country

Nov. 5, 2026 10 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration held secret talks with Iran on deporting Iranians even as the war there dragged on, court documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

The court documents unsealed Thursday show the Republican administration as recently as mid-October said it had plans to deport the Iranians through an unnamed third country, although it was unclear when it intended to do so. The judge in the case ordered the government to give the court 24-hour notice of any finalized plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country and five days’ written notice before any such deportation is carried out.

The documents show that the administration maintained contacts with Iranian officials during the war over the removals, specifically for submitting travel documents and figuring out “possible avenues for removal.”

“We are at war with a country where the President of the United States has said, as recently as two or three days ago, if not yesterday, that it is essentially lawless … A country that is an enemy of the United States, according to the current president. A country that, according to our president, murdered tens of thousands of protestors,” Judge Ana Reyes said according to the Oct. 15 transcript.

“And what you’re telling me is that the United States of America is going to send individuals back to that region, facing what you and I and everyone who would ever look at this would know would be, at a minimum, a serious threat of certain death.”

“Yes, your honor,” Justice Department attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel said. “The government is executing lawful orders of removal.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The development emerged from an ongoing lawsuit that alleges the Trump administration’s immigration agencies have been sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating national immigration regulations and endangering countless Iranians, court filings argue.

The new court documents show the coordination continued during the war.

The lawsuit depicts a coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran — a marked departure from decades of diplomatic hostility between the two governments and an ongoing war. DHS has denied that it is sharing asylum application records with the Iranian government.

Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials exposed how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be flown back to Iran on three immigration flights in September and December 2025 and January 2026.

Deportations of Iranians back to their home country are historically rare, owing to the lack of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran and the possible persecution they could face if they were sent to Iran.

But under the Trump administration, ICE has aggressively pushed to deport people even from countries that have typically been reluctant to take people back or with whom the U.S. has had icy or no diplomatic relations.

Sometimes that has meant sending people back to their home country but it has also meant deporting people to other countries that they have no connection with.

The Trump administration has deported people, including Iranians, to countries other than their own in an attempt to circumvent diplomatic hurdles with governments that won’t take their people back. During Trump’s second term, countries including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and across Africa have accepted noncitizens from the U.S.

In June, an Iranian woman was among the two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic.

Activists abroad have expressed concern about deportees returning to Iran, whose theocracy has been cracking down on intellectuals and where the government vociferously cracks down on any dissent.

Kunzelman and Santana write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Corruption topped the list of concerns for voters who ousted Republicans and handed Democrats control of Congress in the midterm elections. Now, the newly empowered Democratic Party is putting the issue front and center as its leaders chart their course for investigations and policymaking.

Senior Democrats in both chambers of Congress have vowed to marshal the subpoena powers and larger investigative staffs that come with their soon-to-be majorities to probe what they say is the self-enrichment that President Donald Trump and people in his orbit have done at the public’s expense. The Republican president and his White House have long denied any wrongdoing.

House Democrats are preparing a vast oversight agenda to look at how Trump and his family have become wealthier since he returned to office — and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who’s in line to become House speaker, has not ruled out trying to impeach Trump for a third time.

Months ago, Jeffries tasked the ranking Democrats on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, Rep. Robert Garcia of California and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, with leading the effort, as Democrats work to link the costs of public corruption to the affordability concerns hitting Americans’ pocketbooks.

“Lawyer up,” Garcia posted on X as election results favoring Democrats began coming in on Tuesday night.

The Senate is expected to conduct similar investigations.

“Americans want us to clean up corruption in government,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is poised to return as Senate majority leader next year. “No American should have to make tradeoffs at the supermarket while Trump is making inside trades on the stock market.”

Investigation targets could include ICE raids, Epstein and DOGE

Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has outlined five priorities, including Trump family business dealings, the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, said he wants to dig into Trump’s White House ballroom and other construction projects, as well as the Trump family’s role in mineral deals.

With the House majority comes an infusion of congressional committee staff and resources, and the effort is expected to be sprawling, involving House committees with authority to conduct oversight on Cabinet officials and the agencies they lead.

In the Senate, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who is expected to become the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said his panel will want to look into Trump’s real estate projects around the nation’s capital and his crypto dealings with special envoy Steve Witkoff. Witkoff is a longtime ally who partnered with Trump on the president’s family cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial.

“The tentacles of corruption reach deep in this administration, and they have added costs to everyday Americans,” Blumenthal said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday. The senator added that he also wants hearings on ICE raids, the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency and Medicare plans he says are too restrictive and have cost some patients care.

Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who is in line to become Senate Finance Committee chairman, ticked off several investigative targets that he describes as part of an “accountability” agenda, including banks that he contends ignored red flags about the financial dealings of Epstein and pharmaceutical companies that have profited from their ties to the Trump administration.

“When I am chair, they will be forced to answer to the Senate Finance Committee for their role in hurting the American people and enabling Trump’s corruption,” Wyden said in a statement Wednesday.

The issue of corruption resonated for voters, The AP Voter Poll shows

Many U.S. voters in Tuesday’s elections expressed deep concerns about government corruption and the state of democracy, according to The AP Voter Poll, which surveyed more than 100,000 voters nationwide.

While roughly 4 in 10 voters said the economy was the top issue facing the country, about 3 in 10 said that “the state of democracy” was the top issue. About half of U.S. voters said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote for Congress, and most of those voters supported the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race, while about one-third said they voted for the Republican.

About 8 in 10 voters who said “the state of democracy” was the top issue facing the country supported the Democrat, while about 2 in 10 supported the Republican.

Older voters, those age 65 or older, were more likely than voters under 65 to say “the state of democracy” was the most important issue facing the country. About 4 in 10 older voters pointed to this as the nation’s top problem, compared with about 3 in 10 who said the economy. That view was reversed with younger voters, who were more likely to call the economy the top issue.

That explains why anti-corruption played such a central role in Democratic campaigns this cycle, with candidates accusing their Republican opponents of looking out for themselves or their donors rather than a broader constituency. They embraced stock trading bans and bans on former members of Congress becoming lobbyists and promised to be part of an effort to root out corruption.

Democrats’ challenge: Focusing on corruption without ignoring cost-of-living issues

In his public comments since his party lost the elections, Trump has taken a conciliatory tone toward Democrats, conceding that they “did a good job” in their campaigns as he’s tried to skirt personal blame for the GOP’s midterm thrashing. That could change as investigations ramp up.

“As the president has said, he’s willing to work with anyone to continue delivering victories for hardworking Americans,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Wednesday. “If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”

Schumer insisted that congressional Democrats will be able to balance legislating on key issues, such as affordability, while launching investigations to target “rampant corruption.”

In a letter to Democratic lawmakers announcing his candidacy for House speaker, Jeffries said the “days of the House functioning like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump administration are over.”

“The massive corruption the country has experienced from the Trump Cartel explains why very little is getting done to help everyday Americans,” Jeffries wrote as he promised to target price gouging and push for a stock trading ban for lawmakers. “That changes immediately.”

The challenge for Democrats will be to continue to tie corruption to the affordability issues that topped the list of concerns for voters.

The Congressional Integrity Project, an advocacy group initially created to combat Republican investigations into President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, is now shifting its focus to help Democratic lawmakers make that connection. In a memo, the group urged congressional Democrats to trace the Trump administration’s actions to people in and outside government, as well as corporations, who may be profiting from those moves.

“Corruption is not just corruption,” said the group’s senior adviser, Jack Miller. “It is costing taxpayers and costing Americans in their everyday lives.”

Some Democratic lawmakers are already stressing that congressional investigations have to be directly tied to affordability issues, while urging restraint.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said that Democrats need to earn voters’ trust, and while investigations are an important part of the Democratic agenda, “we can’t turn this into just a vengeance tour.”

“We have to be careful, cautious and judicious about that,” Welch said.

Kim and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro and polling writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), a prolific lawmaker who has reshaped California policy on a host of fronts — from housing to transgender rights — will succeed House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s representative in Congress after San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan called Wiener on Wednesday to concede, her campaign confirmed.

Wiener, 56, who is gay and reviled by some on the far right for his progressive policies and staunch LGBTQ+ advocacy work, overcame Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan in the much-watched race between Democrats, and will be the first out LGBTQ+ person to represent the bright-blue city in the House.

“In Washington I’ll bring the same determination I showed in Sacramento every single day,” Wiener said in a statement. “It’s time to deliver a better tomorrow for our city and our country.”

Wiener’s win hands Pelosi — known for her deft political instinct and sweeping influence over the Democratic Party and donor base — a rare defeat in her home city just as her nearly 40-year career in the House concludes.

The Associated Press had yet to call the race in Wiener’s favor as of late Wednesday.

But Chan, a progressive backed by labor, announced she was conceding the race in a statement, writing, “After reviewing the results and the ballots remaining to be counted, while we expect the margin to narrow significantly, we do not have a clear path to victory. I congratulate Scott Wiener on his election and wish him success in serving San Francisco.”

Chan said she was “deeply grateful” to Pelosi “for her trust and for four decades of extraordinary service that have strengthened San Francisco and our country.”

Pelosi in her own statement said Chan “brought courage, conviction and a deep love for San Francisco” to the campaign.

“As a working mom, a public servant, and an immigrant, she gave voice to families whose struggles she knows firsthand,” Pelosi said. “I was proud to support her, and I am so proud of the campaign she ran.”

Pelosi also congratulated Wiener. “Representing San Francisco is an extraordinary honor and a profound responsibility. My office stands ready to assist in the transition, and I wish him success in service for the people of our city,” she said.

Wiener thanked Chan for a “spirited and hard-fought campaign,” his campaign team, volunteers, supporters and donors for their hard work, and Pelosi — whom he hailed as “the greatest Speaker in modern American history” — saying he is “humbled to carry forward the powerful legacy of this seat.”

He also thanked San Franciscans for placing their trust in him — and making history by sending their first queer representative to Congress, something he said he never could have imagined when he first arrived in the city’s Castro neighborhood as a young man and “fell head over heels for this city.”

“San Franciscans voted for results, and we have so much work ahead: Building the millions of homes we need; moving toward true universal health care; investing in clean energy, public transit, and high-speed rail; standing up for science, education, and immigrants; making sure people — not massive corporations — decide what works for this country, including on AI; and ensuring the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President,” he said.

He said it “won’t be easy” but that voters nationwide had “delivered a powerful mandate for Democrats in Congress” to get it done.

The race, which ratcheted up when Pelosi bypassed Wiener to endorse Chan in May, just before the June primary, had divided the Democratic Party.

Chan — who immigrated to the city from Hong Kong at age 13 and has deep ties to its large Chinese and immigrant communities — was a community and legislative aide for years, including for then-Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2020. She has served as budget chair since 2023.

In addition to Pelosi’s imprimatur, Chan had received endorsements from major labor groups including the California Federation of Labor Unions and the California Teachers Assn.; a host of Congress members, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.); various progressive organizations; fellow and former supervisors; former mayor and S.F. power broker Willie Brown; and Saikat Chakrabarti, the third-place finisher in the primary.

Wiener, a former deputy city attorney and local Democratic Party chair before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2010 and to the state Senate in 2016, was endorsed by the state and local Democratic parties; state leaders including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, state Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister); various queer organizations; labor groups including AFSCME; more than half the city’s supervisors; and various members of Congress.

Many of Wiener’s supporters cited his legislative effectiveness — he’s the author of more than 100 laws, including some of the state’s most progressive laws on LGBTQ+ rights — and his willingness to fight hard battles, which they said is needed with President Trump in the White House.

Wiener has pushed progressive laws backing safe injection sites, extending bar hours until 4 a.m., decriminalizing psychedelic drugs, and limits on federal immigration agents in California. He has pushed for housing deregulation and development near transit hubs statewide to solve the housing and affordability crises, and pushed for artificial intelligence regulation while seeking buy-in from wealthy tech leaders — some of whom backed his campaign.

He also has passed laws protecting net neutrality, capping prescription drug costs and mandating mental health parity, ending mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, and requiring that corporations disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Wiener ran on his experience as a lawmaker who would be able “to fight in a smart way, and to fight in an aggressive way, to defeat Donald Trump and to lower the cost of living.”

“This is a race to succeed the most effective and operational member of Congress in modern American history,” Wiener told The Times in September. “San Francisco should send someone who actually has a track record, a proven track record, of being able to deliver.”

In backing Chan, Pelosi made a point of noting that she had spent much of her political career backing fellow women in office, and said she believed Chan — an immigrant woman — would make a mark in Congress, particularly given the political atmosphere under the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Pelosi cheered the election of other women across the country — even if not her own chosen successor.

“When I came to Congress in 1987, there were only twelve Democratic women. We made it our mission to change that. Today, we celebrate the election of more than 100 Democratic women to the House — a tremendous joy and source of pride,” Pelosi wrote on X. “When women succeed, America succeeds!”

