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Israeli forces have carried out air strikes on the areas of Mahmoudiyeh and Jarmak, in southern Lebanon. The strikes are the latest in near-daily Israeli violations of the US-brokered ceasefire involving Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah that began in November.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. military carried out three strikes Monday in the waters of the Eastern Pacific against boats suspected of carrying drugs, killing 14 and leaving one survivor.

The announcement made on social media Tuesday, marks a continued escalation in the pace of the strikes, which began in early September spaced weeks apart. This was the first time multiple strikes were announced in a single day.

Hegseth said Mexican search and rescue authorities “assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue” of the sole survivor but didn’t say if that person would stay in their custody or be handed over to the U.S.

In a strike earlier in October which had two survivors, the U.S. military rescued the pair and later repatriated them to Colombia and Ecuador.

Hegseth posted footage of the strikes to social media in which two boats can be seen moving at speed through the water. One is visibly laden with a large amount of parcels or bundles. Both then suddenly explode and are seen aflame.

The third strike appears to have been conducted on a pair of boats that were stationary in the water alongside each other. They appear to be largely empty with at least two people seen moving before an explosion engulfs both boats.

Hegseth said “the four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics.”

The death toll from the 13 disclosed strikes since early September is now at least 57 people.

Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.

From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.

That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.

Which brings us to what happened in South L.A. on Tuesday.

Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.

Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.

Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.

Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”

Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.

Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.

Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.

The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.

Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:

La migra.

It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.

Who knew?

Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.

Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.

A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.

Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”

Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.

Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.

The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.

This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?

As I’ve written before, there’s never a nice way to conduct an immigration raid but there’s always a better way. Or at least a way that’s not dripping with malevolence.

Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.

And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.

Ajike “AJ” Owens was a dedicated 35-year-old mother of four when she was shot and killed by her 58-year-old neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in June 2023. The tragedy, which rocked the otherwise peaceful, tight-knit community of Ocala, Fla., followed years of Lorincz making habitual calls to the police to report neighborhood kids, including Owens’, for playing in a vacant lot next to her home. Lorincz, who is white, claimed that the children — most of whom are Black and were under 12 — were a threat, citing one of the nation’s many “stand your ground” laws, which allow individuals to use deadly force to protect themselves if they feel their life is in danger.

Now award-winning filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir, with the support of producer-husband Nikon Kwantu and such nonfiction luminaries as Sam Pollard and Soledad O’Brien, has chronicled the two years leading up to Owens’ death in “The Perfect Neighbor,” premiering Friday on Netflix after an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run. Composed almost entirely of police body camera footage, the moving and powerful verité documentary uses the case to depict the perils of such laws, which are all too easily misused or abused in a society where not every claim of self-defense is treated equally.

A jury convicted Lorincz of manslaughter in August 2024, but the repercussions of her erratic and violent behavior continue to impact the Owens family and their neighbors. Gandbhir, whose sister-in-law was a close friend of Owens, hopes “The Perfect Neighbor” will honor Owens’ memory while showing how our nation’s growing fear of “the other” and the proliferation of “stand your ground” laws are a deadly combination.

Initially, you weren’t planning on making a film about this tragic killing, but you were documenting the aftermath of the crime. Why?

We got a call the night Ajike was killed, and we immediately jumped into action to try to help the family. We stepped in to be the media liaisons. They looked to us to try to keep the story alive in the media, just because they were worried [it would be overlooked]. This is Ocala, Fla., the heart of where “stand your ground” was born. Susan wasn’t arrested for four days because they were doing a “stand your ground” investigation. We were not thinking about making a doc, really. We were just terrified that there would be no justice.

That’s happened before …

Yes, Trayvon Martin’s case being the most notorious.

But in Ajike’s case, there’s reams of footage and audio recordings that captured what happened. How were you able to obtain so much of that material from the police department?

Anthony Thomas, who works with [civil rights attorney] Benjamin Crump, had sued the police department through the Freedom of Information Act and got them to release all of the material that they had pertaining to the case. That’s how we got the footage. What came to us was the police body camera footage, detective interviews, Ring camera footage and cellphone footage. There was also all the audio calls that Susan had made to the police, and then after the night of the [killing], the calls the community had made. There was basically a plethora of stuff that we were handed, in a jumble, and Anthony was like, “Sort this out. See if you can find anything that makes sense for the news, like snippets we can share.”

