The Brief

RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. — Brightline West aims to connect Las Vegas and Southern California with high-speed rail.

But the planned terminal is not in Los Angeles, where you might expect, but 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

"We've got the best name. Who doesn't want to say Rancho Cucamonga?," asks Elisa Cox, assistant city manager for this town of about 170,000 near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California's Inland Empire.

This is where Brightline West plans to build a terminal to handle millions of travelers a year.

The company broke ground last year on what would be the first true high-speed rail line in the U.S., with trains that can make the 218-mile trip to Las Vegas in just over two hours. The project also aims to ease the notorious traffic congestion between L.A. and Las Vegas that frequently turns Interstate-15 into a parking lot.

But high-speed rail is expensive. So Brightline West has had to make some big compromises to keep costs down — for example, putting the terminal in Rancho Cucamonga instead of downtown L.A., and running track through the median of an interstate, to save on land acquisition costs.

From left to right: Brightline founder Wes Edens, then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) at a groundbreaking ceremony at the Brightline West Las Vegas station in April 2024 in Las Vegas.

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Still, the project is expected to cost at least $12 billion dollars, and likely more. The company has raised about $6.5 billion so far in private financing and federal grants, but it's warning investors that construction costs are rising. And skeptics worry whether the company can deliver on its promises.

"I think that there's a lot of risk around it failing, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago," said Marc Joffe, a former analyst in the financial industry who's now a visiting fellow at the California Policy Center, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Brightline's existing service in South and Central Florida is falling short of its ridership and revenue projections, Joffe notes. And the company recently pushed off an interest payment in July, prompting some ratings agencies to downgrade its bonds.

Investors have some doubts about Brightline West as well, Joffe says, and he believes they're right to be concerned.

"I think it'll be late. I think it will generate less revenue than they expect. Between those two things, I don't think it'll be successful, at least from a financial point of view," Joffe said in an interview.

The U.S. is one of the few wealthy countries in the world without a high-speed rail line that travels more than 180 miles per hour. Brightline West is betting it can change that. With top speeds of almost 200 miles per hour, these trains will be faster than Amtrak's Acela service on the Northeast Corridor, or Brightline's current service in Florida.

Even the Trump administration — which has tried to strip federal funding from another high-speed rail project in California — is on board with Brightline West so far.

"I would love to see high-speed rail in America," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy last month. "I don't think it should just be China, Europe, Japan, others that have high-speed rail."

Brightline West declined an interview request for this story.

But Asha Jones, the vice president of corporate affairs, laid out some of the company's plans in a virtual presentation for the board of the San Bernardino, Calif. County Transportation Authority in June. The link between Brightline West and the L.A. regional rail system will be seamless, she said.

"You'll be able to buy one ticket that will take you from Las Vegas or any of the other pick-ups if you're going to L.A. or wherever you're going that Metrolink goes," she said. "We want it to be quick and efficient."

Building a terminal in Rancho Cucamonga instead of L.A. should save time and money. It's not the only move the company has made to keep costs down. For much of the route, the company plans to put the track in the median of an interstate highway, so that it doesn't have to acquire as much land.

But those compromises come with downsides. The decision to build a single track in the middle of the freeway will limit speeds, for example, and cap the number of trains.

Still, high-speed rail supporters see Brightline West as the best chance to get a train up and running in the U.S. At the groundbreaking in Las Vegas last year, then-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg helped drive in one of the ceremonial spikes.

"I am firmly convinced that once the first customer buys that first ticket to ride true high-speed rail on American soil, there will be no going back," Buttigieg said.

For Rancho Cucamonga, the imminent arrival of Brightline West is both a challenge and an opportunity.

"There is nowhere else in the United States that has high-speed rail," said Elisa Cox, the assistant city manager, in an interview at the future site of Brightline West's California terminal.

"There is nothing like it yet. So there isn't necessarily another city to call up and say, like, 'hey, how did you deal with X, Y, Z?,'" she said. "There is no other example."
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Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died. She was 80 years old.

