The Brief

You know the feeling…tossing and turning because it’s just too hot to sleep.

“We need to actually cool our bodies down to sleep,” said David Eisenman, professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA who studies the health impacts of extreme heat. "So if we can't cool our bodies down, our sleep becomes disturbed. That then has effects on our heart, on our immune system, on our psychology. Our inability to sleep is bad for our bodies and our minds.”

Eisenman said emerging research is showing hotter nights may even increase the risk of stroke, particularly in older adults.

“The idea here is that we think that persons are getting dehydrated at night because it's too warm in their homes. This increases the thickness of their blood and this leads to greater risk of blood clot formation and then strokes occur,” he said.

Eisenman added that research is also showing that the overnight temperature associated with the biggest risks is around 80 degrees, but the threshold will be different for different people, and can depend on other factors such as levels of humidity.

Some feel the nighttime heat more than others

Wealthier households can often protect themselves from this worsening trend because they live in better-insulated housing and can afford to run air conditioning for longer periods of time.

But lower-income communities largely home to people of color are disproportionately affected by both the urban heat island effect and climate change that's contributing to hotter nighttime temperatures. Historically redlined communities with fewer trees and more concrete and pollution are particularly at risk.

The risk of health impacts caused by disturbed sleep is particularly high for people without air conditioning (some 20% of homes in Los Angeles have no AC, for example).

Even for those who do have air conditioning, many with lower or fixed incomes can’t afford to run it long or at all. And as more people get pushed out of safe housing — largely due to unaffordable rent and housing costs — and onto the streets or into mobile homes that can’t sufficiently keep heat out, the health affects will only grow.

Eisenman said better public health messaging around the specific affects of nighttime heat is needed.

The cooling center at the Mid Valley Senior Center in Panorama City will have extended hours through the weekend.

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Ashley Balderrama

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“We've seen a lot of good messaging around high temperatures and it always sort of assumes daytime temperatures….here's where you can go during the day if it's really hot,” Eisenman said. “We aren't dealing with the nighttime temperatures in any of our risk messaging that comes out of governments or public health departments, so this is really an important gap in our approach. We need to think about how can we provide resources for nighttimes.”

Longer-term solutions include increasing shade and cool roofs and pavement in the hottest neighborhoods, as well as access to energy-efficient cooling technology such as heat pumps. Cutting global carbon pollution is key to preventing the issue from getting worse.

What hotter nights say about climate change

The science is clear that greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere by human society are driving hotter and longer heat waves around the world, including here in the Southland.

And nights are warming nearly twice as fast as days.

That trend is hitting home in Southern California, not just because it’s summer and hotter temperatures are exacerbating the urban heat island effect, said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) San Diego office.

It’s largely human-caused climate change, he said.

“The heat waves are getting worse. The heat waves are containing a little bit more moisture. So that means your nighttime temperatures are also warmer,” Tardy said.

Warmer air holds more moisture, Tardy explained. As the climate crisis makes heat waves hotter and longer, additional moisture is sucked into the atmosphere. (That also dries out vegetation faster, raising the risk for more severe wildfire).

To make matters worse, more moisture in the atmosphere can also mean more humid weather — that’s what we’re seeing in the current heat wave, Tardy said. While that humidity can keep daytime temperatures lower, it makes nighttime temperatures higher, he added.

“It's kind of a lose-lose scenario because your daytime is not quite as hot, but your nighttime is equally or even slightly warmer,” Tardy said. “So we're going to be spending a lot of our time in the 80s and 90s in a lot of these inland locations, even more than what we just recently did [in the late June and early July heat waves].”

More humidity makes it even harder for our bodies to cool down, since sweating isn’t as effective, further exacerbating the risk of heat illness.

How far from normal are we? 

Tardy said here in the Southland, nighttime temperatures in the mountains and deserts have been 4 to 8 degrees above normal for this time of year — for example, Big Bear has seen nighttime temperatures 6 degrees above normal for July. Palm Springs has been 8 degrees above normal, with nighttime lows averaging 87 degrees, instead of the long-term average for this time of year of 79 degrees.

The coast is starting to see above-normal nighttime temperatures now too, as the effects of May gray and June gloom have burned off.

“The trend is that you're having these anomalies repeat,” Tardy said. “Now you're not always first place, you're not always second place, but it's just like looking at sports — if a team wins the division six out of 10 years, there's a definite trend.”

Six out of the last 10 years have ranked among the top 10 highest for average night temperatures in Palm Springs, for example, Tardy said.

