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Turkiye’s President Erdogan says Ankara will join a ground task force to monitor the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as part of a US-brokered deal under President Trump. He added Turkiye will also help rebuild Gaza under the new truce.

THIS is the terrifying moment a helicopter crashes onto a freeway just feet away from shocked drivers in California.

Three people on board are in a critical condition after the Airbus lost control before plunging towards the busy road and smashing into the ground.

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Footage showed the chopper flying low above Highway 50 near Howe Avenue in Sacramento.

Within seconds it started plummeting towards the ground with huge plumes of smoke seen billowing across the highway as it smashed.

Pictures from after the crash shows the medical helicopter upside down in the middle of the road.

Smashed glass and debris can be seen strewn across the highway as firefighters and cops surround the wreckage.

Motorist Davyd Bychkoviak was driving past just after 7pm local time (3am UK time) as the helicopter spiralled through the air.

Mr Bychkoviak said: “I’m still shaking. It was a brush with death.

“The helicopter crashed inches away from me. The dust kicked up into my face, and I could feel the wind of the propellers in the car.

“If it had crashed on the road there would have been multiple fatalities.”

The Sacramento Fire Department and Federal Aviation Administration said the helicopter went down on the eastbound lanes of Highway 50 near Howe Avenue.

They added that it was a helicopter that provides air medical services.

REACH Air Medical Services later confirmed to ABC7 news that three of its crew were hurt in the crash.

Captain Justin Sylvia, from the Sacramento Fire Department, confirmed three people were “transported in critical condition” to local hospitals.

These included two females and a male made up of a pilot, nurse and paramedic.

No patient was on board at the time of the disaster, Captain Sylvia added.

Speaking at a press conference today he said: “There was one victim that was trapped underneath the helicopter… [with] the help of just civilians that were standing around, they were able to lift part of that helicopter out and get that victim out.

“There’s a pretty large debris field around that at this point.

“The lucky portion for us, I’d say, is the fact that the helicopter did not catch on fire.”

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In an overstuffed workshop in East L.A., Chris Francis reached out a heavily tattooed arm and pulled a single shoe box from one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls.

“Anjelica Huston,” the shoemaker and artist said. “Let’s see what’s in here.”

Removing the top of the box, he revealed two carved wooden forms known as shoe lasts that cobblers use to make their wares. Beneath those were strips of yellowing shoe patterns and a tracing of the actor’s foot with a note written in loopy cursive:

To Pasquale
My happy feet shall thank you
— Anjelica Huston

“Cool, huh?” Francis said, gazing reverently at the box’s contents. “Every time I open one it’s amazing. It’s like Christmas all the time.”

For the last three years, Francis has been surrounded by a sprawling archive of famous feet originally amassed by Pasquale Di Fabrizio, the late shoemaker to the stars. From the early ‘60s to the early 2000s, Di Fabrizio created custom footwear for the rich, famous and notorious out of his humble shoe shop on 3rd Street.

The shoes went to his customers, but his voluminous collection includes shoe lasts, patterns, drawings, correspondences, leather samples and handwritten notes from thousands of clients, all stored in cardboard shoe boxes that the Italian immigrant trimmed with green, white and red striped ribbon.

The names, written in bold Magic Marker on the front of each box are a who’s who of entertainers from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and beyond: Liza Minnelli, Tom Jones, Richard Pryor, Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bea Arthur, Arsenio Hall, Nancy Sinatra, Ace Frehley. The list goes on and on.

“So many great people stood on these pieces of paper,” Francis said, looking at the stacks of boxes around him. “Roy Orbison. Eva Gabor. Stella Stevens. Lauren Bacall. I could pull these down all day.”

Francis never met Di Fabrizio, who died in 2008, but in 2022 he traded two pairs of his sculptural shoe-art pieces to Di Fabrizio’s friend and fellow shoemaker Gary Kazanchyan for the entirety of the Italian shoemaker’s archive. Three years later, Francis is still making his way through it all.

The amount of material is overwhelming, but he is committed to preserving Di Fabrizio’s legacy. Ultimately, he wants to find a space where he can share it with others.

“I never want to be without it, but I’m realistic that it deserves to be appreciated by more than just myself,” he said. “If my life’s work ended up in somebody’s hands, I don’t think I’d want them to just keep it for themselves forever.”

