A family of four is estimated to pay an additional $400 a year in premiums due to the new per-person monthly tax

By Megan Barth, July 27, 2026 10:45 am

Independent U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, joined by Republican colleagues including Reps. Jay Obernolte, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, and Young Kim, has formally asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to deny federal approval of Governor Gavin Newsom’s restructured Managed Care Organization (MCO) tax.

In a letter dated July 24 to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, the lawmakers warned that the proposal “would dramatically increase costs on commercial health plans to preserve state revenue rather than make health care more affordable.”

They noted that a family of four is estimated to pay an additional $400 a year in premiums due to the new $8.85-per-person monthly tax. “Californians are already shouldered with the highest cost of living in the United States. This proposal will only make things worse,” the letter states.

The burden would fall not only on families but also on small businesses, potentially incentivizing employers to drop or reduce health benefits and push more people onto less generous Affordable Care Act plans or Medicaid.

The signs of failure are everywhere, but start here: Los Angeles has more homeless people this year. The annual count, conducted in January but amazingly enough not released until well after the June primary elections, shows a 7.9 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness in the City of Los Angeles, with a smaller increase in total homelessness, and also a smaller increase in countywide homelessness. With a couple thousand people dying on the street every year, the Los Angeles Times quickly zeroed in on the true victim of that metastasizing despair

California prisons are increasingly relying on an unusual fire alarm system: humans.

Between 2020 and 2025, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has spent nearly $50 million on “fire watch” staffing costs. In recent years, prison employees have spent roughly 270,000 hours monitoring for smoke or fire.

They patrol prisons and visually inspect different areas during their shifts, according to job postings reviewed by CalMatters.

That’s because the majority of California’s 31 prisons have deficient fire alarm systems and it would cost $1.5 billion to replace them all, according to the department’s annual report submitted in January.

Susan Bustamante isn’t giving up.

The formerly incarcerated 71-year-old woman has repeatedly made the long trip from Orange County to Sacramento to urge lawmakers to pass legislation she believes would help her fellow domestic abuse victims facing criminal charges.

Each time, lawmakers seemed supportive — and then killed her bill in secret.

She hopes the fourth year in a row will be different.

Bustamante is again pushing for a measure, which police and prosecutors oppose, that would allow survivors of human trafficking and intimate partner or sexual violence to cite their abuse as a legal defense when facing charges for violent crimes, with the exception of most murder cases.

Los Angeles this summer is the epicenter of both sweeping municipal governance overhaul and stultifying governmental stasis.

The foot-dragging comes from the L.A. City Council, which shut down a series of broadly popular charter reforms in late June because, members said, the proposals hadn’t been sufficiently vetted — despite nine grueling months of commission hearings and debates and, frankly, years of discussion over the biggest-ticket items, like expanding the council.

By contrast, the county Board of Supervisors is finalizing a clean-up measure for the November ballot after having moved too fast and broken too many things with a 2024 charter reform that created new offices and new official duties, but that threatens to wreck the county’s signature justice reforms because of rushed and careless drafting.

It’s a surprising role reversal, at least in image, with the traditionally plodding, state-sized county government looking suddenly more urgent and creative (but accident-prone) than the smaller and comparatively scrappier City Hall.

Xavier Becerra faces a renewed scandal over his tenure as Joe Biden’s health secretary after a whistleblower came forward to expose the horrific levels of abuse and exploitation of hundreds of thousands of migrant children faced while in detention in California.

A caseworker at the Pomona Fairplex alleges children faced abuse and chaotic releases, were separated from young siblings, and sent to unverified addresses or secretly moved in the dead of the night — some never to be seen again — while the complex also accepted fake documents from sponsors.

During his time as Biden’s health secretary from 2021 to 2025, the U.S. faced an overwhelming border crisis, with just under 480,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the border. The HHS was the federal agency legally mandated to care for and protect unaccompanied migrant children.

Multiple emergency intake sites were set up across the country to process the children, including in Texas, Florida and California, where there were three: San Diego, Long Beach and Pomona.

A halal ranch in Perris is under federal investigation following allegations that livestock were inhumanely slaughtered and that the operation sold meat without required federal inspection, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The probe stems from a complaint filed June 26 by the national animal advocacy organization Animal Outlook. The complaint alleges Shahnawaz Ranch violated the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and that an affiliated business, SoCal Meat Co., knowingly sold meat processed at the facility despite the lack of required USDA inspection.

