Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in literature

• October 8, 2026

By JILL LAWLESS, STEFANIE DAZIO and KOSTYA MANENKOV

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for playful, genre-blending works that fuse the classical and the modern.

Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her to notify her of the win.

“She was very taken by surprise,” Carlberg said.

Toronto-born Carson, 76, draws on themes and stories from ancient Greek and Roman literature for works that often blend elements of poetry, essay and fiction.

Her books include “Eros the Bittersweet,” a look at the pleasure and pain of desire in ancient Greek literature, verse novel “Autobiography of Red,” “Men in the Off Hours,” a collection of poetry and prose that won Canada’s Griffin Prize for poetry in 2001 and “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which compares Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy.

Carson also has translated works of classical Greek literature that, the Swedish Academy said, “may be regarded as independent works in their own right.” They include “If Not, Winter,” based on poem fragments by Sappho, Sophocles’ tragic plays “Electra” and “Antigone” and Euripides’s “Bakkhai.”

“Almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the literature committee.

Olsson added that Carson’s juxtaposition of influences ranging from the ancient Greeks to John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte “leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms.”

Carson has taught classics at several North American universities and has lived in Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022.

The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The Associated Press’ efforts to reach Carson and her literary agent, Nicole Aragi, were not immediately successful.

Last year, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose surreal and anarchic novels combine a bleak world view with mordant humor, won the Nobel Prize in literature for work the judges said upholds the power of art in the midst of “apocalyptic terror.”

Three science awards were announced earlier this week. The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award recognized a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos. The chemistry prize recognized two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.

This week ends with Friday’s peace prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million).

Dazio reported from Berlin and Lawless reported from London. Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.

AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

​ Orange County Register 

A British man is bailed after his arrest in security incident at a US-run military base in England

• October 8, 2026

LONDON (AP) — A 22-year-old British man arrested on suspicion of plotting a terror attack following a security incident at a U.S.-run military air base in England has been released on bail, authorities said Thursday.

The suspect, who was not named, is the seventh man bailed in the investigation of an apparent plot aimed at RAF Fairford air base, which has been used by American bombers to strike Iran.

British authorities have linked Tehran to the incident that led the U.S. to pull its bombers from RAF Fairford on Sunday.

The Trump administration believed the base faced Iranian threats intended to kill as many American troops and destroy as many U.S. planes as possible, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said the U.K. sees “strong indications” that Iran played a part in the incident. He did not provide details about what the suspects were planning or why the U.K. thinks Iran was involved.

Iran has denied involvement, although it has previously said that it considers any base used to attack its territory a legitimate target.

Police are continuing to investigate the incident that led to scores of residents being evacuated from their homes near the base on Sept. 27 as armed police officers and army bomb-disposal experts swarmed the rural area.

Police later said they had found a quantity of an accelerant — gasoline — in three vans linked to the initial five suspects, but no explosives.

All the suspects arrested have been in their 20s and six have been British nationals while one is a dual U.K.-Iranian citizen.

The U.K.-owned base, 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of London, was used by American B-1 and B-52 bombers during the Iran war.

The British government allowed the U.S. military to use RAF Fairford for what it called defensive strikes on Iranian missiles and their launch sites following Iranian attacks on U.K. interests and Britain’s allies in the Gulf.

​ Orange County Register 

How a Chicago educator uses food to teach science

• October 8, 2026

At least once a month, Rita Leary incorporates food into a science lesson at Ashburn Community Elementary School in Chicago. On a recent Thursday, it was all about honey. Sticky, sweet, viscous, varied in hues of light to dark amber.

“Do you guys think it will taste like it smells?” Leary asked her mixed class of sixth, seventh and eighth graders.

The goal was to conduct a sensory exploration of honey samples native to Illinois, while hitting a core standard of food education: Food connects us and the food and the environment are interconnected.

