The Brief

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a fiery warning to what he called the “billionaire class” at a rally Wednesday in Los Angeles in support of a tax initiative that would target California’s wealthiest residents.

“The billionaire class no longer sees itself as part of American society,” said the Vermont independent, who won the 2020 California Democratic presidential primary by 8 percentage points over former President Joe Biden. “They see themselves as something separate and apart, like the oligarchs of the 18th Century, the kings and the queens and the czars, they believe they have the divine right to rule and are no longer subject to democratic governance.”

The proposed November initiative would tax the 2025 net worth of billionaires residing in California by 5%, allowing them to pay off the tax over five years. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for health care and 10% reserved for K-12 education.

Instead of targeting income, like most taxes, this one aims at individuals’ collected wealth.

“They’re saying there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, we’ve got some bad news for them, starting right here in California,” Sanders told the L.A. crowd.

He said California’s richest people are preparing to spend heavily to defeat the initiative, and voters should be ready for deceptive messaging.

“Their ads will not be saying, ‘We are billionaires, we want it all, please vote down this referendum,’” Sanders said to laughs from the crowd at The Wiltern theater. “What they are saying is, ‘If you stand up to us, we are gonna punish you.’”

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West and St. John’s Community Health in Los Angeles, the sponsors of the proposal, are gathering signatures to place the measure on the ballot in November amid opposition from some other unions.

It’s also a risky proposition for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run and needs the support of the deep pockets in Silicon Valley, to whom he has been close for years. He and the leading Democrats who are running to replace him have come out against the tax as part of a larger opposition push expected to ramp up in the coming weeks. They argue that they support making wealthy people pay more, but this specific measure would drive billionaires out of California.

That pushback will now also include Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, who pledged to introduce a bill this week in Congress that would prohibit any state from levying a tax retroactively on people who no longer live in the state.

Dr. Jackline Lasola, an obstetrician, said at the rally Wednesday that the tax would help maintain staffing in hospitals that could be affected by an estimated $30 billion in annual cuts to federal Medicaid funds, beginning in 2027.

“At a time when this administration is gutting our health care, our safety nets and our public services, we’re here to protect Californians,” Lasola said. “It’s time to tax the billionaires.”

Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, played the band’s best-known song, “Killing In The Name Of,” but replaced the second half of a lyric: “Some of those who burn crosses / are the same that hold office.”

There’s little question that California could use the money. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax reform and budget bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is projected to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade.

California is estimated to lose roughly $30 billion in federal Medicaid funds annually as a result. The state’s Medi-Cal agency estimates 3.4 million people will lose coverage as a result of federal eligibility changes. The bulk of cuts won’t take effect until 2027, but states, including California, are already taking steps to shrink their health insurance programs for low-income and disabled individuals.

Opponents of the billionaire tax argue that its impacts won’t be felt for years, but the state budget will be hit from losing the income tax that the billionaires pay, which accounts for a significant portion of California’s revenue.

The opposition has coalesced around three proposed ballot measures designed to invalidate the proposed billionaire tax. One would forbid retroactive taxes, a second would prohibit any taxes that exclude revenues from their calculation and a third would exempt non-residents and part-time residents from a net-worth tax.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A year ago at this time, the streets of Los Angeles and other American cities were the sites of highly visible, large-scale immigration raids. While those scenes have died down, immigration enforcement remains more quietly active.

Federal data show Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained more people in June, at 43,000, than in any month since January 2025. Locally, Los Angeles Police Department officials say June had the highest tally of potential unlawful conduct by federal immigration officers. The 12 incidents investigated mark the most since the department began reporting the data in March.

German Hurtado, LAPD immigration affairs liaison, said in an interview that he noticed the uptick of reported immigration enforcement incidents, but could not say what caused the increase.

In February, Mayor Karen Bass issued a directive requiring the reporting. Police commissioners approved the most recent report at their meeting Tuesday.

Hurtado said the increase seen in June might be reflective of the department’s efforts to capture more of the potential issues.

“We’re finding better ways to improve how to capture these incidents,” Hurtado said. “It could be a combination of everything, but I did see that it was a large increase.”

He said those efforts include changes in how they label calls related to federal immigration enforcement actions and adjustments to the way department computers store the information.

What’s in June’s report

Here’s how that process worked, according to the department’s report:

The LAPD first identified 45 potential federal immigration enforcement actions by searching internal reporting systems for immigration related search terms. The immigration affairs liaison determined 33 of those incidents were unrelated to immigration enforcement.

