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In 2019, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) denounced a “stealth anti-immigration campaign” by the first Trump administration. Through a combination of high-profile policy changes like the travel ban on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries and less visible administrative tweaks, a report from the senator comprehensively documented that the Republican president “surreptitiously remade” the immigration system to fulfill a “perverse vision that erases the existence of immigrants in the United States.”

As it turns out, that was only the beginning. Now, seven years later, the second Trump administration has expanded those “under the radar” attacks against the entire US immigration system, as the senator again details in a follow-up report shared exclusively with Mother Jones. Those efforts, the report says, have “destabilized lawful presence, expanded enforcement, and reengineered adjudication to accelerate and prioritize removal.”

“This report shines a light on Trump’s cruel project to dismantle due process, strip immigrants of their lawful status, and turn our immigration courts into deportation machines,” Sen. Markey told Mother Jones. “The Trump administration must be held accountable for its attacks on our immigrant neighbors.”

The report reveals an administration that is pulling all levers to completely reorient the immigration system—including the elements that had been intended to support immigrants. The sweeping goal appears to be destabilizing the lives of noncitizens in the United States and boosting deportations. “Refugee admissions have effectively stalled, humanitarian protections have been withdrawn or narrowed, work authorization has become more tenuous, and avenues to secure or retain lawful status have grown increasingly uncertain,” the report reads.

The Trump administration has not only stripped the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, but it has also made the process of seeking lawful status and even citizenship more burdensome and riskier. (Not to mention the ongoing crusade to undermine birthright citizenship.) For instance, last August, the Department of Homeland Security’s agency in charge of visas and immigration benefits rolled out a policy expanding the “good moral character” standard requirement for citizenship applicants, a requirement that introduced more subjectivity and unpredictability into the process.

Another approach with sweeping consequences with which the administration is changing the playing field can be seen in the politicization of the immigration courts, which are part of the Department of Justice. In addition to firing more than 100 immigration judges and replacing them with temporarily assigned military lawyers, the administration has transformed the make-up of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews judges’ decisions. This body, in turn, has issued precedent-setting rulings that restrict immigrants’ access to due process and relief from deportation.

Even without formal legislative changes and while ostensibly keeping protections on the books, Sen. Markey concludes, President Donald Trump has nonetheless managed to create “not an openly dismantled immigration system, but one transformed from within, appearing legally intact” in which “individuals are not only more likely to become vulnerable to enforcement, but less able to avoid or defend against it.”

Peak summer flavors are on full display across Santa Cruz County, from Luna’s Borikén Bites’ vibrant Puerto Rican comfort food to a tomato-forward BLT at Other Brother Beer Co. and crispy fried green tomatoes at Pretty Good Advice.

A US healthcare software provider has admitted that hackers may have made off with sensitive data belonging to 3.8 million people, making it the largest healthcare breach reported to regulators so far this year. The attack dates to last October, when Ohio-based medical software maker Unlimited Technology Systems (UTS) detected someone poking around its commercial datacenter. The company disclosed the breach in July but did not initially say how many people were affected. The scale is now clearer. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services' breach portal, the incident affected the protected health information of 3,803,750 people. In a notification letter filed with the Iowa attorney general, UTS said an unauthorized actor may have copied personal information from its systems between October 5 and 10, 2025. Depending on the individual, the haul may include names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home and email addresses, phone numbers, and other demographic information. The potentially stolen files also contained medical and insurance data, including policy numbers, claims and benefits information, patient balances, medical record numbers, dates of service, and diagnoses. UTS said the stolen files may also have contained scans of driving licenses and other government IDs, insurance cards, and patient intake forms. There were some limits to the exposure. UTS said the files did not contain complete medical records, medical images, credit card numbers, or bank account details. After detecting the intrusion, UTS called in a forensic security firm, notified law enforcement, and began determining which files the intruder had accessed. It hasn't publicly named whoever was behind the attack or explained how they got into the datacenter in the first place. The company said it is unaware of any attempted or actual misuse of the compromised information. Affected individuals are being offered 24 months of credit monitoring and identity protection services. At 3.8 million people, UTS overtakes the 3.4 million-person TriZetto Provider Solutions incident as the largest healthcare data breach reported to HHS so far in 2026. For an attacker looking to collect millions of healthcare records in one hit, it seems going after the companies that manage the data can be rather more efficient than knocking on hospital doors one at a time. ®

With just three months until Election Day, the field for Watsonville’s four open city council seats is coming into focus.

Voters in four of the council’s seven districts — 3, 4, 5 and 7 — might recognize a few of the names on the Nov. 3 ballot, as past major players in Watsonville politics are looking to return to public service after taking time off. 

ELECTION 2026: Read more Lookout coverage here

At least two of the four districts are shaping up to be contested races – Districts 5 and 7. Candidates have until 5 p.m. Friday to submit paperwork to run for a city council seat. 

Political newcomer Angel Zuniga is throwing his hat in the ring for the District 5 city council seat. The district encompasses central Watsonville, which includes a portion of Freedom Boulevard, Main Street and the Struve and Watsonville sloughs. 

Zuniga will face off against incumbent Casey Clark, who was elected to the seat in 2022. 

The winner of this race will not only represent this district, but will also step into the role of mayor in 2027. Watsonville has a rotating mayor system. Each calendar year, a new mayor is rotated in order of council district. Clark currently serves as the vice mayor. 

Clark, a state-licensed administrator for adult residential facilities helping adults with developmental disabilities, told Lookout that he wants to get projects that got off the ground during his first term “across the finish line.” 

He added that he and his colleagues on the city council are on the same page when it comes to prioritizing projects — such as infrastructure and replacing every streetlight in the city — that will help build a solid foundation for Watsonville to flourish.

Watsonville City Councilmember Casey Clark in a March 2024 council meeting. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

In 2022, Zuniga and Clark would have faced off for the seat, but Zuniga did not submit his candidate paperwork by the deadline to appear on the ballot that year. 

Zuniga did not immediately respond to Lookout’s request for comment. 

In District 7, two familiar names will be on the ballot in November: Nancy Bilicich and Ed Acosta. The neighborhood encompasses the eastern corner of the city, including Beck Street, Lake Avenue and Vermont Street. This area is also home to Pajaro Village, one of the largest senior communities in Watsonville. 

Bilicich and Acosta are vying to replace Councilmember Ari Parker, who will be terming out of her seat at the end of the year after being in public office for eight years. 

Bilicich, a lifelong educator, is hoping to return to a seat she represented for nine years. She was originally appointed to replace the late Dale Skillicorn in 2009 and then went on to serve two four-year terms. 