“Whenever you have anomalies, you don't want them to be showing up year after year or month after month,” he said. “Part of how we look at climate change is what's driving the overnight temperatures. It's not just urban heat island, it's also a planet or atmosphere that potentially has more moisture. And the reason why it has more moisture is because it's overall the air mass is warmer. So warmer air will hold more moisture.”

The Food and Drug Administration intends to get tougher on vaccine approvals, as top officials raised concerns about the risk of COVID vaccines for children.

Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency would no longer "rubber-stamp new products that don't work," claiming it made a "mockery of science."

Makary's comments came the day after FDA's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, told his team the agency would change its annual flu vaccine framework, update vaccine labels to be "honest," and make other changes to how it reviews vaccines, according to contents of an internal email reviewed by NPR and reported on first by a PBS News Hour correspondent and later by The Washington Post.

Prasad wrote that the FDA would also no longer authorize vaccines for pregnant women without stricter requirements. And for pneumonia vaccines, manufacturers will have to prove they reduce disease rather than show they generate antibodies. He also raised questions about giving multiple vaccines at the same time, which is standard practice.

The changes could make it much more difficult and expensive for vaccines to get approved, further limiting the availability of vaccines, which are considered among the safest and most effective tools for protecting people against infectious diseases.

While all vaccines carry some risks, most public health experts argue the current process for vetting vaccines before marketing has long assured that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks. Studies required after vaccines are approved and surveillance systems, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), also flag potential safety issues once vaccines are in use.

FDA says an analysis links COVID shots to some deaths

Makary said on Fox News that 10 children had died from the COVID shot during the Biden administration, but did not offer specifics about how the FDA came to that conclusion. Millions of children have received the vaccine. 

Officials with the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the COVID analysis and changes to vaccine review standards.

According to the FDA email from Prasad, he told the agency's biostatistics and pharmacovigilance team to analyze 96 reported deaths from 2021 to 2024, and they determined 10 children died "after and because of" the COVID vaccine. But Prasad said the true number was likely higher.

Dr. Paul Offit, who directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a text message that Prasad has not shared the evidence that these vaccines killed 10 children.

"Because he doesn't provide any evidence, he is asking us to trust him on an important issue," Office said. "All this will do is scare people unnecessarily. At the very least, he should provide all the evidence he has so that experts in the field can review it and decide whether he has enough data to prove his point."

Dr. Jesse Goodman, a professor at Georgetown University who held Prasad's job at FDA from 2003 until 2009, said in an email that the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccine approval, has been "recognized globally as a gold standard regulator." Goodman defended "immunologic endpoints like antibody levels" for the accelerated approval of pneumonia and influenza vaccines. He said science supports their use and they are confirmed with studies after approval: "These approaches have helped provide children and adults with timely access to safe and effective vaccines, saving many lives."

Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, reviewed the email from Prasad and challenged his statement that "COVID-19 was never highly lethal for children." Osterholm also questioned the FDA's latest analysis of adverse event reports attributing the 10 deaths to COVID vaccines.

"Prasad's email is filled with factual mistakes and misrepresents both the severity of COVID in children (1597 deaths in 2020-2022) and how the US responded to the first signals of possible vaccine-associated pediatric deaths in May 2021," Osterholm wrote in an email to NPR.

"While Prasad's email notes 10 such deaths, these cases have never been presented for review by the medical and public health communities or published in the medical literature," Osterholm continued. "Given the record of this Administration to misrepresent scientific data regarding vaccines, until these cases have been reviewed by an expert third party, like the National Academy of Science[s], we can not accept the fact they are vaccine-associated deaths."

Surveillance system collects vaccines reports

The FDA makes public data from the VAERS surveillance system co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But FDA cautions, "it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause and effect relationship has been established." In his email, Prasad wrote that "with case reports, causality is typically assessed on a subjective scale. In this scale ranging from certain to unlikely -- certain, possible/likely, and probable are broadly considered as related to the product."

Makary said on Fox News that when the COVID shot was first rolled out, it was "amazing" for people at high risk of coming down with severe disease, but things have changed.

"Back in 2020, we saw a reduction in the severity of illness and lives saved, but now recommending that a 6-year-old girl get another 70 million COVID shots – one each year for the rest of her life – is not based on science. And so we're not going to just rubber stamp approvals without seeing some scientific evidence."

The claim is the latest move by Trump administration health officials questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and how the government has regulated them. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned vaccines.

