The Brief

A dozen states, led by California, are suing to block Paramount from buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a Hollywood mega-merger that would unite some of the nation's largest movie studios, television newsrooms, and other entertainment properties.
"The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement announcing the suit, which was filed in federal court in California's Northern District.
The deal would give a wealthy family that has taken pains to show its allegiance to President Trump the effective ownership of the companies' competing movie studios, streamers (Paramount+ and HBO Max), sports programming (CBS Sports and Turner Sports) and news divisions (CBS News and CNN) as well as a suite of cable channels, such as Comedy Central, VH1, MTV, TNT, TBS, HGTV and Discovery, among others.

The president has repeatedly praised Larry and David Ellison, the digital titan and his son who are the controlling owners of Paramount. And he has publicly urged the sale of Warner's CNN to new owners.

"We're trying to have CNN go in a normal path," Trump told CNN anchor Jake Tapper yesterday at the end of an interview about the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

In his statement Monday, Bonta said, "With this lawsuit, California and our sister states are fighting for free and fair markets, not rigged markets. America has no kings in government or our economy."

Paramount is inviting in sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as major investors who will forego voting rights. The financing proposal also envisions that the company will take on $80 billion in new debt. That will assuredly trigger major cuts throughout the combined company. Warner dramatically reduced its own debt after slashing budgets, but is still tens of billions of dollars in the red, which helped set the stage for Paramount's unsolicited bid.

Bonta sees 'red flags'

In late June, Bonta told MS NOW's Jacob Sobroff that the deal presented "red flags in the air everywhere." The acquisition is valued at approximately $111 billion, including debt and major (though nonvoting) investment stakes from Saudi and other sovereign wealth funds. Bonta has armed his office for potentially costly legal battles by hiring a new batch of lawyers, including some who left the U.S. Justice Department after Trump took office a second time. He also secured new funds from the state legislature specifically for antitrust enforcement.
The other states involved in the lawsuit are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. An overlapping cadre of Democratic state attorneys general have sued to block the takeover of local TV giant Tegna by Nexstar, the nation's largest owner of television stations. A federal judge in Sacramento has put the full integration of the two station groups on hold in advance of a trial that is scheduled to be heard a year from now.
Paramount has argued that the entry of streaming giants such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple into entertainment has altered the landscape, rendering such antitrust concerns obsolete. Anticipating the same vast shifts, Disney swallowed up most of Fox's Hollywood holdings in 2019.
Any delay caused by the attorneys general could prove costly, securities filings show. Starting Oct. 1, Paramount has to pay Warner shareholders a "ticking consideration" of roughly $650 million for every 90 days the deal is set back. If the deal is not consummated by next June 4, Paramount will have to pay Warner $7 billion.

A Silicon Valley titan expands power in Hollywood

Though Paramount's new chairman and CEO is Hollywood producer David Ellison, a past financial donor to the campaigns of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the takeover bid was financed and guaranteed by Ellison's father: Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a friend and adviser of President Trump, is backing Paramount's $111 billion plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Larry Ellison is one of the richest people on Earth. He is also a Trump supporter and adviser — both formally and informally — serving, for example, on a board counseling the White House on artificial intelligence. Last fall, Trump made good on his plans to grant Larry Ellison and Oracle a controlling stake in TikTok's U.S. operations.
The Ellisons took over Paramount just last summer, making concessions to Trump's chief broadcast regulator and earning the president's vocal support.
"The Ellison family, two great people, great people," Trump said in March, ahead of a dinner David Ellison threw in Trump's honor. "It's a great family."
David Ellison hired a new editor in chief for CBS News: Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right The Free Press. She arrived with a record of deeming mainstream media, including CBS News, to be too reflexively "woke" and anti-Trump. Her effort to reshape coverage has been met with a series of controversies, including firings and fiery resignations by CBS journalists accusing her of bias, which the network and Weiss deny. Bonta's announcement did not focus on the combining of CBS News and CNN.
Given that Oracle provides the software skeleton on which much of the nation's commerce and government runs, and that the Ellisons now control major media platforms and the digital data they gather, the family has the ability to create a vast reservoir of information about how people act online.

Trump's remarks on the Paramount-Warner deal — and especially on CNN's fate —represent a sharp break from past administrations. Predecessors both Republican and Democrat tended to respect the independence of regulators in the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission.

Past Warner deals led to a trail of debt

Makan Delrahim, who is now Paramount's chief legal officer, ran the Justice Department's antitrust division during Trump's first term. He led an ultimately unsuccessful effort to block AT&T's takeover of TimeWarner, the precursor company to Warner.

