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A decade ago, “Weird Al” Yankovic launched his 12th concert tour, which covered 200 shows over two years. Somewhere along the line, the pop world’s foremost parodist was backstage putting on a fat suit “for literally the 1,000th time” when he was suddenly struck by the desire to “go out on stage and do a show like a regular musician.”

Soon after, he launched his “Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour,” playing small venues with no video screens, no costume changes, no props or choreography, and none of the song parodies that made him famous. The songs were still comedic — “Everything I write winds up a little warped,” he says — but were original tunes that were pastiches of, say, Frank Zappa or They Might Be Giants’ style. He enjoyed it so much he revived the concept a couple of years ago.

Yankovic, 65, has also not released a parody song for more than a decade, in part, he says, because there’s no longer a “monoculture where it’s more obvious what the hits are,” but also because he enjoys the challenges of those original pastiches, some of which take months for him to develop.

“I wanted to prove that I’m more than just the parody guy,” says Yankovic, who also co-wrote the 2022 TV film “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” The loopy biopic satire starred Daniel Radcliffe and earned Yankovic an Emmy nomination for his writing. (Recently, he also had self-parodying cameo in “Naked Gun.”)

“The smaller tours cleansed the palate for me and were fun for my band and the hardcore fans,” he says. “But now we’re back playing the big tent. We’ve ramping up the silliness.”

(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Times)

Now, having proved he was more than the parody guy, Yankovic has re-embraced the whole full-throated “Weird Al” parody thing — his “Bigger & Weirder” tour, which comes to the Kia Forum in Inglewood on Saturday, features plenty of video screens, lots of costume changes and props, and twice as many band members.

And, of course, it features parodies covering decades of pop music: The Knack (“My Bologna”), Michael Jackson (“Eat It”), Madonna (“Like a Surgeon”), Coolio (“Amish Paradise”), Nirvana (“Smells Like Nirvana”) and Robin Thicke (“Word Crimes”).

“The smaller tours cleansed the palate for me and were fun for my band and the hardcore fans,” he says. “But now we’re back playing the big tent. We’re ramping up the silliness.”

That includes reviving not just old songs but also old bits. “Some fans feel comfort in repetition, which is OK,” he says. While he’ll change up individual jokes, “we’re trying not to change too much what people came to see — if we don’t fulfill their expectations, they’re liable to walk away disappointed.”

(His fans are committed enough that some even parody his songs with their own rewrites. Yankovic is particularly impressed by Steve Goodie, who parodied his “Hardware Store” with “Dumbledore” and even has a one-man show called “AL! The Weird Tribute (and How Daniel Radcliffe Got Mixed Up in This Nonsense).” “It’s fun and gratifying and a little ‘Inception’-like,” Yankovic says, although he has yet to parody Goodie’s parody.)

And so band newcomer Probyn Gregory, a musician who worked with Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel and Eric Clapton, spends “Smells Like Nirvana” dressed like a janitor and mopping the stage as part of the performance. “He’s an amazing artist, but you can’t have a sense of shame and be part of this entourage,” Yankovic says.

For the most part, of course, Yankovic is putting Gregory and the other multi-instrumentalists he hired to more practical uses — three of them are women because he wanted three-part female harmonies, but between them they also can add percussion, guitar, saxophones and more. “I needed somebody that could play the trumpet and then someone to play clarinet for the polkas,” he says. “In the arenas, I hear our sound and think, ‘Wow, this is much, much bigger than it’s ever been.’”

It’s also more layered, with all those instruments enabling him to “stretch and do songs that were out of our reach as a five-piece.”

To show off his band, Yankovic drops the funny stuff at one point in each show, covering a classic song and playing it straight. In recent weeks, the group has played Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” George Harrison’s “What Is Life,” the Box Top’s “The Letter,” the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove,” and even Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”

“It’s a rotating slot and almost every night is something different,” he says. The fans get into it, he says, although when he talks to them about it, he sometimes finds their reactions “baffling.”

“People sometimes say, ‘Oh, you guys can really play. You can really do real music,’” he says. “What do you think we’ve been doing? Just because the words are funny, it’s not real music?”

Yankovic is a “pop culture sponge” and has always listened to various music genres, first for pleasure and then for work. “I just like to soak it in and regurgitate it in my own demented way,” he says. But he was also raised on Dr. Demento, and was heavily influenced by Spike Jones, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, and Monty Python. Those comedians taught him that craftsmanship matters even, or especially, when you’re being silly.

“I think that the craftsmanship is one of the reasons that the humor works so well and I think the best parody is material that emulates the original source as closely as possible,” he says. “It helps the joke if you’re sucked into thinking you’re listening to a particular pop song and then think, ‘Wait a minute, these aren’t the lyrics I’m used to.’”

For that to work, the craftsmanship in his writing and arranging must be matched by the musicianship in his band; he hopes his audience appreciates both sides of that coin.

He adds that he thinks he personally has improved over time. “I think I’m a better singer now than I was in the ’80s and I’m a better musician and a better arranger,” he says.

Even with the four newcomers, Yankovic relies heavily on his original band. “I’ve got one of the best bands in the world and they do every genre flawlessly, and that’s what helps make the whole act work,” he says. “The core band has been together for over 40 years and we’re kind of telepathic in the way we communicate now, so we’re a lot better than we were back in the day.”

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Trump had no legal right to impose sweeping tariffs but left in place for now his effort to build a protectionist wall around the American economy.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Trump wasn’t legally allowed to declare national emergencies and impose import taxes on almost every country on earth, a ruling that largely upheld a May decision by a specialized federal trade court in New York.

But the 7-4 court did not strike down the tariffs immediately, allowing his administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The president vowed to do just that. “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” Trump wrote on his social medial platform.

The ruling complicates Trump’s ambitions to upend decades of American trade policy completely on his own. Trump has alternative laws for imposing import taxes, but they would limit the speed and severity with which he could act. His tariffs — and the erratic way he’s rolled them out — have shaken global markets, alienated U.S. trading partners and allies and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth.

But he’s also used the levies to pressure the European Union, Japan and other countries into accepting one-sided trade deals and to bring tens of billions of dollars into the federal Treasury to help pay for the massive tax cuts he signed into law July 4.

“While existing trade deals may not automatically unravel, the administration could lose a pillar of its negotiating strategy, which may embolden foreign governments to resist future demands, delay implementation of prior commitments, or even seek to renegotiate terms,” Ashley Akers, senior counsel at the Holland & Knight law firm and a former Justice Department trial lawyer, said before the appeals court decision.

The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it’s collected, delivering a financial blow to the U.S. Treasury.

“It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!” Trump said in a previous post on Truth Social.

Revenue from tariffs totaled $142 billion by July, more than double what it was at the same point the year before. Indeed, the Justice Department warned in a legal filing this month that revoking the tariffs could mean “financial ruin” for the United States.

The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA):

— The sweeping tariffs he announced April 2 — “Liberation Day,’’ he called it — when he imposed “reciprocal’’ tariffs of up to 50% on countries with which the United States runs trade deficits and a “baseline’’ 10% tariff on just about everyone else. The national emergency underlying the tariffs, Trump said, was the long-running gap between what the U.S. sells and what it buys from the rest of the world. The president started to levy modified the tariff rates in August, but goods from countries with which the U.S. runs a surplus also face the taxes.

— The “trafficking tariffs’’ he announced Feb. 1 on imports from Canada, China and Mexico. These were designed to get those countries to do more to stop what he declared a national emergency: the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across their borders into the United States.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over decades, lawmakers have ceded authorities to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.

But Trump’s assertion that IEEPA essentially gives him unlimited power to tax imports quickly drew legal challenges — at least seven cases. No president had ever used the law to justify tariffs, though IEEPA had been used frequently to impose export restrictions and other sanctions on U.S. adversaries such as Iran and North Korea.

The plaintiffs argued that the emergency power law does not authorize the use of tariffs.

They also noted that the trade deficit hardly meets the definition of an “unusual and extraordinary’’ threat that would justify declaring an emergency under the law. The United States, after all, has run trade deficits — in which it buys more from foreign countries than it sells them — for 49 straight years and in good times and bad.

The Trump administration argued that courts approved President Richard Nixon’s emergency use of tariffs in a 1971 economic crisis that arose from the chaos that followed his decision to end a policy linking the U.S. dollar to the price of gold. The Nixon administration successfully cited its authority under the 1917 Trading With Enemy Act, which preceded and supplied some of the legal language used in IEEPA.

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York rejected the argument, ruling that Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the President’’ under the emergency powers law. In reaching its decision, the trade court combined two challenges — one by five businesses and one by 12 U.S. states — into a single case.

In the case of the drug trafficking and immigration tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the trade court ruled that the levies did not meet IEEPA’s requirement that they “deal with’’ the problem they were supposed to address.

The court challenge does not cover other Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos that the president imposed after Commerce Department investigations concluded that those imports were threats to U.S. national security.

Nor does it include tariffs that Trump imposed on China in his first term — and President Joe Biden kept — after a government investigation concluded that the Chinese used unfair practices to give their own technology firms an edge over rivals from the United States and other Western countries.

Trump could potentially cite alternative authorities to impose import taxes, though they are more limited. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, for instance, allows the president to tax imports from countries with which the U.S. runs big trade deficits at 15% for 150 days.

Likewise, Section 301 of the same 1974 law allows the president to tax imports from countries found to have engaged in unfair trade practices after an investigation by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Trump used Section 301 authority to launch his first-term trade war with China.

