death

Prince overdosed on a powerful painkiller that federal health authorities say is a public health threat. One addiction specialist calls it “heroin on steroids.”

The pop star died of a self-administered accidental overdose of fentanyl, according to the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office in Minnesota. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is between 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

How Prince obtained the prescription painkiller is not known. His April 21 death at age 57 in his Minneapolis-area compound remains under investigation by the Carver County Sheriff’s Office, which had no comment Thursday.

Fentanyl was first introduced under the name Sublimaze in the 1960s, and was initially administered via an intravenous anesthetic. Nowadays, patients can get a fentanyl dosage via tablets, patches, and injections — or even lozenges referred to as “lollipops.”

The drug is often prescribed for patients dealing with chronic pain from late-stage cancer, and is also used as an anesthetic during heart surgery.

“Think of fentanyl as legal heroin on steroids,” said Dr. Cali Estes, a private addiction coach. “The way most people describe [the high is like] lying in a bed of roses, having sex and eating a cheeseburger at the same time.”

Doctors have to undergo special training required by the Food and Drug Administration in order to prescribe it, said Dr. Matt Torrington, addiction medicine research physician who has worked at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs. “One reason it’s so good is that it’s incredibly powerful in small doses,” he said.

In media interviews, close associates of Prince have said the performer was constantly in pain from years of athletic performances on stage. Just before he died, efforts had been initiated to get him into an addiction rehabilitation program.

Prince’s cause of death arguably makes him the opioid abuse epidemic’s most famous victim, along with actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February 2014 after overdosing on heroin and other drugs.

“We need to see the Prince in all of us. We need to see the vulnerability. We’re all vulnerable here,” explained Dr. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “It’s a wake-up call for how we view these drugs.”

Because of its heroin-like effect, fentanyl has recently become one of the most popular illicit street drugs. In a March 2015 nationwide alert, the Drug Enforcement Administration identified fentanyl as a public health threat after more than 700 fentanyl-related overdose deaths were reported between late 2013 and throughout 2014.

In 2014 alone, the National Forensic Laboratory Information System found there were 1,245 fentanyl drug seizures in Ohio alone; Minnesota was not among the top 10 states with the most seizures.

“It’s become especially popular in the last six months,” Estes said. “On the black market, fentanyl is cheaper than heroin.”

Kessler said it’s a mistake to separate people using opioids legally from those who are getting them illegally. People start, he said, because they are told the drugs are going to help, but often aren’t advised about the long-term consequences of addiction.

“The most important thing is not to look at this through a lens of ‘This is bad behavior,’” Kessler said. “We all are susceptible to these medications.”

Questions remain as to how Prince got his drugs. According to an affidavit for a search warrant obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Prince saw a Minneapolis-area doctor, Michael Todd Schulenberg, the day before he died, and Schulenberg was at Prince’s Paisley Park compound to deliver medical test results on the morning the musician was found dead.

The doctor, who specializes in family medicine, had also seen Prince earlier in the month, on April 7, and told investigators he had prescribed medication. The singer was supposed to fill the prescription at Walgreens, although it is unclear from the warrant whether he did.

Prince’s health appeared to be a concern in the days leading up to this death. Attorney William Mauzy told reporters that his client Dr. Howard Kornfeld was contacted by Prince’s representatives, who were seeking help, the day before the singer died. Kornfeld specializes in addiction treatment and runs Recovery Without Walls in Mill Valley, Calif.

Mauzy said that Kornfeld couldn’t clear his schedule and instead had sent his son Andrew Kornfeld to Paisley Park in his place with a small amount of buprenorphine, a drug used in opioid addiction treatment. Andrew Kornfeld had flown to Minneapolis in hopes of encouraging Prince to check himself into the Mill Valley rehabilitation program and that the buprenorphine he was carrying was intended to be turned over to a Minneapolis physician to be administered to the pop star. According to Mauzy, the medication was not administered and was later taken into possession by sheriff’s investigators.

Dr. Kornfeld and his son declined to be interviewed.

According to authorities, Prince was last seen alive at 8 p.m. April 20, when someone dropped him off at Paisley Park. The musician was apparently left alone that night, without staff members or security.

Prince, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, was “a very private person,” said Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson. “I don’t think it would be unusual, for him to be there by himself.”

Days before Prince was found unconscious at Paisley Park Studio, he’d given his final performances in Atlanta. Despite not feeling well and reportedly fighting the flu, the performer told the concert promoter that he “would give it his all.”

“I knew after the show that he was fatigued because normally he does an after-party and he didn’t,” said Lucy Freas, who heads up Atlanta’s Rival Entertainment, which had presented Prince’s April 14 shows. “He wanted to go straight home, so he left the same night.”

The performer left the venue after those back-to-back gigs just before midnight and headed home to Minnesota, but his private plane took a detour along the way for an unscheduled landing in Moline, Ill., just after 1 a.m. Prince was unresponsive, according to an airport official.

Firefighters and paramedics spent 18 minutes attending to the singer on the tarmac, before whisking him to a hospital. “An unresponsive person is typically someone unconscious and not responding to efforts to revive them,” explained Jeff Patterson, public safety director at the Quad Cities Airport.

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Prince performs at the Forum in Inglewood on Feb. 18, 1985.   (Liu Heung Shing / Associated Press )

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People get emotional while talking about Prince at a memorial for the artist in Leimert Park.

  (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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A rainbow appears over Paisley Park near a memorial for Prince in Chanhassen, Minn. Prince, widely acclaimed as one of the most inventive and influential musicians of his era with hits including “Little Red Corvette,” ’’Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry,” was found dead at his home at Paisley Park on Thursday.

  (Carlos Gonzalez / Star Tribune via AP)

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Prince performs at the St. Paul Civic Center in St. Paul, Minn. on Dec. 25, 1984.

  (David Brewster / AP)

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Prince performs on stage on the Hit N Run-Parade Tour at Wembley Arena in London in August 1986.

  (Michael Putland / Getty Images)

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Prince performs at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary, on Aug. 9, 2011.

  (Balazs Mohai / EPA)

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Prince at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, on Nov. 8, 2010.

  (Dirk Waem / EPA)

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Prince presents an award at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles on Nov. 22, 2015.

  (Matt Sayles / Invision / Associated Press)

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Prince performs at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in 2008.

  (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)

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A shirtless Prince performs in 1986.

  (Mario Suriani / Associated Press)

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Prince and Manuela Testolini arrive at the 2005 Academy Awards.

  (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince and Manuela Testolini arrive at the 2005 Annual Academy Awards.

  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince performs at the Super Bowl in 2007.

  (Evan Agostini / Getty Images)

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Prince in 2008.

  (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince performs “Purple Rain” at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards in 2004.

  (Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince performs at the Super Bowl in 2007.

  (Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)

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Prince with Beyonce at the 2004 Grammy Awards.

  (Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince performs on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2006.

  (Peter Kramer / Getty Images)

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The crowd at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood before a Prince concert in 2007.

  (Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times)

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Prince performs in France in 2011.  (Bertrand Guay / AFP/Getty Images)

Prince was hospitalized for a few hours before departing in the early morning of April 15 for his home in Minnesota. Six days later, he would be found dead.

Prince’s family is planning a memorial service in August — and is also sorting out his estate. So far, no will has surfaced for Prince. Under Minnesota law, his siblings — including his sister, Tyka Nelson, and several half-siblings — stand to inherit the entertainer’s assets. Prince’s two marriages ended in divorce, and his son, Boy Gregory, died in infancy in 1996.

A Minnesota judge appointed corporate trust company Bremer Trust to oversee his multimillion-dollar estate. Among the assets at stake is a catalog of music that would likely include a royalty stream for some of pop music’s most recognizable tunes, such as “Purple Rain,” “When Doves Cry” and “Kiss.”

The trailblazing performer sold more than 100 million records over his career, fusing rock, pop, funk and R&B and demonstrating an audacious, idiosyncratic sense of style and willingness to court controversy.

A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, he won seven Grammy Awards and an Academy Award for original song score for the 1984 film “Purple Rain.” He also wrote hit songs for other artists, including Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and The Bangles’ “Manic Monday.”

“We appreciate the public’s patience and have been comforted by your outpouring of love, support and condolences,” Prince’s family said in a statement regarding a planned public event. “We look forward to sharing with the world this celebration of, and farewell to, our Prince.”

Times staff writers Amy Kaufman, Christie D’Zurilla, Matt Pearce, Richard Winton and Peter King contributed to this report.

MORE ON PRINCE:

From the Archives: Prince: ‘If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldn’t be in the music industry’

When Prince bended gender, he gave black men permission to be free

Appreciation: From beginning to end, Prince was always surprising us

UPDATES:

3:01 p.m.: This article was updated throughout.

1:53 p.m.: This article was updated throughout.

11:42 a.m.: This article was updated with an official cause of death.

