The World and Everything in It: January 5, 2026

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

A busy Legal Docket today, we’ll tell you the "legal" basis that set in motion the capture of Venezuela’s Maduro.

Also, the year end report from the Chief Justice and an oral argument over copyrights and the Internet.

ROSENKRANZ: The program stopped infringement by 98 percent of the people who were accused of infringement. That is not nothing.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today, The Monday Moneybeat. The economic impact of the Venezuela operation.

And the WORLD History Book:

LIBONATI: It was a half-acre of smoke; 10 minutes later, it was 20 acres.

A year ago: the California wildfires.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, January 5th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Florida celebration » Jubilation in Miami, with many Venezuelan immigrants celebrating the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

SOUND: [Celebrations]

US forces conducted a surgical operation over the weekend, capturing Maduro and his wife at a military installation near Caracas. They now face criminal charges in the United States.

And in New York, one Venezuelan immigrant told reporters:

AUDIO: This is my dream.  This is the best moment for my life in this moment because he is the bad person.

But inside Venezuela, celebrations have been muted. People there are still living under Maduro’s regime power structure, which remains in control of the media and security forces.

Many demonstrators in the U.S. have also protested the operation.

Rubio/administration on Maduro capture » One question now on the minds of many is: What’s next for Venezuela?

Secretary of State and Acting National Security advisor Marco Rubio told NBC’s Meet the Press, that the U.S. has no plans right now to try and enact a full regime change by force.

Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime Maduro loyalist, is now the acting leader.

Rubio says problems the regime has caused for the United States remain, however:

RUBIO: We are gonna give people an opportunity to address those challenges and, and those problems until they address it. They will continue to face this oil quarantine. They will continue to face pressure from the United States. We will continue to target drug boats if they try to run towards the United States. We will continue to seize, uh, the, the boats that are sanctioned with court orders.

And he said the U.S. isn’t ruling out other actions if the regime, now led by Rodriguez, doesn’t cooperate.

Publicly, she is condemning the U.S. capture of Maduro. But the Trump administration says that privately, Rodriguez is cooperating with at least some of its demands.

That’s a claim that Democratic Congressman Ami Bera echoed, despite his criticism of the operation:

BERA: It does look like the interim president, um, is in conversation with the administration.

Bera sits on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.

The Trump administration is reportedly demanding that Rodriguez and other top figures maintain stability, keep calm and control in Venezuela; no reprisals; open the books on the country’s oil finances; cooperate on drug trafficking; and lay out a credible transition plan. That could effectively mean immunity and an offramp for members of the Maduro regime.

Washington reaction to Maduro capture » In Washington, reaction to the operation has been largely split down party lines. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday:

SCHUMER: They did not just, uh, do ships off the water, they went inside Venezuela, bombed civilian as well as military places, and it's a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of congress.

We’ll have more on the legal questions surrounding the operation later in the program.

But most Republicans see it differently, insisting the move was legal, justified, and exactly the right course of action.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford.

CRAWFORD: This is exactly what this country has needed, and that is leadership in this hemisphere. We need to be projecting strength in our neighborhood and our allies. Welcome that.

Administration officials were expected to brief members of Congress soon on the operation.

Ukraine peace deal latest » National security advisers from across Europe and other U.S. allies were in Kyiv over the weekend, stepping up talks on security guarantees and economic support for Ukraine. The meetings come as a U.S.-led diplomatic push to end the war with Russia begins to intensify.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine has now shared all draft peace documents under discussion with partners involved in the talks. He said that includes material on long-term security guarantees.

He added that the peace process is now on stronger footing. And many in Washington agree. GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt:

SCHMITT: It is. I mean, there’s still important work to do. There’s still some sticking points along the way.

And everyone agrees that the process is a long way from complete.

Zelenskyy is preparing to travel to Paris for follow-up meetings and expects the next round of work to move quickly into European capitals, as well as Canada and Japan.

Iran leader on protests » Iran’s supreme leader is signaling a crackdown on demonstrators as protests spread across the country, with some turning violent. The death toll has climbed to at least 15.

Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the unrest over the weekend, saying “rioters,” “must be put in their place.”

Protesters are voicing anger over Iran’s struggling economy and the collapse of the national currency. They’ve taken to the street for more than a week, marking the country’s largest demonstrations since 2022.

