The Brief

It's officially summer in Southern California, and the warm evenings ahead are perfect for taking in the night sky. Today is also the start of the seasonal, free Star Parties at Griffith Observatory that run from June through September.

If you go, you might meet local amateur astronomer, Spencer Soohoo. By day, he’s a research scientist at Cedar Sinai but in his off time, he’s an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society.

We asked Soohoo for some advice on how to get into amateur astronomy in Southern California — if you’re already into stargazing — how to up your game.

Getting started

To kick us off, we asked Soohoo to recommend a few places where the stars may be easier to spot:

• Joshua Tree: He says the national park "is starting to get a little more light pollution now than before but it's still fairly decent."
• I-5 near Frasier Park: "There's a couple of turnouts you can go to."
• Saddleback Butte State Park: Soohoo has this caveat: "There's a lot of light now from the Lancaster-Palmdale area. But the last time I went, you could still see the Milky Way without too much trouble."
• For really dark skies: You have to drive a distance, probably about an 1 1/2 to 2 hours away.

Not up for that drive? Soohoo says "to be honest with you, if you're OK with looking at the planets and some of the brighter nebula, you can even do that from downtown L.A."

What can you see in SoCal this time of year?

Soohoo says right now the only night object "really prominent" is Venus.

"If you are up around maybe midnight or 1 a.m., you can see Saturn and Jupiter will rise a couple hours after that," he says.

How to spot planets

We asked Soohoo what he'd recommend folks use if they want to know where the constellations and planets are specifically in the sky.

Soohoo says his favorite smartphone app is Sky Safari ("I think it's about $9 to $10") but there are other free apps to check out.

"They're tied into the GPS in your phone and they'll show you what the sky looks like at that particular time," he says. "Some of them have what they call augmented reality. So they'll actually use the camera on the phone and superimpose the background of what you're seeing along with the sky chart."

Will the northern lights be back in Southern California?

Recently and unexpectedly, people were able to catch a glimpse of the northern lights exceptionally far south. So we asked Soohoo if that's going to be possible over the summer months.

He doubts it.

"It's rare that you'd be able to see them this far south," he says. "But I know that the last time you could see the northern lights from Mount Wilson — that one night that they were visible — the marine layer had moved in and blocked out all the light pollution from downtown L.A. and so you could see the northern lights there."

What to expect at Griffith Observatory

Griffith Observatory hosts monthly star parties during the summer that are free to the public. Volunteers from telescope groups and the L.A. Astronomical Society are there and Soohoo says participants can expect 25 to 40 telescopes to be set up on the grounds.

"We basically set up our telescopes on the lawn and point them at whatever target we want to and invite people to look through them," he explains. "And I personally focus on the moon because you'd be amazed at how many people have never seen the moon through a telescope in their lives. I can't tell you how many languages I've heard people say, 'Wow, it's just incredible.'"

Soohoo said he got his "greatest thrill" from helping an 82-year-old woman who had never looked through a telescope in her life.

"I showed her the moon and just to watch the expression on her face as it lit up — that's why we do it," Soohoo said.

How to attend

The Griffith Observatory lists the following dates for public star parties:

• Saturday, June 24: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, July 22: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, Aug. 26: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, Sep. 23: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.

You can find more resources and events at the Los Angeles Astronomical Society website or on the Griffith Observatory website.

Joey Quiñones grew up in East Los Angeles, , where cumbia, punk and oldies soul could all be heard within two blocks. That mix shaped the sound he's built with his band, Thee Sinseers, and on his own. This year, he's out with two very different albums — the band's Love Stories and his solo album, Inna Soul Steady Situation. And most recently, he brought it all back with hometown shows at The Wiltern this past Saturday and Pacific Electric on Sunday.

Quiñones says the sounds of East L.A. are baked into his music.

"You wake up in the morning, and your mom would be cleaning to cumbia, and you'd hear it blasting from the other yards," Quiñones says. "You'd hear the local neighborhood band practicing their punk rock songs. Then you get to the street, and you hear all the oldies with the lowriders on Whittier Boulevard. It's everywhere. We can't sit down and not write a song that doesn't incorporate stuff like that, whether it be the singing or the horn section or the guitar playing. It's always gonna be subliminally in there." 

Quiñones says  Thee Sinseers came together almost by accident, when he accepted a dare to sing. But he knew the band had potential when they started getting paid.

