city

Manchester City are understood to be ready to appeal any guilty verdict, but could face ‘severe penalty’ says ex-chair.

Former Manchester City chairman David Bernstein said the club could face potentially “drastic” sanctions after reportedly being found guilty on all but one of 115 charges for breaching Premier League financial rules.

The Premier League has not made an official announcement over the case and there is no indication of any possible punishment.

Abu Dhabi-backed City have always strenuously denied the charges and a club spokesperson said the position had not changed.

It is understood City will appeal should the charges be upheld.

“The club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence,” the spokesperson said.

City were charged by the Premier League in 2023 following an investigation into alleged breaches of rules between 2009 and 2018.

The club were accused of failing to provide accurate financial information and details of payments to players and coaches, as well as breaches of financial sustainability rules.

They were also charged with failing to cooperate with an investigation.

A hearing by an independent commission started in September 2024.

Man City face ‘severe penalty’

Bernstein, who was City chairman between 1998 and 2003, told Times Radio that “money is not sufficient” in terms of a potential punishment, urging a swift appeal process.

“The appeal process cannot go on for year after year, I think that would be a disaster,” he said, “not just for this particular case but for English football generally. The timing is crucial.

“I can’t give a view on the punishment. If they are found, after the appeal, guilty of [the] charges, my beloved club is going to face a very severe penalty.

“All I would say is that money is not sufficient, it would have to be something, unfortunately, more drastic than that.”

Oasis star and City fan Noel Gallagher described his “shock” at the developments.

Speaking on the Let Me Talk podcast, he said: “Surprised because only that the club have assured us all along that they vehemently denied any of these charges.

“So it was a bit of a shock to find out that we’ve been found guilty of all but one. But really overall just quite sad really. Sad for the fans and for the players.”

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy described the case as “unsettling” for football fans and called for a swift resolution.

In 2020, UEFA imposed a two-year European ban on City as well as a fine for breaking financial fair-play rules, though that ban was later overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

If the reported guilty verdicts are confirmed, sanctions could include a severe points deduction and possibly even expulsion from the Premier League.

Everton and Nottingham Forest were both hit by points deductions in the 2023/24 season for single breaches of profit and sustainability rules.

Other Premier League clubs are understood to be taking legal advice about compensation relating to the charges.

Under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour, whose Abu Dhabi United Group acquired the club in 2008, City have become the dominant force in English football.

They have won eight Premier League titles, a Champions League crown and multiple other trophies over the past 15 years.

The latest developments in the case come just months after former City manager Pep Guardiola left the club following a golden decade in charge at the Etihad.

Guardiola always backed the club’s stance on the charges but threatened to walk away if he felt he had been lied to and they were proven to be true.

Manchester City‘s legal fight with the Premier League has the potential to “spiral out of control”, a former top club executive has warned.

Christian Purslow, a former Liverpool managing director and Aston Villa chief executive, who also held a senior role at Chelsea, said the case could begin a chain of events that would be “appalling for the game”.

City have been found guilty of the vast majority of 115 charges brought forward by the Premier League.

The club were accused of a wide range of rule breaches which centred around claims that they inflated sponsorship revenue from connected companies and made other “off the books” payments to circumvent football’s financial rules.

Premier League clubs are seeking legal advice about compensation relating to the charges, while BBC Sport has been told that City will appeal.

Sanctions on the club are yet to be announced, but repercussions could include a points deduction, expulsion from the Premier League or a huge fine.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Purslow appeared alongside football law expert Paul Gilroy KC, who described the case as a “seismic moment for world football”.

Purslow said: “It’s a sort of ‘where does this end?’ because if you look at every single season – the nine seasons which we now know Manchester City breached rules – then all of their 19 Premier League rivals in that season, to differing extents, suffered easy-to-compute loss. Whether it was a place in the Premier League – every place was worth £3m.

“Teams that came fifth who didn’t make the Champions League maybe lost tens of millions of pounds – and of course teams that were relegated. Let’s say the team that finished 18th would’ve finished 17th if Manchester City weren’t there. And they, of course, suffered huge loss.

“If you add all those claims up, over nine years, and that’s just in the Premier League, you can see that the potential here for this to spiral out of control is huge.

“I really hope that common sense prevails here and that there is a comprehensive solution between the authorities and Manchester City that looks at all these issues and tries to draw a line in the sand.

“Because a never-ending waterfall of legal claims and uncertainties for another four or five years would be absolutely appalling for the game.”

Gilroy added that, so far, four clubs have put in protective claims “reserving the right to claim compensation if City are found guilty”.

Political polls are like weather forecasts. They’re worth passing consideration, maybe, but you’d have to be a fool to bet your house on their accuracy.

And yet there’s something that rings true about the recent poll suggesting that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is in deep trouble among likely voters as she tries to hold on to a job that Councilmember Nithya Raman is trying to snatch away from her.

Here are the numbers, as compiled by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times:

Raman: 39%.

Bass: 28%.

Undecided: 33%.

Bass has naturally tried to debunk the poll. What else could she do, when her supporters are outnumbered by people who can’t make up their minds? Bass would need to dominate the undecided vote to have a chance, but given her high unfavorability rating, that’ll be hard to do.

On the other hand, Raman certainly hasn’t put things out of reach, despite the fact that Bass carries the baggage of the Palisades fire and has made only minimal progress on her signature issue — homelessness. Election day is less than two months away, and Raman has failed to convince anywhere near a majority that she’s the answer.

So what do Raman and Bass need to do between now and Nov. 3?

Some speculate that Bass may need to step up the negative attacks.

I beg to differ.

We need both candidates to be bolder, more creative, more convincing, and to tell us things we haven’t heard before.

All the recent L.A. mayors I’ve known had their faults and failures, whether the task was filling potholes, building out transit or addressing the high cost of housing. But among their best qualities, Dick Riordan was arrogantly confident, Jim Hahn had a steady hand on the tiller, Antonio Villaraigosa was tireless and passionate, Eric Garcetti was a long-range thinker on earthquakes, water and energy.

L.A. needs a mayor with all of those qualities. A cheerleader. A task master. A ball buster.

Running the second-largest city in the country is no easy task, because many of the problems at street level begin well beyond local control, related in part to an economy that leaves too many people behind.

But if you want to lead a world-class city, you need to have world-class answers on the big stuff like housing and homelessness and on the basics, too, like fractured sidewalks and neglected parks. Most voters don’t give a hoot about which candidate is more of a socialist or a moderate. City Hall is broken, and they want to know who can fix it.

On Wednesday, I checked the same sadly neglected area around City Hall that I wrote about in April and found only minimal improvements. Graffiti has been washed from the Frank Putnam Flint fountain, but it remains a broken-down monument to neglect, as it has for most of the past 60 years. And all around it, most of the little placards identifying native plants are broken or missing.

People rest on the Frank Putnam Flint fountain outside City Hall, a sadly neglected area.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The L.A. Mall is still a largely abandoned wreck, with broken planter boxes and weeds at street level. A woman with two shopping carts told me she’s been homeless for 5½ years. The restaurant next to the nearby police department is shuttered; the restaurant across the street from it is long dead, and the once-vibrant downtown — which generated revenue that benefited every neighborhood of the city — is gasping.

I drove down Hope Street, south of 12th Street, because a reader who lives in that area and has told me about repeated fires at abandoned properties. A tractor was clearing debris from a recent blaze.

I drove west on Olympic toward Alvarado, an area I visit regularly to see a friend. Streets are strewn with trash. They’re always strewn with trash. At Olympic and South Lake, where encampments line the street and a fire once spread into a church parking lot, destroying vehicles, there’s a concrete triangle that was heaped with trash. It’s always heaped with trash, like a municipal dump on a busy thoroughfare.

Next I headed west on Wilshire to the RFK Memorial I wrote about 10 months ago, near the site of the 1968 Bobby Kennedy assassination. It remainsfenced-off, with trash and graffitiand with overgrown vines covering tributes to Kennedy. The city was going to help the school district clean things up. Then the school district took on the task.

