Aurelia Butler

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    California’s FAIR Plan Gets $1 Billion Bailout After L.A. Fires

    The move will likely lead to higher costs for households across the state, and may push more insurers to leave, intensifying a home insurance crisis.California’s home insurance plan of last resort, designed for people who can’t get coverage on the private market, does not have enough money to pay claims from the Los Angeles wildfires and is getting an infusion of cash from regular insurers.State regulators said Tuesday that they will allow the program, known as the FAIR Plan, to collect $1 billion from private insurance companies doing business in California to pay its claims. That is likely to drive up insurance costs for homeowners across the state.The situation marks a perilous new stage for California’s home insurance market, which had already been reeling from wildfires made more frequent and intense by climate change. Facing growing losses, major insurers like State Farm were already pulling back from the state, making it harder for homeowners to find coverage.Now the pressure to leave will be even greater.The $1 billion assessment is the largest since the FAIR Plan was created in 1968, and the first time since the 1994 Northridge earthquake near Los Angeles that the FAIR Plan has faced claims it can’t pay on its own. The fee will be divided among insurers based on their market share, as required by state law.“The number one priority right now is that the FAIR Plan pay out its claims,” Ricardo Lara, California’s insurance commissioner, said in an interview. “The FAIR Plan, the way we’ve set it up, is doing what it’s supposed to.”As of 2023, the state’s largest insurers by market share were State Farm, Farmers Insurance Group and CSAA Insurance, according to data from AM Best, a company that rates the financial strength of insurers. Other major insurers in the top 10 included Liberty Mutual, Allstate and Travelers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Curtails Anti-Corruption Efforts, as Aides Seek End to Eric Adams Case

    Two nearly simultaneous moves by the Trump administration on Monday signaled a new and far more transactional approach to the Justice Department’s handling of corruption cases.In the evening, President Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries, arguing such cases hurt the United States’ competitive edge. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said of his decision to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.Around the same time, a top Justice Department official directed federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. The stated justification for the demand had nothing to do with the evidence in the case and focused instead on politics.The actions on Monday stunned current and former prosecutors and investigators who said the department was abandoning a tradition of holding public officials, corporate executives and others accountable for corruption in favor of an approach built on political or economic expedience.That same day, Mr. Trump pardoned Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted in 2011 of essentially trying to sell a Senate seat that was vacated by President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump had previously commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s sentence.Trump administration officials have also ordered the shutdown of an initiative to seize assets owned by foreign kleptocrats, dialed back scrutiny of foreign influence efforts aimed at the United States and replaced the top career Justice Department official handling corruption cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Birds of Paradise Glow on Their Mating Parade

    Elaborate poses, tufts of feathers, flamboyant shuffles along an immaculate forest floor — male birds-of-paradise have many ways to woo a potential mate.But now, by examining prepared specimens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, scientists have discovered what could be yet another tool in the kit of the tropical birds — a visual effect known as photoluminescence.Sometimes called biofluorescence in living things, this phenomenon occurs when an object absorbs high-energy wavelengths of light and re-emits them as lower energy wavelengths.Biofluorescence has already been found in various species of fishes, amphibians and even mammals, from bats to wombats.Interestingly, birds remain woefully understudied when it comes to the optical extras. Until now, no one had looked for the glowing property in birds-of-paradise, which are native to Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea and are famous for their elaborate mating displays.In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers examined prepared specimens housed at the American Museum of Natural History and found evidence of biofluorescence in 37 of 45 birds-of-paradise species.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Enjoying the Pinnacle of Power, Musk Holds Court on Trump’s Stage

    The president let the spotlight in the Oval Office go to his billionaire friend/budget slasher, who cited blank checks and 150-year-old Social Security beneficiaries to justify purging the federal work force.Three weeks into this administration, hardly a day seems to go by that does not produce a norm-busting moment at the White House. But the scene that played out in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon was among the wildest yet.President Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk stood at his side and attempted to explain, for the first time in public since Inauguration Day, what it is he came to Washington to do.For weeks, he and his Dorito-dusted minions have burrowed deep inside the federal government, tearing the thing apart from within by sending workers packing and shutting down programs and entire agencies, testing if not exceeding the bounds of the law and the Constitution in the process.So far, the only explanations to be had about what they are doing or where they are going next have come in the form of brief or sometimes trolling messages on the social media platform Mr. Musk owns or in opaque statements from administration officials.Dressed all in black, with a dark MAGA hat on his head and his young son fidgeting by his side or on his shoulders, Mr. Musk, seeming quite jolly about finding himself at the very pinnacle of power, sought on Tuesday to justify pushing tens of thousands of federal employees out the door by casting them as a collection of unelected and unaccountable managers of a wasteful and corrupt bureaucracy.Workers overseeing contracts were mysteriously getting rich, he asserted without any backing details or evidence. Social Security was paying benefits to 150-year-olds. Taxpayers were being gouged.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Musk ally was accidentally given broad access to sensitive Treasury data.

