Oct. 27 (UPI) — Preparation is underway for Rockefeller Center’s annual 2025 Christmas tree custom in New York City.
Officials announced Monday a 75-year-old Norway spruce at 75 feet high and weighing about 11 tons was picked to be the iconic tree for this year’s holiday season. The tree was chosen by head gardener Erik Pauze.
“What I look for is a tree you’d want in your living room, but on a grander scale,” according to Pauze, adding it “needs to make people smile the second they see it.”
It was donated by the Russ family of East Greenbush, N.Y., and scheduled to be cut down Nov. 6.
The tree is slated to make the 130-mile journey to arrive in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center on Nov. 8 and will remain in place until mid-January.
Rockefeller’s Christmas tree tradition dates to 1931. Last year’s display was a 74-foot Norway Spruce grown in West Stockbridge, Mass.
After this season’s tree is removed from Rockefeller Center in January, it will be turned into lumber and used for Habitat for Humanity projects.
Pregnancy centers in the U.S. that discourage women from getting abortions have been adding more medical services — and could be poised to expand further.
The expansion — including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and even providing primary medical care — has been unfolding for years. It gained steam after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade three years ago, clearing the way for states to ban abortion.
The push could get more momentum with Planned Parenthood closing some clinics and considering shutting others after changes to Medicaid. Planned Parenthood is not just the nation’s largest abortion provider, but also offers cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, and other reproductive health services.
“We ultimately want to replace Planned Parenthood with the services we offer,” said Heather Lawless, founder and director of Reliance Center in Lewiston, Idaho. She said about 40% of patients at the antiabortion center are there for reasons unrelated to pregnancy, including some who use the nurse practitioner as a primary caregiver.
The changes have frustrated abortion rights groups, who, in addition to opposing the centers’ antiabortion messaging, say they lack accountability; refuse to provide birth control; and offer only limited ultrasounds that cannot be used for diagnosing fetal anomalies because the people conducting them don’t have that training. A growing number also offer unproven abortion-pill reversal treatments.
Because most of the centers don’t accept insurance, the federal law restricting release of medical information doesn’t apply to them, though some say they follow it anyway. They also don’t have to follow standards required by Medicaid or private insurers, though those offering certain services generally must have medical directors who comply with state licensing requirements.
“There are really bedrock questions about whether this industry has the clinical infrastructure to provide the medical services it’s currently advertising,” said Jennifer McKenna, a senior advisor for Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, a project funded by liberal policy organizations that researches the pregnancy centers.
Post-Roe world opened new opportunities
Perhaps best known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” these mostly privately funded and religiously affiliated centers were expanding services such as diaper banks ahead of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which overturned Roe.
As abortion bans kicked in, the centers expanded medical, educational and other programs, said Moira Gaul, a scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of SBA Pro-Life America. “They are prepared to serve their communities for the long term,” she said in a statement.
In Sacramento, for instance, Alternatives Pregnancy Center in the last two years has added family practice doctors, a radiologist and a specialist in high-risk pregnancies, along with nurses and medical assistants. Alternatives — an affiliate of Heartbeat International, one of the largest associations of pregnancy centers in the U.S. — is some patients’ only health provider.
When the Associated Press asked to interview a patient who had received only non-pregnancy services, the clinic provided Jessica Rose, a 31-year-old woman who took the rare step of detransitioning after spending seven years living as a man, during which she received hormone therapy and a double mastectomy.
For the last two years, she’s received all her medical care at Alternatives, which has an OB-GYN who specializes in hormone therapy. Few, if any, pregnancy centers advertise that they provide help with detransitioning. Alternatives has treated four similar patients over the last year, though that’s not its main mission, director Heidi Matzke said.
“APC provided me a space that aligned with my beliefs as well as seeing me as a woman,” Rose said. She said other clinics “were trying to make me think that detransitioning wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Pregnancy centers expand as health clinics decline
As of 2024, more than 2,600 antiabortion pregnancy centers operated in the U.S., up 87 from 2023, according to the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a project led by University of Georgia public health researchers who are concerned about aspects of the centers. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 765 clinics offered abortions last year, down more than 40 from 2023.
