June 2026

'Into the Forest,' a Swiss stop-motion short by Antonin Niclass in which three puppet monkeys turn an animation studio into a jungle, has won the Young Audience Award at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Festival.

The stock market is running two races at once. The headline S&P 500, dominated by a handful of tech giants, is lagging — while the broader mass of American stocks quietly surges. Analysts say the rotation out of megacap tech has shifted from a drift into a sprint.

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to halt a proposed truck-staging lot near the Port of Los Angeles, taking jurisdiction over a project that the harbor commission had approved but that Wilmington-area residents say would add to a long-standing pollution burden.

Los Angeles has reached an agreement with the LA28 organizing committee setting out how the city will be repaid for the extra police, sanitation and other services it must provide during the 2028 Summer Olympics — resolving a contract that had been overdue for months.

Oil prices have given back most of the spike driven by the Iran conflict, with Brent crude back near $81 a barrel after nearing $124. Yet drivers — especially in California — are still paying far more at the pump, and the lag is no accident.

The firing of veteran correspondent Scott Pelley from '60 Minutes' and a pending merger that would place CNN under the same owner as CBS News have put media executive David Ellison and his hand-picked editor Bari Weiss at the center of the biggest shake-up in American television news in years.

An Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 300 people since May, and the burial teams and health workers fighting to contain it face a second danger alongside the virus: the anger and mistrust of the communities they are trying to save.

Bruno Bischofberger, the Swiss art dealer whose early faith in American Pop art reshaped the European market and whose introduction of Andy Warhol to Jean-Michel Basquiat produced one of postwar art's defining collaborations, has died at 86.

Ecuador came from behind to beat Germany 2-1 at MetLife Stadium, a result that secured the South Americans a place in the knockout round and left the four-time world champions nursing fresh doubts even as they advanced.

At the Annecy animation festival, Warner Bros. Animation laid out an unusually eclectic adult-animation slate — from a long-gestating adaptation of Anthony Bourdain's comic 'Get Jiro!' to a newly announced animated revival of the 1960s gothic soap 'Dark Shadows.'

Iran accused Washington of violating a recently signed accord after fresh US strikes on its coastal radar and missile sites, as the conflict between Iran and a US-led coalition reached its 120th day with the Strait of Hormuz still its central, unresolved flashpoint.

A man accused of helping orchestrate one of the largest pandemic-relief frauds in US history was arrested in Somalia after nearly four years as a fugitive, captured with the help of Somali intelligence in a rare instance of cooperation between Washington and Mogadishu.

Two powerful earthquakes have killed at least 188 people in Venezuela, drawing one of the most visible US humanitarian deployments in years — including a Los Angeles County rescue team — and testing the Trump administration's vow to play an outsized role in a country it has sought to reshape.

A routine illegal-dumping complaint on a vacant lot near Palmdale led investigators to one of the larger methamphetamine labs uncovered in Los Angeles County, where authorities seized more than 800 pounds of the drug and arrested one suspect.

Argentina has spent a century turning dirt lots and crowded academies into a conveyor belt of world-class footballers, from Maradona to Messi. The culture behind that pipeline is the envy of the sport — and, increasingly, the subject of hard questions about the cost to the children inside it.

Christian Pulisic looked sharp in his return from injury at SoFi Stadium, but a stoppage-time goal handed the United States a 3-2 loss to Turkiye — a defeat that did not cost the already-qualified hosts their group, yet exposed problems to fix before the knockout rounds.

When Algeria and Austria meet at the 2026 World Cup, the fixture carries the weight of one of football's most notorious episodes — a 1982 match so cynical it forced FIFA to rewrite the rules of the tournament.

Milwaukee Brewers rookie Jacob Misiorowski fired a fastball clocked at 105.5 mph in a win over the Chicago Cubs, a pitch that Statcast data ranks among the fastest ever thrown since baseball began tracking velocity.

Ousmane Dembele scored three goals inside the opening 32 minutes as France brushed aside a much-changed Norway side 4-1, finishing the group stage with a perfect record at the 2026 World Cup.

