The Brief

As Los Angeles firefighters push into their sixth day battling the still-raging wildfires, thousands of residents are beginning to survey the damage left behind in their communities.

Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and more than 150,000 residents are under evacuation orders as the city braces for more powerful winds which threaten to exacerbate the already devastating fires.

Last week, President Biden declared a major disaster in the area, opening up federal funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House says the funding is being used to provide people with services such as grants for temporary housing and low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses.

In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition, Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spoke with host Ayesha Rascoe about how this assistance is being used to help LA County residents affected by the wildfires.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee in November. Criswell says more than 24,000 people have already applied for assistance in California as a result of the L.A. wildfires.

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Mark Schiefelbein

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AP

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Interview highlights

You've seen a lot of disasters. What stands out about this one?

People have lost everything. When you look at a hurricane and a tornado, people have something that they can come sift through and try to find their memories. But here, they've lost the physical structure. But they've also lost so many of their memories, which makes this journey that they're going to have to go through that much more difficult in the coming weeks and months.

What sort of financial assistance is FEMA offering people who've lost their properties and possessions?

FEMA has a program called individual assistance, and it's designed to jump start the individual or family's recovery process. If they haven't registered already, they should register for assistance, and they can go to disasterassistance.gov.

And what they need to do too is contact their insurance company, because while our programs jump start the recovery process, we're not going to rebuild their home for them. So the insurance company is the biggest piece that may help with that. If they still have needs, we're going to work with our other partners, like the Small Business Administration or our philanthropic and our nonprofit partners, to help each of these families as they're trying to figure out what they're going to have to do next.

Do you know how many people have applied for FEMA assistance so far?

Over 24,000 have applied already, but we know that that number is going to continue to rise.

You talked about people trying to go to their insurance companies, but we know that a lot of people may not have insurance policies that cover fires. Is there anything that FEMA can do about that?

There's nothing that we can do as far as requiring the insurance company to stay in. What we want to be able to do is work with these communities as they rebuild and rebuild them in a way that makes them more resilient to future disasters so the insurance industry wants to stay there, but I just want to emphasize that we need people to still go to their insurance company and get something that shows that they're either underinsured or uninsured. If they are, it opens up their ability to access the other programs, and so it's a really important step to still reach out to them.

What about people who have evacuated but can't stay with friends or family? Are there temporary shelters?

There are a number of shelters around the area. But one of the programs that FEMA also has is we can reimburse them if they've been staying in a hotel. If you've stayed in a hotel, keep your receipts. Register for that assistance, and then we can help them get reimbursed for the costs that they've had in these initial days of just trying to stay safe and stay out of harm's way.

FEMA money also goes to local governments for recovery efforts. What's the top priority there right now?

For the rebuilding, the first thing that we're going to have to do is remove all of the damaged debris, right, all of the structures that have been destroyed. And so before we can start rebuilding roads and rebuilding homes, rebuilding businesses, we have to get that debris out of the way. That's one of the big steps that needs to start, which is why President Biden gave 100% of cost reimbursement to California for debris removal, as well as covering all of their emergency costs that they've had during the response to this. And then we're going to work with the state of California with what their priorities are to help them in their recovery process.

President-elect Donald Trump is claiming FEMA doesn't have enough money to respond to these fires. Is that true?

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On Monday, Los Angeles travels back in time. Well, sort of.

The Varnish, the famed speakeasy hidden behind a secret door at the back of Cole’s French Dip, will be reconstituted for one night only as part of a special pop-up at Firstborn in Chinatown.

(Meanwhile, Cole's itself will be open through the holiday season, with its last night of regular service planned for Dec. 31.)

The iconic bar, which shuttered in 2024 after a 15-year run, holds a special place in the hearts of many Angelenos, who believe it's where L.A.’s modern cocktail revival truly began. The event reunites three bartenders who all came up through The Varnish’s famously exacting school of cocktail-making. Kenzo Han (recently named Esquire’s Bartender of the Year) cut his teeth there before moving into roles that established him as one of L.A.’s most respected classic-cocktail technicians. Wolf Alexander and Miles Caballes emerged from the same pipeline.

One night only

Kenzo Han, bar director at Firstborn and former Varnish bartender, is hosting two fellow Varnish alumni for the Monday pop-up.

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Ron De Angelis

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Han is now Firstborn’s bar director, where he leads a tight, classics-leaning bar program. The restaurant sits inside Mandarin Plaza, where chef Anthony Wang turns out playful comfort dishes with Chinese and American influences. It’s a lively, unfussy neighborhood hangout just off Broadway, surrounded by neon, noodle shops and family-style restaurants.

The Varnish connection

All three bartenders trace their lineage back to Sasha Petraske, who, in 2009, co-founded The Varnish with Eric Alperin and Cedd Moses, the owner of Cole’s French Dip.

Petraske traded '90s flash for pre-Prohibition craft: fresh citrus over sour mix, precise technique over bottle tricks, elevating cocktails from party fuel to art form.

Miles Caballes brings his Varnish training back to the bar for one night.

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Courtesy Firstborn

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Wolf Alexander, another Varnish alum, demonstrates the precise technique that defined the speakeasy's approach.

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Courtesy Firstborn

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The Varnish became the city’s clearest expression of Petraske’s cocktail philosophy, where his playbook of precision, restraint and quiet hospitality took root on the West Coast. (Petraske passed in 2015.)

