Topline:
Southern California's citrus industry left a lasting mark on the region, economically and culturally.
The backstory: SoCal's citrus boom lasted from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century and coincided with the rise of the railroad.
See it for yourself: For a taste of citrus history, check out California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside.
For many decades, visitors to Southern California spoke in awe of the miles and miles of citrus trees that dominated the horizon. The orange — particularly the Washington Navel Orange — was the region’s calling card from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, driving economic growth, and becoming a key symbol of Californian prosperity.
Host Larry Mantle dove into this rich history on LAist’s daily news program, AirTalk, on 89.3 F.M.
Discovered in Brazil, the Washington Navel orange made its way to California via the Department of Agriculture.
“Because of the climate, because of the soil, because of the water in the Riverside area, it became this winter ripening marvel, with a glorious orange rind,” said Vince Moses, CEO of VinCate and Associates, a museum and preservation consulting firm, and previous director of the Museum of Riverside. “By the mid 1880s, it had begun to supplant Mediterranean sweet oranges in California.”
“The railroad and the citrus groves sort of grew up together in the 1880s and 1890s as the railroads, in particular the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads — two transcontinental systems — started to lay tracks to places like Los Angeles, Pasadena, and especially Riverside,” said Benjamin Jenkins, associate professor of history and archivist at the University of La Verne and author of Octopus's Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.
The invention of refrigerated cars in the late 1800s meant that people in New York and Boston could purchase oranges that were grown in California, Jenkins added. Packing houses and orange groves sprang up along the train tracks in cities like Claremont, Anaheim and Riverside, incentivized by the profits earned from shipping oranges and lemons east.
The industry was so lucrative that Riverside became “the wealthiest city per capita in the entire United States because it had become the home of the Washington Naval Orange,” Moses said.
Growers then banded together in 1893 to form the Southern California Fruit Exchange. It was “a cooperative incorporated to represent those growers and negotiate with the railroads and to create an organized manner in which they could pick, pack, and ship their fruit,” Moses said.
As it grew, the group became the California Fruit Growers Exchange, representing upward of 15,000 orange and lemon growers. The cooperative started branding their oranges “Sunkist” in 1909, which became the organization’s name in 1951. “They, in essence, branded the sun of Southern California,” Moses added.
Before the 20th century, packing was done by Native American, Chinese, and other East Asian immigrant groups, “but over the course of the 20th century, as immigration into California accelerated, particularly in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, starting about 1911, Mexicans and Mexican Americans really became the dominant picking and packing forces in Southern California,” Jenkins said.
Workers would move depending on the season, picking Washington Navels in the winter and Valencias in the spring.
“We can really date a lot of the downfall of the citrus industry to the early 1940s,” Jenkins explained.
Because of its position on the coast, Southern California was “an ideal place to build battleships [and] airplanes that would be used in the war against Japan.”
According to Jenkins, this shift meant the region needed new housing developments to accommodate all the people moving into the Southland to take part in the new defense industries. Citrus growers suddenly realized they were sitting on valuable real estate.
“A lot of orange growers decided to pull up stakes," Jenkins said. "They would maybe remove their orange trees to the Central Valley where they are still active today, and they would sell their land to housing developers to create tract homes.”
Though citrus is no longer commercially viable in Southern California “it also has this strange grasp on the public imagination because we're not willing to let go of the vestiges of those communities, whether that's in the form of packing houses, or public murals that you'll see in many towns in the San Gabriel Valley or in the Inland Empire showing what orange groves used to look like,” Jenkins said.
Those hoping to dig further into the history of citrus in Southern California can visit California Citrus State Historic Park, which has 200 acres of commercial navel orange trees, as well as tours and a visitor center built as a replica of a packing house.
"The park is just a hallmark of Southern California and that industry that made this region's identity for so very long,” Moses said.
Topline:
After 32 years in uniform and a career punctuated by declining murders, spiking traffic deaths and challenges retaining officers, Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish announced Wednesday that he will retire in December.
