The Brief

Driving down the 5 freeway in Santa Ana recently, you may have noticed that the iconic white and blue rocket outside the Orange County Discovery Cube looks a bit different.

About a week ago, drivers on their daily commute discovered the rocket’s drastic new appearance: wrapped in bright orange with a big, angry cartoon eyeball glaring out at drivers. Some thought it was graffiti. Others thought that Discovery Cube was simply giving the spacecraft a facelift.

Then came the online chatter. The strange eye was identical to that of the original Anaheim Ducks hockey team logo from more than 30 years ago — a cartoon duckbill-shaped goalie mask atop two crossed hockey sticks — reminiscent of the days that the Walt Disney Company owned the team. “That’s it, we are winning the cup this year,” one fan proclaimed on Reddit.

Keen sports fans from Orange County correctly guessed that the mysterious orange rocket was all part of a rebranding campaign by the Anaheim Ducks hockey team, ahead of a much-anticipated uniform redesign for the upcoming NHL season.

The mystery is over: The team announced Wednesday that the ducks are finally returning to their original logo.

The new Anaheim Ducks logo.

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Alex Gilchrist

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Courtesy The Anaheim Ducks

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For those who don’t know, back in the early 1990s, a classic Disney film inspired a real-life NHL franchise — originally named the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, after the film — until the media giant sold the team in 2005. The sale was followed quickly by a complete overhaul of the Ducks’ brand. The duckbill mask was replaced by the current “D” logo, and soon after, the team won its first and only Stanley Cup in 2007. Despite the Ducks’ competitive success, fans have been buzzing for a return to the original logo, which has only appeared for special events and alternate jerseys, for 20 years.

The new uniform for the 2024-2025 Anaheim Ducks keeps the team’s bright orange color and black accents, and brings back the duckbill-shaped hockey mask logo that sports fans and Disney aficionados adore.

The rocket is being re-wrapped again as of Thursday morning, presumably to reveal the entirety of the new logo. The team will have updated jerseys to give to new players at the NHL draft Friday and Saturday.

President Donald Trump announced Friday afternoon on his Truth Social platform that Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, is leaving his position at the head of the Kennedy Center before it closes for scheduled renovations in July.

Trump,, who has been chairman of the Kennedy Center since Feb. 2025, said that he is promoting Matt Floca, the center's current vice president of operations, to chief operating officer and executive director. Grenell's departure comes about three months before the Kennedy Center is set to close for renovations, which President Trump has said would take two years.

As NPR reported last month, the renovations as detailed in an internal memo include some facility repairs and cosmetic changes, including to public spaces that were just renovated two years ago. In his Truth Social posting Friday, the president repeated his claim that the renovations will be a "complete reconstruction" of the complex.

Grenell, who served as the center's president, has a reputation as a Trump loyalist and has frequently deplored what he has called "leftist activists" in the arts. During Grenell's tenure, which began as interim executive director in Feb. 2025, the Kennedy Center has experienced intense tumult. Numerous prominent artists have canceled their performances and presentations. One of the center's core tenants, the Washington National Opera, severed its relationship with the Kennedy Center last month. Many longtime staff members have departed. Ticket sales have plummeted.

Grenell, who had no prior arts administration experience prior to his Kennedy Center appointment, told PBS NewsHour in January, "We cannot have arts institutions that lose money." He insisted that productions at the Kennedy Center needed to be revenue generators or at least revenue-neutral – a non-starter in the performing arts, in which large legacy institutions generally depend on a balance of earned revenue, philanthropic giving and some amount of government grants.

Last November, Senate Democrats opened an investigation against Grenell, accusing him and the current Kennedy Center leadership of cronyism and corruption, citing "millions in lost revenue, luxury spending and preferential treatment for Trump allies." Grenell denied the allegations in an open letter posted to social media on the official Kennedy Center accounts, which has since been removed.

In his Truth Social post, President Trump praised Grenell, writing: "Ric Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done."