11:15 a.m.: This article was updated with information on Prince’s autopsy and law enforcement comment.

10:25 a.m.: This article was updated with more information regarding claims of Prince’s drug use.

9:48 a.m.: This article was updated with Los Angeles Times staff reporting.

This article was originally published at 9:10 a.m.

On Friday night, the new series of Return to Paradise began and saw DI Mackenzie Clarke back at the helm

Death in Paradise fans said the same thing as they tuned in to watch the new spin-off series.

Anna Samson was back to play the Death in Paradise spin-off’s female lead detective, Di Mackenzie Clarke, along with her sidekick Colin Cartwright (played by Lloyd Griffith). However, the first episode of series three was far from plain sailing as Mackenzie came face to face with a blast from the past – her mother.

Mack’s mum not only was their prime suspect in a murder, but the detective was also trying to deal with her ex Glenn’s exit, while also dealing with his replacement – a new pathologist called Leo.

Death in Paradise fans wasted no time in sharing their thoughts about episodes one and two of series three, with many taking to social media. Praising the series, one fan said, “Watched first episode and enjoyed. Just easy watching and escapism for an hour.”

“I binge-watched it, and I’ve got to say that ending to the series? If there’s not another series, we will riot,” someone else wrote, while a third added, “Brilliant; could not stop watching it. Great ending; pity only 6 episodes, only downside.”

Another went on, “Watched first 2 series and have watched episode 1 and 2 of series 3. Really enjoying the series.”

“5 was jaw-droppingly good,” one fan beamed. However, not all fans were impressed, as one person said, “Sorry, I watched the previous series hoping it would improve. Unfortunately, no improvement.”

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Another offered their comparison to Beyond Paradise as they wrote, “It’s trying to be like our Beyond Paradise. It’s far from it.”

Each episode of Return to Paradise is available to watch on BBC iPlayer, and for those who want to watch weekly, it airs every Friday. However, next Friday, the Death in Paradise spin-off will be replaced by Children in Need.

At the end of series two, Glenn decided to leave Dolphin Cove after his wedding was ruined. When speaking about his exit and being replaced, the actor who plays Glenn, Taj Hara, said, “At the end of the second series, we see the heartache and anguish he’s experienced through two failed weddings, and he’s concluded he’s probably the root cause of it all.

“Series three, Glenn’s been off finding himself, reflecting and taking some time away where no one’s been able to contact him. He thinks he’s quite certain of what he wants in his life – that’s Mack.”

On working with his replacement Leo, the actor had nothing but praise for Jacob, who plays him. He added, “It was brilliant – such a new dynamic. Having this complete fresh take, it really just energised and gave a whole new feeling to the series. Jacob’s a brilliant actor and he fit into our dynamic so well.

“For me, it was a great experience to be able to delve into a completely different side of Glenn that no one’s really seen before. More hardened, a little bit jealous, but very conflicted. That really grows and bubbles over throughout the rest of the series.”

Return to Paradise is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

While running for California governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom declared that he would rather be bold and fail than retreat to the safety of mediocrity.

The two-term governor known for taking big political risks once again made good on that vow Thursday when he moved to offer clemency to every inmate sentenced to death in California.

Amid a hum of speculation about how the mass commutation could help or hurt his presidential prospects in 2028, the Democratic politician sent a clear, defining message to Americans about where he stands and the type of leader they could expect.

“If my job is just to read the polls, you can have an AI chatbot as governor,” Newsom said in an interview Friday. “I was hired for my judgment, and like it or hate it, that was why I think I was given this privilege, and that’s the responsibility of a leader. My job’s leadership, not stewardship. It’s not management. It’s to lead.

“I’m here to change polls, change minds.”

The sweeping decision comes more than 20 years after Newsom emerged in the national consciousness when, as mayor of San Francisco, he defied federal law and allowed same-sex marriages in the City by the Bay.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at the “Stop the Power Grab rally” at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 2026.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Bold moves that test the limits of his power, such as a controversial, first-in-the-nation stay-at-home order during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and spearheading Proposition 50 last year to redraw California’s congressional districts to offset Republican attempts to gerrymander red states, have defined his leadership, for good or bad.

The Democratic governor said those kinds of decisions are “sort of embedded in my DNA.” About a decade ago he said he was pushed to describe his core motivation. Though he admits it sounds trite, the governor said: “It’s to stand up for ideals and strike out against injustice.”

The death penalty, he said, is not handed out equally. He quoted Bryan Stevenson, the founder of Equal Justice Initiative, who said you’re better off being rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

“I couldn’t not have done this,” Newsom said. “There was an easy out, but … I would the rest of my life felt, you know, ashamed of myself.”

Commuting the death sentences of all 548 state prisoners awaiting execution pushes the bounds of his authority once again. California voters have twice rejected ballot measures to abolish the death penalty, first in 2012 and again in 2016, and Newsom’s decision overrides the will of the courts and state laws that permit capital punishment.

Under the state Constitution, Newsom has the power to commute about 40% of the death sentences on his own. The rest of the cases, which involve prisoners who had a felony conviction on their record prior to receiving a death sentence, or racked up additional crimes while awaiting execution, require approval from the California Supreme Court — a constitutional check to ensure the governor’s actions are not an abuse of power.

The court rejected 10 commutations handed out by Gov. Jerry Brown in his last full month in office — all of which involved people convicted of multiple felonies — and did not provide an explanation for the action.

Despite Newsom’s push to commute all death sentences, capital punishment remains legal in California and prosecutors can continue seeking that punishment.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman speaks during a news conference at the Hall of Justice last month.

(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said until the law is changed, his office “will continue to evaluate every death penalty-eligible case with the rigor, care and restraint these decisions demand.”

Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper urged Newsom to reconsider the commutations.

He said he remembers watching Luis Bracamontes, who was sentenced to death for killing Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver and Placer County Sheriff’s Detective Michael Davis Jr. in 2014, “laugh in court while their families, including Danny’s two young daughters, had to sit and watch.

“Deputy Danny Oliver and Detective Michael Davis Jr. should be alive today, enjoying long and healthy lives with their families,” Cooper said in a statement. “Instead, the man who murdered them has now escaped his sentence.”

Others accused the governor of reducing the death penalty sentences to seek an advantage in the 2028 presidential election.

“The people of California deserve leaders who put politics and personal ambition aside and pursue truth, accountability, and justice with courage, integrity, and transparency,” said Michael Hestrin, Riverside County district attorney, in a statement. “Instead they have been presented with a decision that demonstrates a profound disregard for the victims, their families, and the prosecutors who dedicated themselves to seeking justice on their behalf.”

Luis Bracamontes looks up in Sacramento Superior Court in 2018 as the verdict is read in the killing of two law enforcement officers. Bracamontes was found guilty.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

A poll conducted in August by the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of voters nationally favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder.

Political analysts suggest that reducing the sentences adds to Newsom’s credentials as a progressive leader and aligns him with Democratic primary voters on the issue if he runs for president. Republicans, however, could take advantage of Newsom’s action and cast him as a soft-on-crime liberal who is out of touch with most Americans, which risks turning away moderate voters.

But others cautioned that national political elections are hard to predict.

Gar Culbert, chair of the political science department at Cal State Los Angeles, said it would be politically advantageous for Newsom to try to appeal to the Democratic Party’s base as he considers a run for president. Culbert said he doesn’t believe the death penalty will be a substantial issue in a general election when, if Newsom becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, his Republican challenger would attack his record as California governor regardless.

“It’s possible he’s not being strategic,” Culbert said. “Maybe he doesn’t have to be strategic because he just might think it’s the right thing to do.”

The governor first issued a moratorium on executions about two months after he took office in 2019, saying capital punishment is discriminatory and unjust. Without the moratorium, 45 people would be subject to execution now, according to his office.

Daniel Zingale worked for Newsom as a senior advisor in the governor’s office at the start of his first term. Part of Zingale’s job at the time was to consider how the governor’s actions would be received by the public.

“The only piece of data he was not interested in in that process were the polls,” Zingale said. “His view, and I agree with this, is this is not an issue that you can leverage politically.”

Newsom’s decision to commute the sentences won’t have much practical effect in a state that has not executed a prisoner since 2006. At Newsom’s command, the death chamber was dismantled at San Quentin State Prison, now San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, after he issued his moratorium.

His successor, Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, has also said he will continue the pause on executions.

There was no immediate need to offer commutations to save the lives of the inmates.

Taking no action would have been the safe bet, Newsom said in an interview about his decision a day after he made the announcement. Many people around him, he said, advised him to do nothing.

He also understands that commuting the sentences could make him vulnerable if he runs for president.

“I’m not an idiot. The ads write themselves,” Newsom said. “But I just also would be fake. I wouldn’t be myself and if I’m going to be up there and not be myself, I couldn’t do that.”

With the clock ticking on his time in office, the governor said he also doesn’t want to leave with regrets.

