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You’ve probably heard the one about the masochist who asks the sadist to beat him up. The sadist says no. That hoary joke came to mind when I saw President Donald Trump’s reply to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s statement that artificial intelligence has become too dangerous not to regulate. Two rival AI chief executives, Open AI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk, agreed with Amodei. But Trump said no:

[W]hen, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.

I bet you feel better already!

From a strictly medical point of view, my analogy of the masochist and the sadist does not apply. Amodei, Altman, and Musk can be faulted for not banding together earlier to demand forcefully that AI be regulated at the federal level. (Didn’t they see The Matrix?) But procrastination isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (though being a billionaire perhaps should). For his part, Trump isn’t a sadist, exactly, but rather suffers from the related disorder of malignant narcissism, worsened lately by a vanishing attention span. It’s our hard luck that a new global crisis is arising under the most mentally unstable president ever to occupy the White House—worse even than the heavy-drinking, deeply paranoid Richard Nixon, at the height of the Watergate scandal, talking to portraits on the White House walls. The example of how Trump handled his last global crisis—the Covid epidemic—is deeply discouraging.

Still, Trump isn’t entirely wrong to be suspicious. The tech industry has shown itself to be untrustworthy in recent years, and some degree of skepticism about how Amodei, Altman, and Musk would like this to go forward is warranted.

The main suspicion is that these AI chief executives see regulation as an opportunity to reduce competition and otherwise benefit their own dominant companies, a process known as regulatory capture. The tech venture capitalist David Sacks, who co-chairs Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said on X that “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” Aiden Gomez, chief executive of a Canadian AI startup called Cohere, wrote on his company website: “These oligopolies are now requesting to bend competition rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a cartel by any other name.”

Gomez is right to question some of what Amodei proposed in last week’s memo. The Anthropic chief’s first idea was that every “frontier AI company” commit to giving “employee-like access” to “a team of embedded third-party evaluators” who will impose safety standards. AI is “unilaterally committing to this step now,” Amodei wrote, and that’s laudable. But Amodei undermined his argument when he analogized these evaluators to bank regulators. The federal agencies that regulate banks—the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, even the Federal Reserve—are pretty much the poster child for regulatory capture. Bankers are expert at persuading regulators that this or that regulatory move will bring down the whole house of cards. They’re able to bluff this way because finance, much like AI research, is a fast-changing realm that almost nobody really understands.

Amodei’s second proposal was that “frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” This “will require government support,” Amodei wrote. That’s a nice way of saying it’s illegal under antitrust law. These “frontier AI companies within democratic countries” are Open AI, Anthropic, and perhaps one or two others, and if they consulted with each other as Amodei proposed they’d be operating like a cartel. Gomez is right to use that word.

Amodei’s third proposal is unassailable. It’s international cooperation to guarantee safety worldwide. To Trump that sounds like surrendering to China. But it is by far the most necessary step, and nobody with a properly functioning cerebral cortex can oppose it.

To acknowledge that Amodei’s first two proposals would give Anthropic an unfair competitive advantage needn’t be to argue against regulation. It can simply be to argue against faulty regulation. Amodei’s first proposal might be made to work if the third-party evaluator were less like the usual run of bank examiners and more like an official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. Trump put the CFPB on ice precisely because banks (and their allies in Congress) resented its focus on the common good rather than on banking profits. A third-party evaluator who acted more like a CFPB regulator would be helpful. A third-party evaluator who acted more like an FDIC regulator probably would not.

Amodei’s second proposal can’t be made to work, but it’s a useful illustration of why AI needs to be regulated by government. The only way to set proper industry standards is for a bunch of experts to get together and hammer them out. But having the individual companies do this on their own is unacceptable because it’s anticompetitive. So instead the job typically gets done by government regulators in consultation with the companies, with public interest groups, with concerned academic experts, and various other “stakeholders” (a word I tend to avoid because it makes me think of a large cut of sirloin dangling from a grill fork). If there’s no statute under which the government may plausibly do this, then Congress should create one after conducting hearings and holding meetings that address the more obvious aspects of the problem, while leaving abstruse details to regulators.

