Topline:
The Palisades and Eaton fires have now killed a combined 27 people as firefighters make progress on containment.
What we know so far: The rising death toll comes as authorities warn of potential flare ups as another Santa Ana wind event is in the forecast, bringing with it the potential for fire spread after firefighters made progress in containment over the weekend.
Keep reading... for more on the fires and conditions and the new health emergency.
This is a developing story and will be updated. For the most up-to-date information about the fire check the links under each fire.
The Palisades and Eaton fires have so far killed a combined 27 people as firefighters take advantage of a slight reprieve from the Santa Ana winds to increase containment.
Roughly 82,400 residents remain under evacuation orders or warnings across Los Angeles County.
The good news: The Eaton Fire is at 65% containment, burning at just over 14,000 acres. The Palisades Fire in the Santa Monica Mountains has grown to 39% containment, with just above 23,700 acres burned.
According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, however, the death toll has increased to 27 — 10 in the Palisades Fire, 17 in the Eaton Fire. Authorities say they are carrying out search operations to survey burn areas, warning the death toll could rise.
Few details have been released about the fatalities and coroner's officials cautioned identification may take some time.
A curfew is in place in the Palisades and Eaton fire evacuation areas, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. until further notice.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell says officers will no longer be accompanying residents into the area to collect things like essential medicine, as the department begins today to search the area for human remains.
"What we found was, uh, that was successful for those who we were able to accommodate, but the numbers became overwhelming," McDonnell said.
People looking for information on their loved ones can visit family assistance centers set up at Cheviot Hills Recreation Center (2551 Motor Ave., Los Angeles) and Pasadena Convention Center (300 E. Green St., Pasadena).
You can also call (800) 675-5799 or visit redcross.org to fill out an inquiry form.
The order includes a ban on the use of leaf blowers, because they stir up ash and other potentially toxic debris. And it asks county residents to stay indoors to avoid exposure to wildfire smoke.
Some simple steps: Keep your windows and doors closed and avoid using fireplaces, candles, or vacuums.
The L.A. County Sheriff's department said it has made some 30 arrests for people violating those curfews in the Palisades and Eaton fire areas, mostly on suspicion of looting. Specifically, 25 arrests in Eaton Fire area, and 5 in the Palisades area.
L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said deputies arrested a man who allegedly posed as a firefighter with the intention to burglarize houses in the Malibu area.
Here's what we know about the latest fire, and others burning now.
Watch CalFire for new incidents ▶
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
Forward progress of the Auto Fire that erupted Monday night has been stopped at nearly 61 acres. Thursday evening, the fire was 85% contained, officials reported.
Strong winds fanned the flames as the fire ate up tall dry grass and brush in the Santa Clara riverbed in Ventura. Firefighters were able to knock down the fire and stop the fire's forward progress a little before midnight. They have remained on scene to mop up hotspots. The fire was confined to the river bottom.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The Eaton Fire has devastated whole neighborhoods of Altadena and forced mass evacuations from Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Glendale. The fire is at 65% containment as of Friday evening.
Officials report 17 deaths due to the fire and said many others were injured as the fire spread. Some areas are also now under orders not to drink or use the water in the area for cooking due to debris from the fire.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The Palisades Fire that broke out in the Santa Monica Mountains Jan. 7 and sent thousands of residents fleeing, some of them on foot, as they tried to outrun advancing flames driven by extremely strong winds.
Ten deaths have been confirmed as of Thursday.
More than 23,000 acres have burned, and the fire is so far 39% contained.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The Kenneth Fire that broke out along the western edge of the San Fernando Valley has has been fully contained after growing to 1,052 acres, according to CalFire.
The fire started Thursday in the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve and pushed toward dense developments in the cities of Calabasas and Agoura.
All evacuation orders and warnings issued shortly after the fire started have been lifted.
Note: there was initial confusion about both the name and location of this fire. The name was first given as Kennis and the the city alert listed the location as Woodland Hills, but mapped to the correct address in West Hills.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The brush fire started at 6:04 p.m. on Wednesday at around the 2300 block of Solar Drive in the Hollywood Hills.
The fire quickly burned about 60 acres between Runyon Canyon and Wattles Park. At 7:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, evacuation orders were lifted for the area and by the end of the day the fire was considered fully contained.
Resources stationed nearby and air support likely made a big difference. More than 150 firefighters were deployed to fight the Sunset Fire almost immediately, said Margaret Stewart, public information officer for the Los Angeles Fire Department, to our media partner KCAL News. Helicopters made water drops throughout Wednesday evening into Thursday.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The fire started the night of Jan. 7 above Olive View Medical Center and spread toward the 210 Freeway in Sylmar. The CHP received a report that a power line had exploded in the area and that the fire was moving toward homes in the area.