At the commission's meeting on Tuesday, Lisa Ridoutt, assistant inspector general, explained these incidents included:

• 26 notices from federal agents conducting surveillance in the area
• 2 reports of protests
• 2 medical related incidents
• 1 report of DHS agents executing a search warrant unrelated to immigration
• 1 federal task force meeting
• 1 call reporting someone believed they were pushed from behind by a federal agent. LAPD reviewed security footage and determined no crime had occurred.

The department then looked deeper into 12 enforcement incidents that qualify for reporting under Bass’ executive directive, which asks the LAPD to report when officers document or receive reports of suspected unlawful conduct by immigration officers. Two of those incidents involved an LAPD response in the field, according to the report. The department also says neither resulted in officers being on the scene for an active enforcement action.

The report states the LAPD does not know the overall number of immigration enforcement actions that happened in June.

The 12 reported incidents are a significant increase from previous months. The department reported just four incidents in May, four in April and none in March.

Hurtado said the number of incidents has increased every month since March, potentially because the department is getting better at documenting them.

“It takes a while to teach 8,700 people exactly what to do, so as we are rolling out different training, the officers are now being more observant of it, documenting it more," Hurtado said.

The increase, he added, could also stem from federal authorities communicating with LAPD more. He said federal immigration authorities have not asked LAPD for support during enforcement actions.

The backstory

For decades, the LAPD has refrained from directly enforcing immigration laws. That’s because policing experts say doing so could deter witnesses or victims from cooperating with law enforcement.

State and local laws have codified that policy in recent years and further prohibited California law enforcement from assisting in federal immigration enforcement.

The mayor issued two executive orders last year with instructions for how city departments interact with federal immigration officers.

Executive directive 17 mandates the monthly immigration reports from the LAPD and instructs officers to activate their body-worn cameras whenever they respond to potential immigration-related incidents.

Ridoutt, of the Office of Inspector General, said that while officers did activate body-worn and in-car video systems, the OIG found some recordings were not properly titled or tagged and that some videos or photos from community members were not uploaded to the department’s evidence database as required by department policy.

The Inspector General’s Office reviews the LAPD’s reports to ensure compliance with the directive. Ridoutt said the office will be releasing a more comprehensive report in October or November.

Calls for increased transparency

At previous meetings, commissioners have asked for more details about what calls for service or incident reports entail.

Hurtado said the executive directive just requires the department to release aggregate numbers.

Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center, said the directive calls for greater transparency than what the LAPD’s monthly reports currently provide.

The June report, for example, notes that LAPD twice dispatched officers in response to a report of ICE activity, but provides no description of the department’s role once officers arrived. Cheer said the public should know whether officers were responding for crowd control, interacting with federal agents or serving some other purpose.

Cheer said the LAPD’s monthly reports should explain what happened during the incidents the department counts.

Sophia Wrench, an attorney with Public Counsel, agrees.

“A central purpose of Executive Directive 17 was to provide increased transparency and build public trust, but LAPD’s reporting month after month falls short,” she said in a statement. “The lack of information in its monthly reports only creates more confusion in the community, building greater fear and mistrust of the police.”

Everyone knows the frustration of bad sleep on a hot night, tossing and turning in the sheets as the hours slip away.

That experience is becoming more common thanks to climate change, according to a new study from the research organization Climate Central. The analysis finds that on average, people around the world lose about 56 hours, or seven full nights of sleep each year to uncomfortably warm temperatures. About 10% of that lost sleep—roughly 5 hours—can be pinned to human-driven climate change.

"Summertime is hot. It's always been," says Kristina Dahl, the lead scientist at Climate Central. "But climate change is making them hotter, and making nights hotter. So it's really amplifying the sleep loss that would happen naturally."

The study looked at temperature records from 1,300 cities around the world. The Climate Central team knew from a study published a few years earlier that the amount of time people sleep is tightly tied to overnight outdoor temperatures. So they could extrapolate the total time people spent sleeping based on the temperatures where they lived. That number represented the real sleep people got in a world that has been heated up by climate change.

Then, the Climate Central researchers used a climate model that presents a hypothetical world: one where human-driven climate change hasn't happened. The researchers could estimate temperatures in all those same locations—and see how much people would have slept in that cooler scenario.

The difference, Dahl says, isn't enormous for each person: it's on the order of 5 hours a year so far. But that number has doubled since the 1970s, and it will continue to rise as climate change marches onward, she says.

That's in part because overnight temperatures have crept upward much faster than daytime ones. The causes are complex, but one factor is the shape of the atmosphere: At night, the layer of air closest to the ground, where people actually live, is short and compact. During the daytime, that layer expands. Heat absorbed during the day gets trapped into that compact band of air during the night, pushing temperatures up.