Whatever the process, it needs to begin yesterday, because recursive self-improvement—the ability of AI to create the next generation of AI without human intervention—is right around the corner. Three weeks ago, how many of us had even heard of recursive self-improvement? Now it’s scaring us to death.

Opposition to regulating AI may not be so formidable as it seems. Venture capitalists like Sacks and Marc Andreesen are the most fervently opposed because they’re all about money. But tech entrepreneurs (omitting the Antichrist-obsessed Peter Thiel) are lately showing more sympathy toward the idea, perhaps because they’re more familiar with what AI can do. Gomez, for instance, after denouncing Amodei’s regulatory scheme, proposed one of his own, including an “independent testing” scheme that sounded a lot like Amodei’s bank-examiner proposal, only not with a risk framework defined by “a select few companies.” (Gomez even repeated Amodei’s clueless suggestion that bank regulators might provide a sound model!) Gomez’s definition of what constituted risk was too complex and technical for me to understand, but if the gist is that the focus should be on the really dangerous stuff, count me in.

Trump probably never heard of regulatory capture. But he’s right to observe that it’s unusual for a company to judge itself a threat, as Anthropic did last week. Jacob Coxon, a 27 year-old AI researcher at Anthropic, quit his job and posted on X a tweet that quickly circled the globe: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” In response, a top Anthropic scientist replied: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” With Amodei posting his memo shortly thereafter, Anthropic was fairly shouting: Stop me before I kill again!

If the Frankenstein monster came up to you and said, “Stop me before I kill again,” you wouldn’t ask it which safety precautions to take. You’d lock it up. The fear among AI leaders is persuasive. If they’re afraid, then I’m going to be afraid, too. But finding the solution to ameliorate these fears shouldn’t be left to them. Our democratic institutions of governance are built to handle this. Electing a Democratic Congress in November will help speed the process along. Let’s hope Trump can be persuaded to get out of the way.

When longtime Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County Executive Director Karen Delaney began preparing for retirement, the organization knew it had big shoes to fill. So big, in fact, that the board kicked off an 18-month strategic planning process to help chart the organization’s next chapter.

Key to those efforts was Shawn Peterson, who was officially announced as executive director in July. Peterson has been serving as interim director since January, and has been with the organization for a decade. 

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

California will set first-in-the-nation standards for smoke-damage testing and cleanup after the governor on Tuesday signed a package of bills to improve wildfire recovery.

Almost two years after the deadly Los Angeles County fires, many survivors have yet to return to homes that did not burn down but might not be habitable because of smoke damage. They have complained that the delays are due in part to arguments with their insurance companies over who should pay for testing and cleanup. The state Insurance Department estimates that more than 13,000 smoke-damage claims came out of the January 2025 fires.

“These new protections will make insurer obligations clearer and give homeowners more financial flexibility when they need it most,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said as he signed the bills in Altadena at a meeting with Eaton fire survivors. They take effect Jan. 1.

Assembly Bill 1642, authored by Assemblymember John Harabedian, a Democrat representing Pasadena, directs the Department of Toxic Substances Control to create standards for lead and asbestos testing, repair and removal by the end of 2028. It will have to establish similar standards for other toxic materials and contaminants by the end of 2029. Until the new standards are created, existing federal and state standards around lead and asbestos exposure will apply.

AB 1795 creates the legal presumption that smoke damage in a fire zone came from the fire, and requires insurance companies to pay for testing and remediation based on the impending standards.

“For homeowners who have already lost so much in a fire, the last thing a family should have to do is fight for a clear answer about whether it is safe to return home,” said Assemblymember Mike Gipson, a Carson Democrat and author of AB 1795, in a statement.

The insurance department, fire survivors and Los Angeles County have filed lawsuits or other legal action against State Farm and the last-resort FAIR Plan over their handling of smoke-damage claims. Last week, the county launched an investigation into Farmers over similar issues.

Other related bills by Harabedian became law after the governor signed them Tuesday, including AB 1842, which creates a statewide mortgage forbearance program for homeowners whose homes are deemed uninhabitable after a major disaster. Under the law, mortgage providers would be prohibited from charging penalties or late fees while homeowners pause payments. 

Also Harabedian’s is AB 1847, which extends mortgage forbearance to 24 months for survivors of the Los Angeles County fires, and extends the latest possible deadline for a borrower’s request for forbearance to Jan. 7, 2029.