The fire grew to nearly 800 acres by Saturday. As of Thursday, officials reported the fire was 100% contained, aided by a break in Santa Ana wind conditions.
All evacuation orders and warnings have been lifted.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The Lidia Fire broke out shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday off Soledad Canyon Road in the Angeles National Forest. It burned 395 acres, and was 100% contained as of early Saturday. The cause is under investigation.
The extreme fire threat prompted forest officials to close down the entire Angeles National Forest starting Wednesday, Jan. 8 at 5 p.m. through midnight Wednesday, Jan. 15.
For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
The Woodley Fire was reported near North Woodley Avenue and the Sepulveda Basin shortly after 6 a.m. Wednesday. Fire crews were able to hold the fire to 30 acres, after initially reporting the size at 75 acres. It is now 100% contained. In the early hours of the fire, officials warned that it posed "a threat of crossing Burbank Boulevard."
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If you have to evacuate
If you have more time:
Things to consider
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How to help yourself and others
Understanding how it got this bad
Topline:
The National Weather Service is now forecasting major rainfall for the week of Christmas in L.A. and Ventura counties.
Storm duration: The heaviest rain is expected to arrive late Tuesday night into Wednesday day. Less intense rain is expected to stick around through Christmas until Saturday, according to the weather service.
How much rain? In all, about 4 to 6 inches of rain is expected for the coast and valleys in L.A. and Ventura counties from the storm, and between 6 to 12 inches for the foothills and mountains.
Impact: "We could see significant and damaging mudslides and rock slides. We could see flooded freeways and closures," said David Gomberg, lead forecaster at NOAA in a weather briefing on Saturday.
Winds: Damaging winds are also in the forecast, particularly between Tuesday night and Wednesday in the mountains and foothills, Gomberg said, potentially resulting in downed trees and power outages.
Topline:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cannot impose dramatically different conditions for homelessness programs for now, according to an oral ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Rhode Island.
Why it matters: McElroy granted a preliminary injunction to a group of states, cities and nonprofits who said a last minute overhaul of how to spend $4 billion on homelessness programs was unlawful. She also agreed with their argument that it likely would push many people back onto the streets in the middle of winter, causing irreparable harm.
The backstory: HUD has sought to dramatically slash funding for permanent housing and encourage more transitional housing that mandates work and treatment for addiction or mental illness. The overhaul – announced last month — also would allow the agency to deny money to local groups that don't comply with the Trump administration's agenda on things like DEI, the restriction of transgender rights and immigration enforcement.
Read on ... for more on the legal battle over HUD changes.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cannot impose dramatically different conditions for homelessness programs for now, according to an oral ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Rhode Island.
McElroy granted a preliminary injunction to a group of states, cities and nonprofits who said a last minute overhaul of how to spend $4 billion on homelessness programs was unlawful. She also agreed with their argument that it likely would push many people back onto the streets in the middle of winter, causing irreparable harm.
"Continuity of housing and stability for vulnerable populations is clearly in the public interest," said McElroy, ordering HUD to maintain its previous funding formula.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement the order "means that more than 170,000 people – families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities — have respite from the government's assault."
HUD has sought to dramatically slash funding for permanent housing and encourage more transitional housing that mandates work and treatment for addiction or mental illness. The overhaul — announced last month — also would allow the agency to deny money to local groups that don't comply with the Trump administration's agenda on things like DEI, the restriction of transgender rights and immigration enforcement.
"HUD will continue working to provide homelessness assistance funding to grantees nationwide," said HUD spokeswoman Kasey Lovett in a statement to NPR. "The Department remains committed to program reforms intended to assist our nation's most vulnerable citizens and will continue to do so in accordance with the law."
McElroy expressed frustration with a series of HUD actions in recent weeks. Just hours before a Dec. 8 hearing, the agency withdrew its new funding notice, saying it would make changes to address critics' concerns. But on Friday, HUD's attorney said the new version would not be ready until the end of the day.
"The timing seems to be strategic," McElroy said, asserting there was no reason the document could not have been ready before the hearing. "The constant churn and chaos seems to be the point."
In defending the agency, attorney John Bailey said HUD was simply trying to change its policies to reflect President Donald Trump's executive orders, which he called "legal directives." The judge interjected repeatedly to explain that he was conflating things, noting Congress — not the president — makes laws.
HUD's changes were announced in November with little notice and only weeks before local homeless service providers must apply for new funding.
"Our agencies are just scrambling right now to try to respond," said Pam Johnson with Minnesota Community Action Partnership, whose members provide housing and other services for homeless people. "It also just reverses 40 years of bipartisan work on proven solutions to homelessness. So it's really, it's kind of shocking."