Known for her curvy physique, massive blonde wigs and skin-tight outfits that served her self-deprecating wit, she was among the most beloved personalities in music and beyond — the rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.

She wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that totaled more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams. Parton, who plucked bejeweled banjos, guitar and dulcimers with her long fingernails during performances, was a generous philanthropist and successful businesswoman whose projects included a theme park in the Smoky Mountain foothills near her birthplace.

Her career was forever influenced by her upbringing as one of 12 children born into what she called a “dirt poor” Tennessee family. She started her education nonprofit, Imagination Library, to send free books to children in Tennessee because her father, who quit school to work on the farm, struggled to learn to read.

Parton’s first musical performances were in church, where her grandfather was a preacher. By age 10, she was learning guitar and singing on local television shows. At 13, she appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where Johnny Cash introduced her as “a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.”

With a suitcase of songs, she followed her uncle, Bill Owens, also a songwriter, to Nashville after graduating high school in 1964. Fred Foster, who produced Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson and more, saw her potential and got her songs cut by other artists, as well as recording and releasing Parton singing her own material. By the mid-1970s, Parton was a Nashville queen.

A key collaboration with Porter Wagoner

Parton’s partnership with Porter Wagoner, a pencil-thin pompadoured star with flashy rhinestone outfits, was key to her career. She honed her acting skills on his syndicated TV show and he advocated for her to get a record deal at RCA. Their first duet, “The Last Thing On My Mind,” was released in 1967, the same year she started her own publishing company.

While their duets were often big radio hits, Parton’s solo singles didn’t chart as high at first. With Wagoner as a co-producer, she began to adjust her country warble to a more polished, pop-leaning style.

She got her first No. 1 solo single with “Joshua,” and reached the Top 5 with the ballad “Coat of Many Colors,” about how her mother sewed together scraps of clothes to make a coat Parton wore “so proudly” even as her peers mocked her for being poor. The song, with its Biblical references and ode to maternal love, was later made into a children’s book and a TV movie.

In 1973, she had the hit that made her career — “Jolene,” a country music standard with its steady, churning rhythm and Parton’s repeated delivery of the title as she pleads for the woman not to steal her man.

The song topped the country charts, crossing over to pop and later being released internationally, opening up new audiences for Parton. “Jolene” is one of her most covered compositions, including by Miley Cyrus (Parton’s goddaughter), Olivia Newton-John and The White Stripes.

She left Wagoner’s show in 1974, amid reports of squabbling between the two, although they continued to record together and Wagoner stayed her producer for years after that. But the relationship turned litigious when Wagoner sued her in 1979 for millions in management fees and royalties.

A pop crossover star

She followed “Jolene” with a huge hit in 1974, “I Will Always Love You,” an ode and farewell to Wagoner that helped her win the Country Music Association’s female vocalist of the year back-to-back in 1975 and 1976. She famously turned down Elvis Presley, who wanted to record it, because she would not share publishing rights.

Decades later, Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” became a smash for the soundtrack of her 1992 film “The Bodyguard,” and broke sales records. Houston won a Grammy for her performance in 1994, presented to her by Parton.

“Here You Come Again,” a pop crossover hit and one of the few she didn’t write, further established Parton as a multi-genre entertainer and brought her first Grammy Award in 1979.

“A lot of people thought I had totally lost my mind,” she told The Associated Press in 1979 of changing her singing style. “But I had no fear of change. I expected success, but I was braced for failure. I didn’t care if people thought I was wrong. In my own heart, I knew I was doing the right thing.”

Parton’s other crossover hits included the title song from “9 to 5,” the 1980 comedy starring Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin; and her duet with longtime friend Kenny Rogers, “Islands in the Stream,” written by brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. In 1987, she collaborated with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on the million-selling “Trio” album.

