In an era of escalating climate disasters, the ability to translate data into life-saving action has never been more critical. For the Asia-Pacific region—the world’s most disaster-prone, this is not an abstract challenge but a daily reality. At the forefront of this battle is the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which is leveraging artificial intelligence to close the gap between risk knowledge and on-the-ground resilience. In this exclusive Q&A, Kareff May Rafisura, Economic Affairs Officer at the ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of ESCAP, provides a clear-eyed look at their innovative tool, SatGPT, and how it’s changing the game for communities from the remote village to the ministerial office.
1. It’s one thing to see a flood risk map, and another to break ground on a new levee. Could you walk us through how a local official might use SatGPT to confidently decide where to actually build?
Kareff May Rafisura, Economic Affairs Officer at the ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of ESCAP: First, it’s worth noting that there’s growing rethinking within the science and policy communities on the long-term benefits and trade-offs of constructing artificial levees.
Going back to your question, understanding an area’s flood history is key to making smart infrastructure decisions. You wouldn’t build a levee on natural floodplains, for example. Without risk knowledge, levees might not protect communities effectively and could even cause problems downstream or in ecologically sensitive areas. SatGPT offers a rapid mapping service that helps local officials make risk-informed decisions. It significantly reduces the time and cost traditionally required to assess flood characteristics, such as frequency, spatial extent, and impacts, and converts that data into actionable information. This information is critical for decisionmakers who must weigh it alongside economic, social, and environmental considerations when determining whether, and where, to build a levee.
2. We often hear about getting tech “to the last mile.” Picture a rural community leader with a simple smartphone. How does SatGPT’s insight practically reach and help them make a life-saving decision?
Kareff: SatGPT’s strength lies in enhancing historical risk knowledge. It’s not designed to predict the next disaster, but rather to help communities prepare more effectively for it. For instance, when a rural leader needs to decide whether to evacuate ahead of a flood, she will still rely on early warnings from national meteorological services. What SatGPT can do is support smarter ex-ante planning—so that when early warning information arrives, the community is ready to respond quickly. This includes decisions on where to build shelters, how to lay out evacuation routes, and where to preposition relief supplies. These are all critical elements that must be in place to help avert disasters, as consistently demonstrated in the cyclone response histories of India and Bangladesh.
3. Floods are an urgent threat, but what about slower crises like droughts? Is the vision for SatGPT to eventually help with these less visible, but equally devastating, disasters?
Kareff: ESCAP coordinates the long-standing Regional Drought Mechanism, which has been supporting drought-prone countries in gaining access to satellite data, products, tools, and technical expertise—everything they need to conduct drought monitoring and impact assessments more effectively. Our support goes beyond making data available—we work with countries and partners to strengthen institutions and capacities, converting these data into actionable analytics and insights. We are currently working with three Central Asian countries in establishing their own Earth observation-based agricultural drought monitoring systems.
4. AI is powerful, but it can sometimes reflect our own blind spots. How are you ensuring SatGPT doesn’t accidentally worsen inequality by overlooking the most vulnerable communities in its models?
Kareff: You raised a valid concern. That’s why in our capacity development work, our participants combine SatGPT’s flood mapping with socio-economic data to pinpoint who’s most at risk and where. They work on use cases that unpack the exposure of essential services like hospitals and water treatment facilities. When these critical infrastructures fail, it’s the poorest who pay the highest price. That’s why it’s vital to understand the hazards that threaten them.
5. Governments have tight budgets. If you were making the pitch to a Finance Minister, what’s the most compelling argument for investing in SatGPT now versus spending on recovery later?
Kareff: Investing in reducing disaster risk – which involves measures taken before disasters occur to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience (e.g., early warning systems, resilient infrastructure, land-use planning) – is far more cost-effective than recovery. Every dollar invested in disaster risk reduction can save multiple dollars in future losses. While the benefits are context-specific, a recent multi-country study found that for every $1 invested, the return can be as high as $10.50.
6. The region is innovating fast, with countries like Indonesia and Thailand building their own systems. How does SatGPT aim to be a good teammate and connect with these national efforts, rather than just adding another tool to the pile?
Kareff: That’s a good point. And beyond technological innovation, we’re also seeing progress in policy and institutional innovations being put in place. Our intention is not to replace national systems, but to show what’s possible when you make risk knowledge accessible and actionable. We work closely with our national counterparts with a focus on integrating SatGPT insights into existing workflows and systems-not reinventing them.
7. Training young professionals is key. Beyond the technical skills, what’s the most important lesson you hope they take away about using this technology responsibly?
Kareff: I’m glad you recognize that today’s most pressing need goes beyond technical expertise. That’s precisely why our technical capacity-building activities are held alongside youth forums to provide a platform for young people to engage in meaningful conversations around values and motivations. As stakeholders, we all share the responsibility of upholding safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems to support sustainable development.
8. Looking ahead a year, what would a “win” for SatGPT look like on the ground? Is it a specific number of communities better protected, or a faster warning time?
Kareff: Forecasting and enhancing the forecast lead times remains the responsibility of mandated early warning agencies. SatGPT is well-positioned to support efforts to protect more communities. By enhancing the historical understanding of floods, it can help improve the accuracy of early warning information, help communities proactively plan their response, and reduce disaster risk ex-ante. In that sense, I would say that effective SatGPT roll-out would amount to both gains in space and time – more communities being warned with improved lead times for mitigative response with more reliable historical data for granular risk characterization.
9. The document mentions turning the Jakarta Declaration into action. From your vantage point, what’s the biggest spark of progress you’ve seen so far?
Kareff: One of the most promising sparks of progress has been the strengthened regional cooperation aimed at enhancing the capacity of countries—especially the countries in special situations—to overcome barriers to accessing the benefits of innovative geospatial applications. With the support of ESCAP members, we are implementing field projects, providing capacity-building and technical assistance, facilitating expert exchange, and knowledge sharing across more than a dozen countries. These efforts are helping to develop space-based solutions from the ground up to tackle sustainable development challenges such as urban poverty, air pollution, droughts, floods, and crop biodiversity loss.
10. Finally, behind all the data and code, you mention this is about protecting lives. Has working on SatGPT given you a new perspective on what “resilience” truly means for a family facing a flood?
Kareff: Having lived and worked for the United Nations in some of the world’s most flood-prone countries, I’ve witnessed first-hand how the lack of historical data can lead to underinvestment in risk reduction. Tools like SatGPT and other digital innovations are not silver bullets, but they help close this gap by converting geospatial data into actionable insights – quickly and more accessibly – to guide communities to prepare and protect lives and livelihoods.
The conversation with Kareff May Rafisura underscores a pivotal shift in disaster risk management: from reactive recovery to intelligent, data-driven preparedness. SatGPT represents more than a technological achievement; it is a practical instrument of empowerment, ensuring that from the finance minister to the rural community leader, the best available knowledge informs the decisions that save lives and safeguard futures. In the fragile balance between human vulnerability and environmental force, such tools are not just helpful, they are essential. The future of resilience in the Asia-Pacific is being written today, not in the aftermath of disaster, but in the proactive, thoughtful application of innovation like SatGPT.
Many people remain unaccounted for while camps and towns surrounding el-Fasher are overwhelmed too.
Millions of people across war-ravaged Sudan, particularly its western parts, remain in dire need of humanitarian aid as key generals show no intention of ending the civil war amid ongoing violence and killings in North Darfur’s el-Fasher.
International aid agencies called on Sunday on the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to facilitate increased entry of aid while a roadmap by mediators has failed to produce a ceasefire so far.
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A week after the paramilitary force seized el-Fasher, the state capital of North Darfur, after an 18-month siege and starvation campaign, the situation remains catastrophic.
Tens of thousands of civilians are still believed to be trapped in the final major city in the western region of Darfur to fall to the RSF while thousands more are unaccounted for after fleeing el-Fasher.
Only a fraction of those who fled on foot from el-Fasher have made it to Tawila, a town roughly 50km (30 miles) away.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Tawila, an official with a France-based aid agency said only a few hundred more people have turned up in the town over the past few days.
“Those are very small numbers considering the number of people who were stuck in el-Fasher. We keep hearing feedback that people are stuck on the roads and in different villages that are unfortunately still inaccessible due to security reasons,” said Caroline Bouvard, Sudan country director for Solidarites International.
Bouvard said there is a “complete blackout” in terms of information coming out of el-Fasher after the RSF takeover and aid agencies are getting their information from surrounding areas where up to 15,000 people are believed to be stuck.
