IRIS Law had her assistants running across New York to find her favourite treats ahead of the Victoria’s Secret show, it’s been reported.
The 25-year-old daughter of actorJude LawandfilmproducerSadie Frost, made her debut as an Angel during the return of the world famous runway show in October.
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Iris Law made her Victoria’s Secret runway debut this yearCredit: GettyThe model reportedly had a set of ‘diva’ demands before the showCredit: Getty
This year’s Victoria’s Secret show was full of famous faces including fellow nepo babies, Bella and Gigi Hadid, and Lila Moss.
But it was reported that Iris had plenty of demands as she prepared to walk the runway.
Iris is said to have sent her team of assistants looking for cookies from a particular bakery and then smoothies from another place in New York, according to Daily Mail.
The Victoria’s Secret catwalk show made a stunning return earlier this month and was full of A-list models including,Alessandra Ambrosio, Jasmine Tookes, Angel Reese, Barbie Ferreira, Ashley Graham, Irina Shayk and Emily Ratajkowski.
The whirlwind romance between Trent and Iris hit the rocks last year.
Before then pictures of Trent and Iris in the Caribbean in July showed them looking like a perfect couple after meeting on a photoshoot with Guess Jeans only five months prior.
Her dad, Jude has seven different children with four different women.
His other kids are named Raff, 27, Rudy, 21, Sophia, 14 and Ada, eight.
Jude and his current wife Phillipa Coan, whom he married in 2019, have reportedly had two children, one in 2020 and one in 2023.
Iris is the daughter of Jude Law and Sadie FrostCredit: Getty – Contributor
Christopher Cash (left) and Christopher Berry (right) both deny the accusation of spying for China
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has written to the prime minister asking him to address “unanswered” questions about the collapsed case against two men accused of spying for China.
Charges against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry – who deny the allegations – were dropped in September, prompting criticism from MPs.
The director of public prosecutions (DPP) said the case collapsed because evidence could not be obtained from the government referring to China as a national security threat. On Sunday, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said ministers were “disappointed” it had not proceeded.
In her letter, Badenoch said the government’s account of the situation had “changed repeatedly”.
Sir Keir Starmer previously said ministers could only draw on the last government’s assessment of China – which dubbed it an “epoch-defining challenge” – and his government has maintained it is “frustrated” the trial collapsed.
Badenoch outlined “several key questions which remain unanswered” in her letter on Sunday, and asked that Starmer or a senior minister appear before MPs “to clear things up once and for all”.
She wrote: “This is a matter of the utmost importance, involving alleged spying on Members of Parliament. It seems that you and your ministers have been too weak to stand up to Beijing on a crucial matter of national security.”
The letter queried remarks made by Phillipson to the BBC earlier in the day, in which she said Starmer’s national security advisor Jonathan Powell had no role in the “substance or the evidence” of the case.
Phillipson also said ministers were “deeply disappointed that the case hasn’t proceeded”, and insisted the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was “best placed to explain why it was not able to bring forward a prosecution”.
The Conservatives had suggested Powell, who has sought closer relations with Beijing, failed to give the CPS the evidence it said it needed to secure convictions.
Badenoch questioned Phillipson’s comments: “What does this mean? If he was “not involved” in the decision over months not to give the CPS what they needed, then who was?”
Jonathan Powell, one of Sir Keir’s most senior advisers and political allies, visited China earlier this year
The opposition leader also claimed the government – which had denied ministers were involved in the trial’s collapse before the DPP claimed the necessary material had not been obtained – had sought to “appease China”.
She disputed Starmer’s comments that ministers could only draw on the previous Conservative government’s position, writing: “As various leading lawyers have pointed out, this is not how the law works.”
Starmer had told reporters earlier this week: “You have to prosecute people on the basis of the circumstances at the time of the alleged offence”.
“So all the focus needs to be on the policy of the Tory government in place then.”
Badenoch asked that Starmer clarify whether any ministers knew about the government’s interactions with the CPS in which it “refused” to provide the material being sought.
She also asked if the matter had ever been raised with Starmer, including by Powell, and if an earlier denial of the government’s involvement had been “misleading”.
The Conservatives have submitted an urgent question in Parliament, asking ministers to address MPs on Monday to explain why the trial collapsed.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp told the BBC ministers “must urgently explain why it chose not to disclose the reams of information it has demonstrating China was a threat to national security in the 2021-2023 period”.
He said: “It looks as if Jonathan Powell was behind this decision – and he should resign if he is.”
Meanwhile, several former Conservative ministers and advisers have told the BBC there was no official designation of whether a country amounts to a threat.
They claim there is a document with “hundreds” of examples of Chinese activity posing a threat to the UK at the time of the alleged offences, which could have been given as evidence.
Sources cited the hack on the Ministry of Defence, which ministers suspected China was behind, as one of many incidents.
“I don’t think there is a sane jury in the world that would look at that evidence and conclude China was not a threat,” a source in the last government said.
Former Conservative ministers also point to public statements, including from the former head of MI5 Ken McCallum, who in 2023 said there had been a “sustained campaign” of Chinese espionage on a “pretty epic scale”.
The Liberal Democrats said the government’s approach to China was “putting our national security at risk”.
The party urged the government to block the planning application for a new Chinese embassy in London.
“Giving the green light to the super embassy being built in the heart of the City of London and above critical data connections would enable Chinese espionage on an industrial scale,” Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Calum Miller said.
Mr Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and Mr Berry, were charged under the Official Secrets Act in April 2024, when the Conservatives were in power.
They were accused of gathering and providing information prejudicial to the safety and interests of the state between December 2021 and February 2023.
Under the Official Secrets Act, anyone accused of spying can only be prosecuted if the information they passed on was useful to an enemy.
Last month, the DPP said “the case could no longer proceed to trial since the evidence no longer met the evidential test”.
MAFS UK decsended into chaos once again tonight, as one groom broke down in tears after his wife told him he was ‘too negative’ during a camel ride in Morocco
22:35, 25 Sep 2025Updated 23:06, 25 Sep 2025
Another honeymoon spiralled into disaster during tonight’s episode of Married At First Sight, as Julia-Ruth and Divarni headed off to Morocco.
The couple tied the knot during last night’s E4 episode, and they instantly bonded, with Divarni even going as far as to say it was “love at first sight”. However, tonight things took a huge U-turn with Divarni left in tears after a ‘disastrous’ camel ride date.
Things started to change the morning after the wedding, when Julia said that she’d woken up with a different thought, and despite being a sexual person, the desire wasn’t there for her.
Things took an awkward turn when they arrived at their destination, and began talking about their first impressions of each other after walking down the aisle.