“I don’t want to be one of the elders on some panel talking about what I would have, could have, should have done,” Newsom said. “I’ve spent my life trying not to be that person. I’ve been willing to take risks. I’ve been willing to go first on so many issues.

“If others aren’t willing to do it, you know what? I’ll raise my hand, and I’m happy, honestly, to take the hits.”

Courage in politics is rare.

It’s especially difficult and fraught for a politician such as Gavin Newsom, who has Oval Office ambitions and everything to lose from a misstep. Playing it safe is playing it smart.

On Thursday, Newsom took what can only be described as a courageous stand, a risky stand — commuting the death sentences of the 548 men and women condemned to die in California, and instead seeking to change their sentences to life without parole.

Many people will stop reading right now because honestly, do you care what happens to those on death row? They’ve raped, murdered, robbed, tortured — you name the heinous crime, one of them has done it. They are not the most sympathetic lot, and in truth many of us have ambivalent feelings on the death penalty.

It’s that ambivalence, that uncertainty, that makes Newsom’s move so interesting. We are in the most unlikely of moments — witnessing a self-inflicted test of political endurance from a savvy politician who didn’t need to go there. What happens in these strange days when a presidential hopeful takes an unnecessary risk simply because he believes it’s the right thing to do?

Newsom will be roasted by those claiming to be tough-on-crime types. They predictably will cry that he is circumventing the will of the people and disrespecting crime victims and juries. Some will say he cares more about criminals than victims. Fox News is going to have a field day.

Newsom has publicly pondered this decision for some time, calling it a “rocking chair” choice, one he’s likely to look back on someday to judge whether he lived up to his own ideals. He has said he is morally opposed to the state killing to prove killing is bad. As he terms out of office, he had only a couple of months left to take action on that belief before the power to end the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere slips out of his hands.

“Faithfulness to our values is measured by how we act when it’s most difficult to uphold them,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Californians announcing his decision. This, he said, was one of those moments for him.

“Americans are looking for leadership that is more principled,” civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson told me, arguing Newsom’s move is actually in sync with the electorate. Stevenson is one of the people Newsom has talked to about the death penalty, and the founder of the Legacy Museum in Alabama, which traces the line from slavery to mass incarceration.

The shocking blue-wave midterms showed that Americans aren’t just tired of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, he said. They are tired of injustice, tired of selfish, self-serving leaders, tired of fearing that their own government might crush them simply because it can.

Across the country, voters elected political leaders who stood for something — who bucked the trends to run on their values and vision of a better America, even if it wasn’t mainstream or safe.

So whether Americans agree with Newsom’s decision to commute these sentences to life without parole or not, voters are at a moment when I suspect, as Stevenson does, that they may embrace his courage to stand for something, even if they don’t agree with what that something is.

The death penalty is the ultimate expression of that power of government to crush. Support for it has been mixed for years, even among liberals — though young people are less likely to back it. It has been banned in nearly every Western democracy including almost all of Europe, Canada and New Zealand.

Twenty-seven U.S. states either have abolished it or have gubernatorial moratoriums on it (Newsom enacted one in California a few years ago). And President Biden commuted the death sentences of most federal inmates in his final days of office, as have several other governors over the years.

There also has been a growing understanding in the U.S. that race bias is baked into how we use the death penalty. Black and brown people make up the majority of those on death row, and crimes in which the victim is white are more likely to draw the death sentence — even when we get it wrong.

More than 200 people on death row have been exonerated across the United States since the 1970s — including eight in California — meaning that for every eight people we have put to death, there has been one other who was going to be killed by the state until we figured out they were innocent.

So while there’s a moral argument to be made against the state killing people to prove killing people is wrong, there’s also a practical one: It turns out we’re really bad at imposing a lethal sentence fairly, or even correctly.

Vicente Benavides Figueroa is proof of that. After 25 years on death row, the justice system finally realized it had made a terrible error in his conviction. Figueroa wasn’t just railroaded into a lethal sentence — for the murder, rape and sodomy of a toddler — the crime itself likely never actually happened.

Figueroa was a seasonal farmworker, a Mexican immigrant with less than a high school education, who was watching his girlfriend’s kids in the Central Valley in 1991 when he lost track of the youngest, Consuelo, for 15 minutes. When he found her, she was in the front yard, unresponsive and vomiting.

One thing led to another — a “reckless” investigation, as his civil attorney Salomon Zavala, describes it; faulty translators; a mostly white jury who werefar from his peers; and erroneous medical testimony — and Figueroa was convicted. The machine of justice was so grinding that Figueroa did not understand he had been sentenced to death until he got to San Quentin.

Decades later, the doctors who claimed Consuelo was raped and sodomized would realize the injuries were likely because of trauma from medical workers attempting to insert an adult-sized catheter. They recanted. New experts, hired by the defense, theorized the child had been hit by a car, causing the extensive internal injuries that killed her. The witnesses now agreed the child never had been raped or sodomized.

Figueroa’s conviction was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 2018, citing false evidence in the original trial.

“No matter what your moral position is on the death penalty, I think we have to look at it from a standpoint of institutional responsibility,” Zavala, the lawyer, told me. “We have to really think about whether we, as a society, are comfortable with executing someone that could potentially be innocent.”

I’m of the mind that erroneously killing one person in the name of justice is one too many — that the death penalty is an unacceptable risk.

I take nothing away from, nor mean to diminish, the importance or pain of any victim, their story or their point of view. Their pain is real and enduring, and surely there will be some who feel Newsom’s decision robs them of some sort of final resolution.

But pain cannot define justice.

It’s easy to forget that Newsom is married to a survivor of violent crime, and knows as well as anyone how complicated and difficult and personal the journey to recovery is, and how that suffering affects not just victims, but also families and communities.

But whether or not the state should be in the business of killing has to be a bigger decision that we consider collectively in moments when we are not in distress.

Newsom’s decision does that, seeking to go beyond “these performative sentences that just represent a lot of fear and anger,” Stevenson said, and move our justice system toward one that lives up to the ideal of promoting safety and fairness over vengeance. And even then, the state Supreme Court will have a say in the majority of these clemencies, since Newsom needs their approval in cases where there are repeat felonies.

But it’s a can of worms he didn’t have to open — the clearest statement we’ll ever get of who Newsom is as a leader.

And it’s a welcome reminder that sometimes, occasionally, values still have a place in politics.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he will commute the sentences of all 548 people on death row in the state, the largest mass clemency in United States history.

The announcement on Thursday effectively clears out California’s death row, although the state has not executed a prisoner for 20 years. Those on death row will instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom said in an open letter.

Support for the death penalty in the US has largely declined since the 1990s, although it still holds majority backing.

A Pew Research Center poll released in August found that 66 percent of Americans supported the punishment for those convicted of murder. Roughly 73 percent, however, acknowledged there was a risk of executing an innocent person.

Because death penalty cases often involve long and arduous legal appeals, many of those on death row are never executed.

Twenty-three states have banned the practice outright, and others have effectively abandoned it even if the punishment remains on the books.

Still, President Donald Trump, a Republican, has championed the death penalty for serious federal crimes. In April, his administration pledged to expand the use of federal executions, including by employing firing squads.

While proponents of the death penalty have argued that the punishment has a deterrent effect, critics say decades of scholarship indicate otherwise.

They have also pointed to ethical and logistical issues, including the expense.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), California has spent $6bn on the death penalty since 1978 while carrying out just 13 executions in that time.

Capital punishment has also been criticised for being applied disproportionately to racial minorities and for the frequency of botched executions.

The DPIC says that, since 1973, at least 203 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US have later been exonerated.

Newsom’s decision has been praised by criminal justice groups as a step away from a practice they say is outdated, inefficient and immoral.

“Governor Newsom’s announcement marks a decisive moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States. Though other governors have granted universal clemencies, none have been at this scale,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the DPIC, said in a statement.

“By bookending his time as governor first with a moratorium and now this mass clemency, Governor Newsom has irrevocably changed California’s relationship with the death penalty.”

The DPIC noted that about two-thirds of the commutations must be reviewed by the California Supreme Court, which is required under state law to review clemency for anyone with multiple felony convictions, before they become final.

Despite its left-leaning reputation, California previously served as a laboratory for punitive criminal justice policies in the late 20th century, during the heyday of the US’s tough-on-crime politics.

The states of Washington and California, for instance, were among the first to pass “three strikes” laws in the early 1990s, punishing repeat offenders with high minimum sentences.

The state continues to have the largest death row in the country.

Newsom’s decision will reduce the number of people on death row nationally by nearly 30 percent.

The announcement also comes days after a blockbuster night for the Democratic Party in the US midterm elections, with major wins in formerly right-wing strongholds such as Texas and Kansas.

The so-called “blue wave” during the midterms has set off speculation over potential Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2028.