Wiseman and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mark Sherman and Josh Boak contributed to this story.

The tech-laden Nasdaq Composite index clocked impressive gains in the past decade, rising 374% during this period and outpacing the S&P 500 index’s jump of 240%. The disruptive nature of technology companies is a key reason why the Nasdaq has delivered above-average returns. Tech companies can grow at faster rates thanks to the innovation taking place in this sector. New products, services, and features can witness rapid adoption by customers, organizations, and governments, leading to robust revenue and earnings growth for tech stocks.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM 1.26%), popularly known as TSMC, enables innovation and disruption with its advanced chip manufacturing processes. Not surprisingly, TSMC stock has shot up a remarkable 12.5x in the past decade, significantly outpacing the Nasdaq Composite index’s jump.

Let’s look at the reasons why it has real potential to keep outperforming the Nasdaq Composite in the next 10 years.

Image source: Getty Images.

TSMC’s growth is likely to accelerate in the coming decade

TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry. According to Counterpoint Research, it controlled 35% of the global Foundry 2.0 market in the first quarter of 2025, growing its share by almost six percentage points from the year-ago period.

The Foundry 1.0 market is defined by pure chip manufacturing, while Foundry 2.0 includes ancillary services such as advanced packaging, assembly and testing, and photomasking. TSMC, which was a pure-play chip manufacturer earlier, has been expanding its expertise to offer Foundry 2.0 solutions to its customer base.

This explains why the company keeps gaining a bigger share of this market. TSMC established a massive lead over its rivals in the Foundry 2.0 space, with second-placed Intel controlling just over 6% of this market in the first quarter. Another thing worth noting is that the Foundry 2.0 market saw a 13% year-over-year increase in revenue in Q1 2025 to $72 billion, driven by the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chips.

TSMC’s advanced chip manufacturing processes are tapped by several fabless chip designers such as AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Sony, Apple, Qualcomm, and others, who don’t have manufacturing facilities of their own. These companies have been tapping TSMC’s 3nm (nanometer) and 5nm process nodes to fabricate AI chips that go into multiple applications ranging from data centers to consumer electronics devices to vehicles.

Specifically, 60% of TSMC’s revenue came from the high-performance computing (HPC) segment in the previous quarter, while smartphones accounted for 27%. The Internet of Things (IoT) and the automotive segment aren’t moving the needle in a significant way for the company right now. However, all these end markets are expected to clock healthy growth over the next decade, paving the way for secular growth at TSMC.

Deloitte, for instance, points out that the growth of AI is expected to lead to a 30x increase in data center power demand by 2035. This rapid surge will be driven by the construction of more data centers needed to tackle AI workloads. According to one estimate, AI-focused data center spending is expected to jump by almost 4x by 2030, which should allow TSMC to sell more of its advanced chips.

Meanwhile, the adoption of AI in other areas, such as robotics and the automotive industry, can create more lucrative growth opportunities for TSMC. In all, the AI chip market expects to clock an annual growth rate of close to 35% through 2035. TSMC’s solid share of the foundry market puts it in a solid position to make the most of this massive growth opportunity.

Product development moves should help it maintain its solid position

TSMC’s growth picked up impressively in the past couple of years on account of the AI boom.

Data by YCharts.

The company expects 30% revenue growth this year. It can sustain such impressive growth levels in the future as well, since it is focused on further advancing its manufacturing processes, which should enable it to maintain its healthy lead in this market. For example, TSMC is already constructing 2nm and A16 (1.6nm) chip fabrication facilities.

These new processes are expected to deliver significant performance and efficiency gains over the company’s current 3nm chip node. The 2nm process, for instance, is expected to deliver a 10% to 15% increase in performance while reducing power consumption by 20% to 30%. The A16 process is also expected to replicate such gains when compared to the 2nm process.

The improved performance of TSMC’s new chips should come in handy while tackling AI workloads in the cloud and in edge devices such as smartphones and personal computers. So, TSMC seems set to retain its lead in the foundry market in the future. As such, it is a no-brainer buy right now at 25 times earnings since its healthy financial performance can help this AI stock outpace the Nasdaq Composite’s gains over the next 10 years.

TAMZIN Outhwaite appeared to extend an olive branch to ex-husband Tom Ellis a decade after their split.

The former couple’s seven-year marriage ended in 2014 after Tom allegedly confessed to cheating with American actress Emilie de Ravin in 2013.

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Over the years, actress Tamzin, 54, has taken aim at her actor ex, who is best known for roles in Miranda and Lucifer, for “walking out” on her and their two children.

However, she appears at peace with their difficult history now, re-sharing pictures Tom, 46, uploaded to Instagram from the premiere of Netflix‘s The Thursday Night Murder Club.

They featured a suited Tom linking arms with daughter Marnie, 12, who stood beside brother Flo, 17.

Tamzin added: “My heart is bursting #suchaproudmama [love heart emoji].”

The positive post was very different in tone from a tweet she posted in 2023.

It read: “Ten years since the father of my kids walked out on us for the final time. I still meet new people on jobs who reveal more infidelities and lies he committed. 

“But thankfully my heart and soul are clear and clean and I could not be happier right now.”

After removing the post, the former EastEnders star explained: “Thank you all for your messages re my now deleted tweet.I was marking the 10 year anniversary with pride,a feeling of triumph & genuine gratitude.

“I understand it has triggered some people. For anyone struggling, the most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself.”

Last year Tamzin split from boyfriend of six years Tom Child. That relationship ended on much more civil terms, and she still refers to him as her “best friend”.

She credited him with being supportive throughout her eldest child’s transition to identifying as a boy.

Tamzin said: “[He] has been around for the whole of like Flo’s transitioning period, for the whole of Marnie becoming a girl that was discovering all sorts of stuff and boys, and so he is still a member of the family. We’ve been not together for over a year. 

“The kids often say to him ‘When you meet someone, or even if you have, how are you going to explain this situation to your girlfriends?'”

She’s in no rush to find a new man and hasn’t found dating apps to be fruitful.

Tamzin told The Sun last month: “I’m single, I’ve tried the dating apps. I’m on one now but I keep forgetting to check it.

“I just can’t imagine actually going on the date and going back to the small talk. It will happen one day but I’m certainly not waiting for it.

“I’ve been single for over a year now and I’m loving it too much.

“I owe it to myself to be single, because I haven’t been single for this long, ever. I have always been in relationships. I actually like being on my own, it’s really nice.”

Tamzin became a household name in 1998 when she joined the cast of the BBC’s EastEnders as Mel Owen, and went on to win several Sexiest Female awards as well as Best Actress.

She has also starred in army series Red Cap, crime drama New Tricks and played Rebecca Mitchell in drama Hotel Babylon.

Recently she played a recovering drug addict in ITV’s police series The Tower, and last year played sex-loving Sylvie in Channel 5’s six-part drama The Wives.

Tamzin says that after reading the script for The Wives, she overhauled her health and figure ready for the camera.

She said: “I lost weight before we started filming The Wives last February.

“I read that I was in a bikini a lot and a swimsuit. So, between Christmas and the New Year, I didn’t drink any alcohol and I exercised every day. I didn’t ever weigh myself, but I just knew I could fit into things that I didn’t used to.

“I went down a dress size. It took me six weeks. Now it’s just keeping it off.”

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The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is the biggest opportunity in technology since the internet and PC adoption in the 1990s. Top tech companies continue to report surging demand across cloud services, software, and semiconductors.

Investors who choose wisely among the top companies benefiting from AI adoption could make a fortune over the next decade. Here are two top AI stocks to help you profit from this opportunity.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. Applied Digital

There is massive spending pouring into data center infrastructure for AI. But as AI advances, it creates potential bottlenecks in power requirements and data center capacity. This is a huge opportunity for Applied Digital (APLD 1.78%) — a small but fast-growing data center builder with a market cap of $3.7 billion.

The Dallas-based data center operator has delivered tremendous growth over the past few years. While quarterly revenue can be lumpy due to the timing of revenue recognition from new projects, revenue has grown from $55 million in fiscal 2023 to $215 million in fiscal 2025 (which ended in June), and it grew 41% year over year in the most recent quarter.

The stock is volatile, which is evident in the company’s large operating losses. This results from high upfront costs to build new data centers. In the most recent quarter, Applied Digital reported a loss of $26 million. But this is not concerning because demand is robust for more data center power, and Applied Digital stands ready to supply it.

Goldman Sachs has found that data centers currently have about 55 gigawatts of power capacity, with 14% being used for AI. By 2027, the global power used by data centers will increase to 84 gigawatts, with AI’s percentage increasing to 27%.

Applied Digital recently signed a 15-year lease agreement with AI hyperscaler CoreWeave to deliver 250 megawatts of power for CoreWeave’s Ellendale, North Dakota, data center campus. CoreWeave just recently extended this agreement to 400 megawatts. For Applied Digital, this will help generate approximately $7 billion in contracted revenue over the lease term, which is a big deal for the company’s value.

AI chip leader Nvidia held a $77 million stake in Applied Digital stock in the second quarter. This is a huge vote of confidence by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Applied Digital’s strategy to capitalize on this opportunity. It’s still early in this market. Investors will have to endure volatility in the share price, but patiently holding over the next 10 years could have a big payoff.

2. Microsoft

Microsoft (MSFT 0.56%) is a highly profitable business that makes it a great complement to a volatile stock like Applied Digital. The software giant is on pace to eventually take the No. 1 market-share position in the cloud-computing market. It has a large offering of software products to capitalize on the growing demand for AI.