Whether in Missouri or Bruges, an isle off the coast of Ireland or a speck in the Pacific Ocean, a Martin McDonagh movie whisks audiences someplace remote for a detached view of the mess we’ve made of civilization. Human society continually tries to organize itself around religion, politics, empathy and law. His whip-smart and violent comedies are insights into why it keeps failing.

“Wild Horse Nine,” an exemplar of the format, is about two CIA agents, Chris and Lee (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell), enjoying a getaway on Easter Island. It’s 1973 and the men are stationed in Santiago, Chile, where the U.S. has spent millions of dollars on a propaganda campaign to prevent the socialist Salvador Allende from winning the presidency. When Chileans vote for him anyway, Richard Nixon gives secret orders to “kick them in the ass,” empowering Henry Kissinger to tank the country’s economy, raise inflation, fund paid protesters and stoke extremist polarization.

“We came here to destabilize your country, and it’s going great,” Chris brags to a pair of flabbergasted young Chilean women, Monica and Alicia (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), fellow tourists who gape at this Yankee old-timer in dismay. In a few months, a military coup will install Gen. Augusto Pinochet as dictator and begin to disappear liberal dissenters. The folk singer Victor Jara (Aron Hernández), the Woody Guthrie of Chile, is also in Easter Island to play a show and he, too, will soon be machine-gunned by the Army. McDonagh doesn’t show us this (and the soundtrack leans more on Jara’s mentor, Violeta Parra). But he’s definitely hoping you leave the theater and look him up.

Chris likely doesn’t have that long to live himself. The aging spy is suffering from several diseases including dementia, impaired judgment and a mildly guilty conscience — a fatal combination for a blabbermouth who claims to know the whereabouts of the rifle that may have shot John F. Kennedy. Some of what Chris says is a lie; some is addled and confused. His scariest statements are unapologetic facts about the CIA’s involvement in removing other progressive leaders in the Congo and Guatemala. Chris describes overthrowing governments as casually as if he was recalling yesterday’s lunch.

Only classic screwball comedians have delivered dialogue as blithely as Malkovich does here, with zingers that float off unburdened by the heaviness of the real world. He’s marvelous in this. His rogue is as destructive as his villains in “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Con Air,” but carries himself with the lightness of his self-mocking performance in “Being John Malkovich.” While Malkovich gets the best lines, Rockwell gets the best reaction shots, staring aghast at his pesky colleague. Yet, McDonagh himself doesn’t have quite as light of a touch as usual. One of Chris’ digressions about how he’s becoming kinder to insects is terrific, until the script goes one sentence too far and forces the character to blurt out the subtext: He’s nicer to Chile’s moths than to its people.

Ostensibly, the duo are on vacation. Narratively, one has evaded punishment for an outrageous crime and the other has been ordered by their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi), to assassinate his friend before the truth escapes. The plot is so similar to McDonagh’s 2008 feature film debut, the masterpiece “In Bruges,” which starred Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell as exiled hit men, that the filmmaker should sue himself for plagiarism. I’ll forgive it only because “In Bruges” is one of the best movies of the 21st century. (And anyway, both films already owe a debt to John Steinbeck’s sympathetic galumphs George and Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.”)

In transplanting the setting from “Bruges’” moody, gloomy medieval hamlet to a sunshiny island populated by free-roaming ponies, McDonagh teases the idea that this is a western with a twist: a moral showdown told from the perspective of the hired guns who claim they’re too ignorant to take blame. (He even finagles an excuse to cut to Monument Valley.) Together, Chris and Lee have killed over six dozen people, but never for personal reasons — they’re employees. “Maybe I should have learned more about the places I went into,” Chris muses. Staying dumb allows him to pretend that he’s not John Wayne massacring the Comanches. He’s just the horse underneath John Wayne who doesn’t have any control over where he’s told to go.

McDonagh gets a kick out of making us enjoy palling around with sinners as they chitchat about the correlation between democracies and good cheese. Like him, they refuse to retire their favorite retrograde insults which, at this point, feels like McDonagh’s own in-joke for himself. I suspect it amuses him that audiences get more upset when one of his characters says a slur than when that same character shoots someone in the face.

No filmmaker working today is as merciless with a quip. Debating the power of mass protest with Monica and Alicia, Chris says, “Marches are just the place where we can get the cleanest photos of you without you knowing,” a punchline that lands with a wallop in today’s era of constant surveillance. We cringe at Chris’ aberrant chattiness and recoil from his stony confidence that men like him and Lee will continue to control the world, an assurance as implacable as Easter Island’s monolithic statues. Occasionally, cinematographer Ben Davis even lines up those centuries-old face carvings behind Malkovich to note their resemblance to his imposing profile.

Doom engulfs the movie much like the water circling the stunning coastline. The script’s air of inevitability prevents it from mustering up much suspense. Even when the danger ripples all the way to Lee’s wife (Parker Posey) back in the States, the tension drains away. You expect McDonagh to play around more with Chris’ memory loss and morphine addiction than he does; meanwhile, another junkie beat is so convenient that I can’t believe the film even tried to get away with it, and nearly succeeds.

“Wild Horse Nine’s” darkest prank is convincing us that a charming scoundrel like Chris should have a say in how and when he dies — a privilege he didn’t grant his own victims. What’s the use of punishing a terminally ill man? But that, McDonagh suggests, is how life actually works. Normal westerns mete out justice. This tropical one refuses.

The Dodgers lost four straight playoff games to the Milwaukee Brewers in a humiliating end to their season.

But this was worse.

Steve Hilton lost to Xavier Becerra in the race for governor before “Jeopardy” aired.

But this was worse.

President Trump lost early, late and often Tuesday night in the midterm elections.

In contests across the country — for governor, for Senate, for the House — he had told people to vote as if he was on the ballot.

They did, and Democrats ran the table, taking the House and then the Senate.

Trump lost big, inspected the wreckage, and claimed the problem was lousy candidates.

Has he lost a step? I would have expected him to say the election was stolen. All of the elections.

But maybe he realized that for all intents and purposes, his political career is over. Trump was trounced, the country triumphed, and the long national nightmare is over, but for the rest of his lame duck presidency.

I don’t think we were witnessing a national love affair with Democrats, nor do I think Tuesday night’s winning political party has all the answers on any of the day’s pressing matters. The Dems have their own problems, including an identity crisis and a shortage of bankable presidential prospects.

But the country’s voters signaled loud and clear that they’re tired of:

The lies.

The insults and name-calling.

The hatred.

The chaos.

The self-dealing.

The lack of civility.

The absence of humility.

Last week I turned on the news and saw Trump making fun of the name of newly elected Michigan Sen. Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim.

An awful thing to see a president do, but here’s what’s worse:

I wasn’t surprised.

Then I saw him say at a political rally that he had looked at a man’s rear end, “and I’ve never done that before…Off the record, women, yes, men no, OK?”

Again, no surprise.

He once mocked the physical appearance of a female presidential primary foe, as well as the wife of a male foe, and insisted for years that the first Black president was secretly from Africa.

Trump had always been able to get away with this sort of numbskullery. His true believers were willing to put up with it as long as he seemed true to his promise of working on their behalf. Until they could no longer deny that he was only working on his own behalf.

The cryptocurrency profiteering. The bloody ballroom. The gold-plating of the White House.

All of it while working people, including staunch supporters, struggled to understand the goofball tariffs and wondered when the promise of lower grocery prices would be delivered.

Trump and the Republicans might have prevailed Tuesday night if not for the war in Iran, which everyone is still paying for at the gas pump. The president who promised we’d stay out of international conflicts went all in, for no good reason, then said it was over, we won, except that it’s not over, and we didn’t win.

And there’s no exit plan.

But so what?

It’s not like Trump is paying for gas. His golf cart is probably electric.

In the beginning, as a Republican populist who tapped into justifiable voter disapproval of Democratic leadership, Trump was onto something when he first ran for president. The scapegoating of immigrants was odious even then, but in 2016, at a Trump campaign rally in Arizona, I caught a glimpse of his appeal to adoring fans who cheered the presidential candidate’s vow to build a border wall, strengthen the military and make America great again. A struggling low-wage worker told me Trump was the best hope for a new day.

“We’re going to come back and rebuild our country,” Trump told the approving crowd that day in Arizona. “You will never be disappointed with me. … You are going to be so proud of your president.”

The act worked for way longer than I would have predicted. But 10 years later, and halfway through a second presidency, the gig is up. Voters said yes, they are disappointed, and no, they’re not so proud.

We thought we were having a mid-term election.

It turned out to be a political wake.

But also an awakening.

Red states voted for blue candidates in a nearly total Trump rebuke.

As I watched the returns Tuesday night, I thought about my daughter–an earth science grad student–and her generation. She’s 23, which means that for almost half her life, Trump has been a political force. Imagine being that young and living in a country that twice elected one of the most divisive and scabrous figures in history.

A man who attacked judges, invaded American cities, insisted ad nauseum that a lost election was stolen, pardoned the Jan. 6 barbarians, exonerated political donors and allies, called climate change a con job, gutted environmental protections and upended America’s global in scientific research.

It’s easy to understand why younger generations have lost faith in elections, both primary parties and the political/corporate establishment.

But on Tuesday, voters of all ages turned out and said enough already, in states red and blue.

The man who so bitterly divided us might ultimately have united us, at least for an evening.

That doesn’t mean that there is consensus on much of anything. Surely calamity awaits, just beyond the shadows, and new species of political trolls are being spawned as we live and breathe. But there was hope, on election night, in the collective declaration that we deserve and demand better.

Trump once said he was so popular and powerful, he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York, shoot somebody, and not lose any voters.

It might have been true once.

But he’s lost them now.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday called for a significant expansion of the state’s film and TV tax incentives in the face of mounting evidence that producers are fleeing California in search of cheaper locales.

Newsom said in a statement Monday that he favors expanding California’s current Film and Television Tax Credit Program from $750 million to at least $1 billion annually.

Notably, Newsom’s proposal would include credits for actors and other above-the-line talent and extend the tax credit through 2040, according to the statement. That would make California’s program more competitive with those of other states such as Georgia and New York that allow tax credits to offset the cost of actors’ salaries.

If approved by the state Legislature, the credit would be the country’s largest capped film and TV tax credit, Newsom’s office said.

“We’re the capital of entertainment and we’re going to keep it here,” Newsom said in the statement. “Through this expansion, we will maintain the momentum and success of our historic expansion last year.”

Newsom’s announcement comes as the outgoing California governor and possible presidential candidate is looking to burnish his image as a champion of Hollywood as the state is increasingly losing production to other hubs in the U.S. and abroad, where tax incentives are higher and production costs lower.

The proposal puts pressure on fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra, who is widely expected to be California’s next governor, to take up the mantle of helping Hollywood at a time when the state faces rising financial pressures.

Newsom expanded the program last year, when the annual credit was raised from $330 million to $750 million through 2030. Since then, the credit has generated more than $8 billion in direct production spending and over 43,000 jobs, according to the governor’s office.

Newsom also recently signed California’s first stand-alone postproduction credit to bring back jobs for the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists.

With a budget of $10 million, the program will allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses related specifically to postproduction work done in California, even for productions that don’t shoot in the state.

Despite the expanded incentives, local film and TV production in the Los Angeles area continues on a downward trend.

On-location shoot days in the Los Angeles area fell nearly 5% between July and September from the same period a year earlier, and were 29% below the five-year average, according to FilmLA, the nonprofit group that handles film permits for city and county.

Newsom said the expanded credits would address some of California’s limitations.

For example, the new incentives would allow companies that commit to shooting two different productions in California to get a 5% boost in credits. Independent productions would be eligible for $100 million in annual funding, up from $26 million.

Steve Kang, president and chief film liaison for the city’s Board of Public Works, welcomed the proposed enhancements.

“This is a huge win because the current expanded program is helpful, but there were a lot of exceptions and caveats, which limited its full potential,” Kang said.

Others welcomed Newsom’s proposal as “a good start,” but said more was needed to keep the industry in Southern California.

Many productions that shoot locally still face logistical and operational problems with permitting and specific shoot requirements, said Cale Thomas, policy legislative director for Stay in L.A., a grassroots coalition.

“We just need to make it cheaper and easier to shoot here,” Thomas said. “A multifaceted problem takes multifaceted solutions.”

Scott Budnick, a producer of the successful “The Hangover” franchise who lobbied for the state’s enhanced film tax credits last year, also praised Newsom’s proposal, but said the state needs to remove a cap on funding that has created significant hurdles for filmmakers.

“I feel very strongly that the biggest problem with the current credit is because we have a cap,” Budnick said. “It makes every piece of the credit 10 times harder.”

The effort in California comes after congressional leaders introduced the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act in September. The bill would establish a 20% federal tax credit on U.S. labor for eligible film and TV productions, including postproduction and visual effects work.

If the federal incentive passes, the hope is for U.S. productions to stack incentives and make the U.S. more attractive for major studio shoots. The federal incentive, however, also is likely to raise the competitive stakes for California as other states compete for Hollywood’s business.

“This is about protecting the future of an industry that has helped define California for generations,” Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) said in response to Newsom’s proposal. It would ensure “the next generation of creative workers and small business owners can raise their families right here at home,” he said.