“I think there was an expectation around height,” Julia-Ruth told her new husband. “I have dated taller guys,” she said, before crying to the cameras, telling them she “didn’t want to be mean to him”.
Divarni was left shocked, telling cameras he was hurt by the admission. However, they didn’t let it put a halt to the honeymoon, as Julia-Ruth seemed bored in her husband’s company.
Things got too much during their camel ride, as Julia-Ruth asked Divarni what his greatest fear was – but the answer isn’t what she was expecting.
“Growing up, I was always alone,” he said. “I think knowing that I could probably be alone for the rest of my life, that would be the worst.”
Speaking to the cameras, Julia-Ruth said: “That’s not what I meant at all. With Divarni it’s quite hard to see the fun, light-hearted side. It’s just too deep, he doesn’t see any positives, it’s just too much.”
She then went on to tell her groom that he “focuses on the negatives” which will make him attract it. “The camel ride was a disaster,” she told cameras. “I can’t lift us both up.”
Later at dinner, the pair talked it out, with Julia-Ruth saying she needed positivity and fun. “I don’t want you to feel that you can’t open up to me because that’s not what the case is. There just needs to be a balance and a time and place for things.”
Divarni responded that it wasn’t his intentions to “be Mr Negative” – while his bride responded: “The last thing I want to do is have a talk about traumas and then, like, get into bed with you,” as they slept in separate rooms.
Opening up once again to the cameras, Divarni said: “The thing that hurt me the most is sleeping in separate rooms, but if she needs her space, I’lll give her space.”
He was then seen with his head in his hands as he sat on the floor in tears, but can they come back from this?
Published on 25/09/2025 – 14:39 GMT+2 •Updated
15:05
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Negotiations over the sustainability chapter of the trade agreement with India are proving “challenging” the Commission’s chief negotiator Christophe Kiener told a meeting of the European Parliament’s trade committee on Thursday.
“We will need to adjust the approach we usually take on trade and sustainable development to make sure this is something India can live with,” said Kiener, adding: “Not having a chapter on trade and sustainability is not an option, but we must also make sure that this chapter cannot be an empty shell.”
The EU and India aim to conclude negotiations on a trade agreement by the end of the year. On 12 September, EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen travelled to New Delhi for a new round of talks. However, no breakthrough was achieved.
One of the main sticking points is the dispute settlement mechanism the EU seeks to include in the deal to ensure India complies with environmental standards.
“The notion that there would be a dispute settlement, let alone sanctions applying to those commitments, the idea that the commitments would be legally binding, that civil society would be involved in the management of the agreement from that perspective, but also that those commitments would apply at the sub-federal level — these are elements that are very difficult for India,” Kiener told MEPs.
India ‘not like New Zealand’
Since its last mandate, the Commission pushes for inclusion of environmental provisions in its trade agreements, including mechanisms to oversee their implementation and enforce compliance.
This same chapter proved contentious during the EU’s talks with the Mercosur countries — Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay — until a deal was finally reached in December 2024.
The Mercosur agreement includes a dispute settlement mechanism involving an external review by independent experts and participation from civil society. It also identifies adherence to the Paris Agreement — the legally binding international climate treaty adopted in 2015 — as an “essential element” of the deal. This means the agreement can be suspended if one party seriously breaches or withdraws from the climate accord.
“We should not fall into the delusion that India is a country like New Zealand,” Kiener said, referring to the EU-New Zealand deal that entered into force in May 2024 and is considered a benchmark for integrating green standards into trade agreements.
EU green legislation, in particular the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) adopted in 2023, has raised concerns among Indian negotiators, Kiener told MEPs. CBAM introduces a levy on imports into the EU of certain carbon-intensive goods, a measure India perceives as potentially protectionist.
Kenyan President William Ruto told the UN General Assembly that Africa’s exclusion from permanent membership on the Security Council is unfair and undermines the UN’s credibility, arguing the continent bears the “heaviest cost of instability”.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta on Monday accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr of unlawfully intimidating television broadcasters into toeing a conservative line in favor of President Trump, and urged him to reverse course.
In a letter to Carr, Bonta specifically cited ABC’s decision to pull “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air after Kimmel made comments about the killing of close Trump ally Charlie Kirk, and Carr demanded ABC’s parent company Disney “take action” against the late-night host.
Bonta wrote that California “is home to a great many artists, entertainers, and other individuals who every day exercise their right to free speech and free expression,” and that Carr’s demands of Disney threatened their 1st Amendment rights.
“As the Supreme Court held over sixty years ago and unanimously reaffirmed just last year, ‘the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech,’” Bonta wrote.
Carr and Trump have both denied playing a role in Kimmel’s suspension, alleging instead that it was due to his show having poor ratings.
After Disney announced Monday that Kimmel’s show would be returning to ABC, Bonta said he was “pleased to hear ABC is reversing course on its capitulation to the FCC’s unlawful threats,” but that his “concerns stand.”
He rejected Trump and Carr’s denials of involvement, and accused the administration of “waging a dangerous attack on those who dare to speak out against it.”
“Censoring and silencing critics because you don’t like what they say — be it a comedian, a lawyer, or a peaceful protester — is fundamentally un-American,” while such censorship by the U.S. government is “absolutely chilling,” Bonta said.
Bonta called on Carr to “stop his campaign of censorship” and commit to defending the right to free speech in the U.S., which he said would require “an express disavowal” of his previous threats and “an unambiguous pledge” that he will not use the FCC “to retaliate against private parties” for speech he disagrees with moving forward.
“News outlets have reported today that ABC will be returning Mr. Kimmel’s show to its broadcast tomorrow night. While it is heartening to see the exercise of free speech ultimately prevail, this does not erase your threats and the resultant suppression of free speech from this past week or the prospect that your threats will chill free speech in the future,” Bonta wrote.
After Kirk’s killing, Kimmel said during a monologue that the U.S. had “hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Carr responded on a conservative podcast, saying, “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Two major owners of ABC affiliates dropped the show, after which ABC said it would be “preempted indefinitely.”
Both Kirk’s killing and Kimmel’s suspension — which followed the cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” by CBS — kicked off a tense debate about freedom of speech in the U.S. Both Kimmel and Colbert are critics of Trump, while Kirk was an ardent supporter.
Constitutional scholars and other 1st amendment advocates said the administration and Carr have clearly been exerting inappropriate pressure on media companies.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, said Carr’s actions were part of a broad assault on free speech by the administration, which “is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st amendment.”