It’s still a mess. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s an indictment. And so is the fact that in Studio City, where frustrated neighbors complained for five years that an abandoned property had been taken over by squatters, it took a recent fire to get City Hall’s attention.

The property, since cleared, is in Raman’s district, and she and Bass traded accusations about who had dropped the ball.

“As far as homelessness goes, I don’t see either candidate really showing a clear vision to solve this,” said Kayt Miranda, whose home was damaged by the fire at the abandoned property. “I mean, it’s a tall order, and I wouldn’t want to be in charge of that. But I’m not hearing anything from either of them that sounds like it will work or hasn’t been tried already.”

To be fair, Bass and Raman have each had lots of success on homelessness, with thousands of people being brought indoors. That job is not easy, especially given the number of people with mental illness and addiction issues. I know this from personal experience, having spent a year trying to steer a friend in from homelessness.

But the pace is too slow and the cost too high. As my colleague David Zahniser reported earlier this year, $300 million had been spent on the mayor’s Inside Safe program since December 2022, and as of last December, 40% of the 5,800 people who had been housed were back on the street.

And that was with an estimated annual cost per person of $82,000. Raman, who had supported the program, became a critic of it and touted a less expensive strategy that itself has been criticized for its slow pace, as Times City Hall reporter Noah Goldberg wrote in August.

Not long ago, a homelessness policy expert suggested to me that if we could figure out a way to double the nearly $1,000 Social Security Disability subsidy many homeless people get, it would open some doors in a housing market they’re now priced out of. Too expensive? It’s cheaper than what we’re doing.

I’d like to hear the candidates rethink the playbook like that, double down on what works and drop what doesn’t.

I’d like to hear from a candidate with a realistic plan to get L.A. out of the cellar in park rankings nationally, to break up the 10-year logjam for a sidewalk repair and the two-year wait to fix a street light.

All those undecided voters know exactly what they want.

A mayor who says fix the busted fountain by the end of the week, or else.

They want someone to win their vote.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

There is no better way to explore a city than by foot, but not all places are as suitable for an adventure as others, as I found out during a recent visit to the world’s most walkable city

There is no better way to explore a city than on foot. Once touched down in a city, bag in the hotel and a fresh pair of socks on, the first thing I do is go for a walk.

It is impossible to get a feel for a place from the back of a taxi or from the elevated vantage point of a coach. You’ve got to start pounding the pavement, ideally without a destination in mind, and see where you end up.

On a recent trip to Rome, I set out from my central station hotel and marveled at the carnage of the Trevi Fountain queues, crossed the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and witnessed a coordinated group of ball-under-cup scammers sweatily fail to take anyone’s money. Last spring, I headed out into Benidorm, finding myself an impossibly cheap roast, a seafront pint of Guinness, and a ‘Good boys go to heaven, bad boys go to Benidorm’ t-shirt.

And so, in April, I applied the same approach to Seoul, a city recently named the most walkable in the world.

Do you have a story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

OPINION

Each year, Time Out conducts an annual city survey, this time around quizzing 24,000 people on how easy or not it is to discover given cities on foot. The ranking is based on the highest percentage of locals who rated their city’s walkability ‘good’ or ‘amazing’, and the South Korean capital tops the list.

“A city doesn’t have to be small to be walkable. In fact, Seoul is one of the largest cities on the list by surface area and population, but its impressive 93 percent approval rating from locals has secured the South Korean capital joint-first position. Why? Well, the city has a reputation as an exceedingly safe place to stroll by day and night, and is home to neighbourhoods such as Myeongdong, Insadong, and Hongdae, which are all primed for exploring on foot,” writes Time Out.

“Then there are the innovative pedestrian walkways, like Seoullo 7017, an 1074m-long elevated ‘sky garden’ which has seen an old inner city highway revamped into a stroll-worthy green space, home to 24,000 different plants. In downtown Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream is flanked by a walkway that not only links many of the city’s central metro stations, but also landmarks such as Gwanjang Market, Jongmyo Shrine and Gyeongbokgung Palace.”

I could not disagree more.

Seoul is a fantastic city. It’s alive with a kind of youthful, optimistic energy that feels far removed from most places I’ve visited; it’s fearlessly trendy, and it’s centered on an urban mountain blanketed with cherry blossoms come the spring.

But walkable it is not. Seoul is a car city.

The almost unbelievably cheap cost of an Uber (we’re talking around £5 for a half-hour ride) means that hopping in a cab is far more common than in the UK, while the wide, four and six-lane roads that dominate much of the city encourage motoring. And produce a lot of fumes.

According to NASA, Seoul is one of the world’s cities with the worst air pollution, beating Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, and London. You can certainly feel it. On one crisp morning, I walked up Namsan, the 170-meter-tall hill in Seoul’s center. The view from the top would be spectacular, were it not for the heavy, shimmering cloud that hung over everything.

Walking back down, I started to get the vague feeling I’d done something wrong. I hadn’t accidentally offended a waiter or lost my hotel pass; it was the signs. Seoul is a city of signs. From the expected ‘no smoking’, to the less typical ‘no archery’, to the possibly unique ‘no hiking without a flashlight’, everywhere you look, some kind of rule is being transmitted to you. It doesn’t leave you with a feeling of freedom and exploration, nor do the CCTV cameras placed on tall metal poles in the city’s woodland.

It’s a place that’s big on rules and completely opposed to bins. Having finished a snack, I walked for two hours without finding a trash can. South Koreans are expected to take their rubbish home with them – a system that says a lot about the population’s diligent character, but one I find inherently anti-social.

As I do the lack of pavements that had me regularly sliding down alleyway walls to give way to cars, and the complete, frustrating prohibition of jaywalking. Couple all of this with the fact that the city lacks an obvious centre and is exhaustingly massive, and its status as one of the world’s least walkable cities is clear.

Given my love of treading the tarmac, it says a lot about how fantastic the rest of Seoul is that I left in love with the place. From the fish-filled waters of Cheonggyecheon River, the rusty octopus of Yongma Land, and the impossibly cheap but high-grade cosmetics, it’s a fascinating place that feels like it’s at the centre of the world. Just prepare to order a cab.

A stunning new poll showing Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman gaining a double-digit lead over incumbent Karen Bass in the mayor’s race is increasing pressure on Bass and her allies to go sharply negative against her opponent and to seek support from conservative and undecided voters to narrow the gap.

The poll, conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times, showed Bass trailing Raman by 11 percentage points — with 28% of likely voters saying they supported the mayor while 39% said they would vote for Raman. The remaining 33% were undecided, an unusually high number this close to the Nov. 3 election.

“The bottom line is this is a huge shot in the arm politically for Raman — and it’s not a good day for the mayor,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Dan Schnur, a former Republican political consultant, said the poll could have instant negative effects for the mayor’s fundraising ability as potential supporters might now view Raman as the favorite in the race.

“The most immediate tangible result of a poll like this is that Bass’ greatest advantage was her fundraising and it now becomes much more challenging to raise money,” he said.

Bass, appearing Wednesday at a news conference in Hollywood, said she’s seen multiple polls that show a tight race. She said that Raman is “absolutely not” the front-runner in the race.

Mayor Karen Bass speaks at Vermont/Santa Monica Metro Center on Wednesday, touting progress on construction of affordable housing.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The mayor said she is working to highlight the city’s progress in making rent more affordable, pointing to newly released numbers that show that more than 10,000 units of housing with restricted rents have been built since she took office in December 2022.

“The No. 1 issue to Angelenos continues to be lack of affordability, and our primary way of addressing that from the city is housing,” she said. “So we are absolutely addressing affordability.”

Others in the Bass camp seemed more anxious about the poll results.

“It put a pit in stomachs,” said one supporter close to the Bass campaign who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the poll. “But there is still an outside chance for Bass. It’s not total doomsday.”

The supporter said that the Bass campaign truly doesn’t believe Raman’s lead is that big, but that the poll was still “not good news,” especially for fundraising.