The FDA restricted eligibility for the updated COVID vaccines in August after announcing the agency planned to require more evidence about the shots' safety and effectiveness going forward.

CDC committee will meet to review vaccine policies

The FDA email on vaccine policy comes just before the CDC convenes a crucial two-day meeting of that agency's influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Dec. 4-5. The committee is in the process of conducting a major review of how children are inoculated against dangerous infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.

Many public health experts are concerned the committee will upend the childhood vaccination schedule. It could move to delay the timing of some inoculations, space out vaccinations and call for the reformulation of some vaccines. Taken together, the moves could result in fewer children getting protected and the resurgence of once-vanquished diseases.

Asked about Makary and Prasad's claims that the COVID vaccine caused deaths among 10 children, Moderna, whose COVID vaccine is approved for children as young as 6 months old, pointed to a statement it made in September. The company says that multiple published, peer-reviewed studies from a variety of sources show its shot is safe and that it is "not aware of any deaths in the last year or pertinent new information from prior years."

Moderna says it monitors its vaccine's safety along with regulators in more than 90 countries. "With more than one billion doses distributed globally, these systems — including in national health systems across Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the U.S. — have not reported any new or undisclosed safety concerns in children or in pregnant women."

Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Copyright 2025 NPR

California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Afghan immigrants, many of them now grappling with the Trump administration’s abrupt visa and asylum freeze.

Friday’s announcement by the White House followed the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington, D.C. a couple days earlier by a suspect who had immigrated from Afghanistan.

In Orange County, where many Afghans have settled as their immigration applications pend, local officials are gearing up to help them navigate the change, even as guidance is scant from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Jose Serrano, director of Orange County's Office of Refugee and Immigrant Services, said the goal is to provide the “most up-to-date information so they can continue on towards their pathway towards citizenship here in the United States.”

“The Afghan population in Southern California, specifically in Orange County, is one that is really important to the DNA of who we are,” Serrano said. “Let's continue to stay together and strong and reimagine a place for belonging for everyone.”

As they await more information, Serrano advised visa and asylum seekers to:

• stay on top of updates from USCIS and the Department of Homeland Security
• contact their local office of immigrant and refugee affairs
• connect with organizations that work closely with immigrant and refugee populations, such as resettlement agencies and legal aid groups

The pull of OC

Nearly 200,000 Afghans are in the U.S., with 39% of them residing in California, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Hundreds of Afghan households have settled in Orange County, Serrano said, making it one of the state’s hubs for Afghan immigrants alongside San Diego and Sacramento.

Serrano said a big draw for immigrants to Orange County is Little Arabia in Anaheim, a regional destination for Middle Eastern food, culture and community life.

Serrano, who spent more than a decade working with immigrants at World Relief Southern California and the state's refugee programs bureau, said entering Afghan homes means being offered large meals. One family had prepared a whole feast for a Time Warner cable worker, he recalled.

“They didn't understand why that person couldn’t stay to dine with them,” he said. “That’s the type of people that are here in Orange County, folks who are so committed to being a part of civic engagement, to connecting alongside other communities.”

Visa applications in limbo

Serrano said many of the Afghans who resettled in the county are Special Immigrant Visa holders, a program created for Afghan nationals who helped the U.S. government during the war in their home country.

That program has now been frozen by the State Department.

Serrano said immigrants who entered the U.S. as refugees and have since become green card holders could see their cases reopened.

Joseph Edlow, who leads USCIS, said the new immigration measures will last until “we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

For Serrano, the current screening process is rigorous and involves multiple organizations aside from USCIS, such as the U.S. Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and counterterrorist organizations.

Applicants undergo health screenings and multiple fingerprinting appointments, he said.

“They're constantly doing an assessment to verify that you are a good-standing citizen,” Serrano said. “One of the things that I think we should be very proud of within the United States is that there is an in-depth screening process for anyone who is seeking a protection.”

STOCKTON, Calif. — Four people were killed and 10 wounded in a shooting during a family gathering at a banquet hall in Stockton, sheriff's officials said Saturday.

The victims included both children and adults, said Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County sheriff's office. Early indications "suggest this may have been a targeted incident," Brent said during a news conference at the scene.

Local officials said the suspected shooter has not been caught and pleaded with the public for help. Detectives were still working to identify a possible motive.

"If you have any information as to this individual, reach out immediately. If you are this individual, turn yourself in immediately," San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said during a news conference.

The shooting occurred just before 6 p.m. inside the banquet hall, which shares a parking lot with other businesses. Stockton is a city of 320,000 about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Sacramento.

