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Today’s top stories

Acting Attorney General James McHenry fired several Justice Department officials yesterday who worked on the federal criminal investigations into President Trump, according to two DOJ officials. At least a dozen people who worked with special counsel Jack Smith received dismissals. It is not clear how many officials involved in the Trump investigations received termination notices.

• 🎧 In the termination letters, McHenry wrote that he did not trust the officials to faithfully implement the president’s agenda due to their role in prosecuting him, NPR’s Carrie Johnson tells Up First. A longtime lawyer informed Johnson he could not recall a time in modern DOJ history when so many prosecutors from a single case were dismissed. While the fired prosecutors could protest, sue, and potentially regain their jobs with back pay, the process could take time. Meanwhile, some senior civil Justice Department officials have been reassigned in recent days to work on a sanctuary city task force, which Johnson says could be a tactic designed to get them to quit.

The future is unclear for more than 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S. legally under several Biden-era programs. These programs provided temporary legal status to migrants from specific countries, many of whom were escaping violence in their home countries. However, Trump has now ended these programs and given immigration officials the authority to swiftly deport these asylum seekers.

• 🎧 One program is known as CHNV parole, which is specifically designed for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, NPR’s Sergio Martínez-Beltrán says. People from those countries were allowed into the U.S. as long as they had a sponsor and passed a background check. Trump has expanded the expedited removal, which was originally only applied to migrants who had recently crossed the border. Martínez-Beltrán adds, “it’s one thing to issue an order; it’s a lot more complicated to actually deport people, and it’s unclear how that will happen.”
• ➡️ Immigrant and mixed-status families are changing their routines as immigration raids have begun.
• ➡️ How districts are responding to Trump clearing the way for immigration arrests at schools.

Tech stocks worldwide have plummeted over the past day as investors digest reports that a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, DeepSeek, developed a competitive AI model at a low cost. The company has attracted Trump’s attention. In addition, DeepSeek became the No. 1 most downloaded app on Apple’s U.S. app store, ousting OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

• 🎧 What rattled markets is a narrative that DeepSeek, with some caveats, basically did it all cheaper, quicker and with less powerful microprocessors than its big competitors, NPR’s John Ruwitch reports from China. It’s a spinoff from a Chinese hedge fund, established in 2023. The founders hired great engineers and developed new algorithms. DeepSeek says it spent under $6 million to make, but analysts say that number can be misinterpreted as it doesn’t include the cost of developing versions in which the latest was distilled. Ruwitch adds that while this development is pathbreaking, China faces growing challenges from the U.S. export ban on microprocessors.

Life advice

You can see the world and save money — it just takes a little savvy planning.

Photograph by Tsering Bista and Beck Harlan

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Photograph by Tsering Bista and Beck Harlan

Traveling on a budget doesn’t have to involve staying in hostels, eating cheap food or sleeping in train stations. You can enjoy a great trip without draining your bank account or compromising your safety or quality. Whether you are planning a quick weekend getaway or an international trip, here are some tips: 

• ✈️ Find an affordable lookalike for your dream destination. Can’t afford Paris? Consider Montreal or Quebec City.
• ✈️ Be flexible with travel dates.  Avoid flying on Sundays and Mondays, which are often pricier due to weekend trips.
• ✈️ Compare accommodations: Airbnb or other vacation rental services are not always more affordable. Check hotel rates or consider a home swap.

For more tips, check out the full list here.

Picture show

Qing Bao, one of the Smithsonian National Zoo’s new Giant Pandas, eats an apple on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025. In November 2023, the National Zoo sent its three pandas — Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, who had lived there since 2000, and their cub Xiao Qi Ji — back to China, in advance of the expiration of their loan agreement and amidst rising tensions between the two countries.

Tyrone Turner/WAMU

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Tyrone Turner/WAMU

Panda-monium has officially begun in the nation’s capital. After a three-month wait and an 8,000-mile trip from China, giant pandas Bao Li and Qing Bao are finally on display at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Their debut marks the latest chapter in China’s “panda diplomacy” in the U.S.