Newsom has faced tense relations with Hollywood. Many in the industry remain angry with Newsom over his role in the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Newsom was instrumental in behind-the-scenes lobbying to get state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to abandon the court fight challenging Paramount-Skydance’s takeover of the legacy studio, which is expected to lead to widespread layoffs.

Newsom’s support for the deal came after Paramount threatened to move operations to Tennessee or Texas, placing more pressure on Bonta to come to an agreement and blunt efforts to lose California’s signature industry.

The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm elections are so high that Shane Dunn voted for the first time in his life, at age 65.

After a career as a cook up and down the East Coast, Dunn moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and voted last week in Levittown. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside his polling place. But now, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.”

Democrats got his vote. “It feels great, to put my word in,” he said, patting the “I Voted” sticker on his black hoodie.

Voters across the United States are getting their word in, too, as they determine which party controls the Senate and the House and takes charge of governors’ offices, legislatures and state leadership posts in the final two years of Republican Trump’s presidency.

What many of them see is that the America they’ve known is slipping away.

They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with people who cast ballots at advance polling places or drop boxes across the country, the angst was palpable, most sharply from those who oppose Trump but also from many who support him.

A vote is cast to stop the ‘madness’

“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a food importing and marketing company that has been hurt by tariffs, after dropping his mail ballot at Dauphin County’s election bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He voted for Democrats.

In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, voted in Woodbury County’s historic Prairie-style courthouse and walked out stewing about a variety of things — the chemicals in processed food, her son’s struggles to get his veterans’ benefits and, perhaps most of all, what she sees as society’s leftward lurch. Things seem broken to her, too.

“Family values are going by the wayside, and they need to be brought back,” she said. “Our liberties have been stomped all over. Religion has been stomped all over. And I believe we in the majority need to step up and stop being silent.” She voted Republican.

Voters despair at the stoking of anger by Trump and allies

The anger in the air, stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights, is too much for some people.

“He’s just destroying us,” Democrat Linda Markle, 72, said of the president. She spoke outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

“I am so afraid for this country,” she said. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”

“All people do now is just hate each other,” she said, and Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that. … The division is horrible, absolutely horrible, and I can’t wait to see the back of him.”

Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, sympathizes with Markle’s sentiment, to a point.

“A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” he said, noting that ”I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.” But he likes Trump’s effort to return manufacturing to the U.S. along with the goals of his tariffs, and he voted Republican because he still thinks that party is more fiscally responsible than Democrats.

In Ohio, Lori Wilkinson, a retired home health worker from New Pittsburg, and her husband, David, a janitor, consider themselves independents. David recently wrote to their Republican governor, Mike DeWine, to tell him what a good job he’s doing, and they voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in the past.

Trump? “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said from the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’” Said Lori: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She fears that if Democrats win widely Tuesday, Trump will “go fricking berserk.”

Trump supporter Therese Mennell gets it. “There’s that kind of arrogant vibe about him that people don’t like, and sometimes I shut him off because of the way he talks,” the retiree said from the Wayne County center. “But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”

Some pretend Trump is on the ballot

Despite his striking unpopularity in polls, Trump repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he’s on the midterm ballot, betting that would motivate fans to vote who otherwise might not. But that cuts both ways.

Samontae Mwangi, 20, and his brother, Gathenya Mwangi, 19, voted for the first time, casting early ballots Tuesday at their election center in Topeka, Kansas. Both work at a plant that manufactures trackside buildings for railroads.

They went with their grandfather, Lynn Henderson, 68, a retired Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. worker and a former Marine lance corporal who wore a Marine’s cap. Henderson said he took his grandsons to vote because his own mother died recently and he wanted them to have an event to remember him when he’s gone.

All three are hoping that the election produces Democratic victories and political change. Gathenya said the economy and discontent with Trump could motivate people who’ve voted in the past to show up, as well as those who never have. “It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” he said.

Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager, pulled up to the center in a van featuring a decorative license plate with an American eagle. The strong Trump supporter is the daughter of Democrats. Illegal immigration is her top issue.

“I think Trump is kind of our last hope, because otherwise this world’s going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. “Yeah, he says stupid stuff, but, you know, so do we.”

In the Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Henrico County, voters arrived at a steady clip on a crisp fall afternoon a week from Election Day. The moment of decision found one conservative couple, Joan and Frank Bark, lamenting the country’s direction.

“I’m afraid Trump has gotten so egotistical, it’s affecting his ability to make intelligent or more favorable decisions,” Frank said. But, he said, “I don’t want the decisions that would be generated from that far left side, either.”

Joan, a retiree like her husband, said of Democrats: “I haven’t found very much that they want to change or work with. It’s just mostly, ‘I hate Trump.’” But Trump really isn’t on the ballot. They voted for Republican candidates.

In Nanuet, New York, people streamed into the small room of a community center to vote; some were in Halloween costumes. Primrose D. Sullivan, a nurse, is an independent. She scoffed at Trump’s wish that voters act as if he’s running.

“No, because he’s not,” she said. “When a patient comes into the hospital, you want me dealing in facts, not in, ‘Hmm, let me act like you might have cancer.’ No. Do you or do you not have cancer? We need to proceed based on facts.” She voted for Democrats.

Yet some see a cancer on politics, if not the presidency

Sullivan was among a number of voters who singled out the billionaires Trump has made common cause with and how that might feed into American decline.

“I don’t begrudge any of our wealthy people, Jeff Bezos or, you know, Elon Musk,” she said. “But I do have a certain problem with them wanting more and more and doing things that really don’t help humanity.”

“If we keep going the way these guys are going,” she went on, meaning both the political and CEO classes, “we’re not going to have anything like what we had in the past.” Theirs is a “self-destructive attitude,” she added, “because, honestly, if the whole planet destroys itself, the wealthy go with us.”

Outside the polling station at the YMCA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, Benjamin Updegraft offered a piercing denunciation of the elite as he traced his evolution from a “full-throated young Republican” who voted for Trump as a young man in 2016 to a “lifetime Democrat,” after casting his ballot in the Senate race.

He cited Musk’s throttling of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, which disrupted a key defense against Russian attacks, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad in the Ohio governor’s race featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton among the reasons powerful men must be brought to heel.

“That needs to be cut out from this country like a cancer,” Updegraft said. “We have an incredible responsibility to take back the stranglehold that the worst people in this country have on the reins of power and to inflict punishment on them for their actions.”

In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee described his conservative upbringing, his past voting for Republicans and now his decision to turn against that party and vote Democratic in the contested races for governors and the House. He considers Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement to be lawless.

“Nobody wants open borders, but you’re treating these people without due process, sending people to countries they don’t even belong to,” said Lee, 63. “There’s no more rules.”

Then there are those prices. And that war

The Trump supporters interviewed by the AP at the polls signaled their tolerance of the surge of gas prices from the Iran war, in some cases blaming factors other than the actual cause. Nor did they break with him on the war itself.

Among them was David Stouffer, 59, branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, who spoke outside the Harrisburg elections office. “Iran has been killing Americans for 50 freaking years,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll suffer with some higher gas prices in the interim until they get that nonsense figured out.”

Does that put a crunch on your household budget, Stouffer was asked. “Of course it does.” How to cope with that? “I just keep driving.”

“He’s made the tax cuts real,” Stouffer said. “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”

By the dozens, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some of them granted the president his achievements on taxes and immigration.

Horner, the food importer, is going “bonkers” with the tariffs and all the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts while a “feckless” and now electorally endangered Republican Congress largely stands aside.

“You can’t do business when every month you have to readjust your pricing because the president gets a wild hair on something that he’s not even constitutionally allowed to do,” Horner said. He added, “He’s just playing out the clock on all of this stuff — where you just know he knows it’s wrong.

“And what do we have? Higher healthcare, higher food, higher gas, a business environment that is complete chaos.”

But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a suburb of Harrisburg, wants as much of Trump as he can get. Alas, “he can’t run again,” Casner noted.

“Well, technically,” Casner said, “he can’t run again.”

Levy, Catalini, Hanna and Woodward write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.; Levy from Harrisburg, Pa.; Catalini from Levittown, Pa.; and Woodward from Washington. AP journalists Julie Carr Smyth in Wooster, Ohio; Erik Verduzco in Fort Mill, S.C.; Thomas Beaumont in Sioux City, Iowa; Joseph Frederick in Nanuet, N.Y.; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Warminster, Pa.; Mikella Schuettler in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Sarah Rankin in Henrico, Va., contributed to this report.

MARANA, Ariz. — Michael Falk was heading into the Pima County branch library to drop off his ballot when he stopped to discuss Tuesday’s midterm election.

Pima County, in south-central Arizona, is home to one of the most competitive congressional races in the country. Falk, a 66-year-old retiree and political independent, was casting his vote for the Democrat, JoAnna Mendoza, even though he hardly knows a thing about her.

But Falk knows — and loathes — a good deal about President Trump.

“From the very beginning, when he stepped on the political stage, he made it quite clear to the people who were silenced for a long time, the bigots of the United States, he gave them a voice, and he told those people, ‘It’s OK for you to think the way that you do.’

“And then that just took off like wildfire,” Falk said, sweeping his arm like a moving wall of flame, “and that’s why we have all these laws that are against brown people and illegal people.”

Gregory Corron confessed he’s not too familiar with Mendoza’s opponent, the Republican incumbent Juan Ciscomani.

But Corron, a 67-year-old computer programmer, voted for Trump three times and believes the president is moving the country in the right direction.

Gregory Corron likes the way things have gone under Trump and wants him to continue unimpeded by a Democrat-run Congress.

(Cassidy Araiza / For The Times)

“I think, for instance, exposing fraud is a big thing. Technology is taking off. I’m totally excited about that,” said Corron, who was killing time at a strip mall in Oro Valley while the tires on his Lexus were being replaced. “I think the economy is strong. The stock market is doing well. Employment is doing well.”

For that reason, Corron cast his ballot for Ciscomani, fearful of what might happen if Democrats take control of Congress. “The reforms that Trump started,” Corron said, “need to continue.”

Mendoza and Ciscomani have assaulted the voters of southern Arizona for months, overwhelming their senses and curdling the airwaves with a ceaseless barrage of acrid advertising. Together, the two rivals and their allies have spent tens of millions of dollars on the contest, which both parties have made a top priority.

And yet, to a large degree, Mendoza and Ciscomani are mere stand-ins, their candidacies serving as little more than proxies for the president and his opposition.

Laura Lentner, another Oro Valley resident, allowed as how Ciscomani has done some good things. He is not, the Democrat said, a bad man.

“But his continued support of Trump negates it all for me,” said the 73-year-old retired dental hygienist. It’s about time, Lentner suggested, Republican lawmakers stand up and “stop being afraid of [Trump] and his constituents.”

Arizona’s 6th Congressional District is anchored in eastern Tucson and its suburbs, sprawling north toward Phoenix, east to New Mexico and south all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. The arid landscape is creased with rugged mountain ranges, cleaved by scenic canyons and filled with vast stretches of open space interrupted by midsize cities and small towns that spring like oases from the desert floor.

In recent years, the terrain has been some of the hardest-fought political turf in the nation.

Joe Biden carried the district in 2020 by less than a percentage point. Four years later, Trump flipped it by the same tiny margin.

Ciscomani, bidding for a third term, has won two nail-biters. He’s facing a fresh opponent in Mendoza, a Marine veteran and former congressional staffer.

The district has a significant Latino population — Ciscomani and Mendoza are Mexican American — and a sizable number of seniors, veterans and military personnel. Mendoza has leaned into her Navy and Marine Corps service. “Battle Tested. Ready To Lead,” her billboards declare, including one near the Ft. Huachuca Army base. (His signs tout “Veterans For Ciscomani.”)

Mendoza has attacked the incumbent as a “spineless” tool of Trump, putting the president front and center in her avalanche of advertising. Ciscomani’s incessant ads tout his bipartisanship — he hails from the establishment wing of the Republican Party — and portray Mendoza as a tool of the unhinged left.

In that way their campaigns distill the push-pull of this midterm election, which, like every one before, amounts to a referendum on the occupant of the Oval Office.

For Trump supporters, that means explaining away vexations like inflation and the war with Iran, twin anchors dragging down the president and fellow Republicans.

Higher costs, Trump voters said, are a hangover from Biden’s time in office, a needed sacrifice or an inconvenience that will pass. Echoing the president, they said the record-breaking cost of gas was a trade-off — and a good one — to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

“I wish gas prices were lower,” said Susan Summers, a Republican who stopped to chat while grocery shopping in Vail. The old railroad town has become a destination for retirees like Summers, 74, a former administrator at Cal State San Bernardino, and for commuters who don’t mind the roughly 25-mile drive to Tucson.

But, Summers went on, she’s willing to accept higher gas prices “because I think it was important to stop a fanatical regime from acquiring nuclear weapons that would actually threaten us in the longer range. Once there is some kind of resolution … prices will come down somewhat and it will make life easier for a lot of people.”

