Reasserting Trump’s false claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election, the administration doubled down on his decision to issue blanket pardons for the rioters, blamed Capitol Police for escalating tensions that day, and denounced Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, for “refusing to act” in defiance of the Constitution to stop congressional certification of Trump’s loss.
It was a display of political audacity that has become the hallmark of Trump’s second act — challenging anyone to stop him from asserting raw executive authority, both at home and increasingly abroad.
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Whether on foreign or domestic policy, lawmakers have struggled to respond to an administration that moves with unfettered restraint and exceptional speed. The U.S. Supreme Court has only facilitated Trump’s expansion of unitary executive power. And governments abroad accustomed to Trump’s lack of predictability now face a president whose entire philosophy toward foreign interventionism appears to have turned on a dime.
“There are political checks. They are checks, though, that have been degraded,” said William Howell, dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.”
“They are checks that are looked upon not just with frustration, but an outward animosity by the president,” Howell added. “It’s a feature of his populist politics for him to say, ‘anything that stands in my way is illegitimate.’”
Unitary rule
Trump’s extraordinary use of executive authority has no comparison in recent times. The president has issued more than 220 executive actions in his first year back in office — more than the 220 orders he issued throughout his entire first term, and dwarfing the 276 actions that President Obama issued over eight years in office.
Directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies, and deploying his pardon power to shield his friends and allies, Trump risks fueling the very sort of politicized system of justice he campaigned against as a presidential candidate.
And his administration has shown derision for Congress, controlled by the president’s own party, approving historically few bills and neglecting those that have passed, such as the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump has attempted to unilaterally rename the Defense Department and the Kennedy Center, despite straightforward laws requiring acts of Congress to do so, and has impounded funds appropriated by Congress for child care and family assistance allocated to Democratic states.
“The nature of presidential power is that it is given as much as taken,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.” “You can’t have an imperial presidency without an invisible Congress. And certainly, the current Congress is setting new records for intentional invisibility.”
After Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, a reporter asked his press secretary what was stopping him from knocking down the entire building. Karoline Leavitt demurred. “That’s a legal opinion that’s been held for many years,” she said, suggesting he could, in fact, demolish the rest of it.
“The institutional constraints on the unilateral presidency are weak,” said Dino Christenson, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of “The Myth of the Imperial Presidency.” “The conservative majority of the [Supreme] Court has also recently chosen to back executive power.
“Arguably,” he added, “international constraints are even weaker, at least for powerful nations like the U.S.”
‘Governed by force’
Trump’s order over the weekend to depose Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, seizing him and his wife from their bedroom in a stunning military raid, was the type of rare exercise in American power that has defined past presidencies. But Trump said he was just getting started.
Beaming from the operational success in Caracas, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was considering military action against no fewer than five countries, allies and foes alike. His homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, said that no one would even try to stop Trump from militarily taking over Greenland, an autonomous region of Denmark, a NATO ally and European Union member state.
“We live in a world,” Miller told CNN, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
At the State Department, veteran U.S. diplomats waited anxiously for guidance from the administration on how it would justify the operation based on international law on the global stage. It never came. “At least with Iraq, Libya, Syria, there was an effort to seek legal cover,” one diplomat said, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “This is just grab-and-go.”
After the president vowed to run Venezuela going forward as a vassal state, Trump’s energy secretary said the United States would exert control over its oil production “indefinitely.”
And the Trump administration ordered the seizure of two foreign tankers on Wednesday in international waters that have violated its unilateral oil embargo against Caracas, risking precedent governing the laws of the seas that have for decades ensured international commercial flows.
It was a surprising turn for a president who had campaigned on a promise to focus on domestic policy, under a slogan of “America first.”
“So many of the claims that he was making — both in terms of his power and his politics — was about an inward turn, about standing up for America and attending to core problems that it had failed to face, whereas all these foreign entanglements were distractions to be avoided,” Howell said. “So it is striking that he has assumed this new posture of outward imperialism — land grabs, oil tankers, removing heads of state — all at once.”
Several Republican lawmakers expressed skepticism over Trump’s new posture, warning the president against entrenching the U.S. military in foreign conflicts. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, warned that U.S. military action against Denmark in Greenland “would not be appropriate” after the White House issued an explicit threat of force.
Scholars of the imperial presidency often say that public opinion — not the legislature or the courts — remains the strongest check on executive authority. Trump is ineligible for a third term in office, and has signaled in recent weeks that he recognizes that constitutional limit as unambiguous.
“I don’t think Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity,” Rudalevige said. “Despite his bluster, he is a lame duck. He has never had a Gallup approval rating above 50%, and that rating is in the 30s. His policy actions are even less popular.”
But he also said he believes the public supports him in his brash use of power, telling lawmakers there could be a “constitutional movement” to keep him in office.
“MAGA loves it,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News this week, defending his foreign policy approach. “MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do.”
“MAGA is me,” he added. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday defended his actions during the Capitol riot five years ago, joked about being liberal-minded to win the votes of transgender people and mocked a predecessor’s use of a wheelchair while delivering a meandering speech to House Republicans as the party enters a critical election year facing a razor-thin majority in the House.
The remarks were intended to ensure both the GOP’s executive and legislative wings are aligned on their agenda heading into the November midterms that will determine party control of Congress. But Trump spent more time rehashing past grievances during the lengthy appearance than he did talking about the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro or specific steps he’s taking to bring down prices as polls say inflation is the public’s top concern.
He also did not discuss new policy initiatives or legislation on his agenda for the year.
“We won every swing state. We won the popular vote by millions. We won everything,” Trump said, recounting his performance in the 2024 presidential election while seeming to acknowledge that history will side with the Democratic Party in November.
“But they say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm,” he said.
Political trends show that the party that wins the White House usually loses seats in Congress during the midterm elections two years later.
But Trump did try to rally the caucus at times, asserting that his first year back in office was so successful that Republicans should win in November on that basis alone. He briefly touched on Venezuela and talked about money coming into the U.S. through tariffs and direct investment and negotiations to bring down drug prices.
“You have so many good nuggets. You have to use them. If you can sell them, we’re going to win,” Trump said. He claimed that “we’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history and it should be a positive.”
The House GOP is facing a sudden narrowing of their already thin majority with the death of California Rep. Doug LaMalfa, announced Tuesday, and the resignation of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which took effect at midnight.
“You can’t be tough when you have a majority of three, and now, sadly, a little bit less than that,” Trump said after paying tribute to LaMalfa, noting the challenges House Speaker Mike Johnson faces in keeping their ranks unified.
The president also noted that Rep. Jim Baird (R-Wis.) was recovering after a “bad” car accident, further slimming Johnson’s vote margins.
House Republicans convened as they launch their new year agenda, with healthcare issues in particular dogging the GOP heading into the midterm elections. Votes on extending expired health insurance subsidies are expected as soon as this week, and it’s unclear whether the president and the party will try to block its passage.
Trump said he would be meeting soon with 14 companies to discuss health insurance.
In remarks that approached 90 minutes, Trump also mused about unconstitutionally seeking a third term as president. He claimed it was never reported that he urged his supporters to walk “peacefully and patriotically” on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Capitol, where they rioted to try to overturn his election loss. He used his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, to poke at President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who used a wheelchair.
According to the president, she thinks the dancing he does at his rallies is not presidential.
“She actually said, ‘Could you imagine FDR dancing?’ She actually said that to me,” Trump said. “And I said there’s a long history that perhaps she doesn’t know.”
GOP lawmakers were hosting a daylong policy forum at the Kennedy Center, where the board, stocked by Trump with loyalists, recently voted to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. The move is being challenged in court.
Trump and Johnson are trying to corral Republicans at a time when rank-and-file lawmakers have felt increasingly emboldened to buck Trump and the leadership’s wishes, on issues such as the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The meeting also comes days after the Trump administration’s dramatic capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, which occurred after a months-long U.S. campaign to pressure the now-deposed leader by building up American forces in the waters off South America and bombing boats alleged to have been carrying drugs.
The Maduro capture is reigniting the debate about Trump’s powers over Congress to authorize the campaign against Venezuela, though House Republican lawmakers have largely been supportive of the administration’s efforts there.
Kim and Superville write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Will Weissert contributed to this report.
UK’s King Charles III praises Schloss for her lifelong work on ‘overcoming hatred and prejudice’ around the world.
Eva Schloss, the Auschwitz survivor who dedicated decades to educating people about the Holocaust, and who was the stepsister of diarist Anne Frank, has died aged 96, according to her foundation.
The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was the honorary president, said on Sunday that she died on Saturday in London, where she lived.
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The United Kingdom’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who co-founded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice.
“The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend, and yet, she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through her tireless work for the Anne Frank Trust UK and for Holocaust education across the world,” the king said.
In a statement posted on X, the European Jewish Congress said it was “deeply saddened” by the passing of Schloss, who it described as a “powerful voice” for Holocaust education.
Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
She became friends with another Jewish girl of the same age, Anne Frank, whose diary would become one of the most famous chronicles of the Holocaust.
Like the Franks, Eva’s family spent two years in hiding to avoid capture after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. They were eventually betrayed, arrested and sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
Schloss and her mother, Fritzi, survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Her father, Erich, and brother, Heinz, died in Auschwitz.
After the war, Eva moved to the UK, married German-Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss, and settled in London.
In 1953, her mother married Frank’s father, Otto, the only member of his immediate family to survive.
Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, months before the end of the war.
Schloss did not speak publicly about her experiences for decades, later saying that wartime trauma had made her withdrawn and unable to connect with others.
“I was silent for years, first because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then, I repressed it. I was angry with the world,” she told The Associated Press news agency in 2004.
But after she addressed the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London in 1986, Schloss made it her mission to educate younger generations about the Nazi genocide.
Over the following decades, she spoke in schools, prisons and international conferences, and told her story in books, including Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.
She kept campaigning into her 90s.
“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘other’,” Schloss said in 2024.
