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Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has begun work on a major power system upgrade in Watsonville, Freedom and nearby communities that the utility says will improve reliability, reduce outages and help meet growing electricity demand.

The project will upgrade the local electric system from 4 kilovolts to 21 kilovolts, allowing power lines to carry more electricity and better withstand extreme weather events such as heat waves and winter storms, according to PG&E.

The work is expected to nearly double capacity at the Green Valley Substation and support future building and transportation electrification. PG&E said thousands of customers in Watsonville, Interlaken, Amesti, Freedom and Corralitos will benefit from the upgrades.

“It’s like taking a two-lane freeway and expanding it to six lanes,” PG&E Regional Senior Manager Jeremy Howard said in a statement. “The upgrade lets us carry more electricity at once, reduces congestion and improves reliability as the community grows.”

The first phase began in May and is expected to continue through early 2027.

That phase includes replacing 159 poles, upgrading 93 transformers, installing or upgrading more than 30,000 feet of higher-capacity overhead lines, installing 1,700 feet of new underground lines and upgrading another 800 feet of underground lines. PG&E also plans to upgrade nearly 70 protective devices on power poles that help detect problems, isolate outages and restore power faster.

Work will take place along Green Valley Road between Mesa Verde Drive and Freedom Boulevard, throughout the College Lake area, along Highway 152 between Holohan Road and Carlton Road and on several adjacent streets.

PG&E said some customers may experience more than one planned power outage during the project. “No Parking” signs will be posted on affected streets at least 24 hours before work begins.

Residents and businesses should prepare for minor traffic delays when crews are working nearby. Most work will take place Monday through Friday during business hours.

Watsonville Community Hospital has been awarded $10.6 million through California’s Distressed Hospital Small Grant Program, part of a state effort to help financially struggling hospitals avoid closure.

The funding was announced Friday as part of a $25 million statewide program created through Assembly Bill 108, emergency budget legislation approved in 2025. The program is administered by the California Department of Health Care Access and Information and provides one-time grants to nonprofit and public hospitals facing immediate financial distress.

To qualify, hospitals were required to meet several criteria, including having fewer than 10 days of cash on hand, demonstrating efforts to exhaust other financial options, and serving a patient population in which more than half of patients are covered by government insurance programs or are uninsured.

Watsonville Community Hospital CEO Stephen Gray said the grant will provide a critical financial bridge as the hospital works through ongoing fiscal challenges.

“The State’s award of $10.6 million in grant money to support Watsonville Community Hospital is a crucial funding bridge during a challenging financial period,” Gray said in a statement. “We are thankful to the leadership of Sen. John Laird and the support of the governor to take quick action to support community hospitals like our own.”

Gray said the funding will be used for operational expenses, including debt management, employee salaries and medical supplies.

“The grant is critically important to WCH as we continue to navigate fiscal challenges brought on by funding delays and cutbacks at the federal level,” Gray said.

State officials established the Distressed Hospital Small Grant Program to prevent hospital closures and preserve access to healthcare services in vulnerable communities.

Gray said hospital leaders remain focused on maintaining patient care despite financial pressures.

“Watsonville Community Hospital’s dedication to the health and well-being of those we serve is the compass that guides every decision we make, and a focus on patient care remains our highest priority,” he said.

Gray also thanked hospital employees, community members and Sen. John Laird for their support.

“We are grateful to the commitment of our healthcare team, the ongoing support of the Pajaro Valley community, and the unwavering advocacy Sen. Laird has provided,” Gray said.

Watsonville Community Hospital was purchased by the Pajaro Valley Healthcare District Project in 2022 after community leaders and local governments worked to prevent the facility’s closure. The hospital serves residents throughout the Pajaro Valley and surrounding areas.