I'm Kent Covington.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 5th day of January, 2026. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: 

And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

We’ll tell you about the special year-end report by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we have one oral argument for you, but before all that:

REICHARD: Let’s return to the biggest news of the day: Venezuela, and in particular the legal underpinning of the mission to capture former president Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The two will be turned over for prosecution in federal court in the Southern District of New York.

EICHER: At the press conference on Saturday in Florida, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine:

CAINE: This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discrete, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2, and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake.

President Trump said Maduro had become a dictator and kingpin of a vast drug-trafficking network.

TRUMP: He personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as cartel de los Solas, which flooded our nation with lethal poison, responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, the many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years of Americans died because of him.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized it was not only this administration that saw Maduro in this light.

RUBIO: He is not the legitimate president of Venezuela. That's not just us saying it. The first Trump administration, the Biden administration, the second Trump administration. None of those three recognize them. He's not recognized by the European Union and multiple countries around the world. He is a fugitive of American justice with a $50 million reward, which I guess we saved $50 million…

The Grand Jury indictment filed in New York lays out the charges. We’ll include a link to that document in this transcript.

REICHARD: The indictment finds probable cause that Maduro, his wife, son, and three others ran a criminal enterprise responsible for bringing tons of cocaine into the U.S. and using their power to provide cover for traffickers. These charges build upon an earlier indictment from 2020, adding new charges of partnership with international drug cartels.

EICHER: What comes next is procedurally straightforward but politically complex. The defendants will face arraignment, discovery, and potentially a trial. They will be treated as ordinary criminal defendants under U.S. law. If convicted, sentencing could include decades in prison.

REICHARD: There is precedent in Trump’s favor: in the late 1980s, the U.S. indicted and captured Panama’s de facto ruler, Manuel Noriega, on drug-trafficking charges. American courts ruled that he had no immunity as head of state because the U.S. did not recognize him as a legitimate leader. They also ruled that U.S. courts retained jurisdiction over him despite legal questions about his capture.

That precedent underpins this case, though Venezuela’s size, regional influence, as well as modern legal scrutiny make the outcome far less predictable.

EICHER: Alright, next: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, in large part to honor the semiquincentennial this year of the Declaration of Independence.

REICHARD: The audio you’re hearing and will hear comes from a celebration last summer at the National Archives kicking off the 250th anniversary remembrance, less than a mile from the Supreme Court building.

WASHINGTON: In Congress, July 4th, 1776

A historic reenactor portraying George Washington declared:

WASHINGTON: When in the course of Human Events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.

A reenactor portraying Abigail Adams read aloud the famous preamble:

WASHINGTON: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

EICHER: The chief justice in his annual report traced America’s founding principles back to a booklet titled Common Sense by Thomas Paine. It was published early in 1776.

It then went viral (using today’s parlance) and galvanized the colonists to vote for independence from the Crown.

REICHARD: That’s when the Committee of Five set out to draft the Declaration of Independence. They were: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, John Adams, and Robert Livingston.

Jefferson, just 33 years old, was lead writer.

No less than 86 edits later, it was adopted at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, July 4, 1776.

EICHER: The writers and signers of the Declaration knew what they were in for; the British would see this as treason. That’s why Benjamin Franklin warned they’d have to hang together on this… or else they’d all hang separately.

REICHARD: The Declaration of Independence set the American mission statement down on paper for all to see. It was more aspiration than law; but it led to the Constitution that is law; protecting basic freedoms. That in turn led to the 13th amendment that abolished slavery, to the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote and to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

The Chief ended his report with a quote from President Calvin Coolidge during the nation’s 150th anniversary one hundred years ago:

EICHER: “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

Chief Justice Roberts wrote it was true then and that it’s still true today.

REICHARD: Well, our final order of Legal Docket business: a case the court heard in December. It’s one with massive consequences for the Internet:

ROBERTS: We will hear argument first this morning in Case 24 171 Cox Communications versus Sony Music Entertainment.

Likely the most consequential copyright case in years, with billions of dollars at stake.

Here’s the background. Sony Music Entertainment and more than 50 labels (including Universal, Warner) sued Cox Communications.

Cox provides internet, phone, and TV service to six million homes and businesses in 18 states. The labels say Cox received notice of copyright infringement by its subscribers, but Cox did not cut off their service.

EICHER: A Virginia jury slapped Cox with a massive billion-dollar verdict that was later vacated as far as the damages go.

But the appeals court still said Cox may have some contributory liability. Liability is what the lawyers are battling over.