Summer Lopez, the interim co-chief executive of PEN America, said this is “a dangerous moment for free speech” in the U.S. because of a host of Trump administration actions that are “pretty clear violations of the 1st Amendment” — including Carr’s threats but also statements about “hate speech” by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and new Pentagon restrictions on journalists reporting on the U.S. military.
She said Kimmel’s return to ABC showed that “public outrage does make a difference,” but that “it’s important that we generate that level of public outrage when the targeting is of people who don’t have that same prominence.”
Carr has also drawn criticism from conservative corners, including from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC. He recently said on his podcast that he found it “unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.”
Cruz said he works closely with Carr, whom he likes, but that what Carr said was “dangerous as hell” and could be used down the line “to silence every conservative in America.”
United States President Donald Trump’s administration has announced new restrictions on media outlets’ reporting of the country’s military, including a requirement that journalists pledge not to publish unauthorised information.
Under the new rules unveiled by the Department of War, previously the Department of Defense, reporters could lose their credentials to cover the military if they refused to sign a pledge agreeing to only disclose approved information.
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The rules, contained in a memo published by The New York Times following its circulation among media outlets on Friday, stipulate that information must be approved for release by “an appropriate authorising official before it is released, even if it is unclassified”.
The measures also limit the movements of journalists within the Arlington, Virginia-based Pentagon building itself, designating much of the facility off-limits without an escort.
“The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon – the people do,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a post on X following a report about the changes.
“The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules – or go home.”
Mike Balsamo, the president of the National Press Club, blasted the changes as an attack on independent journalism “at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most”.
“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American,” Balsamo said in a statement.
“Independent reporting on the military is essential to democracy. It is what allows citizens to hold leaders accountable and ensures that decisions of war and peace are made in the light of day.”
Multiple media organisations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Reuters news agency, joined in the condemnation of the restrictions.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that decades of US Supreme Court precedent affirmed the right of the media to publish government secrets.
“That is essentially the job description of an investigative journalist. The law is also clear that the government can’t require people to contract away a constitutional right, like the right to obtain and publish secrets, in exchange for a benefit, like access to government buildings or press credentials,” Stern told Al Jazeera.
“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication, which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations. As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”
The Pentagon Papers case, aka the New York Times Co. v. United States, refers to a 1971 ruling by the Supreme Court that affirmed the freedom of the press by allowing The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish classified documents detailing the history of US involvement in the Vietnam War.
The Trump administration’s new restrictions are the latest in a series of moves by the US government to curtail the media.
On Wednesday, the ABC announced that it had suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s long-running talk show after the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) threatened regulatory action over remarks the host made about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
FCC chair Brendan Carr has signalled that further action to rein in voices critical of the administration could be on the way.
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Carr, a Trump appointee, said that his agency would continue to hold broadcasters “accountable to the public interest”, and that those who did not like that could “turn their licence in”.
Days before Kimmel’s suspension, Trump filed a $15bn lawsuit accusing The New York Times of defamation, following similar suits against CBS News, ABC News and The Wall Street Journal.
On Friday, a judge in Florida threw out the suit against The New York Times, finding that the complaint relied on “tendentious arguments” and contained “repetitive” and “laudatory” praise of Trump that was not relevant to the case.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has suggested that he is open to talks with the US if Washington stops insisting that his country give up its nuclear weapons.
“If the United States drops the absurd obsession with denuclearising us and accepts reality, and wants genuine peaceful coexistence, there is no reason for us not to sit down with the United States,” Kim said in a speech at the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang on Sunday, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
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The North Korean leader also commented on US President Donald Trump, whom he met three times during Trump’s first presidency, saying: “Personally, I still have fond memories of US President Trump.”
Kim’s comments come after both Trump and South Korean leader Lee Jae-myung expressed their willingness to meet with their North Korean counterpart at a meeting at the White House last month.
“Someday, I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump said at the time, adding that he knew Kim, whose family has ruled North Korea for three generations, “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister”.
Lee, who has been vocally supportive of thawing relations with his country’s northern neighbour since taking office in June, said at the same meeting that he hoped the US president would “build a Trump Tower” in North Korea “so that I can play golf there”.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump inside the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea on June 30, 2019, in Panmunjom, South Korea [Handout: Dong-A Ilbo via Getty Images]
Despite overtures from Lee and Trump, North Korea has been critical of joint military drills between the US and South Korea, with Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, describing them as a “reckless” invasion rehearsal.
A more realistic goal
In recent interviews with the BBC and the Reuters news agency, Lee has also expressed an openness to negotiating his country’s stance on North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Lee said he would be open to a more “realistic” goal of North Korea agreeing to stop acquiring more nuclear weapons, rather than continuing with “fruitless attempts” at making it give up its existing arsenal.
“So long as we do not give up on the long-term goal of denuclearisation, I believe there are clear benefits to having North Korea stop its nuclear and missile development,” Lee said.
In an interview with Reuters, also published on Sunday, Lee acknowledged that sanctions had ultimately failed to deter Pyongyang, which today is adding an estimated 15 to 20 nuclear weapons to its arsenal every year.
“The reality is that the previous approach of sanctions and pressure has not solved the problem; it has worsened it,” Lee said.
Addressing the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang on Sunday, Kim also said that sanctions had only made his country stronger and more resilient, despite reports that the nation of some 26 million people has long suffered from a food crisis.
“There will never be, and will never ever be for eternity, any negotiations with enemies of exchanging some things out of some obsession with lifting sanctions,” Kim said.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Beijing, China, on September 3, 2025 [Rao Aimin/Xinhua/EPA]
The United Nations imposed sanctions on North Korea for pursuing its banned nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes close to 20 years ago.
But Kim Jong Un last year promised to “exponentially” boost his nation’s nuclear arsenal to defend itself against “hostile” forces.
The push comes as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) Yearbook warned in its latest annual report that the world is at risk of a new arms race among the nine nuclear-armed states: China, France, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US.
Meanwhile, Kim’s signalling of an openness to meeting with Washington comes after he met with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, in Beijing earlier this month for a military parade marking 80 years since the end of World War II.
In comments apparently addressed to Xi regarding the Beijing celebrations, Trump said on his Truth Social platform: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”
WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic Leader Charles E. Schumer weathered backlash from Democrats earlier this year when he voted with Republicans to keep the government open. But he’s now willing to risk a shutdown at the end of the month if Republicans don’t accede to Democratic demands.
Schumer says he and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries are united in opposing any legislation that doesn’t include key healthcare provisions and a commitment not to roll them back. He argues that the country is in a different place than it was in March, when he vigorously argued against a shutdown, and he says he believes Republicans and President Trump will be held responsible if they don’t negotiate a bipartisan deal.