A shoemaker’s journey

Francis isn’t just cataloging L.A.’s shoemaking history, he’s helping to keep it alive.

Over the last decade and a half he’s made a name for himself as a custom shoemaker, creating handmade bespoke footwear for rockers like former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, as well as sculptural art shoes that are displayed in museums like the Craft Contemporary, the Palm Springs Art Museum and SCAD FASH in Atlanta.

In his East L.A. workshop, he eschews modern technology, focusing instead on traditional methods of shoemaking, often with hand tools.

“The handmade shoe is alive and well in this shop,” he said, dressed in pressed black slacks and tinted sunglasses, chunky gold rings gleaming on his fingers. “There’s no computer here, and even the records half the time are vinyls or 78s.”

Making shoes by hand is time-consuming and expensive work — Francis doesn’t sell a pair of shoes for less than $1,800 — but for his mostly musician clientele, a sturdy, custom-made, comfortable shoe that also boasts over-the-top style is well worth the price.

“At my price point, my customers are buying something that’s really a tool,” he said. “It’s part of their look, but it also has to hit 27 guitar pedals, keep all of its crystal, be beautiful, last multiple tours and they have to be able to stand in it all night.”

Francis, who has a certain aging-rocker swagger himself, never expected to become a shoemaker.

After going to art school and hopping freight trains for several years, he moved to Los Angeles in 2002 originally to join the Merchant Marines. Instead he found work hanging multi-story graphics and billboards on the side of hotels and high-rises on the Sunset Strip and at casinos in Las Vegas. “That gave me the same thrill of riding a freight train,” he said. “Being on a high-rise building and rappelling down.”

He discovered he had a knack for pattern making in 2008 when he began creating hand-stitched leather jackets to wear to the Hollywood parties he had started attending with his now-fiancee. One day a stranger approached him and said she knew someone who would appreciate a jacket like the ones he was making. She was a stylist for Arnel Pineda, the lead singer of Journey. Commissions from Mötley Crüe and other rock bands followed.

A few years later he became interested in making shoes, but although he knocked on the door of several shoe shops in town, he couldn’t find a mentor.

“They didn’t have time, or they’d say, ‘You belong in a rock and roll band, you’re not one of us,’” he said. “But I would say, ‘Just teach me one thing, one trick.’ And everyone had time to teach one trick.”

It was an education in much more than shoemaking.

“Almost every shoemaker I met had immigrated to the country,” he said. “So I learned how to make shoes from the Italians, from guys from Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Syria, from everybody. And while doing so, I learned about all these different cultures.”

‘He was the king’

As Francis dove deeper into the history of shoemaking in Los Angeles, one name kept coming up again and again: Pasquale Di Fabrizio.

“I started asking other makers about him, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we remember him,’” Francis said. “He was the king.”

For more than 50 years Di Fabrizio was the most sought after shoemaker in Los Angeles. He made Liberace’s rhinestone-encrusted footwear and shod Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck for touring productions of Disney on Parade. He was the go-to shoemaker for country western stars, Vegas showgirls, Hollywood movie stars, gospel singers and casino owners. The Rat Pack helped put him on the map.

“My best customer is Dean Martin,” Di Fabrizio told The Times in 1972. “He buys 40 pairs a year.”

Sporting a thick, bristled mustache and oversize glasses, Di Fabrizio had a tough reputation. He once kicked a movie star out of his shop because the star brought back a pair of patent leather shoes that he claimed were defective. Di Fabrizio accused him of missing the urinal and peeing on them at the Oscars.

“Never come back here again,” he said in his thick Italian accent.

The shoemaker occasionally made house calls, but his customers mostly came to him. In his workshop on 3rd Street near Crescent Heights, he would trace their bare feet on a piece of paper and measure the circumference of each of their feet at the ball, around the arch, the heel and the ankle. Then he would customize a pre-carved wooden last from Italy, adding thin pieces of leather 1 millimeter at a time to more perfectly mimic the unique shape of the client’s foot.

The size and shapes of the lasts varied wildly. He once told a reporter that it took “half a cow” to make shoes for Wilt Chamberlain, who wore a size 15. In his archives, Francis found a petite high heel shoe last roughly the length of his hand.

