No one has won the City Section individual golf championship four times, but Layla Phillips has a chance to be the first.
The 14-year-old freshman from Harbor Teacher Prep carded a five-under-par 67 on Thursday at Balboa Golf Course in Encino, good enough for a six-stroke victory over Macy Lee of El Camino Real.
“She’s been playing since she was 2,” explained her father Kasey, who was there to watch his daughter’s round and could not have been more proud. “Our old house was right off of Maggie Hathaway Golf Course and balls were constantly flying onto our property. It was an annoying thing and my wife was afraid the kids might get hit playing in the backyard. So we complained about it and they offered us free lessons as kind of a peace offering.”
As fate would have it, Layla and her sister Roxanne, one year younger, both took to the sport like fish to water.
“We started taking lessons at Chester Washington Golf Course because they had a better driving range there,” said Layla, who started playing the Toyota Tour Cup series 18 months ago. “We get along great and we practice together everyday. She’s following in my footsteps. We’re opposites. I get really nervous but she just hits the ball and doesn’t care. At times, we have to take advice from each other.”
After bogeying the first hole, Phillips birdied the second, eagled the third and birdied the fourth to vault to the top of the leaderboard. She maintained at least a two-shot lead the rest of the way. A bogey on No. 6 was followed by two pars and three consecutive birdies that stretched the margin to six.
“I can’t be too mad with my performance today but there’s always room for improvement,” said Phillips, who got to six-under before bogeying 18 and who finished two strokes off the City finals record of 65 set last year by Palisades senior Anna Song, now a freshman at Stanford. “I’ve only played this course twice before and I’d never played the back nine.”
Phillips tries to get a round in once a week and plays a two-day tournament every month. She shot six-under (equaling her personal best) to win a Southern California PGA Junior Tour championship in Palm Springs in December. She has won around 50 SCPGA Junior events since she was 10. In March, Roxanne won the L.A. City Junior championship by 15 shots on the same course when she was only 12.
“School lets out at 3:30 so I’m practicing from 4 to 7:30 p.m. at Los Verdes [in Palos Verdes] or Victoria [in Carson],” said Phillips, who finished in the top 10 at the Junior World Golf Championship last year in San Diego.
Phillips longs to play college golf (maybe at USC, which is only a 30-minute drive from where she lives in Harbor City). When told she could potentially be the first four-time City champion, she said: Yeah, it’s a possibility. My best competition in City might be my sister. She’s beaten me a couple of times already.”
She will also have to contend with fellow ninth grader Lauren Song (Anna’s sister) who shot a 75 to finish alone in third Thursday to help Palisades (+55) win its fifth straight team title, one shy of the City record accomplished twice by Granada Hills. The Highlanders finished second by 64 shots Thursday but still advanced to next week’s SoCal Regionals.
As Los Angeles city officials worked on an agreement to modernize the Convention Center, more than one member of the McOsker family was playing a key role.
City Councilmember Tim McOsker supported the $2.6-billion expansion, which could bring more tourism but threatens to further exacerbate Los Angeles’ dire fiscal situation.
Nella McOsker, his daughter, runs the Central City Assn., an influential downtown Los Angeles business group, which advocated strenuously for the project.
And his nephew, Emmett McOsker, who was an aide to former Mayor Eric Garcetti, works for the Tourism Department — handling the Convention Center.
Central City Assn. President and Chief Executive Nella McOsker.
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
Nella McOsker often argued for the project as her father listened with his council colleagues. In September, he cast a “yes” vote.
“It’s just a family tradition of public service,” said Doane Liu, executive director of the Tourism Department, who is a longtime friend and former colleague of Tim McOsker — and Emmett McOsker’s boss. “I wish there were more McOskers working at City Hall.”
And there are. Flying a little beneath the radar, due to her last name, is a fourth family member, Anissa Raja — the councilmember’s niece (cousin to Emmett and Nella), who is also his legislative director and president of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats.
Raja does not lead with the fact that she is the councilmember’s relative.
“I don’t mention it because I’m a staffer. I keep it professional at work,” she said.
While the interplay between McOskers can create potential conflicts of interest, Nella says she logs every lobbying conversation she has with Tim’s office to the city’s Ethics Commission, just like she does with other councilmembers.
Plus, she and her dad often disagree. And in L.A. city government, lobbying a close family member is perfectly legal, as long as neither party has a financial stake.
“As a city, we made a policy decision that it shouldn’t be just because you’re related to someone that you can’t try to exert influence over them if they’re in an elected position,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University and former head of the city’s Ethics Commission.
Councilmember Tim McOsker speaking during a 2023 meeting at City Hall.
(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)
For decades, the McOskers — a large, tight-knit Irish Catholic family from San Pedro — have wielded power at Los Angeles City Hall. Unlike the Garcettis and the Hahns, the McOskers have not served in citywide or countywide elected office. But their breadth of influence in Los Angeles politics over the last quarter century may be unparalleled.
The McOskers are hardly alone in making city politics the family business.
There’s Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, whose father-in-law Zev Yaroslavsky once held her seat. And Herb Wesson, the former council speaker, whose son was his aide and whose daughter-in-law Alexis Wesson is chief of staff to Councilmember Adrin Nazarian.
Sometimes that leads to family members bumping up against each other in questionable ways.
Eric Garcetti’s father, Gil Garcetti — perhaps best known for being L.A. County district attorney during the O.J. Simpson trial — was president of the Ethics Commission when his son was on the City Council. That led to issues in 2006, when Gil inadvertently contributed to Eric’s reelection campaign, which was not allowed. Or consider Councilmember Curren Price, who has been charged with allegedly voting in favor of development projects his wife’s company was being paid to consult for.
The McOskers’ tradition of city service predates Tim, who worked for City Attorney James Hahn in the 1990s before becoming Hahn’s chief of staff when Hahn was mayor in the early 2000s. Tim’s father, Mac, was a city firefighter, which many in the family cite as the origin of the public service bug.
To this day, the family is as much, or more of, a fire family than a politics family — and some members have combined the two.
Tim’s brother Patrick is a retired LAFD engineer who served as president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the powerful firefighters union. Another brother, Mike, who died in 2019, was vice president of the same union.
Emmett, Patrick’s son, said his father was always his hero and that he wanted to be a firefighter. But when he graduated college in 2011 following the Great Recession, the fire department wasn’t hiring, so he got into politics instead.
Tim, too, aspired to be a firefighter at one point. Two of his children are firefighters, one for LAFD and the other for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, while a cousin works for the county fire department.
In 2003, then-Councilmember Janice Hahn — sister of Mayor James Hahn and daughter of longtime county supervisor Kenneth Hahn — told The Times that Tim and his brothers Patrick, Mike and John (then vice president of the city’s Harbor Area Planning Commission) “are involved in everything.”
Rebecca Liu Morales, a former aide to then-Councilmember Eric Garcetti, was Nella McOsker’s close childhood friend in San Pedro.
“We grew up super familiar with public life and what it looks like. We were dragged to campaign events. We spent Saturdays volunteering,” said Liu Morales, who as Doane Liu’s daughter was also raised in a political family.
Little did Nella McOsker know that decades down the line, she would still be attending her father’s campaign events, helping him get elected to the City Council in 2022.
She worked as his operations director, referring to herself as his “Ego Killer” for always being willing to knock him down a peg. The campaign was filled out by volunteers from the family, from Tim’s wife, Connie, to brother Patrick, who was an avid doorknocker.
One politico who lives in the district noted that two McOskers separately knocked on his door and a third called him as part of a phone banking operation.
After Tim won his council seat, Nella took a job running the Central City Assn. Now, she lobbies councilmembers, including her father’s office.
