The Brief

Amid a flurry of political mail sent ahead of the upcoming election, Megan Shuham of Los Feliz received one piece in particular that gave her pause.

It featured a photo of Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman — a progressive, MIT-educated urban planner — next to one of L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón, known for his fight against mass incarceration by seeking lighter penalties for people convicted of crimes.

A caption on the mailer reads: “Nithya Raman and George Gascón broke their promise to keep us safe.”

“It did surprise me,” Shuham told LAist. “The mailer was saying if you don’t like what Gascón’s doing, you’re really not going to like Nithya either."

“I don’t think the two are associated,” said Shuham, a stay-at-home parent who lives in City Council District 4, which is represented by Raman. “It felt like a reach.”

The mailer comes from an independent expenditure committee funded by a powerful real estate mogul and the labor union that represents Los Angeles police officers. Together with the firefighters union, they are spending more than $1 million in an effort to defeat Raman, whose district runs from Silver Lake west to Reseda, and includes all or parts of the Hollywood Hills, Studio City, and Sherman Oaks.

These forces want voters to see Raman the same as the embattled Gascón, who faces 11 challengers looking to unseat him, and beat back a growing progressive trend in L.A. politics.

Raman, however, has indicated her district is one of the safest in the city.

"All of the negative ads funded by outside spending say that crime and homelessness are spiking in our district. But it's not true ..." she said in a statement to LAist.

Citing the Police Department's own data, she noted that violent and property crime had fallen in the last two years, and "we've continued to steadily reduce street homelessness as we’ve brought hundreds of people indoors," she continued.

"So I don't think [the ads] are representing our district or their motivations honestly."

Major contributions from a real estate mogul, police union

Real estate company Douglas Emmett Management, owned by Dan Emmett, contributed $400,000 to the independent committee opposing Raman, according to campaign finance reports. The Los Angeles Police Protective League contributed $164,000.

The company refused to state its reason for the contribution.

“While we are committed to transparency, we do not discuss the specific reasons for our contributions,” Douglas Emmett said in a statement.

Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee, was a vocal opponent of Dan Emmett’s ongoing attempts to evict tenants from more than 700 units at his Barrington Plaza high-rise in Westwood — something he said was necessary to install fire systems.

An outspoken supporter of tenants’ rights, Raman sided with residents who accused Emmett of staging the mass evictions so he could raise rents in the rent-controlled building. The residents argued that the sprinklers could have been installed without evicting anyone.

The ad makes no mention of Emmett’s dispute with Raman. Instead, it focuses on her opposition to a city ordinance that banned homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools, parks and daycare centers.

At a recent candidates’ debate, Raman said the law — known as 41.18 — had done nothing to solve homelessness.

“It has pushed people around the neighborhood without actually getting people off the street,” she said. “The focus of my work has been getting tents off of our streets.”

Raman faces two challengers in the March primary. Ethan Weaver is a deputy city attorney. Lev Baronian is a software engineer.

Weaver assailed Raman’s position on 41.18. “The purpose of [the law] is about protecting our children. It's not about solving homelessness,” he said.

Baronian said he “wholeheartedly” supports the ordinance. “In fact," he added, "I think we should look at more places where we need to prohibit tents."

Independent expenditures dominate

So far, Raman has collected more money in individual campaign donations — about $368,000 — than her opponents. Weaver has raised about $252,000; Baronian about $32,000.

But it is the independent expenditures that are dominating this race.

The independent expenditure committee opposing Raman and two others supporting Weaver have raised more than $1 million to defeat the incumbent.

The firefighters’ union is playing a major role. It has spent more than $300,000 in support of Weaver, with some of its ads blaming Raman for a 10% increase in homelessness during her term. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and Kilroy Realty also have made significant contributions to eject Raman.

Independent expenditure committees supporting Raman, whose donors include the hotel and restaurant workers union Unite Here Local 11 and Smart Justice, have attracted more than $200,000.

The race is shaping up to be a barometer on the city’s more progressive tilt in recent years, said Fernando Guerra, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

“Raman was the face of that early momentum, as well as George Gascón, and now both are under severe attack,” Guerra said.

Follow the money

Differences on key political issues

Raman and her two opponents differ substantially on several additional key issues.

At the debate, held last month at the Autry Museum, Raman said she opposed a hefty pay raise last year for L.A. police officers because of the burden it placed on the rest of the city budget.

“Now we’re in a $250-million deficit, which is only going to increase and impact all of the other services that matter for quality of life,” she said.

