company

A French court has found cement company Lafarge guilty of financing armed groups during the Syrian war. Prosecutors said the company paid millions of dollars to ISIL and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front between 2013 and 2014 to keep its factory operating.

In 2019, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater needed a lifeline. Forced out of its edge-of-downtown home of more than 55 years, the beloved troupe with its thousands of handcrafted puppets — a saucy black cat in heels, a fish out of water that can’t help but wiggle — ultimately found a new location in a Highland Park theater.

Signing a 10-year lease was a sigh of relief for the company, the result of a lengthy search that included more than 80 spaces and ensured its playful, fanciful shows would continue to be a multigenerational, SoCal tradition. But yearly rises in rent, as well as the looming end of the contract, remained a cause of stress for the nonprofit.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater can exhale once again.

The saucy black cat puppet in a performance at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.

(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)

The theater’s executive team said it has entered into an agreement to purchase its current location at the corner of York Boulevard and North Avenue 50, which had former incarnations as a movie theater and a Korean church. Once completed, the $5 million acquisition will ensure the theater has a permanent home, a place where skateboarding clowns and leek-haired onions can continue to frolic and dance for decades to come.

“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater’s co-executive director. “It’s been decades of us struggling to survive. Now we’re at this moment where it’s not a struggle. It’s a blossoming moment where our future is set up forever.”

Bob Baker’s Highland Park home was originally built as the York Theater in 1925, hosting movies and vaudeville performances during that era. It most recently housed the Pyong Kang First Congregational Church. Over the years it has also been a barbershop and the site of an organ sales and repair store.

The purchase comes at a celebratory time for the troupe. While its annual Bob Baker Day Festival at the Los Angeles State Historic Park had to be postponed from April 12 to the fall due to a forecast of rain — the historic and fragile puppets cannot be exposed to water — the company still took its show on the road to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Its adults-only May fundraising event the Puppet Prom, which typically raises more than $30,000, is nearly sold out, and the theater, which also hosts film screenings and concerts (with puppets, of course), continues to pack in full audiences — partly due to its location in a walkable neighborhood with young families.

And in the coming weeks the theater will launch its first new show in 40 years, “Choo Choo Revue.”

“Now is the time,” says Evans, who notes that while they have built new puppets and tweaked existing shows, this is the first proper new production since 1981’s “Hooray LA!” “We have the staff to implement it. We have a sustainable business to be able to pull off what is going to be close to a half-million-dollar production to mount a new show.”

In going public with its intent to secure the York Boulevard theater, the company is initiating a new round of fundraising. Bob Baker over the last year has raised $4.5 million of the $5 million purchase price. It is seeking $500,000 to close the gap as well as an additional $2 million for what it describes as critical renovations, such as repairing the building’s roof and restrooms.

Some of the eccentric canines puppets.

(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)

Mary Fagot, Bob Baker’s co-executive director, says the theater has in place a $500,000 loan to ensure the deal closes. Yet Bob Baker does not want to to begin its new era with debt.

“We think it’s an achievable gap,” Fagot says, pointing to community fundraising the theater had to enact to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the days of the shutdown, for instance, the company was able to raise $365,000 in 365 days.

Rising rent, say the co-executive directors, was a key driving factor in the decision to approach the building’s ownership to purchase the space. This year, Bob Baker will pay close to half a million in rent, an amount, says Evans, that is double the theater’s budget when it was in its prior space near downtown L.A. That, coupled with the lease’s impending expiration in a couple of years, acted as a sort of deadline to craft a proposal that could appeal to its building owners.

“We started to have discussions in 2023 with the owners of the building, and those evolved into this becoming a real possibility,” Fagot says. “Then we started the hard work of talking to our biggest supporters about getting behind us.”

Bob Baker, founded in 1963 by its namesake puppeteer, now attracts more than 145,000 audience members per year, including about 20,000 students via school field trips. Funding for the building purchase was secured, in part, by gifts from the Perenchio Foundation, the Kohl Family Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the late Wallis Annenberg, and celebrity donors such as Jack Black and Tanya Haden.

A sidewalk performance outside the Bob Baker Marionette Theater featuring ladybug puppets.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“I’m proud to have played a small part in helping safeguard such a beloved institution that has enriched Los Angeles for decades,” says Brian Mikail of Capstone Equities, which rents the space to the troupe. The hope when signing the lease, says Mikail, was that Bob Baker could someday be set up to purchase the venue.

The agreement, says, Fagot, is a win-win for both sides.

“I think we were the ideal owners for this space,” Fagot says. “If it’s for any other purpose, it would need a giant transformation, and for us, it’s exactly what we need.”

“Choo Choo Revue” is set to open May 16 and will feature more than 100 brand new, handcrafted puppets. Look, for instance, for a conductor with a clock as a face, dancing luggage and a cicada jug band, among a host of other oddities. Expect, perhaps, a crescent moon in pajamas to be a new favorite. Or maybe audiences will instead fall for the singing mushrooms.

“The show invites audiences to go on a train ride, where the show is looking out of a train window and seeing flights of imagination,” Evans says. “It’s daydreams outside of a window. Windmills run around. It’s weird, fantastical abstractions of what’s possible. The hope is by the end of the show people are inspired to be more creative and to look at the world more beautifully.”

There’s also a clear hunger for the type of whimsical, family-friendly entertainment that the theater provides. Gross revenues topped $3.1 million in 2025, up from $699,211 in 2018, according to its most recent annual report. Fagot says the COVID pandemic only increased the demand for the “special brand of magic” that Bob Baker creates.

“People needed community,” she says. “They just need joy. They need inspiration and creativity and want to do it together, and that is what we do.”

Sana* is a 27-year-old woman living with her roommate, Fatemeh, in a two-bedroom apartment in western Tehran. The economics master’s student and risk control analyst at an investment firm had already survived the June 2025 Israel-Iran war. When the latest war began in late February, she promised herself she would not run away from the city again. As told to Ariya Farahand. 

The night before the war, every piece of news arriving on my phone had two possibilities: Either they strike, or they don’t. I stayed up late, waiting. Previously, the strikes had come around midnight, so I kept watching. When nothing happened, I put on some Persian music, poured myself a drink to take the edge off, and went to bed. I told myself the night had passed without an attack.

I was wrong.

It was 9:40am on February 28 when the first missiles hit Tehran. I was caught between sleep and wakefulness in my apartment in the west of the city. My neighbourhood hadn’t been targeted yet. I hadn’t heard any explosions. I didn’t know what to expect.

My phone began chiming with text messages I couldn’t bring myself to get up and check. When it started ringing, I realised that it was urgent. It was my boyfriend, his shaky voice enquiring if I was OK. Before I could answer, he blurted out: “They struck. They attacked.”

He didn’t need to elaborate further.

Within minutes, my mother, my father and my younger sister were calling from Sari, 250 kilometres (155 miles) north in Mazandaran province, where they’re based, begging me to leave the capital. I stared at my cat, Fandogh (Hazelnut). She stared back. I made myself a promise: No matter what happens, I am not leaving Tehran.

The 12-day war last June had broken something in me. On its third day, my family’s pressure forced me out of the city. The drive to Sari was miserable, and my parents’ house was crowded; none of us found peace. This time, I refused. My boyfriend urged me to go somewhere safer. I said no.

By mid-afternoon, my roommate Fatemeh had finally made it home from work, the gridlock traffic making her typical hour-and-a-half journey take four hours. She walked in, still wearing her coat, sat down in the middle of the living room, and wept – the first explosion, she told me, had hit right near her office.

Routine

The war settled into a grim routine. We learned to anticipate strikes during certain windows: early morning, the afternoon, and after 11 at night. The bombings were never predictable enough to be safe, but those were the hours we instinctively braced. We relied on supermarket deliveries to avoid going outside. If we absolutely needed something, we made a frantic dash to the shops and rushed straight back.

The internet was another kind of suffocation. When friends who had emigrated abroad heard there was “no internet”, they assumed it meant social media was blocked. But, for most people, it was a total blackout – we couldn’t even load Google. We kept buying virtual private networks (VPNs) that would work for a day and then stop. My daily life ran on podcasts and YouTube. Now there was nothing. I downloaded foreign TV series from local servers that were still operating just to keep my mind occupied. I read. I found a copy of Baghdad Diaries (a 2003 book recounting the war in Iraq), and its mirroring of my own reality sent a chill through me. You could write a whole book, I kept thinking, about what we were living through.

March 16 was one of the worst nights of my life – though it had started gently enough.

At my friends’ urging, I had gone to a nearby cafe that evening, the first time in weeks that anything felt briefly, superficially normal. I got home about 9pm, did some light cleaning, and was asleep by 11.

At 2:30 in the morning, a massive explosion tore through the silence. The force of it jolted me upright. Fatemeh was already awake. We stumbled into the hallway, peered out the window – and then an intense flash of light flooded the apartment, followed by a blast so violent we both screamed. Still in our pyjamas, without stopping to grab our phones, we sprinted down the fire escape to the lowest level of the parking garage. Several neighbours were already there.

Seven or eight more explosions followed. They were bombing near Mehrabad airport, close to us. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

When I finally went back upstairs, my cat was hiding in the wardrobe, trembling. My family and boyfriend had been calling and texting, without response, for hours, watching the news reports about strikes near the airport and imagining the worst. Guilt washed over me for leaving my cat behind. I called everyone to say I was alive.

Attempting normality

I felt like a refugee in my own city.

The days had already been darkening before that night. One day, an oil depot was struck. I had stepped out to do some shopping at the corner of the street. I stopped and looked up. It was the middle of the day, but the sky had turned black. Pitch black. Like the end of the world.