Schloss is survived by their three daughters, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Bob Pulford, a Hockey Hall of Fame player who went on to a lengthy career in the NHL as a coach and general manager, has died. He was 89.
A spokesperson for the NHL Alumni Assn. said Monday the organization learned of Pulford’s death from his family. No other details were provided.
A tough, dependable forward, Pulford helped the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup four times during his 14-year stretch with them from 1956 to 1970. The Newton Robinson, Canada, native was part of the 1967 team that remains the organization’s last to win a championship.
He was picked for five All-Star games and led the league in shorthanded goals three times. After recording 694 points in 1,168 regular-season and playoff games, Pulford was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991.
Off the ice, Pulford was the first president of the players union, taking part in early collective bargaining and laying the foundation for the modern NHLPA.
Pulford spent his final two playing seasons with the Kings in the early 1970s before coaching them for the following five years. He then ran the Chicago Blackhawks’ front office as general manager or senior vice president of hockey operations for three decades from 1977 to 2007, going behind the bench to coach four times during that span.
“Whether coach, general manager, senior executive, or even multiple at the same time, Bob wasn’t afraid to serve in whatever role was most needed at the time and take on the different challenges associated with each that seem unthinkable by today’s standards,” said Blackhawks chairman and Chief Executive Officer Danny Wirtz, whose grandfather, Bill, employed Pulford. “We are grateful for his leadership and devotion to the sport, which will forever be part of our club’s history.”
Former LA Kings Captain, Bob Pulford passed away earlier today. Bob spent seven seasons in Los Angeles, including 5 as Head Coach, earning the Jack Adams Trophy.
Our sincere condolences are with the Pulford Family, including his daughter Wandamae, and son-in-law, Dean Lombardi. pic.twitter.com/lVtxKWP9V6
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said Pulford “left an indelible mark on the game,” especially given the various roles he filled.
“Bob became a friend, counselor and confidant to me — particularly in my early years as commissioner — and I had enormous respect for him and all he gave the game,” Bettman said.
The NHL Alumni Assn. in a post memorializing Pulford called him “one of the most respected figures in the history of hockey.”
“Rest in peace, Bob,” the NHLAA said. “Your impact on hockey and on all who had the privilege of knowing you will never be forgotten.”
WASHINGTON — Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.
It’s not on display at the Capitol, as is required by law. Its whereabouts aren’t publicly known, though it’s believed to be in storage.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.
Determined to preserve the nation’s history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they’ve mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances.
“On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” reads the faux bronze stand-in for the real thing. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.”
Jan. 6 void in the Capitol
In Washington, a capital city lined with monuments to the nation’s history, the plaque was intended to become a simple but permanent marker, situated near the Capitol’s west front, where some of the most violent fighting took place as rioters breached the building.
But in its absence, the missing plaque makes way for something else entirely — a culture of forgetting.
Visitors can pass through the Capitol without any formal reminder of what happened that day, when a mob of President Trump’s supporters stormed the building trying to overturn the Republican’s 2020 reelection defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. With memory left unchecked, it allows new narratives to swirl and revised histories to take hold.
Five years ago, the jarring scene watched the world over was declared an “insurrection” by the then-GOP leader of the Senate, while the House GOP leader at the time called it his “saddest day” in Congress. But those condemnations have faded.
Trump calls it a “day of love.” And Johnson, who was among those lawmakers challenging the 2020 election results, is now the House speaker.
“The question of January 6 remains – democracy was on the guillotine — how important is that event in the overall sweep of 21st century U.S. history,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University and noted scholar.
“Will January 6 be seen as the seminal moment when democracy was in peril?” he asked. Or will it be remembered as “kind of a weird one-off?”
“There’s not as much consensus on that as one would have thought on the fifth anniversary,” he said.
Memories shift, but violent legacy lingers
At least five people died in the riot and its aftermath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by police while trying to climb through a window toward the House chamber. More than 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, some gravely, and several died later, some by suicide.
All told, some 1,500 people were charged in the Capitol attack, among the largest federal prosecutions in the nation’s history. When Trump returned to power in January 2025, he pardoned all of them within hours of taking office.
Unlike the twin light beams that commemorated the Sept. 11, 2001, attack or the stand-alone chairs at the Oklahoma City bombing site memorial, the failure to recognize Jan. 6 has left a gap not only in memory but in helping to stitch the country back together.
“That’s why you put up a plaque,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa. “You respect the memory and the service of the people involved.”
Police sue over Jan. 6 plaque, DOJ seeks to dismiss
The speaker’s office over the years has suggested it was working on installing the plaque, but it declined to respond to a request for further comment.
Lawmakers approved the plaque in March 2022 as part of a broader government funding package. The resolution said the U.S. “owes its deepest gratitude to those officers,” and it set out instructions for an honorific plaque listing the names of officers “who responded to the violence that occurred.” It gave a one-year deadline for installation at the Capitol.
This summer, two officers who fought the mob that day sued over the delay.
“By refusing to follow the law and honor officers as it is required to do, Congress encourages this rewriting of history,” said the claim by officers Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges. “It suggests that the officers are not worthy of being recognized, because Congress refuses to recognize them.”
The Justice Department is seeking to have the case dismissed. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and others argued Congress “already has publicly recognized the service of law enforcement personnel” by approving the plaque and displaying it wouldn’t alleviate the problems they claim to face from their work.
“It is implausible,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote, to suggest installation of the plaque “would stop the alleged death threats they claim to have been receiving.”
The department also said the plaque is required to include the names of “all law enforcement officers” involved in the response that day — some 3,600 people.
Makeshift memorials emerge
Lawmakers who’ve installed replicas of the plaque outside their offices said it’s important for the public to know what happened.
“There are new generations of people who are just growing up now who don’t understand how close we came to losing our democracy on Jan 6, 2021,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Jan. 6 committee, which was opposed by GOP leadership but nevertheless issued a nearly 1,000-page report investigating the run-up to the attack and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Raskin envisions the Capitol one day holding tours around what happened. “People need to study that as an essential part of American history,” he said.
“Think about the dates in American history that we know only by the dates: There’s the 4th of July. There’s December 7th. There’s 9/11. And there’s January 6th,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-calif., who also served on the committee and has a plaque outside her office.
“They really saved my life, and they saved the democracy and they deserve to be thanked for it,” she said.
But as time passes, there are no longer bipartisan memorial services for Jan. 6. On Tuesday, the Democrats will reconvene members from the Jan. 6 committee for a hearing to “examine ongoing threats to free and fair elections,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York announced. It’s unlikely Republicans will participate.
The Republicans under Johnson have tapped Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia to stand up their own special committee to uncover what the speaker calls the “full truth” of what happened. They’re planning a hearing this month.
“We should stop this silliness of trying to whitewash history — it’s not going to happen,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., who helped lead the effort to display the replica plaques.
“I was here that day so I’ll never forget,” he said. “I think that Americans will not forget what happened.”
The number of makeshift plaques that fill the halls is a testimony to that remembrance, he said.
Instead of one plaque, he said, they’ve “now got 100.”
George Skelton and Michael Wilner cover the insights, legislation, players and politics you need to know in 2024. In your inbox Monday and Thursday mornings.
SACRAMENTO — Congratulations, you survived 2025. What will the new year bring? Joy and prosperity for all, hopefully, but it’s hard to say.
Few in California could have predicted some of the most life-changing events of 2025 — the deadly Los Angeles area wildfires, the Trump administration’s militant, often inhumane immigration crackdown and an obscure congressional redistricting fight that could alter the balance of power in Washington.
With that in mind, California can expect one of 2026’s most consequential stories to be the turmoil in Sacramento over the entrenched state budget deficit — which will be compounded by the massive federal healthcare cuts by the Trump administration.
Happy New Year! This is Phil Willon, the California Politics editor for the Los Angeles Times, filling in for columnist George Skelton. Along with the state budget crisis, 2026 will bring a wide-open race for governor — and the person the candidates hope to replace, Gov. Gavin Newsom, is flirting with a run for president in 2028 and has just a year left in his final term to deliver on all his promises. So buckle up and visit latimes.com early and often.
An $18-billion problem
The California Legislature returns to work Monday for the 2026 session, and a major financial headache awaits.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the state will have an $18 billion budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year – $5 billion higher than what the Newsom administration predicted in June.
As Times reporter Katie King reported earlier, state revenue has been improving, but a shortfall is still expected. That’s because mandatory spending requirements under Proposition 98, which sets minimum annual funding for public schools, and Proposition 2, which specifies reserve deposits and debt payments, almost entirely offset any gains, according to the legislative analysis.
And it gets worse. The LAO said that, starting in 2027-28, California’s structural deficits are expected to grow to about $35 billion annually “due to spending growth continuing to outstrip revenue growth.”
The solution? Cut spending and/or increase revenue, the LAO report says.
But cut what, and raise money how? That’s up to Newsom and the Legislature to decide, and their difficult task will begin later this week when the governor releases his proposed budget.
Poking the billionaire
One controversial idea — outside of the legislative process — already is being kicked around.
A November ballot measure proposed by a labor organization, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires that could raise $100 billion for healthcare programs. Opponents say it will drive wealthy, taxpaying, job-creating, economy-driving Californians out of the state.
The measure has yet to qualify for the November ballot but will receive ample attention regardless.
The California Budget & Policy Center estimates that as many as 3.4 million Californians could lose Medi-Cal coverage, more rural hospitals could close and other healthcare services would be slashed unless a new funding source is found.
Federal cuts to healthcare
If California does not backfill those federal cuts by raising taxes, or other creative means, costs for the state will still increase, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. That seems counterintuitive, since millions of Californians may lose coverage. But under the “Big Beautiful Bill,” cuts to federal cost sharing and a drop in health provider tax revenue will far outpace any potential cost savings for the state.
Newsom’s possible White House run will ensure that California’s budget shortfall and liberal policies it spends money on will whip up the nation’s caustic partisan divide. Near the top of the list will be California’s decision to extend state-sponsored healthcare coverage to low-income, undocumented immigrants. The expansion has cost the state billions and drawn sharp criticism from Republicans and, last year, Newsom and the Democratic-led Legislature reduced the expansion of state-sponsored healthcare to those immigrants due to the high cost.