Over the years, pregnancy centers have received a boost in taxpayer funds. Nearly 20 states, largely Republican-led, now funnel millions of public dollars to these organizations. Texas alone sent $70 million to pregnancy centers this fiscal year, while Florida dedicated more than $29 million for its “Pregnancy Support Services Program.”
This boost in resources is unfolding as Republicans have barred Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds under the tax and spending law President Trump signed in July. While federal law already blocked the use of taxpayer funds for most abortions, Medicaid reimbursements for other health services were a big part of Planned Parenthood’s revenue.
Planned Parenthood said its affiliates could be forced to close up to 200 clinics.
Some already had closed or reorganized. They have cut abortion in Wisconsin and eliminated Medicaid services in Arizona. An independent group of clinics in Maine stopped primary care for the same reason. The uncertainty is compounded by pending Medicaid changes expected to result in more uninsured Americans.
Some abortion rights advocates worry that will mean more healthcare “deserts” where the pregnancy centers are the only option for more women.
Kaitlyn Joshua, a founder of abortion rights group Abortion in America, lives in Louisiana, where Planned Parenthood closed its clinics in September.
She’s concerned that women seeking health services at pregnancy centers as a result of those closures won’t get what they need. “Those centers should be regulated,” she said. “They should be providing information which is accurate, rather than just getting a sermon that they didn’t ask for.”
Thomas Glessner, founder and president of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, a network of 1,800 centers, said the centers do have government oversight through their medical directors. “Their criticism,” he said, “comes from a political agenda.”
In recent years, five Democratic state attorneys general have issued warnings that the centers, which advertise to people seeking abortions, don’t provide them and don’t refer patients to clinics that do. And the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a state investigation of an organization that runs centers in New Jersey stifles its free speech.
Different services than Planned Parenthood
Choices Medical Services in Joplin, Mo., where the Planned Parenthood clinic closed last year, moved from focusing solely on discouraging abortion to a broader sexual health mission about 20 years ago when it began offering STI treatment, said its executive director, Karolyn Schrage.
The center, funded by donors, works with law enforcement in places where authorities may find pregnant adults, according to Schrage and Arkansas State Police.
Schrage estimates that more than two-thirds of its work isn’t related to pregnancy.
Hayley Kelly first encountered Choices volunteers in 2019 at a regular weekly dinner they brought to dancers at the strip club where she worked. Over the years, she went to the center for STI testing. Then in 2023, when she was uninsured and struggling with drugs, she wanted to confirm a pregnancy.
She anticipated the staff wouldn’t like that she was leaning toward an abortion, but she says they just answered questions. She ended up having that baby and, later, another.
“It’s amazing place,” Kelly said. “I tell everybody I know, ‘You can go there.’”
The center, like others, does not provide contraceptives — standard offerings at sexual health clinics that experts say are best practices for public health.
“Our focus is on sexual risk elimination,” Schrage said, “not just reduction.”
Mulvihill and Kruesi write for the Associated Press.
A slow-paced, fact-based period drama of war and love in precolonial Hawai’i, “Chief of War,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, presents co-creator and star Jason Momoa as the late-18th century warrior Ka’iana in a story set at the intersection of the island kingdoms and the arrival of European colonists. It’s clearly a passion project, and like many passion projects, it can go overboard at times, grow overstuffed, not to say oversolemn — though solemnity, to be sure, is appropriate to the history. But the passion shows through, and the stuff is interesting — nothing you see everyday, for sure.
Hawaii, of course, was a cultural touchstone, an obsession among continental Americans, long before it became the 50th state. Ukuleles. Steel guitars. Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii” and “Paradise, Hawaiian Style,” not to mention “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite.” The Brady Bunch traveled there, and so did Dennis the Menace in a comic book I once owned. “Magnum P.I.,” “Hawaii Five-0,” “The White Lotus,” Season 1. Hawaiian Punch (created 1934), which mixed orange, pineapple, passion fruit, guava and papaya flavors, and is still available at a store near you in at least 14 flavors. Tiki bars. Suburban luaus. Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, where the birds sing words and the flowers croon, presented by Dole. It goes on and on.
