decades

James Talarico has won the United States Senate race in Texas, the first time a Democrat has won state office since 1994.

Tuesday’s victory marks a seismic shift in Texas, which has become a standard-bearer for staunch conservative policies for the Republican Party.

The win comes after a primary intervention by US President Donald Trump, which saw him endorse scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Republican Senate candidate John Cornyn.

But Paxton failed to generate enthusiasm, even among his own party. That came despite record-breaking spending, topping over half a billion dollars.

The largest share came from billionaire donor Elon Musk, who spent at least $212 million supporting Paxton.

Musk’s SpaceX company is based in Texas. He has spent heavily across the country, with Democrats expected to investigate his role as head of the federal cost-cutting panel, DOGE, after taking control of Congress.

“It’s historic,” said Taylor Bell, a 27-year-old law student, who attended an election watch party in Houston.

“Hopefully we see money coming back to the people of Texas, and not more of the same we’ve seen — well, my whole life at this point.”

Congressman Christian Menefee, who represents Houston, told those gathered that “tonight Texas has restored the hope of a nation”.

“Tonight, I believe firmly that we can accomplish anything in this country if we just stand together and we fight back against hate and bigotry,” he said.

“The younger generation and all the people who want a better future came out and made their voices heard,” said 29-year-old Yvonne Nunga, who works in IT. “This party, this fight right now, is not about left or right. It’s about top versus bottom, and I’m so glad that we have candidates that are making this a pivotal point in their messaging.”

“The current politics of the current administration is not working for the people. It’s not for the people, by the people, it’s for the billionaires bought by the billionaires,” she said.

No ‘puppet governor’ for Trump

Tuesday also saw the surprise victory of Gubernatorial Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa, whose challenge had been considered a long shot even into the final days of the race.

Hinojosa has become the first Latino governor in the history of Texas, despite Latinos making up 40 percent of the state’s population.

Alejandra Peimbert, a regional communications director for Hinojosa’s campaign, said the victory should be seen as a rebuke to the hardline immigration policies enacted under 10 years of outgoing governor Greg Abbott.

Abbott has cooperated closely with the Trump campaign in its mass deportation campaign, spearheading policies that saw local law enforcement officials conduct immigration enforcement.

“I think the Latino community and our vote has been underestimated by politicians constantly,” Peimbart told Al Jazeera, adding that the economy is so bad, and the horrendous things that ICE has done to our community, tearing apart families…I think my community finally had enough.”

“President Trump will no longer have a puppet in a governor,” she said.

Abbott’s tenure has been defined by a conservative lurch in the state, with hardline approaches not only to immigration, but to social welfare programmes, abortion rights, education and religious freedom.

Abbott’s supporters have touted rapid economic growth in recent years, spurred by tax cuts and rollbacks on regulation.

The state has long been a Republican standard bearer in the US

Critics have said the metrics of economic success have the most positive impact on corporations and the wealthy, while middle and lower class Texans see little benefit.

Texas’s poverty rate sits above the national average, with little in the way of social safety nets.

“It’s one of the biggest things Texas can ever experience because these are two strong candidates that took their time, they took their dedication, and focused with every community in Texas, and so they deserve this position,” said 21-year-old Dylan Sutter.

“Everything is blue. It’s like the ballot itself was painted blue by the time we were done with it.”

In a sign of the times, for the first time in many years, U.S. Air Force fighters have returned to an air defense alert posture at Eareckson Air Station in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. This represents a notable development in efforts to strengthen NORAD’s ability to defend North America’s northern and Pacific approaches from a key strategic stronghold on Russia’s back doorstep. The deployment culminated in a multinational air defense mission involving U.S. and Canadian fighters operating across thousands of miles, reflecting a growing focus on the increasingly strategic Arctic and North Pacific regions.

Fighter operations at Eareckson date back to the Cold War, when F-4s and F-15s deployed to the island to support air defense missions against Soviet aircraft. The base’s routine fighter mission ended in the early 1990s, making the October 2026 deployment a notable return to an alert posture at one of America’s westernmost military outposts. In the interim, we have seen fighters, including F-16s, return to Eareckson, but not in the context of air defense alert missions.

Packing live air-to-air missiles, the F-16s were deployed to Eareckson, on Shemya Island, from October 18 through 26, maintaining an alert posture before launching on October 25 as part of a homeland defense mission.

