The Brief

At around midnight on Jan. 1, 2025, Jonathan Rinderknecht started the Lachman Fire in the hills of the Pacific Palisades, according to a federal indictment released Wednesday.

The fire was kept small that night — contained to just 8 acres by helicopters and hand crews from the L.A. city and county fire departments. Six days later, as strong and dry winds whipped across the Santa Monica Mountains, its remnants erupted from within the ground, quickly spreading through nearby communities and taking on the name the Palisades Fire.

On Wednesday, officials revealed that Palisades, one of California’s most devastating blazes, was a “holdover fire.”

“Unbeknownst to anyone, the fire continued to smolder and burn underground, within the root structure of dense vegetation,” reads the criminal complaint filed against Rinderknecht in the Central District of California. “On Jan. 7, heavy winds caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground.”

Fires, mop up and reignition 

Typically, after a wildfire is extinguished, firefighters walk the area and “mop up.” They look for evidence that anything still is burning and extinguish it.

"It's a lot of man hours to do mop up,” said Derek Bart, a retired L.A. County Fire captain who described the process of spraying ash pits with water and digging up smoldering roots as exhausting and mind numbing.

And sometimes, tiny embers can be missed.

“There may be things that are not visible to your eye,” Bart said. “You can't smell them. It's not putting out any smoke.”

Bart said he’s seen that with oak trees, where embers will creep deep into crevices, slowly burn the interior of the tree over time before catching on fire again and spreading embers to nearby grassy areas.

LAist reached out to the Los Angeles Fire Department about the mop up after the Lachman Fire but did not receive a response before publication.

The science of smoldering

Big, visible flames are produced when fuel heats up to the point that it chemically degrades, and the vapor coming off mixes with oxygen and combusts.

Underground, smoldering combustion occurs as the surface of the fuel itself burns; however, due to lower oxygen levels, flames aren’t produced.

Rotten roots are particularly vulnerable to smoldering because they have lots of fissures, which expose surface area, and small amounts of oxygen can creep in and sustain the burning, said Scott Stephens, a fire scientist at UC Berkeley.

“It really is more common than I think people realize,” Stephens said.

It just doesn’t usually reignite another fire.

However, those bits of smoldering material can be as small as a quarter and continue to burn for months, sometimes through winter. Strong, dry winds can get things going again.

Something along those lines is believed to have happened during the Oakland Hills Fire in 1991, when a rekindle from an earlier, smaller fire kicked back up. Twenty-five people died and 400 homes were lost in that fire.

How do you know when it’s safe?

After fire crews mop up, be on the lookout for flames or smoke coming from the area for weeks or months after the event occurs.

And be ready to call the fire department, who can come back out and tackle the blaze.

Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live.

Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and receive — some very public help from President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing health insurance issues that had delayed his treatment with an FDA-approved cancer drug called Pluvicto.

Adams said he was able to book an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration's public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that "the odds of me recovering are essentially zero."

Adams' former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, and then read a statement from Adams who said, "I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can."

Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in 2023.

Dilbert, which at its height was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries, spawned a number of books, a video game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.

"I think you have to be fundamentally irrational to think that you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never answer succinctly why it is that I thought this would work," Adams told NPR's Weekend Edition in 1996. "It was about the same cost as buying a lottery ticket and about the same odds of succeeding. And I buy a lottery ticket, so why not?"

He said that he had "pretty much always wanted to be a famous cartoonist," even applying to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, as a pre-teen.

"I was 11 years old, and I'd filled out the application saying that I wanted to be a cartoonist," he said. "It turns out, as they explained in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist."

Turning to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clement School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.

Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working what he described in a blog post as a "number of humiliating and low paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, and commercial lender."

He then spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell — the California telephone company now owned by AT&T — in various jobs "that defy description but all involve technology and finances," as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he started drawing Dilbert, working on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 until 1995.

"You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle," he told NPR's Weekend Edition in 2002. "But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity."

Adams satirized corporate culture for decades 

Scott Adams works on his comic strip in his California studio in 2006. He announced in May that he was dying of metastatic prostate cancer.