A big advantage of Microsoft is that many businesses and individuals are familiar with its software. Windows, Office, and Teams are software products widely used by millions, if not hundreds of millions of people. This puts Microsoft in a lucrative position to benefit from growing adoption of AI, as it rolls out advanced features in the form of subscriptions through Copilot.

On the enterprise side, Microsoft Azure is experiencing strong demand. Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 39% year over year in the June-ending quarter. This is double the growth that competitor Amazon Web Services is reporting, positioning Microsoft Azure to take the lead in the not-too-distant future.

Azure’s recent growth is an acceleration from the 33% growth rate reported in the previous quarter, signaling that demand for AI remains red hot. But this growth shouldn’t come as a surprise, since most of the world’s data is still stuck in on-premise servers. The arrival of AI is clearly incentivizing more businesses to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of cutting-edge tools that can improve their efficiency, and this will continue to benefit Microsoft.

But Microsoft isn’t stopping there. Quantum computing is the next growth opportunity for cloud computing. Microsoft is partnering with Atom Computing on a quantum computer built on Azure Elements, which will be shipping to customers by the end of 2025. Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled its Majorana 1 quantum chip to solve the most complex computing problems, positioning it to be a top player in this burgeoning market.

The ability for Microsoft to benefit from AI demand while generating growing free cash flow makes it a solid investment. It generated $71 billion in free cash flow on $281 billion of revenue over the last year, which is driving the stock higher.

ONE in three Brits expect to become an unpaid carer – within the next decade on average – but almost half admit they wouldn’t know where to turn for support when the time comes.

A poll, of 2,000 adults, found 62 per cent worry they will have to provide increasing levels of care for elderly parents, or loved ones, as their health declines.

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Yet 46 per cent remain unaware of the services available for those who can no longer leave their homes.

And only 39 per cent are confident that they’ll know where to ask for help.

The research was commissioned by Specsavers Home Visits, as part of its Most Valuable Portrait campaign, which celebrates the unseen role of unpaid carers through a portrait by acclaimed artist Colin Davidson.

Featuring carer Jaycee Le Bouche, the portrait aims to spotlight carers’ selflessness and dedication, and has been symbolically ‘valued’ at £184 billion – the same amount as the invisible care system in the UK – by auction house Roseberys.

Chris Smith, director of Specsavers Home Visits, said: “When a loved one becomes ill, it can turn your life on its head – both practically and emotionally.

“Many people become carers overnight, with no training and little idea where to turn, which can be overwhelming, especially while juggling work and a personal life in tandem.”

The study also revealed two thirds (67 per cent) feel unpaid carers do not receive the recognition or support they deserve – even though their contribution is worth an estimated £184 billion a year to the UK economy, according to Carers UK.

Despite this significant number, almost half (47 per cent) underestimate the contribution of unpaid carers by billions.

When asked what they associated most with being an unpaid carer, 68 per cent pointed to cooking, cleaning and other household tasks.

A further 67 per cent said helping with washing, dressing and mobility is a key responsibility, while 62 per cent believe managing medical appointments – including eye tests and hearing checks – plays a major part.

The research also revealed two in three regularly think about whether they may one day need care themselves.

And 43 per cent said a major life event would be the trigger to begin such conversations with loved ones.

A third (34 per cent) would feel more comfortable discussing future care if they knew what options were available, according to the survey, conducted via OnePoll.

While 29 per cent would be more open if they had a clearer understanding of the financial impact of not planning ahead.

Chris Smith added: “Unpaid carers shouldn’t have to do it alone.

“That’s why we’re doing our bit through our Home Visits service – delivering essential eye and ear care at home to help ease the load and support both carers and those they look after.”

José Antonio Rodríguez held a bouquet of flowers in his trembling hands.

It had been nearly a quarter of a century since he had left his family behind in Mexico to seek work in California. In all those years, he hadn’t seen his parents once.

They kept in touch as best they could, but letters took months to cross the border, and his father never was one for phone calls. Visits were impossible: José was undocumented, and his parents lacked visas to come to the U.S.

Now, after years of separation, they were about to be reunited. And José’s stomach was in knots.

He had been a young man of 20 when he left home, skinny and full of ambition. Now he was 44, thicker around the middle, his hair thinning at the temples.

Would his parents recognize him? Would he recognize them? What would they think of his life?

José had spent weeks preparing for this moment, cleaning his trailer in the Inland Empire from top to bottom and clearing the weeds from his yard. He bought new pillows to set on his bed, which he would give to his parents, taking the couch.

Finally, the moment was almost here.

Gerardo Villarreal Salazar, 70, left, is reunited with his grandson Alejandro Rojas, 17.

Leobardo Arellano, 39, left, and his father, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, are reunited after 24 years.

Officials in Mexico’s Zacatecas state had helped his mother and father apply for documents that allow Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. for temporary visits as part of a novel program that brings elderly parents of undocumented workers to the United States. Many others had their visa applications rejected, but theirs were approved.

They had packed their suitcases to the brim with local sweets and traveled 24 hours by bus along with four other parents of U.S. immigrants. Any minute now, they would be pulling up at the East Los Angeles event hall where José waited along with other immigrants who hadn’t seen their families in decades.

José, who wore a gray polo shirt and new jeans, thought about all the time that had passed. The lonely nights during Christmas season, when he longed for the taste of his mother’s cooking. All the times he could have used his father’s advice.

His plan had been to stay in the U.S. a few years, save up some money and return home to begin his life.

But life doesn’t wait. Before he knew it, decades had passed and José had built community and a career in carpentry in California.

Juan Mascorro sings for the reunited families.

He sent tens of thousands of dollars to Mexico: to fund improvements on his parents’ house, to buy machines for the family butcher shop. He sent his contractor brother money to build a two-bedroom house where José hopes to retire one day.

His mother, who likes talking on the phone, kept him informed on all the doings in town. The construction of a new bridge. The marriages, births, deaths and divorces. The creep of violence as drug cartels brought their wars to Zacatecas.

And then one day, a near-tragedy. José’s father, jovial, strong, always cracking jokes, landed in the hospital with a heart that doctors said was failing. He languished there six months on the brink of death.

But he lived. And when he got out, he declared that he wanted to see his eldest son.

A framed artwork depicting the states of California and Zacatecas is a gift for families being reunited.

A full third of people born in Zacatecas live in the U.S. Migration is so common, the state has an agency tasked with attending to the needs of Zacatecanos living abroad. It has been helping elderly Mexicans get visas to visit family north of the border for years.

The state tried to get some 25 people visas this year. But the United States, now led by a president who has vilified immigrants, approved only six.

José had a childhood friend, Horacio Zapata, who also migrated to the U.S. and who hasn’t seen his father in 30 years. Horacio’s father also applied for a visa, but he didn’t make the cut.

Horacio was crestfallen. A few years back, his mother died in Mexico. He had spent his life working to help get her out of poverty, and then never had a chance to say goodbye. He often thought about what he would give to share one last hug with her. Everything. He would give everything.

He and his wife had come with José to offer moral support. He put his arm around his friend, whose voice shook with nerves.

Horacio Zapata, 48, hoped his father would be able to come to Los Angeles through the reunion program, but his visa request was denied.

East L.A. was normally bustling, filled with vendors hawking fruit, flowers and tacos. But on this hot August afternoon, as a car pulled up outside the event hall to deposit José’s parents and the other elderly travelers, the streets were eerily quiet.

Since federal agents had descended on California, apprehending gardeners, day laborers and car wash workers en masse, residents in immigrant-heavy pockets like this one had mostly stayed inside.

The thought crossed José’s mind: What if immigration agents raided the reunion event? But there was no way he was going to miss it.

Suddenly, the director of the Federation of Zacatecas Hometown Assns. of Southern California, which was hosting the reunion, asked José to rise. Slowly, his parents walked in.

Of course they recognized one another. His first thought: How small they both seemed.

José Antonio Rodríguez and his mother, Juana Contreras Sánchez, wipe tears from their eyes after being reunited.

José gathered his mother in an embrace. He handed her the flowers. And then he gripped his father tightly.

This is a miracle, his father whispered. He’d asked the Virgin for this.

His father, whose heart condition persists, was fatigued from the long journey. They all took seats. His father put his head down on the table and sobbed. José stared at the ground, sniffling, pulling up his shirt to wipe away tears.

A mariachi singer performed a few songs, too loudly. Plates of food appeared. José and his parents picked at it, mostly in silence.

At the next table, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, addressed his middle-aged son as muchachito — little boy.

In the coming days, José and his parents would relax into one another’s company, go shopping, attend church. Most evenings, they would stay up past midnight talking.

José Antonio Rodríguez holds a bouquet of flowers for his mother and father.

Eventually, the parents would head back to Zacatecas because of the limit on their visas.

But for now, they were together, and eager to see José’s home. He took them by the arms as he guided them out into the California sun.

Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.

In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.

Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)

At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.

“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”

For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.

Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.

“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”

L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford plays the cornet while rehearsing his original composition in his Altadena home in 2019.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”

But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.

“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”

The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.

With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.

American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.

(David Redfern / Redferns)

He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.

“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”

He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.

Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”

Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.

(Michael Rowe / For The Times)

He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.

Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.

“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”

Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.