The latest mission began under Operation Noble Defender before transitioning into Operation Noble Eagle in support of northern sovereignty operations. It brought together F-16s operating from Eareckson, F-35As and additional F-16s from Eielson Air Force Base, and Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornets deployed from Cold Lake, Alberta.

The F-16s operating from Eielson were assigned to the 18th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS), a particularly unusual unit with roots as the 18th Aggressor Squadron. The unit was redesignated in 2024, shifting its primary combat focus from adversary training toward aerospace control and homeland defense in Alaska. Its Block 30 F-16s bring a combination of air defense capabilities and experience in replicating adversary tactics, making them a very specialized outfit, as you can read about here.

From their distributed locations, the Eareckson-based F-16s provided coverage in the southern portion of the theater, while fighters from Eielson operated in the northwest. Canadian CF-18s covered the northern approaches.

An E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson provided airborne command and control, supported by multiple U.S. KC-135 tankers and a Canadian CC-150 Polaris. An HC-130 Combat King II also participated, providing contingency search and rescue and personnel recovery coverage.

The distances involved illustrate the scale of the operation. Eareckson is approximately 1,600 miles from Eielson and 2,600 miles from Cold Lake, requiring substantial coordination and aerial refueling support to bring the different elements together.

Strategic Significance

Located at the western end of the Aleutian chain, Shemya occupies a strategically important position in the North Pacific, facing the approaches from Russia’s Far East and the wider Pacific region and acting as a gateway to the Arctic. While fighters operating from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, with additional support from Eielson when needed, normally provide coverage across this vast area, Eareckson puts combat aircraft dramatically farther west. Its reactivation as a fighter operating location gives NORAD another forward option, extending the reach of its air defense network well beyond Alaska’s principal airbases.

The island’s military significance was especially pronounced during the Cold War, when it supported detachments of RC-135 surveillance aircraft, including hosting Cobra Ball missile-tracking aircraft, as you can read about here.

Shemya’s potential role in a future conflict has attracted increasing attention from U.S. military planners in recent years. The island hosts the AN/FPS-108 Cobra Dane radar, a massive phased-array installation that provides critical ballistic missile warning and tracking capabilities. Its position in the western Aleutians, roughly 500 miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and approximately 1,000 miles from mainland Alaska, gives it considerable strategic importance but also leaves it isolated and potentially vulnerable.

The growing threat posed by one-way attack drones and cruise missiles also makes protecting Cobra Dane a significant force-protection challenge. Forward-deployed fighters provide a highly adaptable, wide-area defensive layer, intercepting aerial threats before they reach the island, much like the fighter deployments to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The vulnerability of Shemya and Cobra Dane has been the focus of several military exercises. In 2021, Green Berets assigned to Special Operations Command North participated in a NORAD exercise that involved deploying to Shemya and preparing to defend the Cobra Dane installation against potential attack. The troops arrived by sea and brought Stinger man-portable air defense systems, highlighting concerns about protecting the island against both conventional and unconventional threats.

In August 2023, elements of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, better known as the Night Stalkers, returned to the island as part of Operation Polar Dagger, as TWZ reported at the time. At least two MH-60M Black Hawk helicopters and associated personnel and equipment deployed to Eareckson, with a C-17 transporting personnel and materiel. The exercise explored the ability to rapidly project special operations capabilities into the remote region, protect critical infrastructure, and improve operational awareness in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Taken together, these developments point to growing interest in Shemya as a potential forward operating location in a wider North Pacific defense network. Its radar, long runway, and remote position offer considerable advantages, but its isolation also presents significant logistical and force-protection challenges.

The return of F-16s to an air defense alert posture at Eareckson adds another dimension to the installation. With its ability to host forward-deployed fighters, the base can maintain an alert posture and generate homeland defense sorties. Its location would be particularly useful for responding to activity approaching Alaska from the western Pacific and the Bering Sea. At the same time, having fighters at Eareckson provides an organic means of defending Shemya’s critical surveillance assets.

There are other potential benefits in dispersing fighter operations away from Alaska’s principal airbases. In a major conflict, those installations could be subject to missile strikes and other attacks, making alternative operating locations valuable. Eareckson’s long runway, ramp space, and arresting equipment provide a foundation for such operations, although sustaining fighters there over an extended period would require significant fuel, munitions, maintenance, and force-protection support.

Outside of Eareckson, Alaska has a network of remote airfields that can support dispersed fighter operations during contingencies. These include King Salmon Airport on the Alaska Peninsula, which hosted four 18th FIS F-16s during an Agile Combat Employment deployment in September last year.