On top of that, the monthly premiums for federally subsidized plans available on the Covered California exchange — often referred to as Obamacare — will soar by 97% on average for 2026. That’s due to decisions by the Republican-led Congress and Trump not to extend federal subsidies for that coverage. State officials estimate that roughly 400,000 Californians will drop their coverage under the program because of the higher cost. And California counties are ill prepared to step into the breach, as KFF Health News recently reported.
Needless to say, the healthcare situation will be extremely volatile in 2026, which will make the state’s upcoming high-stakes budget process even more unpredictable.
How Spain conquered with armies and missionaries, fusing faith, force and gold into global dominance.
This film explores how the Spanish empire built its global dominance by fusing military conquest, religious conversion and imperial wealth.
At the heart of the Spanish expansion was the close alliance between crown, church and conquest. Military campaigns were inseparable from missionary efforts as conversion to Christianity became both a justification for empire and a tool of control. Faith and force advanced together, reshaping societies across the Americas.
Through the conquests of the Aztec and Incan empires, the documentary shows how Spanish power was established through violence, alliances and religious authority. The mission system spread across the Americas, reorganising Indigenous life around churches, labour regimes and colonial administration. Conversion promised salvation but enforced obedience and cultural destruction.
The film also examines the economic foundations of Spanish imperial power. Vast quantities of gold and silver were extracted from the Americas alongside the exploitation of Indigenous and enslaved labour. These resources fuelled European economies, financed global trade and helped integrate the Americas into an emerging world system built on extraction and inequality.
By tracing how faith, conquest and wealth operated together, the documentary reveals how Spanish colonialism shaped global capitalism, religious power and imperial governance. It shows how the legacies of conquest, forced conversion and resource extraction continue to influence social inequality, cultural identity and economic structures in the modern world and how current global superpowers like the United States and China adopt this model to their benefit. It also draws on the parallels between the erasure of cultural artefacts then and today’s “algorithmic colonisation”.
Cape Town, South Africa – Lucy Campbell, with her long grey dreadlocks, stands animated in front of the thick stone walls of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town’s city centre, her small frame accentuated by their towering height.
The 65-year-old activist-turned-historian has a message for the 10 American students who have come to hear her version of the city’s history. Dressed in a black hoodie and blue jeans, Campbell is well-spoken but shows her disdain for Cape Town’s colonial past, often erupting in harsh language for those she blames for its consequences.
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“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says at the beginning of her five-stop tour of the city. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”
Campbell refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, which she sees as a symbol of the violence and dispossession that the colonial era brought to South Africa’s second biggest city.
“That is where they used to hang people,” she says, pointing to one of the castle’s five bastions. It was built by the settlers of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known by its Dutch acronym, VOC. The VOC built the fortress as part of its efforts to establish a refreshment post between the Netherlands and other trade destinations in the East. The castle is now run by the South African military.
Campbell, an accredited tour guide, has been giving privately run tours like this for 17 years, starting at the castle and offering a scathing critique of the city’s monuments and museums for dozens of people each year.
She says most official tributes, such as the Slave Memorial erected in 2008 in Church Square, fail to do justice to the enslaved people who contributed to the construction of Cape Town and often neglect to acknowledge the Indigenous population that lived here for hundreds of years before the Dutch arrived in 1652, displacing them and introducing slavery to the Cape.
Campbell can still see clear echoes in the city of the “genocide” and dispossession of the Khoi people, the Indigenous herders who lived on this land for thousands of years. She remembers her mother’s stories about how this history personally affected her family, who are descendants of the famously wealthy Hessequa, a subset of the Khoi. The Hessequa lost their land and livestock to the Dutch.
Known as “the people of the trees”, the Hessequa lived for centuries in the farming area now known as Swellendam, about 220km (137 miles) east of Cape Town. The arrival of European settlers transformed them from land and cattle owners to peasant workers employed by white people, conditions that in many places persist to this day.
Land ownership in Cape Town and South Africa as a whole remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the white minority. Rights groups have also accused white farmers of sometimes abusing predominantly mixed-race agricultural workers and evicting them on a whim, a practice that has carried on since the colonial era.
“Many of them have worked there for generations, and they are just being evicted,” Campbell says. “There’s no pension. There’s nothing. So the ailments of the past [continue].”
Visitors enter Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope, one of South Africa’s oldest surviving colonial buildings [Esa Alexander/Reuters]
The coloniality of the museum
With a resume that includes posts ranging from trade union administrator and mechanic’s assistant to historian, Campbell started her tours after working at the Groot Constantia estate of the VOC colonial Governor Simon van der Stel, now a museum. This is where she got her first taste for history.
When she started working on the estate as an information officer in 1998, she found that the history of enslaved and Indigenous people was largely erased on the property, including the “tot” system, the use of wine as payments to workers that dates back centuries and was still in use on some Cape Town farms years after the fall of apartheid in 1994.
Alarmed by this erasure of her ancestors at the estate, Campbell resigned and pursued a degree in history. Armed with a postgraduate degree specialising in the history of slavery in the Cape,Campbell established Transcending History Tours in 2008.
Her academic research uncovered the inherently colonial nature of museums globally. She discovered that human remains were held in museums, universities and in private ownership, especially in Europe. The South African Museum, founded in 1825, housed human remains that were used in studies that sought to reinforce racist ideologies, such as seeking to prove that non-Europeans were racially inferior. Even though these studies have been halted, the remains continued to be housed by these institutions.
Campbell would prefer that the museums she tours be decentralised and relocated to the Cape Flats, a mainly nonwhite working-class area where Campbell and most descendants of the Khoi and enslaved people live. She argues this would make the museums more accessible to these communities, bringing them closer to their personal histories and demonstrating that their current difficult living conditions and marginalisation are not natural or inevitable, but rather the result of a cruel past.
“At night, this place is filled with homeless people,” she says on a sunny morning in September as the tour leaves the castle.
A few steps away, past two lions perched on pillars at the castle’s entrance and a moat filled with fish and pondweed, a barefoot man is asleep on the sidewalk while a woman in a bra and camouflage pants scrounges for food in the shrubs. Like most of the unhoused on the wealthy city’s streets, they are people of colour.
The tour passes the Grand Parade, the city’s public square and oldest urban open space, where the mud and wood predecessor to the existing castle stood. For many years, it served as a training ground for the colonial garrison before becoming a marketplace, surrounded by striking buildings, such as the Edwardian City Hall.
The parade’s most famous moment in modern South African history was as the setting of Nelson Mandela’s first public speech after his release from prison in 1990. Today, traders still gather here to sell everything from brightly coloured dashikis (colourful, traditional garments) to kitchen electronics.
Krotoa, a Khoi woman, was the first Indigenous person in South Africa to have an official interracial marriage [File: Creative Commons]
A ‘trailblazer’
A few blocks away, the group stops to look at a plaque in St George’s Mall dedicated to one of Campbell’s heroes, Krotoa, a Khoi woman known as the progenitor of Cape Town’s mixed-race population after her marriage to a Danish surgeon.
The plaque dedicated to her in this busy modern commercial area feels misplaced and superficial to Campbell, who says it fails to celebrate the woman’s historical significance. Campbell also dislikes the commonly used image of Krotoa on the plaque, which she says is fabricated.
“The Krotoa that I know, she’s a trailblazer. She’s an interpreter. She’s a negotiator,” Campbell says.
The niece of the Khoi chief Autshumato, Krotoa joined the household of the first Dutch governor in the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, at about the age of 12. As one of the first Indigenous interpreters, she became a mediator between the Dutch and the Khoi, playing a key role in the cattle trade, which was vital to the settlers’ survival at the Cape. She also negotiated in the conflict that arose between locals and the settlers.
Krotoa’s influence in van Riebeeck’s government eventually led to her becoming the first Indigenous person to be baptised as a Christian in 1662 and adopting the name Eva. She married a Danish soldier, who was later appointed as the VOC surgeon, Pieter van Meerhof, in 1664, and the couple became the Cape’s first recorded interracial marriage.
In the end, though, Krotoa was a controversial figure: Khoi leaders criticised her for adopting colonial ways, and both they and Dutch officials accused her of being a spy for the other side.
“She went right into the kitchens of the Dutch,” Campbell says. “She used to tell them, ‘I know you. I know who you are. You can’t do anything for yourself. Slaves have to do everything for you.’”
Campbell says Krotoa was instrumental as a mediator in the first Khoi-Dutch war, which lasted from 1659 to 1660 and was sparked by a campaign led by local Khoi leader Nommoa, or Doman, to reclaim the Cape Peninsula. The Dutch were victorious against the two Khoi groups, the Gorinhaiqua and the Gorachouqua, and expelled them from the peninsula to mountain outposts about 70km (44 miles) away.
Asked what she would consider a fitting memorial for Krotoa, Campbell says: “Monuments are Eurocentric and hierarchic. Where her memorial should be, I am not sure. What I know is that her story and her memory should be a popular memory and part of our learning in schools and in other tertiary learning. She and her Danish husband van Meerhof were sent to Robben Island. She also spent lots of time at the first castle, which is today’s Golden Acre [shopping mall], and her so-called plaque in Castle Street is a humiliation of the contributions she made in resisting the colony in favour of her people.”
A seal from the Registrar of Slaves and Deeds is seen on display at the Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town [File: Mike Hutchings/Reuters]
Profits over people
Around the corner from Krotoa’s memorial in Castle Street, Campbell stops at another VOC landmark – the cobbled walkway featuring the VOC’s bronze emblem framed by an outline of the castle’s five ramparts.
“I want you to see how the VOC is embedded right in the fabric of the city,” she says, pointing to the insignia emblazoned in the street.
Then she directs her tour’s attention to nearby skyscrapers, which she views as symbols of wealth rooted in VOC exploitation.
