The Brief

Los Angeles Unified School District Board candidate Kahllid Al-Alim apologized this week for pre-campaign social media posts that endorsed assigning antisemitic literature to students, and for liking “graphic content.”

The controversy could scramble the most crowded school board primary race in the district. Al-Alim, a longtime community organizer, janitor, and LAUSD parent, is running against six other candidates to represent Board District 1, which includes Mid-City, Crenshaw, and part of south L.A.

LAUSD’s teachers union endorsed Al-Alim to replace longtime leader George McKenna, who is retiring at the end of the year.

United Teachers Los Angeles wrote in a statement to LAist that Al-Alim’s “social media activities are offensive and unacceptable. They are inconsistent with what we have seen of Kahllid as a decades-long organizer for education justice,” and that the union would be considering “next steps.”

(Update, Feb. 23: The union announced it would suspend support for Al-Alim's campaign.)

Why now

There are dozens of screenshots circulating on social media of posts that were allegedly “liked” by Al-Alim.

In his statement Tuesday, Al-Alim addressed one specific post.

In October 2022, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, made multiple antisemitic statements and spread conspiracy theories on social media and in interviews, including with Fox News.

An X user wrote on October 17, “You don’t understand the Kanye interview because you never read this” and included a picture of the second volume of “The Secret Relationship Between Jews and Blacks.” The series author Louis Farrakhan has made antisemitic comments and promoted conspiracy theories for decades. Farrakhan leads the Nation of Islam, a religious Black nationalist group.

The book’s subtitle: “How Jews gained control of the Black American economy.” It plays into antisemitic tropes about money and power and its scholarship has been debunked.

An X account with Al-Alim’s name and photo responds that the book should be “mandatory reading” for LAUSD students, particularly in schools with extra resources and those trying to improve outcomes for Black students.

“I was wrong,” Al-Alim wrote in his statement. “I have connected with educators and community members and have since learned about the issues. I fully rescind that post. It has no place in our schools.”

The statement continues: “I have spent my life fighting against antisemitism, anti-arab (sic) hate, Islamophobia, and all forms of oppression. I have spent my life fighting for the equality of all people.”

LAist requested an interview with Al-Alim early Tuesday evening. Campaign manager Erica Huerta said the candidate was unavailable and attending a fundraiser and offered to answer questions.

LAist asked for examples of how Al-Alim had “learned about the issues.”

“He has a lot of networks of educators and community members that he's been working with over the past 20 years,” Huerta said. “He's dedicated to consulting with his networks before taking action that can hurt anyone.”

More posts

Huerta initially said Al-Alim’s campaign was already aware of the post’s existence.

“Before the campaign even officially started, that was one of the tweets that we recognized,” Huerta said in an interview on Tuesday, Feb. 20. ”We tried to delete it.”

Huerta contacted LAist again on Sunday, Feb. 26 after Al-Alim posted a new, longer apology on Instagram.

“I misspoke,” Huerta wrote in an email. "I clarified with our team that we did not know about the social media activity.”

There are more than two dozen posts alleged to have been “liked” by Al-Alim circulating on social media.

Al-Alim has yet to refute or deny the authenticity of many of those posts. His Tuesday statement also acknowledged liking “graphic content” and reads, “It was inappropriate. I will never do that again.”

Huerta, who self-identified as one of several Jewish people working on the campaign, said she’d known Al-Alim for almost 20 years though local activist circles.

“His goal was never to run for office,” Huerta said. “Any missteps in the past, I think, should be taken, you know, with that understanding that Kahllid is truly a community member and a grassroots activist… We'll definitely learn from his mistakes ongoing.”

How the posts came to light

An informal teachers union caucus of Jewish educators surfaced the Farrakhan post and others on Friday, Feb. 16.

Educators Caucus for Israel posts under the handle JewTLA, a play on UTLA, the acronym for the LAUSD’s teachers union.

The ad hoc committee describes itself as Zionists.