As governor for nearly eight years, Newsom has reached California’s term limits: His second and final term will end in January 2027.

He will be replaced by former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra on January 4.

But Newsom has long been seen as a likely presidential contender, and he has increasingly dedicated time to serving as a proxy to support Democratic candidates in key races nationwide.

He has, however, taken positions on criminal justice issues that have put him at odds with criminal justice groups and the state legislature.

In 2022, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have placed limits in state prisons on the use of solitary confinement, a practice defined as torture by the United Nations after certain lengths of time.

In 2019, he also vetoed a measure that would have limited cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison authorities, and a similar bill failed in the state Senate in 2022.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told the California Supreme Court Thursday that he will commute the death sentences of all 548 state prisoners awaiting execution, reducing their punishments to life in prison without parole.

Newsom can commute about 40% of the death sentences with the stroke of a pen, but the rest will require the high court’s approval in order to be finalized.

The mass commutation would apply to inmates convicted of some of the most heinous acts in the state’s history. Newsom and other opponents of capital punishment have long argued that the process is costly, cruel and discriminatory, with death sentences disproportionately handed down to defendants of color.

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundation of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Californians explaining his decision. “I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”

The move comes in Newsom’s final months as governor and as he considers a run for president. Reducing the death sentences could help him in a primary with a Democratic base of like-minded liberal voters, but potentially hurt him in a general election with a national electorate that supports capital punishment.

The decision to officially spare the condemned inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed a prisoner since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs every year. Only 13 inmates have been killed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978. The state’s electorate reaffirmed its support a decade ago, voting down a ballot initiative that would have abolished capital punishment. Polls show its popularity has waned in the years since.

Despite his outspoken opposition to state-sanctioned executions, the governor has declined to use his political influence with voters to pursue a ballot measure that would amend the state Constitution to align with his position and officially end the death penalty. Without changing state law, criminals can continue to be sentenced to death in California.

“California voters have voted to keep the death penalty on the books and I respect that,” Newsom wrote in the letter to Californians. “But the constitution also gave every governor clemency authority, and that power exists for moments when law as applied cannot be squared with justice. For me, this is that moment.”

Newsom made national headlines two months after his inauguration in 2019 when he issued a temporary moratorium on executions and vowed to dismantle the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, now called San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Calling the death penalty system a “failure,” Newsom said the punishment is also often reserved for poor people who cannot afford expensive legal representation, fails to deter crime and wastes taxpayer money.

Careful to avoid elevating a death penalty debate in the midterm elections, Newsom intentionally waited until after the general election on Tuesday to go a step further and launch the process of commuting all California death penalty sentences.

The decision is another bold signature Newsom move that sits well with his base of support in California and wealthy, white and college-educated national voters who would be crucial to his success in a Democratic presidential primary, said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant.

However, his liberal stance on government executions could also create a vulnerability for him if he advances in the 2028 presidential election as the party’s nominee.

“Gavin’s exactly right with that base Democratic voter on that position,” Madrid said. “One hundred percent. It makes him a champion.”

But more moderate blue-collar voters who helped the party flip Congress in the midterms, Madrid added, are “not in line with him on this.”

A poll conducted in August by the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of voters nationally favor the death penalty for people convicted or murder.

Those numbers could shift following the botched lethal injection of Christa Pike in Tennessee in September and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s now-scuttled plan to livestream the execution of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

“Those events have really ripped the veneer off the death penalty in this country,” said attorney Natasha Minsker of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. “The death penalty is an act of violence. It’s taking another life. I think that’s become clear to the entire country.”

The state spends more than $200 million a year to adjudicate automatic death penalty appeals and habeas corpus petitions for inmates who, in all likelihood, will never be executed, according to a 2025 report by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center.

The case of Clarence Ray Allen, the last inmate killed by lethal injection in California 20 years ago, is emblematic of how the law has failed, death penalty opponents say.

Allen was 76, making him the second-oldest person ever executed in the United States. He had been on death row for 23 years and his appeals cost the state more than $750,000. Many current condemned inmates are even older — some in their 80s and 90s — and their appeals even more drawn out and expensive.

“It’s just a broken system,” said Michael Hersek, former executive director of Habeas Corpus Resource Center and an ex-state public defender.

Taxpayers foot the bill for both the defense and the prosecution in post-conviction capital cases, as well as the administrative judicial costs associated with years of complicated appeals in state and federal court.

The existing appeal requirements were instituted to counter long-standing racial bias in capital sentencing. Attempts to reform and expedite the appeals process over the years have further gummed up the system.

“There is no indication that the situation has improved, and … [there are] data indicating that it has worsened,” Justice Leondra R. Kruger wrote for the California Supreme Court in 2024.

It’s estimated that death penalty appeals alone constitute about a quarter of the work of the California Supreme Court.

“It’s ludicrous, the amount of time, resources and energy put into these cases,” Hersek said.

Some victims’ families agree.

“The death penalty is this promise to people who are angry and broken that you’re somehow going to make them feel better by executing this person,” said Bethany Webb, whose sister Laura was among eight people killed in a mass shooting in Seal Beach in 2011.

Their mother was also shot and badly injured in the attack.

“It is brutalizing to family members, the whole system,” Webb said.

Others say Newsom’s latest move is a betrayal of the justice they were promised.

“It’s total disrespect for the victims. It’s a slap in the face,” said Sandy Friend, whose 8-year-old son Michael Lyons was abducted, raped and murdered in 1996.

She and other relatives stressed the unique brutality of many capital crimes, saying Newsom did not consider victims’ suffering when commuting their killers’ sentences.

The commutations would go to inmates such as Charles Ng, who was convicted of killing six men, three women and two infant boys in Northern California in 1984 and 1985. Also in line to benefit is Richard Allen Davis, who abducted and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma in 1993, sparking a months-long search that gripped the nation. Another condemned inmate, Christopher Cheary, was convicted of murdering, raping and torturing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter, Sophia Acosta, in Tulare County.

Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra also opposes the death penalty. If state leaders wanted to resume executions, experts say it would take the better part of a decade and millions of dollars in new spending for the state to design and approve a workable protocol for lethal injections, rebuild a death chamber and secure the gray-market drugs necessary to perform executions.

Legal experts believe the end of the death penalty is likely inevitable in California, with or without Newsom’s involvement.

In 2024, the Office of the State Public Defender sued California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office, arguing “persistent and pervasive racial disparities infect California’s death penalty system.”

This spring, the California Supreme Court ordered Bonta’s California Department of Justice to show cause why it should not declare the death penalty unconstitutional — a move widely read as signaling the justices’ ultimate intent to end it.

“The statistical findings in the studies invoked by petitioners are extraordinarily disturbing,” Bonta wrote in his reply to the order in August. “Evidence of pervasive racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty could show that California’s capital punishment system gives rise to a constitutionally intolerable risk of arbitrariness.”

Around 60% of the inmates in line for commutations would require review and approval by the California Supreme Court before Newsom’s term ends in January. Those cases involve prisoners who had a felony conviction on their record prior to receiving a death sentence, or racked up additional crimes while awaiting execution.

The high court previously rejected 10 clemency cases without much clarification when Gov. Jerry Brown submitted them in 2018 months before he left office.

If approved by the California Supreme Court, the immediate effect could be relatively muted. The death chamber was taken down and all but a handful of the remaining condemned inmates were relocated from segregated housing in San Quentin to other facilities across the state after Newsom’s 2019 moratorium.

The decision to formally pause executions drew support from the late Pope Francis during Newsom’s 2024 trip to the Vatican, according to the governor’s retelling of a brief conversation between the two men.

In a subsequent interview, the governor said his Catholic background and the inequities in the criminal justice system influenced his refusal to sign off on executions. His father, the late William Newsom, also opposed the death penalty.

His father and grandfather were involved in the case of Pete Pianezzi, a friend who was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting and killing of a gambler and busboy in Los Angeles in 1937.

Pianezzi escaped the death penalty by a single vote and served 13 years in prison. He was later exonerated.

Even if it were possible to limit inequity and wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system, Newsom has said he would still be against the death penalty.

“The decision is among the most difficult in my career, not because I doubt its necessity for our state but because I know its announcement may surface excruciating memories for victims’ families,” Newsom wrote in the letter to Californians. “Today I am acting on my long and deeply held conviction that individually and collectively we are stronger as a society when we reject state-sanctioned killing.”

Walter Koenig’s official cause of death has been revealed.

The actor, who portrayed Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series, died at age 90 on Oct. 25. His immediate cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, according to the death certificate obtained by TMZ and People. Chronic diastolic congestive heart failure was an underlying cause, and acute renal failure was also listed as a significant contributing condition.

Koenig was cremated on Oct. 30, per the outlets.

Cardiopulmonary arrest, also called cardiac arrest, is when a person’s heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating. It is different from a heart attack.