I was surprised at how much material there was, and I’m just talking about what made it into the film.

It speaks to how much Susan called the police. Basically, the body cam footage [was a result of those calls]. What’s interesting is the reaction when we screened the film for the community. They agreed to be part of this so we wanted to show them before it came out. We’re very concerned with participant care and the ethics of this. They said that they didn’t think that we had everything, because Susan [allegedly] called the police sometimes, like, 10 times a day. They [said they] think the police gave us maybe what they could organize, where they don’t look terrible. But they don’t think that that’s everything.

Ajike “AJ” Owens, pictured on the poster, was shot and killed by her neighbor in 2023. The crime is at the center of Geeta Gandbhir’s new documentary “The Perfect Neighbor.”

Ajike’s mother, Pamela Dias, has been a major force in keeping her daughter’s memory alive — and seeking justice. How did she feel about you making this film?

I went to Pamela and said I could make a movie and maybe we could make a change. It’s quite an endeavor to try to change gun laws or the “stand your ground” law, but maybe we can reach people. She said yes. This is a woman who by her own admission was blinded by grief [when Ajike was killed], who said she couldn’t see two feet in front of her. But she knew even then that her daughter’s story had to be told. She said her daughter died standing up for her kids, and she felt it was her turn to stand up.

I told her the material was graphic. But Pam was inspired by Emmett Till and how his mother had an open-casket funeral and told the photographers to take pictures because she wanted the world to know what had happened to her baby. Plus, we thought about George Floyd and [how footage of his killing] sparked a movement. It is a terrible thing to bear witness, but if we let these things continue to happen in the shadows, then they will happen forever. It’s only by bearing witness that things might change.

What about your own emotional well-being while making this film?

See all my gray hair? [Laughs.] I realized later it was grief work for me, because I needed to know what happened. I had to know what happened. I couldn’t understand how someone could pick up a gun and kill their neighbor over children playing nearby. How did we get here? So many questions were just eating me, so the work was in some ways cathartic. Then once we had it all strung out and I thought it was a film, I brought on Viridiana Lieberman, who’s our editor. We had a similar sensibility about what we wanted this to be and we really committed to living in the body camera footage.

“Body camera footage is a violent tool of the state,” Gandbhir says. “It’s often used to criminalize us, particularly people of color. It’s used to dehumanize us, to surveil us, to protect the police. What I wanted to do with this material was flip that narrative and use it to humanize this community.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Why not use narration?

I worked for 12 years in narratives and scripted before I segued into documentary. I learned that the best vérité documentaries are show and not tell. If you tell people what they’re seeing, there’s some room for doubt or for your bias or some questioning around it. But to me, this footage plays like vérité. There’s no reporter on the ground. There’s no one influencing what’s happening in the neighborhood, other than the police who are coming in and asking questions. I felt that made the footage and the story undeniable. No one could say that we were down there asking provocative questions. And the body camera footage is so incredibly immersive, I wanted people to have the experience of what the community experienced.

How would you describe what they went through?

Their experience felt a bit like a horror film. You have this beautiful, diverse community living together with a strong social network, taking care of each other and each other’s kids. What was so powerful to me in the body camera footage is you really got to see this community as they were before [the tragedy], and you never get that. There’s horrible shootings all the time, and we see the aftermath, right? We see the grieving family, we see the funeral. We have to re-create what their lives were like before. And in this, you see this beautiful community thriving and living together, and that was so profound. I wanted to rebuild their world so everyone could see the damage done by one outlier with a gun. How she was the only one who was repeatedly calling the police and seeing threats where there were none.

We’re used to seeing police body cam footage used as evidence following a police brutality incident, or as entertainment in true crime shows. It’s used to tell a very different story in your film.

I wanted to subvert the use of body cam footage. Body camera footage is a violent tool of the state. It’s often used to criminalize us, particularly people of color. It’s used to dehumanize us, to surveil us, to protect the police. What I wanted to do with this material was flip that narrative and use it to humanize this community.

Why do you think that Susan was not seen as a threat by the police?