Several of the posts that the Al-Alim account “liked” are critical of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. War broke out on Oct. 7 when militant group Hamas attacked Israel. The Palestinian Ministry of Health reports nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent attacks and the majority of Gaza’s population has been displaced.

“We certainly support the rights of Jews to be in Israel, where there's a long established relationship with the territory spanning millennia,” said Chair Amy Leserman in an interview with LAist. (Not all Jewish Americans consider Israel an essential part of their Jewish identity and this divide has contributed to hostility since the start of the Israel-Hamas war).

The group formed in 2021 as UTLA considered a resolution in support of ending aid to Israel. In May 2021, NPR and other media reported more than 200 Palestinians and a dozen Israelis died in a rash of violence. The resolution was later shelved, but the caucus continued to grow, including to chapters in other parts of California and out-of-state.

“We organize so that we can protect the Jewish students and workers and families within LAUSD's jurisdiction,” Leserman said. For example, the group organizes virtual meetings about antisemitism in schools.

Leserman said the group became aware of Al-Alim’s social media posts last week, and on Feb. 14 asked UTLA leadership to reconsider its endorsement.

“Somebody who has these values should not be making decisions about students—period,” Leserman said.

UTLA has not responded to LAist’s question about when it learned of Al-Alim’s posts.

“He should withdraw from the race,” Leserman said. “He has much learning to do about educational systems… educational systems need to honor and protect all of the learners and all of the families.”

Board District 1 fundraising frontrunner

The primary election is in two weeks.

Historically, teachers union endorsements are strong predictors of school board race outcomes.

“Average voters tend to use the union endorsement as a cue for favoring the candidate,” said Michael Hartney, a political scientist and Hoover fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Hartney evaluated California, New York and Florida school board elections between 1995 and 2020 and found union-backed candidates won 7 out of 10 seats.

UTLA announced its endorsement for 3 of the 4 LAUSD board seats on the ballot in January.

“Kahllid has been a partner in our struggles against privatization, reconstitutions, and co-locations, and he has helped shape our work on Community Schools and the Black Student Achievement Plan,” the union’s endorsement reads.

Outside groups affiliated with teachers unions have spent more than $650,000 in support of Al-Alim’s campaign. The only other candidate to benefit from independent expenditures, Didi Watts, has brought in less than half that amount. Watts is a longtime educator and chief of staff for current LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin.

How LAist reported this story

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Depression increased 36% and anxiety increased 22% among patients seen at AltaMed after the Lineage warehouse fire, according to a new report released Thursday.  

The report, released nearly 100 days after the Lineage fire broke out, compares the patients treated within a 5-mile radius of the Lineage warehouse since June 17 with patients treated in the same period in 2025. The clinic estimates about 40,000 patients were seen during that period. 

The numbers also revealed a 27.8% increase in gastrointestinal concerns, a 24.2% increase in eye and throat irritation and a 19.9% increase in respiratory diagnoses within the same timeframe. 

“On their own, the data do not establish that the fire caused each of these increases, but they definitely help us identify trends,” said Dr. David Escobar, regional medical director for AltaMed, at a press conference Thursday at Lou Costello Recreation Center. 

“Patients were coming to me frequently with headache, throat irritation, eye irritation, and traumatic stress,” Escobar said. 

A majority of patients who were evaluated for behavioral health issues were treated through talk therapy and trauma therapy, Escobar said. 

Chronic stress and depression have disrupted Elizabeth Lopez’s daily life in the months after the fire. Lopez lives in the Estrada Courts housing complex and said she experienced the smoke, smell and physical symptoms after the fire, including eye irritation and ongoing asthma attacks. 

The inability to leave her home during heat waves over the summer and having to endure the horrible smell left her feeling defeated and with no motivation, Lopez said. Her doctor prescribed her antidepressants. 

“I’ve never been on depression [medication],” Lopez said. “I didn’t have that energy that I used to have. I had always been a very active person…and I just wasn’t.” 