“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”

MIAMI — For decades, its powerful lighthouse illuminated Miami’s Biscayne Bay, and during the height of the Cold War, what was known as the Freedom Tower stood as a beacon of hope for hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing communist rule.

The 14-story Spanish Revival skyscraper was where, from 1962 to 1974, the U.S. State Department welcomed Cuban refugees with medical services, English classes, and comfort kits containing essentials and something wholly exotic to the new arrivals: peanut butter.

After decades of neglect, what was once Miami’s tallest building is getting a well-deserved facelift. Next month, it will reopen as a museum honoring the history of Cuban exiles with immersive, state-of-the-art exhibits that explore the meaning of migration, freedom and homeland.

Ellis Island of the South

The reopening of what’s dubbed the Ellis Island of the South comes at a sensitive moment. Cuban Americans — who dominate politics in Miami — voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the last presidential election. But the president’s crackdown on migrants — including Cubans — is increasingly viewed as a betrayal and has left many second-guessing that support. Not surprisingly, recent protests against Trump have gathered outside the tower.

The organizers of the museum, while tiptoeing around the present-day politics, are nonetheless unapologetic in their embrace of the American dream. In Miami, a thriving crossroads where 70% of residents speak Spanish as their first language and more than half are foreign-born, compassion for migrants runs deep.

“It’s cyclical,” said Rene Ramos, who as head archivist of Miami Dade College participated in the $65 million renovation led by the school. “This country has had moments where it clearly saw the value of immigrants and other moments when it did not. What we’re doing here is reminding people what immigrants can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity.”

The iconic building opened in 1925 as the headquarters of the once-acclaimed Miami Daily News, which shuttered decades ago. It was designed in the style of a Moorish bell tower from Seville, Spain, by the New York architectural firm Schultze & Weaver, which was behind some of the most glamorous hotels, theaters and office towers of the era.

It was renamed the Freedom Tower when President John F. Kennedy launched the Cuban Refugee Assistance Program to resettle the streams of middle-class individuals and families fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution. It’s estimated that nearly 400,000 Cubans relied on services provided at the tower by the U.S. government in coordination with the then-fledgling Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami. The total cost of the refugee assistance ran over $730 million by 1971 — almost $6 billion in today’s dollars — a U.S. government report from that year found.

A safe place for refugees

Known to the Spanish-speaking migrants as “El Refugio,” or “The Refuge,” it was a safe place to get vaccines, fill out paperwork and receive financial assistance of around $120 per month. In the Grand Hall, with its giant windows and Corinthian columns, the Pizarra de la Suerte — the Bulletin Board of Good Luck — carried job notices to help the Cubans adjust to their new life, according to a replica of the hall in the museum.

At the time, metropolitan Miami was a tropical tourist town, with fewer than 1 million inhabitants. Most émigrés fanned out across the United States.

“They weren’t staying in Miami because they didn’t want warmth and sunshine. There were no jobs,” said Madeline Pumariega, the president of Miami Dade College, whose own Cuban parents relocated to Amarillo, Texas, after arriving here.

But over time, the exiles would trudge back from the cold and snow to put their unmistakable Cuban stamp on what would become one of America’s most vibrant cultural and economic hubs.

Jorge Malagón, who teaches history at Miami Dade College, was just 5 when he arrived. But he still wells up recalling the hardship of his departure — when Cuban customs officials ripped open his teddy bear looking for contraband jewelry — and arriving in Miami on a “Freedom Flight” paid for by the U.S. government and being immediately shuttled in a school bus from the tarmac to the Freedom Tower.

“The memories never go away,” said Malagón, who recalls being welcomed with a bar of unfamiliar peanut butter and a block of government cheese. “To this day, a grilled cheese sandwich with cheap, Velveeta processed cheese is still comfort food to me.”

The Freedom Tower, a national historic landmark, was long ago overtaken by Miami’s fast-growing steel and glass skyline. Abandoned for years, it was rescued in 1997 by Cuban American businessman Jorge Mas Canosa, a top exile opponent of Castro. He later sold it to a prominent Cuban American family and it was then donated to Miami Dade College.

Even in a dilapidated state, the tower remained a mecca of the Cuban diaspora. In 2003, tens of thousands of salsa fans gathered here to show their respects to Cuban-born singer Celia Cruz. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents migrated from Cuba, used it as the backdrop to announce his bid for the U.S. presidency in 2015.

The current restoration was funded by $25 million investment from the state of Florida, with additional funding from Miami Dade College, private donors and federal government grants.

Galleries designed by the same firm behind New York City’s National September 11 Memorial & Museum provide a gripping account of the Cuban American journey to freedom. They include exhibits dedicated to Victims of Communism, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that the CIA organized against Castro, and the 14,000 unaccompanied minors sent by their parents as part of the U.S.-led Operation Peter Pan.

Giant media screens project scenes of protest and acts of courage by newer residents of the Magic City fleeing persecution in Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua. There’s also a makeshift recording studio for those who passed through the Freedom Tower to add their testimony to an archive of over 300 oral history interviews with exiles, including prominent voices like singer Gloria Estefan.

Emerging from the dark galleries of often traumatic stories of dislocation and exile, the museum’s final stop is a gallery flooded with all the sun, salsa music and pastel hues that make modern-day Miami so beloved.

“Miami and the world would not be what it is today without them,” said Pumariega. “That’s important and so is the contributions that immigrants play in our country, and I think will continue to play beyond this moment.”

Goodman writes for the Associated Press.

MIAMI — When Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno visits Colombia this week as part of a three-nation tour of Latin America, it will be something of a homecoming.

The Ohio senator, who defeated an incumbent last year with the help of Donald Trump’s endorsement and the highest political ad spending in U.S. Senate race history, was born in Bogota and has brothers who are heavyweights in politics and business there.

Moreno has emerged as an interlocutor for conservatives in Latin America seeking to connect with the Trump administration.

In an interview with the Associated Press ahead of the trip, he expressed deep concern about Colombia’s direction under left-wing President Gustavo Petro and suggested that U.S. sanctions, higher tariffs or other retaliatory action might be needed to steer it straight.

The recent criminal conviction of former President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative icon, was an attempt to “silence” the man who saved Colombia from guerrilla violence, Moreno said. Meanwhile, record cocaine production has left the United States less secure — and Colombia vulnerable to being decertified by the White House for failing to cooperate in the war on drugs.

“The purpose of the trip is to understand all the dynamics before any decision is made,” said Moreno, who will meet with both Petro and Uribe, as well as business leaders and local officials. “But there’s nothing that’s taken off the table at this point and there’s nothing that’s directly being contemplated.”

Elected with Trump’s support

Moreno, a luxury car dealer from Cleveland, defeated incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown last year and became Ohio’s senior senator on practically his first day in office after his close friend JD Vance resigned the Senate to become vice president.

In Congress, Moreno has mimicked Trump’s rhetoric to attack top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer as a “miserable old man out of a Dickens novel,” called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and threatened to subpoena California officials over their response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.

On Latin America, he’s been similarly outspoken, slamming Petro on social media as a “socialist dictator” and accusing Mexico of being on the path to becoming a “narco state.”

Such comments barely register in blue-collar Ohio, but they’ve garnered attention in Latin America. That despite the fact Moreno hasn’t lived in the region for decades, speaks Spanish with a U.S. accent and doesn’t sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He’s somebody to watch,” said Michael Shifter, the former president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “He’s one of the most loyal Trump supporters in the senate and given his background in Latin America he could be influential on policy.”

Moreno, 58, starts his first congressional delegation to Latin America on Monday for two days of meetings in Mexico City with officials including President Claudia Sheinbaum. He’ll be accompanied by Terrance Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who is making his first overseas trip since being confirmed by the Senate last month to head the premier federal narcotics agency.

Seeking cooperation with Mexico on fentanyl

Moreno, in the pre-trip interview, said that Sheinbaum has done more to combat the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. than her predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who he described as a “total disaster.” But he said more cooperation is needed, and he’d like to see Mexico allow the DEA to participate in judicial wiretaps like it has for decades in Colombia and allow it to bring back a plane used in bilateral investigations that López Obrador grounded.

“The corruption becomes so pervasive, that if it’s left unchecked, it’s kind of like treating cancer,” said Moreno. “Mexico has to just come to the realization that it does not have the resources to completely wipe out the drug cartels. And it’s only going to be by asking the U.S. for help that we can actually accomplish that.”

Plans to tour the Panama Canal

From Mexico, Moreno heads to Panama, where he’ll tour the Panama Canal with Trump’s new ambassador to the country, Kevin Marino Cabrera.

In March, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate struck a deal that would’ve handed control of two ports on either end of the U.S.-built canal to American investment firm BlackRock Inc. The deal was heralded by Trump, who had threatened to take back the canal to curb Chinese influence.

However, the deal has since drawn scrutiny from antitrust authorities in Beijing and last month the seller said it was seeking to add a strategic partner from mainland China — reportedly state-owned shipping company Cosco — to the deal.

“Cosco you might as well say is the actual communist party,” said Moreno. “There’s no scenario in which Cosco can be part of the Panamanian ports.”

‘We want Colombia to be strong’

On the final leg of the tour in Colombia, Moreno will be joined by another Colombian American senator: Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona. In contrast to Moreno, who was born into privilege and counts among his siblings a former ambassador to the U.S., Gallego and his three sisters were raised by an immigrant single mother on a secretary’s paycheck.