She’s a middle-aged white lady. She weaponized her race, her status, and she kept trying to weaponize the police against the community. The fact that she was using hate speech against children [she allegedly called them the N-word]. She was filming them. She was throwing things at them. She was cursing at them. But the police didn’t flag her as more than just a nuisance…. After the third time she called and it was unfounded and not about an actual crime, there should have been some measure taken to reprimand her. They didn’t tell the community that they could file charges against her: “She’s harassing you all. She’s harassing your children.” It was systemic neglect. And honestly, should the police be a catch-all for everything? Probably not. But they were not equipped. They didn’t take the necessary steps and the worst outcomes happened, which is that we lost Ajike, and Susan is in prison for the rest of her life. I’m sure that’s not the outcome she wanted.

There’s a moment in the film where a policeman knocks on Susan’s sliding glass door. She doesn’t know it’s a cop. She opens the curtain and screams at him in a terrifying, almost demonic voice. It’s quite a switch from her nervous, genial 911 calls.

Yeah, the jump scare. That was one of the moments where I was like, “Oh, there she is.” And the 911 call, after she shot Ajike. She was hysterical. Then her voice changes when she says, “They keep bothering me and bothering me, and they won’t f— stop.” I felt my heart clench, because it’s like, “Oh, there she really is.” She has this way of going between victim and aggressor. A little Jekyll and Hyde. It’s frightening.

The victim/aggressor dynamic is part of what makes “stand your ground” laws so dangerous. They can be weaponized.

“Stand your ground” policy was born in Ocala and now it’s in around 38 states, in different forms. It’s a law that emboldens people to pick up a gun to solve a dispute. If you can other-ize your neighbor to the extent of [killing] them, the question is, what else will you do? What else will we tolerate? As human beings, how we show up in our communities is a reflection of how we show up in the world. This film takes place on this tiny street, but it is a microcosm of what is happening today. Susan represented the dangers, and that little community represented the best of what’s under threat.

Reporting from Washington — By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court kept in place Wednesday its order blocking video coverage of the trial of California’s Proposition 8, with a conservative majority ruling that defenders of the ban on same-sex marriage would likely face “irreparable harm” if the proceedings were broadcast to the public.

“It would be difficult — if not impossible — to reverse the harm of those broadcasts,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion. The witnesses, including paid experts, could suffer “harassment,” and they “might be less likely to cooperate in any future proceedings.” The high court also faulted U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker for changing the rules “at the eleventh hour” to “allow the broadcasting of this high-profile trial” that will decide whether gays and lesbians have a right to marry in California.

The unsigned opinion clearly speaks for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The four liberal justices dissented and accused their colleagues of changing the court’s rules so as to “micromanage” a trial judge.

“The Court today issues an order that will prevent the transmission of proceedings in a nonjury civil case of great public interest to five other federal courthouses,” wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer. “The majority’s action today is unusual. It grants a stay in order . . . to intervene in a matter of local court administration that it would not (and should not) consider. It cites no precedent for doing so. It identifies no real harm, let alone ‘irreparable harm’. . . . And the public interest weighs in favor of providing access to the courts.”

Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor agreed.

The court’s order means that the trial can be seen only inside the courthouse in San Francisco.

Last week, Walker said the trial would be taped each day and posted on YouTube each evening. On Monday, he revised that plan somewhat and said the video coverage would appear on the court’s website. He also planned to have the proceedings streamed live to several courthouses around the country.

But the high court issued a temporary order Monday morning to stop the video coverage. The extent of the split became apparent Wednesday afternoon when the court issued the 17-page opinion and 10-page dissent.

The majority cited newspaper accounts from the last year to bolster its contention that opponents of same-sex marriage have been “subject to harassment,” including “confrontational phone calls and e-mail messages” and even “death threats.” Under the court’s rules, the justices do not intervene in pending cases unless they are convinced that the appealing side has a strong legal claim as well as evidence of “an irreparable harm” if the court fails to act.

Breyer scoffed at the notion that the witnesses in this case would face harm, because they have gone on television in the past to advocate their views. “They are all experts or advocates who have either already appeared on television or Internet broadcasts, already toured the state advocating a ‘yes’ vote on Proposition 8,” he said.

Advocates for equal marriage rights lambasted the decision. “The Supreme Court just struck a huge blow against transparency and accountability,” said Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign in Los Angeles. “The five conservative justices are enabling Prop. 8 supporters to mask their radical views. This historic trial will remain largely hidden from public view.”