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BT Email customers say they have been bombarded with hundreds – and in one case more than 1,000 – unsolicited password reset messages, leaving the telco investigating what is causing the deluge. The reports began appearing on BT's community forums over the weekend, with customers describing sudden bursts of PIN messages arriving within minutes despite them making no attempt to reset their passwords. One customer said they received between 50 and 70 PIN texts "in the space [of] a few minutes," while a second reported more than 100. A third said the number had passed 500, and another claimed to have received more than 1,000. One BT customer who contacted The Register separately said they had received around 300 password reset emails over the previous 24 hours, typically arriving in bursts of around 50 within a minute before stopping for several hours. BT has acknowledged the problem but has yet to explain what is behind it. "We are aware that some customers have received a large number of password reset pin messages and we are actively investigating the cause of this," a BT moderator said on the company's community forum. "If you have received multiple messages like this, please ignore them and remain vigilant for any unusual activity with further messages or unexpected calls." BT added that customers' email accounts are secure and that those receiving the messages do not need to take any action. At least one customer, however, claims someone accessed their account during the PIN barrage. The user said they lost access to both their email and BT ID overnight, but managed to request a PIN before whoever was accessing the account could change the telephone number attached to it. That account has not been independently verified, and it isn't clear whether the apparent takeover was connected to the flood of PIN messages. The cause of the wider problem remains a mystery. It isn’t yet clear whether it’s the result of someone deliberately hammering a password recovery mechanism, a fault within BT's systems, or something else entirely. The Register has asked BT how many customers are affected, whether the messages are being generated by external password-reset attempts, and whether it has found any evidence of malicious activity. We've also asked the telco what rate limiting it applies to password reset requests, given reports of hundreds of PINs arriving within minutes, and whether both email and SMS messages are affected. BT says it's investigating. In the meantime, some customers are getting enough PINs to start their own lottery. ®

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

Starting Jan. 1, 2028, Californians ages 80 and older can opt out of jury service permanently due to a medical condition, without needing a note from a health care provider.

The change comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1359 on Monday, which enables older adults to request a permanent exemption by attesting that they have an impairment that renders them incapable of performing jury service. Further medical documentation will not be required. Seniors who still want to serve on a jury can still do so.

Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a Cupertino Democrat, said he introduced the bill after a constituent — Dianne McKenna, a former Santa Clara County supervisor — relayed to Ahrens the difficulties she faced helping her husband get an exemption from jury service.

“Seniors are great jurists that can and will continue to serve if they’re willing and able to,” said Ahrens in an email to CalMatters. “But if they cannot, they will no longer have to jump through hoops to permanently opt out.”

Unlike some other states including Florida and Texas, California doesn’t have a blanket age of exemption for jury service. It’s 70 in Florida and 75 in Texas.

Californians 70 years and older can be excused due to a medical impairment without a doctor’s note, but they still must inform the local jury’s office that they’re unable to serve with a written excuse. But under current law, this is a one-time exemption and residents must repeat this process each time they’re selected for service.

Proponents of the measure argue that repeatedly seeking exemption can put significant stress on older individuals — particularly those with mobility issues and chronic health conditions, or those who don’t have regular access to a computer or internet. A third of adults over 80 will have difficulties staying home without assistance, and 1 in 5 will experience self-care limitations, according to a 2025 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. 

The measure would be especially beneficial for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and do not have a caretaker who can assist them, said Andrew Mendoza, the director of state affairs for the Alzheimer’s Association, during a June hearing.

“This bill can assist vulnerable populations avoid what would otherwise be a stressful process to obtain documents and explain their condition as a disability during a time of great circumstantial change,” he said.

