UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.

FDA approves first drug to clearly slow Alzheimer’s | Washington Post

Keith Vossel, director of the Alzheimer’s center at UCLA, said he was excited about Leqembi, calling it “a breakthrough scientifically.” But he added that dementia experts would have to carefully explain the medication’s benefits and risks. Usually, initial visits with patients last about an hour, but “just a discussion on Leqembi could take 30 minutes because it requires a lengthy discussion of how the drug works, and what that means,” he said. (Also: KCAL-TV and KNBC-TV.)  

When the cure can rival the disease | Slate

In the U.S., approximately 42 percent of people with cancer are over the age of 70 — a number that’s poised to grow in the years to come — and yet they comprise less than a quarter of the people in clinical trials to test new cancer treatments. Those who do participate are often the healthiest of the aged, who may not have common age-related conditions such as diabetes or poor kidney or heart function, said Mina Sedrak, a medical oncologist and the director of the Cancer and Aging program and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The legitimacy crisis facing Palestinian Authority | The Conversation

(Commentary by UCLA’s Dov Waxman) But however successful in the short term, no military operation can resolve what I see as the underlying problem that caused Jenin’s refugee camp to become what Netanyahu has described as a “safe haven” for Palestinian militants. That problem is a legitimacy crisis facing the Palestinian Authority — the self-governing body that has limited rule over parts of the occupied West Bank, including Jenin, that are not directly ruled by Israel.

County Sherriff calls video of officer tackling woman ‘disturbing’ | MSNBC

“I see much of what you have described. A woman who was exercising her constitutionally protected right to record the police, being assaulted with no justification, with no indication that she was any risk, that she was interfering with what the officers were doing,” said UCLA’s Joanna Schwartz (approx. 6:10 mark).

Build less housing for cars and more for people | Los Angeles Times

Grabar also charts the influence of “parking rock star” Donald Shoup, a professor emeritus of urban planning at UCLA, whose wildly popular 2005 book “The High Cost of Free Parking” helped dismantle the idea that established parking requirements were hard science. (Many cities are overloaded with parking that is inefficiently used.)

$40M has been spent to house 1,400 people in L.A. motels | LAist

Out of nearly 1,400 people placed in Inside Safe motels by city officials, only about 77 people — or 6% — have moved into permanent housing, which is the ultimate goal of the program. … As for the vacant shelter beds, Gary Blasi, a law professor at UCLA who works closely with unhoused people, told LAist “there are very understandable reasons why utilization is not 100%.” “Unhoused people are people,” he said in an email.

The human labor powering AI engines | NPR’s ‘1A’

“In some cases … workers may be annotating individual pieces of content. That could be text-based, it could be video, it could be image. In other cases, they are working towards essentially building a model to train the larger model,” said UCLA’s Sarah Roberts (approx. 6:20 mark).

Mexico says it doesn’t have a fentanyl problem | Los Angeles Times

The new Mexicali data are “a massive statement and finding,” said David Goodman-Meza, a UCLA harm-reduction researcher. “To say that more than 200 people — of just the people who died in one city — had fentanyl on board really goes against the official narrative of the president saying that nobody uses fentanyl. It’s a massive contradiction to what officials say is going on.”

Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads platform | Reuters

Ramesh Srinivasan is a professor of information studies at UCLA. “That’s quite intelligent because the networks that we already have and those we already follow or engage with on a platform like Instagram can be quickly brought into bear rather than having to create a so-called ecosystem of users from the start.” [said Srinivasan.]

Should California’s coast be affordable too? | Daily Breeze

First, few can doubt that California makes it uniquely difficult to build housing anywhere near the coast. Even in the best of cases, added hearings and appeals can add months, if not years, to the process — as has recently been the case with mixed-income housing proposals in Santa Cruz and Venice. According to one team of UCLA researchers, this added discretionary review has served to stymie housing production along the coast, raising prices and driving gentrification.