Despite their different upbringings, the two have made common cause in seeking to uphold the tradition of bilateral U.S. support for Colombia, for decades Washington’s staunchest ally in the region. It’s a task made harder by deepening polarization in both countries.

The recent sentencing of Uribe to 12 years of house arrest in a long-running witness tampering case has jolted the nation’s politics with nine months to go before decisive presidential elections. The former president is barred from running but remains a powerful leader, and Moreno said his absence from the campaign trail could alter the playing field.

He also worries that surging cocaine production could once again lead to a “narcotization” of a bilateral relationship that should be about trade, investment and mutual prosperity.

“We want Colombia to be strong, we want Colombia to be healthy, we want Colombia to be prosperous and secure, and I think the people of Colombia want the exact same thing,” he added. “So, the question is, how do we get there?”

Goodman and Smyth write for the Associated Press. Smyth reported from Columbus, Ohio.

When the fires this year upended Los Angeles and put into question what it even means to return to normal, I was reminded of a chapter in “California Against the Sea” that had expanded my own understanding of what it takes to truly adapt our built environment — and to reimagine the places that we have come to love and call home.

This chapter, which opens with a radical shoreline reconfiguration just north of San Francisco, came not without controversy, but it provided a glimpse into what compromise might need to look like for so many communities struggling to keep up with climate change. Rather than hold the line with increasing futility, here was a humbling example of what can be possible when we transcend the throes of politics — and when we choose to set aside our differences and think beyond just reacting to the same disasters time and time again.

Since the book was published in 2023, the bridge described in the following excerpt has been completed, and the creek is finally free. Accommodating nature in this way called for some tough and unfamiliar changes, but go out to the beach today, and you can see the marsh starting to recover and the entire ecosystem gently resetting with the rhythms of the sea.

So much of the climate debate is still framed around what it is that we have to give up, but does it have to be this way? Rather than confront these decisions as though it’s our doom, can we embrace change and reconsider each effort to adapt as an opportunity — an opportunity to come together and build more bridges to the future?

Excerpted from “California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline” by Rosanna Xia. Reprinted with permission from Heyday Books, © 2023.

A few winding turns past Bodega Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco, relentless waves pound against a stretch of coastline in dire need of re-imagining. Gleason Beach, once reminiscent of a northern version of Malibu, is now mostly just a beach in name. Sand emerges only during the lowest of tides. Bits of concrete and rebar are all that remain of 11 clifftop homes that once faced the sea. A graveyard of seawalls, smashed into pieces, litters the shore. Here along the foggy bluffs of the Sonoma coast, the edge of the continent feels more like the edge of the world — a window into the future if California does not change course.

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

These wave-cut cliffs, a brittle mélange of ancient claystone and shale, have been eroding on average about a foot a year, exacerbated since the 1980s by a hardened shoreline, intensifying El Niños and, now, sea level rise. With the beach underwater, the seawalls destroyed and so many homes surrendered, the pressure is now on Highway 1 to hold the line between land and sea. Year after year, residents have watched the waves carve away at the two-lane road — their only way to get to work, their only way to evacuate, their only way to reach all the rocky coves, beaches and seaside campgrounds that make this coast a marvel.

Broken concrete is all that’s left of a number of clifftop homes at Gleason Beach on the Sonoma Coast, pictured here in 2019.

(Carolyn Cole/ Los Angeles Times)

So, with every storm and every knock from the ocean, officials have scrambled to save the highway, pouring millions of tax dollars into a vicious cycle of sudden collapses and emergency repairs. From 2004 to 2018 alone, state transportation officials spent about $10 million in emergency defenses and failed repairs. In 2019, almost half a mile had to be reduced to one lane.

This lifeline for the region now hangs inches from the edge. The once spectacular coastline had seemingly morphed overnight — an apocalyptic transformation, decades in the making, seen with stark clarity now that orange caution tape and makeshift traffic lights mark what’s left of the shore.

“This is what unmanaged retreat looks like, and it is quite frankly a hot mess of septic systems, old house parts and armoring that have fallen into the intertidal zone with no real mechanism for cleaning it up,” Sonoma County supervisor Lynda Hopkins declared. “If we don’t start planning ahead and taking proactive measures, Mother Nature will make the decisions for us.”

With the realities of climate change looming ever closer, California transportation officials agreed it was time to try something different: make peace with the sea and move the crumbling highway more than 350 feet inland. They knew nailing down the details would be fraught, but, if done right, this would be the first radical effort by the state to plan for a reimagined coast — a coast that could support California into the next century. It was the rare managed retreat proposal that intentionally sought to both raise and relocate critical infrastructure far enough from the shore to make room for the next 100 years of rising water.

Compromise wasn’t easy. Officials studied more than 20 alternatives that tried to balance safety codes, traffic needs, fragile habitats, public access to the coast and other competing requirements that were tricky to meet given the topography. There were also all the nearby property owners who needed persuading, not to mention a skeptical, conservation-minded community that was averse to saving a human-altered shoreline with more human alterations. They ran into every argument and counterargument that have tugged, pulled and paralyzed other communities.

At its heart this project, like so many attempts along the California coast, called for a reckoning over what was worth saving — and what was worth sacrificing — and whether it was possible to redesign a treasured landscape so that it survives into the future.

Book cover for “California Against the Sea” by Rosanna Xia

(Heyday Books)

“It seems daunting; it’s a lot of change to cope with, but it’s also an opportunity for communities to think about, ‘What are the coastal resources we want to have access to fifty, one hundred years from now?’” said Tami Grove, who oversees transportation projects for the California Coastal Commission and spent years reconciling all the emotional meetings, the disagreements, the many stops and stalls and hand-wringing compromises. “It gets lost, sometimes, when people are worried about everything that we’re going to lose to sea level rise — but there are things that we’re going to be able to choose and enhance and design into the future if we start planning now.”

In what many described as a major coup in government bureaucracy, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the coastal commission and county leaders set aside their differences to come up with a new solution together. By November 2020, they had hammered out a plan to relocate almost one mile of the highway — most notably with a new 850-foot-long bridge spanning Scotty Creek, a degraded stream that, choked for decades by the highway’s current configuration, rarely reached the ocean anymore. Rather than agonize over how to restore the landscape to some former, unobtainable baseline of “natural,” officials unanimously agreed that this bold re-imagining of the coast was the best way forward among no perfect options.

The concrete bridge (a monstrous overpass or a reasonable compromise, depending on who’s talking) will at least allow Scotty Creek to flow freely into the ocean again — making room for more red-legged frogs, Myrtle’s silverspot butterflies, and the passage of steelhead trout and coho salmon. Officials reasoned that elevating the highway would avoid paving over what’s left of the wetlands, which were already in desperate need of healing. By rerouting traffic onto a bridge, these drowning habitats would have the space to recover and migrate inland as the sea moved in.

State transportation officials also agreed, as part of the $73 million project, to pay $5 million to help clean up the mess of abandoned homes and failed road repairs. An additional $6.5 million will go toward wetland, creek and prairie restoration. Some of the old highway will be converted into a public coastal trail, and visitors will have access to a new parking area, as well as a beach that was once limited by private property.

Caltrans also set aside money to negotiate and acquire land from three private properties, including oceanfront portions of a historic ranch that will be most impacted by the realigned highway. Once completed, much of the open space will be transferred to Sonoma County to manage on behalf of the public.

This all came as a shock at first for Philip and Roberta Ballard, who own and live on the ranch, but they said they’ve come to understand the necessity of this project. The bridge still feels way too big — especially for this rural stretch of paradise that first captured their hearts more than two decades ago — but after years of meetings, questions and debating each trade-off, the retired couple decided to turn their energies toward making sure Scotty Creek got restored as part of the deal.

The creek, the largest watershed between Salmon Creek and the Russian River, has needed help since before they purchased the ranch, they said. In a past life, steelhead trout and coho salmon thrived in this stream. The once-abundant fish disappeared after the concrete culvert, installed in 1952 to support the highway, blocked their ability to migrate between fresh- and saltwater. The brackish habitat drowned over the decades. Then the creek, swollen after a series of big storms in the 1980s, flooded the lower plain. The stream banks were denuded of vegetation and the riffle crests obliterated as the choked stream tried to reach the sea.

Since 2004, the Ballards, both professors emeriti of pediatrics at UC San Francisco, have been piecing together ways to restore the creek, one small project at a time. Full restoration would require grading and reshaping the riverbanks, bringing back the native vegetation, improving water flow and re-creating the pools that once provided shelter to juvenile fish. The $6.5 million that Caltrans promised as part of the final deal will go a long way, they said, to nursing this entire ecosystem back to life.

“A lot of our efforts have gone into trying to make the best out of something that is necessary,” Roberta Ballard said. “We’ve arrived at feeling reasonably good about getting the best mitigation we can get for this region and getting something reasonably positive out of it.”

Construction crews work on building a new bridge over Scotty Creek, as part of Caltrans’ Gleason Beach Roadway Realignment Project.

(John Huseby / Caltrans)

When we don’t understand and don’t allow for the ocean’s ways, we end up with homes perched on crumbling cliffs and seawalls still making a stand. Guided by a few mere decades of history and a narrow understanding of the California shore, many today know only how to preserve the version of the coast they learned to love. Rather than imagine a different way to live, we cling to the fragility of what we still have and account for only what we consider lost. Even remembering how wide a beach used to be, or how the cliffs once withstood the tide, glorifies the notion that resilience is measured by our ability to remain unchanged.