“There’s a strong request for advocacy with the different parties to ensure that humanitarian aid can reach these people or that at least we can send in trucks to bring them back to Tawila.”
Many of the people who have managed to survive numerous RSF checkpoints and patrols to reach Tawila have reported seeing mass executions, torture, beatings and sexual violence. Some were abducted by armed men and forced to pay a ransom on pain of death.
Many more have been forcibly displaced to the al-Dabbah refugee camp in Sudan’s Northern State. Some have been there for weeks.
Reporting from the camp, Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan said over the past few days, more displaced people have poured in from el-Fasher, exacerbating the humanitarian situation.
People are in need of food, clean water, medication and shelter as many are sleeping out in the open. Thousands more could turn to the camp as well as other surrounding areas over the coming days as people flee the slaughter by RSF fighters.
The United States, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt, as mediators, have all condemned the mass killings and called for increased humanitarian assistance.
“The RSF must stop engaging in retribution and ethnic violence; the tragedy in El Geneina must not be repeated,” the US Department of State said in a statement on Saturday in reference to the massacre of Masalit people in West Darfur’s capital.
“There isn’t a viable military solution, and external military support only prolongs the conflict. The United States urges both parties to pursue a negotiated path to end the suffering of the Sudanese people,” it said in a post on X.
US lawmakers have also called for action from Washington in the aftermath of the el-Fasher takeover by the RSF.
Republican Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Friday called for the US to officially designate the RSF as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness has declared Jamaica a “disaster area” after Hurricane Melissa barrelled across the Caribbean island as one of the most powerful storms on record, leaving behind a trail of devastation.
The hurricane – which made landfall as a Category 5 storm on Tuesday – ripped off the roofs of homes, inundated the nation’s “bread basket”, and felled power lines and trees, leaving most of its 2.8 million people without electricity.
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Melissa took hours to cross over Jamaica, a passage over land that diminished its winds, dropping it down to a Category 3 storm, before it ramped back up as it continued on Wednesday towards Cuba.
Holness said in a series of posts on X that the storm has “ravaged” his country and the disaster declaration gives his government “tools to continue managing” its response to the storm.
“It is clear that where the eye of the hurricane hit, there would be devastating impact,” he told the United States news channel CNN late on Tuesday. “Reports we have had so far include damage to hospitals, significant damage to residential property, housing and commercial property as well, and damage to our road infrastructure.”
Holness said he does not have any confirmed reports of deaths at the moment. “But with a Category 5 hurricane, … we are expecting some loss of life,” he added.
The prime minister said his government was mobilising quickly to start relief and recovery efforts by Wednesday morning.
Even before Melissa slammed into Jamaica, seven deaths – three in Jamaica, three in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic – were caused by the hurricane.
Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s local government minister, told reporters on Tuesday evening that the storm had caused damage across almost every parish in the country and left most of the island without electricity.
He said the storm had put the parish of St Elizabeth, the country’s main agricultural region, “under water”.
“The damage to St Elizabeth is extensive, based on what we have seen,” the minister said, adding that “almost every parish is experiencing blocked roads, fallen trees and utility poles, and excess flooding in many communities.”
“Work is presently on the way to restore our service, to give priorities to the critical facilities, such as hospitals and water and pumping stations,” he added.
The storm caused “significant damage” to at least four hospitals, Health and Wellness Minister Christopher Tufton told the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper.
A roof was completely torn off a building at a section of the Savanna La Mar Public General Hospital due to the passage of Hurricane Melissa. The system made landfall earlier today near New Hope district in Westmoreland, Jamaica. #GLNRToday#TrackingMelissapic.twitter.com/zBnm9bu4Oq
Robian Williams, a journalist with the Nationwide News Network radio broadcaster in Kingston, told Al Jazeera that the storm was the “worst we’ve ever experienced”.
“It’s truly heartbreaking, devastating,” she said from the capital.
“We’re calling Hurricane Melissa ‘Monstrous Melissa’ here in Jamaica because that’s how powerful she was. … The devastation is widespread, mostly being felt and still being felt in the western ends of the country at this point in time. So many homes, so many people have been displaced,” she said.
“We did prepare, but there wasn’t much that we could have done.”
In Kingston, Lisa Sangster, a 30-year-old communications specialist, said her home was devastated by the storm.
“My sister … explained that parts of our roof was blown off and other parts caved in and the entire house was flooded,” she told the AFP news agency. “Outside structures like our outdoor kitchen, dog kennel and farm animal pens were also gone, destroyed.”
Mathue Tapper, 31, told AFP that those in the capital were “lucky” but he feared for people in Jamaica’s more rural areas.
“My heart goes out to the folks living on the western end of the island,” he said.
Melissa restrengthens
The US National Hurricane Center warned on Tuesday night that Melissa was restrengthening as it approached eastern Cuba.
“Expected to make landfall there as an extremely dangerous major hurricane in the next few hours,” the centre warned at 11pm Cuba time on Tuesday (03:00 GMT on Wednesday).
Authorities in Cuba have evacuated more than 700,000 people, according to Granma, the official newspaper, and forecasters said the Category 4 storm would unleash catastrophic damage in Santiago de Cuba and nearby areas.
People shelter from the rain in Santiago de Cuba on October 28, 2025 [Ernesto Mastrascusa/EPA]
A hurricane warning was in effect for the provinces of Granma, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, Holguin and Las Tunas as well as for the southeastern and central Bahamas. A hurricane watch was in effect for Bermuda.
The storm was expected to generate a storm surge of up to 3.6 metres (12ft) in the region and drop up to 51cm (20 inches) of rain in parts of eastern Cuba.
“There will be a lot of work to do. We know there will be a lot of damage,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a televised address in which he assured that “no one is left behind and no resources are spared to protect the lives of the population”.
At the same time, he urged Cubans not to underestimate the power of Hurricane Melissa, “the strongest ever to hit national territory”.
Climate change
Although Jamaica and Cuba are used to hurricanes, climate change is making the storms more severe.
British-Jamaican climate change activist and author Mikaela Loach said in a video shared on social media that Melissa “gained energy from the extremely and unnaturally hot seas in the Caribbean”.
“These sea temperatures are not natural,” Loach said. “They’re extremely hot because of the gasses that have resulted from burning fossil fuels.”
“Countries like Jamaica, countries that are most vulnerable to climate disaster are also countries that have had their wealth and resources stripped away from them through colonial bondage,” Loach added.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Holness urged wealthy countries to increase climate financing to assist countries like Jamaica with adapting to the effects of a warming world.
“Climate change is not a distant threat or an academic consideration. It is a daily reality for small island developing states like Jamaica,” he said.
Jamaica is responsible for just 0.02 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming, according to data from the World Resources Institute.
But like other tropical islands, it is expected to continue to bear the brunt of worsening climate effects.
State officials on the front lines of preparing for natural disasters and responding to emergencies say severe cuts to federal security grants, restrictions on money intended for readiness and funding delays tied to litigation are posing a growing risk to their ability to respond to crises.
It’s all causing confusion, frustration and concern. The federal government shutdown isn’t helping.
“Every day we remain in this grant purgatory reduces the time available to responsibly and effectively spend these critical funds,” said Kiele Amundson, communications director at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
The uncertainty has led some emergency management agencies to hold off on filling vacant positions and make rushed decisions on important training and purchases.
Experts say the developments complicate state-led emergency efforts, undermining the Republican administration’s stated goals of shifting more responsibility to states and local governments for disaster response.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the new requirements were necessary because of “recent population shifts” and that changes to security grants were made “to be responsive to new and urgent threats facing our nation.”
A new wrinkle tied to immigration raids
Several DHS and FEMA grants help states, tribes and territories prepare for climate disasters and deter a variety of threats. The money pays for salaries and training, and such things as vehicles, communications equipment and software.
State emergency managers say that money has become increasingly important because the range of threats they must prepare for is expanding, including pandemics and cyberattacks.
FEMA, a part of DHS, divided a $320 million Emergency Management Performance Grant among states on Sept. 29. But the next day, it told states the money was on hold until they submitted new population counts. The directive demanded that they omit people “removed from the State pursuant to the immigration laws of the United States” and to explain their methodology.
The amount of money distributed to the states is based on U.S. census population data. The new requirement forcing states to submit revised counts “is something we have never seen before,” said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, a group representing emergency managers. “It’s certainly not the responsibility of emergency management to certify population.”