Momoa, who was born in Honolulu, raised in Iowa and returned to the islands for college, slipped into show business by way of “Baywatch Hawaii,” followed by the Oahu-set hotel drama “North Shore.” He played an alien in four seasons of “Stargate Atlantis,” Conan the Barbarian, Aquaman, of course, and twice hosted “Saturday Night Live.” (And recently Ozzy Osbourne’s swan song concert “Back to the Beginning.”) It’s not surprising that he’d want to stretch a little, to step away from genre projects, and represent the roots of his people in a respectful manner. One would call “Chief of War” well-researched, even if one was not at all aware of how much research was done. The ordinary viewer may need to take notes to keep things straight; titles notwithstanding, I wasn’t always certain what island we were on, especially since characters might be living on or aligned with another, and because within an island, various “districts” might be at war, intramurally, as it were. (I did take notes, and I’m still a little confused as to exactly what some of them were after.)
A comparison to “Shogun” is as good as inevitable, given the subtitled dialogue — most of the series is performed in Hawaiian — the encounters with outsiders, the ambitious monarchs and the warring factions. In the latter respects, the series also resembles “Game of Thrones,” where Momoa spent two seasons as chieftain Khal Drogo. And its opening might make you think of “The Lord of the Rings,” as a woman’s voice sets the story (a prophesied king will unite the endless, ending “a cycle of endless war”), introducing the island kingdoms of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, Maui and O’ahu, “separated by cunning chiefs and powerful gods.”
We’re introduced to Ka’iana, a Maui war chief who has left that island, and more to the point, deserted its army, to live a peaceful life on Kaua’i with his two brothers Nahi’ (Siua Ikale’o) and Namake (Te Kohe Tuhaka) and significant others Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinepehinga) and Heke (Mainei Kinimaka). On the whole, given what follows, one would call this the superior lifestyle, and I would have been happy just to spend a little time in this world, with its plant-based architecture and fashions and cheeky local children getting into Ka’iana’s stuff. But like a retired gunslinger in a western movie, circumstances will not let him rest. (He will, in fact, sling a gun before the season is out.)
Kaina Makua and Luciane Buchanan also stars in “Chief of War.”
(Nicola Dove/Apple TV+)
“A war chief who runs from war — you are a chief of contradictions,” says Kaʻahumanu (Luciane Buchanan), a young Maui woman Ka’iana meets in a cave while he’s on the run, where she’s lying low from her councilor father (Moses Goods), who means to ship her to Hawai’i to marry her to Kamehameha (Kaina Makua), in charge of the “god of war,” a sort of military good-luck charm whose possession will be a major issue, though Kamehameha’s own inclinations bend toward peace. But with crazy villains like King Kahekili (Temuera Morrison) and Keoua (Cliff Curtis), not to mention some rogue white sailors with their own dreams of conquest, that may have to wait.
A contemporary account describes the real-life Ka’iana as “near 6 feet 5 inches in stature, and the muscular form of his limbs was of a Herculean appearance,” which is basically typecasting for Momoa. In many ways “Chief of War” is another superhero role for him, if a more emotionally busy one. He’s the best fighter by miles, can catch a spear in his head, ride a shark (a drugged shark, but still) and whip out a laser stare calculated to make his enemies quake. But he also must grapple with family business, love stuff and getting people to listen to his better ideas.
Circumstances will lead Ka’iana into the ocean and onto a British sailing ship, where he will travel to Alaska and the Spanish East Indies, learn all about guns, which he regards as a potentially useful invention, and to speak English — John Young (Benjamin Hoetjes) a marooned sailor taken into the community, is teaching it back on Hawai’i, and soon many characters are speaking English, even when it doesn’t make any practical sense. And in a story in which “pale-skin” colonists meet and exploit Indigenous populations, white racism necessarily gets a licking — “They do not see you as people,” says Tony (James Udom), a Black man who befriends Ka’iana on his accidental voyage — including an actual licking.