We fail to see how we’ve replaced entire ecological systems with our own hardened habitats, and then altered the shoreline even more once the shore began to disappear. Neither replicating the past nor holding on to the present is going to get us to the future that we need. Learning from the recurring cycles of nature, listening to the knowledge gained with each flood and storm, adapting and choosing to transform — this is what it means to persevere. Change, in the end, has been the only constant in our battle for permanence. Change is the only way California will learn how to live with, not on, this beautiful, vanishing coastline that so many people settled and still wish to call home.

Stefan Galvez-Abadia, Caltrans’s district division chief of environmental planning and engineering, is now attempting with his team to design a prettier bridge at Gleason Beach, one more fitting for the rural landscape. They’ve studied the arched columns of Bixby Creek Bridge on the Big Sur coast and other popular landmarks that have become iconic over time. They’ve conducted surveys on what color to paint the bridge — some shade of gray or brown, for example, or a more distinct hue like that of the Golden Gate Bridge. Donne Brownsey, who served as vice chair of the Coastal Commission at the time, remarked that the project reminded her of a concrete beam bridge in Mendocino County that spans the mouth of the Ten Mile River, just north of where she lives in Fort Bragg. “It was a new bridge, it caused a lot of consternation, but I didn’t know that the first few times I went over it — I would look forward to that part of the drive, because I could see the whole estuary to the west, and I could see the rivershed to the east,” she said. “You don’t even really see the bridge anymore because the swallows now all nest there, and it’s just part of nature.”

The bridge at Gleason Beach, facing similar design constraints as the Ten Mile Bridge, also has to be massive — a counter-intuitive twist to what one might think it means to accommodate the environment. Engineers had at first tried more minimal options — a shorter bridge, thinner columns, a less intrusive height — but many were not large enough in size or distance to outlast the coastal erosion projected for the next 100 years. And to give the wetlands enough space to grow back, the highway needed to be elevated at a landscape-wide scale.

The completed bridge and realignment of Highway 1 can now be seen at Gleason Beach, about an hour north of San Francisco.

(Caltrans)

Despite so many years of seminars and talks about climate change adaptation, turning an abstract concept like managed retreat into reality has been a delicate exercise in compromise, Galvez-Abadia said. There were few case studies to turn to, and each one he examined dealt with an increasingly complicated set of trade-offs.

“You don’t have many choices when it comes to sea level rise,” he said, flipping through almost two dozen renderings his team had tried. “Whichever way you choose, you’re going to have some kind of impact. These are the difficult decisions that we will all have to make as a region, as a community, for generations to come.”

As he filed away his notes and prepared to break ground, he reflected once more on all the years it took to reach this first milestone. The process wasn’t easy. A lot of people are still frustrated. Even more are disappointed. Many tough property negotiations still lay ahead, but he hoped, at least, to see the wetlands and creek recover beneath the bridge one day. If the native plants reemerge, the salmon return, and there still remains a coast that families could safely access and enjoy, perhaps this new highway — however bold, however different — could show California that it is possible, that it isn’t absurd, to build toward a future where nature and modern human needs could finally coexist.

THIS is officially Love Island’s sauciest season for nearly a decade, with crew forced to take action on behalf of frisky cast.

It comes after Islanders coined a new term for one sex act based on footballer Andy Carroll.

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For the first time since 2016, production took the step of ordering in more condoms to ensure there was protection available.

They took action after it became apparent this year’s cast were keen to get hands on.

A source said: “It’s been a long while since there’s been as much action in the bedroom as this year.

“When Harry and Helena went into the Hideaway just 56 hours into the series it set the ball rolling and it’s been a particularly feral year.

“There’s been duvet tents most nights.

“Obviously duty of care is paramount so producers stocked up on condoms to ensure there were enough for the run.”

Viewers were shocked when the ITV2 dating show aired scenes of randy Harrison Solomon asking Harry Cookseley, who slept in the next bed, to pass him a condom in the middle of the night.

Harrison slept with Lauren Wood twice before she lost her place in a vote and he followed her out.

But others have gone all the way too, including girlfriend and boyfriend Meg Moore and Dejon Williams.

As part of their duty of care process, ITV are careful what they air and usually wait for the Islanders to consent to sex scenes being screened.

The girls admitted to performing “Handy Carolls” on their boys, though, in cheeky new terminology.

But ex-Islander Mitch Taylor told the Sun he was put off going all the way in the villa during his 2023 series because of show procedure.

He said: “Even if you shuffled about it in bed a bit, you’d go to the beach hut the next day and production are going ‘did you wear a condom?’

“It’s like instant production c*ckblock for me, the next day production asking 21 questions.

“That killed it for me to be honest.”

Fans have always considered Love Island’s 2016 series its sauciest year, when Alex Bowen and now wife Olivia plus Zara Holland, Terry Walsh and Emma Jane Woodhams set the screen alight.

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“E! News,” the nightly pop culture program that helped define cable network E! Entertainment Television, is going away.

The Comcast-owned network informed “E! News” staff Thursday the program will tape its final episode on Sept. 25. The channel’s news operation will continue to provide coverage online where it has a robust presence.

The staff was told the E! news audience prefers breaking entertainment coverage throughout the day on social media platforms instead of showing up at 11 p.m. Eastern for a live nightly show on traditional TV. About 20 jobs will be eliminated with the cancellation.

The network will continue to provide live coverage of red carpet events such as the Oscars and Golden Globes. E! also carries the People’s Choice Awards.

The “E! News” move was revealed ahead of the channel’s move to Versant, the spinoff company that will include other current Comcast cable channels such as MSNBC, CNBC and Golf Channel.

Comcast is putting all of its cable networks — with the exception of Bravo — into Versant to prevent the mature businesses from dragging down the company’s stock price.

“E! News” was launched in 1991 and was long a highly profitable business for the network as there were few TV outlets for live coverage of entertainment and pop culture. Ryan Seacrest was co-host of the program from 2006 to 2015. The program was canceled in 2020 but returned in 2022.

The show is currently co-hosted by Keltie Knight and Justin Sylvester. Some of the on-air talent from the program will have the chance to move to Versant.

Analysts expect a turnaround in future quarters as the automaker bets on robotaxi expansions.

Tesla has reported its biggest decline in quarterly revenue in more than a decade as CEO Elon Musk’s political activity weighs on the electric carmaker brand’s reputation.

Revenue fell to $22.5bn for the April-June quarter from $25.5bn a year earlier, according to its earnings report, which Tesla released after the closing bell on Wall Street. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $22.74bn, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Revenue from car sales declined by 16 percent. Tesla attributed the revenue dip to a decline in vehicle deliveries. Earlier this month, it reported a 14 percent decline in car deliveries in the second quarter.

Investors are worried about whether Musk will be able to give enough time and attention to Tesla after he locked horns with United States President Donald Trump by forming a new political party this month. Weeks earlier, he had promised that he would cut back on government work and focus on his companies.

Musk’s connections to the Trump administration and layoffs across the US government when he headed the Department of Government Efficiency weighed on its US reputation. Meanwhile, the billionaire’s endorsements of the far-right AfD party in Germany have affected the brand’s reputation in Europe.

A series of high-profile executive exits, including last month of a longtime Musk confidant who oversaw sales and manufacturing in North America and Europe, is also adding to the concerns.

The company reported a second straight quarterly revenue drop, despite rolling out a much-awaited refreshed version of its best-selling Model Y SUV that investors had hoped would rekindle demand.

Much of the company’s trillion-dollar valuation hangs on its bet on its robotaxi service – a small trial of which started in Austin, Texas, last month – and developing humanoid robots. On Wednesday, Bloomberg News reported that Tesla has been in talks with the state of Nevada about introducing robotaxi services there.

Analysts believe that this will keep the automaker on pace for growth in future quarters.

“We are at a ‘positive crossroads’ in the Tesla story: Musk is laser focused as CEO, Robotaxi/autonomous expansion has begun, demand stabilisation has begun especially in China, and Tesla is about to embark on an aggressive AI-focused strategy that, we believe, will include owning a significant piece of xAI,” Dan Ives, an analyst at the financial services company Wedbush Securities, said in a note provided to Al Jazeera.

xAI is Musk’s AI firm which also makes the chatbot Grok.

“While near-term and this quarter the numbers are nothing to write home about, we believe investors are instead focused on the AI future at Tesla, with a motivated Musk back driving Tesla’s future,” Ives said.

Tesla’s stock closed the trading day in positive territory, up by 0.1, but has tumbled in after-hours trading, down by 0.3 percent.

Imagine a Washington in which President Trump was held to account. A Washington in which Congress doesn’t roll over like a dog begging for a treat. A Washington that functions the way it’s supposed to, with that whole checks-and-balances thing working.

Enticing, no?

Democrats need to win just three seats in 2026 to seize control of the House and impose some measure of accountability on our rogue-elephant president. That’s something Trump is keenly aware of, which is why he’s pushing Texas to take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional boundaries ahead of the midterm election.

Republicans, who’ve exercised iron-clad control over Texas for decades, hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats. A special session scheduled next week in Austin is aimed at boosting that number by as many as five seats, increasing the GOP’s odds of hanging onto the House.

Enter, stage left, California’s White House-lusting governor.

As part of a recent Southern campaign swing, Gavin Newsom sat down with a progressive Tennessee podcaster to discuss the Republican power grab. (The picnic bench, rolled up shirt sleeves, beer and f-bomb showed the governor was being authentic, in case there was any doubt.)