Councilmember McOsker, along with Councilmember Yaroslavsky, proposed a law in 2023 that would have required lobbyists like Nella who are close relatives of councilmembers or high-level council staffers to disclose the relationship. They would have been prohibited from lobbying on land use development projects in that councilmember’s district. Because Nella works on issues involving downtown, not the San Pedro area, she and Tim would likely not have been affected. The law was never passed.
Rob Quan, who runs a transparency-focused good government advocacy group, said there is no evidence that the McOskers have leveraged their relationships for undue advantage.
Tim said the family rarely talks local politics at dinners and holidays. First off, there are so many of them that the atmosphere can become chaotic.
Last time he hosted Thanksgiving, Tim said about 47 people showed up, and the tables stretched all the way outside onto the back patio. Mostly, they dote on the kids, and cousins reconnect.
“It’s not a lot about politics. It’s a lot about family,” Tim said.
When politics do come up, the McOskers often land on opposite sides.
Tim said he disagreed with his firefighter daughter Miranda and his brother Patrick, who believed LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley should have been reinstated after Mayor Karen Bass ousted her over her handling of the Palisades fire. The two showed up with other firefighters at the council chambers when the council was voting on the issue.
“You can’t have a mayor and a chief of fire … on different pages. It is dangerous,” Tim said.
While Tim and Nella both supported the Convention Center expansion, the two have split on other issues.
“There’s a different intensity I can get to with him [than with other councilmembers],” she said, referring to her conversations with her father about politics.
This summer, Nella McOsker and the Central City Assn. were part of a business coalition that proposed a ballot measure to repeal the city’s gross receipts tax on businesses, which generates about $800 million for the city annually. Her goal was to help struggling businesses by reducing their taxes.
“Terrible idea,” Tim McOsker said.
That was probably the most annoyed “Tim” got with her, Nella said.
She calls him Tim, not Dad — partially out of decorum in a world where she is lobbying him and his colleagues on a regular basis.
It’s also how she and her four younger siblings grew up — they’ve always called their parents Tim and Connie.
Nella’s son Omero is 4. She says he can be whatever he wants when he grows up, but some in the city family already have their eyes on him.
A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration Thursday to find the money to fully fund SNAP benefits for November.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. gave President Trump’s administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though it’s unlikely the 42 million Americans — about 1 in 8, most of them in poverty — will see the money on the debit cards they use for groceries nearly that quickly.
The order was in response to a challenge from cities and nonprofits complaining that the administration was only offering to cover 65% of the maximum benefit, a decision that would have left some recipients getting nothing for this month.
“The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP,” McConnell said in a ruling from the bench after a brief hearing. “They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial SNAP payments and failed to consider the harms individuals who rely on those benefits would suffer.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
McConnell was one of two judges who ruled last week that the administration could not skip November’s benefits entirely because of the federal shutdown.
The Trump administration chose partial payments this week
Last month, the administration said that it would halt SNAP payments for November if the government shutdown wasn’t resolved.
A coalition of cities and nonprofits sued in federal court in Rhode Island and Democratic state officials from across the country did so in Massachusetts.
The judges in both cases ordered the government to use one emergency reserve fund containing more than $4.6 billion to pay for SNAP for November but gave it leeway to tap other money to make the full payments, which cost between $8.5 billion and $9 billion each month.
On Monday, the administration said it would not use additional money, saying it was up to Congress to appropriate the funds for the program and that the other money was needed to shore up other child hunger programs.
The partial funding brought on complications
McConnell harshly criticized the Trump administration for making that choice.
“Without SNAP funding for the month of November, 16 million children are immediately at risk of going hungry,” he said. “This should never happen in America. In fact, it’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here.”
Tyler Becker, the attorney for the government, unsuccessfully argued that the Trump administration had followed the court’s order in issuing the partial payments. “This all comes down to Congress not having appropriated funds because of the government shutdown,” he said.
Kristin Bateman, a lawyer for the coalition of cities and nonprofit organizations, told the judge the administration had other reasons for not fully funding the benefits.
“What defendants are really trying to do is to leverage people’s hunger to gain partisan political advantage in the shutdown fight,” Bateman told the court.
McConnell said last week’s order required that those payments be made “expeditiously” and “efficiently” — and by Wednesday — or a full payment would be required. “Nothing was done consistent with the court’s order to clear the way to expeditiously resolve it,” McConnell said.
There were other twists and turns this week
The administration said in a court filing on Monday that it could take weeks or even months for some states to make calculations and system changes to load the debit cards used in the SNAP program. At the time, it said it would fund 50% of the maximum benefits.
The next day, Trump appeared to threaten not to pay the benefits at all unless Democrats in Congress agreed to reopen the government. His press secretary later said that the partial benefits were being paid for November — and that it is future payments that are at risk if the shutdown continues.
And Wednesday night, it recalculated, telling states that there was enough money to pay for 65% of the maximum benefits.
Under a decades-old formula in federal regulations, everyone who received less than the maximum benefit would get a larger percentage reduction. Some families would have received nothing and some single people and two-person households could have gotten as little as $16.
Carmel Scaife, a former day care owner in Milwaukee who hasn’t been able to work since receiving multiple severe injuries in a car accident seven years ago, said she normally receives $130 a month from SNAP. She said that despite bargain hunting, that is not nearly enough for a month’s worth of groceries.
Scaife, 56, said that any cuts to her benefit will mean she will need to further tap her Social Security income for groceries. “That’ll take away from the bills that I pay,” she said. “But that’s the only way I can survive.”
The next legal step is unclear
This type of order is usually not subject to an appeal, but the Trump administration has challenged other rulings like it before.
An organization whose lawyers filed the challenge signaled it would continue the battle if needed.
“We shouldn’t have to force the President to care for his citizens,” Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement, “but we will do whatever is necessary to protect people and communities.”
It often takes SNAP benefits a week or more to be loaded onto debit cards once states initiate the process.
Mulvihill and Casey write for the Associated Press. AP writers Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, La.; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn.; and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.
SAN FRANCISCO — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a trailblazing San Francisco Democrat who leveraged decades of power in the U.S. House to become one of the most influential political leaders of her generation, will not run for reelection in 2026, she said Thursday.
The former House speaker, 85, who has been in Congress since 1987 and oversaw both of President Trump’s first-term impeachments, had been pushing off her 2026 decision until after Tuesday’s vote on Proposition 50, a ballot measure she backed and helped bankroll to redraw California’s congressional maps in her party’s favor.
With the measure’s resounding passage, Pelosi said it was time to start clearing the path for another Democrat to represent San Francisco — one of the nation’s most liberal bastions — in Congress, as some are already vying to do.
“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” Pelosi said in a nearly six-minute video she posted online Thursday morning, in which she also recounted major achievements from her long career.
Pelosi did not immediately endorse a would-be successor, but challenged her constituents to stay engaged.
“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way — and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy, and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”
Pelosi’s announcement drew immediate reaction across the political world, with Democrats lauding her dedication and accomplishments and President Trump, a frequent target and critic of hers, ridiculing her as a “highly overrated politician.”
Pelosi has not faced a serious challenge for her seat since President Reagan was in office, and has won recent elections by wide margins. Just a year ago, she won reelection with 81% of the vote.
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However, Pelosi was facing two hard-to-ignore challengers from her own party in next year’s Democratic primary: state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker with a strong base of support in the city, and Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a Democratic political operative and tech millionaire who is infusing his campaign with personal cash.