Lopez is a health promoter for AltaMed and said she referred her neighbors to AltaMed mobile health clinics to get treated for similar symptoms. 

Since June 23, AltaMed has deployed its mobile health unit at Lou Costello Recreation Center, Pecan Recreation Center, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Branch Library, providing clinical evaluations, respiratory care, medication access, and connections to social support to help residents navigate recovery.

Escobar emphasized that the needs of the patients he cared for in Boyle Heights did not end when the fire was knocked down on June 24. 

“Even when the fire was out, patients were still coming to me in my clinic personally with ongoing new or recurring symptoms…which tells me clinically there’s still exposure happening of some kind or another,” Escobar said. “What concerns me the most as a physician clinically is that I still do not know exactly what my patients were exposed to.”

Escobar told Boyle Heights Beat that the vast majority of AltaMed patients in Boyle Heights and East L.A. have Medi-Cal and Medicare. The health provider also serves residents without insurance and offers sliding scale fees. 

In August, a St. John’s Community Health report also revealed the physical and mental toll that the fire had on patients seen at its mobile clinics. Of the 1,306 patients seen between June 17 and July 31, 36% had serious health problems attributed to smoke and toxic chemical exposure, including acute upper respiratory infections, eye disorders and asthma exacerbation. Dozens of patients were prescribed anxiety and/or sleep medication to treat acute stress after the fire.  

After a fire scorched more than a third of Santa Rosa Island this spring, the race is on to protect what remains of a beloved grove of rare Torrey pines.

The fire sparked in mid-May after a sailor wrecked his boat on the island’s rugged southeastern shore. It grew to more than 18,000 acres, becoming the largest fire ever recorded on the Channel Islands.

The island’s grove of Torrey pine trees, a subspecies found nowhere else on the planet, bore much of the worst damage. Early surveys estimate as much as 80% of the rare trees will perish. Experts with the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden are working on a more complete analysis.

Now, the biggest worry is how intense El Niño-driven rains may erode soil in the charred remains of the grove.

Restoration ecologist Michelle Gados holds Torrey pine seeds gathered from the burn scar.

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“ It keeps me up at night,” said Michelle Gados,  a restoration ecologist with the California Institute of Environmental Studies and a lead on the restoration effort. “I just hope it's not as bad as they predict because this would just be really bad timing. … If you get too much too fast, then all that soil could slide down the slopes.”

The pines released thousands of seeds during the fire — more than 14,000 have been collected by Gados’ team, park staff and other partners since the fire, while thousands more seeds remain in the charred soil.

“ So we're really concerned about all that seed being washed out to sea,” Gados said.

She said keeping the soil intact in the grove is key to supporting surviving trees and to planting hundreds of Torrey pines after the rainy season. The goal is to plant 300 to 500 Torrey pines annually over the next four years.

To prevent erosion, biologists, fire crews and dedicated volunteers have been racing for nearly four months to build 500 wattles — essentially 18-foot cigars of rolled-up biodegradable material. The fiber cylinders can be bought pre-made, but on the island, they have to be built from scratch to avoid introducing any nonnative plants. They’re made of a tightly rolled coir blanket, or coconut husk fiber, around five layers of jute fabric. The wattles will be installed in some of the most erosion-prone areas identified in the Torrey pine grove.

“This is kind of a make-your-own option that we have developed through other projects that have been ongoing for about a decade and have worked really well,” said David  Mazurkiewicz,  a wildlife biologist with Channel Islands National Park, and the implementation lead for the post-fire response on Santa Rosa.

He said they expect to have all 500 rolled and installed by the end of October, just as the official rainy season begins.

The charred grove of Torrey pines on Santa Rosa Island as seen from a boat this week. Early surveys estimate 60% to 80% of the trees will perish from the fire. Some trees are showing new growth today, but it's unclear how they'll fare long-term.

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Volunteers are key to the effort

Originally, the park was planning to work with fire crews from across the state and country, but a busy fire season across the West pulled those crews elsewhere, Mazurkiewicz said. So dozens of dedicated volunteers have stepped in.