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Dilbert revolves around its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his company's comically dysfunctional bureaucracy, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac dog named Dogbert.

"Dilbert is a composite of my co-workers over the years," Adams wrote on his website. "He emerged as the main character of my doodles. I started using him for business presentations and got great responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to."

Dilbert — with his trademark curly head, round glasses and always-upturned red and black tie — fights a constant battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch manager known only as Pointy-haired Boss.

Even after Adams quit his day job, he kept a firm grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with help from his devoted audience.

He included his email address on the strip and said he got hundreds of messages each day. Recurring reader suggestions ranged from stolen refrigerator lunches to bosses' unrealistic expectations.

"So they all, for example, say, 'I need this report in a week, but make sure that I get it two weeks early so I could look at it,'" Adams said. "Just bizarre stories where it's clear that they either have never owned a watch or a calendar or they are in some kind of a time warp."

Dilbert's storylines evolved alongside office culture, taking aim at a growing range of societal and technological topics over the years. In 2022, Adams introduced Dave, the strip's first Black character, who identifies as white — a choice critics interpreted as poking fun at DEI initiatives.

That ushered in an era of anti-woke plotlines that saw dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.

The comic strip was cancelled over Adams' comments

Adams didn't limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the "talent stack," combining multiple common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor and risk tolerance, in his case.

He ventured briefly into food retail at the turn of the millennium, selling vegetarian, microwavable burritos called Dilberitos. He published several novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe over the years.

Adams was open about his health struggles throughout his career, including the movement disorder focal dystonia — which particularly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through an experimental surgery.

And he opined on social and political events on "Real Coffee with Scott Adams," his YouTube talk series with over 180,000 subscribers.

His commentary, which often touched on race and other hot-button issues, led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in February 2023.

In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers whether they agree "It's OK to be white" (which is considered an alt-right slogan) — urged white people to "get the hell away from Black people," labeling them a "hate group." The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers across the country ditched Dilbert, and the comic's distributor dropped Adams.

The incident also renewed focus on numerous controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including about race, men's rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later said getting "canceled" had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.

Adams, in his final years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.

But he extended his "respect and compassion" to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis became public in May 2025.

The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live, saying he expected "to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer."

"I've just sort of processed it, so it just sort of is what it is," he said on his YouTube show. "Everybody has to die, as far as I know."
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Jan. 12, 2025.

Elected officials, school leaders and community advocates condemned federal immigration enforcement across Eastside neighborhoods on Monday, as families returned to school following the Los Angeles Unified School District’s winter recess.

Community members reported immigration activity in El Sereno, Eagle Rock and Highland Park. According to the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network, three street vendors were detained before 10 a.m. at York Boulevard and Figueroa Street in Highland Park, including a father of three LAUSD students who is the head of his household. The network also confirmed that another person was detained at Division Street and Cypress Avenue in Cypress Park.

Two additional people were detained near a commercial strip mall in El Sereno, according to Council District 14 spokesperson Alejandra Alarcon.

At a news conference in front of Eagle Rock Plaza, where federal enforcement vehicles were spotted earlier that day, attendees held signs that read, “Education not deportation,” and “ICE out of Eagle Rock.”

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose 14th District includes several Eastside neighborhoods, said the timing of the enforcement actions was particularly troubling.

“Let’s be clear about what happened today,” Jurado said. “Parents were taken, community members were taken, workers were taken and this all happened on the first day of school.”

Jurado acknowledged that households are losing breadwinners due to immigration enforcement, and urged families to seek support from her office.

LAUSD school board member Rocio Rivas represents District 2, which includes neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights, East L.A., El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Highland Park and Cypress Park. She said these areas have been heavily impacted by immigration enforcement over the past few months. She also denounced the recent deaths of Keith Porter and Rene Good, who were killed by immigration agents.

“The result is predictable and devastating. People are dying, families are being torn apart and being shattered and communities are traumatized,” Rivas said.

Some LAUSD families received an automated robocall on Monday informing parents that the district was aware of federal enforcement activity in the area.

