn't alone. State Farm is California's top home insurer, and many customers around Los Angeles started to get checks in November after L.A. County announced it was investigating complaints about how the company had handled claims from last January's wildfires, says Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

For homeowners, the battle to collect insurance money after the Eaton and Palisades fires has exacerbated a grueling recovery that's far from over. As Johnson's case with State Farm languished, he had to scramble for other sources of funding to try to rebuild. Other fire survivors have gone into debt while bouncing between rental housing, as they wrangled with State Farm and other insurers over coverage.
The struggle Los Angeles residents have faced with insurers mirrors what's happening in communities around the United States. Years of rising premiums, due in part to threats from climate change, have added to the frustration with insurance companies.

"This is a national issue," Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, told reporters recently. He added, "the first commandment of the insurance industry is to pay as little, as late as possible."

Asked about its handling of insurance claims, State Farm sent NPR a statement from its website that says the company takes every claim seriously and tries to provide customers with appropriate coverage.

"The rebuilding process [in Los Angeles] is underway, but frustration with the pace is understandable," David Sampson, chief executive of American Property Casualty Insurance Association, an industry group, said in a statement to NPR. "Insurers have paid tens of billions of dollars to policyholders impacted by the fires, and that process continues."

Insurers face 'staggering' costs from LA fires

The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures around Los Angeles. They rank as the most expensive blazes ever globally, with $40 billion of insured losses, according to Swiss Re Institute, the research arm of reinsurance company Swiss Re.

Soon after the fires were extinguished, homeowners started to complain about how insurance companies were responding to the disaster.

"The price tag is so staggering for the insurers here that they are bringing strategies to try to limit the pain" they experience financially, says Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a national consumer advocate. "But it's nothing new under the sun what we're seeing."

In November, the Los Angeles County counsel opened an investigation of State Farm following reports from residents that the company delayed, underpaid and denied valid insurance claims. The county counsel's office declined to comment on the state of the investigation.

State Farm said in a statement on its website that the investigation is a distraction from its efforts to help fire victims recover.

Chen of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network says State Farm's alleged behavior was devastating for its customers.

"Around February or March, I realized that whether a family was recovering or not depended largely on which insurance company they were with, which was shocking," Chen says. "These are all people who have been paying [their] insurance premiums faithfully for 20 or 30 years, but only some of them were getting the benefits."

The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures around Los Angeles.

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The fight for insurance money has been especially hard for homeowners whose houses survived the fires but were contaminated with lead and other toxins from the smoke, according to survivors and consumer advocates.

"With total loss, it's a very clear-cut, 'OK, we either rebuild or we sell. And if we rebuild, it's this. And if we sell, it's that.' And we do not have any paths to take," says Krista Copelan, whose Altadena home suffered smoke damage and lead contamination in the fires. "It's 100% trying to figure it out, fighting every step of the way, having no clear-cut answers."

Until about Thanksgiving, Andrew Wessels says State Farm resisted replacing his family's personal belongings, like clothes and bedding, that had been contaminated with lead, insisting the items could be cleaned instead. As the one-year anniversary of the fires approached, Wessels still didn't know how much State Farm would pay to remediate lead contamination in his Altadena house. To get rid of all the toxic ash, Wessels says floorboards need to be pulled up and walls torn down.

"We're here almost a year later, and we haven't taken one step forward," Wessels said in December.

As they've waited, Wessels, his wife and two young children have moved a dozen times, and the family has taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

A lot of families are in similar situations. In Altadena, 65% of residents are still in temporary housing, according to a report this month from Department of Angels, a nonprofit that was set up to help victims of last year's fires. In Pacific Palisades, the number is even higher, with nearly three-quarters of residents still displaced.

As the recovery has dragged on, the toll on residents has grown, according to the Department of Angels report. Around half of respondents said they have depleted much or all of their savings. And about the same share said they worry about their mental health.

"I think everyone has been overwhelmed and drained for, literally, the past 11 months," Copelan, a State Farm customer, said in December.

