Max Muncy stood in the middle of what is normally an underground batting cage. But on Friday, moments after the Dodgerscompleted a four-game sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, it had been transformed into the most exclusive drinking spot in the city, the place where the players came to toast their return to the World Series.
Cheap champagne and even cheaper beer flowed freely — mostly over people’s heads — before forming deep puddles on some plastic sheeting that had hastily been laid along the floor.
“You never get tired of this. You can’t ever take this for granted,” Muncy, the Dodger third baseman said, as he clutched a lit cigar in one hand and two red Budweiser bottles in the other. “This is the whole reason that you play baseball. You want to be in this moment.
“You want to play postseason baseball. And to be able to do it for as many times as I’ve done it, it’s just truly a blessing.”
The moment Muncy referred to is the alcohol-infused postseason series victory celebration, a tradition that dates to the 1960 World Series when members of the Pittsburgh Pirates chose not to drink the champagne that had been wheeled into their victorious clubhouse, but began spraying it on one another instead.
As baseball’s postseason format expanded, so did the number of champagne celebrations; Friday’s was the Dodgers’ fifth in 29 days and 10th in less than two years. And it may not be the last since they’ll open the World Series next weekend with a chance to become the first repeat champion this century.
“It’s a grown man acting like a little kid. You look forward it,” reliever Blake Treinen, who has played for seven playoff teams in his career, said as he leaned on a giant red cooler stuffed with mostly empty bottles of champagne.
When the Dodgers qualified for the playoffs last month, they toasted that achievement at home, then toasted themselves again six days later in Arizona when they clinched the division title. This month they’ve beaten the Cincinnati Reds in the wild-card series, the Philadelphia Phillies in the Division Series and now the Brewers in the LCS.
And with each victory, the celebrations have grown in fervor and joy.
“It gets better and better each round,” pitcher Tyler Glasnow agreed.
As soon as Caleb Durbin’s fly ball settled in Andy Pages’ glove near the right-field bullpen gate Friday night, extending the Dodgers’ season while ending the Brewers’, fireworks filled the air and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” blared from the stadium’s sound system. As a small army of workers rushed to set up a temporary wooden stage behind second base, the players pulled on gray t-shirts with words National League Champions and the script Dodgers set against a baseball diamond outlined in yellow.
On their heads they wore black caps that read World Series 2025. But the public ceremony on the stage, in which chairman Mark Walter was presented with the league championship trophy and Shohei Ohtani was handed the series MVP trophy, was short and tame compared to raucous fiesta that started in the batting cage a few minutes later.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani celebrates in the clubhouse after the team’s NLCS-clinching win over the Brewers at Dodger Stadium on Friday night.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“These kinds of celebrations, you can never have too many,” infielder Miguel Rojas shouted in Spanish over a loud soundtrack of percussive music that played in a loop. “A moment like this is really important, really beautiful.
“Five times this year. We’ve got one to go.”
A few feet away outfielder Teoscar Hernández surrounded himself with a handful of journalists in an unsuccessful attempt to hide from the champagne sprays directed at him by teammates.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that gets tired of this. I’m not tired,” he said. “I want to get one more, and then five more next year.
“This is the only time that you can get to celebrate something, to be free, not thinking about your job, not thinking about what you got to do tomorrow.”
As the party began to wane and players left the batting cage to join their families in a quieter gathering on the field, Muncy looked down at the thick victory cigar between his fingers and turned reflective. The celebration wasn’t about champagne or beer or victory cigars. It wasn’t even about winning.
It was more about surviving the crucible of the longest schedule in pro sports and celebrating that with the people who were with you every step of the way.
“It’s amazing, is what it is,” he said. “This is one of the best parts about being in the postseason. You grind with your teammates and your brothers for seven, eight months, all the way back to spring training.
“This is just like a culmination of all your collective efforts.”
It’s almost a year into Trump 2.0 and MAGA has gone full “snowflake.”
You know the word, the one that for the past decade the right has wielded against liberals as the ultimate epithet — you know, because libs are supposedly feelings-obsessed, physically weak, morally delicate and whiny as all get out.
Because if you think, among other things, that Portland is “War ravaged” like Trump claims it is and the U.S. of A. has to send in the military, you truly are a snowflake.
It sure wasn’t the left that called for the firing of people who criticized one of their heroes in the wake of their tragic death. Or that revoked visas over it. Or cheered when a late-night talk show host was temporarily suspended after the FCC chairman threatened to punish his network, as Brendan Carr did to ABC when he told a podcaster Disney could mete out punishment to Jimmy Kimmel “the easy way or hard way.”
Which president complains any time someone doesn’t think they’re the greatest leader in human history? Threatens retribution against foes real and imagined every waking second? Whines like he’s a bottle of Chardonnay?
Trump even complained this week about a Time magazine cover photo that he proclaimed “may be the Worst of All Time.”
“They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the king of MAGA-dom wrote on Truth Social.
Here’s guessing he’d have complained a little less if the “something” floating on the top of his head looked like a really, super-big crown.
President Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One prior to departure from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Watch out, Time magazine, Trump might send the Texas National Guard to your newsroom!
This is an administration that is forcing airports to run videos blaming the government shutdown on their opponents? What branch of the government just asked journalists to only publish preapproved information?
And always with the reacting to Democrat-led cities like Portland, Chicago and L.A. as if they’re Stalingrad during the siege.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary in August: “L.A. wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action then. That city would have burned down if left to the devices of the mayor and the governor of that state.”
Trump about Washington, D.C., over the summer as he issued an executive order to take over its police department in the wake of what he characterized as out-of-control crime: “It is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to military brass he called in from across the world last month to declare the following: “No more beardos. The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.”
Welcome to our Snowflake Government. The way these people’s tough talk turns into waterworks at the slightest provocation, you’d think they were the ski slopes of Mt. Baldy come summertime.
Trump and his lackeys possess scary power and don’t hesitate to use it in the name of punishing enemies. But what betrays their inherent snowflake-ness is how much they cry about what they still don’t dominate and their continued use of brute force to try and subdue the slightest, well, slight.
The veritable pity party gnashes its teeth more and more as the months pass. Trump was so angry at the sight of people causing chaos over a relatively small area of downtown L.A. after mass raids swept Southern California in June — chaos that barely registered to what happens after a Dodgers World Series win — that he sent in the Marines.
His spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, keeps describing any nasty look or bad word thrown at migra agents as proof of them suffering a supposedly unprecedented level of assault despite never offering any concrete proof.
The Southland’s acting U.S. attorney, Bill Essayli, accused an LAPD spokesperson last week of leaking information to The Times after one of my colleagues asked him about … wait for it … an upcoming press conference.
No part of the government melts faster, however, than the agency with the apropos acronym of ICE.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their fellow travelers across Homeland Security are Trump’s own Praetorian Guard, tasked with carrying out his deportation deluge. They’ve relished their months in the national spotlight cast by the federal government simultaneously as an unstoppable force and an immovable object. La migra continues to crash into neighborhoods and communities like a masked avalanche of tear gas and handcuffs, justice be damned.
Illinois State Police clash with demonstrators by the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., as tensions rise over prolonged protests targeting federal ICE operations in Chicago on Oct. 10.
(Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)
They’re firing pepper balls at the heads of Presbyterian priests outside detention facilities and tackling middle-aged reporters.
Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino, who thinks he’s Napoleon with a crew cut and an Appalachian drawl, has accused protester Cole Sheridan of causing an unspecified groin injury even though the government couldn’t provide any video evidence during a preliminary court hearing earlier this month.
Agents have set off tear gas canisters without giving a heads-up to Chicago police. They’re detaining people without giving them a chance to prove their citizenship until hours later.
All this because — wah, wah! — Windy City residents haven’t welcomed la migra as liberators.
Bovino and his ICE buddies keep whimpering to Trump that they need the National Guard to back them up because they supposedly can’t do their job despite being the ones armed and masked up and backed by billions of dollars in new funds.
That’s why the government is now pushing tech giants to crack down on how activists are organizing. In the past two weeks, Apple has taken down apps that tracked actions by ICE agents and a Chicago Facebook group that was a clearinghouse for migra sightings at the request of the Department of Justice.
On X, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi bragged that she “will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement” despite offering no evidence whatsoever — because who needs facts in the face of Trump’s blizzard of lies?
Since the start of all this madness, I’ve seen the left offer a rejoinder to the snowflake charge: the slogan “ICE Melts,” usually accompanied by a drawing of the action at hand. It’s meant to inspire activists by reminding them that la migra is not nearly as mighty as the right makes them out to be.
That’s clever. But the danger of all these conservative snowflakes turning into a sopping mess the way they do over their perceived victimhood is that the resulting flood threatens to drown out a little thing we’d come to love over many, many, many years.
Croix Bethune scored on a header in the 71st minute to pull the Washington Spirit into a 2-2 draw with Angel City on Thursday night in the National Women’s Soccer League.
The Spirit (10-4-7) remained in second place in the league standings behind the Kansas City Current with a nine-game unbeaten run.
The draw stopped a two-game losing streak for Angel City (6-9-6), which was below the playoff line but still within reach of a berth.
Trinity Rodman’s penalty attempt was stopped, but she scored on the rebound to give the Spirit the lead in the 12th minute.
Just two minutes later, rookie Evelyn Shores scored her first NWSL goal off a cross from Gisele Thompson. Thompson has five assists this season, tied for the league lead.
Angel City went ahead in the 56th on an own goal by Spirit defender Tara McKeown. Bethune pulled Washington back even with her header.
Deborah Abiodun was bloodied when she caught a cleat in the head in a collision with Angel City’s Jun Endo that caused a lengthy delay in the first half. Abiodun returned to the match with a wrap on her head.
Well, it is starting to appear that we are on the way to another in a series of mediocre football seasons at my alma mater UCLA.
I am now officially in the “I don’t care about UCLA Football anymore” camp. I graduated from UCLA in 1975 and while every once in a while UCLA will have a somewhat successful season, the best they seem to be able to do is be invited to a second-tier bowl game. The College Football Playoff? Forget about it.
Coach DeShaun Foster is very clearly in way over his head. I predict he will be gone after this season.
Bruce Dunklin Thousand Oaks
It has to be painfully obvious that the DeShaun Foster experiment at head coach is a dismal failure. The loss to UNLV was not just embarrassing but shameful. It was once said that Foster was Karl Dorrell 2.0, but that is unfair. Dorrell had a 10-win season and beat USC. Coach “We’re Close” Foster is in way over his head. His team is undisciplined and unprepared. This clueless performance will lead to a completely empty Rose Bowl and eventual desertion of NIL sponsors. What is the athletic department going to do when we lose to New Mexico and go 0-12 for the year?
Thomas Auyong Diamond Bar
DeShaun Foster has to be the worst head coach in UCLA history. If a team is a reflection of their coach, then this is the worst UCLA team every. Does the team have a weight program? They are getting pushed around out there and it’s only going to get uglier. We are going to lose 100-0 to Ohio State.