Their challenges come amid a shifting tide against gerontocracy in Democratic politics more broadly, as many in the party’s base have increasingly questioned the ability of its longtime leaders — especially those in their 70s and 80s — to sustain an energetic and effective resistance to President Trump and his MAGA agenda.
In announcing his candidacy for Pelosi’s seat last month after years of deferring to her, Wiener said he simply couldn’t wait any longer. “The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” he said.
Chakrabarti — who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) topple another older Democratic incumbent with a message of generational change in 2018 — said voters in San Francisco “need a whole different approach” to governing after years of longtime party leaders failing to deliver.
In an interview Thursday, Wiener called Pelosi an “icon” who delivered for San Francisco in more ways than most people can comprehend, with whom he shared a “deep love” for the city. He also recounted, in particular, Pelosi’s early advocacy for AIDS treatment and care in the 1980s, and the impact it had on him personally.
“I remember vividly what it felt like as a closeted gay teenager, having a sense that the country had abandoned people like me, and that the country didn’t care if people like me died. I was 17, and that was my perception of my place in the world,” Wiener said. “Nancy Pelosi showed that that wasn’t true, that there were people in positions of power who gave a damn about gay men and LGBTQ people and people living with HIV and those of us at risk for HIV — and that was really powerful.”
Chakrabarti, in a statement Thursday, thanked Pelosi for her “decades of service that defined a generation of politics” and for “doing something truly rare in Washington: making room for the next one.”
While anticipated by many, Pelosi’s decision nonetheless reverberated through political circles, including as yet another major sign that a new political era is dawning for the political left — as also evidenced by the stunning rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist elected Tuesday as New York City’s next mayor.
Known as a relentless and savvy party tactician, Pelosi had fought off concerns about her age in the past, including when she chose to run again last year. The first woman ever elected speaker in 2007, Pelosi has long cultivated and maintained a spry image belying her age by walking the halls of Congress in signature four-inch stilettos, and by keeping up a rigorous schedule of flying between work in Washington and constituent events in her home district.
However, that veneer has worn down in recent years, including when she broke her hip during a fall in Europe in December.
That occurred just after fellow octogenarian President Biden sparked intense speculation about his age and cognitive abilities with his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of last year. The performance led to Biden being pushed to drop out of the race — in part by Pelosi — and to Vice President Kamala Harris moving to the top of the ticket and losing badly to Trump in November.
Democrats have also watched other older liberal leaders age and die in power in recent years, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another San Francisco power player in Washington. When Ginsburg died in office at 87, it handed Trump a third Supreme Court appointment. When Feinstein died in office ill at 90, it was amid swirling questions about her competency to serve.
By bowing out of the 2026 race, Pelosi — who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 — diminished her own potential for an ungraceful last chapter in office. But she did not concede that her current effectiveness has diminished one bit.
Pelosi was one of the most vocal and early proponents of Proposition 50, which amends the state constitution to give state Democrats the power through 2030 to redraw California’s congressional districts in their favor.
The measure was in response to Republicans in red states such as Texas redrawing maps in their favor, at Trump’s direction. Pelosi championed it as critical to preserving Democrats’ chances of winning back the House next year and checking Trump through the second half of his second term, something she and others suggested will be vital for the survival of American democracy.
On Tuesday, California voters resoundingly approved Proposition 50.
In her video, Pelosi noted a litany of accomplishments during her time in office, crediting them not to herself but to her constituents, to labor groups, to nonprofits and private entrepreneurs, to the city’s vibrant diversity and flair for innovation.
She noted bringing federal resources to the city to recover after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and San Francisco’s leading role in tackling the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis through partnerships with UC San Francisco and San Francisco General, which “pioneered comprehensive community based care, prevention and research” still used today.
She mentioned passing the Ryan White CARE Act and the Affordable Care Act, building out various San Francisco and California public transportation systems, building affordable housing and protecting the environment — all using federal dollars her position helped her to secure.
“It seems prophetic now that the slogan of my very first campaign in 1987 was, ‘A voice that will be heard,’ and it was you who made those words come true. It was the faith that you had placed in me, and the latitude that you have given me, that enabled me to shatter the marble ceiling and be the first woman speaker of the House, whose voice would certainly be heard,” Pelosi said. “It was an historic moment for our country, and it was momentous for our community — empowering me to bring home billions of dollars for our city and our state.”
After her announcement, Trump ridiculed her, telling Fox News that her decision not to seek reelection was “a great thing for America” and calling her “evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”
“She was rapidly losing control of her party and it was never coming back,” Trump told the outlet, according to a segment shared by the White House. “I’m very honored she impeached me twice, and failed miserably twice.”
The House succeeded in impeaching Trump twice, but the Senate acquitted him both times.
Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, by contrast, heaped praise on her as a one-of-a-kind force in U.S. politics — a savvy tactician, a prolific legislator and a mentor to an entire generation of fellow Democrats.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi ally who helped her impeach Trump, called Pelosi “the greatest Speaker in American history” as a result of “her tenacity, intellect, strategic acumen and fierce advocacy.”
“She has been an indelible part of every major progressive accomplishment in the 21st Century — her work in Congress delivered affordable health care to millions, created countless jobs, raised families out of poverty, cleaned up pollution, brought LGBTQ+ rights into the mainstream, and pulled our economy back from the brink of destruction not once, but twice,” Schiff said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Pelosi “has inspired generations,” that her “courage and conviction to San Francisco, California, and our nation has set the standard for what public service should be,” and that her impact on the country was “unmatched.”
“Wishing you the best in this new chapter — you’ve more than earned it,” Newsom wrote above Pelosi’s online video.
FOR one city in the UK, Christmas has come early as it’s been transformed into a wintry delight for a Hollywood movie.
Stars of the screen have been spotted in one of the country’s most famous streets to film scenes for the upcoming blockbuster.
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The Shambles in York were transformed for Christmas early due to festive filmingCredit: AlamyHollywood’s Richard E Grant was spotted filming for an upcoming 2026 movieCredit: Alamy
York, known for being one of UK’s oldest cities, was also named the top place in the country for the best quality of life according to the Good Growth for Cities Index.
And now it is being turned into a winter wonderland for an upcoming movie.
The film is called ‘Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint’ and is due for release in 2026.
Game of Thrones star John Bradley, who plays the titular character Aubrey Flint, was spotted filming scenes, along with fellow actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe.
According to production company WestEnd Films, the movie tells the story of a reclusive model soldier painter with a lifelong hatred of Christmas who ends up assisting with a care home production of A Christmas Carol.
Shopkeepers and passers by watched on as the stars filmed on Colliergate, a street very near The Shambles.
One of the shops used as a filming location was Barnitts, a department store that sells everything from Christmas decorations to homeware and DIY tools.
Totally Awesome Toy Shop, will also make an appearance in the film, and the owner, Jo Patton, told the BBC: “To have a film star stood literally on your doorstep, in some ways wasn’t too strange, because in York you expect the unexpected.”
Celebrity Traitors star and actress will appear in the filmCredit: BBCGame of Thrones actor John Bradley plays titular character Aubrey FlintCredit: Alamy
The cast and crew also filmed scenes outside an empty shop on Colliergate.
It was transformed from being empty to a miniature model shop and outside table salt lined the edges of the windows to create the illusion of snow.
York was founded by the Romans in 71AD making it one of the oldest cities in the country.
It’s possibly most famous for its 233ft tall York Minster that dates back to the 7th century.
Visitors are welcome to explore the cathedral whether you fancy a guided tour, or a trip up the tower – tickets for general admission starts at £20pp.
The Shambles, which was used to film the Christmas movie, is full of independent shops selling everything from gifts to baked treats or toys,
Lots of visitors compare the street to Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley which has towering timber-framed shop fronts.
