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.
Topline:
Something unusual is happening with only a few days remaining before the U.S. men's national team opens its World Cup campaign against Paraguay: Tickets for the match are not sold out.
More details: Although numbers fluctuate regularly, FIFA's ticketing website still shows 132 tickets left to sell for a game that's set to take place in Los Angeles on Friday. Meanwhile, resale platforms such as StubHub and SeatGeek — and FIFA's own marketplace — also show thousands of tickets on sale.
Why now: Ticketing experts widely agree on the reason: the prices. FIFA dramatically jacked them up for the tournament — especially for high profile games. The most expensive regular seats for the U.S. opener against Paraguay are priced at $2,735 — more than the final cost for the 2022 World Cup final — while the cheapest are $1,120.
Read on... for more on the opening matches.
Something unusual is happening with only a few days remaining before the U.S. men's national team opens its World Cup campaign against Paraguay: Tickets for the match are not sold out.
Although numbers fluctuate regularly, FIFA's ticketing website still shows 132 tickets left to sell for a game that's set to take place in Los Angeles on Friday. Meanwhile, resale platforms such as StubHub and SeatGeek — and FIFA's own marketplace — also show thousands of tickets on sale.
The number is even higher for Canada's opening match against Bosnia Herzegovina in Toronto on the same day, with 226 tickets left in FIFA's website and a high number of tickets available in resale markets.
That's unusual for high-profile events such as the opening matches of the World Cup — traditionally among the hardest to get tickets in the tournament. This year will feature three hosts in the U.S., Canada and Mexico — but so far only Mexico's opening match against South Africa on Thursday looks to be virtually sold out.
Ticketing experts widely agree on the reason: the prices. FIFA dramatically jacked them up for the tournament — especially for high profile games. The most expensive regular seats for the U.S. opener against Paraguay are priced at $2,735 — more than the final cost for the 2022 World Cup final — while the cheapest are $1,120.
Even President Trump said he wouldn't pay those prices.
"I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest with you," Trump told the New York Post in a recent interview.
The other two remaining games for the U.S. national have far fewer tickets available, given that prices are well below the ones for the opening match.
There are not only plenty of tickets left to sell — a number of them are also available below FIFA's face value. According to Ticketdata, which tracks prices across the resale platforms, the cheapest pair of tickets for the opening match for the U.S. and Canada was $951 as of Monday morning, while in FIFA's resale platform, tickets were available for as low as $690.
Other games across the 104-match tournament also still have many tickets left to sell — despite FIFA President Gianni Infantino's claim that every match is "already sold out." That's especially the case for lesser well known teams such as the Jordan against Algeria match, which still had hundreds of unsold seats in the FIFA's web site.
Demand for high-profile tickets such as Argentina and Portugal was far higher, however, with many of those games looking largely sold out.
Whether eventually the U.S. and Canada opening matches will sell out is hard to answer. Throughout the sales process, FIFA has closely guarded how many tickets it has actually sold and how many are left to sell, making it virtually impossible to gauge.
In addition, like other teams, FIFA could also sell tickets in other platforms including third-party ones such as SeatGeek, which can further obscure how many tickets are left to sell.
FIFA and organizers, however, are hoping for a surge in excitement that leads to a last-minute rush of sales for the opening matches as well as for those such as Jordan against Algeria that look far from being sold out.
Ben Shields, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says perceptions so far of the tournament have been shaped by how expensive tickets and travel has been for a tournament taking place across an entire continent.
That, he says, "does not seem to sit well with many."
But that could change.
"The hope or bet — for FIFA is that once the matches start — and the greatest players in the world compete for the most prestigious prize of them all, the sport as business lens will fade into the background and the World Cup will be seen and experienced as the enduring global institution that it is," Shields says. "We shall see."
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Orange County’s top elected leaders on Tuesday are set to discuss what to do with $3.7 million recovered from the Andrew Do corruption scheme.
The backstory: Do is now serving a five-year sentence in federal prison after he admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for awarding millions in tax dollars meant to feed needy seniors and people with disabilities in his district. As part of the plea deal, Do acknowledged taking over $800,000 in bribes through his two daughters, including a down payment on the house his youngest daughter Rhiannon Do later forfeited to resolve the criminal case. The scheme was first uncovered by LAist.
