America

DUBAI — President Trump has signed an executive order vowing to use all measures, including U.S. military action, to defend the energy-rich nation of Qatar — though it remains unclear just what weight the pledge will carry.

The text of the order, available Wednesday on the White House’s website but dated Monday, appears to be another measure by Trump to assure the Qataris following Israel’s surprise attack on the country targeting Hamas leaders as they weighed accepting a ceasefire with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip.

The order cites the two countries’ “close cooperation” and “shared interest,” vowing to “guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the state of Qatar against external attack.”

“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure of the state of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order says.

“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the state of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

The order apparently came during a visit to Washington on Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump organized a call by Netanyahu to Qatar during the visit in which Netanyahu “expressed his deep regret” over the strike that killed six people, including a member of the Qatari security forces, the White House said.

Qatari officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s order. However, the Qatari-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera prominently reported about it Wednesday under the headline: “New Trump executive order guarantees Qatar security after Israeli attack.”

The true scope of the pledge remains in question. Typically, legally binding agreements, or treaties, need to receive the approval of the U.S. Senate. However, presidents have entered international agreements without the Senate’s approval, as President Obama did with Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

And ultimately, any decision to take military action rests with the president. That uncertainty has clouded previous U.S. defense agreements in Trump’s second term, such as NATO’s Article 5 guarantees.

Qatar, a peninsular nation that sticks out into the Persian Gulf, became fantastically wealthy through its natural gas reserves. It has been a key U.S. military partner, allowing America’s Central Command to have its forward operating base at its vast Al Udeid Air Base. President Biden named Qatar a major non-NATO ally in 2022, in part due to its help during America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, Saudi Arabia entered a mutual defense agreement with Pakistan, bringing the kingdom under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. It’s unclear whether other Gulf Arab countries, worried about Israel as well as Iran as it faces reimposed United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program, may seek similar arrangements as well with the region’s longtime security guarantor.

“The Gulf’s centrality in the Middle East and its significance to the United States warrants specific U.S. guarantees beyond President Donald J. Trump’s assurances of nonrepetition and dinner meetings,” wrote Bader al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University who analyzes Gulf Arab affairs.

Gambrell writes for the Associated Press.

A 10-second bit by ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel plunged Walt Disney Co. into a full-blown crisis that rippled across America.

President Trump, the Federal Communications Commission chief and others were angered this month over Kimmel’s remarks about the Charlie Kirk shooting, which they said had suggested the suspect was a “Make America Great Again” Republican. Kimmel asserted Trump supporters were “trying to score political points” from the tragedy.

TV station groups pulled the program and Disney benched the comedian, sparking a bigger backlash. Protesters lit into the Mouse House for seemingly kowtowing to the Trump administration, consumers canceled Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions and more than 400 celebrities, including Tom Hanks, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lin-Manuel Miranda, signed a letter calling for a defense of free speech. Some investors bailed, briefly erasing nearly $4 billion in corporate market value.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger and his team turned the tide last week when they returned Kimmel to his late-night perch.

But the pressure on Disney’s top brass remains. Trump was not happy over Kimmel’s comeback, grousing that he may lob another lawsuit at ABC. In December, Disney agreed to pay $15 million to end a defamation suit Trump brought against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos over misstatements.

And FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — who threatened ABC over Kimmel’s comments — isn’t backing down; he’s already opened one investigation into Disney and ABC for their diversity embrace.

“This [situation] isn’t going away anytime soon,” Nien-hê Hsieh, a Harvard Business School professor, said in an interview. “How it is managed certainly matters a lot.”

The Kimmel controversy exposed cracks at the Burbank company that has long meticulously managed its image. It also highlighted the fraught environment facing Disney’s next leader during a period of significant challenges for the entertainment juggernaut.

“Succession is difficult for any company — the stakes are high,” Hsieh said. “But Disney also is kind of a lightning rod that attracts criticism because of its brand and its prevalence and prominence.”

Iger, 74, is retiring for a second time in late 2026, when his contract expires. Within a few months, Disney’s board is expected to name a replacement — a pivotal decision for a company that has long struggled with succession.

Aside from the Trump administration, Disney’s next boss must navigate the shift to streaming, competition from tech giants, the rise of artificial intelligence, a potential economic slowdown and fragile geopolitics with a theme park in China and one planned for the Middle East. The new CEO also must try to keep Disney from again being drawn into America’s culture wars.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger is expected to retire at the end of 2026 after nearly 20 years leading the Burbank entertainment giant.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Four internal candidates are vying for the job, including Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, who oversees television and streaming and managed the Kimmel crisis with Iger.

Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme parks and experiences chief, is viewed by many as the leading contender.

Also in the CEO mix are ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro; and Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman, who oversees movies, including the Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars franchises, and, in concert with Walden, entertainment streaming services.

“The next leader needs to be very attuned to how the company is perceived and valued by its customers and clients,” Hsieh said. “This is a moment for people to be very clear about their values.”

Disney’s values were questioned by many after the decision to yank Kimmel from the air.

As protesters buzzed around Disney’s Burbank headquarters and Kimmel’s darkened theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the voice of the company’s former chief rang out.

“Where has all the leadership gone?” Michael Eisner asked in a stinging Sept. 19 social media post. “If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners, and corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment?”

Disney hadn’t formally addressed the situation. The only public message was a terse ABC statement on Sept. 17 — minutes after Iger and Walden moved to suspend the show: “ ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ will be pre-empted indefinitely.”

Kimmel was furious. It was about an hour to showtime and his studio audience was queued up outside the El Capitan Entertainment Centre. He had intended to clarify his words that night.

But Walden and Iger were worried the comedian was dug in, and his planned remarks would only inflame the situation.

Disney’s move to bench Jimmy Kimmel prompted protests, including days of demonstrations outside the El Capitan Entertainment Centre, where “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is taped.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

What was initially viewed by Disney executives as a social media storm — vitriol from Trump supporters — had morphed into an existential threat for ABC when Carr, the FCC chairman, threatened to go after station licenses.

Carr urged other broadcasters to take a stand — a call heeded by Nexstar Media Group, which needs FCC approval for its proposed $6.2-billion takeover of a rival TV station owner, Tegna.

Nexstar pulled Kimmel’s program, followed by the politically conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. The two companies own stations that provide 22% of ABC’s coverage.

Protesters called for a Disney boycott this month outside the darkened stage of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ The comedian returned Sept. 23.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

ABC’s ambiguous seven-word statement suggested to many that Kimmel wasn’t returning.

“Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that night. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.”

Disney executives privately said they were simply hitting pause. ABC executives and talent were getting death threats, according to one insider who was not authorized to discuss the situation. Later, in Sacramento, a gunman fired three shots into the lobby of an ABC-affiliated station. No one was injured.

But Disney’s initial response was roundly criticized for being weak, an abdication of the 1st Amendment. “To surrender our right to speak freely is to accept that those in power, not the people, will set the boundaries of debate that define a free society,” Anna M. Gomez, the sole Democrat FCC commissioner, said in a statement.

Executives defended the ABC statement, noting that anything Disney had said at that moment could have exacerbated its troubles with the FCC and station groups. One insider added that company also needed time to weigh whether it was worth bringing back the show.

Iger and Walden held a Sunday sit-down with Kimmel on Sept. 21 to clear the air. The following day, Disney announced his show would return.

“It wasn’t a reaction to any regulatory threats or political threats — it was an editorial decision because we felt the comments were ill-timed and, thus, insensitive given the topic,” Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and compliance officer, said in an interview Monday. “We felt our responsibility was to avoid further inflaming the situation during a very delicate and emotional time for the nation and that couldn’t be achieved in the heat of the moment.”

Gutierrez said narratives about Disney’s motives were inaccurate.