For decades, U.S. policy favored permanent housing with optional treatment for addiction or mental illness Years of research has found the strategy is effective at keeping people off the streets.
But many conservatives argue it's failed to stop record rates of homelessness.
"What is the root cause of homelessness? Mental illness, drug addiction, drug abuse," HUD Secretary Scottt Turner said recently on Fox Business Network. "During the Biden administration, it was just warehousing. It was a homeless industrial complex."
Turner and others who support the changes say the goal is to push people towards self-sufficiency.
But local advocates say mental health and substance abuse are not the main factors driving homelessness.
"It's poverty. Poverty, low income and significant lack of affordable housing," says Julie Embree, who heads the Toledo Lucas County Homelessness Board in Ohio.
Many in permanent housing have disabilities that make it hard to work full time, she said. Embree agrees with Trump administration goals like efficiency and saving money, but says pushing people back into homelessness, where they're more likely to land in jail, the courts or a hospital, is not cost-effective.
"One emergency room visit is just as expensive as a month of sustaining this [permanent housing] program," she said.
In Los Angeles, Stephanie Klasky-Gamer with LA Family Housing said there is a need for more transitional housing, but not at the expense of long-term housing. And the idea that programs could simply switch from one to the other is not only unrealistic, it's illegal.
"You cannot take a building that has a 75-year deed restriction and just — ding! — call it interim housing," she said.
Those challenging HUD say providers who own such properties – or states who've invested millions of dollars in permanent housing projects — face "significant financial jeopardy" if their funding is not renewed.
In addition to the legal challenges, members of Congress from both parties have questioned HUD's sudden shift on homelessness. Advocates have lobbied lawmakers to step in and, at the least, push for more time to prepare for such a massive overhaul.
Topline:
President Donald Trump said the administration has reached agreements with nine more drugmakers to bring their U.S. drug prices more in line with what other wealthy countries pay.
Why it matters: Fourteen companies in total have now reached what the administration calls most-favored-nation pricing deals. They agreed to charge the U.S. government no more for new drugs than the prices paid by other well-off countries. The agreements will allow state Medicaid programs to access lower prices from the nine new companies.
Read on ... for more on the administration's work to bring down prescription drug prices.
President Donald Trump said the administration has reached agreements with nine more drugmakers to bring their U.S. drug prices more in line with what other wealthy countries pay.
Fourteen companies in total have now reached what the administration calls most-favored-nation pricing deals. The companies that took part in Friday's announcement were: Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi.
They agreed to charge the U.S. government no more for new drugs than the prices paid by other well-off countries. The agreements will allow state Medicaid programs to access lower prices from the nine companies. In a statement, the White House said the change will result "in billions of dollars in savings."
The drugmakers also agreed to invest at least $150 billion in manufacturing operations in the U.S. The president is seeking to increase domestic production of pharmaceuticals.
In addition, the companies agreed to make some of their most popular drugs available at lower prices to consumers who pay out of pocket through a government website called TrumpRx.com. The TrumpRx website is expected to launch in early 2026, and would take consumers to pharmaceutical companies' direct-to-consumer websites to fulfill orders.
For example, Merck will reduce the price of Januvia, a medication for Type 2 diabetes, from $330 to $100 for patients purchasing directly through TrumpRx, the White House said. Amgen will reduce the price of Repatha, a cholesterol-lowering drug, from $573 to $239 when purchased through TrumpRx.
In exchange for these concessions, the companies will be exempt from possible administration tariffs for three years.
The extent of savings for consumers under the agreements is unclear. Medicaid and its beneficiaries already pay some of the lowest prices for drugs. And people with health insurance could spend less on copays for their medicines than paying cash for them through the drugmakers.
Separately, Trump said during the press event that he would like to get health insurers to lower their prices, too.
"I'm going to call a meeting of the insurance companies," he said. "I'm going to see if they [will] get their price down, to put it very bluntly."
America's new top health diplomat is Bethany Kozma. The job she took on this week — leading the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs — does not have a high profile. And Kozma herself is not a familiar name in the world of public health.
What is the job? The office is sometimes referred to as the "diplomatic voice" of HHS. As director, Kozma will have considerable influence over how the U.S. shapes health policy in other countries in the wake of the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts and withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
Read on ... for more on Kozma's position on a number of controversial issues.
America's new top health diplomat is Bethany Kozma.
The job she took on this week — leading the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs — does not have a high profile. And Kozma herself is not a familiar name in the world of public health.
But it is a position with power — and Kozma has a record of public statements and activism on health issues, equating abortion with "murder" and campaigning against gender-affirming care.
