Topline:
A historic lack of predators and human-caused climate change are leading to more people being stung by stingrays.
Why it matters: Warming ocean waters are helping stingrays expand their range. That may sound good for stingrays, but it's a bad sign for the ocean's health.
Keep reading ... for more on our local stingrays and how to avoid their painful stings.
I recently had the excruciatingly painful experience of being stung by a stingray while swimming at Bolsa Chica State Beach. It was my second time being stung, so as soon as I felt the familiar stab in the bottom of my foot, dread arose. But at least this time I knew what to do.
I hollered at my friend in the water — “I got hit by a stingray!”
Ironically, I’d just been telling her about the “stingray shuffle” — the strategy to shuffle your feet as you enter the water and therefore scare any nearby stingrays away.
I swam as fast as I could to the sand and sprinted to the nearest lifeguard tower. Already, the pain was sharp in my foot, and I could feel it pulsing up my leg, growing more intense. I took deep breaths and tried to keep my face stoic.
Now, you lucky folks who have never been stung may be smirking at my desperation. But if you know, you know — a stingray’s sting is no joke.
A kind lifeguard wrapped my bleeding foot in gauze and drove me in his pickup truck to the main tower. When we got there, I hopped into a painfully comedic scene: About 10 other sorry souls sat in a semicircle of chairs, each with one foot in a bucket full of scalding water.
You’re most likely to get stung by a stingray during low tide on warm water days when the surf is relatively calm — basically when it’s an ideal beach day.
The "stingray shuffle" — or shuffling your feet in the sand as you enter the water — is your best defense, according to Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach. Also, check for signage warning of high stingray activity, usually posted at the entrance to beaches.
We passed around a hose of hot water, taking turns refilling our buckets as soon as the water started to cool. You have to keep the temperature as hot as you can tolerate, to neutralize the venom and stave off the pain. There were so many stings that day that lifeguards handed out shiny bags of hot water when they ran out of buckets.
As I waited for my pain to fully subside — it can take more than an hour of soaking in hot water — I watched as a steady stream of people came and went for their stings.
A young teen, bawling, was consoled by her frantic dad. Others sat silently, grimacing occasionally as their friends or family patted their backs. When the hose with hot water was hogged by a single party too long, the rest of us grew anxious and a little desperate. Still, everyone treated each other kindly — after all, misery loves company.
As I sat with my own foot in a bucket of hot water, I had time to wonder: Why are so many people getting stung? And has it always been this way?
We have four types of stingrays in Southern California waters — bat rays, diamond rays, butterfly rays and round stingrays.
“The round stingray is the one that most people come to know and love at their local beaches, because they're the most abundant, and they're the ones that people accidentally step on the most and get stung by,” said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach.
Round stingrays come into contact with our feet because they forage on the sea floor for clams, crabs, isopods and small fish. They hide from predators under the sand while they digest. Understandably, they strongly dislike being stepped on, especially with a full belly. I don’t blame ‘em.
Round stingrays range from Panama up to Santa Barbara County — the northern tip of their range. Over the last hundred years, their populations have been growing steadily, largely because we killed off many of their predators, such as sea lions, white sharks and sea bass, last century.
Now, thanks to conservation efforts and improved fishing practices, many of those predators are making a comeback.
“As a result of those predator populations coming back, we expect the round stingray population to get tamped down a little bit,” Lowe said.
Stingrays or “white shark pancakes,” Lowe joked, are “the first food we think the juvenile white sharks that hang out off our beaches really take advantage of.”
At the same time, coastal development over the last 100 years has destroyed much of the habitat that stingrays prefer, such as lagoons and estuaries, which have calm, shallow warm water and sediment to hide under. Now, the habitat available to them is primarily coastal beaches.
“That puts a lot more people in the path of what we call prime round stingray habitat,” Lowe said.
In January, officials at Huntington Beach warned beachgoers of an uptick in stingray activity. Down the road in Seal Beach, a popular surf spot has long been known as “Ray Bay.”
