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Watsonville High School senior Chris Delgado has transformed childhood trauma into success, earning a statewide courage award and a scholarship as he prepares to attend college. He’s sharing his story in hopes of encouraging other young people to speak up and persevere through adversity.

A new court filing has revealed the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions accepted a bid from Capita to run its new Oracle-based HR and finance system at £272 million less than its own cost modelling. In March, the UK outsourcing company won the contract for running shared services for £370 million over ten years. The central government department had earlier produced a "Should Cost Model" — designed to protect against a bias towards low bids — which provided a total price of £642 million, according to court papers. Capita’s bid was 42 percent less than the “should-cost” estimate. Since January, the deal to run HR and finance systems for four UK government departments has been the subject of a legal claim from rival bidder Sopra Steria, which alleges Capita's bid was "abnormally low" and based on staffing "significantly below the current levels." Capita has already told The Register it took part in a robust procurement process and stands ready to work with the DWP to ensure a smooth transition of service and value for money. A DWP spokesperson has previously told us: "We have signed a contract with Capita to deliver the Business Process Service and are committed to ensuring a smooth transition. Our priority is continuity of service and value for money for the public." Through its subsidiary SSCL, Sopra Steria has been running back-office shared services for the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Office and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, based on Oracle eBusiness Suite 12.2.6, since 2013. In 2024, the DWP led the procurement for a new Oracle-based SaaS system and awarded the deal to IBM and Big Red for £711 million ($950 million), with the Home Office set to join the shared service at a later date. Capita’s 10-year deal to run the Business Process Services (BPS) for the group of Whitehall departments — known as the Synergy cluster — is part of the government's shared services strategy it says will offer £4 billion in benefits. In its defense against the claim, the DWP alleged that Sopra Steria was in breach of an “Ethical Wall Agreement” by basing its case on a document the department sent in error. A Sopra Steria spokesperson told The Register: "Sopra Steria was not excluded by the DWP from the procurement, and we do not accept that there was any breach of the Ethical Wall Agreement." In its defense, the DWP also alleged that Sopra Steria’s bid was “excessively high.” In the recently disclosed reply to the defense, Sopra Steria denies that claim by producing evidence from the "Should Cost Model" the department developed during the procurement in accordance with Cabinet Office guidelines. The model put the contract price at £642 million. Sopra Steria notes its price was less than the model price, and not "excessively high" as the DWP alleged, although details of its bid are redacted. Cabinet Office guidelines state that complex outsourcing projects shall produce a “Should Cost Model Estimate” as part of the delivery model assessment. They refer to a Sourcing Playbook which states that the model can help “demonstrate value for money, to inform the development of payment mechanisms or to help protect government from ‘low-cost bid bias’.” The Playbook says that if a bid is more than 10 percent lower than either the average of the other bids or the “Should Cost Model” estimate, it should be referred to the Cabinet Office’s Government Commercial Function. The Register asked the DWP if it had referred the Capita bid in that way. Officials said it would be inappropriate to comment further, as the procurement is currently subject to an ongoing legal process. Last month, during a hearing of the UK’s Parliamentary spending watchdog, Labour MP Clive Betts questioned why the DWP would pick Capita after its performance on the Civil Service Pension Scheme, which has sparked protests. Users of the pension portal launched last year were quick to complain about login failures, broken links, and unfinished-looking pages after the launch. MPs later heard the system went live without full functionality in place and struggled to handle the volume and complexity of cases transferred from the previous administrator, MyCSP. Dianne Jeans, DWP Senior Responsible Officer for the Synergy Programme, told the Public Accounts Committee that the shared service award was “a very different scenario than from pensions.” She said the award to Capita followed all the government regulations and processes. “We also had strong legal and commercial oversight and subject matter experts from all four Departments assessing the competing bids throughout the whole process. Capita emerged as the clear preferred bidder under Government procurement processes,” she said. ®

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.

And sue they have.

In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”

“It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us.”

The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”

The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.

“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.

Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court. 

For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.

Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.

The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.

“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”

Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”

Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony. 

Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.

Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”

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A City of York Council email mishap exposed the email addresses of hundreds of Blue Badge holders in the ancient Viking capital, inadvertently revealing their status as disabled residents and triggering a data breach investigation. The council confirmed to The Register that it’s investigating what it described as a "personal data breach" after emails sent to residents last week were distributed without using the blind carbon copy (BCC) function, allowing recipients to see everyone else on the mailing list. According to local reports, the council sent three emails containing Blue Badge-related updates before issuing a fourth message acknowledging the error and asking recipients to delete the previous emails, including from their deleted items folders. Recipients were also warned to remain alert for suspicious messages following the incident. While the exposed information appears to have been limited to email addresses, the breach is especially sensitive because everyone on the distribution list was receiving communications intended for Blue Badge holders. In practice, that meant recipients could identify hundreds of people as members of a group generally associated with disabilities or mobility impairments. One affected resident told local media that the disclosure had left her upset because most people in her life were unaware she held a Blue Badge. "Honestly, I think it's just disgusting – we've been given the details of hundreds of disabled people, which feels unsafe," she said. In a statement to The Register, a spokesperson at City of York Council said it activated its data breach procedures as soon as the error was identified and is conducting a risk assessment in line with guidance from the UK Information Commissioner's Office. "We're working carefully to establish exactly what's happened, alongside conducting a thorough risk assessment ... to understand any potential impact on individuals," a spokesperson said. “Our investigation is ongoing, and we’ll continue to be as open as possible while ensuring the accuracy of the information we provide.” The spokesperson declined to say how many individuals were affected or whether the issue was caused by human error or a technical issue. The council added that it was assessing whether the incident meets the threshold for notification to the ICO within the statutory 72-hour reporting window. That may depend less on the email addresses themselves than on what the mailing list revealed. A spokesperson at the ICO told The Register: "We can confirm that we have received a data breach report on this matter, and following an assessment of the information provided we have closed the case with advice given.” For all the talk of AI-powered cyber threats, it seems some organizations remain committed to the classics. ®

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

For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election. 

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost 2-to-1, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two. 

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair. 

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base. 

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks during an event hosted by the Sacramento Press Club in November 2023. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters

The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November. 

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans. 

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule. 

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There might be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top. 

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November. 

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on “things not related to governance,” like gender or race. 

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In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election. 

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing might be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa. 

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge. 

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

From left, Katie Porter speaks as Chad Bianco, Antonio Villaraigosa, Xavier Becerra and Matt Mahan listen during a California gubernatorial debate hosted by CBS Bay Area and the San Francisco Examiner in San Francisco on May 14. Credit: Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press, pool

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair. 

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make [a shutout] happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.  

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries. 

“The fact that there are any [same-party general elections] is simply undemocratic,” Maviglio said. “People have the choice between only one party, like they’re in the Soviet Union?”

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive. 

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don’t have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting. 

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member. 

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project launched a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It’s very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we’ve seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

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Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) has been told to urgently overhaul an IT estate so dysfunctional that officers say they are fighting serious organized crime despite the technology rather than because of it. A new report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) has delivered a bruising verdict on the National Crime Agency's tech, concluding that the systems underpinning Britain's fight against organized crime are no longer up to the job. The criticism lands despite inspectors otherwise finding much to like. The NCA was graded "Good" in several operational areas, including tackling serious and organized crime and working with partners. But throughout the report, inspectors repeatedly return to technology as a fundamental weakness running through the entire organization. "The NCA's IT infrastructure isn't fit for purpose," the report states. Inspectors backed that assessment with a long list of examples, from officers manually re-entering data and sharing information by hand to teams relying on spreadsheets and other workarounds due to a lack of confidence in official systems. According to the report, around 70 percent of critical IT incidents each month are linked to that technical debt, the result of years spent prioritizing short-term fixes over long-term modernization. Officers told inspectors they did not trust the agency's systems, while others described technology as a major drag on productivity. One interviewee summed up the mood: "IT is a blocker; we achieve in spite of it." Another was even less flattering. "When I started in policing 15 to 20 years ago, I had better technology than I do in the NCA." The report paints a picture familiar to anyone who has worked in a large public sector IT environment. Officers told inspectors they routinely enter the same information multiple times, rely on manual processes, and manually transfer data to external partners. Some said the agency lacks even a basic personnel directory, making it difficult to find the right colleague when they need help. While the NCA operates a corporate system called ATLAS CM, inspectors heard that officers are using as many as 50 different case management methods across the agency, including spreadsheets and other manual workarounds, often due to a lack of confidence in the official platform. The agency's security architecture has also produced its own headaches. Because data sits across multiple government security classifications, many officers reportedly require at least two laptops to do their jobs. Inspectors spoke to some staff who were using four separate machines and said they witnessed the resulting inefficiencies firsthand. In a separate HMICFRS inspection published last year, inspectors found the agency was still relying on around 260 legacy IT systems more than a decade after beginning a project to modernize IT, with technical debt consuming roughly 80 percent of entire IT budget. These ongoing IT problems appear to be taking a toll on morale as well. In the NCA's 2024 staff survey, only 33 percent of respondents said they had the tools needed to do their job effectively. Inspectors concluded the problems are not solely the NCA's responsibility. They also pointed the finger at the Home Office, arguing that short-term funding cycles and a lack of coordinated investment have slowed modernization efforts. HMICFRS has given the NCA and Home Office until September 30 to explain how they intend to dig the agency out of its technology hole, complete with timelines, funding requirements, and a plan to retire aging systems. Criminals may have embraced ransomware, encrypted communications, and industrial-scale cybercrime. But according to inspectors, the NCA is still trying to get some of its own systems to talk to each other. ®