3 things to know before you go

When Claire Burnside Och was a young waitress, a customer’s unexpected reply put her at ease.

Claire Burnside Och

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Claire Burnside Och

1. In 2004, Claire Burnside Och was a server at a high-end restaurant when she made a mistake opening a bottle of wine. She had broken the cork, leaving half on her corkscrew and the other portion stuck in the bottle. Instead of being annoyed, the customer handled it with grace and left her with words she now uses to respond to others’ fumbles.
2. The last of the 43 monkeys that escaped from Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center in Yemassee, S.C., in November of last year have been recovered, according to the local police department. 
3. The First State of Being and Chooch Helped have won the Newbery and Caldecott awards, respectively — the biggest honors in children’s literature.

This newsletter was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.

On a hill above Altadena named Little Round Top, a grave stood for 136 years as the community below it blossomed.

Here lay the remains of Owen Brown, son of the legendary abolitionist John Brown. Owen moved to Pasadena in the 1880s and was greeted by locals as a hero for fighting alongside his father in the Bleeding Kansas wars and Harper’s Ferry raid. His funeral in 1889 attracted thousands of mourners, and he was put to rest near a cabin where he and a brother spent his last years.

The grave became a place of veneration, then a site of controversy in the early 2000s when Little Round Top’s owner began to shoo away the curious. Lawsuits were filed to push for public access. Brown’s tombstone disappeared for a decade before being found hundreds of feet down the hill.

His final resting place is now open to the public. A new owner gave a local group $300,000 to restore it in 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors designated it as a historical landmark in December, and the site is now under the care of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The saga was supposed to get its most prominent airing yet on Wednesday at Mountain View Cemetery, where two of Owen’s siblings are buried and where a plaque is inscribed with his name and image. Altadena resident and filmmaker Pablo Miralles had been scheduled to debut a 20-minute documentary on Owen’s life.

Facebook is where I learned about the screening. Facebook is also where I learned that Miralles and his family lost their home in the Eaton fire.

He and his son fled with important documents, photos and a painting his grandmother took with her as she escaped the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Gone are Miralles’ production notebook and the final paychecks for his crew. The documentary was already saved online, though Miralles has no idea when it will screen.

“People need to find places to live — we need to find a place to live,” said Miralles last week at Stumptown Coffee in Pasadena. “I’m proud of my film, but it can wait.”

Few were better qualified to make a documentary about Owen Brown than Miralles. His parents, immigrants from Argentina, moved from Eagle Rock to Altadena in the 1970s after finding a home large enough for them and their seven children. They ignored friends who said Altadena was “dangerous” and financed the purchase through a Black-owned bank. Their regular bank had refused “because they told my father that our house would be on a Black street,” Miralles said.

He remembers a bucolic upbringing in a multiracial paradise that informed the rest of his life and eventually became his muse. The 60-year-old created a well-received documentary about how his alma mater, John Muir High in Pasadena, resegregated as white families enrolled their children in private and charter schools. Last year, Miralles wrote and directed a play that imagined a friendship between two of the City of Roses’ most famous natives, Julia Child and Jackie Robinson. (I appeared in his 2012 documentary about the intense soccer rivalry between the U.S. and Mexico).

“I didn’t know I would cover Pasadena like I have,” he said, “but when you recognize that you came from a place with a history of struggle, you kind of have to.”

Altadena’s charm lured Miralles back as a resident in 2019. By then, he had made a four-minute short for the Owen Brown Gravesite Committee about their cause.

“You learn about [John Brown] in school, that he’s a maniac and a madman intent on killing white slave owners,” said Miralles, who had hiked up to Owen’s grave but otherwise didn’t know much about him at the time. “But when you read his papers, he wasn’t that at all.”

Miralles’ short film impressed committee chair Michele Zack. She asked Miralles to make a longer film that the Pasadena Unified School District could show in classrooms.

