The Brief

At a gas station on Alondra Boulevard, a quiet reminder of the local protest that became a pivotal national moment can be found in the hot food aisle.

On the roller, there are no hot dogs broiling. The heated box is emptied of chicken sandwiches, empanadas, and a single urn has fresh coffee, no decaf.

Ricky, the store manager, said he knew not to prepare anything Monday morning because none of his regulars — gardeners, construction workers and laborers, some without papers — would show.

“We usually get big trucks and crews who all buy food, … nothing today,” he said, standing outside the store.

Three days after violent clashes tore across the boulevard in Paramount — a small, predominantly Latino city that borders Long Beach — the city became ground zero for a national political fight that’s played out in screaming headlines, chaotic social media videos, and dire warnings from Republicans and Democrats alike.

As local officials lobby and state officials sue to try to remove troops President Donald Trump ordered in, residents are dealing with the aftermath with no indication of when they’ll leave.

“I’m not happy that they came to town,” Paramount Mayor Peggy Lemons said. “I don’t think it was necessary.”

In recent days, protesters had risen up against sudden, sweeping immigration raids in L.A. County, but the resistance escalated Saturday when hundreds of demonstrators assembled along Alondra Boulevard. Rumors had spread that agents intended to raid a nearby Home Depot.

Jose “Bear” Gallegos, a former high school Spanish and literature teacher, said he caught wind of the protest through social media from his former students.

“They f—ed around and found out,” Gallegos said of the authorities. “They woke up the young people, and we can’t control the young people. It just started. (And) they picked the wrong place.”

Protests began that morning outside Paramount Business Center, an office park at the 6400 block of Alondra Boulevard, which houses a Department of Homeland Security office that served as a staging point for federal forces. Protesters kicked and threw objects at agents, while officers used flashbang grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Federal authorities reported 29 arrests on Saturday and at least three fires in the Paramount-Compton area that included a car burned in the middle of an intersection across the L.A. River from the business park.

Confrontations unfolded up and down the boulevard. They continued west into Compton and splintered off into nearby streets, including the ExtraMile gas station at Hunsaker Avenue and Alondra Boulevard.

Protesters hide behind a dumpster near a set fire as LA County Sheriff deputies shoot projectiles to keep demonstrators from advancing after ICE raids at a nearby Home Depot and the Garment District brought out resistance from Los Angeles residents on June 7, 2025 in Compton, California.

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Ricky, who did not provide a last name, said the gas station took a hit in sales, as the police cordoned off most of the building from public access until 4 a.m. Sunday.

They normally sell 4,000 gallons of gasoline a day, but sold about 700 gallons.

“It was sad,” Ricky said of the protests over the weekend. “The whole situation just made me sad. We had to lock our doors no matter who the customer was.”

As tensions escalated and confrontations played out between the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and demonstrators along several intersections, President Trump ordered thousands of National Guard members to Los Angeles to protect federal officers conducting immigration operations.

Trump on Monday ordered an additional 2,000 troops and also tapped 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton, which he said were needed to help quell the unrest that included burned-out cars, fireworks and reports of looting in limited portions of downtown Los Angeles.

The president said in a social media post he intends to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.”

Trump’s order is expected to last 60 days, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday.

The decision overrode objections from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who have both condemned the order as muscle-flexing that will only provoke more violence.

“This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic,” Newsom said in a statement.

It’s a battle of political giants, from Washington to Sacramento, that dwarfs the political muster of Paramount: a city with a size of 5 square miles, a population of roughly 51,000 and an annual budget of $45 million.

Mayor Lemons said Monday the decision to send troops was a “huge waste of resources” and undermines a situation she said “was already under control.”

The chaos “was all done and over with before the National Guard even came to town,” she said. “So I really don’t know why they’re here.”

National Guard troops stands at the entrance of a business park, which they use as a staging area in Paramount on Monday, June 9, 2025.