Leary’s gooey lesson was sparked by Pilot Light, an organization founded in 2010 that developed a food-based curriculum for educators to integrate lessons about food, nutrition and the food system into everyday subjects like math, science and reading. The program’s emphasis is on using food as a learning tool and giving students ownership of learning and agency in their lifestyles, Leary said.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh here’s a carrot and here’s why carrots are good for you,’ but instead we use food to learn more about science,” said Leary, who has been an educator for 36 years. “Other things like robotics, only some kids like. Coding, some kids like it — art, just some. But food? Everybody likes food. And the students are so engaged, calm and so polite with each other.”

In September, Pilot Light launched an extensive update to its Food Education Center, a digital hub of free pre-K-12 lesson plans and resources for educators, parents and students that can be integrated across multiple subjects. The nonprofit, which started in a single Chicago classroom with notable local chefs, now partners with administrators, schools and teachers in 26 states. It’s also launching its first official chapter in New York City this fall.

Leary, a former Pilot Light Fellow, has been using a mix of self-made lessons and digital curriculum from the organization for more than five years. She wants more educators across Chicago Public Schools to find the benefit in incorporating food into classroom learning.

That Thursday, Leary’s students sat at their communal lab tables in groups of four, watching closely as their science teacher promised a tasting of pumpkin honey, apple blossom honey, blueberry honey and clover honey. Each flavor corresponds to the plant the bees pollinated, she reminded them.

But first — a few tests, for science.

Leary turned off the lights and asked her students to use mini flashlights to categorize the honey by shades. Then, to test each honey’s viscosity, the students flipped the vials over to see how fast or slow the honey moved down.

“Viscosity is thickness, how slow something flows — seventh graders, we’ll be talking about it a lot when we get to lava and volcanoes, because some lava is quite viscous,” Leary said, telling them to flip.

Leary explained, to many oohs and aahs, that when forager bees collect nectar from flowers, it’s almost 80% water. The worker bees fan their wings to make a phase change that turns it into that gooey honey texture.

Next, she asked them to smell each sample, using a gentle waft.

“Oh my god, the pumpkin one smells like NyQuil, the honey NyQuil!” screeched Lia Henry, a seventh grader.

When it was finally time to taste each one, Henry confirmed that the dark-hued pumpkin honey tasted like NyQuil, too.

Henry said she only ever has honey with tea, while her classmate, Tyjon Poole, also in seventh grade, said he’ll only have honey when his grandma gives him a spoonful for a cold or cough.

It was a “pretty cool” day in science class, Poole said, plus he never knew different kinds of honey could taste so unusual.

“If you really look and think about your tongue, it’s a map, right? All of those taste buds aren’t the same. They are chemical receptors, and they receive different kinds of chemicals,” Leary said, instructing the class to spread the honey on different corners of the tongue to experience the nuance in flavor.

Though the honey project was her own, Leary said if it wasn’t for Pilot Light, she may have never thought to incorporate food in her science lesson plan, because the public education system doesn’t necessarily require food education.

“And it’s not always eating — the next one for the sixth graders, because they’re looking at plant and animal cells, we’re going to see what cooking does to the cell wall,” Leary said. “A few years ago, when I was teaching social studies, we had a chef visit us through Pilot Light, and he gave a presentation on spices that traveled to Spain through North Africa, and that fit right in with our medieval history unit.”

Pilot Light’s ultimate goal is to make food education a part of every child’s learning, said Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn, the organization’s executive director.

“What are all the ways in which we connect with food? What do we need to know about food? What is it we can do once we have all this knowledge? We can make different decisions. We can advocate,” DeSorbo-Quinn said. “There’s a lot of different ways in which food connects to our lives. You can teach anything through food.”

Getting the Food Education Center to where it is now was a heavy undertaking, driven by teachers who were part of focus groups that helped shape the more than 200 available lesson plans grounded in Pilot Light’s Food Education Standards, which are designed by a multidisciplinary team of chefs, farmers, medical experts and psychologists.

