The Brief

Investigators said Friday that they reviewed statements from more than 60 witnesses and other evidence before charging a Moorpark man in the death of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man who was fatally injured last week during a confrontation between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrators in Thousand Oaks.

Loay Alnaji, a 50-year-old college professor, was charged with two felony counts: involuntary manslaughter and battery causing serious bodily injury. The charges come with special allegations that Alnaji personally inflicted great bodily injury on Kessler.

Alnaji pleaded not guilty in Superior Court Friday afternoon. If convicted, he could face time in prison. A judge reduced Alnaji's bail to $50,000 from $1 million, and ordered him to turn over any passports.

Defense lawyer Ron Bamieh objected, arguing that Alnaji isn't a flight risk and has no criminal record.

“He’s an American citizen [and] he deserves to be treated like an American citizen. And to act like he’s some kind of flight threat... is ludicrous,” Bamieh said outside the courthouse.

Bamieh indicated he has seen video on social media that may shed more light on both Kessler's and Alnaji's behavior.

“At the most this is a push, somebody fell, and something tragic happened,” Bamieh said. 

On Friday morning, Ventura County's sheriff and district attorney held a joint news conference where they explained the progress of the ongoing investigation.

District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said investigators obtained nine search warrants, all of which were approved within 24 hours of Kessler’s death the morning of Nov. 6. He said prosecutors in his office began reviewing the witness statements and more than 600 pieces of evidence.

He did not identify the evidence or specify what any of the witnesses said.

Collectively, the Sheriff's Department and the DA’s Office spent more than 2,000 hours on the case before it was filed, according the county authorities.

“We took this case seriously, and we investigated it and charged it thoroughly,” Nasarenko said, adding that authorities approached the case “with an open mind” and did not proceed as though criminal charges would be “a forgone conclusion.”

“Our charge and task as prosecutors is to follow the facts, follow the evidence and adhere to the rule of law,” he said.

According to the sheriff’s office, the incident was reported about 3:20 p.m. on Nov. 5 at the intersection of Westlake Boulevard and Thousand Oaks Boulevard, where demonstrators had gathered in rival protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Kessler, a 69-year-old Thousand Oaks resident, was injured and fell to the ground, hitting his head. He was bleeding, but conscious and responsive when sheriff’s deputies arrived. He died at a hospital hours later.

Ventura County Dist. Atty Erik Nasarenko addresses the media on Nov. 17, 2023.

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Ventura County Chief Medical Examiner Christopher Young has said Kessler’s injuries caused swelling and bleeding around his brain.

During the news conference, the district attorney noted that his office did not file a murder charge against Alnaji because there is no evidence that he arrived at the intersection “with the intent to kill, harm or injure anyone.” So far, Nasarenko added, no hate crime allegations have been filed, but they have not been ruled out.

Nasarenko explained that in addition to the battery charge, Alnaji faces a count of involuntary manslaughter, meaning he is accused of killing a person with criminal negligence, “specifically reckless conduct that carried with it a high risk of death or great bodily injury.“

When considering the charges, he said, prosecutors relied on physical and forensic evidence, as well as “findings regarding the injuries to the left side of Paul Kessler’s face.” Nasarenko said investigators were able to put together video and digital footage to recreate the sequence of events leading to the confrontation.

Detectives and prosecutors are still seeking information from witnesses and asking anyone with video of the incident to come forward.

During the Friday news conference, Nasarenko said Kessler worked for decades in medical sales and was a pilot. He said Kessler was married for 43 years and leaves behind a son. 

The debate over the potential benefits and safety risks of accelerating artificial intelligence development reached a crescendo this month, as supporters and critics of the technology clashed over warnings that increasingly powerful AI could pose existential risks to humanity.

On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher-turned-whistleblower, publicly resigned from major AI firm Anthropic after a previous stint at OpenAI, accusing the companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon's claims supercharged an ongoing debate over the potential damage AI could wreak on society and prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI CEOs to call for a slowdown in AI development.

Over the past two months, companies including OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed multiple incidents in which their AI agents accessed the internet when they weren't supposed to and carried out unapproved activities. In OpenAI's case, swarms of agents worked together to hack the open-source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself, without alerting humans.

The debate over the safety of AI and whether and how it should be regulated is not a simple clash between two opposing sides. There are multiple factions with a variety of goals and assessments about the technology's promise, dangers and how it should be governed. Here are the main arguments shaping that debate.

Effective accelerationists and the tech right

Those who have an aggressively optimistic worldview of AI are often referred to as effective accelerationists (sometimes shortened to e/acc) — a term reflecting their belief that AI should be rapidly advanced.

People belonging to the faction are emphatically optimistic about AI and its future benefits to society. They believe that the technology can propel medical advancements, boost economic productivity, increase living standards and automate dangerous or undesirable work. To achieve this, they argue that AI development should be accelerated, not restricted.

Effective accelerationists' ideology overlaps with that of the "tech right" in that both camps wholeheartedly believe in accelerating AI development and deployment and minimize critics' concerns over safety and security.

