The Brief

For the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles, the feelings around Iran's World Cup participation have been complicated. Monday's game between Iran and New Zealand ended in a 2-2 draw at SoFi Stadium. Now, Iran prepares to face Belgium at the same stadium on Sunday in a match that continues to carry weight well beyond the scoreline.

For Sahar Shomali, who owns Kouzeh, an Iranian bakery located in the Miracle Mile neighborhood, those feelings live somewhere between the oven and the morning news.

Kouzeh takes its name from the Farsi word for a clay jar. A small row of them sits on the bakery case that greets customers when they walk in. On the wall above, a laminated National Geographic map of Iran hangs alongside a small illustration featuring an Iranian saying: "What comes out of the vessel is whatever's inside it."

Sahar Shomali didn't plan for the name and the saying to connect. She just liked the way Kouzeh sounded.

Barbari is one of Iran's most beloved breads — a long, oval flatbread with a golden, slightly crisp crust and a soft, chewy interior. It’s as common in Tehran as a baguette is in Paris. And for Shomali, it was the one thing she couldn't stop thinking about after she left and arrived in the U.S.

A selection of breads at Kouzeh, including barbari (far left), kelaneh (the folded triangle), and several sweet breads tied to specific Iranian provinces.

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Growing up, she lived a 10-minute walk from a barbari bakery, and her father would go every morning before breakfast, coming home with two pieces still hot from the oven. There is a running understanding among Iranians, she said, that you never make it home with the bread whole. Someone always tears off a piece on the walk back.

Kouzeh, an Iranian bakery on Wilshire Boulevard in Mid-Wilshire, opened earlier this year.

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"I really missed that," she said. "Especially the barbari. That was my thing."

When she got to Los Angeles, she went looking for a replacement— and found Persian bakeries making barbari that were, to her, not the real thing. So she did what she calls the opposite: went to culinary school, and spent years moving as far from Iranian cuisine as possible, taking every Californian and French restaurant job she could find.

"So that I could just learn everything that I didn't know," she said.

It worked. In 2018 she left her last pastry chef job and applied everything she'd learned to make barbari. Once she felt she’d cracked it, Kouzeh followed.

Shomali doesn't just stick to barbari. She offers 25 very different breads, some sweet, some savory, each tied to a specific Iranian province. Standouts include kelaneh, a savory Kurdish flatbread with an herb filling — scallion, parsley, cilantro — pillowy soft with a slight char, somewhere between a flour tortilla and a scallion pancake. The kakouli bakhtiyari, made with grape molasses and flavored with fennel and fenugreek seeds, walks the line between sweet and savory. And eashly koukah, a festive bread from Tabriz filled with ginger and turmeric paste, rounds out a case that spans nearly the full breadth of the country.

The bakery case at Kouzeh, where each bread and pastry is labeled with its city or province of origin.

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None of the breads come from family recipes — Shomali built each one through research, conversations with friends, a single bread book her cousin sent from Iran, and a culinary background that lets her reverse-engineer a recipe from a description alone. The shelves lining the walls tell a similar story: Saba Jams, small-batch preserves made by a childhood friend now based in San Francisco; torshi from Nicole's Kitchen; goods from ZoZo Baking — all Iranian women food makers in California that Shomali sought out personally.

"I called them all up," she said. "I said, I have shelves, and I want Persian goods on those shelves."

While having little interest in sports or the World Cup, Shomali's heart lies with her home country. Every morning, before the bread goes in, she checks the news from Iran — a ritual her customers share.

Even mid-rush, Sahar Shomali makes time for the regulars who keep coming back.

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"We stress about it together, we grieve about it together. But people still show up and buy bread."

It's not lost on her, the duality of how she and her community feel torn between the country they adopted and the one they came from.

"Both of my countries are at war," she said. "I can't take sides in either one."

This summer's World Cup has been a bonanza for corporate sponsors.

