building

As both the Navy and the USAF were racing to field a new generation of advanced tactical jets, the seagoing service’s program hit a wall. A major reason behind this from the Pentagon was concern that the U.S. industrial base could not handle simultaneous final development and production of two extremely complex new fighter aircraft. This was a controversial justification that many had a hard time swallowing. The Navy’s program, dubbed F/A-XX, is supposedly back on and a down-select on who will build it is coming soon, but that concern appears to linger among at least one of the Department of War’s top acquisition officials.

Though he remains confident that the U.S. Air Force F-47 sixth-generation fighter will fly in the next two years, Air Force Gen. Dale R. White, Director, Critical Major Weapon Systems — the service’s leading weapons procurement advisor — remains concerned about the overall capacity of industry to provide the military with the aircraft it needs, including two new fighters. His comments were in response to questions about the Navy’s challenges in building its own sixth-gen fighter alongside F-47.

The concerns are “not unique” to the F-47 or the Navy’s program but the problem exists to various degrees across the industrial base too, White told reporters Tuesday during a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Conference that TWZ is attending.

White has a dual-hatted role, serving as the Pentagon’s top weapon’s procurement officer and as the senior acquisition advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force for all acquisition matters.

“We’re seeing it in multiple platforms,” said White, who did not elaborate. “And so what we’re having to do is, at some point, we’re having to make some trade space in between some of these.”

“I see Boeing making smart investments,” White said of the prime contractor of the F-47, selected for the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) ‘fighter’ initiative. “They have a lot of CAPEX [capital expenditure] that they’re pouring in, but we have to get through the process of the design piece, getting that completed and closed out. Then we all hit some major milestones with things like flight tests and software and those things.”

“Really, it’s just being able to manage the overall resourcing as it relates to number one, people resources,” the general added. “Number two, when you start getting into the production conversation, do we have enough capacity to be able to produce at that rate? And so, by and large, I have concerns. I have concerns about the capacity of our industrial base, but they are not unique to F-47 or to any program.”

As for the F-47, White said the program “continues to progress exceptionally well.”

“As you know, many, many years in tech maturation and risk reduction gave us a tremendous head start on this program,” White explained. “Extremely proud of what the team has done, what they continue to do each and every day. We are still absolutely on path to be able to hit the mark of flying within this administration. So we see no issues in front of us right now.”

While the first example of the F-47 has been in production for about a year now, the Navy has yet to even select a prime contractor for its next generation fighter. The current competitors for the F/A-XX are Boeing and Northrop Grumman. A decision was supposed to have been made by last month.

“The F/A-XX program remains on track, and we have no further information to provide at this time,” a Navy official told us last week.

Despite intervention from Congress, the next-generation carrier-based fighter has remained in question since the Pentagon moved to effectively shelve the program last year.

In response to a question from TWZ earlier this year, the Chief of Naval Operations acknowledged the uncertainty over the F/A-XX program.

“One of the challenges we’re seeing is, not only [are] our peer competitors improving their capability for anti-air, either air-to-air or surface-to-air, but the lower cost of entry of very capable weapons is also making more players on the field in which that level of stealth and technology is required,” Adm. Daryl Caudle told us back in April at the Sea-Air-Space 2026 exposition. “So this is not about the need for a peer adversary. This is just having an aircraft that can operate with a level of uncertainty and with the acceptable level of risk.”

With Boeing as a finalist, it is also possible that F/A-XX could be a variant of the F-47. As we noted in a past story, the Boeing render for its F/A-XX concept is remarkably similar to artwork for its F-47.

WASHINGTON — The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees is planning to propose adding President Trump’s name to the facility’s exterior in recognition of his saving the building from its “precarious fiscal position,” according to a new court filing in a suit aimed at blocking the move.

It’s the latest development in the case revolving around adding the president’s name to the exterior of the cultural and arts facility that sits along the Potomac River in Washington and reflects the Trump-aligned board’s efforts to honor the president.

The new information came out of a court filing made by Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex-officio member of the board. Beatty, who has led an effort to block Trump from putting his name on the building, said in a filing she was alerting the court to the proposal because it could implicate a pending decision before the court.

Both the court and the Kennedy Center board are expected to hold meetings Tuesday.

Beatty’s filing includes two exhibits. One is a draft vote to shut the center down, asserting the building is unsafe for occupancy. That assertion incorrectly cites a consulting group’s finding, “which expressly disclaimed providing any such opinion,” according to Beatty.