A single npm user on Thursday published 14 malicious packages within a four-hour window, all mimicking popular OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, DevOps, and environment-configuration libraries, according to Microsoft. It’s the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of supply chain attacks targeting developer tools, and stealing cloud credentials and CI/CD pipeline secrets in its wake. Using a newly created maintainer alias, vpmdhaj (a39155771@gmail[.]com), the threat actor published 14 packages impersonating legitimate libraries from the @opensearch and @elastic ecosystems and targeting Amazon Web Services, HashiCorp Vault, GitHub Actions, and the npm registry itself. This suggests that the attacker “likely chose a developer audience to have AWS and Elastic cloud credentials in their environments,” Microsoft warned in a Thursday blog. All of the malicious packages include the same install-time stager and the same Bun-compiled, second-stage payload: a 195 KB credential harvester purpose-built for cloud and CI/CD environments. Plus, as we’ve seen with all of the other open source supply chain attacks of late, after stealing tokens and other secrets, the attacker can move laterally across cloud environments, steal additional sensitive data, and push even more poisoned updates to packages owned by hijacked maintainer identities, thus expanding the attack beyond the initial 14. All of the malicious libraries have since been removed, and Microsoft published a list of all 14 in its blog. Give that a read to help identify systems that installed or built affected package versions on or after May 28. Be sure to also rotate an AWS IAM/STS, HashiCorp Vault, npm publish, and GitHub Actions tokens that may have been exposed. To trick users into installing these developer tools and search engines, the attacker used typosquatting - naming a package one or two letters off from the legitimate one - or lookalike naming (such as opensearch-setup-tool, opensearch-config-utility, and elastic-opensearch-helper) to impersonate well-known libraries. In addition to this social engineering technique, used to drive installs through users’ typing mistakes or trust, the attacker also used two other techniques to make the supply chain attack more believable. This includes spoofing upstream metadata. “Every unscoped package sets its package.json homepage, repository, and bugs fields to the legitimate github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-js project,” Microsoft’s threat hunters explained. And finally, they inflated version numbers, so the phony “releases” jump straight to 1.0.7265, 1.0.9108, or 2.1.9201 to indicate a mature release history. After tricking users into installing the npm packages - all 14 are listed in the blog, so give that a read - the credential-stealing payloads automatically execute through preinstall hooks as soon as the victim runs npm install. For this, the attacker used one of two stagers. The Gen-1 stager uses install, preinstall, and postinstall hooks that all invoke preinstall.js, and then collects a ton of host information including hostname, platform, arch, Node version, USER/USERNAME, cwd, INIT_CWD, npm_package_name, npm_package_version. It then base64-encodes the JSON, and POSTs it to the actor’s command-and-control server, which then serves a second-stage payload, written to payload.bin in the package install directory. “The package’s index.js re-launches the same payload.bin on every subsequent require() of the module – a quiet persistence mechanism that survives across CI build stages and developer rebuild loops,” according to Microsoft. The later Gen-2 stager replaces the install-time C2 roundtrip with a stealthier loader that checks whether bun is already present on the host. If not, it downloads the legitimate Bun runtime v1.3.13, and then executes the second-stage payload, which sets to work stealing credentials across AWS, HashiCorp Vault, npm, GitHub Actions, and other CI/CD environments.®

Since the start of his second term, the public messaging around President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda has included crossovers with popular online trends as it tries to make light of its aggressive approach to arresting and detaining immigrants, but they’ve brought their game to a new level. “Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in…

