Curfew in LA, World Cup countdown and vaccine confidence
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Today, US Marines arrive as the mayor imposes a curfew in downtown LA. One year to go until the World Cup. What kind of welcome will the US give? And what RFK Jr's overhaul means for vaccine confidence?

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A curfew is in place in downtown LA and more police are being sent in as authorities try to avoid any escalation of anti-ice protests. Law enforcement will arrest individuals who break the curfew and you will be prosecuted. LA Mayor Karen Bass says looting and graffiti was a tipping point for the decision.

Tuesday marked five days of protest over immigration raids, which are seeing the rounding up of undocumented migrants. Bass is emphasising that what's happening downtown is not affecting the whole city. In another part of LA, 700 Marines have arrived, adding to the 4,000 National Guard troops already mobilised.

Photographer Mike Blake has been covering the protests. These are not big demonstrations by any sense of anyone's imagination. I mean, they're not that big. I saw most of the crowd on Sunday from where there's maybe 5,000 people there. Black Lives Matter was in the tens of thousands. And it's in a very small area of Los Angeles down by the federal building, which is like not even the size of Times Square even. Like it's tiny little area.

There's a lot of presence of the LAPD. There's the Los Angeles County Sheriffs. There's the California Highway Patrol, which is a state. So they have their own kind of riot teams there. And now we have the National Guard that have come in to basically surround the federal building there.

And today we were searching for the Marines. They were coming from 29 Palms. And that's a whole different ballgame in America. Having the president send active military people here, that's something that just that's not something that happens in America.

State and local officials have called Trump's response an extreme overreaction to mostly peaceful demonstrations. President Donald Trump defending his decision in a speech before soldiers at Fort Bragg. If we didn't do it, there wouldn't be a Los Angeles. It'd be burning today.

President Trump has warned people against protesting at the weekend military parade in Washington, marking the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary. We're going to be celebrating big on Saturday. We're going to have a lot of, and if there's any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force. Saturday's event will coincide with Trump's 79th birthday.

The immigration raids, meanwhile, are continuing. One at a meat production plant in Omaha, Nebraska, saw some 80 people detained, according to Congressman Don Bacon. Homeland Security says it's the largest worksite enforcement operation in the state during Trump's presidency so far. Elon Musk says he regrets some of the posts he made about Trump.

Posting on his social media site X in the small hours of the morning, quote, they went too far. Hundreds of people gather for a vigil in the Austrian city of Graz after the worst school shooting in the country's history. The 21-year-old shooter, who was a former pupil, shot and killed 10 people and then himself on Tuesday.

The US and China have agreed to get their trade truce back on track. Carmel Crimmins is here with more. Officials wrapped up two days of talks around midnight in London. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the agreement means that restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earth minerals and magnets and some recent US export restrictions will be removed in a balanced way. So that's good news for US auto and defence companies that rely on those minerals.

But Lutnick didn't provide any details on the agreement. The deal puts the so-called Geneva Consensus back on track. That brought down tariffs from triple-digit levels. But it doesn't resolve deep differences between the two sides. As one analyst put it, we're back to square one, but that's much better than zero. So the two sides have now until August 10 to negotiate a more comprehensive agreement.

or else tariff rates will snap back from about 30% to 145% on the U.S. side and from 10% to 125% on the Chinese side. So LA may have its hands full at the moment, but later today, the city is also hosting an event to mark one year to go until the World Cup, which will be in Los Angeles as well as other cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

But the tensions in California and nationwide immigration crackdown are becoming an unavoidable complication for city officials who are gearing up to welcome potentially millions of foreign soccer fans. Our sports correspondent Amy Tenery has the latest.

The Trump administration has assured not only World Cup organizers, but Olympic organizers that they will be able to open their doors to the world to come compete, to watch, to enjoy. But at the same time, it is a country that has...

or is in the process of outright banning travelers from 12 different countries. There will be other countries that are limited in their travel. You even have Iran that qualified in March for the World Cup. They're listed among the 12 countries that are banned for travelers. So I think there are a lot of understandable questions from travelers

are reporting, which is, are tourists going to feel comfortable here? You've been speaking to city officials who are tasked with planning the event. What are they saying? The host committee executives that I've spoken to clearly are not going to stray from the party line too much, right? They're all sending a unified message, which is that they're ready to welcome the world and they're ready to party.

At the same time, they've also made it clear that they recognize that these travel bans exist, that there are protests happening in Los Angeles, that the federal government has moved military force in to face off against civilians. This is not lost on them. So I spoke with one host city executive from Miami who said that she's been in touch with

members of area consulates to make sure they have the resources they need to work with any international travelers who may have concerns about coming to the United States. As we reported yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime vaccine skeptic who now heads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has laid off all 17 members of a CDC panel of vaccine experts and replaced them with his picks.

Our health team has been looking into Kennedy's claims for this purge and what the impact might be. Michelle Gershberg is our global health editor. So, Michelle, Kennedy says he did this to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science. Is that what's happening now?

vaccine experts, you know, virology experts. Their concern is the message that's being sent in just firing everybody all at once as if there was a specific emergency happening. The criticism that we've heard is that sends a message not only for the future of like how decisions are going to be made in the future, and we feel uncertain over how those decisions are going to be made because we know how this group made their decisions. That process was very clear to us. But

But also, how does it reflect on the decisions that have already been made? Right. We have a current vaccine schedule protocol for giving people immunizations of all ages.

And what does that say about it? Could that undermine the trust in the vaccines that are already recommended and how they're recommended to be used, even though vaccine or disease experts know very well the work that went into it, the evidence that was reviewed, and they came to their conclusions on a firm basis. But Kennedy, as we know, is speaking to a constituency that has a lot of

concerns about vaccines, doubts about vaccines, and it remains to be seen whether that constituency will have their confidence restored. It's not yet clear. We don't have details on who will the new members of the committee be, what expertise do they bring, how will they go about making their decisions, and whether or not they'll be able to bring to the table something that the departing members couldn't.

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And for today's recommended read, potatoes and policy. Surging potato prices in Russia are being monitored by the central bank as it prepares to set interest rates. In Russia, food accounts for a whopping 40% of the basket used to calculate inflation, and the price of potatoes and other staples is a major reason for its tight monetary policy. We'll drop a link to that story in the pod description.

For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.