With no guidance on how to calculate the numbers, Hawaii’s Amundson said staff scrambled to gather data from the 2020 census and other sources, then subtracted he number of “noncitizens” based on estimates from an advocacy group.
They are not sure the methodology will be accepted. But with their FEMA contacts furloughed and the grant portal down during the federal shutdown, they cannot find out. Other states said they were assessing the request or awaiting further guidance.
In its statement, DHS said FEMA needs to be certain of its funding levels before awarding grant money, and that includes updates to a state’s population due to deportations.
Experts said delays caused by the request could most affect local governments and agencies that receive grant money passed down by states because their budgets and staffs are smaller. At the same time, FEMA also reduced the time frame that recipients have to spend the money, from three years to one. That could prevent agencies from taking on longer-term projects.
Bryan Koon, president and CEO of the consulting firm IEM and a former Florida emergency management chief, said state governments and local agencies need time to adjust their budgets to any kind of changes.
“An interruption in those services could place American lives in jeopardy,” he said.
Grant programs tied up by litigation
In another move that has caused uncertainty, FEMA in September drastically cut some states’ allocations from another source of funding. The $1 billion Homeland Security Grant Program is supposed to be based on assessed risks, and states pass most of the money to police and fire departments.
New York received $100 million less than it expected, a 79% reduction, while Illinois saw a 69% reduction. Both states are politically controlled by Democrats. Meanwhile, some territories received unexpected windfalls, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, which got more than twice its expected allocation.
The National Emergency Management Association said the grants are meant to be distributed based on risk and that it “remains unclear what risk methodology was used” to determine the new funding allocation.
After a group of Democratic states challenged the cuts in court, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on Sept. 30. That forced FEMA to rescind award notifications and refrain from making payments until a further court order.
The freeze “underscores the uncertainty and political volatility surrounding these awards,” said Frank Pace, administrator of the Hawaii Office of Homeland Security. The Democratic-controlled state received more money than expected, but anticipates the bonus being taken away with the lawsuit.
In Hawaii, where a 2023 wildfire devastated the Maui town of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people, the state, counties and nonprofits “face the real possibility” of delays in paying contractors, completing projects and “even staff furloughs or layoffs” if the grant freeze and government shutdown continue, he said.
The myriad setbacks prompted Washington state’s Emergency Management Division to pause filling some positions “out of an abundance of caution,” communications director Karina Shagren said.
A series of delays and cuts disrupts state-federal partnership
Emergency management experts said the moves have created uncertainty for those in charge of preparedness.
The Trump administration has suspended a $3.6 billion FEMA disaster resilience program, cut the FEMA workforce and disrupted routine training.
Other lawsuits also are complicating decision-making. A Manhattan federal judge last week ordered DHS and FEMA to restore $34 million in transit security grants it had withheld from New York City because of its immigration policies.
Another judge in Rhode Island ordered DHS to permanently stop imposing grant conditions tied to immigration enforcement, after ruling in September that the conditions were unlawful — only to have DHS again try to impose them.
Taken together, the turbulence surrounding what was once a reliable partner is prompting some states to prepare for a different relationship with FEMA.
“Given all of the uncertainties,” said Sheets, of the National Emergency Management Association, states are trying to find ways to be “less reliant on federal funding.”
In next week’s episode of Fletcher’s Family Farm, Kelvin and Liz are hit with yet another farming emergency, having been forced to move off the property after a fire broke out
16:38, 20 Oct 2025Updated 16:39, 20 Oct 2025
Kelvin Fletcher’s family farm has been hit by fresh disaster
Kelvin Fletcher and his farming family are facing yet another disaster on their Cheshire land in an upcoming episode of their ITV show. The ex Emmerdale star and his family are back with a third series of Fletchers’ Family Farm – however, the show started on a sombre note when their farmhouse was destroyed by a blaze.
Unfortunately, the Fletchers’ troubles don’t stop there – with Kelvin learning in next week’s episode that their oat crop could be “devastated” by an infestation. Showing the cameras his oat field in the show, Kelvin admits that he’s “worried” about the crop after it loses his colour.
After enlisting the help of agronomist Ben, who has been helping the family with their soil, he discovered that leatherjackets have taken hold of the soil. Leatherjackets are the larvae of some crane flies, which can embed in lawns and soil before eating the roots.
“Ah, look at that – is that a leatherjacket?” Ben says as he goes through the soil. “A leatherjacket is like a little grub and they come in rings in the field and you’ll find there are bare patches in the field where they have just mauled and eaten the seed.
“There – there’s a leatherjacket,” he tells a disappointed Kelvin. “They’ll eat the root system of your grass and now your oats. These can be quite a problem.”
When Kelvin asks whether they will “decimate the crop”, Ben replies: “They really can be devastated but generally speaking, they’re in circles across the field.” Despite the alarming news, Kelvin and wife Liz will need to wait to see whether the leatherjackets have fully invaded the field.
“Ben won’t know the extent of the leatherjacket invasion until the crop is more established,” he tells the show. “If gaps or rings start appearing across the field, it’s usually an indicator that it has spread across the field.”
It’s not all bad news for farmer Kelvin and his first oat crop – Ben confirms that the oat seeds have taken hold in the soil. Elsewhere in the upcoming episode, Kelvin and Liz challenge their kids to make scarecrows to keep the birds and bugs at bay, while Liz comes up with a plan to whip chaotic chickens into shape.
It comes after Kelvin, Liz and their four kids were forced to leave their farm after a fire broke out while they were on holiday. Episode one saw the emotional couple go through the remains of the fire, with Kelvin admitting that all of his clothes had been destroyed.
“The way the year has got off to a busy start, but it hasn’t all been plain sailing,” he said. “While the animals have been thriving, at the end of last year, an unexpected and devastating disaster hit our farmhouse.
“The fire we think has started around there, and then it’s honestly gone up through the roof, and the roof’s completely gone.”
Fletchers’ Family Farm continues on Sunday at 11:30am on ITV1 and ITVX.
A MARRIED At First Sight honeymoon takes a disastrous turn tonight when a bride piles on the pressure days after her wedding.
Reiss and Leisha walked down the aisle on the E4 show last week.
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Married At First Sight UK viewers will see Reiss and Leisha’s argument in full tonight
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Reiss snapped after another question from his wife
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Leisha has been trying to get answers out of Reiss
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Reiss was left panicking after he met his new wifeCredit: Channel 4
But the painter and decorator, and dental industry marketeer failed to click.
They got off to a bad start at the reception when Leisha pummelled him with questions about his life.
In a preview clip for tonight’s show, Leisha and Reiss fail to see eye-to-eye again as they discuss what the future holds for them.
During a boat trip, Leisha asks her husband: “Do you visualise me in your future?”
But her need for reassurance doesn’t go down well.
An annoyed Reiss throws an epic strop and responds: “I can’t cope! You’re too much.
“I don’t need pressure yet, it’s so early.
“I don’t like it. I know you’re saying you want to see the real me you aint going to find that out over night.
“You know I’m a closed book. If you’re constantly pressuring me you’re just going to keep me closed.”
Leisha replied: “It’s just the lack of questions, it makes me feel you don’t really care about me.
“I know you fancy me. Do you want to know are we going to have a future together.”
He replied: “You want to know do I want a wife, to have kids, to settle down. Yes, yes, yes.”
He then dealt the hammer blow, adding: “I don’t know if that’s what I want with you after knowing you three days.”
Speaking to the camera away from his wife, he later vented: “I can’t believe Leisha just ask me that, is she joking?! F hell.”
AWKWARD RECEPTION
After the pair exchanged their wedding rings and said their vows, the registrar declared: “Leisha and Reiss, it’s my huge pleasure to proudly announce you husband and wife.”
The new couple awkwardly leaned in for two kisses on the cheek before stepping back from one another.
Their guests looked on with confused looks on their faces as they clapped for the pair.
The shutdown of the U.S. government has brought work determined by the Trump administration to be “nonessential” to a halt across the country as thousands of federal employees have been furloughed and ordered not to do their jobs.
The shutdown — the first in six years — began late Tuesday and could last days if not weeks. Many employees may not return to work at all, as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget recently advised federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs in the event of a shutdown.
While much of the fallout remains to be seen, federal agencies that deal with wildfires, weather and disaster response — including the U.S. Forest Service, the National Weather Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency — expect to see some impacts.