These resources cover a broad array of topics, including agriculture, astronomy, historical events such as the Great Migration, ecosystems, geometry, global challenges like the refugee crisis, sustainability and food insecurity.

At Ashburn Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, Leary also tries to educate students on alternative food options to processed items, which is particularly vital in an area that has long suffered from a shortage of local grocery stores. A Pete’s Fresh Market opened four years ago in Evergreen Park, but before that, the neighborhood did not have a grocery store for about 10 years.

“So many of my students are processed food eaters — I like chips too — but they’re not really aware of what food can be, so I try to give them some clear options, and they’re ambitious and they like to try things,” Leary said. “Recently, we made a cream cheese and brown sugar mixture to dip apples in, and the next night I got a picture from one of the moms saying, ‘Look what Ricardo made for us!’”

Leary said the most powerful of Pilot Light’s seven food education standards is that it can be used to advocate for change.

“That’s where the connection comes from… when you taste things and you’re sharing,” she said, pointing to a group of students huddled over a plate of Triscuit crackers, fruit and honey at the end of class. “These (students) never do anything together, and here they are. This is also good for the community and culture of our school.”

Pilot Light now reaches thousands of educators and classrooms, but it didn’t start that way.

“We were responding to, literally, a call to arms by Michelle Obama of, ‘Hey chefs, get involved in schools — kids need you,’” explained Jason Hammel, chef and owner of acclaimed Lula Cafe in Logan Square and one of the organization’s founding members. “We did not think about it as a program or a nonprofit at all. We thought about it as a way of getting connected to the school system and to children.”

During the Obama administration, First Lady Michelle Obama’s signature “Let’s Move!” campaign urged chefs to partner with K-12 schools to weave nutrition and food into everyday life. Some chefs also helped students build school gardens.

“More and more, especially since COVID, chefs and restaurants are looked upon as resources for a variety of social needs — whether it’s actual hunger or community support,” Hammel said. “So it was natural for us to pitch in. But what was interesting about this was that we were doing our own program. We weren’t donating to someone else’s program. We did this ourselves.”

Even before the plan materialized, Matthias Merges, chef and proprietor of craft-driven hospitality group Folkart, was already working in select classrooms at his daughter’s school, Disney II Magnet Elementary, sharing insights about salmon farming, fish migration, how something goes from the ocean to someone’s plate and more. After he and other chefs went to Washington, D.C., for the launch of Michelle Obama’s “Chefs Move to Schools” program, they started to put a plan on paper.

The founding chefs — Hammel; Merges; Justin Large, former One Off Hospitality culinary director; and Paul Kahan, executive chef and partner of The Publican — would take turns going to classrooms on select days, first only at Disney Magnet but soon at multiple schools across CPS, using food to teach a lesson on any given topic.

“We’d email our list of teachers and ask, ‘What do you happen to be teaching that day?’” Hammel explained. “When the emails came back, like one classroom was doing fractions. OK, that’s easy. We’ll make a pie and cut it up or make a recipe. But then we got the Boston Tea Party, or plate tectonics, or how magnets work… the different chefs had to figure out a way to use food to teach (it).”

For that Boston Tea Party lesson 16 years ago, Hammel said the chef used herbal tea sachets and groups of students to market and brand their product to help teach consumerism and how “no taxation without representation” became a rallying cry for American democracy.

“As it started to take off, we were wrestling with (the fact that) there’s only a certain number of chefs, and there’s more than 400 schools in Chicago itself, there’s no way that we’re going to be able to do that,” Merges said. “That’s how it transformed into a system where the teacher was now the key. They could bring it back to their own classes and their own schools, and they became advocates for piloting and teaching food education themselves.”

Pilot Light also encourages student-led actions that impact school cafeterias and local food systems, while fellows are required to do a classroom advocacy project.

Recently at Ancona School in Kenwood, educator Christopher Weber brought together 80 elementary students, parents and teachers for a day of learning and cooking to fill their neighborhood’s Love Fridge with homemade soups and bread, with custom labels to promote allergy safety, to raise awareness of food insecurity in their community.