It’s not just all mooching about seeing the sights, visitors can settle in one of York’s 365 pubs.
The film cast and crew were spotted on Colliergate street in November 2025Credit: Google mapsYork is home to the famous mister which is 233ft highCredit: Alamy
One writer who visited suggested popping into House of Trembling Madness which serves a selection of local beers and huge sharing boards of meats and cheeses.
He said: “York is the best UK city for families because it has so many captivating activities and attractions.
“There’s enough in York to keep both junior and secondary school children entertained, from the Viking Museum to York Chocolate Story and Harry Potter-style streets and a cold war bunker.
“The Viking Museum has interactive activities for children, the Castle Museum has recreated Victorian Streets and there’s also the Shambles, the inspiration behind JK Rowling‘s Diagon Alley.”
“There’s so much to keep kids busy in York, families will be spoilt for choice.”
Here’s the UK’s ‘most beautiful town’ set to star in huge new Christmas movie with Hollywood stars…
Between January and February 2025, cast and crew were spotted in the Yorkshire town, in areas like Castlegate, Riverside, and Green Dragon Yard.
Filming of the Sky Original Christmas movie meant that the festive decorations were up for months longer than usual.
The film, set to be released on November 28, will see Kiefer Sutherland play Bradley Mack, a failed Hollywood action star ending up in a small, snow-dusted village to star in the town’s eccentric production of Cinderella.
It’s here that he encounters a number of oddball locals, one of whom is no-nonsense choreographer Jill, played by Rebel Wilson.
Knaresborough has pretty waterfront cafes and the opportunity to canoe down the river, while watching steam trains travel over the viaduct.
Katrina said: “If you venture down by the river from either Bond End or walking down the steps at the castle you’ll stand at the foot of the iconic viaduct.
“Amongst the cafes and houses are two boat hire places – Blenkhorn’s and Marigold Cafe & Boating. Both are open daily, weather permitting, and are a great way to soak up the stunning scenery.
“No visit to Knaresborough is complete without heading to Knaresborough Castle for the best view of the viaduct.
“You don’t need to pay to enter the castle grounds, and I recommend seeing the view during the day and at night time, with the viaduct all lit up.”
The famous city of York will appear in a Christmas movie next year
US President Donald Trump labelled New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ‘a communist’ and claimed New Yorkers would flee the city when he becomes mayor. In his election victory speech, Mamdani called Trump ‘a despot’ and said he had ‘betrayed the country’.
Zohran Mamdani has won the election to be the next mayor of New York City, knocking out political heavyweight Andrew Cuomo. In less than a year, Mamdani has gone from being a little-known state assemblyman to becoming one of the most high-profile politicians in the United States.
How did he do it, and what could happen now? Start Here with Sandra Gathmann explains.
This episode features:
Joseph Stepansky | US reporter, Al Jazeera Digital
Christina Greer | associate professor of political science at Fordham University and cohost of the FAQ NYC podcast
Andres Bernal | lecturer at the School of Labor and Urban Studies of the City University of New York
The 16th-century monks of Évora knew life was short. As if to ram home the point, they decorated an entire chapel with bones dug up from the town’s overflowing cemeteries. The sign outside the Chapel of Bones roughly translates as “We bones in here wait for yours to join us”. Cheerful lot, those monks. Columns, walls, arches – all are covered in skulls, tibias, fibulas, clavicles. Rapt, I can’t stop staring, then start to chuckle when I see skulls curving round frilly frescoes of cherubim on vaulted ceilings, a whimsical touch of chintz among the ghoulishness.
Évora has me in its grip even before I come to the Chapel of Bones. This former royal city of Portuguese kings and capital of the Alentejo region has so many architectural and cultural treasures wedged within its historical centre that it’s often referred to as a living museum. But in a museum, you generally have to keep your voice down: here in Évora, there’s the buzz you get with 11,000 university students roaming round a Unesco world heritage site old town that’s encased within medieval walls.
I feel a pang of envy when I visit the 16th-century College of the Holy Spirit within the University of Évora, which is open to the public willing to pay €3 and take pot luck as to which of the ridiculously beautiful classrooms are free at that moment. My guide, Andre Birken, came to Évora from Germany as an Erasmus student years ago and decided to stay. Chilly northern Germany or laid-back southern Portugal, where even in late October it’s still 23C? Bit of a no-brainer, he tells me. He shows me classrooms decorated in the azulejo tiles for which Portugal is renowned, and where, if the lecture gets dull, you can lose yourself in bucolic blue-and-white scenes.
The ancient Romans, rather than the Greeks, left their mark on Évora in a more monumental style, including an enormous aqueduct that’s one of the first things visitors see as they approach the city. Rising in the centre of the old town are the 14 graceful Corinthian columns of the Roman temple built for emperor Augustus around the 1st century AD (and not, as is commonly assumed, dedicated to the goddess Diana). Surrounding it are buildings that typify most of the architecture here – low-slung, whitewashed, trimmed in ochre and usually sporting wrought-iron balconies. One of them is my hotel, a 15th-century former convent turned into the Pousada del Convento Évora. Every cobbled lane in the old town has this same style of architecture, and I find its uniformity immensely pleasing and harmonious – the white reflecting the sun, the mustardy ochre reminding me of the landscapes of the Alentejo around me, whose brownness is dotted with olive groves and cork forests.
The Chapel of Bones. Photograph: Sirbouman/Alamy
And vineyards, of course, all of them blazing with autumnal colours. Alentejo is one of Portugal’s major wine regions, and its subregion of Baixo Alentejo will be 2026’s European Wine City. About 10 minutes’ drive from Évora is Fitapreta Winery, the brainchild of the innovative Portuguese winemaker António Maçanita and the British viticulturist David Booth. In 2015, Maçanita bought an old fortified manor house that had been in the same family since the 14th century, resurrecting ancient grape varieties, planting new vineyards and sticking to organic production. It’s an idyllic spot for a leisurely wine-tasting, followed by an even more leisurely lunch.
Within the modern winery (its facade clad in cork in a nod to Portugal’s millions of cork forests), André Alves leads me through a tasting of five of the winery’s 22 varieties – all indigenous. A deliciously bone-dry rosé (amusingly named Freshly Squeezed), a fresh-tasting orange-type wine that technically wasn’t an orange wine (A Laranja Mecânica) and the very elegant red Enxarrama all made me wish I had room to stash these in my luggage.
Heavenly … Azulejo tiles in the University of Évora. Photograph: Geogphotos/Alamy
This is only the preamble. Sommelier Francisco Cunha of the winery’s A Cozinha do Paço restaurant then guides me into the part of the manor house that was originally the chapel, and whose galleried upper floor is one of the many atmospheric spots where they serve a seven-course lunch that deserves some serious Michelin attention. Braised fennel and a gorgeous sheep’s milk cheese sauce with turbot, and the famed black pig of the Alentejo paired with a cauliflower cream quenelle were exquisite.
In fact, excellent food is a given in Alentejo. At Enoteca Cartuxa near the Roman temple, they serve their own wines to go with plates of thin buttery slices of cured black pig and chorizo; not to mention the sublime Monte da Vinha sheep’s milk cheese that’s as gooey and as good as an Époisses. The venerable Restaurante Fialho comes out with classic Alentejo dishes done expertly: pigs’ cheeks braised in red wine melt in the mouth, and pork and clams unite in a piquant red peppery stew.