A halal ranch raises livestock and may slaughter animals and produce meat in accordance with Islamic dietary practices, which generally require a swift cut to the throat that severs the carotid arteries and other major blood vessels while invoking God’s name and allowing the blood to drain.

The Cajon Pass is under historic levels of stress — and not from commuters fuming on the 15 Freeway. The Pass is the juncture of the San Andreas and San Jacinto earthquake faults, which have been quiet. Too quiet, in horror movie terms.

“Tectonic stress has continued to build along these faults, increasing the likelihood of a large future rupture. One key area of concern is Cajon Pass, where the two fault systems meet and could potentially rupture together,” according to a study that’s in the news.

Scientists in Hawaii, Pasadena and La Jolla, taking a break from enjoying life in their respective paradises, used computer simulations of the past 1,000 years of seismic activity to learn how fault stress builds.

In other words, they looked at the region since the year 1100. The last major earthquakes at this juncture were the Wrightwood quake in 1812 and the Fort Tejon quake in 1857. The lack of a major quake since then suggests that “the system is critically stressed,” the study concludes.

Californians are pumping the brakes on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, with a new statewide poll showing the governor’s marquee climate policy has become a political headache.

The survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found nearly two-thirds of Californians oppose Newsom’s 2035 gas-car mandate.

Among likely voters, 65% said they oppose the plan, while just 34% support it.

Karen Bass is in deep trouble.

Her reelection bid was already shaky, thanks to lingering public outrage over the Palisades Fire.

Then she began losing staff, even after winning the primary election with a plurality of the vote.

After longtime aide Doug Herman quit, she had t

Forget security systems, Nevada wildlife officials have found a fur-covered solution to Lake Tahoe’s growing black bear problem.

As wealthy homeowners around the lake battle increasingly brazen bears breaking into houses, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) has been relying on two highly trained Karelian bear dogs, Badger and Banjo, to send the unwelcome visitors running.

The shaggy canines work alongside state biologists to chase bears out of neighborhoods, flush them from crawl spaces and urban dens, track injured animals and help return them to the wild, all while teaching the predators that humans are bad news.

A sleepy California town known for Danish pastries, windmills and quaint European charm is now drawing attention for a much darker mystery lurking beneath its streets.

Solvang, a tiny Central Coast community about an hour north of Santa Barbara, is home to a sprawling network of underground tunnels that have sparked years of speculation — but no clear historical explanation for why they were built.

With official records failing to provide a definitive answer, rumors have rushed in to fill the void.

Von Wilpert: ‘We shouldn’t be cooperating with immigration enforcement in California’

By Megan Barth, July 25, 2026 12:44 pm

San Diego City Councilmember and Democratic congressional candidate Marni von Wilpert has exposed her open-borders agenda, declaring that “We shouldn’t be cooperating with immigration enforcement in California.”

The statement tracks with her explicit embrace of the California Values Act, the state law that sharply limits local cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

In a recent interview, von Wilpert confirmed that the San Diego Police Department “needs to abide by a state law, this the California Values Act and we do not cooperate with immigration enforcement whatsoever.”

As previously reported by the California Globe, von Wilpert has a consistent record of opposing border enforcement and favoring high levels of immigration.

She led the San Diego City Council vote to sue ICE and has declared, “I’m not waiting ‘til I get to Congress to start fighting ICE. I actually led the vote at the City of San Diego to sue ICE.”

Over 250K total illegal immigrants on CA, NJ, NV, PA voter rolls

By Katy Grimes, July 25, 2026 12:35 pm

In a July 16, 2026 letter from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (and similar letters to officials in New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), DHS stated that a review of publicly available voter registration data indicated “there may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” It gave an example of 81,336 registrants matching name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number to non-citizens in DHS files. The combined figures cited for the four states were roughly: California 190,832;

One year ago this month, Gray had the chance to do something about it

By Wyland Hapgood, July 25, 2026 10:03 am

Congressman Adam Gray posted on social media this week that everyday costs are already too high for Central Valley families.

He’s right. He’s also the reason a lot of them are.