As she speaks, workers on their lunch breaks walk by while others sell beaded jewellery, paintings, leather handbags and other wares in stalls dotted along the mall. Most of these workers live in overcrowded townships far outside the city, which is famed for its French Riviera-like lifestyle and has often been voted one of the world’s top tourist destinations.
“For me, it’s important to speak of that company, the first company that came here,” Campbell says, explaining the origin of capitalism in the region.
“It comes from there – profits before people. It comes from history. … The VOC is alive and kicking in the city.”
Restoring memory
The most haunting stop on the tour comes next: the Slave Lodge. It stands on the doorstep of the parliament precinct and the gardens that the VOC established to provide fresh produce to ships journeying between the East and the Netherlands.
Thousands of enslaved people from as far away as Angola, Benin, Indonesia, India and Madagascar were housed here from 1679 to 1811. Converted into a museum, it contains artefacts, including shackles and the reconstructed hull of a slave ship as well as a plinth recording the names of the enslaved people – names assigned to them by slave owners when they arrived at the Cape.
The Slave Lodge in Cape Town housed thousands of enslaved people from 1679 to 1811 [Creative Commons]
Campbell objects to the pristine exhibits, saying they are in stark contrast to the building’s dark history as a place of suffering and violence. One of the most horrific aspects of life there was the sexual violence inflicted by soldiers on women, including rape and coercion into sex work, often with payments made to the VOC.
This violent culture has had lasting effects, contributing to today’s high levels of sexual crimes and domestic violence on the Cape Flats, according to Campbell.
“The Slave Lodge does not get the reflection that it should get,” Campbell tells her tour. “It is very much veneered and made palatable to the visitors. It doesn’t bring the voices of the women in.”
The tour ends in the street behind the Slave Lodge, where Campbell shows the tourists a macabre landmark they might otherwise miss. On a traffic island in the middle of Spin Street is the spot where the city’s slave auctions were once held. A tree that marked the spot was chopped down in 1916. In its place, a slab of stone was installed in 1953, inscribed with a fading and barely legible message about its historical significance.
“It looks like a drain,” Campbell says, noting the sharp contrast between this neglected memorial and the bronze statue of Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, oddly situated in front of the Slave Lodge, where the plaque bearing his name has been restored to a brilliant gleam.
In 2008, the city tried to rectify this oversight at the auction site, unveiling a commemorative art installation designed by prominent artists Gavin Younge and Wilma Cruise across the street. It consists of 11 granite blocks, roughly at knee height, inscribed with the assigned names of enslaved people and words that recall their tortured reality: “Suicide, infanticide, abscond, escape, flee.”
Activists have criticised the installation for being too cold and failing to convey the deep wounds left by nearly 200 years of slavery.
“Birds s*** on it, people sit on it, but they don’t know what it is,” Campbell says. “They have the names of the slaves that were held at the Slave Lodge, but there’s no story. … It’s a monument that only serves the master, at the end of the day, because it doesn’t bring out the pain of the people.
“I would have loved to see a high rise to bring out the memory of the people, … something more visible.”
Historian Lucy Campbell, third from right, poses with American students at the end of her tour through historic sites that tell the story of slavery and colonialism in Cape Town [Gershwin Wanneburg/Al Jazeera]
A combination of a world record-breaking trawler, a floating lighthouse and a dizzying array of maritime objects that include a stuffed polar bear called Erik are all helping to make Hull one of the top 25 places in the world to visit in 2026.
The East Yorkshire city is on the verge of completing an ambitious £70m transformation, which, supporters believe, will propel it into becoming an international tourist destination.
Eyebrows have been raised about the inclusion of Hull, a city that had a reputation problem even in the 17th century, when the poet John Taylor wrote: “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us.”
Neither eyebrow of Mike Ross, the city council’s Liberal Democrat leader, went up when he heard the news. “There was a sense of surprise for some,” he said. “But why shouldn’t Hull be one of the top 25 places? It has got so much going for it. This is a place that can do things and we want more people to see that.”
The newly restored Arctic Corsair trawler, known as Hull’s Cutty Sark, one of several projects that are part of a £70m transformation of the city. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
When the Guardian visited on a rainy day in December, it was clear that everything is nearly there. Finishing touches and final decisions are being made for a series of openings taking place in 2026.
A vessel called the Spurn Lightship, which for 50 years guided ships through the treacherous waters of the Humber estuary, will reopen to the public after a makeover.
Swathes of public space are being improved, including a £21m refurbishment of Queen’s Gardens, a former dock; and the city’s much-missed Maritime Museum will reopen after a five-year closure.
The ambitious project is a legacy from Hull’s UK city of culture success in 2017 and has had a number of frustrating delays, but 2026 will be the year things finally start happening.
The Spurn Lightship will reopen to the public after a makeover. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
The Arctic Corsair, the project’s centrepiece, is a deep-sea trawler built in 1960 that operated during the cod wars with Iceland and which once broke world records for landing the largest amount of cod and haddock in a year.
It is an emblem of Hull’s proud trawling history – still within living memory – and has been a visitor attraction since 1999. It was badly in need of restoration and closed to the public in 2018. Today, the 57-metre-long boat positively gleams.
The Arctic Corsair was restored by Dunston Ship Repairs in Hull, where it is docked, and everyone involved in the project has praised the company for going above and beyond what was expected.
For Dave Clark, the technical director at Dunston, it has clearly been a passion project but he will be happy when it makes its way to its permanent home. “People need to be on it, it needs to be seen,” he said. “People need to hear the stories, to see the working conditions … men working 16 hours a day.
“We are all from Hull and most of the people who work for us have been involved in the fishing industry their whole life and you can see the pride that has been put into it.”
Hull Maritime Museum will reopen after a five-year closure. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Moving the trawler from its current berth to its dry dock home will be a huge challenge involving dredging and a possible 20-point turn.
Men who used to work on the Arctic Corsair have also volunteered their memories and knowledge. They include Cliff Gledhill, a retired maritime engineer who seems to know every working part of the boat’s machinery and huge, labyrinthine engine room.
“It’s 52 years since I first came on this ship,” he said. “If the ship broke down, it doesn’t matter where it was … Iceland or Norway or wherever, the chances were that one of us [engineers] would go.”
He said the Arctic Corsair was important to Hull. “It was a very successful ship with quite a history. It was the pride of the fleet. This is going to be a massive attraction.”
Cliff Gledhill, a retired maritime engineer, on the newly restored Arctic Corsair. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
At the city’s Maritime Museum, housed in former dock offices, the rooms are still largely empty but the roof has been fixed, display cabinets are being put in place and boxes are ready to be emptied.
Robin Diaper, a curator, said the museum was a place for tourists to spend time but also somewhere local people could pop in to see Erik, the popular polar bear on long-term loan from Dundee, while they were shopping.
“We wanted to make the whole project world-class,” said Diaper. “It’s of a standard you might see in New York or Paris or London. But we also want a young mother from the Orchard Park estate to be able to just walk in and for it to be hers as well.”
The Ferens Art Gallery in Hull city centre is also a draw for tourists. Photograph: Andrew Paterson/Alamy
Rooms in the museum that were previously off limits are being used to display far more objects, more boldly. The grade II*-listed former docks building was badly in need of restoration. When it rained, plastic sheeting had to be placed over whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling.
Hull also has the Ferens Art Gallery, the Wilberforce House Museum and its spectacular aquarium, The Deep. With everything happening in 2026 it is a world-class destination for visitors, say tourism officers.
For the council leader Ross, the challenge is for people not to be surprised they might have a great time in Hull, but to know in advance that they will. “If we can do that, we’ve made it,” he said.
I use the words “national treasure” hesitantly because they smack of trite hyperbole. But they truly fit.
That’s because it was Cannon who brought to light through several Reagan books innumerable broad details of the actor-turned-politician’s important and often controversial actions as America’s 40th president and California’s 33rd governor.
Bookshelves are crammed with Reagan tomes. But no author has been so thorough on a sweeping scale as Cannon. That’s because he put in the time and did the hard work of sifting through records and conducting hundreds of interviews, then painstakingly explaining it all in very readable nongovernmentese.
Reagan once asked Cannon why he was embarking on yet another book about him. “I’m going to do it until I get it right,” the writer replied, only half-jokingly, according to Cannon’s son, longtime journalist Carl Cannon.
That’s an invaluable contribution to historians and contemporary America’s sense of this oft-misunderstood and underestimated world leader.
But that’s not what mainly prompted me to write this column. I wanted to point out Cannon’s core strength. And that was his dedication to strict nonpartisanship in writing, whether it be straight news stories for the Washington Post, syndicated columns or his Reagan biographies.
I knew Cannon for 60 years, competed against him covering Reagan for at least 20 and we became friends very early based on professional respect. In none of my countless conversations with him did I ever learn whether he leaned right or left. He registered to vote as an “independent,” as do many of us political journalists.
Cannon was the type of journalist that millions of Americans — particularly conservative Republicans and MAGA loyalists — claim is rare today: An unbiased reporter who doesn’t slant stories toward one side or the other, especially left.
Actually, most straight news reporters follow that nonpartisan credo or they leave the business. Columnists? We’re supposed to be opinionated. But for some, their opinions are too often rooted more in predetermined bias than in objective facts. But that has always been true, even in the so-called “good ol’ days.”
Cannon’s sole goal was to report the news accurately with analysis and, if possible, beat his competitors to the punch. He beat us plenty, I hate to admit.
I vividly remember one such beating:
At the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Cannon scooped everyone for a full news cycle on Reagan selecting former campaign rival George Bush as his vice presidential running mate. Still pounding in my ears are the loud whoops and cheers by Cannon’s colleagues as he walked into the Post working area — next to the Los Angeles Times quarters — after Reagan formally announced Bush’s selection. It was deflating.
News sources readily opened up to Cannon, who was intense but always wore a slight smile.
I asked former Reagan speechwriter and Republican strategist Ken Khachigian what Cannon’s secret was.
