Scott Bryce, the actor best known for originating the role of Craig Montgomery on the soap opera “As the World Turns,” has died. He was 68.
Bryce died Sunday evening “surrounded by his loving wife Jodi Stevens-Bryce and loving son Jackson Bryce,” his agent Ken Melamed told The Times by email on Tuesday. “He was beloved by all!”
The actor revealed last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 esophageal and stomach cancer in 2024.
“This evening my father lost his long-fought battle with cancer. What began as stage three esophageal cancer eventually spread and became brain tumors that took his life away from him,” Bryce’s son, Jackson, wrote in a tribute posted Sunday to Instagram. He said his father approached his treatments with “pride and courage, and an unshakable belief that somehow, everything would work out.”
“May his strength and relentless belief forever live within me,” he added. “He fought the hardest and most honorable fight I have ever witnessed.”
Born Jan. 6, 1958, in New York, Bryce followed in the footsteps of his actor parents. His father, Ed, portrayed Bill Bauer on the daytime drama “Guiding Light” for years, while his mother, Dorothy, was known for her role on the hospital soap “The Doctors.”
Bryce made his television debut as Craig Montgomery on CBS’ long-running soap “As the World Turns” in 1982. He received two Daytime Emmy nominations for his portrayal of the charming but ruthless businessman, whom he portrayed off and on from 1982 to 2008. The character was known for his ambition and mysterious business dealings but also had a reputation for being unlucky in love. One early romantic interest was Betsy Stewart, who was portrayed by Meg Ryan from 1982 to 1984.
Finn Carter, who played Montgomery’s wife, Sierra Esteban, on the show, shared a tribute to Bryce on Instagram Monday.
“My sadness knows no bounds. My gratitude for Scott knows even fewer,” Carter wrote. “Scott was the best husband a woman could ask for. As an actor he was fearless, kind, generous and forever looking for ways to grow. And what a sense of humor!”
Over the course of his decades-long career, Bryce appeared on shows such as “The Facts of Life,” “The Golden Girls,” “Murphy Brown,” “L.A. Law,” “The Good Fight,” “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
He also portrayed Mike McQueen, the father of a cheerleader (Leslie Bibb) on the millennial teen drama “Popular.” McQueen marries the mother of his daughter’s high school rival (Carly Pope) in the series, which ended on a cliffhanger in 2001 after its cancellation.
“When asked what he wanted people to remember about him, he said, ‘I was a one-take actor. Two takes, max,’” Jackson Bryce wrote in his tribute. “In working with Dick Wolf on NBC, directors would schedule him at the end of the day because they knew it wouldn’t take long.”
In addition to his onscreen work, Scott Bryce was a theater actor as well as a director and a producer, with credits including the 2010 television movie “Frederick Douglass, From Slavery to Freedom” and the satirical web series “Steamboat.”
“My dad also made sure I knew his greatest accomplishment that came at 50 years old, becoming a Dad,” son Jackson said in his tribute. “He is a part of everything I’ve done and everything I will do.”
The White House visit will be on a day off in the middle of a nine-game East Coast trip.
“I’m sure a lot of guys are going to participate and be there, and this is an individual choice,” Roberts said. “But I do expect a lot of our guys to be there.”
Scheduling conflicts when the Dodgers played the Nationals in Washington on April 3-5 pushed back the trip.
“This took a long time to get both sides together, and, honestly, like I’ve always said, my company line, my personal line is I hope that we get this invitation every year,” Dodgers manager Roberts said. “Because that’s the goal: to win a championship, to get this invitation to the White House. And I’m not a politician, and I’m doing something that teams have done for decades. And so that’s where I stand, really. I’m a baseball coach. That’s what I do.”
Back in 2019, Roberts suggested that he might not accept an invitation to the White House with Trump in office. But he did attend last year when the Dodgers celebrated their 2024 title.
Roberts said the Dodgers found out earlier this week that the White House visit had been scheduled.
“There was a lot of unknown,” Roberts said. “It’s an off day, and then how could we work this out logistically?”
That set off “a lot of phone calls, texts, and communication internally.”