Évora’s food and wine alone make it a worthy holder of the 2027 European Capital of Culture title, even without its architectural marvels. Then again, Évora Cathedral is magnificent, with a typical mishmash of architectural styles, from romanesque and gothic to Renaissance and baroque. From here, it’s almost a rite of passage to walk down the narrow pedestrianised Rua Cinco de Outubro and its souvenir and craft shops wedged into white and yellow houses. Yes, it’s touristy, but delightful nonetheless, with cork handbags and ceramics actually made in Portugal.
Évora’s Roman temple, which dates from the 1st century AD. Photograph: Bert de Ruiter/Alamy
This takes me to Évora’s historical heart, Praça do Giraldo, an expansive square filled with cafe terraces, arcaded shops, more of those lovely wrought-iron balconies and a huge 16th-century marble fountain that instantly grabs your attention. This is the spot for lazy and mild autumn mornings with a coffee and a pastel de nata custard tart or a cheesy tart called queijada de Évora, before heading off in search of more of the town’s oddities.
One in particular catches my eye: the row of very cute houses built under the 16th-century aqueduct Água de Prata, in the north-western part of the old town. I need more time here, yet I end up following the tourist trail out of Évora for a morning in the hilltop village of Monsaraz, right by the Spanish border. Here, in this all-white village, where craft boutiques and wine shops attract the tourists, it feels less real, more toytown. It’s all very pretty, and I even get a closer look at the beaches of Alqueva, western Europe’s largest artificial lake, just outside the village.
But I was missing Évora, which manages to hold on to its mellowness despite the growing number of tourists. I recall a chat with my guide, Andre, who mentioned the number of people who take day trips from Lisbon (only 90-odd minutes away) and tour groups who stop for a night or two. But they need four, five days, maybe a week, he says, to get the most out of it. I’m inclined to agree, as these too-short days fly by and I don’t get round to following the nature trails out of the town, or visiting all of the museums, or having another lazy coffee and eating a pastel de nata in the sunshine. Those monks were right: life really is too short.
The trip was provided by Kirker Holidays, which has three-night breaks at Pousada Convento Évora in November from £819pp, including breakfast, car hire and flights, although rail options are also available. Further information: visitalentejo.pt
NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on Tuesday, capping a stunning ascent for the 34-year-old state lawmaker, who was set to become the city’s most liberal mayor in generations.
In a victory for the Democratic party’s progressive wing, Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani must now navigate the unending demands of America’s biggest city and deliver on ambitious — skeptics say unrealistic — campaign promises.
With the victory, the democratic socialist will etch his place in history as the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian heritage and the first born in Africa. He will also become the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century when he takes office Jan. 1.
Mamdani’s unlikely rise gives credence to Democrats who have urged the party to embrace more progressive, left-wing candidates instead of rallying behind centrists in hopes of winning back swing voters who have abandoned the party.
It was one of three victories by Democrats in high-profile races for elective office that were being viewed as a gauge of public sentiment toward President Trump in his second term. In California, voters were expected to approve Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50, a redistricting measure aimed at boosting Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections.
In New Jersey, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill was elected New Jersey governor over Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Trump.
New Jersey Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill speaks during an election night party in East Brunswick, N.J., on Tuesday.
(Matt Rourke / Associated Press)
Sherrill, a 53-year-old Navy veteran who represented a northern New Jersey district in the U.S. House for four terms, will be the state’s second female governor.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race, defeating Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to give Democrats a key victory heading into the 2026 midterm elections and make history as the first woman to lead the commonwealth.
Spanberger, 46, is a center-left Democrat and former CIA case officer who helped her party win a House majority during Trump’s first presidency.
Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.
The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggested the public was troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.
Supporters celebrate during the election night watch party for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger as she is projected to win the race at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Mamdani has already faced scrutiny from national Republicans, including Trump, who have eagerly cast him as a threat and the face of what they say is a more radical Democratic Party.
The contest drove the biggest turnout in a mayoral race in more than 50 years, with more than 2 million New Yorkers casting ballots, according to the city’s Board of Elections.
Mamdani’s grassroots campaign centered on affordability, and his charisma spoiled Cuomo’s attempted political comeback. The former governor, who resigned four years ago following allegations of sexual harassment that he continues to deny, was dogged by his past throughout the race and was criticized for running a negative campaign.
There’s also the question of how he will deal with Trump, who threatened to take over the city and to arrest and deport Mamdani if he won. Mamdani was born in Uganda, where he spent his early childhood, but was raised in New York City and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.
New Yorkers celebrate as NY1 projects Zohran Mamdani the winner in the mayoral election at the Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden on Tuesday.
(Jeremy Weine / Getty Images)
Mamdani, who was criticized throughout the campaign for his thin resume, will now have to begin staffing his incoming administration before taking office next year and game out how he plans to accomplish the ambitious but polarizing agenda that drove him to victory.
Among the campaign’s promises are free child care, free city bus service, city-run grocery stores and a new Department of Community Safety that would send mental health care workers to handle certain emergency calls rather than police officers. It is unclear how Mamdani will pay for such initiatives, given Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s steadfast opposition to his calls to raise taxes on wealthy people.
His decisions around the leadership of the New York Police Department will also be closely watched. Mamdani was a fierce critic of the department in 2020, calling for “this rogue agency” to be defunded and slamming it as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” He has since apologized for those comments and has said he will ask the current NYPD commissioner to stay on the job.
Mamdani’s campaign was driven by his optimistic view of the city and his promises to improve the quality of life for its middle and lower classes.
But Cuomo, Sliwa and other critics assailed him over his vehement criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Mamdani, a longtime advocate of Palestinian rights, has accused Israel of committing genocide and said he would honor an arrest warrant the International Criminal Court issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
New York Independent mayoral candidate former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo votes at the High School of Art and Design on Tuesday in New York City.
(Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
Going into the Democratic primary, Cuomo was the presumed favorite, with near-universal name recognition and deep political connections. Cuomo’s chances were buoyed further when incumbent Mayor Eric Adams bowed out of the primary while dealing with the fallout of his now-dismissed federal corruption case.
But as the race progressed, Mamdani’s natural charm, catchy social media videos and populist economic platform energized voters in the notoriously expensive city. He also began drawing outside attention as his name ID grew.
In New Jersey, Sherrill built her campaign around pushing back against Trump. She recently seized on the administration’s decision to abruptly freeze funding for a multibillion-dollar project to replace the aging rail tunnels that connect New Jersey to New York City beneath the Hudson River.
Spanberger’s victory in Virginia will flip partisan control of the governor’s office when she succeeds outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“We sent a message to every corner of the commonwealth, a message to our neighbors and our fellow Americans across the country,” Spanberger told cheering supporters in Richmond. “We sent a message to the whole word that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship. We chose our commonwealth over chaos.”
Izaguirre and Colvin write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mike Catalini, Adriana Gomez Licon, Olivia Diaz and Bill Barrow contributed to this report.
On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.
On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.
“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.
Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.
“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.
The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.
Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.
Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.
“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.
Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.
On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.
The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.
As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.
This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.
The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.
In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.
“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
The Los Angeles Police Department has released a report that identifies several shortcomings in its response to the devastating Palisades fire, including communication breakdowns, inconsistent record-keeping and poor coordination at times with other agencies — most notably the city’s Fire Department.
The after-action report called the January blaze a “once in a lifetime cataclysmic event” and praised the heroic actions of many officers, but said the LAPD’s missteps presented a “valuable learning opportunity” with more climate-related disasters likely looming in the future.
LAPD leaders released the 92-page report and presented the findings to the Police Commission at the civilian oversight panel’s public meeting Tuesday.
The report found that while the Fire Department was the lead agency, coordination with the LAPD was “poor” on Jan. 7, the first day of the fire. Though personnel from both agencies were working out of the same command post, they failed to “collectively establish a unified command structure or identify shared objectives, missions, or strategies,” the report said.