News of his departure was first reported Friday by Axios.

Copyright 2026 NPR

How long a Los Angeles County resident lives can depend on where they live in the area, and the gap between the county’s richest and poorest communities has gotten wider over the past decade, according to a report released this week.

Average life expectancy countywide is 80.5 years, according to the report by Measure of America, a program of the Social Science Research Council. That’s down 1.6 years from the group’s previous report, released in 2017.

The Portrait of Los Angeles County measures how Angelenos are doing neighborhood by neighborhood, using a metric called the Human Development Index, or HDI. The index combines life expectancy, educational attainment and personal earnings into a single well-being score between 0 and 10.

The county’s HDI crept up to 5.64, from 5.43 in the previous report. That was far short of a county goal set in 2017 to raise L.A. County’s HDI by a full point.

“The main reason for this anemic progress is COVID and the disproportionate impacts it had on different groups of Angelenos,” said Kristen Lewis, director of Measure of America.

Drug overdoses and cardiovascular disease also contributed, the report says.

The report was produced in partnership with the L.A. County Department of Mental Health and supported by a group of philanthropic funders including the James Irvine Foundation, Cedars-Sinai and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

Life expectancy in L.A. County map graphic produced by Measure of America

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Measure of America

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A widening gap

The report details disparities between L.A. County’s wealthiest communities — where life expectancy went up — and poorer ones, where it dropped.

“What we saw in terms of change over time is that the areas that were already doing well are doing better,” Lewis said.

The gap between the longest-living and shortest-living communities is more than 16 years. Average life expectancy in Westwood was 88.1, compared to 71.8 in the Antelope Valley community of Sun Village.

Lewis said she drove to Sun Village during the research process and found no grocery stores and no sidewalks.

"It would be very hard to make healthy choices in that environment,” she said.

While median personal earnings rose countywide since the last report, they didn’t keep pace with dramatically rising housing costs.

In every L.A. County neighborhood, a resident earning the local median salary would need to work more than 40 hours a week to afford median housing costs, according to the report. In 31 L.A. County neighborhoods, that figure exceeds 80 hours.

The report sorts L.A. County neighborhoods into five tiers of well-being, based on where they fall on the Human Development Index, from “precarious L.A.” to “glittering L.A.”

No community in the county scored below 3.0 on the HDI and landed in the lowest tier in the 2026 report. That’s an improvement from 2017, when six areas fell into that category, including Cudahy, Westmont and Southeast Los Angeles.

The latest report examined L.A. County death records between 2019 and 2023. The earlier report had looked at 2010 through 2014.

One bright spot, according to researchers, was that educational attainment improved significantly. The share of adults with a bachelor's degree rose by more than 18%.

Measure of America's breakdown of the '5 L.A.s', rated via the Human Development Index, or HDI.

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Measure of America

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Disparities abound

Latinos saw the steepest decline in life expectancy of any major racial group, falling 3.7 years to 80.7 years of age.

The report attributes this largely to COVID-19, noting that Latino Angelenos are disproportionately concentrated in frontline jobs and are more likely to live in overcrowded, multigenerational households, both factors that increased exposure to the virus.

Asian Angelenos have the longest life expectancy, at 86.2 years. Black Angelenos live to 72.9, on average, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to just 71.2.

Black mothers remain nearly four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white or Asian women.

Lewis said the disparities across neighborhoods are based on policy choices.

“There's nothing natural or inevitable about inequality,” Lewis said. “It was really decades of deliberate decisions, policies and investments designed to advantage some groups of Angelenos while excluding others that really created this landscape of inequality we see today.

Measure of America rankings of the top and bottom L.A. County neighborhoods by Human Developent Index score.

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Measure of America

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What comes next

Lewis said she hopes local officials and community organizations use the report to guide planning, programming and investment decisions.

After the first report in 2017, the city of Los Angeles relocated some workforce development sites based on neighborhood HDI scores, and the county Department of Mental Health used the findings for needs assessment, according to the report.

