The Brief

When it comes to impaired driving and the state’s open container law, a rolled and ready joint is more like a can of beer in giving police cause to search a car than a few crumbs of marijuana, according to the California Supreme Court.

The court’s reasoning: You can smoke a joint and drink a beer, but loose marijuana isn’t readily consumable.

In a ruling handed down today, the high court ruled that police must find marijuana in a condition that’s ready to be smoked if they are going to charge a driver with an open container violation.

“We hold that at a minimum, to constitute a violation of (the open container law), marijuana in a vehicle must be of a usable quantity, in imminently usable condition, and readily accessible to an occupant,” wrote Associate Justice Goodwin Liu in a unanimous opinion.

Loose marijuana found on a car’s floorboards is like spilled beer, the court ruled. “In assessing whether the marijuana is imminently usable or readily accessible, courts should consider whether the marijuana could be consumed with minimal effort by an occupant of the vehicle,” the court found.

The ruling reversed a magistrate judge, trial court and the California Court of Appeal, which had all agreed that the loose marijuana constituted an open container violation and gave police cause to search a vehicle.

Recreational marijuana has been legal in California since 2016 when voters passed an initiative allowing it. It remains illegal under federal law.

The case at issue was out of Sacramento, where police officers stopped a car and searched it, finding 0.36 grams of marijuana crumbs on the floorboards of the backseat, along with a tray on which to roll joints. The driver hadn’t been driving erratically, her registration and license were unblemished and she had no warrants out.

“No officer suggested he was concerned that (the driver and passenger) could have somehow, while riding in the front of the car, collected the scattered bits of marijuana from the rear floor behind (the passenger) for imminent consumption,” the court ruled. “Nor was there evidence of paraphernalia, such as matches, lighters, rolling papers, blunts, or vaporizers, that could facilitate the marijuana’s consumption.”

The Supreme Court also found that the officers did not have probable cause to search the car in the first place. The police had argued that the driver’s nervousness and possession of a rolling tray was sufficient to search the car, an argument the court rejected.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

An American born in 2024 can expect to live to age 79, on average, an increase of more than half a year from 2023, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics released Thursday.

The average U.S. life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2024, according to the NCHS data, as the nation continued to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deaths from drug overdoses continued to decline.

The new high surpasses the last peak in life expectancy in 2019, and it's the highest since the government started tracking this key measure of the nation's health and well-being in 1900.

"It's good news," says Robert Anderson, the chief of the statistical analysis and surveillance branch in the division of vital statistics at the NCHS, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We seem to have rebounded from the pandemic. This may just signal that we're back to some semblance of normal post-pandemic."

Anderson and other experts cautioned, however, that significant disparities remain among Americans and that the U.S. still lags behind other wealthy nations.

"We should celebrate. It's very encouraging to see that mortality is declining and life expectancy is increasing in the United States," says Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. "But we still see very high mortality from drugs, very high mortality from suicide, infant mortality remains high and maternal mortality remains high. So as we celebrate we still have a lot of work ahead."

U.S. life expectancy fell in recent years because of a surge in drug overdoses and deaths from COVID-19. But life expectancy has been slowly inching back up since the pandemic ended in 2023 and drug overdoses began falling.

The latest rebound seems to have been caused primarily by a continued drop in deaths from drug overdoses and from COVID, Anderson says. In fact, COVID dropped out of the top 10 causes of death in 2024 for the first time since the pandemic. At the peak of the pandemic, COVID was the third leading cause of death. Now it's No. 15.

"The declines in COVID-19 mortality and drug overdose mortality — those were the two main drivers," Anderson says.

Anderson stressed that COVID and drug overdoses are still killing many Americans. Nearly 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses and more than 30,000 died from COVID in 2024.

And while the improvements in death rates appear to have benefited all ages, races and genders, there are still significant disparities between states, between counties within states and between different races and ethnic groups.

"Unfortunately, many people are still left behind," University of Washington's Mokdad says.

In addition, U.S. life expectancy hasn't rebounded nearly as quickly as it has in other countries, and the nation remains far behind other well-off countries, such as Australia, Spain and Japan.

"We're nowhere near the upper range for developed countries in the world in terms of life expectancy even at 79 years," Anderson says. "Most of the developed countries are over 80 years, in terms of life expectancy. So we still lag behind other countries."

Anderson says the 2025 life expectancy data look promising so far for further improvement, but it's too early to know for sure. But many public health experts worry that Trump administration policies could reverse progress.

"Under the current administration, the policies are moving in the opposite direction: reduced regulations on industry, reduced access to health care, cuts in funding for medical research, widening income inequality, raising prices," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "All of this is going to have adverse effects on health."