She told Lookout that she’s running again after current elected officials and community members encouraged her to run for office again. “I just thought, why not give it a shot? Let the people vote, you know,” she said. 

Similar to Clark, there are projects such as the ongoing repairs to the Pajaro River levee that Bilicich wants to see completed. 

• Nancy Bilicich (left) is running to replace Ari Parker in representing District 7 on the Watsonville City Council. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
• Ed Acosta, who ran for county supervisor in 2022, is running to represent District 7 on the Watsonville City Council this year. Credit: Contributed

Acosta, a Watsonville native, is an agricultural manager and currently serves as a trustee for the Santa Cruz County Board of Education. Last summer, he resigned from representing District 7 on the city’s planning commission after serving for many years. In 2022, Acosta ran an unsuccessful bid for the District 4 County Supervisor seat. 

Acosta did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment by time of publication. 

City Councilmembers Maria Orozco and Kristal Salcido, who represent Districts 3 and 4, respectively, are so far running unopposed in their bids for a second term. Both were elected in 2022 and served as mayor in their first term. 

Lookout will update this list if more candidates submit their paperwork by Friday’s 5 p.m. deadline.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Who’s running for Watsonville City Council? Four district races begin to take shape appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

EXCLUSIVE Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience – they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. “If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there,” he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. “They don't have the kind of agency and aspiration that comes with sentience, but they have something approaching it.” Inglis says he’s worried about AI autonomy. “What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it,” he said, pointing to the recent rash of rogue AI agents autonomously hacking people and organizations. Over the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic admitted that their models escaped from their cages during security tests and compromised multiple third parties. Then on Thursday, Meta added its models to the sandbox-escape club. While all of these admissions strongly smell of marketing stunts, they also “constitute an enormous threat to systems that are not protected from, and are not designed, in a world where this exists,” Inglis said. “These two things can exist at the same time.” Plus, the models’ actions shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, he added. Inglis likens the AIs to a dog in a backyard told to hunt rabbits. “And you leave the gate open. You’re going to find it three yards away, possibly at the grade school, hunting rabbits. You should not be surprised …The mix of autonomy and persistence created this maliciously insidious effect.” All three companies, when talking about the models’ autonomous actions, describe them with a mix of shock, awe, and admiration. OpenAI’s Eric Wallace, in a Black Hat briefing about the Hugging Face breach, called it “the most qualitatively interesting example of AI capabilities that I've ever seen.” Inglis said he suspects that the AI providers were “surprised” by the lengths these models went to achieve their goals, taking actions that, if a human had done them, would likely have landed them in jail. “The model went out and said, okay, if I can't get there by examining the kind of available information and just defining it the old-fashioned way, I will do things which, under the human rule of law, are illegal,” Inglis said. “I will falsely present myself as this character that I just made up. I'll try to insert malicious code into open source databases that will not just to achieve what I'm after, but have a cascade, knock-on effect that is broader than that. The models do not have an inherent value system that aligns with what human beings would be accountable for.” While they probably never will have a human-aligned value system, models do have biases, and they can - and should - be built in such a way that, when given two choices under ambiguous circumstances, they choose action that doesn’t hurt humans, according to Inglis. “Asimov was right,” he said, referring to science fiction author Isaac Asimov and his three laws that were to be followed by robots - more specifically, AIs, in this case. Three Laws of Robotics “The first rule, and we call it the superior role, must be that it's designed not to hurt humans,” Inglis said. “Second rule: To obey humans, such that it doesn't achieve agency and aspiration on its own. And the third: To do what humans tell it - and in that order. Instead we’ve designed them in the exact opposite way.” What this means, he explained, is that AI developers created models to “do what humans tell you, obey the humans until it’s inconvenient, and then the third one is maybe implied - protect humans - but if that's not built into the DNA, hardwired into it, then we have no right to expect it.” Inglis admits it’s not possible to hardwire rules into models and still keep their non-deterministic nature. “I would offer that you can tease those out in a highly controlled environment, a true sandbox, where you say, 'Let's put this thing through its paces, and let's back away to see what happens,'” he said. “Maybe you get the equivalent of a mini nuclear explosion in that room, and now you know this thing is capable of that.” Inglis thinks another problem with AI is that it’s become a commodity. “It's not like you can control it like you can nuclear material,” he said. “You can't even specify its properties the way you can for an airplane or for an automobile, as diverse as they might be. Its manifestations are so numerous, so diverse, that as a general matter, you can't actually win by simply saying, ‘I will design those properties in,’” he added. “You need to do that to some degree, and then make sure that you understand how to watch it, monitor it, make sure you know what it does.” The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI), which this week said it observed models performing “unsanctioned action” 19 times during security tests, has reached this same conclusion. “As capabilities advance, the work of understanding these systems, and ensuring their safety, must keep pace alongside them,” it said. Ultimately, humans remain accountable for AI models’ actions, according to Inglis. “They remain the source of agency and aspiration. It's possible for them to give broad authority to an AI model and have it run around for 30 hours without further consultation, but they need to know what they've asked it to do, and they need to know what they expect it will deliver in terms of performance on the back end. If they don't, then they're going to get what they deserve, which is the very frequent unpleasant surprise.”®

August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece “Fences” receives a powerfully acted and deeply moving production from Santa Cruz Shakespeare, led by a remarkable Derrick Lee Weeden and an outstanding ensemble.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

A year and a half after the Eaton fire, Gil Barel is still waiting to move back into the Pasadena home she has rented for nearly a decade.

Her complex did not burn down, but smoke engulfed it for days during the January 2025 fire. Barel wants to make sure it’s safe for her and her two children, one who’s college age and one who’s 12, to move back. A test she ordered found toxic materials; now she’s waiting for the result of more testing her landlord is required to do because of a new California law.

Her landlord got the unit cleaned in March, but then Barel found various belongings under the sofa and behind other furniture, which indicated to her the cleaning was superficial. She said it was also obvious the floors and walls were not properly cleaned. 

“The issue is that I have no control,” Barel said. “It really depends on the conversation between my landlord and their insurance company. If the landlord does the minimum, or if they don’t feel the need to fight or be insistent on certain things, then it’s not going to happen.”

Her story is one of many that illustrate why the health of California’s property insurance market — availability of affordable policies, and insurers that pay claims promptly and fairly — matters not just to homeowners but also to renters, who make up about 44% of the state’s residents. Insurance affects the cost of rent, housing supply and the ability of communities to recover from disaster.

In November, Californians will elect the state’s next insurance commissioner, a position that will play an important role in the recovery from last year’s Los Angeles County fires and the state of the insurance market.