Hydration breaks are "powered by Powerade." Each game crowns a Michelob Ultra "superior player of the match." Even the signs announcing player substitutions have a label slapped on: Rexona deodorant, which is owned by Unilever. They're the "official personal care sponsor" of this World Cup.

This relentless branding is nothing new for major sporting events, but it has provoked outrage in Los Angeles, where protests during the tournament took aim at FIFA's corporate partners, saying they betrayed the city's values.

At a demonstration in downtown L.A. last week, advocates rallied against a number of high-profile sponsors of the tournament, including Home Depot, the official "home improvement retailer" for the 2026 World Cup.

Its signature orange branding has been splashed across tournament activations this summer, but in the L.A. area its parking lots have been the sites of high profile immigration raids. Last summer in Monrovia, a man was killed fleeing ICE activity in a Home Depot parking lot after he ran onto a freeway and was hit by a car. In another incident, federal agents jumped out of a Penske moving van at the Westlake Home Depot and detained 16 people.

" Their parking lots have been turned into hunting grounds," said Miriam Arghandiwal, an organizer with the Boycott Home Depot Coalition.

" FIFA has been intentional in allowing the people's game to become the billionaire's game, and there's no better example of this than its choice in sponsors," she said at the protest.

The group also railed against FIFA partners Hyundai and Kia, citing a 2022 report that suppliers of Hyundai and Kia had used child labor in its Alabama factories. LAist has reached out to Home Depot and the Hyundai Motor Group, which also owns Kia, for comment.

Demonstrators said they wanted FIFA to make corporate accountability a metric of accepting a sponsor.

" We know mega-events like the World Cup can only happen with the support of host communities, local infrastructure and resources, with the workers throughout various supply chains that make these events possible," said Valerie Lizárraga with the nonprofit Jobs to Move America.

The group was also gathered to demand action from the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission, which runs the L.A. World Cup Host Committee. Demonstrators said they were dissatisfied with the committee's guidance on human rights for the World Cup.

A spokesperson for that commission deferred to FIFA for comment on corporate sponsorships. FIFA did not respond to LAist's request.

Last week, a small group of climate activists also demonstrated outside SoFi Stadium against Saudi energy company Aramco, another major FIFA partner. They were calling on FIFA to drop the fossil fuel giant as a sponsor.

The World Cup is wrapped up in Los Angeles after Friday's quarterfinal match between Spain and Belgium. But advocates rallying in L.A. say they are looking toward the future.

" Things like the World Cup [and] the Olympics are events that are fueled by people," said Father Thomas Carey, a member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. "The question is, do we hold them to account to take care of and protect the people who work for them and the people who attend their games?"

Next year, Los Angeles will host the 2027 Super Bowl. And the year after that will be the Olympics.

The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.

The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told NPR in a statement: "CMS does not comment on future rulemaking or speculate on potential actions. The Trump Administration rejects ideologically driven surgical interventions on vulnerable children."

(Surgery is very rare among transgender people under age 18, and the rule applied to all gender-affirming care, which is mainly therapy and medications for children.)

A "victory" for trans rights, but not a "retreat" by HHS

The fact that the Trump administration is backing off from this action is "a victory for people who are defending the rights and interests of trans people," says Sam Bagenstos, a professor at Michigan Law who served as general counsel at HHS under the Biden administration. "But I don't think it indicates a more general retreat from the aggressive posture of the Trump administration."

Bagenstos notes that this type of leverage — a "conditions of participation" rule for the Medicare and Medicaid program — has historically been used by HHS to compel states and hospitals to meet basic health and safety standards. Things like "making sure that you have stockpiles of certain kinds of equipment, making sure that you have certain kinds of emergency protocols, making sure that you have certain staffing ratios," he explains.

The proposed rule was unprecedented, Bagenstos says, because it instead would have prohibited certain kinds of treatments for a certain population. He says it seemed unlawful in a variety of ways. For one, "it violates the Medicare Act, which says that Medicare and Medicaid can't be used to control the practice of medicine within the state — states get to regulate the practice of medicine," Bagenstos says.