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While she’s certain that residents are infuriated by their presence, Lemons said there is nothing the city can do to remove them.

“It is the federal government,” she said. “It’s not like we have the authority to say, ‘please leave.’ I mean, the mayor of L.A. has not been able to do that, nor has the governor. I doubt the lowly city of Paramount has any authority to do that.”

According to Paramount City Manager John Moreno, camouflaged National Guard troops arrived in the city by early Sunday morning.

For now, the building inside the office park will remain a staging area for them and federal agents. Guardsmen stood sentry inside the fenceline, flanked by armored vehicles and checking with those who drove through the gate. Foot patrols walk the perimeter, while the majority of Humvees and other vehicles remain parked at the front.

And this has already begun to affect business, said Jose Torres, who runs a print shop inside the office park. Apart from losing customers Saturday, he said they’re experiencing delays in customers picking up their orders.

“A lot of our clientele are Latinos,” Torres said. “A lot of them are immigrants… that are even afraid or concerned to come through to pick up their orders. So obviously, I’m not thrilled about that, and so we’re trying to kind of figure that out. This is not something we’ve ever been through.”

For years, Torres said, the 30 or so businesses inside the park coexisted with the nearby Department of Homeland Security office without issue. Federal agents have operated out of the building since 2007, according to the city manager.

“They go about their business, we go about our business every day,” Torres said. “No big deal. But now that it’s been made public … I don’t know how it’s gonna affect us.”

Torres acknowledges he’s conflicted in what to make of the protests. He and his wife are first-generation Americans. They’re uneasy about the National Guard’s presence, but also were quick to accept them as a deterrent against vandals and looters who they felt took advantage of the mayhem over the weekend.

“We do feel grateful that, you know, their presence is here, because nothing will come through the front gates,” Torres said.

Federal activity has since picked up across the region in South L.A., including Huntington Park and in Long Beach at Fourth Street and Elm Avenue on Saturday morning, according to local officials.

It’s unclear how long agents were in Long Beach or why. The Long Beach Police Department deferred questions about that operation to ICE, which did not immediately respond to inquiries.

Lemons said she has not heard of any Paramount resident being detained by federal agents. She assured residents that the city will not assist in immigration operations.

When asked, Lemons said the weekend has brought the worst kind of attention to Paramount.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A week after 45-year-old Raz Chowdhury was moved off the streets into interim housing through an Inside Safe operation, he was found dead in his hotel room.

Chowdhury had spent years living on the streets of Koreatown, moving between encampments along Sixth Street and Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

Sherin Varghese first met him three or four years ago. Chowdhury would reach out to Varghese, a volunteer with Ktown for All, an advocacy group that provides direct aid for people experiencing homelessness in Koreatown. He would ask her for tents, tarps, clothes and other supplies. More often than not, she said, they weren’t for him.

“He would always go above and beyond to take care of the people around him,” Varghese said at a vigil for Chowdhury on Saturday, Aug. 29.

Once, after Chowdhury lost his phone during a sanitation sweep, he searched for Varghese online and found her work number. He called to ask if she could bring tents and tarps for him and other people whose belongings were lost in the sweep.

“He was resourceful, he was reliable, and he was so thoughtful about the way that he talked about how all of this affected him and affected his friends,” Varghese said.

On June 25, Chowdhury was among 31 people moved into housing during an Inside Safe operation at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office.

A week later he was dead.

What happened after Inside Safe

According to Ktown for All, Chowdhury died at the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake, which is used for interim housing.

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said the case is still under investigation and Chowdhury died at a hotel in the 1200 block of West 7th Street on July 2. His cause of death is listed as deferred and the case is under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which oversees the Mayfair, would not say if Chowdhury was a resident when he died. An agency spokesperson said they cannot confirm an individual’s enrollment in a LAHSA-contracted program without a written release from next of kin.