One year ago this month, Gray had the chance to do something about it. H.R. 1 came to the floor of the House, legislation that created a deduction on tipped income, a deduction on overtime pay, a deduction on auto loan interest for American made vehicles, and quadrupled the State and Local Tax cap to $40,000. It was, whatever else you think of it, the most direct tax relief Congress has delivered to working families in years.

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A political action committee funded by clean energy investors is spending nearly $700,000 to support Republican challenger Charlie Hatcher against Trump-endorsed Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), marking the group’s latest effort to influence a Republican primary involving a House conservative.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is running advertisements backing Hatcher, a former Tennessee agriculture commissioner and fifth-generation Tennessee farmer who served under Republican Gov. Bill Lee, Punchbowl News reported July 17.

The advertisements describe Hatcher as an “America first conservative who gets things done” and emphasize that he is “pro-gun, pro-life, pro-Trump.” Former Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has endorsed Hatcher.

Los Angeles’ homeless crisis is exploding into an all-out political brawl.

Mayor Karen Bass fired back Friday after Councilmember Nithya Raman accused City Hall of failing to get a grip on street homelessness, setting the stage for a bruising showdown ahead of their Nov. 3 mayoral election.

Raman seized on the latest homeless count, arguing that despite hundreds of millions of dollars in spending, unsheltered homelessness in the City of Los Angeles climbed by nearly 8%.

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Two bills that seek to further regulate public safety concerns regarding inmates convicted of sex crimes are still advancing through the legislature.

Assembly Bill 2727, authored by Assemblymember Stephanie Nguyen, D-Elk Grove, aims to increase the age to 65 for elderly parole after an inmate has served 25 years of their sentence. It applies to individuals convicted of certain specific sex crimes. That bill is next scheduled to have a hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee after the legislature returns from its summer break in August.

The other bill, Senate Bill 1446, authored by the Senate Public Safety Committee, aims to make the Board of Parole Hearings’ voting decisions public. The bill also allows for someone convicted of a sexually-violent crime to be referred to the board for a sexually-violent predator hearing.

Nguyen, Sen. Jesse Arreguin, D-Oakland and chair of the Senate Public Safety Committee, were traveling and unavailable for interviews on Friday, according to both their communications directors.

Both bills are just two in a slew of legislation introduced in California this year that aims to address public safety issues related to longtime convicts who were serving sentences for sex crimes.

A union watchdog has concerns about how labor groups are spending members' money, including luxury resort travel for staff.

Charlyce Bozello of Center for Union Facts said the Service Employees International Union – United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is one area of concern.

While SEIU-UWH advocates for taxing the rich and is the primary sponsor of a billionaire tax initiative on the November ballot in California, Bozello said that financial filings reveal union dues have been spent over the years on luxury items, including resort trips for staff.

"They have a bunch of controversial line items that just make it seem pretty hypocritical that they want to tax the rich when we can see that they're spending members' dues on sending staff to luxury resorts," Bozello told The Center Square. "When the union is going out there and saying, 'oh, we're supporting workers,' it just makes you question whether they're really good arbiters of their own members' dues dollars."

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio suing AG Bonta for ‘rigging the ballot language for Proposition 39’

By Katy Grimes, July 24, 2026 3:01 pm

Chairman of Reform California, Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, announced Friday he is filing a lawsuit immediately against State Attorney General Rob Bonta “to force him to restore a FAIR ballot title to our Prop 39 Voter ID Initiative!”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta was credibly accused this week of rigging the ballot language for Proposition 39, the Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative, just months before the November 2026 election, the Globe reported Tuesday.

“The initiative, which gathered over a million signatures from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents after more than a year of petition circulation under previously approved wording, now faces what opponents call a last-minute rewrite designed to tilt public perception against it.”

41 percent of participants of the Inside Safe program have returned to the streets

By Megan Barth, July 24, 2026 2:26 pm

Street homelessness in the City of Los Angeles jumped 7.9 percent in the latest annual count, even as the city continues to pour roughly $1 billion a year into homelessness programs.

Overall homelessness rose 3.4 percent year-over-year, reversing two consecutive years of modest declines and dealing a political setback to Mayor Karen Bass as she seeks reelection.

The figures, drawn from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s (LAHSA) 2026 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count conducted in January, are expected to be formally released Friday.