April 4 was my first day back in the office – and the day we would find out whether our contracts were being renewed or not. When I arrived, a colleague was already standing in the hallway, termination letter in hand, crying about how she would pay her rent, how she was supposed to find work in the middle of a war. I will never forget her tears. By midday, half the staff – 18 out of 41 – had been laid off. Nobody did any work.

I kept my job. Three days later, on my commute home, the streets were nearly empty – a journey that once took more than an hour took less than 20 minutes. The only queues were at petrol stations, snaking down deserted roads, after US President Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure and destroy our “whole civilisation”. In the lift, my neighbour stepped in, carrying two large packs of bottled water and talked anxiously about pooling money for a building generator. That night, Fatemeh went to bed early, claiming she didn’t care about any of it. She had been biting her nails all evening. She showered before bed – so that she would be clean, she told me, if the water was cut off after an attack.

When the ceasefire was announced, I couldn’t believe it. I waited for the denial that never came. When it was finally clear the war was on pause, it felt as though a 100-kilogramme weight had been lifted from my chest.

I pulled the blanket over my head, but found I still couldn’t sleep. What happens next?

The first thing I did the following morning was book an appointment to get my hair cut and my nails done. The second thing I did was buy a high-grade VPN – expensive, about $4 a gigabyte — and scroll through Instagram for the first time in weeks.

Small things. The kind that makes you feel human again.

*The names used in this article are pseudonyms chosen for security reasons

NEW YORK — Calls inside Congress for investigations into the prediction market platform Polymarket are increasing after the latest instance in which groups of anonymous traders made strategic, well-timed bets on a major geopolitical event hours before it occurred.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that at least 50 new accounts on Polymarket placed substantial bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the hours, even minutes, before President Trump announced it late Tuesday. These were the sole bets made on Polymarket through these accounts.

In January, an anonymous Polymarket user made a $400,000 profit by betting that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro would be out of office, hours before Maduro was captured. In the hours before the start of the Iran war, another account made roughly $550,000 in a series of trades effectively betting that the U.S. would strike Iran and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from office.

Such prescient wagers have raised eyebrows — and accusations that prediction markets are ripe for insider trading. And the issue goes beyond these three geopolitical events, according to at least one report.

Researchers at Harvard University released a paper last month in which, using public blockchain data, they estimated that $143 million in profits have been made on Polymarket by individuals who potentially had insider information about events ranging from Taylor Swift’s engagement to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y who sits on the House Financial Services Committee as well as the subcommittee on digital assets and financial technology, sent a letter Thursday to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding the regulator review and investigate these well-timed trades. The CFTC regulates the derivatives markets, which includes prediction markets.

“This pattern raises serious concerns that certain market participants may have had access to material nonpublic information regarding a market-moving geopolitical event,” Torres wrote. The letter was shared exclusively with AP.

“What is the statistical likelihood that of anyone other than an insider trader placing a winning bet 12 minutes before a market-moving presidential announcement?” Torres said in an interview with AP. “There are two answers: God, or an insider trader. And something tells me that God is not placing bets around Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social. “

Prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket allow users to bet on everything from whether it will rain in Phoenix, Ariz., next week to whether the Federal Reserve will raise or lower interest rates.

Americans have limited access to Polymarket, which was banned from the U.S. in 2022. The company has moved to reenter the country by acquiring a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse, giving it a legal pathway to start offering contracts domestically. The company has begun a limited rollout in the U.S.

Polymarket also operates a separate, crypto-based platform offshore that remains outside U.S. jurisdiction. That platform accounts for most of its activity.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent a letter to Polymarket on Thursday demanding the company explain why it continues to allow trades on war and violence as well as whether the company is making efforts to keep insiders from trading on the platform.

“Polymarket has become an illicit market to sell and exploit national security secrets unlike any in history, and by extension a potential honeypot for foreign intelligence services watching for those same suspicious bets and wagers,” Blumenthal wrote.

Republicans also have criticized these platforms and called for bans on these sorts of bets. There are at least two bills pending in Congress co-signed by both parties, one in the House and one in the Senate.

“We don’t want to imagine a world where America’s adversaries use prediction markets to anticipate our next move,” Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, said after the release of AP’s findings on the ceasefire wagers.

Polymarket did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The stakes are high for both Polymarket and Kalshi as they seek approval to operate nationwide, particularly in the lucrative sports betting market.

Kalshi, which already is regulated in the U.S., and its executives have a goal of making the company the nation’s dominant prediction market. Kalshi has leaned heavily into sports, which critics have said effectively makes it a sports betting platform that dabbles in event-based contracts on the side. Both companies also announced partnerships with sports teams and even news organizations to broaden their reach as well. AP has an agreement to sell U.S. elections data to Kalshi.

The competition also carries political overtones. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, and separately serves as a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi.

Sweet writes for the Associated Press.

While many of us were worried in recent days about our president ending a “whole civilization,” one Silicon Valley tech company was warning, without much notice, it might accidentally disrupt all civilization as we know it.

The San Francisco technology company Anthrophic announced Tuesday that it wasn’t releasing a new version of its Claude AI super-brain — because it is so powerful that it has the ability to hack into just about any computer system, no matter how secure, in a matter of days if not hours.

“The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe,” Anthropic said in a statement.

AI worry isn’t anything new. We are worried about artificial intelligence taking jobs, about toys that seem too real to our kids, about mass surveillance of our every move. But Anthropic’s warning about its own product is bigger than any of those singular problems. It is a call from inside the house that disaster is hiding right around the corner. That sounds awfully dire and overblown, I know. But here’s the thing — it’s not.

Anthropic, you may recall, is the company that U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth is beefing with because it didn’t want Claude going into battle without supervision and maybe doing something like accidentally bombing little girls at a school.

Now, that company has put out this chilling warning: The existing Claude that caused that kerfuffle is outdated and shockingly less powerful than the new one it’s trying very hard to not unleash — though this new Claude, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, has already escaped at least once on its own. More on that in a moment — there’s only so much existential dread a person can handle.

“We should all be worried,” Roman Yampolskiy told me of this latest advance of a technology certain to change the course of humanity. He’s one of the country’s preeminent AI safety researchers, and a professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

“We’re about to create general super intelligence and that threatens humanity as a whole,” Yampolskiy said.

“Everything else is irrelevant,” he added, before suggesting I stop calling myself an idiot for not understanding the tech-heavy parts of this debate. My simplistic take, he assured me, was “a reasonable way to explain it.”

So here you go.

This isn’t a “really smart computer geniuses could misuse this,” scenario, or an “everyone’s going to be unemployed” scenario, or even a “it might accidentally bomb children” scenario, which is a truly terrible scenario.

This is a “your teenage son could use it to break into the local school district system to change a grade with pretty much minimal knowledge and accidentally destroy the California power grid” scenario.

Or maybe, a country that doesn’t like us — I can think of a few — could drain every U.S. citizen’s bank account, while also clicking open the auto locks on jail cells, shutting down our sewage plants and taking over air control systems. Or maybe Claude Mythos just does that on its own.

For example, Anthropic said that in one popular operating system it tested, used by thousands of companies including Netflix and Sony, Claude Mythos found a flaw that had existed undetected for 17 years. Then, on its own — without human guidance or help — figured out how to use that flaw to take control of any server running the operating system, using any computer, anywhere in the world.

Just spitballing here, but if almost no security system is safe, the possibilities for social, financial and general chaos really are unlimited. And to be honest, any security expert will tell you that some of America’s greatest weak points when it comes to cybersecurity are local and state governments, because strangely, the top experts aren’t working five-figure jobs for cities in the Great Plains.

Based on its own testing, Anthropic predicts it could find “over a thousand more critical severity vulnerabilities and thousands more high severity vulnerabilities.”

That means Claude Mythos puts at risk our infrastructure, well, everywhere — because so much is connected in backdoor ways most of us never consider and it just takes one weak system to open the door to hundreds of others. But it is almost impossible to protect and fix all those systems quickly enough and robustly enough to guard against this kind of AI.

And that’s just the cybersecurity risk, Yampolskiy said. An AI with the capabilities of Claude Mythos could be used to leaps and bounds ahead in so many more ways.

“We see the same happening with synthetic biology. We’ll see the same with chemical weapons, possibly something novel in terms of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

To Anthropic’s great credit, it sounded the warning on its creation and created, if not a solution, then a game plan of sorts — Project Glasswing, named I suspect, because no matter how bad this gets we’re going to make it sound like a thriller with an exciting ending.

Project Glasswing would have been better named Project Headstart because that’s what it is. Before releasing Mythos into the wild, Anthropic is releasing it to about 40 technology companies, including Apple, Google and Nvidia, to see whether they can collectively patch all the vulnerabilities they find before the general public has a chance at them. It’s kind of like in the movies when the killer gives the victim 15 seconds to run.

I mean, I’ll take the 15 seconds and hope they’re real. But, as Anthropic also said in a statement, the “work of defending the world’s cyber infrastructure might take years; frontier AI capabilities are likely to advance substantially over just the next few months. For cyber defenders to come out ahead, we need to act now.”

And do we really have 15 seconds? One of Claude Mythos’ overseers posted on social media recently that he was having lunch in a park when Mythos emailed him — even though it’s not supposed to have access to the internet. Researchers had tasked Mythos with trying to break out of its not-connected “sandbox” and it did.

That’s another problem with Mythos and other AI — they rarely do what we expect and find sneaky ways around rules. Virtually every AI super-brain created has been shown to lie, deceive, and in general behave in disturbing and unethical ways when put in the right conditions.

Even Claude, billed as one of the most ethical AI super-brains out there, engages in bad behavior. Anthropic boasts its the “best-aligned model” it’s ever made — which is tech-speak for following human values and intentions, but also acknowledges it “likely poses the greatest alignment-related risk,” which is tech-speak for, well, maybe not.