At Langston Hughes Elementary in Roseland, STEM teacher LaTina Taylor spearheaded a project that quickly became one of the most cherished stories within Pilot Light. K-8 students spent the year caring for a flock of chickens in their school coop — a hands-on “living textbook” that taught them about agricultural responsibility, animal husbandry and sustainable closed-loop food systems. However, the students encountered a harsh reality of farming midyear when predators breached the coop overnight, killing four chickens. The students then moved to safeguard the sole surviving chicken, using their STEM training to build him a secure, predator-proof “fortress.”

Back at Ashburn Elementary, Leary pointed toward the window in her class. Outside is the class beehive project — a fully functioning wooden hive box, with one queen bee and 10,000 worker bees — constructed and installed by the Roof Crop Foundation using money she secured from a grant.

Leary learned of the urban farming company through Pilot Light. A week before, beekeeper AJ Appledorn-Orozco, who leads hands-on educational workshops and apiary programs for Roof Crop, had stopped by the class to introduce them to the “world of bees.” Leary took it a step further and dove into honey.

As Pilot Light continues to grow, the crux of it has been the same since day one, DeSorbo-Quinn said.

“We were founded with this idea of food being a common language,” she said. “There are only a few things that will universally engage people, and food is one of them. It’s an extraordinary teaching tool.”

​ Orange County Register 

Newport Harbor girls flag football opens ‘flood’ to beat Corona del Mar

• October 8, 2026

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NEWPORT BEACH — Newport Harbor pass rusher Aliyah Chappell felt a jolt of excitement as Corona del Mar’s girls flag football team lined up for a fourth-and-1 attempt near midfield on the opening series of the second half Wednesday night.

Newport Harbor led its Back Bay rival by six points and needed a defensive stop.

“Knowing what’s on the line as a senior, and it’s my last Battle of the Bay, I just wanted to give everything my all,” Chappell said.

Chappell recorded a sack for a 6-yard loss and helped spark host Newport Harbor to a 38-7 victory in the Sunset League.

Newport Harbor (19-4, 9-2), ranked No. 3 in Orange County, outscored No. 7 Corona del Mar 25-0 in the second half to remain one game behind first place Huntington Beach (21-3, 10-1) in the league race.

No. 2 Huntington Beach has clinched at least a share of the league title and plays host to Newport Harbor on Monday to close league.

After Chappell’s sack, Newport Harbor’s Scarlett Guyser rolled to her right and tossed a 2-yard TD to Blakely Irvine to cap a 33-yard scoring drive. Freshman Emma Yokoi caught extra-point as the Sailors opened a 20-7 lead.

On the ensuing possession, Yoki intercepted a pass and returned the ball to the Sea Kings 7. Skylie Cid followed with a 4-yard touchdown run to extend Newport Harbor’s lead to 26-7.

“(We) absolutely went on a flood,” said Chappell, who hoisted Cid during a touchdown celebration. “We all did it together.”

Guyser had a spectacular 19-yard touchdown scramble early in the fourth quarter.

Freshman Jordan Sanders later caught a short pass from Ally Shaw and raced along the sideline for a 46-yard touchdown.

On her touchdown run, Guyser juked past two pass rushers and eluded four defenders down field for her second rushing touchdown.

“She’s a great player,” Cid said of Guyser, who also threw two TDs. “She’s great at throwing as well as running.”

Newport Harbor recorded four sacks in improving to 10-0 all-time against Corona del Mar. Sanders had two sacks while Chappell and Caroline Eadie each added one.

Newport Harbor coach Jason Guyser called the performance the Sailors’ best of the season.

“That team is really good,” he said of Corona del Mar (13-7, 6-4), the reigning CIF-SS Division 2 champion. “They beat Huntington (Beach). They only lost by one the second time. They played Edison really tight. That’s a Top 15 team and we just did what we did.”