Weaver said he would have supported the raise, regardless of its affect on the budget.

“Morale is low because there is no leadership for LAPD in City Hall, and I’m running to provide that leadership,” he said.

Baronian said the raise mostly kept up with the cost of living and he “definitely would have voted in favor.”

Government reform is another point of demarcation among the candidates. Raman has said she strongly supports expanding the size of the 15-member City Council to make it more representative of L.A. residents.

Weaver and Baronian oppose expansion. Weaver said he would not support it “unless we do real structural reform on how power works.” (Read more about the candidates’ policy positions at the LAist Voter Game Plan.)

The ad campaigns against Raman play on the fears and frustrations of voters, some of whom say they have buyer’s remorse after supporting Raman in 2020.

“I actually voted for her and unfortunately I regret it,” said Elizabeth Lovins, a renter who sits on the board of directors of the Los Feliz Improvement Association.

“I’ve seen the quality of life degrade over the past five years,” she added, citing among other things RVs in front of homes “dumping waste.”

Jade Luu, a landscape architect from Silver Lake said she voted for Raman four years ago, but won’t be supporting her again.

“The increase in crime has been a major issue in my neighborhood,” Luu said. “Catalytic converters stolen, copper pipes cut, defecation, crazy people screaming obscenities, vandalism.”

Aida Ashouri, of the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council, said she believes L.A. is ”broken,” but she is unwilling to point to Raman as the problem.

“If we blame one person, we ignore all of the other structural issues that predated that person,” Ashouri said.

Amy Gustincic of Los Feliz agreed.

“It's very easy for someone running for office to say, ‘Yes, I’ll do that, I’ll fix that, I’ll make that better,’ and the incumbent has to talk about the realities of it,” she said.

One of Raman’s challenges is that the boundaries of her district changed dramatically during the 2021 redistricting process. Nearly 40% of the district now includes voters who have never seen her name on a ballot.

If no candidate garners a majority of the votes in the March 5 primary election, the two top finishers will face off in November.

Maloy Moore and Brian Frank contributed to this report.

Updated November 14, 2026 at 13:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON— Friday's nationwide ground stop started when a contractor updated old Federal Aviation Administration telecommunication lines, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.

Tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S. are still stranded Saturday after the rare ground stop. Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator who joined Duffy at Saturday's media briefing, said schedule problems should be resolved by Sunday evening.

Nearly 25,000 flights were delayed, and over 9,000 were cancelled on Friday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. The disruption seeped into Saturday morning with more than 4,000 cancellations recorded, which is 18% of flights departing the U.S., according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

L3Harris, a long time contractor for the FAA, was doing routine maintenance in at least one remote location changing copper wire to fiber optics, Duffy said. "When I tell you that we're using old equipment, we're using old equipment," he said.

He said the FAA is still investigating the exact error that started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, and if L3Harris was at all responsible.

"It's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?"

L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

These updates have been happening in American institutions for decades, Duffy said.

"Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital," Duffy said. "Just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made, but this is not complicated."

Bedford said there was no evidence of anything nefarious happening or any AI-related issues.

Since his time in office, Duffy said he's been asking Congress for money to make more upgrades. In July 2025, Congress approved $12.5 billion to modernize the nation's aging air traffic control system.

With that money, 70% of copper communications have been replaced to high-speed fiber, Bedford said. Duffy called the innovations and the need for more a "bipartisan moment."

"This is the moment, if we don't start to switch out our systems, when, how long are we going to wait, America, and Congress?" Duffy asked.

Thousands of passengers miss flights

Passengers wait at boarding gates at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC on November 13, 2026.

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Zina Desmazes

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AFP via Getty Images

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For about four hours on Friday, thousands of flights at U.S. airports were grounded in one of the biggest disruptions of the nation's air travel system since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The aviation system is back online and slowly returning to normal Saturday morning, but delays and cancellations will continue, Duffy said. Bedford said all passengers will be put on new flights or they'll get a full refund, but that people should reach out to their airlines directly.

Flight boards at airports across the country Saturday morning continued to be riddled with red cancelled marks. At Tampa International Airport in Florida, people in the main terminal area before security curled up in chairs to grab a wink of sleep.

On Friday night, a flight board at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. showed dozens of flights delayed into the early morning hours or cancelled.

Passengers Erin and Jake Britt spent half the day at the airport in D.C. on Friday. Their plane to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. boarded at 3 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., they were getting off the plane — but they were still in D.C.