Sony wants the kind of liability called secondary: holding Cox liable for something it didn’t directly do, namely pirate music or movies.

REICHARD: But remember, Cox is not the pirate here. Cox didn’t copy songs or upload files or press download. Its subscribers did that.

So here’s the legal question: Can an internet service provider be held liable when its customers commit copyright infringement, knowing it’s happening but not cutting those people off?

Cox says absolutely not. Its lawyer, Joshua Rosenkranz:

ROSENKRANZ: No notion of tort or copyright law ever conceived can support that theory. No case has suggested that knowledge alone can create the necessary culpability to find someone liable for infringement. The consequences of plaintiff’s position are cataclysmic. There is no sure fire way for an ISP to avoid liability and the only way it can is to cut off the Internet not just for the accused infringer but for anyone else who happens to use the same connection. That could be entire towns, universities, or hospitals, turning internet providers into internet police.

Rosenkranz pointed to Supreme Court precedent in support, particularly a dispute involving Twitter. There, the court held that Twitter couldn’t be held liable for “aiding and abetting” terrorism by just hosting or recommending content made by users.

ROSENKRANZ: Twitter held several things that are fully applicable here. The first is that contributory liability requires malfeasance with the purpose of fostering the bad act… there’s no liability for passive non-feasance, and there’s no liability for sales to the general public on the same terms regardless of any eventual use…what our customers do is invisible to us in real time.

EICHER: But Justice Elena Kagan distinguished the cases, starting with the Twitter case:

KAGAN: Twitter….We spent a lot of time talking about the fact that the companies, Facebook and so forth, didn’t know of any particular conduct that had led to the attack. It wasn’t even clear that the terrorists in Twitter had used those companies to plan the attack. So we said that there was no real nexus between the companies and the actual communications that created the legal issue. Now, here, your client has received notice as to particular people doing particular infringements of copyright… I would think that’s a step further from Twitter.

Rosenkranz pushed back with an example:

ROSENKRANZ: There is literally not a single place in this record where a specific individual was identified… Let's take the smallest unit, a household. You still don’t know who the individual is.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped in with this sharp exchange, which we have edited for time as we have for several other clips you’ll hear today:

SOTOMAYOR: But what I’m troubled by is that you got these reports, and it’s about 1% of your customer base who’s infringing. there are things you could have done to respond…You did nothing

ROSENKRANZ: The notion that Cox did nothing is absurd.

Rosenkranz brought plenty of data:

ROSENKRANZ: Cox sent out hundreds of warnings a day…contacting them, cutting them off, that is suspending their accounts which we did 67,000 times in the course of this time and the program stopped infringement by 98 percent of the people who were accused of infringement. That is not nothing, Your Honor.

REICHARD: Justice Amy Coney Barrett underscored another problem, that of incentives should Cox prevail:

BARRETT: What incentive would you have to do anything if you won? If you win and mere knowledge isn’t enough, why would you bother to send out any notices in the future? 

ROSENKRANZ: Cox is a good corporate citizen that cares a lot about what happens on its system.

Cox had an ally in the federal government. Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart said secondary liability doesn’t apply to companies that provide a service on equal terms to everyone:

STEWART: This form of secondary liability is reserved for persons who act for the purpose of facilitating violations of law…. Because Cox simply provided the same generic Internet services to infringers and non-infringers alike, there is no basis for inferring such a purpose here…

Justice Barrett tested that standard against the ruling in the Twitter case.

BARRETT: So does that mean that your answer to the question I asked, Mr. Rosenkranz, is that, yes, Twitter would not be liable for facilitating child trafficking if it knew that a particular user was using its account for that purpose?

STEWART: --it wouldn't be secondarily liable ... .that is, perhaps a platform like YouTube or Twitter..the platform could be held directly liable on the theory that it was speaking the words as well as assisting the third party content provider….

EICHER: Then it was Sony’s turn, with former Solicitor General Paul Clement framing the argument this way:

CLEMENT: This Court’s cases recognize that liability for copyright infringement is not limited to direct infringers but extends to those who induce, cause, or materially contribute… and a classic form of material contribution is to provide the means of infringement to a specific known infringer, knowing that infringement is substantially certain to follow… Now on this record…it is beyond dispute that Cox provided the service to known infringers with substantial knowledge that what they themselves called habitual abusers would continue to infringe…

Justice Samuel Alito asked a practical question:

ALITO: Well, what's --what is an ISP supposed to do with a university account that has, let's say, 70,000 users? What is the university supposed to do in your view?

