The Brief

Despite protests from residents of the small Juniper Hills community in the Antelope Valley, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has approved the release of Christopher Hubbart into a home in the area. Known as the "pillowcase rapist," Hubbart will be required to wear a GPS bracelet and be under supervision in a "highly structured program," according to the judge.

The backstory

Hubbart was convicted in 1973, 1982 and 1990 of at least 40 rapes and other sex crimes that took place in L.A. County and parts of Northern California. In 2000 he was detained as a sexually violent predator and committed to the Department of State Hospitals.

His first release took place in 2014, after which he was assigned to live at a Palmdale-area home. In 2017, that conditional release was rescinded by a Santa Clara County judge after evidence that he'd violated the terms of his release.

At that time he was re-committed to Coalinga State Hospital.

Why now

Then in March 2023, a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge again approved Hubbart for conditional release. In September, against the objections of the Los Angeles District Attorney, that Northern California court designated L.A. County as Hubbart's domicile.

What's next

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Robert Harrison said another hearing will be set for "consideration of any further modifications needed to the site and to the conditional release plan."

Harrison also stressed that Hubbart must live under supervision, with a GPS bracelet. He said Hubbart will live under "highly structured program" and be subject to spot inspections.

Reaction

Supervisor Kathryn Barger has called the judge's decision "simply appalling."

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón also has voiced opposition. In a previous statement, he said the Antelope Valley "should not be a dumping ground for every sexually violent predator that is released in Los Angeles County.”

Go deeper:

• 'Pillowcase Rapist' Christopher Hubbart released near Palmdale
• Man Who Admitted To 40 Rapes Can Move To L.A. County, Judge Rules

A large black bear that was relocated earlier this year after being found under a house in Altadena is up to his old tricks again.

The bear, nicknamed Barry by the neighbors, was found last week under a different Altadena home, and wildlife officials are using a caramel- and cherry-scented lure to entice the roughly 550-pound male bear out of his hiding spot.

So far, they’ve been unsuccessful.

Cort Klopping, information specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told LAist the bear seems to be spooked by increased activity around the home, including media crews outside and helicopters overhead.

“It seems as though in this case, this bear has found this poor guy's crawlspace as a comfortable, safe-seeming, warm enclosure for denning purposes,” he said.

He said the space is “somewhere for this bear to kind of hang its hat when it's relaxing.”

How the bear returned

Wildlife officials can tell it’s the same bear who was lured out from under an Altadena house after the Eaton Fire because of the tag number on his ear.

The bear was trapped and relocated about 10 miles away to the Angeles National Forest in January, but Klopping said he’s been back in the Altadena area for around five months.

The male bear after it was removed from under an Altadena home earlier this year.

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The bear spooked a SoCal Gas crew who stopped by for repairs after the Eaton Fire in January.

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The Department of Fish and Wildlife fitted the bear with a temporary GPS collar so officials could keep track of it. The collar came off a couple months later while the animal still was living in the forest.

The bear is believed to have been spotted around the home last Tuesday, Klopping said, and the owner reached out to wildlife officials a few days later for help.

“I’ve seen pictures of this bear, and I’m shocked to be under that house,” homeowner Ken Johnson told LAist media partner CBS LA.

Officials said they were hopeful the bear would move along on its own. They encouraged the homeowner to set up a camera on the crawlspace and line the area with ammonia soaked-rags or a motion-activated wildlife sprinkler system to deter the bear from returning, Klopping said.

“These are all actions that would not harm the bear, not harm people, but they would make it less comfortable for the bear to be there,” he said.

But the bear stayed put.

“Right now, it seems like it's stressed,” Klopping said. “It seems like it's scared, and therefore, it's not really wanting to leave the security of where it is at the moment.”

The hope ahead

A pair of wildlife officials stopped by the home Thursday to set up the sweet-smelling lure and camera so the department can keep an eye on the bear’s activity remotely.

Barry didn’t take the bait immediately, Klopping said, but officials are hopeful the animal will feel more comfortable leaving the crawlspace once activity around the home dies down a bit.

Klopping also is warning people in the area to secure access points on their property so the bear just doesn’t move in there next.

“If I were in that neighborhood, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure that my crawlspaces would not be accessible,” he said, including covering it with something stronger than the wire mesh the bear got through before.

Bears also are extremely food motivated, and Klopping said they can smell your leftover chicken in trash cans on the curb from 5 miles away.

He encouraged residents to be mindful of trash that could be an easy meal for wildlife, as well as pet food and hummingbird feeders, which Klopping said biologists have seen bears drink “like a soda.”

You can find tips on how to handle a bear in your backyard here and resources from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife here.

There’s a new way you can track pollution in your neighborhood.