Koenig’s representative previously told The Times that he died of natural causes and that his daughter Danielle and niece were with him when he died.

“Walter helped inspire audiences with his optimism, humor, and adventurous spirit,” the representative said in the statement. “Beyond ‘Star Trek,’ his long and distinguished career showcased his versatility as an actor and his genuine love for his craft. … Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it.”

Koenig made his debut on “Star Trek” during the second season of the original series when Chekov was introduced as the navigator of the starship. He also portrayed the character in seven subsequent “Star Trek” films. Koenig is also known for portraying the notorious Psi Cop officer Alfred Bester in the TV series “Babylon 5.”

LOTTIE Tomlinson was seen wiping away tears as she opened up about losing her mum, and how her brother Louis really “stepped up” in a fatherly role.

The two siblings “grew closer” after their beloved mother Johannah Deakin’s death in 2016, aged 43.

Lottie was just 18-years-old when her mother died from leukaemia.

Speaking to her brother’s girlfriend Zara McDermott on her Feel Good Formula podcast with Boots, mum-of-two Lottie, who shares her kids with Lewis Burton, said: “‘It’s really hard having your own kids without your mum.”

Beginning to well up, she said: “(I’m) Not gonna get upset. Literally said to myself, ‘Don’t cry’.

“But yeah, I think my sisters have been a big one, we’ve all sort of come together and tried to look after each other and it makes me feel closer to her in a way because obviously I know how much being a mum meant to her.

hospital dash

Lottie Tomlinson rushed to hospital for emergency surgery after falling ill

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“And it means so much to us, I think, because of how she brought us up with being so maternal and I think that’s why we all are how we are because of her but yeah, it’s hard.”

Speaking about how her big brother Louis really stepped up, she added how he took her on tour with him, and supported her.

“I appreciate now that he even let me come on the tour,” Lottie said.

“But it was actually really nice in the end because he sort of stepped into a real fatherly role on that tour, and he didn’t let me get away with anything.

“I think it gave us a really strong bond that you sort of can’t explain because we went through that together.

“We’re so close now, and I think it is because of those few years. Me being there with him, I think in the end he liked having me there for the support.

“And he was sort of fathering me a bit, but I was almost mothering him a bit as well. So I would pull him up on stuff if he was acting a certain way and it sort of worked both ways, which was nice.”

Lottie’s late mother Johannah had seven children, including Louis and Lottie.

But just three years after their mum’s death, the siblings lost sister Félicité Tomlinson, following an accidental overdose, after she took a fatal concoction of anti-anxiety medication, cocaine and painkillers.

World Athletics described her as “an inspiration to many, on and off the track”, highlighting her historic European gold medal in Rome in 2024.

Athletics Ireland, the country’s governing body for the sport, said Mageean was “much-loved and inspirational”.

“Her courage, warmth and spirit will leave a lasting legacy,” the organisation said.

Conal Heatley, the chief executive of Commonwealth Games Northern Ireland, described Mageean as “one of the best of us”.

He told BBC News NI she had carried herself with “incredible dignity” throughout her illness and was a “fantastic figure for the island of Ireland”.

The Camogie Association also paid tribute to Mageean, with its president Brian Molloy describing her as a great friend of the sport, both as a player and a supporter.

“In her all-too-short life, Ciara touched the hearts of so many,” he said.

“Her self-belief and commitment to her craft will always be inspirational and she will be fondly remembered by all who had the privilege of knowing her.”

Missouri officials have determined the official cause of death for “Days of Our Lives” actor Robert Kelker-Kelly, who died this month at age 62.

Kelker-Kelly died of arteriosclerotic heart disease, the St. Charles county regional medical examiner of Missouri confirmed to The Times. The actor’s death was deemed natural. Arteriosclerosis occurs when blood vessels carrying oxygen and nutrients from the heart to the body become thick and stiff, according to the Mayo Clinic. The coroner’s report confirms details previously disclosed by law enforcement and emergency personnel.

The actor, who worked as a pilot later in life, died Oct. 3 after he complained of chest pain and became unresponsive, police confirmed earlier this month. Officers reported with paramedics to the actor’s home for a report of an unconscious man who was not breathing.

“Life-saving measures were administered but were unsuccessful,” police said.

Kelker-Kelly’s wife, Allison Kelly, informed authorities the actor complained of pain in his left arm and chest while on the drive home from Spirit Airport, People reported. The actor asked his wife to pull the car over to vomit and said he did not need to go to the hospital. He reportedly continued experiencing pain at home. Kelly found her husband unresponsive, alerted authorities and administered CPR.

Kelker-Kelly was best known for his work in long-running daytime dramas “Another World” and “Days of Our Lives,” where he portrayed the rebellious heartthrob Beauregard “Bo” Brady from 1992 to 1995. He began his turn as Bo, which lasted for more than 586 episodes, following the departure of original actor Peter Reckell, who would return to the show off and on in the following decades.

He debuted in “Another World” in 1987 and appeared in more than 400 episodes in a handful of roles until 1998, according to the actor’s IMDb page. He was also known for his work as Stavros Cassadine in “General Hospital” and its spinoff series “Port Charles.” Kelker-Kelly’s “General Hospital” tenure lasted from 2001 to 2014 and was his final TV role. His television credits also include “Jack’s Place,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Rescue 77.”

Gaza City— Mohammed Hamad, 14, was on his way home from school in Deir el-Balah on October 17 when an Israeli strike targeted the road he was travelling along.

He had finished classes at the makeshift school and was walking home through the al-Baraka neighbourhood with his 10-year-old brother, Abdullah. Mohammed was killed in the strike along with another man. Abdullah survived.

Mohammed was Riyad Hamad’s third child, an eighth-grade student among the top pupils in his class. His loss is difficult for the 44-year-old father to comprehend.

“He was not just my son, he was my friend,” Hamad told Al Jazeera from his family tent in Deir el-Balah. “He was doing so well. May God have mercy on him.”

The family has struggled to come to terms with the death of a boy whose schoolwork and achievements had been a source of pride.

“Mohammed used to ask me: ‘How am I with you?’ I swear, I never asked him for anything more,” he said.

The loss has also left a deep mark on Abdullah, who now fears losing his father, too.

“He has become very afraid of going to school. They used to go together every day and come back together. Now he cannot come to terms with having to go on his own,” Hamad said.

“We are living in fear. When I go out into the streets, I swear I am afraid. Even when I am walking or sitting in a car, my heart is filled with fear … Why should our children have to live with this constant fear and anxiety, even until the last moment?

“Enough is enough. The child is supposed to bury his father, not the father bury his child. They have turned the order of things upside down.”

The gradual return of children to school – even in makeshift classrooms and tents – had offered families in Gaza some hope of restoring a sense of normality after years of disruptions.

But Israeli air raids and sniper fire have continued, despite a ceasefire being established last October for Gaza. Since then, Israel has killed at least 1,574 Palestinians and injured 5,687 in Gaza, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health.

The academic year resumed in Gaza on September 19, after nearly three years of disruptions caused by Israel’s war – and with it came more Israeli strikes.

Ten children aged from six to 16 and a teacher were killed between October 18 and 24. In a statement last Sunday, the Ministry of Education said that two girls were wounded during morning assembly at Muradiya School in Jabalia on October 21. Five students were also injured, some critically, in an attack on the Islamic University campus in Gaza City on Sunday.

The ministry called for urgent international action to protect students, schools and universities in Gaza.

The risks are particularly high for schools located near the so-called “Yellow Line”, a point that divided Gaza’s territory between Israeli and Palestinian control as part of the October 2025 “ceasefire” agreement. The line has moved westward to give Israel control of more than 65 percent of Gaza, according to the United Nations, up from the 53 percent agreed upon a year ago

At least 66 Palestinian children have been killed close to the Yellow Line, and pupils and teachers travelling near this zone remain in mortal danger from Israeli snipers and bombs.

On October 21, Suad Abd Rabbo, a fourth-grade student, went to school carrying her bag and books. Not long afterwards, her older sister rushed home shouting that Suad had been shot.

“I ran out barefoot,” Suad’s mother, Aliaa Abd Rabbo, recalled. “When I saw her, I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. She was bleeding, crying and screaming.”

The bullet struck Suad above the knee and lodged in a sensitive area close to her nerves and tendons. She was rushed to hospital, where doctors warned that trying to remove it could cause paralysis. They operated on Suad but were still unable to extract the bullet, which remains in her leg.

Abd Rabbo remembers when Suad came round from the anaesthesia after surgery and started reciting a passage she had been preparing for a school dictation exercise.

“‘O symbol of generosity and resilience … When I feel tired, I sit under an olive tree in the yard of our home, and feel rested after the exhaustion,” her mother recalled her saying.

Suad has since been discharged from hospital and has returned to her tent, where she remains unable to walk or move around. She needs surgery abroad to fully recover, but with Israel tightly controlling exit and entry from Gaza, her prospects of proper treatment are remote.