The other document asserts the center faces dire financial straits. It specifically calls for Trump’s name to be placed in marble beneath the name of the center on the building’s exterior. It offers 10 options for a possible inscription, including “Renovation and endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” Another proposes: “With Gratitude for Support from President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

“The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center,” the board wrote in the proposed resolution.

Trump has spent much of his second term reshaping Washington, demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom and planning a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery as well as a renovated golf course along the Potomac River.

The Kennedy Center has been a stumbling block in that effort after a judge ruled in May that Trump’s name was added to the building illegally, ordering it to be removed.

Trump and his allies, however, have continued to fight the ruling.

The board voted last month to inscribe his name on the venue’s facade to read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.”

If the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reached $100 million, another inscription would be added reading: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

Catalini writes for the Associated Press.

At age 14, Glen Walsh started surfing because of a crush. He was a boogie boarder until the object of his adoration told him, “What are you riding that for? You should be surfing. Get a surfboard.” So, he did. “I was terrible at it, but I kept going. I was super persistent.”

That resilience proved useful. As a gay teenager in Santa Monica, Walsh was often called slurs on the Venice Pier. “You think you’re like a unicorn — a weirdo,” he says. He felt at odds with the local surf community. To Walsh, surfing was “super straight, very hypermasculine, very intimidating.” Yet his love of the ocean — and sure, crush-worthy surfers — kept him returning to the water. “I wanted to be around them, and surf with them,” he says.

When Instagram launched in 2010, Walsh began posting one of his early loves — only this time, it was morning surf conditions. Every morning, before surfers paddled out, the longtime Venice resident described swells, winds and surf conditions to his followers, becoming for some the town’s trusted surf chronicler.

A “Surf Swim” sign greets beachgoers at Venice Beach — a stretch of coast where daily surf reports and grassroots organizing have helped break down traditional surf stereotypes.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

His videos combined informative dispatches with the laid-back vibe of surfer ASMR. “Light offshore wind. Clean, glassy barrels,” he declares softly to the camera as gray waves break behind him. “Lumpy close-out with hollow barrels with low tide, fam.”

At first, the account functioned like a group chat for local surfers. “Friends were asking me how the waves were, and I was texting them. I figured I’d jump on Instagram and start doing it for them,” says Walsh, who has been a Venice resident for 15 years.

What began as a practical update for a handful of friends eventually attracted followers in London, Berlin and Tokyo — people who checked in daily to see whether the surf was firing in Venice Beach. The account has amassed over 10,000 followers, inspiring imitator accounts. “Now it’s just for everybody,” says Walsh. “I built a community around the surf reports. It really blew me away. I didn’t realize that people were so interested.”

His surf reports have made him an unofficial mayor of Venice surf culture, getting recognized at the beach town’s local hangouts like Hinano Cafe and the Cow’s End. “People stop me and tell me they love my surf reports. They don’t even surf, but they see it every day,” says Walsh. “I always tell people I’m very popular between Washington Boulevard, Lincoln Boulevard and Rose Avenue.” His nickname around town is Glenice Venice.

However, the real triumph wasn’t becoming recognizable around Venice — it was finding other queer surfers, something that felt elusive in Walsh’s youth in Southern California. “I had met a lot of other surfers from all over the world and built a queer community of surfers here in L.A.,” says Walsh. “It was pretty awesome.”

Walsh saw an opportunity to use his surf report to not only report on the condition of the ocean — which is especially unpredictable during our current El Niño cycles — but to also create a burgeoning queer space in the Venice surf scene. “I could set up a community-based surf report for everybody, and the fact that I happen to be queer made it a little more unique,” he says. He began to connect with gay surfers, organizing trips with them and building lasting friendships. “It was just a lot of fun, building a little team.”

Later, Walsh became a co-producer and music supervisor of a movie about homophobia in surfing titled “Out in the Line-Up” that premiered at film festivals across the world in cities such as New York, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia. “The movie kind of spoke for itself. It was a worldwide issue — homophobia in surfing.” Since then, Walsh has served on panels about queer people in the surf world. Last June, the film had a 10th anniversary screening in Venice, hosted by the Venice Surfing Assn. “At some point, I brought some diversity to this culture. I put my name on it,” he says.

In recent years, others have joined Walsh’s efforts to create a burgeoning queer surf scene at Venice Beach. In 2020, Shelly Guidera relocated to Venice and noticed that there wasn’t a strong queer presence in surfing. “My friend and I were maybe the only queer people some of these surfers had ever seen,” she says. Shortly after, Guidera started Dream Team Surf, a collective for queer surfers to meet up and build camaraderie.

Its mission is simple. “It’s all of us looking out for each other,” Guidera says. “ Having a team of people makes the experience that much more enriching and safe.”