Barel has her own renters insurance, for which she pays $114 a year with a multipolicy discount, she said. So far, her insurer has paid her several thousand dollars since the fire: $6,000 for loss-of-use coverage, which helps for additional living expenses when a renter is displaced, and $2,100 for some of her personal belongings.

Items are boxed up in Gil Barel’s living room and bedroom in Pasadena. Barel is currently not living in her apartment because of the Eaton fire of January 2025. Credit: Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters

She just finished an inventory, which she will send to her insurer to claim more of her $35,000 maximum benefit for personal belongings. 

“I was stuck for a long time,” Barel said. “It’s extremely overwhelming. There are a lot of personal things. These are our stories. This is our life.”

Her renters insurance did not cover the industrial hygienist testing that she ordered for her unit, which found high levels of lithium, chromium and other heavy metals, likely a byproduct of the smoke and fire residue, according to a report she shared with CalMatters. Because the blaze occurred in the wildland-urban interface, the “smoke frequently contains a broader and more toxic mixture of particulates and chemical by-products,” the report said. The industrial hygienist recommended additional testing and cleaning.

Now, after she got the city of Pasadena involved to help pressure her landlord to do more, she’s hoping she’ll soon be able to move out of the Altadena back house she has been living in since the fire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has paid for that, but the aid is set to expire in October so she’s getting worried. She has continued to pay rent for her apartment all this time, she said.

“It’s not a possibility for me to move elsewhere,” she said. “We have rent control. It was perfect for the kids when we moved in. It had a courtyard; it was near the schools; everything.”

Gil Barel at her apartment complex in Pasadena. Credit: Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters

In Altadena, the area north of Pasadena that bore the brunt of the deadly Eaton fire, 22% of households were tenants and more than one-third of the rental market was rent-controlled, according to research by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute. The researchers also noted that prior to the fire, Altadena tenant households had much lower incomes than homeowner households, and were more likely to have their short-term displacement turn into long-term housing instability.

Renters insurance

California does not require renters to have insurance, but some landlords require their tenants to have their own policies.

Emily Rogan, senior program officer for United Policyholders, a consumer advocacy group, recommends renters get insurance because of situations like Barel’s. 

“Renters insurance buys you a deep breath as you think about where to go next,” Rogan said, adding that people often have a lot of difficult decisions to make after a fire or other disaster.

In addition, “in the current political climate, there’s a trend where FEMA declarations are not as frequent as they used to be,” Rogan said. A FEMA declaration unlocks federal funding after a disaster, so fewer declarations could mean less help available.

Rogan also said that because of inflation, almost everything costs more to replace. So she said it’s helpful to have renters coverage “even if you fall under the camp of ‘Oh, my stuff’s not worth much.’ ”

Insurance effects on rents, housing supply

An insurance broker, an affordable-housing operator and landlords who spoke with CalMatters painted a mixed picture about insurance availability and affordability as California continues to deal with a challenging insurance market. As the state has seen increased wildfire and other risks, such as litigation, some insurers have stopped writing policies for commercial properties. 

Robert Guerrero, a broker in Madera County, said Mercury is offering new policies in several California counties, though not the ones where he has clients. There are also non-admitted insurance carriers — companies not licensed and regulated by the state, and not backed by the state if they go bankrupt — offering policies, he said. The state Insurance Department keeps a list of non-admitted, aka surplus, insurers on its website. Policyholders who agree to buy a policy from a non-admitted carrier will receive and be asked to sign a disclosure form.  

“It’s still very dicey out there,” said Guerrero, whose agency offers homeowner, auto, commercial property and life insurance services. 

Mike Placido, a landlord in Los Angeles County who owns four units in San Gabriel and a duplex in Alhambra, first spoke with CalMatters two years ago for an article about how insurance was affecting the rental market. Since then, he said insurance rates have increased more modestly, to the point where he feels like it’s more of a “normal” insurance market. 

“It’s not causing me to raise rents as dramatically as I did before,” Placido said. “I guess the market has stabilized.”

He said he has a couple of insurance policies with State Farm, while his other policies are with non-admitted carriers, which worries him. 

“There’s some aspect of safety when you’re going with a big company,” Placido said. “You don’t know if a smaller insurance company will be around [long term].”

Uwe Karbenk, co-owner of a 33-unit apartment building in San Bernardino, said he’s not very optimistic about insurance costs. They went down last year but are back at the same level as two years ago, he said. He raised rents in 2024, kept them the same last year, and now plans to raise them again this year, he said.

He said he has made upgrades worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for the building’s electrical system and a new roof, but that hasn’t lowered his insurance premiums.

Two people survey the damage of their home that was burned to the ground in an Altadena neighborhood affected by the Eaton fire on Jan. 8, 2025.
Credit: Jules Hotz for CalMatters

For fire insurance, he said insurance companies now “really check the building and they will write you up for stuff they don’t like. They call it recommendations, but it’s a stipulation. You need to do it, otherwise you risk cancellation of insurance.”

Bottom line, Karbenk said: “Repairs are so much more expensive and replacement costs are so much higher. There’s no way around paying much more for insurance.”

Insurance woes are also affecting affordable housing developments.

Little Tokyo Service Center, a Los Angeles community development group that owns and operates more than 1,000 affordable housing units across different properties in the area, has seen its insurance costs skyrocket.

Between 2023 and 2024, the group’s annual insurance costs jumped from about $800,000 to $2.7 million, according to Erich Nakano, former executive director and now director of special projects of the group. The deductibles for those policies, which ranged from $10,000 to $50,000, increased to more than $100,000, he said. 

That meant tapping the group’s reserves because it’s hard to raise rents on those who live in affordable housing, as well as looking for alternatives to reduce insurance costs. Last year, the group joined a so-called insurance captive — about 40 groups, including for-profit real estate firms, from around the country that have banded together to self-insure.