“The guidance we were given by Bob as we were thinking this through was to do the right thing, and that’s what we did in both preempting the show and in putting it back on the air,” he said. “Other people can comment about what they would have done or said … but the reality is the action of the company speaks louder than any words.”

Brian Frons, a former senior ABC executive and a UCLA Anderson School professor, said the way the crisis was handled reflected Iger’s measured leadership style.

“This situation could have turned into a firefight with the [Trump] administration — a direct confrontation,” Frons said. “It could have been Florida-Chapek all over again.”

Disney’s last major public relations debacle was in early 2022, when former Disney CEO Bob Chapek tumbled into a political quagmire with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Disney belatedly opposed a Florida law banning school conversations about sexual orientation, the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, prompting DeSantis to retaliate with a takeover of a Central Florida land-use board overseeing development around Walt Disney World.

Chapek’s shaky handling of the Florida dispute, which led conservatives to declare the company had become “woke,” was among the reasons Disney board’s fired him in November 2022, returning Iger to the top job.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger (left) and Bob Chapek (right) who served 2 1/2 years as chief executive. Chapek was removed in November 2022 to make way for Iger’s return.

(Business Wire)

Chapek had been Iger’s hand-picked successor but lasted in the job just 2½ years as pandemic dealt a crushing blow to theme parks, movie theaters and sporting events.

“In our instant-response culture, we want managers to have an immediate response and confrontation,” Frons said. “Sometimes, the instant solution might not be the best one.”

The Kimmel crisis and Chapek’s stormy tenure hover over succession.

Disney’s Achilles’ heel has long been its leadership handoffs. Over the years, Iger postponed several planned retirements, prompting at least one prospective successor, Tom Staggs, to exit the company in frustration.

The switch to Iger from Eisner 20 years ago was even more tumultuous, a move made to tamp down a shareholder revolt.

Before Iger was in the wings, Eisner recruited Creative Arts Agency co-founder Michael Ovitz — a debacle that ended in a court battle and a $140-million Disney payout.

Walt Disney Co. Chairman James P. Gorman is the former chief executive of Morgan Stanley.

(China News Service / China News Service via Getty Images)

Last year, Disney turned to James P. Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s former executive chairman, to oversee the succession process amid past criticism that some board members were too deferential to Iger. (A source close to the company disputed that characterization.)

Gorman became chairman of Disney’s board in January. He’s credited with orchestrating a smooth transition at the bank where he served as CEO for 14 years.

Disney’s board has said it would consider internal and outside candidates when determining who’s best equipped to lead the $206-billion company.

Walden was viewed as the early favorite, but some believe that Trump’s election last November might have changed that. The 60-year-old television executive has long been supportive of Democrat causes and is a friend of former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Walden joined Disney in 2019 after Disney swallowed Rupert Murdoch’s Fox entertainment properties, including the Fox television and movie studios and a controlling stake in Hulu. She oversees ABC, ABC News, Disney Channel, National Geographic and, with Bergman, the streaming services.

It’s not clear whether the Kimmel controversy helped or hurt her chances. By the end of last week, both Nexstar and Sinclair had abandoned their boycotts, returning the show to their ABC-affiliated stations.

“If this situation holds, Dana may have proved herself as a very effective crisis manager,” Frons said.

Clockwise from top left: Alan Bergman, Josh D’Amaro, Dana Walden and Jimmy Pitaro.

(Evan Agostini, Chris Pizzello and Richard Shotwell / Invision via AP)

D’Amaro, the parks and experiences chief, is thought to have an edge. Neither Disney nor the board have signaled that there is a front-runner.

The 54-year-old executive runs Disney’s biggest and most prosperous unit — theme parks, resorts, cruise lines and experiences, including video games. D’Amaro is an architect of Disney’s $60-billion campaign to expand and revitalize its parks and resorts and double the number of cruise ships.

The charismatic D’Amaro brims with enthusiasm for Disney where he’s spent most of his adult life — more than 27 years.

Bergman, 59, is a savvy executive who runs Disney’s film studios, its major creative franchises, as well as theatrical and streaming releases and marketing. He oversees Disney Music Group and its Broadway show unit.

And Pitaro, the Connecticut-based ESPN chief, has helped lead Disney’s push to streaming as the once lucrative cable business has contracted. The 56-year-old executive, a former consumer products and Yahoo executive, has managed Disney’s dealings with the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.

Some worry that none of the candidates will match Iger’s skills.

“This idea that you’re going to replace the CEO — a person who is at the height of their power — with somebody in a similar place is pretty hard,” Frons said. “Instead, you have to ask: Who is the person who can best position Disney for the future in all the businesses that are important today and might be important in the future?”

With next week’s publication of his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s secret 20th century is at last complete.

For many of us, Pynchon is the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since the arrival in 1963 of his first novel, “V.,” he has loomed as the presiding colossus of our literature — revered as a Nobel-caliber genius, reviled as impenetrable and reviewed with increasing condescension since his turn toward detective fiction with “Inherent Vice” in 2009.

Now comes “Shadow Ticket,” and it’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, “Shadow Ticket” capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in “V.” our “great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.

A photograph of Thomas Pynchon in 1955. The elusive novelist has avoided nearly all media for more than 50 years.

(Bettmann Archive)

It all begins in Depression-era Milwaukee as a righteously funny gangster novel. In a scenario straight out of Dashiell Hammett’s early stories, a detective agency operative named Hicks McTaggart gets an assignment to chase down the runaway heiress to a major cheese fortune. Roughly midway through, Pynchon’s characters hightail it all the way to proto-fascist Budapest, where shadows more lethal than any Tommy gun begin to encroach. By the end, this novel has become at once a requiem, a farewell, an old soft-shoe number — and a warning.

When Pynchon’s jacket summary of this tale of two cities first surfaced six months ago, cynics could be forgiven for wondering whether an 88-year-old man, hearing time’s winged chariot idling at the curb, hadn’t just taken two half-completed works in progress and spot-welded them together. Younger people are forever wondering — in whispers, and never for general consumption — whether some person older than they might have, you know, lost a step.

Well, buzz off, kids. Thomas Pynchon’s voice on the page still sings, clarion strong. Unlike most novelists, his voice has two distinct but overlapping registers. The first is Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound, and unmistakably worked at. The second, audible less frequently until 1990’s “Vineland,” sounds looser, freer, warmer, more improvisational, more curious about love and family, increasingly wistful, all but twilit with rue. He still brakes for bad puns and double-negative understatements, but he avoids the kind of under-metabolized research that sometimes alienated his early readers.

“Shadow Ticket’s” structure turns the current film adaptation of “Vineland” inside out — that would be “One Battle After Another,” whose thrilling middle more than redeems an only slightly off-key beginning and end. By contrast, “Shadow Ticket” offers a wildly seductive overture, a companionable but occasionally slack midsection, and a haunting sucker punch of an ending.

Mercifully, having already set “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice” largely in L.A., Pynchon still hasn’t lost his nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place where he lived and wrote for a while in the ’60s and ’70s. “Shadow Ticket” marks Pynchon’s third book to take place mostly on the other side of the world, but then — like so many New Yorkers — the novel finds its denouement in what Pynchon here calls “that old L.A. vacuum cleaner.”

Pynchon may not have lost a step in “Shadow Ticket,” but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now. His chapters end with a wink as often as a thunderclap. Sometimes he sounds almost rushed, peppering his narration with “so forths,” and making his readers play odds-or-evens to attribute long stretches of dialogue.

Maybe only on second reading do we realize that we’ve been reading a kind of Dear John letter to America. Nobody else writing today can begin a final chapter as elegiacally as Pynchon does here: “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman. … Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.”

Is this the Statue of Liberty, turning her back at last on the huddled masses she once welcomed? One character immediately suggests yes, another denies it. Either way, it’s a sobering way to introduce an ending as compassionately doom-laden as any Pynchon has ever given us.

