The Brief

NPR has named a new news chief at a moment of uncertainty for the network, when it must adjust to the end of federal funding for public media on Sept. 30 — a move brought on by the Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress.

NPR has tapped Thomas Evans — widely called Tommy — a veteran of CNN's international coverage who reported on conflicts for more than two decades. He arrived at NPR a year ago to launch its editorial review desk. The desk is charged with helping the newsroom ensure that its reporting is fair, accurate and contextual — in stories both on air and online, and in the full weight of NPR's coverage.

"I had a lot of respect from beforehand, but these are really the best journalists in the country, if not the world," Evans says in an interview. He says CEO Katherine Maher had charged him with maintaining the network's core journalistic mission and making sure "that won't be lost in the mix of just dealing with all the other maelstrom that's coming at us."

He says NPR needs to keep innovating in how it shares its journalism. But Evans says NPR should "lean into its strengths," among them the deep subject knowledge of its reporters, hosts, producers and editors, its international coverage and its time-proven ability to tell stories compellingly.

Evans is to succeed NPR Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief Edith Chapin on Sept. 15. Chapin will stay on for a couple weeks to ensure a smooth transition, Maher says.

In announcing her intention this summer to step down, Chapin said she wanted a break from running the newsroom and serving as NPR's acting chief content officer at the same time. She said her decision was not influenced by NPR's financial concerns. NPR has indicated it intends to hire a full-time chief content officer but the job has not yet been posted.

Chapin and Evans first intersected a generation ago, when they both worked at CNN. She was a managing editor based in New York; he was a junior journalist who lived near Ground Zero of the Sept. 11 terror strikes in New York. Evans covered the aftermath of the attacks on foot for CNN; he was able to get close to the site because he was a resident of Lower Manhattan.

Suddenly, Evans says, CNN cared about his master's degree from the University of London, as his dissertation was centered on Al Qaeda. A career in international journalism was born.

Financial challenges at NPR follow political anger

Evans' arrival at NPR last year came in the wake of public and political outcry triggered by an essay critical of NPR's news coverage. Uri Berliner, then a senior business editor at the network, wrote it for The Free Press, a news outlet that argues the mainstream news media has become biased.

While conservatives have periodically questioned the need to fund public media throughout its decades, Berliner's essay provided a new rallying cry. Republicans on Capitol Hill attacked Maher – who had just become NPR's chief executive – for her old social media posts. The NPR job is her first leading a journalism organization.

While she was brought in to NPR to shape a new strategy tailored for a digital age of listening, reading and viewing on demand, much of Maher's time has been consumed by the fallout of that article and the attacks on public media funding that have accompanied the return of President Trump to the White House.

Chapin had long wanted to put in place a system of editorial checks similar to that at CNN. She seized the moment to hire Evans, who assembled a team of editors to review NPR's journalism — both individual stories and podcasts —and to monitor the larger thrust of coverage.

At the outset, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped to pay for the initiative, though the funding soon waned. The CPB is a privately incorporated nonprofit with a Congressional charter to funnel federal tax dollars appropriated for public television and radio stations. PBS has typically received 15% of its funds directly from federal sources; NPR typically got between 1 to 2% of its money that way. Local stations, on average, have been bigger beneficiaries of federal dollars through CPB.

But all of that is going away on Sept. 30. At President Trump's urging, Republican leaders in Congress pushed through what's called a rescission, taking back $1.1 billion already set aside for public media (including NPR, PBS and local stations). CPB has announced it's shutting down.

Maher has said as many as 70 to 80 stations may close; others may consolidate. And that will affect the strength, reach and resilience of the larger public radio system — now some 240-stations strong — and NPR itself. The network receives about 30% of its annual budget from fees local stations pay to run NPR's programs.

A murky financial future

Asked about whether budget cuts will be necessary at the network, Maher demurred, saying she is to present a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, to NPR's board of directors at meetings this week. The board is scheduled to vote on it on Friday. Maher has said publicly that NPR will write off about $8 million in fees from the stations in the greatest financial danger, but she says that's not a budget cut. NPR's annual budget currently stands at about $300 million annually.

Maher also said she is promoting NPR's senior vice president for government and external affairs, Marta McLellan Ross, to be her chief of staff.

McLellan Ross has been praised by public radio station officials for galvanizing the campaign seeking to convince lawmakers to preserve federal funding for the public media system, though it proved unsuccessful. Now, she is to help Maher and the senior leadership team execute a new strategy for the current moment, though Maher has not yet revealed what it is to be.

NPR officials say they are not yet certain of the full effect of the federal funding cuts on NPR member stations and how that, in turn, will affect NPR's finances. Many station managers say they received a boost in contributions from listeners following Congress' rescission vote. But they are not convinced that level of giving will sustain over time.