'They're trying to make it difficult'

More than a thousand miles east, in Oklahoma, State Farm faces separate allegations that it has shortchanged policyholders. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, recently accused the insurer of running a scheme to deny and minimize payments for roof damage from hail and wind.

"Oklahomans are paying rising homeowners insurance premiums yet receiving less protection in return, as State Farm simultaneously pursues additional rate increases while allegedly escalating its claims denials and underpayments practices," Drummond wrote in a December court filing.

Drummond's complaint is part of a growing wave of frustration with insurers nationwide as rising premiums strain household budgets.

In Texas, Democratic state Rep. Mihaela Plesa recently told reporters that homeowners who are struggling to pay for insurance in her district near Dallas routinely have their claims denied.

"That's not insurance, that's extraction," Plesa said. "That's a system that's designed to pull maximum dollars out of Texas pockets and providing minimum protection when disaster strikes."

And in southwest Florida, Jessica Gatewood, a Realtor, told NPR that home insurance feels like "a scam."

"You pay into it for, like, 30 years, 40 years, and then you have to make a claim, and they don't want to pay you what you actually need," Gatewood says.

The insurance industry says it has been dealing with years of rising disaster costs that have forced companies to raise premiums and to limit coverage in some high-risk areas.

The cost of disasters is increasing in part because climate change fuels more-intense storms, floods and wildfires that damage and destroy property. Additionally, people continue to move to coastal regions vulnerable to hurricanes and to forested areas prone to wildfires. That means more property is in harm's way. Then, when homes get damaged or destroyed, inflation has made it more expensive to rebuild.
Robert Gordon, a senior vice president at American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the industry group, says Florida and other states have also been plagued by cases of what Gordon described as insurance "fraud" related to alleged roof damage from storms, which he says have contributed to rising costs.

Construction workers build a home in the Palisades fire zone on the one-year anniversary of the fires.

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In California, Mark Johnson hopes to move into his rebuilt Altadena home by fall. Reflecting on his ordeal with State Farm, part of him wonders if the insurer was just overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. But he can't shake the feeling that all of the delays he faced were intentional.

"They're just trying to push you away," Johnson says. "They're trying to make it difficult for you so that you won't ask for much, so you'll be happy with whatever you get."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Something unusual is happening with only a few days remaining before the U.S. men's national team opens its World Cup campaign against Paraguay: Tickets for the match are not sold out.

Although numbers fluctuate regularly, FIFA's ticketing website still shows 132 tickets left to sell for a game that's set to take place in Los Angeles on Friday. Meanwhile, resale platforms such as StubHub and SeatGeek — and FIFA's own marketplace — also show thousands of tickets on sale.

The number is even higher for Canada's opening match against Bosnia Herzegovina in Toronto on the same day, with 226 tickets left in FIFA's website and a high number of tickets available in resale markets.

That's unusual for high-profile events such as the opening matches of the World Cup — traditionally among the hardest to get tickets in the tournament. This year will feature three hosts in the U.S., Canada and Mexico — but so far only Mexico's opening match against South Africa on Thursday looks to be virtually sold out.

Ticketing experts widely agree on the reason: the prices. FIFA dramatically jacked them up for the tournament — especially for high profile games. The most expensive regular seats for the U.S. opener against Paraguay are priced at $2,735 — more than the final cost for the 2022 World Cup final — while the cheapest are $1,120.

Even President Trump said he wouldn't pay those prices.

"I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest with you," Trump told the New York Post in a recent interview.

The other two remaining games for the U.S. national have far fewer tickets available, given that prices are well below the ones for the opening match.

Prices have also fallen sharply

There are not only plenty of tickets left to sell — a number of them are also available below FIFA's face value. According to Ticketdata, which tracks prices across the resale platforms, the cheapest pair of tickets for the opening match for the U.S. and Canada was $951 as of Monday morning, while in FIFA's resale platform, tickets were available for as low as $690.