Surfers ride the waves near the Venice Pier, where Glen Walsh does his daily surf reports.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Early on, Guidera was inspired by Walsh’s uplifting presence in the Venice surf scene. “This person is respected in the community for what he brings, which is knowledge and insight and fun and flair,” says Guidera. In turn, Walsh has championed Dream Team Surf.

In January 2025, Dream Team Surf hosted a Pride beach party with a banner that read: “Trans bodies belong on the beach.” In some San Diego area beaches, Guidera says, queer representation can still feel like an anomaly. “It’s so funny because it’s like these people have maybe never seen a woman in a bathing suit with hairy legs,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s not that deep.’”

Guidera is certified in surf therapy, taking courses through Groundswell Community Project, a surf therapy program that uses surf to promote holistic healing. The mental health benefits of surfing are lifelong, Guidera explains. “Growing up as a swimmer, surfing was a form of play and wellness,” she says. “It eased the brakes on competition and the structure within competitive swimming.”

Group photo of Dream Team Surf, which hosted a Pride beach party.

(Sara Werner)

Even if you don’t shred waves, being in the ocean can promote healing. “To give people access to the ocean that is in and of itself a form of wellness,” she says. “There’s a level of surrender and humility that comes with surfing and that comes with being in nature. … You have to be so present in such a way that makes you a stronger person.”

Like Guidera, Walsh also works as a surf instructor with a similar goal to instill confidence in his students. “I was teaching a lot of people to surf, mostly women who didn’t want a straight man to teach them how to surf because it feels vulnerable enough,” says Walsh. “I try to break down the stereotypes and have a little fun with them and let them become a kid again.”

When done correctly, he argues, surfing can invite expansiveness. “I love seeing people out there. Feel the fear and do it anyway,” says Walsh. “And creating a lifestyle around it — going to different beaches — and meeting friends.”

Rescue teams work to locate survivors after New Delhi building collapse.

A multistorey building in the Indian capital, New Delhi, has collapsed, killing at least six people and trapping dozens of others.

Rescue teams are searching the rubble of the collapsed building, which housed mostly students, near a Delhi University campus in Satya Niketan on Sunday.

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) said it treated several victims after the incident.

“Out of the 10 patients, five were brought dead, while one patient who was in critical condition later succumbed to his injuries,” AIIMS said in a statement.

Crews from India’s disaster response agency, police and firefighters cleared debris with earthmovers and used detection dogs to search for those trapped inside. A nearby building was evacuated over concerns that it could also collapse.

Up to 40 people remain trapped under the rubble, according to fire officer Abhilash Malik. The number of survivors and the cause of the accident were not immediately clear.

A video filmed by a man trapped under the rubble as onlookers called for rescuers to help him has circulated online. Additional footage showed residents attempting to rescue survivors before disaster response teams arrived.

“The most important thing for us is to save the lives of these students. Rescue operations will carry on,” Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta told local news outlets.

“I assure you we won’t spare the guilty,” she said.

“Condolences to those who lost their loved ones. Praying for the speedy recovery of the injured. Authorities are working at the site and assisting those affected in the mishap,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office said on X.

Building collapses are frequent in parts of India during the rainy season from June to September. A similar incident occurred on Saturday after a three-storey building collapsed in northern India following heavy rain. No casualties were reported.

In 2025, at least 11 people were killed after a residential building collapsed in the northeastern district of New Delhi.

Walking through downtown Santa Barbara, it’s impossible to not turn your head when you see it: those marshmallow-like plaster walls, wiggly wrought ironwork and tile that looks as though it belongs in a palace you’d stumble upon in a storybook.

This is the effect architect Jeff Shelton’s signature design has on viewers: the ability to pluck you out of the monotony of the day, if only briefly.

When asked why he thinks this is so, Shelton is quick to point to the tried-and-true architectural methods of the past, which he proudly uses. Buildings, he said, had to be designed “to act more independently” in serving the needs of their specific inhabitants. A window’s primary purpose, for example, was to allow the ideal amount of light to enter.

“So therefore they had taller windows,” he said, sitting opposite me in his Fig Avenue office in downtown Santa Barbara, surrounded by endless sketches and pattern mock-ups.

Shelton obsesses over other design details that are often overlooked in modern architecture yet instinctively felt when you encounter them: high ceilings, for one (his are 14 to 18 feet from the ground floor), as well as smaller touches like ironwork, stonework and glass. Crucially, all are made by people, designed by people — “nothing,” he said, “out of the catalog.”