The SoCal Clean Manufacturing Coalition, a climate advocacy group, has released a map with the locations of more than 1,800 fossil fuel-burning industrial boilers across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Many are at universities and hospitals, as well as some apartment complexes like the Park La Brea apartments in the Miracle Mile.

The map is part of an effort to push the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates our air quality, to pass rules to require these large boilers to be phased out.

Why do these boilers matter?

Industrial boilers aren’t exactly the poster child of pollution, but they do play a role in Southern California. Boilers come in different sizes, and although there are electric types, many still burn fossil fuels to generate hot water, steam and, as a byproduct, nitrogen oxide.

South Coast AQMD says that makes it a source of pollutants. Nitrogen oxide contributors are not only a problem for smog and respiratory issues but also for the agency’s effort to meet federal air quality standards.

That’s why last year the agency approved new requirements for certain buildings to use zero-emission water heaters and boilers when they need replacement.

Teresa Cheng,  California director for Industrious Labs, a coalition member focused on creating cleaner industries, says these rules were for smaller “baby boilers” and that the coalition wants to see that applied to larger ones, which are covered under the agency’s 1146 and 1146.1 rule.

The push has caused concern in the gas industry. The California Fuels and Convenience Alliance, which represents small fuel retailers and industry suppliers, says boilers are essential in a wide range of manufacturing facilities that need high heat, like food processing, fuel production and more.

“CFCA is deeply concerned that requiring industrial facilities to abandon gas-fired boilers at the end of their useful life before the market is technologically or economically ready will still have severe consequences for manufacturers, workers and consumers,” the alliance said in a statement.

The organization says many facilities already have invested in “ultra-low” nitrogen oxide technology and that requiring a switch to zero-emissions equipment could destabilize the industry because of costs.

See the map

The map includes the number of boilers in each place, including how many aging units, and their permitted heating capacity. (That metric essentially correlates with how much pollution it can release.)

Cheng says the map is being shared to make the “invisible visible” so residents can know what’s around them. Most boilers are in communities that already deal with environmental pollution problems.

Boilers are even close to K-12 schools, like Glendale’s Herbert Hoover High School, which has its own.

“ These boilers have a very long lifeline,” she said. “If the air district doesn't pass zero-emissions rules for these boilers, we actually risk locking in decades more of pollution.”

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up one of President Donald Trump's most contentious policies by reviewing the American legal principle of "birthright citizenship," potentially upending a 127-year-old understanding of who gets to be a U.S. citizen.

The Trump administration argues that citizenship has been too freely granted to the offspring of non-citizens. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order withholding citizenship from children born to non-citizens "unlawfully present" in the U.S., or non-citizens in the country on a temporary basis, such as tourists. The order would apply only to people born 30 days after the order was signed Jan. 20.

Four federal courts and two appeals courts have blocked implementation of the executive order. Courts cite the 14th Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War and grants citizenship to "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

In one of those cases, the Supreme Court earlier this year handed down an important ruling limiting the ability of lower courts to issue universal injunctions. But it did not rule on the constitutionality of Trump's executive order, or the validity of birthright citizenship in these cases.

Lawyers for the administration say parents in the country temporarily are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S., and that broad "birthright citizenship" is out of step with what's done in other countries. The administration also says current practices allow for what they deride as "birth tourism," in which parents without meaningful ties to the U.S. claim citizenship for their children by giving birth here. This practice is not tracked in government statistics, but the Center for Immigration Studies estimates there are more than 20,000 such cases per year.

Despite the administration's repeated losses in lower courts on this issue, the high court will now hear its arguments this spring.

"It does say something about how important this issue is to the president," says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State who specializes in immigration law. He says the Trump administration is playing "the long game."

"Those skirmishes in the lower courts are skirmishes that they are willing to lose because they have their eyes set on the main prize, and that's a favorable audience in the Supreme Court," he says.

But García Hernández says that doesn't mean the Supreme Court will necessarily agree with the administration's position.

"Birthright citizenship based on the location of birth is common within our neighbors in North America and throughout the Western Hemisphere but highly unusual in other parts of the world," he says. "But what should dictate the way in which citizenship law evolves moving forward is the text of the 14th Amendment, and how that applies in the modern United States."

Since 1898, the governing case has been United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which affirmed the citizenship of a man born to Chinese citizens in San Francisco.

That case has long been seen as establishing an unambiguous citizenship right for children of foreign nationals, but it has also long been criticized by some for allowing foreign-born mothers to exploit the right by visiting the U.S. expressly for the purpose of giving birth here. As President Trump began his second term in January, he made curbing that phenomenon a central part of his larger immigration enforcement plans.

By agreeing to take the case this term, the Supreme Court may end up highlighting the issue ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections.

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In public, the Trump administration is on the attack against the media by launching investigations, restricting press access in government buildings and creating websites slamming critical news coverage of the president.