Hernández’s injury rehab has moved along more quickly than Roberts initially expected. He landed on the injury list in late May after playing in just two games following offseason surgery on his left elbow.
“He looks normal,” Roberts said last weekend. “I’m not saying miraculous, but I’m really in disbelief how well he responded, given the injury.”
I am a lifetime resident of Los Angeles and my family has always rooted for the Dodgers. Last year we gave them a pass when they went to visit Trump at the White House. This year after Trump’s attack on our community we cannot accept the Dodgers visiting Trump again. Dave Roberts should know that the first obligation of a patriot is to stand up against tyranny. Shame on him and any other Dodger who goes to the White House this year. I will be canceling my Spectrum service. I’m not playing with the future of our democracy.
Felipe Caceres Los Angeles
If the Dodgers kowtow to Donald Trump yet again, Angelenos should consider boycotting the team for the rest of the season. Yes, they are an exceptional team and might return to the World Series yet again. However, other great athletes, such as the recent U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team, have displayed their courage and integrity in refusing to bow down to that dangerous tyrant.
By serving, as too many others continue to do, to support and enable the thug, they are enabling him in his inhumane and destructive policies and actions. As well, Trump invaded L.A., and the Dodgers did little to support the city they allegedly represent. If they return, it is more than a slap in the face of every sane and thoughtful Angeleno.
Barry Cutler Palm Desert
I have always paid for the Dodgers’ games on mlb.tv, but this year when the Dodgers did not decline the White House visit, I did not. I was holding out hope they wouldn’t squeeze a visit in on their road trip after the All-Star Game and I’d get half a season. Instead I’m listening to the games on the radio. I’ve heard the players say things like “you never know when this might happen again” or “it’s tradition.” I don’t get either one of those excuses. Is Mookie Betts going to ask Trump why he posted the picture of the Obamas as monkeys? Or any of the players going to stand up for anything?
How about be like the women’s Olympic hockey team and stand up for what is right? Don’t be a pawn for another photo op for this dysfunctional White House. Please?
Marnie Jernagan Fresno
Columnist Bill Plaschke wants to impose his political views on us and the Dodgers. Let each player decide if he wants to go to the White House, and if some players don’t want to go, then fine — don’t go. But why should all the players be confined to Plaschke’s view of politics?
David Waldowski Laguna Woods
I was a huge Dodgers fan until last year when they visited the White House. What a happy crowd they looked, even presenting President Trump with his own jersey, No. 47. That wasn’t enough? They’re off again, with Dave Roberts talking about “respecting the highest office in the land, it doesn’t matter who’s in office” while Clayton Kershaw, who presented the jersey is so “excited to go” again. Roberts had previously talked about it being a tradition. Nothing about this White House or this president is traditional, and not going is not making a “political” stand. It would be a stand for decency and normalcy. While visiting the East Wing maybe they can present Trump with the inaugural Baseball Peace Prize. Shame on the Dodgers!
“President Trump is excited to welcome the Los Angeles Dodgers BACK to the White House to celebrate their World Series championship!,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement to The Times.
The date falls on a scheduled off day in the middle of a nine-game East Coast road trip for the Dodgers. The team will play three games in Philadelphia against the Phillies July 20-22 before ending the trip with a three-game series against the New York Mets July 24 to 26.
The visit continues a tradition from the Dodgers’ two previous World Series championships. They were hosted by President Biden in 2021 and President Trump in April 2025.
After the Dodgers claimed their second consecutive World Series title with a dramatic Game 7 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays, a visit to the White House was planned, but it wasn’t until Thursday that a date was officially booked and confirmed.
Questions swirled around whether players would decline the visit this year after it did not happen during a scheduled visit to Washington in April.
Kiké Hernández said in 2018 he was unsure he would have gone had the Dodgers won the World Series the previous year. Mookie Betts said he was undecided and needed to talk it over with his family when last year’s visit was announced. After winning his first World Series with the Boston Red Sox in 2018, Betts skipped their trip to the White House the following year during Trump’s first term.
