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The Eaton fire that killed five people and destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 homes, businesses and other structures in several foothill communities has slowed, but remained at 10,600 acres and zero containment Thursday morning, Jan. 9.The fire’s growth has been significantly stopped, Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Anthony Marrone said.Firefighters were able to use aircraft starting Wednesday, Jan. 8.Four firefighters are among those injured in the fire. But authorities have not released the number of injured or released details about the five people who died. Information about fatalities will be handled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.The Bank…

By MICHAEL HILL, MICHAEL R. SISAK and LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated PressALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York’s highest court on Thursday declined to block Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing in his hush money case, leaving the U.S. Supreme Court as the president-elect’s likely last option to prevent the hearing from taking place Friday.One judge of the New York Court of Appeals issued a brief order declining to grant a hearing to Trump’s legal team.Trump has asked the Supreme Court to call off Friday’s sentencing. His lawyers turned to the nation’s highest court Wednesday after New York courts refused to postpone the sentencing by Judge Juan M. Merchan. Merchan presided over…

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — In one of the most important cases of the social media age, free speech and national security collide at the Supreme Court on Friday in arguments over the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular digital platform that roughly half the people in the United States use for entertainment and information.TikTok says it plans to shut down the social media site in the U.S. by Jan. 19 unless the Supreme Court strikes down or otherwise delays the effective date of a law aimed at forcing TikTok’s sale by its Chinese parent company.Working on a…

By ZEKE MILLERWASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden canceled the final overseas trip of his presidency just hours before he was set to depart for Rome and the Vatican, choosing to remain in Washington to monitor the response to devastating fires raging in California.Biden was scheduled to leave Thursday, after eulogizing former President Jimmy Carter at a memorial service in Washington, for the three-day trip to meet with Pope Francis and Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as well as a final face-to-face meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.The trip was meant as a coda to the…

President-elect Donald Trump declared this week that U.S. control of Greenland and the Panama Canal are crucial to American interests and reaffirmed his interest in making Canada the 51st state. In his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump declined to rule out using military force to secure Greenland and the canal but assured everyone that he would only use “economic force” on Canada. Threatening to violate the sovereignty of two independent nations by force is certainly an interesting way to lead up to your inauguration. Even worse than all of this talk of military-aided expansion, Trump has also claimed that he will rename…

“Swift swings” takes a quick peek at one economic trend.The number: California’s inability to attract other Americans is reinforced by statistics showing 2024 was the second worst for van relocations to the state since 2004.The source: My trusty spreadsheet looked at my curious collection of annual migration data from three moving van lines — Allied, Atlas, and United — over two-plus decades. Let’s remember that these interstate relocations are expensive. So, these tallies can be best viewed as a yardstick of where people with fat checkbooks or generous employers are moving.The curveAn average 41.1% of California-linked moves by the three…

Jimmy Carter, the 39th U.S. President, was honored with a state funeral Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral before a family service in his tiny Georgia hometown of Plains. Here are some of the images from the day’s proceedings: The remains of former US President Jimmy Carter arrive at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, for a State Funeral Service on January 9, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) The remains of former US President Jimmy Carter arrive at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, for a State Funeral Service…

The federal government needs to end its antitrust crusades.The first case that should end is United States v. Google LLC. The case was brought by the United States Department of Justice on Oct. 20, 2020 in the final months of Trump’s first term and has been carried on aggressively by the outgoing Biden administration.On Aug. 5 last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly” with its search engine, he wrote in his decision. On Nov. 20, the Justice Department asked…

There is a recurring debate in California about the effectiveness of regional governments when compared to the existing local government structure. While the traditional political subdivisions of the state consisting of cities and counties are easily identifiable and have defined boundaries, not so with “regions” per se. Depending on the purpose, there may be as few as four but as many as fifty designated “regions” in California.Some progressives have opined that cities and counties should be abolished altogether. Joe Matthews proposed just that a few years ago in a column entitled, “Save Local Government By Eliminating Local Governments.”  While recognizing…

The arrival of a new presidential administration invokes new beginnings and a break from the past. Still, realities from previous administrations remain, such as a fiscal challenge that demands immediate attention. It may weigh on the newcomers even more than they realize today. We can only hope they take it more seriously than their predecessors have done. The longstanding notion that debt accumulation is benign, based largely on interest rates that for a time fell below growth rates, has proven dangerously misleading. This flawed thinking ignored both human nature and economic reality: Politicians rarely limit borrowing to one-time emergencies (as…