Bear in mind, this is the same Pynchon who, a hundred pages earlier, has raffishly referred to sex as “doing the horizontal Peabody.” (Don’t bother Googling. This one’s his.) One early reviewer has compared “Shadow Ticket’s” shaggy charm to cold pizza, and readers will know what he means. Who’s ever sorry to see a flat box in the fridge the next morning?

For most of the way, though, “Shadow Ticket” may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before.

Thus, with a flourish, Pynchon types fin to his secret 20th century. But what does he do now? The man’s only 88. (Anybody who finds the phrase “only 88” amusing is welcome to laugh, but plenty of people thought Pynchon was hanging it up at 76 with “Bleeding Edge.” Plenty of people were mistaken.)

So, will Pynchon stand pat with his 20th century now secure, and take his winnings to the cashier’s window? Or will he, as anyone who roots for American literature might devoutly wish, hold out for blackjack?

Hit him.

Kipen is a contributor to Cambridge Pynchon in Context, a former NEA Director of Literature, a full-time member UCLA’s writing faculty and founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the just-birthed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project.

Four of America’s nominally closest allies — Britain, Australia, France and Canada — disgraced themselves this week by recognizing a so-called Palestinian state. In so doing, these nations didn’t merely betray their Western civilizational inheritance. They also rewarded terrorism, strengthened the genocidal ambitions of the global jihad and sent a chilling message: The path to international legitimacy runs not through the difficult work of building up a nation-state and engaging in diplomacy, but through mass murder, the weaponization of transnational institutions and the erasure of historical truth.

The Trump administration has already denounced this craven capitulation by our allies. There should be no recognition of an independent Palestinian state at this moment in history. Such a recognition is an abdication not only of basic human decency, but also of national interest and strategic sanity.

The global march toward recognition of an independent Palestinian state ignores decades of brutal facts on the ground as well as the specific tide of blood behind this latest surge. It was less than two years ago — Oct. 7, 2023 — that Hamas launched the most barbaric anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust: 6,000 terrorists poured into Israel, massacring roughly 1,200 innocent people in acts of unconscionable depravity — systematic rape, torture, kidnapping of babies. The terrorists livestreamed their own atrocities and dragged more than 250 hostages back to Gaza’s sprawling subterranean terror dungeons, where dozens remain to this day.

Many gullible liberal elites wish to believe that the radical jihadists of Hamas do not represent the broader Palestinian-Arab population, but that is a lie. Polls consistently show — and anecdotal videos of large street crowds consistently demonstrate — that Hamas and like-minded jihadist groups maintain overwhelming popularity in both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (what the international community refers to as the West Bank). These groups deserve shame, scorn and diplomatic rebuke — not fawning sympathy and United Nations red carpets.

The “government” in Gaza is a theocratic, Iranian-backed terror entity whose founding charter drips with unrepentant Jew-hatred and whose leaders routinely celebrate the wanton slaughter of innocent Israelis as triumphs of “resistance.” Along with the kleptocratic Palestinian Authority dictatorship in Ramallah, this is who, and what, Group of 7 powers like Britain and France have decided to reward with an imprimatur of legitimate statehood.

There is no meaningful “peace partner,” and no “two-state” vision to be realized, amid this horrible reality. There is only a sick cult of violence, lavishly funded from Tehran and eager for widespread international recognition as a stepping stone toward the destruction of Israel — and the broader West for which Israel is a proxy.

For decades, Western leaders maintained a straightforward position: There can be no recognition of a Palestinian state outside of direct negotiations with Israel, full demilitarization and the unqualified acceptance of Israel’s right to exist in secure borders as a distinctly Jewish state. The move at the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state torches that policy, declaring to the world that savagery and maximalist rejectionism are the currency of international legitimacy. By rewarding unilateralism and eschewing direct negotiation, these reckless Western governments have proved us international law skeptics right: The much-ballyhooed “peace process” agreements, such as the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, are not worth the paper they were written on.

In the wake of Oct. 7, these nations condemned the massacre, proclaimed solidarity with Israel and even briefly suspended funding for UNRWA, the U.N. aid group for the Palestinian territories, after agency employees were accused of participating in the attack. Yet, under the relentless drumbeat of anti-Israel activism and diplomatic cowardice, they have now chosen to rehabilitate the Palestinian-Arab nationalist cause — not after the leaders of the cause renounced terrorism, but while its most gruesome crimes remained unpunished, its hostages still languish in concentration camp-like squalor and its leaders still clamor for the annihilation of Israel.

Trump should clarify not only that America will not join in this dangerous, high-stakes charade, but also that there could very well be negative trade or diplomatic repercussions for countries that recognize an independent Palestinian terror state. The reason for such consequences would be simple: Undermining America’s strongest ally in the Middle East while simultaneously creating yet another new terror-friendly Islamist state directly harms the American national interest. There is no American national interest — none, zero — in the creation of a new Palestinian state in the heart of the Holy Land. On the contrary, as the Abraham Accords peace deals of 2020 proved, there is plenty of reason to embolden Israel. Contra liberal elites, it is this bolstering of Israel that fosters genuine regional peace.

The world must know: In the face of evil, America does not flinch, does not equivocate and does not reward those who murder our friends and threaten the Judeo-Christian West. As long as the Jewish state stands on the front lines of civilization, the United States must remain at its side, unwavering, unbowed and unashamed. Basic human decency and the American national interest both require nothing less.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer

Haiti’s transitional leader Laurent Saint-Cyr told the 80th UNGA Haiti faces a “modern-day Guernica,” with rampant killings, rapes, and mass hunger. He urged urgent, large-scale international action to defend democracy, protect children, and secure Haiti’s right to peace.

Christopher Nolan was elected president of the Directors Guild of America on Saturday, taking over leadership of the union that represents more than 19,500 members.

Nolan, 55, is among the most successful directors of his generation. His previous film, 2024’s “Oppenheimer,” made more than $975 million worldwide and won seven Academy Awards, including best director and best picture for Nolan. His next film, a star-studded adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” opens July 16, 2026, and sold out shows a year in advance.

In a statement, Nolan said, “To be elected President of the Directors Guild of America is one of the greatest honors of my career. Our industry is experiencing tremendous change, and I thank the Guild’s membership for entrusting me with this responsibility.”

Nolan takes over leadership of the guild from Lesli Linka Glatter, who has served two terms since 2021.

Nolan added in a statement, “I also want to thank President Glatter for her leadership over the past four years. I look forward to collaborating with her and the newly elected Board to achieve important creative and economic protections for our members.”

Also announced on Saturday were Laura Belsey as national vice-president and Paris Barclay, a former president of the DGA, as secretary-treasurer. Additional vice-presidents include Todd Holland, Ron Howard, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Seith Mann, Millicent Shelton and Lily Olszewski.

Nolan has been a member of the DGA since 2001 and served as a member of the national board since 2015. He is chair of the guild’s theatrical creative rights committee and its artificial intelligence committee.

He won the DGA award for outstanding directorial achievement in theatrical feature film for “Oppenheimer” and was previously nominated for his films “Dunkirk,” “Inception,” “The Dark Knight” and “Memento.”

Next year the DGA is expected to enter into new negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, who represent the studios and streaming services, over its basic agreement.

In a statement, the AMPTP said, “We look forward to partnering with President Nolan to address the issues most important to DGA members while ensuring our member companies remain competitive in a rapidly changing industry.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”

The decision comes 2½ months after President Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans adopted in July means 3 million people would not qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, also known as food stamps.

The decision to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Report was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In a news release Saturday, the USDA said the 2024 report, to be released Oct. 22, would be the last.

“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security,” the USDA said. ”The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.’’

The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that the U.S. poverty rate dipped from 11% in 2023 to 10.6% last year, before Trump took office.

Critics accused the administration of deliberately making it harder to measure hunger and assess the impact of its cuts to food stamps.

“Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said on social media. “This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.”

Wiseman writes for the Associated Press.

President Trump took his most extensive step yet toward overhauling the U.S. legal migration system, with a pair of proclamations that explicitly favor the wealthiest of the world’s prospective expat workers.

Trump on Friday imposed a $100,000 application fee on the widely used H-1B visa program, a move that would drastically increase the cost of visas heavily coveted by some of America’s largest companies — including in the Silicon Valley — seeking to bring in skilled workers from abroad.

The president also unveiled a “Trump Gold Card” visa program — under which, for the price of $1 million, immigrants could get U.S. residency. Businesses could buy residency permits for $2 million per employee, while a new “platinum”-level card set to be issued soon would cost $5 million and allow the holder to come to the U.S. for up to 270 days a year without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.

The restrictions and fees go into effect on Sunday.

It all amounts to a plan for a new gilded age of immigration to America, where those with the resources to invest are welcomed along with their wallets — while at the same time new barriers to entry are erected for those with lesser means and others seen as taking away jobs that could be occupied by U.S. citizens.

The pomp with which Trump announced the programs echoed the theme — over his right shoulder as he spoke to reporters in the Oval Office was an image of a gold card with his face on it along with traditional American images including a bald eagle, all in gold.

It’s a stark shift from America’s stance toward immigration historically, which welcomed those of various economic backgrounds coming to the country legally in search of a better life and more freedom.

‘Significant disadvantage’

Yet even while Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick mused about the prospects of a windfall for the U.S. Treasury that could total $100 billion or more, immigration attorneys cautioned that a move of this magnitude would cause major disruptions — several of them potentially very expensive to the U.S. economy.

Cleveland-based lawyer David Leopold warned that Trump’s H-1B changes, including the $100,000 fee, would “effectively kill the program.”

“Who’s going to pay $100,000 for a petition? Unless you want to make this an exclusive program for extremely rich people,” said Leopold, a partner at UB Greensfelder, whose clients include physicians on H-1Bs.

Accenture, Cognizant Technology and other IT consulting stocks hit session lows on Friday on the news of the visa fee.

“This is a senseless, terrible policy for financial services firms that makes American firms less competitive in the global market for talent,” said Alexis DuFresne, founder of recruiting firm Archer Search Partners.

DuFresne warned that while some mega funds won’t be daunted by the prospect of a new six-figure fee to import top talent, “it will have a substantial impact at the margins — with mid-sized firms, smaller firms, and up-and-coming, younger talent at a significant disadvantage.”

“We have had clients who have said in the past, prior to this announcement, that they do not want to have to sponsor a visa. We anticipate that that will become a more prevalent part of our conversations with clients and their goalposts going forward.”

A feature, not a bug

Some of that sentiment, if it comes to pass, may be seen by this administration as an asset rather than a problem.

Senior members of Trump’s administration have repeatedly complained — in blunt terms — that too many immigrants are taking American jobs.

In a fact sheet, the White House said American workers are being replaced with lower-paid foreign labor and called it a national security threat. The dynamic is suppressing wages and disincentivizing Americans from choosing careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the White House said.

Trump’s proclamation does anticipate a scenario whereby it can work around the new costs if they became a major burden, allowing for case-by-case exemptions if deemed to be in the national interest. That provision opens a potential window for certain companies or industries to seek an exception to the new fee.

Nonetheless, the intention to skew the H-1B program toward higher-paying jobs is clear.

Trump also plans to order the Labor secretary to undertake a rule-making process to revise prevailing-wage levels for the program, a move intended to limit the use of visas to undercut wages that would otherwise be paid to workers who are U.S. citizens.

Legal risks

Courts may also scrutinize the expansive new fees.

The H-1B $100,000 application fee in particular is at risk of being struck down as “excessive,” said Becky Fu von Trapp, an immigration lawyer in Stowe, Vt. That’s because federal law allows agencies to charge enough to recoup reasonable costs, and most work visa applications currently cost about $5,000. Even the most complex ones, for certain investment visas, usually run less than $10,000 in total.

The move could also incentivize technology firms and other companies reliant on foreign workers to set up offices outside the U.S. to avoid the application fee and associated hassles.

“Companies will reassess the need of who they really need to bring to U.S. and who can be based in Canada or Singapore, where they still have good technology infrastructure and can work remotely,” she said.

The move may also have a chilling effect on international students seeking admission to U.S. universities, since many of them hope to find jobs through the H-1B process upon graduation, she said.

Congress will also weigh in, Lutnick said, noting that lawmakers must also approve the planned platinum card program. He predicted that could happen later this year.

That’s easier said than done.

Republicans only narrowly control the House and the Senate. Immigration has been a particularly challenging issue to legislate for the GOP in years past, sparking clashes between the pro-business wing of the party that wants more high-skilled immigrants to come in, and another group far more skeptical of immigration as a whole who’ve sought to limit new arrivals no matter where they come from.

What’s more, Democrats are broadly furious about the president’s stepped-up immigration enforcement including aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in major U.S. cities including Los Angeles. As such, they have little incentive to cooperate without demanding wholesale reversals of Trump’s existing immigration policies, which he almost surely wouldn’t accept.

Wingrove and Soper write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg reporters Katia Porzecanski and Hema Parmar contributed to this report.

The abrupt suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC might seem like the least of our worries amid the shuttering of government agencies, the collapse of congressional checks on executive power and bands of ICE agents detaining people on the basis of race or language. But humor matters.

While the news media is sometimes referred to as the fourth estate, alongside the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, few think of stand-up comedy as a pillar of democracy. But jokes allow a society to mock itself, spotlight uncomfortable truths, bridge differences and say what cannot otherwise be said. Humor is a crucial bulwark of a free society. To play that role, comedians need the leeway to embarrass, provoke and take risks, sometimes crossing the line into offense.

In the wake of Kimmel’s suspension it is hard to imagine any mass market humorist poking fun with abandon that biting satire demands. One of the most powerful salves for people under stress, and a particular lifeline during the Trump era, is the ability to laugh at the ridiculous or unfathomable. Lowering a curtain on comedy will not only dim one of our country’s most treasured cultural forms, but also accelerate the dark turn of American democracy.

Dating back to pre-revolutionary times, political satire has been a mainstay of American culture. Rebellious colonists skewered British taxation policies, military blunders and parliamentary pomposities through plays, songs and cartoons that rallied others to the cause of independence and made mass mobilization fun. Benjamin Franklin’s 1773 “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” used irony to lampoon British policy, undermining authority while avoiding direct flouting of the era’s harsh sedition laws. The juxtaposition of a lighthearted format with a pointed commentary has marked America’s comedic tradition ever since, encompassing literary humorists such as Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, satirical magazines like Puck and MAD, political cartooning, vaudeville, radio satire, stand-up and the late-night juggernauts of variety shows, talk shows and, since 1975, “Saturday Night Live.”

While our 1st Amendment tradition has mostly protected satire over the years, it hasn’t prevented heavy-handed politicians from occasionally trying to silence their comedic critics. When Thomas Nast, known as the father of American political cartooning, took on New York City’s Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall political machine in the 1870s, Tweed reportedly said: “Let’s stop those damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me — my constituents can’t read, but damn it, they can see pictures.” But Nast kept up a furious pace of cartooning, hastening Tweed’s downfall on corruption charges.

Charlie Chaplin’s satire of capitalism and authoritarianism in films including “Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator,” alongside his outspoken politics and alleged communist ties, drew FBI surveillance. In 1952 his re-entry permit to the U.S. was revoked, effectively exiling him for nearly 20 years.

Around the world, autocrats have recognized the power of comedians to puncture preferred narratives, undermine authority and stoke dissent. The Nazi regime’s Reichskulturkammer, or chamber of culture, tightly censored cabaret and comedy. Cabaret performer Werner Finck opened a club in 1929 and dared Gestapo members in the audience to write down his every word. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the venue shuttered in 1935 and sent Finck and his colleagues to a six-week stint in a concentration camp. In the Soviet Union, jokes about Joseph Stalin or the Communist Party were treated as serious crimes against the state, warranting time in the gulag.