Both players, along with every returning member of the 2024 team who was with the team during its road trip, participated in the visit. The only notable absence was first baseman Freddie Freeman, who remained in Los Angeles to nurse an ankle injury.
Manager Dave Roberts, who indicated in comments to The Times in 2019 he might not go to the White House if Trump was president, also participated in last year’s ceremony.
Asked at the Dodgers’ fan festival in January about the possibility of returning to the White House, Roberts told The Times’ Bill Shaikin: “For me, I stand by: I’m a baseball manager. That’s my job.”
“I was raised — by a man who served our country for 30 years — to respect the highest office in our country,” Roberts said. “For me, it doesn’t matter who is in the office, I’m going to go to the White House. I’ve never tried to be political. … For me, I am going to continue to try to do what tradition says and not try to make political statements, because I am not a politician.”
Clayton Kershaw, who retired after last season but was on Team USA for this year’s World Baseball Classic, told The Times in the spring that he was aware Dodgers fans are split over whether the team should visit the White House again this year, but he said he is looking forward to it.
“I went when President Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”
Times deputy sports editor Ed Guzman contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The leaders of Europe are bracing for another turbulent summit with President Trump this week as NATO members gather for their annual meeting in the Turkish capital.
European diplomats view Trump’s decision to attend as a positive sign of his continued commitment to the alliance. But the president’s grievances with several European governments over their refusal to join the U.S. war with Iran have cast a pall over a summit already strained by Trump’s wavering support for the continent.
The secretary-general of the transatlantic alliance, Mark Rutte, told reporters on Monday that Trump had aired his resentments in a recent phone call. But Rutte countered with a mix of flattery and countervailing facts that has thus far kept Trump engaged.
While Trump has accused European leaders of denying U.S. forces access to allied bases for takeoffs and refueling during the war, Rutte noted that about 5,000 sorties supporting Operation Epic Fury launched from European airfields. And last Friday, France and Britain committed to a joint military mission with Oman to support freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz — “an extremely important development,” Rutte said.
At last year’s summit, held in The Hague, all NATO member states — with the exception of Spain — agreed to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035, marking a significant increase in historic spending goals for modern Europe. The pledge is divided into two categories, with 3.5% of spending allocated to core military requirements, and the rest committed to a broad set of security-related investments.
Trump’s tough love on the alliance “is, I think, bringing NATO closer together,” the secretary general told reporters.
“You could argue that he is the first president of the U.S. since Eisenhower who was able to come to this situation where the Europeans and the Canadians will spend the same as the Americans” on security, Rutte said. “This equalization was a wish for 50, 60 years, and now it’s happening — I think in large part due to his leadership.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte speaks to reporters Monday ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
(Hussein Malla / Associated Press)
In a video message posted on social media Monday, Trump’s ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said the summit this week would serve as a “report card” to determine whether countries were beginning to fulfill their commitments from last year.
He offered a note of optimism and suggested the president’s goal is to enhance, rather than undermine, the alliance.
“The United States will be here, but we also need our allies to be here. We cannot do it alone, and the American taxpayer should no longer bear the burden,” Whitaker said.
A White House schedule for Trump’s trip lists bilateral meetings with Rutte and the leaders of Turkey, Syria and Ukraine, in between alliance-wide meals and conferences.
Ukraine will remain at the top of the agenda, Trump told reporters Monday, expressing hope that the war could soon come to an end after four brutal years of fighting.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest loss of life in Europe since World War II, resulting in more than 1 million casualties, including an estimated 600,000 dead. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022, following his covert invasions of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and eastern regions in 2014, Russian forces have captured roughly 12% of Ukraine’s territory.
The war has settled into a deadly stalemate since a 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive failed to break Russian defensive lines. While Russian forces have occasionally advanced, they have only managed to hold marginal gains along the front, at tremendous cost.
In recent weeks, however, expanded Ukrainian drone and missile capabilities have shifted the dynamic, striking military production sites deep inside Russia and targets near Moscow, bringing the war more directly into the Russian public consciousness and raising questions in the Russian capital whether the war effort is sustainable.
Ukraine’s boldness has impressed the Trump administration, Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, told the Financial Times this week.