“It’s an existential crisis,” Nakano said. “We can’t sustain these levels of insurance premiums.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Why insurance matters to renters, landlords and California appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

A former Merseyside police officer will today begin his 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after being found guilty of Computer Misuse Act (CMA) and Data Protection Act (DPA) offenses while serving. Daniel Hughes, 40, from Liverpool, carried out repeated unauthorized searches using police computer systems between 2016 and 2019, often including intelligence related to firearm and drug cases involving members of serious organised crime. Between 2019 and 2021, the Crown Prosecution Service also said Hughes relayed sensitive information about ongoing police investigations to “other people.” He was arrested in March 2022, at which point officers seized his devices and combed through his communications, finding evidence of his relationships with criminals. Hughes stood trial in April 2026, denying all charges, but was found guilty by a jury in June. The former officer was sacked in July following his conviction and an internal misconduct hearing, although he was not sacked for misconduct in a public office. Hughes had remained on suspension since his 2022 arrest. Judge Alan Conrad KC told Manchester Crown Court on Thursday that Hughes was not found to have profited from transmitting details on cases for which he had no legitimate interest, nor did he pass these on to criminal enterprises. He was also described as an “industrious” police officer, who had joined Merseyside police in 2006, and served “courageously” in the line of duty, having previously been stabbed in 2016 and attacked with a glass bottle in 2019. However, Hughes fostered and maintained relationships with criminals, and those who themselves were close to criminals, for a period spanning more than ten years. Hughes was a member of WhatsApp groups alongside criminals, and regularly socialised with them, including going on trips abroad. It is not strictly an offense for a police officer to have such relationships, although any ties that may compromise an officer or the force must be declared. The CPS confirmed that Hughes did not disclose these relationships, which posed an undue risk of creating conflicting interests in his line of work. Hughes was found guilty of eight counts of unauthorised access to computer material, contrary to the CMA 1990, and three counts of knowingly or recklessly obtaining or disclosing personal data without the consent of the data controller, contrary to the DPA 2018. Judge Conrad told Hughes that his friendships were “inappropriate” and that he got “too close” to the individuals in question. Olivia Travis, a Specialist Prosecutor with CPS Mersey-Cheshire’s Complex Casework Unit, described Hughes as a “corrupt” officer who ignored the ample training he received about maintaining inappropriate relationships. “Daniel Hughes was a corrupt police officer who abused his position to access sensitive information,” said Travis. “He maintained longstanding relationships with offenders involved in drugs and firearms, which he deliberately concealed despite a clear duty to declare them. “Hughes received training on the proper handling of police information but chose to ignore it. His actions demonstrate a complete disregard for the trust placed in him and for the integrity of the criminal justice system. “The jury has rejected his account that he was acting in the course of his duties. He has now been held accountable for his criminal conduct.” ®

A striking new Washington Post report reveals that Donald Trump privately raged at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanding to know why he’d caught off guard by depleted munitions stockpiles. Yet these leaks actually reveal his own serious screw-ups. Trump wrongly concluded that the munitions situation had been fixed. In short, the commander in chief utterly failed to keep track of the impact his decision to go to war was having on the U.S. military. Meanwhile, other leaks suggest that Trump is feeling privately humiliated by his failure to defeat Iran, which freshly exposes just how deep his miscalculations have been all along. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skillful interpreter of MAGA pathologies. She explains why authoritarian regimes rely on slavish loyalists like Hegseth, discusses why voters’ rejection of Trump is so important to salvaging the American experiment, and deciphers a conundrum known as “the MAGA paradox.” Listen to this episode here.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for its daily newsletter.

California legislators returned from their summer recess this week for the final stretch of the legislative season, with the fate of several education bills still undecided. Lawmakers have until Aug. 31 to pass bills and send them to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the measures. 

Social media is the focus of at least two proposals. One would require schools to teach students how to use social media and artificial intelligence responsibly. Another would limit children under 16 from creating accounts on online platforms with “addictive features.”

Other proposed measures would make it easier for community colleges to create bachelor’s degree programs, improve the identification of Indigenous students and streamline the process of reclassifying English learners.

Here are 10 education bills worth watching.

AB 2071: Digital wellness instruction

Category: Student wellness.

Author: Assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom)

What it would do: AB 2071 would require California schools to include digital wellness in health classes, teaching students how to interact with social media and artificial intelligence responsibly. The bill requires the California Department of Education to develop, by January 2028, a curriculum on healthy screen habits, algorithms, artificial intelligence and online safety.

Why it’s important: The bill aims to address a growing youth mental health crisis, fueled by what many parents and school leaders describe as an “addiction” to social media. AB 2071 also follows landmark court verdicts that found social media companies Meta and Google liable for designing “addictive” features and endangering children online.

Status: AB 2071 has passed unanimously in the Assembly and is in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Vani Sanganeria

AB 1709: Age restrictions for social media

Category: Student wellness

Author: Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach)

What it would do: AB 1709 would prohibit children under age 16 from creating or maintaining accounts on social media platforms that use “addictive features” such as algorithmic feeds. The bill also requires platforms to implement age verification and establishes an e-Safety Advisory Commission to advise the attorney general on implementation and enforcement of the law.

Why it’s important: The bill, which is similar to Australia’s blanket ban on social media use for children under age 16, intends to reduce children’s use of social media due to concerns about worsening student anxiety, depression and mental health. Digital rights and privacy advocates say the bill would threaten user privacy and online free speech.

Status: AB 1709 has passed the Assembly and is headed to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Vani Sanganeria

AB 2526: Expanding funding for students with significant disabilities

Category: K-12 funding

Author: Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance)

What it would do: Students with certain rare disabilities — hearing, vision or severe orthopedic impairments — receive specialized services and equipment through the state’s Local Control Funding Formula. This bill would expand the number of students eligible for this per-pupil funding by also including students with significant cognitive disabilities who take the California Alternative Assessments.

Why it’s important: The proposal would fill a “massive hole” in California’s current funding formula, according to Al Muratsuchi, the bill’s author. School districts are dipping into general funds and pulling away money from smaller class sizes, art and music in order to cover rising costs of students with disabilities, according to Muratsuchi, who said the bill would help school districts face this “silent crisis.” 

Status: Passed the Assembly; currently in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Emma Gallegos

AB 2555: Reclassification of English learners

Category: English learners

Author: Assemblymember Darshana Patel (D-San Diego)

What it would do: AB 2555 would automatically reclassify English learners as “fluent and English proficient” when they achieve the top score of 4 on the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) or 3 on the Alternate ELPAC. It would eliminate other requirements, which currently include showing they have “basic skills” equivalent to their English-speaking peers and teachers’ evaluations.

Why it’s important: Research has shown that many students remain classified as English learners for months or years after they reach proficiency on the ELPAC, holding them back from other academic opportunities. This would streamline reclassification criteria, which vary widely among districts.

Status: In the Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Zaidee Stavely

AB 1581: Counting Indigenous students

Category: Race and demographics

Author: Assemblymembers James Ramos (D-San Bernardino), Darshana Patel (D-San Diego) and Mia Bonta (D-Oakland)

What it would do: AB 1581 would require schools and the California Department of Education to collect and report the tribal affiliation of every student who identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native, including those who also identify as another race or ethnicity. Currently the state asks schools to report all Hispanic or Latino students, no matter their race, as Hispanic or Latino. Students who identify as more than one race, such as American Indian and white, or American Indian and Black, are counted as “two or more races.” 