So, at least for now, being the most ethical AI super-brain is a bit like being the most ethical serial killer. Run, people, run.

Again, thank you Anthropic (and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, who often warns of the dangers of what he’s creating, whatever that’s worth) for not plunging us into global chaos with no warning, because I’m betting that some other companies might have just tossed their super-AI onto society and let the destruction fall where it may. There is little doubt that other AI brains as capable as Mythos are coming, and soon — Anthropic was first with this level of capability, but it’s only 15 seconds ahead of its competitors.

But the idea that the technology industry is going to — or should— solve these problems on their own is an absurd, gross abdication of duty and common sense on behalf of governments big and small to protect their people. This isn’t a race for domination as President Trump has described it. It is a race to protect ourselves from ourselves — and from the majority of the superrich titans of the industry who seem to consistently place business and commerce over societal good.

We are down to the last 15 seconds before AI changes everything. Either we demand oversight and regulation now, or we let technology companies decide the fate of the world.

The Dept. of Justice is investigating the NFL’s media deals with streaming companies as more of its games go behind subscription pay walls.

The investigation first reported by the Wall Street Journal centers on the financial impact of live sports streaming on consumers and whether the league’s traditional broadcast partners are getting fair treatment.

The Justice Dept. did not respond to a request for comment. A government official told NBC News the DOJ’s investigation into the NFL is “about affordability for consumers and creating an even playing field for providers.”

Early last month, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah requested the investigation in a letter to the DOJ, and issued a statement Thursday on X saying he was glad to see it move forward.

The Sports Broadcasting Act passed by Congress in 1961 allowed professional football teams to collectively license the TV rights of their games to national broadcast networks without running afoul of anti-trust laws. Lee noted that courts have recognized the act refers to broadcasts “financed through advertising and made available free to the public.”

Lee said sports packages that go behind subscription paywalls “no longer align” with the intention of the act which was passed when the public only had access to three TV networks.

The NFL has not received a letter from the DOJ saying it is under investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment. But the league issued a statement asserting that fans can see every NFL game played by the teams in their markets for free on broadcast TV unlike every other major sport.

“The NFL’s media distribution model is the most fan and broadcaster-friendly in the entire sports and entertainment industry,” the league said. “The NFL has for decades put our fans front and center in how we distribute our content.”

The NFL said 87% its games can be watched on free TV. The other 13% on streaming and cable platforms are made available on the local TV stations of the teams involved in those contests.

The sports rights landscape has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years as deep pocketed tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Netflix have provided the NFL with significant leverage in its negotiations with its longtime TV partners NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN.

While streaming companies initially eschewed live sports because of the high cost of rights fees, they have found them to be an effective way to bring a massive number of viewers to their platforms.

Amazon Prime Video is paying $1.5 billion a year for the rights to “Thursday Night Football,” a package that was a money loser when carried by the broadcast networks. Netflix has picked up the rights to games on Christmas Day, while Google’s YouTube became the home of the Sunday Ticket package that gives subscribers access to out-of-market games.

The pressure from the newer competitors comes at a time when companies with traditional TV networks depend on the NFL more than ever as it provides the highest rated programming by a wide margin. The NFL packages also give TV station groups with leverage in negotiating carriage deal fees with cable and satellite companies.

Tensions over the rising rights fees are growing as the NFL has the right to open up the deal with Paramount, because the company underwent an ownership change last year when acquired by Skydance Media. The league is reportedly looking for another $1 billion annually from Paramount which is already paying $2.1 billion a year for its package of games on CBS.

The league has also made it clear it plans to exercise its option in 2029 to open the current 10-year media rights contract that runs through the 2032-33 season.

Fox Corporation — home of the Trump-friendly Fox News Channel — heavily depends on the NFL for programming on its TV stations — has already raised concerns about the renegotiation.

Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch has said he believes the $2.5 billion a year Fox pays the NFL is “fair market value.” But he has also told Wall Street analysts the company may have to re-examine its other sports deals in preparation to pay more to the NFL going forward.

Last week, Fox and station group owner Sinclair Broadcasting filed a statement with the FCC asserting that the NFL’s antitrust exemption does not apply to streaming platforms that require paid subscriptions.

“Congress provided a valuable exemption from the antitrust laws for leagues that bargain collectively for sports broadcasting,” wrote Joseph Di Scipio, Fox Corp.’s senior VP, legal and FCC compliance. “But on its face, the statute does not exempt negotiations that the leagues may have with streaming services.”

Survivors of the devastating Eaton fire called on state lawmakers on Wednesday to pass a bill requiring audits of spending by Southern California Edison and the state’s two other big for-profit electric companies on wildfire prevention.

The survivors pointed to an investigation by The Times that found that Edison had not spent hundreds of millions of dollars that it told regulators before the fire was needed to keep its transmission system safe. Edison had begun charging customers for the costs.

“Californians funded the wildfire prevention,” Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network, told members of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Commission on Wednesday. ”And we survivors paid the price when that work was not done.”

While the government’s investigation into the fire has not yet been released, Edison has said it believes that a century-old transmission line, which had not carried power since 1971, may have briefly re-energized on the night of Jan. 7, 2025, to ignite the fire. The inferno killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures in Altadena.

Chen’s wildfire survivors group and Consumer Watchdog sponsored the bill, known as Assembly Bill 1744. It would require the wildfire safety spending by Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric to be audited by an independent accounting firm.

The state Public Utilities Commission would have to consider the audits’ findings before agreeing to raise customer rates to cover even more wildfire spending.

“Had Edison known it would be accountable for those funds, that wildfire may not have started,” Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog told the committee, referring to the Eaton fire.

All three utilities said at the hearing they opposed the bill.

A lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric said he believed the audits were unnecessary because the commission was already reviewing the spending.

“We think it creates a duplicative process,” he said.

At the committee hearing, Edison’s lobbyist did not say why the company was opposed to the bill.

The company has previously said that safety is its top priority and that it does not believe maintenance on its transmission lines suffered before the Eaton fire.

Also voicing support for the bill at the hearing were survivors of other deadly wildfires in the state, including the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Investigators found that the fire was ignited when equipment failed on a decades-old PG&E transmission line.

The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, an Encinitas Democrat, pointed to how independent audits of the three companies’ wildfire spending from 2019 to 2020 found that $2.5 billion could not be accounted for.

Those were the last independent audits of the three companies’ wildfire spending.

Despite the findings, the commission did not require the companies to return any of the questioned amounts to electric customers. Instead, the commission agreed the companies could spend billions of dollars more, Boerner said.

“This is frankly unacceptable,” she said.

Asked for a response to those audits, the lobbyist from San Diego Gas & Electric told the committee he wasn’t familiar with the findings.

California electric rates are the nation’s second highest after Hawaii.

In 2024, wildfire expenses amounted to 17% to 27% of the costs the three companies charge to consumers, according to a legislative analysis of Boerner’s bill. The average residential customer pays $250 to $490 a year for that spending.

Walt Disney Co. is planning an extensive round of layoffs in the coming weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter but unauthorized to comment.

The move comes nearly three months after Disney unveiled a more streamlined management structure that sought to centralize its sprawling marketing operations.

Disney declined to comment.

The total number of layoffs could be as many as 1,000, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the planned cuts.

Many of the layoffs are expected to come from the recent consolidation of Disney’s marketing department.

After officially taking the reins of the company last month, Chief Executive Josh D’Amaro told employees he wants the Burbank media and entertainment giant — which includes film and TV studios, a tourism division, streaming services and live sports programming — to operate as “one Disney,” saying the global businesses all play a role in deepening consumers’ relationship with Disney and its characters.

Like many studios in Hollywood, Disney has faced decreased theatrical revenues, the continued decline of linear television and the smaller profits it makes from its streaming services. Though the company’s theme parks division has served as its economic engine for years, Disney recently indicated it expects to see “headwinds” in international tourism to its U.S. parks.

News of the planned Disney job cuts add to the ongoing drumbeat Hollywood has endured for the last few years.

On Tuesday, Sony Pictures Entertainment said it planned to cut hundreds of its employees worldwide as it looked to restructure its business.

Disney recently laid off thousands of workers in the years after former Chief Executive Bob Iger returned to the company. At the time, Iger said Disney had been pumping out too many shows and movies to compete with Netflix and needed to retrench.

Paramount President Jeff Shell is expected to exit the company after being entangled in a legal battle with a controversial Las Vegas gambler and self-styled “fixer.”

Shell has been negotiating his exit and is expected to leave imminently after just eight months on the job, said two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly.

The veteran entertainment executive officially joined the media company with David Ellison’s takeover in August, though he had been a key member of Ellison’s team for nearly two years as the group worked to assemble the pieces of the tech scion’s growing empire. Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount and then pulled off a stunning $111-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in late February.

Shell brought substantial experience running a media company to Ellison’s inner circle, a group that included former investment bankers and others who haven’t run a large-scale enterprise. Shell also served as a member of Paramount’s board and is expected to leave that role, too.

His exit comes after the high-roller, Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani, sued Shell in Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 9, alleging fraud and breach of an oral contract. Cipriani claimed that he provided Shell with “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services,” according to his suit. He alleged Shell spilled corporate secrets, which Shell has denied, and also failed to deliver on a verbal pledge to help Cipriani develop an English-language version of a Roku TV Spanish music show.

Shell maintains Cipriani fictionalized the two men’s dealings, then spread “false and salacious lies to extract a massive payday.” Cipriani has been seeking $150 million in damages. Shell filed a counterclaim, saying the two men met only twice and that Shell owed him nothing.

The legal skirmish cast a cloud over Shell’s tenure helping lead the company because the Ellisons wanted to stay focused on their Warner Bros. takeover and lining up regulators approvals in the U.S. and abroad. The Cipriani controversy made Shell’s future at Paramount untenable, the sources said.

