The Brief

Canada's government forced Air Canada and its striking flight attendants back to work and into arbitration Saturday after a work stoppage stranded more than 100,000 travelers around the world during the peak summer travel season.

Federal Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu said now is not the time to take risks with the economy while announcing the intervention. It means the 10,000 flight attendants will return to work soon.

"The talks broke down. It is clear that the parties are not any closer to resolving some of the key issues that remain and they will need help with the arbitrator," Hajdu said.

Hajdu said the full resumption of services could take days, noting it is up to the Canada Industrial Relations Board.

The shutdown of Canada's largest airline early Saturday is impacting about 130,000 people a day, and some 25,000 Canadians may be stranded. Air Canada operates around 700 flights per day.

The bitter contract fight between the airline and the union representing 10,000 of its flight attendants escalated Friday as the union turned down the airline's request to enter into government-directed arbitration, which would eliminate its right to strike and allow a third-party mediator to decide the terms of a new contract.

Keelin Pringnitz, from Ottawa, was returning with her family from a European vacation when they became stranded at London's Heathrow Airport after flights were canceled. She said there was an option for the travelers in line to go the United States, but they were told there wouldn't be any further assistance once they landed in the U.S.

"It didn't go over well with the line. Nobody really seemed interested, everybody seemed a little bit amused almost at the suggestion, or exasperated, because it is a bit ridiculous to offer to take stranded passengers to a different country to strand them there," she said.

Montreal resident Alex Laroche, 21, and his girlfriend had been saving since Christmas for their European vacation. Now their $8,000 trip with nonrefundable lodging is in doubt. They had a Saturday night flight to Nice, France, booked.

Air Canada Chief Operating Officer Mark Nasr has said it could take up to a week to fully restart operations once a tentative deal is reached.

"Such little progress has been made"

Flight attendants walked off the job around 1 a.m. EDT on Saturday. Around the same time, Air Canada said it would begin locking flight attendants out of airports.

Cancelled and delayed Air Canada flights are seen on the departure board at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport on Friday.

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Ian Lee, associate professor, Carleton University's Sprott School of Business, earlier noted the government repeatedly intervenes in transportation strikes.

"They will intervene to bring the strike to an end. Why? Because it has happened 45 times from 1950 until now," Lee said. "It is all because of the incredible dependency of Canadians."

Canada is the second-largest country in the world and flying is often the only viable option.

"We're so huge a country and it's so disruptive when there is a strike of any kind in transportation," Lee said.

The government forced the country's two major railroads into arbitration with their labor union last year during a work stoppage. The union for the rail workers is suing, arguing the government is removing a union's leverage in negotiations.

The Business Council of Canada has urged the government to impose binding arbitration in this case, too.

Travelers in limbo

Passengers whose travel is impacted will be eligible to request a full refund on the airline's website or mobile app, according to Air Canada.

The airline said it would also offer alternative travel options through other Canadian and foreign airlines when possible. But it warned that it could not guarantee immediate rebooking because flights on other airlines are already full "due to the summer travel peak."

Laroche said he considered booking new flights with a different carrier, but he said most of them are nearly full and cost more than double the $3,000 they paid for their original tickets.

Laroche said he was initially upset over the union's decision to go on strike, but that he had a change of heart after reading about the key issues at the center of the contract negotiations, including the issue of wages.

"Their wage is barely livable," Laroche said.

Sides are far apart on pay

Air Canada and the Canadian Union of Public Employees have been in contract talks for about eight months, but they have yet to reach a tentative deal.

Both sides say they remain far apart on the issue of pay and the unpaid work flight attendants do when planes aren't in the air.

"We are heartbroken for our passengers. Nobody wants to see Canadians stranded or anxious about their travel plans but we cannot work for free," said Natasha Stea, a Air Canada flight attendant and local union president.

The attendants are about 70% women. Stea said Air Canada pilots, who are male dominated, received a significant raise last year and questioned whether they are getting fair treatment.