Ed Villanueva Chino Hills
UCLA fell for the third consecutive game to open the season, with their drubbing at the hands of New Mexico. Maybe it’s time for AD Martin Jarmond to consider dropping the football program to a lower division, or just dropping football completely (the latter might help balance the athletic budget). Either way, coach DeShaun Foster and the Bruins are in for a long season.
Chris Sorce Fountain Valley
My 98-year-old father and I are 25-year UCLA football season-ticket holders. We love our Bruin football, but let’s face facts. When our AD, Martin Jarmond, hired coach DeShaun Foster, he looked at us with a straight face and told us that they had interviewed upward of 40 candidates for the head coaching position and that Foster was the best of the group. A man with no offensive, defensive or head-coaching experience.
It sadly is now painfully obvious that Jarmond and Foster should be replaced with more experienced and qualified candidates.
Zach Neto hit a two-run homer, Mike Trout drove in two runs and the Angels beat the Minnesota Twins 4-3 on Wednesday.
Trout’s sacrifice fly in the eighth inning brought home Bryce Teodosio to give the Angels a 4-3 lead. Teodosio tripled off the top of the center-field wall, over the head of James Outman.
Trout also hit an RBI single in the third and scored on Neto’s homer off starter Taj Bradley to put the Angels ahead 3-1. It was Neto’s 26th home run of the year.
Byron Buxton tied it with a two-run shot in the sixth, his 31st homer this season.
Outman also homered, doubled and made a pair of leaping catches for the Twins. But they fell to 64-82 and were assured their first losing record since 2022.
Robert Stephenson (2-0), the fifth Angels reliever, got one out for the win. Kenley Jansen struck out two in a perfect ninth to earn his 27th save.
Cole Sands (3-4) took the loss.
Bradley gave up three runs and four hits in 6 1/3 innings, striking out five.
Key moment
Teodosio’s leadoff triple in the eighth was hit over the head of Outman, who made leaping catches in the fifth and sixth. Outman hit a double in the top of the eighth that Teodosio could not see in center field.
Key stat
Minnesota stranded 11 baserunners and went 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position.
Up next
Angels right-hander José Soriano (10-10, 4.07) is scheduled to start Thursday night in Seattle.
During the trial, though, a concerning but little-noticed exchange popped up between lawyers for the state of California and Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, who was in charge of the federalized National Guard forces in L.A. It should have been an explosive, red-flag moment highlighting the pressure our military leaders are under to shake off their oath to the Constitution in favor of fealty to Trump.
Sherman testified that he objected to National Guard involvement in a show-of-force operation in MacArthur Park, where Latino families often congregate.
That action, Sherman said, was originally slated for Father’s Day, an especially busy time at the park. Internal documents showed it was considered it a “high-risk” operation. Sherman said he feared his troops would be pushed into confrontations with civilians if Border Patrol became overwhelmed by the crowds on that June Sunday.
Gregory Bovino, in charge of the immigration efforts in L.A. for the Border Patrol, questioned Sherman’s “loyalty to the country,” Sherman testified, for just showing hesitation about the wisdom and legality of an order.
It’s the pressure that “you’re not being patriotic if you don’t blow by the law and violate it and just bend the knee and and exhibit complete fealty and loyalty to Trump,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Tuesday. And it’s a warning of what’s to come as Trump continues to press for military involvement in civilian law enforcement across the country.
For the record, Sherman has served our country for decades, earning along the way the prestigious Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star and the Meritorious Service Medal among other accolades.
The MacArthur Park operation, according to the Department of Homeland Security, was itself little more than a performative display of power “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles,” according to agency documents presented in court. It was dubbed Operation Excalibur, in honor of the legendary sword of King Arthur that granted him divine right to rule, a point also included in court documents.
But none of that mattered. Instead, Sherman was pushed to exhibit the kind of blind loyalty to a dear leader that you’d expect to be demanded in dictatorships like those of North Korea or Hungary. Loyalty that confuses — or transforms — a duty to the Constitution with allegiance to Trump. Military experts warn that Sherman’s experience isn’t an isolated incident.
“There’s a chilling effect against pushing back or at least openly questioning any kind of orders,” Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, told me. She’s former active duty judge advocate in the U.S. Air Force who now teaches at Southwestern Law School and serves as a national security law expert.
VanLandingham sees the leadership of our armed forces under pressure “to not engage in the critical thinking, which, as commanders, they are required to do, and to instead go along to get along.” She sees Sherman’s testimony as a “telling glimpse into the wearing away” of that crucial independence.
Such a shift in allegiance would undermine any court order keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement, leaving Trump with exactly the boots on the ground power he has sought since his first term. This is not theoretical.
Through Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump has purged the top ranks of the military of those who aren’t loyal to him. In February, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Black soldier who championed diversity in the armed forces. Hegseth has also purged the head of the Pentagon’s intelligence agency, the head of the National Security Agency, the chief of Naval Operations, multiple senior female military staff and senior military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. In August, he fired the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency after that general gave a truthful assessment of our bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, angering Trump.
At the same time, the military is being pushed farther into civilian affairs, and not just as erstwhile cops. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Hegseth ordered 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges.
Not to dive too deep into the convoluted immigration system, but these are civilian legal positions, another possible violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, VanLandingham points out.
And beyond that, can a military lawyer — trained and bound to follow orders — really act as an impartial judge in proceedings where the administration’s wish to deport is clearly known?
Goodbye due process, goodbye fair trial.
That “looks like martial law when you have militarized … judicial proceedings,” VanLandingham said. “How can we trust they are making unbiased decisions? You can’t.”
And even though Sherman pushed back on a full-blown military presence in MacArthur Park, that raid did happen. Federal agents marched through, about three weeks after Father’s Day, with National Guard troops remaining in their vehicles on the perimeter. It was Hegseth himself who authorized the mission.
Sherman also said on the stand that he was told there were “exceptions” to the Posse Comitatus Act — the law being debated in the trial that prevents the military from being used as civilian law enforcement — and that the president had the power to decide what those exceptions were.
“So your understanding is that while [some actions] are on the list of prohibited functions, you can do them under some circumstances?” Judge Charles Breyer asked.
“That’s the legal advice I received,” Sherman answered.
“And the president has the authority to make that decision?” Breyer asked.
“The president has the authority,” Sherman answered.
But does he?
Breyer also asked during the trial, if the president’s powers to both command troops and interpret law are so boundless, “What’s to prevent a national police force?” What, in effect, could stop Trump’s Excalibur-inspired inclinations?
For now, it’s the courts and ethical, mid-level commanders like Sherman, whose common-sense bravery and decency kept the military out of MacArthur Park.
Men and women who understand that the oaths they have sworn are to our country, not the man who would be king.
HOUSTON — José Soriano and two relievers combined for a two-hitter and Oswald Peraza hit his first home run since a trade from the Yankees to lead the Angels to a 3-0 win over the Houston Astros on Sunday.
Angels outfielder Taylor Ward was injured trying to make a catch on that hit when he crashed face-first into the metal scoreboard in left field.
He was bleeding and appeared to have a cut above his right eye. He held a smaller cloth to his head as he was slowly carted off the field while resting his head on the shoulder of a team employee who rode the cart with him. There was no immediate update on his injury.
Soriano (10-9) allowed one hit and struck out eight in seven innings. Luis García allowed one hit in a scoreless eighth and Kenley Jansen threw a perfect ninth for his 25th save.
There were two outs in the fifth when Peraza connected off Hunter Brown (10-7) into the bullpen in right-center field to put the Angels up 1-0. His homer comes after his two-run single in the ninth inning Saturday helped Los Angeles to a 4-1 victory that snapped a three-game skid.
Yoán Moncada walked to start the eighth and scored on Mike Trout’s double that bounced off the wall in center field to make it 2-0. Ward walked before Luis Rengifo reached and Trout scored on an error by Lance McCullers Jr. when the pitcher overthrew first base.
Yordan Alvarez singled with no outs in the first and Soriano walked a batter in the second and sixth innings. The Astros didn’t get another hit until Ramón Urías doubled with one out in the eighth inning.
Brown allowed three hits and a run with five strikeouts in six innings. McCullers Jr. allowed three hits and two runs in his first relief appearance since 2018.
Up next: LHP Yusei Kikuchi (6-9, 3.68 ERA) will start for the Angels in the series finale Monday. Houston hasn’t announced its starter.
Actually, he arrived at Flushing Meadows with no hairdo — as in no hair at all, aside from some teeny, tiny specks on his head that come to a widow’s peak.
The world’s No. 2-ranked player was asked about his shocking new look following his 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 victory over Opelka. Alcaraz told reporters that he had simply wanted a haircut before the tournament, but one of his brothers “misunderstood” how to use the clippers.
The resulting mess, he said, left him with no choice but to start over with a clean pate.
“The only way to fix it is just shave it off,” a casual Alcaraz said.
Alcaraz isn’t bothered by the situation. As he reminded the reporters, hair grows back.
“I’m not really into, you know, the hair at all,” Alcaraz said. “So I’m the guy who thinks like, OK, the hair grows, you know? And then [in] a few days it’s gonna be already OK, I guess.”
Alcaraz apparently is not kidding about the speed at which his hair grows. He mentioned it to reporters during the Australian Open, after arriving in toasty Melbourne with shorter locks than usual.
Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz serves during a practice session ahead of the Australian Open on Jan. 9 in Melbourne.
(Mark Baker / Associated Press)
“I discussed with my barber that when I get a haircut… three days later it’s grown out,” Alcaraz said in Melbourne. “So I have to go more often.”
Alcaraz unintentionally provided a demonstration during the French Open, where he first sported a rather bushy look during his first-round win over Giulio Zeppieri on May 26.
Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz celebrates after winning a point during his first-round French Open match against Italy’s Giulio Zeppieri on May 26 in Paris.
(Thibault Camus / Associated Press)
Two days later, however, Alcaraz returned to the court for his second-round match against Nuno Borges with a ‘do possibly (but probably not) inspired by Moe Howard from the “Three Stooges.” Alcaraz told befuddled reporters after the match that he “had to do something” about his hair and beard, so he flew in his personal barber.
Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz returns the ball to Portugal’s Nuno Borges during their second-round match of the French Open on May 28 in Paris.
Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz celebrates after defeating Italy’s Jannik Sinner in the French Open final June 8 in Paris.
(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
So if Alcaraz happens to win the U.S. Open championship, like he did in 2022, he might have a lengthy mane while hoisting the trophy at Arthur Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
In the meantime, though, some people might continue to respond to his haircut the way U.S. player Frances Tiafoe did when asked about it by a reporter following his first-round victory over Yoshihito Nishioka.
“It’s definitely terrible,” Tiafoe said with a laugh. “He’s my guy, though. It’s funny. I looked at him and I was like, ‘I guess you’re aerodynamic’ … I don’t know who told him to do that, but it’s terrible. From a guy who gets haircuts week in, week out and prides myself on good haircuts, it’s horrendous.”
Alcaraz also laughed when he was asked about Tiafoe’s comment.
“I know he’s lying,” Alcaraz said. “He likes the haircut. He likes it, he told me.”
Others might react like Irish golfer Rory McIlroy, who expressed his full support for the radical change atop Alcaraz’s head while meeting with the Spaniard earlier Monday.
