The Brief

A tiny 22-legged crustacean that swims upside down, flapping its legs front to back, has become the star at Joshua Tree National Park following the heavy rains that came with Tropical Storm Hilary.

The cute little fairy shrimp emerged after long dormant eggs were activated by the recent storm water in the park’s Barker Dam reservoir, prompting rangers to post about it on social media.

“Last month, tropical storm Hilary dropped 1-4 inches of rain on different parts of the park. Before the storm, the Barker Dam reservoir was bone dry,” they said in the post. “After the storm, it was filled with water, fairy shrimp, tadpoles, and aquatic insects.”

Fairy shrimp were discovered at Joshua Tree National Park after Tropical Storm Hilary.

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Sarah Jane Pepper

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Fairy shrimp eggs can lie dormant for years in the soil of dry pools and potholes, the rangers added. Once they fill with water and the right conditions occur, the shrimp can hatch, grow and mature, depositing more eggs before conditions turn dry again.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife has designated the tiny crustaceans, primarily found in California, as a threatened species for various reasons, including climate change, drought and the use of pesticides.

Hilary walloped nearby Coachella Valley bringing more than half a year’s worth of rain in just one day, resulting in road closures and significant flooding. The storm dropped over 2 inches of rain on Joshua Tree, which is the equivalent of an entire year's rainfall for the park.

ATLANTA — Argentina, the death-defying defending World Cup champion, will play for a second consecutive title after scoring two late goals to beat England in the semifinal, 2-1.

For a fourth straight knockout game, Argentina survived a heart-stoppingly close call. First was Cape Verde, the African island nation underdog, who took the champions to extra time. Then was the furious miracle comeback after Egypt took a 2-0 lead. Then, in the quarterfinal, a shorthanded Switzerland squad forced extra time despite a 72nd-minute red card.

This gutsy Argentina squad prevailed in all three games, and Wednesday, they pulled it off yet again. In the 55th minute, England took a 1-0 lead when forward Anthony Gordon tapped in a cross.

Then, as the clock ticked up, Argentina turned up the intensity. A relentless onslaught yielded near miss after near miss before finally midfielder Enzo Fernández scored off a rocket from outside the penalty area to equalize the game at 1-1 in the 85th minute.

Then, in stoppage time, forward Lautaro Martínez sent the Argentina crowd into delirium with a header off a cross from 39-year-old superstar Lionel Messi, who assisted on both goals.

In Sunday's final they will face Spain, which defeated France on Tuesday 2-0 to contend for their second-ever title.

England's Anthony Gordon celebrates scoring his team's first goal during the World Cup semifinal against Argentina on Wednesday in Atlanta.

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Justin Setterfield

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Wednesday's game, the sixth meeting between these two teams at the men's World Cup, was the newest chapter in their storied rivalry. That history includes the infamous "Hand of God" goal scored by Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup, four years after a war between the two countries over the Falkland Islands.
The British won the war but the sovereignty of the territory is still under dispute.

(Asked Tuesday about the "Hand of God," which was the first of two goals scored by Maradona, Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni slyly deflected. "I think all of the world remembers that game, remembers Diego's performance, remembers above all the second goal," he said.)

To hear England's coach, none of that mattered on Wednesday. "We respect our opponent, but we don't dip in historic events, and we don't make it bigger than it is," Thomas Tuchel told reporters the day before the game.

Yet from the opening kick, both teams eagerly played a physical game: Collisions, jersey tugs, tough tackles, bodies flying to the ground. Referee Ismail Elfath, the first American man to work a World Cup semifinal, awarded a yellow card to each team before halftime.

Neither team managed a shot on target in the first half (there were only three attempts in total).

The atmosphere inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta was raucous and ear-splitting. Argentine fans by the thousands wore the white and sky blue striped jerseys bearing the name of their star Messi. The English celebrated their team wearing all-white or all-red jerseys of their scoring sensations: Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham.

But neither star could save England from another defeat, extending what has already been an agonizing 60-year wait to return to the final.