Woolf adds: "We worry that the crisis conditions that we were already seeing before the pandemic came along will continue to deepen unless we adopt policies that really would make America healthy again."

The Trump administration disputes that characterization and says that under Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fighting chronic diseases and other health problems is a top priority.

"For the first time in history, under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, HHS is putting Americans first with decisive action to confront the nation's chronic disease epidemic," said department spokesman Andrew Nixon in an email to NPR. "HHS is shifting attention toward prevention, nutrition, and chronic disease reduction. Historic reforms like the MAHA Strategy, which includes more than 120 initiatives to tackle the root causes of childhood chronic disease, and the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines, show we are delivering real change."

Nixon added: "We continue to reverse Biden-era policies that made Americans sicker, stripped away health choices, and wasted taxpayer money."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Last January, Robert King watched on TV as the school where he’s taught for 30 years burned in the Palisades Fire.

The blaze destroyed 30% of Palisades Charter High School and closed the campus for a year. The U.S. history teacher returned to the school for the first time last week ahead of the school’s Jan. 27 reopening.

“To be back here in my classroom — as I started in this room, actually in 1996 — it's just an incredible, joyful thing for me,” King said.

While his classroom is still standing, King lost the collection of posters, books and other artifacts he used to tell the story of our country’s history from the colonial era to the modern day.

“One of the reasons I've been working all week to set up the room is I want normalcy,” King said. “I want [students] to be able to connect with the room. I want them to feel that this is a place that is comfortable for them and a place that they can learn.”

King's classroom on the eve of students' return to campus for the first time since the Palisades Fire.

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How the fire changed Pali High

Pali opened as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1961 and now as an independent charter school it enrolls 2,400 students from throughout Los Angeles. The school’s palm trees and grassy quad have appeared in a handful of movies and shows including Freaky Friday (the 2003 Lindsay Lohan edition) and Carrie.

When King first arrived last week, a chunk of that picturesque campus was gone. He avoided the north side of the campus where the J building and baseball fields once stood.

A grassy field at Palisades Charter High School where an academic building once stood.

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“ I thought ‘OK that's not the school,’” King said. “‘I don't know that.’”

King said now that he’s had some time to process the change, he’s started to imagine how his students will see the grassy expanse after spending much of the last year in a refurbished Santa Monica department store.

“They're gonna love having a big open space,” King said. “That part of it is kind of joyful, but it is just so different.”

As part of the post-fire clean-up, the Los Angeles Unified School District stripped King’s room of nearly everything he’d collected over his career.

A photo of King's classroom before the Palisades Fire.

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King's classroom on Mon. Jan. 26, 2025, the day before students returned to campus for the first time since the Palisades Fire.

A framed September 12, 2001 front page of the L.A. Times that reads “Terrorists Attack New York, Pentagon,” and a copy of a World War I documentary on VHS are a few of the only items left from before the fire.

There’s also a metal sign that reads “The King is in residence” on the wall above the whiteboard. Next to it is a new sensor, part of a network set up throughout the Palisades schools to monitor air quality.

Rebuilding a history collection

King has had help rebuilding his collection.

“Some of the things that I truly loved, kids remembered,” King said.

A family's unwanted collection of campaign buttons now has a new home in King's classroom.

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A former student ordered a new copy of the World War II era poster of Rosie the Riveter.

“Before I even was able to start setting up at Sears, I had gotten it in the mail,” King said.

A New York Times reader donated a collection of vintage campaign buttons after reading about the school’s relocation in the paper.

“When I get to each of these elections, I'm now gonna have something to be able to hold up to the kids,” King said. “We can even look at what's on the buttons to even see what the story was, … How were they using these buttons to advertise what was gonna happen in that election?”

Last summer King traveled through Georgia and Alabama and stopped at several famous civil rights landmarks, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

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This summer King went to Alabama and Georgia. On a road trip from Selma to Montgomery, he picked up a poster of (and walked across) the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers beat nonviolent civil rights protestors in 1965.

“ I like things to be able to tell a story. That's my approach to teaching history,” King said. “ When I put things on the wall, it's with an idea that I will bring it in as part of the story later on.”

King said he remembers what’s been lost as he moves through his lesson plans for the year.

For example, he imagines reaching for a copy of Only Yesterday from the bookshelf behind his desk to read a passage to his students about the 1920s, and remembering it’s not there.

He plans to share these moments as they happen with the class.

“ I'll say, ‘I had this and this is what I would've done,’” King said. “And we'll kind of have a moment with that.”

The California Public Utilities Commission is hosting a series of public forums — including one in Los Angeles — where the public can learn more and comment on Charter’s $34.5 billion bid to take over Cox Communications.