Overall, Alcaraz told reporters, reactions have been mixed — and he really doesn’t care either way.
“Some people like it. Some people don’t like it,” he said. “To be honest, I’m just laughing about the reaction of the people. It is what it is. So I can’t do anything else right now, so I’m just laughing about everything that they are talking about my haircut.”
Glacier National Park, Mont. — JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him — a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning.
It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing — to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no pain, just disbelief. It bit into him again and again, its jaw like a sharp vise stopping at nothing until teeth hit bone. Then came the claws, rising like shiny knife blades, long and stark.
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Johan and Jenna had been on the trail little more than an hour. They had just followed a series of switchbacks above Grinnell Lake and were on a narrow ledge cut into a cliff. It was an easy ascent, rocky and just slightly muddy from yesterday’s rain.
Johan took some pictures. Jenna pushed ahead. It was one of the most spectacular hikes they’d taken on this trip, a father-daughter getaway to celebrate her graduation from high school. There were some steps, a small outcropping, a blind turn, and there it was, the worst possibility: a surprised bear with two yearling cubs.
The bear kept pounding into him. He had to break away. To his right was the wall of the mountain, to his left a sheer drop. Slightly behind him, however, and 20 feet below the trail, a thimbleberry and alder patch grew on a small slope jutting from the cliff. As a boy growing up in Holland, Johan had roughhoused with his brother and had fallen into bushes. He knew it would hurt, but at least it wouldn’t kill him.
So like a linebacker hurtling for a tackle, he dived for that thimbleberry patch. The landing rattled him, but he was OK. His right eye was bleeding, but he didn’t have time to think about that. Jenna was now alone with the bear.
She had reached down to pick up the bear spray. The small red canister had fallen out of the side pocket of his day pack, and there it was, on the ground. But she couldn’t remove the safety clip, and the bear was coming at her again. She screamed.
“Jenna, come down here,” he yelled.
She never heard him. She was falling, arms and legs striking the rocky cliff, then nothing for seconds before she landed hard.
The bear did hear him, however. It looked over the cliff and pounced. Johan had never seen anything move so fast in his life. He tucked into a fetal position. The bear fell upon him, clawing and biting at his back. His day pack protected him, and his mind started racing again.
His daughter didn’t have a pack. He always carried the water and snacks. If the bear got to her, it’d tear her apart.
He turned, swung to his right and let himself go. Only this time there wasn’t a thimbleberry patch to break his fall. It was a straight drop to where Jenna had landed, and instead of taking the bear away from her, as he had hoped, he was taking the bear to her.
JOHAN Otter lived with his wife, Marilyn, and their two teenage daughters in a two-story home in a semirural neighborhood of Escondido, Calif. He worked as an administrator at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. He ran in marathons and bred exotic birds. He knew the love of his family, success at his job, good health. At 43, he had dreams of a long and happy life. But dreams are often upended. Johan knew this, and whenever possible, he tried to distance himself and his family from risk.
It was Aug. 25, 2005. Seven days earlier, Johan and Jenna had packed up the family pickup truck and driven north through Nevada and Utah. In September, she would begin her freshman year at UC Irvine. Hiking was their special bond. He was a runner, she was a dancer; they both were in good shape for the trail, and it wasn’t unusual for Marilyn and Stephanie, their younger daughter, to stay home.
Johan Otter, top photo at Logan Pass in Glacier National Park on Aug. 24, 2005. A day hike that he and his daugther Jenna took. “My last day with hair,” Otter said. Bottom photo shows Jenna Otter in of the last photos taken by Johan Otter before being attacked by a Grizzly bear on the Grinnell Glacier Trail in Glacier National Park, Montana.
(Jenna Otter)
Johan and Jenna checked into a motor lodge on the east side of Glacier. Johan was eager to experience the wildness of the park, and the first night he did. A black bear, just outside the lodge.
For millenniums, bears have lurked on the periphery of everyday life, dark shadows just beyond the firelight. On this continent, they have been our respected competition and greatest threat. Even though close encounters with bears, especially grizzlies, are rare, they trigger a conditioned response, a reflex of fear and flight that is seldom called upon in modern life. Sometimes we get away. Sometimes we can’t.
But most of all, bears inspire a deep fascination. Johan remembered how, as a boy, he would go with his family on vacations to Norway and how his parents, his brother and he had always wanted to see a bear. The curiosity never left him. Three years ago, during a trip to Canada with the family, he and Stephanie saw a cub. Marilyn and Jenna stayed back.
On this trip to Glacier, they had an ambitious hiking schedule, and they were disappointed when it rained their first full day. They contented themselves with driving to various sights. The next day was beautiful. The sun cut through scattered, misting clouds. Johan was eager to get out on the trail before anyone else. It was 7:30 a.m.
The path wound through a lush carpet of thimbleberry, beargrass and lilies growing beneath a mix of Engelmann spruce and Scotch pine. They skirted Lake Josephine, and in less than an hour, Johan and Jenna were above the tree line. Surrounding peaks were lightly dusted with snow. At one point Johan spotted a golden eagle trying to catch a thermal. They talked loudly, just as you’re supposed to do in bear country. Jenna was trying to figure out how she could be both a dancer and a doctor. He wondered if he’d be able to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
As they made their way along the southern flank of Mt. Grinnell, a glacier-carved cliff that rises nearly 3,500 vertical feet from the valley floor, they fell silent, lost in the sounds of the wind and the water, the beauty of the moment. Ahead of them were the Gem and Salamander glaciers. A ribbon of water cascaded into the forest below. A river flowed into the turquoise stillness of Grinnell Lake.
Penstemon, columbines and fireweed bloomed amid the low-lying alder scrub. They passed through Thunderbird Falls, a landmark on the trail where a stream often pours from the cliff above onto a platform of flat stones. Today it was only wet and slippery, but the drop-off was unforgiving.
(Doug Stevens / Los Angeles Times)
TEN minutes past the falls, they ran into the bear. In a matter of minutes, they had all tumbled 30 feet down a rocky V-shaped chute, landing on a ledge beneath the trail. Jenna had scrambled away, and the grizzly was on top of Johan.
The attack had just started, and it had been going on too long. He grabbed the bear by the fur on its throat. The feeling of the coarse hair, as on a dirty dog, was unforgettable, and for a moment the animal just stared at him, two amber-brown eyes, its snout straight in his face. It showed no emotion, no fear, no anger. There were just those eyes looking down at him.
Johan considered fighting. He reached to his left for a rock. A piece of shale, it crumbled in his fist. He tucked his knees to his chest and tried to cover his head.
The bear bit again and again on his right arm. So this is what it feels like to have your flesh torn, he thought, still trying to comprehend the attack. He tussled about, trying to avoid greater injury.
“Aaagh,” he screamed.
Now the bear was tugging on his back. It felt as if someone were jumping up and down on him, and he found himself growing angry. Throw it off the mountain. If only he could throw it off the mountain.
He felt a sharp pressure on the top of his neck and his head. The bear was biting into his skull, chewing into the bone. This could be it, he thought. This could be his death, and his right hand was useless. He could not push the bear away.
If only this were a movie or one of those old episodes of “Bonanza” he used to watch on TV. He’d be a stuntman, and they’d stop shooting any time.
But this was real. He’d die if he didn’t make another move, so he rolled and fell again, sliding 20 feet down the slope to a small ledge and then over that and onto a narrow shelf. Right foot, left foot. He landed on his feet. He was lucky he stopped. He wouldn’t have survived the next long straight drop.
He was silent. The bear stood above him, unable to reach him. It felt good to be left alone. Water flowed down his back. Cold water. He’d fallen into a small stream, runoff from yesterday’s rain.
Jenna heard the bear panting as it came closer to where she lay beneath the branches of a low-lying alder. She felt woozy from her fall. She had a knot on her head. Her back ached, and her ankle was bleeding.
She tried to stay tucked in, but when the bear got close to her face, she had to push it away. It nipped at the right corner of her mouth, at her hair, her right shoulder. Each bite was quick, followed by a slight jostle.
Her screams split the morning silence like an ax.
Source: National Park Service. Graphics reporting by Thomas Curwen
(Thomas Suh Lauder/Los Angeles Times; Photo by Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
JOHAN pressed himself against the mountain. There was no room to sit or lie down. He heard Jenna, but he couldn’t do anything. He would remember the sound as the worst he had ever heard, and then there was nothing. All was still.
He was wet and dirty, soaked with blood and starting to shiver. The attack had lasted at most 15 minutes. He looked at his right arm and saw exposed tendons. His medical training as a physical therapist told him no major nerves or arteries had been cut. They can sew that together, he thought, and that, and that.
Then he touched the top of his head and felt only bone. He stopped exploring. It was enough to know that his scalp had been torn off. His neck hurt. He wondered if something was broken.
He couldn’t see out of his right eye. He reached up. It was full of blood and caked over. Was his eyeball hanging out? No, it was still in place. He carefully parted his eyelids. The sweet turquoise stillness of Grinnell Lake shimmered nearly 1,500 feet below him. He could see. He was relieved.
“Jenna,” he eventually called out.
“Dad.”
She had played dead, and the bear had moved on. She assessed her injuries. A bite on her shoulder as deep as a knuckle. Lower lip torn down to her chin. Hair caked with blood.
Her father’s voice was the best sound she’d ever heard.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“I’m OK. How are you?”
“I’m bleeding a lot.” He thought of his own injuries and of his daughter’s appearance. “How’s your face? Did it get you?”
“Just my mouth.”
“And your eyes?”
“They’re fine.”
He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was OK. Thank you, God.
He gazed up into the sky above Mt. Gould on the far side of the valley. He thought of the people he knew who were dead. His mother and father. Thank you, Mom, and thank you, Dad, for being an energy that he could draw on. Somehow it made him less afraid.
And thank you, Sophie. She was a patient of his, an 80-year-old woman who had died last year. They had grown close as Johan worked with her. She would complain — I’m going to die, she’d say — and he’d tell her to be quiet. You’re not going to die, Sophie. And to think he nearly had.
And thank you, Steve, his father-in-law, Marilyn’s dad, who had become his own dad in a way.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Then he called back to Jenna. “It got me kind of bad.”
It was the only time he told her how he felt. After that, he turned stoic. No complaining. No despairing. He knew his dad would have reacted the same way. He chalked it up to being Dutch: You take care of yourself and your children. Jenna would do the same.
Together, unprompted, they began to call out.
“Helllp.”
“Helllp.”
GLACIER National Park straddles the Continental Divide. Popularly thought of as North America’s Switzerland, famous for its snowy peaks, alpine meadows, rivers and lakes, the park attracts nearly 2 million visitors each year. On the east side of the park, the Grinnell Glacier Trail is one of the most popular day hikes.
“Helllp.”
Johan knew he couldn’t stand here much longer. He took off his day pack and camcorder. His digital camera was gone, lost in the chaos. He pulled a jacket out of his pack and put the hood over his head. The night before, he’d read a book about bear attacks: how a woman in Alaska had stopped the bleeding of her scalp by covering her head. He also thought it might be easier on Jenna or anyone else who might happen to see him.