Uncertainty about who was in charge was another persistent issue, with more confusion sown by National Guard troops that were deployed to the area. Department leaders were given no clear guidelines on what the guard’s role would be when they arrived, the report said.
The mix-ups were the result of responding to a wildfire of unprecedented scale, officials said. At times the flames were advancing at 300 yards a minute, LAPD assistant chief Michael Rimkunas told the commission.
“Hopefully we don’t have to experience another natural disaster, but you never know,” Rimkunas said, adding that the endeavor was “one of the largest and most complex traffic control operations in its history.”
Between Jan. 11 and Jan. 16, when the LAPD’s operation was at its peak, more than 700 officers a day were assigned to the fire, the report said.
The report found that officials failed to maintain a chronological log about the comings and goings of LAPD personnel at the fire zone.
“While it is understandable that the life-threatening situation at hand took precedence over the completion of administrative documentation,” the report said, “confusion at the command post about how many officers were in the field “resulted in diminished situational awareness.”
After the fire first erupted, the department received more than 160 calls for assistance, many of them for elderly or disabled residents who were stuck in their homes — though the report noted that the disruption of cell service contributed to widespread confusion.
The communication challenges continued throughout the day, the report found.
Encroaching flames forced authorities to move their command post several times. An initial staging area, which was in the path of the evacuation route and the fire, was consumed within 30 minutes, authorities said.
But because of communication breakdowns caused by downed radio and cellphone towers, dispatchers sometimes had trouble reaching officers in the field and police were forced to “hand deliver” important paper documents from a command post to its staging area on Zuma Beach, about 20 miles away.
Several commissioners asked about reports of journalists being turned away from fire zones in the weeks that followed the fire’s outbreak.
Assistant Chief Dominic Choi said there was some trepidation about whether to allow journalists into the fire-ravaged area while authorities were still continuing their search for bodies of fire victims.
Commissioner Rasha Gerges Shields said that while she had some concerns about the LAPD’s performance, overall she was impressed and suggested that officers should be commended for their courage. The department has said that dozens of officers lost their homes to the fires.
The report also recommended that the department issue masks and personal protective equipment after there was a shortage for officers on the front lines throughout the first days of the blaze.
The Palisades fire was one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history, engulfing nearly 23,000 acres, leveling more than 6,000 structures and killing 12 people. More than 60,000 people were evacuated. The deaths of five people within L.A. city limits remain under investigation by the LAPD’s Major Crimes Division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The LAPD reports details how at 11:15 a.m., about 45 minutes after the first 911 calls, the call was made to issue a citywide tactical alert, the report said. The department stayed in a heightened state of alert for 29 days, allowing it to draw resources from other parts of the city, but also meaning that certain calls would not receive a timely police response.
As the flames began to engulf a nearby hillside, more officers began responding to the area, including a contingent that had been providing security at a visit by President Trump.
Initially, LAPD officers operated in largely a rescue- and traffic-control role. But as the fire wore on, police began to conduct crime suppression sweeps in the evacuation zones where opportunistic burglars were breaking into homes they knew were empty.
In all, 90 crimes were reported in the fire zone, including four crimes against people, a robbery and three aggravated assaults, 46 property crimes, and 40 other cases, ranging from a weapons violation to identity theft. The department made 19 arrests.
The new report comes weeks after the city of Los Angeles put out its own assessment of the fire response — and on the heels of federal prosecutors arresting and charging a 29-year-old Uber driver with intentionally setting a fire Jan. 1 that later grew into the Palisades fire.
The LAPD’s Major Crimes and Robbery-Homicide units also worked with the ATF to investigate the fire’s cause.
NEW YORK — Voters were casting ballots in high-stakes elections on both coasts Tuesday, including for mayor of New York, new congressional maps in California and governor in both New Jersey and Virginia, states whose shifting electorates could show the direction of the nation’s political winds.
For voters and political watchers alike, the races have taken on huge importance at a time of tense political division, when Democrats and Republicans are sharply divided over the direction of the nation. Despite President Trump not appearing on any ballots, some viewed Tuesday’s races as a referendum on him and his volatile second term in the White House.
In New York, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, 34, was favored to win the mayoral race after winning the Democratic ranked-choice mayoral primary in June. Such a result would shake up the Democratic establishment and rile Republicans in near equal measure, serving as a rejection of both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a more establishment Democrat and Mamdani’s leading opponent, and Trump, who has warned that a Mamdani win would destroy the city.
On the eve of voting Monday, Trump threatened that a Mamdani win would disrupt the flow of federal dollars to the city, and took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race.
“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Monday.
A vote for Sliwa “is a vote for Mamdani,” he added. “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”
Mamdani, a Ugandan-born naturalized U.S. citizen and New York state assemblyman who already defeated Cuomo once in the primary, has promised a brighter day for New Yorkers with better public transportation, more affordable housing and high-quality childcare if he wins. He has slammed billionaires and some of the city’s monied interests, which have lined up against him, and rejected the “grave political darkness” that he said is threatening the country under Trump.
He also mocked Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo — calling Cuomo Trump’s “puppet” and “parrot.”
Samantha Marrero, a 35-year-old lifelong New Yorker, lined up with more than a dozen people Tuesday morning at her polling site in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn to cast her vote for Mamdani, whom she praised for embracing people of color, queer people and other communities marginalized by mainstream politicians.
Marrero said she cares deeply about housing insecurity and affordability in the city, but that it was also “really meaningful to have someone who is brown and who looks like us and who eats like us and who lives more like us than anyone we’ve ever seen before” on the ballot. “That representation is really important.”
New York mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo speaks to reporters as he marks his ballot in New York on Tuesday.
(Richard Drew / Associated Press)
And she said that’s a big part of why people across the country are watching the New York race.
“We’re definitely a beacon in this kind of fascist takeover that is very clearly happening across the country,” she said. “People in other states and other cities and other countries have their eyes on what’s happening here. Obviously Mamdani is doing something right. And together we can do something right. But it has to be together.”
Elsewhere on the East Coast, voters were electing governors in both Virginia and New Jersey, races that have also drawn the president’s attention.
In the New Jersey race, Trump has backed the Republican candidate, former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli, over the Democratic candidate, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, whom former President Obama recently stumped for. Long a blue state, New Jersey has been shifting to the right, and polls have shown a tight race.
In the Virginia race, Trump has not endorsed Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by name, but has called on voters to “vote Republican” and to reject the Democratic candidate, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a 46-year-old former CIA officer whom Obama has also supported.
“Why would anyone vote for New Jersey and Virginia Gubernatorial Candidates, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, when they want transgender for everybody, men playing in women’s sports, High Crime, and the most expensive Energy prices almost anywhere in the World?” Trump recently wrote on Truth Social, repeating some of his favorite partisan attacks on Democrats from the presidential campaign trail last year.
At a rally for Spanberger in Norfolk, Va., over the weekend, Obama put the race in equally stark terms — as part of a battle for American democracy.
“We don’t need to speculate about the dangers to our democracy. We don’t need to wonder about whether vulnerable people are going to be hurt, or ask ourselves how much more coarse and mean our culture can become. We’ve witnessed it. Elections do matter,” Obama said. “We all have more power than we think. We just have to use it.”
Voting was underway in the states, but with some disruptions. Bomb threats disrupted voting in some parts of New Jersey early Tuesday, temporarily shutting down a string of polling locations across the state before law enforcement determined the threats were hoaxes.
In California, voters were being asked to change the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw congressional maps in their favor through 2030, in order to counter similar moves by Republicans in red states such as Texas.
