Topline:
Firefighters continue to make progress in containing the massive Hughes Fire that broke out Wednesday near Castaic Lake, growing to more than 10,396 acres and forcing mass evacuations.
What we know so far: The Hughes Fire broke out Wednesday off Lake Hughes Road near Castaic Lake. It was 56% contained by Friday.
Keep reading... for more on evacuations and weather conditions.
This is a developing story and will be updated. For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
Firefighters continue to make progress in containing the massive Hughes Fire that broke out Wednesday near Castaic Lake, growing to more than 10,000 acres and forcing mass evacuations.
Around 38,000 people remain under evacuation warnings even as containment has reached 56%.
The Federal Aviation Administration has also issued a Temporary Flight Restriction in the airspace above the fire, meaning people cannot fly drones in the area.
The fire started shortly before 11 a.m. on Lake Hughes Road near Castaic Lake and burned through hundreds of acres within minutes. In the first three hours of the fire, 5,000 acres burned.
3 hour time-lapse of the #HughesFire that has grown from 500 to over 5,000 acres.pic.twitter.com/C63X5ICYmD
— Hexdline (@HexdlineNews) January 22, 2025
— L.A. County Fire Department (@LACoFDPIO) January 22, 2025
The National Weather Service extended a red flag warning in the area until 10 a.m. Friday — with a high wind advisory in place until 2 p.m. Thursday.
The smoke from the fire prompted alerts about poor air quality in Ventura County for Camarillo, Fillmore, Moorpark, Oxnard, Piru, Santa Paula, Simi Valley and Ventura. Parts of L.A., Riverside and San Bernardino counties also are under smoke and windblown dust and ash advisories.
Evacuation warnings have been issued for several areas in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Caltrans reopened both sides of the 5 Freeway Wednesday evening after closing lanes between Grapevine Road and State Route 126.
Area school districts will reopen most schools Friday after closing Wednesday and Thursday.
“After conferring with the fire department battalion chief and reviewing the latest air quality reports… we are happy to report that it is safe for our students and staff to return to school tomorrow morning,” the Castaic Union School District wrote in a statement.
Superintendent Bob Brauneisen previously said in a statement to families and staff that poor air quality and the need to assess facility safety extended the closures, which affected about 2,000 students.
William S. Hart Union High School District said in a statement that it will reopen all campuses except for Academy of the Canyons, which is on the campus of College of the Canyons and currently serving as a command center. The closures earlier in the week affected about 5,000 students.
The Saugus Union School District told LAist in an email that all campuses will be open. The district previously closed its offices and three schools in mandatory evacuation and evacuation warning zones, affecting nearly 2,500 students.
Los Angeles Unified schools in the San Fernando Valley limited outdoor activities such as recess, sports and lunch Thursday. Schools “particularly impacted by air quality” may release students early, the district wrote in a statement.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's officials moved 476 people from the Pitchess Detention Center, located in the evacuation zone.
Einer Rivera, a spokesperson for the department, said those jailed were taken to North County Correctional Facility.
That facility is also within the evacuation zones. Sheriff Robert Luna said the department is prepared to pivot to Plan B if needed.
"The Plan B that they would be being transported to other facilities around the county and they would be transported by any means possible," he said. "We do have buses that are on the way up there."
Check out LAist's wildfire recovery guide
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Topline:
Another woman came forward Tuesday to accuse former California Congressman Eric Swalwell of sexual assault. This comes after previous sexual misconduct allegations resulted in Swalwell ending his campaign for governor, and resigning from his seat in Congress.
The details: Model and fashion software entrepreneur Lonna Drewes said in a news conference that Swalwell offered to help her make connections to build her software company. But Drewes said on their third meeting in West Hollywood in 2018, she believes he drugged her glass of wine.
Her words: “When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated, and I couldn't move my arms or my body,” Drewes said. “He raped me. He choked me, and while he was choking me, I lost consciousness, and I thought I died. I did not consent to any sexual activity.”
What’s next: Drewes’ attorney, Lisa Bloom, said they would be filing a report to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department immediately after the news conference. Bloom said they would turn over texts, journal entries, photographs and other corroborating evidence to aid with a criminal investigation.
Swalwell’s response: In a statement posted Tuesday on X, attorney Sara Azari said Swalwell "categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him."
The statement continues: " These accusations are false, fabricated and deeply offensive — a calculated and transparent political hit job designed to destroy the reputation of a man who has spent 20 years in public service."
Topline:
More than one third of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, according to a June 2025 Pew Research study. People are not only deploying AI chatbots for everything from planning trips to doing homework assignments — they are also having fun impersonating them.