Merilyn Prentice, 78, is another refugee from the state next door. She moved to Benson (population 5,500) from Southern California after a career in nursing. She praised Trump for demonstrating a resolve that other presidents lacked.

“They’re terrorist supporters, and we have terrorist cells in this country,” Prentice said of Iran. “No one wants to talk about that. None of the other presidents wanted to touch it.”

An early voting center and ballot drop-off location at the public library in Marana, Ariz.

(Cassidy Araiza / For The Times)

If backers of the president often seemed defensive — justifying, rationalizing, urging patience — Trump critics were seething.

In Sierra Vista, Ann Nichols, 72 and a Democratic-leaning independent, could scarcely get the words out fast enough as she cataloged her outrage.

“Let’s not forget how the tariffs have wrecked the economy,” she said, “how the war that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu tricked Trump into declaring on Iran has wrecked the economy, driven up gas prices, and the rampant corruption in the government, and how the Environmental Protection Agency might as well be known as the Environmental Pollution Agency, and the attempt to wreck the Education Department, and we’ve got a twit who knows nothing about medicine in charge of medicine.”

Nichols paused to adjust her N95 mask. She spent decades as a medical librarian at the Ft. Huachuca Army base.

Her vote for Mendoza, Nichols said, was a vote to leash Trump and start undoing some of the damage he’s inflicted over the last two years.

For all that passion, however, it would be wrong to assume a blue wave — should one come Tuesday — means there’s great regard or overflowing affection for Democrats.

Clayton Surratt, 63, a retired actor and screenwriter, was passing out boxes of groceries — veggies, protein, a loaf of bread — at the food bank in Vail when he paused to share his unhappiness with both Trump and the Democratic Party.

“I think our current government thrives and lives on cruelty,” he said as a steady stream of cars pulled up for delivery. “It upsets me to see our world, our leaders, acting in ways that we would punish an 8-year-old at school if they behave that way.”

At the same time, Surratt said, he’s not sure what Democrats stand for, beyond opposition to Trump.

Adam Thompson, a Democratic-leaning independent, was blunter still. “I don’t like either party,” he said. The 39-year-old lives in Tanque Verde and travels throughout south-central Arizona, delivering soda and snack foods to major retailers. He’s particularly upset these days with Trump.

Why, Thompson asked, are so much time and resources being devoted to matters overseas?

“We need to take care of the people here,” Thompson said. “The war in Iran, the war in the Middle East is not helping me put food on my table. I work my ass off. But at the end of the day, I have to pay that price because … we’re so busy fighting wars for other people.”

The big question is how many discouraged Trump voters sit the election out. Their level of apathy and absenteeism will spell the difference between a good and a great night for Democrats.

Alex Lagerberg, a 35-year-old tattoo artist and libertarian, is a three-time Trump voter. He was initially attracted by his seeming authenticity and background as a New York real estate developer. “He was a good option because he was not a politician,” Lagerberg said outside a mercado in Casa Grande. But, he continued, it turns out that Trump’s supposed entrepreneurial prowess wasn’t all Lagerberg thought it was, or that Trump purported it to be.

“Treating the country like a business was a good thing for a little bit, but it really hasn’t helped,” Lagerberg said. “We haven’t seen much change.”

He’s not particularly motivated to vote, Lagerberg said, or decide between Ciscomani and Mendoza, especially with the two heaving so much mud at each other.

Alex Lagerberg is disappointed in Trump and not very motivated to vote on Tuesday.

(Cassidy Araiza / For The Times)

Rick, who declined to give his last name because he doesn’t want to be hassled for his opinion, has made up his mind. He’s done voting — forever.

The 67-year-old retired government worker, a right-leaning libertarian, soured on politics and politicians long ago. “Democrat, Republican,” he said, “it’s all the same thing.”

He voted for Trump in 2024, giving the political system one last shot. And now? Trump promised “no new wars. What do we have?” Rick asked. “New wars. Taxes are still too high. And Medicare? Medicare sucks.” So no, he said, he’s not bothering with the election.

As he left Vail’s thrift shop, steamed about Trump, Mendoza, Ciscomani and the whole lot, Rick clutched his purchase, a compilation of Ray Price’s greatest hits. One song by the country singer seemed to sum up Rick’s attitude: “You Done Me Wrong.”

He’s not alone.

DUBLIN — Limerick, first settled by Vikings nearly 1,100 years ago, is a verdant sprawl of lush forests, rolling hills and liminal bogs.

But this region in midwest Ireland, steeped in folklore, where the River Shannon meets the estuary’s tidal waters before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean, is also the unlikely site of bustling production activity.

In a technology park, not far from 13th century castles, medieval ruins and picturesque villages, stands Troy Studios. Opened nine years ago in a former Dell Computer factory that shut down when it shifted manufacturing to Poland, Troy is Ireland’s biggest and newest soundstage complex.

It is here that Apple TV’s science fiction series “Foundation,” based on the Isaac Asimov masterpiece, was filmed, as was the SyFy horror series “Nightflyers,” adapted from the works of George R. R. Martin. It’s also where four prime-time American game shows are produced.

“It’s cheaper to bring 100 American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox,” actor Rob Lowe cracked on his podcast last year. Lowe is also the host of the trivia face-off show “The Floor,“ which relocated to Troy for its sixth and upcoming seventh seasons, after previously shooting at a studio south of Dublin.

Film activity in Los Angeles has plummeted to historic lows, with devastating consequences for crews and vendors. This series examines how L.A. lost its dominant perch as a film and TV destination and what can be done to bring Hollywood back home.

While some in Ireland’s fiercely proud film industry bristled at Lowe’s comments, they were, in fact, a razor-sharp distillation of the pent-up frustration runaway production has engendered across the industry in Los Angeles.

Last year, 45% of all U.S. films and scripted television shows were shot internationally, up from about 33% in 2022.

As Hollywood productions have turned away from L.A., spanning the globe chasing tax credits and rebates, Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.

Ireland’s mix of dramatic landscapes, diverse architecture and modern and historic scenery has long been a draw for international filmmakers. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” turned the UNESCO World Heritage site Skellig Michael, a rocky island once occupied by a 6th century monastery, into the fictional planet Ahch-To. It was Ballinesker Beach’s soft sand dunes in County Wexford that stood in for Omaha Beach in “Saving Private Ryan’s” epic opening scene.

Now, the country is increasingly a magnet for a diverse slate of American productions. In the last year alone, the USA Network’s series “The Rainmaker” wrapped its second season in Dublin; the Netflix hit series “Wednesday” shot its third season around Dublin and Wicklow; and the A24 film “The Riders” starring Brad Pitt filmed across the country over the summer. L.A.-based Blumhouse Productions has shot a slew of movies and TV shows here, including the newly released American suburban nightmare flick “Other Mommy” and the upcoming Amazon MGM Studios horror movie “Seasons,” which is set in Idaho and filming in County Wicklow.

The hit Netflix series “Wednesday” starring Jenna Ortega shot its third season around Dublin and Wicklow in Ireland.

(Netflix)

While filming in the L.A. region remains at historic lows, production spending in Ireland has soared, hitting a record $632.7 million last year, up 26% from the previous year, according to Screen Ireland, the national agency for film and television. In a survey conducted by ProdPro this year, Ireland was ranked in the top five preferred filming spots globally behind New York, the United Kingdom, California and Georgia.

With outsize interest in this small country, its sound stages are frequently full, and filmmakers say there is often a run on everything from lenses to edit bays to left-driving cars.

“Definitely post-COVID, it’s gone absolutely crazy in terms of the number of productions happening here,” said Ruth Treacy, producer and co-founder of Dublin-based production company Tailored Films, which served as co-producer on the 2024 biographical drama “The Apprentice.” Treacy and others in the industry call it a “green wave.”

“Obviously these projects are not necessarily shooting as if they’re supposed to be in Ireland,” Treacy told The Times. “It’s shooting the U.S. in Ireland, and that’s working quite well.”

The green wave grows

The seeds of the green wave were sown decades ago.

Ireland is a nation of storytellers. Over generations, it has maintained its ancient oral traditions, preserving its history, language and mythology, memorializing them on the page and eventually the screen.

Towering literary figure James Joyce helped to open the country’s first cinema, the Volta Electric Theatre, in a former metals shop in Dublin in 1909. Today, the country is said to have the highest per capita rate of moviegoers in Europe.

Ireland’s current course was set in 1980, when the government established the Irish Film Board to champion and fund domestic movies. Tax credits were introduced in 1987 to spur economic growth, but the prime minister suspended the program that same year.

Still, a small but influential group of Irish filmmakers came of age. Acclaimed movies such as “My Left Foot” and “In the Name of the Father,” directed by Jim Sheridan, and Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game” found outside funding and became international hits. Their success and lobbying efforts prompted Michael D. Higgins, the country’s culture minister at the time, to relaunch the film board in 1993, now called Screen Ireland.

Since then, Screen Ireland has embarked on a dual strategy: to create a destination for international filmmaking and foster Irish culture on screen.

The effort has spurred a creative renaissance. In recent years, the country’s global profile has grown with a surge in homegrown talent featuring a range of actors, from Cillian Murphy to Jessie Buckley, along with projects such as “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Normal People.” In 2023, the Irish-language film “The Quiet Girl” earned the country’s first international feature Oscar nomination. Co-production partnerships with the U.S., U.K. and other countries have flourished.

A surge of Irish films, like “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in 2022, starring Colin Farrell, has raised the profile of Irish talent internationally.

(Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures)

“Across Ireland, you see a real value put on arts and culture,” said Désirée Finnegan, chief executive of Screen Ireland. “For us, the investment in talent is a strategic priority. We are filmmaker-driven, artist-led.”

In the last five years, Screen Ireland has invested nearly $170 million across film, television, animation, documentaries and game design, as well as training and early talent development, Finnegan said.

In 2021, the agency established an office in the same building as Ireland’s Los Angeles consulate to further build relationships with the U.S. entertainment industry.

Ireland’s tax incentives program has evolved into one of Europe’s most stable. It provides a 32% refundable tax credit on eligible expenditures, including salaries of cast and crew (Irish feature films qualify for more), and the per project cap has increased from $81 million to $145 million.

This year, Ireland sweetened the pot, adding VFX and post-production uplifts to the incentive program. It also became the first European country to support dedicated unscripted content, for which it offers a refundable credit of 20% on eligible Irish production expenditures, capped at $16.8 million per project.

Jake Walshe, president and CEO of Screen Scene Post Production Group and chair of the trade association VFX Ireland, helped spearhead efforts for the new post-production enhancement.

Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” The fictional planet of Ahch-to was shot on Skellig Michael, an UNESCO World Heritage site off the Irish coast.

(Jonathan Olley / Lucasfilm Ltd.)

“You’re going to see more growth in this area with this tax credit,” he said.

Another catalyst was the global success of HBO’s series “Game of Thrones,” which filmed its first season in Northern Ireland in 2010.

“We didn’t know how big ‘Game of Thrones’ was going to be,” laughed Walshe, whose Dublin company did post-production work on the project.

Since then, the visual effects studio has worked on “Shōgun,” “The Penguin,” “The Irishman” and Marvel’s “Black Widow.”

“A lot of high-level Irish crews today got their start on big productions like ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Penny Dreadful,’” said Michael Byrne, a former location manager here, now a Screen Ireland executive.

The green wave triggered a homegrown cottage film industry.

Model and prop maker Mark Maher returned to Ireland in 2012 after working in New Zealand.

“I did notice there was a gap there with the prop and prosthetics and no company to feed into the film studios here,” said Maher, who worked on the Showtime series “Penny Dreadful.”

AppleTV’s science fiction series “Foundation” was filmed at Troy Studios in Limerick.

(Apple TV)

In 2017, he opened Odyssey Studios in Limerick and has supplied miniatures and props to such projects as “Foundation” and “Wednesday” and also operates a training academy.

“There is a surge here in Ireland,” he said. “We were very lucky.”

An animation boom

The expanded credits have been a boon to Ireland’s once-fledgling animation industry, which now has nearly 50 studios employing about 2,500 staffers. Many partner with Disney, Netflix and Nickelodeon.

Cartoon Saloon, one of the country’s first animation studios, founded in 1999, got its start in Kilkenny, a medieval city in southeast Ireland. Its founders, Tomm Moore, Paul Young and Nora Twomey, met while studying animation at Ballyfermot College, a vocational school in a working-class Dublin suburb.

Instead of making computer animated movies like Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story,” Cartoon Saloon decided to focus on hand-drawn Irish folklore. Its first feature, “The Secret of Kells,” released in 2009, was about manuscript-making monks. It was nominated for an Oscar, as were three other of the studio’s films, including “The Breadwinner,” executive produced by Angelina Jolie, and “Wolfwalkers,” which ran on AppleTV.

“We found that through our own authentic voices, [that] not necessarily every story has to be set in Ireland, it’s just every story that we tell has to have something that really resonates with us as a company of animators,” Twomey said.

