Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about the confusing plan to make LAX less confusing. Onto the five USC, Los Angeles and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Reggie Bush is getting his Heisman Trophy back. The former USC football star, considered one of the century’s most transcendent college athletes, was forced to forfeit his 2005 most-valuable-player award when investigators accused him of accepting cash and gifts that violated NCAA rules. But the college athletics landscape has changed drastically since then. Athletes can now profit off of their name, image and likeness, and an athlete minimum wage has begun to seem inevitable. The Heisman trust cited those changes in reinstating Bush’s trophy. 

Pete Thamel / ESPN

2.

A fight that left one teen dead near a South LA high school has renewed the debate over the role of police in schools. In 2020, the LA Unified School District slashed its police budget and promised to minimize the presence of officers in and around campuses — and instead started relying on unarmed staff and volunteers. But in a fight last week, one such unarmed adult was heard on video saying: “I’m not breaking up shit. I don’t give a fuck” before a student pulled a gun and shot another to death.

Howard Blume / Los Angeles Times

3.

Tensions over the Israel-Hamas war continue to swell at California college campuses. At UC Berkeley, pro-Palestinian protesters are digging in for their second day of camping on the school’s main plaza. Stanford students staged a massive rally earlier this week. And in the state’s far north, Cal Poly Humbolt had to shut down its campus after protesters barricaded themselves in at least two buildings and got in physical confrontations with police officers.

Nanette Asimov / San Francisco Chronicle

4.

The LA County Board of Supervisors strongly opposed a plan to deploy helicopter-borne sharpshooters to gun down invasive deer on Catalina Island. Supervisors called the plan — which was proposed by Catalina officials — “inhumane” and “potentially dangerous to the public.” But ecologists on the island contend that the aerial solution is the only way to effectively eradicate the deer before they irreversibly damage the island’s native ecosystem. 

Steve Scauzillo / Los Angeles Daily News

5.

LA and its surrounding counties comprise the smoggiest region in the country, a report from the American Lung Association found. It’s nothing new: The Greater LA region has earned the accolade for 24 of 25 years that the lung association has bestowed the title. The California counties of San Bernardino, Riverside, LA, Tulare, Kern and Fresno swept the top six slots for U.S. counties with highest ozone pollution.

Tony Briscoe / Los Angeles Times