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Rogue agents are dangerous, but eliminating them is never easy. Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, and James Bond have each run afoul of their governance at various junctures, yet stopping them takes sequel after sequel until all the loose ends are tied up and they eventually die or retire, only to get rebooted. It’s not so different in the world of AI agents. Okta leaders, citing the company's own research, say enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than they are securing them, with 92 percent of executives reporting moderate or widespread use of autonomous AI agents, but only 22 percent saying their organizations have identities tied to those agents. “That is a real problem,” Okta president and chief operating officer Eric Kelleher said during the company's earnings call on Thursday. “It's a measurable, quantifiable exposure customers have right now within their companies, and they need to invest to fix it." In short, when agents go sideways, someone has to handle the dirty work. Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told investors that’s what ServiceNow was asking for when the ITSM market leader came calling. “What they were really interested with Okta was this kill switch capability,” McKinnon said during earnings. “When agents go awry and agents aren't following the policy, how do you shut them down? … The one thing we do really well, and that they wanted from us, is the ability to sever the connections, the access tokens, the actual logical connection at the authorization layer to the backend resources, and we're really good at that.” ServiceNow has previously said its acquisition of Veza could provide that capability. In a statement to The Register, a ServiceNow spokesperson said Okta serves as the logical connection to backend resources at the identity layer, while Veza gives ServiceNow visibility and control over the permissions graph. "To clarify how the pieces fit together: ServiceNow's AI Control Tower is the orchestration and governance layer that monitors risk and detects when an agent is behaving outside policy. When that happens, the platform can trigger remediation actions across multiple identity and access systems, including Okta, which handles token revocation at the authorization layer," the spokesperson said. Veza, which ServiceNow acquired earlier this year, operates at a different layer, the spokesperson said, mapping permissions across human, machine, and AI identities at scale, and it lets ServiceNow revoke agent permissions directly within the ServiceNow platform, which is its own "kill switch." McKinnon said that he has spent the past six months meeting Okta's largest customers in person, reaching roughly 75 of the company's top 100 accounts. The pattern he saw across those conversations was that agents are widely deployed, but the controls around them are immature. “You’ll have a development team that’s using Claude Code, but it's connected to GitHub and their Jira system with static tokens in the local developer box,” he said. “So that company is using agents, but they’ve really done it in a haphazard, non-secure way.” He said the company’s two leading products for controlling AI agents – Okta for AI Agents and Auth0 for AI Agents – are not yet contributing substantially to the company’s revenue, but Okta sees an industry in need just over the horizon. “It’s going to be big. We’re pouring a lot of R&D effort into this and focused on it. The interest is super high and unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” he said. McKinnon said that there are several ways to control rogue agents, whether it's stopping them from running or quarantining them at a network level, but all of that relies on observability and permissions that need to be set from the beginning. Okta's proposed answer is to apply the model it already uses for employee and customer access to the AI agents themselves. McKinnon said Okta can identify the agents operating inside an organization, maintain a record of them, and set rules governing what systems each agent may reach. "We tell you who your agents are. There's a directory of agents," he said. "We can scan multiple platforms and multiple systems and give you that source of truth of where your agents are, and we can help you set a policy on what they can connect to." For large enterprises running thousands of applications, he said, rewiring each one to accommodate agents is not practical, so Okta instead places an authorization layer around the agents to control their permissions and connections. Rival identity platform Microsoft Entra also boasts that it has similar capabilities. Autonomous agents authenticate directly with the Microsoft Entra ID platform using their agent identity and the client credentials flow, Microsoft says. Entra assigns identities to agents, autodiscovers them across an organization, applies Conditional Access rules and permissions, and lets customers disable entire classes of agents in a single operation, Redmond says. McKinnon said that, while the market is busy hunting for winners and losers in the AI agent race, customers want a secure experience regardless of the vendor. In addition to its work with ServiceNow, Okta partnered with Salesforce last year and AWS this month. Okta for AI Agents integrates with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a fully managed AI service from AWS to provide identity governance for agents, including ownership assignment, lifecycle management, and "the ability to deactivate rogue agents." “I think there's going to be way more working together than people think,” McKinnon said. “We're really excited about our conversations with Amazon and their AgentCore, Agentforce from Salesforce, and the message from customers is clear. They want this identity layer and this connectivity layer to be independent to give them more flexibility, and I think the industry is coalescing around that.” ®

We’re not sure when we’ll see Deadpool and Wolverine team up again. Rumors suggest it could be as soon as Avengers: Doomsday, but who knows. However, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman will be on our screens together again soon, only in a totally different and unexpected way this time. Disney+ has just greenlit a new docuseries from Maximum Effort, which follows SailGP’s BONDS Flying Roos from Australia, co-owned by Jackman and Reynolds, across a global racing season. Reynolds is clearly trying to bring some of that Welcome to Wrexham success to Disney+, only on the water this time. Both Jackman and Reynolds put out a joint statement about their brand new series:

This is our first collaboration since Deadpool & Wolverine, and we once again anticipate action, comedy, heart but with a lot more water. And (fingers crossed) pirates. We hope there’s pirates in SailGP.

Disney+

We’re not sure about any salty pirates, but we imagine there will still be plenty of high-stakes drama. In this stadium-style championship, 50-foot identical catamarans race in close-to-shore courses at speeds of up to 100 km/h. They are led on the water by driver and CEO Tom Slingsby, an Olympic gold medalist and America’s Cup winner, not to mention a three-time SailGP champion. The new series will combine humor, the pressure for all involved to win, and lots of behind-the-scenes access. Viewers will get an inside look at one of the world’s most demanding sports leagues from the inside.

Rob Mac will also serve as an executive producer on the show. Right now, the docuseries doesn’t have an actual title. However, something like Welcome to the Indian Ocean might work? Someone pass that along to Ryan Reynolds. Although we imagine he’ll come up with something way catchier. The show doesn’t have a release date yet either. But we expect it to drop on Disney+ and Hulu sometime within the next year.

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The post A Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman Sailing Team Series Announced appeared first on Nerdist.

In a letter to the editor, Santa Cruz mayoral candidate Ami Chen Mills takes issue with the characterization of the race laid out by the author of a previous Lookout opinion piece.

