Aston Villa manager Unai Emery insists it is still too early to say whether his side is in contention for the Premier League title despite being third in the table after their 2-1 victory against Chelsea.
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Arne Slot says Liverpool are doing enough things right to be winning their matches more comfortably following a nervy 2-1 victory against Premier League bottom club Wolves.
MATCH REPORT: Liverpool 2-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers
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The Las Vegas Museum of Art has revealed new key details of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré’s design for the city’s first freestanding museum, which is expected to break ground in 2027.
The earthy red structure will feature a facade of locally sourced stone, and was inspired by the canyons and red rock landscape that stretches beyond the brash, man-made playground of Sin City, Kéré said in an interview alongside the museum’s executive director, Heather Harmon.
“How can I use what is surrounding Las Vegas to create something open and welcoming?” he said. “We started to think about the subtle beauty of the nature, and to bring it into the core of the museum.”
Renderings of the structure, which is situated in Symphony Park, show a cubed modernist building with a large awning that stretches over a bustling entry plaza to provide shade. A curved grand entrance staircase spirals through the center of the museum and is visible from the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Cloistered second-floor galleries are meant to provide a peaceful sanctuary for taking in the art.
A concept sketch for the Las Vegas Museum of Art by architect Diébédo Francis Kéré.
(Diébédo Francis Kéré / Las Vegas Museum of Art)
Architect Paul R. Williams’ Guardian Angel Cathedral, which opened in the city in 1963, is cited as a design influence, as are the singular stocky trunk baobab trees of the African savanna. Kéré was born in the village of Gando in the West African country of Burkina Faso, and noted that although the natural environment of his home country is quite different from that of Las Vegas, he was able to find many design parallels for inspiration.
Kéré, who is also a professor at Yale in New Haven, Conn., has made many trips to Las Vegas over the last few years, and received personalized tours of the city and its natural surroundings from Harmon and Elaine Wynn, a museum board member and philanthropist who died in April.
They went to the Valley of Fire State Park, which features fantastical sandstone formations the same color as the museum’s renderings. They also saw various quarries as well as the Hoover Dam. In the city, they visited the west side, which is rooted in the city’s rich African American history, as well as Ward 3 on the east side, which is home to a large Latino population.
“We looked at community spaces, we looked at people in community spaces,” said Harmon. “And we really wanted to have that feeling of understanding as we approached the project — just knowing firsthand who we were building the museum for.”
The 60,000-square-foot building is expected to welcome more than 2.4 million year-round Las Vegas residents, as well as millions of global tourists. The museum is expected to cost about $200 million, including its endowment. The target opening date is in 2029.
Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced it would share its collection with the Vegas museum, which does not have plans to become a collecting institution. LACMA director and LVMA founding trustee Michael Govan told The Times that the sharing arrangement is part of a paradigm shift for LACMA, allowing it to expand access to its collection without increasing the physical footprint of its home base. (Critics, including former Times art critic Christopher Knight, disagreed with the move.)
“I think that’s a very 20th century idea — to keep adding wings until you’re a million square feet on Fifth Avenue,” Govan said in an interview at the time.
A “60 Minutes” story on the Trump administration’s imprisonment of hundreds of deported Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador was pulled by CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss shortly before it was scheduled to air Sunday night.
The unusual decision drew a sharp rebuke from Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent for the piece.
Alfonsi said the decision was motivated by politics, according to an email she circulated to colleagues and viewed by the Times. Alfonsi noted that the story was ready for air after being vetted by the network’s attorneys and the standards and practices department.
“It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote. “In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
According to the CBS News press department’s description of the segment, Alfonsi spoke to released deportees who described “the brutal and torturous conditions they endured inside CECOT,” one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons.
In a statement, a representative for CBS News said the report called “Inside CECOT” will air in a future “60 Minutes” broadcast. “We determined it needed additional reporting,” the representative said.
Weiss viewed the segment late Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly. She had a number of issues with story and asked for additional reporting, which could not be completed in time for airing on Sunday. A press release promoting the story went out Friday.
Weiss reportedly wanted the story to have an interview with an official in President Trump’s administration.
But Alonsi said in her email the program “requested responses to questions and/or interviews” with the the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.
“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote. “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”
Alfonsi’s email said she learned the story was pulled on Saturday and that she had not discussed the matter with Weiss.
Even if Weiss’ concerns might be valid, the sudden postponement of a “60 Minutes” piece after it has been promoted on air, on social media and through listings on TV grids is a major snafu for the network.
For Weiss, it’s perilous situation as her every move as a digital media entrepreneur with no experience in television is being closely scrutinized.
As the founder of the conservative-friendly digital news site who was personally recruited by Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison, journalists at CBS News and media industry observers are watching to see if Weiss’ actions are tilting its editorial content to the right.
Before it was acquired by Skydance Media, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit making the dubious claim that a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to aid her 2024 presidential election campaign against him.
Trump recently said “60 Minutes” is “worse” under Paramount’s new ownership following an interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in which she was highly critical of the president and his administration.
Paramount acquired the Free Press for $150 million as part of the deal to bring Weiss over. Her first major move was to air a highly sympathetic town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Erika Kirk has taken over as head of Turning Point USA, the political organization her husband founded.
England coach Brendon McCullum says his side haven’t lived up to “high hopes and expectations” after failing to regain The Ashes, but that fans can expect his side to “show what we’re capable of achieving” in the final two Test matches in the series against Australia.
MATCH REPORT: England beaten to lose another Ashes in Australia
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The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.
The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.
Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip.
Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said.
She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred.
“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.
The mayor’s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to “The Fifth Column’s” YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version — one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.
The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast’s YouTube channel.
Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can’t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.
“We’re not going to be talking about any of that right now,” he told The Times before hanging up.
Bass’ team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. “The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said Tuesday in an email.
In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.
“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said on the original 66-minute video. “I’m responsible for everything.”
Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a “casual conversation” — a situation she called “unfortunate.” Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response “numerous times.”
In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.
“The city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,” she told The Times.
Bass was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.
Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire have created an opening for Bass’ rivals. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor — and has been a harsh critic of her performance.
Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor’s use of the word “botched” a “stunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor” on “the biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.”
“She’s admitting that she failed her constituents,” Beutner said.
Bass isn’t the first L.A. elected official to use the word “botched” in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass’ office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.
“Let’s be honest,” she told one of the mayor’s staffers. “You guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.”
Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.
“It’s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there’s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,” she said.
Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions on “Naked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.” She also went on “Big Boy’s Off Air Leadership Series” to discuss the Palisades fire and several other issues.
On “Big Boy’s Off Air,” Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February, she cited the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.
Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters “were sent home and they shouldn’t have been.”
She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later, causing the Palisades fire, “shocking.” The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn’t fully extinguished.
Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn’t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana.
Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: “At the end of the day, I’m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.”
On “The Fifth Column,” Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles and the effort to rewrite the City Charter to improve the city’s overall governmental structure. She also described the “overwhelming trauma” experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.
“To lose your home, it’s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,” she said. “You lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it’s overwhelming grief and it’s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.”
In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.
“Right,” Bass responded.
Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”
“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”
The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”