On Monday, federal enforcement vehicles were also reported at the Home Depot in Cypress Park and Dollar Tree in El Sereno, according to the BHIRN. They were also seen at a Costco in Los Feliz and the Glendale Galleria, according to CD14 spokesperson Alejandra Alarcon

At the news conference, Jurado said the council district plans to launch a text alert service, similar to one used by Council District 1, to notify constituents about federal immigration enforcement activity.

Jurado also announced the creation of the Eagle Rock Development Task Force, which will work to ”make sure that development in our neighborhood lines up with our values,” she said.

The task force was created in response to a new Home Depot that is slated to take the spot of a former Macy’s in the Eagle Rock Plaza. Home Depot locations have often been sites of immigration enforcement operations targeting day laborers and street vendors.

“When your name becomes synonymous with the cruelty of federal enforcement, here in Eagle Rock, we say no more, not here, not in our community,” Jurado said.

Last year began with the costliest wildfires in American history, as a series of blazes tore across Los Angeles for nearly all of January.

A parade of other catastrophes followed: severe storms across the southern and northeastern United States, tornadoes in the central states, drought and heat waves through the western expanse of the country.

All told, the U.S. notched 23 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025, which claimed 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damages, according to a new analysis from the research group Climate Central. Only 2023 and 2024 recorded more of these events, and 2025 was the 15th consecutive year with an above-average number. (Since 1980, the annual average has been nine events costing $67.6 billion. In that time, the country tallied 426 total billion-dollar disasters, costing more than $3.1 trillion.) Last year was the ninth most expensive on record for billion-dollar disasters.

The clear signal here is climate change: It’s worsening wildfires, causing heavier rainfall and flooding, and supercharging hurricanes. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters happened on average every 82 days, according to the analysis, but over the last decade that window has tightened to just 16 days. In 2025, Americans endured one of these events every 10 days on average — an almost nonstop cavalcade of suffering.

Last May, the Trump administration announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would no longer update the federal government’s own billion-dollar disaster database, to the alarm of experts who call it an essential tool for determining risk and adapting to climate change.

In October, Climate Central revived that database, hence its release of these figures for 2025. “The continuation of this dataset, like other datasets, is important because it helps demonstrate the economic impact of extreme weather and climate events,” said Adam Smith, senior climate impacts scientist with the organization, who’s leading the program and was formerly the lead scientist for NOAA’s version. That, in turn, can give policymakers and the general public more information for “a more enhanced decision-making process, as we try to learn from these events and rebuild after these extremes that we know will continue into the future.”

At $61.2 billion in damages, the Los Angeles fires accounted for more than half of the losses from the 23 total events in 2025, according to the analysis. That outbreak brought a public health crisis that’s harder to calculate: Hundreds of people likely died from inhaling smoke, even if they were many miles away from the flames. Wildfire smoke already exacerbates conditions like heart disease and cardiovascular disease, but this smoke was especially toxic because the fires were chewing through houses and cars, melting plastic and metal.

For the folks who survived inhaling the smoke but nonetheless experienced complications, medical costs add yet more to that $61.2 billion that Climate Central reported. Add still more when you factor in the trauma of surviving such a disaster, and the associated mental health costs.

“Even though we have a very robust, comprehensive estimate based on the data that’s available, it’s still conservative with respect to what is truly lost, but cannot be completely measured,” Smith said.

Elsewhere across the U.S., communities struggled with unruly weather: hail events in Texas and Colorado, and severe storms all across the South and Northeast. (Of the 23 events, 21 were related to tornadoes, hail or high wind events. When considering only severe storms, 2025 was the second most costly year for billion-dollar disasters, after 2023.) Generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture it can hold and then dump as rain. In addition, the Gulf of Mexico was extra hot in 2025, which added still more moisture to storms that marched across Southern states. (Scientists are still working out how climate change might be influencing tornadoes, like the six separate billion-dollar outbreaks that struck the U.S. in 2025.)