Here in Southern California, estimates are that lifeguards treat more than 10,000 stings a year, Lowe said. That’s likely a very conservative estimate, he added, since many people don’t seek treatment.
Climate change is increasingly playing a role in stingray life too, Lowe said, by warming waters that historically have been too cool for them to survive.
Over the last 200 years, human society has pumped an unprecedented level of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is heating up the planet. The ocean has been our main buffer to the worst effects of that pollution — it absorbs about 30% of all carbon dioxide emissions and about 90% of the excess heat generated by those emissions, according to NASA.
That’s not only changing the chemical composition of the ocean, but also driving worsening marine heatwaves or “blobs,” which can lead to mass die-offs of marine life. In fact, we’ve been in a record-breaking marine heat wave since last summer.
“The pattern at which these marine heat waves are increasing is clearly an indicator of climate change,” Lowe said. “So these are all real true harbingers of climate change, and we're seeing the animals that live in these environments respond to these conditions.”
Though they can withstand only so much heat, stingrays prefer temperate, subtropical waters.
“As the ocean continues to warm, that range gets pushed farther north, which means the habitat in Southern California just becomes even more pleasant to the round stingray,” Lowe said.
Over the last 50 years, round stingrays have had periodic pulses as far north as Monterey. And with an El Niño weather pattern likely this year, ”we might start seeing animals even farther north,” Lowe said.
Warmer waters may sound good for stingrays, but it’s not a great sign for the health of the ocean. Last year’s extreme marine heat wave led to massive algae blooms that sickened and poisoned marine wildlife.
Ah geez: You're here because you're wondering if you should get back with your ex, aren't you?
Don't be ashamed: Almost half of people end up getting back with a past flame at some point.
But: Is it a good idea? Like, for reals? We turned that question over to listeners of AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, and got some mixed responses.
Listener thoughts:
Listen: To the full AirTalk segment above to hear advice from relationship expert Lauren Salaun, and how one man's desert rendezvous with an ex left him stranded in SoCal.
Ah geez: You're here because you're wondering if you should get back with your ex, aren't you?
Don't be ashamed: Almost half of people end up getting back with a past flame at some point.
But: Is it a good idea? Like, for reals? We turned that question over to listeners of AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, and got some mixed responses.
Listener thoughts:
Listen: To the full AirTalk segment above to hear advice from relationship expert Lauren Salaun, and how one man's desert rendezvous with an ex left him stranded in SoCal.
Topline:
MacArthur Park will host two more Fall Friday Nights this month, with a Glow Party on Friday and a free outdoor movie night next week as the city continues its community programming at the park.
More details: The free events are open to the public from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and include free food, games, entertainment, activities and community resources.
The backstory: The two events are the final Fall Friday Nights scheduled at MacArthur Park this year. The series has been held at the park since 2024 and brings together city departments, neighborhood organizations and service providers. Fall Friday Nights was created in 2015 as an extension of the city’s Summer Night Lights program.
Read on... for more on the two events this month.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
MacArthur Park will host two more Fall Friday Nights this month, with a Glow Party on Friday and a free outdoor movie night next week as the city continues its community programming at the park.
The free events are open to the public from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and include free food, games, entertainment, activities and community resources.
Friday’s Glow Party will include a DJ, glow sticks, dancing and interactive games.
The Sept. 25 movie night will feature a screening of “The Super Mario Galaxy” on a large outdoor screen.
The two events are the final Fall Friday Nights scheduled at MacArthur Park this year. The series has been held at the park since 2024 and brings together city departments, neighborhood organizations and service providers.
Fall Friday Nights was created in 2015 as an extension of the city’s Summer Night Lights program.
Eduardo Rodriguez, executive director of Central City Neighborhood Partners, said Fall Friday Nights grew from a partnership between the city, Mayor Karen Bass, CCNP and other community groups to create “more consistent, positive, family-centered activity at MacArthur Park.”
CCNP began activating the park this summer through its “Meet Me at MacArthur Park” initiative, which Rodriguez said showed that families wanted more welcoming events and accessible resources.