The office sometimes is referred to as the "diplomatic voice" of HHS. As director, Kozma will have considerable influence over how the U.S. shapes health policy in other countries in the wake of the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts and withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
Kozma declined to be interviewed for this story. She doesn't appear to have a background in global health based on publicly available information online. The HHS website offers few details about her professional profile. In response to questions about her qualifications and vision for the role, HHS responded with this statement.
"The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) advances the Trump administration's agenda and priorities by bringing common sense, transparency and gold-standard science to global partners. Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, OGA is committed to strengthening the United States' position as the global gold-standard for public health and ensuring Americans are protected at home and abroad."
Kozma began her career in public service during the George W. Bush administration, working at the White House Homeland Security Council. During the Obama years, she re-entered public life as an activist.
In a 2016 commentary for The Daily Signal, a conservative news website founded by the Heritage Foundation, she argued against the Obama administration's guidance that public schools should allow children to use the bathroom that comports with their identity.
"This radical agenda of subjective 'gender fluidity' and unrestricted shower and bathroom access actually endangers all," she stated, noting that "predators" could abuse the policy.
In 2017, she joined the Trump administration as senior adviser for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in the United States Agency for International Development, eventually being promoted to deputy chief of staff. In videos obtained and released by ProPublica, Kozma recalls calling the U.S. a "pro-life" country in a closed-door U.N. meeting about women's rights in 2018, when access to abortion still was protected nationally by Roe v. Wade.
In August 2020, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and four other Democratic senators issued a letter labeling Kozma and several other political appointees at USAID as "prejudiced" and called for them to be removed from their posts. Kozma has "spoken extensively and derisively of trans people and trans issues," the senators wrote.
During the Biden administration, she also was involved in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's "blueprint" for a new Republican administration. She played a prominent role in Project 2025 training videos, obtained and published by ProPublica.
In one nearly 50-minute training video focused on left-wing language, she called for a Republican administration to "eradicate 'climate change' references from absolutely everywhere," and said that concerns over climate change are efforts at "population control." She also called gender-affirming care "absolutely infuriating" and said "the idea that gender is fluid is evil." Overall, she argued that changing language around these policies should be a priority for political appointees.
Kozma joined the second Trump administration as a chief adviser at the HHS Office of Global Affairs. In September, she spoke at a U.N. event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the declaration that denying women's rights is a human rights violation.
"While many may celebrate so-called successes gained for women over the last 30 years, one must ask what defines true success for women?" she began, adding that "biological reality is rooted in scientific truth and is confirmed by the universal truths that we are endowed by our creator who made us 'male and female.'"
Those views can be divisive but have garnered some support for Kozma's promotion.
"Bethany is an excellent pick for global affairs at HHS," says Roger Servino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. "She was an early champion of protecting children from gender ideology back when the medical establishment was able to silence voices of reason and dissent and she is perfectly placed to help push back on global health bodies trying to impose left wing pseudoscience on the American people and the world."
Kozma is taking over as director of the HHS Office of Global Affairs at a time of drastic change for global health.
In previous administrations, a main focus of the office was dealing with the World Health Organization. Typically, the director, who usually has a background in public health, is involved in negotiations on sharing data for pathogen surveillance or developing vaccine policy, for example.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from WHO, the administration has started a new strategy: striking deals with individual countries to give health aid in exchange for their meeting certain policy prescriptions. Kozma has been involved in some of those negotiations, but the details aren't quite finalized.
Some reproductive rights advocates believe Kozma will use her new position to insert anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policies into these agreements.
"[Kozma] is vehemently anti-trans, anti-LGBTQI+, anti-abortion," says Keifer Buckingham, managing director at the Council on Global Equality, a coalition of advocacy organizations that focuses on LGBTQ issues. "For those of us who want to ensure that the provision of U.S. foreign assistance and health doesn't discriminate against people based on who they are, [Kozma's appointment] raises a lot of red flags."
One particular worry is about the Helms Amendment, a U.S. policy that prohibits foreign aid being used to fund abortion services.
"There's been speculation that there's an intention by the U.S. government to expand the Helms Amendment beyond abortion to include LGBTQ's as well," says Musoba Kitui, director of Ipas Africa Alliance, a non-profit that works to provide access to abortion and contraception. He's concerned that health groups that serve those populations could lose funding. That speculation is backed up by reporting from The Daily Signal that the administration is planning to prohibit U.S. aid funding for "gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives."
Given LGBTQ people are often at higher risk for diseases like HIV, such policies could make these communities even more vulnerable, says Kitui.
"We could see more marginalization, inequality, spikes of infection," he says. While many African governments signing these deals understand those dynamics, Kitui says they may still agree to more restrictive conditions as aid cuts have "starved health systems to a point of desperation."
Have information you want to share about ongoing changes at federal health and development agencies? Reach out to Jonathan Lambert via encrypted communications on Signal: @jonlambert.12
