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The number of homeless students in California has risen in the last year. As CalMatters’ Carolyn Jones explains, schools are required by federal law to count their homeless students. In the most recent data published in June, the state had 230,443 homeless students — a 9.3% increase from the previous year. For the purposes of […]

Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a state budget deal with the caveat that the Legislature would also advance trailer bills intended to speed up housing development in California. The governor signed those measures Monday (more on that later), signaling a major change in the state’s 54-year-old environmental law.  The California Environmental Quality Act, or […]

Find out what happened to three men who were arrested in California and deported. Also: Marines at the border, the political and economic toll of the immigration raids and why Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing Fox News.  CalMatters events: Join us on July 30 in San Francisco for a two-part conversation on how artificial intelligence […]

A year after the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities more authority to clear homeless encampments, how much has California’s homelessness crisis changed?  As CalMatters’ Marisa Kendall explains — along with Lisa Halverstadt from Voice of San Diego and Aaron Schrank from LAist — the landmark Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling allowing local authorities to arrest […]

To identify student work written by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, many California colleges and universities rely on Turnitin, a plagiarism detection service. But the company’s tools aren’t always accurate, and when it falsely flags work done by humans as AI-generated, students are caught in the crossfire. As CalMatters’ Tara García Mathewson explains, in […]

California courts have failed to report hundreds of vehicular manslaughter convictions to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles over the past five years, allowing deadly drivers to improperly keep their licenses, a CalMatters investigation has found. Drivers like Marvin Salazar. Salazar was convicted in May 2023 for felony vehicular manslaughter after a crash that killed […]

Honey bees across the country are under attack from tiny, eight-legged parasitic mites. These mites burrow between the segments of the bees’ adult bodies or invade their larvae and infect them with viruses — deforming their wings and leaving them flightless. That’s not only problematic for the bees — whose entire colonies can collapse from […]

As immigration raids continue to rattle California small businesses, farms and communities, CalMatters’ Ben Christopher and Mikhail Zinshteyn take a look at how public sentiment towards immigration has changed dramatically in California over the past few decades — and what that could mean under a federal administration that pledges to conduct the largest deportation campaign […]

Scheduling note: WhatMatters is taking Juneteenth off and will return to your inboxes on Monday. From CalMatters technology reporter Khari Johnson: When Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed California’s most high-profile artificial intelligence regulation last fall, he simultaneously asked the state’s deep bench of AI researchers to recommend guardrails that balance safety and innovation. The result of […]

From CalMatters Capitol reporter Jeanne Kuang: The California Senate voted this week to reverse course on the state’s calls for a constitutional convention, one of which many Democrats supported just two years ago at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s urging.  With the President Donald Trump administration at the helm and Republicans running Congress, Sen. Scott Wiener, a […]