However, the tech right takes a more nationalistic stance, championing U.S. dominance in the global AI race. Like effective accelerationists, they believe that AI research and deployment should be unencumbered by regulation, arguing that could slow innovation or allow adversarial governments such as China to overtake the U.S. in the AI race.

Venture capitalist David Sacks is one of the leading accelerationist voices in the AI safety debate and was President Trump's AI and cryptocurrency advisor.

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The tech right's philosophy is represented by figures such as former White House AI and cryptocurrency advisor David Sacks, whose views remain influential with the Trump administration. Other significant players include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The three founded the Leading the Future super PAC to support pro-AI political candidates, and campaign against those who advocate for regulation.

Andreessen also penned a 2023 widely-read blog post titled "Why AI Will Save the World," in which he claimed that fears of AI triggering mass unemployment are overstated. He argued that previous waves of automation ultimately created more jobs and economic activity than they eliminated, and the fears of existential risk are overblown.

Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are used by most AI companies, has emerged as one of the industry's leading voices pushing back against calls for a slowdown and urging a light regulatory approach.

Populist right

AI has exposed an ideological split within President Trump's political coalition. While Trump and his advisers overwhelmingly favor accelerating AI, parts of his MAGA base believe the powerful corporations he has aligned himself with could undermine the U.S. economy.

Figures including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have been vocal about potential job losses, the tech industry's political power, child safety and threats to traditional social and religious values.

This month, Bannon formed an unlikely partnership with independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to call for significant restrictions on AI development, government oversight and corporate accountability at the Pro-Human Assembly conference in Washington, D.C.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has sharply broken with the Trump administration around AI policy.

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Still, the two have differing stances on what any of those measures should look like. Sanders called for an immediate pause on AI development until clear safety rules are established by scientists, a permanent ban on the development of artificial "superintelligence" (AI systems that are more intelligent than humans in all domains), and an international treaty with China in an effort to avoid an AI arms race. Bannon, meanwhile, argued for slowing the pace of AI development, the formation of a national regulatory organization and cutting off China from U.S. AI technology.

"So why are we letting the Chinese Communist Party drive us? Oh, we have to do this or China wins," said Bannon in his speech at the event in Washington. "We should quarantine now every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party today. We should cut them off."

Safetyists

Safetyists are primarily concerned with the potential risks of the rapid advancement of AI. Their worries center on the possibility of catastrophic or existential outcomes, such as the death of humanity at the hands of autonomous machines.

High-profile members of the safetyist community include Geoffrey Hinton, who is commonly referred to as the "Godfather of AI" because of his pioneering work in deep learning that helped launch the modern era of AI. In recent years, Hinton, who previously worked at Google, has issued a series of warnings about existential risks associated with AI, particularly if an AI model surpasses human intelligence and becomes autonomous.

Another vocal AI safetyist is Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-author of AI 2027, a paper published last year that discusses how super-intelligent AI could lead to human extinction by the mid-2030s.

Effective altruists

Effective altruists (often shortened to "EA") generally believe in maximizing humanity's long-term welfare. The movement originally focused on material ways to reduce global poverty. But more recently, many EA thinkers have focused their concerns on the possibility of existential risks from advanced AI and other potential societal-scale disasters such as nuclear war, climate change and pandemics. They particularly worry about the consequences for future generations. People from the EA camp prioritize AI safety, alignment — which is the science of making sure AI systems behave in a way that is reflective of human values and in line with safety rules — and reducing the probability of catastrophic outcomes.

The key difference between EAs and safetyists is that EAs generally provide funding for AI safety research and risk mitigation, whereas safetyists are researchers and advocates undertaking AI safety work and publicly calling for regulation.

Other AI factions often derisively describe effective altruists as so-called "AI Doomers." EA has also become a focus of criticism from the Trump administration since Coxon's resignation from Anthropic.

"Americanism, not effective altruism. The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!" said one Defense Department post this month.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is associated with the effective altruists and argues for stronger regulations on AI.

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Well-known people in the EA movement include Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematical approaches to making advanced AI systems safe. He is also the author of Harry Potter fan fiction that helped popularize ideas associated with EA. Holden Karnofsky, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), an organization that funds causes central to the EA mission, including AI and biosecurity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is considered to be aligned with effective altruism. Karnofsky also works at Anthropic and is married to Daniela Amodei, who is a co-founder of Anthropic and the sister of Dario Amodei, the CEO.

Another high-profile supporter of the EA movement is Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded major cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In 2023, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the misuse of customer and investor funds and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

AI ethics

The AI ethics camp argues that society should focus on the harms AI is already causing, rather than on hypothetical existential risks. Some proponents contend that emphasizing existential threats from a hypothetical future superintelligence can serve as a distraction from the more immediate harms and accountability issues surrounding AI today.

AI ethicists' concerns include how AI systems can be biased due to the content of their training data, for example, the ways in which AI facial recognition or job application systems might perpetuate existing societal biases. They are also concerned with how AI could be used to exploit workers and to enable mass surveillance, as well as about the environmental costs of data centers, autonomous weapons and the concentration of power among technology companies.

