The Brief

A federal judge issued a blistering ruling Tuesday, finding Los Angeles officials failed in multiple ways to follow a settlement agreement to create more shelter for unhoused people.

Judge David O. Carter also ordered stronger oversight by a court-appointed monitor to “ask the hard questions on behalf of Angelenos,” as well as quarterly hearings to oversee compliance with the city’s commitments to create nearly 13,000 new shelter and housing beds.

“When the system fails, people die,” Carter wrote in his 62-page ruling, which comes as a result of a major, long-running homelessness lawsuit filed by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a group of downtown business and property owners.

“Nearly seven unhoused community members die each day in the County of Los Angeles,” the judge continued. “These deaths are preventable and represent a moral failure by all of us.”

The judge stopped short of the most extreme option he was considering: seizing control of the city’s hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness spending and handing control to a court-appointed receiver.

Carter noted that such a move would be a last resort after a court has given multiple opportunities for the city to comply.

In the statement issued late Tuesday, the City Attorney's Office said the judge had "correctly" decided not to appoint an "unelected and unaccountable" receiver.

"Over the last three years, the City of Los Angeles has successfully moved thousands of Angelenos off the streets, into housing and services," the statement read in part. "Thousands of new housing units have been built, and homelessness is down in LA for the first time in years."

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for L.A. Alliance, told LAist that the ruling is a win for the people of L.A., especially those experiencing homelessness.

“The court continues to hold the city’s feet to the fire on its failure to comply with the agreement,” he said. “Instead of fighting us and fighting the court on this issue, the city should be coming to the table.”

How the judge says the city breached the agreement

The court found that L.A. breached the settlement agreement with L.A. Alliance in four ways:

• The city did not provide a plan for how it intends to create 12,915 shelter beds, as promised, by June 2027.
• It consistently missed milestones over years for creating those beds. 
• It incorrectly reported encampment reductions and disobeyed the court’s order on those actions.
• The city “flouted” responsibilities by failing to provide accurate, comprehensive data when requested and did not provide evidence to support the numbers it was reporting.

The ruling comes after days of court testimony and thousands of pages of documents submitted to Carter on the issue.

The judge ordered stepped-up reviews by a court monitor to check for compliance with the settlement agreement in the case. The monitor “shall have full access to the data that the City uses to create its reports to the Court” to show compliance with the agreements, according to the ruling.

Carter also ordered the city and L.A. Alliance to attend in-person court hearings each quarter to review compliance, starting in the fall. The hearings will continue for as long as needed to make sure the city honors its commitments under the settlements, Carter ruled.

He wrote that these steps are progress, not punishment.

“The Court wants the City to succeed,” he wrote. “Because when the system fails, people die. And when it works — even slowly — lives are saved.”

Judge finds lack of accountability

Carter had harsh words for what he described as a glaring lack of accountability for how the city spends money on homeless services and housing.

“Unhoused individuals hear about programs and promises" the judge wrote. "They hear that hundreds of millions are being spent, that homelessness is being addressed, that success is being claimed. Yet many still cannot find a bed, a bathroom, or a hot meal.

"Their lived reality does not match the headlines.”

He pointed to the difficulty faced by court-appointed reviewers, and LAist, in getting data from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — about how much was being spent for more than 2,000 housing subsidies the city was taking credit for to show compliance.

“Without accurate data, the public is left to rely on the assurance of public officials who have already presided over repeated reporting failures,” the judge wrote.

“The City’s compliance rests on shaky ground, upheld not by verifiable facts, but by the last-minute declarations of its own officials,” he added. “If the Roadmap Agreement has taught us anything, it is that seeking accountability with the City of Los Angeles is like chasing the wind.”

After LAHSA officials criticized LAist’s reporting of concerns about the data, Carter ordered the city to turn over addresses for each housing site. The city then acknowledged that the data was inflating the true number: 130 subsidies were being wrongfully counted twice.

“The pattern is clear: documentation is withheld until exposure is imminent, public accountability is resisted until judicially mandated, and the truth of reported progress remains clouded by evasive recordkeeping,” Carter wrote in his ruling. “These failures have undermined public trust and judicial trust alike.”

The judge added that the court-enforced agreements in the lawsuit — the L.A. Alliance settlement and an earlier agreement known as the Roadmap — were intended to be a turning point in the homelessness crisis. But there have been major problems with the city’s compliance.

“That neglect carries real consequences, borne most heavily by those with the least, by the people whose lives depend on those promises being fulfilled,” he wrote.

Referring to audits of the city’s homelessness spending, he added: “Taken together, these audits paint a consistent and deeply troubling picture of chronic operational failures in Los Angeles’ approach to homelessness.”

What do city leaders say about the ruling?