The airline's latest offer included a 38% increase in total compensation, including benefits and pensions over four years, that it said "would have made our flight attendants the best compensated in Canada."

But the union pushed back, saying the proposed 8% raise in the first year didn't go far enough because of inflation.

"We're the national carrier and we have people operating in poverty. Like that's disgusting, that's very problematic," Wesley Lesosky, President of the Air Canada Component of CUPE, said at a news conference.

Copyright 2025 NPR

California’s latest budget includes $116 million over three years to help schools identify and support students experiencing homelessness — the first time the state has dedicated funding specifically for this purpose.

Homeless student advocates welcomed the investment after years of lobbying lawmakers to supplement the federal dollars California gets annually to address student homelessness. However, advocates cautioned that one-time funding will only go so far to address the long-term problem of student homelessness.

Nearly 300,000 students in California were identified as experiencing homelessness in 2024-25, according to state data. However, homeless student advocates say that number is likely an undercount because it’s challenging to identify homeless students. With dedicated funding, schools can hire specialized staff trained to identify students facing housing instability and develop longer-term support programs.

“There is a great need, but the hard part with this population is you have to find them and identify them, and we have never funded that,” said Margaret Olmos, senior director at the National Center for Youth Law.

For years, Olmos and other advocates urged California lawmakers to provide state funding dedicated to homeless students, arguing that the federal McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act allocation — about $15 million annually to California — was insufficient to meet districts’ needs.

This year’s 2026-27 budget includes a one-time, three-year competitive grant program totaling $116 million. Although advocates had hoped for an ongoing funding stream, they called the allocation a significant step forward.

“Short-term money is very, very difficult for schools to utilize,” Olmos said.

Why dedicated funding?

California schools already can use several funding buckets to support students experiencing homelessness, including funding for community schools, Title 1 for schools to support low-income students, and supplemental dollars via the Local Control Funding Formula.

But those funding sources can help students only after they have been identified as experiencing homelessness. The state’s $116 million investment is intended primarily to help schools find eligible students and connect them with services, according to the budget trailer bill.

“Whether it’s community school funding or other funding that California’s providing for its students, if homeless students aren’t identified, if they don’t have regular transportation, a way to get to school, has somebody who’s attending to all those other needs — they’re not going to be able to benefit from those other investments,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, an organization that advocates for homeless students.

Identifying students can be difficult if families are reluctant to disclose housing instability or do not realize they are considered homeless under federal law and thus qualify for services.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, student homelessness is defined more broadly than it is for the general population under the more commonly used definition from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Under McKinney-Vento, students are considered homeless if they lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence — including many who are temporarily living with relatives or friends because of economic hardship.

This definition includes students living “doubled-up,” meaning families who share housing due to economic hardship. The HUD definition doesn’t include families who are doubling up. The great majority of California’s homeless students live “doubled-up,” but they could go uncounted if they or people offering support are not aware of the different definitions of homelessness.

In recent years, California has taken steps to improve identification and access to resources.

A 2022 state law, for example, requires schools to administer an annual housing questionnaire and report the results to the California Department of Education. Schools are also required under federal law to designate homeless liaisons responsible for identifying students and connecting them with services.

During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, billions have been allocated to address homelessness statewide, with a small percentage set aside for youth. Some county offices of education have applied for and received grants via that program, but funds are exclusively for housing, and not for services such as transportation, food assistance, clothing, school supplies and more that students need.

Olmos and other advocates say that this is where schools come in. School staff work to identify homeless students, though often with little to no dedicated funding.

A teacher or classroom aide might notice a student whose grades have slipped, or another’s who has an unkempt appearance. An attendance team might note sudden increased absences and might know they should flag a homeless liaison.

In many cases, further conversations reveal that a family recently lost housing, cannot afford basic necessities or lacks reliable transportation to school.