“You’d get a fair shot from him,” Khachigian says. “He’d always be straight. He just wanted to get information mostly and find out what was going on.
“He had a way of talking to people that made them comfortable and he’d get a lot out of them. He wasn’t aggressive. He had a soft personality, one of his benefits. He’d put people at ease, a big advantage.”
His son, Carl Cannon, says: “If he’d been in politics, he’d have been a Democrat. But he didn’t go into politics. He went into journalism. He wasn’t partisan. He was a reporter who wanted to know what happened and why.”
Cannon began covering the state Capitol in 1965 for the San Jose Mercury News and became friends with Jud Clark, a young legislative staffer. Clark ultimately co-founded the monthly California Journal and persuaded Cannon to write for it on the side. Cannon did that for many years and when it folded, followed up by writing columns for a successor publication, the Capitol Weekly.
Cannon just loved to report and write and juggled it all in — reporting full time for the Washington Post, authoring books and writing for friends’ small publications in Sacramento.
“He would always want something new. In interviews, he didn’t want the standard stock story,” Clark says.
“Lou was curious about everything,” says Rich Ehisen, his longtime editor at Capitol Weekly. “He liked understanding what was going on and breaking things down. He told the straight story unvarnished. Never shortchanged on facts.”
Cannon was a workaholic, but he also knew how to carve out time for fun.
One summer while we covered Reagan vacationing at his beloved Santa Barbara hilltop ranch, Cannon decided he wanted to drive down to Los Angeles to see a Dodgers’ night game. But it’s risky to abandon your post while bird-dogging the president. Anything could happen. And you’d need to explain to your bosses why you weren’t there but your competitors were.
Cannon’s solution was to also get good seats for the two reporters he considered his main competitors– Steve Weisman of the New York Times and me at the L.A. Times. We’d provide each other some cover if any news broke out around the president, which it didn’t. Cannon even managed to wrangle us free dinners in a large suite overlooking the playing field.
He’ll be missed as a friend and a journalist — but not as an unrelenting competitor.
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Books can be a refuge from (waves arms) all this, even when they take you deeper into the darkness of 2025. There is a grace in the relationship between book and reader, with nothing but your eyes and brain and the words on the page. Thank goodness for the hearts and minds of the authors who imagine and construct these worlds, who ask these rigorous questions, who spend their lives with words. It’s a pleasure to join with a couple of my fellow book critics in selecting some of our favorite books of the year. — Carolyn Kellogg
Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.
“Audition: A Novel” by Katie Kitamura
(Riverhead)
“Audition” By Katie Kitamura Riverhead: 208 pages, $28
This is one of those books the less explained the better. Kitamura is one of our most exacting novelists, with never a careless word. On its surface, “Audition” is about an actress, her husband and a young man in New York City. As you’d expect with this setup, the ideas of self, performance and identity are in the mix. Every observation, theater visit and glimpse into their apartment becomes quietly important. The marriage’s past spools out with such clarity that what they have for breakfast becomes ominous. Every relationship has secrets, but this one’s are transformative. Elements of this book that cannot be prized apart also cannot cohere. It’s an astonishing accomplishment of form and narrative. It’s a rare book that can surprise like this one does. And it’s a delight to read. — C.K.
“Flesh: A Novel” by David Szalay
(Scribner)
“Flesh” By David Szalay Scribner: 368 pages, $28.99
Emotionally stunted men aren’t particularly hard to find in fiction. But Istvan, the antihero of Szalay’s fifth novel, is an extreme and engrossing case. Born in poverty and surviving an adolescence of sexual violation, wartime PTSD and drug abuse, he enters early adulthood destined to be a casualty if not a menace. But a lucky chance gives him money and a relationship, until his failure to deal with past traumas catches up with him. This novel, winner of the Booker Prize, uses a blunt, clipped style to advantage, exposing Istvan as an exemplar of both toxic masculinity and hinting at what’s required to escape it. — Mark Athitakis
“Flashlight” by Susan Choi
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
“Flashlight” By Susan Choi Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 464 pages, $30 Should anyone think controlling metaphors are so 20th century, please pick up Choi’s new novel about family, exile and the different ways the titular humble tool works on literal, figurative, allegorical and visceral levels. When Louisa is 10, she and her Korean-born father go for a walk by the ocean; he’s carrying a flashlight to guide their footsteps. That night he disappears and Louisa is found half-dead in the surf; she has to shine a light onto her past in an effort to heal this loss. However, it’s her father’s past that signals this expansive book’s great theme of loneliness, even in the midst of other human beings. — Bethanne Patrick
“Shadow Ticket” by Thomas Pynchon
(Penguin Press)
“Shadow Ticket” By Thomas Pynchon Penguin Press: 304 pages, $30
That in this his 88th year Thomas Pynchon has published another novel, beginning in 1930s Milwaukee, of all places, packed full of punny names per usual, featuring a lug of a detective, successful with women who flirt as exquisitely as they dance or sing or grift, then shifting to Europe where it can be hard to sort out, from moment to moment, who’s in power, is more than anyone could have hoped for. “Shadow Ticket” is a detective novel that is also an anti-Nazi romp, with improbable motorcycles and flying machines. In The Times, critic David Kipen hailed Pynchon’s classic style as “Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound.” This book is more accessible than “Gravity’s Rainbow,” more cheerful than “The Crying of Lot 49” and more political than “Inherent Vice.” It’s also still Pynchon, in all his goofy paranoiac glory. Rejoice. — C.K.
“The Director: A Novel” by Daniel Kehlmann
(S&S/Summit Books)
“The Director” By Daniel Kehlmann S&S/Summit Books: 352 pages, $28.99
Kehlmann’s stunning novel about Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst makes every reader a collaborator, at least about their level of comfort with fascism. The real-life Pabst, who returned to Europe after a disappointing sojourn in Hollywood, fell in readily with Hitler’s propaganda machine, to include directing “The White Hell of Pitz Palu” starring none other than future Third Reich filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. History may never know precisely why Pabst played along, and Kehlmann uses this uncertainty to great effect, inventing scenes juxtaposing art versus propaganda, sleekly privileged Nazis against frail prisoners, and historical truth with the chaos of dementia. — B.P.
“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s” by Paul Elie
Today’s culture wars didn’t start in the ‘80s, but Elie’s rich cultural history shows how the decade ushered them into the mainstream. Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the pope on live network TV, Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” sparked protests, Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” made him a literal target, and legislators fumed about public art. Religion sat at the center of all of these donnybrooks, and questions of culture and faith had real-world consequences: AIDS victims, especially in the demonized LGBTQ community, took their pleas to religious leaders on the streets and in the pews. It was a vibrant and dispiriting time, and Elie’s history is a sharp cross-cultural study that speaks to the present as well. — M.A.
“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad
Novelist Omar El Akkad’s despair at the unfolding genocide in Palestine drove him to write this, his first nonfiction book. It’s part cry of anguish, part memoir that examines how the systems we enjoy in the western world are allowing Israel to perpetrate violence in Gaza in real time. The book poured out of El Akkad, though normally a slow writer: “I was writing quite furiously for months on end,” he told Dan Sheehan of Lithub. On Nov. 19, that furious outpouring won the National Book award in nonfiction. “It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide,” El Akkad said in his acceptance speech, refusing to let the reason for his book go unspoken. “It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this and that many of my elected representatives happily support it.” The book provides a vital moral questioning and point of connection. — C.K.
Perhaps this novel is really a thinly disguised memoir about the author’s mother — but what a brilliant disguise Gish Jen has concocted to give her Chinese-born mother, posthumously, a full voice that speaks to the pain of intergenerational misogyny and abuse. After the mother’s, Loo Shu-hsin’s, childhood story is told, her statements (in the U.S. she was known as Agnes) appear in boldface as stark counterpoint to her daughter’s searching questions. “Bad bad girl! Who says you can write a book like that? I laugh. That’s more like it.” Ultimately this novel-plus-memoir morphs into an artist’s origin story, one in which the artist understands that there is no creative work without origins, no matter how twisted their roots. — B.P.
Taylor is one of the most emotionally perceptive fiction writers working today, and his third novel, set in the New York art world, is his best. Its hero, Wyeth, is a Black painter anxious about being pegged as simply a Black painter; he’s exhausted with what he considers the easy pandering (and bad art) surrounding identity politics. But a budding romance and unusual restoration project prompts him to question his certainties. Covering high and low, the sexual and the intellectual, Taylor’s book is a New York social novel distinct from the swagger of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” or the fevered melodramas of “A Little Life.” — M.A.
“Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson” by Claire Hoffman
This marvelous biography of Aimee Semple McPherson reasserts her vital place in Los Angeles’ history. She was a celebrity, a brilliant performer, an inspiring preacher with a nationwide flock devoted to her writings and radio programs. She was, too, genuinely called to her Pentecostal Christianity, at least at first, which author Claire Hoffman writes about with great sensitivity. Her climb was slow and earned; she spent many years on the road, pitching tents and preaching to diverse audiences. Then to Los Angeles, where her grand church, the Angelus Temple, was built in Echo Park. In 1926, she vanished at Venice Beach and was thought to have drowned. She reappeared — after a memorial service attended by thousands — with stories of a dramatic kidnapping. It was a sensation. Reporters raced to find the kidnappers and, instead, turned up evidence of a tryst. Hoffman unspools the scandal, which included headline-grabbing trials, in page-turning detail. What she shows us is a woman whose spiritualism, stage presence and charisma propelled her into a place of celebrity and fame that became a trap. — C.K.
It’s 2119 when scholar Thomas Metcalfe sets out to find the sole copy of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” written by one Francis Blundy in 2014. Much of the speculation about the poem’s whereabouts centers on a dinner party that allows McEwan to flash his tail feathers in describing a late-capitalist tableau of quail and ceps, anchovies and red wine, high-minded conversation and low lamplight. Is it a spoiler to share that a tsunami has wiped out most of Europe, leaving scattered archipelagos as repositories of things once known? Definitely not, in light of who narrates the book’s second half. Don’t miss this, among the author’s best. — B.P.
“Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” by Caroline Fraser
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, America was overpopulated with notorious serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, BTK and Ted Bundy. By the ‘90s, though, evidence of that brand of savagery declined. What happened? In “Murderland,” Pulitzer winner Caroline Fraser considers the theory that the derangement was tied to smelters that released mind-warping levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere until regulations kicked in. Braiding memoir, pop science and true crime, Fraser delivers a remarkable, persuasive narrative about how good-old-fashioned American values — manufacturing might, westward expansion, cheap leaded gas — turned into a literally toxic combination. — M.A.
“Stone Yard Devotional: A Novel” by Charlotte Wood
An atheist walks into a convent. … That’s not the start to a joke but the premise of this 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel. The unnamed narrator leaves Sydney (husband, house, grievances) to live with a rural religious order. Even as she works alongside the nuns, worldly troubles rush in: The bones of a murdered nun are accompanied by famed climate activist Sister Helen Parry, disrupting the quiet. The narrator knows Sister Helen from schooldays and wonders whether our past actions affect our present circumstances, all while the women battle a rodent infestation that might not be out of place in a horror story. In other words, it’s riveting prose about how humans beat back despair. —B.P.
Prophète’s blunt, bracing novel concerns Cécé, a young Haitian woman whose world has fallen out from under her — she’s endured an absent, drug-addicted mother, a recently dead grandmother, and a slum life that leaves her with few options beyond prostitution. An unlikely escape hatch arrives in the form of Instagram, and as her posts about her Haitian life gain traction, she becomes a prize — and a target — for rival gangs. Cécé can be read as a portrait of contemporary Haiti, a parable about influencer culture or a distressing study of exploitation. However it’s read, Prophète’s vision is piercing and memorable. — M.A.
Take your AI-hallucinated definitions and send them in a rocket ship to Mars, baby! The Merriam-Webster dictionary is back in print in a new edition. In its first update since 2003, it’s added 5,000 new words, 20,000 new usage examples, and 1,000 new idioms and phrases (hello, “dad bod”). But that’s not the most important part, which is that this is a beautiful, solid, immutable printed book. It will never randomly serve up some flaky incorrect definition or reference. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary captures language in a moment, with the full history and understanding of the way it evolves. It was crafted by researchers and etymologists who love words (“comes from the Greek word etymon, meaning ‘literal meaning of a word according to its origin’ ”). The Merriam-Webster website is hugely popular — keep using it! — but an actual printed dictionary will never let you down, and be good for another 20 years. — C.K.
Four members of the advocacy group Palestine Action have pledged this week to continue their hunger strike amid grave medical warnings and the hospitalisations of their fellow protesters.
The group’s members are being held in five prisons in the United Kingdom over alleged involvement in break-ins at a facility of the UK’s subsidiary of the Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in Bristol and a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire. They are protesting for better conditions in prison, rights to a fair trial, and for the UK to change a July policy listing the movement as a “terror” group.
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Palestine Action denies charges of “violent disorder” and others against the eight detainees. Relatives and loved ones told Al Jazeera of the members’ deteriorating health amid the hunger strikes, which have led to repeated hospital admissions. Lawyers representing the detainees have revealed plans to sue the government.
The case has brought international attention to the UK’s treatment of groups standing in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Thousands of people have rallied in support of Palestine Action every week.
Hunger strikes have been used throughout history as an extreme, non-violent way of seeking justice. Their effectiveness often lies in the moral weight they place upon those in power.
Historical records trace hunger strikes back to ancient India and Ireland, where people would fast at the doorstep of an offender to publicly shame them. However, they have also proved powerful as political statements in the present day.
Here are some of the most famous hunger strikes in recent world history:
A pigeon flies past a mural supporting the Irish Republican Army in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast, September 9, 2015 [Cathal McNaughton/Reuters]
Irish Republican Movement hunger strikes
Some of the most significant hunger strikes in the 20th century occurred during the Irish revolutionary period, or the Troubles. The first wave was the 1920 Cork hunger strike, during the Irish War of Independence. Some 65 people suspected of being Republicans had been held without proper trial proceedings at the Cork County Gaol.
They began a hunger strike, demanding their release and asking to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. They were joined by Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, whose profile brought significant international attention to the independence cause. The British government attempted to break up the movement by transferring the prisoners to other locations, but their fasts continued. At least three prisoners died, including MacSwiney, after 74 days.
Later on, towards the end of the conflict and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, imprisoned Irish Republicans protested against their internment and the withdrawal of political prisoner status that stripped them of certain rights: the right to wear civilian clothes, or to not be forced into labour.
They began the “dirty protest” in 1980, refusing to have a bath and covering walls in excrement. In 1981, scores of people refused to eat. The most prominent among them was Bobby Sands, an IRA member who was elected as a representative to the British Parliament while he was still in jail. Sands eventually starved to death, along with nine others, during that period, leading to widespread criticism of the Margaret Thatcher administration.
India’s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was later popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, used hunger strikes as a tool of protest against the British colonial rulers several times. His fasts, referred to as Satyagraha, meaning holding on to truth in Hindi, were considered by the politician and activist not only as a political act but also a spiritual one.
Gandhi’s strikes sometimes lasted for days or weeks, during which he largely sipped water, sometimes with some lime juice. They achieved mixed results – sometimes, the British policy changed, but at other times, there were no improvements. Gandhi, however, philosophised in his many writings that the act was not a coercive one for him, but rather an attempt at personal atonement and to educate the public.
One of Gandhi’s most significant hunger strikes was in February 1943, after British authorities placed him under house arrest in Pune for starting the Quit India Movement back in August 1942. Gandhi protested against the mass arrests of Congress leaders and demanded the release of prisoners by refusing food for 21 days. It intensified public support for independence and prompted unrest around the country, as workers stayed away from work and people poured out into the streets in protest.
Another popular figure who used hunger strikes to protest against British rule in colonial India was Jatindra Nath Das, better known as Jatin Das. A member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Das refused food while in detention for 63 days starting from August 1929, in protest against the poor treatment of political prisoners. He died at the age of 24, and his funeral attracted more than 500,000 mourners.
Palestinian kids wave their national flag and hold posters showing Khader Adnan following his death on May 2, 2023 [Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo]
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons
Palestinians held, often without trial, in Israeli jails have long used hunger strikes as a form of protest. One of the most well-known figures is Khader Adnan, whose shocking death in May 2023 after an 86-day hunger strike drew global attention to the appalling treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
Adnan, who was 45 when he starved to death at the Ayalon Prison, leaving behind nine children, had repeatedly been targeted by Israeli authorities since the early 2000s. The baker from the occupied West Bank had once been part of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group as a spokesperson, although his wife later stated publicly that he had left the group and that he had never been involved in armed operations.
However, Adnan was arrested and held without trial multiple times, with some estimates stating that he spent a cumulative eight years in Israeli prisons. Adnan would often go on hunger strike during those detentions, protesting against what he said was usually a humiliating arrest and a detention without basis. In 2012, thousands in Gaza and the West Bank rallied in a non-partisan show of support after he went 66 days without food, the longest such strike in Palestinian history at the time. He was released days after the mass protests.
In February 2023, Adnan was once again arrested. He immediately began a hunger strike, refusing to eat, drink, or receive medical care. He was held for months, even as medical experts warned the Israeli government that he had lost significant muscle mass and had reached a point where eating would cause more damage than good. On the morning of May 2, Adnan was found dead in his cell, making him the first Palestinian prisoner to die in a hunger strike in three decades. Former Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti described his death as an “assassination” by the Israeli government.
Hunger strikes at Guantanamo
Following the 2002 opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp of the United States in Cuba, where hundreds of “terror” suspects were held prisoners, often with no formal charges, they used hunger strikes in waves to protest against their detention. The camp is notorious for its inhumane conditions and prisoner torture. There were 15 detainees left by January 2025.
The secret nature of the prison prevented news of earlier hunger strikes from emerging. However, in 2005, US media reported mass hunger strikes by scores of detainees – at least 200 prisoners, or a third of the camp’s population.
Officials forcefully fed those whose health had severely deteriorated through nasal tubes. Others were cuffed daily, restrained, and force-fed. One detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, later wrote that he went without a real meal for two years, but that he was forcefully fed twice a day: he was strapped down in a restraining chair that inmates called the “torture chair”, and a tube was inserted in his nose and another in his stomach. His lawyer also told reporters that his face was usually masked, and that when one side of his nose was broken one time, they stuck the tube in the other side, his lawyer said. Sometimes, the food got into his lungs.
Hunger strikes would continue intermittently through the years at Guantanamo. In 2013, another big wave of strikes began, with at least 106 of the remaining 166 detainees participating by July. Authorities force-fed 45 people at the time. One striker, Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab, filed for an injunction against the government to stop officials from force-feeding him, but a court in Washington, DC rejected his lawsuit.
Protests against apartheid South Africa
Black and Indian political prisoners held for years on Robben Island protested against their brutal conditions by going on a collective hunger strike in July 1966. The detainees, including Nelson Mandela, had been facing reduced food rations and were forced to work in a lime quarry, despite not being criminals. They were also angry at attempts to separate them along racial lines.
In his 1994 biography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote that prison authorities began serving bigger rations, even accompanying the food with more vegetables and hunks of meat to try to break the strike. Prison wardens smiled as the prisoners rejected the food, he wrote, and the men were driven especially hard at the quarry. Many would collapse under the intensity of the work and the hunger, but the strikes continued.
A crucial plot twist began when prison wardens, whom Mandela and other political prisoners had taken extra care to befriend, began hunger strikes of their own, demanding better living conditions and food for themselves. Authorities were forced to immediately settle with the prison guards and, a day later, negotiate with the prisoners. The strike lasted about seven days.
Later, in May 2017, South Africans, including the then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was imprisoned in a different facility during apartheid, supported hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners by participating in a collective one-day fast. At the time, late Robben Island veteran Sunny “King” Singh wrote in the South African paper Sunday Tribune that hunger strikes in the prison never lasted more than a week before things changed, and compared it with the protracted situation of Palestinian strikers.