Why now: Hebeish declined a request to comment on Wednesday. In a characteristically terse and formal statement, he thanked the department that he described leading through “some of the most challenging times we have faced in modern law enforcement.” In a separate statement sent by department spokesperson Allison Gallagher, Hebeish said he had been “contemplating and planning my retirement for some time,” and wanted to see through the department’s newest round of academy cadets and a tough budget year before leaving. “It’s been a rewarding [five] years as Chief and I’m proud of everything the Department has accomplished,” the statement said.
The backstory: Hebeish, who began his career in 1994 with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and joined the Long Beach Police Department a year later, stepped into the limelight in 2021 when he replaced then-Chief Robert Luna, who went on to become the LA County Sheriff.
This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.
After 32 years in uniform and a career punctuated by declining murders, spiking traffic deaths and challenges retaining officers, Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish announced Wednesday that he will retire in December.
Hebeish, who began his career in 1994 with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and joined the Long Beach Police Department a year later, stepped into the limelight in 2021 when he replaced then-Chief Robert Luna, who went on to become the LA County Sheriff.
Hebeish declined a request to comment on Wednesday. In a characteristically terse and formal statement, he thanked the department that he described leading through “some of the most challenging times we have faced in modern law enforcement.”
In a separate statement sent by department spokesperson Allison Gallagher, Hebeish said he had been “contemplating and planning my retirement for some time,” and wanted to see through the department’s newest round of academy cadets and a tough budget year before leaving. “It’s been a rewarding [five] years as Chief and I’m proud of everything the Department has accomplished,” the statement said.
A spokesperson for Mayor Rex Richardson did not respond to a request for comment. In a social media post Wednesday, Richardson praised Hebeish, saying his legacy is one of “leadership, progress, and a deep commitment to our community and the men and women who serve it.”
“Wally Hebeish has always been a public servant focused on keeping people safe and a person of high integrity,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, who served as mayor when Hebeish first became chief. “Long Beach has been lucky to have had him as Chief, and I’m thankful to have worked with him.”
City Manager Tom Modica said the outgoing chief led the department through a “transformative period in modern policing” and did so with “integrity, compassion and an unwavering commitment” to the public. “We thank Chief Hebeish for his decades of public service and wish him the best in his retirement,” Modica said. “As we begin the search for our next Chief of Police, we will build on the strong foundation he leaves behind.”
Modica said the city plans to hire a recruitment firm in the next two weeks to begin a national search he hopes to finish by early next year. Candidates will be screened through the city’s human resources department and undergo interviews with a community panel, a technical panel and city department directors. The final choice will ultimately be made by Modica.
The city manager will also be creating a “community input process;” the city will announce something in the next couple of weeks.
Gerrit DeJongh of the Long Beach Police Officers Association said the union wants a chief with experience at a department of similar size who is “level-headed and fair-minded.”
The union supports a nationwide search, he said, but believes the department has “phenomenal internal candidates as well.” “If the city manager wants to have a discussion or wants the [union’s] opinion on it, I’d be happy to offer it,” DeJongh added.
Born in Cairo and raised in North Long Beach, Hebeish became the city’s first Arab American and Muslim to lead the department. After joining in 1995, he worked in criminal intelligence, investigations, patrol and internal affairs, and later served as chief of staff, deputy chief of the Support and Patrol bureaus and assistant chief, a post he took in 2019.
He became acting chief in 2021 while Luna, then the chief, recovered after being struck by a truck while crossing a street. Hebeish was appointed to the top job in December of that year.
Commanding a department of 800 sworn officers and another 1,200 employees, Hebeish took over the post amid intense pressure on police departments nationwide following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Meanwhile, the instability of the pandemic led to a spike in murders around the country. Like many departments, Long Beach grappled with new expectations of its police leaders and a need to rebuild public trust against challenges to retain officers.
In Long Beach, it was a balancing act with some success. Hebeish touts a citywide decline in murders, particularly fatal shootings, during his tenure. He said the city saw year-over-year reductions in shootings and, in 2025, its first recorded year without an officer-involved shooting.
He credited a High Crime Focus Team, created in 2024, which directs patrols to the places where violent crime, illegal firearms and quality-of-life complaints occur most often, with helping to reduce gun violence. He also lobbied for funding for a Real Time Crime Center, established a program for drones that back up police, launched a public online crime dashboard and instituted a yearly accountability report.