Injecting a strain of anticipatory feminism, Momoa and his collaborator Thomas Paʻa Sibbett have taken care not only to incorporate women into their testosterone-heavy world (including Sisa Grey as a street-smart Hawai’ian expat), but to give them interesting things to do — Kupuohi “was once a chiefess of war,” Heke wants Nahi’ to teach her how to fight — and wise things to say, e.g., “Men train their whole lives to be warriors but they fear being wrong more than they fear death.” (So true.) There are gay characters, too, presented without comment.
The actors are appealing when they’re meant to be, and very much unappealing when they’re meant to be, but they’re all excellent (including the nonprofessional Makua). The pacing can be pokey — elegiac if you prefer — between the big action scenes, which can be disturbingly violent. (It can also be very violent when someone’s just trying to make a point.) Filmed across Hawaii and New Zealand and thoughtfully designed, it’s always a pleasure to look at, notwithstanding some dodgy CGI in the volcano scene. (Yes, there’s a volcano.) There is one red-hued orgy scene (denoting villainy) too many — which is to say, there’s one. The score, by Hans Zimmer and James Everingham, is Hollywood-obvious, and the series as a whole is not immune to corniness — but that is sometimes just another word for love.
Brazil is turning to AI data centers to boost its economy, but critics say they put our ecological future at risk.
When AI data centers come to town, companies promise jobs and opportunities. In one drought-stricken community in Brazil, residents are weighing the choices. How do communities balance the economic boost and environmental cost of hosting water-reliant data centers?
June 28 (UPI) — Friends and family members of people detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are raising concerns over conditions inside detention centers in California.
One family member reported not being able to meet with his father who is being held at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and instead having to leave blood pressure medication for him, CBS News reported.
CBS also quoted one immigration lawyer who collectively referred to the Los Angeles facility and others in California being used to detain thousands of people as a “ticking time bomb.”
Other family members report similar conditions faced by detainees.
“She’s saying that she’s not being fed, that she’s sleeping on a concrete floor and that her and a couple of people have to huddle in order to keep warm,” Zulma Zapeta told KTLA in an interview about her mother.
Zapeta’s 41-year-old mother Guadalupe Gutierrez, has been detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, Calif.
Zapeta claims she has not been able to provide necessary medication to Gutierrez, who has been in the United States for over two decades and does not have a criminal record.
Civil rights attorney Sergio Perez called the situation inside several of the state’s federal detention centers “cruel and inhumane,” in an interview with KABC-TV.
“I saw people waiting for hours, elderly women and men without chairs in a concrete hallway infested with flies, and not receiving any information as to how long it was going to take to view their loved ones,” Perez, executive director for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said in the interview.
“This year alone, the number of children held for two weeks or longer, as this child and their family was, has increased sevenfold,” the center said on Facebook. “Border Patrol runs some of the harshest and cruelest prisons that will never be safe for children — making every day spent there dangerous.”
Officials are currently holding around 59,000 immigrants in federal detention centers across the country, CBS News reported this week, citing internal government data.
That puts the number of detainees being held at 140% capacity, compared to the 41,500-person figure passed by Congress.
Earlier this month, the city of Glendale, Calif., said it was terminating contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to house federal detainees at local police stations, calling the issue too “divisive.”
Private prison firm CoreCivic confirmed earlier in the month that it reached a deal with DHS and ICE to convert one of its facilities to house federal detainees. The Nashville-based company is converting its existing detention facility located in California City, in Kern County, Calif. The detention center currently has 2,560 beds for inmates.
BALTIMORE — A federal lawsuit could open a new chapter in an escalating legal battle in Maryland, where officials are struggling to address an unexpected onslaught of claims alleging child sexual abuse in state-run juvenile detention facilities.
With thousands of similar claims already pending in state court, the litigation has raised questions about how Maryland will handle the potential financial liability.
The new federal suit, filed Wednesday on behalf of three plaintiffs, seeks $300 million in damages — an amount that far exceeds caps imposed on claims filed in state court. It alleges Maryland juvenile justice leaders knew about a culture of abuse inside youth detention facilities and failed to address it, violating the plaintiffs’ civil rights.