Edward Whelan, a conservative critic of Walker, praised the majority for acting to rebuke him. He accused Walker of seeking a “show trial” in San Francisco to intimidate and embarrass the defenders of California’s voter initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage.

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Former Rep. Katie Porter, the 2026 gubernatorial candidate who has a narrow edge in the polls, raised eyebrows Tuesday when footage emerged of her apparently ending a television interview after becoming irritated by a reporter’s questions.

The footage shows CBS Sacramento reporter Julie Watts asking Porter, a Democrat, what she would say to the nearly 6.1 million Californians who voted for President Trump in 2024, and the UC Irvine law professor responding that she didn’t need their support if she competed against a Republican in the November 2026 run-off election to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

After Porter highlighted her experience winning a closely divided Orange County congressional district, she grew palpably irritated by Watts’ follow-up questions about her dismissiveness about needing support from voters who supported Trump.

“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?” Porter said.

Watts responded that she had asked every other candidate similar questions in relation to Proposition 50, the redistricting ballot measure that Newsom and other California Democrats put on the ballot in a special election in November.

Porter said she would seek every vote she could win, but then grew testy over follow-up questions.

“I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m going to call it,” Porter said, saying she objected to multiple follow-up questions. “I want to have a pleasant, positive conversation. … And if every question you’re going to make up a follow-up question, then we’re never going to get there.”

She later said, “I don’t want this all on camera.”

Porter, a protege of Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, won election to Congress in 2018 and gained attention for grilling executives and her use of a white board to explain complex policies. The 51-year-old unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2024 and returned to teaching law at UC Irvine.

On Tuesday night, Porter’s campaign said that the interview continued for an additional 20 minutes after the heated exchange but did not offer further comment.

The former congresswoman’s Democratic rivals in the 2026 gubernatorial race seized on her comments, and Democratic strategists not associated with any candidate in the race also cringed.

“When you’re governor, you’re governor of everyone, not just the people in your party. It’s a bad look to say you don’t want or need votes from certain Californians, even those you really disagree with,” said Elizabeth Ashford, who served as a strategist for Govs. Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris when she was the attorney general of California.

“But, also, even good candidates have bad nights,” Ashford added. “This was a miss for Katie, but not every interview is going to go great.”

New footage appears to show the man responsible for an attack at a Manchester synagogue, minutes before he drove his car into worshippers on Yom Kippur.

Two people were killed, when Jihad Al-Shamie carried out, what Greater Manchester Police (GMP) have described as a terror attack in Crumpsall on Thursday.

Footage of a street nearby marked 09:22 BST appears to show a man matching the description by witnesses of the attacker, walking back after an earlier confrontation at the synagogue where he was told to leave.

The doorbell camera then shows a black Kia Picanto, matching the car driven by Al-Shamie, heading back towards the synagogue at 09:26 BST. GMP were called to the scene at 09:31.

The black Kia Picanto also matches the car driven through the gates at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue and at worshippers.

As with the car used in the attack, the back right hub cab can be seen missing from the vehicle in the footage.

Two Jewish men Melvin Cravitz, 53, and Adrian Daulby, 66, died in the attack, the latter believed to have been hit by police gunfire as firearms officers shot Al-Shamie.

Three people remain in hospital, while police have detained four people on suspicion of terror offences.

On Sunday, counter terror police were granted more time to hold them in custody, while inquiries are under way to establish “the full picture” into what was happened, a spokesman for Counter Terrorism Policing North West said.

Two other people, a man and a woman, were released without charge after they were arrested on the day of the attack.

Dutch prosecutors have dropped charges against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans after CCTV footage showing violence towards Muslim women last November was erased. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen is in Amsterdam, where the decision has sparked controversy over alleged double standards.

American Apparel’s billboards were hard to miss when traversing Los Angeles in the 2000s. The ubiquitous ads for the L.A.-based clothing company featured gritty, amateurish photos of seemingly ordinary young women, posed suggestively, in various states of undress. As for the clothing, there wasn’t much of it. A tube sock here, a thong there. American Apparel’s apparel clearly wasn’t the draw.