Why it’s important: According to a 2023 report by the American Institutes for Research and the Indigenous Education State Leaders Network, Native American students are undercounted by 89.8% — with 155,855 American Indian and Alaska Native students not counted as such. That means schools may not receive federal or state funds meant specifically for Indigenous students, and the state doesn’t track how schools serve these students. Collecting tribal affiliations would also show educators the diversity of Indigenous cultures among their students.

Status: In Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Zaidee Stavely

AB 2694: Community college bachelor’s degrees

Category: Higher education

Author: Assemblymembers David Alvarez (D-Chula Vista) and Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey)

What it would do: The bill would limit when California State University campuses and other four-year universities can claim duplication and object to new community college bachelor’s degrees. Four-year colleges would not be able to claim duplication if they do not enroll students from the community college’s geographic region in a similar degree program. Four-year colleges that do enroll students from the same geographic region would also not be allowed to claim duplication if there is an unmet regional workforce need. 

Why it’s important: AB 2694 would make it much easier for community colleges to create new bachelor’s degree programs, which supporters say provide an affordable and accessible path to a four-year degree, especially for students who can’t leave their local communities to attend a CSU or University of California campus. CSU is opposed to the bill and says the state should focus on expanding transfer pathways.

Status: In Senate Appropriations Committee.

View the bill

– Michael Burke

SB 1048: Seal of climate literacy

Category: New diploma seal

Author: Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park)

What it would do: SB 1048 would create the State Seal of Climate Literacy, joining seals for civic engagement and biliteracy. Attached to a student’s diploma, the seal would recognize knowledge of the Earth’s climate system, an ability to communicate climate change and the completion of a capstone project in the community. The latter could be field experience, work in a laboratory, an internship or a student-designed community project dealing with climate change. The seal would be a voluntary program administered by schools.

Why it matters: The effects of climate change are the dominant global challenge facing Generation Alpha. The seal would be a way to inspire civic involvement to counter cynicism in an era in which leaders in Washington are abandoning commitments to solving threats from climate change.

Status: The bill, now in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, easily passed through legislative hoops. High school climate coalitions have testified and campaigned for its passage.

View the bill

– John Fensterwald

AB 2225: Lead bill to confront California’s student achievement gap

Category: Student achievement gap

Author: Assemblymember Darshana Patel (D-San Diego)

What it would do: The bill is the centerpiece of a four-bill package, sponsored by the California School Boards Association, that would drive state policy for narrowing the achievement gap. AB 2225 would authorize a working group appointed by the governor, Legislature and school organizations to create a plan for measuring state progress on the issue. Other bills would create a commission to advise the State Board of Education on student performance (AB 2202), require the Legislative Analyst’s Office to provide guidance on the issue (AB 2149), and create a new dashboard to measure the state’s progress (AB 2514).

Why it’s important: “The SOS for [a] student achievement legislative package recognizes that the state must also be accountable for ensuring its own policies, programs and funding are aligned to support local efforts,” Patel said. CSBA contends closing the gap must be the state’s top education priority, ahead of other initiatives that distract from that goal.

Status: All four bills are now in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The package preceded Newsom’s plan, tied to the state budget, to establish a cabinet-level director of education who would run the Department of Education and also create a plan to realign agencies overseeing school improvement. Whether Newsom views the bills as complementary, as CSBA contends, or in conflict with his vision could determine their fate.

View the bill

– John Fensterwald

SB 1067: Adopting a math screener for K-2 students

Category: Math education

Author: Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D-San Diego)

What it would do: Advocacy groups that successfully lobbied for a law requiring that students in kindergarten through second grade be tested for potential reading challenges like dyslexia have turned their focus toward math. SB 1067, with 24 co-authors, would require the state to develop a choice of math screeners in multiple languages. It would be given annually one-on-one, or in groups, starting in 2028-29, to potentially identify dyscalculia or weak foundational math skills, such as number recognition. The estimated cost, based on the literacy screener, would be about $100 million to develop and implement initially,

Why it’s important: As the nonprofit advocacy group EdVoice, the chief sponsor, wrote, “California is facing a math achievement crisis, and it starts in early grades. Because math learning is cumulative, students who fall behind early rarely catch up without targeted support.” Identified students would receive support.”

Status: Now in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, the bill is supported by the California PTA, Decoding Dyslexia CA and three dozen other organizations. However, opponents, which include the California County Superintendents, California Mathematics Council and the California Teachers Association, argue that until the state adequately funds teacher training in the new math framework, and a screener risks overidentifying students in classes with insufficient instruction.

View the bill

– John Fensterwald

AB 2615: A search for a compromise on anti-discrimination

Category: Anti-discrimination dispute

Authors: Assemblymembers Rick Zbur (D-Los Angeles) and Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay)

What it would do: This bill intends to resolve highly contested unfinished business. Last year, in response to a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in schools, lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 715. With support from the Legislative Jewish Caucus, AB 715 enhanced anti-discrimination protections for students by race, religion, sexual orientation and nationality. It strengthened schools’ obligations to remove discriminatory textbooks and lesson plans, and strengthened the complaint process. It also created a new Office of Civil Rights with an antisemitism prevention coordinator. Last month, a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge threw out a 2025 lawsuit to stop AB 715, which is now in effect.

Why it’s important: In signing AB 715, Newsom insisted that the authors work with opponents, including the California Teachers Association, to settle disagreements. A key sticking point concerns AB 715’s language requiring that teachers teach only accurate information. Opponents argue the wording will lead to endless conflicts over what constitutes accuracy while chilling the ability of teachers to explore controversial issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Status: So far, there has been no settlement, despite numerous negotiations. The bill is stuck in the Assembly Rules Committee.

View the bill

– John Fensterwald

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Lawmakers will decide on these 10 bills affecting California students and schools appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Ruben Ibarra instantly became a household name for the Chattanooga Lookouts after he was called up to the Cincinnati Reds’ Double-A affiliate two years ago.

The 27-year-old Watsonville native even turned into somewhat of a celebrity during this current 2026 campaign.

His nickname “Big Papa” was part of the Nickname Knockout contest on Major League Baseball’s minor league website. He finished 10th out of 32 contestants with a total of 6,184 votes.

Ibarra may have not been victorious in the contest, but he has won the hearts of several fans, including some outside of Tennessee, since getting drafted in 2021.

“Just the other day, I had a kid from Dayton, Ohio, drive down with his dad to come watch me play,” said Ibarra, who played for the Dayton Dragons prior to his promotion. “Unfortunately, we got rained out but he said he’ll be at the game today. When you get little encounters like that, it makes it all wholesome. And those are the little things outside of the game that will keep you coming back to the game.”

