From Francisco Sosa’s front yard, you can see the imposing metal structure of the SoFi stadium in Los Angeles, California. Eight FIFA World Cup matches will be played on that pitch, but its proximity is irrelevant as far as Sosa is concerned; he is already resigned to watching the games of the most expensive tournament in history on TV. “There’s no money right now,” says the 41-year-old U.S. citizen who is a fervent supporter of the Mexican national team. When he learned that a luxury box for the match between the United States and Paraguay was selling for $112,500, his reaction was immediate: “Fuck! It’s too much.”

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NEW YORK, May 15 — The US Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale medical school of discriminating against white and Asian applicants following a year-long probe into diversity practices at the elite university.

It is the latest chapter in President Donald Trump’s campaign against US colleges, which he accuses of promoting “woke” anti-conservative ideologies and of pushing unfair diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

“Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

With the move, the agency said it was seeking a voluntary agreement with Yale to bring the university’s admissions practices into compliance with federal law.

It specifically alleged that, based on admissions data, “Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.”

Yale School of Medicine responded to the allegation by saying it was “confident in the rigorous admissions process.”

Admitted students “demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment” and “graduates go on to become leaders in clinical care, research, and public service. We will carefully review the Department of Justice’s letter.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that affirmative action by universities on the basis of race was unlawful but said that they could use statements about the racial experiences of candidates in admissions decisions.

The Justice Department cited that ruling in its findings Thursday, alleging that Yale had failed to comply.

Last week, the Trump administration issued a similar finding against the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, alleging that it had unfairly favoured Black and Hispanic applicants with lower qualifications.

As part of his wider push to bring higher education to heel, Trump has wielded federal funds as a negotiating tool for universities that he says are too liberal, insisting that they submit to curriculum, enrolment and other changes.

The Republican’s administration has also decreased or placed holds on spending for university research as part of wider budget cuts since taking office in January 2025. — AFP

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operation has exposed the activities of a violent Los Angeles gang, Barrio 18, which was distributing Mexican cartel drugs on the streets. The group sold methamphetamine with 100% purity (even higher than the 99.1% boasted by Walter White in Breaking Bad), used a business as a front, and relied on dealers who did not fit the usual profile. One of their stash houses was located in the exclusive neighborhood where the Kardashian family lives, while gang members sold their product in a park crowded with addicted homeless people — described by authorities as an “open‑air drug market.”

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Nadia emigrated to Los Angeles in 2010, and the first thing she was advised to do was go to Alvarado Street to buy fake documents. She was bluntly warned that there was no other way to get a job. She paid $150 and was given two fake cards with her real name: a Social Security card and a green card. It was a fabricated identity that several employers have accepted since then. “You know beforehand that it’s not right, but the need to survive leads us to look for ways to get ahead in this country,” says the 56-year-old Mexican woman.

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Sabrina Carpenter directs the heist. The Espresso singer, along with actresses Margaret Qualley and Madelyn Cline, breaks into a Hollywood mansion to steal jewelry, clothes, and even a Grammy. This is the plot of the music video for House Tour, one of the tracks from Carpenter’s latest album Man’s Best Friend. Music videos produced by the pop singer have become popular for including actresses and movie references: in Taste, featuring Jenna Ortega, she hides clues to Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Kill Bill; Tears features Colman Domingo and is inspired by The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And in her latest video, which she released in early April, she references Sofia Coppola’s film The Bling Ring. The latter is based on a true story popularized by a Vanity Fair article titled “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”: between 2008 and 2009, a group of wealthy, fame-obsessed young people burglarized the homes of celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, Megan Fox, and Orlando Bloom.

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Source: AGU Advances

Urbanization, climate change, and fire suppression practices are contributing to increased wildfire risk at the densely populated wildland-urban interface. These factors make fires more unpredictable and harder to manage. In January 2025, this was made devastatingly clear in Los Angeles, when massive wildfires engulfed entire hillsides and canyons, destroying neighborhoods and damaging surrounding ecosystems.

The Mediterranean climate region of California, which stretches up most of the state’s coastline, is a naturally fire-prone landscape because its dry conditions support vegetation growth and also allow for fire to spread easily. As wildfires become more intense, better modeling and understanding of their drivers is crucial in efforts to predict risk.

Ward-Baranyay et al. looked at three of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires by analyzing preburn conditions, such as fuel characteristics, topography (including elevation and slope), and wind speed. Satellite observations gathered from the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) and the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT)—precursors to a recently announced NASA mission, the Explorer for Artemis Geology Lunar and Earth (EAGLE)—provided detailed information about the vegetation’s condition before the fires began. The researchers then built a random forest regression model to predict burn severity based on these conditions, ultimately demonstrating that prefire fuel conditions were a key driver of the destructive wildfires’ immediate effects on wildlands.

The model used in the study was able to accurately capture about 60% of the patterns in burn severity. It was most accurate for the Palisades and Hughes fires, but less accurate for the Eaton Fire. This discrepancy could be because the area burned by the Eaton Fire was more topographically variable, meaning its burn severity drivers may not have been fully captured by the model, the researchers suggest. Vegetation type was also a strong performance indicator: Terrain with shrub or scrub cover, the dominant vegetation type, offered the most accurate predictions for burn severity. The burn patterns of forests and other landscape types were less accurately captured.

Fuel conditions emerged as the dominant driver of burn severity, more so than topography or weather. In particular, how abundant, wet, dry, or stressed vegetation is can hint at how severe future fires may be. Tracking and monitoring these fuel conditions, researchers suggest, may be a way to monitor wildfire hazard in California and other fire-prone regions. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002179, 2026)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2026), Want to predict wildfire severity? Look to the state of vegetation, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260130. Published on 4 May 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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It was meant to be one of the great nights on the Washington calendar, the one in which, like every spring, political power and the press cross the threshold that separates them to celebrate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel. And it ended up being a night to remember, but for unimaginable reasons. At 8:36 p.m. on Saturday, as Donald Trump was about to speak for the first time at a traditional event he had declined to attend four times, the sound of gunfire at a security checkpoint one floor above changed the course of the evening. At that moment, Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old from California, entered the annals of political violence in a country with more guns than citizens and which has seen four presidents killed in office.

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