The underage appearance of the models was disturbing but not entirely shocking given the controversial Calvin Klein ads over previous decades, and by the year 2000, Britney Spears’ schoolgirl-meets-stripper-pole routine in her “Oops! … I Did it Again” video was popular with tweens and moms alike. Yet there was something about the voyeuristic, predatory nature of American Appeal’s ad campaign that felt different, worse, beyond exploitative.

“Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel,” a documentary now streaming on Netflix, explains why those billboards felt more like criminal evidence than sexy ads. The 54-minute film breaks down what was happening on the other side of the camera at the company, led by problematic founder and CEO Dov Charney, and there’s nothing hip or fashionable about the abuse chronicled in it, which features footage, research and firsthand accounts from former employees.

Dov Charney founded American Apparel and was its CEO until he was fired after allegations of misconduct.

(Netflix)

The doc is part of a Netflix series that touches on messy, disastrous events, brands and people such as the Balloon Boy scandal and the so-called Poop Cruise. High-end stuff it’s not, and this installment of the series isn’t nuanced or long enough to be an in-depth exploration of a troubled company and its volatile founder. It does, however, lay bare an abusive culture at American Apparel and how Charney — who shot many of the ads himself — turned his own alleged regressions into a wildly successful branding campaign.

The documentary tracks the rise and fall of American Apparel and its CEO from the company’s inception in 1989 to it becoming one of the largest garment manufacturers in the United States until its bankruptcy in 2015. Reimagining plain sweatshirts and other wardrobe basics as hip alternatives to blingy jeans and gawdy UGG boots, the L.A.-made clothing was promoted as “Ethically Made — Sweatshop Free.” It later garnered the unofficial title of indie sleaze, just in time to resonate across a new thing called social media.

Charney is seen in action through reams of footage captured by employees and others in his orbit. Former workers tell their stories, recalling how they were hired or advanced into management positions despite having no experience. One recalls how new hires at the company received a welcome gift box that included a vibrator, a book by Robert Greene titled “The 48 Laws of Power,” a Leica camera and a Blackberry so Charney could contact them 24/7. They were also asked to sign nondisclosure agreements which would later make it difficult to hold Charney accountable for alleged misconduct.

EJ and Jonny are among the former American Apparel employees interviewed in the documentary. (Netflix)

Footage shows Charney as a wiry, supercharged figure who frequently berated his staff as “losers” and worse. He housed chosen employees at his Silver Lake mansion, the Garbutt House, and they included a gaggle of young women whose roles seemed to be as surrogates and enforcers for Charney — workers referred to them as Dov’s Girls. Then in his 40s, he’s shown verbally accosting young employees, some of whom were teenagers at the time. At least one clip captures him parading around naked in front of two female employees.

After defining fashion for roughly a decade, the thriving company began to nosedive by the 2010s as news of Charney’s inappropriate behavior and oppressive conditions in the workplace surfaced. He was accused of mistreating young employees in the company’s stores and offices, as well as exploiting undocumented employees in the factory, but it was allegations of sexual misconduct and assault in the workplace that made headlines, leading to his ouster as CEO. Women who claim they were sexually assaulted by Charney are interviewed in the documentary.

Charney did not disappear after his fall from grace. He founded another clothing manufacturer, Los Angeles Apparel, and he reportedly works on Yeezy, the fashion brand created by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Rolling Stone reported that Charney printed West’s controversial “White Lives Matter” T-shirt.

As for American Apparel, it was bought by a Canadian clothing company that relaunched the brand shortly before the pandemic. The clothes are no longer made in L.A., but curiously, the indie sleaze billboard campaign has returned to the city. It’s disturbing in a throwback kind of way, pointing to a time when pedo-marketing was king, and the creepy folks behind the ads were heralded as marketing geniuses.

Dispatches from northern China, Jia Zhangke’s movies constitute their own cinematic universe. Repeatedly returning to themes of globalization and alienation, the 55-year-old director has meticulously chronicled his country’s uneasy plunge into the 21st century as rampant industrialization risks deadening those left behind.

But his latest drama, “Caught by the Tides,” which opens at the Frida Cinema today, presents a bold, reflexive remix of his preoccupations. Drawing from nearly 25 years of footage, including images from his most acclaimed films, Jia has crafted a poignant new story with an assist from fragments of old tales. He has always been interested in how the weight of time bears down on his characters — now his actors age in front of our eyes.