He wanted to climb to the ledge above. He didn’t know how he’d carry his pack and camcorder. Then it came to him, what they say on airplanes. Leave your luggage and take care of yourself. It made sense. He clambered and crawled off the narrow shelf and up to the ledge. He felt dizzy, so he sat down.
Johan and Jenna alternated their calls. Jenna had decided to stay where she was. She too was dizzy and uncertain of her injuries. Perched on the side of the mountain, about 75 feet apart, they looked down into the valley. Their cries disappeared in the vast open space. It was windy and cold, and the quiet seemed unreal after the intensity of the attack.
“Helllp.”
Then Jenna called out. “Dad, the boat just got to the dock. I see people getting off.” It was a water taxi that ran a regular service across Lake Josephine.
Johan knew that with the arrival of the boat, hikers would soon be streaming along the trail and their shouts would be heard. He was tired. He stopped yelling and tried not to think about how badly injured he was. Nothing a little surgery can’t fix, he told himself. Besides, he was alive, and his daughter was fine.
Amid the isolation and the cold, he grew sore and stiff and numb. Lying down, sitting up, nothing helped. Forty-five minutes later, he heard Jenna talking with someone. She called to him. “Dad, there are people here now. They’re getting help.”
Still it seemed like forever. Then Johan saw a man cutting through the bushes and sliding down toward him. The man’s eyes were wide open. The expression said everything.
“Are you OK?” the man asked.
“Do you see a camera?” Johan replied.
Jim Knapp was surprised by the question, but very little was making sense.
Knapp and his wife had started their hike that morning a little past 8, well ahead of the water taxi. After an hour on the trail, they heard what sounded like a coyote or a hawk or some animal being attacked. Then there was more, and it sounded human. They started running. Someone must have fallen or sprained an ankle.
Knapp told Johan he would look for the camera, but his attention was focused on the injured man before him. It was the most gruesome sight he had ever seen.
Blood covered Johan’s face. His arms and legs oozed blood. His voice and sentences were jerky and repetitive. He reminded Knapp of Dustin Hoffman in “Rainman,” and with his sweat shirt pulled up over his head, he looked like Beavis in an episode of “Beavis and Butthead.”
“Jenna’s OK,” Knapp said, as he began to get a sense of Johan’s injuries. He noticed the day pack — but no camera — on the shelf beneath them, and he climbed down to retrieve it. Inside were a sweat shirt and four water bottles. He covered Johan and tried to make him drink. He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around a deep gash on Johan’s leg. He laid out some nuts and a granola bar and took some water up to Jenna.
Then Johan saw a girl. She was sliding down to him. Her name was Kari.
Kari Schweigert and Heidi Reindl had been car-camping in Glacier. They were just starting on an 11-mile hike when they ran into Jim Knapp’s wife, running down the trail, screaming for help.
Then there were two teenage boys. Johan couldn’t keep track of everyone, but one of the boys — the one who wore a beanie — did get his camera. It was the camcorder, and Johan was glad to see it. He was also glad that people were finally getting there, but he felt bad for them. He knew stumbling upon a bear attack — and finding him as bloody as he was — couldn’t be easy for them. A fall or a sprain, sure, but a bear attack? He tried to tell himself that it would be OK. He tried to console himself. If he and Jenna had not been attacked, then these other hikers would have.
What can we do, everyone asked. How can we help?
The rock at the back of his head felt like it was digging into his skull. He squirmed about. He wanted them to help him sit up, but they didn’t want to. They were worried about his neck.
Then he’d have to do it himself. He simply wanted to sit up, have a drink of water and then maybe lie down again.
But he was fading.
Grinnell Glacier at Glacier National Park
(Ryan Herron/Getty Images/iStockphoto)
VOICES told him that help was on the way, only he was losing interest. He didn’t want to deal with any of this anymore. It was all too much: wondering how they’d get him and Jenna off the mountain; wanting to be cleaned up from the dirt and sticky blood; saddened that their trip was ending this way.
Kari Schweigert sat beside him, talking. Her curly hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was in a tank top; Johan was wearing her jacket. He was shaking and numb with cold.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“The pain is OK,” he said. “I’d just like to take a nap.”
Then she started to move in closer to him. She knew he was cold. She said she wanted to warm him up. She angled around him and covered his abdomen and chest with her body, her legs off to a side.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked. He didn’t want her to get covered with blood; it would be impossible to wash out.
She couldn’t cover him completely, but she did shield him from the wind. It was a moment he would never forget. How strange, he thought, to be hiking along on this trail one moment, thinking about running in a marathon, and then suddenly not being able to walk, being so dependent upon strangers, and now this girl so close to him, so tender and different from the savagery of the attack.
His mind kept going back to Jenna. Everyone told him that she was not as badly injured as he was. He felt guilty. Why had he wanted to go hiking here? Why wasn’t he a better parent?
Schweigert kept talking to him. She told him not to fall asleep. It made sense. He knew he’d lost a lot of blood, and he knew he was in shock. The wash of voices and movement of people around him, once reassuring, began to blur.
A park ranger and a dozen hikers were on the trail above them. The ranger radioed a report on Johan and Jenna’s status to the ranger station at Many Glacier, where an incident commander was assembling a rescue team.
A few of the hikers peered over the edge.
“Do you need anything?” they yelled.
“More jackets.”
Someone tucked one under Johan’s head.
His neck felt broken.
“WHAT’S your name?”
“Johan Otter.”
“Where are you?”
“Glacier National Park.”
“What time of day is it?”
“Late morning.”
“What happened?”
“Bear attack….”
The name badge said Katie. She wore the green and gray uniform of the park service. She had slid down the slope, balancing a medical kit and a shotgun in her hands, and once she determined that he was alert and oriented, she started dressing his wounds.
Katie Fullerton had pulled into the Many Glacier parking lot expecting just another summer day. Then she heard about the attack. She and another ranger were ordered to get to Johan and Jenna as soon as possible. Since opening in 1910, Glacier National Park has had only 10 bear fatalities, and they were enough.
The incident commander at Many Glacier had put a call out for additional rangers, some stationed on the west side of the park, 70 miles — a two-hour drive — away. A helicopter, chartered from Minuteman Aviation, would ferry those rangers to the site of the attack and would be used to shuttle equipment and personnel up to the mountain.
Whup, whup, whup.
Katie Fullerton looked up. At 9,000 feet, the white chopper had negotiated a U-shaped notch in the Garden Wall, a narrow filigree of stone crowning the Continental Divide. As it drew close, it circled, looking for a place to land. Johan and Jenna Otter could not have fallen in a less accessible place.
Three hours had passed since the attack, and Johan’s metabolism was slowing down. The blast of adrenaline triggered by the attack was long gone; the 15-minute torrent of thought and reaction had dissipated in a miasma of pain, discomfort and boredom. Why was the rescue taking so long?
Crashing mentally and emotionally, he knew he needed to stay warm and awake. Gusts of wind ghosted along the cliff; temperatures shot from warm to freezing as clouds drifted beneath the sun. Hikers on the trail were tossing down energy bars, water and more outerwear. A ranger was talking on the radio.
A second ranger crouched beside Johan. He had arrived with nearly 50 pounds of gear, including a life-support pack with IV fluids, medications and an oxygen tank, and he began cutting away Johan’s jackets and clothing. He introduced himself as Gary, Gary Moses. Johan appreciated his calm and confident manner.
Moses explained that the plan was to place Johan and Jenna on litters, have them lifted up to the trail and then carried down to a landing zone, where the chopper would take them to the Kalispell Regional Medical Center in Kalispell, Mont., in the Flathead Valley on the west side of the park.
Rangers on the trail set up a belaying system. They knew they had to move fast. Moses took Johan’s vitals. His blood pressure was 80 over 30, his pulse 44, his temperature dropping.
Moses prepared an IV line. Johan tried to lie still, but he was shivering uncontrollably. Then he heard something. It was Katie Fullerton; she was crying. The sound startled him at first.
“Do you want to stand down?” Moses asked his fellow ranger.
She shook her head.
Johan was glad. She had worked hard to make him comfortable and safe.
This was her first season as a patrol ranger, her first major trauma. Just last year, she’d been collecting user fees, and she had grown up near the park. She and her family had hiked these trails. This could just as easily have been her father.
Her tears reminded Johan how grave his situation was.
THE helicopter was making a second landing, and all Johan could think was: Hurry up. A second medic had joined Moses and Fullerton.
“How’s Jenna?” It was his steady refrain.
“There’re people with her.”
Moses and the other medic put a C-collar around Johan’s neck and got ready to insert a urinary catheter. Johan reminded them about a scene in “Seinfeld” in which an embarrassed George Costanza is caught naked and complains about “shrinkage.” They burst out laughing, and Johan relaxed a little. This is who he was: not just a bloodied man but someone always there with an easy line, ready to lighten the mood, to give to others.
Moses reassessed the rescue plan. It had taken nearly an hour to find a vein and get the IV started. Carrying Johan out, lifting him to the trail and then down to the helicopter landing zone was going to be too traumatic, and the afternoon was getting on.
He thought a helicopter could lift Johan directly off this ledge, in a rescue known as a short haul. It would be quicker but riskier. Still, he didn’t see any way around it. He radioed in his recommendation. The incident commander agreed. They called in the rescue helicopter operated by the hospital in Kalispell.
As they waited, Johan remembered an Air Force chopper that had crashed during a rescue on Mt. Hood little more than three years earlier. Everything — the foundering, the dipping, the rolling down the slope in a cascade of snow — had been televised on the evening news.
It made him nervous.
“Am I going to die?” Johan asked.
“You’re not going to die up here,” the second medic said.
RED against the blue sky and white clouds, the short-haul helicopter was easier to spot than the Minuteman.
“Hear that?” Gary Moses looked out over the valley. “That’s the sound of your rescue.”
Pilot Ken Justus adjusted the foot pedals and hand controls to bring the Bell 407 closer to the cliff. Travis Willcut, the flight nurse, sat next to him, calling out positions, monitoring radio traffic. Jerry Anderson, a medic, dangled 150 feet beneath them on a rope with a red Bauman Bag and a body board at his waist.
Piloting a helicopter at moments like this is like pedaling an exercise bike on the roof of a two-story building while trying to dangle a hot dog into the mouth of a jar on the ground. Lying on his back, Johan watched.
The IV had kicked in. Though stiff and still cold, he was wide awake and in no pain. Anticipation was everything, and he remembered feeling a little afraid. He hated roller coasters and worried about his stomach.
“You’ll have the best view of your life,” Moses said, hiding his worry. He knew getting Anderson in would be tricky. Because helicopters can’t cast sharply defined shadows on steep terrain, pilots flying short-haul missions have trouble judging closing speeds and distances.
Johan Otter is airlifted from the Grinnell Glacier Trail with medic Jerry Anderson, after being attacked by a grizzly bear and her two cubs in Glacier National Park, Montana on August 25, 2005. Johan tumbled down a steep chute about 75 feet where he almost died.