“The strong community response demonstrated that families want welcoming events, accessible resources, and reasons to return to the park,” Rodriguez said.
About a thousand people attended each of the first two Fall Friday Nights this year, Rodriguez said, for an estimated 2,000 people combined.
The Friday events are also part of a longer-term plan for the park.
Rodriguez said CCNP, through its “Meet Me at MacArthur Park” initiative, plans to establish a recurring presence at the park two days a week. CCNP will provide FamilySource services, youth and family programs, workforce and education resources, financial empowerment, wellness services, food assistance and other community support.
“Our goal is to turn individual events into long-term relationships with families and create consistent, visible, and positive activity at MacArthur Park,” he said.
For Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, the Friday events are part of a broader effort in MacArthur Park that includes clean teams, street medicine teams, overdose response and infrastructure improvements.
Hernandez said residents are beginning to notice changes at the park, but argued that they came after years of work.
“This has been years of investment, of time, of money that me and my team have put into MacArthur Park and into Westlake from the moment I got into office,” she said on social media.
Hernandez has also described that work as part of a broader approach to public safety that extends beyond law enforcement.
“The public safety ecosystem is not just law enforcement,” she said, pointing to street medicine teams and mobile overdose response teams working in the park.
The Los Angeles Police Department and federal agents have spent much of the summer carrying out a multi-phase operation targeting drug activity in and around MacArthur Park, while the city says it remains on track to install a perimeter fence this fall.
Fall Friday Nights “targets communities that may need a little extra care once the school year starts,” according to Bass’ office.
Free clothing will also be distributed. CCNP will provide free transportation from its Westlake office, Tenth Street Elementary School and Virgil Middle School. Residents can call CCNP at (213) 482-8618 for transportation information.
Last year, Fall Friday Nights brought more than 3,000 people to MacArthur Park over four Friday nights, according to the city. The programming included arts and crafts, futsal, meals and other activities, while unhoused residents could also access medical care and other services.
Topline:
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered state agencies to develop safety regulations for artificial intelligence after vetoing tougher rules two years ago.
Why now: His change of tune on those measures, including requiring AI developers to include a “kill switch” to shut off certain programs in emergencies, comes in response to growing public alarm over the fast-developing technology’s potential “catastrophic” harms such as AI creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.
The backstory: Newsom has sought in recent weeks to respond to several incidents in which AI agents from leading developers OpenAI and Anthropic broke away from testing environments, gained access to the open internet and carried out cyberattacks on other websites and companies. Earlier this month, a researcher set off a panic when he resigned from Anthropic while warning the technology could “kill all humans;” the researcher’s former colleagues were quick to agree.
Read on... for more on Newsom's order.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he is directing state agencies to develop artificial intelligence safety recommendations, some of which were part of a bill he vetoed two years ago.
His change of tune on those measures, including requiring AI developers to include a “kill switch” to shut off certain programs in emergencies, comes in response to growing public alarm over the fast-developing technology’s potential “catastrophic” harms such as AI creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.
Newsom is seeking recommendations from the Government Operations Agency and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services by Nov. 16, meaning they could form the basis of a special legislative session on the issue. He floated the possibility of calling one in Politico on Thursday.
Newsom has sought in recent weeks to respond to several incidents in which AI agents from leading developers OpenAI and Anthropic broke away from testing environments, gained access to the open internet and carried out cyberattacks on other websites and companies. Earlier this month, a researcher set off a panic when he resigned from Anthropic while warning the technology could “kill all humans;” the researcher’s former colleagues were quick to agree.
The hackings have captivated the public and seem to confirm AI researchers’ fears that the fast-developing technology is improving its own capabilities beyond human control. Several industry leaders last week endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a slowdown in development.
Newsom’s Friday executive order directs the state agencies to recommend changes in state law to implement an external evaluation requirement, as well as requirements that AI companies’ safety frameworks required under the newest law be independently verified. He’s also seeking recommendations on how to require a kill switch, and how to expand the safety incidents companies must report to include “a range of loss-of-control incidents” such as the recent reported hackings.