NPR's Russell Lewis contributed reporting from Atlanta
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Nearly one month after the Lineage warehouse fire, residents are still trying to figure out what recovery help is available and how to access it. 

At a public forum last week, Lineage announced temporary housing, cash assistance, grocery vouchers and other support for residents living near the warehouse. 

Since then, Airbnb announced an additional $1 million for emergency housing, on top of the $600,000 of housing support it has already provided since the fire.

Boyle Heights Beat reached out to Lineage, Airbnb, and 211 LA, a helpline for residents across L.A. County, to learn how residents can access these resources. 

We’ll update as we confirm information. Here’s what we know so far:

Temporary housing is available. Here’s how it works

Residents who live near the Lineage warehouse can be eligible for free emergency housing provided by Airbnb.org, a nonprofit founded by Airbnb.

“Displaced residents will be provided with an Airbnb stay that meets their needs, including staying near their workplace, school, family, or support network,” according to Airbnb.org.

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Here’s who’s eligible

A map shows that people living between Beswick Street and Union Pacific Avenue and between Los Palos Street and South Hicks Avenue may be eligible for emergency housing. 

To determine eligibility, Gilbert Zavala, a spokesperson with 211 LA, said residents will need: 

• a photo ID 
• proof of housing, such as a rental agreement, a mortgage statement, a utility bill from the last 60 days, a paycheck stub or a piece of mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the IRS, or the county of L.A.

How to apply

A dedicated hotline has been set up for impacted households in need of temporary housing. Residents can call (626) 406-2786 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. 

While residents can call 211, those seeking temporary housing will be directed to the hotline number, Zavala said.

“We’re continuing to assess needs and working to establish additional emergency options to support households,” Zavala said. 

Residents can request air purifiers and AC units

Lineage has released a community contact form for residents to fill out to receive air purifiers, N95 masks and air conditioner units. The form asks for name, email, telephone number and street address. 

Residents can also write additional comments in the form, if necessary.

In addition, several community organizations, including Proyecto Pastoral and Weingart East Los Angeles YMCA, as well as local elected leaders, have been offering resources.

Cash assistance and vouchers are still unclear

Lineage Chief Operations Officer Jeff Rivera on Thursday announced cash assistance, housing vouchers for residents in 400 homes closest to the warehouse, and grocery vouchers that would be redeemable at Food4Less on Olympic Boulevard and Calada Street, a few blocks from the warehouse. 

As of Tuesday, Lineage said it had teams going door-to-door connecting residents directly with resources including cash assistance, and grocery and housing vouchers.

Lineage, which said residents can receive direct financial assistance through prepaid cards, has not answered questions from Boyle Heights Beat about who is eligible and if there are other ways to access this support.

Lineage has not shared further information on how it would support residents’ utility bills through LADWP, as it noted in a July 9 statement.

Lineage hotline number isn’t available yet 

The Lineage COO on Thursday also said that a community support hotline would launch July 13 to answer resident questions directly. As of Tuesday no such number has been displayed on their website or Instagram.

To contact Lineage directly, residents can email boyleheights@onelineage.com.

Cleanup continues and air quality

As of Monday, Lineage reported 356 tons of food waste had been removed to date. 

Regular updates on the cleanup schedule and daily air monitoring are available through Lineage’s website, printed flyers and a dedicated Instagram account.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District is also conducting continuous air monitoring at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School and Eastman Avenue Elementary School, as well as unannounced air quality assessments throughout the community, according to the city. Data can be found at AQMD.gov/Palos.

Odor complaints

The South Coast AQMD on Monday said it issued a violation to Lineage for odors impacting nearby communities. 

More than 40 public complaints reporting rotten, sour, garbage-type odors in the area were received on July 12, AQMD said. “Inspectors responded to the complaints, confirmed the odors with community members, and traced them back to cleanup operations at the facility,” the agency said. 

Such violations can result in civil penalties or even a lawsuit.

The notice comes after AQMD on Thursday urged residents to call (800) CUTSMOG if they’re dealing with odors and issue a complaint every day in order to track the severity. 