A notable voice of the AI ethics faction is Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Gebru left the company in 2020 because of a dispute with the company over a research paper she wrote exposing problems with large language models (LLMs), including their tendency to generate harmful or misleading language.

AI as a normal technology

People belonging to the "AI as a Normal Technology" group reject both the utopian and dystopian narratives about AI. Instead, this faction sees AI as a powerful but ultimately normal technology, comparable to the internet or electricity. They believe the focus should be on understanding and regulating specific applications and harms instead of treating AI as an unprecedented threat or as a path to inevitable superintelligence.

Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. She and others in her faction argue that AI is more like a typical technology than others in the field believe.

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Notable people associated with this worldview include Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Li is famous for creating ImageNet, a vastly large dataset of images which provided the training data for large neural networks, which led to several major developments in AI.

Katie McQue's reporting is supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which is a grantee of Coefficient Giving. Neither Tarbell nor Coefficient have any editorial input into her work.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Angelenos looking up Saturday may have noticed a particularly striking sight — a vibrant sunset framed by clouds.

Tropical moisture coming in from far off the coast could explain it.

“One thing that might have played a role in making it look awfully nice yesterday was those high clouds that were moving in,” Robert Munroe, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. “The way the sun was hitting the high clouds made some bright yellows and oranges in the sky. That moisture is actually related to probably mostly Odalys.”

An early sunset at yesterday's "Be The Light" 5K event in Valencia last night.

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Odalys is the hurricane (since downgraded to a tropical storm) churning off the coast of Mexico, along with Hurricane Polo.

Neither is expected to make landfall here, but they're forecast to bring high surf, dangerous rip tides and potential flooding to coastlines already battered this month by Hurricane Marie.

The bright side is Munroe said those high clouds from yesterday will be sticking around through at least today, which could make for another pretty sunset this evening.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6 struck off the South Bay at about 8:40 a.m. and was reported as being felt as far as Oxnard.

The U.S. Geological Survey says it was centered about four miles west-southwest of Hermosa Beach. More than 1,500 people reported feeling it within the first hour after it struck. [You can report what you felt to the USGS.]

No significant damage has been reported, which is typical at this low of a magnitude.

The quake was below the threshold of 4.0 magnitude that triggers an alert on the ShakeAlert app.

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We have earthquake resources

We don't want to scare you, but the Big One is coming. We don't know when, but we know it'll be at least 44 times stronger than Northridge and 11 times stronger than the Ridgecrest quakes in 2019. To help you get prepared, we've compiled a handy reading list:

• Your guide to surviving the Big One
• For earthquakes, forget the 'go-bag.' Here's how to prepare
• How to not get life-threatening diarrhea after a major earthquake
• 10 earthquake-related questions to ask your landlord immediately
• How to prepare for an earthquake if you have a disability

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On a Sunday night at the Mexican restaurant La Popular in Claremont, diners are eating to a soundtrack that starts with cumbia and jumps to J Balvin and Bad Bunny before landing on Luther Vandross.

That’s the aim of DJ collective Compás Discoteca — to bring connection and community through live vinyl mixing at La Popular and El Balcon in Ontario.

How Compás Discoteca was born 

Ricardo Carlos, Elias Ruiz, Albert Piña and Adrian Silva have been friends for about two decades. They all DJ as a hobby and often share music. On a night out in 2024, they saw a sign: a parking space for a “compact car,” minus two letters.

“The C and T are missing — compá. Like, ‘We're compás,’” Carlos said, recounting that night.

A "Compás Discoteca" turntable mat.

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Their DJ collective, Compás Discoteca, was born. “Compás” means “buddies” in Spanish and “Discoteca” means “nightclub."

Seasoning the scene

When Compás Discoteca first formed, the members said Southern California’s vinyl-listening scene was more focused on track selection, letting songs play out in full. The collective wanted to bring more life to the experience by mixing music live.

“It just seemed a little stale,” Silva said. “I feel like we helped to bring some seasoning to that.”

They also wanted to play genres people wouldn’t normally hear together.

“You might hear us jump from funk to cumbia to hip-hop to disco, soul to house. We're just trying to take people on a journey with us,” Silva said.

Each compá takes their turn at the turntables for two 30-minute sets. And each brings their own sound.

Three of the "compás" pose for a picture in between their sets.

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Silva is the “party-starter.” He gets people dancing.

Carlos has a Latin bent, taking influence from his Puerto Rican, Salvadoran and Creole roots.

Ruiz lives for “jaw-drop moments” and brings records he thinks will surprise his fellow DJs.

Piña spins rare world grooves in the funk and boogie vein.

“He probably gets the most Shazams from us and from the audience,” Ruiz said of Piña. “But most importantly, you feel like you're hanging out and with some good music.”

Albert Piña prepares looks through a box of vinyl records during his DJ set at "La Popular" in Claremont.

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Feeding off the energy

Compás Discoteca DJs at El Balcon in Ontario on the first Friday of each month and at La Popular in Claremont on the third Sunday.

The vibes for Sundays are chill, they said, and Fridays are for letting it all loose.

“There's like an energy there, like, ‘Oh, man, we made it through the week.’ We try to feed off of that,” Piña said.