A year after Fox News tried and failed to convince its viewers—and the rest of the country—to turn away from the “Superman” movie for being too pro-immigrant, the right-wing propaganda network is now taking aim at the upcoming “Supergirl” movie for being too feminist. Writer Ian Miller complains that actor Milly Alcock, who stars as the iconic superhero, has made “divisive” comments that will…

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A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center and blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard…

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Esta traducción fue generada utilizando inteligencia artificial y ha sido revisada por un hablante nativo de español; si bien nos esforzamos por lograr precisión, pueden ocurrir algunos errores de traducción. Para leer el artículo en inglés, haga clic aquí.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville recibirá 10,6 millones de dólares provenientes de una medida presupuestaria de emergencia destinada a apoyar a hospitales públicos y sin fines de lucro que están “experimentando dificultades financieras inmediatas y significativas.”

Watsonville es uno de cuatro hospitales de California que recibirán subvenciones del Departamento de Acceso e Información sobre Atención Médica de California (HCAI, por sus siglas en inglés), según un comunicado de prensa emitido el viernes. Los fondos provienen de la Asamblea Legislativa mediante la Ley AB 108, que destinó casi 25 millones de dólares para ayudar a hospitales con dificultades financieras.

El dinero tiene como objetivo estabilizar a hospitales que, de otro modo, no podrían pagar sus deudas antes del 1 de julio. De acuerdo con la ley, los hospitales seleccionados para recibir los fondos contaban con menos de 10 días de efectivo disponible, habían agotado otras opciones financieras y más de la mitad de sus pacientes estaban inscritos en programas públicos como Medi-Cal o Medicaid, o no contaban con seguro médico.

Durante la reunión mensual de la junta directiva del hospital celebrada el miércoles por la noche, el director ejecutivo, Stephen Gray, informó que el centro contaba con “entre seis y ocho días de efectivo disponible.” Además, aproximadamente el 85 % de los pacientes del hospital dependen de Medi-Cal.

Los otros tres hospitales que recibirán financiamiento estatal son: Palo Verde Hospital, en el condado de Riverside (3 millones de dólares); El Centro Regional Medical Center (11 millones de dólares); y Southern Inyo Healthcare District, en Lone Pine (400.000 dólares).

Julie Peterson, directora financiera del Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville, señaló el miércoles que una parte de los fondos podría utilizarse para reducir el atraso en los pagos a proveedores y cubrir “otras necesidades operativas.”

Al momento de la publicación, el Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville no había respondido de inmediato a la solicitud de comentarios de Lookout.

Mientras tanto, la dirección del hospital también está reanudando la búsqueda de un socio externo que ayude a administrar las operaciones diarias del centro, después de que una posible alianza no llegara a concretarse.

El presidente de la junta directiva del hospital, Tony Nuñez, le dijo a Lookout a principios de esta semana que la administración creía estar “muy cerca” de presentar una propuesta formal. Sin embargo, la posible asociación finalmente no prosperó. Nuñez se negó a revelar qué proveedor de atención médica estaba involucrado o las razones por las que las negociaciones fracasaron.

Según Nuñez, la dirección del hospital ya ha programado reuniones con otros posibles socios en las próximas semanas.

Establecer una alianza con un gran proveedor de servicios de salud también podría ayudar a mejorar la situación financiera del hospital, ya que le permitiría negociar mejores tarifas con las compañías de seguros y obtener precios más favorables para suministros médicos, algo que resulta más difícil para un hospital pequeño e independiente, explicó anteriormente Gray a Lookout.

The post El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville recibirá una subvención estatal de 10.6 millones de dólares para afrontar desafíos financieros appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

➤ Para leer el artículo en español, haga clic aquí.

Watsonville Community Hospital will receive $10.6 million from an emergency budget measure to support nonprofit and public hospitals “experiencing immediate and significant financial distress.”

Watsonville is one of four hospitals in California that will receive grants from the California Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), according to a media release Friday. The funding comes from Assembly Bill 108, which allocated nearly $25 million to help the struggling hospitals. 

The money is intended to help stabilize hospitals that would otherwise be unable to pay their debts before July 1. Hospitals selected to receive funding had fewer than 10 days’ cash on hand, have exhausted other financial options, and more than half of their patients must be enrolled in public programs, such as Medi-Cal or Medicaid, or are uninsured, according to the bill. 