What they want: Ahead of Tuesday’s discussion, Do’s successor — Janet Nguyen — said the funds should support residents of his former district who were deprived by Do and his alleged co-conspirators. Other supervisors have advocated a broader view of how they’d want to use the money.
Orange County’s top elected leaders on Tuesday are set to discuss what to do with $3.7 million recovered from the Andrew Do corruption scheme.
Do is now serving a five-year sentence in federal prison after he admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for awarding millions in tax dollars meant to feed needy seniors and people with disabilities in his district.
As part of the plea deal, Do acknowledged taking more than $800,000 in bribes through his two daughters, including a down payment on the house his youngest daughter Rhiannon Do later forfeited to resolve the criminal case. The scheme was first uncovered by LAist.
Federal officials recovered money from seized bank accounts and two properties connected to Do’s scheme — including the Tustin house his daughter bought.
The county Board of Supervisors is expected to publicly discuss plans for the recovered funds as they make decisions on the overall county budget at their meeting Tuesday. Public comment will also be taken.
Ahead of Tuesday’s discussion, Do’s successor said the funds should support residents of his former district who were deprived by Do and his alleged co-conspirators.
“For the past five years, every other district in Orange County has benefitted from the same community funds to support their cities, nonprofits, civic projects which strengthens their communities,” Supervisor Janet Nguyen wrote in a mass email to constituents last week. “However, our district went without because Do stole what belonged to our residents.”
“This money was stolen from the First District, and it must come back to the First District,” Nguyen added.
Nguyen was Do’s mentor and former boss more than a decade ago, before the two had a bitter falling out by 2016.
She encouraged residents of her district to send letters to the board and to speak during public comments.
Several county supervisors told LAist they supported a similar approach, one in which the recovered money goes to support the original intended recipients: seniors and people with disabilities in Do’s former district. Some supervisors have since advocated a broader view of how they’d want to use the money, noting that it was meant to address disruptions caused by the pandemic. Now that years have passed since the initial COVID-19 outbreak and lockdowns, some supervisors argue community needs have changed.
“We are so many years on, and the problems that money originally was to address (mostly Covid impacts) are now behind us, that I think we should have a discussion about how and where to spend it,” Supervisor Don Wagner told LAist via text message in March. “The budget is so tight and the needs so great across the county.”
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said he’d work toward a fair distribution of the funds to best serve residents, with a focus on current needs.
“We will definitely consider what areas of the County were harmed by Do’s scheme, but we must also remember that the funds were intended for relief efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, a threat we are no longer facing,” he said in March. “We also need to consider addressing the current needs of residents with any dollars returned to the county.”
The amount of taxpayer money recovered so far is less than half of the $7.9 million Andrew Do admitted was diverted from specific meal contracts.
In a lawsuit seeking to recover funds, the county alleges the total amount lost in the scheme was even larger: $13.25 million. The county’s suit — scheduled for trial in November 2027 — covers all of the money Do gave to two nonprofits accused in the scheme, Viet America Society and Hand to Hand Relief Organization.
If you have a tip, you can reach me on Signal. My username is ngerda.47.
That leaves more than $4 million — and possibly much more — not yet recovered.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office noted they have an ongoing criminal case against Do’s alleged co-conspirator Peter Pham.
“Assuming we obtain a conviction in that matter, we would expect to seek restitution,” the spokesperson, Ciaran McEvoy, said.
Pham left the country on a flight to Taiwan in late 2024 and remains a fugitive, according to McEvoy. The case against him also includes charges against another alleged co-conspirator, Thanh Huong Nguyen, who led the Hand to Hand nonprofit.
Topline:
More than 6,000 fans watched a U.S. Men's National Soccer Team practice Monday morning at their base camp at Great Park Sports Complex in Irvine. It's the only time the team will practice in public during the World Cup.
Why it matters: For fans of the US Men's National Soccer Team, it's a rare chance to see them without an expensive ticket. Thousands signed up for a lottery, with many left disappointed.