Corona del Mar’s Annasofia Dickens made a leaping 19-yard touchdown reception from freshman Charlotte Ring in the middle of the second quarter. Dickens also grabbed the extra-point as the Sea Kings tied the score 7-7.

Corona del Mar coach Theo Rokos remained confident in his team.

“We are playing at times like the best team out there and sometimes we lose collective consciousness,” he said. “Not making the fourth-and-1 and interception deep in our territory turned a tight game into a lopsided game.”

​ Orange County Register 

Ducks flattened by Oilers after 5-goal 2nd period

• October 8, 2026

ANAHEIM — Wednesday night’s heavyweight bout with the Edmonton Oilers began auspiciously for the Ducks, but after a five-goal second period they finished the fight on the mat staring up at the Honda Center ceiling.

Edmonton got a small measure of revenge against the team that ended its bid for a third straight Western Conference crown last spring, triumphing 5-2.

With the Ducks’ loss and the Colorado Avalanche falling to the Winnipeg Jets, there are no more undefeated teams in the NHL. The Philadelphia Flyers, who coveted Leo Carlsson, lie with the rival Kings and the Ducks’ next opponent at home, the Calgary Flames, as the league’s winless clubs.

Beckett Sennecke deposited two goals, both set up by Carlsson, in the first period. Lukáš Dostál stopped just 12 of 17 shots before being relieved by Ville Husso to begin the third period. Nikita Klepov, the 15th overall pick in June’s draft, made his pro debut and became the youngest Duck to appear in an NHL game at 18 years and 102 days.

Evan Bouchard scored two goals and assisted on another by Kasperi Kapanen. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl combined for seven points. They were a goal and two assists for McDavid and four assists for Draisaitl, including one on Vasily Podkolzin’s goal. Devon Levi made 28 saves.

The middle frame belonged to the visitors, which made the third period a mere formality.

The Oilers struck 11 seconds into the second, equalized on the power play at the 6:30 mark, took their first lead at 14:12, then pushed it to 5-2 at 16:50 and 19:08.

McDavid ascended to the top of the Art Ross Trophy leaderboard with his last-minute, 4-on-4 goal. He moved to his left to get wide of Tristan Luneau and flicked a shot back to his right that banked in off Dostál and chased him from the contest.

Draisaitl nearly set Podkolzin up for a tiebreaking goal and connected with him for a lead-extending one instead. His buttery stretch pass found Podkolzin behind the entire Ducks defense, allowing him to take it to the house.

Bouchard’s pair of goals put him in sole possession of the league lead with six. That’s more than Philadelphia has scored as a team this season and twice as many as Calgary has accumulated to date.

His hard shot off a soft pass from Draisaitl and against an overmatched Ducks fourth line gave the Oilers a 3-2 edge. He had scored Edmonton’s first goal with a seeing-eye shot from the far corner of the offensive zone that changed direction through staggered traffic before beating a visibly frustrated Dostál.

In between, McDavid’s patient exploration of the middle of the offensive zone got all four Ducks penalty killers to collapse, enabling him to feather a backhand pass to Kapanen for a swift redirection.

When the Ducks and Oilers last met, Edmonton was eliminated in six games in a first-round playoff clash. In that series, the Ducks went 8 for 16 on the power play, and they continued their magic with the extra man early on Wednesday.

After scoring on three consecutive power plays while defeating the Florida Panthers in their home opener, the Ducks cashed in on their first two opportunities against Edmonton on Wednesday to extend their streak to five straight conversions.

Sennecke kicked off the offense at 4:11 and then tallied again at 15:28 to put the Ducks up 2-0 at the first intermission.

His second goal was served to him wide open at the netfront after an aesthetically pleasing passing sequence on which all five players touched the puck.

He had already notched the first goal of the game and his first of the season, also from the doorstep. After Mikael Granlund lured Bouchard into the corner, he skated toward the near post and found Sennecke for a shot attempt.