“I think he does feel pressure,” Trump said of Putin, addressing reporters in the Oval Office before departing for Turkey on Monday.
The president referred to an ongoing U.S. effort to end the war, a goal that has remained elusive for Trump since returning to office.
“I think we’re getting much closer than people realize,” he said. “President Putin wants it to end, I will tell you that. Very strongly. Had a good call. And President Zelensky actually wants it to end now.”
“We’re going to be going to NATO, and we’re going to be talking about it,” Trump added. “And I think we’re going to get it ended. It’s been terrible.”
ESPN is pulling up stakes from downtown Los Angeles and heading to the NFL’s headquarters at Hollywood Park in Inglewood.
“We look forward to all of ESPN’s L.A. based studio content, originating from a single location, further enhancing creativity and collaboration with expansion possible in the future,” the Walt Disney Co.’s sports media unit said Wednesday in a statement.
ESPN produced “NBA Today” and “WNBA Countdown” out of the L.A. Live location, which opened in 2009. A late night edition of “SportsCenter” was produced there until last year. The productions will move into the NFL’s Los Angeles headquarters near SoFi Stadium.
ESPN’s local radio outlet, KSPN, will continue to broadcast out of the L.A. Live location adjacent to Crypto.com Arena.
The NFL took a 10% equity stake in ESPN last year. As part of the deal, ESPN oversees the NFL Media, including the NFL Network and the RedZone channel, which has its production facilities at the Hollywood Park location that opened in September 2021.
The moves, expected to be completed by early September, come ahead of ESPN producing its first Super Bowl, which will air on ABC in February 2027 from SoFi Stadium.
Although a new round of layoffs is reportedly expected at ESPN, a person familiar with the matter who could not comment publicly said there will be no job cuts related to the move to Hollywood Park.
About 160 employees work at the L.A. Live location. People involved in ESPN’s productions will relocate to Hollywood Park while others will move to a Disney location in Glendale, Calif.
Chris Johnson, the former NFL running back who holds the record for most yards from scrimmage in a single season, has the degenerative neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Johnson shared the diagnosis during an interview with Michael Strahan that aired Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The 40-year-old father of four spoke in his own voice but didn’t use his mouth — instead, he used his eyes to trigger a device that generated sentences based on recordings Johnson made soon after he was diagnosed last year.
“It’s continued to progress much faster than I ever imagined,” Johnson said of the disease. “I want people to understand just how quickly ALS can attack your body. Just over a year ago, I was picking up my 7-year-old daughter so she’d make a wish with her birthday cake. Today, I couldn’t do that.”
There is currently no known treatment that stops or reverses ALS, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and most people with disease die of respiratory failure within three to five years of noticing symptoms (although one in 10 survive a decade or more).
In addition to receiving the standard medication to help slow the disease’s progression, Johnson has been working with neurologist and leading ALS researcher Dr. Merit Cudkowicz. She told “Good Morning America” that Johnson has taken part in a clinical trial for a therapy “that decreases inflammation, and I think that helped him a lot.”
“At first, you’re in shock, then you realize you have two choices: You can give up, or you can fight,” Johnson said. “I chose to fight.”
Johnson’s wife Brittany told Strahan: “We’re still hopeful. We’re hopeful that a breakthrough will happen or … a miracle will happen.”
Selected by the Tennessee Titans at No. 24 in the 2008 draft, Johnson was an instant NFL star. He made the Pro Bowl in each of his first three seasons and was named the league’s offensive player of the year in 2009. Also that season, Johnson led the NFL with 2,006 rushing yards — earning the nickname CJ2K as one of only nine players to have rushed for 2,000 or more yards in a season — and set a record with 2,509 yards from scrimmage that still stands.
Johnson rushed for more than 1,000 yards in each of his six seasons with the Titans, then spent a year with the New York Jets and three more with the Arizona Cardinals before retiring after the 2017 season. He finished with 9,651 yards and 55 touchdowns rushing and 2,255 yards and nine touchdowns receiving.
Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk released a statement Monday morning after Johnson’s diagnosis was revealed.
