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      Newsom Tacks to the Middle With California in the Spotlight

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      While Donald J. Trump has attacked California as too liberal for the nation, Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed several bills that could have become political fodder.For much of the past year, conservatives have considered Gov. Gavin Newsom of California a perfect symbol of liberal excess, a well-coifed coastal governor with national aspirations whose state seemed to embrace undocumented immigrants while homeless encampments proliferated on the streets.It was Mr. Newsom who was invited to debate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Fox News last November. It was Mr. Newsom whose political action committee ran ads in Republican states to criticize their policies on abortion rights.But Mr. Newsom, a business owner, often governs more from the middle than his critics acknowledge. And over the past month, as he has sifted through hundreds of bills that the heavily Democratic Legislature sent his way to sign or veto by this Monday, his decisions indicate a more centrist shift than usual.With Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator from California, in a hotly contested race for the White House, Republicans have aimed a spotlight on her and Mr. Newsom’s home state. As such, the governor has been under pressure to make sure that California’s lawmakers don’t give them more ammunition for political attacks.The national political stakes are highMr. Newsom approved many measures that were in keeping with what most Americans would expect in California. There were big bills to address the state’s ongoing housing crisis; labor bills to protect the earnings of child influencers and the likenesses of Hollywood performers; and an outright ban on all plastic bags at retail stores.There was legislation to name the Dungeness crab as the official state crustacean, the banana slug as the official slug, and the black abalone as the official seashell. There was a bill pushed by celebrities like Woody Harrelson and Whoopi Goldberg that will allow Amsterdam-style “cannabis cafes” to open.There was a measure that will require health insurers to cover infertility treatment, including in vitro fertilization, as Democrats have attacked Republicans nationally for restricting access to fertility services.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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      California Passes Law Protecting Consumer Brain Data

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      The state extended its current personal privacy law to include the neural data increasingly coveted by technology companies.On Saturday, Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed a new law that aims to protect people’s brain data from being potentially misused by neurotechnology companies.A growing number of consumer technology products promise to help address cognitive issues: apps to meditate, to improve focus and to treat mental health conditions like depression. These products monitor and record brain data, which encodes virtually everything that goes on in the mind, including thoughts, feelings and intentions.The new law, which passed both the California State Assembly and the Senate with no voter opposition, amends the state’s current personal privacy law — known as the California Consumer Privacy Act — by including “neural data” under “personal sensitive information.” This includes data generated by a user’s brain activity and the meshwork of nerves that extends to the rest of the body.“I’m very excited,” said Sen. Josh Becker, Democrat of California, who sponsored the bill. “It’s important that we be up front about protecting the privacy of neural data — a very important set of data that belongs to people.”With tens of thousands of tech startups, California is a hub for tech innovation. This includes smaller companies developing brain technologies, but Big Tech companies like Meta and Apple are also developing devices that will likely involve collecting vast troves of brain data.“The importance of protecting neural data in California cannot be understated,” Sen. Becker said.The bill extends the same level of protections to neural data that it does for other data already considered sensitive under the California Consumer Privacy Act, such as facial images, DNA and fingerprints, known as biometric information.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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      Newsom Vetoes Bill Requiring Cars to Warn Speeding Drivers

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      The legislation would have made California the first state in the nation to require intelligent speed assistance technology in vehicles.Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday vetoed California legislation that would have mandated that all new cars in the state have a system that alerts drivers when they exceed the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour.Speeding is a factor in nearly one-third of traffic fatalities in the United States, and the legislation’s supporters said they wanted to curb rising roadway deaths by making California the first state in the nation to require the technology.The state has a long history of adopting vehicle requirements, particularly on emissions, that have spurred automakers to adopt changes across their national fleet. Backers hoped that the California speed sensor law would have similarly forced changes that would have had an impact beyond the state.Intelligent speed assistance systems have been widely used in Europe for years, and they became mandatory in July in all new cars sold in the European Union. They are similar to other driver assistance technologies that, for example, notify drivers if a car is their blind spot or if their vehicle is drifting into another lane.Research in Europe has found that speed-warning systems reduce average driving speed, speed variability and the proportion of time that a driver exceeds the speed limit, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has urged the federal government to require the technology in the United States.The California bill would have mandated that, beginning with model year 2030, all new passenger vehicles, trucks and buses in California would have to include technology that emits visual and audio signals that notify drivers when they have exceeded the posted speed limit. Emergency vehicles and motorcycles would have been exempt, as would vehicles without GPS or a front-facing camera.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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      California Will Formally Apologize for Being Complicit in Slavery