The latest volunteer cohort of about 20 went to the island this week, where for several days they’ll camp and spend their days rolling wattles.

David Rush of Riverside was there for the second time since the fire.

“The Torrey pines, they're the most endangered pine on the planet, so it's a worthy cause,” he said. “We're killing the earth, and just doing, in my own little way, something to help, it's cool.”

Hundreds of wattles will be installed in the Torrey pine grove on Santa Rosa Island to help prevent erosion during winter rains.

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Volunteers prepare to roll a wattle made of a coir blanket and five layers of jute on Santa Rosa Island.

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Volunteers, including CSU Channel Islands student Carlos Cruz, right, complete the rolling a wattle on Santa Rosa Island.

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Carlos Cruz, a first-year student at Cal State Channel Islands, joined this round, too. With Indigenous roots in Oaxaca, Mexico, he felt called to the work to honor and restore land that for millennia was home to and tended by Chumash people.

“ I think that it’s important to understand and … see, as folks residing on spiritual lands, how we could come together,” he said.

On Wi'ma, Santa Rosa Island

The fire is just the latest moment of upheaval in the island’s long history. Birthed from shifting tectonic plates and volcanic lava flows more than 15 million years ago, then eventually named Wi'ma and inhabited by Chumash people for millennia, the island as we know it today was reshaped by European settlers. Experts say the recent fire was made worse by nonnative grasses that have covered it since ranching began here in the mid-1800s, after European settlement.

Nonnative livestock and game species such as feral pigs, cattle, horses, deer and elk destroyed the island’s forest of native oaks and bishop pines, as well as over 75% of the island's native vegetation.

It’s only been in the last decade-and-a-half that, thanks to conservation efforts since the islands became a national park in 1980, native plant and animal life have begun to return, including the once-nearly extinct endemic Santa Rosa Island fox. Mazurkiewicz said officials have not found many carcasses of the foxes in the burn scar, and expect their population to remain stable despite the fire.

A Santa Rosa Island fox.

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Park officials have also been working for more than a decade to restore an ancient oak and bishop pine forest, or “cloud forest,” named for the trees’ ability to catch heavy ocean fog and harvest its water, which then condenses and drips to the chaparral below their branches. That ecosystem, essential habitat for native species, is slowly being restored, and was largely untouched by the recent fire.

In areas that were once just dirt, there are now native shrubs like toyon, sage scrub, lupin and lemonade berry. And in recent years, in the absence of nonnative mammals, Torrey pines have actually been growing beyond their traditional footprint on the island as well — some of those seem to have survived the fire.

Cause for hope

In the burn scar, other signs of hope are sprouting. On a recent afternoon,  Mazurkiewicz pointed to light green grass emerging from the charred hillsides.

“All that green is actually native vegetation, and it just was waiting for a little breathing room,”  Mazurkiewicz said.

In some ways, he said, the fire may prove beneficial — by clearing out the invasive nonnative grasses that have choked much of the island’s flora.

A dusting of light green on this burned hillside are native grasses sprouting where invasive, nonnative grasses once dominated.

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David  Mazurkiewicz,  a wildlife biologist with Channel Islands National Park, and the implementation lead for the post-fire response on Santa Rosa, describes the importance of installing wattles in the island's charred Torrey pine grove.

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Native plants like the endemic manzanita — which hasn’t done so well since the fire — as well as other native shrubs, grasses and trees are propagated at the island’s nursery. A newly-built shade house will soon be the home of Torrey pine seedlings that will eventually be replanted in the burn scar.

But for now, how the Torrey pine grove will fare is unclear. One factor that could play a big part in its future is how severe the upcoming rains will be.

“We don’t know  until we get some rain, and we can see whether the trees that are pushing back out are going to hold,”  Mazurkiewicz said. “The grove was heavily impacted. … A lot of those trees are not going to make it. But there's also outliers that look a little more encouraging.”