Regulation is unlikely from the federal government; President Donald Trump remains all-in on speeding up AI development in the face of competition from China and said the calls for a slowdown are a “conspiracy.”
Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, said Friday in a press release that should “alarm every American.”
“We’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it's too late,” he said.
California under Newsom has enacted several first-in-the-nation laws to curb the potentially existential risks of AI. In 2025 he signed Senate Bill 53, which requires large AI model developers to publish frameworks on how they manage safety incidents and assess catastrophic risk — defined as incidents involving 50 or more deaths, chemical or biological weapons or more than $1 billion of theft or damage. They also must report critical safety incidents to the state. Illinois and New York have similar laws.
But the measure was a compromise — a requirement for transparency rather than regulatory control — after Newsom in 2024 vetoed Senate Bill 1047.
Both bills were authored by Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, whose San Francisco district is home to the most prominent AI companies.
The vetoed measure would have required the largest AI developers to receive safety auditing from third-party, external monitors, develop a kill switch and be subject to clearer legal liability if their technology causes harm. The measure divided Silicon Valley and received fierce opposition from several, but not all, of the largest AI developers.
Newsom wrote then in a veto letter that while he agreed with the need to require safety protocols, the bill could restrict AI development at large companies “at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.”
“I agree with the author — we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public,” he added.
Since then, more in the industry have embraced third-party evaluations. This year, Newsom signed two laws to verify and set standards for those external monitors. But the new laws did not require companies to use them.
In a recent call for a slowdown in AI development that was endorsed by several other industry leaders, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also called for third-party monitoring; both that company and OpenAI say they will commit to the practice.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Topline:
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a series of measures that halt the rebuilding of the burned Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights and that steer funding toward fire recovery efforts.
Why it matters: In a unanimous vote, the City Council barred the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) from issuing any rebuild permits until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completes its investigation.
More resources: The council also directed city staff to explore the feasibility of establishing a fund of up to $10 million to support the affected Lineage community. It also called for the reallocation of up to $940,000 in Los Angeles County Fire Assistance Grant Funds to the Boyle Heights WorkSource Center for Lineage Fire Recovery to support impacted workers and businesses.
Read on... for more on the vote.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a series of measures that halt the rebuilding of the burned Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights and that steer funding toward fire recovery efforts.
In a unanimous vote, the City Council barred the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) from issuing any rebuild permits until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completes its investigation.
The council also directed the Department of City Planning, the city attorney and the LADBS to present an interim control ordinance prohibiting permits or certificates of occupancy for large cold-storage warehousing and distribution near residential neighborhoods and sensitive areas like parks, schools, day care centers and libraries in Boyle Heights.
The ordinance, if approved, would be in effect for 45 days, with an option to extend by 10 months and 15 days. It could be extended by an additional year, or until the “appropriate land use regulatory controls have been prepared,” according to a city staff report.
“This Lineage fire exposed the cost of systems that have concentrated industrial risk in working-class communities of color for generations,” said Councilmember Ysabel Jurado during the council meeting.
“A facility should not be able to request a like-for-like rebuild while the fire investigation remains active and the surrounding community is still living with the consequences,” she added.
Jurado pushed forward the measures, noting that “recovery doesn’t finish when the site is cleaned up.”
“Our responsibility is also to demand accountability and strengthen protections so residents do not experience a disaster like this again,” she said.
Jurado said the measures will ensure Boyle Heights residents “aren’t left to navigate recovery alone or bear the financial burden of an emergency they did not create.”
The council also directed city staff to explore the feasibility of establishing a fund of up to $10 million to support the affected Lineage community.
It also called for the reallocation of up to $940,000 in Los Angeles County Fire Assistance Grant Funds to the Boyle Heights WorkSource Center for Lineage Fire Recovery to support impacted workers and businesses.
Additionally, council members instructed the LADBS and the city attorney to provide recommendations for increasing penalties for notices of violations “on projects that impose a significant impact to the community,” as seen in the Lineage fire. Recommendations should include a fee and fine structure that ranges from $25,000 to $1 million per fine, according to a city staff report.