“Things have changed” since the March vote, Schumer said in an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday. He said Republicans have since passed Trump’s massive tax breaks and spending cuts legislation, which trimmed Medicaid and other government programs, and Democrats are now unified — unlike in March, when he voted with Republicans and Jeffries voted against the legislation to fund the government.
A shutdown, Schumer said, wouldn’t necessarily worsen an environment in which Trump is already challenging the authority of Congress. “It will get worse with or without it, because Trump is lawless,” Schumer said.
Democrats’ consequential decision
Schumer’s threat comes as Republicans are considering a short-term stopgap spending measure to avoid a Sept. 30 shutdown and as Democrats face what most see as two tough choices if the parties can’t negotiate a deal — vote with Republicans to keep the government open or let it close indefinitely with no clear exit plan.
It also comes amid worsening partisan tensions in the Senate, where negotiations between the two parties over the confirmation process broke down for a second time on Thursday and Republicans are changing Senate rules to get around Democratic objections to almost all of Trump’s nominees. Democrats are also fuming over the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally claw back $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid just as negotiations over the spending deadline were getting underway in late August.
Republicans move ahead
Republicans say that Democrats clearly will be to blame if they don’t vote to keep the government open.
Trump said Friday to not “even bother” negotiating with Democrats. He said Republicans will likely put together a continuing resolution to keep funding the federal government.
“If you gave them every dream, they would not vote for it,” Trump said, adding “we will get it through because the Republicans are sticking together.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), said in an interview with Punchbowl News on Thursday that he believes Democrats see it as “politically advantageous” to have a shutdown.
“But they don’t have a good reason to do it,” Thune said in the interview. “And I don’t intend to give them a good reason to do it.”
Thune has repeatedly said that Schumer needs to approach Republicans with a specific proposal on healthcare, including an extension of expanded government tax credits for many Americans who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Some Republicans are open to extending those credits before they expire at the end of the year, but Thune has indicated that he is unlikely to add an extension to a short-term spending bill, instead favoring a “clean” stopgap for several weeks without any divisive issues while Congress finishes its budget legislation.
Schumer said he believes his caucus is ready to oppose the stopgap measure if Republicans don’t negotiate it with Democrats. “I think the overwhelming majority of our caucus, with a few exceptions, and same with the House, would vote against that,” he said.
Less realistic is Democrats’ demand that Republicans roll back Medicaid cuts enacted in their tax breaks and spending cuts legislation this summer, what Trump called his “big, beautiful bill.”
Escalating partisan tensions over spending
Schumer said Democrats also want Republicans to commit that the White House won’t take back money they have negotiated and Congress has approved after Republicans pushed through a $9-billion cut requested by the White House in July and Trump blocked the additional foreign aid money in August. “How do you pass an appropriations bill and let them undo it down the road?” Schumer said.
Congress is facing the funding deadline Sept. 30 because Republicans and Democrats are still working out their differences on several annual budget bills. Intractable partisan differences on an increasing number of issues have stalled those individual bills in recent years, forcing lawmakers to pass one large omnibus package at the end of the year or simply vote to continue current spending.
A shutdown means federal agencies will stop all actions deemed nonessential, and millions of federal employees, including members of the military, won’t receive paychecks. The most recent shutdown — and the longest ever — was during Trump’s first term in 2018 and into 2019, when he demanded money for his U.S.-Mexico border wall. It lasted 35 days.
Schumer’s March vote
Schumer’s move to support the spending legislation in March put him in the rare position of bucking his party’s base. He said then that of two bad options, a partial government shutdown was worse because it would give Trump even more control to lay off workers and there would be “no offramp” to get out of it. “I think people realize it’s a tough choice,” he said.
He faced massive backlash from within the party after the vote, with some activists calling on him to resign. Jeffries temporarily distanced himself from his New York colleague, saying in a statement immediately after Schumer’s vote that House Democrats “will not be complicit.” The majority of Senate Democrats also voted against the GOP spending legislation.
This time, though, Schumer is in lockstep with Jeffries and in messaging within his caucus. In Democrats’ closed-door lunch Wednesday, he shared polling that he said suggested most Americans would blame Trump, not Democrats, for a shutdown.
“I did what I thought was right” in March, Schumer said. “It’s a different situation now than then.”
Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christopher Megerian contributed to this report.
Thousands rallied in New York for a ‘Mass March for Humanity’ demanding an end to Israel’s imposed starvation of Gaza and the complicity of the US. Protesters honoured slain journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, and accused Israel of targeting media workers.
“Stop the killing of our spouses.” The widow of slain Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Qreiqeh says he was a kind, loving father and husband before he was assassinated by Israeli forces to silence his coverage on the Gaza war.
Joyce Birdwell survived the North Complex fire in 2020, though it devoured her home, and a life she loved, in the mountain town of Berry Creek.
Her partner, Art Linfoot, built the house they lost, a cabin with a wraparound porch and a year-round brook where deer drank and the sound of the water lulled the couple to sleep. Birdwell fired up her chain saw nearly every morning, she told me, aware that keeping the brush at bay was crucial for safety.
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.
But the fire that came through their Butte County home didn’t care about her trimmed trees, or her hard work or our persistent belief that everything will somehow be OK after a disaster. Birdwell, 69, and Linfoot, 80, are in Irvine now, with no intention of returning, or rebuilding.
Berry Creek Elementary School burned to the ground in the North Complex fire in 2020.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“I never thought twice about it as soon as we went back there and saw what was left,” she told me. “I know how long it takes for a tree to grow, and I just knew this would never, never work out for us.”
Hers is a bit of wisdom that is too often lost in our conversations about urban fire: Sometimes, recovery is not rebuilding. Politicians won’t admit it, but the ethos of #strong — measuring success with how quickly we can raise up houses on scorched earth — is snake oil, an emotional rallying cry that often delivers little more than a slippery bit of comfort that benefits the rich more than the rest. Because even rebuilding the most beloved of homes at the fastest of paces will not restore lives or communities to what they were. Or what they need to be. And by focusing on this powerful but narrow idea of recovery, we do a disservice to individual survivors and our collective good.
We need to change our understanding of what recovery is, because we live in an era when the climate crisis has created not just survivors, but refugees and migrants in California and the United States — and they deserve more than a slogan that, to steal a favorite phrase from our governor, does not “meet the moment.”