(Heidi Reindl)
Anderson, dangling at the end of the rope, had a radio in his helmet. He was using it to direct Justus lower and closer to Johan. Abruptly, the radio died.
“I’m at your 11 o’clock position, a mile out,” Moses broke in with his radio, once he understood the problem. “Half mile, 12 o’clock.”
“Do I need to come up or down?”
“Up about 10 feet.”
Then just as Justus got closer, he caught Anderson’s shadow on the ledge and set him down about 20 feet to the right of Johan. The other rangers shielded Johan from the rotor wash and dust.
Anderson unhooked himself. Justus moved the helicopter away. With the rangers’ help, Anderson slid the body board beneath Johan and strapped the Bauman Bag around him. He waved Justus back in.
“We’re ready to lift.”
“Roger, ready to lift.”
Johan couldn’t tell when he was off the ground. Dangling with Anderson beside him, 150 feet beneath the helicopter, all Johan would see was Anderson’s face, the blue sky and the belly of the chopper. The wind whistled around him.
“Woo hoo!” The hikers and rangers on the mountain started cheering and clapping.
With Johan and Anderson still beneath him, Justus accelerated down the valley to the helipad at Many Glacier. A waiting crowd was asked not to take pictures. Johan was transferred into an ambulance while Justus went back to pick up Jenna. Finally Johan was out of the wind and in a warm place.
Then he heard the news.
“Jenna is here,” someone said.
“Hi, sweetie,” he called out as they prepared to fly him to the medical center in Kalispell. With his head wrapped in bandages, mummy slits for his eyes and the C-collar on his neck, Johan couldn’t see her. “Make sure when they call Mom that you talk to her.”
He knew he wouldn’t be the one making that call.
“Otherwise she’ll totally freak out,” he said.
About this article
The accounts in this article are drawn from interviews over a span of 18 months with Johan, Marilyn and Jenna Otter. Additional interviews were conducted with the following individuals:
National Park Service: Jan Cauthorn-Page, Katie Fullerton, Rachel Jenkins, Kathy Krisko, Gary Moses, Rick Mulligan, Melissa Wilson, Amy Vanderbilt and Andrew Winslow.
Hikers on the Grinnell Trail: Julie Aitchison, Colin Aitchison, Kathleen MacDonald, Jim Knapp, Marla Moore, Robin Malone and Heidi Reindl.
Minuteman Aviation: Jerry Mamuzich.
Kalispell Regional Medical Center’s Advanced Life Support and Emergency Rescue Team (ALERT helicopter): Jerry Anderson, Addison Clark, Ken Justus, Travis Willcut, Patricia Harmon and Keith Hannon.
Additional reporting came from the National Park Service’s investigation report concerning the attack.
EDINBURGH, Scotland — President Trump said Monday he intends to shorten the 50-day deadline he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach a deal that ends the three-year war in Ukraine, after Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities.
Russia fired an overnight barrage of more than 300 drones, four cruise missiles and three ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian air force said.
Trump said two weeks ago he would implement “severe tariffs” on Russia unless a peace deal is reached by early September, as he expressed exasperation with Putin over the bombardment of Ukrainian cities amid the Republican president’s attempts to stop the fighting.
Trump said he would now give Putin 10 to 12 days from Monday, meaning he wants peace efforts to make progress by Aug. 7-9. The plan includes possible sanctions and secondary tariffs targeting Russia’s trading partners. The formal announcement would come later Monday or on Tuesday, he said.
“No reason in waiting,” Trump said of the shorter timeline. “We just don’t see any progress being made.”
Putin has “got to make a deal. Too many people are dying,” Trump said during a visit to Scotland.
There was no immediate response from Russia.
Trump repeated his criticism of Putin for talking about ending the war but continuing to bombard Ukrainian civilians.
“And I say, that’s not the way to do it,” Trump said. He added, “I’m disappointed in President Putin.”
Asked at a news conference about a potential meeting with the Russian leader, Trump said: “I’m not so interested in talking anymore.”
Still, he voiced some reluctance about imposing penalties on the Kremlin, saying that he loves the Russian people. “I don’t want to do that to Russia,” he said, but he noted how many Russians, along with Ukrainians, are dying in the war.
Ukraine has urged Western countries to take a tougher line with Putin. Andrii Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, thanked Trump for shortening the deadline.
“Putin understands only strength — and that has been conveyed clearly and loudly,” Yermak said on Telegram, adding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shared the sentiment.
Latest attacks in Ukraine
A Russian drone blew out the windows of a 25-story residential building in the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv, the head of the city’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, wrote on Telegram. Eight people were injured, including a 4-year-old girl, he said.
The attack also started a fire in Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine, local officials said, but no injuries were reported.
The main target of the Russian attack was Starokostiantyniv, in the Khmelnytskyi region of western Ukraine, the air force said. Regional authorities reported no damage or casualties.
Western Ukraine is on the other side of the country from the front line, and the Ukrainian military is believed to have significant airfields as well as arsenals and depots there.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces carried out an overnight strike with long-range, air-launched weapons, hitting a Ukrainian air base along with an ammunition depot containing stockpiles of missiles and components for drone production.
Weissert writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
I took a week of vacation to relax, clear my head and stop obsessing over depressing news.
I hear frequently from people who say that, for their peace of mind, they’re tuning out the news altogether, so I tried it for a couple of days. Opened a book. Walked the dog.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
But I’m in the news business, and I felt like a hypocrite, so I kept sneaking peeks. As it turns out, that wasn’t healthy.
You can’t follow a single 24-hour news cycle without questioning your own sanity.
In which the federal government has made it a priority to arrest tamale vendors and fire meteorologists?
President Trump holds a gavel after signing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” at the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 4.
(Brendan Smialowski / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
In which the Social Security Administration sends us emails fawning over the president and making false claims, the White House jokes and memes about immigration raids and the Department of Homeland Security triggers a trolling war with social media posts about its version of national heritage?
I have a weekly goal of avoiding alcoholic beverages on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in this political culture, what chance do I have?
With lots of time to practice, I picked up my guitar, but events of the last few weeks continued to haunt me.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed into law on July 4 will add trillions to the national debt, heap tax breaks on those who need them least and rip healthcare coverage away from the neediest. As a result, L.A. County’s health services are anticipating federal cutbacks in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“We can’t survive this big a cut,” Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s head of public health, told the Times for a story by Rebecca Ellis and Niamh Ordner. She added: “I’ve been around a long time. I’ve never actually seen this much disdain for public health.”
Dr. Jonathan LoPresti, who worked at County/USC for decades and is an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, is alarmed. He sent me an a copy of an opinion piece he’s writing, which includes a warning that county hospitals could “again be overrun with the poor … and homeless, leading to further hospital and ER overcrowding, delayed discharges and reduction in routine health maintenance … That could lead to an increase in community TB cases and more serious complications of treatable disease, as well as deaths.”
He added this:
“How many public deaths are people willing to accept?”
There is no limit, judging by crystal clear signals from Washington.
I think we can all agree that historic rainstorms, hurricanes and wildfires in the United States and the rest of the world will continue to kill thousands.
So I swam laps, thinking that having my head under might help, but it only made me feeling like I was drowning.
Hundreds of probationary workers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have been fired, and the fulltime staff will be trimmed by 2,000.
These cuts, and the elimination of federal support for scientific research, are damaging in obvious ways. But when I asked UCLA professor Alex Hall what’s most disturbing, here’s what the director of the Center for Climate Science had to say:
“I feel like the thing that’s most chilling is the way the word ‘climate’ has become a dirty word.”
In other words, the politicization of the subject — Trump and supporters insist human-caused climate change is either exaggerated or a hoax — has created a form of censorship.
I may be a little biased on this topic. My daughter just graduated from college with a degree in earth science. What she and thousands like her are being told, essentially, is, “Good for you, but the planet’s health is neither a concern nor a priority. If you’re looking for work, the Border Patrol is hiring, and cryptocurrency might be a good career path.”
So there you have it. That’s how I spent my summer vacation, failing miserably in my attempt to look the other way.
But all was not lost.
I played pickleball a couple of times, in Glendale and Los Feliz, and suffered no major injuries. I took my beagle Philly to Rosie’s Dog Beach in Long Beach and watched him race around like the happiest hound in the world. And, borrowing from Trump’s penchant for cutbacks, I’ve trimmed my list of no-alcohol days from three to two.
Los Angeles County’s health system, which is responsible for the care of the region’s poorest, is careening toward a financial crisis because of cuts from a presidential administration and Republican-led Congress looking to drastically slash the size of government.
President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed earlier this month, is expected to soon claw $750 million per year from the county Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and roughly two dozen clinics. In an all-staff email Friday, the agency called the bill a “big, devastating blow to our health system” and said a hiring freeze had gone into effect, immediately.
And the Trump administration’s budget for the next fiscal year will likely result in a $200-million cut to the county Department of Public Health, whose responsibilities include monitoring disease outbreaks, inspecting food and providing substance use treatment.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m not going to say we survive this,” said Barbara Ferrer, head of the public health department, in an interview. “We can’t survive this big a cut.”
Both Ferrer and Department of Health Services head Christina Ghaly warned that the federal cuts will devastate their agencies — and the patients they serve — for years to come. Employee layoffs are likely.
In April, the White House announced it was ending infectious disease grants worth billions of dollars, including $45 million that L.A. County was supposed to use to combat the spread of measles and bird flu. California has joined other states in a lawsuit fighting the cuts, and the court has issued a preliminary injunction suspending the cuts.
A protest earlier this month in Anaheim, co-led by the California Nurses Assn., called on Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) to vote against President Trump’s spending bill.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
This month, the county public health department lost another $16 million after Trump’s bill cut funding for a program educating food stamp recipients about how to buy healthy meals.
And there’s more to come. The Trump administration’s proposed budget for 2026 will be the biggest blow yet, Ferrer warned, yanking $200 million from her department — a 12% cut.
“I’m old. I’ve been around for a long time,” said Ferrer, whose work in public health dates back to the Reagan administration. “I’ve never actually seen this much disdain for public health.”
Ferrer said the cuts mean she no longer has enough money for the county’s bioterrorism watch program, which monitors for outbreaks that might signal a biological attack. Soon, she said, county officials may have to stop testing ocean water for toxins year round, cutting back to just half the year.
“Like, you want to swim? You want to know that the water is safe where you swim, then oppose these kinds of cuts,” she said. “That affects everybody who goes to the beach.”
L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said she is bracing for $200 million in cuts to her budget.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
Layoffs are likely, said Ferrer. About 1,500 public health staffers are supported through federal grants. More than half the federal money the department receives is funneled to outside organizations, which would likely need to make cuts to stay afloat.
A similarly grim cost analysis is underway at the county Department of Health Services, where executives said they expect to lose $280 million this fiscal year because of the bill.
“I can’t make a promise that we will be able to avoid layoffs because of the magnitude of the challenges,” said Ghaly.
Ghaly said the bill slashed the extra Medicaid money the county typically gets to cover care for low-income patients. They expect many patients might be kicked off Medicaid because of new eligibility and work requirements. The federal government is pulling back on payments for emergency services for undocumented people, meaning the county will have to foot more of the bill.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Department of Health Services officials said they expect to lose $750 million per year by 2028. By then, the agency’s budget deficit is projected to have ballooned to $1.85 billion.