“We were beaten by our captors but never experienced the type of abuse and torture that some of the Palestinian prisoners complain of,” he wrote. “It was rare that we were put in solitary confinement, but this seems commonplace in Israeli jails.”
Algeria’s parliament unanimously passed a law declaring France’s colonisation a crime. Lawmakers celebrated in the chamber as they demanded an apology, reparations and assigned France legal responsibility for the harms caused during colonial rule.
NEW YORK — Four years ago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams swept into office with swaggering confidence, pledging to lead a government unlike any other in history and declaring himself the “future of the Democratic Party.”
On the first promise, the mayor more than delivered. But as his tumultuous term comes to an end, Adams, 65, finds himself in the political wilderness, his onetime aspirations as a party leader now a distant memory.
Instead, he has spent his final weeks in power wandering the globe, publicly mulling his next private sector job and lashing out at the “haters” and “naysayers” whom he accuses of overlooking his accomplishments.
For many of his supporters, the Adams era will be looked back on as a missed opportunity. Only the second Black mayor in city history, he helped steer New York out of the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, often linking the city’s comeback to his own rise from humble roots in working-class Queens.
At a moment when many Democrats were struggling to address voter concerns about public safety, he drew national attention for a “radically practical” agenda focused on slashing crime and reactivating the economy.
But while most categories of crime returned to pre-pandemic levels, Adams will probably be remembered for another superlative: He is the only New York City mayor of the modern era to be indicted while in office.
“That’s a disappointment for voters, especially for Black voters, who had high expectations and aspirations,” said Basil Smikle, a political strategist who served as executive director of the state’s Democratic Party. “He entered with a lot of political capital, and that was squandered, in part because of his own hubris.”
Equally memorable, perhaps, were the strange subplots along the way: his hatred of rats and fear of ghosts; the mysteries about his home, his diet, his childhood; and his endless supply of catchphrases, gestures and head-scratching stories that could instantly transform a mundane bureaucratic event into a widely shared meme.
“So many mayors want to be filtered, they want to pretend who they are and act like they are perfect,” Adams said during a recent speech at City Hall, a freewheeling affair that ended with the mayor burying a time capsule of his achievements beneath a Manhattan sidewalk. “I am not.”
Swagger versus seriousness
Adams took over from Mayor Bill de Blasio in January 2022, amid a COVID-19 spike that was killing hundreds of New Yorkers every day, along with a worrisome uptick in both violent crime and unemployment.
Adams, a former police captain, Brooklyn borough president and state senator, increased patrols on streets and subways, brought back a controversial anti-crime unit and appointed the department’s first female police commissioner. He also raised eyebrows for installing many of his former Police Department allies, including some ex-officials with histories of alleged misconduct.
As he encouraged New Yorkers to return to their pre-pandemic lives, Adams made an effort to lead by example, frequenting private clubs and upscale restaurants in order to “test the product” and “bring swagger back” to the city, he said.
But if New Yorkers initially tolerated Adams’ passion for late-night partying, there seemed to be a growing sense that the mayor was distracted, or even slacking off, according to Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic consultant and supporter of Adams.
“There was a tension between swagger and seriousness,” Sheinkopf said. “New Yorkers wanted to see more seriousness. They didn’t want to see him out partying at some club they couldn’t afford to go into.”
It didn’t help that Adams often declined to say who was footing the bills for his meals, his entry into private clubs or his flights out of the city. When reporters staked out his nighttime activities, they found that Adams, who long professed to be a vegan, regularly ordered the branzino.
Asked about his diet, the mayor acknowledged that he ate fish and occasionally “nibbled” on chicken, describing himself, as he often would in the coming years, as “perfectly imperfect.”
City Hall in crisis
The corruption investigation into Adams’ campaign, launched quietly in the early stages of his mayoralty, first spilled into public view in the fall of 2023, as federal agents seized the mayor’s phones as he was leaving an event. It loomed for nearly a year, as Adams faced new struggles, including a surge of migrants arriving in the city by bus.
Then, on Sept. 26, 2024, federal prosecutors brought fraud and bribery charges against Adams, accusing him of allowing Turkish officials and other businesspeople to buy his influence with illegal campaign contributions and steep discounts on overseas trips.
Investigators also seized phones from the mayor’s police commissioner, schools chancellor and multiple deputy mayors. Each denied wrongdoing, but a mass exodus of leadership followed, along with questions about the mayor’s ability to govern.
Adams insisted, without evidence, that he had been politically targeted by the Biden administration for his criticism of its immigration policy. But his frequently invoked mantra — “stay focused, no distractions, and grind” — seemed to lose potency with each new scandal.
Among them: a chief adviser indicted by state prosecutors in a separate alleged bribery scheme involving a bike lane and minor TV role; another longtime adviser forced to resign after handing a chip bag filled with cash to a reporter; and a string of abuse and corruption allegations within the Police Department, many of them linked to longtime friends Adams had installed in high-ranking positions.
Looking back at what went wrong, both supporters and critics of the mayor tend to agree on at least one point: Adams could be loyal to a fault, refusing to distance himself from long-serving allies even after they appeared to cross ethical lines.
“There was one City Hall made up of dedicated and competent leaders focused on executing his priorities,” said Sheena Wright, Adams’ former first deputy mayor. “There was another City Hall made up of people who knew the mayor for a long time, and who were allowed to operate outside the norms of government.”
‘A nuclear bomb’
Facing a plummeting approval rating and the prospect of years in prison, Adams began aligning himself with President Trump, going to great lengths to avoid criticizing the Republican and even leaving open the possibility of switching parties.
That seemed to work: Weeks after Trump took office, the Justice Department dismissed the corruption case, writing in a two-page memo that it had interfered with Adams’ ability to help with the president’s immigration agenda.
But in the view of Evan Thies, one of Adams’ closest advisers at the time, that was the moment that sealed Adams’ fate as a one-term mayor.
“The memo hit like a nuclear bomb,” Thies said.
The damage worsened a few days later, when Adams appeared on “Fox & Friends” alongside Trump’s border director Tom Homan, who threatened to “be up his butt” if the mayor didn’t comply with Trump’s agenda.
“It seemed to confirm the belief that he had traded his duty to New Yorkers for his personal freedom,” Thies recalled. “It wasn’t true, but that was perception.”
Adams adamantly denied striking a deal with the Trump administration. He has continued to suggest a broad conspiracy against him, at times blaming bureaucrats in the “deep state.”
Even with his case behind him, Adams struggled to build a reelection campaign. Earlier this year, his approval rating sank to a record low. In September, he abandoned his efforts, throwing his support behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a onetime rival he’d recently referred to as a “snake and a liar.”
As of late December, Adams’ plans for life after he leaves office remain uncertain.
“I did what I had to do, I left everything I had on the ice, and I’m looking forward to the next step of my journey,” he said during a farewell speech at City Hall.
Then, for the third time in as many months, Adams took off on an international trip. This time, the destination was Mexico.
How the French Empire built power through language, schooling and cultural assimilation and what it means today.
Beyond armies and violence, France built its empire through language, schooling and cultural influence. This film explores how assimilation became a method of rule and a source of resistance.
At the heart of French colonial rule was the mission “civilisatrice”, a doctrine that claimed to lift up colonised societies through education, administration and the French language. In practice, this system sought to reshape colonised people’s identities, loyalties and cultures, replacing local traditions with French norms while maintaining strict political and economic control. Schools, legal systems and bureaucracies became tools of empire as powerful as armies.
Through case studies in Algeria, Indochina and West Africa, the documentary shows how colonial administrations operated on the ground. In Algeria, settler colonialism and mass repression led to war. In Indochina, education and bureaucracy coexisted with exploitation and nationalist resistance. In West Africa, language policy and indirect rule reshaped social hierarchies and governance.
This episode examines how resistance movements challenged the promise of civilisation, forcing France to confront the contradictions at the heart of its empire. Anticolonial struggles, intellectual movements and armed uprisings not only weakened imperial rule but reshaped French politics, culture and identity itself.
The documentary also places French colonial strategies in a broader modern context. In the contemporary world, the United States projects influence less through formal empire and more through soft power. Hollywood cinema, television and digital platforms circulate American values, lifestyles and narratives globally, shaping cultural imagination in ways that echo earlier imperial projects. At the same time, US dominance in higher education, academic publishing and institutional standards helps define what knowledge is valued, taught and legitimised worldwide.
It also draws direct connections between French colonialism and the modern world. Contemporary debates over language, immigration, secularism and inequality are deeply rooted in colonial systems designed to classify, discipline and extract. Many modern state institutions, education models and economic relationships reflect structures first imposed under empire.
By tracing how cultural control, education and administration functioned as instruments of power, the documentary reveals how the legacy of French colonialism continues to shape modern capitalism, global inequality and postcolonial relations today.
SACRAMENTO — I’ve got a wish list for Santa and it’s topped by this urgent request: a remodeled president with at least an ounce of humanity and humility.
Maybe a Ronald Reagan type. I’m not referring here to ideology or policies. Just common decency, someone who acts presidential.
I know, forget it. That’s beyond Santa’s reach. It would require a miracle. And that’s not likely to happen with President Trump, who seems increasingly to be auditioning for the devil’s disciple.
But you’d think as we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, America could be led by a president who at minimum doesn’t publicly trash the newly deceased.
Someone who follows the basic rules of good behavior and respect for others that our mothers taught us.
For Trump, the Golden Rule seems to be only about cheapening the historic Oval Office with tasteless gilded garnishments, turning it into an extension of his Mar-a-Lago resort. That’s what you’d expect from someone who would pave over the lovely Rose Garden.
But I’ve gotten off the point: the despicable way our unhinged president treats people he deems the enemy because they’ve criticized him, as we’ve got a right and often a duty to do in a democratic America.
What our president said about Rob Reiner after the actor-director-producer and his wife Michele were brutally stabbed to death in their Brentwood home, allegedly by their son Nick, should not have shocked us coming from Trump.