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Donald Trump exploded in wild fury at the Supreme Court after it blocked his scheme to corrupt vote-by-mail. But in his bizarrely unhinged tirade was a key tell: He called the ruling a “big loss for Republicans.” In effect, he openly admitted he’s angry because he won’t be able to rig the midterms—and because his party is more likely to lose them badly. This comes as a New York Times poll finds Democrats leading by nearly nine points in the generic ballot matchup. This is the gold-standard survey and it shows Democrats with a widening lead. It also shows Democrats suddenly leading on the economy and on immigration and finds his approval lower than any president heading into a midterm since George W. Bush before the 2006 Democratic blowout. As a Times analysis concludes, a “blue wave may be building.” Taken all together, it’s arguably his worst polling news of the cycle. We talked to Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, a veteran of midterms. We discuss the Times poll’s hidden findings, why Texas is no longer a pipe dream, why the polls might soon start to tighten, and why that shouldn’t freak you out. Listen to this episode here.

$29 million to renovate a gym at a Santa Barbara college in Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón’s district.

$13 million for a farmers market and food innovation hub in wealthy Marin County, where Gov. Gavin Newsom lives.

$3 million to renovate the San Jose Giants’ minor league baseball stadium in Santa Clara County. 

California lawmakers doled out $1.3 billion in handouts for their legislative districts with almost zero public scrutiny or input during an annual budgeting process that allows legislators and the governor to hand-pick funding recipients in private.

The money, often known as earmarks or “pork-barrel projects,” is commonplace in California and elsewhere, even in years when the state faces huge budget deficits. The practice allows lawmakers to tout their accomplishments and woo voters.

The earmark process is so secretive that few know why some projects make the cut and others don’t, raising equity and transparency concerns, even among lawmakers. Critics argue that it allows elected officials to play favorites. 

“[It] is done all behind closed doors,” said Julie Baker, CEO of California for the Arts. “It is somewhat inequitable … to have a grant-making process that everyone’s competing over and then have a process that’s non-transparent.”

Here’s how earmarks work: The leaders in the California Assembly and Senate, both Democrats, allow their colleagues to submit private wish-lists for funds with a suggested spending cap the leaders set. Then billions of dollars for hundreds of projects suddenly appear in a bill heard just days before lawmakers leave for the year, leaving little time for the public to weigh in. Lawmakers don’t put their names on the earmarks, making it hard to identify who requested what.

This year, Limón loosely capped Senate Democrats’ requests at $5 million each, said Sen. Dave Cortese, a San Jose Democrat who secured $6.5 million for his district. Lawmakers do not share their funding requests with each other, he said — at least not before they take credit for them in media releases or ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

“It’s a confidential process between each office and leadership,” he told CalMatters.

But even he bemoaned the opaque nature of it.

“Why couldn’t we do this process a little earlier and get our requests into subcommittees so the public could just see what’s going on?” Cortese said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of here.”

‘Why did I spend all that time and energy?’

The vast majority of the funding goes to urban counties such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are represented by powerful Democrats, and to other pet projects in Democratic leaders’ districts. Areas that are represented by Republicans typically get little to nothing. 

This year, 17 counties, mostly lower population rural counties represented by Republicans, did not appear to receive any earmark funding. 

“The leadership decides the major portions of the budget,” said Sen. Roger Niello, a Roseville Republican and vice chair of the Senate budget committee. “That is frustrating, but it is the system that we have.”

CalMatters compiled the earmarks in the budget measure Assembly Bill 113 and used Digital Democracy’s Find your legislators tool to determine which county and legislative district each project falls in.

More than $550 million — 42% of all earmarks identified by CalMatters — went to non-governmental organizations, mostly nonprofits, according to the analysis. It includes at least $93 million for arts projects, museums and murals, as well as funding for immigration services, land conservation and housing and homelessness.

The rest went to city and county governments for infrastructure including parks, community pools, wildfire mitigation and road repairs.

CalMatters reached out to Newsom, Limón, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and more than 20 other lawmakers to ask for a list of their funding requests. Few provided them.

Newsom, Rivas and Limón declined to answer questions about specific projects but told CalMatters in general statements that they are proud of the earmarks.

In a statement, Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said the funding in this year’s budget will “make a lasting, meaningful difference in communities across California.”

“From supporting our natural resources, and improving recreation centers to strengthening the arts and expanding food access, these additional investments reflect a continued commitment to building stronger, healthier, and more vibrant communities for all Californians,” the statement read.

Proponents of earmarks say they empower state lawmakers to prioritize projects with urgent needs in their districts instead of funneling the money through lengthy grant applications. The earmarks are also just a sliver of the state’s $352 billion budget, they noted.