More than a year and a half into President Donald Trump’s second term, immigration attorneys critical of the administration say political pressure has transformed immigration courts across the country from neutral arbiters to a de facto “deportation machine.” Supporters of stricter immigration laws say that’s by design.

The clearest indication of this transformation is seen in the way immigration judges are handling requests for bond. An analysis of data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review reviewed by LAist shows that immigration judges nationwide are granting fewer bond requests. The judges denied about 43% of bond requests in 2025, up from about 36% in 2024, according to the data. The denial rate continued to rise, reaching about 55% in the first three months of 2026.

This shift is especially visible at the immigration court at Adelanto, the privately run detention facility about 90 miles northeast of downtown L.A. in San Bernardino County. Between Jan. 1, 2024, and Nov. 10, 2025, immigration judges there denied about 39% of bond requests, the data analysis shows. Since Nov. 10, 2025, Adelanto judges have denied just over 57% of bond requests.

Nov. 10 marks an inflection point in the data that immigration attorneys based in Southern California have tied to an internal email containing new instructions to immigration judges. They’ve filed a lawsuit seeking unredacted versions of emails after a Freedom of Information Act request returned messages with the contents redacted.

Federal officials returned almost entirely redacted emails in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by advocates for immigrants.

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Department of Justice

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One in a series of redacted emails returned following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by advocates for immigrants.

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Department of Justice

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When bonds are granted, the data shows the amount set in each case is thousands of dollars higher than before — a big change for detainees who often have limited resources. Again, Adelanto saw an especially large shift. Nationally, median bond amounts increased from $7,500 between Jan. 1, 2024, and Nov. 10, 2025, to $9,211 after that date. At Adelanto, the median is now $10,000.

As a result, people are sitting in detention while their immigration cases move through the system. The analysis of federal data concluded that favorable results of appeals decided on merits, meaning results that favor the immigrant appealing their deportation orders, are “essentially zero.”

The change in the bond adjudication follows a series of instructions from the administration to immigration judges, including a September 2025 decision issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA, to deny bond hearings to the vast majority of people who entered the country illegally.

Trump officials have argued this direction complies with federal immigration law. The Department of Justice, which houses the Executive Office For Immigration Review, responded to LAist’s request for comment with an unsigned email statement.

“The Executive Office for Immigration Review is restoring integrity to the immigration adjudication system, and Board of Immigration Appeals decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of clear statutory language,” the statement said, in part.

“The argument that Trump 2 makes is that, for the first time in 30 years, we are applying the law as Congress wrote it,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that says it advocates a “pro-immigrant, low immigration” stance.

Immigration advocates disagree. They say the current administration has abdicated the responsibility to make fair and impartial decisions about an individual’s right to stay in the United States or be deported.

Stacy Tolchin, an immigration attorney based in Pasadena, is part of a group of attorneys using federal immigration court data in habeas corpus filings, which challenge the legality of continued detentions.

“The laws are dictated to be fair and consider people's circumstances, how long they've been here, whether they've committed crimes, whether they pay taxes, have any family ties here,” Tolchin said. “They're complicated and they're meant to consider all of these equities, and we're just losing consideration of all of that.”

One case among more than 360,000 

Hundreds of people protested conditions at the Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in San Bernardino County in March.

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Libby Rainey

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In Trump’s second term, his administration’s wave of immigration enforcement includes more than 360,000 new immigration court cases initiated in the 2026 fiscal year, as of May, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering and research organization at Syracuse University.

Immigration cases can be complex and take years to fully adjudicate, even after an individual has received removal orders from an immigration judge.

As the volume of immigration cases has increased, so too has the volume of bond requests. Those requests more than doubled from 34,845 in 2024 to 80,130 in 2025, according to Executive Office for Immigration Review data. As the volume rose, the data shows the rate of approval declined nationally, especially at Adelanto.

Israel Uriarte had lived in the U.S. for 33 years when immigration officers arrested him in January in his longtime Cypress Park neighborhood. The 70-year-old street vendor has no criminal record. Two of his children and his brother are U.S. citizens. He is trying to gain legal status through his family ties.

