The Brief

Students across the country are staging hunger strikes in solidarity with Palestinian families in Gaza, calling for their campuses to divest from weapons manufacturers, among other demands.

Students at several Southern California universities, and a quarter of the California State University campuses, have now joined a movement that calls for schools to sever ties with military-industrial companies and draws attention to the plight of about 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who are on the verge of famine.

Last spring, colleges across the country cracked down on Gaza solidarity protests that relied on encampments, often using police force to dismantle them. Some participants have since been charged with failing to disperse and resisting arrest. Students have also faced multi-year suspensions, expulsions and degree revocations. And, in recent months, the Trump administration has detained several noncitizen students and threatened them with deportation.

Students say the hunger strikes are a way to continue that advocacy without being penalized.

A handful of Cal State Long Beach joined the nationwide movement earlier this month. They’ve committed to consuming nothing but water and electrolytes, all while navigating finals.

“The encampments last year were symbolic of the refugee tent cities that had to be erected because of the mass displacement of Palestinians,” said psychology major Marcus Bode.

“Now, [our] hunger strike is an analog to what Palestinians in Gaza are going through,” he added, underscoring that the protest is “a fraction” of what people in the Middle East are experiencing.

What do students want — and do they expect to get it?

So far, students on at least six of the system’s 23 campuses have joined the hunger strike movement. The CSU Long Beach students presented the following demands to administration:

1. "CSU must divest from companies that supply weapons, military and surveillance technology, infrastructure, or conduct business related to activities that violate human rights as defined by international law." 
2. "CSULB must adopt the SF State Human Rights IPS Screening resolution."
3. "CSULB must establish our campus as a Sanctuary Campus for non-citizen students and community members, immediately notify those on campus of ICE or DHS activity on or near campus, [and] create designated anonymous ICE and DHS-free zones for students."
4. "CSULB must lift any and all policies that place restrictive and repressive measures on the usage of free speech, protest, marches, assembly, and demonstration."
5. "The CSU system must end academic partnerships with Zionist universities and the study abroad program, via the CSU International Program at the University of Haifa."

In a statement, CSU Long Beach spokesperson Jim Milbury said campus staff “has been in touch with the students to make sure they have consulted with medical professionals and are staying healthy and safe.”

The CSU Chancellor’s Office said it “honor[s] the right to protest,” but that the system “will not be altering its investment policies.”

What's the long-term plan?

In Southern California, hunger strikes in solidarity with Gaza have been going on since at least April, starting at private institutions, including Chapman University and Occidental College.

Aurora Dorsett, a classics major, is among the seven CSU Long Beach students who joined the hunger strike 11 days ago. She said they decided against a “dry” hunger strike (no food and no water) because they do not expect the administration to readily meet their demands.

“We choose and will continue to choose to move from a place of optimism, as opposed to a place of fear, which is what we know [the] government and administrations want us to do,” they said.

The hunger strikes, Bode added, are also strategic in that students don’t have to worry about being penalized for occupying campus property.

“They cannot take action against us for this,” he said.

As they make their way through campus, Bode, Dorsett and the other students wear shirts that read “HUNGER STRIKE DAY ___.” Each day, they add a mark to the tally.

The shirts are a way to bring what’s going on in Gaza to every classroom and spark conversations, Bode said. “It can be difficult for people [to keep abreast of what’s happening] as they go about their everyday lives, working one to two jobs, studying for finals,” they added.

At least once a day, students in the medical field check on the strikers’ vitals. So far, four students have been compelled to quit because of potentially dangerous health issues. The strikers told LAist they are scheduled to meet with president Jane Close Conoley on Friday.

Dorsett is determined to press on if necessary. Regardless of how the administration responds, she said, “we see this as a meaningful form of resistance.”

Tech companies that create large, advanced artificial intelligence models will soon have to share more information about how the models can impact society and give their employees ways to warn the rest of us if things go wrong.