Fake AI chatbot: The website Your AI Slop Bores Me — a fake AI chatbot — has only been around for about a month. The users of the site know their questions will be answered by humans. But its creator, Mihir Maroju, said it's already received more than 25 million unique visitors and nearly 280 million total hits. "People are spending hours on the site," the 17-year-old high school graduate in Puducherry, India said in an interview with NPR. "I didn't really expect it to be so addictive."
Humans, not algorithms: As with real AI chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, anyone can submit a request for an image or information by typing it into the youraislopbores.me interface. But in this case, the response doesn't come from an algorithm — just another human. The site forces its human users to approximate the speed at which a machine would return a response; there's a 75-second time limit. So drawings, created with a mouse or finger on a trackpad, have a necessarily slapdash look.
The website Your AI Slop Bores Me takes its name from a meme people on social media use to criticize AI-generated content. The site — a fake AI chatbot — has only been around for about a month. But its creator, Mihir Maroju, said it's already received more than 25 million unique visitors and nearly 280 million total hits.
"People are spending hours on the site," the 17-year-old high school graduate in Puducherry, India said in an interview with NPR. "I didn't really expect it to be so addictive."
As with real AI chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, anyone can submit a request for an image or information by typing it into the youraislopbores.me interface. But in this case, the response doesn't come from an algorithm — just another human.
More than one third of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, according to a June 2025 Pew Research study. People are not only deploying AI chatbots for everything from planning trips to doing homework assignments — they are also having fun impersonating them.
"Someone asked me to draw a bat eating a strawberry," said San Francisco-based cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, author of the chatbot-oriented graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, of her interactions on youraislopbores.me. "That was really fun." The site forces its human users to approximate the speed at which a machine would return a response; there's a 75-second time limit. So drawings, created with a mouse or finger on a trackpad, have a necessarily slapdash look.
In addition to responding to queries, Kurzweil said she's also enjoyed asking questions through the site. "I asked someone what they were reading. They said they were reading Twisted Hate, but they liked Twisted Games more." (Kurzweil said the exchange inspired her to look these titles up — they're part of a romance series by Ana Huang.)
With its old-school Comic Sans MS font — a staple of websites in the late 1990s and early 2000s — the cartoonist said Your AI Slop Bores Me inspires nostalgia for a time when the Internet was, for the most part, a lively, friendly place.
"I do think that people are reaching a point of frustration with the Internet being flooded with non-humans," Kurzweil said. "So I think people are having fun reclaiming some of the magic of the early Internet, just for the little joy of connection."
Because the digital landscape has changed a lot since the late 1990s, Your AI Slop Bores Me's administrators said they have implemented tools that try to flag and filter out harmful or illegal contributions. "We had a lot of spam and people exploiting loopholes in the site," Maroju said. "Of late, we haven't had those issues.
The users of the site know their questions will be answered by humans. If its URL doesn't make this clear, the two tabs users can select from on the homepage — "human" and "larp as ai" (which means humans get to "Live Action Role-Play" as AI) — certainly do.
But some parts of the AI-bot-dressup universe, such as Ben Palmer's brand of comedy, operate under different rules.
In a deadpan, 2023 skit on YouTube, the Nashville-based comedian talks about a fake ChatGPT website he set up not long after the real ChatGPT took off.
"Sometimes people end up on the website thinking that they're writing to the actual ChatGPT. But they're writing to me," he explains. Palmer goes on to describe his back and forth with a user in China — where the actual ChatGPT has been banned since 2023 — who unwittingly finds themselves on the comedian's fake version:
"They asked me to write an article on global climate change. And I tried to tell them that this isn't the real ChatGPT; it's a joke. And they wrote back and said, 'This is no joke.' And I gave them the address to the real ChatGPT, and said, 'I'm too lazy to write an article.' And they said, 'I need your help.'"
Palmer goes on to explain how he asks the real ChatGPT to write the requested article, which he then sends on to the user. He finally uses AI to translate the text, also at the user's request, into Chinese.
In an interview with NPR, Palmer said he set up a bunch of fake AI text and image generation sites with URLs very similar to the names of the real AI websites. He says some users would get angry when they realized they were being pranked by a human. But others played along. "They would keep going because they were now being entertained," he said.
The comedian said most of his sites have been pulled down from various platforms. He admitted there's a dark side to disguising himself as a bot. For example, he has declined to fulfill requests for sexually explicit content.