Down home charm

For millions of fans, she was simply “Dolly,” a mixture of Southern charm, humor and glamour. But she was also considered a feminist role model for holding the reins of her own career, writing her own songs, owning her content and looking after her finances in an entertainment world dominated by men.

Parton was open to making fun of herself; when she hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1989 she told the writers that her only restrictions were she wouldn’t curse and she wouldn’t make fun of Jesus. She regularly joked about her breasts or her dumb blonde appearance, but with a wink that she was the one controlling the laughs. In the memoir “My Life So Far,” Fonda remembered Parton’s way with a wisecrack, “usually high raunch,” and a laugh that was “somewhere between a girl’s giggle, an explosive shriek, and a cascade of little bells.”

After her gown split down the front when she won CMA’s entertainer of the year in 1978, Parton quipped: “My Daddy said that’s what I got for putting 50 pounds of mud in a five-pound bag.”

Throughout her career, she embraced her glamorous style, often wearing custom curve-hugging rhinestone dresses and bodysuits even if they drew tsk-tsks from others in the industry. Her look was always a part of her larger musical business plan.

“I knew my songs were good even if I had been ugly as sin,” she told the AP in 2014. “So I thought, ‘Well, I would have probably chose to look this way even if I had been a waitress.’ I mean, this is my look. I mean, I like a lot of makeup. I like a lot of hair. I like flashy clothes. I like to show it off. But that’s just who I am.”

She married Carl Dean, an asphalt paving contractor, in the mid-1960s; they were together until his death in 2025 at the age of 82. Though rarely seen in public, he was an influence on her career. She told NPR that she wrote “Jolene” about a flirty bank teller who seemed to take an interest in Dean.

‘9 to 5’ to Hollywood and Broadway

In her first major film role, Parton played alongside Fonda and Tomlin as office workers who rebel against their tyrannical boss in “9 to 5.” Critic Roger Ebert called her a “natural-born movie star” and the title song earned her two Grammy Awards and a ranking of 78 on the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 movie songs. Starring roles in the “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas” and “Steel Magnolias” followed.

“I never thought of myself as a movie star,” she told AP’s Bob Thomas in 1979. “I knew I’d be a star, but as a singer or as a writer of songs or books or poetry. I wanted to be a famous performer and wear flashy clothes, but singing in movies was not one of my ambitions. My family lived in the mountains and we didn’t see movies.”

Her love affair with TV and film continued for decades, with appearances alongside Cyrus on “Hannah Montana” and adaptions of her music for Christmas specials, films and streaming series. She also became an author, her books ranging from the memoir “Dolly” to a bestselling novel co-authored by James Patterson, “Run, Rose, Run,”

The stage adaptation “9 to 5: The Musical” debuted in 2009, and “DOLLY: A True Original Musical” had been set to open in December 2026.

United States of Dolly

Beyond her music, Parton’s most lasting legacy might be her generosity and broad appeal.

When a deadly wildfire swept through the Smokies in 2016, she held an all-star telethon and set up a foundation that sent monthly checks to residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed.

She opened up her Dollywood theme park in East Tennessee, a major economic driver in Appalachia that draws tourists from around the country, and established the Dollywood Foundation. She wrote books and memoirs, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy. She was selected for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2025.

With 55 Grammy nominations and 10 wins, Parton is the third-most nominated woman in Grammy history, only behind Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

Parton spanned social and political divides, through multiple generations of fans, urban and rural and in between. In tumultuous election years, it wasn’t uncommon to see “Dolly for President” shirts. But she was strict in not voicing her own political beliefs, often turning aside questions about presidents, candidates, policies and other controversies.

“I don’t do politics,” Parton told host Jad Abumrad on his hit podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.”

“I have too many fans on both sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion about everything, but I learned years ago to keep your mouth shut about things.”

When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation sent out a ballot in 2022 with her name on it, though she said she felt she hadn’t earned it, the voters answered with a “Hello, Dolly.” Parton showed up to the induction ceremony, performed and then put out a rock album.

Associated Press writer Hillel Italie contributed.