A journalism career built around the world

In interviews, Maher says Evans brings an understanding of NPR's network — yet has fresh eyes for how it could evolve.

"As the network and system for public media changes, the ability for us to change with that moment is going to be really important," Maher says in an interview. "High quality, high integrity journalism is table stakes. But it is beyond that important to know what differentiates us, what makes us unique."

She says Evans will help ensure NPR provides original and distinctive reporting across old fashioned platforms and new ones.

"This is somebody who had a good sense of where we are strong, a good sense of where we might grow, a good sense of what makes us different, and a good sense of where we might lean into that in the future," Maher says. "He is unafraid to identify what it is at NPR that we should celebrate and invest in — as well as what we are going to need to change about ourselves in order to move into the next phase of what public media will become."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Evans' career took off. For years, Evans reported on major developments throughout Europe and the Middle East, traveling to places like Iraq. Then he coordinated that kind of coverage as an international news executive for CNN based in London.

He rose to be CNN's vice president for newsgathering responsible for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. He was also London Bureau chief. He has led reporting on stories including Brexit, the British royals and terrorist strikes in Europe, as well as ongoing tensions in the Middle East.

Before that, Evans had helped CNN set up bureaus in Kabul and Baghdad during the American-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks on the U.S.

"I have always thought of him as a tremendous leader and somebody whom I could go to at any time, with any question, and know that he is a valued adviser," says Laura Bernardini, former head of global planning for CNN.

Bernardini says she first met Evans in New Orleans two decades ago, where he was producing stories for Anderson Cooper about the flooding and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"Every day they would go out and find a new story," Bernardini says. "Each was more incredible than the last — and it would capture where the city was at that moment."

Evans's father was in the import/export business; his mother was an antiques dealer. He was born in Singapore, grew up in Thailand, and went to school in India, though he also spent time in the States.

Evans graduated from the University of Rochester in upstate New York and received a master's in international politics from the University of London. His work at CNN has won numerous prominent recognitions, including Emmy, Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards.

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for covering itself, no news executive or corporate official reviewed the story before it was posted publicly.

Copyright 2025 NPR

A new analysis of alerts sent during the Eaton Fire found “no failure” by emergency officials to issue timely evacuation orders to areas west of Lake Avenue in Altadena.

The timing of alerts to neighborhoods west of Lake, where all but one of 19 deaths in that fire occurred, has been under scrutiny since the January 2025 fire.

The independent report by Citygate Associates was commissioned by the L.A. County Fire Department at the start of this year and was released Monday.

Its conclusions are similar to those of after-action reports from other firms — that officials did the best they could amid unprecedented fire conditions and strained resources.

“While the report provides an honest account of our operations, we recognize that no investigation can truly capture the horror and tragedy residents endured,” said L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone in a prepared statement. “My focus is to ensure that the lessons learned from the Eaton and Palisades fires are turned into lasting changes that will better protect our residents and neighborhoods into the future.”

Altadena resident Zaire Calvin — whose sister died in the fire and whose own home burned down — said the report feels like another “slap in the face.” He said he wanted to see details on any mistakes that may have been made. But reading the report, he felt blame was once again largely placed on unprecedented fire conditions.

“A  community that's already down, a community that's fighting for their lives, a community that's fighting all of the people trying to take property from them — at some point you just want accountability,” Calvin said.

L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena, said in a prepared statement that the “investigation should not be interpreted as dismissing the experiences of residents. Public trust requires both accountability and a willingness to learn from every aspect of a disaster response.”

Citygate Associates, which produced an after-action report on the 2018 Woolsey Fire, used interviews, operational records, dispatch records and internal communications to analyze decisionmaking between 9 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025, and 6 a.m. the following day.

Some of the main findings include the following:

• With aircraft grounded by  high winds, “Incident Command was forced to fight a fire while blind to its movements.” 
• Evacuation decisions were not based on “race, age or socioeconomics.” 
• “Evacuation planners who created the evacuation zone areas well before the fire tried to use, where possible, major north/south and east/west streets. … Thus, Lake Avenue was a natural, very long street that could be utilized as an anchor for creating evacuation zones.” 
• Other fire timeline reviews cite reports of fire moving westward between 11 p.m. and just before midnight, but Citygate staffers write that strained resources were focused on the eastern front of the fire at that time, which was the direction the fire was initially spreading, and that “fire progression maps … do not show the the Eaton Fire directly impacting western neighborhoods at that time.” 
• The fire initially spread westward more slowly, and did not escalate significantly until early in the morning on Jan. 8.
• Reports of fires before 1 a.m. west of Lake Avenue were likely a result of downed power lines.
• By 2 a.m., radio reports indicated embers were being cast deeper into Altadena. 
• Discussions to expand evacuation orders west started at 2:18 a.m., with evacuation orders being sent to residents west of Lake by 3:25 a.m. 
• The main fire front crossed west of Lake Avenue by about 5:15 a.m. 

