California
Missing house cat makes incredible trek from Yellowstone to California
At the edge of their campground in Yellowstone National Park in June, Susanne and her husband, Benjamin “Bennangy” Anguiano, gazed at the lodgepole pine tree forest. The ground was covered with piles of broken branches and dry, old trees that had fallen on top of each other.
The Anguianos felt overwhelmed and distraught: Somewhere in that forest was their small, brownish seal point Siamese cat that had run off from the Fishing Bridge RV Park.
For five days the couple searched the area, calling out for their 2-year-old cat named Rayne Beau (pronounced “rainbow”). They used cat food and toys to try and lure him back.
Benjamin and Susanne Anguiano in Yellowstone National Park.
(Benjamin and Susanne Anguiano)
But it would be weeks before they would reunite with their beloved pet, a tearful reunion that by some miracle would also take place hundreds of miles west in California.
There is no shortage of stories about pets traveling great distances to get home. In 2012, a black Labrador named Bucky walked 500 miles from Virginia to South Carolina, eventually reuniting with his owner.
Hollywood has even made movies about them — take 1993’s “Homeward Bound,” in which an American bulldog, a golden retriever and a Himalayan cat make their way through the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco to reunite with their family.
And now, there’s Rayne Beau.
Although it has been a month since the cat returned home, it wasn’t until this weekend that the Anguianos felt comfortable enough to talk about the incident, in part because they want to know if anyone helped the cat travel more than 800 miles from Yellowstone to California.
In a phone interview Friday, Susanne Anguiano said everything began June 4 when the couple arrived at the campground. She said she was trying to transfer Rayne Beau and his sister, Star, a flame point Siamese cat, from the truck to the traveling trailer.
Anguiano said she was untangling the cats’ leashes when Rayne Beau jumped out of the vehicle, slipping out of his collar before dashing toward the forest.
“I screamed,” she said. “I swear, I think the whole campground heard me.”
She ran after Rayne Beau, leaving the truck door open and the other cat behind. She said her husband shut the door to prevent the other cat from escaping.
She said Rayne Beau ran under a log, where she tried to scoop him up, but that caused him to run off again, this time deeper into the woods. Eventually, she lost sight of him.
The next day they reported the cat missing with the ranger’s office, providing a photo.
“Every morning I went out for an hour and called,” she said. “Even his sister, from the safety of the screen door of the trailer, meowed for him.”
The couple spent days searching the forest, calling out for him, trying to entice him with tuna and toys well into the night.
“But he never showed up,” she said. “Then came the day when we had to leave and that was horrible.”
“It felt like I was abandoning him,” she said.
As their truck pulled out of the campground on June 8, Anguiano looked out the window, crying, calling and scanning the road.
“I knew it was hopeless to do that but I did it anyway,” she said.
The ride home was somber. The couple didn’t talk, and Star clung to Susanne. She worried about Rayne Beau getting stuck in a tree or falling from one. Would he starve? No, she told herself, there were plenty of mice he could live off.
Susanne Anguiano took a sighting of a double rainbow in the Nevada desert as a sign of hope.
(Benjamin and Susanne Anguiano)
As they were entering the Nevada desert, the couple saw a double rainbow. For Anguiano, it was a sign that their cat was safe.
“I’m a Christian and I was praying the whole time,” she said. “God told me: ‘I have him safe,’ and that’s what I hung on to.”
It was July 31 and Alexandra Betts had arrived at her job at Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, Calif. It was hot and temperatures were in the triple digits, she recalled. She was making her way from the parking lot to the hospital when she heard yowling coming from some bushes.
Betts said it sounded like a cat in heat or in labor, so she walked over to take a look. There, she noticed saw a small brownish cat near a storm drain.
She stayed with it for a few minutes before going into work. Her co-workers told her the cat had been there for days and likely belonged to someone nearby. Betts didn’t buy that. A cat yowling and in the same spot for days didn’t seem right to her.
Alexandra Betts found a panting cat during triple-digit temperatures in Roseville, Calif. She took it home and posted pictures in hopes of finding the owner.