All this comes as concerns grow about the level of protection afforded to Air Force airbases. There are growing calls for the U.S. military to invest in new hardened shelters, and the lack of physical hardening of bases has been hammered home by the experiences from the war with Iran, which have underscored the huge risks posed to aircraft sat out in the open on flightlines.

The October deployment does not mean Eareckson is being transformed into a permanently staffed fighter base. It does, however, demonstrate that NORAD can use this isolated installation as another node in its air defense network, extending the geographic reach and flexibility of its operations across the North Pacific.

For NORAD, having additional locations from which it can generate air defense sorties is a major plus. The combination of forward-based fighters, airborne command and control, aerial refueling, and Canadian participation demonstrates another way of distributing combat power across a broad geographic area rather than depending exclusively on a handful of major bases.

More broadly, the Aleutians are assuming renewed strategic importance as the westernmost part of U.S. territory, positioned at the intersection of the North Pacific and Arctic theaters. As military competition with both Russia and China intensifies, the island chain offers a valuable forward position for surveillance, air defense, and power projection, as well as a means of gaining time and distance against potential threats approaching North America or operating across the Pacific. The return of F-16 alert operations to Eareckson adds another piece to that defensive architecture, underscoring the continued military relevance of this remote island chain.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The Hotel Clark has been throwing its stately shadow across Hill Street since 1914, first as a fancy lodging in the formative years of downtown Los Angeles, then as a last-resort residential hotel for the aged and desperate, then as a vast, lifeless structure between Grand Central Market and Pershing Square (now Biddy Mason Park). The 11-story hotel hadn’t seen a paying guest for more than 30 years.

That is, until now.

Last month, downtown historian Nathan Marsak was at Angels Flight when, as he recalls, “A guy comes up and says, ‘You like the Clark? I just had drinks there.’ And he slaps his receipt down. And I lost my damn mind.”

The lobby inside Hotel Clark.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Marsak, who admits to “a fetish for old, lost Los Angeles,” once called the Beaux-Arts hotel a “great gray monument to grinding attrition.” Since the 1990s, Marsak has kept watch on the Clark, often labeled a “zombie building” because of its long idleness. Marsak included it in his 2002 book “Los Angeles Neon,” and has looked down upon it from his part-time gig taking tickets atop the Angels Flight Railway on Bunker Hill.

In the downtown community, there had been rumors of a reopening over the years, but that seemed less likely as time went on. Kim Cooper, a close observer of downtown politics and co-owner of Esotouric tours, said that after a while, it seemed that the hotel’s owner, the Chetrit Group, “just locked the door.”

To see that structure “so dilapidated and dirty and covered in bird droppings and decades of grime, it broke my heart,” Marsak said. Still, “as long as they didn’t tear it down, there was always hope.”

A ‘zombie building’ awakes

When he and relatives bought the hotel 27 years ago, owner Michel Attias of the Chetrit Group said people assumed they would flip the building.

“I guess they know by now that’s not the case,” he said. “Many of those people have left town by now.”

Michel Attias at the Hotel Clark.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Attias stood in the hotel lobby, whose design leans toward gray, black, white, earth tones and chrome. Guest rooms include zebra-print wallpaper and faux alligator-skin panels.

“We wanted chic modern but also comfortable and warm,” said Attias, noting that new artworks and rugs are still arriving. A “luxury sports bar” is due to open by Super Bowl Sunday. As of Oct. 21, general manager Adrienne Craig said, about 120 of its guest rooms were ready to rent, with others soon to follow. Rates start at about $200 nightly.

There have been at least three near-openings during his firm’s ownership, Attias acknowledged. But now, he said, it’s the right moment.

“We have a lot coming,” he said. “We have the Olympics. Downtown is starting to move again. I’m very, very confident that downtown is going to get back on its feet.”

Members of the Chetrit family, based in New York, hold extensive real estate through multiple companies, some of which have suffered legal and financial troubles in the last two years. In Los Angeles, the Chetrit Group also owns the long-idle Trinity Auditorium, also known as the Embassy Auditorium and Embassy Hotel. Also a 1914 Beaux-Arts building, it includes about 180 guest rooms along with an 1,800-seat performance space. Attias said he hopes to open the Trinity Auditorium before the Olympics.

“We’re not done,” Attias said.

Added Craig: “Hotel Clark is amazing. Trinity is out of this world.”

Vintage postcards and photographs are from the collection of historian Nathan Marsak.