When “Caught by the Tides” premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics leaned on a handy, if somewhat inaccurate, comparison to describe Jia’s achievement: “Boyhood,” which followed a young actor over the course of 12 years, a new segment of the picture shot annually. But Richard Linklater preplanned his magnum opus. Jia, on the other hand, approached his film more accidentally, using the pandemic shutdown as an excuse to revisit his own archives.

“It struck me that the footage had no linear, cause-and-effect pattern,” Jia explained in a director’s statement. “Instead, there was a more complex relationship, not unlike something from quantum physics, in which the direction of life is influenced and ultimately determined by variable factors that are hard to pinpoint.”

The result is a story in three chapters, each one subtly building emotionally from the last. In the first, it is 2001, as Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) lives in Datong, where she dates Bin (Li Zhubin). Early on, Qiaoqiao gleefully sings with friends, but it will be the last time we hear her voice. It’s a testament to Zhao’s arresting performance that many viewers may not notice her silence. She’s so present even without speaking, her alert eyes taking in everything, her understated reactions expressing plenty.

Young and with her whole life ahead of her, Qiaoqiao longs to be a singer, but her future is short-circuited by Bin’s text announcing that he’s leaving to seek better financial opportunities elsewhere. He promises to send word once he’s established himself, but we suspect she may never see this restless, callous schemer again. Not long after, Bin ghosts Qiaoqiao, prompting her to journey after him.

“Caught by the Tides” richly rewards viewers familiar with Jia’s filmography with scenes and outtakes from his earlier movies. Zhao, who in real life married Jia more than a decade ago, has been a highlight of his movies starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform,” and so when we see Qiaoqiao at the start of “Caught by the Tides,” we’re actually watching footage shot around that time. (Jia’s 2002 drama “Unknown Pleasures” starred Zhao as a budding singer named Qiaoqiao. Li also appeared in “Unknown Pleasures,” as well as subsequent Jia pictures.)

But the uninitiated shouldn’t feel intimidated to begin their Jia immersion here. Those new to his work will easily discern the film’s older footage, some of it captured on grainy DV cameras, while newer material boasts the elegant, widescreen compositions that have become his specialty. “Caught by the Tides” serves as a handy primer on Jia’s fascination with China’s political, cultural and economic evolution, amplifying those dependable themes with the benefit of working across a larger canvas of a quarter-century.

Still, by the time Qiaoqiao traverses the Yangtze River near the Three Gorges Dam — a controversial construction project that imperiled local small towns and provided the backdrop for Jia’s 2006 film “Still Life” — the director’s fans may feel a bittersweet sense of déjà vu. We have been here before, reminded of his earlier characters who similarly struggled to find love and purpose.

The film’s second chapter, which takes place during 2006, highlights Qiaoqiao’s romantic despair and, separately, Bin’s growing desperation to make a name for himself. (This isn’t the first Jia drama in which characters dabble in criminal activity.) By the time we arrive at the finale, set during the age of COVID anxiety, their inevitable reunion results in a moving resolution, one that suggests the ebb and flow of desire but, also, the passage of time’s inexorable erosion of individuals and nations.

Indeed, it’s not just Zhao and Li who look different by the end of “Caught by the Tides” but Shanxi Province itself — now a place of modern supermarkets, sculpted walkways and robots. Unchecked technological advancement is no longer a distant threat to China but a clear and present danger, dispassionately gobbling up communities, jobs and Qiaoqiao’s and Bin’s dreams. When these two former lovers see each other again, a lifetime having passed on screen, they don’t need words. In this beautiful summation work, Jia has said it all.

It has been five years since May 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. Five years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood on the curb outside Cup Foods, raised her phone, and bore witness to nine minutes and 29 seconds that would galvanize a global movement against racial inequality.

Frazier’s video didn’t just show what happened. It insisted the world stop and see.

Today, that legacy lives on in the hands of a different community, facing different threats but wielding the same tools. Across the United States, Latino organizers are lifting their phones not to go viral but to go on record. They are livestreaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, filming family separations, documenting protests outside detention centers. Their footage is not content. It is evidence. It is warning. It is resistance.