California’s Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical on Monday that Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco was acting within his legal rights when he seized more than 650,000 ballots from that county’s top election administrator in March.

In back-to-back hearings in downtown San Francisco, Bianco’s attorney, Bradley Hertz, argued that local law enforcement officers have the right to take ballots after obtaining a warrant, regardless of state laws detailing how election challenges, recalls and investigations should be handled. He also argued, in the second case, that California’s attorney general does not have the power to issue orders to county sheriffs like Bianco.

Deputies seized the ballots as part of Bianco’s investigation into alleged voter fraud in California’s November special election on redistricting after activists alleged the ballots were undercounted. Riverside’s registrar of voters has said repeatedly those claims were based on a basic misinterpretation of preliminary vote count data.

Bianco grabbed national headlines at a time he was mounting his ultimately unsuccessful bid for governor and amid President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine faith in the outcome of the 2020 elections and nationalize election administration.

The ballot seizure drew two legal challenges, both of which the court considered.

At a news conference after the first oral argument, lawyers and advocates who sued Bianco were optimistic.

The case “is going to send a message around the country. That our election ballots are the voters’ ballots to be protected at all costs,” said Chad Dunn, with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who argued the first case against Bianco. “We couldn’t be more satisfied with how the hearing went today.”

Bianco, speaking to reporters on the courthouse steps, said he hopes the court will rule his way anyway. He said if the court orders his office to return the ballots, he will comply, but suggested that his office would continue its investigation.

“I would expect that that’s what every Californian should expect,” he said.

The justices may not release a ruling for months.

Bianco’s argument ‘bizarre’ to one justice

The first lawsuit came from a handful of Riverside voters, including two local Democratic elected officials, who argue that state law makes it abundantly clear how ballots in contested elections should be handled — and this wasn’t it.

“The election code provides a process” for who, how and under what circumstances ballots should be handled, Dunn told the court. Any recount should take place in a public, transparent way, conducted by trained, properly sworn officials and initiated by a district attorney, county board of supervisors and the California secretary of state, he said.

State law does not permit simply “taking ballots into a back room” with “officers trying to assemble a vote-counting airplane while they’re flying it,” said Dunn.

Dunn’s legal argument focused on one California election law regarding recounts and criminal prosecutions into election results that says “In no event shall the (ballots) be taken from the custody of the elections official.”

Hertz countered that because Bianco obtained a warrant from a judge, the penal code applies instead. Bianco ultimately obtained three warrants from Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel. Kiel is a political ally of Bianco’s.

Justice Kelli Evans appeared unpersuaded, noting that the language of the state election law is pretty straightforward. “So it’s ‘in some event,' despite the fact that it says ‘in no event?’” she asked with apparent skepticism.

Hertz also argued that the election code in question only applies to criminal prosecutions, not to the type of preliminary investigation Bianco was conducting.

But if that were true a sheriff could seize the ballots during an investigation, only to be forced to hand them back during prosecution, said Justice Goodwin Liu. “That seems bizarre.”

Direct supervisor or elder statesman?

Bianco’s argument in the second case didn’t fare much better.

The legal challenge Attorney General Rob Bonta brought focused on whether Bianco was required to abide by directions from the state attorney general, which ordered Bianco to hold off on executing the warrants in late February. Bianco ignored it. Bonta then ordered the sheriff not to do anything with them. Bianco’s office began counting the seized ballots and only stopped when ordered to do so by the state Supreme Court in April.

Bianco didn’t have the authority to do any of that, said California Solicitor General Sam Harbourt. The California constitution grants the attorney general “direct supervision” over sheriffs, which has been affirmed by the state Legislature. Though attorneys general have been loath to exercise such sweeping powers in the past for political reasons, the law is clear, said Harbourt.

Hertz argued that the authority apparently conferred on the attorney general was actually like that of an “elder statesman” — someone able to dispense advice and arguably step in when necessary action wasn’t being taken, but otherwise restricted from going further. He acknowledged that such a reading might seem “counterintuitive.”