Find the full report here. 

Huntington Beach must pay $50,000 for each month it continues to fail to comply with the state’s mandate to zone for more housing, according to a recent court ruling. For several years now, the city has been waging a court battle against the state's order to make way for 40,000 new homes.

The judge ruled that the city should be penalized $10,000 per month going back to January 2025, and then fined $50,000 per month, starting next month, until the city gets a compliant housing element approved.

The backstory

State law requires California cities and counties to plan for enough housing to meet the expected demand over an eight-year time period, including for low-income housing. Huntington Beach, citing its independence as a charter city, has fought its most recent housing allocation all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to review the case last year.

Does the state require cities to actually build that many homes?

No. Cities are not required to actually build housing, but rather to make sure their zoning and land use codes accommodate the amount of housing assigned to them through what’s known as the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).

What does the city say?

In a statement, Casey McKeon, the city’s mayor, said the city “strongly opposes these penalties and will continue fighting for the rights of our residents and for the principle of local control against ongoing efforts by the Attorney General to centralize land use authority in Sacramento.”

Is Huntington Beach an outlier?

Yes. Huntington Beach is an outlier in its aggressive fight against the state housing mandates. More than 90% of California’s 539 jurisdictions are in compliance with the state requirement to plan for the amount of housing assigned to them through the latest RHNA cycle.

What’s next?

The city recently posted draft revisions to its housing plan — for the first time since 2021. That’s significant because the city’s efforts to come into state compliance have been paused for years.

One complication with compliance: Huntington Beach residents voted to require any major changes to the city’s zoning, including its state-mandated housing plan, to be put up for a public vote. That could mean more delays in coming into state compliance, and consequently, more fines, at a time when the city is facing a budget crunch.

During a press conference following a shooting at the San Diego Islamic Center, San Diego Police Department Chief Scott Wahl confirmed three adult victims at the center and the two suspects are dead.

Police said the suspects were found dead in the vehicle nearby. They were 17 and 19 years old. The motivation behind the shooting is unknown at this time.

Wahl said in 28 years, this is the most dynamic and impressive response he's seen in policing with help coming from agencies all over the county.

Imam of the Islamic Center of San Diego Taha Hassane said the center stands in solidarity "with all of the families in our community here and all the mosques and places of worship" in San Diego.

"This is something that we never expected, and I would also like to thank all the people who contacted us from all over the country and overseas to offer their condolences."

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was also present at the news conference.

"We will do anything it takes to make sure you feel safe in this city," Gloria said.

In a statement, the Council on American-Islamic Relations-San Diego Executive Director Tazheen Nizam said:

“We strongly condemn this horrifying act of violence at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by this attack. No one should ever fear for their safety while attending prayers or studying at an elementary school. We are working to learn more about this incident and we encourage everyone to keep this community in your prayers."

The active shooter situation was reported at 11:43 a.m. at ICSD in the 7000 block of Eckstrom Avenue in Clairemont, according to SDPD.

The department is asking people to avoid the area.

A reunification location for those impacted by the incident has been established at 4125 Hathaway Street.

According to our news partner ABC 10News, authorities shut down northbound and southbound Interstate 805 at Balboa Avenue due to the law enforcement activity.

The San Diego Unified School District confirmed several campuses were placed on lock down. SDUSD spokesperson James Canning said lockdowns are gradually being lifted but schools closest to the Islamic Center will be the last to have their lockdowns lifted.

The Islamic Center is the largest mosque in San Diego County. The center holds five daily prayers.

In California’s upcoming June primary election, you’ll have the opportunity to cast your ballot for any of the candidates for governor, regardless of which party you’re registered with. The top two vote-getters advance to the general election.

Known as a “jungle primary,” this system is different from how most states handle their primary elections.

This year, Democrats raised the alarm that two Republican gubernatorial candidates may move to the general election, locking out Democrats despite outnumbering Republican registered voters almost two to one. That’s because the crowded field of Democratic candidates threatens to split the party’s vote. Until recently, multiple polls have shown the two Republicans, former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, polling at the top of the race.

Driven in part by these concerns, critics of the top-two primary have now filed a ballot initiative that would repeal this system and return California to party-based primaries, potentially as early as 2030.

But how does this top-two arrangement work? Why does California do things this way? And what are the chances of voters choosing between two GOP candidates for governor in November?

How does California’s top-two primary system work?

In a traditional closed primary, such as in presidential races, voters can only choose among candidates from their own party: That is, say, registered Democrats could only vote for Democratic candidates.

But in a top-two primary, all candidates from all parties appear on a single ballot open to any registered voter. The two candidates with the most votes in that primary then move on to the general election, even if they’re from the same party.

Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation, said this is an even bigger concern for third parties in the state.