Mike Bonin, a progressive former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, said Bass needs to focus on winning over voters who chose former reality television personality Spencer Pratt in the primary election in June. Many of those voters are now on the fence.

Pratt received 26% of the vote in the primary, and most of the voters who cast ballots for him — 63% — say they still haven’t decided whom to vote for in the runoff, the poll found. Among the Pratt voters who have decided, 22% favored Bass compared with 16% for Raman.

Bonin said he expects Bass and her allies to attack Raman’s progressive views in order to reach Pratt voters. Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and opposed raises for Los Angeles Police Department officers that had been championed by Bass.

“The nature of the attacks will try to reach the Pratt voters particularly since they are the largest bloc of undecideds and they skew conservative,” Bonin said.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, is already airing campaign ads critical of Raman over her opposition to a law barring homeless encampments next to schools. In the coming days, the group will also roll out commercials highlighting Raman’s ties to the DSA, which has endorsed her mayoral bid, said union spokesman Tom Saggau.

“Our own poll told us that the Pratt folks were very much undecided, and that when they heard more about Nithya’s record, and her co-governing with DSA, they moved off of her,” he said, adding that his group still views the race as a dead heat.

Raman, not surprisingly, cheered the poll results.

“This poll reflects the momentum we’re seeing on the ground. Angelenos are ready for change and want to see a City That Works,” Raman said in a post on Instagram.

Raman campaign officials said the poll probably will help their fundraising efforts, which they said had already been gaining momentum over the last few weeks. And Schnur, the former GOP political consultant, said the wide lead allows Raman to spend more time touting her own credentials instead of disparaging Bass.

“For the most part Raman has the front-runner’s luxury of putting out a positive message and reinforcing her own credentials,” Schnur said.

Estevan Montemayor, who is running the pro-Raman Estamos con Nithya independent expenditure group, said his group’s role will be to inform voters about Raman’s positives while the Bass campaign attacks.

“They’re gonna come after Nithya and we’re gonna be here to tell her success story,” he said.

Bass supporter Stuart Waldman, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, said the large number of undecided voters this close to the Nov. 3 election is worrying but also leaves an opening for Bass to gain ground.

“Any swing in any direction could make a big change,” Waldman said. “We have no idea who’s going to vote. … Usually by this point in time, everything has tightened up.”

Councilmember Nithya Raman, lower right, campaigns at a Latinos Con Raman rally at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In courting those undecided voters, however, Bass is burdened by high unfavorability numbers, according to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

The mayor had 63% unfavorable ratings, the poll found, with 28% favorable and 9% having no opinion. By comparison, 40% had a favorable view of Raman, according to the poll, while 39% said they had an unfavorable view of her and 21% had no opinion.

Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant, said that Bass needs to accept responsibility on core issues upsetting Angelenos about her tenure, such as homelessness and the 2025 Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. In a recent interview with The Times, Bass said her biggest mistake as mayor was being in Ghana when the fire began amid high wind warnings.

“You have to say, ‘I hear you,’” he said. “Voters don’t think Karen gets that they are mad about things that happened during her term.”

Then, Murphy said, he believes Bass needs to attack Raman as being more establishment than Bass.

Murphy noted that Bass has frequently attacked Raman for being “at City Hall longer than I have,” which he called a powerful message to voters who are considering Raman because they want change. Raman was elected in 2020 and Bass in 2022.

Other polls taken in the campaign have shown a closer race than the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

In an internal Raman campaign poll from early September, the council member was ahead, 44% to 39%, with 17% undecided. She was also leading, 38% to 32%, in a poll commissioned by the group Streets for All, which is backing Raman.

In an early August poll commissioned by an independent expenditure group supporting Bass, the mayor had the edge, 41% to 35%, with 24% undecided.

Mayor Karen Bass greets community members after speaking at Vermont/Santa Monica Metro Center.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The Bass campaign cited some of those polls when responding to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll Wednesday, calling it an “outlier poll” and accusing the pollsters of getting it wrong.

“In the primary … they got it wrong and undercounted Karen Bass’ support,” campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said in a news release.

Stack added that polls conducted online, like the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, “systematically [undercount] working-class families, seniors, and non-English speaking communities who regularly turn out on Election Day.”

Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll, defended the methodology, saying he has spent 45 years polling in California and eight years running the Berkeley IGS Poll.

“What would you expect from a campaign down by double digits? They attack the poll,” he said.

Mayor Karen Bass called the training that LAPD officers receive for handling mental health calls “woefully inadequate” and ordered an outside review of the department’s policies Thursday, saying recent shootings highlight continued shortcomings in how police deal with people in crisis.

Bass is particularly concerned by the relative lack of specialized intervention training for patrol officers who respond to the vast majority of service calls. While the SWAT team and other units receive such training, it is not standard across the Los Angeles Police Department.

“After the academy, they have spot training that is essentially videos that are played at roll calls,” Bass said in an interview week with The Times.

The mayor’s directive comes as she’s locked in a reelection fight with progressive challenger Nithya Raman, who, like Bass, has criticized the LAPD over shootings of mentally ill people.

“The ability of the city to respond to someone’s pleas for help is incredibly important in ensuring that we maintain the trust of the public,” Raman recently told The Times. “And right now, there is no alternative system besides LAPD to respond to many of the calls that are coming into 911 besides, of course, Fire Department calls.”

Polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, shows Raman is favored by 39% of likely L.A. voters, compared to 28% support for Bass — with 33% still undecided.

LAPD officers have fired their weapons at people 16 times this year — down from 34 shootings in 2025, but recent incidents have highlighted how officers continue to turn to their guns when confronting individuals with mental illnesses. In years past, department statistics showed at least a third of all police shootings involved someone with obvious signs of emotional distress.

Bass was particularly disturbed by a July 29 incident in the Olympic patrol area in which police fatally shot a man who approached them with an aluminum bat.

Body-camera video captured officers approaching 33-year-old Alejandro Garcia as he was walking through traffic on Normandie Avenue underneath the 10 Freeway overpass. Officers ordered him to drop the bat, although it’s unclear whether he heard them. While Garcia could be seen holding the bat with both hands, the footage appeared to contradict an early LAPD account suggesting he swung at them.

The shooting could have been avoided if “the officers were trained differently or better,” Bass said, noting that one of the officers had been on the job for roughly five months.

The LAPD has yet to identify the officer or officers who opened fire.

Bass said it would have been appropriate for the department to deploy a unit that sends a social worker out with officers when responding to calls involving a person in crisis.

“You knew before that he had a bat and he was going around smashing cars,” she said.

About a week later, two officers shot and killed Canas Zimran, 44, in Boyle Heights after, department officials say, he approached officers with what was later determined to be a tree trimmer.

The shootings occurred despite policies that prioritize deescalation techniques and the use of “less-lethal” alternatives, such as bean bag rounds meant to subdue people without resorting to firearms.

Bass said the killings reflect, in part, a broader failure of the mental health system to get people the care they need. Also of concern, the mayor said, was the lack of training for officers on how to distinguish between symptoms caused by mental illness, physical and cognitive disabilities and drugs such as phencyclidine, or PCP, which seems to be having a resurgence on city streets.

Bass said her review would be a top-down evaluation that also scrutinizes the roles of dispatchers, supervisors and others involved in responding to reports of people behaving erratically.

She said the audit will examine calls from the last five years involving people with “with known histories of mental or behavioral health conditions” in which police officers avoided using force. The goal, Bass said, is to “identify common themes or best practices that successfully de-escalated the incident or allowed officers to gain compliance.”

Bass added that it’s also important to consider the needs of LAPD officers and ensure they “receive appropriate assistance” to cope with stress. She was struck by the willingness of younger officers to openly talk about the mental toll of the job, recalling a recent visit to a roll call in which an officer described feeling a lack of support after being involved in an on-duty shooting.

LAPD officials have said the department has made numerous changes in recent years to curb police shootings, including adopting deescalation training focused on slowing down volatile situations, particularly those involving people who may be mentally ill. Still, the agency’s critics pack police commission meetings each week to argue for removing police from such calls, saying that officers are too quick to fire on people — particularly those wielding knives.