Yale University is seeking to negotiate a settlement with the Trump administration to end a federal inquiry into whether the school used race in admissions, choosing accommodation over the kind of public legal fight that has embroiled Harvard.

A cold-storage warehouse fire that smoldered in Boyle Heights for more than a week has drawn UCLA researchers to the scene, where they are sampling ash, dust and standing water for heavy metals and 'forever chemicals' as the city's response bill climbs past $4 million.

A Duarte man is recovering after he was shot while rushing a gunman who opened fire near a World Cup watch party in Koreatown, an act of bystander courage that police and a quick-thinking officer say helped prevent something worse.

A new display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland lets fans get close to the costumes and props from Taylor Swift's record-setting music video 'The Fate of Ophelia' — not through a screen, but in person.

Ventura County health officials are warning residents about a phone scam in which callers pose as hospital staff and demand immediate payment for medical care — pressure tactics that no legitimate hospital uses.

The ground holds more heat than humanity could ever use, available day and night and free of carbon. The hard part has always been reaching it affordably — and a wave of drilling technology borrowed from the oil industry is starting to change that.

An Atlantic archipelago of barely half a million people has done what no nation its size ever has — reached the knockout stage of a World Cup — and done it without losing a match.

Los Angeles property owners have voted down a proposed increase in the city's streetlight assessment, leaving the Bureau of Street Lighting to maintain a network of more than 220,000 lights on a budget that has barely changed in three decades.

The Los Angeles Angels dismissed general manager Perry Minasian on Friday after six seasons without a winning record and turned to veteran former Cardinals executive John Mozeliak to steady the front office and lead the search for his replacement.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says an anonymous caller filed a fabricated abuse report against him, triggering a Michigan police and child-welfare investigation that separated him from his young twins for roughly a day.

President Trump has threatened a 100% tariff on all goods from any country that imposes a digital services tax on American technology firms, a move that lands days before a U.S.-EU trade truce is due to take effect and that puts California's biggest companies at the center of the dispute.

With the Fourth of July barely a week away, forecasters have hoisted red flag warnings across a wide swath of inland and desert Southern California, where strong winds and single-digit humidity could turn any spark into a fast-moving fire.

Ten years after it set out to give Los Angeles a stage for the romantic ballads its immigrant families never stopped singing, the Boleros de Noche concert series has won a rare civic honor: a day of its own on the city's calendar.

Election officials in Los Angeles County have certified the results of the June 2 primary, locking in the contests that will define the November ballot — including a Karen Bass–Nithya Raman runoff for LA mayor and a Becerra–Hilton race for governor. Orange County's count, with two tight supervisor races, follows next week.

The Toronto Maple Leafs selected Gavin McKenna with the first overall pick at the 2026 NHL Draft in Buffalo — a generational prospect the franchise kept only by winning the draft lottery, narrowly avoiding handing the pick to a rival.

Israel and Lebanon signed a US-brokered framework at the State Department on Thursday under which Israeli forces will pull back from two small areas of southern Lebanon and hand them to the Lebanese army — a modest but symbolic first step that both sides, and a hostile Hezbollah, are watching closely.

The days around July 4 are the busiest of the year for animal shelters in Los Angeles and across the country, as fireworks send frightened pets bolting from yards and homes. A few simple precautions — updated ID, a quiet room, a checked gate — go a long way toward keeping your animal safe.

One hundred years after a Guernsey-born protégée of Anna Pavlova opened a dance studio near Pasadena, the Collenette School of Dancing is still teaching children to plié in San Marino — a quiet century-old thread connecting classical ballet's golden age to the San Gabriel Valley.

A burst of neon pink and purple on Santa Monica Boulevard marks the arrival of a new lesbian nightclub — and, its creator hopes, a louder, prouder claim on public space for sapphic Angelenos during Pride.

The Minnesota Timberwolves acquired star guard LaMelo Ball from the Charlotte Hornets the morning after the NBA draft, sending back Naz Reid and a large haul of draft picks in one of the offseason's biggest moves.