The rise of co-productions

Many of Ireland’s best-known productions got their start at Ardmore Studios, just south of Dublin in the seaside town of Bray. It’s the country’s oldest studio, opening in 1958.

From the outside, the 18-acre campus of soundstages and back lots, nestled among the forests and mountains of County Wicklow, looks like a historic village. It was here that movies such as “The Spy that Came in from the Cold” and “The Commitments” and TV series like “Penny Dreadful” and “The Tudors” were filmed.

“Angela’s Ashes,” the 1999 adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, also was made at the studio. More recently, Ardmore has been one of the main locations for the hit Netflix series “Wednesday,” the dark supernatural comedy starring Jenna Ortega.

David McLoughlin, the co-CEO and producer at Metropolitan Pictures, which is “Wednesday’s” Irish co-producer, has witnessed dramatic changes firsthand.

“Compared to 25 years ago, it’s obviously just a huge difference,” said McLoughlin, whose company is based at Ardmore Studios. “But that’s not just in terms of international production. There’s been an awful lot of Irish producers developing projects, and then they’re bringing in outside production partners.”

On Dublin’s north side, where the city center is divided by the River Liffey, Element Pictures operates its award-winning production company above a busy commercial street. Its conference room is filled with BAFTA awards, Golden Globes and posters from its acclaimed films such as “The Favourite” and “Room,” which each won best actress Oscars, and “Bugonia,” which was nominated for best picture.

Founded in 2001, Element is one of Ireland’s leading production companies and owned by London-based TV producer and distributor Fremantle. Founders Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe began as the local producer for BBC series shot here and cultivated relationships with European and American filmmakers and distributors to develop their own projects.

It’s a successful model others have adopted.

“We’ve seen that change from something that was a kind of weird, little curiosity making strange, small films to something that actually has a kind of profile on the international stage,” Guiney said.

Not far from Dublin’s Trinity College are the offices of Wild Atlantic Pictures, named after the 1,500-mile stretch of western Ireland’s rugged coastline. The company began by co-producing with various American and British studios, emerging as a force in the industry here and abroad.

Timothy Dalton and Eva Green in “Penny Dreadful,” the Gothic psychological drama set in Victorian London but filmed in Ireland.

(Jonathan Hession/SHOWTIME)

In recent years, Wild Atlantic served as a co-producer or the Irish production company on such films as Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated “Blue Moon,” “Cocaine Bear” with Universal and “The Green Knight” with A24, as well as Apple TV’s “Foundation” and the Netflix dark comedy series “Bodkin.”

“Every film I’ve made is a co-production of some description,” said Macdara Kelleher, the company’s co-CEO and founder. “It’s not an unusual thing for Irish people, for a small country. There’s just a limit to the amount that you can raise in Ireland, and U.S. films dominate our box office.”

Kelleher points to Wild Atlantic’s relationship with Santa Monica-based Blumhouse Productions.

“They’re a great partner and they give us access,” he said. The companies have a number of projects in various stages of development, including the horror film “Seasons” and the TV adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker.”

Doubling for America

As Ireland has emerged as a major film hub, it increasingly has become a double for America.

About 15 miles south of Dublin in County Wicklow lies the Powerscourt Estate, with its 47 acres of gardens and the iconic waterfall featured in the 1981 Arthurian legend film “Excalibur.” The area also was transformed into the fictional seat of power for the “Vikings” series commissioned by the History Channel.

The iconic waterfall in Powerscourt Estate has served as the backdrop for a number of films including 1981’s “Excalibur.”

(Stacy Perman/Los Angeles Times)

More recently, the same expanse of forest and lakes masqueraded as Appalachia in the film “Cocaine Bear,” Elizabeth Banks’ dark comedy and true story about a black bear that ate a massive amount of cocaine dropped by a drug smuggler in Georgia.

Beginning in 2024, veteran Irish production director Susie Cullen worked back-to-back on four movies all set in America but filmed in Ireland, including “Abigail,” the Boston-based vampire horror-comedy, and “Blue Moon,” a movie set in 1943 Manhattan about troubled lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke.

“Part of being a production designer is to create something, to create a fantasy or period, and that part of the challenge is kind of great,” Cullen said.

Cullen re-created the historic Broadway haunt Sardi’s on a soundstage at Ardmore Studios. A local artist mimicked the restaurant’s famed caricatures of celebrities, using the faces of the crew.

For the scene showing the Broadway opening of “Oklahoma!” set at St. James Theatre, Cullen said they filmed at the Gaiety, a 155-year-old opera house on Dublin’s South King Street near St. Stephen’s Green. At the time, “Riverdance,” the traditional Irish step dance troupe, was performing at the theater.

“We just had a little mini-version of ‘Oklahoma!’ in the theater, on ‘Riverdance’s’ day off,” Cullen said. “We got there in the morning and put our set in front of theirs and they shot that evening and we took ours down and ‘Riverdance’ was back the next day.”

The soundstages of Ardmore Studios hosted another production, the TV adaptation of the John Grisham’s 1995 bestselling novel “The Rainmaker” for USA Network.

While the book takes place in Memphis, Tenn., the producers wanted to update the legal thriller, setting the story in present-day Charleston, S.C.

“I was thrilled,” recalled Dan Rogers, a senior project manager with the South Carolina Film Commission, and he said that “we’d love to bring it here” after a production executive told him the series was expressly written for Charleston.

But months later, Rogers was informed the studio decided to film elsewhere. Much to his surprise, the location wasn’t L.A. or even another Southern U.S. city — but Ireland.

Showrunner Michael Seitzman said it was a matter of money.

“You’re trying to maximize that budget, make the biggest show you can, make a show that looks like the one that you wrote on the page,” he said, adding, “every producer is having the same conversation right now.”

Seitzman estimates he saved about $10 million for a 10-episode season because of the tax credits and lower costs for labor and other production expenses. Another bonus: He could cast supporting local actors adept at shifting to an American accent.

The series has shot at locations around Dublin, including a former 18th century military school, St. Mary’s Hospital, that became the fictional North City Hospital. Ireland’s oldest school of law was transformed into various institutions in Charleston.

The King’s Inns, Ireland’s oldest school of law, has doubled for various institutions in Charleston, S.C., in the TV series “The Rainmaker” and the Explorer’s Club in “Penny Dreadful.”

(Stacy Perman/Los Angeles Times)

For Season 2, which wrapped in August, Seitzman had become so familiar and enthralled with Dublin that he created a storyline in Ireland over a few episodes.

“We could really shoot Ireland for Ireland, which was fantastic,” he said. “Suddenly we could stop hiding all the beautiful things we were seeing.”

Despite taking place in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia, “Cocaine Bear” was filmed in County Wicklow.

(Universal Pictures)

Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon” stands outside the iconic Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s recreated on an Irish soundstage.

(Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics)

Game show mecca

Perhaps the biggest wave to crash on Irish shores is the American game show.

In January, BiggerStage — the television production company that has co-partnered with Fox Entertainment and produces six shows in Ireland for American prime time — invested a reported $11.2 million in a deal to create a global, unscripted production hub at Troy Studios in Limerick.

“We did it because we see a real opportunity to increase the amount of work here, and that’s both work we create as much as it is work that we partner with other producers around the world,” said Sean O’Riordan, BiggerStage’s chief creative officer.

Pat Kiely, a former managing director of Virgin Media Television, launched the Dublin-based company five years ago to develop original content — particularly in the unscripted segment for the global market — and position Ireland as an international television center (hence the company name).

Meanwhile, Fox Entertainment had launched something called the international fund. The idea was to pilot an idea for a show and see how it could be produced for less money, partnering with international networks or production companies.

Rob Lowe hosts the Fox trivia game show “The Floor” from a soundstage in Ireland.

(Dan Smith/FOX)

The first was a singing talent show called “The Big Deal” that BiggerStage produced for an Irish audience.

Impressed by the quality and cost-effectiveness of the show, Fox quickly began discussing collaborating on other productions with BiggerStage.

“They were incredible partners creatively. And so from there we were able to know we had a trusted production partner in Ireland,” said Allison Wallach, head of unscripted programming at Fox Entertainment Studio.

In 2022, Fox relocated “Name That Tune” from Australia to Dublin. That same year, “Beat Shazam,” the game show hosted by Jamie Foxx, relocated from Television City in Los Angeles to Ireland, where Fox also launched a series of shows including “The Floor” hosted by Lowe and “Next Level Chief.” In all, BiggerStage produces about 100 hours of American prime-time shows in Ireland.

BiggerStage leveraged its success with Fox to lobby the Irish government for the unscripted tax credit to attract even more growth.

“Hubs are going to be more crucial than ever to make things work at a price point,” Wallach said. “And I think that BiggerStage and actually Ireland is really well suited to be that hub for Europe and for the U.S.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Friday that it has approved a proposed $2.1-billion sale of Patriot air defense interceptors for Ukraine after Kyiv had accused the Pentagon of delaying delivery of the vital munition needed to stop Russian ballistic missiles.

The State Department said that 500 Patriot missiles are being purchased for Ukraine with donations from Canada, Germany and Norway through a U.S. program and that no American funds were involved.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a partner country that is a force for political and economic stability in Europe,” the department said in a news release.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned this month that his country had nearly run out of the vital military munition it needs to combat Moscow’s attacks as tensions with President Trump’s administration escalated.

The Ukrainian leader had accused the Pentagon of delaying the delivery of the missiles that other countries have purchased for Ukraine. He also said U.S. intelligence that warns of incoming Russian attacks had been interrupted and the Starlink satellite internet service had been throttled. Ukraine says Starlink speeds and intelligence have been restored.

Iran has sentenced award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi to five years and one month in prison and ordered the seizure of of all of his assets.

The “It Was Just an Accident” director was sentenced Monday, according to the Associated Press. The charges against Panahi, who’d returned to the country in March, remain unclear, per the outlet.

One of Iran’s most politically outspoken filmmakers, Panahi has been critical of the country’s leadership and condemned violence against anti-government protesters. He has previously been convicted of “propaganda activities against the system” and has repeatedly been imprisoned, banned from traveling and put under house arrest by Iranian authorities over the years.

Panahi filmed the Palme d’Or-winning “It Was Just an Accident” clandestinely in Iran following his release from a seven-month stint in prison in 2023 after he declared a hunger strike.

“I felt a huge burden on my shoulders when I left prison that made me feel I owed something to my fellow prisoners who were left behind,” Panahi told The Envelope earlier this year.

Panahi was detained by Iranian authorities in 2022 after inquiring about the arrests of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad. Authorities then reimposed a six-year prison sentence that had never been enforced stemming from a 2010 conviction related to a documentary he was making about the disputed reelection of Iran’s then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the protests that followed.

“This arrest was more like banditry and hostage-taking than the execution of a judicial sentence,” Panahi said in a statement from Tehran’s Evin Prison at the time.

Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told Iranian news site Emtedad that the filmmaker was currently involved in three open legal cases but had not been notified of the hearing date for the latest one, according to a report by the Guardian. Nili also said that the court imposed a two-year travel ban and has barred Panahi from using social media for two years.

MONTREAL — Prime Minister Mark Carney called Canada “the most European of non-European countries” early in President Trump’s trade war. Now, he’s hosting European leaders to pursue an unprecedented alliance, but the proposed European Union “associate member” designation faces resistance even as the EU’s top official champions it.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa are in Montreal for a two-day summit aimed at deepening trade, defense and economic ties as Canada and Europe seek to reduce their dependence on Washington in a changing world order.

Speaking in Montreal on Thursday, Von der Leyen warned that economic relationships once considered sources of stability were increasingly being used as instruments of pressure. Without naming Trump, she described the consequences for ordinary families and warned that national sovereignty was under threat.

“When trade becomes a tool of economic pressure, it is families that pay the price, from the supermarket shelf to the cost of a new car,” Von der Leyen said. “We are seeing in real time our sovereignty being attacked.”

She warned that dependence on a single supplier for energy, semiconductors or critical minerals could be exploited and said countries faced a choice between acting alone or working with trusted partners to protect their economic security.

Trump has suggested Canada’s proposed EU arrangement could be a “hostile act” and threatened tariffs on Europe if he considered it unfriendly. Asked Wednesday about possible retaliation, a senior Canadian government official told reporters the closer relationship was not directed against the United States but reflected long-standing shared interests.

The summit puts Carney’s vision for a new global order to the test. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, he warned that the U.S.-led international order was breaking down and urged middle powers to unite against economic coercion.

Von der Leyen stands by her plan for Canada’s new status

The structure and even the name of the proposed partnership remain unsettled, with some EU member states questioning the “ associate member ” designation proposed last month by Von der Leyen.

Despite resistance from EU member states, Von der Leyen showed no sign of abandoning the idea.

“Canada cannot become a full-fledged member of the EU because of geography, but we both want to bring our relationship to the highest level possible,” she said. “This is why we are discussing the idea of Canada becoming the first associate member of the European Union.”

Von der Leyen described the proposed relationship as an “association without accession,” saying it could bring Canada closer to EU membership than any previous arrangement with a country outside the bloc. She said the arrangement would deepen cooperation on everything from artificial intelligence and energy to defense and trade.