UP NEXT

The Ducks will hit the road for a back-to-back set that will take them to Winnipeg on Friday and Calgary on Saturday.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Brewers eliminate Padres in Game 4, advance to NLCS rematch with Dodgers

• October 8, 2026

By GREG BEACHAM AP Sports Writer

SAN DIEGO — Garrett Mitchell tripled and scored the tiebreaking run in the fifth inning before making a pivotal catch on Manny Machado’s drive to the wall in the eighth, and the Milwaukee Brewers advanced to the National League Championship Series for the second straight season with a 3-1 victory over the San Diego Padres on Wednesday night, winning their best-of-five Division Series in four games.

Mitchell, a former Orange Lutheran and UCLA standout, also drove in Sal Frelick with Milwaukee’s first run as the Brewers snapped a 12-game postseason road losing streak that dated to 2018 and reached the team’s fifth LCS.

Machado nearly tied Game 4 with a 406-foot drive off reliever Abner Uribe, but Mitchell coolly tracked it down and reached just above the short wall in right-center field to keep it in the ballpark.

Second baseman Brice Turang then ended the eighth with an acrobatic catch of Ty France’s tailing pop-up in foul ground.

After fending off the surging Padres in four tight games decided by a combined five runs, the 103-win Brewers will get an NLCS rematch with the Dodgers, who eliminated the Atlanta Braves earlier Wednesday, also in four games.

The Dodgers swept Milwaukee last October on the way to their second consecutive World Series title.

Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a 429-foot homer on an otherwise tepid offensive night for the Padres, who repeatedly tested the majors’ best regular-season team before falling short of what would have been the fourth NLCS appearance in franchise history.

One night after the Padres avoided elimination in Game 3, Milwaukee claimed its first road playoff win since the 2018 NLCS by sticking to its season-long formula for success.

While four Brewers pitchers combined on a three-hitter and the defense made nearly every big play, Milwaukee’s lineup calmly worked counts, pounded 10 hits through the Padres’ defense and manufactured enough runs to head home smiling.

Game 2 hero Jackson Chourio capped his high-impact series by driving in Mitchell to become the Brewers’ career leader in postseason RBIs at just 22 years old. Chourio has 17 RBIs, including six in this series, in 16 playoff games.

Milwaukee opened the scoring in the third when Frelick reached on an infield single, stole second and came around on a single by Mitchell.

Brewers starter and former Padres draft pick Robert Gasser threw four innings of three-hit ball, but Tatis ended his 1-for-19 skid since San Diego’s playoff opener with a long shot to center in the third. It was the longest homer ever hit in the postseason at Petco Park by a San Diego player.

Padres starter Walker Buehler yielded just three hits and a run, but Manager Craig Stammen replaced him with Game 1 starter Robbie Ray after William Contreras’ leadoff single in the fourth.

Mitchell then stroked a mild liner perfectly over first base and into the right field corner leading off the fifth, and he scored on Chourio’s single through the drawn-in infield. Chourio surpassed Ryan Braun for the most postseason RBIs in Brewers history.

Jake Bauers singled leading off the sixth and went to third on Cooper Pratt’s ground-rule double before scoring on Frelick’s sacrifice fly.

The Padres were already down 3-1 in the seventh when Mason Miller allowed three baserunners, but no runs. The vaunted closer missed Game 3 for the birth of his first child.

After sitting below .500 and in 11th place in the NL in late July, San Diego roared into the first wild-card spot and then swept the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card Series last week. The Padres had won 19 of 22 games before losing three of four to Milwaukee.

UP NEXT

The Brewers host the Dodgers in Game 1 on Sunday at 5 p.m. PT with ace Jacob Misiorowski almost certainly lined up to start. Milwaukee is four wins from only the second World Series berth in team history.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Reform California’s bizarre endorsement of Proposition 38

• October 8, 2026

With ballots out and too many things on everyone’s ballot, many voters will be relying on voting guides put out by newspapers, political parties, pundits, friends, and so on to use as cheat sheets. (Obviously, you should be consulting the guides put together by the editorial boards of the Southern California News Group and the San Diego Union-Tribune, since we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of candidates and ballot measure supporters and opponents.)