Other games across the 104-match tournament also still have many tickets left to sell — despite FIFA President Gianni Infantino's claim that every match is "already sold out." That's especially the case for lesser well known teams such as the Jordan against Algeria match, which still had hundreds of unsold seats in the FIFA's web site.

Demand for high-profile tickets such as Argentina and Portugal was far higher, however, with many of those games looking largely sold out.

Will the opening matches sell out?

Whether eventually the U.S. and Canada opening matches will sell out is hard to answer. Throughout the sales process, FIFA has closely guarded how many tickets it has actually sold and how many are left to sell, making it virtually impossible to gauge.

In addition, like other teams, FIFA could also sell tickets in other platforms including third-party ones such as SeatGeek, which can further obscure how many tickets are left to sell.

FIFA and organizers, however, are hoping for a surge in excitement that leads to a last-minute rush of sales for the opening matches as well as for those such as Jordan against Algeria that look far from being sold out.

Ben Shields, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says perceptions so far of the tournament have been shaped by how expensive tickets and travel has been for a tournament taking place across an entire continent.

That, he says, "does not seem to sit well with many."

But that could change.

"The hope or bet — for FIFA is that once the matches start — and the greatest players in the world compete for the most prestigious prize of them all, the sport as business lens will fade into the background and the World Cup will be seen and experienced as the enduring global institution that it is," Shields says. "We shall see."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Orange County’s top elected leaders on Tuesday are set to discuss what to do with $3.7 million recovered from the Andrew Do corruption scheme.

Do is now serving a five-year sentence in federal prison after he admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for awarding millions in tax dollars meant to feed needy seniors and people with disabilities in his district.

As part of the plea deal, Do acknowledged taking more than $800,000 in bribes through his two daughters, including a down payment on the house his youngest daughter Rhiannon Do later forfeited to resolve the criminal case. The scheme was first uncovered by LAist.

Federal officials recovered money from seized bank accounts and two properties connected to Do’s scheme — including the Tustin house his daughter bought.

The county Board of Supervisors is expected to publicly discuss plans for the recovered funds as they make decisions on the overall county budget at their meeting Tuesday. Public comment will also be taken.

What to do with the money?

Ahead of Tuesday’s discussion, Do’s successor said the funds should support residents of his former district who were deprived by Do and his alleged co-conspirators.

“For the past five years, every other district in Orange County has benefitted from the same community funds to support their cities, nonprofits, civic projects which strengthens their communities,” Supervisor Janet Nguyen wrote in a mass email to constituents last week. “However, our district went without because Do stole what belonged to our residents.”

“This money was stolen from the First District, and it must come back to the First District,” Nguyen added.

Nguyen was Do’s mentor and former boss more than a decade ago, before the two had a bitter falling out by 2016.

She encouraged residents of her district to send letters to the board and to speak during public comments.

Several county supervisors told LAist they supported a similar approach, one in which the recovered money goes to support the original intended recipients: seniors and people with disabilities in Do’s former district. Some supervisors have since advocated a broader view of how they’d want to use the money, noting that it was meant to address disruptions caused by the pandemic. Now that years have passed since the initial COVID-19 outbreak and lockdowns, some supervisors argue community needs have changed.

“We are so many years on, and the problems that money originally was to address (mostly Covid impacts) are now behind us, that I think we should have a discussion about how and where to spend it,” Supervisor Don Wagner told LAist via text message in March. “The budget is so tight and the needs so great across the county.”

Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said he’d work toward a fair distribution of the funds to best serve residents, with a focus on current needs.

“We will definitely consider what areas of the County were harmed by Do’s scheme, but we must also remember that the funds were intended for relief efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, a threat we are no longer facing,” he said in March. “We also need to consider addressing the current needs of residents with any dollars returned to the county.”

Millions more haven’t been recovered, at least yet

The amount of taxpayer money recovered so far is less than half of the $7.9 million Andrew Do admitted was diverted from specific meal contracts.