As we hurl forward to rebuild after January’s fires in the Palisades and Altadena — and all the disasters yet to come — it’s time to acknowledge that recovery and rebuilding, for all our talk, is never fair. There is a bias toward the rich embedded in the process. And for every recovery that we allow to be unfair under the guise of #strong, we march deeper to a California where the elite live in comfort and the rest live in fear — a rightful anxiety that everything we have is tenuous, given and taken as afterthoughts in a tug-of-war between Mother Nature and the wealthy.
‘Conspicuous resilience’
The idea that fire recovery is fair has always been a scam. In his infamous 1998 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the much-revered and equally despised environmental activist and historian Mike Davis wrote that the “flatland majority” has always been paying “the ever increasing expense of maintaining and, when necessary, rebuilding sloping suburbia,” those rarefied neighborhoods that consider themselves part of Los Angeles proper only when they need something from the rest of us.
If that was true at the turn of the millennium, it’s even more so now.
A 75-year history of fires in the Santa Monica Mountains
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
2020-2025
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Davis wrote his controversial piece, he also noted that “late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles.” More than three decades later, climate change has intensified our weather so much that floods and fires haunt almost every month of the California calendar, eclipsing the chthonic terrors of earthquakes that rattle us only now and then.
Summer Gray, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies the inequities in our responses to climate change, says disaster recovery can be “highly performative, often driven by more privileged members of the community” who have the money and clout that allow them to suck up resources. She saw this firsthand by examining recovery after the debris flows in Montecito in the wake of the 2017 Thomas fire.
Though talk in the ultra-wealthy enclave was all about community recovery, Gray concluded — through interviewing community members — that those with the ability to speak loudest and earliest often received more help, and set the agenda for what recovery included, and didn’t. She found that “narratives of resilience were actually obscuring systemic inequalities.”
Gray warns that sometimes, whether consciously or not, these privileged groups leverage “the optics of this collective recovery to accelerate their own rebuilding,” leaving working-class survivors “sidelined or ignored.” Gray calls this attitude part of “conspicuous resilience,” conflating being temporarily displaced and inconvenienced with being oppressed and vulnerable, leading to the celebration and glorification of a recovery that mostly benefits the few.
“I am not saying that our billionaire class has bad intent,” Gray said. But the elite, “don’t really understand what the needs are.”
My colleague Liam Dillon reported not long ago that before the fire, “the average home in Pacific Palisades cost $3.5 million, the median household earned $325,000 and the total number of rental units restricted as affordable housing was two.”
Two.
When Dillon asked former mayoral candidate and developer Rick Caruso, whose super-high-end mall is an anchor of Palisades commerce, if that should be expanded at this unique moment when everything must be rebuilt anyway, Caruso told him, “Now is not the time for outside groups with no ties to the area to slow down the ability of people to rebuild their homes by trying to impose their agenda.”
Two people ride past a burning house off Enchanted Way in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
No ties to the area except our tax dollars, of course, and our erstwhile equality as Angelenos and Californians.
Mayor Karen Bass’ now-ousted recovery czar, developer Steve Soboroff, who supported more affordable housing, put the mood more succinctly.
“We’re not rethinking,” Soboroff said. “We’re rebuilding.”
But if now is not the time to rethink, when is?
The climate crisis is costly, whipping up more and more disasters each year. When Davis wrote his book, there were about six natural disasters in the U.S. every year where the costs of recovery exceeded a billion dollars. Last year, there were 27. This year, we stopped counting, as part of government cost cutting, but that has not stopped floods, fires and heat waves.
Even if the federal government, largely through our taxes, was able to pick up the tab for every tornado, hurricane and wildfire, our current administration has made it clear it does not want to. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been gutted, and may hand off many of its former duties to states, including California, that even if prosperous, lack the money to cover those costs.
Add to that the financial precariousness of tariffs that are making building more expensive, immigration policies that are decimating our construction workforce and insurance costs that are skyrocketing, if you can get a policy, and the prospect of the poor and middle class recovering from fire as quickly as the rich seems naive at best.
Fixes for the future
There are three actions we can take that have the potential to keep California from further devolving into climate rich and poor, housing winner and housing loser.
First, we need to end the fixation on speed.
“If it’s speed without a plan, it means you’re more likely to return to the status quo,” Laurie A. Johnson told me. She’s an urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery convened by L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.
Johnson views a focus on speed as “an empowerment of those who have everything they need, or who can easily get it.”
Volunteer archaeologists Elyse Mallonee, left, and Parker Sheriff carefully sift through rubble and ash while looking for cremated remains at a house in Altadena on Feb. 18.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Why don’t we acknowledge that fire destroys more than owner-occupied houses and give equal weight to graduation rates for affected students or the number of renters successfully relocated to safe apartments? What about measuring success around health outcomes for those with asthma or heart conditions exposed to the smoke, or count the number of people who feel their mental health needs have been met or their jobs stabilized?
Certainly home ownership is emotionally and financially important, especially in unique places such as Altadena where a Black middle class found refuge and economic security. But home ownership — and by extension rebuilding — is predominantly a measure of an upper-class recovery, especially in L.A. County, where less than half of the people own the place where they live.
It’s time to slow down, and, yes, rethink.
The second action that will help us reform how we handle disaster is even more difficult: Openly talk about who gets to recover with public money (which repaves roads and fixes water systems and sewers, for example) and who gets to decide who recovers with public money.
Returning to Davis’ point all those years ago, do we continue to rebuild in places that we know, for certain, will experience fire again? What do we owe places such as Malibu, where housing values have increased significantly with each post-fire rebuilding and which have made their elitism part of their identity? What do we owe places such as Altadena, if we allow homeowners with modest means to rebuild without robustly mitigating risk of a future fire?
Maybe not every place should be rebuilt. Maybe in some places, it’s time to let Mother Nature win, or at least create buffers so that she doesn’t have the upper hand.
Our better natures want to help everyone who faces loss, rich or poor. The idea that we would tell a community that they cannot have the money to restore themselves sounds like a political and moral absurdity. But it is increasingly likely that there simply will not be enough money in the future to rebuild everything.
It is absolutely time to impose a recovery “agenda” that takes into account the realities of climate change and our housing crisis and seeks to create communities that are safe and in service of our collective needs. Anything less ignores the reality of the majority, and nearly ensures that these places will return more gentrified, wealthier and even more exclusive, the exact opposite of what public dollars should support.
The Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, destroyed by the Palisades fire, is seen along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on Jan. 10.
(Zoe Meyers / AFP via Getty Images)
The last action we need to take to better face a difficult future is to expand what recovery means. It is not always rebuilding. More often than we like to acknowledge, it means moving on. But currently, few of our resources or even our conversations include help for those who don’t want to stick around. In fact, they’re often scorned or simply forgotten.