Shell’s departure comes three years after he was ousted as NBCUniversal chief executive.

NBCUniversal-owner Comcast hired a law firm to investigate him after a CNBC anchor filed an internal sexual harassment claim against him. Shell stepped down, acknowledging that he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with the journalist, who has since left the company.

The job at Paramount was envisioned to be his second act.

Shell’s dealings with Cipriani began with an August 2024 meeting at litigator Patty Glaser’s Century City office. At the time, Glaser represented both men and urged Cipriani to “cease” his efforts to drum up damaging stories about Shell, who was trying to recover from the scandal that cost him his job at NBC.

Jeff Shell, Paramount Skydance president.

(Paramount / Skydance)

The most serious of Cipriani’s allegations was that he made a report about Shell to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission that Shell had discussed highly sensitive Paramount information with him: Paramount’s proposed $7.7-billion deal with the UFC owner to bring the mixed-martial arts fights to CBS and other Paramount outlets. Shell, in his lawsuit, denied the allegation.

Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani in Amazon Prime Video’s 2025 series, “Cocaine Quarterback.”

(Courtesy of Prime)

Paramount’s brass hired the Gibson Dunn law firm to investigate Shell’s surreptitious dealings with Cipriani. Investigators have been reviewing whether Shell had divulged any secrets. The review is still pending.

“Nobody believed me,” Cipriani said Wednesday. “The best thing I did was cooperate with Gibson Dunn and showed them that the texts were real.”

It’s unclear whether Ellison will look to bring in other experienced media executives or look to senior Warner Bros. Discovery executives following Paramount’s proposed takeover of that company.

TikTok advertising leader Khartoon Weiss is leaving the short-form video company, joining a wave of American executives stepping down over the past year.

Weiss is departing to pursue a new opportunity, the company said Tuesday. She had been at the video service for nearly six years, most recently in charge of TikTok’s global brands and agency business for North America.

Other recent departures have included global head of creators, Kim Farrell, who left earlier this year after almost six years, and Blake Chandlee, who departed in 2025 after leading advertising and marketing for six years.

Michael Beckerman, a public policy executive who helped lead TikTok’s fight against a US ban, also exited last year, as did music chief Ole Obermann. And Erich Andersen, who served as US-based general counsel for TikTok and its Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd., left that role in 2024.

Though ByteDance spun off key parts of its US business in January — part of a national security deal brokered by the Trump administration — the Chinese company remains in control of the advertising and marketing arm. In March, Weiss was the star of TikTok’s first major event since this tumultuous regulatory saga came to a close following more than half a decade.

“We’re going to kick into fifth gear,” Weiss said at the event. “We’re going to completely accelerate.”

In a memo this week, Weiss told advertisers that a search was underway for a replacement. The message was first reported by Digiday.

ByteDance regularly restructures TikTok teams and shuffles leaders. In some cases, it’s enlisted leaders or personnel who worked in China, angling to replicate the success it’s enjoyed in that country with TikTok’s sister app, Douyin.

Levine writes for Bloomberg.

SACRAMENTO — A federal judge appears willing to block a $6.2-billion merger of two large TV station groups as he evaluates whether Nexstar Media Group’s takeover of a rival violates U.S. antitrust laws.

At the conclusion of a two-hour hearing in Sacramento on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy L. Nunley signaled he was preparing to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent Nexstar and Tegna from combining operations amid an ongoing legal challenge.

Nunley said he would draft a written order, which is expected by Friday.

Previously, Nunley had issued a temporary restraining order to pause the merger.

Last month, Nexstar raced to finalize its blockbuster purchase of Tegna — despite a lawsuit filed by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and seven other state attorneys general. The state officials, all Democrats, claimed the massive merger would give Nexstar too much control over local TV stations, ultimately hurting consumers by diminishing the diversity and quality of their newscasts.

California Deputy Attorney General Laura Antonini argued that when news consolidates, it results in a loss of diverse viewpoints.

“That’s extremely harmful to democracy and to the citizens of this state,” she said at the hearing.

President Trump has championed the Nexstar-Tegna merger, suggesting it would diminish the clout of the major TV networks, including those he often gripes about: ABC and NBC. Nexstar, based in Irving, Texas, owns dozens of network affiliate stations.

Nexstar, which also owns KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles, already is the nation’s largest station group. The deal was expected to reshape the local television industry by extending Nexstar’s reach to 265 television stations, up from 164.

If the acquisition is finalized , Nexstar stations would cover 80% of the U.S. population, exceeding a 39% ownership cap set by Congress.

El Segundo-based DirecTV separately sued, alleging the combination of the nation’s two largest television station groups would do irreparable harm to its pay-TV business by raising prices and potentially increasing programming blackouts.

Representatives of Nexstar, DirecTV and Bonta’s office declined to comment after Tuesday’s hearing.

During the hearing, Nexstar attorney Alexander Okuliar, argued against an injunction, saying the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate that the merger posed an immediate threat to the public. He said DirecTV and the attorneys general had only offered proposed financial harms.

In court documents, the state attorneys general and DirecTV alleged the deal would give Nexstar multiple TV stations in dozens of markets. That raised concerns about layoffs in an industry that has sustained significant downsizing in recent years as viewers and advertisers migrate to streaming options and social media platforms like TikTok.

Nexstar could “shut down local newsrooms in dozens of markets, reducing the amount, variety, and quality of local broadcast news that Americans rely on for trusted information about their communities,” DirecTV alleged.

For example, Nexstar owns the Fox station in Sacramento, while McLean, Virginia-based Tegna owns the ABC affiliate.

Okuliar pushed back, saying there was no evidence that local newsrooms would be shuttered.

“One of the reasons for this deal is to protect local broadcasters, to protect local journalism,” he told the judge.

Nexstar contends the deal would strengthen TV station economics, allowing stations to bolster their news gathering and expand the number of newscasts. The company cited dozens of awards won by Nexstar journalists, including in Oklahoma City.

In addition to Bonta, the plaintiffs include state attorneys general in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

Nearly two dozen lawyers attended the hearing on behalf of the other plaintiffs. Eight lawyers represented Nexstar and Tegna.

Nexstar Chief Executive Perry Sook and Chief Operating officer Michael Biard also attended.

In its complaint, DirecTV argued that it would suffer financial harm because Nexstar would use its increased heft to demand significantly higher fees for the rights to carry its network-affiliate stations, which carry local news, primetime shows and professional sports, including NFL football. Such programming disputes can lead to blackouts which infuriate customers.

Nexstar’s lawyers disputed such allegations, telling the judge the merger would ultimately increase the value of content. The company suggested the deal could lower prices for distributors like DirecTV, which has about 10 million customers nationwide.

Nunley recently combined the DirecTV and state attorneys general lawsuits into one.

The judge, who was elevated to the federal bench by President Obama, had already expressed concerns about the merger.

In his March 27 order granting the temporary restraining order, Nunley said DirecTV had demonstrated that it could prevail at a trial due to the merits of its arguments.

He then instructed Nexstar to “immediately cease all ongoing actions relating to integration and consolidation of Nexstar and Tegna.”

Instead, the Tegna unit must continue to operate independently as “an ongoing, economically viable, and active competitor,” the judge wrote.

The Nexstar-Tegna merger took on political overtones in early February after Trump threw his weight behind it, writing in a post on Truth Social that the proposed union was among the “good deals,” because it would provide competition against “THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks.”

“GET THAT DEAL DONE!” Trump wrote.

The state attorneys general sued to block the merger on March 18, when the transaction was still pending at the U.S. Justice Department, which is tasked with conducting anti-trust reviews, and the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees TV station licenses.

The DOJ and FCC blessed the deal the following day.

Within an hour, Nexstar announced that it finalized the transaction and that Tegna had been disbanded.

“It’s very rare to do what Nexstar did here,” DirecTV’s attorney Glenn Pomerantz said.

Nexstar had asked the judge to require the plaintiffs to post a $150 million bond to compensate it for damages it would suffer from any delays in closing the deal.

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies are “urgently warning” private sector companies throughout the nation that Iranian actors “are conducting exploitation activity” that has resulted in “disruptions across several U.S. critical infrastructure,” according to a government notice reviewed by The Times.

The Iranian cyberactivity comes as President Trump is threatening to target Iran’s critical infrastructure in the coming hours, particularly its bridges and power plants.

Iran’s attack targeted products by Rockwell Automation’s Allen-Bradley, one of the most widely used industrial automation brands, according to the notice, which said that cyber actors affiliated with Iran were exploiting “programmable logic controllers across U.S. critical infrastructure.”

Tehran’s targeting campaigns against U.S. organizations “have recently escalated, likely in response to hostilities between Iran,” the notice warned.

“Iran-affiliated advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are conducting exploitation activity targeting internet-facing operational technology (OT) devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley,” the notice reads.

“U.S. organizations should urgently review the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) in this advisory for indications of current or historical activity on their networks,” it continues.

The advisory was issued Tuesday jointly by the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Security Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and Cyber Command.

Top executives from companies at the core of the nation’s ability to function — those leading America’s largest energy, water, transportation, and communications corporations — had already been taking it upon themselves to increase their vigilence over potential attacks, concerned that Trump’s willingness to target Iran’s critical infrastructure inadvertently put a mark on their backs.

Some fear Iran’s ability to conduct cyber operations that could take down transformers or power inverters, if not a wide-scale power system. Others are concerned by threats to brick and mortar sites from proxies of Tehran — physical attacks against facilities such as nuclear plants, or power management systems, the crown jewels of the sector.

Larger, even more capable actors, particularly Russia and China, may also take advantage of the fog of war to launch strikes themselves.