City officials and the department also point to its largest academy class on record, the opening of a new police academy, creation of a Neighborhood Safety Bike Team and expansion of its team that handles nonemergency calls.
DeJongh is especially proud of the department’s Wellness Division and its Community Services Bureau, which Hebeish helped lead while assistant chief. The program, he explained, watches for traumatic officer-involved incidents and refers them to counseling. It came about shortly after a string of officer suicides rocked the department.
“I cannot help but to think or believe that the experiences and the trauma they experienced on this job played into their decision to take their own lives,” he said. “You can only help but wonder, you know, could we even save just one of them if we had something like this in place at the time?”
But Hebeish leaves a department that has long suffered high vacancy rates, which has slowed response times. An August 2024 analysis of city data by the Post found 155 vacancies, about one in five officers. For all but the highest-priority calls, officers were taking more than 20 minutes longer to respond than they had three years earlier, the analysis found.
While dealing with a shortage of officers, the department announced it would stop responding to many minor noninjury crashes to focus on priority calls. Questions remain over how the department has handled traffic safety enforcement, as the city recorded 53 fatal traffic collisions in 2025 — the most in over a decade and surpassing the city’s homicide count that year.
Fatalities continue to climb into 2026, reaching more than 40 traffic deaths as of mid-October.
Public trust in the city police department continues to be an issue, as well, as criticisms are regularly slung at the department during city council meetings over the department’s handling of homelessness and the federal immigration raids that have continued throughout Long Beach over the past year.
The city’s Office of Police Oversight, established in 2022, has also urged the department to improve how it deals with the families of those killed by police and witnesses to shootings, following the 2024 killing of Brandon Boyd. The oversight commission has previously questioned whether internal investigations are handled in a timely manner and asked the department to review policies for when officers respond to domestic violence calls.
Topline:
Countries are not doing enough to cut emissions that cause climate change, according to a new report from United Nations scientists. And the United States is a big part of the problem. The U.S. sticks out as the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year, the report notes. Among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the U.S. was tied last year with Russia for the most emissions per capita. China emits significantly more total greenhouse gases each year than the U.S., but has more than four times the population.
Why it matters: U.S. emissions grew because of increased electricity demand, as well as Trump administration policies that support the burning of fossil fuels. The Trump administration has ordered coal-fired power plants in the U.S. to stay open longer than planned, rolled back fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and ended tax credits for solar and wind projects. Those policies have made the U.S. an outlier when it comes to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, says Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.
Why this changed: The Trump administration has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and is working to remove the U.S. from all U.N. climate work, arguing the international system imposes unfair burdens on Americans. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now says greenhouse gases do not pose a threat to human health and welfare, reversing its previous position. The new report includes a statement from the U.S. government, saying the U.S. "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report." The U.S. State Department did not respond to NPR's questions.
Countries are not doing enough to cut emissions that cause climate change, according to a new report from United Nations scientists. And the United States is a big part of the problem.
The U.S. sticks out as the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year, the report notes.
Among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the U.S. was tied last year with Russia for the most emissions per capita. China emits significantly more total greenhouse gases each year than the U.S., but has more than four times the population.
Overall, global emissions were basically the same last year as they were the previous year.
U.S. emissions grew because of increased electricity demand, as well as Trump administration policies that support the burning of fossil fuels. The Trump administration has ordered coal-fired power plants in the U.S. to stay open longer than planned, rolled back fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and ended tax credits for solar and wind projects.
Those policies have made the U.S. an outlier when it comes to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, says Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.
"Right now, everybody is scrambling a little bit regarding energy security," Andersen says, pointing to global oil and gas disruptions stemming from the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
Despite the geopolitical upheaval, "several G20 members have shown sustained emissions reduction," she notes.
That includes the European Union, which has invested heavily in energy-efficient appliances and renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar, partly in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Trump administration has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and is working to remove the U.S. from all U.N. climate work, arguing the international system imposes unfair burdens on Americans. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now says greenhouse gases do not pose a threat to human health and welfare, reversing its previous position.
The new report includes a statement from the U.S. government, saying the U.S. "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report." The U.S. State Department did not respond to NPR's questions.