Rady Children's Health, the parent network of Children's Hospital of Orange County, has agreed to keep providing gender-affirming care to patients under 19 for another six months under a court deal with California's attorney general. The arrangement gives roughly 1,450 families a reprieve while a lawsuit plays out — but no long-term certainty.

A California appellate panel unanimously upheld Harvey Weinstein's 2022 Los Angeles rape and sexual assault conviction, but ruled that his 16-year sentence cannot stand and that the trial court must resentence him. The decision came a day after New York prosecutors dropped a separate rape charge against him.

Wastewater monitoring shows elevated levels of rotavirus — a highly contagious cause of severe diarrhea and vomiting in young children — across several Bay Area communities, part of a national rise that infectious-disease experts link to slipping childhood vaccination rates.

Los Angeles has moved hundreds of millions of dollars in 'mansion tax' revenue into affordable housing and tenant protections — about $544 million in all, the Los Angeles Times reported — even as the City Council edges toward putting changes to the tax before voters and a statewide measure threatens to wipe it out entirely.

American forces struck Iranian military sites on Friday after an Iranian drone hit a Singapore-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz — an attack President Trump called a 'foolish violation' of a ceasefire signed only days earlier. The exchange tests an agreement meant to reopen one of the world's most important shipping lanes.

A divided Supreme Court ruled that federal courts cannot review the administration's decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian nationals, clearing the way to strip legal protection from hundreds of thousands of people — including tens of thousands in California.

On Halloween eve 1966, an 18-year-old college freshman left the Riverside City College library and never made it home. Six decades later, the killing of Cheri Jo Bates remains one of Southern California's most haunting cold cases — clouded for years by hoax letters and a disputed serial-killer theory, and still under investigation.

Federal regulators have opened a formal review of California's coastal management program, scheduling summer hearings that could test the Coastal Commission's power to shape development along 1,100 miles of shoreline. State officials call it the latest escalation in a year-long campaign against the agency.

The twin earthquakes that killed hundreds in Venezuela this week struck on a strike-slip fault system built much like the San Andreas, the seismologist Lucy Jones notes — a geological kinship that makes the disaster less a distant tragedy than a mirror for California.

Soccer fans who came to the United States for the 2026 World Cup arrived for the goals and stayed for the ranch dressing. The buttermilk-and-herb condiment — a California invention — has become an unlikely viral star of the tournament, even drawing tongue-in-cheek travel advice from the TSA.

A federal jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal in the arson trial of Jonathan Rinderknecht, the man prosecutors accuse of igniting the blaze that became the catastrophic Palisades Fire. The judge declared a mistrial Friday, and the government says it will retry the case in the fall.

John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump administration before becoming a sharp critic, pleaded guilty Friday to a single felony count of illegally retaining national defense information, resolving an 18-count indictment. He faces up to five years in prison at an October sentencing.

Two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela seconds apart on Wednesday, collapsing apartment towers in and around Caracas and killing hundreds of people, with the toll still rising. A Los Angeles County urban search-and-rescue team is among the international crews deploying to dig through the rubble.

The New York Mets dismissed manager Carlos Mendoza on Friday after a 34-47 first half left baseball's highest-spending team in last place in the NL East. Andy Green takes over as interim manager for the rest of the season.

A light aircraft struck the upper floors of CITIC Tower, Beijing's tallest building, on Friday afternoon, sending debris onto the streets of the capital's central business district and prompting an evacuation. Chinese authorities released little information, and references to the crash were quickly scrubbed from the country's social media.

Katsuya Uechi, the Okinawa-born chef who built one of Los Angeles' most recognizable restaurant names and gave the city its beloved spicy tuna on crispy rice, has died at 67. His restaurant group announced the death late Thursday.

A union-backed ballot measure would levy a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of California's roughly 200 billionaires to fund health care, education and food programs. Tech wealth is mobilizing against it — and Governor Gavin Newsom, who opposes the state measure, is pushing a federal version of his own.

The White House asked Congress this week for $87.6 billion to cover what it called the nation's most urgent needs, but included nothing for the tens of thousands of Angelenos still rebuilding from the Eaton and Palisades fires. California's senators called the omission deliberate.