"Overall, our plane was definitely annoyed, but reasonable," Erin Britt said, as the couple left the airport at 8 p.m. "People being upset and asking like, 'Well, how are you not prepared for this?' And it was like, 'Well, no one was prepared.'"

She said neither the pilot nor flight attendants had any more information than passengers."They seem just as in the dark," she said.

The pair decided to cancel their weekend trip, but the night didn't end there. They spent over nine hours overnight waiting on the JetBlue customer service call line to be reimbursed. "I was setting alarms in 20 minute intervals in case I fell asleep," Erin Britt said.

For people who had events or plans over the weekend – the delay added an extra layer of stress. Joe Romano and Maddie Cabana had a cruise leaving Orlando, Fla. Saturday afternoon.

"It was a big eye roll. I mean, I travel a lot for work already, so I'm constantly dealing with flight delays," Romano said. "When this happened, I was just like, 'Of course, it always happens to me.'"

"Just rather inconvenient and frustrating," Cabana added, as the pair contemplated checking their bags or going home. They even thought about driving to Florida. "Hopefully, everything will be fine. It'll all work out. It always does."

And it did— eventually. After their JetBlue flight was ultimately cancelled, they quickly booked another one on Southwest Airlines and made it early Saturday morning.

Others, like Suze DiPietro decided flying wasn't worth it anymore. Her husband drove about four hours down from Ocean City, New Jersey to pick her up in D.C. Luckily, they had friends in the area where they spent the night.

"My husband, my hero, is driving down from New Jersey to come get me," DiPietro said.

Other alternatives included people switching to Amtrak trains as they struggled to get to their destination. Although, even Amtrak's system had a brief outage Friday night.

This was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The U.S. last issued a ground stop of this scale in 2023, when all U.S. airports were shut down due to an outage in the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and airports of real-time hazards.

That outage prompted fears of a cyberattack, but the FAA later determined the issue was caused when contract workers inadvertently deleted critical files.

The FAA has recently begun rolling out an AI-enhanced software tool known as the SMART system as part of its ambitious overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. But Air Space Intelligence, the company that makes the tool, quickly dismissed speculation that its product could be connected to the flight disruptions.

"The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC," the company said on social media.

Ava Pukatch contributed to reporting.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Eggs from the first confirmed sea turtle nests found on the U.S. West Coast have hatched.

"We are excited to share that some of the olive ridley sea turtle eggs from Seal Beach successfully hatched after a 58-day incubation period," said the Aquarium of the Pacific in a social media post.

The Long Beach-based aquarium has been keeping watch over 204 olive ridley sea turtle eggs, laid on Seal Beach and Huntington Beach in September. A second set of eggs found on Huntington Beach is still incubating

The aquarium said the hatchlings were released early Saturday morning in a coastal area with little light and human disturbances.

Baby turtles, the aquarium said, go through a “frenzy period” after hatching, where they swim nonstop for up to two days

The eggs came from the first confirmed sea turtle nests found on the U.S. West Coast. Scientists say unusually warming water tied to El Niño likely drew the rare turtles to the Southern California coast.

If you happen to see 600 people snaking down 14.3 miles of Santa Monica Boulevard (and then some) on Saturday, Nov. 21 — their sole purpose is just to … walk.

“For years people were asking us, ‘What are you doing?’” said Michael Schneider, founder of the Great Los Angeles Walk.

These strolls are maximalist in nature, usually covering the entire length of a given thoroughfare. Sunset Boulevard. Melrose Avenue. Ventura Boulevard.

The inaugural Great L.A. Walk in 2006 along Wilshire Boulevard.

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How the walk began 

The pre-Thanksgiving tradition started in 2006 with Wilshire Boulevard. Schneider, who had reached the milestone of living in L.A. for a decade, was inspired by a book about the street’s history to walk its entire 15.8 miles on foot. He asked others to join on his blog Franklin Avenue.

About two dozen people showed up. That day, they popped into storefronts, stopped by restaurants, sneaked into the Park Plaza Hotel near MacArthur Park and shot up to the roof. “That kind of unearthed a whole new side of Los Angeles as we walked down Wilshire,” he said.

By the time the trek reached the ocean, folks were asking Schneider about next year. Now, it's always on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

“I inadvertently turned it into an annual tradition,” he said.

The 2016 edition of Great L.A. Walk along Pico Boulevard.