In the age of international television and social media the potency, and the perceived threat, of comedy has only grown. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky built national stature as a television satirist playing a fictional president. His predecessor’s government, which did all it could to derail its political opponents, did not see Zelensky coming; until it happened, few imagined his leap from sound stage to presidential podium. In 2013 the Cairo government issued an arrest warrant for television comic Bassem Youssef, known as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, for jokes about President Mohamed Morsi and Islam. He was hounded into exile and has lived in the U.S. for the last decade.

In an increasingly polarized America, the place of comedy has been under attack from all sides. A decade ago Jerry Seinfeld said he would no longer do shows on college campuses because of ferocious politically correct backlash against his jokes. In 2019 the New York Times announced it would no longer publish political cartoons after apologizing for an antisemitic caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This year the White House Correspondents’ Dinner canceled a planned appearance by comedian Amber Ruffin, the latest in a series of kerfuffles over controversial emcees of that event. The rising cost of reprisals, in the form of offended constituencies, online outrage and direct threats, is increasingly rendering humor too hot to handle.

The public threats issued by Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr against Kimmel and ABC, based upon comments by the comedian that were neither incendiary nor menacing, marks a sharp escalation in the battle against humor. The immediate capitulation of Disney, one of America’s largest and most revered corporations, is a shocking sign of just how quickly private, independent institutions are melting down under heated threat by a vindictive administration. If a comedian as mainstream as Jimmy Kimmel is not safe from silencing, it is hard to imagine who is.

In helping audiences understand what is happening around them and reckon with their fears, comedy is both a collective coping mechanism and a catalyst for unfettered, clear-eyed thought. Autocrats around the world understand this.

Suzanne Nossel is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy and international order at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.”

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Kamala Harris says she would have picked Pete Buttigieg as her running mate last year but America wasn’t ready for the pairing, according to an excerpt of her new book.

Harris writes in an excerpt of “107 Days” published Wednesday in The Atlantic that former President Biden’s transportation secretary was her “first choice,” adding that he “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”

“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk,” she writes.

Her thoughts on selecting a running mate come as potential 2028 contenders begin traveling the U.S. in the early days of the second Trump administration.

In the book excerpt, she writes about her love of working with Buttigieg and her friendship with him and his husband, but that the two of them on the Democratic ticket would have been too risky.

“And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness,” she writes.

It wasn’t immediately clear at what point she decided against Buttigieg, a former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and former intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves. Buttigieg emerged as a national political figure during his 2020 presidential run in which he finished atop the Iowa caucuses.

The Associated Press didn’t immediately hear back from a spokesperson for Buttigieg.

After Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024 following a disastrous debate performance, Harris was left to head up the Democratic ticket.

She picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate after his attack line against former President Donald Trump and his running mate, then-Ohio Sen. JD Vance — “These guys are just weird” — spread widely. They ultimately lost.

Harris’ book, whose title is referencing the length of her condensed presidential campaign, is set to be published by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday.

Comics have long been on the front lines of democracy, the canary in the cat’s mouth, Looney Tunes style, when it comes to free speech being swallowed by regressive politics.

So Jimmy Kimmel is in good company, though he may not like this particular historical party: Zero Mostel; Philip Loeb; even Lenny Bruce, who claimed, after being watched by the FBI and backroom blacklisted, that he was less a comic and more “the surgeon with the scalpel for false values.”

During that era of McCarthyism in the 1950s (yes, I know Bruce’s troubles came later), America endured an attack on our 1st Amendment right to make fun of who we want, how we want — and survived — though careers and even lives were lost.

Maybe we aren’t yet at the point of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, but the moment is feeling grim.

Wake up, Los Angeles. This isn’t a Jimmy Kimmel problem. This is a Los Angeles problem.

This is about punishing people who speak out. It’s about silencing dissent. It’s about misusing government power to go after enemies. You don’t need to agree with Kimmel’s politics to see where this is going.

For a while, during Trump 2.0, the ire of the right was aimed at California in general and San Francisco in particular, that historical lefty bastion that, with its drug culture, openly LBGTQ+ ethos and Pelosi-Newsom political dynasty, seemed to make it the perfect example of what some consider society’s failures.

But really, the difficulty with hating San Francisco is that it doesn’t care. It’s a city that has long acknowledged, even flaunted, America’s discomfort with it. That’s why the infamous newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it “Baghdad by the Bay” more than 80 years ago, when the town had already fully embraced its outsider status.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has never considered itself a problem. Mostly, we’re too caught up in our own lives, through survival or striving, to think about what others think of our messy, vibrant, complicated city. Add to that, Angelenos don’t often think of themselves as a singular identity. There are a million different L.A.s for the more than 9 million people who live in our sprawling county.

But to the rest of America, L.A. is increasingly a specific reality, a place that, like San Francisco once did, embodies all that is wrong for a certain slice of the American right.

It was not happenstance that President Trump chose L.A. as the first stop for his National Guard tour, or that ICE’s roving patrols are on our streets. It’s not bad luck or even bad decisions that is driving the push to destroy UCLA as we know it.

And it’s really not what Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk that got him pulled, because it truth, his statements were far from the most offensive that have been uttered on either side of the political spectrum.

In fact, he wasn’t talking about Kirk, but about his alleged killer and how in the immediate aftermath, there was endless speculation about his political beliefs. Turns out that Kimmel wrongly insinuated the suspect was conservative, though all of us will likely have to wait until the trial to gain a full understanding of the evidence.

“The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, before making fun of Trump’s response to the horrific killing.

You can support what Kimmel said or be deeply offended by it. But it is rich for the people who just a few years ago were saying liberal “cancel culture” was ruining America to adopt the same tactics.

If you need proof that this is more about control than content, look no further than Trump’s social media post on the issue, which directly encourages NBC to fire its own late-night hosts, who have made their share of digs at the president as well.

“Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Trump wrote.

This is about making an example of America’s most vibrant and inclusive city, and the celebrity icons who dare to diss — the place that exemplifies better than any other what freedom looks like, lives like, jokes like.

If a Kimmel can fall so easily, what does that mean the career of Hannah Einbinder, who shouted out a “free Palestine” at the Emmys? Will there be a quiet fear of hiring her?

What does it mean for a union leader like David Huerta, who is still facing charges after being detained at an immigration protest? Will people think twice before joining a demonstration?

What does it mean for you? The yous who live lives of expansiveness and inclusion. The yous who have forged your own path, made your own way, broken the boundaries of traditional society whether through your choices on who to love, what country to call your own, how to think of your identity or nurture your soul.

You, Los Angeles, with your California dreams and anything-goes attitude, are the living embodiment of everything that needs to be crushed.

I am not trying to send you into an anxiety spiral, but it’s important to understand what we stand to lose if civil rights continue to erode.

Kimmel having his speech censored is in league with our immigrant neighbors being rounded up and detained; the federal government financially pressuring doctors into dropping care for transgender patients, and the University of California being forced to turn over the names of staff and students it may have a beef with.

Being swept up by ICE may seem vastly different than a millionaire celebrity losing his show, but they are all the weaponization of government against its people.

It was Disney, not Donald Trump, who took action against Kimmel. But Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to “take action” if ABC did not sounds a lot like the way the White House talks about Washington, Oakland and so many other blue cities, L.A. at the top of the list.

Our Black mayor. Our Latino senator and representatives. Our 1 million undocumented residents. Our nearly 10% of the adult population identifies as LGBTQ+. Our comics, musicians, actors and writers who have long pushed us to see the world in new, often difficult, ways.