Here’s what we know:
The U.S. Forest Service will shut down activities on more than 193 million acres of land across 46 states, including at least 154 national forests, according to the agency’s most recent contingency plan, published in September. Hundreds of recreational sites and facilities will be closed, while work on operations such as timber sales and restoration projects will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The Forest Service — the largest federal firefighting entity in the country — will continue its work geared toward responding to and preparing for wildfires, according to the plan. However, the agency will reduce some work related to fire prevention, including prescribed burns and the treatment of vegetation to reduce fire risk.
What’s more, the shutdown will delay state grants for forest management and wildland fire preparedness; delay reimbursement for ongoing forest management work on non-federal lands; and may affect states’ ability to train firefighters and acquire necessary equipment, among other impacts, the plan says.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection works closely with the Forest Service to manage fire preparation and response. Cal Fire officials said it does not anticipate any impacts to its ability to respond to blazes, and that the agency is fully staffed.
However, effects may be seen when it comes to federal grant programs that support fire prevention work in the state. For example, private property owners in California who rely on federal funds to conduct vegetation reduction work or create defensible space on their land may have to “front the money themselves” while they await reimbursement said Jesse Torres, deputy chief of communications with Cal Fire.
“The other thing is there are a lot of unknowns,” Torres said. “We don’t know what this is going to look like — is it going to be two days, two weeks, two months?”
Other agencies that play key roles in California’s disaster response and preparation — including the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — are largely deemed essential and will face fewer interruptions, according to their contingency plans.
“We are still operating in our core mission function and providing most of our normal services,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. That includes weather forecasts and extreme weather watches and warnings.
“The things that we do for public safety will continue as normal,” Kittell said.
About 84% of FEMA employees, meanwhile, are exempt from shutdown-related furloughs, according to its plan, which provides few additional details about which operations will cease or proceed.
Officials with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said FEMA staff have advised them that they will continue to make payments for existing disaster declarations made by President Trump, but there’s no guarantee that new or additional disaster declarations or funding will be made available.
FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund — the main source of funding for response and recovery efforts following major disasters — is also running low and is not likely to be replenished during the shutdown. It requires congressional approval for additional funds.
What’s more, FEMA, the National Weather Service and the Forest Service have already been affected by significant budget cuts and layoffs this year as part of the Trump administration’s larger reorganization of the federal government, which it says will help save taxpayers money.
These agencies, including NWS’ parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have lost thousands of employees to layoffs and buyouts and have experienced reduced operations, grant cancellations and the closure of offices and research arms.
The same is true for the EPA, which has undergone staff cuts and layoffs in addition to a considerable shift in its organizational priorities. The nation’s top environmental agency has spent the last several months loosening regulations that govern air and water quality, electric vehicle initiatives, pollution monitoring and greenhouse gas reporting, among other changes.
Experts said the shutdown could further weaken the EPA’s capabilities, as nearly all of its employees — about 90% — will be furloughed. While the EPA’s imminent disaster response work will continue, such as work on oil spills and chemical releases, longer-term efforts including research projects and facility inspections will halt, according to the agency.
Meanwhile, H.D. Palmer, a spokesman with the California Department of Finance, said impacts to the California EPA’s environmental programs should be minimal if the shutdown is brief, but that problems could arise if it drags on long enough to create backlogs and funding lapses.
The average length of government shutdowns over the last 50 years was seven days, Palmer said. However, he noted that the most recent federal shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019 — during Trump’s first term — lasted 35 days.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.
“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.
The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.
In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.
Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.
Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.
Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.
“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”
Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.
Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.
Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.
A man shared how he went through a horrifying flight experience, and it was all down to the piece of jewellery he had been constantly wearing since the start of this year
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He was denied boarding (Stock Image)(Image: Getty Images)
A man was left vowing to “never” wear a piece of jewellery again after he was denied boarding a plane thanks to it. Wearable smart rings have become all the rage as an alternative to the sometimes clunky smart watch. But when Daniel Rotar noticed his ring wouldn’t come off his finger just before he was meant to board a flight, he was left incredibly stressed.
Sharing a picture of the ring stuck on his finger, he wrote on X: “Ahhh…this is…not good. My Samsung Galaxy Ring’s battery started swelling. While it’s on my finger. And while I’m about to board a flight. Now I cannot take it off, and this thing hurts”.
He shared another picture, writing: “You can see the battery expanding. Not great for something that’s now stuck to my finger”.
Some asked how long he’d had the device, and Daniel explained he bought it in January 2025. Some Samsung rings retail for £399, depending on the model.
Content cannot be displayed without consent
He wrote: “Had it since January 2025. No clue on the battery health (never checked it and not even sure if that’s visible in the app).
“I think it definitely had some battery issue before, as it stopped lasting for more than 1.5 days. When I first got it, it was close to the advertised seven days, so I even stopped charging it regularly because of this. When it swelled, it had no battery juice left in it”.
Somebody shared that the same thing happened to them with a smart ring, saying: “I cut it off with a Dremel. If you do this, be sure you do not cut the battery, and slide a file underneath so you don’t slice your finger. I just saved you four hours in urgent care! Good luck”.
Another urged: “Go up to the nearest restaurant and tell them you need a stick of butter warmed for 30 seconds. Finger the butter and then wiggle that thing off”.
One man seethed: “This is so messed up. It’s one thing for a battery in a phone or even smartwatch to expand like this (at least you can take it out of your pocket or off your wrist), but a ring…very glad to see you got it removed ok”.
Daniel then shared an update, saying: “I was denied boarding due to this (been travelling for 47 hours straight, so this is really nice). Need to pay for a hotel for the night now and get back home tomorrow”.
He also shared that he “was sent to the hospital, as an emergency,” and “the ring got removed”.
“You can see the battery all swollen. Won’t be wearing a smart ring ever again,” he fumed.
Someone wrote: “Dude, I’m sorry you had to go through this”. Daniel said he was just glad his finger was “fine”.
Another person suggested they should be designed with a gap in them instead to get on and off easier.
A spokesperson for Samsung said: “The safety of our customers is our top priority. This is an extremely rare case, and we are in direct contact with Mr Rotar to retrieve the product and learn about the concerns”.
Disasters are real — also, these days, frighteningly common, be they epic confluences of nature and negligence or the murderous and preventable kind. And when it comes to disaster movies, it’s hard to know what the acceptable level of exploitation is.
Of course, director Paul Greengrass could never be confused with the unseriousness of producer Irwin Allen (“The Towering Inferno”) or filmmaker Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow”), ringmasters who preferred heaping helpings of A-listers on slick, expensive calamities. Rather, when Greengrass, coming from documentaries, tackles dark days of mass casualty, they tend to be true stories like “United 93” and “Bloody Sunday.” His stripped-down, jagged style, absent marquee names and focused on such issues as terrorism and community, brings intelligent urgency to the unfathomable.
With his new film “The Lost Bus,” however, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, about the real-life effort to save a busload of schoolchildren from the 2018 Camp fire, a wildfire that would destroy most of Paradise, Calif., Greengrass is trying to merge the two sensibilities. This time he mixes star heroism with you-are-there spectacle and the results can be galvanizing if awkwardly framed.
“The Lost Bus” is not as potent as Greengrass’ “Captain Phillips,” in which Tom Hanks anchored a re-created reality no less pulse-pounding than any action blockbuster. Instead the director seems to be in a programmatic mode. There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.
McConaughey plays Paradise bus driver Kevin McKay, whose life is almost comically scripted to come off as especially challenged before one lick of flame gets near it: strapped for cash, dying dog, recently dead father (no love lost), sullen teenage son (love lost), ex-wife (also unhappy) and a memory-ailing mother. But on the afternoon of Nov. 18 as the fires reach eastern Paradise, Kevin’s is the only bus that can meet a request from his dispatcher (Ashlie Atkinson): Pick up stranded elementary schoolkids and evacuate them to safety.
A failed dad feeling the weight of sudden responsibility, Kevin corrals as co-chaperone a schoolteacher (America Ferrera). Though Mary is a mother eager to get to her own child, she’s willing to help. The occasional cut to Yul Vazquez as the fire chief spearheading rescue efforts, however, is this movie’s barometer of increasingly bad news. As smoke quickly darkens the day and the unstoppable, town-hopping fire hems in the bus, cutting off routes, the journey takes a dystopian turn, raising the stakes and alarm levels to unimaginable heights. (Eaton and Palisades survivors, fair warning — you were never going to watch this anyway.)