Not long ago, immigration attorneys say, people like Uriarte — someone with deep roots, no record and family in the country — would have almost certainly been released on bond. That has changed.

“He’s very hard working,” said Uriarte’s 33-year-old daughter, Karla Robles, who spoke on behalf of her father. “The community knows him as the street man around here because he’s always working, and if you catch him outside, he’s never in a bad mood. I mean, at least you’ll never notice it because he always says good morning to everyone he sees.”

Three times, Uriarte asked an immigration judge at Adelanto to release him on bond while his case moved through the courts. Three times, Judge Patrick C. Barrett said no.

Officials with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which is based in Los Angeles and represents day laborers and migrants, said they noticed their clients were struggling to get released on bond at the end of last year.

According to immigration advocates, the practice of denying bond requests puts pressure on people to give up on fighting their cases and accept deportation.

“There's two sides of it,” said Caleb Soto, a workers’ rights director for the organizing network. “You either are railroaded into giving up your rights or you're let to sit there for as long as you can stomach being in these facilities, which have horrific conditions.”

Soto said he could think of at least two cases where clients gave up their cases and accepted voluntary deportation, but that outcome is probably much higher among individuals who don’t have access to legal representation.

How we got here

President Trump ran on a platform promising to deport millions of people from the U.S. Last summer, masked ICE officers were out in force in L.A. before wide-scale operations in Minneapolis and Chicago made international headlines. By then, changes were underway in immigration courts.

At the core of this change is a September 2025 ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which held that people who entered the country illegally are subject to mandatory detention and that immigration judges lack authority to hold bond hearings.

“When you’re talking about individuals who have entered illegally, they have already shown they are willing to violate the law to remain in the United States,” said Arthur, of the Center for Immigration Studies. “In my opinion the statute clearly mandates their detention.”

Prior to that, the law was interpreted to mean that detention was discretionary, meaning an immigration judge could choose to hold a bond hearing and release individuals who could prove they were not a danger to the community and were not a flight risk.

District Court Judge Sunshine S. Sykes of the Central District of California vacated the September decision this past February, but the government appealed the orders and the Ninth Circuit issued a stay pending appeal in March. Immigration attorneys said they expect the case to land before the Supreme Court later this year. Until then, that leaves people in every jurisdiction but California’s Central District, where Sykes’ decision was issued, subject to mandatory detention.

Mandatory detention reverses decades of precedent and violates fundamental rights to due process, according to Chloe Dillon and other immigration attorneys.

Dillon now heads San Mateo County’s criminal immigration defense for the Private Defender Program. Before that, she was an immigration judge in San Francisco — a court the Trump administration effectively shut down when it fired her and other judges there.

“It’s not just that, they cannot get bond, not just that they will ultimately not be released,” Dillon said, “but that they can’t even have a hearing on whether or not they should be released, where they could present facts and say, 'This is why I think I should be released.'”

Dillon said the Executive Office for Immigration Review data shows the impact of policy changes like this.

“I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that this administration has said in writing what their objectives were,” said Dillon, who had a rate of approving asylum requests more than 90% of the time. “I also think that there’s an argument that this is what they at least believe they were elected to — whether that is true or not — which is to deport as many people as possible.”

What changed in November? 

In March 2026, Angelenos journeyed to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the Mojave Desert to protest conditions at the facility. Before leaving, they created an altar for immigrants who've recently died in custody.

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Julia Barajas

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The analysis of Executive Office for Immigration Review data shows a clear inflection point in November 2025 when bond releases became rarer in immigration courts across the country.

Attorneys with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said they noticed this shift at Adelanto almost immediately, before the data was released.

“We were seeing from one week to the next, this jump, this complete change in how immigration courts and immigration judges were deciding and issuing bonds,” said Lauren Michel Wilfong, a lawyer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

In early December, the network filed a Freedom of Information Act request after hearing that immigration judges at Adelanto and other immigration courts received guidance instructing them to justify any granted bond requests to their superior in writing.