The new report, which is compiled annually by an international group of scientists, comes less than a month before global climate talks kick off in Turkey. World leaders will gather to discuss how to speed investments in clean energy and how to pay for the costs of dealing with climate change. The Trump administration will not participate in those talks.
Still, whether or not American leaders formally participate in international climate efforts, the effects of America's reliance on oil, gas and coal are being felt around the world, the U.N. warns. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping extra heat that warms the entire planet. The effects of all that pollution are felt globally.
The Earth is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) warmer on average than it was in the mid-1800s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That warming is driving widespread disasters, from deadly heat waves and floods to more intense storms and wildfires.
"All countries, especially the big emitters, must do more," says U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "Every fraction of a degree matters."
Right now, the planet is on track for upwards of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming this century, which would cause catastrophic impacts, such as massive sea level rise and the mass extinction of plants and animals, the report warns.
The U.N. Paris Climate agreement sets a goal of limiting warming to well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), in the hopes of avoiding such cataclysms.
This is the first year the annual report has acknowledged that even lower targets are now out of reach. However, it finds it is still possible to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, if global greenhouse gas emissions fall by about 25% in the next decade.
But countries are currently lagging far behind that goal.
Under the Paris agreement, about two thirds of countries have submitted formal, up-to-date plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. If they all follow through on those plans, it would reduce emissions by about 15% in the next decade — far less than the 25% needed.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park serves hand-pulled Lanzhou beef noodle soup in a dining room with a baby grand piano, where customers — and staff — are invited to tickle the ivories.
Why it matters: Two former piano teachers turned their hometown’s signature dish into a growing noodle chain, bringing their love of music along for the ride.
Why now: It’s practically cozy season, which means it’s time to curl up with a rich bowl of noodle soup.
At Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park's Atlantic Times Square, the dining room is small. But there's still room for a baby grand piano.
If you’re lucky, you might catch owner Zi Yang playing for customers as they work through bowls of Lanzhou beef noodle soup. A few feet away, cooks pull a fresh batch of noodles by hand, made to each diner’s preferred thickness.
Yang and his wife, Mimi Song, are both former piano teachers who met through music.
After moving from China to the U.S., they hoped to make a living teaching piano, but it didn’t pay the bills. So they turned to another love: noodles.
The couple opened the first Chopin Noodle House in Catonsville, Maryland, in 2023. They later expanded to Southern California, starting in Chino, and opened in Monterey Park in March. The chain now has five locations in Maryland, Virginia and Southern California.
When I visited, Yang stepped out from behind the counter, sat down at the baby grand and played Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, its soft, rolling melody filling the small dining room. A group of diners in the corner looked up from their bowls of noodles, watched and cheered when he finished.
The restaurant name comes from the Polish composer. “We both love Chopin,” Yang said.
Yang is from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in northwest China, and the birthplace of the signature beef noodle soup.
“I was born in Lanzhou, a city along China’s ancient Silk Road,” he writes on the restaurant’s website. “Every morning, the streets fill with the scent of beef broth and the rhythm of pulled noodles slapping the counter.”
“Maybe 80% of the people eat it for breakfast or lunch,” he told me.
Before opening the restaurant, he returned to China for a crash course in its creation.
“I went back to learn how to pull the noodles and how to make the very delicious beef noodle soup,” he said.
The piano started as a practical idea.
“We saw that restaurant life would be so boring, so we decided to put a piano in our restaurant. So sometimes if there’s no customer, we can practice the piano,” Yang said.
The most popular order is the traditional beef noodle soup ($14.99). It's made from beef bones and beef shank.
Diners choose from eight noodle styles, from extra-thin to extra-wide, plus knife-sliced and gluten-free rice noodles. The bowl follows what the restaurant calls Lanzhou’s five signature elements: clear beef broth, white radish, red chili oil, green cilantro and leek, as well as golden hand-pulled noodles topped with thinly sliced beef.
For sipping alongside the noodles, order the eight treasures tea, known in Lanzhou as san pao tai. It’s served in a lidded bowl called a gaiwan and brewed with green tea, dried red dates, goji berries, longan, raisins, rose petals, chrysanthemum and rock sugar. You use the lid to keep the fruit and leaves in place as you drink. It’s naturally sweet, a nice counterpoint to the chili oil.