He also once mocked a disabled New York Times reporter at a campaign rally, saying: “The poor guy, you ought to see this guy.” Then Trump jerked his arms around imitating someone with palsy.
Recently, he called all Somali immigrants “garbage. … We don’t want them in our country.” As for Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a onetime Somalian refugee, “she’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
But even with Trump’s sordid history of insults and insensitivity, what he disrespectfully said about Reiner was stunning. He implied that the Hollywood legend was killed by someone angered by Reiner’s criticism of Trump. Again, everything’s all about him, in this egotistical president’s mind.
Trump said the Reiners died “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Then the next day, he doubled down, telling reporters that Reiner “was a deranged person. … I thought he was very bad for our country.”
Topping off the holiday season for Trump, he orchestrated the renaming of Washington’s classy John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself. From now on, it’s to be called the Trump Kennedy Center.
What’s next? The Washington National Cathedral?
OK, next on my Santa’s wish list is a governor who spends his last year in office trying to improve California rather than his presidential prospects. Actually, he could do the latter by doing the former: making this state a better place to live and proving his ability to sensibly govern.
Too many of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s projects fall flat, collapse or are a waste of energy and dollars.
One recently announced Newsom venture particularly is questionable. He seems to be using state resources and tax money to expand his overdone war with Trump rather than helping Californians with their everyday lives.
Yeah, well, so what? I suppose some people may be interested in that. But at taxpayers’ expense? Will the information lower gas prices? Make it easier to buy a home? Pay for childcare?
Here’s just one example of a Newsom program that failed miserably:
Early in his administration the governor announced with great fanfare that he was increasing fees on telephone service to pay for upgrading California’s 911 emergency communication system. The state spent $450 million, couldn’t make the new stuff work and abandoned the project, the Sacramento Bee reported after a lengthy investigation. Now they’re apparently going to start all over.
A little hands-on supervision by the governor next time could help.
Also on my wish list: A Legislature that doesn’t hibernate through the winter and wait until late spring before starting to push bills.
They’d need to change legislative rules. But Democrats with their supermajorities could do practically anything they wanted — even work earnestly during the cold months.
Either that or just stay home.
Included in the gift package: Legislation focused more on quality and less on quantity. This year, the Legislature passed 917 bills. My guess is that 100 meaty measures would have sufficed.
There’s one more item on my Santa list that all of America needs: A new casual greeting to replace “How ya doing?”
Nobody really wants to hear how most people are doing and they probably don’t want to candidly say anyway — not in an elevator, on the sidewalk or in a restaurant.
“Bad stomach flu,” I might honestly answer. You really want to hear that while chomping on a hamburger.
The Great Omari Mosque is one of Gaza City’s most significant landmarks, with origins dating back more than 2,000 years. It was destroyed in an Israeli strike in December 2023. Hatem Haniya, the mosque’s administrator, reflects on its history and its deep significance to the people of Gaza.
WASHINGTON — Today’s political consensus crosses all ages, demographics and party lines: Three out of four Americans think the economy is in a slump. It is not just in their heads. Economic growth this year has been practically stagnant, save for one exception, economists say.
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Hundreds of billions of dollars invested by California-based tech giants in artificial intelligence infrastructure accounted for 92% of the nation’s GDP growth this year, according to a Harvard analysis, supported by other independent economic studies.
It is a remarkable boon for a handful of companies that could lay the groundwork for future U.S. economic leadership. But, so far, little evidence exists that their ventures are expanding opportunities for everyday Americans.
“You have to watch out for AI investments — they may continue to carry the economy or they may slow down or crash, bringing the rest of the economy together with them,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at MIT. “We are not seeing much broad-based productivity improvements from AI or other innovations in the economy, because if we were, we would see productivity growth and investment picking up the rest of the economy as well.”
Even in California itself, where four of the top five AI companies are based, the AI boom has yet to translate into tangible pocketbook benefits. On the contrary, California shed 158,734 jobs through October, reflecting rising unemployment throughout the country, with layoffs rippling through the tech and entertainment sectors. Consumer confidence in the state has reached a five-year low. And AI fueled a wave of cuts, cited in 48,000 job losses nationwide this year.
“It is evident that the U.S. economy would have been almost stagnant, absent the capital expenditures by the AI industry,” said Servaas Storm, an economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, whose own analysis found that half of U.S. economic growth from the second quarter of 2024 through the second quarter of 2025 was due to spending on AI data centers.
The scale of investments by AI companies, coupled with lagging productivity gains expected from AI tools, is spawning widespread fears of a new bubble on Wall Street, where Big Tech has driven index gains throughout the year.
The top 10 stocks listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, most of which are in the tech sector, were responsible for 60% of the yearlong rally, far outperforming the rest of the market. And the few who benefited from dividends fueled much of the rest of this year’s economic growth, with the vast majority of U.S. consumption spending attributed to the richest 10% to 20% of American households.
“There were ripple effects into high-end travel, luxury spending, high-end real estate and other sectors of the economy driven by the financial elite,” said Peter Atwater, an economics professor at William & Mary and president of Financial Insyghts, a consulting firm. “It tells the average consumer that while things are good at the top, they haven’t benefited.”
Stan Veuger, a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent visiting lecturer at Harvard, said that slowing growth and persistently high inflation were diminishing the effects of the AI boom.
“Obviously, that’s not a recipe for sustainable growth,” he said.
U.S. growth today is based on “the hope, optimism, belief or hype that the massive investments in AI will pay off — in terms of higher productivity, perhaps lower prices, more innovation,” Storm added. “It should tell everyday Americans that the economy is not in good shape and that the AI industry and government are betting the farm — and more — on a very risky and unproven strategy involving the scaling of AI.”
Trump’s AI bet
The Trump administration has fully embraced AI as a cornerstone of its economic policy, supporting more than $1 trillion in investments over the course of the year, including a $500-billion project to build out massive data centers with private partners.
Trump recently took executive action attempting to limit state regulations on AI designed to protect consumers. And House Republicans passed legislation this week that would significantly cut red tape for data center construction.
Administration officials say the United States has little choice but to invest aggressively in the technology, or else risk losing the race for AI superiority to China — a binary outcome that AI experts warn will result in irreversible, exponential growth for the winner.
But there is little expectation that their investments will bear fruit in the short term. Data centers under construction under the Stargate program, in partnership with OpenAI and Oracle, will begin coming online in 2026, with the largest centers expected to become operative in 2028.
“AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at the launch of the Stargate project. “That compute is the key to ensuring everyone can benefit from AI and to unlocking future breakthroughs.”
In the meantime, the Americans expected to benefit are those who can join in the investment boom — for as long as it lasts.
“2025 has been a very good year for people who already have significant wealth, a mediocre year for everyone else,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a prominent economist and professor at Harvard. “While the stock market has exploded, wage growth has been barely above inflation.”
“Whether the rest of the economy will catch fire from AI investment remains to be seen, but near term it is likely that AI will take away far more good jobs than it will create,” Rogoff added. “The Trump team is nevertheless optimistic that this will all go their way, but the team is largely built to carry out the president’s vision rather than to question it.”
Fans of English novelist Jane Austen have been celebrating the anniversary of her birth 250 years ago. Al Jazeera’s Charlie Angela has been to Austen’s former home in southern England.
The Victorian seaside town of Llandudno in North Wales has been attracting holidaymakers since the 1800s with its picturesque beaches, historic Great Orme clifftop and palm-lined promenade
08:00, 16 Dec 2025Updated 08:41, 16 Dec 2025
It’s been dubbed the Queen of resorts(Image: Scott Heaney via Getty Images)
This NorthWales resort boasts an extensive history of drawing holidaymakers from across Britain, having secured the coveted title “Queen of the Welsh Watering Places”.
The Victorian seaside gem of Llandudno, with its rich heritage, is thought to have origins stretching back to the Bronze Age. These unique characteristics draw visitors keen to witness the stunning vistas of the Conwy Valley and explore the area’s captivating history.
Indeed, Llandudno has previously been recognised as among the most secure places to reside in Britain, home to roughly 19,700 lucky residents. Additionally, it’s far more budget-friendly to visit and stay in than many competing coastal resorts.
Two main beaches stretch across the shoreline – North Shore Beach and West Shore Beach. The northern section boasts an extensive promenade characteristic of any British seaside town.
Yet, what sets it apart from others is its palm-fringed pathway – evoking memories of a Mediterranean paradise. Tucked away behind North Shore Beach sits the Great Orme headland, offering an adventure on the Great Orme Tramway, carrying passengers to elevated viewpoints via cable cars.
One thrilled visitor said: “The cable car ride was amazing; for the length of the journey, £14 per return (this was the price in 2024) is pretty reasonable. The views are stunning, and you can see for miles on a really clear day, which we had.”
On the West Shore, tucked away on the opposite side of the town, visitors can soak up sweeping vistas of the Snowdonian peaks. One TripAdvisor reviewer says: “One of my favourite beaches anywhere: unspoilt, dog-friendly, free of kiosks and vendors – just sea, rock and sand. Stunning views of the Great Orme. Lots of parking.”
The delightful seaside resort of Llandudno possesses a fascinating past spanning from the Stone Age right through to the Iron Age, with countless communities established over centuries on the slopes of the limestone promontory, more commonly recognised as the Great Orme. This headland draws tourists from across the region and beyond, providing a four-hour hike packed with spectacular scenery.
The Victorian seafront, lovingly dubbed The Parade, alongside the famous pier represent two of the resort’s most treasured features, both constructed in 1877. Following major renovations, the pier has secured recognition as among Britain’s finest.
One holidaymaker described their pier adventure, explaining: “Excellent pier experience. A Punch and Judy, plenty of arcades, hair braiding/colouring, a good walk, fun stalls and a cafe with a wonderful lady singer belting out Amy Winehouse numbers. There’s even a little display of historical photos to show when the pier was used for the ferries. Well worth a visit.”