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A UC Santa Cruz student recently sent a request for available housing to Nextdoor after she and her seven roommates were out on the streets because the owner sold the property without warning them. 

It’s the university’s job to provide housing for its students and it hasn’t lived up to this job for years. I advised the students to voice their situation to the chancellor. If not, I told them I would. The UCSC admissions office keeps signing up too many applicants for whom there is not enough housing. 

When will they stop? If the students can find other students in the same situation, I suggest asking them to protest in front of the chancellor’s office and the housing office.

UCSC has a lot of property (which it refuses to develop) on which temporary housing could be erected in time for fall term 2026.  

Kathy Cheer

Santa Cruz

The post Letter to the editor: UCSC should build more housing for its students appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

California regulators passed a rule in January 2024 that they said would protect communities from one of the state’s most popular, and dangerous, pesticides.

For decades, they knew that 1,3-dichloropropane, or 1,3-D, causes tumors in multiple organs in laboratory animals, which led the state to flag it as a carcinogen in 1989. Yet regulators allowed growers to fumigate fields with large volumes of 1,3-D to kill anything living in the soil before planting strawberries, almonds, grapes and other billion-dollar crops.

But now, a year after regulators implemented a rule they said would reduce cancer risk by decreasing the amount of 1,3-D in the air, applications of the highly volatile compound have spiked, state records show. 

PESTICIDES IN THE PAJARO VALLEY: Read Lookout’s news and Community Voices opinion coverage here

Growers applied a million more pounds of 1,3-D last year than they did in either 2023, before regulators enacted the “residential bystander” rule, or in 2024, after they implemented it. 

Increases were highest in Kern and San Joaquin counties, where it was used mostly on almond and grape plantings. Notably, the “adjusted total pounds”—which accounts for different application methods, weather conditions and other factors that affect how much of the volatile pesticide escapes into the air—nearly doubled in both counties and increased by almost 20% statewide.

“Their new regulations are failures,” said Mark Weller, the campaign director for the statewide public-interest group coalition Californians for Pesticide Reform. “They put in new regulations and 1,3-D use went up.”

The Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) enacted new rules in 2024 to restrict the use of 1,3-D to protect residential bystanders by implementing setback distances, requiring deeper injection in soil with higher moisture content, along with new fumigation methods and tarp requirements to reduce fumigant emissions into the atmosphere, said agency spokesperson Amy MacPherson. “DPR specifically developed methods that could allow for comparable levels of use while reducing overall emissions.”

Anne Katten, pesticide and work health and safety project director for the nonprofit California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, analyzed emissions detected at an air monitor in Delhi, California, one of six monitors operated by DPR. Katten found a 30% increase in average levels of 1,3-D in the air during the first three quarters of 2025 (the most recent publicly available data) compared to the same period in 2024.

Delhi is a largely Latino town in Merced County, where the $10 billion agriculture industry employs one in five residents and farmers primarily use 1,3-D to grow almonds and sweet potatoes. Merced is also where regulators detected alarmingly high levels of 1,3-D at a junior high school in 1990 and suspended its use for five years.

Public health policy assumes that there is no safe level of exposure to a carcinogen, to account for disparities in exposure and variable susceptibility across different populations. Fumigants like 1,3-D can also produce severe short-term symptoms, including respiratory distress, chest pains, eye irritation and dizziness.