“My message to [state agencies] is, ‘You guys take the other 99.9% and leave this fraction of a percent to us,’” Cortese said. “I’ll help target some real need in these districts that you are never going to see in an office in Sacramento.”

Lawmakers gather on the Assembly floor during the final days of session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Aug. 31, 2026.

But critics bashed state leaders for finding $1.3 billion for earmarks when the state has struggled to backfill major federal cuts to healthcare. State leaders this year relied on windfall revenue from an AI-driven economic boom, some tax increases and suspending payments to schools and state reserves to balance the budget and delay deep healthcare cuts to next year.

“They’ve said, ‘Look … there’s no extra money to spend,’ and then a half billion dollars comes out in the last 48 hours of the session,” said Geoff Green, CEO of CalNonprofits, which represents thousands of nonprofits statewide. “For entities that were working through what we considered normal processes through the entirety of the session, to then see this come out at the last second, it feels like, well, why did I spend all that time and energy?”

Susan Shelley, vice president of communications at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, accused lawmakers of handing money out to their supporters at the last moment.

“From a taxpayer perspective, we don’t have the money for this,” Shelley said.

Dance troupes, museums and MMA fighters

The biggest allocation this year was $125 million to help buy and transform a defunct Alameda County horse track into a public park — a Newsom priority. Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks and Senate Housing Committee Chair Jesse Arreguín, both Oakland Democrats, championed the funding.

Some earmarks benefited groups with wealthy backers. The state gave $25 million to the Innovative Genomics Institute, a UC Berkeley-based genome engineering research facility in Wicks and Arreguín’s districts whose funders include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Li Ka Shing Foundation and the United States Department of Defense. 

Other earmarks include: 

• $20 million to help build a facility for the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco, which is backed by dozens of foundations and endowment funds. Executive director Anita Friedman said the endowments only fund roughly 2% of its budget.
• $15 million to renovate the police and firefighters memorials in Sacramento’s Capital Park
• $1 million for the state’s retirement fund for mixed martial arts fighters, currently funded through ticket and vanity plate sales.

Another $86 million went to arts projects, museums and dance troupes — more than 40% of them in San Francisco. 

That includes $3 million to the ODC Dance Company, whose founder Brenda Way was inducted into the California Hall of Fame by Newsom and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom; $2.8 million to the Center for the Art of Translation backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Hawthornden Foundation; and $400,000 to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. 

It’s unclear who advocated for those earmarks. Democratic San Francisco Assemblymember Matt Haney said he did not request any of them. Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, both San Francisco Democrats, did not respond to requests for comment from CalMatters. 

Green, of CalNonprofit, said he worries the money is not reaching those with the most acute needs, but those with the best relationships with lawmakers.

“The capacity of a large, well-staffed institute to access resources is just a completely different universe than a smaller, volunteer, community-based organization in some more rural parts of the state,” he said, adding that the recipients appear to be “folks who have relationships already.”

Relationships matter

Relationships do matter to Cortese. Among the projects he requested funding for, only one — Ashes to Beauty, which received $750,000 — is relatively new to him. He said he’s known the other nonprofits he sought funding for dating to his days as a San Jose city councilmember in the 2000s. 

“If some new group came along and they seemed hopeful … but I didn’t know of them very well, I hadn’t seen their work too much in the community, I’m probably not going to entrust them with $1 million or $800,000,” he said. “It’s not a matter of any kind of favoritism.”

Cortese said his office keeps a long list of requests for funding and considers which groups are “lifting up the greater good of the community.” 

Cortese asked for and received $2.1 million for First Tee-Silicon Valley, which teaches golf and leadership to high-risk kids in marginalized neighborhoods; $2.6 million to environmental nonprofit Our City Forest; and $1 million for Amigos de Guadalupe, an immigration services nonprofit. 

Several earmarks went to nonprofits with ties to the governor. The Redwood High School Foundation, which funds Newsom’s high school alma mater, received $4 million for a “capital project.” Another $250,000 went to Kiss the Ground, a regenerative agriculture nonprofit whose 2020 documentary featured Newsom.