The Palisades fire wiped out 600 homes in Malibu, 5,500 overall. The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 homes and buildings. Almost certainly, something will be built on all of those lots. Developers are already snapping some of them up. But almost as certain, many of the people who once lived in these places will not return — and probably shouldn’t.
Age, finances, health — there are myriad reasons why spending five to 10 years rebuilding a lost home is not the right decision. Recovery needs to support other options with government money, including moving elsewhere, without shame and without the pressure of the elite-driven #strong ethos that forces us to believe recovery looks like the past.
California’s best example of what this could include is the ReCoverCA Homebuyer Assistance (HBA) Program. This program gave financial assistance of up to $350,000 per household through a forgivable second mortgage loan to low- and middle-income folks, mainly renters, displaced by past fires — basically helping to buy houses for economically-challenged survivors.
The catch? The new home had to be outside a high-risk fire zone. That’s a win for displaced people, for the climate, and for encouraging safe housing and wealth building for the future. But the state is not currently funding the program for fire survivors, though some impacted by floods have a shot.
None of this is to argue that rebuilding is wrong, or that losing a home is undeserving of sympathy or help. It is. But there is so much more to survivors, and recovery, than a house.
Birdwell, who lost her home in Berry Creek, still thinks of that cabin as a “slice of heaven” and reminiscences “about how life used to be.” But she is left with anxiety — a remnant of the fire for which no one has offered her help — and a sense of dislocation and discontent. A few nights ago, she dreamed fire was coming at her again.
“I woke up, my heart was beating out of my chest,” she said. “That might be something that will happen the rest of my life.”
In the next 30 years, we will assuredly have more climate refugees, more climate migrants, like Birdwell and Linfoot and the thousands of Angelenos still reeling from our recent fires. We can plan for that now if we choose to, leave behind the gratifying but false camaraderie of #strong and instead broaden our response to ensuring everyone who survives climate tragedy has options and equity.
If we don’t, we will simply move further into a future that bends recovery to benefit the wealthy, as Davis predicted long ago — prioritizing the rebuilding of hazardous communities again and again until the only people who can afford to live in them are the people who can afford to watch them burn.
As authorities identified the shooter in the deadly attack on CDC headquarters as a Georgia man who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a union representing workers at the agency is demanding that federal officials condemn vaccine misinformation, saying it was putting scientists at risk.
The union said that Friday’s shooting at the Atlanta offices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which left a police officer dead, was not a random incident and that it “compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured.”
The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 2883, said the CDC and leadership of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services must provide a “clear and unequivocal stance in condemning vaccine disinformation.”
The 30-year-old gunman, who died during the event, had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Saturday.
The man, identified as Patrick Joseph White, was armed with five guns, including at least one long gun, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.
Here’s what to know about the shooting and the continuing investigation:
An attack on a public health institution
Police say White opened fire outside the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Friday, leaving bullet marks in windows across the sprawling campus. At least four CDC buildings were hit, agency Director Susan Monarez said on X.
DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose was mortally wounded while responding. Rose, 33, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, had graduated from the police academy in March.
White was found on the second floor of a building across the street from the CDC campus and died at the scene, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said. “We do not know at this time whether that was from officers or if it was self-inflicted,” he said.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the crime scene was “complex” and the investigation would take “an extended period of time.”
CDC union’s call
The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 2883, is calling for a statement condemning vaccine misinformation from the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency is led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who rose to public prominence on healthcare issues as a leading vaccine skeptic, sometimes advancing false information.
A public statement by federal officials condemning misinformation is needed to help prevent violence against scientists, the union said in a news release.
“Their leadership is critical in reinforcing public trust and ensuring that accurate, science-based information prevails,” the union said.
Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off CDC employees, has said Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of the CDC’s workforce through “his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust.”
Kennedy reached out to staff on Saturday, saying that “no one should face violence while working to protect the health of others.”
Thousands of people who work on critical disease research are employed on the campus. The union said some staff members were huddled in various buildings until late at night, including more than 90 young children who were locked down inside the CDC’s Clifton School.
The union said CDC staff should not be required to immediately return to work after experiencing such a traumatic event. In a statement released Saturday, it said windows and buildings should first be fixed and made “completely secure.”
“Staff should not be required to work next to bullet holes,” the union said. “Forcing a return under these conditions risks re-traumatizing staff by exposing them to the reminders of the horrific shooting they endured.”
The union also called for “perimeter security on all campuses” until the investigation is fully completed and shared with staff.
Shooter’s focus on COVID-19 vaccine
White’s father, who contacted police and identified his son as the possible shooter, said White had been upset over the death of his dog and had become fixated on the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a law enforcement official.
A neighbor of White told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that White “seemed like a good guy” but spoke with her multiple times about his distrust of COVID-19 vaccines in unrelated conversations.
“He was very unsettled, and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people,” Nancy Hoalst told the newspaper. “He emphatically believed that.”
But Hoalst said she never believed White would be violent: “I had no idea he thought he would take it out on the CDC.”
Joyce Birdwell survived the North Complex fire in 2020, though it devoured her home, and a life she loved, in the mountain town of Berry Creek.
Her partner, Art Linfoot, built the house they lost, a cabin with a wraparound porch and a year-round brook where deer drank and the sound of the water lulled the couple to sleep. Birdwell fired up her chain saw nearly every morning, she told me, aware that keeping the brush at bay was crucial for safety.
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.
But the fire that came through their Butte County home didn’t care about her trimmed trees, or her hard work or our persistent belief that everything will somehow be OK after a disaster. Birdwell, 69, and Linfoot, 80, are in Irvine now, with no intention of returning, or rebuilding.
Berry Creek Elementary School burned to the ground in the North Complex fire in 2020.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“I never thought twice about it as soon as we went back there and saw what was left,” she told me. “I know how long it takes for a tree to grow, and I just knew this would never, never work out for us.”
Hers is a bit of wisdom that is too often lost in our conversations about urban fire: Sometimes, recovery is not rebuilding. Politicians won’t admit it, but the ethos of #strong — measuring success with how quickly we can raise up houses on scorched earth — is snake oil, an emotional rallying cry that often delivers little more than a slippery bit of comfort that benefits the rich more than the rest. Because even rebuilding the most beloved of homes at the fastest of paces will not restore lives or communities to what they were. Or what they need to be. And by focusing on this powerful but narrow idea of recovery, we do a disservice to individual survivors and our collective good.
We need to change our understanding of what recovery is, because we live in an era when the climate crisis has created not just survivors, but refugees and migrants in California and the United States — and they deserve more than a slogan that, to steal a favorite phrase from our governor, does not “meet the moment.”