In addition to climate change making weather and wildfires more catastrophic, human factors are adding to the growing costs of billion-dollar disasters. In the West, for example, communities have been expanding into the “wildland-urban interface,” where structures butt up against forests. So there’s more to burn, while at the same time climate change is amplifying the blazes.

“You’re supercharging some of the ingredients that when they’re aligned in a certain way — with the dryness of the fuels and the near hurricane-force winds, and then, of course, some ignition source — it’s literally impossible to stop,” Smith said.

But if climate change is worsening disasters, why didn’t 2025 see more billion-dollar events than the two years before it? And why was it the ninth most expensive, not the first? That’s largely because for the first time in a decade, no hurricane made landfall in the U.S. last year, thanks to an atmospheric quirk above the Southeastern states that created a sort of force field that bounced storms back out to sea. That was fortunate — both for human lives and economic losses — because hurricanes tend to be the costliest of weather and climate extremes.

“If you talk about major hurricanes making landfall, you can easily approach or exceed $100 billion,” Smith said. “The $115 billion could have been $215 billion.”

Although the U.S. got lucky, the hurricane season was still extreme. Only five Atlantic hurricanes spun up, but four of them — or 80 percent — reached major strength, while in a typical year it’s 40 percent. In addition, 2025 was the second year to have produced three or more Category 5 storms, at least in recorded history.

That’s where climate change comes in: It’s boosting hurricanes by warming up the ocean waters the storms use for fuel. And indeed in 2025 those temperatures reached record highs: Hurricane Melissa, which ravaged the Caribbean, fed on waters made hundreds of times more likely by climate change to fuel hurricanes — which increased wind speeds by 11 mph and extreme rainfall by 16%. All that oceanic fuel helped the storm undergo “extreme rapid intensification,” its maximum sustained wind speeds jumping from 70 mph to 140 mph in 18 hours.

So just because no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. last year doesn’t mean that the storms won’t get more powerful from here.

To prepare, Smith said that Climate Central will be improving the billion-dollar disaster database, for example reexamining historic data to dig more deeply into individual events like wildfires.

“By this time next year,” Smith said, “if we’re having a conversation, I think that it’ll be even a much more useful and helpful data resource.”

Has Los Angeles reached peak pastry?

It feels like brand new sweets shops are opening every week across the city. At the end of last year, Filipino ice cream shop Eat Perlas began scooping flavors like calamansi creamsicle in Montrose, Altadena Cookie Co. debuted a storefront on the west side of the neighborhood, and French bakery The Little Cake started slinging croissants, eclairs and tarts in Commerce.

L.A.'s deep appreciation for bakeries and confectioneries isn’t novel. But with the widespread influence of TikTok and the continued rise in little treat culture, the number of places to satisfy one’s sweet tooth has reached a fever pitch.

The dense concentration of internet-famous bakeries across Pasadena and Highland Park even inspired Koreatown resident and TikToker Irene Chang to coordinate a 13.1-mile walking route that crisscrossed town to sample half a dozen spots.

With over 1,000 sign-ups and only 50 entrants due to limited capacity, many sweets lovers were left disappointed. “Someone said, ‘I'm more nervous about getting a spot than getting into college,'" Chang said. "I was doing the math, and that's true.”

Eight bakeries in eight miles

As an avid walker and runner, I'd put together something similar in 2009, a 5-mile dumpling race across the San Gabriel Valley. After reading about Chang's venture, I felt compelled to curate my own pedestrian-friendly, pastry-centric crawl for the LAist reader.

This 8-mile route visits eight Northeast Los Angeles bakeries that have gained viral popularity in recent years.

Starting in Pasadena and winding its way west toward Highland Park, the itinerary includes Los Angeles’s ultimate chocolate croissant, the plushest matcha cinnamon rolls around, and the internet’s most photogenic churros. These are the spots that everyone is talking about online and in real life.

So, lace up your sneakers, grab a water bottle and slather on sunscreen — you’re in for a treat.