Before going solo, Shelton spent a decade working in downtown Los Angeles with architect Brenda Levin on projects including the Bradbury Building and Grand Central Market. He then returned to his hometown of Santa Barbara, where he has designed 90 buildings since 1994, many of them within Santa Barbara’s Historic Landmarks District, commonly referred to as El Pueblo Viejo.

Following Santa Barbara’s 1925 earthquake, which destroyed much of downtown, new construction in the area was required to adopt the Spanish Revival style, which, according to the city’s website, “is key to the identity and beauty of Santa Barbara.” New buildings in the district must draw inspiration from Andalusia and Southern Spain and incorporate elements such as tile, terra-cotta, plaster and ironwork.

For Shelton, the guidelines are merely a reference. When designing, he doesn’t “try to make it like Spain at all,” he said, rather matter-of-factly. “I try to just use the materials and proportions and the craft of what’s so great about being in Spain.”

That approach shines through in his many projects near his Fig Street office, a 10-block radius Shelton has dubbed the “Fig District,” where 10 of his most lauded projects lie, inadvertently creating a kind of architectural museum in the heart of downtown.

Seeing them requires little more than a two-hour self-guided tour, carving your own path or following the map on Shelton’s website. By the end of the excursion, you, too, may ask yourself the same question I did: Why did we ever stop building this way?

Shelton didn’t have an answer. He could only promise to never stop.

“Every building I do is my last building,” said Shelton, now 68. “If I die tomorrow, at least I put everything in this last building.”

Without further ado, here are designs by Shelton all located in the Fig District, including iron gates designed by his brother, David.

PHOENIX — The Trump administration has begun work on a project to build a stretch of border wall in southern Arizona along part of a Native American tribe’s reservation, pushing ahead with one of its signature projects despite protests from the tribe.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the area is a dangerous smuggling route and that building the wall will close a longstanding security gap. But members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose membership spans both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, have accused the administration of trespassing and say the construction will damage land sacred to the tribe.

The wall segment is part of a $46 billion effort by the Trump administration to fill the border with 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, and technology designed to stop undocumented immigration and smuggling.

But as building efforts have ramped up, the administration has run into opposition from landowners, environmental groups, and Native American tribes who say construction is violating property rights and desecrating sacred Indigenous sites.

The Tohono O’odham Nation said in a statement Tuesday that about 20 Customs and Border Protection officers, working with contractors, went onto the tribe’s land early that morning to begin construction.

Drone videos published by nation officials show roughly 14 vehicles and an industrial drill at one of the sites.

A federal judge permitted the government to move forward with construction earlier this month, but the tribe says the contractors are violating tribal codes and trespassing to access the border wall site.

The Tohono O’odham Nation, which has 37,000 members including thousands who live in Mexico, sued the federal government in June in an attempt to block construction of the border wall. The tribe argued that the wall would cause “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the tribe, and would alter boundaries of their nation.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled in favor of the government, noting that the border wall would be built on a 60-foot wide buffer zone of federally owned land called the Roosevelt Reservation.

“Defendants have not yet articulated plans to construct outside the Roosevelt Reservation,” the judge wrote in his opinion.

The Tohono O’odham Nation said that even if construction were contained to the Roosevelt Reservation, driving onto tribal land to access the area still constitutes trespassing.

“The contractors, who are on the Nation illegally, were accompanied by agents as they worked on three separate locations near the border with drill trucks to conduct soil sampling and other activities,” tribal officials said in a statement.

The CBP agents were masked, armed, and set up a vehicle blockade to stop tribal police from removing the contractors, according to Tohono O’odham officials. The nation had set up “No Trespassing” signs before Tuesday.

So far, no physical confrontations between police or members of the Tohono O’odham Nation have been reported.

CBP defended the need for the wall in a statement Tuesday, saying the desert spanning the Tohono O’odham Nation is a corridor for drug smuggling.

“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

Tribal officials said they’re exploring further legal actions in an effort to remove contractors.

SLSCO Ltd., the Texas-based construction company building the section in Arizona, has secured over $390 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security to build the border wall since 2023.

Schuettler writes for the Associated Press.

Illegal under international law, Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have been expanding for decades.

The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fast-tracked the establishment of new ones.

The policy aims to tighten Israel’s hold on the occupied West Bank and block the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state.

With just months to go until the elections, the government has opened bids for the construction of 1,200 illegal housing units. It has also ignored international criticism of the planned illegal settlement, known as E1.

Some Western countries are threatening sanctions if Israel goes ahead. But would that make a difference?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Ammar Hijazi – Ambassador and head of the Palestinian Mission to the Netherlands

Alon Pinkas – Former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York