Johnny had Ed. Conan had Andy. And Gov. Gavin Newsom? A single-use plastic water bottle.

In most of the YouTube video recordings of Newsom’s new podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom,” a single-use plastic water bottle lurks on a table nearby.

Sometimes, it is accompanied by a single-use coffee cup. Other times, it stands alone.

Typically, such product placement would raise nary an eyebrow. But in recent weeks, environmentalists, waste advocates, lawmakers and others have been battling with the governor and his administration over a landmark single-use plastic law that Newsom signed in 2022, but which he has since worked to defang — reducing the number of packaged single-use products the law was designed to target and potentially opening the door for polluting forms of recycling.

Anti-plastic advocates say it’s an abrupt and disappointing pivot from the governor, who in June 2022, decried plastic pollution and the plague of single-use plastic on the environment.

“It’s like that whole French Laundry thing all over again,” said one anti-plastic advocate, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of angering the governor. Newsom was infamously caught dining without a mask at the wine country restaurant during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Newsom’s efforts to scale back SB 54, the state’s single-use plastic recycling law, has dismayed environmentalists who have long considered Newsom one of their staunchest allies.

“Our kids deserve a future free of plastic waste and all its dangerous impacts … No more,” Newsom said in 2022, when he signed SB 54. “California won’t tolerate plastic waste that’s filling our waterways and making it harder to breathe. We’re holding polluters responsible and cutting plastics at the source.”

Asked about the presence of the plastic water bottle, Daniel Villaseñor, the governor’s deputy director of communications, had this response:

“Are you really writing a story this baseless or should we highlight this video for your editor?” Villaseñor said via email, attaching a video clip showing this reporter seated near a plastic water bottle at last year’s Los Angeles Times’ Climate Summit. (The bottles were placed near chairs for all the panelists; this particular one was never touched.)

After this story was first published, the governor’s office said the plastic water bottles seen on the podcast were placed there by staff or production teams and not at Newsom’s request, and that the governor remains committed to seeing SB 54 implemented.

More than a half-dozen environmentalists and waste advocates asked to comment for this story declined to speak on the record, citing concerns including possible retribution from the governor’s office and appearing to look like scolds as negotiations over implementing SB 54 continue.

Dianna Cohen, the co-founder and chief executive of Plastic Pollution Coalition, said that while she wouldn’t comment on the governor and his plastic sidekick, she noted that plastic pollution is an “urgent global crisis” that requires strong policies and regulations.

“Individuals — especially those in the public eye — can help shift culture by modeling these solutions. We must all work to embrace the values we want to see and co-create a healthier world,” she said in a statement.

On Thursday, Newsom dropped a new episode of “This is Gavin Newsom” with independent journalist Aaron Parnas. In the video, there wasn’t a plastic bottle in sight.

Missed childhood vaccinations. Skipped blood sugar checks. Medications abandoned at the pharmacy.

These are among the healthcare disruptions providers have noticed since Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations began in Southern California earlier this month.

Across the region, once-busy parks, shops and businesses have emptied as undocumented residents and their families hole up at home in fear. As rumors of immigration arrests have swirled around clinics and hospitals, many patients are also opting to skip chronic-care management visits as well as routine childhood check-ups.

In response, local federally qualified health centers — institutions that receive federal funds and are required by law to provide primary care regardless of ability to pay — have been scrambling to organize virtual appointments, house calls and pharmacy deliveries to patients who no longer feel safe going out in public.

“We’re just seeing a very frightening and chaotic environment that’s making it extremely difficult to provide for the healthcare needs of our patients,” said Jim Mangia, president of St. John’s Community Health, which offers medical, dental and mental health care to more than 100,000 low-income patients annually in Southern California.

Prior to the raids, the system’s network of clinics logged about a 9% no-show rate, Mangia said. In recent weeks, more than 30% of patients have canceled or failed to show. In response, the organization has launched a program called Healthcare Without Fear to provide virtual and home visits to patients concerned about the prospect of arrest.

“When we call patients back who missed their appointment and didn’t call in, overwhelmingly, they’re telling us they’re not coming out because of ICE,” said Mangia, who estimates that 25% of the clinic’s patient population is undocumented. “People are missing some pretty substantial healthcare appointments.”

A recent survey of patient no-shows at nonprofit health clinics across Los Angeles County found no universal trends across the 118 members of the Community Clinic Assn. of L.A. County, President Louise McCarthy said. Some clinics have seen a jump in missed appointments, while others have observed no change. The data do not indicate how many patients opted to convert scheduled in-person visits to telehealth so they wouldn’t have to leave home, she noted.

Patients have also expressed concerns that any usage of health services could make them targets. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shared the personal data of Medicaid enrollees with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including their immigration status. No specific enforcement actions have been directly linked to the data.

“The level of uncertainty and anxiety that is happening now is beyond the pale,” McCarthy said, for patients and staff alike.

County-run L.A. General Medical Center issued a statement on Thursday refuting reports that federal authorities had carried out enforcement operations at the downtown trauma center. While no immigration-related arrests have been reported at county health facilities, “the mere threat of immigration enforcement near any medical facility undermines public trust and jeopardizes community health,” the department said in a statement.

Los Angeles County is among the providers working to extend in-home care options such as medication delivery and a nurse advice line for people reluctant to come in person.

“However, not all medical appointments or conditions can be addressed remotely,” a spokesperson said. “We urge anyone in need of care not to delay.”

Providers expressed concern that missing preventative care appointments could lead to emergencies that both threaten patients’ lives and further stress public resources. Preventative care “keeps our community at large healthy and benefits really everyone in Los Angeles,” said a staff member at a group of L.A. area clinics. He asked that his employer not be named for fear of drawing attention to their patient population.

Neglecting care now, he said, “is going to cost everybody more money in the long run.”

A patient with hypertension who skips blood pressure monitoring appointments now may be more likely to be brought into an emergency room with a heart attack in the future, said Dr. Bukola Olusanya, a medical director at St. John’s.

“If [people] can’t get their medications, they can’t do follow-ups. That means a chronic condition that has been managed and well-controlled is just going to deteriorate,” she said. “We will see patients going to the ER more than they should be, rather than coming to primary care.”

Providers are already seeing that shift. When a health team visited one diabetic patient recently at home, they found her blood sugar levels sky-high, Mangia said. She told the team she’d consumed nothing but tortillas and coffee in the previous five days rather than risk a trip to the grocery store.

At the heart of the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is the world’s largest digital camera. About the size of a small car, it will create an unparalleled map of the night sky.

The observatory’s first public images of the sky are expected to be released on June 23. Here’s how its camera works.

When Times reporters visited the observatory on top of an 8,800-foot-high mountain in May, the telescope was undergoing calibration to measure minute differences in the sensitivity of the camera’s pixels. The camera is expected to have a life of more than 10 years.

A single Rubin image contains roughly as much data as all the words that The New York Times has published since 1851. The observatory will produce about 20 terabytes of data every night, which will be transferred and processed at facilities in California, France and Britain.

Specialized software will compare each new image with a template assembled from previous data, revealing changes in brightness or position in the sky. The observatory is expected to detect up to 10 million changes every night.

Some changes will be artificial. Simulations suggest that roughly one in 10 Rubin images will contain at least one bright streak or glint from the thousands of SpaceX Starlink and other satellites orbiting Earth.

Despite streaks, clouds, maintenance and other interruptions over the next decade, the Rubin Observatory is expected to catalog 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars across the Southern sky.