(Courtesy of Nathan Marsak)

The Clark’s rise, fall and long slumber

Look closely at the Clark, including the rooftop neon and the old fire escapes with the initials “CH” in ironwork (for Clark Hotel), and you may catch hints of its tangled history, from early opulence to urban decay, international intrigue and municipal dysfunction.

Eli P. Clark made big money as a railway pioneer in Los Angeles and beyond. But by 1914 he had moved on to other investments. He built the Clark Hotel with 555 rooms, each with a private bath (a notable luxury at the time) and a bold sign outside proclaiming its “absolutely fireproof” construction.

The building’s rooftop neon signage was apparently added a few decades later, along with the rounded letters that spell the hotel’s name and run vertically down one corner of the building. Dozens of vintage photos of the Clark’s ballrooms, restaurants, ashtrays, room keys, menus, postcards, matchbooks, coat hangers and candleholders are visible at BunkerHillLos Angeles.com, having been gathered by Marsak.

A mosaic by the pool inside Hotel Clark.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

But somewhere in the middle decades of the 20th century, as investors began to look away from downtown, the Clark hit the skids. In a 1975 classified ad in the L.A. Times, the Clark offered rooms at $75-$95 monthly, including “special waterbed suites.”

By the 1980s, the Clark had become a residence of last resort, housing many seniors and others on limited incomes. The nearby Rosslyn (built in 1914, now a mix of low-income and market-rate apartments) and Hotel Cecil (built 1924, now low-income and supportive housing) followed similar paths.

The pool inside Hotel Clark.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

By 1989, the Clark had been acquired by May Wah International Enterprises, which was rooted in China and associated with the Chinese government, Attias said. May Wah vowed to revamp the building with a “friendship store” to market Chinese imports and hotel above that might rival the Biltmore. But first May Wah wanted the old tenants out. Twenty of them filed suit against May Wah, saying they were subjected to spells without heat or water, and won a $1.7-million settlement. But by 1992, May Wah had succeeded in evicting the last two tenants.

By 1999, when May Wah sold it to the Chetrit family, the building was empty, its historic interiors rearranged in anticipation of the Chinese hotel that never opened. (During this period, Attias said, the building’s guest-room count changed from 555 to 348.) As Attias tells the story, the hotel was close to opening in 2008 when that year’s financial crisis hit. It came close again in 2013-14, when the Chetrit family invested in another renovation but ran into opposition from the hospitality workers union Unite Here Local 11 and L.A. City Councilman José Huizar.

“José Huizar,” said Attias dryly. “We know where he is now.” (Huizar, who served on the city council until 2020, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2023 and was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison.)

Though the hotel’s owners eventually got the city permissions they needed, Attias said, a partnership with other hoteliers dissolved and the Clark went to the back burner again, as did the Embassy Auditorium. Another near-opening followed in 2019.

Attias said the family decided in 2025 to finally open the Clark, later retaining OTH Hotels Resorts to manage it.

And now, said Attias, “we’re here.”

‘Nowhere to go but up’

In mid-September, the Clark had begun a quiet, soft reopening. Now configured with 348 guest rooms, it includes a Mediterranean restaurant called Votana; a cocktail lounge; a 17-by-29-foot courtyard pool, poolside bar and (in homage to Chetrit family history) a pair of Moroccan tile fountains.

In addition, a ballroom with space for 600 is due to be completed soon. Craig estimated that the business, a nonunion shop, employs about 100 people now and will likely reach 200 workers in coming months.

A guest room inside Hotel Clark.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

This rebirth may not comfort those seeking more affordable housing downtown, but for anyone eager to see more legal commerce on Hill Street or more hotel rooms in the run-up to the 2028 Games, it’s progress. This boost in room supply may also encourage travelers who have seen downtown hotel rates jump by more than 10% in the last year. Analytics company CoStar reports that downtown hotels averaged $200-$210 per night from June through September.

“There’s nowhere to go but up,” Craig said. “The possibilities here are endless.”

A few weeks ago, Craig’s team gave Marsak a tour of building (and bought a batch of Angels Flight tickets to distribute among guests. The historian declared himself mostly delighted.

“Having the Clark open, facing Hill Street — which can get rough — is so brave of them,” said Marsak. “I can’t applaud it enough.”

As for the inside and that zebra-print wallpaper, it’s “not what I would have done,” he said. “I believe that Beaux-Arts buildings should be Beaux-Arts inside and out. But you can’t have everything.”