As we hurl forward to rebuild after January’s fires in the Palisades and Altadena — and all the disasters yet to come — it’s time to acknowledge that recovery and rebuilding, for all our talk, is never fair. There is a bias toward the rich embedded in the process. And for every recovery that we allow to be unfair under the guise of #strong, we march deeper to a California where the elite live in comfort and the rest live in fear — a rightful anxiety that everything we have is tenuous, given and taken as afterthoughts in a tug-of-war between Mother Nature and the wealthy.
‘Conspicuous resilience’
The idea that fire recovery is fair has always been a scam. In his infamous 1998 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the much-revered and equally despised environmental activist and historian Mike Davis wrote that the “flatland majority” has always been paying “the ever increasing expense of maintaining and, when necessary, rebuilding sloping suburbia,” those rarefied neighborhoods that consider themselves part of Los Angeles proper only when they need something from the rest of us.
If that was true at the turn of the millennium, it’s even more so now.
A 75-year history of fires in the Santa Monica Mountains
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
2020-2025
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Davis wrote his controversial piece, he also noted that “late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles.” More than three decades later, climate change has intensified our weather so much that floods and fires haunt almost every month of the California calendar, eclipsing the chthonic terrors of earthquakes that rattle us only now and then.
Summer Gray, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies the inequities in our responses to climate change, says disaster recovery can be “highly performative, often driven by more privileged members of the community” who have the money and clout that allow them to suck up resources. She saw this firsthand by examining recovery after the debris flows in Montecito in the wake of the 2017 Thomas fire.
Though talk in the ultra-wealthy enclave was all about community recovery, Gray concluded — through interviewing community members — that those with the ability to speak loudest and earliest often received more help, and set the agenda for what recovery included, and didn’t. She found that “narratives of resilience were actually obscuring systemic inequalities.”
Gray warns that sometimes, whether consciously or not, these privileged groups leverage “the optics of this collective recovery to accelerate their own rebuilding,” leaving working-class survivors “sidelined or ignored.” Gray calls this attitude part of “conspicuous resilience,” conflating being temporarily displaced and inconvenienced with being oppressed and vulnerable, leading to the celebration and glorification of a recovery that mostly benefits the few.
“I am not saying that our billionaire class has bad intent,” Gray said. But the elite, “don’t really understand what the needs are.”
My colleague Liam Dillon reported not long ago that before the fire, “the average home in Pacific Palisades cost $3.5 million, the median household earned $325,000 and the total number of rental units restricted as affordable housing was two.”
Two.
When Dillon asked former mayoral candidate and developer Rick Caruso, whose super-high-end mall is an anchor of Palisades commerce, if that should be expanded at this unique moment when everything must be rebuilt anyway, Caruso told him, “Now is not the time for outside groups with no ties to the area to slow down the ability of people to rebuild their homes by trying to impose their agenda.”
Two people ride past a burning house off Enchanted Way in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
No ties to the area except our tax dollars, of course, and our erstwhile equality as Angelenos and Californians.
Mayor Karen Bass’ now-ousted recovery czar, developer Steve Soboroff, who supported more affordable housing, put the mood more succinctly.
“We’re not rethinking,” Soboroff said. “We’re rebuilding.”
But if now is not the time to rethink, when is?
The climate crisis is costly, whipping up more and more disasters each year. When Davis wrote his book, there were about six natural disasters in the U.S. every year where the costs of recovery exceeded a billion dollars. Last year, there were 27. This year, we stopped counting, as part of government cost cutting, but that has not stopped floods, fires and heat waves.
Even if the federal government, largely through our taxes, was able to pick up the tab for every tornado, hurricane and wildfire, our current administration has made it clear it does not want to. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been gutted, and may hand off many of its former duties to states, including California, that even if prosperous, lack the money to cover those costs.
Add to that the financial precariousness of tariffs that are making building more expensive, immigration policies that are decimating our construction workforce and insurance costs that are skyrocketing, if you can get a policy, and the prospect of the poor and middle class recovering from fire as quickly as the rich seems naive at best.
Fixes for the future
There are three actions we can take that have the potential to keep California from further devolving into climate rich and poor, housing winner and housing loser.
First, we need to end the fixation on speed.
“If it’s speed without a plan, it means you’re more likely to return to the status quo,” Laurie A. Johnson told me. She’s an urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery convened by L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.
Johnson views a focus on speed as “an empowerment of those who have everything they need, or who can easily get it.”
Volunteer archaeologists Elyse Mallonee, left, and Parker Sheriff carefully sift through rubble and ash while looking for cremated remains at a house in Altadena on Feb. 18.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Why don’t we acknowledge that fire destroys more than owner-occupied houses and give equal weight to graduation rates for affected students or the number of renters successfully relocated to safe apartments? What about measuring success around health outcomes for those with asthma or heart conditions exposed to the smoke, or count the number of people who feel their mental health needs have been met or their jobs stabilized?
Certainly home ownership is emotionally and financially important, especially in unique places such as Altadena where a Black middle class found refuge and economic security. But home ownership — and by extension rebuilding — is predominantly a measure of an upper-class recovery, especially in L.A. County, where less than half of the people own the place where they live.
It’s time to slow down, and, yes, rethink.
The second action that will help us reform how we handle disaster is even more difficult: Openly talk about who gets to recover with public money (which repaves roads and fixes water systems and sewers, for example) and who gets to decide who recovers with public money.
Returning to Davis’ point all those years ago, do we continue to rebuild in places that we know, for certain, will experience fire again? What do we owe places such as Malibu, where housing values have increased significantly with each post-fire rebuilding and which have made their elitism part of their identity? What do we owe places such as Altadena, if we allow homeowners with modest means to rebuild without robustly mitigating risk of a future fire?
Maybe not every place should be rebuilt. Maybe in some places, it’s time to let Mother Nature win, or at least create buffers so that she doesn’t have the upper hand.
Our better natures want to help everyone who faces loss, rich or poor. The idea that we would tell a community that they cannot have the money to restore themselves sounds like a political and moral absurdity. But it is increasingly likely that there simply will not be enough money in the future to rebuild everything.
It is absolutely time to impose a recovery “agenda” that takes into account the realities of climate change and our housing crisis and seeks to create communities that are safe and in service of our collective needs. Anything less ignores the reality of the majority, and nearly ensures that these places will return more gentrified, wealthier and even more exclusive, the exact opposite of what public dollars should support.
The Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, destroyed by the Palisades fire, is seen along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on Jan. 10.