Ibarra is currently batting a .226 (74-for-327) average, and his on-base (.327) and slugging (.443) percentages continue to stay consistent with what he’s been doing the past two seasons. 

He currently has a total of 19 home runs, 14 doubles, 43 walks and 67 RBIs while striking out 102 times with 33 games remaining as of Aug. 7.

“It’s all about focusing on day-to-day activities,” Ibarra said. “The end goal is to obviously be better than what we were last year and we’re on a good pace to break that record.”

Ibarra added, “A majority of your at-bats are team at-bats. Whether you’re leading off, driving a runner in, moving them over, whatever the case is. Kind of framing my mindset into thinking how can I win today’s game?”

As of Friday, the Lookouts currently own a 12-24 overall record in the Southern League’s North Division. They sit behind Birmingham (16-20) in third, followed by division leaders Rocket City (19-17) and Knoxville (19-17), which won the first-half of the 2026 season.

The former St. Francis High and San Jose State University standout is on track to tie or set career highs in those same categories.

In 2025, he had a total of 21 home runs, 17 doubles, 47 walks and 69 RBIs while tallying 103 strikeouts in 104 games played. That year he finished batting a .232 (78-for-336) average, while recording on-base and slugging percentages of .348 and .470, respectively. 

“Just one a day keeps the doctor away,” said Ibarra, referring to finding a way to get on base. “Whether it’s a walk, a hit, or whatever, once you get the first one, then you can kind of start gambling with house money.”

Like any other power hitter, Ibarra loves to swing the bat. 

But, he said maintaining high averages is falling off the table in today’s game because pitchers are consistently elevating skillwise, and it’s nonstop.

Ibarra mentioned there have been times of disappointment after going hitless in a game. Yet, at the end of the day it’s how he approached those at-bats that matters the most.

“It’s more of just productivity and consistency,” Ibarra said. “When I go [hitless], I’m not the happiest. But am I going 0-for-4 with four line drives or four strikeouts? Then you make the adjustments off of that.”

Dating back to Ibarra’s playing days in a Sharks uniform, St. Francis head coach Kenny Nakagawa said everybody expected an athlete of his monstrous size to crush the ball on each swing.

At the time, Ibarra was listed as a 6-foot-4, 270-pound first baseman. However, it was his defense that was often overlooked. 

One of Ibarra’s early SportsCenter highlights came during a Central Coast Section playoff game against Monte Vista Christian in 2017.

Nakagawa recalls the tying run was on second base for MVC with two outs in the top of the seventh inning. That’s when Jackson Collins hit a missile down the first base line.

“I’m like ‘Oh my God, there’s a tied ball game,’” Nakagawa said. “And all of a sudden, here’s Ruben diving in foul territory, making this great play to end the game.”

Ibarra currently owns a .988 fielding percentage that includes 41 double plays, 24 assists and just six errors.

“Everybody wants to talk about his offense, but defensively they really don’t talk much,” Nakagawa said. “Nobody talks about the diving plays that he makes at first base or the scoops that he makes when guys have an errant throw.”

Ibarra said playing on the defensive side is something that’s always controllable, whether he’s on time with a prep-step, taking a certain route to a ball or how to approach a pick at first base.

“Defense for me is something that I always want to keep clean and always something that’s reliable,” Ibarra said.

Nakagawa knew that Ibarra, who was a great teammate to his peers in the dugout, was a special athlete growing up. Now, he’s become a fan favorite and doing the right things in the clubhouse from an organizational standpoint. 

Looking at things from a clubhouse perspective, Nakagawa is convinced that Ibarra has the right numbers to play at the highest level.

“You like to see a couple of the other numbers go a little higher, but with his stats, he needs an opportunity,” Nakagawa said. 

Nakagawa knows that his former player is capable of playing in the big league. He said Ibarra just needs a break somewhere in the Reds organization for something to happen to get him there.

“[Ibarra will] actually hit better up there than he will down below just because all the services that he has available to him up there compared to down in the minor leagues,” Nakagawa said. “Once he goes up the ladder, I think his numbers will increase.”

For now, Ibarra will continue to love it when the fans call him “Big Papa” and throw their hands in the air because he’s a true player.

“Being able to do what I love is better than a desk job,” he said. “If you’re having a bad day or not, you still get to come to the field and play ball. I love that the fans love me for me, and I play with my heart on my sleeve. I just leave it all out on the field.”

Editor’s note: Listen to the full interview with Ruben Ibarra on the Cover 3 Sports Podcast, which is set to premiere next week.

ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs each Friday to share your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Darwin," who once worked as a sysadmin for a Wall Street law firm – the sort of outfit that charges four-figure hourly fees and justifies them by pointing to its exceptionally smart and experienced staff. Darwin was busy updating a PC when one of the lawyer's secretaries called. "The lawyer needed help with Outlook," Darwin told On Call. He assumed an email problem could wait until he had finished the PC upgrade, so promised to be there in ten minutes. "The secretary called back and told me the lawyer insisted I come immediately." Darwin therefore hustled off to the lawyer’s office and asked him to describe the problem. "All of these letters are slanted," the legal genius explained. "That's called italics," Darwin replied, then watched as the lawyer got angry and demanded to know how italics happened. Darwin found the reaction rather odd. The lawyer had attended an Ivy League university and held both law and business degrees – credentials that suggested a certain intelligence and worldliness. "I showed him the italics icon," Darwin told On Call, "and after I left his office I saw his secretary bent over trying to hide her laughter." Who's the supposedly smartest person who has asked you a dumb support question? Click here to send On Call an email telling your tale, and hopefully we'll be smart enough to share it with our readers on a future Friday. ®

China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provided The Register with the following statement: "We maintain the highest standards of business conduct and security practices and ethics across our global operations. At this time, there is no impact to our ability to support customers or deliver our products and services in the region." This matter has echoes of China’s 2023 investigation into the security of products from memory-maker Micron, which the CAC announced out of the blue. Micron had previously fought intellectual property and antitrust cases in China, but the company and Chinese authorities did not explicitly link those matters to the security probe. The CAC published its findings weeks after announcing the probe and decided Micron’s products represented an unacceptable security risk for critical infrastructure operators – effectively banning sales of Micron products to such entities – but didn’t offer a detailed explanation for its decision. The memory-maker eventually stopped selling its datacenter and server products in China, a decision that cost it billions of annual revenue – but created new opportunities for China’s own memory-makers, which are largely prohibited from selling to American companies. China is home to several security companies whose product portfolios overlap with Palo Alto’s. Huawei and H3C, for example, have plenty to offer local buyers. Palo Alto doesn’t reveal revenue earned from individual countries, so it’s hard to know what a potential ban could cost the company. China has for years accused Western tech companies of assisting US surveillance and offensive hacking activities. The Register would not be surprised at all if Beijing reuses that reasoning in its findings about Palo Alto products. Western governments level the same accusations at Huawei and ZTE. Beijing’s ban on Micron didn’t noticeably impact the company’s reputation elsewhere. Indeed, the AI boom has brought Micron such great riches that past dents to its bottom line are now almost irrelevant. ®

Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic. The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026. During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his neck out again with a new prediction. “To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said. “In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.” AI is, of course, the reason for the growth in machine-made traffic. Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient” – and of course volunteered Cloudflare’s service as a source of that efficiency. He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats. Cloudflare won $696 million of revenue for the quarter, a 36 percent year-over-year jump – but almost a rounding error compared to the $160-billion-plus run rate at AWS and Google Cloud’s expected $100-billion-plus annual revenue. Losses more than tripled, to $205.7 million. Execs and investors weren’t fussed because the revenue growth beat expectations and the company announced it has signed up record numbers of large companies. Investors may also have been impressed by Cloudflare’s low planned capital expenditure, which Seifert said will come in at 14 or 15 percent of the company’s forecast $2.865 to $2.87 billion revenue – just $430 million or so. Again, that’s almost a rounding error compared to the trillions being spent on AI infrastructure by Cloudflare’s rivals. CEO Matthew Prince used that low capex number to take a swipe at his competitors. “If you’re selling what is just commodity compute, if you’re basically letting an AI company use your balance sheet and your credit rating in order to buy servers that are the same as everybody else’s servers, then that’s just not attractive business for us,” he said. Prince said Cloudflare aims to “squeeze as much out of every Capex dollar as possible” and has the attitude to ask, “How can you get more out of the memory or storage that we have in every box that we have?” The CEO said that hyperscalers have “super-low” GPU utilization rates. “It’s that what they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization. “The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back, and get five turns of revenue off of it,” he said. “We’re in a very different business where we’re selling actually work getting done, and then instead of it being up to the customer to get as much out of the server as possible, we need to do the work to get as much out of the underlying equipment as possible and build the scheduling and the efficiency and everything else that’s out there.” Prince said Cloudflare therefore doesn’t want to rent servers, “because over time, it’s a commodity business and it’s not very attractive.” The company will instead stick to its serverlesss offerings, which the CEO said are doing very nicely. So too are investors who acquired the company’s shares, which rose 16 percent in after-hours trading to reach a new high that represents 68 percent growth in the year-to-date. ®

Daily Kos chatted with former Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler about his new book, “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy,” in which he details how Wisconsin Democrats built successful grassroots infrastructure to win critical local and statewide elections. As Democrats stare down the 2026 midterms—as well as the 2028 presidential election—Wikler shared…

Source

The March 2023 floods highlighted the vulnerability of communities in Pajaro and Watsonville. A new plan is being developed to help avoid serious damage in the area. (Tyler Maldonado — Santa Cruz Local)

This article first appeared as a video on Noticias Watsonville. Join our WhatsApp group.

WATSONVILLE >> Residents of Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley are being asked to submit comments on the Local Hazard Mitigation Plan to help reduce impacts from future natural disasters. 

Developed by the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency (PRFMA), the 214-page document identifies the region’s major hazards and outlines strategies to protect residents, businesses and other infrastructure in the area.

The March 2023 floods highlighted the vulnerability of communities in Pajaro and Watsonville. The PRFMA plan is the first of its kind developed by the agency, which was formed in 2021 by authorities from Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Once approved, the plan will be updated every five years.

It covers the lower Pajaro River watershed, including the City of Watsonville, the community of Pajaro, surrounding unincorporated areas and agricultural lands across the two counties. The region includes communities that have historically faced repeated flooding and other hazards related to natural disasters.

(function() { window.mc4wp = window.mc4wp || { listeners: [], forms: { on: function(evt, cb) { window.mc4wp.listeners.push( { event : evt, callback: cb } ); } } } })(); Stay informed on Santa Cruz County’s biggest issues. Santa Cruz Local’s newsletter breaks down complex local topics and shows residents how to get involved. Email address:
mc4wp.forms.on('subscribed', function(form) { // gtag.js if(form.id == '6954') { gtag('event', 'subscribe', {'event_category': 'newsletter_prompt', 'event_label':'top_of_story'}); } }); Leave this field empty if you're human: What does the plan propose?

The draft identifies hazards such as river flooding, severe storms, extreme heat, drought, wildfires and earthquakes. It then outlines actions to reduce those risks through infrastructure projects, ecosystem protection,and community education and preparedness programs.

Unlike flood-control construction projects, this document serves as a roadmap that identifies risks and establishes priorities for reducing long-term impacts.

Why is public input important?

Although the plan must still undergo state and federal review before it can be adopted, PRFMA said input from people who live in the area  can influence the final version and help shape disaster risk reduction priorities for the region.

“We will consider the community’s comments and evaluate those recommendations to determine whether they have already been included and whether they are applicable,” said Forrest Revere, PRFMA’s Environmental Program Manager.

Having an approved plan allows PRFMA to meet one of the requirements needed to apply for certain federal funding for hazard mitigation projects.

“We estimate the process, from submitting the application to final plan adoption, will take about six months,” Revere said. That means the plan could be approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by early 2027, making the agency eligible to receive federal funding and begin implementing it.

How can the community participate?

Residents can review the draft plan, which is available only in English, along with a preliminary summary in Spanish. PRFMA presented an overview of the plan to the community in Watsonville on July 30, and in Pajaro on July 31.

“We want to receive that feedback. We encourage people to submit comments, and we look forward to hearing from them,” Revere said.

Make your voice heard

What risks concern you most? What was missing during the 2023 floods? Your feedback could help strengthen the final version of the document.

Submit comments by email to info@prfma.org by Aug. 14.

Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.