A total of $3.86 million went to the Alliance for Community Empowerment, a Los Angeles nonprofit that serves trauma and poverty survivors. Its founder, Michelle Miranda, sat on a board of community advisers to Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, an Encino Democrat who chairs the budget committee.

Gabriel’s spokesperson Alicia Isaacs-Lee did not address specific projects but said Assembly Democrats fought for “smart, targeted, one-time investments” in healthcare, food banks, legal service providers, fire departments and nonprofits. 

Homeless shelter City of Refuge Sacramento received $1.8 million to open two more homes to serve children, co-founder Rachelle Ditmore told CalMatters. She is a close friend of Sen. Angelique Ashby, a Sacramento Democrat who helped the shelter secure $8 million in 2023. Democratic Assemblymember Maggy Krell, who also represents the area, donated $10,000 from her campaign account to Ditmore’s nonprofit in August 2025. 

But Ditmore told CalMatters that the governor, who signed an executive order on human trafficking at City of Refuge, may have requested the funding this year. 

“This is an authentic place and I’m grateful for history, but also love that this was directed by other eyes who were able to see the value,” Ditmore told CalMatters in an email.

Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, a Los Angeles Democrat, secured $13.5 million in earmarks this year, including $500,000 for the Los Angeles Black Workers Center, which she co-founded, according to a list provided by her spokesperson Paulette Thornton. 

The center is the only one in the area serving Black workers, and the funding will connect Black residents to quality jobs, Thornton said.

Rural, Republican-led counties get less

Los Angeles County, where nearly a quarter of all Californians live, received at least $300 million in earmarks this year — just under a quarter of the total and more than any other county, data analysis shows. 

Santa Barbara County, Limón’s home county with a population of 450,000, received at least $72.8 million in earmarks, more than any other similarly sized county. Republican-dominated Tulare County, by comparison, received just $200,000 for its 485,000 residents.

The contrast reflects the power of leadership in Sacramento, said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College. 

“Part of the power … is the ability to get benefits for the district, and it’s not surprising that the legislative leaders tend to do pretty well in that respect,” Pitney said.

Last year, a quarter of the earmarks CalMatters identified — more than $100 million — went to the district of former Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Santa Rosa Democrat. 

This year, CalMatters identified $83.7 million in earmarks benefiting Limón’s district, including the $29 million gym renovation. Others include:

• $6 million to acquire and rehabilitate a historical building that housed nonprofit La Casa de la Raza.
• $5 million to restore Pershing Park in Santa Barbara.
• $3.3 million for a community pool in the city of Carpinteria.
• $3 million for a high school community aquatics center.

Rivas’ district, which includes parts of Santa Cruz County, received just over $10 million in earmarks, including $2.8 million for a regional soccer complex in Salinas, $2.5 million for a recreational center in King City and $525,000 for arts and culture in Watsonville. His district overlaps with that of state Sen. John Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the budget committee. 

Laird’s district received $36.9 million, including: 

• $10 million for expanding public access to the Pacific Gas & Electric-owned North Ranch property.
• $618,000 for highway traffic enforcement on the Bixby Bridge.
• $250,000 to the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade, a nonprofit advocating for beavers.

Gabriel’s district saw at least $7 million in earmarks, including $2.5 million to Mid Valley YMCA, $500,000 to Los Angeles youth film nonprofit Kids in the Spotlight and $200,000 to social services group Family Rescue Center.

Niello told CalMatters that GOP senators were only given $1 million each in earmarks to distribute.

“That means that I’m not able to do enough for my district [as] Dave Cortese is for his, and we both have the same size districts. Is that fair? To me, it’s not.”