McConaughey is solid casting, his unshowy working-class fortitude slightly tinged with fear. In his and Ferrera’s sturdy presence and in the serrated frenzy of Greengrass’ editing style, a shorter, tighter “The Lost Bus” would still hold plenty of dread and dramatic resilience. The fire sequences alone, captured in the hellish fuzz of Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography, are pinnacles of this practical-meets-digital-effects discipline. But Kevin’s dippy redemption arc, doled out midperil in tortured glances and forced dialogue, drags us out of the intensity.
It’s also odd that the activist-minded Greengrass didn’t do more with so corporate a villain: legally responsible utility PG&E, represented in the movie by an ineffectual suit who is briefly yelled at. Forget that redemption story — Greengrass could have leaned even more into those action tropes and, as a final touch, had McConaughey punch PG&E in the jaw.
‘The Lost Bus’
Rated: R, for language
Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Playing: In limited release Friday, Sept. 19; on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3
Far be it from me to tell anyone how to direct their career, but can I just say how glad I am to learn that Jason Bateman, who spent four seasons in the darkness of “Ozark,” is making a comedy again. (A “dark comedy,” but still.) That’s not the series he’s starring in at the moment for Netflix, however, but something called “DTF St. Louis,” for HBO, from “Patriot” creator Steve Conrad, which isn’t arriving until next year. Fingers crossed, we’ll all be around to see it.
In the eight-episode miniseries “Black Rabbit,” which premieres Thursday, Bateman and Jude Law play brothers Vince and Jake Friedkin, respectively, who long before the story begins were partners in a rock band, the Black Rabbits — successful enough that Vince is recognized in a bar (but not so successful that the fans can remember his name, or the name of the band). More recently, they had been partners in a far downtown Manhattan restaurant, also called Black Rabbit, though Vince’s level of current participation is muddy. (At one time, he ran the upstairs bar.) It isn’t a comedy, in spite of Vince’s Michael Bluth-like habit of dropping ironic quips into stressful situations.
The setting brings to mind “The Bear” — which is a comedy — as does its young genius chef, Roxie (Amaka Okafor); the New York Times is planning a review and New York magazine is putting her on the cover. We see that the restaurant, which has a VIP floor upstairs for horrible rich jerks, is a hit because the place is packed, and because there’s a lot of shouting in the barely pictured kitchen, but food, barely shown or talked about, is not really on the menu here. Jake is more interested in property and expansion — he has an inside track to lease the Pool Room, a real-life space in New York’s fabled Four Seasons Hotel, and he wants Roxie to run the kitchen and Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman), who is in a relationship with his old friend Wes (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) — now a mega successful musician, a co-owner of the Black Rabbit and a jealous guy — to design it. From camera angles and cutting, it’s clear that Vince and Estelle are attracted to one another, but as Law and Coleman have no particular chemistry, it feels more stated than felt. But it’s important.
Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Wes, a co-owner of the Black Rabbit, and Amaka Okafor as Roxie, the head chef.
(Netflix)
Vince, meanwhile, is living out west, looking like he’s ready to audition for a late-life Dennis Wilson biopic and trying to sell some valuable old coins. When he’s set up and robbed in his car, he winds up running over one of the thieves — twice. Whether by writerly intention or inattention, this will be no more of an emotional issue for Vince than it will have anything to do with the rest of the story, apart from sending him back to NYC, where he is $140,000 in the hole over gambling debts. Whenever he’s not in actual danger (which is a lot of the time), he’s weirdly happy-go-lucky.
Jake has a well-to-do ex-wife, Val (Dagmara Dominczyk), who seems nice, and a son, Hunter (Michael Cash), taking dancing lessons. They all get along fine, though Jake battles that most common of TV paternal ailments, Busy Dad Syndrome. (He does better than most.) Vince has an adult daughter, tattoo artist Gen (Odessa Young), who is not especially glad to see him back in town. Their safety will become a chip in the series’ central business, which sets Vince, and ultimately Jake, against vaguely defined mobster Joe Mancuso (Oscar-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur, from the film “CODA,” in one of the series’ more layered performances); his sweaty idiot caricature of a wannabe tough guy son, Junior (Forrest Weber); and Junior’s less-than-efficient minder, Babbitt (Chris Coy), who is occasionally sort of likable, albeit one feels bad for sort of liking him. In the small world these characters inhabit, Mancuso was close to the brothers’ dysfunctional family back in Coney Island. But business is business.
Like most every streaming drama nowadays, “Black Rabbit” opens with a flash forward to a more exciting part of the story — here, a robbery and shooting at a crowded party — before dialing back to a calmer chronological beginning. This lets the viewer know that, though there is going to be exposition for a while, things will get crazy eventually. And they very much do, including sexual assault, murder and bad management.
Junior (Forrest Weber), Babbitt (Chris Coy) and Vince (Jason Bateman), who owes them lots of money.
(Netflix)
Jake, chasing his Pool Room dream, has his own money troubles, and the brothers’ needs will clash as one scheme after another to set things right goes wrong and their relationship rockets between heated arguments and brotherly reminiscence. It’s too easy to stop listening to the arguments, which tend to go long and not lead anywhere, but there is some relief (and nice writing) as regards the reminiscence. Still, though later episodes will reveal an early event that might explain something about Vince, it’s not enough to make one care especially what happens to them, except to worry which innocent bystanders, including the Black Rabbit staff, will be hit by shrapnel when things go boom.
A large secondary and sometimes confusing cast comes in and out to propel and complicate matters, but it’s really all about the brothers. As Vince, Bateman — who also directed the first two episodes, efficiently, with “Ozark” co-star Laura Linney helming the second two — leavens an exasperating character with his innate likability. He’s a fine actor, but he’s also Jason Bateman, America’s sweetheart. By contrast, as the tense, excitable Jake, Law doesn’t generate much warmth, or make you believe he’s actually capable of opening a high-class midtown restaurant. (The funky but chic Black Rabbit was Vince’s vision.) That may be the idea, of course. And he does love his brother.
There are only so many ways this story can go, and it does indeed go to one of them, though it’s so likely by the time we get there that it doesn’t deliver much of an emotional charge. An epilogical montage, in a complete tonal turnaround, plays like an homage to the opening of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” cut to Rodgers and Hart’s “I’ll Take Manhattan”; its only purpose seems to be to make you less bad than you might have otherwise felt. (Hey, Katz’s Delicatessen!) So … thanks?
Meanwhile — “DTF St. Louis!” See you next year! Knock wood.
President Trump has approved federal disaster aid for six states and tribes following storms and floods that occurred this spring and summer.
The disaster declarations, announced Thursday, will allow federal funding to flow to Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota and Wisconsin, and for tribes in Montana and South Dakota. In each case except Wisconsin, it took Trump more than a month to approve the aid requests from local officials, continuing a trend of longer waits for disaster relief noted by a recent Associated Press analysis.
Trump has now approved more than 30 major natural disaster declarations since taking office in January. Before the latest batch, his approvals had averaged a 34-day wait from the time the relief was requested. For his most recent declarations, that wait ranged from just 15 days following an aid request for Wisconsin flooding in August to 56 days following a tribal request for Montana flooding that occurred in May.
The AP’s analysis showed that delays in approving federal disaster aid have grown over time, regardless of the party in power. On average, it took less than two weeks for requests for a presidential disaster declaration to be granted in the 1990s and early 2000s. That rose to about three weeks during the last decade under presidents from both major parties. During Trump’s first term in office, it took him an average of 24 days to approve requests.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the AP that Trump is providing “a more thorough review of disaster declaration requests than any Administration has before him” to make sure that federal tax dollars are spent wisely.
But delays mean individuals must wait to receive federal aid for daily living expenses, temporary lodging and home repairs. Delays in disaster declarations also can hamper recovery efforts by local officials uncertain whether they will receive federal reimbursement for cleaning up debris and rebuilding infrastructure.
Trump’s latest declarations approved public assistance for local governments and nonprofits in all cases except Wisconsin, where assistance for individuals was approved. But that doesn’t preclude the federal government from later also approving public assistance for Wisconsin.
Preliminary estimates from Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ administration said more than 1,500 residential structures were destroyed or experienced major damage in August flooding at a cost of more than $33 million. There was also more than $43 million in public sector damage over six counties, according to the Evers administration.
Evers requested aid for residents in six counties, but Trump approved it only for three.