Pour yourself a cup of ambition. It’s Dolly Parton Day.

Across the world, communities are dedicating Friday to honoring the beloved country singer. The day is falling on Sept. 25, a wink at Parton’s hit song “9 to 5.”

Parton, who died of cancer last month at age 80, built an impressive legacy over the decades as a singer-songwriter, actor, philanthropist and entrepreneur — leaving big and small ways to honor the icon.

So whether it’s dusting off your rhinestones, donating a book or throwing back a pink-themed cocktail, here’s how you can celebrate Dolly Parton Day.

Join a celebration

In the U.S., a growing number of state and local leaders are establishing Sept. 25 as an annual Dolly Parton Day from California to the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The proclamations highlight Parton’s successful career and stress her lifelong commitment to promoting literacy.

In Nashville — where Parton had lived since she was 18 — the city will honor the singer with pink lights and posters and give away stickers, buttons and bookmarks. Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines announced that it would hold a Parton-inspired karaoke Friday for travelers and employees. Tennessee state and local officials are currently in the process of renaming the airport after Parton.

“Dolly Parton’s impact on Nashville will be felt for generations, through the music she has given us, the people she has helped and the example she continues to set,” said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell in a statement. “She has shown us that caring for a community means showing up for one another.”

Over in New Orleans, the marching group Krewe of Dolly will lead a parade through the city’s French Quarter to honor Parton.

And in San Francisco, organizers are planning a public event in the heart of the city, called “Dolly Day,” designed to be a celebration of life that will include “singing loud, dressing up, and being a little kinder than usual in her honor.”

Donate a book to Imagination Library

For those chained to their actual 9 to 5 job on Friday, sneaking away for an event may be challenging. Instead, you can channel Parton’s giving spirit.

Parton made it her mission to improve literacy through her Imagination Library book giveaway program. The program has quickly expanded, resulting in more than a million books sent out each month to children in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.

The Imagination Library is encouraging the public to give directly to their local Imagination Library Partner on Dolly Parton Day, or help establish a new program in their community.

Don’t know where to start? The Dollywood Foundation is directing people to ImaginationLibrary.com, where a ZIP code search can find nearby programs.

“For Dolly, giving was always personal and from her heart,” said Jeff Conyers, president of The Dollywood Foundation, in a statement. “She believed deeply in helping people, especially children, and she always felt if you are in a position to help, you should help.”

Get inspired by Parton’s style and songs

The Queen of Country was known for her over-the-top style, proudly wearing sequins with big hair and plenty of fringe in her signature color pink.

Parton especially adored butterflies, singing that “love is like a butterfly, as soft and gentle as a sigh.”

Dig into your closet and throw on something extra flashy, shiny or sparkly. Feeling adventurous? Some tattoo artists are offering Dolly-inspired tattoos on Friday, but a butterfly clip will also work.

Of course, there’s no easier way to celebrate Parton than by playing one of her many, many albums throughout the day.

Known for her hits “9 to 5,” “Jolene,” and “I Will Always Love You,” Parton’s catalog runs deep, and there’s room to discover new favorites.

It was Parton’s wish that her songs would have a lasting impact, and that in turn, she would be remembered for trying to make the world a better place.

“I hope that a lot of my songs may last that long. And I hope I’ll be remembered as somebody that tried to do some good in the world and left, you know, a few good things,” she told The Associated Press in 2024.

Long Beach Airport will hold an emergency preparedness drill Friday night that will include smoke, along with lights and sirens from emergency vehicles.

The drill, which will happen from 9 to 11 p.m. on Friday, is required by the Federal Aviation Administration every three years and “will test the speed and effectiveness of first responders” and airport staff in an emergency situation, according to the airport. As part of the drill, volunteer actors will play injured victims.

It will not take place near the terminal or the drop-off area, but may be visible to some people at the airport, said airport spokesperson Darrick Lee.

No roads will be closed near the airport, and the drill is not anticipated to impact any aircraft operations, Lee said.