"Families should be together instead of at the hospital, standing next to their loved one, praying that they survive," Mayor Christina Fugazzi said.

Authorities did not immediately provide additional information about the conditions of the victims. Officials said earlier that several were taken to hospitals.

Copyright 2025 NPR

California’s battleground House districts might get the lion’s share of national attention for their role in deciding which party rules Congress’s lower chamber.

But in a handful of California’s deep blue districts, an intra-party battle over the future of the Democratic Party is brewing in the wake of grim losses during last year’s presidential race.

In Sacramento, Napa County and Los Angeles, three younger challengers are arguing that Democrats need to give voters fresh faces with bold new ideas to energize the party’s base, rather than aging incumbents who are entrenched more in Washington insider culture than in their districts.

“Status quo politics isn’t going to protect our communities,” said Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang, 40, who is running against 10-term Rep. Doris Matsui, 81. “We need leaders who can meet the moment. And that’s why I decided to step into the ring.”

Vang is the first formidable primary challenge that Matsui has faced in the two decades since the congresswoman won her late husband’s seat in 2005. Former Rep. Bob Matsui held that seat for 26 years prior.

Two other senior California congressional Democrats have also attracted primary challengers. Rep. Mike Thompson, 74, of Napa County, a Vietnam veteran vying for his 15th term, faces a challenge from Eric Jones, 34, a former San Francisco venture capitalist.

And farther south, former Obama and Biden White House climate aide Jake Levine, 41, is challenging Rep. Brad Sherman, 71, of Los Angeles, who is seeking his 16th term. All three challengers have vowed not to take corporate PAC money as their incumbent opponents do.

Around California and across the country, younger challengers argue that Democratic incumbents in safe districts take their seats for granted since they so rarely receive serious challenges. That false sense of security, Vang said, results in out-of-touch members who have fewer incentives to show up in their districts and talk to voters.

Part of meeting the current moment, Vang argues, means taking “bold and courageous” positions on important issues, such as speaking out forcefully against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Vang said she wants Matsui to more strongly condemn immigration raids that have torn Sacramento families apart and violated residents’ due process rights. She was disappointed that Matsui’s denunciations centered around the unsanitary conditions of the John E. Moss federal building, where advocates said detainees were being held without access to proper hygiene, rather than on the separation of families and indiscriminate detentions.

“For the past several months we’ve had neighbors, people in our community that have been kidnapped by ICE, taken by ICE, and Doris hasn’t spoken up against that at all,” Vang said. “And especially as someone who was born in the internment camps, I would think she would be on the front lines to speak out on the issues.”

Matsui was born in the Poston War Relocation Center internment camp in Arizona, where her parents were incarcerated during World War II.

“That’s nonsense,” said Roger Salazar, a campaign spokesperson for Matsui, noting local news coverage of Matsui’s statement against an immigration raid on a South Sacramento Home Depot and her attempt to access an ICE detention facility. “She needs to watch the news.”

Matsui in October hosted a rare in-person forum only after constituents spent months calling on her to meet with them. Angry Sacramentans also hosted an empty-chair town hall in March to highlight Matsui’s absence, not even two weeks after House Democrats did a nationwide blitz of showing up in Republican districts to prove a similar point.

Some senior leaders are sticking around

Calls for generational change within the Democratic Party, while not new, have increased significantly as the party works to find its footing after 2024. The dynamic played out first in internal House leadership races earlier this year, where younger members like Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach leapfrogged more senior colleagues to lead powerful committees.

Rep. Thompson, Matsui’s congressional counterpart in neighboring Napa County, said his constituents have stopped him in public and asked him to run again.

“I can’t tell you how many times I had people tell me, ‘I sure hope you’re gonna stick around. We need you more now than ever,’” Thompson told CalMatters. “No one’s asked me to retire. No one has suggested that I’ve been there too long. And everyone knows that not only am I capable, but I’m in good shape.”

In Sacramento, Vang, the eldest of 16 children whose Hmong parents came to the United States as refugees, said she has the utmost respect for the Matsuis and their long history of service.

Still, she has called on Matsui to follow the examples of House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — who announced last month that she would retire next year and not seek reelection to a 21st term in Congress — and Rep. Nydia Velazquez of New York, who told The New York Times that “now is the right moment to step aside and allow a new generation of leaders to step forward.”