(Zoe Meyers / AFP via Getty Images)
The last action we need to take to better face a difficult future is to expand what recovery means. It is not always rebuilding. More often than we like to acknowledge, it means moving on. But currently, few of our resources or even our conversations include help for those who don’t want to stick around. In fact, they’re often scorned or simply forgotten.
The Palisades fire wiped out 600 homes in Malibu, 5,500 overall. The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 homes and buildings. Almost certainly, something will be built on all of those lots. Developers are already snapping some of them up. But almost as certain, many of the people who once lived in these places will not return — and probably shouldn’t.
Age, finances, health — there are myriad reasons why spending five to 10 years rebuilding a lost home is not the right decision. Recovery needs to support other options with government money, including moving elsewhere, without shame and without the pressure of the elite-driven #strong ethos that forces us to believe recovery looks like the past.
California’s best example of what this could include is the ReCoverCA Homebuyer Assistance (HBA) Program. This program gave financial assistance of up to $350,000 per household through a forgivable second mortgage loan to low- and middle-income folks, mainly renters, displaced by past fires — basically helping to buy houses for economically-challenged survivors.
The catch? The new home had to be outside a high-risk fire zone. That’s a win for displaced people, for the climate, and for encouraging safe housing and wealth building for the future. But the state is not currently funding the program for fire survivors, though some impacted by floods have a shot.
None of this is to argue that rebuilding is wrong, or that losing a home is undeserving of sympathy or help. It is. But there is so much more to survivors, and recovery, than a house.
Birdwell, who lost her home in Berry Creek, still thinks of that cabin as a “slice of heaven” and reminiscences “about how life used to be.” But she is left with anxiety — a remnant of the fire for which no one has offered her help — and a sense of dislocation and discontent. A few nights ago, she dreamed fire was coming at her again.
“I woke up, my heart was beating out of my chest,” she said. “That might be something that will happen the rest of my life.”
In the next 30 years, we will assuredly have more climate refugees, more climate migrants, like Birdwell and Linfoot and the thousands of Angelenos still reeling from our recent fires. We can plan for that now if we choose to, leave behind the gratifying but false camaraderie of #strong and instead broaden our response to ensuring everyone who survives climate tragedy has options and equity.
If we don’t, we will simply move further into a future that bends recovery to benefit the wealthy, as Davis predicted long ago — prioritizing the rebuilding of hazardous communities again and again until the only people who can afford to live in them are the people who can afford to watch them burn.
Failing to end the freeze as planned in 2028 would mean millions more Brits are forced into paying a higher rate of tax under fiscal drag.
This is when people are pulled into higher income tax brackets as inflation pushes their wages up.
It comes after a bombshell report said the Chancellor must find £50billion in her autumn Budget to keep the country’s finances in check.
READ MORE ON KEMI BADENOCH
She will have to raise taxes or cut spending to maintain her stated financial cushion of £9.9billion by the end of the decade, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
At the Budget, Ms Reeves said: “Extending the threshold freeze would hurt working people.
“I am keeping every single promise on tax that I made in our manifesto, so there will be no extension of the freeze in income tax and national insurance thresholds.”
Ms Badenoch asked the PM: “I am writing to you to ask: does this remain government policy?”
Kemi Badenoch pleads for Tories to give her more time just like Margaret Thatcher was given
A Labour spokesperson said: “We’ll take no lectures from this failed Tory Party.
“They crashed the economy which sent bills and mortgages rocketing, and left a £22 billion blackhole.
“Kemi Badenoch’s next letter should be an apology to hard-pressed households for the Conservatives’ role in hammering their family finances.
“Labour is the only party focused on creating a fairer Britain.”
1
Kemi Badenoch has challenged Keir Starmer to back up Labour’s Budget promisesCredit: PA
Varsen Aghabekian Shahin says international community must take concrete steps to end Israeli impunity for abuses.
The international community must “shoulder its responsibility” and take action against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian foreign affairs minister has told Al Jazeera before an emergency United Nations Security Council session.
In an interview on Saturday, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin said the 15-member council must uphold international law when it convenes at UN headquarters in New York on Sunday to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The meeting was organised in response to Israel’s newly announced plan to seize Gaza City, which has drawn widespread condemnation from world leaders.
“I expect that the international community stands for international law and international humanitarian law,” Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera.
“What has been going in Palestine for the last 22 months is nothing but a genocide, and it’s part and parcel of Israel’s expansionist ideology that wants to take over the entirety of the occupied State of Palestine.”
The Israeli security cabinet approved plans this week to seize Gaza City, forcibly displacing nearly one million Palestinians to concentration zones in the south of the bombarded coastal enclave.
Palestinians have rejected the Israeli push to force them out of the city while human rights groups and the UN have warned that the plan will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and lead to further mass casualties.
Israel has pledged to push ahead with its plans despite the growing criticism, saying that it wants to “free Gaza from Hamas”.
The country’s top global ally, the United States, has not commented directly on the plan to seize Gaza City. But US President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that he would not block an Israeli push to take over all of Gaza.
Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera that if Trump – whose administration continues to provide unwavering diplomatic and military support to Israel – wants to reach a solution, Palestinian rights must be taken into account.
“There will be no peace in Israel-Palestine, or the region for that matter, or even the world at large, if the rights of the Palestinians are not respected,” she said, noting that this means a Palestinian state must be established.
The minister also slammed recent remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the future governance of Gaza.
In a social media post on Friday, Netanyahu said he wants “a peaceful civilian administration” to be established in the enclave, “one that is not the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, and not any other terrorist organization”.
But Aghabekian Shahin said it’s up to Palestinians to decide who should govern them.
“The one that has the legal and the political authority on Gaza today is the PLO,” she said, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
“If Gaza wants to come back to the core, which is the entirety of the Palestinian land, then it has to become under the control and governance of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO.”
Aghabekian Shahin also condemned the international community for failing to act as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have faced a surge in Israeli military and settler attacks in the shadow of the country’s war on Gaza.
“It is the inaction that has emboldened the Israelis, including the settlers, to do whatever they are doing for the last six decades, since day one of the 1967 occupation,” she said.
“The times are very dangerous now, and it’s important that the international community shoulders its responsibility. The impunity with which Israel was happily moving should stop.”
‘People are being shot like animals.’ Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is calling for Gaza’s GHF aid sites to be shut down after its report found Israeli troops are deliberately killing Palestinians trying to access food, in what it describes as ‘orchestrated killings’.
Hundreds gathered in Beirut to mark five years since the deadly port explosion that killed over 218 people, renewing calls for justice and accountability. Protesters urged Lebanon’s leaders to act, hoping the stalled judicial investigation will soon be completed.