Palmer said his aim is to remind people that the Internet should be a messy, vibrant place — not one overrun by soulless corporations. "I want to see how people react when they think that they're talking to an AI and it goes off the rails," he said. "Sometimes they might surprise you."
"As more and more people embrace AI, it's naturally starting to show up across pop culture," said ChatGPT maker OpenAI in an email to NPR. "We love seeing how people are bringing ChatGPT into their daily lives, and the humor that comes with it is part of what makes that so fun."
San Francisco-based angel investor Brianne Kimmel, who has backed several AI agent startups, concurs.
"Humans pretending to be AI — that's great sketch comedy. But it doesn't mean we're going to use the technology less," Kimmel said. "It just means we recognize that there's a very clear language that's evolving around how we communicate with bots that's distinct from how we communicate with each other."
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
LA28 will award billions in Olympic contracts for the 2028 Games. City officials are worried that local businesses won't get a slice.
What's happening: Some L.A. city council members say a new procurement plan released by Olympic organizing committee LA28 could end up leaving out businesses in the city of Los Angeles. The plan pledges to award 75% of its spending to local businesses, but defines local as L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
Why it matters: L.A. is the official Olympic host and the financial backstop for the Games. City council members say business owners in the city should benefit the most from the money flowing into the Games. The Olympic contracts are worth up to $4 billion in total, according to LA28.
What LA28 is saying: LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover says LA28 will give L.A. city businesses preferential treatment when awarding contracts, but that focusing exclusively on businesses in the city of L.A. would be fiscally irresponsible.
Read on… for why the dispute is yet another sign that the relationship between city government and the private Olympic organizers.
The Olympic and Paralympic Games will cost billions of dollars to put on, and lucrative contracts will be up for grabs to provide things like cleaning services, construction, catering, and IT services for the month-long spectacle.
L.A. public officials want that money to stay local, but many of them say a new procurement plan released by Olympic organizing committee LA28 could end up leaving out businesses in the city of Los Angeles.
"You could have a scenario where no L.A. business does any business with LA28," Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said at a council committee meeting Tuesday.
That's a problem for the city, which is the official Olympic host and the financial backstop for the Games. City Council members say business owners in the city should benefit the most from the money flowing into the Games. The Olympic contracts are worth up to $4 billion in total, according to LA28.
The dispute is yet another sign that the relationship between city government and the private organizers of the 2028 Olympics is fraying. In recent months, the two sides have clashed over an overdue agreement about what services the city will provide for the Olympic Games, and the city's potential financial exposure.
LA28's plans for Olympic contracts raises the perennial question about the coming Olympic Games: who in the city will actually benefit from the mega-event that will take over the region in the summer of 2028. It also indicates the limits of the city's ability to influence LA28's decision-making.
John Reamer, who leads the city's contracts department, said Tuesday that his staff did not review the procurement plan before it was released, and questioned if the relationship between the city and LA28 was a true "partnership."
"[I believed] that LA28 would allow us to give input, and they would take that input, and we would discuss that input and we would agree upon that input and it would be part of the plan," he said.
LA28 says it's aiming to keep 75% of its spending in the Greater L.A. area, and put 25% towards small businesses. The report says it will prioritize "hyperlocal" businesses in the city of L.A., but makes no explicit promises. Instead, it identifies "local" as anywhere in L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
At a council committee meeting on the Olympics Tuesday, multiple members criticized that plan as too broad — pushing LA28 to instead make guarantees to businesses in the city of L.A.
" Los Angeles stands alone in terms of its commitment, its investment and the amount of risk that we're bearing," Harris-Dawson told LAist. "We think every possible avenue ought to be pursued to make sure you leave the people whole, if not better, off, than they were before this started."
LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover told the council Tuesday that LA28 would give L.A. city businesses preferential treatment when awarding contracts.
"When all else is equal between two competing suppliers, we will prioritize City of L.A. suppliers," he said.
Hoover said that focusing exclusively on businesses in the city of L.A. would limit competition for those contracts — and that he wouldn't commit to a plan that would limit LA28's ability to secure the best contract that would be financially responsible.
"If I focus solely, first and foremost, on the city of L.A. for small business, then I am artificially reducing the pool of competition, placing greater risk on the city taxpayers and placing greater risk on the backstop of the city of L.A.," Hoover said.
Council president Harris-Dawson pushed back.
"We'd rather you pay nominally more to a business in the city, than to save $25," Harris-Dawson said. "If you just go for a straight, 'We want the cheapest person in the five-county area,' I can tell you already, you're going to be using a bunch of businesses where the land is cheap and there's no regulation."