During the Watsonville hospital board’s monthly meeting Wednesday evening, CEO Stephen Gray said the facility has had “somewhere between six to eight days of cash on hand.” And roughly 85% of the hospital’s patients rely on Medi-Cal. 

The three other hospitals that will receive state funding are: Palo Verde Hospital in Riverside County ($3 million), El Centro Regional Medical Center ($11 million) and Southern Inyo Healthcare District in Lone Pine ($400,000). 

Julie Peterson, the Watsonville hospital’s chief financial officer, said Wednesday the hospital could use a portion of the money for its backlog of payments to suppliers and “other operational needs.” 

Watsonville Community Hospital did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment by time of publication. 

Hospital leadership, meanwhile, is also resuming its search for an external partner to help manage the facility’s day-to-day operations after a potential match fell through. 

Hospital board chair Tony Nuñez told Lookout earlier this week that hospital leadership believed they were “very close” to presenting a formal proposal, but ultimately the potential match did not work out. He declined to share which healthcare provider, nor the reason why the potential partnership fell through.

Hospital leadership have already scheduled meetings with other potential partners in the coming weeks, said Nuñez. 

Establishing a partnership with a large healthcare provider could also help improve the hospital’s balance sheet by allowing it to negotiate better rates with insurance companies and better prices for supplies, things that are harder to do as a small independent hospital, Gray previously told Lookout.

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

The post Watsonville Community Hospital will receive $10.6 million state grant to help weather financial challenges appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

If you thought US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s widespread use of face recognition apps was a privacy violation, you’re about to get eye-rate over a new $25 million contract. According to a largely unreported contract summary published last week by ICE parent agency the Department of Homeland Security, US immigration cops have doled out about $25.1 million to a company called Bi2 Technologies for 1,570 biometric recognition devices able to identify people through fingerprints, iris scans, and facial recognition. Additional procurement data indicates that the devices can be used in the field in both mobile and stationary configurations, and they provide ICE agents with access to Bi2’s Inmate Recognition and Identification System (IRIS), which matches biometrics to a database of more than five million booking, arrest, and incarceration records from 47 US states. The Bi2 system is also able to access driver’s license and vehicle plate info. The deal was made without seeking any competing bids, and ICE justified the sole-source acquisition by pointing not only to Bi2’s capabilities being “unmatched by any competitor,” but also to a contract from last year in which it paid the company $4.6 million for what now appears to have been a one-year trial run of its technology on a much smaller scale. Per the FY 2025 contract, which expires at the end of this coming September, ICE got similar access to the IRIS database and mobile/stationary biometric scanning technology as this year’s award, but only 200 devices were deployed across the US. With the addition of this contract, 1,770 of the devices could now be on American streets by the end of May 2027. While the Bi2 contracts have yet to cause a stir on the level of other ICE biometric surveillance technologies, the widespread deployment of eyeball scanners linked to law enforcement databases and other forms of government documentation could end up stirring up more controversy. Senate Democrats have been railing against ICE’s use of biometric identification technology like Mobile Fortify, an app reportedly used by DHS under the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement push to identify people suspected of immigration violations and, potentially, protesters. In a letter last September, senators demanded ICE immediately cease using Mobile Fortify over concerns that the app could be inaccurate, biased, and might have a chilling effect on the legal expression of protected civil rights in the US. Neither ICE nor DHS responded to questions for this story. ®

It pays to earn an endorsement from Donald Trump.

Across 118 endorsement, the president boasts a perfect score in 2026’s midterm primaries, ousting a number of longtime Republican lawmakers (and Trump-irritants) in the process.

In Texas, election-denier Ken Paxton took out Sen. John Cornyn. In Kentucky, Trump-backed Ed Gallrein unseated Rep. Thomas Massie—one of the members of Congress who forced the release of the Epstein files—in the most expensive House primary in history. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger—the secretary of state who refused to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump in 2020—lost his gubernatorial bid to two election deniers.

On paper, Trump is winning.

But these victories might, just might, be losses in disguise. In Georgia, more Democrats than Republicans voted in the primary for the first time since 1998. Texas saw a similar Democratic turnout surge a few months ago, helping James Talarico secure his party’s nomination for US Senator.

What’s clear is that the base of the Republican Party is still deeply loyal to president Donald Trump—despite the war in Iran, broken promises, rising gas prices, and an uneven job market. What’s unclear is how much that loyalty will cost Republicans, who are now anchored to a slate of election-denying Trump loyalists, this November.

Watch the full breakdown here:

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