Makan Delrahim was U.S. assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's antitrust division during President Trump's first term. He is now the chief legal officer at Paramount.

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In retrospect, AT&T may have preferred Delrahim to prevail; the deal was brutally panned by analysts and the stock market. The telecom giant unloaded the media properties less than four years later. They were taken over by Discovery in a deal that burdened the new cable TV conglomerate with tens of billions of dollars of debt. Warner CEO David Zaslav was able to reduce it significantly, but not overtake it, and announced plans last summer to split the company in two in seeking to get ahead of an undesired offer from Paramount.
The Warner board initially struck a deal with Netflix valued at nearly $83 billion for much of the company, not including CNN and other basic cable channels. Then Paramount raised its offer for the whole company and Netflix pulled out rather than compete.
While the top British regulator has expressed qualms too, signaling a possible review that could delay the process, Paramount has won approval from the Justice Department and many regulators abroad. The Justice Department approved the acquisition last month after an eight-month review.
The Wall Street Journal reported senior officials at the Justice Department fast-tracked its process for approval before career attorneys, who were weighing filing suit to block the deal, could intercede. The outgoing antitrust chief denied that in an interview with Politico.
The FCC has not yet signed off. It is involved because Paramount holds broadcast licenses for the 28 local television stations it owns. The FCC is led by Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee and vocal ally who has endorsed Paramount's bid.
"I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly," Carr told CNBC back in March.
Paramount has made minor concessions to try to win approval from officials in Europe. The European Union undertook formal reviews of both the consolidation of assets and its reliance on foreign investors, which are set to conclude soon.
The litigation from the states could tie Paramount up for far longer.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Soh Yun Park wants the Korean community to know that she’s listening. Or more importantly, there are nearly 70 volunteer counselors, the majority who speak Korean, who are available to talk with them.

Last year, she founded with her husband a phone line primarily focused on helping the Korean-speaking community during mental health challenges in their lives.

The organization is based in Koreatown, but its reach goes beyond the neigborhood.

“Hearing such heavy stories makes my heart ache,” she said. ”But it’s an honor to be the ears that listen.” 

She and her husband, Sang Kyun Park, founded the Youstar Foundation’s warmline, one step below the type of hotline that’s called during an emergency, in a means to reach the community that is experiencing high rates of suicides and a stigma in asking for help. 

The thrust of the Youstar Foundation’s warmline is to reduce that stigma around mental health and address the generational struggle in seeking support. Whereas most warmlines offer mental health support for diverse groups of people, this warmline offers a free emotional support telephone service for Korean Americans. 

QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) training for suicide prevention, organized by YouStar Foundation.

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In many ways, Soh Yun Park’s trajectory to mental health advocacy was not a straight line.

She was born and raised in South Korea and finished college before immigrating to the United States to join her family. Her background was a bit different from her current work as she originally majored in engineering, then worked as an accountant after moving to the U.S.

In 2002, Soh Yun Park met her husband who was working as a journalist at the time. In his work, Sang Kyun Park noticed people struggling from difficulties with physical health to battles with mental health. He wanted to do something to help. 

In response, Sang Kyun created a magazine that advertised local community service organizations in hopes that they would reach the people who needed them.

After receiving a call from a mother whose child was diagnosed with leukemia and required a bone marrow transplant, Soh Yun and her husband decided to create the Youstar Foundation. The organization began with a mission to spread awareness about cancer. 

But roughly six years after they started dating, Sang Kyun Park became ill and had a serious health crisis. 

“My husband has bipolar disorder,” Soh Yun Park said. “ That’s when I realized how serious this illness was, but we didn’t fully know how to treat it.”

At the time, she searched for a pyschologist, but the language barrier was a huge hurdle.

“If you can’t communicate, it’s terrifying,” she said.

Despite Sang Kyun’s diagnosis from a young age, he was unable to find proper treatment in Korea. 

“It’s hard to test different doctors when you are already in an emergency state,” Soh Yun Park said. 

After 10 years of combined therapy and medication, she saw her husband improve and the effects that therapy can have on someone in a crisis situation. She wanted to help others do the same. 

That’s when the couple shifted their organization’s mission to helping the Korean community talk about their mental health struggles.

But Soh Yun Park understood the stigma of getting mental health care in the Korean community. 

“They hide it, which prevents them from getting help,” she said “This leaves not just the individual, but the whole family hiding in darkness.”