LAist has reached out for comment from L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto and the chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Councilmember Nithya Raman.

While emphasizing L.A.'s progress in getting unhoused people off the streets, Feldstein Soto's office also pointed to wording from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grants Pass case, which overturned some legal protections for unhoused people.

"As the Supreme Court decision last year in the Grants Pass case noted, developing lasting solutions to homelessness is a complex challenge facing cities across the country, and cities need flexibility in determining the best policy approaches," the statement read.

A spokesperson from Raman's office emailed a statement that read: "For the first time, we are seeing substantial reductions in street homelessness and to take power away from the City when it is actually making progress toward the purported goals of this Settlement, would have been a contradiction and potentially a harmful step backwards."

Umhofer said even though the judge did not order a third-party receiver to take over as L.A. Alliance had requested, the monitor would require the city to share more information about how it reports its progress.

That, Umhofer said, is a “very big deal.”

“The city has spent an extraordinary amount of money to try to defend itself, and the court saw right through the city and concluded that it had failed,” he told LAist.

The first quarterly compliance-review hearing is scheduled for Nov. 12.

Federal immigration agents detained at least two people late Friday outside Adventist White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights, where protesters had gathered after reports of immigration enforcement activity, according to rapid response groups. Protesters remained at the hospital into the early hours of Saturday, where immigration agents maintained a large presence.

It appears the incident began after people witnessed someone being detained and taken into the hospital, according to Raquel Roman, executive director of Proyecto Pastoral and member of the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network.   That spurred a crowd of protesters to rally against ICE agents, who then detained two protesters who are U.S. citizens, Roman said.

ICE activity was also reported near Mariachi Plaza at 5:50 a.m. Saturday, according to witnesses, and outside the East LA Sheriff’s Station, where agents have been seen detaining people in the L.A. County-designated ICE-Free zone. 

Arrests captured on social video

Video posted on social media appears to show one person being detained outside the hospital. In the video, at least three officers in tactical vests are seen detaining someone at the intersection of Boyle and Pennsylvania Avenues around 11:30 p.m.

A group of about six more officers in tactical vests and masks can be seen walking around the area as another, whose vest says “Police ICE,” yells at the person recording to “back up” and “do not impede with the arrest.”

“You’re arresting U.S. citizens,” the person recording says. “18 USC 111, they’re interfering,” the officer replies, referring to Title 18, Section 111 of the U.S. Code: Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. 

In the video, a bystander who says the person being arrested is his brother can be seen speaking to the officer. 

“Your brother assaulted a federal agent. He’s being arrested for assaulting a federal agent; he’s coming with us,” the officer tells them. 

Boyle Heights Beat reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for more information about the incident but has not yet received a response.

LAPD response

The Los Angeles Police Department was first called to the scene at 11:59 p.m. to respond to a “large group causing a disturbance,” according to LAPD Officer Norma Eisenman. LAPD responded again at 2:24 a.m. as crowds continued to gather outside of the hospital. 

“Officers responded to maintain public safety and keep the peace. At no point did LAPD officers assist federal immigration authorities with enforcement activities or detain any individuals in connection with immigration enforcement,” Eisenman said. 

Video posted on social media by Izzy Ramirez shows a line of agents blocking the emergency loading dock around 2:30 a.m. as a crowd continues to shout at the agents and make noise.

“It was horrible for the local community. The ICE presence was a lot more than I’ve seen it visibly before,” said Roman. 

What the hospital said

Japhet De Oliveira, corporate communications executive at Adventist Health, shared the following statement:

“Federal agents brought a person in their custody to our emergency department, and we cared for that patient with dignity and privacy, as we do for every patient. When agents formed a line across our ambulance entrance, which we did not request nor authorize, we diverted ambulances to nearby hospitals for about two hours to ensure every patient received timely care. White Memorial does not participate in immigration enforcement. We know last night frightened our neighbors. No matter what happens outside our doors, everyone who comes inside is our patient, and our focus will only be on that patient, and it will not change.”

Doctors at Adventist White Memorial last year reported that ICE agents were violating the privacy rights of detained patients and prohibiting contact with patients’ family members. While the hospital released guidelines to protect patients and support staff,  doctors and advocates have said they fall short.

What's next

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, said she was “deeply troubled” by the reports overnight and demanded answers from hospital leadership. She said:

The Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network said it plans to lead a protest against ICE outside White Memorial at 2 p.m. Saturday.

This is a developing story and will be updated. 

The post ICE detains two U.S. citizens protesting outside White Memorial Hospital, rapid response groups say appeared first on LA Local.

People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.

Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.

The findings point to cannabis consumption at least 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China.

Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands.

The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.

“It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.

It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.

