Tag: los angeles

LA to Vegas high speed train now predicted to cost $21 BILLION, as critics warn final sum will be far higher

The price tag for the much-anticipated high-speed train between Southern California and Las Vegas has soared to $21.5 billion with warnings the number could keep rising. 

The 218-mile railway will take passengers from Las Vegas to Southern California in just two hours, with a Metrolink connecting them to Los Angeles Union Station.

At speeds of up to 200 mph, Brightline West hopes that its project will promote a ‘car-free, care-free lifestyle’.

Earlier this year, Brightline West reported that the railway’s construction would cost $16 billion, double the initially projection. 

But rising costs due to labor shortages, material cost inflation, and competition from other infrastructure projects has driven the cost up even further, according to Desert Sun. 

To make up for the difference, the company has requested a $6 billion federal loan through the US Department of Transportation.

The company issued $2.5 billion in private activity bonds in February, which requires it to secure the necessary loan by November. 

But if they can’t secure it, they may end up paying even more and be forced to repay investors early. 

Initially, the railway was supposed to open in 2027, in time for the Summer Olympics in LA the following year, but the date has been pushed back to 2029. 

Brightline West ceremonially broke ground on the project in April 2024 and preliminary construction has begun. 

The all-electric trains will be built along the Interstate 15 median with new stations in Apple Valley and Hesperia.

The final stop in Rancho Cucamonga, California will connect passengers to LA on a pre-existing Metro line. 

Brightline West claims taking the high-speed rail will be two times faster than the driving time which can take up to five hours. 

They also boast that they will create more than 10,000 job during construction and 800 permanent operations and maintenance jobs.

It’s also environmentally friendly and is projected to save 325,000 metric tons of CO2 each year.

According to their website: ‘Brightline is the only private provider of modern, eco-friendly, intercity passenger rail service in America.’

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FBI Releases LAX “Jetpack” Case Files; Pilot Interview Contradicts Jetpack Description

The FBI has released a detailed set of investigative files on the so-called “Jetpack Man” sightings near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The release on October 1, 2025, followed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Black Vault first filed August 3, 2021 and resubmitted November 27, 2021 after an initial denial. The Bureau originally withheld all the records under FOIA exemption (b)(7)(A) for ongoing investigations but reversed its position with the second request after nearly four years.

When the sightings first made headlines in 2020 and 2021, they were widely portrayed as encounters with a person flying a jetpack near commercial aircraft. Yet the FBI’s files show that at least one pilot later walked back that description. In one case, the China Airlines captain who initially thought he saw a “jetpack” told investigators on reflection that “he did not believe it resembled the shape and size of a human” and noted that “there were no propellers or jet propulsion devices attached to the object.”

The records released mark the first “interim” disclosure for this case which remains open, indicating that additional material may still be forthcoming. For this release, 250 pages were reviewed, bit only 130 were released. It is unclear what is in the 120 pages completely withheld.

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DOJ Sues LA County Sheriff Over Alleged Second Amendment Violations in Gun Permitting

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for allegedly denying residents’ Second Amendment rights through an inordinately long concealed weapons permit application process.

The lawsuit, filed by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, comes on the heels of a DOJ investigation and a partially successful lawsuit filed by the California Rifle and Pistol Association.

In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, the DOJ accuses Sheriff Robert Luna of overseeing a system designed to deny citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

“Between January 2024 and March 2025, Defendants received 3,982 applications for new concealed carry licenses. Of these, they approved exactly two—a mere 0.05 percent approval rate that cannot be explained by legitimate disqualifying factors alone,” the lawsuit states.

“This is not bureaucratic inefficiency; it is systematic obstruction of constitutional rights.”

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement announcing the lawsuit that it “seeks to stop Los Angeles County’s egregious pattern and practice of delaying law-abiding citizens from exercising their right to bear arms.”

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L.A. School District to Ban Fifth-Grade Plays About U.S. History: ‘Culturally Insensitive’

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is banning a celebrated series of fifth-grade musical plays about American history at a local charter school because, the district says, they are “culturally insensitive.”

For nearly three decades, the fifth-graders at Marquez Charter Elementary in Pacific Palisades have performed musicals about crucial periods in the formation of the United States.

These include Miracle in Philadelphia, about the Constitutional Convention; Hello, Louisiana!, about the voyage of Lewis and Clark; and Water and Power, about the Industrial Revolution. (A fourth-grade play, Gold Dust or Bust, focuses on the history of California.)

The musicals, co-written by Jeff Lantos (with music composed by the late jazz pianist Bill Augustine), are so successful in conveying historical details that Marquez students consistently score off the charts in history assessments.

A 2004 academic study of the Marquez plays observed: “Students who attended Marquez Elementary School scored more than twice as many items correctly [on history tests] as did students from other schools.”

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Homeless Camps Are Morphing Into Larger Homeless ‘Cities’ In LA

A massive homeless encampment in Koreatown has grown into what neighbors describe as a “city” of its own — complete with a tennis court, garden, barbecue pit, and even illegally rigged electricity, according to the NY Post.

“The reason why people are sleeping here is because you leaders are sleeping on not taking initiative and action to clean this place up,” resident Daniel King told ABC7.

Neighbors say they’ve watched people pry open a streetlight, install a surge protector inside, and run extension cords across the street to power the camp. “Thank God it hasn’t rained in a while,” said Sangmin Lee. “It’s a fire hazard … then they run the cable across the street, and it’s a trip hazard for everyone.”

Lee also pointed out, “There’s a tennis court, there’s a garden where they’re growing stuff… There’s a barbecue pit.” Another neighbor, Max Smith, summed it up: “It’s a city in there. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.”

The Post writes that residents say the camp has created safety concerns, with one woman telling ABC7 she avoids walking her dog near the site after being approached by people from the encampment. An ABC7 crew was also threatened while reporting there.