Owen joined his father in the armed conflicts that made John Brown such a divisive figure in U.S. history. In Kansas, Owen killed a man in a skirmish between abolitionists and pro-slavery settlers. He stayed behind to guard weapons and horses while his father led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, which resulted in the deaths of two of Owen’s brothers and in John’s capture and execution.

“The 1850s resonate so strongly with what’s happening right now,” said Zack, who also lost her home in the Eaton fire. “You think we’re divided now? We were divided even more in the 1850s. Owen Brown is symbolic of all that, and here’s this history right in our backyard.”

She still wants to screen the Brown documentary to the public — but not any time soon.

“There’s so much suffering and loss and pain right now, and that’s going to go on for years — but we’re not going to postpone [the film] for years,” Zack said.

Miralles and his team were busy putting the final touches on the project. In fact, the sound engineer was working on it the day the Eaton fire forced him to evacuate (his house remains standing).

“The idea that the original radical abolitionists have their literal roots here — the man is still there, his bones are there — is just so important,” Miralles said. “We need to live up to the ideals of this nation like Owen, which means we locals will fight to maintain diversity here.”

He looked at his phone’s home screen to check the time. It featured a photo of him, his wife, their son and their two dogs at their home in early January.

We got into his SUV and drove into Altadena. The plan was to visit his incinerated home, then see if Brown’s grave came out unscathed. Neither he nor Zack knew its fate.

Miralles drove by his former school, Franklin Elementary — destroyed. A chimney was all that remained of the home where his brother lived. “Here are a lot of my friends,” Miralles said with a sigh as his head darted from side to side. “Just blocks and blocks and blocks.”

He decided to not stop at his home “because I don’t want to put on a hazmat suit again.” Instead, we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint — “Military vehicles in my hood. It’s kind of crazy” — before getting on a winding street that ended near Brown’s grave.

Signs all around warned people to proceed at their own risk. Another proclaimed, “Looters Will be Shot.” Others said the fire danger was “extreme.”

The paved street turned into a one-lane gravel road leading into the Angeles National Forest. Miralles parked near a long-abandoned car that occupied the spot “where Owen’s cabin used to be.” A worker from the California Conservation Corps soon approached us to ask what we were doing up there.

Miralles explained the purpose of our visit. The worker nodded.

“I wondered why there was a trail going up there,” he said, waving over to Little Round Top before walking back to clear more brush.

The first part of the trail is narrow, with a steep drop that forced me to look ahead instead of writing in my notebook. Vibrant yucca, scrub oak and sage stood alongside dried-out chaparral. Along the way were interpretive signs that told the stories of two pioneers of Black Los Angeles: Biddy Mason, a formerly enslaved woman who became a wealthy property owner downtown, and Robert Owens, a successful businessman and Mason’s relative by marriage who used to collect wood in the hills we were trekking through.

We eventually got to the base of Little Round Top, named after a famous Civil War battle, and looked down at a devastated Altadena of blackened trees and leveled properties.

I asked Miralles what he saw.

“It’s not what I see,” he replied. “It’s what I don’t see.”

From there, we hiked up a short but steep switchback that ended on a dirt plateau. Pine trees offered shade for two benches. Before us was Brown’s grave.

After a short hike up the hill, Miralles views the grave of Owen Brown, son of abolitionist John Brown.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Stones outlined where his body lies. Someone had drawn a heart in the dirt. At the head of the grave was a tombstone that listed Brown’s name, his years of life and the legend “Son of John Brown the Liberator.”

There were no signs of fire damage. Miralles looked relieved.

“There used to be way more vegetation here, but it’s all cleared,” he said as we looked down at Altadena again. To our right in the distance was La Cañada Flintridge. A streak of pink fire retardant soiled the valley below.

“I hope people recognize the importance of this grave and what Owen and his family represented for this country,” he said as we looked at Brown’s tombstone. Then he looked back to his Altadena. A plume of dust now rose from a neighborhood.

“I used to hike these hills growing up. There would be fires every three to four years, he said. “But I never thought what happened to us would ever happen.”