A message seeking comment was left Thursday with the state’s Department of Juvenile Services. The department generally doesn’t comment on pending litigation. The Maryland Office of the Attorney General declined to comment.
An estimated 11,000 plaintiffs have sued in state court, according to the attorneys involved. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson said Wednesday that he believes negotiations for a potential settlement are ongoing between attorneys for the plaintiffs and the attorney general’s office. Officials have said the state is facing a potential liability between $3 billion and $4 billion.
Lawsuits started pouring in after a state law passed in 2023 eliminated the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse claims in Maryland. The change came in the immediate aftermath of a scathing investigative report that revealed widespread abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It prompted the archdiocese to file for bankruptcy to protect its assets.
But Maryland leaders didn’t anticipate they’d be facing similar budgetary concerns because of claims against the state’s juvenile justice system.
Facing a potentially enormous payout, lawmakers recently passed an amendment to limit future liabilities. The new law reduces caps on settlements from $890,000 to $400,000 for cases filed after May 31 against state institutions, and from $1.5 million to $700,000 for private institutions. It allows each claimant to receive only one payment, instead of being able to collect for each act of abuse.
Suing in federal court allows plaintiffs to sidestep those limits.
“Despite Maryland’s recent unconstitutional legislative efforts to insulate itself from liability for the horrific sexual brutalization of children in its custody, Maryland cannot run from liability under Federal law,” plaintiffs’ attorney Corey Stern said in a statement. “The United States Constitution was created for all of us, knowing that some would need protection from the tyranny of their political leaders.”
The three plaintiffs in the federal case allege they were sexually abused by staff at two juvenile detention centers. While other lawsuits have mainly presented allegations of abuse occurring decades ago, the federal complaint focuses on events alleged to have happened in 2019 and 2020. The plaintiffs were 14 and 15 years old.
The victims feared their sentences would be extended if they spoke out, according to the complaint. They accuse state officials of turning a blind eye to a “culture of sexual brutalization and abuse.”
Stern said he anticipates more federal claims will be forthcoming.
WASHINGTON — The day after immigration raids began in Los Angeles, Rep. Norma Torres (D-Pomona) and three other members of Congress were denied entry to the immigrant detention facility inside the Roybal Federal Building.
The lawmakers were attempting an unannounced inspection, a common and long-standing practice under congressional oversight powers.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said too many protesters were present on June 7 and officers deployed chemical agents multiple times. In a letter later to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, Torres said she ended up in the emergency room for respiratory treatment. She also said the protest had been small and peaceful.
Torres is one of many Democratic members of Congress, from states including California, New York and Illinois, who have been denied entry to immigrant detention facilities in recent weeks.
Jim Townsend, director of the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy at Wayne State University in Michigan, said the denials mark a profound — and illegal — shift from past practice.
“Denying members of Congress access to facilities is a direct assault on our system of checks and balances,” he said. “What members of Congress are trying to do now is to be part of a proud bipartisan tradition of what we like to call oversight by showing up.”
Subsequent attempts by lawmakers to inspect the facility inside the Roybal Building have also been unsuccessful.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles), who was with Torres the day she was hospitalized, went back twice more — on June 9 and on Tuesday — and was rebuffed. Torres and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) tried at separate times Wednesday and were both denied.
Gomez and other Democrats have pointed to a federal statute, detailed in yearly appropriations packages since 2020, which states that funds may not be used to prevent a member of Congress “from entering, for the purpose of conducting oversight, any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens …”
The statute also states that nothing in that section “may be construed to require a Member of Congress to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility” for the purpose of conducting oversight. Under the statute, federal officials may require at least 24 hours notice for a visit by congressional staff — but not members themselves.
Under ICE guidelines published this month for members of Congress and their staff, the agency requests at least 72 hours notice from lawmakers and requires at least 24 hours notice from staff.
The agency says it has discretion to deny or reschedule a visit if an emergency arises or the safety of the facility is jeopardized, though such contingencies are not mentioned in the law.