"When we made $100. There was a time when that's really what it was," Quiñones says. "The community of musicians that we have has always supported each other in anything. So to be able to kind of do something where we were able to support our families and support each other was the key thing to really take it seriously. When you don't owe money, then you're doing something.”

The band's new album includes a song called "Let's Fall in Love Again," in which Quiñones admits past mistakes. He says that kind of honesty is the key to his songwriting.

“Life has been the teacher in all this,” Quiñones says. “Sitting down and honestly writing honesty, that's the key to, I don't wanna say soul music, but just good music and just music in general. When you make anything, you put honesty in it, because people know when you're kinda full of it. That's the biggest thing: being able to sit down and reflect and admit faults and admit to the life-changing and getting used to it and adjusting to it.”

Ahead of this past weekend's homecoming, Quiñones admitted that it was a little nerve-racking after touring the world.

"I was really excited about it months ago," he said. "But now it's getting closer and I just want things to be perfect. We're all so excited to play for our families and our friends, so coming home and being able to do that properly is the focus right now for all of us."

Stephen Richer no longer runs elections in the fourth-largest county in the country.

But for the rest of his life, he'll remember the feeling when polls closed on an election night.

More than a million ballots staring at him and his staff. Every moment that passes without them fully counted means another conspiracy theory sprouting online.

"Those days, those were hell for me," said Richer, a Republican who served as the clerk and recorder for Arizona's Maricopa County. "You'd have a limited number of workers, and you'd have a limited amount of space, and you'd be doing everything that you possibly could. … And yet you have everyone blowing up your phone, everyone saying that you're incompetent or corrupt or worse."

This midterm year, election officials in competitive congressional districts will face that same pressure.

But they will also face a hard reality: that those races might not be called until days after Election Day.

Here's an FAQ on why that is, and what it could mean this year.

Why do we know the results immediately in some places, and in others it takes days or weeks?

It comes down to the margin of victory.

Which sounds strange, since who wins an election and by how much shouldn't impact how long it takes election officials to count ballots.

But the reality is what most Americans think of as "election results" — the winners announced on election nights across TV networks and social media — are not the result of all ballots being counted, but rather, races being called by news organizations that determine the winners based on a state or district's demographics and initial returns. (NPR relies on The Associated Press for its race calls.)

Those determinations come a lot faster when races aren't close.

"Margins matter," said Richer, who noted that in recent elections, there has been a lot less scrutiny on Utah than there has been on his home state of Arizona, or certain contests in California, despite the states counting votes at similar speeds.

"In Utah you can call all the races very quickly because the Republicans there have high margins," Richer said.

That gives the illusion of elections there being complete, but no state is done counting ballots on election night, even if it seems that way because notable races are called early.

So you're saying the timing of results isn't at all tied to vote-counting speed?

Not exactly.

The closer the race, the more election analysts need to see before they can make a call. So the faster states count ballots, the faster those determinations can be made.

This is why the longest wait times every election usually come from places that have competitive races and which also count slowly.

Like, California?

Exactly. California has become the poster child for long results times because of both those factors: a bevy of competitive congressional districts, which help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House, and a vote count that's been among the slowest in the nation.

Add in that President Trump, the most prominent purveyor of election misinformation in the country, has long targeted the liberal California, and experts see a perfect storm for false voting narratives.

"It's progressive, it likes mail ballots, it gets [postmarked] mail ballots after Election Day," Richer said. "It just all adds up to a fairly incendiary situation."

Charles Stewart, an elections expert at MIT, put it more simply.

"California just has a big target on its back," said Stewart.

California's slow vote counting caused a lot of conspiracy theorizing during the state's June primary. Is this fall going to be a rerun?

Kim Alexander is cautiously optimistic that won't be the case.

She runs the California Voter Foundation, which has been advocating for ways to speed up California's vote tally without giving up the state's generous voting access policies, like mailing every active registered voter a ballot.

"We have all these amazing rights and opportunities that we give to our voters, and the price we're paying is a longer vote count," Alexander told NPR. "But that doesn't mean that it has to be this long."

An election worker processes ballots for the California state primary at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on June 5.

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Justin Sullivan

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The single biggest cause for California's slow count comes from a phenomenon Alexander calls "the pig in the python" problem: a logjam of millions of vote-by-mail ballots getting returned on Election Day that need to be processed.

Those ballots take longer to count than in-person votes, as officials need to deal with envelopes and verify signatures to make sure mail ballots are cast by the people they're supposed to be cast by.

