By AMY TAXIN

SOMIS, Calif. (AP) — Andreas Tompros lost his home and at least a third of his avocado orchard to a wildfire last year, but the 47-year-old grower is not worried about his farm making a comeback.

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While California farmers often rattle off a list of challenges they face including high labor costs, water restrictions and overseas competition, many avocado growers say they have a good thing going. A key reason may come as a surprise to some — Mexican imports.

When the United States lifted its ban on Mexican avocados in 1997, California growers worried at first that the imported fruit would displace their production.

But the steady flow of avocados has wound up helping, not hurting, their sales by allowing for a year-round supply to markets and restaurants that has fomented demand, farmers say. Before the influx, most American consumers considered avocados to be specialty items — and when they came into season in California, industry officials had to work to rev up widespread interest in order to sell them.

But not anymore.

Avocado consumption has been booming in the United States over the past two decades. The amount of fruit available per person tripled to more than 8 pounds between 2000 and 2021, federal statistics show. Avocado toast and guacamole are regular offerings not just in culinary hubs like NYC but at cafes around the Midwest and the South.

Avocados are in demand

On a steep, sun-soaked hillside northwest of Los Angeles, Tompros is replanting nearly 300 avocado trees with the belief that Americans’ hunger for the fruit — and his orchard — will continue to grow.

“It will come back, and I believe it will become better than it was,” Tompros, who previously ran a software company in Hollywood, said of the orchard he took over five years ago in the tiny community of Somis.

Andreas Tompros holds ripe avocados grown at his avocado farm, Ridgecrest Avocados, in Somis, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Avocado demand has also been buoyed by consumers’ growing interest in healthy fats, said Emiliano Escobedo, executive director of the Hass Avocado Board.

A 2000 U.S. law created the board that collected 2.5 cents for every pound of avocados imported or produced in the United States. The board used the money to market avocados and conduct nutritional research, an effort that has been widely credited with making the fruit ubiquitous in supermarkets and on restaurant menus.

“It’s been really wildly successful. It generates way more money than most of these other industry boards do,” said Richard Sexton, distinguished professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. “When you look at the growth rate in avocado consumption relative to all fruits, the difference in growth rate is dramatic.”

A successful crop

Escobedo said about 60% of U.S. households currently buy avocados, and about half of these are responsible for the overwhelming majority of consumption, which means there’s still room for the market to grow — especially in the Northeast, where the fruit is less common.

“There is a lot of opportunity for certain groups of people to increase their purchasing of avocados,” Escobedo said.

While the Trump administration has threatened tariffs on a spate of Mexican goods, avocados have so far been spared. California growers said they want Mexican avocados to keep flowing into the country, though they also want robust U.S. inspections of the imports to keep out pests to protect their crop.

“If you are going to farm in California, avocados are about the best deal right now,” said Ken Melban, president of the California Avocado Commission.

California farmers grow about 10% of the avocados eaten in the United States, Melban said, and account for nearly all of the country’s domestic avocado production. The fruit is largely grown in California from April through September, and Mexican imports arrive year-round to meet nationwide demand, which exceeds what the state’s farmers grow, he said.

Andreas Tompros tours Ridgecrest Avocados in Somis, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

In Southern California’s Ventura County, many growers have shifted to avocados since lemon prices were walloped by cheaper imports from Argentina. As recently planted trees start bearing fruit in a few years, the region’s avocado production is likely to rise, said Korinne Bell, agricultural commissioner for the county northwest of Los Angeles.

A booming market, despite wildfires

Avocado trees do not come without risks in a region prone to wildfires.

Still, demand for the trees has jumped due to interest from lemon growers — and since the November 2024 fire charred Ventura County avocado orchards, said Rob Brokaw, whose family-owned nursery has supplied avocado trees to California growers for 70 years.

“Right now we are sold out essentially for this year,” Brokaw said. “And we’re mostly sold out for 2026.”

Tompros debated whether to plant the more fire-resistant lemon trees or another crop after the fire ripped through Somis, but he decided to replant due to the soaring demand for Super Bowl guacamole and avocado toast.

Avocados grow at Ridgecrest Avocados in Somis, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

“It’s the super food, and it’s still growing in popularity,” Tompros said.

He’s taking precautions to not plant the trees too close to what will eventually be his rebuilt home, because the dried-out leaves that help nourish the orchard’s soil can also fuel blazes.

It may take a few years, but Tompros hopes it won’t be too long before his newly planted trees bear fruit that he can sell to a local packinghouse or in seasonal gift boxes with citrus and passionfruit that he ships directly to customers.