“Di Fabrizio did lots of shoes for little people,” Francis said. “He really offered an important service for that community. They could have formal footwear rather than having only the option of wearing kids shoes.”

The same lasts could be used over and over again to make several pairs of shoes, as long as the heel height was the same. Each last went in its own box decorated with a ribbon in the colors of the Italian flag.

“It’s so simple, but he claims his territory with that ribbon,” Francis said. “He cared enough to take one extra step. It’s what really made that collection iconic.”

A legacy preserved

Francis first encountered Di Fabrizio’s archives in 2010 when Kazanchyan offered him a job at Andre #1 Custom Made Shoes on Sunset Boulevard. Kazanchyan inherited the shop from his uncle, Andre Kazanchyan, who once worked with Di Fabrizio and became his good friend.

Gary Kazanchyan and Di Fabrizio were close as well. When Di Fabrizio retired in the early 2000s, Kazanchyan hired all of the guys who worked at his shop. Di Fabrizio was at Kazanchyan’s wedding and when the older shoemaker was in a nursing home at the end of his life, Kazanchyan visited him every day.

For years Kazanchyan stored as many of the ribbon-trimmed boxes as he could fit in his Hollywood shop, but just before COVID he moved his shop to his garage in Burbank and transferred Di Fabrizio’s archives to his backyard. “At one point, my whole backyard was this mountain of shoe lasts,” he said.

Kazanchyan started a renovation on his house in 2022 and could no longer store Di Fabrizio’s archive in his backyard. He’d sold some of the most famous shoe lasts at auction — a bundle of Di Fabrizio’s shoe lasts for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. went for $4,375 in 2013 — but he still had several tons of material stacked on pallets and covered in tarps. He remembered that Francis loved the collection, so he called him and asked if he wanted it. Francis did.

Francis didn’t have the money to purchase the collection in cash, but he offered Kazanchyan two art pieces that he’d exhibited and Kazanchyan accepted. The first carload of boxes Francis took to his studio included lasts for Wayne Newton, Paula Abdul, Ginger Rogers, Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone.

“My excitement was on fire,” he said.

Francis spent a few weeks sorting through the archive and discarding lasts and shoe boxes that were too covered in mold or deteriorated to be worth keeping. Just before a rainstorm threatened the rest of the collection, he brought thousands of shoe lasts to his studio but even now regrets that he was unable to save it all.

“I tried to grab the big names, but there was so much I couldn’t keep,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”

The boxes hold stories — and life lessons

Living and working among the Di Fabrizio collection has taught Francis a lot more than just the art of making shoes.

“I’m constantly seeing the obituary of a celebrity who has passed and I go to the workshop and there’s their box,” he said. “It really lets you know that life is for the living. It’s up to you to be responsible and live your life when you’re alive. Be yourself, teach others, leave something behind.”

Hanging onto the collection has not been easy — but Francis believes he was chosen from beyond to care for Di Fabrizio’s archive and to share it with others responsibly.

He’s still not sure what that will look like, but he’s determined to try.

And in the meantime, he is also determined to keep the traditional art of shoemaking alive in Los Angeles.

If you look around his workshop, you’ll spot several boxes adorned with red, white and blue striped ribbon.

Francis is making those boxes his own.

FAILED asylum seekers and foreign offenders are being left in Britain for up to a year because their governments are dragging their feet over travel papers, a Home Office file reveals.

The official guide, published by the department, shows deportations are crippled by delays from overseas embassies.

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Egypt, Guinea and Burkina Faso are among the worst offenders — taking six to 12 months to issue the documents needed to put its citizens on a plane home.

By contrast, Italy, Belgium and Sri Lanka can turn the paperwork around in less than two weeks, while India averages one month.

But the file also shows no reliable timescale is available at all for dozens of countries — leaving removals at the mercy of slow or unpredictable foreign bureaucracies.

The delays mean some migrants remain in Britain long after their claims have failed, with taxpayers footing the bill for hotel rooms, benefits and legal fees while they wait.

Yesterday, fed-up protesters raised St George’s Cross and Union flags outside some of the 210 hotels being used to house migrants — as PM Sir Keir Starmer announced plans to overhaul the failing asylum system.

Among those targeted was the Castle Bromwich Holiday Inn in Birmingham.

Outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf, East London, a group of protesters gathered with one holding a banner that read: “Enough is enough protect our women and girls.”

Another said: “Tower Hamlets council house homeless Brits first.”

There were also protests outside the Holiday Inn in Solihull, West Midlands, and the Manchester South Hotel.

At least 15 people were arrested at protests relating to migrant hotels on Saturday.

Following the release of the Home Office file, Reform UK demanded ministers get tough.

Deputy party leader Richard Tice said: “Foreign countries know Starmer’s Britain is a pushover, so it’s no wonder they are dragging their feet when it comes to accepting deportations.

“Britain needs to start using its diplomatic and economic power.

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“Countries that refuse to take their criminals back should not get off scot-free but instead face serious sanctions.

“Unfortunately, with this meek Labour Government, we will continue to be seen as a meek nation on the global stage.”

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp also hit out, saying: “Countries that do not fully and promptly co-operate should suffer visa sanctions — where we don’t give visas to citizens of those countries to come here.

‘TOO WEAK’

“Then, they would pretty soon fall into line.

“The legal power exists to do that but this Labour Government is too weak to use it.”

There is currently a 106,000-strong backlog of asylum claim cases, including at least 51,000 appeals.

Last week, official statistics showed a record 111,000 people applied for asylum in the UK during the first year of Labour coming to power.

The Government has said its latest plans would introduce independent panels to hear appeal cases to speed up the process and deport failed asylum seekers quicker.

A new commission will prioritise cases of those living in costly asylum hotels and foreign national offenders.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “We cannot carry on with these completely unacceptable delays in appeals as a result of the system we have inherited, which mean that failed asylum seekers stay in the system for years on end at huge cost to the taxpayer.”

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She added: “Overhauling the appeals system so that it is swift, fair and independent, with high standards in place, is a central part of our Plan for Change.”

But the new scheme could take months to implement and record numbers of people continue to cross the Channel on small boats.

Tory Mr Philp said: “The Government is too weak to do what’s really needed — such as repeal the Human Rights Act for all immigration matters and deport all illegal immigrants immediately upon arrival.”

The Home Office said: “For some countries receiving returnees from the UK, establishing their identities and nationalities can take time.

“Where that is the case, we work with their respective governments closely to drive timings down to the minimum possible.”

THIS is the moment a police helicopter pursues a man on an allegedly stolen motorbike while flying just feet above the ground.

Footage shows the chopper circling above the rider as he drives at speed around a field near St Helens, Merseyside.

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The pilot then lowers the helicopter just metres above the ground, in a desperate attempt to keep up with the fleeing motorcyclist.

At one point the dark blue and yellow coloured helicopter is seen to be flying almost parallel alongside the bike.

Moments later, both helicopter and motorbike disappear from the view of the camera behind a small patch of trees.

The chopper flies so low past the outcropping of trees it becomes obscured by the foliage.

The shocking video comes to an end but not before it cuts to a shot of a police officer in the field with the chopper heard circling overhead.

Another cut shows the speeding motorcyclist flying past the camera one last time.

Blitzing through the field at high speeds the rider passes just meters away from the cameraman in a final bid to lose the pursuing helicopter.

The helicopter appears to have stayed on the rider’s tail the whole time however and is seen flying overhead in a final cut.

The National Police Air Service (NPAS) said the high octane chase happened on August 13.

The incident is being reviewed internally in consultation with the Civil Aviation Authority.

Merseyside Police said the bike was driving in an “extremely dangerous” manner.

The rider is alleged to have been speeding, mounting pavements and nearly hitting a pedestrian as they revved the off-road bike around the area.

The rider is said to have been joined by a second man with the pair fleeing cops together along the A580 and through fields near a dam.

Officers later detained the second man on the ground when he dismounted his bike.

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The yob seen in the footage was reportedly arrested when he ran out fuel, his bike has been seized.

Chief Superintendent Fiona Gaffney, Chief Operating Officer at NPAS, said: “We’re aware of the video currently circulating on social media and the level of public interest it has generated.

“The circumstances are being thoroughly reviewed internally and in consultation with the Civil Aviation Authority to ensure all relevant standards and procedures have been followed.”

It comes amid talks that police choppers could soon be replaced by police drones.

One unmanned helicopter being trialled by the NPAS is capable of flying at speeds of 115mph and is able to stay airborne for up to six hours.