Many of us are here because other places didn’t want us, didn’t understand us, tried to hold us back. (I am in Sacramento now, but remain an Angeleno at heart.) We came here, to California and Los Angeles, for the protection this state and city offers.

But now it needs our protection.

However this assault on democracy comes, we are all Jimmy Kimmel — we are all at risk. The very nature of this place is under siege, and standing together across the many fronts of these attacks is our best defense.

Seeing that they are all one attack — whether it is against a celebrity, a car wash worker or our entire city — is critical.

“Our democracy is not self-executing,” former President Obama said recently. “It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.”

So here we are, L.A., in a moment that requires fortitude, requires insight, requires us to stand up and say the most ridiculous thing that has every been said in a town full of absurdity:

I am Jimmy Kimmel, and I will not be silent.

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s killing, conservatives have embraced a phenomenon they previously called toxic: cancel culture.

The impulse to cancel some voices this past week is understandable: Celebrating murder is cruel. It’s gross. It’s wrong. But the irony is impossible to miss: Conservatives, who long treated cancel culture as an affront to the 1st Amendment spirit of open discourse, are now calling for people to lose their jobs and their livelihoods, all because of something stupid they said on the internet.

This is the same issue that drove numerous stand-up comedians, young men, podcasters and Silicon Valley tech bros into the arms of Donald Trump in 2024. But now, in an amazing turn of events, conservatives are now aping the progressive scolds and speech cops, only with red hats.

Actually, their version is worse. The left’s “accountability culture” mob might have been overbearing, but their agenda was (with a few notable exceptions) largely driven by hall monitors. Today’s “woke right” is executing things in a more overt, efficient and official manner — which for the record means it can violate not just the spirit of the 1st Amendment but the actual, you know … 1st Amendment.

As a case in point, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States of America, recently told Kirk’s radio audience: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”

Which raises the question, what if their employer is the government? That would be awkward. But no problem! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly telling staff to track down soldiers guilty of wrongspeak. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) is trying to get teachers terminated, tweeting: “We don’t fund hate. We fire it” — which feels like the sort of slogan Mao might have had printed on a T-shirt.

And speaking of printers, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi has warned that the government can “prosecute” any professional printer who refuses to “print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil.” She also pledged to “absolutely target” anyone who targets anyone with “hate speech.”

Not long ago, progressives insisted bakers must bake cakes for gay weddings, and now a U.S. attorney general from a Republican administration is insisting that printers must print images for vigils. Funny how the tables turn.

Then, there’s the so-called Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, which claims to have a searchable list of tens of thousands of people who posted mean tweets after Kirk’s death. Collectively, this purge campaign seems to be working. A lot of scalps have already been claimed, including those of prominent pundits and late night host Jimmy Kimmel (who was suspended after making remarks about the motives of Kirk’s killer).

But — let’s be clear — opposition to cancel culture is merely the latest principle that Trump-era Republicans have conveniently abandoned. Indeed, almost every tenet that conservatives held dear a decade ago has been reversed.

And people are starting to notice. Oregon state Rep. Cyrus Javadi recently switched parties, citing the GOP’s abandonment of principles like “limited government, fiscal responsibility, free speech, free trade, and, above all, the rule of law.”

He has a point. Trump’s America now owns a chunk of U.S. chipmaker Intel (so much for small government), spends like a drunken sailor, slaps tariffs on everything that moves (bye-bye, free trade) and ignores laws he doesn’t like — most recently, the TikTok sell-off mandate that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, which Trump decided to treat like a menu item he didn’t order — until he found a suitable buyer.

But it’s not just normie Republicans who are worried about Trump diverting from the Reagan-Bush playbook.

Comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon recently observed that the Trump agenda looks suspiciously like the dystopia that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used to warn us about between colloidal silver ads: “Military in the street, the FEMA camp, the tech company that monitors everything, the surveillance. This is all of that.”

So why is this happening? Why the contortions? I’m reminded of an old story Rush Limbaugh used to tell about the late actor Ron Silver.

As the story goes, Silver went to Bill Clinton’s first inauguration as a bleeding-heart liberal and was horrified by the military flyover. And then he realized, “Those are our planes now.”

That’s where conservatives are when it comes to cancel culture. They’ve finally realized that this is their cancel culture now.

And maybe that’s the grubby little secret about politics in the Trump era. Almost nobody cares about values or morals — or “principles” — anymore. Free speech, limited government, fiscal restraint — these are all rules for thee, but not for me.

Cancel culture wasn’t rejected, it was just co-opted. So go ahead. Drop a dime. See something, say something. Big Brother is watching.

Irony, meet guillotine.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Bank of America (BAC 0.71%) is one of the largest banks in the world, operating in the U.S. and more than 35 countries worldwide. By market cap, it’s the second-most valuable bank in the world, trailing only JPMorgan Chase. In the past five years, Bank of America has outperformed the S&P 500, with total returns close to 125% in that span, compared to the index’s 112% (through Sept. 12).

Even with Bank of America’s market-beating returns over the past five years, the next five years could continue the same momentum. The reason comes down to one factor: its consumer investment business.

Image source: Getty Images.

The consumer investment business involves standard brokerage accounts, wealth management, and financial advisory services. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Bank of America’s consumer investment assets crossed the $500 billion mark for the first time in the company’s history.

The company noted that this amount has doubled every five years, and it expects to hit $1 trillion in the next five years. In the second quarter of this year, it reached around $540 billion (up 13% year over year).

Hitting this mark won’t guarantee that Bank of America’s stock will soar (nothing guarantees that), but the growth of its consumer investment business means it will earn much more fee-based income and see higher margins than from other revenue sources like traditional lending. This should be a nice boost to Bank of America’s profitability, especially as we anticipate interest rates getting lowered over the next few years, which could impact the bank’s main revenue source.

A stunning Love Island UK star has been lined up as a bombshell for season 2 of US Games. 

Two Brit Love Islanders have already been announced for the show and now a third will be added to the mix in a bid for her to crack America. 

5

5

Irish lass Catherine Agbaje, 25, is taking another shot at love and money as she enters the villa for a third time.

The brunette bombshell first appeared on the ITV2 dating show back in 2023 but failed to find love on the show.

During her first time in the villa Catherine coupled up with Zachariah Noble, Scott van der Sluis and Elom Ahlijah-Wilson.

While she left the villa with Elom, Catherine was left heartbroken when things didn’t work out with Scott.

She went back for a second time on All Stars and met Omar Nyame and the two coupled up eventually exiting the show together. 

Omar and Catherine managed to reach the final during their stint, finishing in fourth place. 

But, the couple failed to make it work once the show ended and they went back to their normal lives.

Now Catherine will be trying her luck in Love Island Games as a bombshell, an insider told us: “Catherine has flown out to Fiji and is in holding right now – she’s being lined up as a bombshell for Love Island Games. 

“She didn’t find love the first two times around on the ITV show – but wants to find a man and crack the US this time!”

Catherine’s rep and Peacock have been contacted for comment.

Series two of Love Island Games kicks off on Wednesday, September 16 and UK viewers will recognise a few of those taking part. 

The spin-off will bring together iconic Islanders from the UK, USA, France, Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands. 

Lucinda Strafford, who shot to fame on series seven of the UK version before appearing in Love Island Australia series five, and series 10’s Tyrique Hyde will both be part of the starting line-up. 

But Harriett Blackmore – from series 11 and All Stars series two – and Toby Aromolaran, who first appeared on the same series as Lucinda before returning for the first All Stars spin-off in 2023, will make a splash with late entrances. 

Meanwhile, fellow Islander and All Stars winner Gabby Allen has also signed up for the Games spin-off.

She agreed to take part in the upcoming series filmed in the US after her split from Casey O’Gorman.

5

5

5

With this administration, it’s another day, another unwinnable fight. All with a real war coming over the horizon.