Although the city has experimented with programs that send specialists to help deescalate such encounters, LAPD policy still requires armed patrol officers to clear a scene of any potential threats beforehand.

Bass said she always has been a proponent of approaches that don’t involve police, some of which are employed by her Office of Community Safety. But she said stabbings and other incidents that pose an immediate danger to the public still require a police response.

Beyond looking at how to avoid police shootings, Bass’ directive calls for further assessment of the department’s training for handling people who’ve been booked into jails and detention facilities, including how they are restrained and transferred to medical facilities.

Bass wanted to ensure the review was done by an outside body, hinting at her frustration with the inaction of department leaders and the police commission on addressing the issue.

“Much more needs to be done,” Bass said.

The moon is an impostor. Swimming backstroke beneath its surface, I look up at craggy hollows in close relief. White rock undulates in all directions, a forest of peaks rising next to a desert of craters. Every time I trick myself into thinking I’m somewhere celestial, the sound of children splashing brings me back to earth.

This is no lunar landscape but Helsinki’s underground swimming hall, excavated from granite bedrock and officially opened in 1993. These days, Itäkeskus uimahalli is one of the Finnish capital’s most visited leisure facilities, welcoming 400,000 people a year. Local people mingle with tourists, I will discover, during a week exploring Helsinki’s subterranean metropolis.

My visit was one of 12 research trips I made over three years to better understand how cities are being reimagined. It turned into a book, How to Build a City, for which I travelled to locations that are testing the frontiers of urban living in response to an increasingly uncertain world.

Many global cities feature a version below ground, but Helsinki’s is thought to be the only one transformed for peace. As urbanisation increased the population, a more efficient solution was needed for heating plants and telecoms cables. You could scatter them around in expensive pockets of land, digging up the streets and sacrificing parks. Or you could tuck them away beneath ground level, by adding to bomb shelters first carved out during the second world war.

And that’s what Helsinki did. By 2010, its city council approved the world’s first officially masterplanned underground city, home to hundreds of vast human-made caves and tunnels up to 90 metres deep. Itäkeskus pool was opened 17 years before this space allocation plan was approved.

In peacetime, the caves function as shopping malls, playgrounds, a go-karting track and subway stations, all connected by almost 200 miles (293km) of tunnels. In the event of war, however, each can be transformed into a bomb shelter, part of a network capable of accommodating 900,000 Finns.

Itäkeskus swimming hall alone could house almost 4,000 people. In less than 48 hours it can be drained and fitted with decontamination showers. For the rest of the time, there are no clues as to its defence nature. Only the comforting hallmarks of the public pool: the tang of chlorine in my nose and the warmth that cloaked my skin.

I arrived in Helsinki on the morning of the spring solstice, although the ground was still dusted with greying snow and I was grateful for the heated carriages on my 25-minute Metro ride from the city centre. At Itäkeskus station, past a school surrounded by Soviet-style tower blocks, silver birches trailed bare branches over cars. From the outside, a municipal glass building gave an uninspiring welcome, but inside, I found a different world entirely.

A broad staircase swept me down steeply, framed by rocky, whitewashed walls. After paying (entry to all four of Helsinki’s public swimming halls is €6 for adults and €3.30 for children, making it popular with families as well as budget-conscious travellers), I disrobed in changing rooms spun off from a cathedral-tall granite core. Signs were in Finnish, but the space was easy for non-natives to navigate. Staff spoke excellent English.

At one side of the colossal hangar, men grimaced as they lowered themselves into a triangle of freezing water. On the other, a postmodern dreamscape was revealed, a large pool lined in lavender, canary yellow and burgundy tiles, with huge plastic triangles in cerulean and lilac suspended overhead. The only windows were set into a lifeguard’s tower next to a waterfall that filled the air with the roar of water in motion.

Swimming under the ersatz moon was an otherworldly experience. After 50 lengths, I’d earned my reward. Included in the entry fee is access to a gym, which I did not visit, plus a hot tub, steam room and two saunas, which I did. A graphic on the door showed a swimming costume crossed out in red and I gingerly removed mine, sliding into place on the bench and reminding myself that prudishness is a uniquely British affliction. Inside, it was so dark I could barely make out other bodies. The low light created the effect of a confession booth.

Around me, conversations bubbled in Finnish, American English and German. The quotidian details of living emerged. I joined in, asking a stranger for dinner recommendations and whether I should brave the plunge pool. If you don’t dwell on it, you could forget the true purpose of this place.

It was something I kept returning to over the following days as I wandered through experimental installations at Helsinki’s underground art museum Amos Rex (from €20; children go free), whose antennae-like skylights popped up on concrete stalks from the pavement near the chichi shopping district of Kluuvi. And in the Töölö neighbourhood’s exquisite Temppeliaukio church (€8; children go free), half-buried in a giant mound of rock.

All were examples of a supremely responsive city. All were bomb shelters, too. Evidence that you can design for the future with verve and beauty. Helsinki shows it is possible to do it all.

How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future by Gabriella Bennett is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Conceived by owner Heidi Ledger as a showcase for small independent makers, including women in particular, Thread Spun is a sunny, inviting retail space offering fair trade apparel, home goods, accessories and gifts from around the world.

Inside, you’ll find plenty of great gifts for others — or yourself — including Los Angeles women-owned brands such as Amente clothing, Flowerhead Tea, hand-poured candles from Roen Candle Co. and Jessica Gonzalez’s playful asparagus-shaped candles for Happy Organics.

Grab a cold drink while you shop — visiting on a hot day, I appreciated that they offered refrigerated drinks for sale — while perusing a wide assortment of cards, books, apothecary gifts and jewelry.

The boutique also offers creative workshops for the local community on the back patio, including sewing, upcycling, journaling and, fittingly, the art of making sun catchers to brighten your home.

Around Encinitas: The boutique opened here in 2020, right next to 101 Piercing, Child of Wild jewelry and Leucadia Floral and Plant, known for its great selection of houseplants and fresh flowers. If you head farther down North Coast Highway 101, you’ll find plenty of restaurants, surf shops and coffee houses, including the longtime favorite, Pannikin Coffee and Tea.

If you’re already dreaming about your next getaway, then you’re in luck, as the best places for 2027 have been named by Lonely Planet, and there’s a lesser-known Spanish city that warrants attention

We’re all familiar with the Spanish hotspots of Madrid, Barcelona, Ibiza and Palma, but there’s a lesser-known destination worth putting on your radar. Often missed by tourists, Lonely Planet has hailed a Spanish city as the best place for 2027, with blissfully few crowds and free tapas under the Mediterranean sun.

It’s not too early to start thinking about your holiday plans for next year, and now just might be the best time, as Lonely Planet has released its ‘Best in Travel’ list, highlighting the top worldwide destinations to visit in 2027. Among their top 24, five underrated European spots made the list, including the beautiful city of León in Spain.

Sitting along the Bernesga River in northern Spain, León is brimming with whimsical architecture, a vibrant old quarter, and a welcoming free-tapas culture. Crowned as one of the best places to visit next year, Lonely Planet noted: “Located in northern Spain, off the traditional tourist radar, it is one of the country’s most evocative medieval cities, combining magnificent Gothic architecture, centuries of history and a lively contemporary spirit.”

Among its striking French-style Gothic landmarks is the majestic 13th-century León Cathedral, known as Pulchra Leonina, meaning ‘the Leonese beauty’ or ‘the House of Light’. It has more than 1,800 square meters of stained glass across 125 windows, along with intricate stone carvings and towering spires, leaving visitors in awe.

One traveller shared on TripAdvisor earlier this month: “This is an extraordinarily beautiful cathedral. The many stained glass windows create a unique ambience in the cathedral. It is an inspiring space for prayer. Take time to attend Mass so that you can just immerse in the beauty of the space.”