In an attempt to pump more cash into the system, L.A. County supervisors voted on Tuesday to increase a parcel tax first approved by voters in 2002, which is expected to raise an additional $87 million for the county’s trauma care network.
After a long debate Tuesday, Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Lindsey Horvath worked to direct $9 million of the parcel tax money to Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, a private hospital that serves as a critical safety net for South Los Angeles residents who would otherwise find themselves in a medical desert.
Without that cash infusion from the county, the cuts in Trump’s bill would have put the hospital at risk of closing, since the majority of patients in its emergency room are on Medicaid, said Elaine Batchlor, Martin Luther King’s chief executive officer.
“If they’ve lost their Medicaid coverage, we simply won’t get paid for those patients,” she said.
Dr. Elaine Batchlor, chief executive of MLK Community Healthcare, said her hospital was hanging by a thread financially. Then came more cuts.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
Martin Luther King replaced a county hospital that closed after losing national accreditation in 2005 because of serious medical malpractice, landing it the nickname “Killer King.”
“The fact that that hospital closed in the first place I think is criminal, and I intend to do all I can to protect the integrity of the services,” said Mitchell, whose district includes the hospital and who pushed for it to get a cut of money from the parcel tax increase.
Local health providers said that changes at the state level have created additional uncertainty. The state budget for this fiscal year freezes enrollment in Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, for undocumented immigrants ages 19 and older starting in January. Medi-Cal recipients ages 19 to 59 will have to pay a $30 monthly premium beginning July 1, 2027.
“Most families [we serve] are making about $2,400 to $2,600 a month. They’re going to have to choose between paying their Medi-Cal fees for a family of four — that’s $120 a month — or paying rent or paying for food,” said Jim Mangia, head of St. John’s Community Health, who said the cuts will disrupt care for tens of thousands of low-income residents.
The St. John’s clinic, which gets most of its revenue from Medi-Cal reimbursements, serves more than 120,000 patients a year, most of whom live below the federal poverty line.
If the clinic doesn’t find a way to replace the lost revenue, Mangia warned, services will have to be reduced. The clinic recently started treating immigrant patients in their homes after realizing they had been skipping appointments because they feared being arrested by federal immigration agents.
“Then what we’re looking at is closing several health centers,” said Mangia. “We’re looking at laying off hundreds of staff.”
At Venice Family Clinic, a community health center that serves nearly 45,000 patients annually, 80% of patients rely on Medi-Cal. Roughly half the clinic’s revenue comes from Medi-Cal reimbursements.
Dr. Mitesh Popat, a family physician and head of the clinic, said that federal policy changes — especially more frequent paperwork and added work requirements — will likely push eligible patients off of Medi-Cal. He said the clinic is exploring ways to expand support for patients to navigate the paperwork and keep their coverage.
“This puts a bunch of barriers in the way of people who already have enough challenges in life,” Popat said. “They’re trying to make it, trying to survive, trying to put food on the table.”
The city of Los Angeles must pay nearly $50 million to a man who has been in a coma since he was hit by a sanitation truck while crossing a street in Encino, a jury decided Thursday.
Kamran Hakimi, now 61, was in a crosswalk at Hayvenhurst Avenue and Ventura Boulevard last August when the sanitation truck struck him. Hakimi had a green light, and the driver made an “unsafe right turn,” according to Hakimi’s attorneys.
A handlebar on the front of the truck hit Hakimi’s head and flung him to the asphalt, where he hit his head, the attorneys said. Hakimi briefly stood and flashed a thumbs up before losing consciousness.
“Mr. Hakimi’s life, and the lives of his family, are forever changed due to the negligence of a City of Los Angeles employee,” said Rahul Ravipudi, one of Hakimi’s attorneys. “This verdict upholds the dignity of the life Mr. Hakimi enjoyed before this tragedy and we are grateful to the jury who carefully considered all the evidence and provided Mr. Hakimi with the means necessary to get the higher level of care he so desperately needs.”
Hakimi is a father of five and worked in real estate before the crash. In October, his attorneys filed a lawsuit against the city in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The city admitted that the driver failed to yield to Hakimi, according to Hakimi’s attorneys. But at trial, the city “disputed the damages suffered by Mr. Hakimi, arguing that his life expectancy was limited and that the value of his non-economic damages, including pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life, was minimized because he was in a comatose state,” Hakimi’s attorneys said.
The jury ordered the city to pay Hakimi $48.8 million, including $25 million for future pain and suffering and $10 million for future medical expenses.
The verdict, which comes as the city continues to struggle with escalating legal liability payouts, was larger than any single payout by the city in the last two fiscal years, according to data provided by the City Attorney’s Office. The city can still appeal.
Another Hakimi attorney, Brian Panish, said the case never should have gone to trial, blaming City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto for refusing to settle the case.
“The city attorney chose to force this case to trial, rejected all reasonable settlement proposals … There were many reasonable proposals made by an independent mediator chosen by the city,” Panish said.
Feldstein Soto, through her press office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Panish echoed arguments made by plaintiffs’ attorneys who have said that Feldstein Soto’s legal strategies have contributed to rising legal liability costs. They claim that Feldstein Soto has taken cases to trial that she should have settled, resulting in bigger verdicts if the city is found liable.
The city paid out a total of $289 million, its highest liability costs ever, in the fiscal year 2025.
Denise Richards has accused estranged husband Aaron Phypers of abuse, death threats and possession of unregistered weapons in a request for a temporary restraining order that was granted Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Phypers, who filed for divorce on July 7 and gave July 4 as the date of separation, has denied abusing Richards.
Richards’ TRO request, reviewed by The Times, refers to abuse that allegedly occurred during their marriage, including between July 4 and July 14, after she had moved out of the family home and into three townhouses that she uses separately as a studio, an office and her residence.
“Throughout our relationship, Aaron would frequently violently choke me, violently squeeze my head with both hands, tightly squeeze my arms, violently slap me in my face and head, aggressively slam my head into the bathroom towel rack, threaten to kill me, hold me down with his knee on my back to the point where I would have to plead with him to get off me so that he would not kill me,” Richards said in her filing.
She added that he “regularly threatened to ‘break my jaw’ and would cry, beg me to stay, and promise to get help — none of which ever happened.”
Richards alleged that Phypers gave her at least three concussions and regularly called her profane and degrading names. She also accused him of downloading her private text messages to her laptop and taking photos of the texts.
“Until now, I have been afraid to report Aaron to the police or file for a restraining order because he has repeatedly threatened to kill himself and me if I reported him to the police,” Richards said in the document, “among his other threats of harm to me and himself if he is reported for his abuse to anyone.”
She said he told her he had eight unregistered guns and some bulletproof vests.
Describing an incident from mid-April, she alleged that she had returned from a business trip and told Phypers he could not stay at the studio townhouse and had to leave. She locked the doors behind him.
While she was unpacking, Richards said in the filing, “Aaron climbed onto the balcony and pushed through the screen and entered the room I was in on the second floor. Once inside, Aaron aggressively approached me and grabbed the back of my head by my hair and pushed me on the ground and put his knee on my back so I could not get up. He would often do this. Aaron then screamed in my face.”
Richards said she told Phypers that she was going to call the police.
“[H]e responded, as he typically did, ‘Watch them try and take me away, they have no idea who they are dealing with and you have no idea who you are dealing with.’ When he refused to leave, I felt unsafe and chose to leave the premises.”
Richards also included photos of herself from January 2022 showing a severe black eye, which she alleged she got when Phypers hit her with “the heel of his palm” during an after-hours incident at his workplace.
There was yelling during the incident, which attracted a police officer who happened to be in the parking lot. After the officer left, Phypers “resumed screaming,” she said, then struck her and used profanity, calling her a derogatory name, she alleged in the filing.
Phypers, born Aaron William Cameron and referred to in the TRO request as Aaron William Cameron Phypers, has denied Richards’ allegations, telling TMZ in a statement Thursday that they are “false and deeply hurtful.” He told the website that he never abused her or anyone else physically or emotionally.
Phypers and actor Nicollette Sheridan of “Desperate Housewives” got married secretly in December 2015, but she filed for divorce six months later. That split wasn’t finalized until August 2018.
He and Richards began their relationship in 2017. They wed a little more than a year later in September 2018, a month after Phypers and Sheridan’s split was finalized, in a private ceremony in Malibu. Richards was previously married to “Two and a Half Men” star Charlie Sheen from 2002 to 2006.
For now, Phypers must stay 100 yards away from Richards and her car, workplace and home and cannot possess firearms or body armor. She requested that he return her laptops and asked for permission to record any phone calls that violate the stay-away order. A hearing on making the restraining order permanent is scheduled for Aug. 8.
Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.
Dan Serafini was a first-round draft pick from a prestigious private high school. He pitched professionally for 22 seasons and earned more than $14 million while with six Major League teams and two in the Japanese League.
Now he might spend the rest of his life in prison.
Serafini, 51, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the 2021 shooting death of his father-in-law, Robert Gary Spohr, 70. He also was found guilty of the attempted murder of Spohr’s wife, Wendy Wood, and first-degree burglary.
Serafini entered the Spohrs’ Lake Tahoe home June 5, 2021, where prosecutors said he secretly waited with a .22 caliber gun for several hours for the victims to return before ambushing them. Two children, ages 3 years and 8 months, were in the home at the time.
“The guilty verdicts come after a six-week trial during which the jury heard testimony from dozens of witnesses and the presentation of physical evidence, including digital, cell phone, and other forensic evidence,” according to a Facebook post from the Placer County District Attorney’s Office.
According to evidence presented at trial, when the Spohrs arrived, Serafini shot both of them in the head and fled the house. Wood survived and called 911. She died by suicide in 2023.
Two years later police arrested Serafini and his nanny-turned-lover, Samantha Scott, 33. Scott pleaded guilty in February to an accessory charge.
Serafini’s motive centered on a $1.3-million dispute over the renovation of a ranch, according to prosecutors. Serafini, prosecutors said, hated his in-laws and had written “I’m gonna kill them one day” in a text message mentioning $21,000, according to ABC News Sacramento affiliate KXTV. The victims had given $90,000 to Serafini’s wife, Erin, the day of the shootings.
“It’s been four years since my mom and dad were shot, and it’s been four years of just hell,” said Adrienne Spohr, the victims’ daughter and Serafini’s sister-in-law, said after the verdict.
Adrienne Spohr was heard gasping and crying along with others in the courtroom when the verdict was read aloud, according to KXTV. Serafini shook his head in disagreement.
The mandatory minimum for first-degree murder with a firearm enhancement is 25 years to life, but could increase to 35 years depending on how the charges are applied.
“My parents had been incredibly generous to Daniel Serafini and Erin Spohr throughout their marriage,” Adrienne Spohr said earlier in the trial.
