The Brief

City librarians in Huntington Beach began moving books about the human body and puberty out of the children's section at Huntington Beach Central Library on Wednesday.

Librarians made the changes in an effort to comply with a city council resolution to restrict access to books with sexual content to people 18 and older.

The controversial measure, sponsored by now-Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, was passed on a 4-3 vote in October with support from her fellow conservative council members.

Librarians began reviewing books dedicated to the human body, health and puberty Wednesday morning. They told LAist they had been instructed to move any books out of the children's section showing body parts that typically would be covered by a bathing suit. (After this story was first published, a Huntington Beach librarian told LAist the criteria has since been updated: Librarians are now being told to look for “material with explicit sexual content and sexual references,” they said in an email.) 

Van Der Mark told LAist it sounded like the process was consistent with what she expected from the resolution. She added that she was unaware the book review was starting until she was contacted by LAist.

Screening books for 'sexual content'

In the bright, ample children's section, librarians began their review by flipping through books on shelves dedicated to the human body, health and puberty.

The librarians debated whether to move certain books, like one, a science book, with an illustration of a nude male body showing the muscular system, and another with a page full of photos, one of which showed the top half of a female toddler in a bathtub. The former stayed on the shelf; the latter got moved.

They also decided to remove a book that had information about miscarriages, though it had no accompanying photos.

The first round of books pulled out of the children's section of the Huntington Beach Central Library and moved to the adult section.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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After about half an hour, they had stacked 41 books on the cart to be moved to the library's adult section, or about one in five books they reviewed.

Some titles moved out of the children's library include:

• "Bunk 9's Guide to Growing up"
• "Human Reproduction and Development"
• "It's Perfectly Normal"
• "On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow!"
• "Once Upon a Potty" 
• "Own Your Period"
• "Puberty is Gross but Also Really Awesome"
• "Sex Is a Funny Word"
• "The Book of Blood"
• "The Care and Keeping of You"
• "The Girl's Body Book" 

So far, only the Huntington Beach Central Library, the city’s main branch, has begun reviewing books to comply with the city’s resolution. Library manager Jessica Framson said other branches would begin the work in the coming weeks.

What is 'sexual content?'

Implementing the city council's mandate to restrict children's access to library books with sexual content was delayed in part because until recently, librarians were unclear what exactly was meant by "sexual content."

According to internal emails reviewed by LAist, the city's director of community and library services, Ashley Wysocki, told librarians earlier this year to follow the Wikipedia definition of sexual content. The Wikipedia page describes sexual content as including “explicit, implicit sexual behavior such as flirting, or include sexual language and euphemisms.”

More recently, librarians said they were told to go by the bathing suit rule. They told LAist that the work of reviewing books for sexual content is likely to get much harder when they start on the fiction section of the children's library, where the classification system and titles aren't so obvious. The Huntington Beach children's library contains 40,000-45,000 unique titles, librarians said..

Van Der Mark, the mayor, said she was pleased the process of reviewing books had started. She said her first job was as a library page, "and we didn't have books with erections, we didn't have books there that showed the vagina in detail, we didn't have books that described how to give yourself an orgasm.

The children's section of the Huntington Beach Central Library.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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"What we're trying to do is take our library back to the days where our kids were able to go to the children's section and run around and open books and look at the pictures and read and have it be safe the way it used to be," she said.

Patti Pappas, a supporter of the new review process, told LAist in a phone interview that she didn't agree with some of the books that librarians had pulled. "It sounds like they need some guidance if they're pulling 'The Potty Book,'" she said. "They're not looking for pornographic content."

Charlotte Gonzalez, who was at the children's library with her 13-year-old daughter as the book review was underway, called the new children's book policy "heartbreaking."

"The library's for everybody so we should be able to choose what we want to have and [the books] need to be available," she said. Gonzalez said she considered the children's library a safe space for kids to learn. "It has better information than what they can get on the internet," she said.

Review board and new library card rules

Librarians are also set to launch new rules for children's library cards, which will give parents more control over which books their kids can check out on their own.

Starting March 1, all of the approximately 8,000 youth library card holders (for those under 18) will find their cards expired. To renew them, they'll have to go to the library with a parent, who can then decide whether to give them access to check out all books, or just books in the kids' section.

The city council is also working on setting up a parent/guardian review board to evaluate potential new material for the children's library and, according to Van Der Mark, to be the final arbiter of which books should be moved to the adult section when librarians are unable to decide.

Each council member can appoint up to three members to the review board. Van Der Mark said she hoped recruiting for the board would start within a few weeks.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna confirmed Monday that ICE will play a role in World Cup security, but said he's been told federal agents won't conduct immigration enforcement.

He made the comments at a news conference on law enforcement's plans for the tournament, and said he'd been speaking directly with the head of Homeland Security in the Los Angeles area.

"There will be federal agents," Luna said. " Because it's gonna take all of us to make sure that all the venues, the scoped and unscoped events, are secure."