In right-wing circles, one of the more popular voter guides is from Reform California, the group run by San Diego Assemblyman Carl DeMaio. None of the endorsements from Reform California are ever really surprising — it’s usually “Whoever is a Republican and/or most aligned with Carl DeMaio.”

Likewise, on state ballot measures, the DeMaio list looks a lot like the one from the Southern California News Group editorial board. Opposition to Proposition 3 and 40, because they’re taxes, support for Propositions 41 and 42 because they’ll block the wealth tax, opposition to two big bond measures (Propositions 1 and 37).

Then there’s the bizarre exception: Proposition 38, an $8.4 billion bond measure which the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle described as “one of the most noxious deposits on California’s political dung heap in years.”

“This one is not a taxpayer-backed bond, it is a public-private partnership,” DeMaio explained to his followers.

The problem for that assertion is that it is indeed a taxpayer-backed bond.

As the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office notes, “The state General Fund cost to repay the bond would be $500 million to $600 million annually for about 20 years. The annual cost would be about one-quarter of 1 percent (0.25 percent) of the state’s total General Fund budget. Since the state has to pay interest on the money it borrows, the total cost of the bond would be about 10 percent more (after adjusting for inflation) than if the state paid up-front with money it already has.”

DeMaio counters that his group backs Prop. 38 “mainly because we see the bond as different from typical government borrowing,” because of a provision requiring “10 percent of all proceeds from the immunotherapies developed as a result of this act go to the state to offset the costs of this act.”

Where have we heard this before? Oh, right, the 2004 stem cell bond under Proposition 71, which likewise vowed to use the proceeds of the breakthrough treatments it would come up with to help pay the $3 billion bond. How did that go?

In 2020, the stem cell research backers came back to top off that 2004 investment with a new $5.5 billion ballot measure. At the time, the LAO noted that, far from the windfall of revenue supporters expected, “these inventions have provided a total of approximately $350,000 to the state.” No, I’m not missing any zeroes. $350,000.  Two years later, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine received $15.6 million in royalties. Still a drop in the bucket for a combined $8.5 billion in bonds, plus interest.

Prop. 38 asks voters to make that same bad bet — and in an even shadier way.

While the measure calls for half the money to be handed out to researchers across the state, the other half would go toward a research institute that isn’t named but narrowly defined by the language of Prop. 38 itself down to square footage so the only place it could be is the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. Which, surprise, happens to be backed by Proposition 38’s chief backer, billionaire Gary K. Michelson.

To make matters worse, as the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board notes, the “California Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy literally has no track record of developing, funding or bringing medical research to market. It isn’t even fully built.”

If that’s Carl DeMaio’s idea of a public-private partnership, then, yikes. It sounds either like a half-baked cynical money grab or boondoggle in the making.

As Robert Kaplan, a senior scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a distinguished research professor at UCLA, warned in these pages recently, the promise of repayment based on potential breakthroughs is one voters should be skeptical about given the nature of the bond and the nature of biomedical research.

“That warning is not pessimism,” he wrote. “It reflects how biomedical research works. Drug development is long and failure-prone. An often-cited National Institutes of Health estimate found that only 1 of every 10,000 promising compounds from early-stage research becomes a new drug; at least 90% of drugs entering preclinical studies fail. Immunotherapy has produced remarkable advances, but it is not exempt from these odds.”

Finally, DeMaio has uncritically parroted the promise by proponents that “every drug or treatment developed with the funding must be sold in California at 20% below the national average price.” Kaplan, in the official argument against the measure, points out the obvious hole in that claim: “While this may sound attractive, it could incentivize companies to prioritize selling these products in other states where the prices are not controlled.”