The NPAS said that the unmanned helicopter, a Schiebel Camcopter S-100, is larger than existing drones used by police forces and has a greater range.

Housed in a small unit, tucked away on a quiet by-street in Holborn, London, just off of Red Lion Square, is the strange yet excellent Novelty Automation

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford,” once mused Samuel Johnson. Presumably he had just come back from an afternoon at Novelty Automation when he said that.

Housed in a small unit, tucked away on a quiet by-street in Holborn, London, just off of Red Lion Square, is the perfect afternoon out, especially for those who have begun feeling that they’ve tasted all that the English capital has to offer.

You’ve been to M&M World. You’ve seen the big blue whale at the Natural History Museum more times than you care to admit. You’ve looked at Big Ben from Westminster Bridge. The obvious next step is Novelty Automation.

The shop is a vibrant treasure-trove of Victorian-style automatons operated by shiny silver coins that roll down the cashier’s chute into your awaiting bucket.

Do you know of an unusual place you think we should visit? Please email [email protected]

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Over the course of one to two hours, you’ll make your way around the small shop, slotting between one and three coins into each of about 20 machines. The cost is reasonable: a bucket of 35 coins coming in at £28 and seeming plenty enough for three.

Some machines do all of the work for you, such as the AirbedbugBNB, which invites up to two players to draw a curtain around them and witness the story of a family of bedbugs as they look for a suitable holiday let to settle down in. Another, the Instant Eclipse, had my friend clamber into a small, dark rocket-shaped pod. He emerged a minute later and refused to explain what had happened. He seemed similarly perturbed after placing his socked foot inside the robot chipodist machine.

Those units that do require some participation are still much more focused on being vehicles of satire than on putting a gamer’s hand-eye coordination to the test.

One of the most addictive had the three of us tensely willing on a magnetised haul of coins up past financial regulators to the top of a skyscraper, where our ill-gotten gains could be effortlessly lost amid the City of London’s modern spires.

A particularly silly yet on-the-nose bit of satire comes in the form of the Fulfillment Centre machine, which has players powering an Amazon warehouse worker on an impossible and gruelling trial shift by running manically on the spot.

Novelty Automation is the work of Tim Hunkin, a Suffolk-based inventor and cartoonist who presented a TV show called The Secret Life of Machines and drew a comic strip for The Observer called The Rudiments of Wisdom.

Clearly, that combination of experiences has been brought together and used to excellent effect. The stylisation of the machines, their absurdist humour and gross characters remind me of the work of Chris Simpsons Artist.

Arguably, the pinnacle of it all comes in the form of Is it Art?, which invited us to put an object into a small glass box. We chose a lighter which then rose up into the eyeliner of a mannequin art critic. After a short moment of consideration and a closer look he concluded that yes, it was indeed art.

Jets of searing hot molten lava spewed over 1,000 feet into the Hawaiian air Friday from the Kilauea volcano. Pictured is a May 4, 2018 column of robust, reddish-brown ash plume from a Kilauea eruption following a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on the South Flank of Kilauea shook the Big Island of Hawaii. File Photo by USGS/UPI | License Photo

June 20 (UPI) — Jets of searing hot molten lava spewed more than 1,000 feet into the Hawaiian air Friday from the Kilauea volcano.

The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement that the “eruption began at approximately 1:40 a.m. HST, June 20, with lava fountains and flows erupting from the north vent. Fountain heights are well over 1,000 feet. Plume is over 20,000 ft.”

Kilauea is one of six active volcanoes in Hawaii, including Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world.

The cloud released by the lava eruption can include hazards like volcanic glass called Pele’s hair and rock fragments known as tephra.

The observatory said that has the potential to cause “far-reaching effects downwind.”

The current eruption was Kilauea’s 26th since December 2024.

The lava jet is known as lava fountaining.

The Hawaii Volcano Observatory predicted in a June 16 statement: “Episode 26 lava fountaining will likely begin between June 18 and 20 based on current rates of summit inflation.”

The main hazards of the lava fountaining include volcanic gas, primarily water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide; and volcanic haze or smog, known as vog, which can blow downwind.”

Residents of area affected by the lava fountaining cloud are advised to minimize exposure due to the glass and other fragments within it.