“They’re not f— around now. They’re playing by a totally different set of rules,” Newsom said of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow Republicans. Years ago, he noted, California created an independent commission to draw its political lines, which states normally do once a decade after new census figures come out.

But with a super-majority in Sacramento, Newsom said, Democrats could “gerrymander like no other state.”

“We’ve been playing fair,” he continued, but Abbott’s actions “made me question that entire program.” Later, elaborating on social media, the governor accused Republicans of cheating their way to extra House seats and warned, “California is watching — and you can bet we won’t stand idly by.”

There’s a Texas expression for that: All hat and no cattle.

The fact is, voters took the power of political line-drawing away from the governor and his fellow lawmakers, for good reason, and it’s not like Newsom can unilaterally take that power back — no matter how well his chesty swagger might play with Trump-loathing Democrats.

“We have a commission,” said Justin Levitt, an expert on redistricting law at Loyola Law School. “Not only that, a Constitution and the commission’s in the Constitution. And not only that, we have a Constitution that says you only get to redistrict once every 10 years, unless there’s a legal problem with the existing maps.”

In other words, it’s not up to Newsom to huff and puff and blow existing House districts down.

California voters approved Proposition 20, which turned congressional line-drawing over to a nonpartisan, 14-member commission, in November 2010. The point was to introduce competition by taking redistricting away from self-dealing lawmakers. It passed by an overwhelming margin, 61% to 39%, and has worked just as intended.

After decades of prebaked congressional contests, when the success of one party or the other was virtually guaranteed, California has become a hotbed of competition; in recent years, the state — an afterthought in November balloting for president — has been key to control of the House. In 2026, as many as a dozen seats, out of 52, could be at least somewhat competitive.

“I think it’s worked out great,” said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant politics professor at Pomona College and a member of the redistricting commission. (Others doing the map-making included a seminary professor, a structural engineer and an investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.)

There are two ways, Levitt said, that Newsom and fellow Democrats could undo the commission’s handiwork.

They could break the law and pass legislation drawing new lines, face an inevitable lawsuit and prevail with a sympathetic ruling from the California Supreme Court. Or they could ask voters to approve different lines through a new constitutional amendment, in a hurried-up special election ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Both scenarios seem as plausible as Newsom delivering universal healthcare and fulfilling his pledge to build 3.5 million new homes a year, to name two other extravagant promises.

To be clear, none of the above condones the plot that Trump and Abbott are attempting to hatch. Their actions are politically ruthless and more than a little cynical. (A letter from Trump’s hand-in-glove Justice Department has provided a legal fig leaf for the special session. Texas was recently — expediently — notified that four of its majority-minority congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered along racial lines, thus justifying the drawing of a new map.)

That’s no excuse, however, for Newsom to end-run California voters, or call a special election that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars at a time the state is gushing red ink.

Politics rooted in vengeance is both dangerous and wrong, whether it’s Trump or Newsom looking to settle scores.

There’s also the matter of delivering vacant threats. Some Democrats may thrill each time Newsom delivers one of his pugnacious pronouncements. That seems to be a big part of his presidential campaign strategy. But those same voters may tire of the lack of follow through, as Californians have.

Newsom has a well-deserved reputation for over-promising and under-delivering.

That’s not likely to serve him well on the national stage.

NEW YORK — Martin Cruz Smith, the best-selling mystery novelist who engaged readers for decades with “Gorky Park” and other thrillers featuring Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has died at age 82.

Smith died Friday at a senior living community in San Rafael, “surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster. Smith revealed a decade ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the same condition to his protagonist. His 11th Renko book, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published July 8 and billed as his last.

“My longevity is linked to Arkady’s,” he told Strand Magazine in 2023. “As long as he remains intelligent, humorous, and romantic, so shall I.”

Smith was often praised for his storytelling and for his insights into modern Russia; he would speak of being interrogated at length by customs officials during his many trips there. The Associated Press called “Hotel Ukraine” a “gem” that “upholds Smith’s reputation as a great craftsman of modern detective fiction with his sharply drawn, complex characters and a compelling plot.”

Smith’s honors included being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, winning the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”

Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pa. , he studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at the AP and at the Philadelphia Daily News. Success as an author arrived slowly. He had been a published novelist for more than a decade before he broke through in the early 1980s with “Gorky Park.” His novel came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park that Smith used for the book’s title.

“Gorky Park,” cited by the New York Times as a reminder of “just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be,” topped the Times’ fiction bestseller list and was later made into a movie starring William Hurt.

“Russia is a character in my Renko stories, always,” Smith told Publishers Weekly in 2013. “‘Gorky Park’ may have been one of the first books to take a backdrop and make it into a character. It took me forever to write because of my need to get things right. You’ve got to knock down the issue of ‘Does this guy know what he’s talking about or not?’”

Smith’s other books include science fiction (“The Indians Won”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Ride for Revenge,” and the “Roman Grey” mystery series. Besides “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s name — he also wrote under the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”

Smith’s Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels and he would trace the region’s history over the past 40 years, whether it be the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Red Square”), the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”) or, in the novel “Wolves Eats Dogs,” the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

By the time he began working on his last novel, Russia had invaded Ukraine. The AP noted in its review of “Hotel Ukraine” that Smith had devised a backstory “pulled straight from recent headlines,” referencing such world leaders as Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin of Russia and former President Joe Biden of the U.S.

Smith is survived by his brother, Jack Smith; his wife, Emily Smith; three children and five grandchildren.

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

Nestled almost two hours away from Munich and three hours from Frankfurt, Bamberg in Germany, is one of Europe’s most picturesque, well-preserved, and affordable holiday hotspots.

Tucked away in Upper Franconia, Germany, lies the charming town of Bamberg, a hidden gem that’s a must-visit for fans of beer, Bratwurst, and affordable holiday destinations. Located nearly two hours from Munich and three hours from Frankfurt, this picturesque town boasts a UNESCO World Heritage status and is often hailed as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Nicknamed the “Franconian Rome”, Bamberg is built on seven hills and is steeped in history, with an array of architectural wonders dating back to the Middle Ages. This quaint Bavarian town, home to just under 76,000 residents, seamlessly blends modern life with historic cultural treasures of global significance.

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As you wander through the streets, you’ll discover buildings that have stood the test of time, while the town centre is filled with ornate palaces and medieval castles.

History buffs will be captivated by the stunning 13th-century Bamberg Cathedral, one of Germany’s most famous cathedrals, built between 1211 and 1237.

This late Romanesque and early Gothic landmark is notable for being one of the only papal graves in Germany, housing the marble sarcophagus of Pope Clement II.

Another unmissable attraction is St. Michael’s Monastery, a Baroque church boasting a breathtaking “celestial garden” with over 578 flowers and herbs, as well as a terrace offering a panoramic view of the town.

In addition to its rich history, Bamberg is also celebrated for its lively beer culture, boasting 13 breweries in the town and 60 more in the surrounding area, reports the Express.

Beer enthusiasts can sample the city’s famous hand-crafted brews, including the unique smoked beer, Rauchbier, available at local breweries Schlenkerla and Brauerei Spezial.

Beyond its breweries, Bamberg offers a range of local culinary delicacies, such as Schäuferla, a roasted pork shoulder marinated in a meat stock and dark beer broth, served with potato dumplings and cabbage.

Another standout dish is the blue sausages, Blaue Zipfel, which are boiled in a seasoned stock to create a rich, smoky flavour, typically served with sauerkraut, a pretzel, and a pint of smoked beer.

Travel vlogger Wolters World recently featured Bamberg in his YouTube video, “The Best Cheap European Destinations”, revealing that it’s his “favourite city” to visit in Germany.

He joked that prices in Bamberg have remained unchanged for the past decade, making it a budget-friendly option compared to other German cities.

Visitors can explore the city’s historic landmarks, such as Altenburg Castle, the Old Town Hall, and the 17th-century Neue Residenz palace, with its ornate ceilings, tapestries, and rose garden.

Though it may take a few hours to reach Bamberg by train or flight, the journey is certainly worth it for those who are fans of bratwurst, beer, and history.

Bamberg’s captivating charm and cost-effectiveness make it a popular choice for tourists.

NEW YORK — “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is good advice for the Britpop band Oasis, who launch their surprising reunion tour today in Cardiff, Wales.

Led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, the reunion marks the end of the siblings’ long-held feud, one that led to Oasis disbanding in 2009. For many fans, this news is almost too good to be true. They’re anxiously awaiting whether the Gallaghers will indeed make it through the entire run of international dates and even perhaps extend the reunion.

Whether they’re in it for the long haul or will call it quits at some point sooner (hopefully not before they reach the Rose Bowl Sept. 6 and 7), here’s a look at a few other very famous — but very brief — band reunions.

The Beach Boys

DISBANDED: Technically, they never broke up. Read on.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 2012.

WHAT HAPPENED: There is no linear history when it comes to the Beach Boys, but here’s the abridged: Band members came and went, and the band’s visionary, the late Brian Wilson, retired from touring in 1964 following a breakdown caused by stress and exhaustion. His place was soon filled by Bruce Johnston, who remained with the group for decades. Wilson also infamously feuded with his cousin and bandmate Mike Love over songwriting credits for years.

The question here is: Can a band that never broke up reunite? In this case, yes: The band — with both Wilson and Love — got together for a new album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” and world tour in 2012, celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary. It wasn’t the whole original lineup, however: Drummer Dennis Wilson died in 1983, and guitarist Carl Wilson died in 1998.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: The force behind the band, Brian Wilson, died last month at age 82, but Love continues to tour under the Beach Boys name.