California received just over $14 million in McKinney Vento dollars during the 2025-26 school year, distributed among 151 of the state’s more than 900 school districts and 58 county offices of education. An additional $1.5 million was allocated to support the state’s technical assistance center, jointly managed by the Los Angeles, Contra Costa and San Diego county offices of education. The homeless liaisons for each of these three large counties answer questions submitted by liaisons or school staff from other districts, help train new liaisons and offer webinars on McKinney Vento requirements, among other things.

Because federal funding for student homelessness nationally has remained flat nationwide for at least three years — about $129 million annually — advocates say California cannot rely on significant increases from Washington.

The state’s $116 million will “signal to other states that there’s a way forward, but also that, within California, this is one-time funding that will help really show policymakers and educators that this needs to be the new normal in California,” said Duffield. “Because there’s no indication that homelessness is going to be down significantly in the next couple years.”

A proof of concept

Supporters of the new funding point to the federal American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth, known as ARP-HCY, as an example of the difference dedicated funding can make.

Starting in 2021, through the ARP-HCY program, school districts nationwide received $800 million in one-time Covid-19 relief funding, including $98.76 million for California. Districts used the money to hire homeless liaisons and support staff, provide emergency housing assistance, expand after-school programs and connect families with basic services.

But when the federal government announced in 2024 the funding would not be replenished, some of those programs began ending as well.

Homeless student advocates say California’s new $116 million allocation creates a new opportunity to demonstrate the value of dedicated funding, while also highlighting the challenges of relying on one-time grants.

“I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from ARP-HCY,” said Duffield. “How the funds go out, what they can be used for, how the actual disbursement is being tracked. All of that from the get-go.”

If districts can demonstrate measurable results, the hope is lawmakers will make the funding permanent, said Olmos.

“Our North Star has not changed. There has to be dedicated funding to this group that is safe in California moving forward,” she said. “So we have a window to prove that this is a wise investment, and we are really hoping that we don’t lose it.”

Spain is going back to the World Cup final, after defeating France 2-0 in a dominant semifinal performance.

It was a tough end for France, which had entered this tournament as a favorite, after winning the 2018 World Cup and losing to Argentina in the 2022 final. But France had no match for Spain, which has only allowed one goal this World Cup — and has not been beaten in two years (a 37-game streak: 28W - 9D - 0L).

In fact, neither team had trailed in this World Cup until a Spanish penalty kick in the 21st minute put them up 1-0. Spain got another goal in the 58th minute to seal the victory and managed to stifle the stellar French attacking trio of Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise. Mbappé had entered the game as the tournament leader in the Golden Boot race (eight goals and three assists, just ahead of Argentina's Lionel Messi with eight goals and two assists).

Spain, the reigning European champion and 2010 World Cup winner, enters Sunday's final on a high note and will play the winner of Wednesday's semifinal between Argentina and England.

France will have one more game to play, the third-place match against the losing team of the other semifinal on Saturday.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Maria Franco has lived in the Park Royale Mobile Home Community for 25 years, in the Van Nuys neighborhood in north Los Angeles. The community has just under 150 rectangular homes, lined up neatly on a large field of mostly asphalt, with fruit trees popping up here and there.

Two years ago, Franco faced a string of bad luck. The 65-year-old lost her long-time job packing orders at a distribution company when it abruptly moved to another county, a commute too far for her to make.

Then her hot water heater clonked out, so she hauled warm water from her stovetop to her bathroom, scooping it over her head for a shower.

“I was depressed,” Franco said in Spanish. “I was in shock.”

The Southern California summer bore down harshly where she lived in the San Fernando Valley, its temperatures regularly 10 to 15 degrees higher than those on the coast.

To cool off, Franco relied on a fan and a partially functional window air conditioning unit. When her adult kids and grandchildren came by, they found the heat inside oppressive.

A knock on her door changed all that. A young contractor named Ben Shamoon stood on her step, wanting to know if he could install a new water heater, and an HVAC system that both cooled and heated her home. The cost to Franco? Absolutely nothing.

Heat pump customer, Maria Franco, outside her home in Van Nuys on June 11, 2026.