A second commented: “A real jewel in a city a little neglected by tourism. A Gothic marvel at the level of Reims Cathedral. And in addition to the splendid stained glass windows and an incredible atmosphere. The museum is also very rich. Worth the trip.” While one more exclaimed, “I think it’s the most spectacular cathedral I’ve ever seen. It’s worth paying to see.”

In the heart of the Spanish city sits the ancient Barrio Húmedo district, packed with more than 100 bars and a legendary free-tapas culture, where Leonese bars automatically serve a hearty free tapa, from croquetas and patatas bravas to stews, with every drink ordered, whether it’s a local wine or a small beer. The quarter comes alive with locals gathering for drinks and traditional Leonese cuisine, alongside a thriving nightlife scene.

Furthermore, the city is home to the Catholic church, the Basílica de San Isidoro, often referred to as the ‘Sistine Chapel of Romanesque art’, which is interestingly located on the site of an ancient Roman temple. The Casa Botines museum is another standout landmark with its fairy-tale design, and it houses a collection of Spanish art dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries.

Yet, there’s plenty to explore in León simply by wandering its narrow lanes and past medieval stone walls, with plenty of authentic espresso bars dotted around the city alongside trendy restaurants and cosy tapas bars serving up the best of Spanish cuisine. There are serene parks and gardens nestled along the river for gentle strolls and to soak up the sun during the warmer months, as well as outdoor terraces offering picturesque views over the unsung Spanish city.

Offering a closer insight into León, writer and traveller Mark Eveleigh told Lonely Planet: “By day, you’ll encounter a city with its roots firmly planted in the soil of northern Castilla, with its grand monuments, Catholic heritage and access to the Camino de Santiago. By night, León is taken over by a deep-into-the-night soundtrack of revelry that floods the narrow streets and plazas of the picturesque old quarter. Two cities in one.”

Do you have a travel story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

Marvin Reid can’t say how many pedestrians he’s seen get hit while trying to brave the North Hollywood intersection of Magnolia Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue. He gave up keeping count long ago.

One afternoon last spring, he watched a man get run over while walking toward a 7-Eleven on the corner. Fortunately, the man popped to his feet “like nothing ever happened” and hustled into the store, Reid said. A week or two prior, he said, an out-of-control motorist nearly plowed into the statue of Amelia Earhart that sits next to a library bearing the famous aviator’s name.

“This is really a bad spot,” said Reid, who has helped run a Jamaican food pop-up at the busy street corner for the past five years. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an old lady crossing the street with a walker.”

The number of Angelenos who die in traffic crashes now regularly outpaces those killed by homicide. From 2016 to 2023, the annual traffic death toll rose nearly 29% overall, and pedestrian deaths jumped roughly 54%. Fatal crashes fell slightly last year, but deaths still exceeded 300 in each of the last three years.

The city is rolling out 125 speed cameras in school zones, known street-racing corridors and places where speeding has contributed to a high rate of collisions — including Reid’s intersection.

But for him, the cameras aren’t a replacement for police traffic enforcement, which he said seems virtually nonexistent.

Even though LAPD squad cars are posted up outside the library “everyday,” he says, they rarely do anything about the drivers who come careening off the exit ramps from the nearby 170 Freeway.

Similar complaints are being echoed around the city. Historically, Los Angeles — like other places across the U.S. — has relied on police stops to produce road safety. But in recent years, public pressure has compelled city leaders to think more critically about whether enforcement can continue without the historical harms that has come along with it.

LAPD data show the department is far less proactive than it used to be.

In 2019, LAPD officers made about 713,000 stops across the city; by 2025, that number had decreased to roughly 308,000 — a roughly 57% decline. A Times analysis of police stop data found that the drop-off was especially pronounced in the Central, West Valley, 77th Street and Southeast police divisions.

In some ways, the decline in stops is unsurprising. Other large U.S. cities have seen similar changes in enforcement strategies by police since the pandemic. As the department continues to shrink, LAPD commanders say they have fewer resources to devote to traffic duty. Officials have been under pressure to curb the use of so-called “pretext stops,” in which officers use a minor violation — a broken turn signal, say, or a cracked windshield — as justification to stop someone in order to investigate whether a more serious crime has occurred.

Reform activists and some city leaders argue the stops are fishing expeditions that lead to police abuses — while failing to deliver safer streets.

The practice of pulling over random vehicles, often based on little more than a hunch, has been a cornerstone of the city’s crime-fighting strategy for decades. The tactic is especially prevalent among the department’s elite Metropolitan Division and anti-gang units, several of which have come under investigation in recent years for failing to document the stops and improper searches.

Since 2019, when a Times investigation found significant racial disparities in LAPD crime suppression tactics, officials have slowed — but never abandoned — the practice of flooding neighborhoods with tactical officers to pull people over and search their vehicles.

Four years later, stops for minor violations began dropping again after LAPD overhauled its policies to limit the circumstances under which officers can make pretext stops, joining law enforcement agencies in cities like Philadelphia, Seattle and Berkeley, Calif.

Yet a report published last year found that officers are still disproportionately targeting Black and Latino drivers.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell and other department leaders have fought against more restrictions, arguing they risk losing an essential weapon against serious crime.

But in May, the Los Angeles City Council passed a measure urging the Police Commission, the LAPD’s policy-making body, to further limit arbitrary pull-overs for non-moving traffic violations.

Commission officials said they would wait for the results of a pair of audits by the inspector general’s office before making any further policy changes. The first report suggested that problems with the department’s gang officers were far more widespread than the department has publicly let on.

While LAPD officials had acknowledged issues in a handful of police divisions, the latest audit found that gang units citywide routinely flouted the department’s rules on pretext stops, including by often failing to obtain proper consent to search the vehicles they stopped. The inspector general’s office also found that gang officers didn’t always turn on their body-worn or dashboard cameras as required during these encounters and at times failed to properly log who they were stopping — resulting in an undercount of “both the number of detentions and the enforcement actions taken,” the report said.

The review, based on a sample of 300 stops as well as interviews with current and former gang officers, also highlighted ongoing confusion about what the department expects its officers to do when pulling someone over.

The findings of the second report — which reviewed pretext stops by officers from other units in January — are expected to be presented at an upcoming commission meeting.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union for rank-and-file officers, and other proponents of pretext stops argue that elected leaders don’t grasp the consequences of doing away with the tactic, which the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed lawful.

Reform advocates have fought to deploy unarmed civilians instead of LAPD officers for traffic enforcement — as the city has already started doing for certain mental health-related calls — but the union has warned that the work is too dangerous. A state bill that would have allowed trained civilian workers to make traffic stops failed to make it through the state assembly.

With the death toll from speeding on the rise, more enforcement is needed, not less, department leaders say. The city, they argue, can’t afford to wait on alternative programs that require study, money and public buy-in that could take years.

Amid the debate over how to proceed, LAPD enforcement hasn’t vanished completely.

Even though the department no longer dispatches officers to the scenes of minor accidents, LAPD statistics show that enforcement the department’s 308-member traffic bureau has gone up. As of July, the number of traffic tickets issued had climbed 44% from the same time last year — increasing to more than 14,600 from around 10,100. Citations for impaired driving have also risen, and the department continues to crack down on street takeovers.

Still, progress toward new, non-police approaches to traffic enforcement has been frustratingly slow in Los Angeles, advocates say.

Advocates have pointed to mounting research in other cities that showed road improvements along high-injury street corridors were more effective than police at changing driver behaviors, ultimately reducing the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries more than the threat of being ticketed.

Supporters of so-called “self-enforcing” roads say narrowing lanes can lead to a considerable decline in crashes as drivers reduce their speed and move more cautiously than when the road is less wide. Such changes also reclaim space for protected bike lanes, public transit lines, or safer walkways — after long prioritizing convenience for cars, advocates say.

Car accidents are dangerous for everyone involved, but they have become even more hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists.

Experts cite speeding and cellphone distractions as two of the biggest problems.

Another factor is the proliferation of larger vehicles — a phenomenon known as “autobesity” — which have bigger blind spots and more likely to seriously injure a pedestrian or bicyclist.