Starting January 1, a law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom gives whistleblower protections to employees at companies like Google and OpenAI whose work involves assessing the risk of critical safety incidents. It also requires large AI model developers to publish frameworks on their websites that include how the company responds to critical safety incidents and assesses and manages catastrophic risk. Fines for violating the frameworks can reach $1 million per violation. Under the law, companies must report critical safety incidents to the state within 15 days, or within 24 hours if they believe a risk poses an imminent threat of death or injury.

The law began as Senate Bill 53, authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, to address catastrophic risk posed by advanced AI models, which are sometimes called frontier models. The law defines catastrophic risk as an instance where the tech can kill more than 50 people through a cyber attack or hurt people with a chemical, biological, radioactive, or nuclear weapon, or an instance where AI use results in more than $1 billion in theft or damage. It addresses the risks in the context of an operator losing control of an AI system, for example because the AI deceived them or took independent action, situations that are largely considered hypothetical.

The law increases the information that AI makers must share with the public, including in a transparency report that must include the intended uses of a model, restrictions or conditions of using a model, how a company assesses and addresses catastrophic risk, and whether those efforts were reviewed by an independent third party.

The law will bring much-needed disclosure to the AI industry, said Rishi Bommasani, part of a Stanford University group that tracks transparency around AI. Only three of 13 companies his group recently studied regularly carry out incident reports and transparency scores his group issues to such companies fell on average over the last year, according to a newly issued report.

Bommasami is also a lead author of a report ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom that heavily influenced SB 53 and calls transparency a key to public trust in AI. He thinks the effectiveness of SB 53 depends heavily on the government agencies tasked with enforcing it and the resources they are allocated to do so.

“You can write whatever law in theory, but the practical impact of it is heavily shaped by how you implement it, how you enforce it, and how the company is engaged with it.”

The law was influential even before it went into effect. The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, credited it as the basis for the AI transparency and safety law she signed Dec. 19. The similarity will grow, City & State New York reported, as the law will be “substantially rewritten next year largely to align with California’s language.”

Limitations and implementation

The new law falls short no matter how well it is enforced, critics say. It does not include in its definition of catastrophic risk issues like the impact of AI systems on the environment, their ability to spread disinformation, or their potential to perpetuate historical systems of oppression like sexism or racism. The law also does not apply to AI systems used by governments to profile people or assign them scores that can lead to a denial of government services or fraud accusations, and only targets companies that make $500 million in annual revenue.

Its transparency measures also stop short of full public visibility. In addition to providing the transparency reports, AI developers must also send incident reports to the Office of Emergency Services when things go wrong. Members of the public can also contact that office to report catastrophic risk incidents.

But the contents of incident reports submitted to OES by companies or their employees cannot be provided to the public via records requests and will be shared instead with members of the California Legislature and Newsom. Even then, they may be redacted to hide information that companies characterize as trade secrets, a common way companies prevent sharing information about their AI models.

Bommasami hopes additional transparency will be provided by Assembly Bill 2013, a bill that became law in 2024 and also takes effect Jan. 1. It requires companies to disclose additional details about the data they use to train AI models.

Some elements of SB 53 don’t kick in until next year. Starting in 2027, the Office of Emergency Services will produce a report about critical safety incidents the agency receives from the public and large frontier model makers. That report may give more clarity into the extent to which AI can mount attacks on infrastructure or models act without human direction, but the report will be anonymized so which AI models pose this threat won’t be known to the public.

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

Flu season is off to a rough start this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the virus arrived as expected, cases are rising faster, compared with previous years.

Last week, more than 19,000 patients with influenza were admitted to hospitals, up about 10,000 from the previous week, according to new CDC data. To date, the CDC estimates at least 7.5 million people have been sickened, and over 3,100 people have died from the flu.

The surge seems to be driven primarily by a new strain of the virus — subclade K of influenza A(H3N2) — that emerged in Australia over the summer.

"Anywhere we detect this virus, you can see a large surge of influenza cases coming afterwards," says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In the U.S., "the timing is not that much different from other flu seasons, but the number of cases, and how quickly those cases are increasing is something that is not usually seen this time of year."