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“It was an inexplicable experience, a blessing from heaven,” Franco said.

Shamoon won over customers by canvassing trailer parks. By working with families who lived in close proximity, he could buy in bulk and work more efficiently to complete projects faster. The approach maximized incentives from a state program — aimed at supercharging heat pump adoption — to improve homes at no cost to owners.

He found a climate solution with a lot of wins — for customers, tradespeople and the planet. The approach cracked the nut of one way to bring heat pumps, which run on electricity rather than gas, to low-income Californians.

Best of all, Shamoon brought safety and comfort to families.

Cold calls to San Diego

In July of 2024, Shamoon was working to get his home upgrading business Bryge, then called LivSmart Home Services, off the ground. Tons of state and federal money was flowing to homeowners and contractors at the time through an initiative called TECH Clean California, to help deploy appliances like heat pumps that cut pollution. Low-income customers received the highest incentive.

Shamoon is based in Los Angeles, but the government incentives in the current funding cycle were exhausted in most parts of the state. He saw that there was some money left — about a million dollars to install heat pump water heaters for low-income customers in San Diego.

Shamoon often passed by a mobile home community at the end of his street. One day, an idea came: why not pitch mobile homeowners on the upgrades?

He could install the units at no cost to the customer and the roughly $8,885 incentive per job would be enough to pay for the equipment, labor, permits and profit.

Shamoon and a colleague found a list of San Diego mobile home parks and started cold-calling managers’ offices. Most said no, he could not go door to door, hoping to keep predatory schemes away from residents. Shamoon’s offer of free upgrades was hard to believe.

But a few said yes.

Door-knocking his way through each community, Shamoon picked up clients.

He found that — along with a higher concentration of potential customers — the mobile home parks were home to many families who made under 80% of the median income in the area, which meant they qualified for state assistance, and higher incentives.

“We started to see a trend,” Shamoon said. Not only did most customers qualify for incentives, but like Franco, they needed the help.

He met senior citizens who’d been living without working hot water heaters for months. And people with no air conditioning on days when outside temperatures exceeded 100 degrees.

“It was just one door after the next, after the next,” Shamoon said. He started to see his work as not just about comfort, but about dignity.

As installations began, Shamoon stumbled on wins. Sending contractors to one community cut down on commute times and meant he could get three to four jobs done in a day, as opposed to just one or two. He could bulk order supplies and get lower prices.

After he and his colleagues first canvassed mobile home parks, word traveled fast through the tightknit communities.

People who had initially turned his company away visited their neighbors’ homes and were assured that they had indeed paid nothing for their fancy new appliances. They called Shamoon back and wanted in.

For most customers who had older, inefficient air conditioners and live in hot, dry areas, their monthly bills went down noticeably.

While walking through a neighborhood in Van Nuys, Ben Shamoon (right), founder of Bryge and LivSmart Home Services, showed Evan Kamei, a director at Energy Solutions, one of the ways he creates social media and word of mouth awareness for Bryge.

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The process was not without challenges: electrical panels in some homes did not have capacity to power the upgrades. Different mobile home parks had restrictive rules about where appliances could be placed on the outside of homes.

But Shamoon was not deterred. He repeated the process, adding installations of heat pumps to warm and cool homes.

In the beginning, he worked with homeowners of all income levels, as there were incentives for people with high incomes too, but he eventually zeroed in on low-income homeowners.

Wealthier clients proved high-maintenance, despite getting free appliances, he said. Low-income families were incredibly grateful, and experienced a dramatic improvement in their quality of life.

Hundreds of miles north in Oakland

Consultant Evan Kamei started to take notice.

He had never met Shamoon, nor heard of his company before he started seeing its name pop up on spreadsheets. Kamei works in Oakland for Energy Solutions, an environmental consulting company that implements the state’s incentive program.

He keeps track of where heat pumps are being installed and how that impacts customer bills.

Kamei realized more and more mobile homeowners were participating in the program thanks to Shamoon.