A sign at a Watsonville strawberry field warns of pesticide use. Credit: Liza Gross / Inside Climate News

In 2023, researchers in China reported what they believed to be the first death from inhaling 1.3-D, which commonly causes nausea, dizziness and headaches in exposed California farmworkers. A 50-year-old Chinese greenhouse worker died of renal failure and brain swelling more than a week after a brief encounter with 1,3-D in a poorly ventilated workspace.

1,3-D is now banned in 40 countries, according to Pesticide Action Network International.

The whole point of the regulations was not necessarily to reduce 1,3-D use but to reduce emissions, said Caroline Cox, a retired pesticide scientist and former research director at the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health. “It just doesn’t seem like the regulations are really doing what they were designed to do.”

Farmworker communities and their allies have tried lawsuits, media campaigns and die-in protests to compel pesticide regulators to protect them from 1,3-D. In February, they returned to court to seek relief from DPR’s “continued failure to meet its legal obligations to protect farmworkers and other members of the public from … a toxic, cancer-causing fumigant.”

DPR now has two separate safety levels for the same chemical, the 2024 residential bystander rule and another rule for occupational bystanders, which went into effect at the beginning of 2026. Having two different 1,3-D regulatory targets for residents and workers does not account for the fact that farmworker communities, where people live and work next to treated fields, typically face much higher exposure risks from childhood to old age. 

“Both regulations miss the mark and allow for the continued use of 1,3-D in a way that neither satisfies DPR’s mandatory legal obligations nor sufficiently protects public health,” farmworker and community advocates argued in their legal brief.

Before enacting the new rules, DPR capped the amount of 1,3-D growers could apply within a roughly 36-square-mile area called a township. DPR did not include a township cap in the 2024 regulations because agency officials expected the setbacks and other additional requirements to mitigate both acute and cancer risks. Still, the cap remained in place, due to a court order, until January, when the occupational bystander rule went into effect.

One township in Kern County already exceeded the previously required annual township cap, and several in Kern and Merced counties are approaching it, in just the first quarter of this year, state records show. As a 2024 Inside Climate News analysis found, the disproportionate burden of pesticide exposure falls on immigrants with limited English proficiency—which describes the majority of California’s farmworker population.

DPR’s MacPherson attributed increased applications of 1,3-D to “unusually high replanting of vineyards and orchards in Kern County, which only occurs about once every 10 to 20 years.”

DPR is monitoring areas with relatively high use in the first quarter, she said, but needs to see a full year of data before drawing “meaningful conclusions.”

DPR released a plan to accelerate sustainable pest management in 2024 with a top goal of eliminating the adverse human health and environmental impacts associated with pesticide use. It does not include a list of priority pesticides.

Seeing elevated emissions of 1,3-D after regulators removed the cap troubles Katten at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. “They were saying everything was going to be OK because things were on a downward trend, and they clearly aren’t,” Katten said. “Their sustainable pest management efforts are not bearing fruit yet.”

At a recent meeting with DPR, Weller told staff members the agency used to be committed to reducing fumigant use in California. “Are you still interested in that?” he asked.

No one answered yes, he said.

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

The post California pesticide regulators say new rules protect communities as applications of a dangerous fumigant rise appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

In a letter to the editor, a Santa Cruz resident expresses doubt over the future of local passenger rail under the current leadership of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission.