CLEMENT: The --the university is supposed to --under those circumstances, the ISP is supposed to sort of have a conversation with the --with the university.

That didn’t quite fly with Justice Alito.

ALITO: So, all right, the ISP tells the university: Look, you know, a lot of your --your 50,000 students are infringing my copyright, do something about it. Now the university then has to try to determine which particular students are engaging in this activity. And let's assume it can even do that. And so then it --it knocks out a thousand students, and then another thousand students are going to pop up doing the same thing. I just don't see how it's workable at all… (much later)..

CLEMENT: I don't think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn't allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent. I could live in that world.

With both sides arguing what sounded like extremes, Justice Sotomayor laid out the dilemma the court faces:

SOTOMAYOR: We are being put to two extremes here. ….How do we announce a rule that deals with those two extremes?

REICHARD: During his rebuttal argument, Rosenkranz for Cox pointed to the fatal flaw in Sony’s case: collective punishment for the specific actions of its customers:

ROSENKRANZ: There is no proof of any specific known infringer that is a human being who actually did any of the things that some of these hypotheticals spun out. Even if you focus on households, there is no way to disaggregate… Plaintiffs tried a case in gross as to 57,000 subscribers, no individual circumstances. Plaintiffs never tried to disaggregate in any way as to the people who they see --who they claim can sustain this verdict

If Cox wins, then Sony argues it has no way to attack repeat offenders, because going after people one at a time is expensive and slow.

Other disputes are now on hold awaiting the ruling in this case; Optimum and Verizon are also fighting copyright infringement with tons of money at stake.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and although in an airport, he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, David, obviously major news over the weekend with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife now facing charges in the United States. You heard what we said earlier. On the legal side when Maduro faces justice, but from an economic standpoint, David, talk a bit about how you see the future.

I mean, Venezuela is an OPEC plus country. It’s an energy producer. How do you see things?

BAHNSEN: Well, from an economic standpoint, the big issue is going to be oil obviously, and you highlight the fact that they’re a member of OPEC, plus the president stated on Saturday that he felt that they had been non productive in terms of global oil output.

US has interest there. On the ground, there are several major integrated oil companies that have a large drilling presence, and the President referenced them, coming in and building out the infrastructure to bring more global supply to the market.

Geopolitically, the major issue here is that Venezuela is a provider of both oil and gas to China, and I believe that that has a lot to do with this behind the scenes, in terms of further strengthening us Western hemispheric presence, and isolating China from other allies in the Western Hemisphere when it comes to global energy markets.

So there’s a lot that will play out in the days ahead. Obviously, there’s a legal, geopolitical, you know, military story here, but my probably most important insight would be on the economic side, and that’s going to be what it does to commodity prices and overall oil supply.

EICHER: Right, well David, we played audio earlier in the program. You heard all of that over the weekend, the President and his national security team explaining what happened the Secretary of State, who now has an even bigger portfolio for himself, the Secretary of War, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

How did all the messaging strike you? I mean, I do wonder about the effect on markets in the long term, and I wonder whether the entire message was communicated clearly and in a restrained way, or whether it might have raised some new questions that might unnerve the markets.

BAHNSEN: I think that Secretary Rubio was most comforting in reinforcing this as a law enforcement action. Everything he said was factually correct. Maduro is a criminal. He has been under US indictment through several administrations.

I think that the concern to the markets would be if we were getting ready to go on a kind of wild west binge of interventions, even if in all contained in the Western Hemisphere, and they did a good job at portraying this for a very specific and strategic purpose.

Look, Venezuela’s relevance to U.S. economic interest is pretty much limited to oil supply. That’s different than what the geopolitical interests are and their role as a narco terrorist and some of these other issues, they get a little bit outside of my lane. But I thought that the administration did a good job messaging what their intent was here.

Obviously, the mission itself was executed very well, and now we wait and see what the aftermath is.

That’s the point I’d bring up, that I am a lot more forgiving and supportive of certain American foreign adventurism than some of my friends are. But that is largely dependent. The US response to these things is largely dependent on the aftermath, how we do, and so you could cherry pick some of the language, like we’re going to go run Venezuela. Now you mentioned Secretary Rubio having a larger portfolio in addition to running the State Department, National Security Advisor, the president of United States more or less implied that he’s now going to run Venezuela for a little bit.