Anyone who visits is welcome to play the piano. Yang said they’ve had everyone from kids learning to play to professional musicians, including members of the San Gabriel Valley Symphony.
Some of the players are so good that Yang admits he’s now a little shy about taking his turn.
“I’m afraid to play because they are so good,” he said.
Location: Atlantic Times Square, 500 N. Atlantic Blvd., Suite 117, Monterey Park
Hours: Monday through Thursday noon to 9 p.m.; Friday, noon to 9:30 p.m; Saturday and Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Instagram:@chopinnoodlehouse
Topline:
The L.A. region is bracing for extreme heat and beach erosion, not to mention longer rain events and droughts that could be here within two decades.
Coastal housing at risk: Researchers found that in L.A. County, about 1,700 housing units are now at risk of being permanently inundated. But if sea levels rise by 3.3 feet — which is possible by 2100 — 9,000 units would be at risk of being permanently flooded.
Extreme heat expected: Temperatures are expected to rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit between 2041 and 2070 — adding to the 4 degrees of warming that have already happened since 1900.
Not all bad news: “What we want to highlight with this report is not how doom and gloom everything is, but just to look at climate change in the L.A. area as something that is inevitable, but which we can adapt to, and in particular, protect the most vulnerable,” said UCLA climate researcher Jesse Norris, the lead author of the report focused on Los Angeles.
California’s microclimates play a role: Most of the hazards predicted in the report will be familiar to Southern Californians, even as the effects are expected to intensify and become more common during climate change.
Read on ... for links to the L.A. and statewide reports.
Longer droughts, more extreme heat, greater wildfire risk and more beach erosion: A new state-commissioned report finds that climate change is likely to reshape the Southern California landscape and way of life.
The study, which comes as part of California’s fifth statewide climate change assessment, includes more detailed models than previous reports.
“What we want to highlight with this report is not how doom and gloom everything is, but just to look at climate change in the L.A. area as something that is inevitable, but which we can adapt to, and in particular, protect the most vulnerable,” said UCLA climate researcher Jesse Norris, the lead author of the report focused on Los Angeles.
If the recent stories of beach and coastline erosion have you concerned, buckle up. The report notes local coastal erosion rates are expected to triple by 2050.
Citing past research, the authors also note that coastal flooding is expected to quickly intensify in the mid-2030s and become a yearly event by the mid-21st century.
Between one-third and two-thirds of the region’s beaches are expected to be lost in the next 75 years.
Researchers found that in L.A. County, about 1,700 housing units are at risk of being permanently inundated. But if sea levels rise by 3.3 feet — which is possible by 2100 — 9,000 units would be at risk of being permanently flooded.
And if sea levels rise by 6.6 feet, which researchers described as an “extreme” scenario, flooding could be widespread during a 100-year wave event. In this scenario, large swaths of urban L.A. and Orange counties could be flooded, though it’s important to note the projections don’t account for any future infrastructure that may be built.
Temperatures are expected to rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit between 2041 and 2070 — adding to the 4 degrees of warming that have already happened since 1900.
Researchers say those effects are more pronounced in inland areas, which are also projected to see more days of extreme heat. The average hottest day of the year is expected to rise to 115 degrees by midcentury.
Most of the hazards predicted in the report will be familiar to Southern Californians, even as the effects are expected to intensify and become more common during climate change.
“It was quite striking to see how much more vulnerable certain locations are than others to different climate hazards,” Norris said. “In particular, the more inland areas being far more vulnerable to the increase in extreme heat, mountain communities being far more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme rain and flooding as well as reduced snowpack, and coastal areas being obviously far more vulnerable to the impacts of rising seas.”
Norris stressed that planning for these effects can be undertaken now. One example: increasing tree cover to mitigate heat.
“A lot of inland cities are thinking very seriously about increasing their tree canopies, increasing the ability for people to have shade as they're going about their business,” Norris said.
Norris highlighted the importance of protecting the most vulnerable in these situations, including people experiencing homelessness and those who work outdoors, and ensuring access to air conditioning and cooling centers.
Norris also said continuing and improving initiatives like active wildfire management, water management and coastal adaptation will be vital in the years to come.