Anand Sundar, a special adviser at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said France and Germany are among the countries unhappy with the designation and that it may not survive the summit.

“The fact that member states have rejected the associate membership framing is very embarrassing for Von der Leyen,” Sundar said.

More talks ahead, Carney said

Carney said Tuesday the summit would be followed by further negotiations over the next year.

“It doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” Carney said. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.”

Carney said the partnership could create new opportunities for Canadian students, businesses and researchers while strengthening the country’s independence and sovereignty.

Carney has ruled out formally joining the EU, saying any enhanced partnership would require approval by Canada’s Parliament.

An alliance without membership

The summit is expected to launch an “Alliance for the Future,” a framework for closer cooperation on trade, defense, critical minerals, technology and research.

Von der Leyen said Canada and the EU would finalize an agreement Friday giving Canadian companies, startups and researchers access to Europe’s network of 12 advanced supercomputers, strengthening cooperation on artificial intelligence.

She also announced plans to strengthen strategic supply chains and encourage joint investment in industries critical to economic security.

The partnership could expand opportunities for Canadian students and researchers through the EU’s Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe programs and make it easier for professionals to work on both sides of the Atlantic.

European commissioners and Canadian Cabinet ministers will hold sector-specific meetings, beginning with a business forum Thursday before formal leaders’ talks Friday. Officials hope to develop the broader partnership for possible endorsement next year.

A changing world order reshapes economic and defense ties

Canada is the only non-European country participating in the EU’s $167-billion SAFE defense procurement program, allowing Canadian companies to take part in joint European military purchases.

But deeper defense cooperation faces obstacles. Sundar said France is pushing for strict “Made in Europe” rules that could limit Canadian companies’ access to future EU defense spending, while Germany favors broader participation. He said negotiations over the EU’s next seven-year budget could prove more consequential for Canada than anything announced in Montreal.

The two sides already have a sweeping free trade agreement, known as CETA, that eliminated most tariffs. Most provisions have been in force since 2017, although some EU member states have yet to ratify it.

The United States accounted for 71.7% of Canada’s merchandise exports last year. Carney wants to double exports to other countries over the next decade.

Canada and the EU are seeking closer cooperation on critical minerals as both sides work to diversify supply chains. Von der Leyen said the value of EU imports of Canadian critical raw materials rose 62% last year to 3.3 billion euros, including lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite.

Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the disagreement over terminology was unlikely to derail closer cooperation.

“There is no magic shortcut to rapidly reducing Europe’s and Canada’s reliance on the U.S. economy and military — not least since Washington might retaliate,” Gehrke said. “But the political window is now wide open to take a much bigger step than was previously conceivable.”

Gillies writes for the Associated Press.

How would the late Anthony Bourdain have responded to our political climate in the United States with less than a week before the midterm elections of Donald Trump’s second term?

This speculative thought bubble emerged for me as I watched the last of two Los Angeles episodes Bourdain did through 12 seasons of his CNN food and travel series “Parts Unknown.” It aired just over a year before his death by suicide in France on June 8, 2018.

Set in our Pacific immigrant metropolis, the program predicts Season 2 of Trumpism, if you will. In another way, Bourdain’s ode to L.A. suggests a framework on how to think about the state of our nation as we head to the polls on Tuesday.

The universal glee of getting tacos

Customers line up at Ave 26 Tacos stand in a parking lot next to the Little Tokyo Galleria in 2024.

(Silvia Razgova)

Picture the moment when a taquero hands you a warm paper plate heaping with warm tortillas and meats on a street in Los Angeles. Do you also get that giddy, kid-like feeling for half a second? There’s nothing like it, right?

Halfway through the Season 9 opener of “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain experiences just that. In a moment you might miss without looking closely, that familiar look flashes on his face, an unbridled glee, as a taquero in downtown L.A. hands him tacos. In that moment he’s not some mythical man known to his best friends as “Tony.” He’s just a guy getting tacos. It’s super cute.

I came upon this episode recently, and it struck me as potently relevant for today, just before the midterm elections. Bourdain’s taco happiness reminded me that even when some sectors of U.S. society are calling for an effective de-browning of this country, everyone everywhere still really loves Mexican food.

Trump does. ICE agents likely do. Even the white ethnonationlists in the government and those cheering on the ICE surge happening right now across L.A. and California, all love to eat tacos, the unofficial culinary emblem of Los Angeles.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m not a Bourdain superfan. I’ve not seen every episode of TV he made. I didn’t read “Kitchen Confidential” until this year. But lately I’ve been studying him. In the past month I finally watched the biopic “Tony” about his coming of age, and I’ve started reading the entertaining memoir “Care and Feeding” by Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s former long-term assistant and co-author.

I’m catching up on Bourdain because I’ve noticed that as we pass eight years since his death, the author’s cultural influence upon chefs, cooks and food lovers in general does not seem to be waning. It might even be growing.

“He taught me that being a rebel lets you enjoy life,” said Evil Cooks chef and co-owner Alex Garcia, who has an image of Anthony Bourdain tattooed on his leg.

(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)

A multitude of chefs or cooks in L.A. have a depiction of Bourdain hanging somewhere in their restaurants, kitchens or homes. Some even on their skin. At least six portraits of Bourdain are on display along the black-clad walls of restaurant Evil Cooks in El Sereno, for example. Chef Alex Garcia has a Bourdain tattoo on his lower leg.

“I love Anthony Bourdain for his rebellious way of being, but also for his love for Mexicanos because he worked for many years with people from Puebla,” Garcia told me after I had dinner there Tuesday night. “He taught me that being a rebel lets you enjoy life, because the end of the day, being yourself, being happy, is the purpose of this journey that we call life.”

This enduring passion for Bourdain also springs from what so much of his television and writing do: Demonstrate an unflagging empathy for almost anyone he met anywhere in the world. Well, almost anyone — he said pretty clearly he’d never share a meal with Donald Trump.

His 2017 episode “Los Angeles” (currently streaming on HBO Max) proves it more than most. It was filmed in 2016, just before the election that took Trump to the White House. It is worth a rewatch before you cast your ballot anywhere.

The program delves into cultural identity, racism, police abuse and corruption and gentrification. Its whole thesis points to the fallacy of being anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican in 21st century America. “Los Angeles, like much of California, used to be part of Mexico,” Bourdain says in the intro. “Now, Mexico, or a whole lot of Mexicans, are a vital part of … us.”

The episode follows Bourdain dining at Indigenous mole specialists Gish Bac with UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda; going for mulitas with photographer Estevan Oriol and tattoo artist Mister Cartoon at the former diner La Reyna (which later became Guerrilla Tacos) on 7th Street downtown; tasting the taquitos at Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street with comedian Al Madrigal and Times columnist Gustavo Arellano; visiting Danny Trejo at Trejo’s Tacos; going to Mariscos El Chente in Inglewood with the Stockton-raised Diaz brothers, and sharing in street tacos with runners from the Boyle Heights Run Club.

“This show will air long after the election,” Bourdain tells Hinojosa-Ojeda at Gish Bac. “There is actually a national conversation now, unthinkable in my lifetime, where the notion of rounding up however many millions of undocumented workers in this country all at once … and then kicking them out. I mean, it seems unthinkable. But, you know, they said that in Europe in the ‘30s.”

In his characteristic tone, grumpy yet hopeful, Bourdain showed he believed in a shared human dignity that superceded all ethnic, national, religious or ideological boundaries.

Listening to him, the prospect of total MAGA Republican rule in all branches of government becomes something like a nightmare that we’ve seen play out in real life. It is a long list of gross constitutional violations targeting immigrants and brown-skinned people, and their supporters like slain U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti of Minneapolis, on a daily basis in this country.

People gather at a memorial for Alex Pretti and Renée Good, both shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

(Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)

Loving immigrants

On Tuesday, voters nationwide are expected to be thinking first of their pocketbooks and of corruption in Washington when they vote. On another level, this election along with the 2016 and 2024 results are also about litigating by the ballot box what it means to “be” an American.

Sandra Zweig, one of the executive producers on the show, told me Bourdain set out to highlight Latino Los Angeles from the very beginning in 2016. In March of that year, she recalled in an interview, he sent producers the initial list of the cities he was thinking of for Season 9, to start the production conversation.

From that first brainstorming session, Zweig found these notes about a second episode in L.A.: “All-Mexico edition.”

“This time we pretend nobody lives in L.A. who isn’t Latino,” the notes continued. “We live, play in that world without leaving it, we will explore Mexican and Central American immigration, how vital this population is to the SoCal economy.”

Those notes show Bourdain wanted to avoid a recycling of the pastoral mainstream modern narrative on L.A., which isn’t inaccurate but can sometimes feel stale: hyping its multicultural, polycentric, polyethnic etcetera identity. No. This time would be all brown.

“He worked in kitchens and restaurants for so long, he knew as well as anyone that a huge portion of that work staff were immigrants from Mexico and Central America,” Zweig told me. “He also knew that being an immigrant wasn’t a bad thing, to use the word pejoratively was just anathema to him.”

Pop figures like Bourdain and Trejo, despite his recent stumble (he was cast in a film by alt-right extremist Ben Shapiro’s film company), have arguably done a lot more to shape Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and Mexicans than any political leader.

“He would always say, ‘Travel allows you to see people, where they live, and understand where they’re coming from, and reducing that fear for the other.’ For the audience, you’re opening up a world that they may not be able to travel to yourself,” Zweig said. “In 2016, there were things being said about immigrants and immigration that he felt strongly about, and this was one way to discuss that.”

Zweig added: “I can’t predict exactly what he’d say, but it’s clear to me that’d be appalled by the whole sort of immigration enforcement and ICE tactics that’s happening now. That’s not a leap to assume that.”

When I look at the audacity and cruelty of the MAGA right’s stance on immigration, the killings of citizens and immigrants at the hands of ICE agents, I always turn back and remind myself how out-of-step with the nation it is to be anti-immigrant.

Alfonso Lira, 61, a dishwasher and busser from Michoacan, Mexico, sweeps the entrance at Chapter One restaurant in downtown Santa Ana during a double shift in 2024.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Gallup polling is a reliable benchmark on weighing Americans’ views on immigration. At its highest point just last year, the trend line showed 79% of Americans believe immigration is a good thing overall to the country by far. Currently that figure is 73%. Only 21% of Americans believe immigration is a bad thing, its second lowest point since 2002.

Polls and sentiments vary widely from there on how to reform and manage the immigration system — although certainly most people in the U.S. are against current ICE raids, roughly by 2-to-1 — but the basic truth is sitting there before us: The country loves and appreciates immigrants. For most of us, it’s always been about welcoming the stranger, honoring hard work, and contributing to the pursuit of social harmony.

Most of us believe anyone can join the party. There just has to be a better process for it. Political leaders therefore must offer a clear plan not for “mass deportations” but for normalizing people who are here and contributing to society, the economy and the tax base. And more than anything, offer as many people as possible a pathway to citizenship.

If anyone ever tells you they are opposed to any version of this notion, remind them that they are in the minority. Americans favor immigrants by 7-out-of-10, Gallup says. And remind them that as his last love letter to L.A. shows, Anthony Bourdain would have tried to snap them out of it if he’d ever gotten the chance.

WASHINGTON — In the final days before an election that will decide control of Congress, President Trump’s closing argument — buoyant, digressive and characteristically off-script — is at times running headlong into the economic anxieties of the voters Republicans most need.

With a war in Iran driving up gas prices for Americans, Trump is boasting to supporters that the conflict is making the country rich. At a rally in Georgia, he said his aides had urged him not to brag about the billions of dollars the United States was earning on oil from the war, since Americans are “paying a little higher” in costs because of it. But he did it anyway.

“I said, I don’t give a damn,” Trump said. “We are making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”

The moment underscores the gamble at the core of Trump’s final pitch to voters. With polls showing an overwhelming majority of Americans unhappy with the economy, the president is offering a portrait of national prosperity that many voters do not recognize, and pairing it with jokes and digressions that can seem to make light of their struggles.

Tuesday’s results will be the clearest test yet of whether that message still moves his base, or whether the president has become a liability for a party at risk of losing Congress in part because of his sinking popularity.

Signs of GOP anxiety are reflected in where Trump is spending his final days campaigning. Rather than courting swing voters in battleground states, he is leading rallies in Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina and Kansas — states that have long been Republican strongholds but where the party now worries its voters may stay home.

Still, the president is insisting to voters that the country is succeeding, and he is making the election a referendum on his agenda.

“The world is falling apart, and we are doing better than we’ve ever done,” he told a crowd in Mississippi on Monday. The next day, during a stop in Texas, he joked that the $5,000 he has promised Americans if Republicans win would not be enough for his supporters to eat a meal at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“You will be my guest at Mar-a-Lago. The problem is that for $5,000 the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert,” Trump said, laughing. “I’m not even sure you could buy that.”