President Trump campaigned on ending the “forever wars,” but he’s since launched two new ones: a shooting war on drugs in the Caribbean and a symbolic war on crime in America’s cities. Neither will ever end and both will tie our military down, just as the most potent threat America’s ever known is rising and readying to fight.

Let’s start with the real war. China is America’s only real competitor, an adversary far more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was. President Xi Jinping has directed his military to be able to take Taiwan by 2027, and they’re nearly set. U.S. Admiral Sam Paparo, America’s military commander in the Pacific, testified in the spring that this activity against Taiwan grew 300% in 2024. These aggressive actions, he said, are “not just exercises; they are rehearsals,” adding that “we must be ready today.” China’s recent military parade put a missile-shaped exclamation on Paparo’s point.

But America’s not preparing for real war right now. And because the world knows that America’s not preparing, America’s not deterring.

Instead we’re sending the Navy to blow up a drug dealer and deploying the National Guard to walk around Los Angeles, Washington and maybe Chicago. These distractions degrade military readiness at a time when we need all the ready we can get.

Last week, the Trump administration killed 11 people when it struck a four-engine speedboat in the southern Caribbean. The president said it was transporting drugs from Venezuela to the U.S. There’s much to consider: whether the strike was legally justified, or possibly illegal murder; or whether the administration should have notified and gotten authorization from Congress.

Setting those aside for the moment, let’s focus on whether a war on drugs in the Caribbean is a prudent use of military assets. The Pentagon sent to the region three guided-missile destroyers (around 1,000 sailors), an Amphibious Readiness Group (4,500 sailors) and a Marine Expeditionary Unit (2,200 Marines), along with surveillance planes, special forces assets, and a submarine. All to destroy a single speedboat? One that may or may not have been carrying a few kilograms of cocaine, or may have been carrying people on a human smuggling run.

Last year, just doing its job, American law enforcement seized 63 metric tons of cocaine. At that rate, the same day as the strike, we could assume that American law enforcement seized about 172 kilograms of cocaine alone, all without an additional armada.

There’s a reason we don’t use blowtorches for brain surgery and knives with soup bowls. They don’t work. Neither will sending thousands and thousands of sailors and Marines — at enormous cost in taxpayer money and troop training — to fight a second war on drugs, one boat at a time.

Consider the American military’s most recent history with drug interdiction. We wanted drug production to go down in Afghanistan, but it tripled in our two decades there. Or take it from Nixon: Wars on drugs don’t end well. Because they simply don’t end.

Neither will the new symbolic war on crime in U.S. cities. Again, costly, when one considers we already have a tool in the box for crime. The National Guard and Marine deployment to Los Angeles cost America $120 million for approximately 5,000 troops over 60 days (some 300 remain today). Washington, as a federal city, has taken on approximately half those used in California, which brings the total bill closer to $200 million for these unnecessary additional measures.

But what’s worse, far worse, is what the soldiers are doing. CNN recently reported that one soldier’s mission in Washington is to walk around Chinatown from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. every day. Another from Mississippi said she’d been routinely cursed at. Yet another guardsman from Louisiana admitted confusion about what the military was even there to do.

The president has said he wants Chicago to be next (“Chipocalypse Now”). The city’s mayor and the governor of Illinois have stood against such a move. It appears the people of Chicago are considering even stronger opposition. This summer a research center at the University of Chicago found that 60% did not approve of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. It also found that 28% would “attend a protest against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, even if it became violent.”

With Chicago’s 2.5 million people, even if the survey counted too many tough talkers — if only 10% of the citizens there were willing to physically contest a deployment that was part of an immigration enforcement roundup — that’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands against handfuls of troops. Not one American soldier ever signed up to police Chicago.

Back in Washington on Friday, President Trump signed an executive order changing the Department of Defense’s title to the “Department of War” in large part because he believes it will get the country back to fighting “to win.” But when you start a new war on drugs and a new war on crime, when you send the ax instead of the scalpel — you’ll never win. You’re just signing America up for two more forever wars, two more unwinnable fights.

And the only one playing to win is Beijing.

ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” @MLCavanaugh

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and the conservative movement were stunned Wednesday by the shooting of Charlie Kirk, a disruptive leader in GOP politics who accomplished what was once thought a pipe dream, expanding Republican ranks among America’s youth.

Inside the White House, senior officials that had worked closely alongside Kirk throughout much of their careers reacted with shock. It was a moment of political violence reminiscent of the repeated attempts on Donald Trump’s life during the 2024 presidential campaign, one official told The Times.

“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”

Kirk, a founder of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in recruiting young Americans on college campuses to GOP voter rolls, making himself an indispensable part of Republican campaigns down ballot across the country. That mission made his shooting on a college campus in Utah all the more poignant to his friends and allies, who reacted with dismay at videos of the shooting circulating online.

His impact, helping to increase support among 18- to 24-year-old voters for Republican candidates by double-digit margins in just four years, has been credited by Republican operatives as driving the party’s victories last year, allowing the GOP to retake the House, Senate and the presidency.

Democrats have recognized his prowess, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting him on his podcast earlier this year in an appeal to young, predominantly male voters lost by the Democrats in recent years.

“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” Newsom said on X in response to the news.

As videos of the shooting circulated online, a number of prominent Republicans, including senior members of the Trump administration, reacted to the news by asking the public to pray for the young activist.

“Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said federal agents were at the scene of the shooting in Utah. FBI Director Kash Patel added the FBI will be helping with the investigation.

Wilner reported from Washington, Ceballos from Tallahassee, Fla.

SEOUL — The immigration raid that snatched up hundreds of South Koreans last week sent a disconcerting message to companies in South Korea and elsewhere: America wants your investment, but don’t expect special treatment.

Images of employees being shackled and detained like criminals have outraged many South Koreans. The fallout is already being felt in delays to some big investment projects, auto industry executives and analysts said. Some predicted that it could also make some companies think twice about investing in the U.S. at all.

“Companies cannot afford to not be more cautious about investing in the U.S. in the future,” said Lee Ho-guen, an auto industry expert at Daeduk University, “In the long run, especially if things get worse, this could make car companies turn away from the U.S. market and more toward other places like Latin America, Europe or the Middle East.”

The raid last week, in which more than 300 South Korean nationals were detained, targeted a factory site in Ellabell, Ga,. owned by HL-GA Battery Company, a joint venture between Hyundai and South Korean battery-maker LG Energy Solutions to supply batteries for EVs. The Georgia factory is also expected to supply batteries for Kia, which is part of the Hyundai Motor Group. Kia has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its factory in West Point, Ga.

“This situation highlights the competing policy priorities of the Trump administration and has many in Asia scratching their heads, asking, ‘Which is more important to America? Immigration raids or attracting high-quality foreign investment?” said Tami Overby, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea. “Images of hundreds of Korean workers being treated like criminals are playing all over Asia and don’t match President Trump’s vision to bring high-quality, advanced manufacturing back to America.”

A protester wears a mask of President Trump at a rally Tuesday in Seoul protesting the detention of South Korean workers in Georgia. The signs call for “immediate releases and Trump apology.”

(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)

South Korea is one of the U.S.’ biggest trading partners, with the two countries exchanging $242.5 billion in goods and services last year. The U.S. is the leading destination for South Korea’s overseas investments, receiving $26 billion last year, according to South Korea’s Finance Ministry.

Trump is banking on ambitious projects like the one raided in Georgia to revive American manufacturing.

Hyundai is one of the South Korean companies with the largest commitments to the U.S. It has invested around $20 billion since entering the market in the 1980s. It sold 836,802 cars in the U.S. last year.

California is one of its largest markets, with more than 70 dealerships.

Earlier this year, the company announced an additional $26 billion to build a new steel mill in Louisiana and upgrade its existing auto plants.

Hyundai’s expansion plans were part of the $150-billion pledge South Korea made last month to help convince President Trump to set tariffs on Korean products at 15% instead of the 25% he had earlier announced.