In response to the FOIA request, the Executive Office for Immigration Review turned over a series of emails from mid-November. Those emails are almost entirely redacted. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network then filed a lawsuit, with representation by Tolchin, in January seeking to compel the Trump administration to release unredacted emails. That case is yet to be decided.

Wilfong said the intent of the lawsuit is to “expose the current policies and practices of immigration courts and how decisions are made.”

She said they want the unredacted records because they believe “this document will show, or at least show in part, the fundamental unfairness of how these decisions are being made.”

Soto said he has seen immigration judges pause bond determination hearings to seek guidance from the federal government about bond amounts.

“They essentially negotiate that,” Soto said. “That just seems so bizarre, and like we’re saying, describes a system that doesn’t actually confer any rights to the person that is sitting there in that room.”

Unlike federal and state court judges, immigration judges are employed by the Department of Justice and can be reassigned or fired. Former immigration judges said this means they are less independent than other types of judges. An August 2025 memo issued by the DOJ cautions that “independence and impartiality" was “not a license to ignore a clear directive from a proper appellate authority.” The memo goes on to say if a judge’s record was found to be an outlier it could indicate “systematic bias or failure to adhere to applicable law that warrants close examination and potential action.”

“That’s a problem,” Soto said. “It’s like an outside system under the DOJ that theoretically is supposed to be separate, civil, non-criminal, is really having these incredible life-altering consequences, and it has less due process than almost any other court that I’ve ever seen.”

Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, who served as an immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, said that’s “a fixture, not a bug of the system.”

“[Immigration judges] work for the Attorney General and the Attorney General sets the rules,” said Arthur.

District court intervention in Uriarte’s case

Like others detained by ICE, Uriarte, the L.A. street vendor arrested in January, looked outside immigration court for help.

Barrett, the immigration judge at Adelanto, initially denied Uriarte’s request for a bond hearing Feb. 17. He cited the September 2025 Board of Immigration Appeals opinion stating that people who entered the country illegally are not eligible for a hearing.

Federal judge John D. Early ordered the immigration court to hold a bond hearing for Uriarte on Feb. 27 because his case is in the Central District of California and, therefore, subject to the partial stay on the BIA decision.

At that February hearing, Barrett determined Uriarte could not prove he was not a flight risk and denied his bond request for three reasons: That Uriarte entered the country illegally in 1992, that he worked without proper authorization and because his brother (a U.S. citizen) was not a valid sponsor.

Tolchin represented Uriarte as he filed a habeas corpus petition April 7, arguing that Barrett did not deny his bond request for valid reasons.

Intervention like this has become common under Trump’s second administration, as an unprecedented wave of habeas corpus filings — nearly 60,000 since January 2025 — has hit federal courts across the country. According to data gathered by ProPublica and analyzed by LAist, the annual average over the previous 15 years was fewer than 1,000.

Dillon, the former San Francisco immigration judge, said that while the federal data shows immigration judges are releasing fewer people on bond, the data doesn’t capture cases like Uriarte’s where bond releases only happened because of intervention by another court — including by judges in what she called “deep red pockets of the United States who have ruled that a bond hearing is necessary for fairness and due process.”

“The data does not show the people who only got bond hearings because a federal court judge ordered them to get a bond hearing,” she said, “that would otherwise not have gotten a bond hearing if it was left to the administration alone without the intervention of a federal judge who works for the federal judiciary.”

Robles said her father began to contemplate ending his case and accepting deportation to Mexico shortly after his second bond request was denied.

“I remember that night, and he said, 'There is nothing that I have to go to, no one that I can go to. I would be stepping out of what was familiar into something unknown because it's been over 30 years, everything has changed,’” Robles said.

Early granted Uriarte’s petition on April 14 and ordered Adelanto to release Uriarte or give him another bond hearing. Early said a new hearing must comply with federal law by considering the unique circumstances of Uriarte’s case.

On April 21, Barrett, held another bond hearing and denied it again.

“They kept denying him for [being a] flight risk, which is ridiculous because we provided all the courts enough information and proof that we wanted to try if there was any way to adjust his status,” said Robles of her father’s case.