Democrats have criticized the president’s remarks, calling them dismissive of voters’ concerns. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Trump boasting that the country was making money out of the Iran war was a “fitting” slogan for Trump’s White House.

Trump’s personal oil and gas holdings are now estimated to be worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, up from $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of last year, according to a report released this week by congressional Democrats.

Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, rejected the idea that the president has dismissed voters’ financial pain.

“The president, I think, shows empathy about what we’re going through, and he is fighting like hell,” Gruters said in an interview.

Asked to sum up Trump’s closing message, Gruters framed it as a choice between “common sense vs. crazy.” When pressed on the economy, Gruters pointed to Trump’s push to limit federal taxes on tips and overtime pay, to create investment accounts for children and to bring back manufacturing jobs.

“He has transformed the Republican Party into the workingman’s party,” Gruters said. “He is all about trying to bring back jobs that will bring up real wages across the board.”

But that message can be overshadowed with the off-script riffs that have long defined Trump’s rallies. During a rally in Ohio, while praising Sen. Jon Husted, Trump detoured into remarks about the Republican senator’s backside as well as rapper Nicki Minaj’s.

“I looked at his ass and I’ve never done that with a man before. It’s true. Off the record: Women, yes, men, no, OK?” Trump said. “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before, Nicki Minaj.”

At a separate rally, Trump turned his attention to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, saying that if elected, El-Sayed should be forced to pass through a metal detector before entering the U.S. Senate chamber.

“Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said of El-Sayed. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate.”

In those moments, the message is aimed squarely at his base, which over the last decade has celebrated his unfiltered style. And it is that base, more than swing voters, that Trump has spent his precious time courting in the final stretch of the campaign.

On Monday, Trump rallied supporters in Mississippi, a state he carried by 23 points two years ago. On Tuesday, he went to Texas for the fourth time this month to make the case for Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee trying to stave off what could be the first statewide Democratic victory there in three decades. Then on Wednesday, Trump was in Ohio for the third time this month, playing defense in a state he has won every time he’s been on the ballot. And on Saturday, Trump is heading to Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.

Gruters said the red state swing reflects the need to get Republicans to the polls.

“You can’t take anything for granted. You have to fight hard in every single state, and remind people why they need to go vote,” he said. “This is a turnout, turnout, turnout race. And we’re doing everything we can as a party.”

Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, said it is still surprising to see the party deploy the president in Republican strongholds so close to the election.

“It really reflects, not just the tilt toward Democrats, but also the lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters for this election,” Haider-Markel said.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Kansas, but there is a possibility that Democrats can win if Republicans stay home, he said. One of the biggest assets the party has to mobilize the MAGA base is having Trump talk to them in person, he argued. But so far, it is unclear whether his closing message will resonate.

“I don’t think that he’s really speaking to the issues that voters care about, but I don’t think he’s coming to change people’s minds,” Haider-Markel said. “He’s looking for lines that get him applause and praise.”

In rally after rally, Trump has turned the event into a show about himself. In Iowa, congressional candidate Joe Mitchell presented Trump with a “man of the century” certificate. In Texas, Trump bemoaned that he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. And in several events, he has shown the crowd a video of a CNN analyst saying that among GOP voters, Trump is more popular than Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.

But in the end, he also tried to appeal to his base with nostalgia.

“We’ve been doing this together for 11 years, and there’s never been anything like it and there probably never will be anything like it again politically or otherwise,” he said. “So let’s go out and do what we do best and that is win on Nov. 3. We gotta win!”

The vital moment comes a couple of hours into the walk. I drop down from a tussocky hill towards the village of Y Fron. There’s an abandoned slate-quarrying machine and a grassy track that suddenly emerges on the rim of a deep lake-filled crater. The water is the colour of an old bruise. Around the rim is a fence of lichen-crusty slates like gravestones. It’s a dark, brooding spectacle and totally unexpected. At that moment, I know that whoever designed this route knew what they were doing.

This is the Llwybr Llechi Eryri (Snowdonia Slate Trail), an 83-mile hike that follows a great loop around the national park, starting in Bangor and ending in Bethesda. It strings together a series of abandoned slate quarries with some of the finest riverside and mountain walking in the UK. I’m doing just three days, starting in Llanberis and heading to Betws-y-Coed via stops in Beddgelert and Llan Ffestiniog.

Beyond Y Fron village, I descend into my first quarry, and it proves to be a classic. This was once the Dorothea slate quarry, a vast abandoned complex of railways, cottages and chasms. I start exploring: tunnels, cuttings, huge looming stone towers like Maya temples, all overgrown with ash, birch and oak. What strikes me is the craftsmanship and precision in construction, each stone hand-fitted without mortar, all for workaday industrial buildings.

The quality of this slate was known from early times. Edward I is thought to have had his Welsh castles roofed with it, but industrial production began in the 1820s and peaked in the 1870s. Soon, there was a railway to Caernarfon and the area bristled with steam pumps, aerial cables and chains. The last-ever Cornish beam engine was installed to pump water from the deep pits, sucking up 10 gallons a second from 500ft down.

From here, the trail burrows eastwards into the Welsh mountains, until Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) appears on the horizon when it turns south, occasionally following the line of the Welsh Highland Railway all the way into Beddgelert, my first overnight stop. Named after a dog or a saint, depending on who you believe, this is a good base for hikers, having pubs, cafes, restaurants and outdoor gear shops.

The second day begins along a path combining the Slate Trail and the Cambrian Way, one of the grandees of the long-distance genre at 298 miles. I follow the route as it heads south along the River Glaslyn, with some spectacular sections on crags with the torrent below. We are getting along very nicely – so well, in fact, that I start to get footpath envy. When the Cambrian Way turns east, heading up the Matterhorn-shaped peak of Cnicht, I cannot resist. The weather forecast is bad, but the sun is out. If I pop over the peak, I can see how the two paths cross each other later.

Views of the Irish Sea open up as I climb, but there is an ominous black cloud approaching. As I reach the summit, a howling wind threatens to blow me off course. I face down the hailstones and get back to the Slate Trail, which now descends into Cwmorthin quarry. Not on the scale of Dorothea, Cwmorthin still seems epic today, dominated by vast heaps of spoiled stone – it took 10 tons to make 1 ton of marketable material. In the late 19th century, Cwmorthin was known locally as “the slaughterhouse” for its propensity to slay workers in fatal accidents. From here, the path runs down a desolate valley before dropping into Blaenau Ffestiniog, where I find a good cafe, Burrito Blasus, to fire me up the last miles into Llan Ffestiniog.

I stay in the Y Pengwern, a community-owned pub that has an excellent, friendly bar and basic rooms and food. Outside, a storm is buffeting the building, but the next day the rain has stopped and I begin with a rare treat: a magical trail beside the tumbling River Cynfal. Here, thunderous white spumes of water and dark powerful currents punch their way through a deep mossy gorge overhung by ancient fern-decked oaks. One of the midstream rock towers is said to have once been the “pulpit” of a magician called Huw Llwyd and, according to the 18th-century traveller and naturalist Thomas Pennant, his voice could be heard at night, ringing down the enchanted chasms.

As I climb higher, the forest dwindles and I emerge on a remote, wind-scoured upland of crags and bog. Even here, you can come across fragments of old quarry workings. In one abandoned cottage, a jacket still hangs on a nail behind the door, as if the occupant had just flounced out: “I’ve had enough. I’m off to America.” Many Welsh slate workers did head to the US, fed up with the poor pay and the repeated failure of strikes. In 1901, sympathetic workers in England sent a two-and-a-half ton Christmas pudding, which briefly lifted morale, but after violent clashes the landowner won, and many quarrymen emigrated.

I stop and brew some tea on my stove. I have not seen another soul all day, yet Yr Wyddfa, with all its crowds, is less than 10 miles away. This remote walk takes me to the top of the old tramway incline down to Rhiwbach quarry – an epic approach, descending to the old engine house. This place peaked in the 1860s, and being so isolated, the miners lived in barracks, some of which remain.

Farther down the valley, I spot peregrine falcons nesting close to a tumbling waterfall, above the little village of Cwm Penmachno. A few miles on, the church of St Tudclud contains an astonishing collection of inscribed stones, including the Carausius Stone. This is thought to be the gravestone of a commander of the Roman empire, who pulled off a coup d’etat in AD286, making himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul for seven years before his assassination.

Approaching Betws-y-Coed, the path joins the River Conwy, first singled out as a beauty spot in the 17th century, long before the Romantic poets seized on the idea. For me, it’s the finale to this fine route, but the path continues and I’ll be back soon for more mountains of slate and spectacular riverside walking.

The trip was provided by Walkers’ Britain & Europe, which offers Hiking the Snowdonia Slate Trail as a seven-day self-guided 83-mile walk, including six nights’ accommodation, breakfast, luggage transfers, digital app with tour information and navigations, and emergency hotline from £890pp, departing daily from April to October

For John and TJ Osborne, work and family have long been intertwined.

Today the siblings are known to country music fans as Brothers Osborne, the rock-leaning twosome that’s put 13 songs on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and been named vocal duo of the year half a dozen times at the annual CMA Awards. Before they moved to Nashville, though, the brothers grew up helping out with their dad’s plumbing business in the late 1990s in the small fishing town of Deale, Md.

“You know how every country star opens a bar in Nashville?” John asks. “I was thinking it’d be funny to start a Brothers Osborne plumbing company that services all the bars.”

With TJ on lead vocals and John on lead guitar, the brothers look back at those early days in Deale on their nostalgic new album, “Watertown,” which came out last week, 10 years after the release of their first LP. It’s got handsome, well-drawn songs about long-lost loves and teenage indiscretions, not to mention one tune about some of the colorful Osbornes who don’t play in the band.

“We got a mama that you wouldn’t want to take home to mama,” TJ sings in “Family Business,” which rhymes that line with “Got a daddy with a girlfriend who loves marijuana” and “Sister took a swing at her first boy’s father.”

“I always tell people that TJ and I are the most boring people in our family,” John says. “Our sister really did punch her ex-husband in the face.”

TJ, 41, calls the album a tribute to the people who shaped him and his brother, who’s 44. “When you’re a kid, you want to run away from home and spread your wings,” the singer says. “Then at some point, it’s like that place is almost calling you back.”

That the Osbornes are at an age to memorialize the old days puts them on the outskirts, to some extent, of a country scene crowded with ascendant zoomers like Ella Langley, Tucker Wetmore and Megan Moroney. Yet the brothers are hardly fuddy-duddys: In 2021, TJ became the first country artist signed to a major label to come out as gay; musically, he and John consistently make unexpected stylistic choices — take the ringing new wave guitars in “Family Business” — even as they court down-the-middle success, as with the new album’s lead single, “Born and Raised Hell,” which features the country radio kingpin Cody Johnson.

“John and TJ don’t make corporate country music,” says Ashley McBryde, who’s collaborated repeatedly with the brothers. McBryde calls John “a guitar god” and says TJ’s deep voice “could make your kneecaps come unglued”; she adds that she likes to listen to their records “while I’m doing yard work, slinging a chainsaw.”

“Our mission the whole time has been: How do we thread the needle of doing something that’s a little left of center while making it commercial enough that people can hear it?” TJ says over coffee at an outdoor cafe in Griffith Park. The Osbornes are in town on a recent afternoon between tour dates; last night they did dinner at Nobu in West Hollywood — “bougie as f—,” John acknowledges — then “climbed up the La Cienega mountain,” as the guitarist puts it, back to their hotel on Sunset.

“The last 50 yards, I felt like I was gonna puke,” John says.

Does Nashville have good sushi?

“They do now,” John replies. “Back in the day, there was just this place Ken’s — kind of a hole in the wall where you’d get these huge styrofoam containers of rolls. It was really cheap, and we’d all get really stoned and eat tons of sushi.”

The brothers learned to play from their dad in Maryland in a family roots-music combo called Deuce and a Quarter; each went to Nashville to do his own thing but didn’t really gain any traction until they teamed up — a union they say their mother envisioned from the jump.

“I think the second TJ was born, she thought to herself: I have a country band on my hands,” John says. “She’s very — what’s the word I want to use? — goal-driven, in a good way. So when we finally joined forces and things started taking off, there was a bit of ‘I told you so’ about it.” He laughs. “In her defense, she was right.” (The brothers’ sister Natalie also works in Nashville as an A&R exec at the indie label Leo33, where she signed Zach Top.)

Brothers Osborne — nominated again for vocal duo of the year at next month’s CMAs ceremony — came up in a tightknit peer group that also included McBryde, Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves. The duo broke out with a No. 1 showing for “Stay a Little Longer,” a single from their platinum 2016 debut; since then they’ve scored hits with tunes with like “21 Summer,” “Nobody’s Nobody” and “Burning Man,” the last a collab with Dierks Bentley that also went to No. 1.

Asked why they’ve been embraced by the traditional Nashville biz in a way that’s sometimes eluded Musgraves, TJ shakes his head. “There’s so many Kacey songs that I’m just like, How was this not a huge hit for her?” he says. “There is a game you have to play with country radio — doing things for them that we were willing to do that I know Kacey was just like, ‘No thanks.’”