    A young ally of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department appointee was accidentally given the ability to make changes to a sensitive payment database, an error that a civil servant said in a court filing was quickly corrected.Career civil servants at the Treasury Department, including Joseph Gioeli, the deputy commissioner at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, provided sworn statements in response to a lawsuit challenging the access Mr. Musk’s government efficiency team gained to sensitive federal payment systems.The filings offer a more detailed recounting of the Treasury decision to grant Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley software executive, and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, entry to the payment systems, which distribute more than $5 trillion a year on behalf of the government. The Treasury Department and White House have repeatedly said that Mr. Elez and Mr. Krause were given only “read-only” access to the data, which includes Americans’ bank account and Social Security numbers.In a court filing, however, Mr. Gioeli said that Treasury staff discovered on Feb. 6 that Mr. Elez had been given “read/write permissions instead of read-only” to one of the payment databases the day before. Mr. Gioeli said that Treasury staff revoked his additional access and are investigating the incident.“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the S.P.S. database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges,” Mr. Gioeli said.Mr. Elez resigned from the Treasury Department on Feb. 6, after the discovery of racist social media posts, though President Trump has said he should be reinstated. Mr. Krause was the only other Trump appointee given access to the system, with the ability to read data initially retrieved by Mr. Elez, according to the court filings.In the filings, the career Treasury staff and Mr. Gioeli discuss steps they took to mitigate potential cybersecurity threats posed by granting access to the sensitive systems, including monitoring what Mr. Elez did. They also describe a new process Treasury created to monitor and help stop payments that the Trump administration is trying to block.Representatives from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency gaining entry to Treasury’s payment systems has alarmed Democrats, who have warned about potential privacy breaches and blocked spending. A federal judge in New York on Saturday blocked Trump appointees from the systems, though a subsequent order loosened the restrictions.Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Musk said his goal at the Treasury Department was to better track payments across the government to see if they were fraudulent.“What we’re talking about here, we’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present,” he said. More

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    Trump Orders Plans for ‘Large Scale’ Work Force Cuts and Expands Musk’s Power

    President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing agency officials to draw up plans for “large scale” cuts to the federal work force and further empowered the billionaire Elon Musk and his team to approve which career officials are hired in the future.The order gives the so-called Department of Government Efficiency vast reach over the shape of the Civil Service as the Trump administration tries to sharply cut the number of employees working for the federal government. It states that, aside from agencies involved in functions like law enforcement and immigration enforcement, executive branch departments will need hiring approval from an official working with Mr. Musk’s team.Each federal agency, with some exceptions, will be allowed to “hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart” after a hiring freeze is lifted, according to Mr. Trump’s order. New career hires would have to be made in consultation with a “DOGE Team Lead,” the order stated. It also said that agencies should not fill career positions that Mr. Musk’s team deems unnecessary, unless an agency head — not a member of Mr. Musk’s initiative — decides that those positions should be filled.The “work force optimization initiative” was signed by Mr. Trump shortly before he and Mr. Musk spent roughly 30 minutes defending the drastic overhaul in front of reporters in the Oval Office. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, has moved rapidly to force change in Washington, an effort he asserted on Tuesday would benefit the public.In the first three weeks of the new Trump administration, Mr. Musk’s team has inserted itself into at least 19 agencies, according to a tally by The New York Times, where it has begun identifying programs to cut.The order is the latest move by Mr. Trump to bolster the authority of Mr. Musk’s effort.Eric Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The New NIMBY Battle Over the Waste From the L.A. Fires

    Federal and state officials say the temporary sites for processing hazardous waste pose no threat, but residents are worried about their air and water.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California visited Altadena on Tuesday to praise the progress of the cleanup after the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, vowing to complete debris removal at “unprecedented, record-breaking speed.”Catalina Pasillas has a problem with the debris, but her home is far from Altadena. She lives near one of the four federal staging areas where hazardous materials from the rubble are being stored.Ms. Pasillas, a real estate agent who lives in Duarte, about a mile from one of the sites in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, said smoke from the fires had exacerbated her asthma. Now, she worries that the waste site, in Lario Park, will poison the air even more.“I understand they need to put the toxic waste somewhere,” she said. “But it feels like they chose our city because they thought we wouldn’t say anything.”Near the ruins of the Los Angeles fires, a new battle has been emerging over how to dispose of the toxic waste left behind.Federal officials said the four temporary sites processing the debris pose no threat to public health or to the environment. But some local leaders and residents worry that their neighborhoods could suffer long-term environmental harm and accuse officials of selecting them because they are working-class Black and Hispanic communities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More