“Suad is now deeply frustrated. She cries and asks: ‘Why did this happen to me? Why was I targeted? What did I do?’” Abd Rabbo said.

Israeli tanks, military vehicles and cranes regularly open fire close to their tent in northern Gaza, particularly after sunset. Families often have to lie flat on the ground for hours to avoid the stray bullets that ricochet through the camp.

“My heart hurts when I send the girls to school. I told my husband I regret coming back from the south,” Abd Rabbo said about their return home to Jabalia after fleeing to Deir el-Balah during the war.

Another girl was also injured on the same day as Suad as students at Muradiya School were preparing for assembly at about 10:30am, Naim Aloush, the school’s principal, said.

“The girls had formed two lines … one suddenly screamed and fell to the ground … another girl standing nearby was struck by a bullet in her side,” she told Al Jazeera.

Teachers rushed to the girls and found that Suad had been shot while the second pupil, Amina Khader, a fifth-grade student, sustained a minor injury to her abdomen.

Aloush said the shooting sent fear through the school, with parents rushing to collect their children.

Pupils who had witnessed the incident were left terrified, and the school saw a marked increase in absenteeism in the days that followed.

The principal sees this incident as part of wider dangers facing the school in the al-Ghubari area, west of Jabalia al-Balad, consisting of 20 educational tents and serving about 1,000 pupils in the surrounding community, close to the Yellow Line.

Aloush said stray bullets or projectiles – from Israeli artillery, quadcopter drones and snipers – still regularly hit the school.

“Education is under fire, and our whole lives are under fire. At any moment, there can be gunfire. It is not light … it comes down like rain,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Every day, I come to school with my hand over my heart, afraid that one of my pupils or a member of the teaching staff might be hit.”

Amina, the other child injured along with Suad, has been left deeply traumatised by the incident, her father, Khaled Khader, said.

Khader said he rushed to the school after hearing that Amina had been injured and carried his daughter to a nearby clinic.

“There was terror, absolute terror. My daughter was in shock. She broke down, started screaming and collapsed,” Khader told Al Jazeera.

“Thank God she is safe … but the psychological impact of what happened will take years to overcome.”

Amina has since been afraid to return to school. Her family tried taking her back once, but she left early, unable to bear the sound of the gunfire.

“She is now afraid of the school itself. She keeps dreaming about her classmate lying there with blood running from her,” Khader said.

He said the incident had also left him afraid for the rest of his children and his wife, with Israeli air raids, random gunfire and shelling continuing to affect streets near the school.

“We are confused about what to do. Do we keep our children away from school and deprive them of their education, or do we send them out, knowing that they could be targeted at any moment?” Khader said. “A student needs stability to be able to learn. But we have no stability, and there are no alternatives.”

Authorities ​are struggling to find a way to control the outbreak, with no approved treatments or vaccines.

The death ⁠toll ⁠from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has surpassed 5,000, government data ⁠show, with authorities yet to find a way to control the ⁠country’s deadliest outbreak of the virus on record.

The latest death toll was announced on Friday.

Ebola has infected more than 10,000 people in the DRC since the outbreak was declared in May.

There are no approved treatments or vaccines to combat the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, responsible for the ongoing outbreak.

Delayed detection, conflict and strained health services have helped the virus spread more rapidly than in past outbreaks, reaching eight of the DRC’s 26 provinces to date.

The virus has spread to neighbouring countries as well.

Last week, Nigeria became the fourth African country to report an Ebola case, extending the outbreak’s geographic ‌spread to West Africa. East African countries Kenya and Uganda have also reported cases.

This year’s Ebola outbreak is the second-largest ever, behind only the 2014-2016 epidemic that infected more than 28,600 people and killed more than ⁠11,000 people across Guinea, Liberia ⁠and Sierra Leone.

Some governments have been restricting travel to affected countries or quarantining travellers who have recently visited or transited through them.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia suspended travel to and entry from Kenya, according to the Saudi Press Agency.

The measures include suspending travel by Saudi citizens to Kenya and a pause on issuing all types of visas to travellers from the country.

The kingdom is also prohibiting entry to travellers arriving from Kenya, including those transiting through third countries who have stayed in Kenya or other Ebola-affected countries within the previous 21 days.

In June, Saudi Arabia suspended travel to and entry from the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Ian McKellen is saying goodbye to his dear friend Patrick Stewart.

Stewart, the storied actor whose performances spanned comic book films, Shakespearean stage productions and sci-fi TV, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86. While tributes from former co-stars across the “X-Men” films and “Star Trek” franchise poured in, fans of Stewart were keeping a close eye out for McKellen’s remarks, as the two had a famously close friendship, often on full display with red-carpet smooches and pally interviews.

On Thursday, McKellen posted a tribute to Stewart.

“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end,” McKellen’s statement began. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”

Although the two had known each other since they were young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s, Stewart said he initially was too shy to approach McKellen, but was “impressed.” Stewart said the two had “X-Men” to thank for their close bond. On set, the two had trailers that were next door to each other, and with time to kill between filming, they would head next door and chat for hours.

“It was a delight for me to find that the enthusiasms and passions that I’d had all my life were shared by Ian,” the late actor said in a 2014 interview. When asked to write a hashtag that summed up their bromance, Stewart wrote #Aren’twelucky, and McKellen wrote #eternal.

In addition to playing rivals across multiple “X-Men” films, Patrick and McKellen starred together in “Waiting for Godot” and “No Man’s Land” on Broadway and London’s West End.

“We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions,” McKellen’s tribute continued. “My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in ‘Star Trek.’”

McKellen recalled saying, “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”

“Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes (‘X-Men’ of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.”

In 2014, Stewart admitted to Broadway.com that he was envious of McKellen for both his university education and his hair.

“Ian knows and he thinks I’m foolish to feel this way,” he said. “Ian went to Cambridge and my formal schooling ended when I was 15. I envy that, but I also envy your head of hair. If only because in the two plays you don’t wear a wig and yet you manage to make your hairstyle look completely different … I envy that whereas I have to stick on a wig.”

McKellen responded by telling Stewart that he was gorgeous with and without the wig.

In 2013, Stewart married longtime girlfriend Sunny Ozell in a Lake Tahoe ceremony that McKellen officiated.

“America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.”

McKellen and Stewart star together again in the forthcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” which hits theaters Dec. 18.

Warning: This article contains distressing content

A man has been found guilty of murdering a head teacher who was dragged to his death for more than a mile while trapped under the wheels of a car.

Simon Richardson crashed into 56-year-old Michael Mullins, who was cycling home from work on the evening of 20 April in the village of Warburton in Greater Manchester.

Prosecutors claimed Richardson, 35, fled the scene of the crash before stopping to try to dislodge the injured but still-living cyclist and then driving on with Mr Mullins still lodged underneath the vehicle.

Richardson was also convicted of dangerous driving and will return to Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court to be sentenced on Monday.

There were shouts of “Yes!” from the court’s public gallery as the murder verdict was returned.

Others could also be heard crying.

The judge, Mrs Justice Brunner, told Richardson that there was only one sentence for murder, namely life imprisonment.

She also thanked the jury and acknowledged their job “cannot have been easy”.

The court heard Richardson drove through “give way” markings at a junction in Warburton and collided with Mr Mullins, who went under the car.

Richardson then stopped at a country lane and twice got out of the vehicle in attempts to pull Mr Mullins free, the jury was told.

Richardson then mounted the grass verge in his Volvo and finally dislodged him before reversing over Mr Mullins, causing “crushing” chest injuries.

Good Morning Britain hosts Ranvir Singh and Paul Brand paid tribute to an acting legend on Friday

The hosts of Good Morning Britain shared some heartbreaking news on Friday.

During the latest edition of the ITV morning programme (October 30), Ranvir Singh and Paul Brand announced the death of Sir Patrick Stewart. The legendary Star Trek and stage actor died at his home in Los Angeles on Wednesday (October 28) at the age of 86, following a “brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Just moments into GMB, Ranvir said: “Sir Patrick Stewart, the star of everything from Star Trek to Shakespeare, has died at the age of 86. Born in Yorkshire, he conquered the world of acting.”

Ranvir went on: “I think there was a whole nation going, ‘Oh no,’ about Sir Patrick Stewart, what a giant of stage and screen. [He has] sadly died at the age of 86, following a short battle with dementia. Friends have paid tribute to the actor, calling him a titan of his craft.”

Paul added: “Sir Patrick’s talent saw him move effortlessly from performing Shakespeare, to delivering epic Hollywood performances, becoming one of the most loved performers of his generation.”

Philip Sime then looked back on Sir Patrick’s career in a pre-recorded segment. He began: “To millions around the world, he is Jean-Luc Picard, the calm and courageous commander of the USS Enterprise.”