Artisanal Goods by CAR

The luscious chocolate croissant by Artisanal Goods by CAR

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In a city blessed with world-class pastries, the chocolate croissants at Artisanal Goods by CAR stand out for owner Haris Car’s meticulous attention to detail. While it is standard for many bakeries to laminate dough on site, Car goes the extra mile by making chocolate batons from scratch using ethically sourced cacao beans. The result is supremely flaky croissants laced with Normandy butter and oozing with chocolaty satisfaction.

BadAshBakes

Bad Ash's cookie display

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Pastry chef Ashley Cunningham took her nearly 600,000 TikTok followers on the winding journey of opening a bakery in Pasadena months before the business officially launched. By the time doors opened in May 2025, crowds were queuing up and clamoring for a taste of the charismatic baker’s slate of cakes and cookies. While it’s hard to go wrong with any of Cunningham’s well-balanced sweets, the matcha cinnamon rolls are as fetching to behold as they are to taste, while the banana pudding comforts with layers of fruit, custard and vanilla wafer cookies.

Delight Pastry

Delight Pastry's take on spiral croissants, with a Persian bent

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Taking a cue from the viral success of The Suprême pastry from Lafayette Grand Cafe & Bakery in New York, Pasadena’s Delight Pastry introduced its take on spiral croissants in 2023. Inside the brightly lit cafe tucked into a quieter pocket of Old Pasadena, the tightly coiled laminated pastries — usually filled with cream, dipped in white or dark chocolate, and adorned with garnishes — take on a Persian bent as a nod to the shop’s owner and pastry chef Lily Azar’s heritage. The creation filled with pistachio cream is the one to get.

Sweet Red Peach's cinnamon bun

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Sweet Red Peach

Sweet Red Peach opened in Inglewood in 2011 and has expanded to Pasadena, Carson and even Atlanta in recent years. While Karolyn Plummer’s Southern bakery has always attracted a steady crowd for its expertly constructed layer cakes, especially the red velvet, her cinnamon rolls are bringing in additional foot traffic after being declared L.A.’s very best by a popular food-rating website. Served in individual-sized aluminum tins, the cinnamon rolls are incredibly supple, saturated with cinnamon, and finished with a tangy cream cheese icing.

Salted Butter Company

Salted Butter Company has been packed since it opened in August 2025

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Wife and husband team Haruna and Johnny Romo weren’t sure what to expect when they opened Salted Butter Company in August 2025. Seemingly from the start, crowds descended on the Nancy Meyers-coded bakery and bought out the whole lot of well-crafted sweet and savory pastries within its first hours of business. These days, dedicated folks are lining up before the shop’s posted 7 a.m. opening time for the choicest selection of classic croissants, laminated cinnamon rolls, and Earl Grey morning buns.

Modu Cafe

Modu Cafe owner and pastry chef Jiyoon Jang knows the power of social media for small businesses. Before opening her bakery in Highland Park in 2024, the self-taught baker sold her Korean-inflected cookies, doughnuts and milk breads on Instagram, selling out with every drop. Now that Jang has settled into a smartly appointed home base, sweets seekers can dependably swing by for picture-perfect milk cream buns, perilla lime tarts, and black sesame mochi cake bars.

Santa Canela

L.A. shaped churros are served fresh out of the fryer at Santa Canela

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At Highland Park’s warm and welcoming panaderia Santa Canela, pastry chef Ellen Ramos is serving new-school takes on classic Mexican pan dulces. Find the bakery’s daily selection casually arranged and neatly labeled on butcher paper at the front counter. The conchas are memorable, served simply or piped with seasonal cream, as are the frosted long johns. Still, it's the L.A.-shaped churros served fresh out of the fryer and dusted in cinnamon and sugar that have captured the hearts and stomachs of Angelenos online and off.

Fondry

The opening of Fondry — a bakery founded by the owners of Kumquat and Loquat coffee shops, as well as the all-new Quat campus in Glassell Park — attracted eager crowds from day one, and it continues to be a pastry destination for many. The daily selection of flaky and rich viennoiserie flexes with the seasons and is overwhelming in the best way possible, offering a dozen different sweet and savory croissants, kouign amanns, Danishes and “croiffins” (a mash-up of croissant and muffin).