The Brief

California’s western burrowing owls may soon see greater protections as a petition to list some populations of the bird as endangered has advanced through a state agency.

This is the first major hurdle advocates for the species needed to clear, and some protections could take effect on a preliminary basis as soon as October. Still, there are several more steps before the state considers some populations of the owl to be endangered.

Path to protection

The process of protecting the burrowing owl started after six environmental groups filed a petition for some populations of the species to be listed as endangered. This week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended passing the petition to another state board for another level of approval: designating the species a “candidate” to be considered endangered.

“We're hoping they take action in October,” said conservation advocate Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that recommended the protections for the burrowing owl. “I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be [designated as a candidate species]. It really does qualify.”

The committee will hear the petition later this month, and the next step will take place on Oct. 10 in front of the Fish and Game Commission, which sets rules that the Department of Fish and Wildlife enforces. At that point, the Fish and Game Commission will determine whether the burrowing owl meets the standards to be listed as a “candidate” for protections.

If the owl qualifies, the commission will determine what protections are needed. In that case, the owl would remain protected during a full review process conducted by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which will last 12 to 18 months.

Conservation advocates for the burrowing owl say time is already running out for many populations across the state, and that this will be a big help for the owl.

“It's a good feature of the state version of the Endangered Species Act, this kind of precautionary principle,” Miller said. “That's especially needed for a species like the burrowing owl.”

The wildlife protection law

The western burrowing owl is relatively widespread, from Canada to the Western U.S. to Central America and is not listed as a protected species overall. But under the California Endangered Species Act, certain populations of an animal can still be protected. (This plays an important role in conservation: Consider how many populations of mountain lions face threats due to human development even though population numbers for the species overall are not cause a concern.)

State officials will decide whether to protect certain populations of the owl or focus on specific areas that are most threatened.

For their part, petitioners are only asking to protect the southwestern population of burrowing owls, which used to extend into Los Angeles County but are now largely confined to western Riverside County and southwestern San Bernardino County, according to Miller.

“Those are places where development is just proceeding at a pretty breakneck pace, so we're losing those populations very quickly,” Miller said.

The petitioners are also asking for burrowing owl populations in the Central Coast and San Francisco Bay Area to be considered endangered.

About the burrowing owl

The western burrowing owl, which Miller described as “adorable,” is different from many other species of owl in that it makes its home from burrows created by mammals like the California ground squirrel — and it’s unique that it both nests and roosts underground.

The western burrowing owl’s habitat is mainly grasslands and low-lying flat areas that are also targeted for farmland and construction, especially as California’s housing and development boom expands even further into the species’ habitat. This construction has caused burrowing owl populations to plummet in certain regions.

“We are losing burrowing owls everywhere, including places where they were formerly very numerous, and it was thought they were kind of the strongholds for the species,” Miller said. “Just since 2018, we've just seen the numbers plummet statewide.”

Even in a worst-case scenario where the species went extinct locally, you may still see burrowing owls in Southern California. But that doesn’t mean the native populations are coming back. Many owls breed in more northern habitats and migrate south, but conservation experts are concerned with maintaining a steady breeding population in all parts of the state.

While populations overall are on the decline, preservation efforts of some breeding populations in California have seen success. A few populations in urban counties have survived due to organizations like the San Diego Zoo performing “triage emergency measures,” including captive breeding and the feeding of juvenile owls, Miller said.

I wasn’t expecting the internet’s biggest Chinese rapper to make his Southern California debut (we are not counting the earlier San Diego show) at a sprawling, sterile business park in Santa Ana.

But there I was Wednesday night along with hundreds of people at the Observatory to watch the viral sensation perform his brand of hip-hop blending Memphis trap with lyrics rooted in Cantonese folk and everyday culture across southeastern China.

You may not know the name, SKAI Isyourgod, but if you have been on Instagram or TikTok in the last couple years, you can’t escape the sound — or the memes.

" He's really famous on Instagram," said Julie Sun, who came to the gig from Irvine. " He popped up a lot throughout all different kinds of video content."

That’s how I learned of his music — through a reel that had nothing to do with his music. But it was grabby from the first note, opening as it did by sampling a vintage Cantonese opera. That inventive touch sent me searching for the whole song, “Blueprint Supreme,” which turned out to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek send up on the nouveau riche.

It’s a theme the 27-year-old from Guangdong Province goes back to with humor and deft wordplay in the track “Stacked On All Sides.”

Throughout the night, the crowd yelled out the name of that tune. When it was finally performed, all the phones were raised.

“His lyrics [are] mostly very positive and kind of give the good fortune to people,” Sun said.

Like Sun, the vast majority of the audience were Chinese.

"Where’s everyone from?" SKAI asked during one of his interludes, and the crowd shouted back: "Dongbei…. Fushan…."

But there were also plenty of non-Chinese speaking fans at the club, a testament to the rapper’s global virility.