Here in Los Angeles, where I teach journalism, several images have seared themselves into public memory. One viral video shows a shackled father stepping into a white, unmarked van — his daughter sobbing behind the camera, pleading with him not to sign any official documents. He turns, gestures for her to calm down, then blows her a kiss. Across town, LAPD officers on horseback charged at peaceful protesters.

In Spokane, Wash., residents formed a spontaneous human chain around their undocumented neighbors mid-raid, their bodies and cameras forming a barricade of defiance. In San Diego, white allies yelled “Shame!” as they chased a car of uniformed National Guard troops out of their neighborhood.

The impact of smartphone witnessing has been both immediate and unmistakable — visceral at street level, seismic in statehouses. On the ground, the videos have fueled the “No Kings” movement, which organized protests in all 50 states last weekend. Legislators are responding too — with sparks flying in the halls of the Capitol. As President Trump ramps up immigration enforcement, Democratic-led states are digging in, tightening state laws that limit cooperation with federal agents.

Local TV news coverage has incorporated witnesses’ smartphone video, helping it reach a wider audience.

What’s unfolding now is not new — it is newly visible. Latino organizers are drawing from a playbook sharpened in 2020, one rooted in a longer lineage of Black media survival strategies forged during slavery and Jim Crow.

In 2020, I wrote about how Black Americans have used various media formats to fight for racial and economic equality — from slave narratives to smartphones. I argued that Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells were doing the same work as Darnella Frazier: using journalism as a tool for witnessing and activism. In 2025, Latinos who are filming the state in moments of overreach — archiving injustice in real time — are adapting, extending and carrying forward Black witnesses’ work.

Moreover, Latinos are using smartphones for digital cartography much as Black people mapped freedom during the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The People Over Papers map, for example, reflects an older lineage: the resistance tactics of Black Maroons — enslaved Africans who fled to swamps and borderlands, forming secret networks to evade capture and warn others.

These early communities shared intelligence, tracked patrols and mapped out covert paths to safety. People Over Papers channels that same logic — only now the hideouts are ICE-free zones, mutual aid hubs and sanctuary spaces. The map is crowdsourced. The borders are digital. The danger is still very real.

Likewise, the Stop ICE Raids Alerts Network revives a civil-rights-era blueprint. During the 1960s, activists used Wide Area Telephone Service lines and radio to share protest routes, police activity and safety updates. Black DJs often masked dispatches as traffic or weather reports — “congestion on the south side” meant police roadblocks, “storm warnings” signaled incoming violence. Today, that infrastructure lives again through WhatsApp chains, encrypted group texts and story posts. The platforms have changed. The mission has not.

Layered across both systems is the DNA of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the guide that once helped Black travelers navigate Jim Crow America by identifying safe towns, gas stations and lodging. People Over Papers and Stop ICE Raids are digital descendants of that legacy: survival through shared knowledge, protection through mapped resistance.

The Latino community’s use of smartphones in this moment is not for spectacle. It’s for self-defense. In cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and El Paso, what begins as a whisper — “ICE is in the neighborhood” — now races through Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram. A knock becomes a livestream. A raid becomes a receipt. A video becomes a shield.

For undocumented families, the risk is real. To film is to expose oneself. To go live is to become a target. But many do it anyway. Because silence can be fatal. Because invisibility protects no one. Because if the story is not captured, it can be denied.

Five years after Floyd’s final breath, the burden of proof still falls heaviest on the most vulnerable. America demands footage before outrage. Tape before reform. Visual confirmation before compassion. And still, justice is never guaranteed.

But 2020 taught us that smartphones, in the right hands, can fracture the status quo. In 2025, that lesson is echoing again, this time through the lens of Latino mobile journalists. Their footage is unflinching. Urgent. Righteous. It connects the dots: between ICE raids and over-policing, between a border cage and a city jail, between a knee on a neck and a door kicked in at dawn.

These are not isolated events. They are chapters in the same story of government repression.

And because the cameras are still rolling — and people are still recording — those stories are being told anew.

Five years ago, we were forced to see the unbearable. Now, we are being shown the undeniable.

Allissa V. Richardson, an associate professor of journalism and communication at USC, is the author of “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.” This article was produced in partnership with the Conversation.