The dig took place starting in 2017 at a large burial mound at the Tunnug 1 site in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia, home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing material culture of the Scythians — ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.

The team, deployed “essentially out in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring-to-autumn season that variously featured swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.

Larger artifacts on the site include weapons in the burials, horse gear and animal-style motifs. But the team “struck gold” as it also found tiny black spots that turned out to be cannabis seeds along with preserved human hair, Caspari said.

“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.

Radiocarbon dating on some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of origin, and “they are not there by accident” but deposited within the tomb, suggesting that the plant material had significance in the community, he said.

Results were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Not all independent experts were convinced.

The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there’s not enough evidence to tell whether cannabis was used, wrote Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, in an email.

“For a central part of the study, the article falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This matters because the hair data carry the abstract’s main claims (cannabis consumption and use for its psychoactive properties).”

Today, scholars don’t consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth — their presence alone doesn’t confirm drug use.

Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data didn’t distinguish consumption from external exposure — in other words, the hair could have picked up traces of weed simply by being buried together with it. He said a lab test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.

But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological hair analysis was not new in archaeology and has been used to identify consumption of psychoactive substances. She was not involved in the study.

In an email, she credited the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite.”

A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.

A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.

The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras.

Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009.

The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.

Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”

The court agreed with the plaintiff that “both shows provide commentaries on the healthcare system; they focus specifically on the emergency room and the difficult conditions under which the medical staff operates. Both shows take place, with little exception, in the emergency room, as opposed to other medical shows which track patients as they move out of the emergency room, or indeed never enter it.”

The opinion also said that both feature “very fast pacing, and reactions to multiple overlapping crises. The fast-paced dialogue is (to a layperson) frequently incomprehensible shorthand and jargon, lending an air of immediacy and accuracy.”

Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that “WBTV continues to maintain that ‘The Pitt’ is an entirely original series and that the claims against it are without merit. Nothing in the Court of Appeal’s decision establishes otherwise, and WBTV looks forward to defending its position as the case proceeds.”

The defendants argued in legal filings that the shows have “generic similarities” that would exist in “any dramatic story” that features “overworked doctors and staff.”

The panel also unanimously dismissed as defendants Wyle, John Wells, who created “The Pitt” and worked on “ER,” and R. Scott Gemmill, a “Pitt” executive producer who also worked on both shows. The judges found there was no evidence the three men knew the provisions of the Crichton contract that the lawsuit alleges they interfered with.

Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit alleges “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot that she had rejected.

Her husband had secured a coveted “frozen rights” provision in his contract for the series, prohibiting Warner Bros. from proceeding with any sequels, remakes, spinoffs or other productions derived from “ER” without Crichton’s consent, or his estate’s consent after his death from cancer in 2008.

After the production company could not reach an agreement with Sherri Crichton over a proposed “ER” reboot, the TV studio proceeded to develop and produce a series based on the same premise without permission, the lawsuit alleges.

Micki Boden wanted a wedding cake that checked off a couple of big boxes — personalized and tasty. Instead of a traditional tiered cake, the San Fernando Valley native went with a favorite from her school days.

“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said.

Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.

Boden and her husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality television show Big Brother and eventually started dating. The two got engaged in 2025.

With the groom’s family traveling from the East Coast for their wedding in October, the couple wanted to provide a uniquely L.A. experience.

Micki Boden and Matt Stollman cut into their LAUSD coffee cake wedding cake.

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Micki Boden

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“We wanted something that was gonna be fun, that was gonna be memorable for people,” Boden said.

They held their wedding at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, surrounded by San Fernando Valley memorabilia, and got a California favorite — an In-N-Out truck — to serve guests.

The search for a cake that fit 

But when it came to the wedding cake, the couple struggled to find something suitable. Neither Boden nor Stollman liked frosting, and traditional wedding cakes didn’t excite them.

“We explored the more traditional tiered cake setup, and it just wasn’t meshing well,” Boden said.

Boden kept returning to the coffee cake she ate throughout her years in public school. Los Angeles Unified School District had published its official recipe online, but she wasn’t confident she could bake it herself. So she reached out to the district to ask for help.

The Stollman's wedding cake, decorated by the chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, sits in a pastry box.

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Micki Boden

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How LAUSD made it happen 

Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative at the district, and Manish Singh, the director of food services, arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake. The chef also shaped part of the cake into a heart just for the couple.

Singh said the district doesn’t take cake orders from the public — but made this exception.

“We were doing it just to make one of our Angelenos, an ex-LAUSD student, make her special day even more special,” Singh said.

For the bride, it was the icing on her big day.

“I think it’s all just part of being an L.A. student,” she said. “The fact that we have these amazing memories from childhood, I think it’s just so meaningful for a lot of people.”