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez echoed those concerns, saying that the minimum wage and cost of living in L.A. are higher — meaning that businesses in Los Angeles may charge more.
"The city of L.A. is the financial back-stop to everything that you are doing. And I don't think that has resonated or permeated through you or this whole board that I just frankly don't trust" he said. "We have to go to our constituents and say that we are fighting for them to make sure that they're going to get as much business as they can out of this event."
The dispute over opportunities for local businesses represents one of many areas where the city and LA28 are at odds.
An important agreement that will dictate which services the city of Los Angeles will provide and how it will be reimbursed is more than six months late. Last week, city councilmember Monica Rodriguez penned a public letter warning Hoover that the Olympics could "bankrupt" the city if that agreement doesn't include adequate protections for the city.
The major concern is who will pay security costs for the Olympics, including LAPD overtime.
The federal government has allocated one billion dollars to security costs for the mega-event, and has put the Secret Service in charge of security planning. Despite those plans, city officials are concerned about who will be left with the bag if the federal funding doesn't come through, or if it doesn't cover all of the city's security costs.
Rodriguez warned that if it isn't changed, the current draft agreement could leave L.A. vulnerable to spending hundreds of millions even if LA28 turns a profit.
Expensive ticket prices are also a sore spot for the city council. Olympics tickets cost up to $5,500 and the cheap $28 tickets went fast in the locals-only pre-sale. Every ticket included a 24% service fee.
Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky asked Tuesday how much of the service fee would be going to LA28 — a figure that Hoover said he didn't know.
"The tickets are not affordable," she said. "A dollar, which would have actually helped us do some of the things that we know we need to do to get ourselves ready as a city for the Olympics, feels like a drop in the bucket compared to a 24% surcharge."
Topline:
A key tool of the U.S. spy community will expire this month without action from Congress. The government says the intel gathered through the provision — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA 702 — underpins a majority of the articles in the president's daily intelligence briefing and is a key asset in international counterterrorism and the fight against trafficking.
Concerns: But a number of lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, are concerned that FISA 702 allows for the federal government to spy on the communications of American citizens without a warrant, violating their constitutional right to privacy.
Why now: The program's 2024 authorization is set to expire on April 20 — unless Congress votes to renew it. Congress has always attached an expiration date to Section 702, which makes its renewal a recurring fight on Capitol Hill. Civil liberties-minded legislators of both parties have long been concerned that Section 702 enables illegal, warrantless surveillance of American citizens by the federal government. And unlike most issues in contemporary politics, the issue doesn't break cleanly along party lines.
Read on... for more about this surveillance tool.
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A key tool of the U.S. spy community will expire this month without action from Congress. The government says the intel gathered through the provision — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA 702 — underpins a majority of the articles in the president's daily intelligence briefing and is a key asset in international counterterrorism and the fight against trafficking.
But a number of lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, are concerned that FISA 702 allows for the federal government to spy on the communications of American citizens without a warrant, violating their constitutional right to privacy.
The looming fight to bolster the law's civil liberties protections is likely to be bruising — and the provision's advocates claim it could jeopardize national security.
Section 702 of FISA empowers U.S. intelligence agencies to collect and review the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside the United States without obtaining individual court orders.
Sometimes, foreign nationals communicate with people in the United States, leading to incidental collection of Americans' communications.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says the government uses the information collected through the program to protect the U.S. and its allies from foreign adversaries — including terrorists and spies — as well as to inform cybersecurity efforts.
"No one denies the immense intelligence value of Section 702," Stewart Baker, former National Security Agency general counsel, told Congress in January.
"The U.S. government recently credited the program with helping to disrupt several terrorist attacks here and abroad, identify the Chinese origins of imported fentanyl precursors, respond to ransomware attacks on U.S. companies, identify Chinese hackers' intrusions into a network used by a key U.S. transportation hub, and disrupt foreign government efforts to carry out kidnappings, assassinations, and espionage on U.S. soil. Those examples just scratch the surface," Baker said.
The program's 2024 authorization is set to expire on April 20 — unless Congress votes to renew it. Congress has always attached an expiration date to Section 702, which makes its renewal a recurring fight on Capitol Hill.
Civil liberties-minded legislators of both parties have long been concerned that Section 702 enables illegal, warrantless surveillance of American citizens by the federal government. And unlike most issues in contemporary politics, the issue doesn't break cleanly along party lines.
Prominent critics include Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio.
But, with a change in administration since the last renewal battle, some lawmakers have switched sides.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who previously voted against the renewal because of its lack of a warrant requirement to query information about Americans, told The Hill he thought reforms to the program were working.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., is working to rally his colleagues against a renewal — after voting for it in 2024.