“There remains concern about Iranian cyber capabilities and retaliation if the U.S. carries through on threats to attack their infrastructure,” said Ernest Moniz, former U.S. secretary of energy under President Obama who helped negotiate the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. “There may already be backdoors, Trojan horses and malware hidden in our infrastructure.”

“I have to believe that the government cyber experts — or what’s left of them — are working closely and indeed overtime with the power companies and other infrastructure operators on cyber defense and intrusion detection and warning,” Moniz added.

Iran has demonstrated an ability to penetrate networks tied to critical U.S. infrastructure before.

In 2015, Iran-backed hackers accessed data associated with Calpine Corp., one of California’s largest power producers, obtaining detailed engineering diagrams and credentials related to power plant systems. Some were labeled “mission critical.” U.S. officials feared at the time that the breach would allow Tehran to initiate blackouts nationwide.

Since that time, companies at the center of the U.S. energy and telecommunications sectors have markedly improved their defenses. But Iran’s offensive capabilities have improved, as well.

Large players in the energy sector are operating with “a watchful eye and an elevated posture right now,” said Pedro J. Pizarro, president and chief executive officer of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, one of the nation’s largest electric utilities.

Companies like Edison have been operating under persistent threat for over a decade. In 2024, a pair of devastating cyberespionage attacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure attributed to Chinese hackers, Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, were discovered after avoiding detection for at least three years.

The threat of a similarly latent attack — where malware lies dormant in critical infrastructure systems, waiting for a signal to activate — is a real cause for concern in the sector, despite its best efforts and technological advances, experts and insiders said.

“The threat of cyber and physical attacks targeting critical infrastructure is not new,” said Jennifer DeCesaro, senior vice president of industry operations at the Edison Electric Institute, “which is why we partner with the government through the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council to share actionable intelligence and prepare to respond to incidents that could affect our ability to provide electricity safely and reliably.”

The ESCC works closely with the National Security Council and its intelligence arms, particularly the intelligence agencies and CISA, to coordinate regular briefings on safety standards, best practices and intelligence tips.

The CIA declined to comment. A spokesperson with CISA, listed as out of office due to the ongoing federal funding hiatus for the Department of Homeland Security, could not be reached for comment.

Last summer, announcing a 40% cut to the workforce of her office, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard eliminated the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, previously seen as a critical fusion hub of information by private sector partners.

Asked to respond to the potential of retaliatory attacks against U.S. infrastructure, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, repeated the president’s threats.

“The Iranian regime has until 8PM Eastern Time to meet the moment and make a deal with the United States,” she said. “Only the president knows where things stand and what he will do.”

Trump has threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Tehran if they fail to come to an agreement that ends its control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Ultimately, corporate executives shoulder much of the burden as the first line of defense for the country’s critical infrastructure, roughly 85% of which is owned by private sector companies.

Tom Fanning, former CEO of Southern Co. and now executive committee chairman at the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, said the threat from Iran is “credible.”

“I have not seen what I would describe as the existential threat, to take down a wide-ranging power system,” Fanning said. “Could those things be turned on? Sure. Is the United States critical infrastructure prepared to act? I think so.”

Last month, early on in the war, the Los Angeles Metro transit system was forced to shut down a portion of its network due to a hack. Authorities say it is still unclear who was behind the breach, but a source told The Times that Iran-backed hackers are being investigated as the potential culprit.

The transportation agency said its security team had “discovered unauthorized activity,” and were making sure its roughly 1,400 servers were secure before bringing them back online. The agency has emphasized the hack did not impact passengers’ commute time.

The FBI said it was aware of the hack. DHS is working with local partners “to address cyber threats to critical infrastructure,” an official said.

“The reality is that the threats are here and now,” Fanning added. “The truth is, the bad guys are already here.”

Times staff writers Kevin Rector, Richard Winton and Rebecca Ellis, in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has launched a $65 billion bid to purchase Universal Music, the label representing some of music’s biggest names like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny.

As part of the proposed deal, UMG would merge with Ackman’s investment firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, and the company’s stock listing would be relocated from Amsterdam to the New York Stock Exchange.

Pershing Square already holds more than 4.5% of the music giant’s shares. Ackman said the move to a U.S.-based stock exchange would increase the value of UMG .

“UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction,” said Ackman in a statement.

The proposed deal includes Universal Music merging with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, an acquisition company approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023. If agreed upon, the proposed transaction could close at the end of the year, according to the company.

Universal Music Group currently has its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and a local L.A. office in Santa Monica. The label was founded in 1996. Over the years, it’s cemented its reputation as one of the music industry’s “Big Three,” alongside Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Universal also controls smaller labels like Republic Records, Interscope Geffen A&M, Capitol Music Group, and Def Jam Recordings.

The news has drawn a level of skepticism, as Ackman will need two-thirds of UMG’s investors to approve the proposed deal, including French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who is UMG’s largest shareholder with a morethan 18% stake, according to Bloomberg.

If finalized, UMG shareholders would receive €9.4 billion in cash, around €5.05 per share, or roughly $10.9 billion and $5.84 per share.

Investors would receive 0.77 shares in the new merged company. This would value the total consideration package of cash and stock estimated to be worth €30.40 per share, a 78% premium to UMG’s stock price. The transaction will also include the cancellation of 17% of UMG outstanding shares. The new UMG will have 1.541 billion shares outstanding.

UMG’s stock price has jumped over 11% to €19.05 Tuesday morning, due to this potential acquisition.

Billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior Tom Steyer, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, is facing mounting questions about how he earned his wealth — notably investments in private prisons that are now being used to house undocumented immigrants facing deportation.

Some of the most vicious political attacks come from his Democratic rivals and Sacramento special interest groups as the June 2 primary election fast approaches, but Steyer has been dogged for years about his past, controversial business ventures and how they help fund his unbridled campaign spending.

Steyer, 68, faced that ire during a town hall event in San Diego last week.

“Tom, you’re not going to come to San Diego and ignore this detention center,” Holly Taylor, a 37-year-old Democrat screamed at Steyer, holding signs with QR codes to help detainees at an Otay Mesa private prison that Steyer’s hedge fund backed. “It’s a concentration camp. They’re drinking water out of a toilet.”

Taylor, a crime scene cleaner from Pacific Beach, is among scores of people who gather weekly at the facility to raise money for detained immigrants to provide them some comfort amid the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

In 1986, Steyer, co-founded Farallon Capital, which had shares valued at $89.1 million in the Corrections Corp. of America in 2005, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That company, now known as CoreCivic, operates private prisons around the nation that are housing people picked up by federal immigration agents, including the one in Otay Mesa.

It is not the first time Steyer has faced criticism about the connection with private detention facilities. At the California Democratic Party convention in February, protesters dressed in orange prison jumpsuits sought to draw attention to the controversy.

His Democratic rivals have also seized upon the issue to question the billionaire’s progressive credentials.

“Before he was a progressive, he made millions off of companies that operate ICE detention centers, that operate private prisons that incarcerated young children,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said during a recent interview with a political influencer known as Mrs. Frazzled.

“His entire campaign is built on the backs of kids in cages,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Dublin) wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

People protest outside of a lunch held by California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco on Feb. 21.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Several years earlier, Yale University’s graduate teachers union called upon the school — Steyer’s alma mater — to divest from Farallon because of concerns about how the private prison company treated detainees, notably minorities.

Steyer has repeatedly expressed remorse about his former firm’s ties with the detention company. In 2012, he sold his stake in Farallon, which was named in reference to islands off the coast of San Francisco and was once one of the largest hedge funds in the world.

“I deeply regret that Farallon made that investment, and I personally ordered the investment in CCA to be sold because it did not accord with my values then or now,” Steyer told The Times in 2019 after he launched a short-lived presidential campaign.

Asked to comment about the latest iteration of the controversy, Steyer’s campaign pointed to comments he made in March at a town hall in San Francisco about how among the hundreds of thousands of companies his hedge fund invested in, the private prison company changed the course of his life.

“It was a mistake, and I sold it over 20 years ago, thinking, not that it won’t be profitable, it’s just a mistake. I don’t want to be in that business. But let me say this, it wasn’t just a mistake,” Steyer said. “It was also a big wake-up call that I was in the wrong place, that I was in a business that was taking me to places I absolutely didn’t want to go. And there’s a reason I walked away from that business and walked away from a ton of money, because I felt like that is not the life I want.”

He added that he and his wife, Kat Taylor, have spent the past two decades pushing for rehabilitative justice — treatment instead of mass incarceration except for violent felons.

“Am I a perfect person? No, have I made mistakes? Yes,” Steyer said. “But for those of you who like to read the Bible, there is a moment on the road to Damascus when someone makes a change, and I have made a big change, and I did it a long time ago, and I’ve been pushing very, very hard the other way.”

Farallon also invested in fossil fuel projects, including an Australian coal mine that denuded thousands of acres of koala habitat and generated an enormous amount of carbon emissions.

Steyer, who has a net worth of $2.4 billion according to Forbes, has painted himself as a reformed billionaire who walked away from Farallon because of angst about how he earned his fortune. He has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Democratic causes, notably efforts to fight climate change.

“The truth is that is not where I think there is value, and that is not what I’m seeking in my life,” he said at a Sacramento town hall in March when retired state employee Gina Coates asked how, as a woman of color, she could believe his promises given his privilege as a wealthy white man.

“In terms of trusting me, let me say this, I left my business 14 years ago, and anybody who cared about money would not have done it,” Steyer said.

Steyer later said at the town hall that he left Farallon because he realized that he didn’t want to remain on that path.

“I want to have a meaningful life,” he said. “I want to stand with the people of this state and have actual prosperity. Twelve trillionaires and 40 million people who can’t make rent is not success.”