The Minnesota Twins made Serafini their first-round draft pick in 1992 out of Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif., the same school all-time home run king Barry Bonds attended. Serafini made his big league debut in 1996 with the Twins and pitched in parts of seven seasons with the Chicago Cubs, San Diego Padres, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds and Colorado Rockies.
Serafini pitched in Japan from 2004 to 2007 before returning to the U.S. He was suspended for 50 games in 2007 for using performance-enhancing drugs that he blamed on medication he took in Japan. He also pitched for Italy in the 2013 World Baseball Classic.
On June 28, 2015, Serafini’s bar in Sparks, Nev., was featured on an episode of “Bar Rescue.” The bar’s named was changed from the Bullpen Bar to the Oak Tavern as part of the makeover, but not before his financial woes were described as blowing through $14 million in career earnings and taking a $250,000 loan from his parents.
Serafini’s sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 18. He will remain in custody without bail until then.
“At this point, our focus is on the sentencing and making sure that Dan Serafini never sees the outside of a jail ever again,” Adrienne Spohr said.
“Heads of State” is not the Cheech & Chong reunion film you’ve been waiting for, but a comic thriller co-starring John Cena and Idris Elba, premiering Wednesday on Prime Video. Previously joined in cultural history by the DC super antihero flick “The Suicide Squad,” the actors have remade their rivalrous characters there into an odd couple of national leaders here, dealing with conspiratorial skulduggery, bullets, bombs and the like.
Call me dim, but I wasn’t even half aware that Cena, whose muscles have muscles, maintains a long, successful career in professional wrestling — which is, of course, acting — alongside his more conventional show business pursuits; he’s ever game to mock himself and not afraid to look dumb, which ultimately makes him look smart, or to appear for all intents and purposes naked at the 2024 Oscars, presenting the award for costume design. (He was winning, too, in his schtick with Jimmy Kimmel.) Elba, whose career includes a lot of what might be called prestige genre, has such natural poise and gravity that one assumes he’s done all the Shakespeares and Shaws and Ibsens, but “The Wire” and “Luther” were more his thing. He was on many a wish list as the next James Bond, and while that’s apparently not going to happen, something of the sort gets a workout here.
Elba plays British Prime Minister Sam Clarke, described as “increasingly embattled” in his sixth year in office, who is about to meet Cena’s recently elected American president, Will Derringer, on the eve of a trip to Trieste, Italy, for a NATO conference. (Why Clarke is embattled is neither explained nor important.) Derringer resents Clarke, who can’t take him seriously, for having seemed to endorse his opponent by taking him out for fish and chips. (This is a recurring theme.) An international star in the Schwarzenegger/Stallone mold — “Water Cobra” is his franchise — one might call Derringer’s election ridiculous, but I live in a state that actually did elect Schwarzenegger as its governor, twice. Wet behind the ears (“He still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press conference and a press junket,” somebody says), Derringer thinks a lot himself, his airplane, his knowing Paul McCartney and his position. Beyond aspirational platitudes, he has no real politics, but as we first see him carrying his daughter on his shoulders, we know he’s really OK.
Directed by Ilya Naishuller (“Nobody”) and written by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query, the movie begins with a scene set at the Tomatino Festival in, Buñol, Spain, in which great crowds of participants lob tomatoes at each other in a massive food fight — it’s a real thing — foreshadowing the blood that will soon be flowing through the town square, as a team of unidentified bad guys ambush the British and American agents who are tracking them. They’ve been set up, declares M16 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who is later reported “missing and presumed dead” — meaning, of course, that she is very much alive and will be seen again; indeed, we will see quite a lot of her.
Also starring is Priyanka Chopra Jonas as M16 agent Noel Bisset, who is tasked with protecting the two heads of state.
(Chiabella James / Prime Video)
Meanwhile, the prime minister and the president board Air Force One for Trieste. They talk movies: “I like actual cinema,” says Clarke, who claims to have never seen one of Derringer’s pictures. “I’m classically trained,” the movie star protests. “Did you know I once did a play with Edward Norton? But the universe keeps telling me I look cool with a gun in my hand — toy gun.”
Following attacks within and without the plane, the two parachute into Belarus and, for the remainder of the film, make their way here and there, trying to evade the private army of Russian arms dealer and sadistic creep Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine) led by your typical tall blond female assassin (Katrina Durden). They’ll also meet Stephen Root as a computer guy and Jack Quaid as a comical American agent. Elsewhere, Vice President Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino) takes charge. (“Bad?” is the note I wrote. I’ve seen my share of political thrillers.)
There will be hand-to-hand combat, missiles, machine-gun shoot-em-ups, more than a couple helicopters and a car chase through the streets of Trieste — a lovely seaside/hillside city I recommend if you’re thinking of Italy this summer. Must I tell you that antipathy will turn to appreciation as our heroes make common cause, get a little personal and, with the able Agent Bisset, become real-life action heroes? That they are middle-aged is not an issue, though there is a joke about the American movie star being less fit than the U.K. politician.
The logline portends a comedy, possibly a parody, even a satire. It’s definitely the first of these, if not especially subtle or sharp (Derringer stuck in a tree, hanging from a tangled parachute; Clarke setting off a smoke bomb in his own face — that did make me laugh), a little bit the second, and not at all the third, even though it sniffs around politics a bit. Above all, like many, most or practically all action films, it’s a fantasy in which many things happen that would not and could not ever, ever happen in the real world, because that’s not how people or physics behave. (It certainly doesn’t represent America in 2025.)
There is just as much character development or backstory as is necessary to make the players seem more or less human. Plot-wise there are a lot of twists, because the script superimposes a couple of familiar villainous agendas into a single narrative; it’s mildly diverting without being compelling, which, I would think, will ultimately work in its favor as hectic, lightly violent entertainment. Not even counting the orgy of anonymous death that has qualified as family entertainment for some time now — blame video games, I won’t argue — it’s a painless watch, and, in its cheery, fantastic absurdity, something of a respite from the messier, crazier, more unbelievable world awaiting you once the credits have rolled.
Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
By Jonathan Gould Mariner Books: 512 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
When an author decides to tackle the story of a popular and important band like Talking Heads, the contours of which are familiar to many of its fans, the remit should be to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that provide a more full-bodied narrative and ultimately bring the band into sharper relief than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has almost completely ignored this directive in “Burning Down the House,” his new Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, full of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that provide little illumination but plenty of needless bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and is not the biography that this great and important band deserves.
As fans of the Heads already know, three of the four members met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-’70s, children of privilege with artsy aspirations and not much direction. David Byrne came from Baltimore by way of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler in conceptualist experiments with photography and a veteran of various mediocre cover bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to join one such band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and the daughter of a decorated Navy vice admiral, played bass. They were an anti-jam band and pro-avant; the first decent song they came up with was a shambolic version of what became “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif in the song’s bridge.
For the emergent Heads, timing was everything. When Frantz signed the lease on a spacious loft on Chrystie Street in East Village in October 1974, he had unwittingly found the practice space where the three musicians would hone their craft. The loft was also a short walk to CBGB, soon to become the proving ground of New York’s punk revolution and the Heads’ primary live performance venue at the start of their career.
In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Kitchen, an arts collective space in Soho, and it showed them a new way to approach their music. Richman, “who dressed like a kid that everyone laughed at in high school,” influenced the band’s preppy visual template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Within a year of moving to the city, Talking Heads had found its look, sound and favored club. When Frantz bumped into Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks in a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired about keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s number, Harrison joined the band and the classic Talking Heads lineup was complete.
What followed was a contract with Seymour Stein’s label Sire and the band’s collaboration with producer Brian Eno, beginning with its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the time the band released 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain in Light,” Eno’s role had expanded beyond his production duties. He was now writing songs with Byrne, which created friction within the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged on songwriting credits (the album listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” rather than the individual band members), it created a rift that never healed, even as the band was selling millions of copies of its follow-up “Speaking in Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme concert film “Stop Making Sense.” The final act was recriminatory, as Byrne commanded an ever greater share of the spotlight while the other members quietly seethed. The band’s final album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Talking Heads dissolved in 1991, after Byrne removed himself from the lineup to explore outside projects.
Author Jonathan Gould
(Richard Edelman)
Gould does a serviceable job of telling the Heads’ story in a book that arrives 50 years after the band’s first gig at CBGB. Curiously, for someone who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s late ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards many of the key players in that scene with derision bordering on contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a prime architect of New York punk, as a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry.” Patti Smith’s music “verged on a parody of beat poetry,” while the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a band that made New York punk possible, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould is also careless with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s band displays a “willful lack” of commercial instinct, the Heads assert a “willful conventionality” to their stage appearance, Johnny Ramone is a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and so on.
It’s hard to fathom how a biographer intent on cracking the code of one of rock’s seminal bands can do so with so much contempt for the culture that spawned it. An inquiring fan might want to go to Will Hermes’ 2011 book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” for a more nuanced and knowledgeable portrait of the creative ferment that made the Heads possible. As for a biography of Talking Heads, we are still left with a lacuna that Gould has unfortunately not filled.
Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
Whether soaring through the sky or sharing a playful moment with his human bestie Hiccup, Toothless, the dark-hued dragon with a friendly face and an injured tail, disarms you with his endearing nature.
It’s no surprise that he’s become the emblem of the “How to Train Your Dragon” animated movies, the first of which arrived in 2010. (There have since been two sequels, three separate TV series and five shorts.) A fan favorite among Gen-Z viewers, Toothless now returns to the big screen in a new hyper-realist iteration for the live-action remake, now in theaters.
And in an unprecedented move, Dean DeBlois, who directed all three “Dragon” animated films — as well as 2002’s original “Lilo & Stitch,” along with Chris Sanders — was asked to helm the live-action reimagining. It was his priority to preserve Toothless’ essence.
“He is our most recognizable dragon within the entire assortment,” DeBlois says on the phone. “And he has a lot of sentience and personality that comes through. And so much of it is expressed in this face that’s quite Stitch-like with the big eyes, the ear plates and the broad mouth.”
In fact, the entire live-action endeavor hinged on whether Toothless could be properly translated as a photorealistic dragon among human actors and physical sets, while retaining the charm of the animated movies.
An image from the original 2010 animated “How to Train Your Dragon.”
(DreamWorks Animation LLC)
According to Christian Manz, the new film’s visual effects supervisor, when Peter Cramer, president of Universal Pictures, initially considered the project back in 2022, he wasn’t convinced Toothless would work. His touchstone for a fantastical creature that successfully achieved believability was the Hippogriff, a winged four-legged creature seen in 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
To test the viability of a new Toothless, DreamWorks enlisted British visual effects and computer animation outfit Framestore to spend three months trying to create a “realistic” version of Toothless. Framestore has had some popular successes to its name: Paddington Bear in the film series, Dobby from the “Harry Potter” universe and Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the Marvel movies.
“We always knew that we weren’t aiming for a real dragon, as in a ‘Game of Thrones’ dragon,” says Manz, via video call from the U.K.
Toothless’ design, particularly his facial features, presented a challenge for Manz and the team at Framestore. If they made his eyes or his mouth too small or if they tried to drastically reshape his head with more naturalism in mind, he quickly lost his personality.