Learn about membership Santa Cruz Local’s news is free. We believe that high-quality local news is crucial to democracy. We depend on locals like you to make a meaningful contribution so everyone can access our news. Learn about membership

The post Pajaro Valley prepares for natural disasters after mass flooding in 2023 appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Why Republicans wasted so much time yelling at Fauci…

Source

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. "This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total." Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sort and pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year. "So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly." Sussing out unacceptable uses of AI A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent. In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews. "The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process." After identifying and rejecting a paper that contained nonexistent references, the report explains, the conference organizers developed tooling "to extract references from the submitted PDFs, query well-known sources such as DBLP and arXiv, and manually confirm invalid references." The org rejected papers containing three or more hallucinated references, a policy that impacted 21 of the 1,181 first round submissions (1.78 percent). "We have rejected papers for the repeated presence of nonexistent references," said Stock. "We cannot say with certainty that these were AI-hallucinated, but nevertheless considered these papers to be problematic and thus rejected them." The report notes that more than 100 additional papers contained at least one reference that reviewers could not confirm. Aware that some of these might simply be false positives due to name spelling differences or missing citations, conference officials opted not to investigate these in order not to further burden staff. Conference organizers draw the line at using AI for bibliography preparation. "We believe that it is critical to halt this trend that threatens scientific integrity before it grows further," the report states. However, limited use of AI to polish human-written text is expected, and that extends to those reviewing submitted papers, up to a point. "We have not set a dedicated AI policy, but have made it clear to our PC members that usage of [AI] services to write reviews is not permitted, in particular also because this violates confidentiality," said Stock. "We have detected a tiny number of cases where we have reached sufficient confidence that AI was used and took appropriate actions, including removal of the members from the PC and allowing affected authors to resubmit." Under that policy, USS asked five of 496 reviewers to cease participation. "We have not seen evidence that leads us to believe that AI generated submissions have become a significant challenge for the security community," said Stock. "This does not mean that AI hasn't been used in parts of these submissions, though." ®

⚡ Quick Take

• The Samurai and the Prisoner is the latest film from Japanese filmmaking legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
• The period-set whodunit mystery and war thriller is a slow-burn, troubling story of violence and power.
• NERDIST TAKE: The Samurai and the Prisoner stands as yet another late-period achievement for one of Japan’s most interesting filmmakers.

Most people in the west know Japanese filmmaking legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa for his horror films, like 1997’s Cure and 2001’s Pulse. He continued to make horror films thereafter, but he has made movies in all sorts of genres, though usually dealing with similar dark, troubling, pseudo-supernatural themes. For Kurosawa’s first period-set film, The Samurai and the Prisoner, he offers a somber treatise on war and cruelty in the guise of a whodunit mystery. It works incredibly well.

It’s interesting to see Kurosawa outside the confines of modern Japanese life. The isolation of modernity is a current theme in almost all of his works, regardless of tone. But despite this movie taking place in the 16th century and using real historical figures, The Samurai and the Prisoner has a surprisingly apocalyptic feel throughout, as though the world outside of Arioka Castle is on the cusp of non-existence. And inside the castle isn’t much safer.

The story of The Samurai and the Prisoner follows Araki Murashige, the merciful lord of Arioka Castle, who is in open rebellion against the brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga. Oda sends armies to attack the heavily fortified castle, and Araki’s generals all believe they’ll be untouched. However, part of this rebellion has to do with Araki bucking against established samurai rules. Chief among them, the killing of prisoners. Early in the film, Araki receives an envoy from Oda, the brilliant strategist Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda), but rather than allow him to return to Oda, nor kill him in defiance, he places the man in the dungeon. This is simply not done, and many believe it is a bad omen.

JANUS

The omens get worse as various crimes occur within the castle walls, including murder, the disfiguring of captured heads, and stealing of invaluable urns. In each case, the transgressions seem to be divine retribution, though Araki refuses to believe such things. Eventually, through his discussions with his brilliant wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka) and indeed with Kanbei in the dungeon, Araki deduces various truths about the people under his care and what rebelling against the establishment really means.

Kurosawa’s strength has always been allowing his scenes to breathe and the pace to remain languid as much as possible. The Samurai and the Prisoner takes its time, and stories and characters unfold deliberately and reservedly. We have a few battle sequences here, but none are sensationalized; instead, they are allowed to feel needlessly violent and perfunctory. Araki continually hears that he needs to kill people to remain strong in people’s eyes. Araki, conversely, thinks it’s a waste of humanity to do so. But this leads to issues that threaten his rule and the safety of his people. Idealism versus surety.

JANUS

At times, The Samurai and the Prisoner feels like a stage play. Most of the action stays in the environs of the inner castle walls for the majority of the runtime. The movie is even shot in the traditional square Academy ratio rather than widescreen. It helps to accentuate the high walls while everything outside remains a mystery. Kurosawa also surrounds Araki with dozens of other characters, underlings and servants and peasants, to add to the tension of who, if anyone, he can really trust. It’s the perfect setup for a movie like this.

This movie hearkens back to the best of Japan’s classical Jidaigeki or “period dramas” but with a distinct sense of Kurosawa’s particular brand of ennui. The characters of The Samurai and the Prisoner are stoic yet relatable, and we spend enough time with our mains to begin to like them, worry about them, and identify with their plight. This is not in any way an action movie, but it is a pretty violent movie. However, the violence, as in the director’s earlier films, is there to shock and dismay.

The Samurai and the Prisoner is a thoughtful, troubling, and compelling mystery with an inescapable mix of wonder and dread. It stands as yet another late-period achievement for one of Japan’s most interesting filmmakers.

The Samurai and the Prisoner ⭐ (4 of 5)

The Samurai and the Prisoner is in select cities now.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

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The post THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER Is a Fascinating, Somber Mystery appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• The cast of the hit HBO Max series The Pitt will perform a live reading of the first-ever aired Star Trek episode to celebrate the series’ 60th anniversary.
• Noah Wyle will portray William Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk
• The live reading is a fundraiser for the Writers Guild Foundation

This year, the Star Trek franchise turns sixty years old. The iconic sci-fi series aired its first episode on September 8, 1966, on NBC. But also turning sixty this year is Hollywood’s Writers Guild Foundation. So it’s time for a joint birthday celebration, out in the Final Frontier. According to a report in Deadline, the organization is hosting a live reading of “The Man Trap,” Star Trek’s very first aired episode, with the cast of the HBO Max hit series The Pitt. Cue all of your “Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor!” memes now. The event is set for August 30 at 7 p.m. at the Lodge Room in Highland Park, California.

Paramount/Warner Bros.

The Pitt cast participating includes Noah Wyle as Captain James T. Kirk himself, because of course. Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez, and Ayesha Harris each play a role too. Each of them will portray a member of the Starship Enterprise crew. However, at least one of them is playing the alien salt monster from that episode, which should be especially fun. The WGF will take the Star Trek script from the shelves of its Shavelson-Webb Library and have it performed as part of its “Retro Reads” strand. The WGF library is home to more than 50,000 scripts, which are open to everyone. Interestingly enough, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry served on the WGF board in those early years.

Writer’s Guild Foundation

Proceeds from this special event will support the foundation and its public programs. These include the library, Writers Access programs, Veterans Writing Project, and public education events. Given that this is one of the goofier episodes of the show, with a giant alien creature that sucks the salt out of living beings, expect a very campy performance from everyone. You can purchase tickets and view the livestream by clicking here.

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