Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about the 110 Freeway closures scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Onto the five USC, Los Angeles and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

It costs $132,860 a year to hold an inmate in California’s prison system. That is, mind you, nearly twice USC’s tuition, which is the most expensive in the state. The cost of imprisoning people in California has risen by more than 90% in the past decade, propelled by ballooning employee compensation deals and court-mandated healthcare improvements. Experts say the state must close at least one prison a year to offset scheduled employee raises.

Kristen Hwang and Nigel Duara / CalMatters

2.

The LA Times laid off 115 journalists, or one in every five people in its newsroom. The layoffs, which gutted the most influential newspaper in the West, have sparked renewed interest in a California bill that would require tech companies like Google and Meta to give newspapers a larger share of their advertising revenue. The two lawmakers who sponsored the bill say it’s a “top priority” to revive the effort after it stalled in the Legislature over the summer.

Sophia Bollag / San Francisco Chronicle

3.

OpenAI banned the developer of a chatbot that mimicked presidential candidate Dean Phillips, noting that its policies forbid using ChatGPT to power political campaigning products. The chatbot, which intended to give voters a novel way to interface with a political candidate, was the brainchild of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who started a super PAC to back Phillips’s long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination.

Elizabeth Dwoskin / The Washington Post

4.

Train robberies are one of the most common tropes in the old Western film genre, but it turns out they aren’t just a thing of the past. Cargo theft is seeing a resurgence. Authorities say some pirates work in remarkably coordinated teams, jumping onto moving trains, cutting brake hoses to trigger emergency brakes, breaking into containers then making a break for it. The LA basin is the country’s “undisputed capital of cargo theft,” and contributes its fair share to the near doubling of cargo theft cases across the U.S. since 2019. 

Malia Wollan / The New York Times Magazine

5.

A 23-year-old Sacramento woman was arrested for stealing 65 Stanley cups from a retail store. When police tracked her car down, they found her trunk crammed with nearly $2,500 worth of water bottles that they say she likely intended to resell. (Click into the article to see the absurd photos.) Stanley’s stainless-steel tumblers are all the rage: #stanleytumbler has more than a billion views on TikTok, and a viral video showed Target shoppers rushing a stand of limited-release tumblers after camping outside the night before.

Suryatapa Bhattacharya and Victoria Albert / The Wall Street Journal

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