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SKAI Isyourgod performs in Santa Ana in 2025.

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Noah Rosen lives in Santa Ana, but he first learned about SKAI two years ago through friends and people he worked with at the company he cofounded, which has a satellite office in China.

"We blasted [it] in carpool karaoke and stuff like that," said Rosen, who doesn’t speak Chinese.

"There's something so catchy and so inventive, and it's a fantastic melody," he continued. "Which is why they're so good on TikTok and Instagram and everything. Doesn't matter if you understand the lyrics or not."

Some of the red ink in California’s budget deficit is coming from unplanned spending in state prisons, according to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is on track to exceed its budget by roughly $850 million over three years despite recent cuts that include four prison closures and some labor concessions that trimmed payroll expenses. The state budget included $17.5 billion for prisons this year.

The office attributed the corrections department’s shortfall to both preexisting and ongoing imbalances in its budget. The analyst’s annual fiscal outlook projected a nearly $18 billion deficit for the coming year, which follows spending cuts in the current budget.

The corrections department last year ran out of money to pay its bills. In May, it received a one-time allocation of $357 million from the general fund to cover needs including workers’ compensation, food for incarcerated people and overtime.

Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco in a June 17 letter to the Department of Finance said he was “shocked and disappointed that (the corrections department) overspent its budget by such a significant amount” while the state faced a $12 billion general fund shortfall that resulted in cuts to key health care and social service programs.

“These were dollars that could have been used to provide basic services to some of our most underserved communities,” wrote Wiener. “While this year’s budget included measures requiring departments to ‘tighten their belts’ and reduce state operating expenses by up to 7.95%, (the corrections department) did the opposite, and overspent by nearly three percent.”

Without having any new dedicated funding to align its actual costs with its budget, Wiener warned, deficits “will likely persist” and put additional pressure on the general fund in years to come.

That’s despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s attempts to save the state money through prison closures. Newsom in May moved to close the state prison in Norco in Riverside County next year, the fifth prison closure under his tenure.

Newsom’s administration estimates it saves about $150 million a year for each prison closure, which lawmakers and advocates regard as the only way to significantly bring down corrections spending. A spokesperson for Newsom’s Finance Department declined to comment on the analyst’s projection. Newsom will release his next budget proposal in January.

“We are allowing wasteful prison spending to continue while Californians are being told to tighten their belts and brace for deep federal cuts to core programs,” said Brian Kaneda, deputy director for the statewide coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget in a statement to CalMatters. “We are spending millions on prisons that could be safely closed. That is government waste, not public safety.”

A new electric streetcar service connecting Garden Grove and Santa Ana is currently undergoing testing. If all goes as planned, the new service will be in operation starting next summer.

The nearly $650 million project — funded through a combination of state, federal and local funds — was originally set to begin service in 2021, but has been beset by rising costs and delays.

A train operator sits inside one of the OCTAs OC Streetcars for safety testing.

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Back on track

Darrell E. Johnson, Orange County Transportation Authority's CEO, told LAist that the service is 95% complete. The current testing phase could take anywhere between six and 12 months.

That means testing the train pulls out of the platform properly, control systems are operating properly, and that the train system interfaces with the street signal system along its route.

All aboard

Each car is over 90 feet long and has the capacity to carry up to 211 passengers.

“The fleet itself is eight vehicles. The service that we plan to run will take six of them every day.” Johnson said.

The new service will travel across some of densest areas of Orange County, ferrying an expected 5,000 passengers a day across the route's 10 stops.

The eastern side of the route starts at Santa Ana Regional Transportation Center, where over 50 Amtrak and Metrolink trains pass through daily.

The Civic Center for the county — which houses state, federal and county courthouses as well as Santa Ana City Hall — is in the middle of the route.

The service will end at the Harbor Boulevard — a heavily used bus route that sees more than 10,000 passengers a day.

The front view of an OC Streetcar on tracks.

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Transportation future

OCTA says it plans to charge the exact same amount as their bus system to ride the streetcar service — $2 one way or $5 for a day pass.

The service is slated to run every day from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., with extended hours on weekends.

Officials are hoping for an Aug. 1 launch next year. And they don't anticipate stopping there.

“This is the beginning of something, whether we go north on Harbor Boulevard or South on Bristol Street or we continue westerly towards Artesia, Cerritos and LAX,” Johnson said. “That’s probably a decision that will be discussed in the next two to five years.”

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene became a household name in the run up to the 2020 election for divisive rhetoric, political stunts and enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump. But after growing disagreements with Trump during his second term, Greene announced she will leave Congress in January before her term is up.

Greene said it would not be fair to her northwest Georgia district, one of the most conservative in the country, to have them "endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for" while noting that "Republicans will likely lose the midterms."