Sleep is tightly tied to temperature. Sleep laboratory studies consistently show that hotter and more humid conditions degrade sleep quality. People's ability to fall asleep in the first place decreases, and the sleep that does occur gets fragmented and less restorative.

Particularly, says sleep doctor Daniel Rifkin from the sleep consultancy group Ognomy Sleep, the type of sleep that leads to dreams: REM.

"If it's too hot," he says, "your REM sleep is extremely broken, and we lose our dreams."

Sleep lab studies helped scientists understand the best temperature conditions for sleeping indoors. But until recently, it wasn't clear how real-world weather conditions affected people's sleep.

But a few years ago, environmental data scientist Kelton Minor and his colleagues set out to figure out that relationship. They collected sleep data from nearly 50,000 Fitbits around the world, along with detailed overnight temperature data from sleepers' locations.

"The warmer it gets, the less that people sleep," says Minor— especially once nighttime temperatures crept above about 50 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that, Minor and his colleagues found, "every additional increase per degree on that hot side leads to progressively less sleep."

The new Climate Central analysis used Minor's sleep-temperature relationship to estimate climate-induced sleep loss.

Sleep is already a precious and threatened commodity, says Minor. In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared sleep problems like disorders and simple insufficiency to be a public health crisis.

So far, the climate impact adds up to just a few minutes a day during summertime. But because the relationship between sleep loss and health is so strong, the cumulative impacts of that loss on public health could be significant, says sleep doctor Rifkin. The impacts also fall hard on people who don't have access to cooling technologies such as air conditioning, or who can't afford to run them.

"Heat really finds the vulnerable people first," he says. "It affects those the most that need the help the most."

He recommends doing whatever possible to cool your sleep space. If nothing else is possible, sticking your feet outside the sheet or blanket can help your body shed heat and cool down enough to sink into sleep.

Beyond those recommendations, Dahl says one of the best sleep aids isn't a pill or a meditation app, but cutting back on burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Artist Betye Saar, whose work reflects Black identity, culture and spirituality, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99.

Saar’s death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week.

A central figure of the 1960s Black Art Movement, Saar pioneered assemblage boxes, or sculptures made of found objects, and reclaimed Jim Crow-era memorabilia as powerful totems of Black liberation.

“Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic and historical context in which it exists,” according to Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her.

Saar began her career in design and shifted to art at age 35. She continued to make art into her 90s. She grew up in Pasadena and was part of a community of Black artists in nearby Altadena; she often cited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as an early source of inspiration.

Saar’s practice incorporated painting, printmaking, sculpture and found objects including dolls, washboards and other antiques. Boats, clocks, cages and altars recur in her practice, as well as symbols of the occult and cosmology. She often referenced her astrological sign of Leo in the form of lions, punctuating many works.

“Her appropriation of Black collectibles, heirlooms and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion,” the gallery said. “Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach.”

Made in 1969, “Black Girl’s Window,” was groundbreaking. Still, it wasn’t widely celebrated until decades later, and it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019.

“There weren’t that many galleries in Los Angeles at the time and there certainly weren’t any for Black artists,” she once said in an interview.

“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” created in 1972, is one of her most important works. It features memorabilia she collected that denigrated Black people, included a “mammy,” or 19th century minstrel character who smiled while serving white slave owners.

In Saar’s hands though, the figure is reclaimed: She smiles, but holds a rifle and has a hand grenade.

It came in response to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Saar said King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior.”

“I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these — thinking about how white people saw Black people, and how that influenced the ways in which Black people saw each other,” Saar said. “What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure.”

After more than 130 years, Quaker Oats announced it would retire its Aunt Jemima brand in 2020, acknowledging the logo and its origins were “based on a racial stereotype.”

Saar taught and mentored generations of Black artists, including painter Kerry James Marshall.

Though Saar’s work was exhibited in a 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the decades that followed large institutions have exhibited her work only sporadically. In 2019 though, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA mounted concurrent solo shows.

In spring 2026, Saar was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“She had boundless energy for making art. I think she had a lot to say and was tired of the art world being dominated by white males,” said Angela Robinson Witherspoon, who produced and directed a documentary in 2023 on Saar’s life. “Betye Saar: Ready to Be A Warrior” features interviews with John Legend, Tina Knowles and other prominent voices.

“She was raising her three young daughters and she wanted to be part of the Civil Rights Movement,” Robinson Witherspoon said.

“Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” which focuses on costume design, is currently on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, and there are 26 of an eventual 100 dolls on view at The New York Historical in Manhattan.

Associated Press writer Anna Furman contributed reporting from Los Angeles.