Some counties see up to 50% of their vote-by-mail ballots turned in on Election Day, Alexander said, which means processing work doesn't even begin until later in the week.

"I can't tell you how many people who are informed and engaged and … when I tell them that the cause for the long vote count is voters holding on to their ballots to Election Day and turning them in, they look at me and they're like, 'That's what I do,'" Alexander said. "And I'm like, 'I know! You're part of the problem!'"

The state allocated $40 million to speeding up its counting this year, and part of that money is going to voter education.

Alexander is optimistic that once voters learn they can play a role in speeding up the process by voting earlier, or by utilizing other voting methods that allow for quicker counting, they will respond.

"California has been beaten up by this president for over a decade over our election process, and it's gotten pretty worrisome," Alexander said. "I think that California voters, if they feel they can do something to respond to that, many will take action."

To that point, research conducted earlier this year found that when voters in California's San Joaquin County received postcards urging them to vote earlier, they were more likely to meet the recommended deadline that allowed for election-night counting.

Alexander noted one more change that could mean less spotlight on California this year: fewer competitive House districts.

Ahead of the 2022 elections, the state had nine districts that the Cook Political Report considered competitive. But this year, in part because voters approved a mid-cycle gerrymander to respond to gerrymanders in Republican-controlled states, the state has just three.

That makes it less likely the entire country will be waiting on California to know who controls the House.

OK, anywhere else we should be watching when it comes to results speed?

Using the formula discussed earlier (competitive races + slow vote counting), it's impossible not to look at Alaska.

According to data from the MIT Election Lab, Alaska was the last state in 2024 to reach 95% of its ballots counted.

Election Day was Nov. 5 that year, but the state's lone House race — which Republican Nicholas Begich won by fewer than 10,000 votes — wasn't called by the AP until Nov. 20.

This year, polling shows a tight Alaska Senate race. That means, if results fall a certain way in other states, the entire country could be waiting weeks to know which party will control the U.S. Senate next year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Neighbors in North Long Beach rushed out of their homes on Saturday and blocked federal immigration agents from detaining a man they had just violently knocked to the ground, according to first-hand accounts from four residents who spoke to the Long Beach Post.

The man is a U.S. citizen named Ricardo Gonzalez who lives near where he was detained, according to neighbors and an online fundraiser started by his family. He was riding an e-bike near Elm Avenue and 56th Street on Saturday afternoon when an agent jumped out of an unmarked car and tackled him, according to a neighbor who asked to be identified only by his first name, Joe. (Other accounts online said agents rammed Gonzalez with their car. The Post could not locate any video of this or anyone who said they witnessed it first-hand.)

The agent then accused Gonzalez of throwing something at their car, Joe said.

Agents tased Gonzalez twice while he was on the ground, and one agent knelt on his back while Gonzalez yelled in pain and said his arm was broken, according to two neighbors who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

As residents came outside to see what was going on, they started yelling and honking, alerting more neighbors.

The area was already on edge, Joe said, because eight or so unmarked law enforcement vehicles had been parked in the neighborhood since early that morning. He said his wife at one point had even called 911 to report the vehicles and ask if they could move because they were blocking multiple one-way streets.

Volunteers with anti-ICE rapid response groups had also brought loudspeakers to warn about the vehicles and urge everyone to stay inside. Instead, when neighbors heard the growing confrontation with agents, many intervened.

“If they try to take one of us, they’re going to have to take all of Long Beach,” said Patricia Velazquez, who has lived in the area for more than three decades.

Cellphone video shows roughly 50 people yelling expletives at masked agents who were carrying handguns and wearing vests that said “ICE.” Neighbors demanded to see a warrant, dragged trash cans behind the agents’ vehicles or stood in front of them, blocking them from driving off.

One agent made racist comments to the mostly Latino crowd, saying they didn’t “look legal,”  according to Joe. They also used pepper spray on the crowd, neighbors said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the confrontation.

At one point during the roughly hour-long standoff, agents grabbed two women — both U.S. citizens — and put them in the backs of different vehicles, according to two neighbors. They were soon freed, according to Joe. He described the crowd distracting agents while people sneaked behind their vehicles to open their doors.

Long Beach police soon showed up. In a statement, they said federal agents had called for help providing medical aid to someone and dealing with a crowd that had vandalized vehicles.

One officer attempted to step in immediately but was held back by his partner, one neighbor said. Video shows federal agents then allowed Gonzalez to leave with the Long Beach officers after agents searched his wallet and looked at his identification.