Leading Democrats, including Obama and Gov. Gavin Newsom, have described the measure as an effort to safeguard American democracy against a power grab by Trump, who had encouraged the red states to act, while opponents of the measure have derided it as an anti-democratic power grab by state Democrats.
Trump has urged California voters not to cast ballots by mail or to vote early, arguing such practices are somehow “dishonest,” and on Tuesday morning suggested on Truth Social that Proposition 50 itself was unconstitutional.
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump wrote, without providing evidence of problems. “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”
Both individually and collectively, the races are being closely watched as potential indicators of political sentiment and enthusiasm going into next year’s midterm elections, and of Democrats’ ability to get voters back to the polls after Trump’s decisive win over former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
Voters, too, saw the races as having particularly large stakes at a pivotal moment for the country.
Michelle Kim, 32, who has lived in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn for three years, stood in line at a polling site early Tuesday morning — waiting to cast her vote for Mamdani.
Kim said she cares about transportation, land use and the rising cost of living in New York, and appreciated Mamdani’s broader message that solutions are possible, even if not guaranteed.
“My hope is not, like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna solve, like, all of our issues,’” she said. “But I think for him to be able to represent people and give hope, that’s also part of it.”
Lin reported from New York, Rector from San Francisco. Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Norwich is a historic city that offers a quieter, yet equally enchanting, winter escape compared to the likes of Bath, London, Oxford, Edinburgh or York
16:20, 04 Nov 2025Updated 16:21, 04 Nov 2025
Norwich’s unique appeal as the only British city located within a national park(Image: Getty)
As the festive season approaches, many Brits’ thoughts turn to staycations in bustling cities like Bath, London, Oxford, Edinburgh or York, all renowned for their Christmas markets and historic charm. But for those seeking a quieter, cosier winter retreat, Norwich is a hidden gem.
The city was even listed among the top UK staycation destinations for 2024 by StressFreeCarRental.com. John Charnock, CEO of StressFreeCarRental.com, said: “As the nights draw in and the temperatures plummet, it’s inevitable that many of us start to feel a little down at this time of year.”
He highlighted Norwich’s unique appeal as the only British city located within a national park.
John explained: “The picturesque Broads National Park has miles and miles of footpaths for visitors to truly feel at one with nature and help to keep active. Norwich is a great city to connect with the outdoors and practice ecotherapy.”
Norwich Cathedral, a medieval architectural marvel, continues to be the city’s main attraction, drawing in countless tourists, reports the Express.
One visitor wrote on TripAdvisor: “Norwich Cathedral is a beautiful building, which we had said we would visit. Over the years, we have visited many of the major cathedrals in the UK and some in Europe, but we have never been to our local cathedral. After 75 plus years, that time had come. We had coffee in the very modern cafe, and overall, the afternoon was most enjoyable.”
Another added: “This a brilliant place to go whatever the occasion even if your not religious. Light a candle for a lost loved one, sing a hymn, look at the amazing architecture or pray. There are also family events in the summer holidays to occupy the kids.”
Throughout the festive period, the cathedral hosts Christmas services, concerts and a stunning light display, whilst Norwich’s own ‘Winter Wonderland’ is situated conveniently nearby.
Following a day of sightseeing, popping into one of Norwich’s numerous historic pubs, complete with a crackling fire, provides the ideal way to get cosy.
Whilst it might not feature one enormous Christmas market, Norwich comes alive with a selection of smaller, more personal festive gatherings that showcase local creativity.
Norwich is packed with independent retailers and well-known high street names, providing a range of distinctive gifts, keepsakes, and much more.
The city features a bustling marketplace, multiple Christmas markets, the Norwich Lanes, and thriving shopping centres.
There are also late-night shopping Thursdays in the lead-up to Christmas. The city is buzzing with festive spirit, boasting stunning Christmas lights and seasonal events at historic venues like The Assembly House and The Maids Head Hotel.
Elsewhere in Norwich, there’s a wealth of charming walks and cosy pubs to discover.
Norwich Lanes glisten with festive decorations during the winter months, perfect for a tranquil wander. Embark on a riverside walk from Norwich Rail Station along the River Wensum.
You’ll stumble upon historical treasures including Pull’s Ferry, Cow Tower, and Norwich Cathedral, with chances to nip into traditional pubs like the Compleat Angler and The Red Lion for a drink.
For a walk steeped in history, take on the city’s circular route, which follows the banks of the River Wensum and crosses several ancient bridges.
You’ll spot medieval city walls, the towering castle, and various churches, while Norwich’s oldest pub, The Adam and Eve, conveniently sits along the route.
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As one century gives way to another, a child is born in Mumbai. “The millennium’s gift,” Chandni Contractor, is a source of joy to her parents. When Chandni turns 4 and reveals herself to be a musical prodigy, she becomes a source of wonder. At the age of 13, she dazzles audiences across India with her piano and sitar performances. Five years later, she enthralls Majnoo, the playboy son of billionaire parents, and the pair go on to have a spectacular wedding. But their marriage sours and her in-laws turn overbearing. Eventually Chandni snaps and wreaks havoc by playing a different kind of music, one that has the power to destroy livelihoods and lives.
“The Musician of Kahani” is one of five stories in a new collection by Salman Rushdie. “The Eleventh Hour” sees the acclaimed Indian-born British American author exploring the weighty matters of life and death. That he should choose to craft tales around these twin themes is hardly surprising. In 2022, he was nearly killed in a frenzied attack at an event in upstate New York. Two years later, in his up-close-and-personal memoir, “Knife,” he recounted his ordeal and told how he had come to embrace what he called “my second-chance life.” Rushdie’s brush with death and new lease on life renders his latest stories — his first fiction since the attack — all the more potent and poignant.
The collection’s opener, “In the South,” gets underway both innocently and ominously: “The day Junior fell down began like any other day.” What follows is a chronicle of a death foretold. Senior and Junior are two octogenarian neighbors in Chennai, India, who spend their time together arguing. The former has had a rich and fulfilling life, but as so many of his friends and family have died — or “gone to their fiery rest” — he now longs for death. The latter, afflicted by “the incurable disease of mediocrity,” has led a disappointing life yet still possesses a lust for it.
When a tsunami hits the city, it kills Junior. At first Senior is angry (“Why not me?” he rages), but his dominant emotion turns to sadness after he realizes he has lost a man who was his “shadow.” Or so he believes. For Junior’s passing is not the end. Senior continues to see, and quarrel with, his fallen friend. As Rushdie puts it: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”
One of the finest stories here, “Late,” involves another apparition. English academic S. M. Arthur wakes up in his university college (an unnamed King’s College, Cambridge) and discovers he is dead. Feeling like “a broken entity trapped in a kind of prison,” he finds peace by communing with the one person who can see him, Indian student and fellow lonely soul, Rosa.
The pair form a bond in the empty college over the Christmas holidays. Despite their affinity, Arthur harbors secrets. When Rosa is tasked with sorting his papers, she comes across a mysteriously locked box file, the contents of which he refuses to disclose. Then Arthur takes stock of his situation and decides he can’t rest until Rosa helps him get even with a past persecutor. What is in the box and why the need for revenge?
Weighing in at over 70 pages, “Late” constitutes more a novella than a story, as does “The Musician of Kahani” and the equally substantial “Oklahoma.” This last offering about writers, writing and elaborate vanishing acts is artfully structured and formally daring, made up of multiple layers, diverse references, literary ventriloquy and slick twists and turns. In a lesser writer’s hands, this novella might have been too clever for its own good; however, Rushdie, a seasoned pro, achieves the perfect balance.