SoFi Stadium is set to host eight tournament matches, including the U.S. team opener against Paraguay on June 12. Los Angeles will also host a historic match three days later when Iran is set to take the field in Inglewood, making the U.S. the first host nation in World Cup history to be at war with a participating country.

Luna said the federal government had said that civil immigration enforcement would not occur at the tournament. But he made no guarantees.

" They told us that specifically would not be occurring at any of the games. Any of that's subject to change," he said. "But I have trust that they're giving me the appropriate information because if that starts occurring, we're gonna have a whole new host of problems."

In a statement to LAist, Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis wrote that Department of Homeland Security is working with federal, state, local and international partners.

“The safety and security of the American people and the millions of visitors attending these events remain our highest priority," Bis wrote in an email. "DHS will continue leveraging every available authority, technology, and partnership to protect the Homeland while ensuring the World Cup remains safe, secure, and successful for everyone involved.”

Luna is the latest official to confirm that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will play a role in the tournament. Kathryn Schloessman, who leads L.A.'s World Cup host committee, told reporters last month that ICE would be at the World Cup, and that its presence was typical at these types of major events.

ICE has two main branches: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which detains and deports people, and Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts international criminal investigations.

Todd Lyons, the former head of ICE, said at a congressional hearing earlier this year that it would be ICE’s investigatory branch, not its enforcement division, playing a key role in World Cup security.

Still, some in L.A. aren't satisfied. The World Cup is coming to Los Angeles at exactly the year mark since immigration agents ramped up arrests in the region. Masked agents in neighborhoods across the county sparked protests and widespread fear, and ICE arrests in the L.A. area last year tripled.

SoFi Stadium workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 have threatened to strike over ICE's role in the tournament. They'll vote on whether or not to authorize a strike later this week.

California air regulators on Friday approved a contentious overhaul of the state’s carbon market, creating a program that could steer billions of dollars in free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters over the objections of environmental groups, key lawmakers and three of the board’s own members.

Ten members of the California Air Resources Board voted to adopt the changes to its cap-and-invest program after two days of lengthy hearings, including a full day dedicated to hundreds of public comments.

The overhaul followed intensive lobbying by the oil industry as well as pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to help keep refineries operating in the state amid rising gas prices.

The approval sets up a potential budget fight in Sacramento. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that quarterly auction revenue for state climate programs will drop from roughly $4 billion a year to about $2 billion under the new overhaul.

Such a shortfall would effectively zero out programs lawmakers spent last year fighting to fund: affordable housing, public transit, drinking water in low-income communities and pollution monitoring in California’s most polluted neighborhoods.

The governor’s office praised the measure as a compromise that balanced economic uncertainty with the state’s climate goals. Refinery closures and the Iran-Israel war have driven average California gas prices above $6 a gallon.

Newsom, in a statement, used the moment to draw a contrast with President Donald Trump.

“While Trump sows ongoing chaos and uncertainty, California is staying focused by protecting our economy, safeguarding public health, and doubling down on the clean energy future all Californians deserve,” he said.

Environmentalists warned the changes to the program amount to a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that weakens California’s only program setting a firm cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California senior director for the Environmental Defense Fund, called the decision “deeply misguided” for prioritizing polluters over communities.

“Newsom’s air regulators are handing billions to oil executives at the expense of our climate, health, and affordability for working families in a rushed process that has shortchanged meaningful public participation,” said Bahram Fazeli, policy director at Communities for a Better Environment.

How the program works — and what changes

California’s 13-year-old carbon market forces major polluters to buy permits while the state lowers the overall cap each year. Friday’s vote will reduce those permits – and creates a new subsidy program carved out of the market.

The program, which may still see changes, could make available a new pool of free pollution permits available to industry valued at as much as $4 billion. Companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency may qualify for the permits in exchange for investments in clean energy.

The pool will be capped at 118.3 million permits — the same number the air board has said must come off the market for California to hit its 2030 climate target. Environmentalists say the proposal risks wiping out those reductions.

Half are reserved for the fossil fuel sector. A recent Berkeley analysis, by the chair of an independent committee that oversees the carbon market, found refineries could end up with more free permits than they need to cover their emissions.

The air board has defended the design. Officials say the credits will go only to companies undertaking decarbonization projects, will be limited and temporary and can be clawed back if companies misuse them. The plan, they say, is meant to keep California refineries operating at a time of mounting closures and global market pressure. According to air regulators, the amended program will spur clean-energy investment as Trump cuts federal support.

Here's what you should know about the vote totals currently released:

Keep in mind that June 9 will be the final day for votes postmarked by June 2 to arrive at county elections offices, so the bottom line on the vote totals won't be known until then.

In L.A. County, the combined tallied votes as of Sunday add up to about 10% of registered voters.

In Orange County, the current tallies represent about 22% of registered voters.

How vote counts will be released

I thought it was an election NIGHT?

That hasn't been true in quite a while. It takes a while to get results because after the initial tallies on election night, there are still many, many votes to count and more mail-in ballots are usually arriving.