Led Zeppelin

DISBANDED: 1980

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: Good question. The band played a few one-off events in the mid-1980s throughout the ’00s, never embarking on a reunion tour. So, a few days? A few hours?

WHAT HAPPENED: Led Zeppelin disbanded immediately following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, reuniting only for a select few events in the decades that followed. Most notably, their first show back was a complicated set at Live Aid in 1985 in Philadelphia. Lead singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones’ last performance together was in 2007 at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert held in London’s O2 Arena. There, Bonham’s son Jason Bonham played the drums. Page and Plant had a separate band together that released a couple of albums in the ‘90s.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: Highly unlikely. The band has successfully evaded reunion requests in the past, including one from President Bill Clinton. In 2013, Clinton asked the British rock greats to get back together for the 2012 Superstorm Sandy benefit concert in New York City. He asked; they said no.

Nirvana

DISBANDED: 1994

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A series of one-off performances in the 2010s and 2020s.

WHAT HAPPENED: Nirvana disbanded following the death of frontman and principal songwriter Kurt Cobain. Its members pursued other projects — most notably, drummer Dave Grohl founded the Foo Fighters. But two decades after Cobain’s death, in 2014, Nirvana was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, so bassist Krist Novoselic, touring guitarist Pat Smear (of the Germs) and Grohl got together for a short set — joined by Lorde, St. Vincent, Joan Jett and Kim Gordon on vocals for a reunion dubbed “Hervana.”

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: Maybe there could be a few more gigs here and there? Novoselic and Grohl reunited for a few one-off performances in the years that followed, most recently coming together for the Fire Aid benefit concert in Los Angeles and the 50th anniversary celebrations for “Saturday Night Live,” both this year. At the latter, Post Malone took over vocal duties.

Oasis

DISBANDED: 2009

HOW LONG THE REUNION IS SUPPOSED TO LAST: If the band makes it through their full run of reunion shows, July through November. So, five months.

WHAT HAPPENED: Good question. The band — and in particular, the Gallagher brothers — have not released a public statement giving specific reasons for the reunion. But the initial tour announcement did seem to allude to past tensions. “The guns have fallen silent,” Oasis said. “The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”

In 2019, Liam Gallagher told the Associated Press he was ready to reconcile.

“The most important thing is about me and him being brothers,” he said of Noel. “He thinks I’m desperate to get the band back together for money. But I didn’t join the band to make money. I joined the band to have fun and to see the world.”

Fans had long theorized a reunion might be on the horizon, too: In the wake of the 2017 bombing that killed 22 at an Ariana Grande concert in Oasis’ hometown of Manchester, Liam Gallagher performed at a benefit concert. He criticized his brother’s absence, but a spokesperson said Noel Gallagher couldn’t attend because of a long-standing family trip. Benefit organizers said Noel Gallagher approved the use of Oasis’ music and donated royalties from “Don’t Look Back in Anger” to the British Red Cross’ One Love Manchester fund.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: It’s happening. A better question is: What are the chances of a new album? That’s impossible to know.

Outkast

DISBANDED: They never officially disbanded, so call it a hiatus. They never released another album after 2006’s “Idlewild,” and 2007 is frequently cited as the year they officially took a break.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 2014? They announced reunion dates in January 2014, played their first in April, and ended that October.

WHAT HAPPENED: At the top of 2014, Outkast — the innovative Atlanta-based hip-hop duo consisting of Big Boi and André 3000 — announced they would tour festivals around the world to mark 20 years of their band, following a near-decade-long hiatus. The dates began at Coachella, where the duo headlined both Friday night shows. Then they made their way to their home state of Georgia for the CounterPoint Music & Arts Festival, which the AP described as “an energetic show that kept the crowd jamming in the late hours.”

Once the reunion shows were done, so was Outkast. Big Boi continued to release solo records, and André 3000 would follow suit … almost 10 years later, when he released his debut solo full-length album, the flute-forward “New Blue Sun,” in 2023.

“New Blue Sun” has “no bars,” he joked to AP shortly after it was released. It’s a divergence from rap because “there was nothing I was liking enough to rap about, or I didn’t feel it sounded fresh.”

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: When asked about new Outkast music, André 3000 told AP, “I never say never. … But I can say that the older I get, I feel like that time has happened.”

The Velvet Underground

DISBANDED: 1973, more or less.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 1993.

WHAT HAPPENED: Here’s another opaque one for you, as band reunions so often tend to be: John Cale was ousted in 1968, Lou Reed left in 1970 and the Velvet Underground slowly dissolved from there, releasing their final album, “Squeeze,” in 1973. In 1990, Cale and Reed joined forces to release an album in homage to Andy Warhol, “Songs for Drella,” opening the door for a future reunion. There were a few one-off performances, and then the band toured Europe in 1993, including a performance at Glastonbury.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: It is pretty much impossible. Reed died in 2013. Guitarist Sterling Morrison died in 1995. And Nico died in 1988.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian lived in the United States for 47 years, married a U.S. citizen and raised their daughter. She was gardening in the yard of her New Orleans home when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers handcuffed and took her away, her family said.

Kashanian arrived in 1978 on a student visa and applied for asylum, fearing retaliation for her father’s support of the U.S.-backed shah. She lost her bid, but she was allowed to remain with her husband and child if she checked in regularly with immigration officials, her husband and daughter said. She complied, once checking in from South Carolina during Hurricane Katrina. She is now being held at an immigration detention center in Basile, La., while her family tries to get information.

Other Iranians are also getting arrested by immigration authorities after decades in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security won’t say how many people they’ve arrested, but U.S. military strikes on Iran have fueled fears that there is more to come.

“Some level of vigilance, of course, makes sense, but what it seems like ICE has done is basically give out an order to round up as many Iranians as you can, whether or not they’re linked to any threat and then arrest them and deport them, which is very concerning,” said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group.

Homeland Security did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on Kashanian’s case but have been touting arrests of Iranians. The department announced the arrests of at least 11 Iranians on immigration violations a week ago, during the weekend of the U.S. missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said, without elaborating, that it arrested seven Iranians at a Los Angeles-area address that “has been repeatedly used to harbor illegal entrants linked to terrorism.”

The department “has been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country, came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs or otherwise,” spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said of the 11 arrests. She didn’t offer any evidence of terrorist or extremist ties. Her comment on parole programs referred to former President Biden’s expanded legal pathways to entry, which President Trump shut down.

Russell Milne, Kashanian’s husband, said his wife is not a threat. Her appeal for asylum was complicated because of “events in her early life,” he explained. A court found an earlier marriage of hers to be fraudulent.

But over four decades, Kashanian, 64, built a life in Louisiana. The couple met when she was bartending as a student in the late 1980s. They married and had a daughter. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, filmed Persian cooking tutorials on YouTube and was a grandmother figure to the children next door.

The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her.

“She’s meeting her obligations,” Milne said. “She’s retirement age. She’s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?”

While Iranians have been crossing the border illegally for years, especially since 2021, they have faced little risk of being deported to their home countries due to severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. That seems to no longer be the case.

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

The administration has asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for several deportations to South Sudan, a war-ravaged country with which it has no ties, after the justices allowed deportations to countries other than those that noncitizens came from.

The U.S. Border Patrol arrested Iranians 1,700 times at the Mexican border from October 2021 through November 2024, according to the most recent public data available. The Homeland Security Department reported that about 600 Iranians overstayed visas as business or exchange visitors, tourists and students in the 12-month period through September 2023, the most recent report shows.

Iran was one of 12 countries subject to a U.S. travel ban imposed by Trump that took effect this month. Some fear ICE’s growing deportation arrests will be another blow.

In Oregon, an Iranian man was detained by immigration agents this past week while driving to the gym. He was picked up roughly two weeks before he was scheduled for a check-in at ICE offices in Portland, according to court documents filed by his attorney, Michael Purcell.

The man, identified in court filings as S.F., has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, and his wife and two children are U.S. citizens.

S.F. applied for asylum in the U.S. in the early 2000s, but his application was denied in 2002. His appeal failed, but the government did not deport him and he continued to live in the country for decades, according to court documents.

Due to “changed conditions” in Iran, S.F. would face “a vastly increased danger of persecution” if he were to be deported, Purcell wrote in his petition. “These circumstances relate to the recent bombing by the United States of Iranian nuclear facilities, thus creating a de facto state of war between the United States and Iran.”

S.F.’s long residency in the U.S., his conversion to Christianity and the fact that his wife and children are U.S. citizens “sharply increase the possibility of his imprisonment in Iran, or torture or execution,” he said.

Similarly, Kashanian’s daughter said she is worried what will happen to her mother.

“She tried to do everything right,” Kaitlynn Milne said.

Chandler, Rush and Spagat write for the Associated Press.

When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.

But that wasn’t the only response.

Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.

“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.

In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.

Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.

The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.

“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”

The shifting debate

Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.

One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.

In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.

People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.

(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)

LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.

However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.

One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.

Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.

“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.

Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.

Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.

He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.

President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”

“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.

From offense to defense

Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.

Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.

“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”

Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.

Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.

One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.

Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.

“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”

Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.

Leaders look ahead

Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.

It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.

“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.

The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.

They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.

The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”

The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.

(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)

“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”

Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.

The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.

A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”

A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.

“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.

Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.

Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.

Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.

Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.

“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”