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The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding projects aimed at delivering connectivity using high-flying aircraft, including technology to beam power from the ground to keep them in the air. Britain's science and technology body, inspired by America's DARPA but on a more modest budget, says it is backing 18 projects to develop aircraft capable of operating reliably and cost-effectively in the stratosphere, as part of a program known as Enduring Atmospheric Platforms. Success will be measured by whether any aircraft can continuously supply 300 W of power to a communications payload for an entire week, while holding station above the UK. The intent is to create an alternative to orbital satellites for providing connectivity to underserved parts of the UK and elsewhere in the world. These are known as high-altitude pseudo-satellites (HAPS). The agency says that satellites have been the default way to reach users or communities that are not well served by terrestrial networks, but their distance and orbits impose physical limits on what they can deliver. ARIA is allocating £70 million ($94 million) in funding over three and a half years for the projects, which will tackle the power and reliability challenges of sustained operations above the UK. The projects are split into three technical areas, with TA1 set to cover enabling technologies, TA2 comprising system integration and testing, and TA3 focused on deployment and communications. ARIA highlighted a project called Carousel from aerospace startup Menapia. This plans to produce a constellation of high-altitude multi-rotor aircraft, capable of routine operations at altitudes up to 20 km (12 miles), with the intention of forming a persistent "canopy" over the UK. Another is Enduring Drone Networks, being developed by VFP Aerospace, which is aiming for persistent presence via a relay team of units that will cycle between their service altitude and ground stations for recharging. It says it is targeting a production cost of £50,000 ($67,000) per drone. In the enabling technologies category, a firm called Hypanode Ltd is working on a fuel cell power system to deliver 20 times more energy than current battery technology. Scalable Laser Ltd is developing laser-based power beaming technology, pairing high-power laser diodes with advanced photovoltaic receivers, while Space Solar Engineering Ltd is looking at radio frequency power beaming to deliver continuous power to a HAPS aircraft. A more exotic-sounding technology is Stratospheric Navigation and Gravity (STRAT-NAV) from the University of Bath. This seeks to extend the endurance of HAPS craft by allowing them to predict and make use of atmospheric gravity waves – caused when air is forced upward by weather fronts or hills, and gravity pulls it back down, creating a ripple. "This research expands the UK's leadership in high-altitude platforms to become the place where this industry is designed, built, and scaled," says Rico Chandra, ARIA's program director for Enduring Atmospheric Platforms. "Getting there means backing bold ideas, from fixed-wing solar aircraft to designs nobody predicted, including aircraft that fly on spinning wings instead of propellers." ARIA funds teams of scientists and engineers to pursue cutting-edge research. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST). It was until recently chaired by entrepreneur Matt Clifford, who stepped down after taking up a role with US AI firm Anthropic. The agency was also controversially spared being asked to make savings leading up to the UK government's Spending Review last year. ®

Santa Cruz surfer and designer Taylor Lane turned thousands of discarded cigarette butts into a striking surfboard—and a globe-spanning documentary about ocean stewardship.

Share a solution to global warming—sensible or far-out.

World Elite Sumo brings its first West Coast tournament to Santa Cruz, with 12 international wrestlers, a new women’s competition and 400-pound Power Slap star Makini “Big Mak” Manu.

Editor Brad Kava remembers the spectacle of sumo wrestling, looks ahead to World Elite Sumo in Santa Cruz and highlights a busy week of local events.

Readers weigh in on Santa Cruz State Parks, license-plate surveillance and the proposed Seahawk battery energy storage project near Watsonville.

Comedian and musician Kristin Key brings her guitar, high-energy musical comedy and viral “Lesbian Army” to Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s Monday Night Revels on Sept. 21.

Taqueria Los Viejones brings handmade heirloom tortillas, quesabirria, tacos and traditional Mexican cooking from a successful food truck to a new Water Street restaurant.

As the autumn equinox approaches, Elizabeth Borelli looks at simple ways to slow down, notice seasonal change and find a little balance heading into fall.

Mark C. Anderson celebrates Rob Brezsny’s rebellious new book, CARNE’s East Cliff debut and California’s enduring avocado obsession—with cider, oysters and kelp on the side.

Santa Cruz Guitar Company celebrates 50 years of handcrafted instruments with a free block party and an all-star concert at the Rio Theatre on Sept. 19.