New York has been hit especially hard, with state health officials announcing over 71,000 cases last week — the most cases ever recorded in a single week in the state. But other states are seeing high levels of flu activity, particularly in the northeast, midwest and south.

"The map is mostly red," says Pekosz, indicating high levels of disease that will likely increase over the coming weeks.

"When you're in the middle of seeing the curve start to go up, we just don't have any sense of where it's going to stop," he says. "That's the big concern in most of the medical communities right now."

What's driving the upswing?

So far, there's no indication that this new strain is more severe, or even more contagious than previous years, says Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

But there have been changes to the virus that may allow it to get around our immune defenses, he says. "There's less immunity to it, and that's allowing the virus to spread very quickly and extensively."

There are some concerns that this season's flu vaccine may not be a perfect match to the new strain, given it emerged after the formulation was decided last February. "I think we're going to have a mismatch between the strain circulating and the vaccine," says Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC until he resigned in August. "But the vaccine is still the best protection we have, even if it's imperfect protection."

Preliminary data from the United Kingdom, which saw an early surge of flu this year, suggests the vaccine is about 30 to 40% effective at preventing hospitalization in adults. "Those numbers are in line with what you would typically see," says Krammer, though he stresses those are preliminary estimates.

What about the flu shot?

Flu vaccines only offer protection if people get them and in the U.S., only 42% of adults have gotten a flu shot this year. That leaves many people unprotected in face of a likely bad flu season, says Daskalakis. He'd like to see the CDC do more to encourage vaccination.

"You're not seeing the robust communication that you would expect," he says. "Usually you'd expect to see more alerts coming out of CDC, more recommendations to be vaccinated."

In response to that criticism, a CDC spokesperson said, "the CDC is strongly committed to keeping Americans healthy during flu season. CDC launched a new national outreach campaign designed to raise awareness and empower Americans with the tools they need to stay healthy during the respiratory illness season," adding "the decision to vaccinate is a personal one. People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines."

In an interview with NPR, Lisa Grohskopf, a medical officer in the CDC's influenza division emphasized the importance of vaccination. "It's definitely not too late to get a flu vaccine if you haven't done it already," she says.

What else can I do to avoid the flu?

"If you're using public transportation, if you're in the room with a lot of other people, if you're in a healthcare setting, it's really smart to wear a mask," says Krammer, especially higher-quality masks. "I was taking the subway yesterday in New York City. I was wearing an N95 mask."

Social distancing, especially when you or someone in your household is infected, can help minimize the spread too.

If you get infected, there are effective treatment options, especially when started with 48 hours of infection. "If you get an infection with influenza, that's really a reason to see a physician, get diagnosed, and then take next steps," says Krammer. "It's not an infection that you should take lightly."

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A federal district court judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration must continue to seek funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, a watchdog agency the administration has been trying to dismantle through staffing and funding cuts.

The administration recently made a legal argument that because the agency gets its funding from the Federal Reserve, and since the Fed is technically operating at a loss, there are no valid funds for the CFPB.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected the argument, writing that this "would be tantamount to closing what is left of the Bureau." This upholds an earlier injunction from Jackson to ensure the agency would continue to exist as congressionally mandated, and to stop efforts to shutter the CFPB, including through layoffs.

Separately, last week a coalition of 21 states and the District of Columbia joined together for a lawsuit to prevent the defunding of the agency. They argue that the administration is too narrowly interpreting which Fed funds can be used to support the agency — that they don't have to be profits.

Representatives from the White House and the CFPB did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers against fraud and predatory practices; among its many duties, it collects people's complaints against businesses. It has long been a target of conservatives who say it's too aggressive in enforcing consumer protection laws.

President Donald Trump installed Russell Vought as the acting director of the agency, who has mirrored the president's desire to close the bureau. Vought ordered a stop to all work at the agency within the first few weeks of Trump's second inauguration.

In April, layoff notices were sent to about 1,400 of the bureau's workers. The National Treasury Employees Union sued to stop the staff reductions. Judge Jackson issued a preliminary injunction blocking the layoffs, but in August an appeals court panel vacated that ruling, saying that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia lacked jurisdiction in the case. In December, that panel decision was itself vacated, meaning that the layoffs currently remain blocked.