Gomez said an ICE official called him Tuesday to say that oversight law doesn’t apply to the downtown L.A. facility because it is a field office, not a detention facility.
“Well it does say Metropolitan Detention Center right here in big, bold letters,” he says in a video posted afterward on social media, gesturing toward a sign outside the building. “But they say this is a processing center. So I smell bull—.”
Department of Homeland Security police patrol the street after detaining a protester at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. on June 12.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
If no one is technically being detained, Gomez said he rhetorically asked the official during their call, are they free to leave?
Torres visited the facility in February by setting up an appointment, her staff said. She got another appointment for last Saturday, but ICE canceled it because of the protests. When members emailed ICE to set up a new appointment, they got no response.
Gomez said he believes ICE doesn’t want lawmakers to see field offices because of poor conditions and lack of attorney access because of ramped-up arrests that have reportedly left some detainees there overnight without beds and limited food.
In some cases, lawmakers have had success showing up unannounced. On Friday, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands) toured the Adelanto ICE Processing Facility, north of San Bernardino. After being denied entry to the Adelanto Facility on June 8, Chu and four other California Democrats were allowed in on Tuesday.
“Just because ICE has opened their doors to a few members of Congress does not excuse their inflammatory tactics to meet deportation quotas,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside), who visited Adelanto with Chu. “Accountability means showing a consistent pattern of accessibility, not just a one-off event.”
The representatives learned the facility is now at full capacity with 1,100 detainees, up from 300 a month ago. Chu said they spoke to detainees from the L.A. raids, who she said were not criminals and who are now living in inhumane conditions — without enough food, unable to change their underwear for 10 days or to call their families and lawyers.
Chu said the group arrived early and stood in the lobby to avoid a repeat of their previous attempt, when facility guards kept them off the property by locking a fence.
Tom Homan, President Trump’s border policy advisor, departs a meeting with Republican senators who are working to cancel $9.4 billion in spending already approved by Congress at the Capitol in Washington on June 11.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)
In an interview with The Times this month, Trump’s chief border policy advisor Tom Homan said members of Congress are welcome to conduct oversight, but that they must contact the facility first to make arrangements. The agency has to look after the safety and security of the facility, officers and detainees, he said.
“Please go in and look at them,” he said. “They’re the best facilities that money can buy, the highest detention standards in the industry. But there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.”
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for Homeland Security, said in a statement to The Times that requests for visits are needed because “ICE law enforcement have seen a surge in assaults, disruptions and obstructions to enforcement, including by politicians themselves.”
She added that requests for visits should be made with enough time — “a week is sufficient” — to not interfere with the president’s authority under Article II of the Constitution to oversee executive branch functions.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, flanked by Deputy Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Madison Sheahan, left, and acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons, speaks during a news conference in Washington on May 21.
“This unlawful policy is a smokescreen to deny Member visits to ICE offices across the country, which are holding migrants — and sometimes even U.S. citizens — for days at a time,” he wrote. “They are therefore facilities and are subject to oversight and inspection at any time. DHS pretending otherwise is simply their latest lie.”
Townsend, the congressional oversight expert, said the practice goes back to when President Truman was a senator and established a committee to investigate problems among contractors who were supplying the World War II effort.
“That committee conducted hundreds of field visits, and they would show up unannounced in many instances,” Townsend said.
More recently, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) drove to the Pentagon in 1983 and demanded access to ask questions about overspending after being stonewalled, he said, by Department of Defense officials.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to mean that Congress has wide authority to conduct oversight to show up unannounced in order to secure accurate information, Townsend said.
National Guard members stand at post at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on June 10.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the Trump administration is trying to hide the truth from the public. Last week, Padilla was shoved out of a news conference, forced to the ground and handcuffed after attempting to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“The Trump administration has done everything in their power but to provide transparency to the American people about their mission in Los Angeles,” he said during an impassioned floor speech Wednesday in which he cried recounting the ordeal.
In an interview Wednesday with Newsmax, McLaughlin accused Democratic lawmakers of using oversight as an excuse to stage publicity stunts.