(Alexandra Betts)
She checked in with her sister, who once worked at an animal shelter, and learned that cats that yowled were either in distress, in heat or lost.
Betts ordered cat food from DoorDash. On her lunch break, she went out to feed it.
“I could tell it was a house cat of some kind because it could register what the sound of a can opening was,” she said.
But the hot weather was starting to take its toll on the cat. Betts said it was panting, and she felt she needed to bring the cat home.
Betts was no stranger to helping animals. She owned a cat herself and often fostered many felines for many years. The next day, a Thursday, she brought the cat home in a carrier.
That night, she said, she took photos and uploaded them to the Facebook account for Roseville Lost and Found Pets.
The cat stayed with the family until Saturday, snuggling and playing.
“It was just the sweetest cat,” Betts said. “My son wanted to keep him but I told him: ‘if your cat Ninja got out, how would you feel if you never got to see him again?’”
She told him they needed to do everything they could to get the cat back to its owner.
On Aug. 3, she took the cat to the Placer Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Roseville. She updated her post on Facebook that day to let people know where she took the cat.
Betts took more photos of the cat after bringing it home, where she said it loved to cuddle. Her son wanted to keep it, but she took it to a shelter so it could have a chance of being reunited with its owners.
(Alexandra Betts)
Leilani Fratis, chief executive with Placer SPCA, said the cat was in fairly good condition when it arrived at the shelter. She said staff immediately scanned the pet for a microchip, and it had one.
“What’s really incredible is that we get over 1,000 cats that come through our shelter,” she said. “Only 23 are ever reunited with their owners and of that number, a teen of them are microchipped.”
“Microchipping is especially important for cats,” she added, “as it can be hard to keep a collar on them.”
She hoped the story will encourage more people to microchip their pets if they haven’t done so.
It was Saturday afternoon when Susanne Anguiano got the call, but she didn’t pick up. The number didn’t show up as Placer SPCA. In fact, the shelter had to call her daughter to inform them of the news.
Even then, Anguiano didn’t believe it. She thought it was a scam. She Googled the number to make sure it matched that of Placer SPCA in Roseville.
She called them and asked if they had Rayne Beau. They told her they did. She asked them to describe the cat and they did that too.
As she was on the phone, her husband walked in and told her he had received a text message that Rayne Beau had been found.
“Wait, is this really happening?” she recalled telling herself.
She said her husband asked the shelter to provide photos. When they received them, the couple was stunned: It was Rayne Beau.
“Eight weeks of hoping and praying just came full circle,” she said. “We were blown away, we hugged and cried, it was just so surreal.”
The next morning, they drove to Roseville, about four hours from their home in Salinas. They walked into the shelter and reunited with Rayne Beau.
Shortly after, Anguiano said she took the cat to the vet.
“He was so skinny,” she said. “He had lost 40% of his body weight.”
She said his blood work showed low protein levels, and the pads on his paws were dry, cracked and calloused, proof that he had spent a lot of time on his own.
Anguiano said they wanted to thank the person who had found their cat but for privacy reasons the shelter couldn’t release that information.
A few days later, however, her husband stumbled upon Betts’ Facebook post. They were able to thank her and provide some details of the story.
“She’s the only one who did something,” she said. “She’s our hero, our angel.”
Betts was elated to hear that the family had reunited with their pet. She was also happy that she decided to help Rayne Beau after learning about his long journey.
“I think everything lined up perfectly for it to work out the way it was supposed to work out.”
By Dan Walters, CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Two decades ago, when California got serious about reducing or even eliminating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, its political leaders weighed two potential tactics about industrial emissions.
The state could impose direct facility-by-facility limits, generally favored by climate change advocates. Or it could set overall emission reduction goals that would gradually decrease and auction off emission allowances, assuming their costs would encourage reductions.
The latter, known as cap-and-trade, was favored by corporate interests as being less onerous and was adopted, finally taking effect in 2012.
Since then, the California Air Resources Board has conducted quarterly auctions of emission allowances, collecting a total of $35 billion dollars so far, which, in theory, is being spent on projects that would reduce emissions.
The revenues have varied from year to year, but they have generally increased as the emission caps have declined. Since reaching a peak of $8.1 billion in the 2023-24 fiscal year, however, auction proceeds have been declining.