His company has installed the majority of the roughly 1,500 TECH-funded heat pump HVAC and water heaters in mobile homes statewide. California’s incentive program has funded about 80,000 heat pump installations on all types of homes.

In Franco’s mobile home park, Shamoon has completed 38 projects.

“That’s the beauty of having a market-based solution of enabling contractors to figure out something that could work,” Kamei said, reflecting on contractor creativity, “It’s not something you typically see with an incentive program like this.”

A lot of wins, and some limits

What Shamoon is doing, swapping gas-powered heating and cooling for electric versions of appliances, lowers carbon pollution by pulling from the state’s mostly green grid. But it also could improve indoor air quality.

Esperanza Sanchez is breathing easier after she upgraded her HVAC system to a heat pump with Shamoon’s help. Sanchez lives in the Blue Star Mobile Home Park in the San Fernando Valley’s Sylmar neighborhood.

Sanchez had previously avoided using her gas heater because it triggered her asthma. “It stung my nose and I couldn’t stand it,” Sanchez said in Spanish. After making the switch, she said her respiratory issues were gone.

Maria Franco’s heat pump takes just 15 minutes to cool down her two-bedroom home on a scorching day.

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“It’s a public health thing. It’s an equity thing,” said Ethan Elkind, a UC Berkeley lawyer and policy researcher who’s studied how low-income Californians can adopt more planet-friendly appliances.

“It’s almost a human rights thing in these really hot climate zones — giving people access to reliable air conditioning,” Elkind said. “It checks a lot of boxes for what we need to do.”

But there are limits to this solution. There’s no way for the state to provide incentives for every low-income Californian to make the switch. California has doled out more than $219 million so far, but bringing electric appliances to all low-income residents would cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Elkind said, money the state does not have.

A settlement from a 2016 gas leak in the San Fernando Valley will funnel roughly $30 million in incentives to nearby residents through TECH starting late this summer. It’s unclear when these funds will again be available for Californians who live outside that region, and are not eligible for the settlement money.

One way to stretch the state’s limited funds is to use public dollars to attract private investors, Elkind said. Under this model, the state pays the interest upfront — giving low-income homeowners access to no-interest loans — and covers the loss if a borrower defaults. This safety net eliminates risk for private lenders, allowing them to finance the initial equipment upgrades. Homeowners would then pay back the loan principal over time, using the savings many see from now lower utility bills.

But that could only go so far. National policies incentivizing heat pump adoption like those in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, done away with under the Trump Administration’s tax bill, would need to be reinstated to achieve large-scale adoption.

Reaching renters is another story. Gas appliances are cheaper upfront. So landlords have little financial incentive to make the switch — while there are bill savings, those go to renters.

Elkind said achieving this shift would take policies like those slated to roll out in the Bay Area in 2027, requiring all new water heater installations be electric.

The most glaring limit is California’s high cost of electricity. For many, monthly bills for a gas appliance are lower than electric alternatives. But for Californians like Franco, who replaced old, inefficient window air conditioners, their bills often go down. That’s because new technologies use less energy to do the same – and often a better – job.

Cool air, hot showers

Three months after that knock on her door, Franco watched two men install her new water heater. It had been half a year since she had the ability to step into her shower, turn a knob and have hot water come out.

“That first time using the shower was beautiful,” Franco said.

A month later, she welcomed a new mini-split heating and cooling unit, blowing crisp air in her living room.

The single unit is powerful enough to transform her two-bedroom home from oppressive to refreshing in just 15 minutes.

Before the changes, her gas bill, which covered her furnace, water heater and stove, was $40 to $50 per month. It is now just $10. Her electricity bill went from $150 to around $80. The savings are meaningful given her monthly social security benefits of $1000.

Without Shamoon and his coworkers, Franco would have never learned about the state incentives, and never made the change.

“When I needed help the most, it came,” Franco said. “If it weren’t for them, we’d be suffering from the heat.”