Train travellers are poorly served by the UK’s mobile networks, says Ofcom. Tests on railway lines in England, Scotland and Wales revealed disappointing signal across 24 rail segments, with results falling short in 83 percent of cases. The communications regulator is now calling for a nationwide effort to raise the standard of mobile coverage passengers can expect. On-board Wi-Fi was also tested by Ofcom and it performed well just one percent of the time. This writer can attest that on train journeys to London, the mobile network signal is often too weak to allow doom scrolling on social media - which is perhaps no bad thing. Ofcom’s report [PDF] found that even the best performing network (EE) met the Good Performance threshold less than half the time, while Three, O2 and Vodafone could only achieve this between 17 and 21 percent of journeys. For the purpose of the tests, Good Performance was defined as a download speed of at least 5 Mbit/s, an upload speed of at least 1.5 Mbit/s and a response time (latency) of 50 milliseconds or better. This level should allow a passenger to stream video or browse the web without noticeable delays. Ofcom tested cell performance on main line rail journeys, and most of these were in England, with a few in Scotland and just a solitary line along the south coast in Wales. Northern Ireland was not included in the tests. According to the results, the best performance was on the London Victoria to East Croydon line, south of the capital, or London to Bristol – but only for EE users. The problem is down to weak mobile signal strength along rail corridors, which can be further attenuated by certain types of rail carriage, Ofcom says. Rural and intercity passengers unsurprisingly experience a worse service than those in urban areas, where there are more cell base station sites. However, latency turns out to be the main reason why tests failed to meet the Good Performance threshold. Even when download and upload speeds were adequate, network delays proved to be the bottleneck, Ofcom says. One aspect of the study relates to the technologies operating across the four networks. EE has a roughly even three-way split between 4G, 5G Standalone (5G SA), and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA), which the report says “represents the most advanced 5G deployment observed in the study.” Three remains predominantly a 4G network along the rail corridors, accounting for 68 percent of samples, 32 percent as 5G NSA and no 5G SA encountered during testing. Vodafone and O2 sit somewhere between these findings. Despite Vodafone and Three sharing their networks as part of their ongoing merger, Three users were not able to use Vodafone 5G SA at the time of the survey, Ofcom found. In the case of Wi-Fi, only South Western Railway, which is testing a trackside millimeter-wave tech, delivered a meaningful service as part of their technology trial, Ofcom says. Throttling by train operators is too severe, it found, with caps of about 1 Mbit/s on some routes preventing passengers from enjoying Good Performance. The on-board service also used older standards, typically Wi-Fi 4 or 5. In-train connectivity does not yet consistently meet the expectations of modern passengers, the report concludes, with significant variation by route, operator and time of day. Improving the experience will require coordination between mobile operators, train operating companies and others, plus supportive policy and regulatory frameworks. Kester Mann, CCS Insight director for consumer and connectivity, told us: "bringing reliable mobile connectivity to trains is hugely challenging. It requires connecting to multiple masts and other network infrastructure while travelling at speeds of 100 MPH or more. Tunnels and cuttings make the job even more demanding." He said many tracks pass through rural areas where mobile coverage is weak or absent. "Poor signals on trains is a regular customer frustration that the mobile industry, Government and train operating companies have long struggled to address." The regulator wants to hear from interested parties on the issues raised in this report, and welcomes responses between now and July 29. “People rightly expect connectivity they can count on - and delivering it will require a joined‑up national effort,” said Ofcom’s Group Director for Infrastructure and Connectivity, Natalie Black. ®

ON CALL Buckle in, dear readers, for an extreme installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of superlative tech support scenarios. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Solomon" who sent a story from his time working for a county sheriff's office. "I usually arrived early in the morning to get my daily stuff done before the phone calls started," Solomon told On Call. "One morning I found the Major waiting for me. He told me to follow him. I said I needed to clock in. He replied that he'd already done that for me." That told Solomon time was of the essence, an impression that proved correct as the Major broke into a jog and led him to a waiting patrol car in which the officer explained that Solomon was coming along on a raid that might need someone with IT skills to mop up afterward. "We sped through streets, with no lights or sirens," Solomon wrote. "The Major didn't say anything except 'You're a good man.'" That's when Solomon noticed the Major was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a belt that held a few extra magazines of ammunition. At which point he became more than a little worried. His mood didn't improve when the patrol car came to a sudden halt and the Major told him to stay in the vehicle – no matter what happened. Solomon did as he was told and soon noticed several other patrol cars arrive and heard a disconcerting increase in radio chatter. So many personnel appeared he wondered if a full-blown SWAT team might be needed for the job. "Just then, two tactical vehicles came roaring down the street from behind me and sped around the corner," Solomon told On Call. Then he heard a lot of shouting, and his mind started to race. "I need a bulletproof vest and a fully automatic rifle. I haven't been to church for years." About 20 minutes later, the Major returned and told Solomon he wasn't needed. "No computers here," the Major said, explaining the situation with a cryptic "Things moved faster than expected." Some of the officers who worked on the raid invited Solomon along to lunch after. "The burger I ate that day was the best I'd ever had in my life, I was so relieved," he told On Call. What's the most dangerous situation you've encountered while delivering tech support? Be brave and click here to send On Call an email so we can help other readers partake of your peril in a future column. ®

In the current environment, remaining heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.