“Learning this news is extremely difficult, and we will support Chris every step of the way throughout his journey,” she wrote. “We are holding him and his family close, and join our fans around the world in expressing our love for Chris.”
The Jets and Cardinals also released statements expressing their support for Johnson.
While Johnson’s body will no longer allow him to perform a task like gripping a cup, he said he wants people to know that with ALS, “your mind stays sharp.”
“People sometimes look at the physical disability and assume you’re not still the same person inside,” Johnson said. “I still think the same. I still dream. I still love my family. My body just doesn’t cooperate.”
Veteran MS NOW anchor Alex Witt is leaving the news network, which is moving away from live programming on the weekends.
The new weekend programming strategy announced Friday is a cost-saving measure that will give parent company Versant more resources for a new direct-to-consumer streaming offering that makes MS NOW available to consumers without a pay-TV subscription. The company is also looking to expand its live event business.
According to a memo from MS NOW President Rebecca Kutler, “The Weekend: Primetime,” a live discussion program launched last year, will have its final airing Saturday.
One of the program’s co-hosts, Antonia Hylton, will take over Witt’s midday shifts later this year. Hylton’s co-hosts Ayman Mohyeldin, Catherine Rampell, and Elise Jordan, will remain with MS NOW and continue to appear on other programs.
Kutler said job losses from the moves are minimal and encouraged staffers who lose their current roles to apply for 40 current job openings at the company with more on the way. MS NOW has been staffing up its news operation since separating from NBC News last year.
Weekends have long been a ratings weak spot for MS NOW, which while a distant second to Fox News, has seen audience growth in 2026 and remains ahead of CNN. The network has started to rely on podcasts such as “Pod Save America, from Crooked Media to fill some hours. The episodes have performed strongly enough for MS NOW to try similar deals with outside podcast producers.
“Throughout the summer, we will expand our taped strategy and announce new content partnerships,” Kutler said in her memo.
With the changes, MS NOW will still have 20 hours of live programming each weekend and will be staffed to handle breaking news.
Witt joined the network formerly known as MSNBC in 1999, long before it began its strong tilt toward progressive political commentary. Over the years, Witt’s weekend newscast became one of the few programs on the network that delivered straight news without opinion.
Kutler called Witt “a beloved longtime member of our MS NOW family” and “a continued, trusted, and steady presence for our audiences.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is once again dealing with blowback for being out of town when a massive fire ignited.
The fire at a cold storage facility in Boyle Heights began burning Wednesday, hours after Bass departed for the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
Since arriving back in Los Angeles around 6 p.m. Thursday, Bass has been to the scene of the fire numerous times, declared a local emergency, hosted five press conferences, met with local leaders and families affected by the fire, and distributed masks and air purifiers.
But her quick return and public appearances have not stopped some from drawing parallels to last year’s Palisades fire. Bass was in Ghana on a diplomatic trip when the deadly inferno spread amid extraordinarily high Santa Ana winds that forecasters had warned about for days.
While the scale of the destruction in Boyle Heights doesn’t compare to the 12 lives and thousands of homes lost in the Palisades fire, Angelenos are having flashbacks as toxic smoke hovers over parts of the region.
Bass, who is running for reelection, said in an interview that she rarely travels and always worries about what could happen when she does — whether it’s a fire or a big car accident. She also said she chose Chief Jaime Moore to lead the Los Angeles Fire Department because she trusts him to handle a crisis like this fire.
“I was in Chicago three hours away, and I was there 24 hours,” Bass said, noting that she was in constant communication with the chief during her brief trip.
A May poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, found that 57% of likely Los Angeles voters had unfavorable views of Bass, while 35% had favorable views.
Bass, who served in Congress for more than a decade, was designated by then-President Biden to be part of his official delegation to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama. She was captured in photos at an embassy cocktail party in Accra as the Palisades fire exploded Jan. 7, 2025.
Last week, there was no warning that anything was amiss when she left the city. But any echoes of the Palisades fire could damage Bass’ image as she campaigns against City Councilmember Nithya Raman in the November runoff election.