What's at stake: The U.S. men’s team is representing co-host country USA in this 2026 World Cup, a country that has millions of youth in soccer leagues nationwide but that is often bested in international play by much smaller countries.
Why Irvine: The team will use the soccer field and stadium at the Great Park as their training facility during the team’s three group play matches at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
The backstory: The U.S. men’s team has not made it to quarterfinals in the World Cup since 2002.
What's next: The U.S. plays Paraguay on June 12, Australia on June 19, and Turkey on June 25 in group play at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
Fans of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team swelled the stadium at the Great Park in Irvine on Monday to watch players practice for the first time since arriving at the training facility they’ll call home for the first round of the 2026 World Cup.
“Seeing them play right now… it was really cool to see how they play and how they practice,” said Mila Ran, who came with her mother from nearby Mission Viejo.
“This whole time she’s saying, 'I want to go shoot, I want to go play,'” said Mila’s mother, Farah Ran.
They were among about 6,000 people who won free entry to the practice in a lottery that received more than 30,000 entries, according to Irvine officials.
The team’s biggest stars — Christian Pulisic, Antonee Robinson and others — showed off their ball handling skills, honed over years of play on U.S. youth fields and overseas in professional leagues. Fans yelled, waved U.S. flags, held up homemade signs, and did the wave several times.
After the roughly 45-minute practice, some players walked to the sidelines to take selfies with fans and sign autographs.
The players know it’s going to take more than this, however, to live up to expectations during the World Cup.
“To be in a position to train in front of these people today… is such a unique opportunity and one that none of us take for granted,” said backup goalie Matt Freese before the practice. “We’re working as hard as we can, as focused as we can to leave the next generation inspired."
The U.S. men’s team and their training staff will use the Great Park facility over the next several weeks as the team plays Paraguay on Friday, Australia on June 19, and Turkey on June 25 in group play at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
Topline:
Jury selection began Monday for the trial of the man accused of igniting a fire that led to the deadly and destructive Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of structures.
The charges: Jonathan Rinderknecht is charged with one count of destruction of property by means of fire, one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce and one count of setting timber afire. He could face up to 45 years in federal prison.
How we got here: Prosecutors allege Rinderknecht set brush alight near a popular hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains on New Year’s Day, starting the Lachman Fire. Firefighters initially thought they put out the fire, but it remained smoldering underground for several days. High winds then brought the embers to the surface, sparking the Palisades Fire, which burned more than 23,000 acres.
Jury selection began Monday for the trial of the man accused of igniting a fire that led to the deadly and destructive Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of structures.
Jonathan Rinderknecht is charged with one count of destruction of property by means of fire, one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce and one count of setting timber afire. He could face up to 45 years in federal prison.
Prosecutors allege Rinderknecht set brush alight near a popular hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains on New Year’s Day, starting the Lachman Fire. Firefighters initially thought they put out the fire, but it remained smouldering underground for several days. High winds then brought the embers to the surface, sparking the Palisades Fire, which burned more than 23,000 acres.
In a court filing in April, prosecutors allege Rinderknecht displayed “extreme anger, indignation, and frustration” because he had to spend New Year's Eve alone. After driving around for Uber, Rinderknecht hiked up a popular trail and set chaparral alight in a clearing, according to prosecutors.
“He then started calling 911 multiple times, hiked down the hill, and fled the area in his car before firefighters arrived. Defendant returned to the area after he saw fire trucks arriving and then took videos of the firefighting efforts,” prosecutors wrote.
The filing also states that Rinderknecht threatened to burn down his sister’s home.
Prosecutors are expected to argue that Rinderknecht started the smaller blaze knowing it could turn into a bigger inferno.
U.S. District Court Judge Anne Hwang has previously expressed the government’s position could confuse jurors.
Defense attorney Steve Haney previously told reporters that prosecutors were trying to blame Rinderknecht for a fire that started days before the Palisades Fire.
"Well what about what happened between Jan. 1 and Jan. 7?" he asked. "Jonathan wasn't out there with a fire hose putting that fire out at the Lachman location, the Fire Department was. So why are they blaming him for whatever the Fire Department didn't do?"
