The Headlines - L.A.’s Private Firefighters, and U.S. Childhood Vaccination Rates Fall

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Plus, remembering a civil rights Freedom Rider.   On Today’s Episode:Dangerous Winds Are Forecast as Crews Battle L.A. Wildfires, by Yan Zhuang, Amy Graff and Jonathan WolfeChildhood Vaccination Rates Were Falling Even Before the Rise of R.F.K. Jr., by Francesca ParisIsraeli Security Chiefs Join Critical Talks for a Cease-Fire in Gaza, by Isabel Kershner, Adam Rasgon and Ronen BergmanInside Trump’s Search for a Health Threat to Justify His Immigration Crackdown, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed AleazizCharles Person, Youngest of the Original Freedom Riders, Dies at 82, by Clay Risen Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Monday, January 13th. Here's what we're covering. With the impending winds, we've got to pay really, really close attention to this. This wind event is approaching us, and it's approaching us very, very quickly. Officials in California are sounding the alarm that a new surge in wind could fuel two massive fires

that are continuing to burn in Los Angeles. Starting later today, winds are expected to pick up and stay strong through Wednesday, with gusts up to 60 miles per hour. It's not over. So we need everybody to stay safe. And I tell you from the first responders that are here, we're going to keep fighting this fight.

Over the weekend, a slight break in the winds had allowed firefighters to start getting control of the blazes. The Palisades fire along the coast is now 13% contained. The Eaton fire near Pasadena is about a quarter contained. Officials say that at least 24 people have died in the fires, and with more reported missing, they say they expect the death toll to rise. More than 150,000 people have been evacuated in recent days. Many of them haven't been able to return home yet. Authorities have been going house by house

through the areas that have burned, taking stock of whether houses have been damaged or destroyed, and they've set up a website. People can type in their address and find out if their home survived. Meanwhile, driving around Pacific Palisades right now, you'll see white pickup trucks that indicate that they are working for private firefighting crews. My colleague Tim Arango is based in Los Angeles. He's been reporting on what's become a coveted and controversial resource, private firefighters, which can cost as much as $10,000 a day.

On a street called Monument Street, which runs down close to the central business district, on one side of the street is house after house and lot after lot of destroyed homes. On the other side is an upscale outdoor shopping mall that survived largely intact. And I spoke to Rick Caruso, who owns that outdoor shopping mall, and he said he had brought in a team of firefighters from Arizona that he had used before to assist in the effort. The owner of the mall told Tim that his crews hauled in their own water He said they also tried to save neighboring houses as they protected the shopping center

Demand for private firefighters has been growing in recent years as the risk of devastating fires has increased But that's come with some public backlash not just about how they highlight inequalities in the city who can afford them and who can't but also concerns that they can potentially interfere with the official response during a fire and use up water by tapping into public hydrants. A new Times analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a potentially dangerous drop-off in childhood vaccination rates. In the past four years, the percentage of American kindergartners who have complete records of vaccines against measles, polio, whooping cough, and chickenpox has gone down.

Experts say some families are simply missing their records, but a wide variety of religious, philosophical, and medical reasons have also been driving down vaccination rates. While the overall vaccination rate in the U.S. is still high, there are a growing number of vulnerable pockets across the country, where rates have dropped so low that any new outbreaks of the diseases could become significantly harder to contain. In Idaho, for example, less than 80% of kids are vaccinated against measles, far below the national average of about 93%. The data also shows a deep partisan divide in the country. The decline in vaccination rates has been sharpest in states that Donald Trump won in November.

Republicans are now far more likely than Democrats to consider vaccines dangerous. Vaccination rates could continue to plunge as the Trump administration takes office. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president's pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has spent years falsely claiming that vaccines cause autism, along with other misinformation.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan says U.S. officials are putting together the final details of a ceasefire proposal in Gaza for both Israel and Hamas to consider. We are very, very close. And yet being very close still means we're far because until you actually get across the finish line, we're not there. For the Biden administration, the pressure is on to help broker the release of at least some of the remaining hostages before Biden leaves office. Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone last night about the negotiations, which are underway in Qatar.

Representatives of Trump's incoming administration are also in the mix. His intended Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Netanyahu on Saturday. Trump has said, quote, all hell will break out if Hamas doesn't release the hostages by his inauguration a week from today. The Times has learned that while some progress has been made in the ceasefire talks, Hamas doesn't release the hostages by his inauguration a week from today. The Times has learned that while some progress has been made in the ceasefire talks, key disagreements remain, including if Israel is willing to fully end the war. Still, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS yesterday that he feels confident the administration has laid the groundwork for a deal. When that agreement is reached, it will be on the basis

of what President Biden put forward. Who will get the credit? You know, ultimately, it doesn't matter. What really matters is whether the United States can bring real change, real change to people's lives. On Friday, President Biden made a sweeping move on immigration, one of his last big policy efforts before Trump is sworn in. He extended temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan.

The designation is intended for people whose countries are too unsafe or in too much upheaval to return to. It protects them from being deported. They'll be allowed to remain in the country with work permits for another 18 months. Trump has vowed to end the TPS program, at least for certain countries, but Biden's extension makes it legally difficult for him to do that, at least until 2026. The Trump administration is actively considering other immigration restrictions, though.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump invoked a public health policy, known as Title 42, to restrict migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, something Biden temporarily kept in place. Now, Trump wants to seal the border again, and his advisors have been searching for a new health concern to build their case. They've looked at whether tuberculosis or other respiratory diseases could justify the crackdown.

They've also considered arguing that migrants could carry unfamiliar diseases, a claim that echoes a long-held racist idea that minorities transmit infections. For years Trump's top immigration advisor Stephen Miller has been on a quest to find diseases to justify implementing Title 42. Even before the pandemic, 2019, he pushed for the border to be closed after an outbreak of mumps. An immigration crackdown based on public health concerns,

even without a clear threat of disease, is just one of many executive orders Trump is expected to sign next Monday, his first day in office. And finally, Charles Person, the youngest member of the original Freedom Riders, has died at 82. Person was a teenager in 1961 when he and 12 others, including future congressman John Lewis, boarded Greyhound buses in Washington, D.C., bound for Birmingham, Alabama. They were trying to integrate interstate bus terminals throughout the South.

My grandfather saw me complaining and moaning and groaning about not being accepted and being able to go where I wanted to go. And he just says to me, you know, you're going to sit there and complain or you're going to do something about it. I guess I did something about it. Person told his story in a podcast interview in 2021. Along his trip, he said he used the restrooms and lunch counters designated for white customers, drawing stairs. By the time they reached Atlanta,

Ku Klux Klan members boarded the bus. Person was beaten for not sitting in the back. And when the bus pulled into Birmingham, more violence broke out engulfing the whole station. But the ride inspired others. More than 400 riders took similar trips, facing beatings and arrests, until President Kennedy's administration

ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals. There are times when you doubt, well, where is humanity? But I've learned that there are a lot of good people in this world, and you can't be dissuaded by those who want to do the harm or who want to deter you from doing normal things like normal people. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, the rise of the MAGA movement in Silicon Valley.

That's next in the New York Times audio app, where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.