But Steyer and his wife continue to receive significant income from the hedge fund, including millions of dollars in investments, holdings and various complicated transactions in 2024, according to a statement of economic interest and tax returns he was required to file with the California Secretary of State’s office because of his gubernatorial run.

A Steyer campaign spokesman said Steyer created guardrails to ensure that he does not profit off companies he morally disagrees with.

“Tom has put in place an investment policy to ensure that he does not directly invest in fossil fuels, payday lending, or private prisons,” spokesman Anthony York said. “To the extent he inadvertently incurs exposure to those industries through third-party managers or liquid legacy investments, Tom will donate all profits to charity.”

After leaving Farallon, Steyer became one of the nation’s top Democratic donors. And he has used his wealth to fund his political ambitions. Steyer contributed nearly $342 million of his own money to his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission.

In the 2026 governor’s race, Steyer has donated nearly $112 million to his campaign as of Thursday, according to the California secretary of state’s office. He has been an ubiquitous presence on the airwaves, including local news programs and campaign ads that aired during the “Puppy Bowl” on the Animal Planet channel on Super Bowl Sunday. In the past month, Steyer has aired more than 5,000 ads, according to iSpot, which tracks television commercials.

California, home to 23.1 million registered voters, is home to some of the nation’s most expensive media markets. And candidates, particularly those who are not well known, need to spend heavily on television advertising if they hope to have a successful campaign.

But money is no guarantee of success. Billionaire Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief and formerly a longtime Republican donor, spent $144 million of her money on her 2010 gubernatorial bid. That set a record for a candidate’s contribution in a state race at the time, but Whitman lost to Jerry Brown by nearly 13 percentage points.

In 1998, Democratic multimillionaire Al Checchi who had been the co-chair of Northwest Airlines spent $40 million of his wealth on an unsuccessful run for governor, also a record at the time.

Steyer is one of the top three Democrats in the sprawling field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. And his liberal positions are drawing the ire of powerful forces in Sacramento. On Tuesday , the state’s Realtors donated $5 million to an independent expenditure committee opposing Steyer’s bid.

Taylor, who confronted Steyer at the San Diego town hall, said she had not planned to be so vocal. But as the event unfolded, she decided she had to speak, not only to Steyer but to the attendees. She and her compatriots gather every Sunday outside the Otay Mesa facility to raise money to help detainees buy food in the prison commissary and call their families.

“My main issue is that he has gotten financial gain off of these people suffering,” she said.

Global streaming revenue surged to $150 billion last year, driven largely by an increase in prices by Netflix and other streamers, according to a new report.

In 2025, global streaming subscription revenue grew by 14%, reaching a total of over $157 billion, the report from Ampere Analysis found. In the last five years, revenue has tripled from the $50 billion seen in 2020.

Streamers continue to dominate the digital distribution market with rising monthly subscription fees , more consumers choosing subscriptions with ads, and platforms expanding their global reach.

“As the streaming market matures, the emphasis is no longer on pure subscriber growth but on extracting greater value from existing audiences,” said Lauren Liversedge, a senior analyst at Ampere Analysis. She noted that the growth is happening “particularly in the most competitive markets.”

Over the next five years, Ampere Analysis estimates subscription revenue will grow by another 29%, potentially reaching over $200 billion worldwide by 2030.

The U.S. is the largest driver of this revenue growth, as the country accounts for 50% of 2025’s global streaming subscription revenue, per Ampere Analysis. Netflix accounted for the largest revenue share in the U.S. at 14%. Last week, the company also announced a price hike, where its premium tier costs $27 a month. This marks the second time in a little over a year that the streaming service raised its fees.

“Our approach remains the same: We continue offering a range of prices and plans to meet a variety of needs, and as we deliver more value to our members we are updating our prices to enable us to reinvest in quality entertainment and improve their experience by updating our prices,” said a Netflix spokesperson in a statement.

It’s not the only streaming service to increase its prices, as Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV made similar moves last year.

Recent data from Deloitte highlights some of the price sensitivity U.S. streaming audiences are experiencing. More than two-thirds of streaming subscribers are now opting for ads, marking a 20% increase from 2024.

That cost-conscious sentimentexpands beyond North America, reaching Western Europe, according to Ampere Analysis. The total revenue from ad tiers has risen rapidly across these markets over the past five years, up from less than 5% in 2020 to 28% in 2025.

But even as consumers demonstrate their willingness to pay less and watch ads, streaming platforms still benefit, making money from both subscription fees and advertising. When accounting for that ad revenue, streaming services generated closer to $177 billion in global revenue last year. Advertising is expected to become an even more important revenue stream for these companies, as ads alone could add $42 billion in annual revenue by 2030, per Ampere Analysis.

ABOARD THE CRESCENT — There’s something melodic about watching the sun rise over a rural stillness broken only by the rhythms of steel wheels on tracks. Or so we tell ourselves.

In this case, being aboard a train at all owed more to politics than poetry.

Congress and President Trump were mired in their latest budget stalemate, one rooted in his immigration crackdown and the tactics of federal forces he has sent to U.S. cities. But this impasse has upended a foundational constant of American life today: easy air travel.

In Atlanta, my hometown airport, cheerfully marketed as the world’s busiest, had descended into organized chaos. Unpaid federal employees called out from work, leaving a diminished security staff to screen travelers frustrated by hours-long waits in line. I wanted to get to Washington for the NCAA basketball tournament. So I eliminated the risk of a missed flight and booked the train overnight and into game day across a 650-mile route.

In this fraught moment in U.S. politics, I slowed down and thought about things we take for granted. Who ever ponders the conveniences of that 20th century innovation, the airplane, that makes 21st century hustle possible? We book and board. An unconscious, first-world flex of modernity. It’s even rarer to grapple with the inconvenience.

My decision had taken me further back, to the 19th century and another defining innovation: the long-distance train.

A 14½-hour weekend train ride is time aplenty to appreciate how completely politics, economics, social strife and fights over identity and belonging have always affected the order of our lives, including how, when and where we move around in these United States. But Amtrak’s Crescent also allowed me to see the expanse of our collective experience.

I traversed the urban, suburban and rural breadth of East Coast America. I learned how other travelers came aboard. And in that, I found the portrait of people, past and present, who refuse to be as paralyzed as some of their elected leaders.

Convenience on the railways

There is little glamour late night in a crowded Amtrak station. Children are up past bedtime and tended by frazzled parents. Older adults struggle with luggage and stairs.

Airports are not red-carpet affairs either, of course. But there is a certain cache to Delta’s Atlanta-Washington flights. They typically take about two hours gate to gate. They often are slotted at a midpoint gate of the concourse nearest the main terminal. That is almost certainly a nod to members of Congress who use it, but who have lost some airline perks during this extended partial shutdown — which as of Sunday is the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

In normal circumstances I can get from my front porch to Capitol Hill or downtown in as little as 4½ hours. Security lines these days could at least double my overall air travel time.

The train is still longer, and time is money, we are taught. But certainty has value, too, even if it means an 11:29 p.m. departure. And at the Amtrak station, there were no standstill lines, no Transportation Security Administration agents, no ICE agents as stand-ins.

Passengers who arrived mere minutes before departure made it on board and found seats quickly — assigned in boarding order, not predetermined zones that yield jammed aisles. There’s no in-seat service or satellite TV. But even coach seats, the lowest Amtrak tier, are as spacious as airline first-class — and there is Wi-Fi, so it’s not the 19th century or even 20th century after all.

On board, I heard one crew member joke, “I’m no TSA agent.”

The pathways of history

As a boy in rural Alabama, I counted train cars and wondered where they were headed. I’ve since read diary entries and letters from my grandmother and her sisters recounting World War II-era weekend trips to Atlanta.

The South’s largest city has a historical hook too. Originally named “Terminus,” Atlanta developed in the antebellum era as a critical intersection of north-south and east-west rail routes. That is what drew Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman for one of the Civil War’s seminal campaigns that helped defeat the Confederacy.

A century after the Civil War, Delta chose Atlanta for its headquarters rather than Birmingham, Ala., which was the larger city as of the 1960 census. The company’s decision was tied up in tax breaks for the airline, named for its crop duster origins in the Mississippi Delta region. According to some interpretations, Delta’s decision was made easier because of the more overt racism of Alabama’s and Birmingham’s leaders as they defended Jim Crow — a code that, among other acts, allowed states to segregate the passenger trains that predated Amtrak.

On this night, I heard many languages and accents, notable given the role that immigrant labor played in building the U.S. rail system and especially striking now with immigration — legal and illegal — at the forefront in Washington, my destination. I saw faces that reflected U.S. pluralism, a different mix from what my grandmother and aunts would have seen a lifetime ago.

The array of voices celebrated the freedom and ease of rail travel. So did Agatha Grimes and her friends after they boarded in Greensboro, N.C., as part of a long weekend trip to celebrate her 62nd birthday.

“I got stuck in the Atlanta airport last week,” Grimes said, as her group laughed together in the dining car. “It’s just nuts.”

Beretta Nunnally, a self-described “train veteran” who organized their trip, said, “There’s no worry about parking. No checking bags. You come to the station, you get where you‘re going, and you come home.”

An era for planes, trains and automobiles

Still, that is not as easy in the United States as it once was.

Just as politics, economics and subsidies helped expand U.S. railroads, those factors diminished the network as auto manufacturers, oil companies, road builders and, finally, airline manufacturers and airlines commanded favor from politicians and attention from consumers.

Riding hours across rural areas, I noticed the junkyards where kudzu and chain-link fencing framed rows of rusted automobiles. I saw the farmland and equipment that helps feed cities and the rest of the nation. I awoke to see the night lights of office towers in Charlotte, N.C., and its NFL stadium. I saw vibrant county seats — and I thought of countless other towns like them that are not thriving as they sit disconnected from passenger rail and far from the Eisenhower-era interstate system that we crossed multiple times on our way.