Sir Patrick was born in Yorkshire, into a home marred by poverty and domestic abuse. Acting first on stage, then on screen, was his escape. He would go on to play Professor Charles Xavier in the blockbuster X-Men films, securing his position as one of Hollywood’s brightest stars.

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William Shatner said: “He brought intelligence, grace, and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did.” Hugh Jackman simply called the star “one of the greats of stage and screen”.

Philip went on: “Sir Patrick’s swansong, though, will be the upcoming Avengers film. One last appearance alongside a lifelong friend.”

Back in the studio, Ranvir said: “A remarkable man, an absolute hero… He was an ambassador for Women’s Refuge, because, of course, his mother suffered domestic abuse at the hands of watching his father attack his mother when he was young. He spoke about it so openly, and it definitely changed lives, especially for young boys growing up in those environments. So many people want to thank him this morning.”

GMB viewers were quick to pay tribute across social media, with one X user writing: “A Yorkshire legend who will be forever immortalised in Sci-fi, Shakespeare, and comics.” Another added: “Not just a sci-fi actor but brilliant comedy actor and his classical work would leave you breathless. I was SO affected by his role of Macbeth at Gielgud Theatre. I still have the framed poster on my living room wall.”

A third said: “I don’t think I realised just how much Patrick Stewart meant to me until I saw this news tonight. Been sitting here watching old clips with tears in my eyes. My childhood, my heroes, my Captain. Thank you for everything, Sir Patrick.”

Good Morning Britain airs weekdays on ITV1 and ITVX at 6am

More information about dementia is available via organisations including the NHS and Dementia UK

Former president faces renewed death penalty demand as he appeals life sentence for insurrection.

South Korean prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for former President Yoon Suk-yeol over his failed attempt to impose military rule.

The team led by special prosecutor Cho Eun-suk renewed the demand at an appeal hearing in Seoul on Thursday, arguing that Yoon’s actions threatened South Korea‘s democracy.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment in February after being convicted of leading an insurrection.

Prosecutors had previously sought the death penalty at Yoon’s original trial in January, but the court sentenced him to life imprisonment the following month.

At Thursday’s hearing at the Seoul High Court, a prosecutor said there was “no reason to hesitate” over imposing the death penalty, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

South Korea retains the death penalty but has not carried out an execution since 1997.

Prosecutors argued that this long pause should not prevent judges from sentencing Yoon to death.

Yoon declared martial law on December 3, 2024, deploying soldiers and police to the National Assembly, South Korea’s parliament.

Lawmakers overcame a security blockade to vote down the measure, forcing the government to withdraw it about six hours after it was announced.

The lower court found that Yoon had tried to stop parliament from functioning, detain political opponents and remain in control of the country for an extended period.

Yoon’s lawyers told reporters on Thursday that he had intended to warn an opposition-controlled parliament against what he considered attempts to obstruct his government, not to establish authoritarian rule.

Speaking at the Seoul High Court on October 27, Yoon also denied seeking to establish a long-term dictatorship, according to the Hankyoreh newspaper.

The crisis led parliament to impeach Yoon in December 2024. South Korea’s Constitutional Court, which decides whether to uphold impeachments, removed him from office in April 2025.

The appeals court plans two more hearings, including Yoon’s final statement on November 5.

Actor Barbara Barrie, best known for films in which she elevated the role of Mom — including her Oscar-nominated turn in “Breaking Away” (1979) — died Wednesday in her Manhattan home. She was 95.

Barrie’s death was confirmed to the L.A. Times by the actor’s representatives, who said it was medically assisted. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the New York Times that her mother’s death followed a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Barrie’s representatives said in a statement to the L.A. Times that the actor was a proponent and advocate of New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, a law that took effect on Aug. 5.

Born Barbara Berman in Chicago in 1931, Barrie and her family moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where she attended Del Mar College. She would later transfer to the University of Texas, where she received multiple awards for drama.

After graduation, she took her acting dreams to the Big Apple, where she made her Broadway debut in the 1955 play “The Wooden Dish.” Throughout her career, Barrie starred in various Broadway productions, among them “The Selling of the President” (1972), “California Suite” (1976) and, most notably, the 1970 musical “Company,” by Stephen Sondheim, for which she received a Tony Award nomination for featured actress in a musical.

Her last Broadway stint was in 2017 in the original role of Helene Berman in the Joshua Harmon play “Significant Other.”

Barrie extended her acting expertise beyond the stage, however, making her first television appearance on “Kraft Television Theater” in 1955. A year later, she made her film debut, albeit uncredited, in the western epic “Giant” while she was in Texas visiting her family.

With more than 120 credits to her name, Barrie began appearing in popular TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s, such as “Naked City,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “The Nurses” and more. Later TV credits included “Barney Miller” and “Suddenly Susan,” where she played an on-screen grandmother to Brooke Shields.

Her first major film role came in 1964, when she played divorcée Julie Cullen Richards in “One Potato, Two Potato.” She portrayed a white woman who falls in love with a Black man, Frank Richards (played by Bernie Hamilton). The film was released during a time when interracial marriage was not yet legalized nationwide. Barrie earned a Cannes Film Festival Award for the performance.

The actor went on to star as the mom Evelyn Stroller in the 1979 coming-of-age comedy-drama “Breaking Away,” which earned her an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress, and later an Emmy nomination when she reprised the role for the 1980 television series.

Other film credits include 1980’s “Private Benjamin,” 1997’s “Hercules” (where she voiced Alcmene, Hercules’ mortal mother) and 1999’s “Judy Berlin.” According to her IMDb profile, her last credit was in 2025 for the queer romantic comedy “Things Like This.”

In 1994, Barrie was diagnosed with rectal cancer, prompting her to raise awareness about the disease. She published two books on the matter, including “Second Act,” a 1997 memoir about resolute optimism and acceptance, and “Don’t Die of Embarrassment: Life After Colostomy and Other Adventures,” a 1999 memoir where she dives deep into her diagnosis and experience with a colostomy procedure.

Barrie married actor, director and producer Jay Harnick in 1964. He died in 2007. The two are survived by their children, Jane and Aaron.

Officials in South Carolina announced Wednesday that an investigation found Hayden Panettiere’s Aug. 16 death to be accidental and the case is now closed.

“Based on the Medical Examiner’s determination and the findings of the investigation, Hayden Panettiere’s death has been ruled accidental,” officials in Greenville, S.C., said.

Paramedics and police found Panettiere in cardiac arrest, according to the coroner’s office. Dispatch audio recordings from Broadcastify.com reference a possible overdose and CPR in progress. Narcan was reportedly administered, and paramedics tried to resuscitate her. She was declared dead at 2:31 p.m.

Federal authorities probing the death of Panettiere are focusing their investigation in Los Angeles and looking into whether the actor procured nonprescription pills from an area dealer.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local investigators have questioned several people about the circumstances of her death.

Such counterfeit pills have repeatedly been found laced with fentanyl, which can be deadly when taken in small amounts.

Panettiere starred on “Nashville” (2012-18) and, before that, “Heroes” (2006-10). Her early work as a child actor included roles in the 1990s on the soap operas “One Life to Live” and “Guiding Light.” She was a model and a singer, having released several singles.

Panettiere also starred in the “Scream” horror movie franchise as well as in hits “I Love You, Beth Cooper” and “Remember the Titans.”

She gained widespread attention with “Heroes,” in which she played a cheerleader with superpowers.

On “Nashville,” she played a troubled country music star, doing her own singing. She received two Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress for the role.

Oct. 28, 2026 9:44 AM PT

MINNEAPOLIS — The parents of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti said the federal government is shielding the immigration enforcement officers involved in their son’s killing, and no one from the government has reached out with any substantive information for nine months.

Michael and Susan Pretti on Tuesday called for the Department of Justice to hold accountable those who shot their 37-year-old son during President Trump’s ramp up in deportations targeting Minnesota. Federal prosecutors disclosed in recent court filings they had stopped sharing evidence with Minnesota authorities who are investigating the January killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal officers.

“The federal government went on TV and lied about Alex,” said Susan Pretti, his mother. “They tried to slander his memory to cover up their crime. Not only was it wrong, it was shameful.”

Within moments of his Jan. 24 death, Trump administration officials sought to portray Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse at a veterans hospital, as an armed disruptor intent on doing harm to federal agents when he brought his own gun to a Minneapolis street where officers clashed with protesters. Kristi Noem, the then-Homeland Security secretary, painted the Veterans Administration hospital nurse as a domestic terrorist who violently resisted federal agents. Court records show he had no criminal record.

Video shot by bystanders that day showed Pretti only had a mobile phone in his hand. No footage has since emerged showing him brandishing a weapon or attacking federal agents in the moments before he was killed.

The Prettis spoke Tuesday at a news conference organized by an attorney representing the family, calling their treatment by the Trump administration “cruelty.” They said they decided to speak out after being “stonewalled” by U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Atty. Dan Rosen.