“I will continue to urge the Trump Administration to approve the remainder of my request, and I will keep fighting to make sure Wisconsin receives every resource that is needed and available,” Evers said in a statement in which he thanked Democratic officeholders for their efforts, but not Trump or any Republicans.
Trump had announced several of the disaster declarations — including Wisconsin’s — on his social media site while noting his victories in those states and highlighting their Republican officials. He received thanks from Democratic North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein and Republican officials elsewhere.
Trump’s approval of six major disaster declarations in one day would have been unusual for some presidents but not for him. Trump approved seven disaster requests on July 22 and nine on May 21.
But Trump has not approved requests for hazard mitigation assistance — a once-typical add-on that helps recipients build back with resilience — since February.
Lieb and Wildeman write for the Associated Press. AP writers Gabriela Aoun Angueira, Scott Bauer, Jack Dura and Gary D. Robertson contributed to this report.
Transfeero’s residents travel expert, Andrea Platania, shares her top five tips for ensuring a smooth airport pick-up at even the most chaotic and crowded arrival zones
Pre-booking your pick-up car in advance is the best way to avoid long queues and an uncomfortable journey [stock image](Image: Getty Images)
Reliable airport transfers are more valuable to Brits than ever, with many passengers scrambling for taxis and struggling to find designated pick-up points at major transport hubs. Luckily, an expert has shared five practical, traveller-first tips for ensuring a seamless airport pick-up.
A 2024 IATA Passenger Survey found that 68% of travellers rank “smooth airport-to-hotel transit” as a top factor in overall travel satisfaction, while UK travel forums frequently cite long taxi queues at peak arrival times, sometimes exceeding 45 minutes at major hubs like Heathrow and Gatwick.
According to Transfeero, preparation is the key to turning a potentially frustrating arrival into a seamless, stress-free transition from airport to destination. The company’s resident travel expert, Andrea Platania, has shared five ways to up your chances of a smooth pick-up.
Sharing your flight details with your driver will help them plan their own arrival accordingly(Image: Getty Images)
1) Pre-book your ride
Booking your airport transfer ahead of time means you are less reliant on chance, which is especially low during busy travel periods like summer holidays or bank holiday weekends.
Once you’ve secured your booking though, it’s important to confirm all pickup instructions with your provider. This should include exact meeting points inside the terminal (e.g., arrivals hall signage, specific exit doors).
2) Share your flight details for tracking
Even the most meticulously planned trips can be derailed by delayed departures, rerouted flights, or early arrivals. Supplying your pick-up contact with your flight number allows them to monitor real-time flight data and adjust their own arrival accordingly.
3) Match the car to your needs
Plan ahead to ensure you have room for oversized items like ski gear, pushchairs, and musical instruments(Image: Getty Images)
Choosing the right vehicle is more than just a comfort preference, it’s also a practical necessity. An undersized car can mean cramped seating or unsafe stacking of luggage — not ideal for particularly long journeys. Consider the number of passengers, total bags, and any oversized items such as ski gear or pushchairs when booking your pick-up car.
4) Get your driver contact details
Arrival zones are notoriously crowded, and it’s easy to miss your driver even if you know what vehicle to look out for. Thus, having their mobile number or an in-app chat function ready means you can quickly connect and coordinate.
5) Plan for special requirements in advance
Special needs like child safety seats, wheelchair accessibility, or extra luggage capacity require advance notice to ensure your vehicle is equipped and ready. Advising your driver or travel company of these needs early helps them prepare an appropriate car and any additional equipment.
According to Andrea: “The difference between a stressful arrival and a seamless one often comes down to two things: preparation and communication. By pre-booking and sharing your flight details, you’re giving your transfer provider the information they need to meet you at exactly the right time and place. Start your trip with confidence.
“In our experience, the best results come when travellers think ahead about their unique needs, whether that’s extra luggage space, child safety seats, or accessibility requirements.”
Dragons’ Den star Alessandro Savelli left the popular show empty-handed but ended up being worth £40million with his pasta company
22:53, 24 Aug 2025Updated 22:53, 24 Aug 2025
Dragons’ Den star called ‘delusional disaster’ now worth £40million(Image: BBC)
Dragons’ Den star Alessandro Savelli left the show empty-handed but ended up being worth £40million. The star co-founded and is the CEO of the popular Pasta Evangelists – a fresh pasta brand which originally started as letter box posted food kits.
Following his appearance on the show, Alessandro’s company is set to open 100 new restaurants across the UK in the next few years, including in the Midlands, Scotland and in the south of England. In a recent chat with The Grocer, the CEO discussed the brand’s plans to expand.
He said they’re pumping £30million into new restaurants. “The demand for our fresh, beautifully cooked artisan pasta is growing,” he explained.
The star co-founded and is the CEO of the popular Pasta Evangelists (Image: BBC)
“Our intention is to become the UK’s fastest-growing, casual dining hot spot and the hottest place to eat for pasta lovers of all ages.”
He continued: “The hospitality industry is going through tough times at the moment, but we are confident that our business model is robust and dynamic.
“And the proof of this is we have already bucked the trend with the confirmed opening of five more restaurants in the space of three months, and more to come.”
Alessandro and his business partner Finn Lagun took part in the show in 2018 asking for a £75,000 investment for a 2.5 per cent cut of the company. Their pitch was rejected, with Jenny Campbell saying Finn was ‘delusional’ and ‘a disaster’.
Anshu Ahuja also failed to get the Dragons to invest(Image: BBC)
There were many people who were rejected on Dragons’ Den, including Anshu Ahuja – who entered the Den in an episode that aired, hoping to seek £100,000 for 3 percent of her business, DabbaDrop.
The founder and her business partner had built up their sustainable takeaway business, inspired by the dabbawala system of Mumbai, in 2018, and had valued the business at more than £3,000,000 just a few years later.
The entrepreneur was looking for investment from the likes of Peter Jones, Sara Davies, Touker Suleyman, Deborah Meaden, and Steven Bartlett to help upscale DabbaDrop and encourage its growth outside of London.
However, despite her inspirational ethics behind the sustainable product, and the fact that DabbaDrop had turned over more than £800,000 in its latest year, Anshu failed to convince the Dragons to invest.
Speaking about the show, she said: “We had done quite a lot of work going into Dragons’ Den and our own fundraising round, so the £4million valuation was independently valued, based on our £850,000 revenue and a lifetime value of the 1,500 subscribers at that point of nearly £400 per subscriber. At that point, we also had a 1,000-person waiting list, which is currently, even before airing, standing at 4,000 people.”
Anshu knew it was a “risk” to go on national TV and pitch her business, but was willing to take the leap as the team was fundraising for DabbaDrop at the time of being approached for the show.
They’d already received interest from more than 2,000 investors, had reached millions of views on an Instagram reel, and pledged more than £1,000,000.
If a major hurricane approaches Central Florida this season, Maria knows it’s dangerous to stay inside her wooden, trailer-like home. In past storms, she evacuated to her sister’s sturdier house. If she couldn’t get there, a shelter set up at the local high school served as a refuge if needed.
But with accelerating detentions and deportations of immigrants across her community of Apopka, 20 miles northwest of Orlando, Maria, an agricultural worker from Mexico without permanent U.S. legal status, doesn’t know if those options are safe. All risk encountering immigration enforcement agents.
“They can go where they want,” said Maria, 50, who insisted the Associated Press not use her last name for fear of detention. “There is no limit.”
Natural disasters have long posed singular risks for people in the United States without permanent legal status. But with the arrival of peak Atlantic hurricane season, immigrants and their advocates say President Donald Trump’s robust immigration enforcement agenda has increased the danger.
Places considered neutral spaces by immigrants such as schools, hospitals and emergency management agencies are now suspect, and advocates say agreements by local law enforcement to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement make them more vulnerable and compel a choice between being physically safe and avoiding detention.
“Am I going to risk the storm or risk endangering my family at the shelter?” said Dominique O’Connor, an organizer at the Farmworker Association of Florida. “You’re going to meet enforcement either way.”
For O’Connor and for many immigrants, it’s about storms. But people without permanent legal status could face these decisions anywhere that extreme heat, wildfires or other severe weather could necessitate evacuating, getting supplies or even seeking medical care.
Federal and state agencies have said little on whether immigration enforcement would be suspended in a disaster. It wouldn’t make much difference to Maria: “With all we’ve lived, we’ve lost trust.”