Unpredictable token bills haunted the first half of 2026 as AI experimenters pushed deeper into the tech and often found useful results could only be achieved after surprising and unwelcome expenditure. We've gone from tokenmaxxers to tokenmisers, counting every character we send to AI services. That changed the way we used AI, focusing users on the ticking meter and unable to cast their eyes up and explore the possible. Those blinkers fell away in the middle of August when Alibaba delivered Qwen3.8-27B, byte-for-byte probably the most powerful language model ever created – and also capable of running on a high-spec laptop. The community of “local AI” enthusiasts noticed and have spent the intervening weeks whittling Qwen down to fit on an ever-widening array of devices, including – surprisingly – my M4 MacBook Air. Their work means millions of similar devices can now access near-frontier-level artificial intelligence from free software. The gap between my MacBook Air and a smartphone isn’t vast. As local AI developers continue whittling Qwen down to size, a few hundred million smartphones will also be capable of running top-tier AI. While that hasn't happened yet, it won't be more than six months away. At the rate things are unfolding, probably closer to six weeks. Suddenly, "good enough" AI isn't something that we will have to rent. We can have it, at no cost, on our desktops, our kitchen tables, our classrooms and in our pockets. That’s great, but also scary because we've been caught unprepared by AI effectively becoming free. Nobody yet knows what we will do with free AI, or if we are ready for it. On the positive side of the ledger, we stand to benefit from a growing “cognition surplus” that brings more thinking capacity into the home or office. Need to wrangle your way through a baroque accounting system? Give it to the AI. Sorting through twenty years of smartphone snaps? Again, let the AI do the heavy lifting. How about a personal newspaper gathered while you sleep, and presented on your tablet at the breakfast table? It's all doable now. All of that feels very much like something I remember clearly from the early 1980s, when the promise of the “home computer” was managing recipes. We knew the device would find a use, but it wasn't until the one-two punch of GUIs and the Web that most people had any real use for a home computer. That's exactly how this moment feels. Sure, managing smartphone photos will be helpful for millions, but the biggest win will be on the darker side of the ledger – where every bad actor – from script kiddies with a grudge through to the worst of the worst – now have equal access to powerful AI that will go with them everywhere. They’ll use it to lie, cheat and vex, at a speed and on a scale never before seen. To deal with that, we'll fight fire with fire. The most important job our AIs will be tasked with will be keeping us as safe as possible from other AIs. We’ll only be aware of this when it fails. But “good enough” AI and “intelligence everywhere” will enable resource pools and defensive techniques that our adversaries could never harness for themselves, so we stand a solid chance. ®

When Microsoft delivered over 970 patches last week, many saw a nightmare for beleaguered security staff. Gartner research vice president Craig Lawson thinks infosec workers might soon see sunlit uplands as their workloads ease. Lawson outlined that scenario at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Australia today and explained it by theorising that the increased volume of vulnerability discoveries made possible by Anthropic’s Mythos and other bug-hunting AI might be getting close to finding most of the flaws in established codebases. “We've never had a situation where massive codebases have been audited to that level before,” he told The Register, and offered the recent series of CVEs found in OpenBSD – which has historically been an unusually secure and stable OS – as evidence that AI bug-hunters are cleaning up. “Think about how much technical debt has been retired in products just in the last six months,” he said. Lawson pointed to the fact security vendors, who in theory know what it takes to create secure products, are also using AI to find flaws in their wares. Those discoveries, he suggested, again indicate AI is taking out potential avenues for zero-day attacks. The high number of CVEs reported in 2026 is a positive signal. Lawson thinks Mythos and its ilk may also create an invisible signal as vendors use the AI to detect more bugs in their future releases. He therefore thinks that 2027 might see CVE numbers fall as vendors finish cleaning up old codebases, and because they use AI to more thoroughly test their next releases. “2027 could be the first year we see a net drop, maybe not in aggregate vulnerabilities, but definitely in severity of flaws,” he told The Register. He thinks AI will also make defenders happy by giving them better tools. Today, he said, a red-teaming exercise is an infrequent and costly event that usually involves hiring an external provider. AI bug-hunters could mean organizations can effectively run a red team every day. And if a red team exercise produces tickets that need solving, he thinks AI will help analysts to identify fixes more quickly. “What if I could spend three minutes going to Gemini and saying ‘Write syntax for an F5 IRule’ that becomes a virtual patch? Everyone can do threat intelligence, enrichment, some of those harder tasks.” When infosec staff make those fixes, Lawson wants organizations to celebrate the impact of their work. Today, Lawson said, security operations centers measure staff by the number of tickets they process and close. He thinks a better approach is to celebrate the fact that cyber-defenders kept a hospital open or stopped a ransomware raid. ®