President Trump supports an extension with no changes to the program.
"When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe. For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension," Trump wrote in a March post on Truth Social. "With the ongoing successful Military activities against the Terrorist Iranian Regime, it is more important than ever that we remain vigilant, PROTECT our Homeland, Troops, and Diplomats stationed abroad, and maintain our ability to quickly stop bad actors seeking to cause harm to our People and our Country."
That position is a major shift for Trump, who railed against the program in the past. Ahead of the last renewal vote in April 2024, during the Biden administration, Trump posted "KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."
A special court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), issues a blanket authorization each year that allows the government to collect information about any targets who fall within certain categories proposed by the attorney general and director of national intelligence.
The National Security Agency, National Counterterrorism Center, Central Intelligence Agency and FBI obtain that information directly from the U.S. companies that facilitate electronic communication such as email, social media or cellphone service.
The National Security Agency also collects communications "as they cross the backbone of the internet with the compelled assistance of companies that maintain those networks."
A massive amount of information is collected under Section 702 authority: There were 349,823 surveillance targets in 2025, up from about 246,000 in 2022. Targets could each have many records collected — think about the number of emails that hit your inbox each day — leading to a giant database of information.
In 2023, 60% of the president's daily brief items — a daily summary of pressing national security issues prepared for the most senior administration officials — contained Section 702 information, according to a government release.
It is also used extensively to combat weapons and drug trafficking — 70% of the CIA's illicit synthetic drug disruptions in 2023 stemmed from FISA 702 data, the document said.
Yes, under certain parameters that have been gradually narrowed over the nearly two-decade lifespan of the legislation.
Here are some of the reasons the government says it might search for Americans, as included in a public report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI):
No, the government does not need — and has resisted reforms that would require — a targeted court order to search for an American's information in corpus of material gathered under Section 702 authority.
Intelligence community and FBI advocates argue that a requirement to obtain a court order to query an American's information would be overly burdensome.
"I am especially concerned about one frequently discussed proposal, which would require the government to obtain a warrant or court order from a judge before personnel could conduct a 'U.S. person query' of information previously obtained through use of Section 702," then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in 2023, amid the last reauthorization fight.
"A warrant requirement would amount to a de facto ban, because query applications either would not meet the legal standard to win court approval; or because, when the standard could be met, it would be so only after the expenditure of scarce resources, the submission and review of a lengthy legal filing, and the passage of significant time — which, in the world of rapidly evolving threats, the government often does not have. That would be a significant blow to the FBI," Wray said.
Privacy advocates say that, as written, the FISA statute allows the government to spy on the communications of Americans and others in the U.S. without the permission of a court, in contravention of the privacy guarantees in the Fourth Amendment.
"The FBI — and every other agency that receives Section 702 data — routinely goes searching through that data for the express purpose of finding and using Americans' communications," according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program. "The government conducts literally thousands of these backdoor searches every year."
Lawmakers in support of reforming Section 702 share her concern.
"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is supposed to be about surveilling foreigners overseas. That way the government doesn't need a warrant," Sen. Wyden told The Lever. "But because so many of these targets are going to be talking to Americans, Americans get swept up in these searches, and that's what I want to have some checks and balances on."
Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, said in a video that his concerns stem from past privacy violations from the government: "The system was abused and they spied on thousands of Americans, violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution — and, well, it was a horrible situation."
Yes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court characterized the FBI's violations as "persistent and widespread" in a 2022 court document that recertified the 702 program.
Documented abuses, detailed in congressionally mandated transparency reports from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, include warrantless searches for a U.S. senator, journalists and political commentators, 6,800 Social Security numbers, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign and an FBI employee's family member, who the employee's mother suspected of having an extramarital affair. Anti-surveillance advocacy group Demand Progress put together a detailed timeline of major violations by the FBI and intelligence agencies, as identified by the FISC.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally prohibited from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the sole goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
More senior approval is required when searching for information connected to U.S. political or media figures. Moreover, information from queries cannot be used without court authorization to conduct criminal investigations of people in the U.S., unless the charges pertain to national security, death, kidnapping, serious bodily injury, or a handful of other serious crimes.
According to disclosures from the bureau, the number of searches for Americans has declined dramatically in recent years — from 119,383 queries from December 2021 to November 2022 to 7,413 queries in the same 2024-2025 window. Civil liberties advocates note that the full scale of searches can't be known — an October 2025 Justice Department watchdog report noted that a now-shuttered tool allowed untracked searches.
Copyright 2026 NPR