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom signed several bills intended to atone for the state’s role in the oppression of Black Americans, but California legislators so far have sidelined proposals on cash reparations.California will issue a formal apology for being complicit in slavery during the 19th century and for enforcing segregationist policies against Black residents as one of several new laws that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Thursday to atone for the state’s past discriminatory treatment of African Americans.Last year, California became the first state in the country to explore concrete restitution for historical racism after a social justice movement was spurred by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. A state reparations task force last year determined, among other acts, that California courts had enforced fugitive slave laws and that more than 2,000 enslaved people were brought to California even after it was admitted as a free state in 1850.The official request for forgiveness “for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants” was one of the dozens of recommendations the reparations panel made last year.But the committee’s central suggestion — financial reparations for the descendants of slaves — got little traction.Costs for a widespread payment plan, which no state has enacted, are estimated to run in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and California has faced budget deficits in the past two years.Led by the California Legislative Black Caucus, state lawmakers this session introduced more than a dozen initiatives to compensate Black Americans harmed by ancestral enslavement. At the time, the response was hailed as a first-in-the-nation model for other states.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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      California Sues Exxon Mobil Over Plastics Pollution and ‘Myth’ of Recycling

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      The lawsuit, seeking ‘multiple billions of dollars,’ opens a new front in the legal battles with oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues.The attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, sued Exxon Mobil on Monday alleging that the oil giant carried out a “decades-long campaign of deception” that overhyped the promise of recycling and spawned a plastic pollution crisis.The suit, filed in superior court in San Francisco, argued that people were more likely to buy single-use plastics because of the false belief, promoted by Exxon Mobil, that they would be recycled. Mr. Bonta said the company is a leading producer of a key component used to make single-use plastics. The suit seeks unspecified damages that Mr. Bonta estimated would amount of “multiple billions of dollars.”In an interview, Mr. Bonta said that plastic pollution was “fueled by the myth of recycling, and the leader among them in perpetuating that myth is Exxon Mobil.”The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues. More than two dozen state and local governments, including California, have sued the companies for their role in the climate crisis, making claims that the companies deceived the public in a quest for profit. None have gone trial yet.The California suit filed on Monday alleged that Exxon Mobil promoted the widely used “chasing arrows” symbol on plastic products, which led buyers to believe that their bottles and other products would, in fact, be recycled if disposed of properly. But only about five percent of the plastic waste in the United States is recycled, according to Mr. Bonta’s office, citing an estimate by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, which looked at 2021 data. At the same time, the amount of plastic manufactured, much of it single-use, grows yearly.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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      Cat Missing in Yellowstone Returns Home to California After an 800-Mile Journey