In today's order, Jackson wrote that the administration was "actively and unabashedly trying to shut the agency down again, through different means."

"Notably, though, not one penny of the funding needed to run the agency that has returned over $21 billion to American consumers comes from taxpayer dollars," she wrote. "Today, the agency is hanging by a thread."
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Are you aiming to sleep better, eat healthier, scroll less and/or generally upgrade your life starting on Jan. 1?

Join the club — it's several thousand years old.

New Year's resolutions are a key part of how many people observe the holiday, as much of an annual tradition as the Times Square ball drop or a midnight champagne toast.

The concept of taking stock and vowing to do better in the new year actually dates back centuries, though there wasn't always a pithy name for it.

The word "resolution" entered English from Latin in the late 14th century, originally defined as the STEM-coded "process of reducing things into simpler forms." Over time, it broadened to more figurative meanings, like solving conflicts and remaining steadfast. By the 19th century, it had also come to signify an expression of intent — including for the year ahead.

One of the first appearances of the phrase "new year resolutions" was in a Boston newspaper in 1813, according to Merriam-Webster.

But diary entries show that people had been practicing the concept well before then — like English writer Anne Halkett, who wrote a list of Bible-inspired pledges on Jan. 2, 1671, titled "Resolutions."

Historians trace the phenomenon even farther back: to 2000 B.C., when Babylonians celebrated the new year with a 12-day springtime festival called Akitu. They marked the arrival of the farming season by crowning a new king, thanking deities for a bountiful harvest and, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac, resolving to return neighbors' borrowed agricultural equipment.

Alexis McCrossen, a history professor at Southern Methodist University whose research focuses on New Year's observances, says it was ancient Romans who first associated Jan. 1 with New Year's resolutions.

They celebrated the start of January by giving offerings to the month's namesake, Janus — the two-faced god of beginnings and endings — and auspicious gifts (like twigs from sacred trees) to their loved ones.

"It was a day to make promises and offerings," McCrossen says. "I think that's the origin of our New Year's resolution, because a resolution is a kind of promise."

Fireworks welcome the arrival of 2015 outside of Rome's ancient Colosseum. Ancient Romans celebrated Jan. 1 with religious offerings and gifts to loved ones.

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Other cultures and countries came to view the new year as a time for self-reflection and goal-setting, especially from a religious perspective.

There was the medieval "Vow of the Peacock," an end-of-Christmas-season feast where knights renewed their vows of chivalry by placing their hands on (you guessed it) a peacock. In well-documented diary entries from the early 1800s, John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president, detailed spiritual reflections from the past year and wishes for the next one.

But it wasn't until the 20th century that Americans en masse began celebrating New Year's as a holiday, and making secular resolutions a part of it.

This installment of NPR's Word of the Week explores the evolution of New Year's resolutions — and what we can learn from that history as we set our intentions for the future.

New Year's was a "non-event" for much of U.S. history, but a reflective season

As McCrossen explains, Jan. 1 didn't hold special significance to most Americans until relatively recently.

That's partially because England and its colonies didn't start treating that day as the new year until they adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Before that, under the Julian calendar, the year began on March 25.

Even in ensuing decades, McCrossen says Jan. 1 was essentially "like any other day of the week," notable mostly because it was the beginning of the fiscal year. In hindsight, she says that was arguably its own kind of New Year's resolution: paying off debts and resolving to avoid them in the future.

Indeed, Robert Thomas, who founded The Old Farmer's Almanac in 1792, called the new year a time of "leisure to farmers … to settle accounts with your neighbors" after the frenzy of the fall harvest and winter holidays.

Jan. 1 was an increasingly popular day to do so. In the antebellum South, it came to be known as "Hiring Day" or "Heartbreak Day," a busy day for renewing contracts — including those of enslaved people — and tallying debts. Printers began to heavily advertise products like ledgers and account books specifically ahead of the new year.