But Matsui remains steadfast that she has much more work to do in Congress, such as overseeing groundbreaking for Sacramento’s new I Street bridge and securing federal funds for flood prevention and wildfire recovery, and said she will stay in the race. She emphasized that the deep relationships she’s built over 20 years in Washington are critical to her ability to deliver on those projects.

“It’s important to not only have advocates, but have people who understand that once you’re in Congress, you have to learn how to govern, too,” Matsui said. “We cannot just throw everything out and start over again.”

As for Vang’s intra-party primary challenge, Matsui said anyone is “perfectly free” to run against her at any time. “I’m fine with that. This is our democracy. This is America.”

But she insisted that her record would reinforce to voters how hard she works.

“I show up every single day working for Sacramento,” Matsui said, “whether it’s in Sacramento or in D.C.”

The risk of Dem-on-Dem challenges 

One risk of primarying veteran members of Congress is the loss of institutional wisdom, said Gale Kaufman, a Sacramento-based Democratic strategist, particularly with the Trump administration testing the limits of the law and boundaries of power.

“Especially when you’re up against stuff like this, which we’re not familiar with, breaking every norm you could possibly imagine,” Kaufman said, “having some of those people around is not a bad thing.”

Even among younger Democrats, there’s not wide consensus that incumbents are out and young challengers are automatically in. Evan Cragin, president of the Sacramento County Young Democrats, echoed Kaufman’s point that a blanket policy of “vote out all incumbents over a certain age” could be counterproductive.

While the Young Democrats have yet to endorse anyone in the congressional races, Cragin said he is personally conflicted about who to support.

“I don’t know who I’m going to vote for,” Cragin said. “It’s nice to have a strong member at the moment, but also, there is part of me that wants to make sure we support our younger members. And Councilmember Mai Vang is a very strong challenger. She’s very community oriented.”

Those who support intra-Democratic challenges argue that they drive important dialogue and force candidates to clearly articulate their ideas and earn voters’ trust, rather than taking their support as a given. Incumbent Democrats across the country could benefit from primary challenges as the party soul searches, said Alex Niles, vice president of political affairs for the Sacramento County Young Democrats.

“We need to have a reckoning and figure out, ‘What does it mean to be a Democrat? What do we stand for? What do people want and who are we serving?’” Niles said.

Unsurprisingly, many incumbents and political strategists disagree, denouncing intra-party primaries as expensive distractions that deplete safe members’ fundraising that could otherwise support colleagues in more vulnerable districts.

“The circular firing squad in blue districts hurts our ability to win swing districts,” Rep. Sherman told CalMatters in an interview.

Candidates in safe districts often support their more vulnerable colleagues to gain clout within the party, whether through direct transfers of campaign cash or by urging their donors to channel their contributions to more contested races. Sherman argues that a competitive intra-Democratic primary forces a safe incumbent to invest more in their own reelection rather than helping flip battleground seats. He repeatedly mentioned tight races in Iowa and Ohio that he views as critical to Democrats reclaiming the House.

“What happens in swing seats may determine whether America’s a democracy,” Sherman said. “Democrats have got to win seats in Iowa, and we can’t do it unless the strong Democrats in Bel Air and Brentwood and Malibu are focused on Iowa.

“It’s hard to get people in Brentwood to focus on Iowa if there’s a real race in Brentwood.”

He added that while it matters which Democrat represents California’s 32nd Congressional District, the Los Angeles-area seat that he’s represented for almost 30 years, it’s “not life or death for our democracy.”

Sherman’s challenger Levine, who outraised the congressmember last quarter and appears to be the frontrunner in a crowded field, agrees that Democrats need to flip GOP-held seats to reclaim control of the House. But at the same time, if their party wants to retain the majority and win back disaffected voters, Democrats need to prove they’re focused on lowering the cost of living and improving their quality of life, in addition to preserving democracy.

After leaving Los Angeles to pursue a climate policy career in Washington, D.C., Levine moved back home earlier this year to help his mother after she lost her house — his childhood home — in the devastating Palisades Fire. He was frustrated by the disjointed local and state response to recovery, and he had hoped Sherman would step up and coordinate the response.

“The things that people want to hear about, and the things that I’m trying to talk about, are the issues in the district,” he said. “Those issues really are not about the composition of the House. They’re not about Washington inside-the-beltway questions of power.”

Instead, Levine wants to see his member of Congress answer the kinds of questions that families like his own think about every day — “Can I afford my rent? Can my kids stay in the same neighborhood where they grew up, and even in the same state, because it’s so prohibitively expensive?”