Kalene Gilbert, a coordinator at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, said the department used the 2017 report to decide where to pilot community school programs, targeting areas with the worst education disparities.

“If we're really serious about equity in L.A. County, it's reports like this that really help make that a reality because this provides that understanding of where the need is at a really detailed level,” Gilbert said.

The report’s underlying data end in 2023, before several major crises hit L.A. County.

The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes and displaced tens of thousands of people.

Federal immigration enforcement raids that summer disrupted daily life in immigrant communities, leading the Board of Supervisors to declare a state of emergency in October.

The passage of the federal budget bill in July 2025 cut $750 million in annual funding for the county's public health system, according to the report.

None of that is reflected in the latest HDI scores.

Gilbert said those crises are already affecting the people DMH serves. She said immigration raids have made some clients afraid to leave their homes for appointments, forcing the department to shift toward telehealth.

“We consistently hear concern about just even coming out into the community,” Gilbert said.The report's interactive portal, where residents can explore data for their neighborhoods, is available at Measure of America's website.

In the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood, a 6,000-square-foot space looks to provide mental health care services for Los Angeles Unified School District students, as well as for kids and young adults ages six to 25.

For years, mental health has been a top concern for L.A. youth, many of whom experience high-level stressors, including housing insecurity, gun violence and discrimination in and outside school.

Last year, the L.A. County Youth Commission’s annual report revealed mental health was the top concern for youth, with education and employment falling close behind.

The commission surveyed 856 youth across the five different districts of the county, 524 of whom listed mental health as a top concern. The majority of the youth who selected mental health as their main concern were Latino and system-impacted.

Witnessing rising health care costs and deep cuts to mental health funding in California led Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers to expand their critical outpatient services for youth, also known as their Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program (GCAOP).

With a new location for its GCAOP inside the Chinatown Service Center, the Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers hope to reach more children and youth who can benefit from therapy, medication management and psychiatric care.

On Tuesday, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the new location for the GCAOP in Chinatown. She began her remarks by thanking Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers “for stepping up,” with the new facility expected to serve more than 230 youth annually.

“This place will provide the healing needed to prevent challenges from escalating into crises,” Bass said. “Make no mistake, we have a long way to go, but my administration and leaders like those at Gateways are turning the tide on major challenges like mental health that have been ignored for decades.”

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education, under the Trump administration ,announced it would stop funding roughly $1 billion in grants that were meant to boost the ranks and training of mental health professionals who work in schools. The department claimed that the grants were awarded under the Biden administration, a decision that was said to conflict with the current administration's priorities.

Aside from terminating the 2025 grants, the department also proposed an additional reduction for the 2026 fiscal year. These consecutive cuts would reduce resources for school counselors and psychiatrists, something that for school districts like LAUSD can be detrimental.

As L.A. Public Press reported earlier this year, LAUSD enrollment has dropped due to ICE raids spreading across L.A. County and many LAUSD staff, including counselors, have indicated that in times like these, the hiring of more trained attendance counselors and investing in mental health support are vital.

Despite that, for many LAUSD campuses, especially in low-income neighborhoods, staff shortages, including counselors and therapists, are a reality.

To combat some of the local shortages when it comes to mental health, the Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers are partnering with LAUSD to provide outpatient services to students, including individual and family therapy and psychiatric evaluations across more than 15 of the district's campuses.

“Our program is designed to meet young people where they are, whether that’s in school, at home, or here in the new Chinatown Service Center location,” said Charlotte Bautista, director of Gateways Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program. “We know early access to mental health care can change the trajectory of a child’s life, and we are providing a safe space where families can heal, grow and thrive together.”

Charlotte Bautista, director of Gateways Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program, said this expansion also allows for more students and families who deserve consistent, high-quality care to be reached, reducing waitlists and out-of-pocket costs.

“Our program is designed to meet young people where they are, whether that’s in school, at home, or here in the new Chinatown Service Center location,” she said. “We know early access to mental health care can change the trajectory of a child’s life, and we are providing a safe space where families can heal, grow and thrive together.”