In each setting, voters — conservatives, liberals, the extremes and betweens — have chosen their representatives, senators and a president who now set the nation’s course.

When I arrived in Washington, I paused to enjoy Union Station’s grand hall and its Beaux Arts appeal, and I lamented how much splendor has been lost because so many striking U.S. terminals have been razed. I stepped outside and looked up at the Capitol dome.

While I had slept, the Senate managed a bipartisan deal to fund all of the Department of Homeland Security except immigration enforcement. As I continued northward, House Republican leaders rejected it. The stalemate continued.

The president, however, took executive action to pay TSA workers, and their paychecks may resume within days, though long airport lines may continue awhile longer.

I was a weary traveler but renewed citizen. I had a game to get to. And the train rolled on.

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

Kicking off the upcoming season at the Mark Taper Forum — which recently celebrated its top-grossing musical ever with “Here Lies Love” — is the world premiere of Zack Zadek’s original musical “The Turning,” a folk thriller set in California’s Sequoia groves.

The show, said Center Theatre Group’s artistic director Snehal Desai as the company announces its 2026-27 slate of performances, has a “very L.A. vibe.”

Next up is a batch of shows meant to provide audiences some comedic relief amid a midterm season that’s sure to sow anxiety: Karen Zacarías’ “Destiny of Desire,” Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!” and the family-favorite “Dog Man: The Musical.” Then in the spirit of springtime renewal, thought-provoking plays like “John Proctor Is the Villain” and “Fences” will leave audiences in contemplation before festive summer item “Boop! The Musical” swoops in to lift spirits.

When Desai plans the company’s season lineup, he always surveys the year ahead — literally.

“I look at the calendar a lot as to, where do we think we’re gonna be a year from now? Six to eight months from now?” Desai said in a recent interview at his office in downtown L.A.

Some entries in Center Theatre Group’s upcoming season are scheduled intuitively, like the Mischief Comedy team’s “Christmas Carol Goes Wrong,” running in the thick of the holiday season. But with others, Desai said he orchestrated the lineup to tell a programmatic story, like an artist might order tracks on an album.

As an artistic director, Desai said, he always encourages visitors: “Join us all season, versus just coming for the things you like,” and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

This year as Desai consulted his calendar, he looked even farther ahead than usual, toward Center Theatre Group’s 60th anniversary season (2027-28) and the L.A. Olympics in 2028.

“We were having conversations of, what are the plays that we want to do or we want to bring back,” Desai said, when the theater company’s associate artistic director Lindsay Allbaugh suggested “Fences,” the final play of August Wilson’s acclaimed Century Cycle to be staged at Center Theatre Group.

“I said, ‘Oh, that’s what we want,’” Desai said, “both to end this season and kick off our 60th.”

The artistic director could not yet confirm who would direct the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a former Negro League baseball player and his family navigating life in 1950s segregated Pittsburgh.

Desai, who has not shied away from politically charged material during his tenure at the theater company, said Wilson’s play aligned with his intent this season to platform work “asking who we are as a country and as a community and society.”

“I wanted voices that felt bold and fearless, that were both outspoken and unafraid in a world where, right now, it feels like there’s a lot of things that are trying to stifle us from speaking out or coming together,” he said. To him, presenting “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish is revolutionary, as is “John Proctor Is the Villain’s” dissection of a classic through a feminist lens.

Desai added that he planned to balance that rabble-rousing spirit with productions that leaned more “celebratory and communal” and provided “different ways of having catharsis.”

“Oh, Mary!” offers riotous fun, and “Destiny of Desire” is an homage to an oft-dismissed yet widely consumed medium, the telenovela.

“With ‘Destiny,’ you’re able to take that format of something that people often watch in isolation at home, and enjoy it together,” Desai said.

Regional theater faces a slew of challenges: rising production and personnel costs, post-pandemic audience declines and competition from digital media. The situation has felt particularly bleak in L.A., Desai said, as seeming moments of recovery in the past year or so were squashed by the L.A. wildfires, then last summer’s immigration crackdown and associated civil unrest.

“We just constantly live in this time period that feels like we’re on shifting sands,” Desai said. Nonetheless, the company is finding paths through the desert, including with alternative programming through CTG: FWD.

The CTG: FWD initiative this season will bring “Riverdance 30 – The New Generation,” “Clue” and “The Music Man” to the Ahmanson Theatre, and “Dog Man” to the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

Another strategy Desai said the theater company has employed is heavy investment in new works development, particularly new musical development. New works are time-and resource-intensive, Desai said, but they’re also good investments, offering the best chances at longevity and commercial prospects.

With “The Turning,” Center Theatre Group spotlights an emerging voice that Desai said represents “the future of American theater.”

After Desai was introduced to Zadek’s folksy musical “The Turning,” he said, “I just kept listening to it over and over again. I was like, ‘I can’t wait for the cast recording of this to be on Spotify.’”

The artistic director was also thrilled to find an ultra-rare gem in Zadek’s piece: a truly original story.

“A lot of things are adaptations these days: adaptations of films, of TV shows,” Desai said. “So to get a world premiere musical that is based on its own original concept — that, I found, was really compelling.”

Following back-to-back seasons of directing his own productions, Desai is taking a breather this go-around to focus on broader administrative duties. But he still hopes to be a resource for visiting directors learning how to navigate the “special space” that is the Mark Taper Forum — and its neighbors the Ahmanson Theatre and the Kirk Douglas Theatre, which will get its own season announcement in the spring or early summer.

See the full season, here.

CHESSY, France — A 118-foot mountain of ice rose over the suburban Paris countryside this weekend as Disney opened its Arendelle kingdom to the world — Elsa’s palace glowing at the summit, a “Frozen” Nordic fishing village below, and the company’s new chief executive standing before a crowd of celebrities.

World of Frozen, an immersive land themed to the blockbuster animated franchise, opened Sunday as a centerpiece of a $2.2-billion transformation at Disneyland Paris.

The transformation renames one of Disneyland Paris’ two parks from Walt Disney Studios Park to Disney Adventure World. The inauguration drew Penélope Cruz, Naomi Campbell and Teyana Taylor.

It is the largest expansion in the 34-year history of Disneyland Paris, and one node in a roughly $60-billion global build-out of Disney’s parks, resorts and cruise lines.

A new CEO’s first stage

It is also the first major international stage for Josh D’Amaro, who took over as Disney’s CEO on March 18 — 11 days before the French gates opened — after nearly three decades in the company’s theme parks division.

The parks-and-experiences business reportedly generated 57% of the company’s $17.5 billion in segment operating income last year, the force that observers say propelled D’Amaro from parks chief to the corner office.

“The Walt Disney Co. was built on one man’s dream, and for more than 100 years we’ve shared that dream with the world,” D’Amaro told the inauguration crowd.

“Storytelling is fundamental to everything that we do, whether that’s on screen or stage, in our theme parks, on our cruise ships, or even at home.”

He called the opening “a transformational moment” and paid tribute to the creative team behind the attraction, including “Frozen” writer-director Jennifer Lee — who are all now at work on “Frozen 3.”

An Associated Press journalist accompanied D’Amaro on the “Frozen” ride Saturday night.

The carriage splashed through water to childlike cheers from riders and laughter from the new CEO as they glided past Elsa singing in the dark. Some stepped off lightly wet.

The evening’s emotional peak came when Lou, an 11-year-old whose wish was granted through Make-A-Wish France, took the stage to sing a few notes of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”

A next-generation robotic Olaf walked out to join her. It was the 25,000th wish fulfilled for a sick child at Disneyland Paris since 1992.

A French reversal

On Friday, D’Amaro had stood alongside Emmanuel Macron at the resort.

The French president used the visit to claim the park as a national economic asset, calling Disneyland Paris “the leading tourist destination in Europe” and describing it as “a genuine ecosystem of success.”

Macron said the latest expansion would create 1,000 additional direct jobs.

“Since the beginning, that’s 13 billion euros invested on this territory,” Macron said, a figure equivalent to about $15 billion.

Disneyland Paris says it has recorded more than 445 million visits since 1992, accounting for 6.1% of France’s national tourism revenue.

Macron’s presence underscored a remarkable reversal.

When the park opened as Euro Disney in 1992, French intellectuals derided it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” The president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, dryly derided the new attraction as “not exactly my cup of tea.”

Now a French president was standing in front of cameras calling it an engine of national prosperity.

European roots

“‘Frozen,’ of course, has its roots in European storytelling,” said Michel den Dulk of Walt Disney Imagineering.

“It’s very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen. So to have a northern European, charming wooden little village here in Disneyland Paris — it just made sense.”

The new Tangled family ride, too, draws from European folklore — the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel.

The land re-creates Arendelle around a lagoon, its timber buildings painted in muted Scandinavian pastels, facades adorned with rosemaling, a traditional Norwegian decorative art.

At the center is Frozen Ever After, a boat ride featuring state-of-the-art animatronics and immersive projection effects.

Guests can meet Anna and Elsa inside Arendelle Castle, have a conversation with a responsive baby troll named Mossy who talks back, and watch a lagoon celebration called the Snow Flower Festival — featuring an original song.

Visitors praised the scale of the mountain and the detail of the village, even after delays and minor glitches.

“Despite the wait, it was well worth it. The attention to detail is incredible, and the perspective of the ice mountain is breathtaking,” said Daniel Weber, 41, an architect from Munich, Germany, after the ride Sunday.

“You forget you’re outside Paris. For a few minutes, it really feels like Arendelle,” said Léa Moreau, 27, a graphic designer from Lille, France.