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Kamala Just Got a Humiliating Reality Check About Her Irrelevance

Kamala Harris just suffered a major humiliation in Los Angeles, and it’s one that speaks volumes about her diminished political stature… assuming she even had any political stature.

On Saturday, the LAPD quietly withdrew its officers from guarding the former vice president’s Brentwood home, ending a weeklong arrangement that had drawn fierce criticism for pulling cops away from fighting real crime in the city. For Kamala the optics couldn’t be worse. A once untouchable figure who enjoyed the trappings of high office is now struggling to find anyone willing, or obligated, to protect her.  

The saga began when President Trump revoked Harris’s Secret Service protection, which Joe Biden had ordered to be extended far beyond the customary six-month window after a vice presidency. Kamala’s aides had pushed for that unusual extension, claiming safety concerns, and Biden obliged—granting cover for another two years. Trump, upon retaking office, terminated that special privilege. That ought to have settled things, but California’s Democratic leadership wasn’t about to let the embarrassment linger unaddressed. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass jumped in, directing the LAPD’s elite Metropolitan Division to step in alongside the California Highway Patrol so Harris wouldn’t appear abandoned.  

Of course, those officers didn’t appear out of nowhere. The LAPD diverted those officers from crime suppression duties in the San Fernando Valley—a part of Los Angeles already ravaged by spikes in theft, gangs, and violent crime. Los Angeles residents know that officers are stretched dangerously thin, yet Bass thought it appropriate to reroute them to stand guard outside a multimillion-dollar Brentwood mansion. 

To say this landed poorly with rank-and-file cops is an understatement.  

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents front-line officers, blasted the arrangement as inappropriate and unfair. Taxpayers, they said, shouldn’t be footing the bill for a partisan security favor, not when ordinary residents endure slow response times and skyrocketing crime. 

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Gavin Newsom declares war on the Marines

Term limited California Governor Gavin Newsom is running for the Democrat Party nomination for President in 2028. He’s not certain against whom he’ll be running, so he’s running against America. He’s been governing against California for years, so why not extend that kind of governance to the whole country?

California Governor Gavin Newsom attacked the U.S. Marines and National Guard on Saturday as “bringing war to the American people” in trashing their recent mission to restore order to the streets of Los Angeles.

His purpose: to attack President Donald Trump, who is campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize by trying to resolve conflicts around the world.

In his first seven months in office, Trump has ended at least six wars and for the first time it appears possible he’ll end the war between Ukraine and Russia, a conflict that has cost Russia untold billions and a million of its young men wounded, captured or killed. That’s quite the campaign. Even should that effort fail, it’s impossible to identify a more deserving recipient of the Peace Prize in this or the last century.

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Why Don’t We Know What Caused the L.A. Fires?

It’s been eight months since the California wildfires incinerated hundreds of homes and left charred scars stretching for miles in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena. The natives are getting restless, however. Angelenos want to know what officially caused these fires, which led to homelessness and despair and contributed to a corrosive and abiding distrust of local and state government competence.

What’s the holdup? 

We’re getting closer to finding out the cause, ironically, not from the state’s congressional delegation and its two troubled senators, but rather because a Florida senator is demanding answers. 

Senator Rick Scott, at the bidding of desperate Palisades fire victims, answered their pleas to get answers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The ATF took command of the investigation less than a week after the Palisades fire sparked at 10:30 a.m on Tuesday, January 7.

Scott met with Palisades fire victims, including Spencer Pratt, a cast member from the MTV show “The Hills,” who lost his home in the fire. Pratt has become a leading spokesman for fire victims. He arranged a meeting with Scott in the Palisades, where the senator promised to get a briefing from the ATF for fire victims. 

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L.A. Mayor Karen Bass Demands End to ICE Raids that Captured Illegal Alien Child Molester Working at Car Wash

Los Angeles, California, Mayor Karen Bass (D) is demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) end all worksite raids “at fruit stands and car washes” in the sanctuary city, just as agents arrested an illegal alien convicted child molester at an Orange County, California, car wash.

This week, Bass posted on X that ICE raids “at fruit stands and car washes must end,” calling such raids “un-American” and declaring that she “will never accept these tactics as a new normal.”

United States Border Patrol agents arrested illegal alien Claudio Reyes-Vasquez during a targeted operation at Chapman Car Wash in Orange County, just an hour outside of Los Angeles.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials called Reyes-Vasquez “one of the worst of the worst,” noting that he had been arrested for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 years old and had an active federal warrant for his arrest after violating his probation.

Most significantly, perhaps, Reyes-Vasquez has a criminal record going back to 1990 — having been convicted of molesting a child, beating his spouse, two DUIs, battery, petty theft, and illegal reentry.

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Blue State Lawmaker Hit With Corruption Charges

Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren Price, a Democrat, is facing additional corruption charges after new evidence revealed that the city’s housing authority and LA Metro paid Price’s wife more than $800,000.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced that two new public corruption charges had been filed against the embattled lawmaker. The latest charges build on the existing case against Price, which has existed since 2023.

In June of that year, he was charged with five felony counts of embezzlement of government funds, three felony counts of perjury and two felony counts of conflict of interest.

Prosecutors allege that Del Richardson & Associates, a company owned solely by Price’s wife, Delbra Pettice Richardson, received payments totaling upwards of $150,000 between 2019 and 2021 from developers who had been green-lit for city contracts by the councilman. Price is also accused of embezzling approximately $33,800 in city funds from 2013-2017 to pay for medical benefits for Richardson, who he falsely claimed was his wife while still legally married to Lynn Suzette Price,” Fox 11 Los Angeles reported.

Price pleaded not guilty to those charges in December 2023 and was released.

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