The warmline was meant to serve as the first step in getting out of the shadows. 

Out of all Asian groups in Los Angeles County, Koreans were found to have the highest rate of suicide, according to the latest available data. 

With recent federal policies cutting funding for mental health resources and mental health becoming a rising concern in Koreatown, Youstar Foundation’s warmline is one way to address the issue.

Park shares her experience in organizing healing seminars for Korean Angelenos.

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For a city like Los Angeles where more than half of the population are immigrants, the warmline reduces barriers for Korean American immigrants by operating in two languages, Korean and English. 

Cheryl Eskin, licensed marriage and family therapist and senior director of the teen hotline program, Teen Line, said these types of resources often go unnoticed among the people who need them the most.

 “These resources are staffed by kind, compassionate people who are ready to listen and support without judgement,” Eskin said. 

The worry about being judgme keeps many people from asking for the very help they need, she said.

“Cultural and societal factors often come into play with people believing that their problems are not worthy of support or reveal that something is ‘wrong’ with them,” Eskin added.

Park’s work with the Youstar Foundation aims to address this type of barrier. 

The line emphasizes the benefits of having counselors who share the same cultural background as their callers, who can relate to parent behaviors and generational hardships specific to the Korean community. 

YouStar Foundation’s warmline can be reached at 213-221-2813. Visit YouStar Foundation’s website for more info on their resources. Available from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. The foundation hopes to expand the program to 24-hours within the next three years. 

If you or someone else requires mental health support, call the 24/7 LACDMH Help Line at 1-800-854-7771 or call/text 988 to reach the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. 

This story was produced under The LA Local’s Youth Journalism Program. To learn more or to get involved, click here.

California’s largest public pension fund just had a banner year, riding a soaring stock market to record its second consecutive double-digit annual investment return.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System announced Monday that it gained 14.8% on its investment portfolio in the 2025-26 financial year, more than doubling its target of 6.8%.

CalPERS Chief Executive Officer Marcie Frost in remarks to the board described the return as the fund’s best year since 2014, excluding 2021 when markets rebounded from a crash caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“Our team has maintained a disciplined approach to building the health of the pension system, and our improved funded status shows this effort is paying off for our 2.4 million members,” she said in a written statement.

By the numbers

CalPERS finished the budget year with a portfolio valued at $637.1 billion — about $80 billion more than a year ago.

The investment return is an important number to California government agencies because they have to cough up more money to cover losses when CalPERS comes up short.

CalPERS is considered underfunded because its assets are worth less than what it owes in total to the people who earn and receive benefits through it. Its assets are now valued at 85% of what it owes to members.

That number is also a milestone in CalPERS’ recovery from its losses during the Great Recession. CalPERS’ assets were worth about 68% of what it owed to members a decade ago before it began a set of policy changes that effectively required government agencies and public employees to pay more toward their pensions.

What this means for union negotiations

The earnings report comes at a moment when public safety unions are urging lawmakers to boost retirement benefits for police and firefighters for the first time since former Gov. Jerry Brown scaled back retirement perks with a 2012 law. The big number could make legislators more confident in saying yes to the unions and modifying Brown’s pension reform law.

Some groups have been urging CalPERS to simplify its investment strategies in the interest of making more money faster, which would relieve some pressure on government agencies and taxpayers. That criticism came up in last year’s CalPERS election, where several unsuccessful candidates characterized the fund as underperforming.

Two former CalPERS board members now involved with an organization called the Retired Public Employees Association — Margaret Brown and J.J. Jelincic — have focused on the pension fund’s stakes in private equity, investments that sometimes include high fees and uncertain values. They supported a failed bill in the Legislature this year that would have compelled CalPERS to disclose more information about those investments.

“These are very good results, however you need to think about how you got there,” Jelincic told the CalPERS board. “You expanded high risk private equity and you moved into higher risk segments within that asset class.”

How they got here

Last year the CalPERS board adopted a so-called total portfolio approach that empowers Chief Investment Officer Stephen Gillmore to make decisions more quickly and in the interest of the overall fund rather than specific asset classes — such as private equity or real estate. The policy directs CalPERS to keep 75% of its portfolio in equities and 25% in bonds.

Frost and Gillmore view private equity as an important segment in the portfolio. The pension fund formally opposed the legislation that would have required more transparency about private equity, which the fund projected would have cost it billions of dollars in missed opportunities.

“Investing in the private markets gives us potential to earn higher returns while spreading our risk from the often volatile public stock market,” Frost told the board.