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Courtesy Great Los Angeles Walk

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The 2007 installment was Pico Boulevard — with restaurant recommendations along the route handpicked by the late Pulitzer-winning food critic Jonathan Gold.

Eventually, Schneider included themed walks. March of Los Pobladores — which retraces the final leg of the 1781 journey taken by the original founders of L.A. — from the San Gabriel Mission to downtown. And USC to UCLA when the rivals faced off on game day.

This year’s route: Route 66 

This year's theme is Route 66.

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Google map screengrab

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This year’s focus is Route 66, marking the centennial of the iconic road. Saturday's walk will start in Echo Park, then go the whole way down Santa Monica Boulevard and end at the pier, totaling about 16 miles.

“You see so many different versions of Los Angeles,” he said.

Michael Schneider, founder of the Great L.A. Walk, at last year's trot along Wilshire Boulevard.

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Courtesy Great Los Angeles Walk

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Celebrity sightings and a marquee shout-out 

One year, he said, the group walked by Magic Johnson.

“He waved at us," Schneider said. "Probably was wondering why [there were] hundreds of people walking past where he was."

As many as 600 people now join the walk, he said. As the number grows, so too has its legend.

“Now we find a lot of people who know who we are,” he said. “You hear people say, ‘Hey, it's the Great L.A. Walk.”

A couple of decades ago, a friend in New York told me about something happening that was kinda underground and just getting traction. It was called “The Moth.” People took turns telling a true, personal story, with no notes, named after the Southern tradition of sitting on front porches and sharing spellbinding tales — with moths flying mesmerized around the porchlight.

It sounded amazing. And terrifying. I filed it under the same list as bungee jumping — no doubt exhilarating but something I’d never do — and got on with my life. Over the years, as it grew bigger and bigger, I went to several Moth events in different cities, and was always so impressed with the storytellers — and equally adamant I’d never do it.

Cut to this September, when a message went out to all the staff at LAist. We’re a media sponsor of The Moth, and an event, a open mike StorySLAM, was coming up in Silver Lake. There were a few tickets available. Did anyone want one? The theme was "Divas." Sure, I thought. I’d go watch. It's always fun.

Nagging thought

As the days went by, the same thought kept nagging at me. How about getting on stage yourself? No, I thought. Too risky. But this time there was another thought, even more vehement. Why are you being held hostage by fear? Life is too short. If you want to do something, you just have to do it. And this opportunity has just fallen into your lap.

So when the day came, I went to the event, and put my name in the hat. Would I be picked? I sat there with sweaty palms as the show started and people came up tell their own funny, moving, poignant stories.

Finally, near the end of the show, my name was called out. Gulp. I walked on stage to the mic, and began telling my story.

“Some years ago I was a BBC radio producer. A show host and I were at Albuquerque airport, on our way to Los Alamos to do interviews about the Manhattan project. But when we got to the gate, it was closed. They’d boarded the plane 15 minutes early. We couldn't believe it. There was only one plane per day and we'd flown in from London and were on a tight schedule. What should we do?”

Holding their breath

It was a strange experience, simultaneously storytelling while looking at the audience and scanning for their reactions. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.... and were holding their breath, waiting to see what came next.

“I could see the plane on the tarmac, one of those regional planes with propellers, on the other side of an alarmed emergency exit door. So I decided, in the heat of the moment, to push it open, and started dashing across the tarmac, yelling for the host to follow me. Security men began running towards me from every direction as the alarm blared loudly.”

The audience was laughing with delight and disbelief, and I was laughing, too, at the recollection. What on earth had made me do that? Ah, my young, impulsive, determined self. Just as well it wasn’t today, post 9/11. I’d be dead.

“As I reached the plane, the security men were shouting 'What are you doing? You can’t run onto the tarmac!' That’s when the diva part came in. I drew myself up to my full 5’ 2” and said, determinedly, 'No, YOU were the ones who boarded the plane early. We did everything right! We have our tickets, we have interviews to do and we are going to get on this plane.'"

The security men looked at each other, unsure what to do. Maybe it was the British accent, or not being used to a woman giving them a dressing down. But one of them shrugged, moved out of the way, and they let us get on the plane. "Hurray! And we made it to Los Alamos, in time to do our interviews. Thank you.”

The audience went crazy, clapping and whooping. I was standing there grinning stupidly. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.

Yes, the story went down well. And the audience hadn't eaten me alive. But there was something bigger, something even more satisfying in my reaction. I’d had made myself do something I was scared of. I'd faced my demons.... and survived.

A lesson for us all.