So yeah, I think markets are going to want to see if we handle the exit as efficiently as we handle this operation, then that will be good for markets.

EICHER: David: One long-running issue here, of course is the legacy of assets nationalized under regime of Hugo Chávez—oil infrastructure now decades old, originally built with capital from American companies.

Could you talk about the economic challenge of restoring productivity to 20-year-old assets that companies haven’t fully controlled and haven’t been able to invest in?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, well, in some cases, it’s older than 20 year old assets.

And so, you know, look, I have full disclosure. We’re a significant shareholder in Chevron, and Chevron is the largest player in this as far as US based companies, partially because of their acquisition of the heck. Corporation, which also had significant contracts there.

And so when you’re dealing with these public private partnerships, which I am very opposed to, when it’s the US government with private companies, but it gets even crazier when it’s US private companies with other public partnership.

And in this case, you have a nationalized oil industry in Venezuela that had various joint ventures with companies like Exxon and Chevron and Hess and so it’s very difficult to get the right capital expenditures when you don’t own the asset and you don’t have control over the productivity out of the asset.

So what the President of the United States very firmly implied in his press conference on Saturday is that the US companies were now going to go in and they were going to spend the money for infrastructure improvement, and then they were going to get paid back from the productivity.

So the US sort of putting its military protection around a private company doing a private activity, versus before the dysfunction, and in a lot of cases, the corruption of the Venezuelan government was distorting that you could argue, why would US companies want to get in bed with such a situation to begin with?

I think that’s a very legitimate issue, and in many countries around the world, they haven’t.

But South America is a little different than some of the Middle Eastern autocracies, because some of the South American countries have had good leadership for a period of time, and then there’s a takeover or revolution, and then you end up with a bad country, but the assets still sit there.

So Venezuela has been very temperamental, very unpredictable for a long time, and unfortunately, this is the legacy of Chavez.

And I’d like to point this out by the way, to American faculty-lounge professors, and I’d like to point this out to the new mayor of New York City, those “collectivist” presences in South America have not done well for their people.

EICHER: Looking ahead, and acknowledging how many unknowns remain, I wonder about a best-case scenario: if everything goes right, could Venezuela re-emerge as a meaningful player in global oil markets—and would that materially change the broader energy picture?

BAHNSEN: Well, when you say if it all goes as well as it possibly could, then yes, there’s a great impact, but nothing goes as well as it possibly could, so there probably will be hiccups and so forth.

But I think at this point, Nick, I’m a little afraid to answer prematurely, because of what we don’t know about succession, about potential uprisings, what kind of you know, push back to US presence there will be.

And let’s not forget that if we just had a magic wand and could take over oil production in foreign countries tomorrow, it doesn’t change the fact that there’s questions about the demand side of the oil equilibrium, right? We’re dealing with a supply and demand equation.

So you did see oil prices come down last year. The President would like to keep them down, and this is one way that US producers can maintain profits at the same level of production, even with low oil prices, is expand places they’re able to produce.

And so there was all this conversation when the US went to Iraq over 20 years ago about where there was and wasn’t an oil motive. And a lot of that proved to be a lot more bark than bite.

President Trump on Saturday, flat out said it that we intend to go in, and we would tend to make money on the oil down there.

So I think that’s a factor. And then, as I mentioned before, deterrent to China. You basically trying to keep oil and gas out from the Western Hemisphere being sold to China. There’s that leverage factor as well.

Those are the economic angles I’m focused on now.

EICHER: All right—David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. Be sure and visit DividendCafe.com to read David’s big annual white paper on the economy. A look back and a look forward. It’s coming Friday, and we’ll talk more about it next week. David, safe travels!

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much Nick.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the one year anniversary of one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. The Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed nearly 40,000 acres in just three weeks.

REICHARD: A year later, recovery efforts are still ongoing, and investigators are uncovering new information about what caused it. WORLD’s Emma Eicher has the story.

EMMA EICHER: It was a Tuesday morning in Southern California. January 7th, a year ago. About 50 miles west of L.A., a plume of smoke rose from California's Santa Monica mountains.

In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood along the coast, a man and his sister were enjoying a cup of tea, when she looked out the window, and screamed, Fire!

LIBONATI: It was a half-acre of smoke. And then 10 minutes later, it was 20 acres of smoke.

Nic Libonati spoke with News 3 Las Vegas, saying he called 9-11 as the blaze left behind a black burn scar of disintegration.

It was just the beginning.