By ED WILLIAMS of Searchlight New Mexico and SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN of The Associated Press

COUNSELOR, N.M. (AP) — On a Tuesday in March, Billton Werito drove his son Amari toward his house in Counselor, New Mexico, driving past natural gas pipelines, wellheads and water tanks. Amari should have been in school, but a bout of nausea and a dull headache kept him from class.

“It happens a lot,” Amari explained from the backseat. The symptoms usually show up when the sixth grader smells an odor of “rotten egg with propane” that rises from nearby gas wells and wafts over Lybrook Elementary School, where he and some 70 other Navajo students attend class. His little brother often misses school for the same reason.

“They just keep getting sick,” Amari’s father, Billton, said. “Especially the younger one, he’s been throwing up and won’t eat.” The symptoms are putting the kids at risk of falling further behind in school.

Lybrook sits in the heart of New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, a major oil and gas deposit that, along with the Permian Basin in the state’s southeast, is supplying natural gas that meets much of the nation’s electricity demand.

The New Mexican gas has reaped huge benefits. Natural gas has become a go-to fuel for power plants, sometimes replacing dirtier coal-fired plants and improving air quality. Oil and gas companies employ thousands of workers, often in areas with few other opportunities, and their revenue boosts the state’s budget.

But those benefits may come at a cost for thousands of students in New Mexico whose schools sit near pipelines, wellheads and flare stacks. An Associated Press analysis found 694 oil and gas wells with new or active permits within a mile of a school in the state. This means around 29,500 students in 74 schools and preschools potentially face exposure to noxious emissions that can be released during extraction.

At Lybrook, Amari’s school, fewer than 6% of students are proficient at math, and only a fifth meet state standards for science and reading proficiency.

Other factors could help explain poor achievement. AP’s analysis found two-thirds of the schools within a mile of an oil or gas well are low-income.

But research has found student learning is directly harmed by air pollution from fossil fuels — even when socioeconomic factors are taken into account.

The risks go far beyond New Mexico. An AP analysis of data from the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker found over 1,000 public schools across 13 states within five miles of a major oil or gas field.

“This kind of air pollution has a real, measurable effect on students,” said Mike Gilraine, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Gilraine’s research has shown student test scores are closely associated with air contamination.

America’s shift to natural gas has resulted in substantial increases in student achievement nationwide, Gilraine’s research shows, as it has displaced dirtier coal and led to cleaner air on the whole. But there has been little data on air quality across New Mexico, even as it has become one of the most productive states in the nation for natural gas. State regulators have installed only 20 permanent air monitors, most in areas without oil or gas production.

Independent researchers have extensively studied the air quality near schools in at least two locations in the state, however. One is Lybrook, which sits within a mile of 17 active oil and gas wells.

In 2024, a study at the school found levels of pollutants — including benzene, a cancer-causing byproduct of natural gas production that is particularly harmful to children — were spiking during school hours, to nearly double the levels known to cause chronic or acute health effects.

That research followed a 2021 health impact assessment that found more than 90% of area residents surveyed suffered from sinus problems. Nosebleeds, shortness of breath and nausea were widespread. The report attributed the symptoms to the high levels of pollutants — including, near Lybrook, hydrogen sulfide, a compound that gives off the sulfur smell that Amari associates with his headaches.

Those studies helped confirm what many community members already knew, said Daniel Tso, a community leader who helped oversee the 2021 health impact assessment.

“The children and the grandchildren need a safe homeland,” Tso said in March, standing outside a cluster of gas wells within a mile of Lybrook Elementary.

“You smell that?” he said, nodding towards a nearby wellhead, which smelled like propane. “I’ve had people visiting this area from New York. They spend five minutes here and say, ‘Hey, I got a headache.’ And the kids are what, six hours a day at the school breathing this?”

Lybrook school officials did not respond to requests for comment.

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Researchers have identified similar air quality problems in New Mexico’s southeast. In 2023, a yearlong study of the air in Loving found air quality was worse than in downtown Los Angeles, containing the fifth-highest level of measured ozone contamination in the U.S.

The source of the ozone — a pollutant that’s especially hazardous to children — was the area’s network of gas wells. Some of that infrastructure sits within a half-mile of Loving’s schools.

For most locals, any concerns about pollution are outweighed by the industry’s economic benefits. Representatives of the oil and gas industry have claimed the air quality studies themselves are not trustworthy. Andrea Felix, vice president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA), said other sources of emissions, such as cars and trucks, are likely a larger source of air quality problems near wells.