Roughly half of the money has been given to utilities to minimize cap-and-trade’s impact on consumer costs. However, the program has been widely criticized as a de facto tax on gasoline and other fuels, which were already among the most expensive of any state.
The remaining revenues have been deposited into a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that governors and legislators have tapped for various purposes, not all of them connected to emission reductions. In a sense, it’s been a slush fund.
Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature overhauled the program in two bills, Senate Bill 840 and Assembly Bill 1207. The program was extended, it was renamed as cap-and-invest and new priorities for spending auction proceeds were set.
Notably, the state’s cash-strapped and long-stalled bullet train project would get a flat $1 billion a year, rather than the 25% share it had been getting. Project managers hope that lenders will advance enough money to complete its first leg in the San Joacim Valley; the plan is to repay the loans from the $1 billion annual cap-and-invest allocation.
Early this year, the Air Resources Board released new regulations to implement the legislative changes but faced criticism that they would increase consumer costs. That led to a revision in April that softens the rules’ impact — most obviously on refiners who have been threatening to leave California — but environmental groups are very critical.
The April version would also sharply reduce net revenues from emission auctions, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, providing barely enough for the $1 billion allocation to the bullet train and another $1 billion for the governor and Legislature to spend. Other programs that have been receiving cap-and-invest support, such as wildfire protection and housing, would probably get nothing.
The program has been tapped in recent years to backfill programs that a deficit-ridden state budget could not cover, so the projected revenue drop would exacerbate efforts by Newsom and legislators to close the state budget’s yawning gap.
“The (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) is a relatively small portion of the overall state budget, but it has been a noteworthy source of funding for environmental and other programs in recent years,” the state Assembly’s budget advisor, Jason Sisney, says in an email. “Collapse of its revenues would change the state budget process noticeably. The state’s cost-pressured general fund seemingly would be unable to make up much, if any, of a significant (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) revenue decline at this time.”
When Newsom presents his revised budget this week, he may reveal how he intends to cover the cap-and-invest program’s shortfall, particularly whether he will maintain the $1 billion bullet train commitment that project leaders say is vital to continuing construction of its Merced-to-Bakersfield segment.
It could boil down to bullet train vs. wildfire protection.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Vance says Trump cares about Americans finances amid Iran debate
Vance pushes back on claims about Trump and says Americans finances matter as the administration weighs Iran and nuclear diplomacy.
Vice President JD Vance announced on Wednesday, May 13 that the Trump administration will be deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California, as part of a new initiative to root out fraud in federal health programs.
The topic of California’s hospice care fraud has been a major focus of scrutiny by state leadership, members of President Donald Trump’s administration, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s critics. In his announcement, Vance claimed that the administration was set on deferring these funds “because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously.”
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously,” Vance said during a press conference.
Notably, this decision was part of Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force’s plan to implement a six-month nationwide, data-driven moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, is set to use this six-month moratorium to conduct investigations and review data on Medicare programs, with the hopes of removing hospice and home health agencies that are suspected of committing fraud.
“Today we’re shutting the door on fraud — preventing new bad actors from entering Medicare while we aggressively identify, investigate, and remove those already exploiting them,” Oz said. “This is about protecting patients, restoring integrity, and safeguarding taxpayer dollars.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the administration’s action “unlawful” and noted that his office would be “carefully reviewing all available information” and may challenge the administration’s decision to threaten “Californians’ rights or access to critical services.”
“Once again, California appears to be targeted solely for political reasons,” Bonta said on X.
“The Trump Administration is planning to defer over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for vital programs that help seniors and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.”
Bonta and his office have attempted to counteract criticism that the state does not take action against hospice fraud.
In April, Bonta announced that the California Department of Justice had arrested five people in connection with a major health care scheme in Southern California that defrauded taxpayers of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
“For years, California has led the charge to protect public programs from fraud and abuse,” Newsom said in the press release on April 10. “We hold accountable to the fullest extent of the law anyone who tries to rip off taxpayers and take advantage of public programs, particularly those as sensitive as hospice care.”