Samsung Electronics announced that it would invest $37 billion to construct a semiconductor factory in Texas. Similarly large sums are expected from South Korean shipbuilders.

Analysts and executives say the recent raid is making companies feel exposed, all the more so because U.S. officials have indicated that more crackdowns are coming.

“We’re going to do more worksite enforcement operations,” White House border advisor Tom Homan said on Sunday. “No one hires an illegal alien out of the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, undercut the competition that hires U.S. citizen employees.”

Many South Korean companies have banned all work-related travel to the U.S. or are recalling personnel already there, according to local media reports. Construction work on at least 22 U.S. factory sites has reportedly been halted.

The newspaper Korea Economic Daily reported on Monday that 10 out of the 14 companies it contacted said they were considering adjusting their projects in the U.S. due to the Georgia raids.

It is a significant problem for the big planned projects, analysts say. South Korean companies involved in U.S. manufacturing projects say they need to bring their own engineering teams to get the factories up and running, but obtaining proper work visas for them is difficult and time-consuming. The option often used to get around this problem is an illegal shortcut like using the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a non-work permit that allows tourists to stay in the country for up to 90 days.

Unlike countries such as Singapore or Mexico, South Korea doesn’t have a deal with Washington that guarantees work visas for specialized workers.

“The U.S. keeps calling for more investments into the country. But no matter how many people we end up hiring locally later, there is no way around bringing in South Korean experts to get things off the ground,” said a manager at a subcontractor for LG Energy Solution, who asked not to be named. “But now we can no longer use ESTAs like we did in the past.”

Trump pointed to the problem on Truth Social, posting that he will try to make it easier for South Korean companies to bring in the people they need, but reminding them to “please respect our Nation’s Immigration Laws.”

“Your Investments are welcome, and we encourage you to LEGALLY bring your very smart people … and we will make it quickly and legally possible for you to do so,” the post said.

Sydney Seiler, senior advisor and Korea chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the timing of the raids was an “irritant” but that South Korean companies would eventually adjust.

“Rectifying that is a challenge for all involved, the companies, the embassies who issue visas, etc.,” Seiler said, adding that the raids will make other companies be more careful in the future.

WASHINGTON — Members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s family are calling for him to step down as Health secretary following a contentious congressional hearing this past week, during which the Trump Cabinet official faced bipartisan questioning about his tumultuous leadership of federal health agencies.

Kennedy’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, and his nephew, Joseph P. Kennedy III, issued scathing statements Friday, calling for him to resign as head of the Health and Human Services Department.

The calls from the prominent Democratic family came a day after Kennedy defended his recent efforts to roll back COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and fire high-level officials at the Centers for Disease Control during a three-hour Senate hearing.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American,” Joseph P. Kennedy III said in a post on X. The former congressman added: “None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting.” His aunt echoed those claims, saying that “medical decisions belong in the hands of trained and licensed professionals, not incompetent and misguided leadership.”

This is not the first time Kennedy has been the subject of his family’s ire. Several of his relatives had objected to his presidential run in the last campaign, while others wrote to senators earlier this year calling for them to reject his nomination to be President Trump’s Health secretary given his anti-vaccine views they considered disqualifying.

Kennedy, a longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement, has spent the last seven months implementing his once-niche, grassroots movement at the highest level of America’s public health system. The sweeping changes to the agencies tasked with public health policy and scientific research have resulted in thousands of layoffs and the remaking of vaccine guidelines.

The moves — some of which contradict assurances he made during his confirmation hearings — have rattled medical groups and officials in several Democratic-led states, which have responded with their own vaccine advice.

WASHINGTON — The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet on the planet, capable of waging electronic warfare, of dropping nuclear weapons, of evading the surveillance and missile defenses of America’s most fearsome enemies at supersonic speeds.

Ten of them are being deployed by a newly branded War Department to Puerto Rico to combat drug traffickers in dinghies.

It is the latest example of the Trump administration using disproportionate military force to supplement, or substitute for, traditional law enforcement operations — first at home on the streets of U.S. cities and now overseas, where the president has labeled multiple drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has vowed a “tough” response.

On Tuesday, that response began with an inaugural “kinetic strike” targeting a small vessel in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics and 11 members of Tren de Aragua, one of the Venezuelan gangs President Trump has designated a terrorist group. Legally designating a gang or cartel as a terrorist entity ostensibly gives the president greater legal cover to conduct lethal strikes on targets.

The operation follows Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for operations with dubious justifications, as well as threats of similar actions in San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, moves that a federal judge said last week amount to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

Trump has referred to both problems — urban crime and drug trafficking — as interlinked and out of control. But U.S. service members have no training in local law or drug enforcement. And experts question a strategy that has been tried before, both by the United States and regional governments, of launching a war against drugs only to drive leaders in the trade to militarize themselves.

U.S. drug policy “has always been semi-militarized,” said Jeremy Adelman, director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. Trump’s latest actions simply make more explicit the erasure of a line “that separates law enforcement from warfare.”

“One side effect of all this is that other countries are watching,” Adelman said. “By turning law enforcement over to the military — as the White House is also doing domestically — what’s to stop other countries from doing the same in international waters?

“Fishermen in the South China Sea should be worried,” he added.

The Trump administration has not provided further details on the 11 people killed in the boat strike. But officials said the departure of a drug vessel from Venezuela makes Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictatorial president labeled by the White House as a top drug kingpin, indirectly responsible.

“Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he’s a fugitive of American justice,” Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and national security advisor, said on a tour of the region Thursday, citing a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City.

(Hector Vivas / Getty Images)

The president’s war on drug cartels will continue, Rubio said, adding that regional governments “will help us find these people and blow them up.”

Maduro has warned the strike indicates that Washington seeks regime change in Caracas. The Venezuelan military flew two aircraft near a U.S. vessel in international waters Thursday night, prompting an angry response from Pentagon officials and Trump to direct his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “do what you want to do” in response.

“Despite how dangerous this performance could be, because of its political consequences, it can’t be taken seriously as a drug policy,” said Lina Britto, an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean at Northwestern University with a focus on the history of the drug trade. “It lacks rigorousness in the analysis of how drug trafficking operates in the hemisphere.”

Most drugs entering the U.S. homeland from South America arrive in shipping containers, submarines and more efficient modes of transportation than speedboats — and primarily come through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, Britto said.

Trump has flirted with military strikes on drug cartels since the start of his second term, working with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to coordinate drone strikes over Mexican territory for surveillance of cartel activity.

But Sheinbaum has ruled out the use of force against cartels, or the deployment of U.S. forces within Mexico to combat them, warning that U.S. military action would violate Mexican sovereignty and upend collaboration between the two close-knit trade and security partners.

In comparison, Venezuela offers Trump a cleaner opportunity to test the use of force against drug cartels, with diplomatic ties between the two governments at a nadir. But a war with Maduro over drugs could create unexpected problems for the Trump administration, setting off a rare military conflict in a placid region and fueling further instability in a country that, over the last decade, already set off the world’s largest refugee crisis.

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump’s use of foreign terrorist designations changes the rules of engagement in ways that allow for action “where law enforcement solutions failed in the past.”

“What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in real time,” Berg said. “Many of Latin America’s most significant criminal organizations are now designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration is demonstrating that this is not only rhetorical.”

But Paul Gootenberg, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug,” characterized Trump’s military operation as a “simplistic” approach to complex social problems.

“This is more a performative attack on the Venezuelan regime than a serious attempt at drug policy,” Gootenberg said.

“Militarized drug policy is nothing new — it was tried and intensified in various ways from the mid-1980s through 2000s, oftentimes under U.S. Southern Command,” he added. “The whole range and levels of ‘war on drugs’ was a long, unmitigated policy failure, according to the vast, vast majority of drug experts.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.