Han, Alexander and Caballes all trained in that environment, absorbing the Petraske rules of clean builds, tight technique and no-nonsense cocktails.

What to expect

For one night only, from 6-10 p.m., the trio will channel that tradition through a Varnish-style menu: curated classics only, no custom builds, with all cocktails priced at $20. Two featured drinks nod directly to the bar's lineage. The Spring Blossom — created at The Varnish — combines mezcal, French aperitifs, including Suze and Lillet Blanc, mole bitters and a grapefruit twist. Death & Taxes features scotch, gin, sweet vermouth, Benedictine (a herbal liqueur), Angostura and orange bitters, finished with a lemon twist.

On the food side, chef Anthony Wang is reviving his cult-favorite Blood Orange Chicken Sando ($20), served with radicchio, alongside a limited run of his Shanghainese-style McRib ($24) — a playful, sweet-and-sour riff built around tender ribs and “all the stuff” that made the original such a guilty pleasure.

The blood orange chicken sandwich at Firstborn from chef Anthony Wang.

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Ron De Angelis

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Expect a casual, walk-in-only atmosphere where guests can grab a seat at the bar and let the cocktail nostalgia wash over them.

Whether you were a Varnish regular or only heard the stories, this pop-up is a rare chance to see that style alive again — familiar faces, bespoke cocktails and the kind of muscle-memory bartending that defined an era of L.A. drinking culture. For newer drinkers, it’s a glimpse of the cocktail philosophy that shaped the city as we know it.

It’ll likely get busy early, and the food specials may run out fast — but that’s part of the charm. The Varnish’s legacy has always been about small rooms, sharp precision and moments you catch only if you’re paying attention.

In the city of Los Angeles, neighbors or homeowner groups who choose to fight approvals of new housing are required to pay a fee when filing an appeal.

Right now, that fee is $178 — about 1% of the amount the city says it costs to process the appeal. But that fee soon will go up.

On Wednesday, the L.A. City Council voted to increase the fee to $229 but rejected a proposal by the city administrative officer that would have raised the cost for appellants to more than $22,800, or 100% of the cost.

Some advocates for making housing easier to build argued the city should have adopted the higher fee.

“Appeals of approved projects create delays that make it harder to build housing and disincentivize future housing from being proposed,” said Jacob Pierce, a policy associate with the group Abundant Housing L.A.

At a time when L.A.’s budget is strained, Pierce said, if someone thinks a project was wrongly approved, “They should put their money where their mouth is and pay the full fee."

The City Council unanimously approved another new fee structure put forward by the city’s Planning Department.

While fees will remain relatively low for housing project opponents, developers will have to pay $22,453 to appeal projects that previously had been denied.

A November report from the city administrative officer said setting fees higher to recover the full cost of processing would have aligned with the city’s financial policies. Generally, fees are set higher when applicants are asking for a service that benefits them alone.

“When a service or activity benefits the public at large, there is generally little to no recommended fee amount,” the report said.

Pierce said he hoped a City Council committee would reconsider the higher fee proposal next year. With the city falling far short of its goal to create nearly a half-million new homes by 2029, he said the city needs to discourage obstruction of new housing.

“Slowing down the construction of housing is expensive for all of us,” Pierce said.

Los Angeles could become the first city in the U.S. to ban ink cartridges that can be used only once.

The L.A. City Council unanimously voted Wednesday to approve the creation of an ordinance that prohibits their sale. The move comes after more than a year of debate over the terms.

Why the potential ban

This builds upon the city’s effort to reach zero waste, including phasing out single-use plastics. You’re likely familiar with some of those efforts — such as only getting plastic foodware by request and banning single-use carryout bags at stores. Multiple plastic bans have been suggested, like for single-use vapes and bag clips, but now it’s ink’s turn.

The cartridges are tough to dispose of because of the plastic, metal and chemicals inside, according to the city. They’re also classified as regulated waste in the state because they can leach toxic substances into the environment, such as volatile organic compounds and heavy metals.

That poses a problem. L.A.’s curbside recycling program can’t recycle the cartridges, and while its hazardous waste program can take them, a significant portion end up in landfills.

Major printer manufacturers and some ink retailers have take-back programs for used cartridges so they can get refilled. However, L.A. Sanitation says there are certain single-use cartridges that don’t have recovery programs. These are usually cartridges that work with a printer but aren’t name brand.

How outlawing them could work

LASAN has spent months figuring out what a ban would cover — and it hasn’t been without pushback. The city’s energy and environment committee pressed the department back in September on how effective a ban would be.

Ultimately, the committee moved it forward with a promise that LASAN would come back with more details, including environmental groups’ stance, concrete data to back up the need and a public education plan.

The department’s current recommendation is that the ordinance should prohibit retail and online establishments from selling any single-use ink cartridge, whether sold separately or with a printer, to people in the city. Retailers that don’t follow the rules would get fined.

So what does single-use mean here? The ban would affect a printer cartridge that:

• is not collected or recovered through a take-back program
• cannot be remanufactured, refilled or reused
• infringes upon intellectual property rights or violates any applicable local, state or federal law

Any cartridges that meet one of these points would fall under the ban, though you still could get them outside L.A.

The proposed ordinance will go to the committee first while LASAN works on a public education plan.

If it ends up getting approved by the full council, the ban likely would go into full effect 12 months later.