Taken together, it’s truly bizarre that a conservative group would lend its support to such a flawed, dishonest and expensive measure. For conservative voters wanting to do the right thing and oppose wasteful spending, always read the fine print of any measure or any voter guide.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

​ Orange County Register 

ALDS: Rays finish sweep of Yankees behind Mesa homer, fan interference call

• October 8, 2026

By RONALD BLUM AP Baseball Writer

NEW YORK — Victor Mesa Jr. hit a tiebreaking, two-run homer off Max Fried in the sixth inning, and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees, 4-3, on Wednesday night with the help of a fan interference call for a three-game sweep of their American League Division Series.

Ryan Vilade also homered for the Rays, who reached the AL Championship Series for the first time since 2020 and host the Chicago White Sox or Cleveland Guardians in the opener on Monday.

After Mesa’s homer gave the Rays a 4-2 lead, Anthony Volpe appeared to hit a two-run shot against Griffin Jax with two outs in the bottom half as a fan reached over the left field wall and caught the ball over the glove of a leaping Mesa.

A video review determined the ball would not have cleared the fence but would not have been caught by Mesa. Volpe was awarded an RBI double and George Lombard Jr. was allowed to score from first base. Jax recovered to strike out Spencer Jones.

Baseball’s adaptation of video technology was key to the inning.

Lombard reached with a one-out walk when a 3-and-1 pitch called a strike by plate umpire Dan Bellino was ruled inside on an ABS challenge. Austin Wells then walked on full-count changeup but an ABS challenge by Rays catcher Liam Hicks ruled the pitch caught the inside corner for a strikeout, bringing up Volpe.

Quite a change from 1996, when umpires did not have technology to assist and Derek Jeter’s homer for the Yankees helped turn around the ALCS opener despite young fan Jeffrey Meier reaching over the right field wall where Baltimore’s Tony Tarasco was set to catch the ball. MLB began using video replay for home run calls in 2008 and allowed challenges to ball/strike decisions starting this season.

Ian Seymour pitched 1⅓ scoreless innings for the win, Kevin Kelly struck out pinch-hitter Giancarlo Stanton to strand a runner in the eighth and Bryan Baker pitched the ninth for his third save of the series.

Seeking its first World Series title, Tampa Bay celebrated on the field of the big-spending Yankees for the second time in two weeks after clinching the AL East on Sept. 22. New York opened the season with MLB’s third-highest payroll at $303 million while the Rays were 26th at $91 million.

Swept in a best-of-five postseason matchup for the first time since the 1980 ALCS against Kansas City, the Yankees ended their 17th straight season without a World Series crown. That equaled their longest drought since winning their first championship in 1923, a gap between titles in 1978 and ’96.

Yankees captain Aaron Judge missed the postseason after straining a calf on Sept. 16. The three-time AL MVP played just seven games after May 31 because of a fractured rib and the leg injury, an absence the team couldn’t overcome.

New York batted .130 in the series and was outscored 10-5.

After sweeping Boston in the Wild Card Series, New York never led against the Rays and has not advanced past a higher-seeded team in the postseason since 2020.

Jonathan Aranda put the Rays ahead with an RBI single in the third and Ben Rice tied the score against Nick Martinez with a single in the bottom half, his eighth RBI of the postseason.

Vilade, a 27-year-old getting extensive major league playing time this year with his sixth major league organization, hit an opposite-field, 340-foot drive into the right field short porch in the fourth. The ball, just over the glove of a jumping Jones, would not have been out of any other big league ballpark.

Volpe, starting at second base in place of Jazz Chisholm Jr., hit a 96.6 mph liner off Martinez’s back with two outs in the fourth for an infield single, and Seymour relieved. Jones’ opposite-field double landed beyond Mesa, driving in Volpe.

Junior Caminero singled in the sixth and Mesa sent a sweeper deep into the right-field seats to chase Fried. It was the first home run he allowed to a left-handed hitter since August 2025.

UP NEXT

Tampa Bay gets four days off and will have played just three games in 14 days before starting the best-of-seven ALCS.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register