Beyond World of Frozen, the rebranded park brings a vast new lake called Adventure Bay, a Tangled family ride, 15 new dining locations — including the posh Regal View Restaurant — and a nighttime spectacular called Disney Cascade of Lights featuring more than 380 drones.

A Lion King land, already under construction, will follow.

More than 90% of the second park’s offerings will have been redesigned since it opened in 2002, and Disney says the footprint will roughly double once the full transformation is complete.

Disney’s streaming has swung from deep losses to profitability, but the parks remain the company’s most dependable earnings engine — and D’Amaro is the man who ran them.

“We continue to dream bigger and bring stories to life in brand new ways,” D’Amaro told the crowd.

Pyrotechnics lighted up Arendelle Village.

The ice palace on the mountain turned blue.

And 34 years after Euro Disney became a punchline, a brand-new kingdom opened in the fields east of Paris — for the first time in forever.

Adamson writes for the Associated Press.

It was Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, when the grass outside the baseline and the bright red sign high above center field read “UNIQLO FIELD.” It will be Dodger Stadium on Thursday, when the defending World Series champions open their new season, and forevermore.

The official name of our summer home is now Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium. The team announcers will say that, and so will some of the signs. The fans won’t, and the founder of the company that just spent nine figures on the name you won’t use said he completely understands.

“That’s a very natural reaction,” Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai told me through an interpreter. “We respect that.”

Yanai said his company’s deal with the Dodgers covers five years. He would say only that the total value was “more” than $125 million. That provides the Dodgers with an annual naming rights payment in line with the ones at Crypto.com Arena, Intuit Dome and Sofi Stadium, without the Dodgers having to sell naming rights to the actual venue.

Are the Dodgers baseball’s version of a gold mine? Yes. Do they spend big and win big? Also yes. Do you mind if Uniqlo essentially covers Freddie Freeman’s salary this season?

“We need a lot of revenue to put out the product that we do,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten said. “That’s not a secret. And we’re proud of everyone who helps us do it: all of our fans, all of our media partners, and all of our sponsor partners. They are all important. It is how this all comes together.”

While Uniqlo would be delighted if you used its name, whatever local fans choose to call the stadium is not critical to the success of the partnership.

For a Japanese company in pursuit of brand awareness and expansion in the United States and elsewhere, there might be nothing better than getting your name in front of millions of fans around the world watching Shohei Ohtani play on television.

Ohtani made an estimated $125 million in endorsements and sponsorships last year, Sportico reported, a larger annual haul “than any other athlete in the history of sports.”

“The Dodgers are such a popular team,” Yanai said. “I usually ask my wife, after I come back from the office, whether Shohei hit a home run. I think all the Japanese people do that.”

Uniqlo Field signs were unveiled Wednesday at Dodger Stadium in the wake of the team’s naming rights deal.

(Beth Harris / Associated Press)

According to Forbes, Yanai is the richest man in Japan, where baseball teams carry corporate names. Why not buy a team and call it, say, the Uniqlo Bears?

“I always keep saying that could be very interesting,” he said, “but my wife turned it down. She keeps telling me, ‘Tadashi, you are not cut out to manage sports teams.’”

Instead, he is managing Uniqlo, an apparel company that pitches itself as blending comfort with quality. “We do not make disposable clothing,” Yanai said in the company’s last annual report.

Uniqlo has 794 stores in Japan but only 77 in the United States, including 14 in the Southland. Koji Yanai, a senior executive officer and Tadashi’s son, said the company aspires to grow annual U.S. revenues from $6 billion to $30 billion.

He shared what might be a more challenging aspiration.

“The Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium name may be very new for everyone,” he said, “but I hope in the near future the fans will like it and will love it.”

United Airlines Field at the Coliseum? Yeah, no.

Jeff Marks, the chief executive of Los Angeles-based Innovative Partnerships Group, once brokered a naming rights deal in which the Cal football team would play on Kabam Field at California Memorial Stadium. He tried to find a receptive audience for the name.

“We educated a lot of freshmen, sophomores, and newcomers,” Marks said. “Are you going to go after alumni who have been calling it Memorial Stadium? No. So you didn’t focus on that. You focused on people that could be more impressionable, and it worked.”

With Dodger Stadium, we’ll see. For the 2026 season, it is now time for Dodgers baseball, but not before one reporter at a press conference Wednesday asked company officials whether Uniqlo would provide the Dodgers players with free clothing.

Kasten could not pass up the chance to interject.

“We pay them enough,” he said with a grin, “to shop at Uniqlo stores.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court made it harder for music and movie makers to sue for online piracy, ruling Wednesday that internet providers are usually not liable for copyright infringement even if they know their users are downloading copyrighted works.

In a 9-0 decision, the justices threw out Sony’s lawsuit and a $1-billion verdict against Cox Cable for copyright infringement.

Lower courts upheld a jury’s verdict against Cox’s internet service for contributing to music piracy, which the company did little to stop.

Sony’s lawyers pointed to hundreds of thousands of instances of Cox customers sharing copyrighted works. Put on notice, Cox did little stop it, they said.

But the high court said that is not enough to establish liability for copyright infringement.

“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.

Two decades ago, the court sided with the music and motion picture producers and ruled against Grokster and Napster on the grounds their software was intended to share copyrighted music and movies.

But on Wednesday, the court said “contributory” copyright infringement did not extend to internet service providers based on the actions of some of their users

“Cox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement,” Thomas said. “Cox neither induced its users’ infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement.”

In its defense, Cox argued that internet service providers could be bankrupted by huge lawsuits for copyright infringement, which they said they did not cause and could not prevent.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding scrutiny into Paramount Skydance’s financial backers amid rising concerns about potential foreign influence of U.S. media properties.

In a letter this week to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, seven U.S. senators criticized Carr’s suggestion that Paramount’s $111-billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, backed by billionaire Larry Ellison and his family, was on a fast track to receive FCC approval with scant oversight.

Such complicated mergers typically receive an intense government review. The proposed merger would combine two legendary film studios, dozens of cable channels, HBO, CBS and two major news organizations, CNN and CBS News.

Ellison and his son, David, who chairs Paramount, are friendly with President Trump, who has long agitated for changes at CNN, which is slated to be absorbed by Paramount.

The company has said it expects to complete the deal by the end of September.

The Democrats expressed concerns that the fix may be in. Trump’s Justice Department has been reviewing whether the merger would violate U.S. antitrust laws, but a key deadline passed last month without comment from the department’s antitrust regulators.

Also at issue is the Middle Eastern money the Ellison family has been expecting to pull off Paramount’s leveraged buyout of its larger entertainment company rival. The acquisition would leave the combined company with nearly $80 billion in debt.

Late last year, Paramount disclosed that it had lined up $24 billion from wealth funds representing the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, who would then become equity partners in the combined company.

Paramount has described the funds as largely passive investors, saying the royal families would not have input into corporate decision-making. They also would not control seats on the Paramount-Warner board.

Congressional Democrats previously have warned about potential national security concerns. The senators, led by Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), remain concerned, particularly because the transaction will help shape the future of Hollywood production and the direction of key news outlets, including CNN, which maintains a strong presence around the world.

Members of the party have called on Carr to conduct “a full and independent” analysis of the foreign ownership interests before signing off on the merger. The FCC could play an important role, they said, because the tie-up includes Paramount-owned CBS, which holds FCC broadcast station licenses.

Paramount declined to comment. FCC officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Booker and Schumer pointed to Carr’s comments at an industry conference in Spain earlier this month. During an appearance at the Mobile World Congress, Carr suggested the Paramount-Warner deal could be swiftly approved because the foreign investment would warrant only a “very quick, almost pro forma review,” Carr reportedly said.

The FCC has a duty to examine foreign ownership, the lawmakers said, referencing the U.S. Communications Act, which forbids owners from outside the U.S. from holding more than 25% of the equity or voting interests in an entity that maintains an FCC license.

The lawmakers mentioned the FCC’s move earlier this year to tighten its foreign ownership framework to bolster transparency.

Paramount has not yet disclosed its final list of equity partners.

The company previously disclosed its proposed partners in Securities & Exchange Commission filings. However, last month, the composition of the Paramount-Warner deal changed when Larry Ellison agreed to fully guarantee the $45.7-billion in equity needed to finance the $31-a-share buyout of Warner investors.

Before Ellison stepped up, Warner board members had expressed concerns about Paramount’s financing. The tech billionaire’s increased involvement helped carry the Paramount deal over the finish line. Netflix bowed out Feb. 26, ceding the prize to Paramount.

Still, Paramount is expected to line up billions of dollars from outside investors.

It would be significant if Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co., contributed $24 billion to the deal, the Democrats wrote.

“This is not incidental capital, it represents roughly one-fifth of the total transaction value,” Booker and the others wrote. “And it is not clear that this will be the only foreign investment.”

Initially, Paramount included Chinese technology company Tencent Holdings as a minority investor, but Paramount later removed Tencent from the investor pool due to concerns about its problematic status — it has been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Tencent might return to the fold.

“This constellation of foreign investment from China and from Gulf States, with complex and sometimes competing relationships with the United States, demands rigorous, not perfunctory review,” Booker and the others wrote.

The letter also was signed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii).

They keyed in on the role of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, saying it was controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “whom the U.S. intelligence community concluded ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.”

The proposed $24-billion investment would give “these governments a significant financial stake in the future content, licensing, and strategic decisions of a combined entity that includes some of the most-watched news and entertainment networks in America.”

It is also unclear whether the current tensions in the Middle East over the Iran war will have an impact on Paramount’s investor syndicate.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a proposed Paramount investor, also withdrew late last year.

Paramount shares held steady at $9.17. The company’s stock is down 31% since Feb. 27, when the company prevailed in the Warner auction.