In a lawsuit seeking to recover funds, the county alleges the total amount lost in the scheme was even larger: $13.25 million. The county’s suit — scheduled for trial in November 2027 — covers all of the money Do gave to two nonprofits accused in the scheme, Viet America Society and Hand to Hand Relief Organization.

That leaves more than $4 million — and possibly much more — not yet recovered.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office noted they have an ongoing criminal case against Do’s alleged co-conspirator Peter Pham.

“Assuming we obtain a conviction in that matter, we would expect to seek restitution,” the spokesperson, Ciaran McEvoy, said.

Pham left the country on a flight to Taiwan in late 2024 and remains a fugitive, according to McEvoy. The case against him also includes charges against another alleged co-conspirator, Thanh Huong Nguyen, who led the Hand to Hand nonprofit.

Fans of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team swelled the stadium at the Great Park in Irvine on Monday to watch players practice for the first time since arriving at the training facility they’ll call home for the first round of the 2026 World Cup.

“Seeing them play right now… it was really cool to see how they play and how they practice,” said Mila Ran, who came with her mother from nearby Mission Viejo.

“This whole time she’s saying, 'I want to go shoot, I want to go play,'” said Mila’s mother, Farah Ran.

They were among about 6,000 people who won free entry to the practice in a lottery that received more than 30,000 entries, according to Irvine officials.

Fans got to the venue early.

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The team’s biggest stars — Christian Pulisic, Antonee Robinson and others — showed off their ball handling skills, honed over years of play on U.S. youth fields and overseas in professional leagues. Fans yelled, waved U.S. flags, held up homemade signs, and did the wave several times.

The U.S. Men's National Team at their only open-to-the-public practice session in Irvine.

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After the roughly 45-minute practice, some players walked to the sidelines to take selfies with fans and sign autographs.

The players know it’s going to take more than this, however, to live up to expectations during the World Cup.

US men's national team player Tim Ream signs an autograph for a fan.

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“To be in a position to train in front of these people today… is such a unique opportunity and one that none of us take for granted,” said backup goalie Matt Freese before the practice. “We’re working as hard as we can, as focused as we can to leave the next generation inspired."

The U.S. men’s team and their training staff will use the Great Park facility over the next several weeks as the team plays Paraguay on Friday, Australia on June 19, and Turkey on June 25 in group play at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

Jury selection began Monday for the trial of the man accused of igniting a fire that led to the deadly and destructive Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of structures.

Jonathan Rinderknecht is charged with one count of destruction of property by means of fire, one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce and one count of setting timber afire. He could face up to 45 years in federal prison.

How we got here

Prosecutors allege Rinderknecht set brush alight near a popular hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains on New Year’s Day, starting the Lachman Fire. Firefighters initially thought they put out the fire, but it remained smouldering underground for several days. High winds then brought the embers to the surface, sparking the Palisades Fire, which burned more than 23,000 acres.

What prosecutors say

In a court filing in April, prosecutors allege Rinderknecht displayed “extreme anger, indignation, and frustration” because he had to spend New Year's Eve alone. After driving around for Uber, Rinderknecht hiked up a popular trail and set chaparral alight in a clearing, according to prosecutors.

“He then started calling 911 multiple times, hiked down the hill, and fled the area in his car before firefighters arrived. Defendant returned to the area after he saw fire trucks arriving and then took videos of the firefighting efforts,” prosecutors wrote.

The filing also states that Rinderknecht threatened to burn down his sister’s home.

Prosecutors are expected to argue that Rinderknecht started the smaller blaze knowing it could turn into a bigger inferno.

U.S. District Court Judge Anne Hwang has previously expressed the government’s position could confuse jurors.

What the defense says

Defense attorney Steve Haney previously told reporters that prosecutors were trying to blame Rinderknecht for a fire that started days before the Palisades Fire.

"Well what about what happened between Jan. 1 and Jan. 7?" he asked. "Jonathan wasn't out there with a fire hose putting that fire out at the Lachman location, the Fire Department was. So why are they blaming him for whatever the Fire Department didn't do?"