Newsom has yet to publicly respond to the administration’s decision to defer California’s Medicaid reimbursement.
However, shortly after Vance made the announcement, Newsom’s press office blasted the decision on X.
“We hate fraud. But that’s NOT what this is,” Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Vance and Oz are attacking programs that keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes. Pretty sick.”
Noe Padilla is a Northern California Reporter for USA Today. Contact him at npadilla@usatodayco.com, follow him on X @1NoePadilla or on Bluesky @noepadilla.bsky.social. Sign up for the TODAY Californian newsletter or follow us on Facebook at TODAY Californian.
California
California girls’ track and field stars speak out as Gavin Newsom’s Title IX crisis grows
Reese Hogan would have a very different set of medals if the rules were different in California.
It’s her third straight year competing against a trans athlete in the California girls’ track and field state tournament. She would have taken first place in the high jump all to herself in the sectional preliminaries last Saturday, if only biological females were allowed to compete.
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Now she’ll compete against a trans athlete in the sectional finals this weekend, representing her Christian high school, Crean Lutheran. It will mark one year since she went viral on social media for stepping up from the second-place spot on a medal podium up to first place, after a trans athlete who took first place stepped off.
“This is my third year competing against a transgender athlete, and last year I was stripped away of a CIF Title, and I basically worked my whole career to get to that point,” Hogan said on “Fox News at Night” on Tuesday. “It’s just really dissapointing to go into a competition knowing you already lost.”
CALIFORNIA TRACK ATHLETE BRIEFLY POSES ON 1ST-PLACE PODIUM AFTER LOSING TO TRANS ATHLETE, RECEIVES PRAISE
Her Crean Lutheran teammate, Olivia Viola, has been right there with Hogan throughout the three years of competition against trans athletes.
“I haven’t heard nearly enough adults come out and say anything. A lot of them like to say that they agree with you, that they’re proud of you for speaking up now, but they won’t do it themselves,” Viola said. “Just because it doesn’t affect every adult out there doesn’t mean it’s not worth standing up for.”
California has legally allowed biological males to compete in girls’ sports since a state law was enacted in 2013. The state’s education agencies are engaged in a federal Title IX lawsuit with President Donald Trump’s administration for commitment to upholding that state law.
A source at Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to Fox News Digital in response to news that a “Save Girls Sports” rally, which the two girls attended, would be held at last Saturday’s meet.
“The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. He rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids. The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies,” the statement read.
“California is one of 22 states that have laws requiring students be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school sports consistent with their gender identity. California passed this law in 2013 (AB 1266) and it was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.”
At the rally, Hogan spoke and fired back at Newsom’s office for the statement.
“The recent statements coming from Governor Gavin Newsom’s office have made it clear that there is no intention of creating a safe, fair, and equitable environment for female high school athletes. Him and his office have gone as far as calling young girls bullies for speaking up for what we believe in,” Hogan said.
“The governor himself has admitted that males competing in women’s sports is unfair, yet nothing is being done to protect girls who train every day to compete on a level playing field.”
CALIFORNIA ATHLETE SAYS SHE CHANGES CLOTHES IN HER CAR TO AVOID SHARING A LOCKER ROOM WITH TRANS ATHLETE
California high school girls wear “Protect Girls Sports” shirts at a postseason track meet at Yorba Linda High School on May 10, 2025. (Reese Hogan/Courtesy of Reese Hogan)
Viola also rejected the “bully” assertion in Tuesday’s interview.
“I think his statement is manipulative, and it’s just completely untrue,” Viola said. “He’s saying stand up for all kids, yet he’s essentially trying to silence us… these girls are not bullies. They make a point, we all make an point to say we are not against any individual athlete, we are against California’s policies,” Viola said.
“We believe athletes deserve dignity and respect, and that’s why we believe women deserve the dignity of having their own category.”
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Crean Lutheran High School senior track and field star Reese Hogan speaks at a ‘Save Girls Sports’ rally. (Courtesy of Alyssa Cruz)
Both Viola and Hogan will compete at the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Final on Saturday in Moorpark, California.
And just like last year, there will be a podium ceremony after the competitions.
Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
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