This story was produced by CALÓ News, a news organization covering Latino/a/x communities.

The L.A. City Council voted Wednesday to study how large property buyers may be preventing Angelenos from becoming homeowners.

The vote follows a housing department study released in October that found large landlords, like property management companies and investment firms, owned a growing share of L.A. properties.

Rapid property buys by these organizations may lead to residents being displaced and limit opportunities for prospective homebuyers, the report states.

The new study approved this week will attempt to weigh how much added risk large property owners’ businesses are placing on tenants, homeowners and small landlords.

President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom have proposed regulating housing purchases by institutional investors — a group of the very largest corporate landlords.

“It’s shameful that we allow private equity firms in Manhattan to become some of the biggest landlords in many of our cities,” Newsom said at his State of the State address in January.

Trump issued an executive order in January to limit institutional investors’ ability to buy single-family homes.

L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez pushed for both housing department studies, saying she hopes the City Council will use the research to make policy that helps first-time homebuyers and mom-and-pop landlords to build generational wealth.

“Mass consolidation and monopolization” of L.A. housing stock puts the first attempt at home ownership out of reach for many young adults and families, she said at Wednesday’s meeting.

More on the October report

The Los Angeles Housing Department found that corporations and other large organizations owned a growing share of L.A.’s housing stock from 2018 to 2023.

The biggest change in ownership was the large organizations’ share of two- to four-unit buildings in the city, which increased by 29% over the six years studied. The report raised concerns that these organizations are targeting relatively small buildings that are often associated with small landlords.

When it comes to single family-homes, more than 1-in-5 properties was found to be sold to an organization and not an individual buyer over the six years studied.

The department also noted that there is some evidence behind concerns that “large corporate landlords may be associated with more evictions, more habitability violations, and overall higher levels of housing insecurity for renters.”

The report listed three companies that each agreed to pay out millions of dollars in recent years after facing allegations of unlawful practices as landlords: K3 Holdings, Wedgewood Homes and Invitation Homes.

According to the housing department report, K3 Holdings ranks as having the fastest-growing inventory of properties over the six-year period. The company agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a lawsuit in 2023 that alleged they illegally targeted long-term Latino residents for displacement from properties in Koreatown and Highland Park.

Wedgewood Homes takes the top spot in flipped L.A. properties, the study found. That company agreed to pay $3.5 million in 2021 after allegations that the company unlawfully evicted and harassed tenants in order to quickly resell homes.

The housing department found Wedgewood Homes sold nearly 400 homes in the six-year period of its study. The company resold 81% of those homes in less than a year at an average price increase of 33%, the study found.

Invitation Homes is one of the largest owners of single-family rentals in the U.S., the report said, and the company agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations of illegal rent increases for around 1,900 California homes.

K3 Holdings and Wedgewood Homes have previously denied any allegations of wrongdoing, and court documents show Invitation Homes Inc. did not admit or deny liability in the lawsuit against the company.

LAist reached out to all three companies about the report’s findings. They did not immediately provide additional comments.

Other council members weigh in

At the Wednesday meeting, council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he appreciated the effort going toward solving this issue.

“When I first took office [in 2015], eight out of every 10 residential units that went up for sale were bought by a corporation,” he said about the area in South L.A. where District 8, 9 and 15 meet.

Harris-Dawson said because the corporations were buying up properties, working people were squeezed out of the housing market in the once-affordable area.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez also criticized corporations and large investors.

“Homes that should be places where people put down roots, raise their kids and build generational wealth are increasingly treated like commodities in an investment portfolio,” Hernandez said.

Councilmember John Lee welcomed the study, but said he blames the consolidation on the council’s own policies that make it harder to be a property owner.

“I don’t even know if we need a study,” he said. “I think we understand why there’s more corporatization of ownership in our city. It’s the over restrictive policies of this council.”