The merger would combine two of California’s largest telecom companies.

Digital equity advocates have said that communication company mergers are declining competition, meaning there’s an increased concentration of power over broadband pricing and services.

What it matters 

The proposed merger comes on the heels of another — Verizon acquired Frontier Communications earlier this month for $20 billion. The business moves also follow the federal government's pullback of $2.75 billion in funding by slashing the Digital Equity Act.

The Verizon-Frontier merger came with state requirements to promote digital equity, but advocates are concerned that fewer companies will hold greater power over affordable prices.

According to Charter, the merger to combine companies will help the provider compete more aggressively with other broadband companies.

How to participate

An in-person forum will be held on Feb. 12 at the East L.A. County Library on 4837 E. 3rd St. The first forum begins at 2 p.m. and a second begins at 6 p.m.

If you can’t make it in person, two virtual meetings will take place on Feb. 4 and Feb. 25. More details can be found here.  

Details on the merger

If the deal is approved, the combined Charter-Cox company will be named Cox Communications, but customers will see Spectrum as the brand when they purchase internet, cable and mobile services.

Spectrum is owned by Charter Communications and is the home to the Dodgers’ regional sports network.

According to the filing, the Charter-Cox merger will mean that existing Cox customers will get access to Charter’s service plans.

Charter also reported that all Cox job roles that are overseas will be transferred to the U.S. In a statement following the merger announcement, Chris Winfrey, president and CEO of Charter, said the move will allow both companies to provide products that save families money, and create more American jobs.

With the merger, the combined company will also be able to compete more aggressively with other broadband companies, according to Charter.

Charter and Cox declined to comment.

The annual Pasadena Rose Parade took place less than a month ago, but at Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, students who are part of the cross-campus Rose Float team are already prepping for 2027.

Now through Feb. 5, the team is accepting design submissions for next year’s float. Community members of all ages are encouraged to apply—and they can make as many submissions as they’d like.

Over the next few months, a fleet of Cal Poly students will bring the winning design to life. The winner will see their work showcased for audiences around the world. They will also have the choice between two tickets to the 2027 parade or a $500 cash prize.

The Cal Poly float design contest is part of a decades-long tradition. Since 1949, students from both campuses have teamed up to create dozens of floats. Last year’s piece, titled “Jungle Jumpstart,” featured a 40-foot robot being tended to by animals as it lay on the rainforest floor.

The Cal Poly universities took top honors for that creation, winning the Sweepstakes Award for “most beautiful entry.”

Every part of the float is done by students, from the construction down to driving the float along Colorado Boulevard, said Allyson Jane Castillo, a mechanical engineering major at Cal Poly Pomona. She’s been part of the Rose Float team since her freshman year and now serves as campus president.

Members of the Cal Poly Rose Float team weld the robot for the 2026 float.

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What happens after you submit?

Bennett Parisi, Castillo’s San Luis Obispo counterpart, is a graduate student in electrical engineering. He said that, each year, the team receives approximately 100 submissions.

But the work actually starts before the submission deadline. In December — before the year is even over, before they even finish the float — the team chooses student leaders from each campus for the following year.

Then, once they select the design in February, the students work on sourcing the materials they need and start building the bones of the float. In the fall, they get down to business to flesh it out.

It can take up to 300 students to bring each float to life, Parisi said. Every fall, students from his campus make a 200-mile trek to Cal Poly Pomona to work on the float on Saturdays. Then, a week before New Year’s Day, the entire fleet heads west to Pasadena, where they stay at a hotel while working on finishing touches.

Parisi joined the team as an undergrad, after being cooped up during the pandemic. He said the group has been a chance to build enduring ties with students from all walks of life at both campuses. Parisi grew up playing team sports, but, in his view, the Rose Float team’s camaraderie is unparalleled.

That’s fitting, because the theme of next year’s parade is “Welcome…celebrating the simple joy of belonging—that feeling that you’re always welcome, no matter who or where you are,” said Terry Madigan, president of the 2027 Tournament of Roses Association in a press statement. “It’s the warmth of family,” he added, “whether related or chosen, the love of good friends and the welcoming embrace of community.”

How to apply

Castillo and Parisi encourage applicants to create designs that align with the theme. They also emphasize that you don’t need to be a great artist to be competitive. Some of the entries they receive are drawn by children, Parisi said.

There is no limit to the number of entries an individual can submit, but these entries can only be submitted to the Cal Poly Rose Float Team.

Submissions can be in color or black and white, no larger than 11-by-17 inches.

Community members must submit their entries to rosefloat@cpp.edu by Feb. 5 at 5 p.m., with the subject line “2027 Concept.” The body of the email should include the applicant’s name, phone number and email address.