Andres Ramirez, executive director for the transportation advocacy nonprofit People for Mobility Justice, said he’s cautiously optimism that the mayor’s promise of a “No Car” 2028 Olympic Games will help fast-track some of the most pressing road safety projects.

“The streets needs to be a lot safer for pedestrians, for bicyclists, different modes,” Ramirez said. “The most obvious way is ensuring that infrastructure projects are prioritized in communities that have long been ignored.”

SACRAMENTO — California’s growing data center industry will have more oversight after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills to regulate the industry’s electricity costs and track water consumption.

The new laws come amid growing public concerns about environmental and economic impacts of the massive facilities, and are aimed at protecting consumers from growing electricity costs and tracking the centers’ immense energy and water consumption.

Newsom on Monday criticized President Trump for dismissing calls to curtail or regulate the facilities and heralding them as “money machines,” even as states and communities across the nation take action to ban or regulate the centers.

“While the Trump administration moves toward deregulation, communities are left to deal with the consequences — higher electricity demand, grid constraints, water use, and pollution,” Newsom said in a written statement Monday. “With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense.”

Senate Bill 886 by Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) and Assembly Bill 2383 by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) establish special rules for data centers’ electrical use. The law orders California Public Utilities Commission to create special requirements and rates for data centers’ use of electricity, including the costs for new power and for infrastructure upgrades.

Scores of other states have already passed similar legislation, according to utility groups.

Two bills by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) will require oversight of data center water consumption. One measure will require data center operators, when applying for a business license or permit, to disclose an estimate of their water use and the expected source of water. Another will bar cities and counties from approving a new or expanded data center unless the developer submits a water assessment and a water scarcity plan, and will require developers to cover the cost of any water system upgrade that is necessary.

Newsom vetoed a similar Papan bill last year that would have required new data centers to disclose their expected water use. The governor said he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements” on “this critically important digital infrastructure” without understanding the full impact on the businesses.

But over the past year, a wave of data center pushback has swept the nation, including California, where dozens of cities and counties have proposed or adopted moratoriums on the facilities. While California lawmakers have hesitated to pursue outright moratoriums and bans that the public is calling for, the political tide has nevertheless turned against the facilities.

Data centers have existed for decades but are rapidly expanding because of the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI. The centers help power everything from streaming services to videoconferencing calls.

Data centers in California are typically smaller than the mammoth, 500+-megawatt AI facilities making headlines in other parts of the country. Electricity costs and state regulations on gas-powered generators limit the vast majority of them to under 100 megawatts.

But as proposals increase in number, opposition has been fierce and growing. A Public Policy Institute of California poll from July showed that 73% of residents oppose the construction of data centers in their communities.

Angel City cruised to a 3-0 road victory over a shorthanded Utah team that received two red cards in the first half.

Defender Paige Cronin and midfielder Ana Tejada were ejected by the 24th minute. Two minutes later, Ally Sentnor converted the resulting penalty kick past goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn to put Angel City (11-8-6) ahead in Sandy, Utah.

Two minutes after coming off the bench for the second half, Taylor Suarez made it 2-0 with a one-touch finish off a pass from Gisele Thompson.

Sveindis Jonsdottir capped the scoring in the 67th minute, dispossessing Tatumn Milazzo deep in Utah territory before rolling a shot past McGlynn’s right side.

Utah fell to 13-9-3.

Arsenal in shock 3-0 loss at Brighton to lose top spot in the Premier League on goal difference to Manchester City.

Arsenal slumped to a first loss in their Premier League title defence – and it was a heavy one at Brighton.

After four straight wins for the champions, the 3-0 defeat at the Amex Stadium on Saturday came out of nowhere. Conceding the third goal from a corner — typically an area of strength for Arsenal – summed up an unusually sloppy performance from Mikel Arteta’s team.

Pascal Gross and Charalampos Kostoulas scored in the first half with shots from outside the penalty area, before Chema Andres completed the win with a header at the back post from Gross’s corner.

The victory will have been especially sweet for Brighton manager Fabian Hurzeler, who said “only one team tried to play football” after his team’s narrow home loss to Arsenal last season.

Arsenal have often struggled against Brighton, which was the last team to inflict such a heavy defeat on the Gunners in any competition — winning 3-0 at Emirates Stadium in May 2023.

It completed a brilliant week for Brighton, after beating Coventry 5-0 in the league last weekend and coming from two goals down in midweek to beat Manchester United 3-2 away in the English League Cup.

Manchester City — the other team to win their first four games — can now move three points clear in the standings by beating Sunderland on Sunday.

The advertising blitzkrieg of L.A.’s mayoral campaign is here.

Mayor Karen Bass and her opponent, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, dropped new campaign commercials over the last week, buying time on television, streaming channels and other platforms. Supporters of both candidates released ads as well.

The two candidates relied heavily on free media for most of the summer, putting videos on Instagram and inviting the news media to cover their appearances.

The dam effectively burst on Monday, with Raman touting her new Hollywood-themed ad “For Your Consideration,” timed to coincide with the Emmy Awards.

The 30-second spot starts with Raman stepping out on the town, then shifts to some standard L.A. imagery: freeways, palm trees, Echo Park Lake and, of course, the Hollywood sign.

“L.A. shows the world what it means to be a star,” declares the ad’s narrator, actor and screenwriter Bob Odenkirk. “And every Angeleno deserves the chance to reach for their own.”

After Raman has stopped off at a taco stand and hugged a dog, Odenkirk delivers the ad’s final message: “Change. Affordability. An L.A. that loves you back.”

That ad ran on television a few times before being cycled onto social media, per the Raman campaign.

Three days later, Bass went up with a 30-second spot — on digital platforms for now — centered on President Trump’s immigration raids.

The ad offers footage from the day in July 2025 when Bass confronted federal immigration agents in MacArthur Park. The video features images of gun-toting federal agents in military uniforms and Bass hopping out of a car in an aquamarine pant suit to face them.

“When someone comes after your family, you don’t hesitate,” Bass says. “You stand up. You fight.”

One of Bass’ most formidable allies — the Los Angeles Police Protective League — went hard negative with its first ad of the runoff campaign, offering the message that Raman “Doesn’t Get It.”

The commercial, released Friday, follows a young girl as she walks past a homeless encampment, juxtaposed against video of Raman talking about her opposition to a law that prohibits encampments near schools.

“I don’t think a kid’s gonna be safer because a tent is 500 feet away from a school,” Raman said in the clip, which was taken from a 2024 candidate forum in Sherman Oaks.

The backpack-wearing child speaks to the camera and says: “Walking to school shouldn’t be scary.”

“I’m just a kid,” she says. “But even I know I’d be safer if this was 500 feet away.”

The police union says the ad will start running on television this weekend and already is on social media platforms.

Meanwhile, Raman’s backers have an assortment of attack ads running on Facebook and Instagram.

Streets For All, a group that wants to expand the city’s bus and bike lane network, pulled video footage from a different Sherman Oaks candidate forum — this one featuring Bass and Raman last month.

At that event, Bass told the audience that Raman is unresponsive to her constituents, forcing many in Sherman Oaks to contact the mayor’s office directly.

“Many of you have my cellphone, you have called me,” Bass says in the ad. “You called on me specifically for help.”

Streets For All contends those remarks show that Bass gives wealthy homeowners her number while “regular Angelenos get ignored.”

“L.A. deserves a mayor who doesn’t just listen to the rich and powerful,” the ad says.

By Friday, Streets For All had nearly two dozen different video spots opposing Bass over such issues as homelessness, transparency and the Palisades fire, according to Ethics Commission filings.

The biggest backer of the group’s political action committee is hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick. Of the $1.2 million that the group plans to spend in the mayor’s race, Sosnick has provided $1 million, said Michael Schneider, who heads the group.

Schneider said the committee also has financial support from retired real estate developer Yuval Bar-Zemer — known for his work in the Arts District — and Todd Wexman, chief principal of 4SITE Real Estate, a real estate development company.