Officials with Loving schools are also skeptical. Superintendent Lee White said funds from the oil and gas industry paid for a new wing at the elementary school, a science lab for students, turf on the sports field and training for teachers. In the most recent fiscal year, oil and gas revenue supported $1.7 billion in K-12 spending in New Mexico, according to a NMOGA report.

“Are we willing to give that up because people say our air is not clean?” White asked. “It’s just as clean as anywhere else.”

Efforts to limit drilling near schools were boosted in 2023, when State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard issued an executive order prohibiting new oil and gas leases on state-owned land within a mile of schools.

AP journalist Sharon Lurye contributed.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By DAVE COLLINS, Associated Press

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A man says he was tortured for weeks in a New York townhouse. Another in Paris was held for ransom and his finger cut off. A couple in Connecticut were carjacked, beaten and thrown into a van.

All, authorities allege, were victims tied to cryptocurrency-related crimes that have spilled out from behind computer screens and into the real world as the largely unregulated currency surges in value.

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While crypto thefts are not new, the use of physical violence is a far more recent trend, said John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas in Austin who tracks financial crimes.

“I think this kind of physical violence is a natural manifestation of the emboldened nature of crypto activities,” he said. “Things that might clearly be outside of social norms in other spaces — like robbing a bank — are somehow just part of the game here.”

Kidnapping, burglary and torture allegations

In the New York case, two American crypto investors — John Woeltz and William Duplessie — have been arrested on kidnapping and assault charges in recent days after a 28-year-old Italian man told police they tortured him for weeks to get his Bitcoin password. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.

While the allegations are still emerging, they come just weeks after 13 people were indicted on federal charges in Washington, D.C., accused of combining computer hacking and money laundering with old-fashioned impersonation and burglary to steal more than $260 million from victims’ cryptocurrency accounts.

Some are accused of hacking websites and servers to steal cryptocurrency databases and identify targets, but others are alleged to have broken into victims’ homes to steal their “hardware wallets” — devices that provide access to their crypto accounts.

The case stemmed from an investigation that started after a couple in Connecticut last year were forced out of a Lamborghini SUV, assaulted and bound in the back of a van. Authorities allege the incident was a ransom plot targeting the couple’s son — who they say helped steal more than $240 million worth of Bitcoin from a single victim. The son has not been charged, but is being detained on an unspecified “federal misdemeanor offense” charge, according to online jail records. Police stopped the carjacking and arrested six men.

Meanwhile in France, kidnappings of wealthy cryptocurrency holders and their relatives in ransom plots have spooked the industry.

Attackers recently kidnapped the father of a crypto entrepreneur while he was out walking his dog, and sent videos to the son including one showing the dad’s finger being severed as they demanded millions of euros in ransom, prosecutors allege. Police freed the father and arrested several suspects.

Earlier this year, men in masks attempted to drag the daughter of Pierre Noizat, the CEO and a founder of the Bitcoin exchange platform Paymium, into a van, but were thwarted by a shopkeeper armed with a fire extinguisher.

And in January, the co-founder of French crypto-wallet firm Ledger, David Balland, and his wife were also kidnapped for ransom from their home in the region of Cher of central France. They also were rescued by police and 10 people were arrested.

Cryptocurrency crime likely fueled by big money, little regulation

The FBI recently released its 2024 internet crime report that tallied nearly 860,000 complaints of suspected internet crime and a record $16.6 billion in reported losses — a 33% increase in losses compared with 2023.

As a group, cryptocurrency theft victims reported the most losses — more than $6.5 billion

The agency and experts say the crypto crime underworld is likely being fueled by the large amounts of money at stake – combined with weak regulation of cryptocurrency that allows many transactions to be made without identity documents.

Violence may be increasing for several reasons including that criminals believe they can get away with crypto theft because transactions are hard to trace and often cloaked by anonymity, according to the crypto tracing firm TRM Labs. And crypto holders are getting easier to identify because of the prevalence of personal information online and people flaunting their crypto wealth on social media, the firm says.

Phil Ariss, TRM Labs’ director of UK public sector relations, said crypto also may be attracting criminal groups that have long used violence.

“As long as there’s a viable route to launder or liquidate stolen assets, it makes little difference to the offender whether the target is a high-value watch or a crypto wallet,” Ariss said in a statement. “Cryptocurrency is now firmly in the mainstream, and as a result, our traditional understanding of physical threat and robbery needs to evolve accordingly.”