CalPERS earned a 17% return on its private equity investments last year and a 24% return on its investments in stocks. The S&P 500 climbed by 21% over that timeframe.

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

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Jordan Brand tent that went up in Inglewood for NBA All-Star Weekend earlier this year is going to become a permanent fixture for school district events, according to a district official. 

Jordan built the structure at 106 E. Manchester Blvd. — a parcel owned by the Inglewood Unified School District — for a string of February promotional events during All-Star festivities at the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum. 

James Morris, the district’s county administrator, told The LA Local that Think True LLC, the company that leased the site from the district, plans to convert the heavy-duty but temporary structure into a permanent event space.

Morris said the district can’t use the building for instructional activities — that would require a rigorous architectural approval from the state — but will be able to use it for events such as career fairs and PTA fundraisers. 

“It’s going to be a pretty awesome event space,” Morris said. 

Think True initially signed a six-month lease with the district in December. The company tore down the vacant former Inglewood Adult School building that sat on the property and built the Jordan tent within months. 

Instead of paying rent, the lease required Think True to build the temporary structure and to allow the district to use the space for events. 

At the end of June, Think True and the district extended the lease until Oct. 20, according to meeting records. 

Morris said the marketing agency will use the remainder of the current lease to add a permanent basketball court, bathrooms, an HVAC system and other amenities needed to get a permanent certificate of occupancy. The new lease still requires no rent payments, though the district is still allowed to use the structure. 

Morris said the lease could be extended again, though no agreement has yet been reached. Think True did not respond to an inquiry from The LA Local.

An outbreak of an intestinal illness that causes diarrhea, nausea and fatigue has been detected in 31 states, according to federal health authorities, but the source is still under investigation.

As of Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had received reports of 843 cases of cyclosporiasis, the gastrointestinal affliction caused by the parasite Cyclospora.

But the true number of infections is likely much higher, because that figure only represents cases reported by states directly to the CDC. There is also a lag between symptom onset and reporting, and many people recover from the illness without medical treatment. Michigan alone reported 1,562 cyclosporiasis cases as of Friday.

According to the CDC, as of Thursday, there had been been 86 hospitalizations nationwide and no deaths.

People can contract the illness by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the parasite. Previous outbreaks have been linked to fresh produce. In 2018, McDonald's removed salads from restaurants in 14 states after federal health officials linked them to dozens of cases of cyclosporiasis, and tainted lettuce imported from Mexico was suspected to have sickened 400 people in the U.S. in 2013.

It's typical for cyclosporiasis infections to rise in the spring and summer, but the CDC said Friday that multiple states had reported a larger jump in cases over the previous two weeks than they had during the same period last year.

Where are cyclosporiasis infections occurring?

Health officials from California to Texas to Florida have reported cases of cyclosporiasis since the start of May.

Some of the hardest-hit areas appear to be in the Midwest and Northeast, including Michigan and New York.

The Ohio Department of Health reported 177 cyclosporiasis cases as of July 2, most of which occurred in June. Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said cyclosporiasis is a "serious illness that can cause dehydration and require people to seek emergency medical care, and it should be taken seriously."

According to the CDC, those sickened with the disease have ranged in age from 5 to 88 years old.

The total number of nationwide cases is expected to grow, due to the estimated six-week gap between when illnesses begin and when they are reported to federal health authorities.

What's causing the outbreak?

That is still unclear. The CDC says it is continuing to try to identify the source or sources of the recent surge of cyclosporiasis infections.

Investigators do that in part by interviewing those who've become sick to find out what they've eaten. But since symptoms can appear anywhere between two days and two weeks or more after a person was infected, they may not remember everything they ate during that period.

Previous U.S. outbreaks of cyclosporiasis have been associated with raspberries, basil, cilantro, snow peas and lettuce, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

How to prevent cyclosporiasis

Cooking produce is an effective way to avoid an infection, as heating food to 158 degrees Fahrenheit or higher kills Cyclospora.

Public health officials also suggest that people thoroughly wash all of their fresh produce, including herbs, though the parasites are not easy to rinse off.

It is also important for home cooks to observe standard food safety rules, such as washing their hands with soap and water before and after handling fresh produce.

Anyone who suspects they've been sickened with cyclosporiasis and is experiencing dehydration or severe diarrhea is encouraged to see a doctor. Cyclosporiasis infections are typically treated with antibiotics.

NPR's Allison Aubrey contributed reporting.
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