Raman pollster says she’s in the lead

The Raman campaign shared the results of a new internal poll that showed their candidate with a five-point lead over Bass.

Of the 600 likely voters who were surveyed, 44% supported Raman and 39% backed Bass, with 17% undecided, according to a memo provided to the campaign and viewed by The Times. The survey, conducted by Hart Research Associates in early September, had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

“In the initial trial heat for Los Angeles mayor, Councilmember Nithya Raman is in the rare position for a challenger of already LEADING the incumbent,” the polling firm wrote.

Another poll, commissioned by an independent expenditure group supporting Raman, portrayed the race as a statistical tie, at least initially. Estamos con Nithya for Mayor of LA 2026, sponsored by the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, said its poll showed Bass with 38% and Raman at 37%.

However, when voters received more information on the candidates, Raman took a 7-percentage-point lead, with 41% supporting her and 34% supporting Bass, according to a memo prepared by the group’s pollster.

The margin of error was 3.7 percentage points.

The Bass campaign declined to share its internal polling when contacted by The Times.

However, Neighborhoods for a Better L.A., an independent expenditure group supporting the mayor, said a survey it commissioned in early August showed the mayor with an edge over Raman of 41% to 35%, with 24% of the electorate undecided.

That poll, conducted by Tulchin Research, surveyed 1,200 likely Los Angeles voters and has a 2.8-percentage-point margin of error, the group said.

The poll also found that when given “balanced biographies” about both candidates, Bass’ support grew to 45% while Raman went down to 33%.

“Communications focused on Raman’s record can both reduce her support and consolidate voters behind Bass,” the pollsters wrote.

Giving back El Grito cash

Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla locked down sponsorships for the city’s celebration of El Grito, which marks Mexico’s independence.

Tuesday’s event, which featured an evening of musical performances, was sponsored by an assortment of city contractors and government agencies, including waste hauler Athens Services and the Department of Water and Power.

Still, Padilla decided she didn’t want to partner with one particular business, announcing at the last minute that organizers no longer would accept a $5,000 sponsorship from Home Depot.

On the day of the celebration, Padilla issued an apology on Instagram, saying she had heard from community members upset over the event’s affiliation with Home Depot, whose parking lots have been the site of many federal immigration raids.

“We have rescinded their partnership for this event,” Padilla said in her post. “The spirit of El Grito is rooted in celebrating our Latino heritage and creating a space where our families feel welcomed, safe, and celebrated.”

In an email, a Home Depot spokesperson said the company is not involved in immigration enforcement activities and doesn’t coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Border Patrol. The company also doesn’t receive advance warning about enforcement actions, the representative said.

“We cannot legally interfere with federal enforcement agencies, including preventing them from coming into our stores and parking lots,” Home Depot spokesperson Evelyn Fornes said.

State of play

— COZY WITH CARUSO: Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who was defeated by Bass in 2022, appeared alongside the mayor at a groundbreaking for the Palisades Recreation Center. Caruso praised her for her work on the project but stopped short of endorsing, saying he intends to meet with Raman in the coming weeks.

— LIFE AFTER PRATT: The voters who picked reality TV personality Spencer Pratt in the June 2 primary election are now up for grabs. But will they stay home instead of picking a mayoral candidate?

— BASS BAILS: The mayor skipped a congressional hearing on waste and fraud in homeless spending this week, calling the session politically motivated. Rep. Tim Burchett, the Republican who chaired the subcommittee meeting, accused her of dodging accountability.

— FINDING FRAUD: Federal authorities arrested three people who were working in Los Angeles-area homeless nonprofits this week, accusing one of them of misappropriating more than $7.5 million in taxpayer funds. Scott Turner, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which provided the funding, had allowed fraud to “run rampant.”

— WE’RE IN THE MONEY: The 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles will generate up to $40.6 billion in increased economic output and add as many as 224,000 jobs, according to an upbeat economic forecast released this week. Another, more tempered estimate put the increase at $20.5 billion to $25.4 billion.

— SEETHING OVER SKID ROW: Some activists want dogs taken away from homeless residents living in Skid Row, saying those animals are living in an unsafe environment. A Bass aide responded by cautioning that it is “neither humane nor legal to remove animals from their human companions without appropriate cause.”

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness went to Avalon Boulevard and 64th Street in South L.A., an area represented by Councilmember Curren Price.
• On the docket next week: The council’s Public Works Committee meets Tuesday to discuss ways of cleaning, safeguarding or demolishing nuisance properties.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

London City Lionesses earn their first away win of the season, ending a four-game streak without a victory on the road, as they emphatically beat a struggling Charlton side that have lost all three of their WSL games.

MATCH REPORT: Charlton Athletic 1-4 London City Lionesses

Available to UK users only.

Separate attacks struck central refugee camps as officials warned Gaza’s health sector faces total collapse.

An Israeli strike on a motorcycle has killed one Palestinian and injured others, with one child in critical condition, reports the Palestinian Wafa news agency.

The air strike targeted the vehicle in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, west of Gaza City, on Friday. Ongoing Israeli strikes on the besieged enclave have killed at least 1,381 people since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025.

Israel has killed at least 73,795 people and wounded 174,869 others since the start of its genocidal war in October 2023.

On Friday, the Israeli army also opened fire in the Nuseirat and al-Bureij refugee camps in the central Gaza Strip, reports Wafa. The attacks on tents sheltering displaced people have resulted in multiple injuries.

Earlier this week, an Israeli “double-tap” air strike killed a paramedic and a 15-year-old schoolboy in Gaza City. Israeli forces claimed they were targeting Hamas operatives.

Last month, UNICEF found that, on average, one child is killed a day by Israel.

Families are now confined to about a third of the enclave, sheltering among destroyed buildings, rubble and uncleared waste, the agency said.

On Wednesday, a previously damaged building collapsed in Gaza City, killing at least 21 people, including 12 children. The Palestinian Civil Defence agency in Gaza struggled to recover bodies from under the rubble due to Israel’s severe restrictions on heavy equipment.

The Health Ministry warned on Wednesday that Gaza’s health system was on the verge of “total collapse” as Israel continues to limit the amount of medical aid and fuel permitted to enter the enclave.

Known as MEHKOs, microenterprise home kitchen operations come in many shapes and sizes. They are coffee shops, barbecue joints, supper clubs, backyard tea parties, pickup-only pizzerias and everything in between. For some of these operators, it’s a passion project, and for others, it’s their only source of income.

MEHKOs were first legalized by state lawmakers in 2019, spurred by advocacy from nonprofit organization the COOK Alliance. Riverside County was the first in the state to adopt the program in 2019. MEHKOs were greenlighted in L.A. County in May 2024, and since then over 400 licenses have been approved. While informal backyard restaurants are nothing new in L.A., the program offers a legal, health-department-approved pathway for many existing home kitchens to thrive.

MEHKOs can only sell up to 30 meals per day and no more than 90 meals per week. They’re also not allowed to advertise with signs on their homes or front lawns. And unlike commercial restaurants, where line cooks will often prep ingredients for the rest of the week, MEHKOs can only serve food that was prepared the same day.

“A home kitchen is not designed or required to have the same commercial infrastructure, such as ventilation systems, grease interceptors, specialized wastewater systems,” said James Dragan, who oversees initiatives including the MEHKO program at the L.A. County Department of Public Health. “The limits are important because of the food safety perspective.”

When dining at a MEHKO, be flexible. It might not be as easy as just placing an order. These home businesses are often open just a few days per week with limited hours, and might only accept orders placed in advance. For example, Palestinian home kitchen Mid East Eats — one of L.A.’s first MEHKOs — currently only offers private dinners and monthly supper clubs. It was previously open for walk-ins with a larger menu, but the format was difficult to sustain and would often create food waste.

“I want to continue doing my private dinners because that’s my favorite thing to do,” said Mid East Eats founder Sumer Durkee. “It’s satisfying to me and feels like home, and people leave feeling so happy.”