Why does he reckon he and his brother were willing to jump through the hoops?

“I mean, we knew it would help,” he says. “We grew up in a poor family where everyone worked their asses off just to get by paycheck to paycheck. So I think for us it was about the fact that we’re gonna put in the work and get noticed.”

“You have to be willing to compromise — not your art or your dignity but compromise your time,” John says, “in the hopes that you can pursue a career in music because it’s very competitive.”

Over the past few years, some of Nashville’s biggest hits have come from outsiders like Post Malone experimenting with country music. Speaking broadly, TJ says the trendiness of the genre “is a little annoying because people are like, ‘I hate all country music,’ until their career flounders and suddenly they do a country record. Some of these people, they don’t know anything about it.

“At the same time, the genre is the biggest it’s ever been, which probably set the stage for a song like ‘Choosin’ Texas’ to be the song that it was,” he adds of Langley’s pedal-steel-soaked mega-smash, which just logged its 25th week atop Billboard’s Hot 100 — longer than any other song in chart history.

“I was just up in Brooklyn at a gay bar, and I’m like, All the gays are singing along — what the f—?” TJ says. “Also very jealous of that. I want a song all the gays are singing.”

Five years after he came out in a widely publicized Time magazine story, TJ says he doesn’t think much about his position as one of the few openly gay men in country music. As we keep talking, though, some things seem to come to mind.

“There was a moment recently with all the equity and inclusion stuff where [my identity] started to feel political — that was weird,” he says. “It felt like picking sides, even though I’m like, This is just my sexuality. But I feel like we’re kind of getting back out of that a bit.”

Then again, TJ recalls his appearance at May’s ACM Awards, where he presented Langley with the prize for female artist of the year. “I made a joke about my gay ass being up here giving this award, and there were comments from people being like, ‘I don’t understand why you have to talk about it,’” he says. “It’s like, F—, maybe people aren’t as open to it as I thought. It was proof to me that there’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

Is TJ up for doing the work of opening minds?

“I am. And I think it’s important work because there’s so many different types of gay people. There’s also so many different types of rural Americans. We’ll go to some places, and there are people who I perceive to maybe have some sort of bigotry towards me but I read them wrong and they’re actually totally cool.

“Look, you’re not gonna be able to convince everybody,” he adds. “There’s people that just hate on people for the stupidest reasons. Girls have it the worst. Anytime a girl does anything — ‘She looks like a slut,’ ‘She’s fat,’ ‘She’s too skinny.’ There’s just some mean people out there.”

“We’ve heard it all,” John says.

“There was this amazing burn we got one time where we’d taken ‘21 Summer’ out of the set,” TJ says, “and someone commented, ‘I can’t believe Brothers Osborne played 21 guitar solos but not ‘21 Summer.’” He laughs. “See, at least that’s pretty clever.”

WANT the dream holiday without the long flight? The Gambia has all the perks of bucket list breaks – and flights restart next week.

In just six hours, Brits could be on a safari spotting wild animals and exotic birdlife in 30C.

A trip to The Gambia can have all the perks of the likes of Kenya or South Africa without the 11 hour journey.

In fact, The Gambia is only a six-hour flight away from the UK and these restart with TUI next week from London Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham.

When it comes to activities, why not head on a safari?

Most tours will take visitors just across the border to Senegal which has lions, giraffe, zebras, buffalo, rhino and antelope.

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For those going on holiday with TUI offers excursions to the Fathala Wildlife Reserve.

On the trip, holidaymakers will take a ferry across the River Gambia and then head on the safari tour.

TUI Musement offers the full-day trip from £115 per person.

TUI also offers the South Gambia safari which takes visitors to local villages to get involved in local culture.

Cruises along the River Gambia will involve searching for hippos and crocodiles.

When it comes to birdlife, there are over 450 species to see.

TUI offers a seven-night holiday to The Gambia, staying at the 3T Senegambia Beach on a bed and breakfast basis from £798 per person.

The hotel has two swimming pools, four bars and three restaurants.

It’s found on the resort area of Kololi Beach in Serrekunda which has golden sand beaches, vibrant nightlife and wildlife.

TUI offers a seven-night holiday to The Gambia, staying at the 4T TUI BLUE Tamala on an all-inclusive basis from £1,337 per person

It has an outdoor swimming pool, three bars and two restaurants.

The rooms are Scandi-style and some of the rooms you can swim up to from the pool.

Throughout the year, The Gambia sits at 30C but the best time to visit is during the dry season which runs roughly from November to mid-June.

TUI Travel Advisor, Linda Sharrocks, who has been in the travel industry for 28 years said: “Lots of customers come in wanting a safari but are put off by the price or the flight time.

“The Gambia is the one I always tell them about. You’re there in six hours, and you can be spotting giraffes one day and lying on a beach in 30C sunshine at an all-inclusive the next.

“And make sure you pack some binoculars too, even if you don’t think you’re a birdwatcher. You’ll be amazed at the colours.”

STRIKES are hitting Portugal as soon as next month with disruption across the country – and it includes flights.

It comes after widespread demonstrations have swept across Europe over cost of living concerns.

One of the most major strikes when it comes to flights is by easyJet staff in December.

The airline’s cabin crew in Portugal will strike for the second time from December 19–23, with the last similar strike causing more than 400 flights cancelled.

The industrial action is set to affect flights from busy airports including Lisbon, Porto and Faro.

From the UK, easyJet operates flights to Portugal from the likes of Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Gatwick, Luton, Southend, Manchester and Newcastle.

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In October, the airline’s cabin crew in Portugal held another strike which disrupted hundreds of flights.

A spokesperson from the airline said: “We are extremely disappointed that SNPVAC is planning strike actions despite our willingness to continue a constructive dialogue.

“We had just started a conciliation process through the mediation of DGERT with the aim to reach an agreement to meet our employees’ requests and protect the sustainability of easyJet business in Portugal.

“The current union demands are unworkable especially given that our crew are already paid significantly above the Portuguese national average.”

Portugal could also face a general strike on 11 November which would coincide with a planned strike in Spain.

If the demonstrations go ahead at the same time it will be called an ‘Iberian general strike’.

It’s still under discussion who would take part but reports say it could be a ‘nationwide stoppage’.

A few weeks later, a nationwide strike in Portugal has been announced by the Frente Comum of Public Administration Unions.

It is in protest against the proposed 2027 State Budget and is set to disrupt the country.

It could particularly affect sectors in public administration which includes schools, healthcare and admin services.

WASHINGTON — N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) has spent years trying to answer a question that has vexed the United States since the abolition of slavery: What would it actually look like to repair the damage?

In Evanston, Ill., she helped turn that question into a $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. Now, Rue Simmons is spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country.

But as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a formidable hurdle: President Trump’s administration.

The administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and its broader efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history, have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work.

Those reversals come while at least part of the world community is reexamining the past. In March the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution — only three voted against it — Argentina, Israel and the U.S. Fifty-two, including England and 27 members of the European Union, abstained.

“Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons, the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, told the Associated Press.

For more than 3½ centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million didn’t survive the journey.

Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the U.S. and their enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery, treating the enslaved and their children as property, until abolition in 1865.

Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth that is still largely concentrated among white families.

From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule, to modern-day reparations proposals, initiatives to address the legacy of slavery are entering a new era of political uncertainty.

“I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word,” said William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen.

“Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility,” he added.

“They want to steal your money for reparations,” Trump told his supporters during a speech in September. “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. … The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”

Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at UCLA, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs come in the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments.

“It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” he said.

The Trump administration disagrees and has entered the legal fight in Evanston to stop it from happening.

The Republican administration’s attacks on modern-day repayment efforts include a lawsuit in Evanston, which was initially filed by Judicial Watch.

Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, says the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without specific harm identification. He argues the city’s program is unlike historical reparations programs.

“The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Beshka told the AP.

The Justice Department this month received a federal judge’s permission to intervene in the case, alleging that the city’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, N.C., contemplating creating their own programs.

Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement to the AP that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.”

“Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them,” she said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

Georgetown University was one of the leaders, offering admission consideration for the descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’ past, an effort that has continued despite Trump’s crackdown on campus DEI efforts.

But across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders.

“People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said.

Some Virginia universities have quietly been taking steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. But otherwise there has been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office, said Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery.

The Georgetown initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana.

The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to the descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments to individuals vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity.

“We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached, said Nicky Burridge, the seminary’s spokeswoman.

“The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one,” said Ebonee Davis-Hayes, its director of reparations.

Hussein, Fields and Binkley write for the Associated Press.

BLAINE, Wash. — The Trump administration’s top border official defended plans to build a wall and other infrastructure in Texas’ Big Bend region despite mounting opposition against the project and a court-ordered pause on construction, saying his goal of fortifying the country’s borders was “non-negotiable.”

In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott argued that the $46-billion wall project was justified despite a bipartisan coalition of landowners, local businesses and environmentalists who view it as a waste of taxpayer money that could be destructive to a region with historically low migrant crossings.

“Our No. 1 goal right out the gate is we have to know who and what is coming into the United States,” Scott said on Thursday. If the Big Bend region were left without a wall or other border infrastructure while other areas along the border get those fortifications, he said, “I am 100% convinced it will be completely overrun and destroyed.”

The fight over Big Bend has become a major test for how far the Republican administration is willing to go for the border wall, President Trump’s signature infrastructure project.

Scott, a former Border Patrol agent, was tapped by Trump to complete it.

His agency is responsible for executing a plan funded last summer by Republicans in Congress to line the roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico with a mixture of 30-foot-tall steel walls, vehicle barriers, new roads and surveillance technology to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling.

The Trump administration says it is building about 12 miles a week. Scott, who gets daily progress updates, said it will be complete by the end of Trump’s second term. The primary border wall — some areas also get a secondary layer — will be done by the end of December 2027.

“We’re actually ahead of schedule,” Scott said.

1

2

1. Charlie Angell stands on an overlook of the Rio Grande river 2. Pamela Priddy, center, holds up signs with others during a weekly protest against barriers along the border in the Big Bend region, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, in Study Butte, Texas. (John Locher / Ap Photo/john Locher)

Big Bend is a test for the Trump administration’s plans for the wall

The wall plan has run into resistance in places like Big Bend. The Trump administration was dealt a major setback earlier this month when a judge ordered a pause on border wall construction in the region, citing what could be a likelihood that plaintiffs “will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction.” The administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the order.

The ruling included any construction in Big Bend National Park, an area that has seen a loud bipartisan outcry, including from some Republican lawmakers.

After bulldozers were spotted in the park tearing up ground in August, Scott ordered a pause on all construction-related activity there while he went to talk to people in the region. He said the agency is making other outreach to locals to discuss how to build projects so they don’t mar the park.

“We’re talking through and figuring out what is the right solution for that area,” he said.

Scott said he can’t get into specific details on what the agency’s plans are for the park because of the numerous ongoing lawsuits, but he reiterated that the project won’t include tall steel walls.

He also said that the agency’s stated goal of protecting the country and knowing what’s coming in and going out is “non-negotiable.”

He said the region’s formidable natural barriers were not enough to prevent people from entering the country illegally through other more navigable points. And he expressed concern that cartels that control smuggling from Mexico into the U.S. would exploit any opening.

CBP has come under fire for immigration enforcement tactics

Scott leads an agency of 67,000 employees responsible for controlling who and what comes into the country through official border crossings like airports or seaports and stopping illegal smuggling and migration outside those official border crossing points.

The agency came under heavy scrutiny last year when its officers were sent into cities deep inside the country to help carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Agents with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement patrol in a neighborhood after apprehending a person on Jan. 31 in St. Paul, Minn.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

As protests against an operation rocked Minneapolis, a Border Patrol officer and a CBP officer both fired shots in an encounter that killed a U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti. The shooting eventually prompted the Trump administration to wind down high-profile city-based crackdowns. A CBP officer who was the face of the missions, Gregory Bovino, who led a helicopter raid at a large apartment building and used chemical agents to confront demonstrators, retired earlier this year.

Scott said while CBP still helps ICE, it’s now less involved in immigration enforcement far from the country’s borders because ICE has since hired more officers to its ranks. Scott wouldn’t comment on the investigation into the Pretti killing, saying that it was being handled by the FBI and was ongoing. And when asked about Bovino’s tactics, he said the officer didn’t report to him during the operations.

Scott spoke to the AP just outside the border with Canada, where he met with border security representatives from other countries to share information about threats and trends. During his trip, he visited an operations center where he said Canadian and American law enforcement work together.

That border has far fewer threats than the U.S. border with Mexico. Scott said cartels in Mexico are increasingly sending drones into the United States to move contraband and keep tabs on Border Patrol agents. In Mexico, the cartels have been using drones to attack each other or Mexican law enforcement.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, recently announced temporary flight restrictions targeting unauthorized drone activity in a zone extending a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border as a way to counter cartels.

“We want to make sure,” Scott said, “that threat does not come into the United States.”

Santana writes for the Associated Press.