LAHSA’s latest Inside Safe report shows that 6,406 people had entered interim housing through the program as of July 31. About 1,750 people remained in interim housing, including 289 at the Mayfair. Meanwhile, 1,802 people, or more than one in four who entered the program, had returned to homelessness. Another 126 people, or about 2%, were listed as deceased.

Bass’ office said it does not disclose the locations where an individual is placed following an Inside Safe operation.

Once someone is connected to interim housing, ongoing services and case management are handled by a LAHSA-contracted service provider, mayor spokesperson Jieun Kim said.

Remembering Chowdhury

The people who knew Chowdhury gathered last week to remember him at the site of the encampment where he had lived at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

A little more than two dozen people attended the memorial, where they placed flowers at the base of a small tribute to him.

Planters now line the sidewalk where the tents once were. Several people cried as they shared memories of Chowdhury, who they said spent years looking out for others living on the streets of Koreatown.

Cynthia Zhang, who has volunteered with Ktown for All for about four to five years, remembers visiting an encampment where Chowdhury was staying after the Los Angeles fires. Newly displaced people there told her they felt safer with that community than they did at shelters.

“I think Raz was really instrumental in helping create that kind of space,” Zhang said at the vigil.

The last time Zhang saw Chowdhury, he had moved again and did not have a lot of his stuff. But he had a new puppy named T-Rex and seemed to be in good spirits.

“He had a really lovely smile,” Zhang said. “I just remember him skateboarding around … all these little things, maybe because I didn’t see him every day, it really does feel like I’ll be walking around and I’ll see him in one of our old spots.”

David Strugar, another longtime Ktown for All volunteer, said Chowdhury was often the person volunteers went to when they wanted to know how people in the area were doing.

“I would always point him out and say, ‘That’s the mayor of this area,’ because wherever he was, he was just the center of it, and he took care of people,” Strugar said.

Chowdhury would tell volunteers who needed what and help distribute supplies, Strugar said.

A few weeks before he died, Varghese said, she and Chowdhury were looking for places where he could stay outside a 41.18 zone, where the city restricts sitting, lying, sleeping and storing personal property in certain public rights-of-way under specified circumstances.

Then Inside Safe moved him indoors.

“I hoped that he’d be one of its success stories, but a week later, he was gone,” Varghese said. “The program is called Inside Safe, but for Raz and 125 others, it wasn’t that. And it was never going to be Inside Safe, and it was never going to be easy to be inside alone for someone who had so much to give and always surrounded himself with people to take care of.”

The last time Strugar saw Chowdhury, he had his dog T-Rex with him. Ktown for All volunteers don’t know where T-Rex is now.

Chowdhury believed he had the right to community and companionship, Strugar said.

“And there are so many people who have so much and won’t give anything,” Strugar said. “And Raz kept having everything taken away from him, and he still ended up being the person to give.”

He added, “I just keep expecting to walk around the corner and see him, and I’m angry that I won’t.”

Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.

But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.

The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.

The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.

“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.

A 99 Ranch market opened in 2023 in Eastvale.

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Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.

“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”

Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.

99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.

Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.

“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”

The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.

He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.

“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.

That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.

Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.

That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.

The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).

The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.

"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"

Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.

These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.

Peking duck from That Peking Duck Guy served with Chinese sweet sauce, chopped spring onions and cucumber slices.

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Duck is the latest obsession

Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.

He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.

It's the oven

Pham and one of his special outdoor ovens he uses to roast duck.

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He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.

"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.

He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.

He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"

Three Pipa ducks inside the oven.

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Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.

"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."

Two Pipa ducks fresh out of the oven.

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Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.

The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.

"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."

For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."

The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.

Getting past the "wall"

People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.

Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.

In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.

"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.

"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.

"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.

State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.

More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.

They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."

Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."

In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.

The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.

To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.

Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.

Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"

They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.

Molecular convergence

There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.

But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.

The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.

"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.

Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.

And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."

Setting sights on new drug-development targets

It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.

"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."

Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.

And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.

Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.

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