“One of the unfortunate byproducts” of California’s jungle primary system, Alexander said, is how “it’s really shut out a lot of minor parties from the general election and they run the risk of being kicked off the ballot altogether.”

“Because if you don’t have candidates appearing on ballots at a certain pace, then you can’t remain an official party,” she said.

Does this really mean Californians might not get a Republican vs. Democrat race for governor in November?

That’s correct: Under the top-two primary system, the November contest could be an intraparty fight.

That scenario has worried many California Democrats. With seven top Democrats crowding the field, there’s a risk of fracturing their party’s vote. Meanwhile, if enough Republican voters back both Hilton and Bianco to push them both into the top two, California could be locked into an all-Republican general election for governor.

Steve Hilton, Republican gubernatorial candidate for California, left, and Tom Steyer, Democratic gubernatorial candidate for California, fist-bump prior to a gubernatorial debate at KRON Studios in San Francisco, California, on April 22, 2026. California will hold its primary election on June 2, where the top two finishers advance to the general election in November regardless of party affiliation. (Jason Henry/Nexstar via Bloomberg)In March, state Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks urged politicians in his party to take a hard look at the viability of their campaigns and drop out before the filing deadline.

“California’s leadership on the world stage is significantly harder if a Democrat is not elected as our next Governor,” Hicks wrote in an open letter.

None of the contenders heeded his plea.

However, the likelihood of Republicans shutting Democrats out of the November election has decreased since President Donald Trump endorsed Hilton in April. A clear front-runner could unify Republican voters behind Hilton and open the door for a Democrat to claim the second spot in the runoff.

Plus, the most recent Emerson poll now shows former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in the lead with 19% of likely voters for the first time in the race. Hilton and Democrat Tom Steyer are tied for second with 17%.

Becerra’s surge came after former East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell — who was regarded as a front-runner for the gubernatorial primary — exited the race last month amid sexual assault and misconduct allegations.

Why does California have this top-two system?

Historically, California required a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to pass the state budget instead of a simple majority vote.

In 2009, Democrats needed to court Republican votes to pass the state budget. Then-state Sen. Abel Maldonado, a Republican, agreed to vote yes — but only if the Legislature put a measure on the ballot to create the top-two primary system.

Voters approved that measure, Proposition 14, in 2010, amending the state constitution.

Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed the measure as a way to transform state politics, forcing candidates to appeal to voters across party lines and ultimately boost more moderate politicians.

“He liked to talk about living in a post-partisan political climate,” Alexander said. “He liked the idea of candidates having to appeal to more voters than just voters of their own party, and to face competition.”

The system was also designed to give more influence to California’s no party preference voters, who make up 23% of registered voters in the state, just behind Republicans at 25%.

Which political offices in California are decided using this system?

The top-two primary applies to “voter-nominated” offices: governor and other statewide positions like lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, state controller, insurance commissioner and state board of equalization members.

It also covers state Senate and Assembly seats and U.S. congressional offices.

The jungle primary system does not apply to presidential elections, local and nonpartisan offices such as city council, school boards, judges, district attorneys or the superintendent of public instruction.

Which other states use this system?

Washington state was the first to adopt a top-two primary for congressional and state-level elections in 2004, but not for governor.

Unlike California, Washington allows write-in candidates in the general election — a safety valve for scenarios where one party is locked out.

A handful of other states use variations of the system. Nebraska’s legislature is nonpartisan, so it uses a top-two primary for state legislative races.

Louisiana uses a majority-vote system for statewide executive offices, state legislative seats and local offices. If a candidate receives a majority of the vote in the primary, they win outright. If not, there is a second round of voting with the top two vote-getters in November.

Alaska adopted a top-four primary in 2020 for state executive, state legislative and congressional races. An effort to repeal the state’s top-four primaries was narrowly defeated by voters in 2024 but will be on the ballot again this year.

If I’m a ‘no party preference’ voter, can I even vote in the California primary?

Yes: Any registered voter, including those with no party preference, can vote for any candidate in voter-nominated races like the governor’s contest.

The top-two primary system draws no distinction based on a voter’s party registration.

Are there any efforts to get rid of California’s jungle primary?

Driven in part by concerns that Democrats could be locked out of this year’s governor’s race, a new ballot initiative seeks to repeal California’s top-two primary system.

Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio filed the initiative, called “Undo the Top Two,” with the attorney general on May 8.
He called the jungle primary a “failed experiment.”

“The prospect of having to vote for a candidate who’s not from your party in November has really woken up a lot of voters in the state about the dangers of the top-two primary,” Maviglio said. “The chance that a Democrat would have to choose between Chad Bianco or Steve Hilton is sending a chill up the spine of a lot of Democrats.”

However, even if successful, Maviglio’s initiative won’t impact the 2026 election — since he hopes to place the measure on the 2028 ballot, with any changes taking effect no earlier than the 2030 elections.