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      The owners of Rayne Beau, the 2-year old Siamese cat, have no idea how their cat made it back, but call his return a “miracle.”When a cat dashed into the woods of Yellowstone National Park during a camping trip in June, his California owners, Benny and Susanne Anguiano, thought they’d never see him again.The couple searched for five days through the woods near their campground at Fishing Bridge R.V. Park but never found their 2-year-old male Siamese cat, Rayne Beau, pronounced “rainbow.” Mrs. Anguiano said that Rayne Beau’s sister, Starr, started to meow through the screen door of the trailer. Eventually, when the couple made the tough decision to drive home to Salinas, Calif., Starr, who had never been away from her brother, meowed all the way back.“Leaving him was unthinkable,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “I felt like I was abandoning him.”But almost two months later, Rayne Beau was found wandering the streets of Roseville, Calif., three hours north of where the Anguianos live and more than 800 miles away from Yellowstone National Park, as first reported by the news station KSBW.When a worker from a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals notified the couple that rescuers had identified Rayne Beau from his microchip, Mr. Anguiano said they were shocked that the cat had made it back to California.The couple met Rayne Beau and his sister when they were 11 weeks old and decided to foster and then adopt them. Rayne Beau, who at first seemed timid compared with his playful sister, quickly adjusted to his new home and developed an adventurous streak. Mrs. Anguiano described him as being like a “dog cat” who played fetch and came to her when she called his name.She said he was also clever. One night he climbed over the fence in their backyard, but he returned home the following morning.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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      Newsom Signs Bill That Adds Protections for Children on Social Media

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      The California legislation comes amid growing concerns about the impact of cellphones and social media on adolescents’ mental health.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed legislation on Friday aimed at protecting minors from social media addiction amid growing concerns about the impact of technology on adolescents’ mental health.The law, which will go into effect in 2027, effectively requires tech companies to make posts on feeds of minors’ social media accounts appear in chronological order as a default, rather than allowing algorithms to curate them to maximize engagement.The bill also prohibits companies from sending notifications to people under 18 during school hours, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, and during sleep hours, between midnight and 6 a.m. The default settings can be changed with the consent of a parent or guardian.“Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children — isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night,” Mr. Newsom, who has four school-age children, said in a statement on Friday.The move, targeting powerful tech interests in the nation’s most populous state, is part of a nationwide effort to address concern over cellphone and social media use among adolescents. Amid reports of cyberbullying and distraction in classrooms, at least eight states, including Florida and Indiana, have already enacted restrictions on the use of cellphones in school settings. New York put in place a similar law aimed at social media addiction this year.In June, Governor Newsom also called for a ban on smartphone use in all public schools in California. Legislation now before him includes a requirement that the schools devise a policy by July 1, 2026, to limit or prohibit smartphones during the school day, though most school districts already have cellphone policies.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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      As California Fires Burn, Some Residents Begin to Mourn Lost Homes

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      Firefighters are making progress against the Bridge, Line and Airport fires to prevent more destruction, but for some, the damage is done.Mazen Sheikhly’s heart was pounding on Thursday as he drove up a winding road to his one-bedroom home of nearly two decades outside the community of El Cariso Village in the Santa Ana Mountains in California. He could feel his blood pressure rising because of the uncertainty of what he and a friend would find.The Airport fire southeast of Los Angeles had exploded in the canyons of Orange County earlier in the week before crossing the mountains into Riverside County, forcing Mr. Sheikhly and thousands of others in the area to evacuate.Now, on his return, he opened the gates to the long driveway of his 20-acre property known for its glittering views of Lake Elsinore below. Then he saw the emptiness.There was “nothing left of the house,” Mr. Sheikhly said. “Completely gone.”A 2000 Indian motorcycle that he treated as his baby was now a gutted hunk of metal. Pictures of his mother and the designer clothes and jewelry that he had from his years working at Neiman Marcus were turned to ash. “It’s like a loss in your family and you can’t get it back. It’s death,” he said.Three major wildfires in Southern California — the Bridge fire, the Line fire and the Airport fire — have destroyed dozens of homes, scorched over 110,000 acres and displaced tens of thousands of people. Cooler, more humid weather has helped slow the fires’ spread and enabled firefighters to make progress trying to contain the blazes, allowing some evacuation alerts to be lifted or downgraded on Friday.But even as crews gain more ground, many residents must deal with the shock of seeing a lifetime of memories reduced to ashes, or the stress of not knowing what they will find, or when they will be able to go back.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