“At every turn, they have ignored us, misled us, and shielded Alex’s killers,” said Michael Pretti, his father. “We are a family who love this country. We trust in the institutions of this country. We believe in the rule of law — and that people should be held accountable through that law.”

After months of reaching out to Rosen’s office, the federal prosecutor agreed to meet with them in July. But the family and their attorney, Steve Schleicher, said that meeting raised more questions than answers, with Rosen refusing to provide even basic information about the status of the federal investigation into Pretti’s death.

A spokesman for Rosen’s office had no comment when reached by the Associated Press on Tuesday. The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Pretti family’s remarks.

Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March for access to materials they said they needed to independently investigate the shootings of Pretti and Good. The Trump administration has suggested that state prosecutors don’t have jurisdiction to investigate federal officers, while Minnesota officials have said they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself.

The state is still seeking the cellphones of the officers involved in both shootings and recordings of key interviews.

Pretti’s parents recounted how they first learned of his death when they were called by a reporter for the Associated Press.

“We learned about his death from the media as we saw him being shot repeatedly in the back after helping a woman from his community, a fellow Minnesotan, who had been shoved to the ground viciously,” Michael Pretti said. “No one from the federal government called us on that horrible day, but they did go on TV to tell lies about Alex. No one from the federal government has called us since.”

He said the videos of his son’s killing haunt his family every day.

“I think it haunts many Americans to see a U.S. citizen who was peaceful and in his community shot multiple times on the back, in the back, while on the ground,” the father said, calling his family heartbroken.

“We wish we didn’t have to be here,” he said. “We wish Alex was alive. We wish we were simply in Minneapolis to visit with Alex. For he and I to chat about cars, hiking, biking or anything that came to our mind. This administration has taken that away from us forever.”

Biesecker and Vancleave write for the Associated Press. Biesecker reported from Pittsburgh.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.

“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”

Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.

The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.

Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.

The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.

Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, in order to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.

Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano through her leave from full-time work with the union in the late 1980s.

It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall, to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down the picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant, as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.

Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. Their obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders and organizing stagnation, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.

Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.

In 1999, the 69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life she still toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunt red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.

In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers. “They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the 95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.

Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.

Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.

To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”

A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was the devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, Cesar’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)

Her relationship with Cesar Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowleged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.

The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San Jose — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.

It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home one day and said, “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.

Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.

But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.

“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”

During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.

Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.

In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

An Echo Park mural features Dolores Huerta alongside artist Frida Kahlo.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Medina left the Chávez-Huerta led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.

Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.

But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.

Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.

The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.

In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.

“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.

At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.

Dolores Huerta at rosary, standing next to the body of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) at rest in the pine coffin in Delano, Calif., on Wednesday, April 28, 1993.

(Jose Galvez/Los Angeles Times)

As Chávez’ son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.

At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”

The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.

Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed — a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.

Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.

But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.

Those setbacks would not be forgotten.

Dolores Huerta in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

(Associated Press)

After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Soon she met Ross and Chávez and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.

Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.

In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.

Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured the images of a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez‘s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.

Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 13 children, counting the two fathered by César Chávez.

Among her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.

Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.

“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, a Central Valley activist.“She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

He and several other of the Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.

In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”

At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”

Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. Take me too, she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.

More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden, during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.

In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.

President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012; the one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.

“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”

Olvera, the family spokesman, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

WASHINGTON — An immigrant detainee died Saturday morning at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, marking the 61st such death under the Trump administration.

In an emailed statement, an unnamed spokesperson with CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based private prison company that operates the facility, confirmed the death. Per the spokesperson, a staff member at the Otay Mesa facility called in a medical emergency around 11:36 a.m. Saturday after finding an unresponsive person in their assigned living area.

Medical staff arrived quickly, began lifesaving measures and called for emergency medical services, the spokesperson said. EMS arrived and continued those efforts, but the person was pronounced dead at the facility.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of anyone in our care,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was immediately notified.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment. CoreCivic did not provide information about the person’s identity.

The death was first reported by Daylight San Diego.

San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, in a statement Tuesday, wrote that ICE and CoreCivic must quickly reach the person’s family, cooperate with a thorough investigation and share what they find with the public. Aguirre said she asked the county public health officer to determine what kind of follow-up is possible under a state law that allows local public health authorities to inspect ICE facilities.

“Somewhere, a family is waiting for a phone call, and my heart is with them,” she wrote.

This is the seventh person to die while in ICE custody in California under this administration, and the first to die at the Otay Mesa facility since 2023.

Deaths have increased as the Trump administration detained record numbers of people, with the population at one point ballooning past 70,000 nationwide.

The most recent death reported by ICE was that of Luis Sandoval, 48, a Salvadoran immigrant who died of apparent suicide Friday. Staff at the Folkston D. Ray ICE Processing Center in Georgia found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck, according to an ICE news release.

ICE policy is to notify the public and Congress within two business days of a detainee’s death. More extensive reports about each death, which were typically three pages, must be released within 90 days, though those have been reduced to a few paragraphs.

MATTHEW Perry’s five surviving Friends co-stars will not appear in a new Netflix documentary about the late actor, with the filmmaker behind the series confirming they were approached.

Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer are all absent from The One About Matthew Perry, which arrives on Netflix on October 27.

The three-part series drops one day before the third anniversary of the star’s death.

Director Mary Robertson has now addressed their absence, saying the cast remain deeply affected by the loss of their longtime friend and co-star.

“We know the Friends cast loves Matthew and is grieving Matthew,” Robertson told The New York Times.

“We did approach them about participation. They decided not to participate.”

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Robertson also told Page Six there were no hard feelings towards the stars, or Perry’s family members who declined to participate.

“I think everyone grieves in their own way. And I understand why someone might feel that this isn’t the moment to talk,” Robertson told the outlet.

A source also previously told Page Six that the stars did not want to publicly revisit their grief over Perry’s death, with Aniston said to have found the prospect particularly difficult.

“She isn’t going to sit down and start crying on camera. She doesn’t want to relive it and have it be so public,” the insider said.

Further reports suggested that feeling extended across the group rather than there being any objection to the documentary itself.

“It’s still too raw,” an insider told New Idea, which reported that Aniston and Kudrow were still struggling to discuss Perry without becoming emotional.

The source claimed LeBlanc and Schwimmer were also uncomfortable with appearing and said the stars wanted to honor Perry privately, on their own terms and in their own time.

However, the stars have all paid tribute to Matthew since his death and some have spoken about him in interviews.

Aniston told Vanity Fair of losing Perry, “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better. I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”

Cox also wrote in an Instagram tribute after his death, “I am so grateful for every moment I had with you Matty and I miss you every day,” adding, “He was funny and he was kind.”

While none of Perry’s five main co-stars appear in the documentary, his younger sister Mia Perry Bowick does take part and speaks about her brother on camera for the first time.

Bowick offers several intimate insights into Perry’s relationships, his addiction troubles and his time on Friends, including how much the storyline between his character Chandler Bing and Courteney Cox’s Monica Geller meant to him.

She says her brother had sometimes felt that Schwimmer and Aniston’s Ross and Rachel received more of the spotlight on the beloved show.

Bowick says Perry was therefore thrilled when Chandler’s relationship with Monica developed, giving his character a major emotional storyline of his own to get his teeth into.

“He was not just silly Chandler anymore,” Bowick says in the documentary.

She explains that the romance allowed Perry to move beyond Chandler’s familiar comedy and demonstrate a more tender, romantic and vulnerable side of his acting.

Bowick says the family also understood how much Perry himself longed for the kind of love and family life that Chandler eventually found with Monica.

But her most poignant recollection of the Friends cast comes as she describes seeing them together at Perry’s private funeral.

Bowick says in the documentary that it was a small affair attended by family and close friends and that the five Friends stars entered together.

“I hadn’t seen them in easily 20 years,” Bowick recalls.

She says Aniston was the first of the group to approach her, giving her a huge hug, before the other cast members embraced her.

Bowick then watched as they all walked towards Perry’s casket holding hands and stood around their former co-star crying together.

Bowick also recalls an unexpected moment of laughter during the funeral as Perry was being moved into a mausoleum.

She says she suddenly felt as though her brother was standing behind her shoulder and could imagine him making a joke.

The thought caused her to start laughing during one of the most painful moments of the service, and she says it was the first time since his death that she had strongly felt her brother’s presence.

Robertson told Page Six that Bowick’s account of the funeral was both “wrenching and harrowing”, but said the unexpected laughter was also true to Perry’s personality.

The documentary also features Perry’s close friends and former NBC executive Warren Littlefield who recalled being in the room when Perry auditioned for Chandler.

Perry was found unresponsive in the hot tub of his Los Angeles home on October 28, 2023. He was 54.

His death was ruled accidental, with the acute effects of ketamine listed as the primary cause and drowning among the contributing factors.