Here’s what we know so far:

L.A. County turnout

Los Angeles County has more than 5.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:

• 580,720 ballots have been processed
• 95% voted by mail
• 5% voted in person

What's next:

• We'll know more on election night and the following days how many ballot remain to be counted.
• Has your ballot been tallied yet? You can track the status of your ballot here.

Orange County turnout

Orange County has more than 1.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:

• 401,865 ballots have been processed
• 95% voted by mail
• 5% voted in person

What's next:

• We'll know more on election night and the following days how many ballot remain to be counted.
• Has your ballot been tallied yet? You can track the status of your ballot here.

Expected total turnout

Political Data Inc. is tracking ballot returns across California and in some high-profile races.

As of midday Monday, turnout statewide was at 16%. While Democrats outnumber Republicans statewide by almost double, Republicans have returned more ballots pre-election (21% of their voters compared to 16% for Democrats).

See the latest totals ▶

Why election day has turned into ballot-counting month

Because of the increasing use of vote-by-mail ballots, the vote count has gotten longer, according to the California Voter Foundation. In an analysis, the organization found:

• In November 2004, more than 80% of votes were counted within two days of Election Day, with 32.6% voting by mail. 
• In June 2022, about 50% of ballots were counted within two days of Election Day, with more than 90% of people voting by mail. 
• In November 2024, 66% of votes were counted within the first two days of Election Day, with 81% of the vote by mail.

A closer look at ballot counting times in California where an increasing number of vote-by-mail ballots has slowed ballot counts.

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Courtesy California Voter Foundation

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Election officials must physically open mail-in ballots and verify signatures.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, recently wrote about the ripple effect of turning in mail-in ballots by hand or in drop boxes on election day. She wrote for our partner newsroom CalMatters:

"We turn in ballots in envelopes on Election Day that take time and care to process and cannot be processed until after Election Day. Processing these ballots — which account for as much as a quarter of all ballots cast — creates a bottleneck I like to call 'the pig in the python effect'. It prevents counties from doing other tasks they need to do to certify the results."

The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates.

But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work.

An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely.

Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers.

The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads — those under the age of 29 — rose 20% after the pandemic, while unemployment among older college grads fell slightly.

The study compares unemployment rates pre-pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, with unemployment rates after the pandemic, from 2022 to 2024.

Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees."

Remote work leads to less feedback on the job

The research began with a look at how much feedback software engineers at a Fortune 500 tech company were getting, says Emma Harrington, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia and one of the authors of the report.

"What we saw was this pretty striking pattern that software engineers got about 20% more feedback if they were sitting near their colleagues than if they were distant from them," she says, adding that that was true even before the pandemic.

But after the pandemic, feedback plummeted.

"And that really hit young workers much harder," says Harrington. "It was these people who had the most to learn that really saw this deficit in feedback."

The researchers then looked deeper into who was getting hired at the tech firm. Turns out, as the company embraced remote work, they switched away from hiring younger people.

"So they used to hire a bunch of new grads for their software engineering jobs," Harrington says. "Then they shifted really towards hiring much older people, like a decade older on average."

Later, the company pivoted again, implementing what Harrington calls a "pretty aggressive" return-to-office policy. At that point, the company resumed hiring new graduates.

"So [there was] some sense that these problems with mentorship were translating into whom this firm was deciding to hire," she says.

A look at the broader economy

The researchers then wanted to see if what was happening at that single tech company was playing out in the broader economy.

Using a widely-used index that measures how feasible it is to do a job from home, the team divided all occupations into two categories: "remotable," which included software engineering, and "non-remotable," which included mechanical engineering.

They found the gap in unemployment between recent graduates and older workers was significantly higher in "remotable" jobs than in jobs that have to be done in person.

The unemployment rate for younger grads in "remotable" jobs jumped by almost a full percentage point after the pandemic, while the unemployment rate among older grads fell marginally.

They concluded that remote work explained nearly two-thirds of the rise in unemployment among young graduates during this period.

"This relative increase in young people's unemployment coincided with the pandemic and has remained elevated since then, as have rates of remote work," the researchers write.

AI isn't disrupting so many jobs for recent college grads — yet

To see how the rise of AI chatbots may have contributed to rising unemployment among the younger set, the researchers used another index that divides occupations into those more exposed to AI, such as engineering and accounting, and those less exposed, such as teaching and nursing.

They found exposure to AI didn't explain the divergence in unemployment rates in the 2022-24 time period. Remote workflows were much more of a driving force, Harrington says, while emphasizing that this could change.

"It's always hard to make guesses about what's going to happen with generative AI," she says. "It's certainly possible that this story could really change over the next few years."

Researchers at the London School of Economics have reached a similar conclusion — that remote work is having a clearer impact on early-career hiring than AI — in a working paper examining new hires in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Regardless of the cause, the New York Fed report warns that a high unemployment rate among young college grads is concerning.

"Early-career experiences can have lasting consequences," the researchers write. "Research finds that individuals who began looking for jobs in slacker labor markets tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression relative to comparable peers who began their job search in better market conditions."

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