Medical groups opposed the change

Normally, HHS would propose a rule, accept public comment for 60 days, and then finalize the rule so that it could take effect. In this case, after proposing the rule in December and receiving more than 30,000 comments, the administration is abandoning the rule. At least in the next year, it will not be finalized and will not take effect.

The American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association both submitted comments urging the agency to rescind or withdraw the proposed rule. Major U.S. medical groups say that puberty blockers and sex hormones are safe and can be effective for transgender young people.

Even so, gender-affirming care for youth is banned in 27 states after a flurry of laws passed over the last several years. In the remaining 23 states, many hospital clinics that offer gender-affirming care have continued to operate, while others have shuttered in the past year citing pressure from the Trump administration.

That pressure has come in the form of this proposed rule, another rule that would bar federal Medicaid reimbursement for transgender pediatric patients, and a declaration from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that aimed to redefine the standard of care. (Interestingly, the press release issued when those actions were unveiled in December is now missing from the HHS website, as is the Kennedy declaration document.)

The Medicaid rule is currently in the final stage of review and appears to be on track to take effect in the coming weeks. A coalition of Democratic-led states sued over the so-called Kennedy declaration and succeeded in blocking it in federal court in Oregon. The Trump administration has not appealed that decision so far.

Protesters who are against gender-affirming care for young people gathered outside Boston Children's Hospital in September 2022.

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At the same time, the Department of Justice has issued administrative and criminal subpoenas to hospitals seeking full personal medical files for transgender youth and employment files for their medical providers, although many of those attempts have been blocked in court so far. The Trump administration has also reached settlements with hospitals in Texas and Ohio that involved establishing "detransition" clinics.

And last month, when the Supreme Court allowed states to bar young transgender girls from sports, the White House issued a press release saying that the decision "Bolsters President Trump's Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity." The release listed actions targeting transgender people across the federal government, from passport markers to military service to research funding.

Will hospitals that ended care for trans youth restart it?

While the Trump administration does not appear to be backing down from anti-transgender actions broadly, its decision not to finalize its most aggressive healthcare rule is significant, says Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown University who also worked in the Biden administration. Those other efforts are not nearly as durable as a finalized rule that takes effect, she notes.

The decision of the Trump administration not to finalize this rule "should give hospitals more confidence to either resume or continue offering the care," she says. Because the rule was never in effect, "I would argue that they should have been doing this all along anyway."

Kellan Baker agrees. He's a senior adviser for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project think tank, which focuses on LGBTQ issues. "This administration may have checked itself in one of the most extreme expressions of its agenda and I think people should take solace in that," he says. "But at the same time, this administration is continuing to show that its ultimate goal is eliminating healthcare for trans people and that it is apparently prepared to use almost any means necessary to do so."

The Medicare and Medicaid rule could theoretically be revived at some point, since it has not been formally withdrawn. An entry in the Trump administration's recent unified agenda sets a final action date for the proposed rule as December 2028, just before President Trump leaves office.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a new law that expands the state's mobile ID program to 60% of licensed drivers, his office announced Monday.

For the last few years, participating residents have been able to use the state-issued mobile app and store their IDs in certain phone wallets as part of a pilot program.

Where you can use it

The program works for driver's licenses and state IDs.

The mobile version is mainly valid at airport security, but use is expected to expand in the future.

TSA accepts the California DMV Wallet App, as well as Apple, Google or Samsung wallets. A small number of stores accept them for age-restricted purchases.

One big caveat: Mobile IDs are not accepted by law enforcement or most state government agencies.

That means you should still keep your physical ID or license with you, especially if you're driving. You can find a full list of accepted places on the DMV's website.

How you can apply

Access to the program was previously capped to 4.2 million drivers — now that's quadrupled to over 16 million.

You can join the pilot by downloading the CA DMV Wallet app from your phone's app store and logging into your MyDMV account.

You'll need to provide your driver's license or ID card information. The app will prompt you to scan your card, and you'll have to refresh the mobile ID every 30 days.

More than 3.5 million Californians have joined so far.