He hasn’t done so in recent years in his long-form fiction. “The Golden House” (2017), “Quichotte” (2019) and his last novel, “Victory City” (2023), were blighted in places by digressive riffs and monologues, bottomless subplots, “humorous” character names (Evel Cent, Thimma the Almost as Huge) and excessive magic-realist high jinks comprising talking revolvers, ferocious mastodons, an Italian-speaking cricket and a demigoddess who grows a city from seeds and lives for 247 years. Sometimes this hocus-pocus worked wonders; at other times it felt like cheap tricks.
Rushdie has far more success in “The Eleventh Hour.” His narratives are more streamlined. His flights of fancy— malevolent music, undead scholars, imaginary brothers, a cult led by a guru with 93 Ferraris in an “experimental township” called the Moon — are more controlled and add subtle strokes of color. Some groan-inducing puns aside, Rushdie’s comic touches are deftly managed, appearing as sharp satirical swipes or witty repartee. “You look like a man who is only waiting to die,” says Junior to Senior, who in turn retorts: “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”
Rushdie exhibits further playfulness by scattering clues and inviting his reader to trace connections. Arthur is in part a crafty composite of the writer E.M. Forster and the computer scientist Alan Turing — all three being, like their creator, King’s College alumni. “And at midnight, the approved hour for miraculous births in our part of the world, a baby was born to a Breach Candy family,” Rushdie writes of Chandni, with a knowing nod to the key time, place and circumstances in his 1981 masterpiece “Midnight’s Children.”
The book’s last and shortest entry, the fabular “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes for a somewhat slight coda. Otherwise, this is an inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer and critic from Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes for the Economist, the Washington Post and other publications.
MIAMI BEACH — South Florida is seeing a wave of new cars, but they won’t add to traffic or lengthen anyone’s commute. That’s because the cars are made of marine-grade concrete and were installed underwater.
Over several days late last month, crews lowered 22 life-size cars into the ocean, several hundred feet off South Beach. The project was organized by a group that pioneers underwater sculpture parks as a way to create human-made coral reefs.
“Concrete Coral,” commissioned by the nonprofit REEFLINE, will soon be seeded with 2,200 native corals that have been grown in a nearby Miami lab. The project is partially funded by a $5-million bond from the city of Miami Beach. The group is also trying to raise $40 million to extend the potentially 11-phase project along an underwater corridor just off the city’s 7-mile-long coastline.
“I think we are making history here,” Ximena Caminos, the group’s founder, said. “It’s one of a kind, it’s a pioneering, underwater reef that’s teaming up with science, teaming up with art.”
She conceived the overall plan with architect Shohei Shigematsu, and the artist Leandro Erlich designed the car sculptures for the first phase.
Colin Foord, who runs REEFLINE’s Miami coral lab, said they’ll soon start the planting process and create a forest of soft corals over the car sculptures, which will serve as a habitat teeming with marine life.
“I think it really lends to the depth of the artistic message itself of having a traffic jam of cars underwater,” Foord said. “So nature’s gonna take back over, and we’re helping by growing the soft corals.”
Foord said he’s confident the native gorgonian corals will thrive because they were grown from survivors of the 2023 bleaching event, during which a marine heat wave killed massive amounts of Florida corals.
Plans for future deployments include Petroc Sesti’s “Heart of Okeanos,” modeled after a giant blue whale heart, and Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre’s “The Miami Reef Star,” a group of starfish shapes arranged in a larger star pattern.
“What that’s going to do is accelerate the formation of a coral reef ecosystem,” Foord said. “It’s going to attract a lot more life and add biodiversity and really kind of push the envelope of artificial reef-building here in Florida.”
Besides the project being a testing ground for new coral transplantation and hybrid reef design and development, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner expects it to generate local jobs with ecotourism experiences such as snorkeling, diving, kayaking and paddleboard tours.
The reefs will be located about 20 feet below the surface of the water and about 800 feet from the shore.
“Miami Beach is a global model for so many different issues, and now we’re doing it for REEFLINE,” Meiner said during a beachside ceremony last month. “I’m so proud to be working together with the private market to make sure that this continues right here in Miami Beach to be the blueprint for other cities to utilize.”
The nonprofit also offers community education programs, where volunteers can plant corals alongside scientists, and a floating marine learning center, where participants can gain firsthand experience in coral conservation every month.
Caminos, the group’s founder, acknowledges that the installation won’t fix all of the problems — which are as big as climate change and sea level rise — but she said it can serve as a catalyst for dialogue about the value of coastal ecosystems.
“We can show how creatively, collaboratively and interdisciplinarily we can all tackle a man-made problem with man-made solutions,” Caminos said.
Fischer writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press videojournalist Cody Jackson contributed to this report.
United States Republican President Donald Trump says he will restrict federal funds for New York City if Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the city’s mayoral elections, to be held on Tuesday.
Trump said on his Truth Social platform on Monday that “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required”, if Mamdani wins the race.
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Polls show Mamdani leading against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who is the Republican nominee.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics polls on Monday, Mamdani led with 45.8 percent, maintaining a 14.7-point advantage over Cuomo’s 31.1 percent and a 28.5-point lead over Sliwa’s 17.3 percent.
On the final day of campaigning on Monday, the mayoral candidates raced across New York City’s five boroughs after months of back-and-forth barbs, social media hits and saucy debates.
As the closely-watched election day edged closer, Mamdani led a sunrise walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, flanked by hundreds of supporters, before kicking off the day with a speech at City Hall.
Cuomo, on his part, denounced socialism in the Bronx, visited seniors in Chinatown, and popped off an X post calling Mamdani a “poser”.
And Republican candidate Sliwa greeted supporters in the Coney Island neighbourhood of Brooklyn in his signature red hat, as he spoke at a subway station where a woman was killed on a train last year.
Mamdani and Cuomo’s duelling campaigns have reflected their positions in the New York race: the son of another former New York governor, steeped in the liberal Democratic political establishment, versus a young and little-known assemblyman who would be the city’s first Muslim, first person born in Africa and the first person of South Asian descent to lead New York City.
The mayoral race, which has captured outsized global attention, has seen a record 735,317 early votes cast over the past nine days, more than four times the total for the 2021 election, according to the New York City Board of Elections.
‘Our time is now’
Mamdani, a 34-year-old New York state assemblyman, has galvanised New Yorkers with an optimistic, multilingual campaign that promised free buses, rent freezes and universal childcare, partially paid for by taxing the city’s wealthiest residents.
“If [Cuomo is] elected as mayor, our city will descend deeper into the darkness that has forced too many of our neighbours to flee, and made it impossible for working people to live lives of dignity,” Mamdani said.
In his City Hall speech on Monday, Mamdani seemed to embrace the seismic shift that his campaign has represented for New York’s politics.
“There were few in this city who dared to imagine that we could win, and what it would mean for a city that has – for too long – served only the wealthy and powerful, at the expense of those who work through sunrises and sunsets,” Mamdani said.
Moments later, the crowd broke out in cheers of, “Our time is now!”
Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after an independent state probe found he had engaged in a pattern of sexually harassing women, took aim at Mamdani’s democratic socialist promises in his final hours of campaigning, likening them to left-wing governments in Latin America.
“Socialism didn’t work in Venezuela. Socialism didn’t work in Cuba. Socialism is not going to work in New York City,” Cuomo said. Mamdani, however, is a self-described “democratic socialist”.
New York’s most prominent billionaires, including hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have supported Cuomo’s campaign, with Ackman doling out a total of $750,000 through donation vehicles known as super PACs, CNBC reported last week.