In June, Early determined Uriarte’s previous bond hearings did not comply with federal law and ordered ICE to release him from Adelanto. In his decision, Early wrote that the court violated his rights to due process by relying on the fact that he came to the country illegally and worked without authorization, since that logic would lead to an automatic denial of bond in all cases, since those factors are true for anyone with an ongoing immigration case.

In his decision, Early quoted another case that found such an automatic denial “fails to comport with due process.”

Early ordered Uriarte’s release from detention June 2. Robles said the court date for Uriarte’s immigration case has been postponed until 2028. He is required to check in with ICE until then.

“I still at times have trouble grasping the fact that he’s actually released and here with us,” Robles said, ”because I know there're many families that unfortunately don’t have the same circumstances.”

It's a summer of extreme heat around much of the world.

I know what that feels like. In Uttar Pradesh, India, where I grew up, temperatures easily soar upward of 120 degrees in May and June. But few people have access to an air conditioner. With a per capita income of around $1,000 a year, many people in this part of the country can't afford to buy an AC unit or pay the power bills that come with using one.

So how do people keep cool?

People in India and other countries across the Global South have long figured out ways to deal with horrible heat. I'd like to share a few tips I've learned from my elders back home in India. Some of the advice is just what you'd think — drinking lots of liquids and staying out of the sun. Other strategies might surprise you.

I know that each of these tips on its own may seem trivial. But as a heat wave researcher, I can tell you that done together, they can really help the body cool down. The key is to be mindful of the power of heat — and be prepared to prevent its adverse effects.

And remember, upon seeing any signs of heatstroke — like fever, headache, nausea, confusion or weakness — call an ambulance ASAP and get medical help. Use ice packs while waiting to be treated at the hospital. Seriously, folks, don't delay. Heatstroke can be fatal.

(Also: We want to hear from you! Scroll to the end of this story to find out how to share tips from your culture on how to cope with heat.)

Drink lots of liquids — it doesn't have to be water!

One of the childhood lessons seared into my head was to always be aware of your hydration status. And drink water, even in small sips, as soon as you do any physical activity. Carrying a water bottle when going out is not just common sense but is lifesaving.

Some of the drinks that are popular in India can help replenish the electrolytes lost in sweat, as well as keep your body hydrated.

We quench our thirst with fruity drinks like sugarcane juice, coconut water and a tangy and raw mango juice called aam ka pana. Made from boiled and blended tart raw mangoes, aam ka pana replenishes electrolytes lost in sweat. Premade mix is available from online vendors and in ethnic grocery stores. Just add chilled water and enjoy!

In India, we also like cooling, milk-based drinks like lassi, a yogurt beverage popular in the summertime, and buttermilk.

And eat something!

Another lesson was to never go out on an empty stomach — always eat something. A cucumber (which contains dissolved electrolytes) or a pineapple snack will do the trick. In India, we'll sprinkle black salt on a cuke, adding to its restorative powers.

Shower power

If you feel hot, take a cold shower or at least periodically splash water on your face and hands and douse your head in water — that'll bring down body temperature.

You can also play with water. When I was a kid in India, I'd have water balloon fights with neighborhood kids. Or we'd fill a tub with water and splash it on each other in the backyard.

Find a cool spot to chill out

Seek out the coolest parts of the building where you live and make that the place where you sleep or hang out. Because heat rises, lower floors in a multistory house are cooler. Verandas are shady and airy. During the day, block out the sunlight with heavy curtains. Turn on any fans you have. And don't be afraid to move furniture around in your quest for coolness. Back in Uttar Pradesh, we used to scoot our beds closer to the windows so we could catch a breeze while we slept.

If it becomes impossibly stuffy indoors, move outdoors and lie in a hammock. Air created from swinging helps cool the body down. As a kid, I remember that mango orchards were the best for hanging out. The dense foliage provided maximum shade coverage. The shade is your friend!