The state’s Public Service Commission commits only 30 percent of the funding that goes into energy saving programs to low- and moderate- income New Yorkers. The rest will be earmarked for residential and commercial properties that are linked to homeowners or renters in higher income brackets.

The funding would go to energy savings programs, including those that help New Yorkers afford their utility costs. (Photo by Jeanmarie Evelly)

On May 15, the state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) published a decision on how it will divvy up $5 billion in ratepayer dollars New York has at its disposal to fund energy saving programs for homeowners and renters over the next five years.

These energy efficiency and building electrification (EE/BE) programs help New York residents keep energy costs down by covering their utility bills, insulating homes, and giving out tax rebates for more efficient heating and cooling equipment.

The PSC’s decision, which has been two years in the making, commits only 30 percent of EE/BE funds to programs that serve low-and moderate-income (LMI) households. The other 70 percent will be earmarked for residential and commercial properties that are linked to homeowners or renters in higher income brackets.

“Not committing more money to low-income programs means that not enough households are getting the help that they need. We are already seeing that more and more people are unable to afford their energy bills,” said Jessica Azulay, executive director for the Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE).

As the cost of energy keeps climbing in New York, those who make up the 40 percent of households on low to moderate incomes struggle to foot the bill. Over the last three years, every utility company in the state raised its electricity rates, according to a report from AGREE. And over 1.2 million New York families were two or more months behind on their energy bills last year, the report estimated.

Leading up to the PSC’s decision, over 150 businesses, consumer advocacy groups and environmental organizations signed a petition urging the commission to dedicate at least 50 percent of its EE/BE funds to the LMI bracket. 

But the commission went with 30 percent, which in practice allocates $1.57 billion for LMI households from 2026 through 2030, according to the PSC.

Each energy saving program has its own rules for who falls under the LMI criteria. As an example, EmPower+, which offers energy efficiency incentives for low and moderate income households, sets limits at 60 percent or less of the State Median Income (SMI). A household of four, for instance, could qualify for the lower incentive with an annual income of $76,680 or less.

The PSC’s order that outlines the decision includes several recommendations on how to “optimize the budgets” dedicated to LMI programs, Chris Coll, director of the PSC’s Affordability and Equity Program said at a public hearing. 

The responsible state entity, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is required to “improve the geographic distribution of projects to ensure that LMI households across the state are able to benefit from these programs,” Coll noted.

Both NYSERDA and utility companies, Coll added, will also have to do a better job of identifying and referring low-income customers with the highest energy consumption rates to state programs that could help them reduce their costs.

These “adjustments” Coll argues will result “in an additional $97 million being made available” to programs that serve low- and moderate-income residents.

The PSC’s order also sets an expectation for New York authorities to “develop strategies and programs” that benefit disadvantaged communities, which the state defines as being disproportionately burdened by economic and environmental challenges.

“Staff will be tracking and reporting on disadvantaged community investments on an annual basis, going forward,” Coll added. 

The PSC’s order also included some wins for environmental groups who fought for the commission to align the EE/BE programs with the state’s landmark climate law, the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (CLCPA). The order ended most funding for gas equipment that helps drive climate change, setting money aside instead for insulating or weatherizing homes, and switching them to clean electric energy. 

Homes in southeast Queens. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

Changes were also made to the eligibility criteria for EE/BE programs so more households can access them, especially in the New York City region where enrollment falls short (although some experts argue that more funding would have been a better way to improve access). The PSC also increased funds that help homeowners do the necessary repairs that will enable them to participate in weatherization programs. 

But environmental advocates say the wins fall short, as the bulk of the money will not be going to the lower-income households that need it most—at a time when federal funding is also drying up. 

“Significantly increased investments in energy efficiency and building electrification programs that directly benefit low and moderate income households are needed now more than ever, from Buffalo to Brooklyn,” said Clarke Gocker, senior director of movement building at the non-profit PUSH Buffalo, in an emailed statement.

The Big Beautiful Bill Act, a legislative package backed by President Donald Trump that passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week, included provisions that would rollback billions in clean energy investments for climate programs and energy tax credits.

The Trump administration has already terminated the entire federal staff that runs the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps households pay for utility bills in the winter and gives out free air conditioners in the summer. The president has suggested getting rid of the program all together in his budget proposal. 

“As the Trump administration makes moves to dismantle social safety net programs like LIHEAP and sets fire to critical climate and clean energy goals, Governor Hochul and the PSC should pull every policy lever within reach to address the energy affordability crisis right now,” Gocker urged. 

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Mariana@citylimits.org. The reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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