An LBPD officer uncuffed Gonzalez and took him to a nearby fire station. Paramedics then took him to a hospital. 

Gonzalez is a Long Beach resident who, until recently, worked for the city, Long Beach City Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk said in a statement. He was riding through his own neighborhood, she said, “when he was racially profiled and violently assaulted by ICE agents—leaving him with broken bones and crushing medical bills.”

In their online fundraiser, Gonzalez’s family says he is a hardworking man who supports his family. He is still recovering, they said, and asked for help spreading the word about what agents did to him.

Long Beach Congressman Robert Garcia said he was “proud of the neighbors who documented and stood up for the family being terrorized by ICE.”

“ICE agents brutally attacked and broke the arm of a North Long Beach resident and U.S. citizen,” he said in a statement. “The videos are horrific and should concern not just our community but the country.”

Mayor Rex Richardson said he is outraged by agents’ actions and is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security.

One of the first major signs of this year's "Super El Niño" has reached the U.S. It's called a Kelvin wave – a deep ocean wave that's currently raising sea levels along the West Coast.

Scientists have long known about Kelvin waves, but this year, the phenomena grabbed the public's attention with video explanations receiving thousands of views across TikTok and X.

"It does surprise me – I mean, here it's been around all this time," says Mark Cane, who created one of the first models to forecast and predict El Niño. "I'm sure Lord Kelvin is happy in his grave."

(Lord Kelvin, the British physicist who also developed the Kelvin temperature scale, first described the wave back in the late 1800s.)

Kelvin waves can develop along the equator during El Niño years, when a vast region of water in the Pacific Ocean becomes much warmer than usual.

Some of this warm water, in the form of a Kelvin wave that stretches thousands of miles, moves slowly east beneath the ocean's surface until it reaches South America. Then it splits, traveling north along the West Coast and as far south as Chile.

"It's like an enormous bathtub sloshing around," Cane says, professor emeritus of earth and climate sciences at Columbia University. "But the slosh is very peculiar, because it only goes west to east along the equator in a Kelvin wave."

These are not the massive, highly visible waves that crash into shorelines during major storms and hurricanes.

"It's not a wall of water, it's not a tsunami, it's not a wave you can surf," says Dillon Amaya, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University. "It's a planetary-scale wave."

A Kelvin wave's impact is gradual, raising sea levels as it moves up the coast, and bringing with it an elevated risk of floods and warmer water temperatures.

What's the impact? 

Kelvin waves can increase the risk of flooding and coastal erosion.

By themselves, Kelvin waves don't cause flooding, Amaya says. Instead, they load the dice, making flooding more likely by raising sea levels.

"It makes the background conditions more favorable towards coastal flooding, but what you need are triggering factors," Amaya said, such as a major storm or very high tides.

Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says Kelvin waves raise the chances of a "triple whammy" along the California coast: "El Nino, the high tide and the storm surge all coming at once."

That's exactly what some Southern California communities experienced in early October. Sea levels were already higher than normal because of the Kelvin wave – about six to eight inches, Amaya says. Then, when Tropical Storm Rachel hit, a storm surge flooded neighborhoods and left oceanfront homes partially submerged.

"That storm surge was almost certainly made more devastating because of the Kelvin wave," Amaya says.

Warmer water temperatures

Kelvin waves move slowly east beneath the ocean's surface until they reach South America. Then they split, traveling north along the West Coast and south as far as Chile. The dark red represents higher than normal sea levels.<br>

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Dillon J. Amaya

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North Carolina State University

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Kelvin waves also bring warmer water up the coast, which can be disruptive and put stress on marine life.

"We've seen tropical fishes in places that we don't normally see them," Amaya says. "Like a whale shark was spotted off the coast of San Diego."

The Kelvin wave can push down nutrient-dense cold waters that support productive marine ecosystems. Amaya says researchers have already seen evidence of sea birds dying in response to warmer water temperatures along the coast.

When is the next Kelvin wave? 

There are usually five to six Kelvin waves during a strong El Niño year, Amaya says.

Amaya predicts the next Kelvin wave will reach San Diego in late October or early November. Several more waves are expected through the fall and early winter, he says. Kelvin waves usually subside before the peak of El Niño.

The El Niño pattern typically peaks late in the year or early January. This year, NOAA researchers predict the El Niño will remain strong through early 2027.
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