Greene's split with Trump widened in recent weeks as she pushed for the release of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For months, Greene had been publicly pressing Trump and top Republicans in Congress to release all files from two federal investigations into Epstein. She was part of a small cadre of Republicans who helped force a vote on the House floor to release the files — a process that drove Trump to reverse his position on the documents and led to near-unanimous support for the measure this week.

But before Trump reversed course, he lashed out last week, calling her "Marjorie Traitor Greene," and told reporters, "Something happened to her over the last period of a month or two where she changed politically."

In her post Friday night, Greene defended her decision to fight for the release of those documents.

"Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for," Greene wrote.

Greene's defiant push against Trump

On a brisk morning this week, Greene stood outside the Capitol with some of the women who say they were abused by Epstein.

"I've never owed him anything," Greene of the president on Tuesday. "But I fought for him and for America First. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women."

The cracks between Trump and Greene grew over the last year, as Greene increasingly pointed out where she saw the president falling short: she called the war in Gaza a genocide, criticized Trump's decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and pressed for expiring health subsidies to be extended, citing the threat of skyrocketing premiums for people in her district, including her own children.

And she was doing it not just on social media or right-wing outlets, but on programs like ABC's The View.

"What Happened to Marjorie?"

"I was thinking, if this was the first time I'd ever seen this person, it sounds like a normal congressperson from Schoolhouse Rock," said University of North Georgia professor Nathan Price after Greene's appearance on the daytime television staple.

For some, this new persona may be hard to square with the Greene many Americans first got to know: the congresswoman who embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, liked a post that called for violence against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and heckled school shooting survivor David Hogg in 2020, before he became a prominent political activist.

Even Trump has publicly mused in recent weeks: "What happened to Marjorie?"

Georgia Republican strategist Brian Robinson says it's a fair question.

"I am open to the idea that she's had a 'road to Damascus' moment, a conversion, that she sees the errors of the toxicity and wants something that's better," Robinson said in an interview with NPR earlier in the week.

On her own social media and with journalists, Greene has been open about addressing claims from Trump and others that she has changed or abandoned the president. NPR reached out to Greene for further comment.

"Nothing has changed about me," Greene told the hosts of The View. "I'm staying absolutely 100% true to the people who voted for me, and true to my district."

Robinson said the changes could be part of a natural evolution for Greene, a former CrossFit gym owner from the Atlanta suburbs.

"We love to elect outsiders to Congress," Robinson said. "They go to Congress with very little idea of how it works. And if at some point you're like, 'I want to do substantive things that make America better, then I've got to do this a little bit different."

Or, Robinson said, she may be trying to broaden her appeal with an important constituency as she weighs a bid for higher office. Trump said last week he showed Greene polling earlier this year suggesting she would flounder in a race for Georgia governor or Senate.

"Is she intentionally signaling to women, 'The good old boys club ignores us, and I understand your struggles?" Robinson said.

Both Robinson and Price said Greene's evolution was more about style than substance. She has disavowed some of her more controversial views, but not others, like the unproven assertion that widespread fraud upended the 2020 election result.

The anti-interventionist, anti-elite principles that first propelled her to Congress also remain core to her identity. "What she's responding to is believing that the President has shifted on these issues," said Price.

Some potential political opponents see an opportunity in Greene's break with Trump. Robinson, who worked for Greene's opponent in her first primary race, says in the past he has warned potential challengers not to underestimate her.

"You are wasting your time," Robinson said. "She will beat you. And I would have said that into infinity until this week."

How Greene's district reacted to the shift

But in the 14th Congressional District, it was not clear this week that anything had changed. As chair of the Paulding County Republican Party, Ricky Hess spends a lot of time talking with voters.

"The issues that they want to talk about involve high property taxes, high health care costs, whether or not their kids will be able to buy a house when they graduate," Hess said this week ahead of Greene's resignation.

Hess told NPR he believes Greene's "America First" worldview resonates in this heavily working class and rural stretch of Northwest Georgia.

"She's pretty tapped into what her constituents are wanting, and I have to believe that most of her actions are in service to that," Hess said.

Hess said voters saw Trump and Greene as fighters on the same team. Though Martha Zoller, who hosts a political talk radio show that airs across North Georgia, said in an interview Wednesday she didn't believe everyone's minds were made up.

"People are kind of reeling, if you want to know the truth," Zoller said. "We haven't had a lot of listeners discussing it because they're waiting to see what happens."

Georgia political observers noted that Greene has been anything but a predictable politician — including her surprise resignation.

Trump has come to a truce with other politicians he's feuded with, including Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. And his future relationship with Greene could still evolve.

But Zoller said the conflict between Trump and Greene has been about more than just two big personalities falling out on the national stage.

"I think that the big discussion we're going to be having as Republicans over the next few years is what is the Republican movement once it's not Trump?"

Zoller said earlier this week it seemed clear that Greene wants to be part of that discussion. But with her resignation, the answer to that question is may be less clear now than before.

NPR's Stephen Fowler contributed to this report.
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