Once again, the justices didn’t seem to be having it.

“It’s more than counterintuitive,” said Justice Joshua Groban. Terms like “direct supervision” have a clear, intuitive meaning, he said. He described a hypothetical conversation between a manager and a new employee to illustrate his point. “‘I’m your new supervisor, but funny thing, I don’t have any control over your actions,’” he said.

That line of questioning seemed to undercut more than just Bianco’s specific legal argument, but the entire “constitutional sheriff” movement with which Bianco has been associated. Members of the movement believe that elected sheriffs have the power to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional and have ultimate political authority within a given county.

The stakes for 2026

Bianco’s gambit was never going to alter the outcome of the November special election, even in Riverside County, where it passed with an 80,000 vote margin.

But many voting rights advocates see the dispute as an important test case for the 2026 midterm elections.

Trump has spent half a decade lobbing unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities to undermine public confidence in results that don’t go his way, this year seizing old ballots and other election records from officials in Fulton County, Georgia and Maricopa County, Arizona and seeking voter roll data from nearly every state.

At the press conference, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, who advises the UCLA Voting Rights Project, tied the case to Trump’s proposed federal legislation to create a national voter ID requirement and to California’s Proposition 39 on this November’s ballot, which would do the same for the state.

“The assault on elections, the assault on voters’ rights, is real, it’s imminent,” he said.

The supporters of both lawsuits argue that the court must demand that Bianco give the ballots back to prevent Trump-aligned local law enforcement officials throughout California from seizing, auditing or otherwise interfering in local elections in ways and at times that could affect the outcome.

Justices Groban and Leondra Kruger pressed Hertz on whether, according to his argument, Bianco could have taken the ballots while votes were still being cast.

Hertz said that ballots are subject to “other protections” so close to Election Day. Upon further interrogation by the justices, he admitted that he did not know what those protections might be. “I don’t have them handy,” he said.

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

Four million acres of California’s wildest backcountry could soon be opened to paving roads and logging.

The Trump administration announced last week that it’s pushing forward with a proposal to scrap a 2001 rule that blocks logging, road building and other construction in parts of national forests. The administration argues repealing the so-called “roadless rule” is key to managing vegetation to better prevent wildfires on public lands.

Environmental advocates and other groups worry rescinding the rule would harm pristine habitat and the wildlife it supports, and open up more public land to industrial activities and human access that can cause more wildfires.

And locals are worried about losing access to some of the last protected natural lands in the region.

“What we're dealing with here in the roadless rule is the protection of the backcountry,” said David Browning, president of the Orange County Mountain Bike Association, “where you can actually go out and be having an experience where you don't hear traffic, where you don't see buildings, where you actually remember what it was like before all of us got here.”

In Southern California, large swaths of the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino and Cleveland national forests would lose protections.

Browning, who spoke with All Things Considered host Julia Paskin on Monday, said he’s particularly concerned about the Santa Ana Mountains, where much of Orange County’s backcountry biking trails exist within a roadless area that could be opened to construction.

“Our mission is to protect and expand trail access, and so our entire agenda is to make sure that in a highly populated county, like Orange, that we have available the outdoors to be able to go and enjoy,” he said.

Browning takes issue with the wildfire argument — he pointed to the 2024 Airport Fire, which was sparked when heavy equipment operated by Orange County employees struck a rock. They were moving large boulders that day to, in part, block vehicles from getting into a dry brush area and potentially starting a fire. Browning said the “roadless rule” prevents such access that could increase the risk of fire. A recent peer-reviewed study supports that, finding that although roads are important for managing a fire once it ignites, they’re also more likely to be a place where a fire starts.

Though addressing wildfires and protecting public lands have become heavily politicized under the Trump administration, Browning thinks most locals probably aren’t as divided.

“ I don't think this is a party issue,” he said. “We want to hold onto the outdoors and protect them as best we can.”