KEELEY: Once the fire got into the urban environment, and once it ignited a home, those homes spread the fires at an incredible rate.

I got in touch with Jon Keeley of the U.S. Geological Survey. He’s a research scientist who studies wildfires. Keeley blames a combination of factors that led to this point.

KEELEY: We had nine months of drought which dried out the vegetation. We had extreme winds, which were unusual, but not unique. And then we had a human ignition, which is always related to these fire events.

In the afternoon, the embers settled onto houses, signalling the next, most devastating stage.

KEELEY: Then it was really an urban conflagration. It was the urban environment that drove these fires, the fuels that ended up destroying so many homes and lives. The fuels were the homes themselves.

Massive red and orange flames ravaged the neighborhoods, while thousands fled their homes.

SOUND: [House burning]

The fire spread through Malibu, the Pacific Palisades and the community of Altadena. Firefighters took to the sky in helicopters to dump water, while those on the ground fought a losing battle.

SOUND: [Helicopters]

Audio here from CBS 8 San Diego.

REPORTER: One of the things we noticed, it would just be a single line of houses on one side of the block, the first one would go, and the wind would keep pushing it. It was just like candlesticks, side by side.

Three weeks later, the last flames flickered out. 16,000 structures reduced to ash. Firefighters and civilians nursing burns and other injuries. Many residents died—31 by official count, but some scientists estimated hundreds.

The evacuation orders were lifted, but for most people, there was nothing to go back to.

PISTOTNIK: I can’t even put this into words …

Laura Pistotnik looked around at what used to be her house in the Pacific Palisades. It was only blackened rubble. Audio from CBS Sunday Morning.

PISTOTNIK: I’m just sick and numb. That’s the two words I will say.

One year later, many houses are still a pile of debris. The federal government promised to help rebuild, but cleanup has been slow.

AYLING: There’s nobody here, either, it’s the eeriest part about it, it’s like it’s empty …

In October of 2025, travel YouTuber Alexander Ayling walked through the Palisades neighborhoods. He found signs claiming hazardous materials had been removed. Whether that cleanup was complete, or only partial, was unclear. Ayling’s video shows remaining heaps of rubble and ash scattered nearby.

AYLING: Why aren’t there people working to clear this up, 8 months later?

Still, the remnants of many houses were hauled away, but very few have been rebuilt. Challenges range from labor costs and insurance disputes to government red tape.

November marked the first home rebuilt after the fires. And that home isn’t meant as a place to live, it’s just a model property for future projects.

Now, there’s a federal investigation into the L.A. Fire Department. ABC7 reported this a month ago:

ABC7: New details this morning of the Palisades Fire investigation. The Los Angeles time reports federal prosecutors have served the L.A. Fire Department with a subpoena for firefighter text messages.

In late December, those text messages were handed over in the courtroom. They revealed in detail the days leading up to the fires.

On January 1st, firefighters put out a blaze in the Santa Monica Mountains. Then, Battalion Chief Mario Garcia ordered the firefighters to pack up their hoses, even though the ground was still smoldering.

Fire Department Chief Deputy Joe Everett insisted that the New Year’s fire was mopped up. And he said it couldn’t have caused the Palisades fire days later. Here’s Everett in an interview with ABC7.

INTERVIEWER: Should those hoses have been kept in place longer, should firefighters have been checking on that burn scar longer?

EVERETT: Well, I mean, in retrospect, I think that yes.

Investigators questioned why some safety measures weren’t followed. The LAFD knew about the wind conditions and drought, but they didn’t send fire engines to high-risk areas.

The LAFD also delayed sending more firefighters until the fire was burning out of control.

Fire Chief Kristin Crowley defended her actions, saying the LAFD lacked resources. In February, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass fired Crowley.

NBCLA asked the mayor for the reason behind the sacking.

BASS: It was just, she was just absolutely not scapegoated, I would never do that. But it is important for us to understand what happened.

Wildfire researcher Keeley says he believes the weather conditions were the main drivers behind the fires, not human error.

KEELEY: When you have 80 mile per hour winds blowing fire through an urban environment. It's an extremely difficult situation. So it seemed to me, watching this event, that it was not something that was going to be easily controlled.

But some things can be controlled. New evidence continues to reveal the scale of executive failure. And that may prove crucial in preventing such destruction in the future.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: More on Venezuela, we’ll talk with a variety of experts. And, new therapy for neurological problems. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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