MEHKOs can serve as a relatively low-cost stepping stone toward opening a brick-and-mortar and offer one-of-a-kind food experiences, even in a city with as rich a culinary vocabulary as L.A. These eight home kitchens, all of which offer dine-in service, are a great starting place to discover the city’s burgeoning MEHKO scene.

A HUGE expansion at a major American airport that was supposed to open this year has been pushed back to 2027.

New York‘s John F. Kennedy International Airport in America is currently undergoing one of its biggest-ever transformations costing £7.1billion.

The centre of the project is the New Terminal One, which was expected to open before the end of this year but has now been pushed back to the first quarter of 2027.

The airport has confirmed that testing is needed before the terminal opens to passengers.

Once open, the terminal – which will have replaced the old one – will have 13 gates plus a temporary gate in its first phase of opening.

When the first phase is complete, the airport will move on to the second phase, which includes demolishing the former terminal.

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The second phase will also add nine gates, making a total of 23 gates at the completed terminal – 22 of which will be for wide-bodied planes commonly used for long-haul, international flights.

The 241,548sqm terminal will be the largest at the airport and inside there will be 27,871sqm of shops, restaurants and six lounges.

One of those lounges is Air France‘s largest lounge outside Paris, spread across two floors.

Inside the lounge, there will be seating for up to 400 travellers, with different dining areas celebrating French food and a bar with French wines and Champagnes.

Other spaces inside the terminal will include an “indoor green space” and “family-friendly amenities”.

And travellers will be able to spot a variety of public art installations too.

Airlines that will feature at the New Terminal One include Air France, KLM, Etihad Airways, LOT Polish Airlines, EVA Air, Turkish Airlines, Air New Zealand, Air China and Philippine Airlines.

The project forms part of an even larger £14.2billion transformation at the airport, where there will also be a new Terminal 6 and upgrades at three other terminals.

Airlines at Terminal 6 are expected to include JetBlue, United Airlines and other Star Alliance carriers.

At Terminal 4, there will be 10 new gates and an expanded check-in and arrival area.

Terminal 8 will then undergo a £300million upgrade, including adding new gates and transforming the retail spaces.

New York is a popular destination among British travellers, with around one million Brits heading to the city each year.

Flights between the UK and New York typically take between seven and eight hours and cost from £380 return.

The youngster joined City’s academy at under-nine level and he really started to make a name for himself last term.

Samba scored 24 goals and provided 10 assists in an eye-catching first full season with the under-18s, including curling home a stunning free-kick to help City win the FA Youth Cup final against rivals Manchester United in May.

On his debut, Samba played the entire 90 minutes and fully grasped his opportunity.

With City struggling for openings, Samba broke the deadlock by flicking home a header – he celebrated by blowing a kiss in the direction of family and friends in the stands, before curling in a delightful second later in the game.

Samba was afforded a generous ovation towards the end of the game when being deservedly named man of the match.

“[I’m] satisfied not just for the goals but for the performance too,” said manager Maresca.

“I asked him in the last three, four days – when I decided to play him as nine – he said he never played there. He is not a nine for sure, but he was good.

“He is young, full of energy, strong, can finish, can set [players up]. He made some good decisions in the first half. I am happy but they are young and we have to go slowly, slowly.

“Hopefully we can give him more chances.”

An unprecedented surge in border crossings over the last decade reshaped America: Millions of people from more than 150 countries arrived, bringing the U.S. immigrant population to its highest levels.

Now, data obtained exclusively by the Associated Press paint a picture of who these migrants are, where they went and what happened after the border.

Some went to cities that have long been magnets for immigrants — New York, Miami — but increasingly, others found their way to smaller cities with less developed immigrant footholds. Blocks, neighborhoods and entire cities were remade in places like Elkhart, Ind., Knoxville, Tenn.,and Dodge City, Kan.

And while the vast majority of migrants traditionally were from Mexico, this surge included people from an astonishing number and diversity of countries: India, Ecuador, Ghana.

Via a Freedom of Information Act request, AP obtained federal records on the self-reported destinations of 4.5 million migrants released in the United States after crossing the Mexican border — both legally and illegally — between October 2018 and July 2025.

Migrants must provide U.S. Customs and Border Protection with a street address. AP obtained their destination ZIP codes, citizenship by country, ages, genders and the dates and border regions where they encountered authorities.

Some probably never arrived at the addresses they gave. Authorities lacked resources to check, though migrants must report truthfully to pursue their cases in court and get work permits. Some have moved elsewhere in the United States or left the country, voluntarily or involuntarily. But many have stayed put.

Data on their initial destinations after the southern border provides both a sweeping and an unusually granular look at how the immigration surge — one that peaked during President Biden’s administration and was a major reason voters returned his predecessor, Donald Trump, to the White House — is playing out today.

Here are some key takeaways from the data.

Cities drew migrants from several continents

The Border Patrol encountered migrants from 174 countries in one year alone, a sharp departure from earlier periods when they were nearly all Mexican and Central American. The growth of social media and new migration routes were key in bringing people from around the world. Cincinnati, for example, experienced a large number of arrivals from West Africa, Uzbekistan and India.

Some cities — ones that for generations have had robust international communities — were further diversified by the range of countries from which people arrived.

New York City’s Queens borough registered at least 25 nationalities with significant arrivals, including five countries that each sent more than 7,000 people: Ecuador, China, Colombia, Venezuela and India.

Philadelphia had 11 nationalities with at least 1,000 new arrivals, led by Brazil, Haiti and the Dominican Republic but also including Russia and Venezuela. The city’s metro area also received more than 1,000 migrants from Georgia.

Florida remained No. 1, but many people looked elsewhere

While Florida was the most popular state, Latin American immigrants increasingly looked elsewhere for more promising job prospects and a better quality of life. Many turned to places with small but established communities of immigrants from their homelands.

For Cubans, nine of the top 10 destination ZIP codes were in Florida, but people of the Caribbean nation also flocked to Louisville, Ky., Grand Island, Neb., and Odessa, Texas. Colombians went to the Denver suburb of Aurora. Paterson, N.J., was the top pick among Peruvians. Some Venezuelans headed to the growing suburbs south of Salt Lake City; others to pockets of Atlanta, Chicago and Denver.

More women and children came than men

Nearly 6 of every 10 migrants released at the border were women and children, a dramatic shift from a few years earlier when migrants were predominantly men.

The change is visible in many places and across nationalities, but some stand out. Tulsa, Okla., attracted Mexican women and children. Ecuadorian women and children went to Spring Valley, N.Y. Guatemalan women were drawn to Chattanooga, Tenn.

Those who came from China headed to L.A. and New York

Chinese migrants, who trekked by hundreds nightly in California’s mountainous border with Mexico, largely gravitated to two places: New York City, especially the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs, and a cluster of neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area.

Trump’s deportation machine hit some migrant magnets and overlooked others

Immigration arrests have hit some areas that ranked among the most popular destinations for migrants in recent years, including Miami and New York. Others that experienced a large migrant influx have gotten less attention from authorities, including Silicon Valley, Madison, Wis, and Stamford, Conn.

Jarrett, Kessler, Lodhi and Spagat write for the Associated Press.

Ally Sentnor, Ary Borges and Taylor Suarez scored in Angel City’s 3-1 victory over the Seattle Reign on Wednesday night at BMO Stadium.

In the 18th minute, Angel City midfielder Maiara Niehue’s volley attempt drew a handball on Seattle Reign midfielder Angharad James-Turner. Sentnor converted her second penalty kick in consecutive weeks to open the scoring.

Off a corner kick from defender Evelyn Shores in the 40th minute, an unmarked Borges headed it home to double the lead. Within 30 seconds of subbing on, Suarez raced past multiple defenders and placed it in the side-netting for the 3-0 lead in the 81st minute.

Defender Sofia Huerta’s long-range blast in stoppage time provided the Reign with their lone goal of the game.

Angel City (10-8-6) is unbeaten four matches unbeaten and now only trails the Reign by a point for the last spot in the playoffs. The loss ended a three-game winning streak for Seattle (11-9-4).