In court, the administration finds itself increasingly on the back foot. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon's new press policy Thursday. By that afternoon, NPR was in court at a pivotal hearing arguing that the administration had broken the law with its treatment of public media.

At a key court hearing in Washington, D.C., NPR's lawyers accused President Trump of acting illegally on May 1 when he issued an executive order demanding an end to all federal subsidies for NPR and PBS. The president's order and materials that accompany it accuse the public broadcasters of ideological bias, in NPR's case due to its news coverage. The networks deny this.

"The executive order flagrantly violates NPR and its member stations' First Amendment rights," NPR's lead trial attorney, the noted free speech lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous, argued in court. "He's not making any secret of his views."

Under the Constitution, the U.S. government cannot discriminate against people on the basis of the views they express; for news outlets, this extends to news coverage.

As Boutrous noted in court, Trump's executive order is titled: "Ending Taxpayer Subsidy of Biased Media." In it, Trump stated: "Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."

Federal lawyers say Trump's motivation includes reasons beyond coverage

The summary judgment hearing represented an opportunity for each side to shape the contours of a trial, should the presiding judge order one. It was also a chance for the opposing legal teams to try to convince the judge he could issue a ruling granting their side victory without one.

In court filings and during Thursday's hearing, the Justice Department team representing Trump and other federal officials named as defendants did not dispute that the president acted because he believed NPR and PBS were biased.

But the lead trial attorney for the federal government, Alexander Resar, noted that Trump had also cited the desire to stop funding media outlets altogether. And he argued at the hearing that NPR had not suffered true damage as a result of the edict.

Over the summer, Trump successfully pushed Republicans in Congress to pull back all future federal funding already approved for public media on a party-line vote — $1.1 billion in all. While that money represents a small fraction of NPR's budget and a modest part of PBS' revenues, it can be critical to public broadcasting stations. Since the passage of that law, many have announced layoffs and programming cuts.

That was not as a result of Trump's executive order, Resar noted.

A skeptical judge

The presiding U.S. district court judge, Randolph D. Moss, seemed skeptical. "You'd be on much firmer ground if the president had simply said, 'We just want to get out of the news business."

The National Endowment for the Arts canceled a grant for NPR that had already been disbursed to the network, simply to make the point they were in line with Trump's decree, Moss said.

For more than a half-century, most federal money for public media has been funneled through the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has a bipartisan board whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. CPB has become a shadow of its former self, run by a skeleton crew since the pullback of federal funding.

The three stations that have joined NPR as plaintiffs in the suit capture the appeal and reach of the broader public radio system: the statewide Colorado Public Radio, which is based in Denver; Aspen Public Radio which broadcasts throughout the Roaring Fork Valley; and KSUT, originally founded by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and now serving four federally recognized tribes in the Four Corners region in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

CPB sued Trump last spring when he sought to fire board members. Yet evidence surfaced this fall that CPB had scrambled behind the scenes in April to appease a top White House budget official. According to sworn testimony from a CPB executive, the official spoke of her disdain for NPR and warned the corporation's chairperson not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Within a day, a senior CPB executive told NPR it would not receive a multiyear contract worth $35.9 million to provide satellite distribution of content to public radio stations. Its board had authorized the agreement just two days earlier, according to court filings.

Judge Moss had explicitly told the CPB's lawyers that he did not find their defenses for the reversal credible. And CPB ultimately settled NPR's suit over the issue for the full amount and an agreement not to enforce Trump's order banning money for the network.

Moss challenged some arguments made by the legal team for NPR and three Colorado public radio stations that joined its suit, drilling down to determine what specific remedy they were seeking.

Government deflects judge's suggestion

The judge also appeared to offer the government a way out for a major part of the case, dangling the prospect that it might enable him to avoid ruling that Trump's executive order was illegal.

Moss suggested that the U.S. government could formally agree that the CPB settlement with NPR was binding on the federal government too — that it would never seek to prevent CPB from sending money to the radio network if federal subsidies were to be somehow restored. In the absence of such a binding promise, Moss suggested, the president could easily undo the settlement someday, given his assertion that he can fire the board of the CPB. Moss repeatedly pointed to the claims of Trump's advisers that the powers of the executive branch reside in the president, often called the "unitary executive" theory.

Resar, the U.S. Justice Department attorney representing Trump and the government, said he was not prepared to accept such a resolution. Given the opportunity, he did not contest that the government was arguing Trump does have the power to force the overturning of CPB's deal. Similarly, the federal lawyer did not challenge the idea that the government was defending Trump's ability to order the cancellation of an institution's federal funding because he does not like what it has to say.

Judge Moss is expected to issue a ruling in the case soon.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editors Vickie Walton-James and Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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