"It's like buying the running shoes before you make the commitment that you're going to train for a marathon," McCrossen says. "There's an emphasis on preparing for the new year and doing it better than you had been."

By the early 19th century, more Americans were embracing the new year as a moment to take stock and set spiritual goals, which McCrossen attributes in large part to the growth of capitalism and Evangelicalism.

While the new year was largely still a "non-event," McCrossen says, people increasingly treated Jan. 1 as a day of visiting and socializing. New Yorkers held open houses; People in D.C. went to the White House to shake the president's hand.

It was around this time that Americans started becoming "more oriented toward festivities" like Christmas (first recognized as a federal holiday in 1870) and New Year's in general, McCrossen says.

"But I think if it had just remained a holiday for the first of the year … I don't know if we would have gotten resolutions," she adds. "I think the resolutions come with the emphasis on midnight … on the moment of the new year's arrival."

A couple toasts to New Year's as the clock strikes midnight on this German postcard from 1904. German immigrants are credited with helping popularize New Year's Eve celebrations in the U.S.

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She traces that shift to two main contributors.

One is the "Watch Night" services that Baptist, Methodist and other evangelical churches began to hold late on New Year's Eve, which tended to focus on shortcomings from the past year and promises for the next one. The preacher would announce the arrival of midnight, McCrossen says, "and there would be shouts of joy and gladness … and a sense of transformation."

The other is the influx of German immigrants, who brought with them "Silvesterabend" (or "Sylvester's Abend"), the tradition — named for an early pope and the German word for "evening" — of celebrating Dec. 31 with song, dance and midnight toasts. The practice was so unusual at the time that it warranted coverage in mainstream U.S. newspapers, she says — and inspired many non-evangelicals to follow suit.

"By the 20th century, we've got electricity, we've got the ball dropping in Times Square, we've got bells ringing, we've got midnight galore, and we have a lot of commercial forces that are trying to make money out of New Year's Eve," McCrossen says.

How our resolutions have changed

People run on treadmills at a New York Sports Club on Jan. 2, 2003 in Brooklyn, New York — perhaps as part of a New Year's resolution.

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The Times Square ball dropped for the first time in 1907 (though it wasn't accompanied by a countdown until many decades later) . Mentions of New Year's resolutions started appearing in U.S. newspapers around the same time.

In 1900, Georgia's Columbus Daily Enquirer spotlighted the "novel New Year's resolution" of an unnamed Columbus woman who "had resolved to stay at home more, and to go out more." A 1914 piece in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram surveyed several Texans about attempting New Year's resolutions.

"I don't remember keeping any one of a dozen I recall making," said one, Howard Higby.

"Never before until today. This is my last cigarette for a year," said another, Billie Moore. "See me Jan. 1, 1916 and ask me."

A 1918 piece in Michigan's Jackson City Patriot says World War I "has brought New Year resolutions back into fashion," and "not the old-style kinds that were readily made and readily broken." It urged Americans to resolve to help win the war by doing things like buying Liberty bonds and rationing food.

New Year's resolutions have largely lost their religious overtones, a development McCrossen says is in line with broader cultural trends. In recent decades, goals have turned more towards self-improvement.

A 1947 Gallup poll shared with NPR asked if people planned to make New Year's resolutions. For those who did, some of the most common answers will be recognizable to readers today: "improve my character, live [a] better life, be more independent," "be more efficient and prompt," "stop smoking" and "save more money."

But "get thin," "stop eating candy," and "get more sleep, take care of my health, not work so hard" ranked at the bottom of the list, in a sign of how times have changed.

These days, McCrossen believes everyone should try to make at least some New Year's reflections and resolutions, ideally informed by generations past. She especially likes the idea of bringing back Jan. 1 as a day to reconnect with others, whether that's through an in-person get together, a phone call or a handwritten note.

And she notes that — as has been the case throughout history — resolutions don't only have to be made on the eve of a new year.

"Each day, one could do that," she says. "It's just that the 1st provides us with a lot of energy and community, all of us together trying to start out on a new foot."
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