New policies deepen concerns
Efforts by Trump’s Republican administration to exponentially expand immigration enforcement capacity mean many of the agencies active in disaster response are increasingly entangled in immigration enforcement.
Since January, hundreds of law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) agreements, allowing them to perform certain immigration enforcement actions. Most of the agreements are in hurricane-prone Florida and Texas.
Florida’s Division of Emergency Management oversees building the state’s new detention facilities, like the one called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades. Federal Emergency Management Agency funds are being used to build additional detention centers around the country, and the Department of Homeland Security temporarily reassigned some FEMA staff to assist ICE.
The National Guard, often seen passing out food and water after disasters, has been activated to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection operations and help at detention centers.
These dual roles can make for an intimidating scene during a disaster. After floods in July, more than 2,100 personnel from 20 state agencies aided the far-reaching response effort in Central Texas, along with CBP officers. Police controlled entry into hard-hit areas. Texas Department of Public Safety and private security officers staffed entrances to disaster recovery centers set up by FEMA.
That unsettled even families with permanent legal status, said Rae Cardenas, executive director of Doyle Community Center in Kerrville, Texas. Cardenas helped coordinate with the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio to replace documents for people who lived behind police checkpoints.
“Some families are afraid to go get their mail because their legal documents were washed away,” Cardenas said.
In Florida, these policies could make people unwilling to drive evacuation roads. Traffic stops are a frequent tool of detention, and Florida passed a law in February criminalizing entry into the state by those without legal status, though a judge temporarily blocked it.
There may be fewer places to evacuate now that public shelters, often guarded by police or requiring ID to enter, are no longer considered “protected areas” by DHS. The agency in January rescinded a policy of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, to avoid enforcement in places like schools, medical facilities and emergency response sites.
The fears extend even into disaster recovery. On top of meeting law enforcement at FEMA recovery centers, mixed-status households that qualify for help from the agency might hesitate to apply for fear of their information being accessed by other agencies, said Esmeralda Ledezma, communications associate with the Houston-based nonprofit Woori Juntos. “Even if you have the right to federal aid, you’re afraid to be punished for it,” Ledezma said.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email that CBP had not issued any guidance “because there have been no natural disasters affecting border enforcement.” She did not address what directions were given during CBP’s activation in the Texas floods or whether ICE would be active during a disaster.
Florida’s Division of Emergency Management did not respond to questions related to its policies toward people without legal status. Texas’ Division of Emergency Management referred The Associated Press to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, which did not respond.
Building local resilience is a priority
In spite of the crackdown, local officials in some hurricane-prone areas are expanding outreach to immigrant populations. “We are trying to move forward with business as usual,” said Gracia Fernandez, language access coordinator for Alachua County in Central Florida.
The county launched a program last year to translate and distribute emergency communications in Spanish, Haitian Creole and other languages. Now staffers want to spread the word that county shelters won’t require IDs, but since they’re public spaces, Fernandez acknowledged there’s not much they can do if ICE comes.
“There is still a risk,” she said. “But we will try our best to help people feel safe.”
As immigrant communities are pushed deeper into the shadows, more responsibility falls on nonprofits, and communities themselves, to keep each other safe.
Hope Community Center in Apopka has pushed local officials to commit to not requiring IDs at shelters and sandbag distribution points. During an evacuation, the facility becomes an alternative shelter and a command center, from which staffers translate and send out emergency communications in multiple languages. For those who won’t leave their homes, staffers do door-to-door wellness checks, delivering food and water.
“It’s a very grassroots, underground operation,” said Felipe Sousa Lazaballet, the center’s executive director.
Preparing the community is challenging when it’s consumed by the daily crises wrought by detentions and deportations, Sousa Lazaballet said.
“All of us are in triage mode,” he said. “Every day there is an emergency, so the community is not necessarily thinking about hurricane season yet. That’s why we have to have a plan.”
CONGRATULATIONS, Sir Keir! The number of people arriving here in small boats from France has reached 50,000 since your magnificent government took office.
That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it? The way things are going, you might make it 100,000 by the end of the year.
4
The number of people arriving here in small boats from France has reached 50,000 since Keir won the electionCredit: AFP
It was about as much use as howling at the moon. And although you deny it, the policy seems to have been quietly shelved.
Nor will the one-in, one-out deal work. A pilot scheme which was only ever going to deal with one in 20 of the illegal migrants.
You scrapped the Rwanda plan. That at least provided SOME deterrent.
And so, like almost every other thing you turn your hand to, you’ve made things worse and worse.
So here’s my ten-point plan to stop what seems to be an unstoppable tide. It’s not really unstoppable, if you really want to do it.
1: Let it be known that anyone arriving here illegally automatically loses their right to live in the UK, in perpetuity. Cost of this? Nil.
Deterrence effect? Very high. No place to live, no permit to work, no schooling, no health care.
2: No more hotels. As Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has suggested, house the migrants who arrive in tents.
Empty every hotel which has migrants in them, immediately. Cost of this? Rather less than the hotels, I would reckon.
Small boat crossings under Labour are on brink of hitting 50,000 – one illegal migrant every 11 mins since the election
3: No grants for swimming lessons, gym workouts and hair extensions. No grants for anything except a ticket home.
4: Withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and all other supranational jurisdiction which stops us from solving our own problems in our own ways. They are well past their sell-by dates, anyway.
5: Abolish the immigration tribunals, immediately. They are all presided over by judges who spend most of their lives advocating the causes of asylum seekers. The legal issue is clear: Arriving illegally means no entry.
6: In complex cases, where it is either not clear where the migrant comes from, or the country of origin refuses to have them back, send them for processing at a place under British jurisdiction.
Such as St Helena — a windswept island in the middle of the Atlantic. Or South Georgia. Or, for the really devious ones, Rockall.
7. For those who have already arrived and are currently going through the appeals process, let it be made clear that by arriving illegally they have automatically lost their right to stay here. Also, abolish all legal aid for those who have arrived.
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Starmer must begin with the conviction that all who arrive illegally must goCredit: PA
8: Offer those who have been here for some time £1,000 to leave the country, never to return. You could throw in some free bags of Monster Munch, and one of those neck cushions, for the flight.
9: Strike a deal with the French to allow British policemen or soldiers to puncture the boats before they leave France.
Or otherwise hole them below the waterline. It is obvious we can’t trust the French to do this.
10: Start taking things seriously, Starmer. Begin with the conviction that all who arrive illegally must go. Including those who have already arrived. And if the Left moans, so be it.
POLICE POLICY A SHAM
I SPOKE to Rob Davies a few days ago. He’s the shopkeeper from Wrexham who was visited by the police for having put up a sign describing shoplifters as “scumbags”.
He was ticked off and warned he might have offended people.
Who, shoplifters? We mustn’t offend THEM now?
Totally bizarre. And you can see where this policy is getting us.
There is now one case of shoplifting every minute in the UK.
Businesses are closing down because their losses are unsustainable.
And when a hard-working shop owner complains about it, he then gets a visit from the Old Bill.
Before the last election Sir Keir Starmer warned he was going to get tough on shoplifters. What happened, Keir?
Meanwhile the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, Matthew Barber, has said the public must help in fighting shoplifting.
Really? And risk being charged by the Old Bill for being nasty to a vulnerable person?
Boring tunes Taylor-made for kids
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Taylor Swift’s music is bloodless and boring – she is a consummate saleswomanCredit: Getty
GOT your pre-order in for the new Taylor Swift album?
Nope, me neither. But I suppose million upon million will.
Her music is bloodless and boring, written by a committee. The lyrics are naff. But she is a consummate saleswoman.
She’s already been giving teasing hints as to what’s on the new album.
It includes a cover of a George Michael song, for example. Which is, for me, another reason to stay well away from it.
Ah well, she’s what a certain section of the kids want now and I suppose I am not necessarily her target audience.
But couldn’t the kids fall in love with something a little more exciting, and dangerous, and full of adventure?
NAKED TRUTH
THE Metropolitan Police is considering prosecuting the vigilantes who stopped a bloke waving his b*****s around after he dropped his trousers and pants on the Tube in front of women and children.
A few blokes on board remonstrated with him and then, when he got aggressive, wrestled him to the ground and handed him over to an off-duty copper.
In other words, they did the right thing.
And the response of the idiots at the Met is why the public is reluctant to get itself involved when a crime takes place.