Take inspiration from architecture

Among many architectural innovations is a building design called jaali (meaning simply a net in Hindi and Urdu). Think of the Taj Mahal. It's basically a way of turning a stone wall into a latticed screen by carving geometric patterns with a series of small openings rather than a solid wall. This stone screen blocks direct sunlight and also causes air to speed up as it passes through the holes.

Now, it's true there's no way you can rebuild your house in the style of the Taj Mahal.

But you can take inspiration from another architectural ploy. Some buildings have a small body of water outside — like the Hawa Mahal (the Wind Palace) in Jaipur. Wind enters the palace through the jaali holes in the thousand windows and picks up moisture from the courtyard water body. The humid wind then moves toward the palace's thousand windows and cools down the inside air.

A nifty trick to bring in cool, humid air is to hang a curtain woven from grass on the door. Sprayed with water, it converts the hot air into a cool breeze. A special fragrant grass called khus is used for this purpose in India. I've also seen curtains made of fine bamboo — offering protection from direct sunlight — with a fine wet cloth added on the inside for cooling. Or a heavy, dampened cloth curtain will do the job.

The swamp cooler effect

The ubiquitous swamp cooler works best in low-humidity settings. Also known as an evaporative cooler, this electrical device passes a room's air over water-saturated pads, which cools down the air, then blows that air back into the room. These devices are cheaper than air conditioners and use less energy. You can even make one yourself.

Wear airy and light-colored clothing

Rabari people (a nomadic tribe in western India) and many other tribal communities use small mirrors on their clothes to reflect sunlight.

Besides the use of cotton and linen fabrics for their clothing — both materials are cooling because they have big pores in their woven threads that allow for air circulation — their choice of color in their clothes is ingenious. They cleverly make use of the fact that black not only takes in heat faster than white but that it also gives off heat much faster than white. Due to the nature of their work, women frequently go in and out of their tents while men grazing livestock stay out for longer durations. Therefore, to stay cool, it makes sense for women to wear darker colors (these hues cool down fast as soon as women go indoors) and men to wear lighter colors (which heat up more slowly than darker colors during prolonged outdoor stays).

Cover your head or neck

In the summers, covering one's head is an age-old practice. Whether it was the nobles wearing a pagdee (a turban) or the commonfolk using a wet rectangular piece of traditional cotton cloth called gamcha for men and dupatta for women. A variation of a white wet towel, it is almost universal in the countryside and even seen in cities.

Or take a light towel, called a gamchha in Hindi, dampen it and wear it around your neck or on your head like a scarf. This wet garb is omnipresent among men in the hinterlands and small towns.

Even our erstwhile British colonial masters fended off the sun with pith helmets — made of an extremely lightweight, dried, milky-white, spongy plant material that could be pressed into various shapes.

Avoid the noonday sun

During the hottest parts of the day, try not to burn energy or exhaust yourself by going out, exercising or standing outside, because the scorching sunlight and hot air will make you hotter. Instead, do what I did in Uttar Pradesh: chill at home or take an afternoon siesta. If you have to work and have a flexible schedule, try to perform your duties in the cooler hours of the day. Farmers in my state, for example, toil in the early mornings and late evenings. And markets close in the hot afternoons but remain open until late in the night.

Embrace the shade

Whether you are working outdoors or walking down the street, stay in the shade provided by trees. The actual air temperature is the same as in the sun, but your skin won't absorb the sun's rays and cause your body to heat up. Thanks to our forefathers for planting trees for us! And we return the favor by planting trees now, even when we know we aren't going to enjoy that shade in our lifetime. Our kids will. And that's what makes us a civilization.

Your turn: Share tips on how to cope with the heat

Did you grow up without an air conditioner in a hot place? How did you deal with the heat? Email us at globalhealth@npr.org with the subject line "Heat hacks," and we may feature your story on NPR.org. Please include your name and location. Submissions close on Monday, July 20. 

Dr. Gulrez Shah Azhar is a Seattle-based Aspen New Voices fellow who researches the health impacts of heat. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, a policy researcher at the RAND Corp. and an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health.
Copyright 2026 NPR