“His big, expressive face with eyes that are larger than any animal in the animal kingdom, including the blue whale, had to remain because, without them, we felt like we were going to be delivering a lesser version of Toothless,” says DeBlois.
A stage show based on the first film called “How to Train Your Dragon: Live Spectacular,” which toured Australia and New Zealand in 2012, radically changed the design — to a mixed response. “Toothless was too creature-like and it just wasn’t as appealing and as charming,” says Simon Otto, head of character animation for all three animated movies, via Zoom.
While they may be too subtle for an untrained viewer to notice, certain design changes have been made that differentiate the live-action Toothless from his animated counterpart.
“He’s now bigger, his head’s smaller, his eyes are actually smaller,” says Manz. The nuanced reshaping of his head and his body was intentional: an effort to make him blend into a photorealistic world.
“The interesting thing is that when people see the live-action movie, they say, ‘Oh, it’s Toothless, like he stepped out of the animated movie,’” says DeBlois. “But in truth, if you put them side by side, you’ll see quite a few differences.”
The texture of Toothless’ body needed to be more intricate for the live-action version, so he would feel more convincingly integrated within the environments.
“In the animation, he’s quite smooth,” says Manz. “We tried very snake-like skin, but it just made him look very unfriendly. You wouldn’t want to put your hand on his forehead.”
Mason Thames in “How to Train Your Dragon.”
(Universal Pictures)
Both on-screen versions of Toothless were crafted using essentially the same digital technique: computer animation. The difference here is that the one meant to share space with a flesh-and-blood world, with distinct aesthetic concerns. Even if seeking realism in creatures that only exist in our imagination might seem counterintuitive, the goal is to make them feel palpable within their made-up realm.
“One of the things I don’t like about live-action remakes is they seem to try to want to replace the animated source, and I find myself very protective of it,” says DeBlois with refreshing candor. “We tried to create a version that lives alongside it. It follows the beats of that original story, but brings new depths and expanded mythology and more immersive action moments and flying. But it’s never trying to replace the animated movie because I’m very proud of that film.”
Toothless as we now know him originated expressly for the screen. The Toothless in Cressida Cowell’s originating book series is tiny and green (a design that can be seen in the first animated movie in the form of a minuscule dragon known as Terrible Terror).
But when DeBlois and Sanders came aboard, 15 months before the 2010 release, replacing the previous directors, their first major change was to make Toothless a dragon that could be ridden.
It was the screensaver of a black panther that first inspired the look of Toothless in the animated films. Otto, one of the designers who knows Toothless best (he drew the original back in 2008), recalls his real-world animal references.
“He is a mix between a bird of prey, like a peregrine falcon, with extremely streamlined shapes — of course a feline but also a Mexican salamander called an axolotl,” Otto says. Sanders’ design for Disney superstar Stitch, namely his large almond-shaped eyes, ears and pronounced mouth, also influenced the design.
“There’s a little bit of a design influence from Stitch in Toothless’ face that makes them feel like they’re distant cousins,” says DeBlois.
He believes that making Toothless more closely resemble a mammal, rather than a reptile, and giving him pet-like qualities were the keys for him becoming so memorable.
“[We] spent a lot of time on YouTube looking at videos of dogs and cats doing funny things,” he says. “And we would try to incorporate a lot of that behavior into Toothless with the hopes that when people watched the movie, they would say, ‘That’s just like my cat’ or ‘My dog does that.’ We wanted him to feel like a big pet. Ferocious and dangerous at first, but then a big cuddly cat after.”
Mason Thames interacts on set with the puppet version of Toothless.
(Helen Sloan)
On the set of the live-action movie, Toothless and the other dragons existed as large puppets with simple functions, operated by a team of master puppeteers led by Tom Wilton, a performer who had worked on the “War Horse” stage play.
Using puppets was meant to provide the actors, especially Mason Thames, who plays Hiccup, a real-world scene partner. The Toothless foam puppet had an articulated jaw and articulated ear plates that allowed for a subtle, interactive performance.
“There’s a performance that Dean can direct and that Mason and the other actors could act against, so that the interaction is utterly believable,” says Manz. “[The puppets] are obviously removed from the frame in the end, but it just means you believe that connection.”
As for the impressive flight sequences, in which Hiccup rides Toothless, the production created an animatronic dragon placed on a giant gimbal that moved on six different axes to simulate the physics of flying.
“If the dragon was diving or ascending or banking and rolling, Mason would be thrown around in the saddle, like a jockey on a racehorse,” says DeBlois. “And it married him to the animal in a way that felt really authentic.”
Mason Thames rides the flying Toothless on an animatronic model.
(Helen Sloan)
For all his success in the animated realm, DeBlois has never directed a live-action film until now.
“I do commend Universal for taking a risk on me knowing that I had not made a live-action film, but also recognizing that I knew where the heart and the wonder was, and I was determined to bring it to the screen,” he says.
Otto, the designer who trained Toothless before anybody else, candidly says he would have “peed his pants” if he knew the drawings he did back in 2008 would spawn a franchise and a theme-park attraction (a re-creation of the films’ Isle of Berk opened at Universal Studios Florida earlier this year).
“The most critical choice they made for the live-action was making sure the audience falls in love with Toothless,” he adds. “And that you understand that if you have a creature like that as your friend, you wouldn’t give up on it.”
Chris Brown is facing the music for allegedly smashing a tequila bottle over a music producer’s head at a London nightclub two years ago. The R&B star was arrested in connection to the incident early Thursday, The Times has confirmed.
The Metropolitan Police force said in a Thursday statement that it arrested a 36-year-old man shortly after 2 a.m. in a hotel in Manchester, England, “on suspicion of grievous bodily harm. “ The controversial “Under the Influence” singer, 36, remains in custody. Brown was arrested for his alleged involvement in a February 2023 “incident at a venue in Hanover Square,” the statement said.
Though police did not provide additional details — including the nature of the incident or the venue — the charge echoes allegations music producer Amadou “Abe” Diaw raised against Brown in a civil lawsuit filed in October 2023. Detectives for the Central West Area Basic Command Unit have launched an investigation, the statement added.
A representative for the Grammy winner did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Thursday.
Brown was arrested more than two years after he allegedly “brutally assaulted” Diaw by “beating him over the head” with a bottle of Don Julio 1942 Tequila at the TAPE nighclub in London, according to the lawsuit reviewed by The Times. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accuses Brown of assault and battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The co-defendants include Live Nation, Sony, RCA Records, and another musician, among others.
In the 13-page complaint, Diaw claims he and a friend entered the nightclub and noticed Brown and the other artist “approaching them in a seemingly friendly manner.” The encounter took a turn when Brown allegedly began beating Diaw “on top of the head” with the tequila bottle, striking the top left side of his head three times, the lawsuit said. Diaw claims Brown — whose music career has been marred by numerous allegations of assault (he notably pleaded guilty to assaulting ex-girlfriend Rihanna) — “inflicted severe and lasting injuries” by smashing his head with the bottle and “continued to ruthlessly stomp on” him as he lay unconscious on the nightclub floor following the bottle attack. The other artist who was with Brown also allegedly kicked Diaw in the stomach and legs.
Nightclub staff intervened and brought Diaw out of the venue. Diaw was hospitalized “with lacerations on his head and torn ligaments on his leg,” according to the suit. He continues to suffer “double vision and significant pain in his legs” and needs continued treatment and therapy.
The bottle attack was captured by nightclub surveillance cameras and Metropolitan Police obtained the footage, the complaint said. Diaw also accuses Brown and the other co-defendants of engaging in “defamatory conduct by spreading false rumors about” his clients and claiming he “is a thief in an effort to sabotage professional relationships.”
Diaw seeks an unspecified amount in damages exceeding $25,000 including medical expenses, loss of earnings and other relief deemed appropriate by the court. The next hearing in the case is set for May 30. A jury trial is also set to begin in June 2026, according to a legal database.
Ryan J. Daneshrad, an attorney for Diaw, said in a statement shared with The Times on Thursday: “We can confirm that Chris Brown was involved in an incident with our client, and the injuries sustained are serious.
“We are pursuing all legal remedies to hold him accountable,” Daneshrad added. “At this time, we will let the facts speak for themselves through the proper legal channels.”
Brown’s arrest precedes the kickoff of his Breezy Bowl 20th anniversary tour in June. The performer will launch his slate of live performances on June 8 in Amsterdam. He is set to perform three shows in Manchester on June 15, 16 and 24.
After the European leg of his tour, Brown will come stateside beginning July 30 when he will perform in Miami. The stadium tour will come to Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium on Sept. 13 and 14.
Adam Sandler has no crocodile tears for “Happy Gilmore” co-star Morris the alligator — he has fond jokes instead.
The “Punch-Drunk Love” actor and comedian on Wednesday shared a playful tribute honoring his reptilian co-star who died Sunday of old age at a gator farm in southern Colorado. In the tribute, shared to Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), Sandler remembered the alligator’s time on the set of his quirky 1996 golf comedy.
“We are all gonna miss you. You could be hard on directors, make-up artists, costumers — really anyone with arms or legs,” Sandler captioned a movie still featuring himself and Morris, “but I know you did it for the ultimate good of the film.”
Jay Young, the owner and operator of Colorado Gator Farm, announced Morris’s death in an emotional video shared to Facebook. “He started acting strange about a week ago. He wasn’t lunging at us and wasn’t taking food,” Young said, stroking the reptile’s head.
“I know it’s strange to people that we get so attached to an alligator, to all of our animals,” Young added. “He had a happy time here, and he died of old age.”
In “Happy Gilmore,” Sandler’s unlikely golf star confronts the feisty gator played by Morris after a golf ball lands in his toothy jaws. After an unsuccessful attempt, Happy dives into the golf course pond where he pummels the reptile and retrieves the ball.
Morris was best known for “Happy Gilmore,” but also appeared in numerous screen projects including “Interview with the Vampire,” “Dr. Dolittle 2” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” before he retired in 2006. He was found as an illegal pet in the backyard of a Los Angeles home and sent to the Colorado Gator Farm.
In his tribute, Sandler said he learned a “powerful lesson” from Morris on the set of their film after he refused to “come out of your trailer” without the bait of 40 heads of lettuce: “Never compromise your art.” The “Wedding Singer” and “50 First Dates” star also reminisced on totally real encounters with the gator including sharing a candy bar.
“You let me have the bigger half,” he joked. “But that’s who you were.”
According to Sandler, Morris was a Hollywood veteran with classy habits. The “Uncut Gems” star joked that the alligator, despite his character’s death in the first film, sent the “Happy Gilmore” team a “fruit basket and [a] hilarious note” ahead of the long-anticipated sequel, which premieres in July.
“I will miss the sound of your tail sliding through the tall grass, your cold, bumpy skin, but, most of all, I will miss your infectious laugh,” Sandler concluded his eulogy. “Thanks to Mr. Young for taking care of you all these years, and vaya con dios, old friend.”
Colorado Gator Farm announced on Monday that it decided to preserve Morris’ body via taxidermy “so that he can continue to scare children for years to come.”
“It’s what he would have wanted,” the farm said on Facebook.