UK IN A RIGHTS MESS
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US Vice President JD Vance warned that human rights in the UK are worseningCredit: Getty
WHEN friends make constructive criticisms, we should listen.
The US State Department has just investigated human rights in the UK – something the Vice President JD Vance has been banging on about.
It says our human rights worsened last year. And it claimed there were “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression”, as well as “crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism”.
That seems to me pretty much bang on.
Over the last 15 years our freedom to express ourselves has diminished and diminished.
And that trend hastened last year with the advent of a Labour government which really hates the idea that people should express themselves freely.
CREDIT IS DUE!
THE UK has just broken a much-cherished record.
There are now, officially, eight million people claiming Universal Credit.
And well done, Sir Keir – that’s an increase of more than a million on the figure for last July.
Soon, everybody will be on Universal Credit. Sitting on their fat arses watching reruns of Deal Or No Deal.
And there will be nobody left to pay for it all.
GOOD luck to all our readers who are about to open their A-level results today.
It’s always a fun time of year, isn’t it?
But it doesn’t really matter in the end, believe me.
And here’s a bit of advice to anyone who got lower than As and Bs.
Don’t go to university. It’s not worth the bother.
Instead, get yourself an apprenticeship and learn something useful which will keep you in work.
Soon you will be earning a decent income while the debt-laden students slum it on awful courses.
High flyer? What do you take me for?
NOW I really have heard it all. A trolley dolly has just won a discrimination case against British Airways.
Jennifer Clifford said she was too scared to fly. Being up in the air in one of those planes made her kind of stressy, you see. So she shouldn’t have been given the boot.
Do you ever get the impression that, much as the Fun Boy Three suggested all those years ago, the lunatics really have taken over the asylum?
AN ENTREPRENEUR whose restaurant idea was rejected as “a disaster” on Dragons’ Den is set to open 100 new outlets of his popular chain.
Alessandro Savelli, who co-founded Pasta Evangelists and currently serves as its CEO, says the chain is aiming to become the UK’s “fastest-growing, casual dining hot spot”.
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Pasta Evangelists was panned by business experts on Dragons’ Den in 2018Credit: BBC
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Now, the company is worth millions of pounds and is aiming to open 100 new restaurants across the UKCredit: Pasta Evangelists – Supplied
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The co-founders had asked for a £75,000 investment for a 2.5 per cent stake in the company during their appearance on the BBC showCredit: BBC
Now worth around £40 million, Pasta Evangelists was rejected on Dragons’ Den by business experts in 2018 when Savelli and co-founder Finn Lagun asked for a £75,000 investment for a 2.5 per cent cut of the company.
Dragon Jenny Campbell even called Finn “delusional” and “a disaster” during their pitch.
However, the entrepreneurs have no doubt had the last laugh as their business is now set for major expansion.
Pasta Evangelists says it will invest £30 million into new restaurants, creating up to 1,500 jobs.
It hopes to open 100 new restaurants across the UK in the next five years, including in the south of England, the Midlands, and Scotland.
The company is also aiming to develop a “Pasta Apprenticeship” scheme to attract new staff and help the current workforce develop new skills and knowledge, reports The Grocer.
Savelli said: “The demand for our fresh, beautifully cooked artisan pasta is growing.
“Our intention is to become the UK’s fastest-growing, casual dining hot spot and the hottest place to eat for pasta lovers of all ages.
“Sustainable growth has always been our plan.
“The hospitality industry is going through tough times at the moment, but we are confident that our business model is robust and dynamic, and the proof of this is we have already bucked the trend with the confirmed opening of five more restaurants in the space of three months, and more to come.”
Pasta Evangelists enter Dragons Den
The chain opened a restaurant in Farringdon, central London, this summer as well as its first outside of the capital in Guildford in July.
Three new London locations are set to open in the coming weeks, helping carry the total number of outlets to 11 as we head into autumn.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the plans were “great news” and highlighted the “dynamism and resilience of British businesses”.
The restaurant has had a remarkable success story since its Dragons’ Den miss.
Recalling their appearance on the BBC show, Finn said he was “shaking life a leaf” before walking out to pitch his business.
He added that he was left devastated by the business experts’ “vicious” comments.
Speaking to The Sun in 2023, he said: “I never would have expected to be called a ‘disaster’ or ‘delusional‘ on national TV – they were vicious things to say to a young entrepreneur.
“To use that kind of language against a young, passionate person was dismaying. I would never talk to any young entrepreneur like that.”
Despite their lack of faith in the business, the Dragons are no doubt feeling red in the face now as Pasta Evangelists is one of the UK’s biggest fresh pasta companies.
It has also earned the highest praise from many voices, including chef Gordon Ramsay.
SCARRED BY EXPERIENCE ON DRAGONS’ DEN
While Pasta Evangelists has gone on to huge success, Finn says he’s still scarred by his experience in the Den.
“We received an extremely strong, negative, visceral reaction,” he says.
“I was 24 years old when I went on Dragons’ Den, so for a seasoned entrepreneur like Jenny Campbell to call me ‘delusional’ and a ‘disaster’ was so vicious… Jenny was savage.
“At one point she said, ‘I like it’ and I replied, ‘Thank you’, only for her to say, ‘I like it because it’s a brilliant business lesson in how not to set up and run a business’.
“I was mortified, I felt like an idiot having grinned at her and thanked her. She was deliberately trying to take me for a ride for entertainment.”
Finn adds: “I don’t want to sound like the Virgin Mary but if the tables were turned and I was Jenny Campbell, I would have apologised.
“If I saw the business had turned into the UK’s biggest pasta company in a few years I’d say, ‘Well done, you defied expectations’ and maybe even offer a little contrition or an apology.”
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Finn Lagun said he was left scarred by his experience on the showCredit: BBC
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Pasta Evangelists will operate 11 stores across southern England by the end of summerCredit: Pasta Evangelists
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.
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.
BBC Radio 2’s listening figures have plummeted since a presenter switch upCredit: PA
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Scott Mills took over the Breakfast Show slot, yet listeners have dropped as the year goes onCredit: Supplied
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Zoe Ball quit her Breakfast Show in DecemberCredit: PA
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For use in UK, Ireland or Benelux countries only Undated BBC handout photo of Zoe Ball presenting her last show on BBC Radio 2 breakfast show, which she has hosted for six years, at BBC Broadcasting House in central London. Issue date: Friday December 20, 2024. PA Photo. See PA story SHOWBIZ Ball. Photo credit […]Credit: PA
Yet at the time, Zoe said she would remain on BBC Radio 2.
She said: “After six incredible years on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, it’s time for me to step away from the very early mornings and focus on family.”
Telling her listeners about her decision, she said: “I’ve decided it’s time to step away from the early alarm call and start a new chapter.
Zoe Ball’s career so far
Zoe was born in Blackpool and is daughter of the children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball and his wife Julia.
She appeared on television at a young age as part of the studio audience of the Saturday morning children’s show, Saturday Superstore when her father was a guest.
The star began her career in broadcasting as a presenter on the pre-school programme Playdays.
After various behind the scenes roles, she earned a spot as a regular host of Top of the Pops, when she alternated with the likes of Jayne Middlemiss and Jo Whiley.
In 1996, she was chosen to front BBC One‘s saturday morning show Live & Kicking, which led to stints on The Big Breakfast on Channel 4.
But she maintained a huge presence on the radio as she was chosen to be the co-host of BBC Radio 1 Breakfast alongside Kevin Greening in October 1997.
Zoe was later appointed the sole host of the show in a groundbreaking move by the corporation as she was the first female DJ to hold the post.
The presenter chose to leave the station in March 2000 to start a family, where she was succeeded by Sara Cox.
As a mainstream face in TV through the noughties, she hosted a range of huge programmes for ITV, including the Brit Awards in 2002, Extinct in 2006, and both Soapstar Superstar and Grease Is The Word in 2007.
In mid-2002, she returned to radio when she joined Xfm (later known as Radio X), when she was the voice of the weekday drivetime show until December 2003. In 2004, she stood in for Ricky Gervais while he filmed the second series of The Office.
In October 2005, she appeared as a contestant on the third series of Strictly Come Dancing, where she was partnered with Ian Waite, The star impressed viewers with her footwork and the duo waltzed into third place.
In 2011, she returned to the franchise as she took over as the host of the magazine spin-off show, It Takes Two.
She also filled in for Claudia Winkleman on the main show in 2014, when The Traitors star took leave after her daughter suffered serious burn injuries.