“The Democrats are reeling,” she said. “They have no actual message and so they’re doing this to get more attention and to manufacture viral moments.”
On Tuesday, Gomez wore a suit jacket with his congressional lapel pin and carried his congressional ID card and business card in his hand — “so there would be no mistake” as to who he was. He said he was concerned that what happened to Padilla could also happen to him. He was denied access anyway.
Gomez said federal officials should be fined each time they deny oversight access to members of Congress. He said he and other members are also discussing whether to file a lawsuit to compel access.
“When you have an administration that is operating outside the bounds of the law, they’re basically saying, ‘What recourse do you have? Can you force us? You don’t have an army. We don’t need to listen to you,’” Gomez said. “Then you have to put some real teeth into it.”
Times staff writer Nathan Solis in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Donald Trump had just been elected president when I first visited the sprawling Wyoming ranch of conservative billionaire Phil Anschutz in late 2016.
But my tour guides didn’t let President Trump’s well-known disdain for wind power stop them from sharing their story: With Anschutz’s fortune behind them, and huge profits ahead, they were preparing to build America’s largest wind farm. America’s future was renewable.
After Trump returned to office this year and began weaponizing federal departments against clean energy, wind in particular, with a vengeance unlike anything seen during his first term, Anschutz’s Power Co. of Wyoming updated its website. The company now planned to build a gas-fueled power plant as large as 3,200 megawatts, it said in February. That would be the country’s second-largest gas plant, after a facility in Florida.
Anschutz’s 3,550-megawatt wind farm remained under construction, as did a long-distance power line capable of transmitting the electricity to California. But the way the company described its mission had changed.
Until at least Feb. 11, the website’s home page, as documented by the Internet Archive, was titled, “Putting wind to work for Carbon County.” It said the wind farm’s benefits would include “a reliable, competitively priced supply of renewable electricity” that would “help America reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”
Now the page says nothing about heat-trapping emissions or renewable electricity, and little about wind. Instead, it’s littered with Trump-esque language about “American-made energy” and “electricity that our nation needs.”
There’s still a separate section of the site describing the wind project and its benefits. But atop the home page, a banner that previously featured two pictures — one of wind turbines, one of the U.S. flag and the Wyoming state flag fluttering in the wind — has been updated. In place of the flag picture, there’s a gas plant.
Why might an energy company owned by a Republican mega-donor feel the need to make such a pivot?
Phil Anschutz, left, watches the Lakers play the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2011.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Simply put, Trump despises wind turbines, an obsession that dates to the early 2010s, when he tried and failed to block an offshore wind farm he believed would ruin the view from his Scottish golf resort. In January, he issued an executive order blocking construction of Lava Ridge, an Idaho wind project approved by the Biden administration. Trump’s appointees have paused federal permitting for all wind farms, which experts say is most likely illegal.
In their most brazen attack yet, last month Trump’s appointees ordered the Norwegian company Equinor to stop construction of Empire Wind, an ocean wind farm off the coast of Long Island that will help power New York City. The company had already invested $2.7 billion in the project. Until the Trump administration lifted the stop-work order this week, Equinor executives said they were days away from canceling Empire Wind entirely.
Given those events, it’s possible Anschutz’s pivot toward gas is a “strategic play” to avoid incurring Trump’s wrath, said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of climate and energy policy at UC Santa Barbara.
“Trump has been attacking wind so much,” she said.
Anschutz spokesperson Kara Choquette gave me a different explanation for the company’s gas-plant plan — one that had nothing to do with Trump. She cited “unprecedented demand growth,” alluding to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence technology that’s driving a data-center boom — and a corresponding need for electricity.
“Market demand has always been the driver for our projects,” Choquette said via email.
In a filing with Wyoming regulators, the Anschutz Corp. expressed interest in selling power to “hyperscale data centers” that could be built on its Wyoming ranch. That power could come from the wind farm, the gas plant or a 1,000-megawatt solar farm that Anschutz is also interested in constructing.
A mix of wind and gas, Choquette told me, “will provide firm, reliable power at a meaningful scale and size.”
PacifiCorp’s Ekola Flats wind farm outside Medicine Bow, Wyo., seen in 2022, has 63 turbines, most of them rated at 4.3 megawatts.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
But Stokes, who helped craft portions of President Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, wonders if the gas plant proposal is largely performative. A surge in gas-plant construction, fueled by AI demand, has led to long delays for gas turbines. The research firm Wood Mackenzie reported this month that some energy developers are finding the earliest they can bring new gas plants online is 2030. Turbine costs have also hit all-time highs.
Meanwhile, solar and batteries made up nearly 84% of new power capacity built in the U.S. last year.
“You’ve got to build batteries and solar, because that’s the only thing you can build fast,” Stokes said.
Thus far, Anschutz’s company hasn’t applied for a gas-plant permit from Wyoming officials. But the Denver-based billionaire won’t lack for resources if and when he decides to move forward. He owns the Coachella music festival, the Los Angeles Kings and L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, among other lucrative assets. He’s already spent at least $400 million over more than 15 years permitting and beginning to build the wind farm and 732-mile power line.
The wind farm and power line could help wean California off fossil fuels, supplying bountiful clean energy during the evening and nighttime hours, when solar panels stop generating and batteries aren’t always sufficient.
But if Anschutz does indeed build the nation’s second-largest gas plant, the air pollution could be significant.
Gas is usually cleaner than coal. But gas combustion still results in harmful pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, which the American Lung Assn. says can cause asthma attacks and reduced lung function. Gas also fuels the worsening heat waves, wildfires and storms of the climate crisis, especially when it leaks from pipelines and power plants in the form of methane, an especially powerful heat-trapping pollutant.
Anschutz’s company says on its website that the gas plant will be “hydrogen-capable and carbon-capture-ready” — meaning the facility will be capable of eventually switching from gas to clean-burning hydrogen, and ready to add installations that capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere.
The city of Glendale’s gas-fired Grayson power plant, seen in 2023, sits near the banks of the Los Angeles River.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In theory, those are nice ideas. In practice, both technologies mostly don’t exist yet in commercial, reliable form. Hence the “capable” and the “ready.” A 3,200-megawatt gas plant would be a big polluter.
“There are water issues. There are wildlife issues,” said Rob Joyce, director of the Sierra Club’s Wyoming chapter. “Even if it is on private land on their ranch, it’s something we should be concerned about.”
Shutting down all gas plants isn’t realistic, at least not yet; even California still depends on gas for one-third of its electricity. But scientists say building new gas plants, especially in richer nations like the U.S., is incompatible with a safe future for human civilization. Not to mention financially questionable, when solar and wind are cheaper.
Here’s hoping Anschutz doesn’t actually build a giant gas plant.
Perhaps just as importantly, here’s hoping America’s most wealthiest and most powerful people and institutions stop caving to Trump’s diktats. Universities, Fortune 500 companies, marquee law firms, billionaires — do they really think if they just give Trump a splash of what he wants, he won’t ask for more? And then he’ll leave office peacefully, and democracy will be fine? And we’ll maintain a livable climate and functioning economy?
I can’t know for sure if Anschutz’s gas-plant proposal is designed to appease Trump.
But Power Co. of Wyoming has definitely undergone a rebranding since he took office.
On its profile page on social media platform X — where it’s long posted under the username “welovewind” — the company used to describe itself as a supplier of “diverse, high-capacity, reliable, ‘Made in Wyoming’ wind power to help meet region’s [renewable portfolio standard, greenhouse gas] and economic growth goals.”
Sometime between late January and early March, though, the description changed. Now it reads: “High-capacity, reliable, clean, ‘Made in Wyoming’ electric power to help meet diverse market demands and goals.”
ONE MORE THING
On this week’s Boiling Point podcast, I talk with Sadie Babits, a climate editor at NPR and author of the excellent new book, “Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change.” We talk about how reporters can do a better job tackling one of the biggest stories of modern times — and how news consumers can help them.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.
Correction: Last week’s newsletter used the wrong name for a nuclear plant in Washington state. It’s Columbia Generating Station, not Centralia. Centralia is a coal plant.