“We’re talking about a fire, and she’s out of town, so it completely and totally reinforces that narrative of January 2025, and that’s not helpful,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
Guerra said while Bass can do much of her job from another city for a day, a mayor is often faulted for not being front and center during an emergency.
“With today’s tech and instant communication, is it really that different that she’s in Chicago making calls than at City Hall?” he said. “But it has always been the case for executives that, symbolically, it is their job to be at the point of the crisis to assure those that are impacted directly, and the city as a whole, that they have the situation under control.”
Guerra said it didn’t help that Kevin Marchetti, the owner of the cold storage facility operating in the burning building, contributed the maximum, $1,800, to Bass’ reelection campaign last year.
Raman declined to comment on Bass’ handling of the Boyle Heights fire.
The blaze ignited Wednesday at the nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility run by a company called Lineage, beginning on the roof, which caused a partial collapse and moved the flames into the building, where 85 million pounds of food are stored.
Firefighters have been battling the flames for seven days now, and smoke has made air dangerous to breathe in neighborhoods across the Los Angeles region.
Bass’ absence from the city soon caught the eye of right-wingers, with Spencer Pratt, who ran against her in the nonpartisan primary election, and Steve Hilton, who is running for governor, among those critiquing her.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with Karen Bass that she seems to keep leaving the city every time something happens,” Hilton said at a Monday press conference in Boyle Heights.
Pratt, who lost his house in the Palisades fire and came in third in the primary, drew the comparison directly.
“Karen was sipping cocktails in Chicago when the Boyle Heights Fire erupted, just as she was sipping cocktails in Ghana when our Palisades Fire erupted. I warned you all … what happened to us will happen to all of LA,” he posted on X on Sunday.
As she flew back to L.A. from Ghana, Bass repeatedly reminded her staff that she could make calls from the military flight, her text messages showed. But during one call or Zoom with her staffers, she had technical problems, texting, “I am listening don’t know why you can’t [hear] me.”
Moore, the new chief, has appeared to be in lockstep with the mayor during the Boyle Heights fire, saying she has been an active partner.
About 30 minutes after the fire began, Moore was on the scene. Ten minutes after he arrived, he was on the phone with Bass, he said.
Over the next day, while Bass was in Chicago, Moore estimated that they spoke six times over the phone.
Moore said her absence was a non-issue.
“Until Mayor Bass goes through our 20-week drill tower, and she learns to fight a fire and she can stand next to me on a hose line, I don’t need her in this city,” Moore told The Times on Tuesday.
“She’s our mayor. She was doing exactly what she needed to do,” he added. “She answered the phone. She provided me exactly what I needed, and that was, ‘Whatever you need to do, you do it.’”
Linda Cohn, an ESPN veteran who has anchored more episodes of “SportsCenter” than anyone in history, announced her retirement Monday.
A Los Angeles resident since 2018, Cohn, 66, will make her final ESPN appearance Friday.
After starting her career in radio and local TV, Cohn joined ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in 1992 when female hosts on sports programming were still a rarity. In a statement, she acknowledged her trailblazer status.
“What I’m most proud of is that my career lasted long enough for me to see little girls grow up watching ‘SportsCenter,’ enter this business, and succeed in it,” she said. “If my journey helped make that path a little easier for them, then that’s the achievement I’ll cherish most.”
She hit a milestone of anchoring 5,000 “SportsCenter” episodes in February 2016 and appeared on at least 650 more over the 10 years that followed.
Cohn, who played collegiate hockey at Oswego Stage University and competed on the boys team in high school, regularly contributed to ESPN’s NHL coverage. She once did a live “SportsCenter” segment where she tried out for the job of emergency goalie for the Florida Panthers.
Cohn will return to ESPN’s Bristol, Conn., studios on Friday and appear on four editions of “SportsCenter” throughout the day. She will also reconnect with longtime co-host John Buccigross during coverage of the NHL Draft.
“Linda Cohn is a legend and a major part of the history of ESPN,” said Burke Magnus, ESPN president, content. “She has brought enthusiasm, personality and her love of sports to our audience for more than 30 years and her contributions to ESPN both in front of and behind the camera would make a very long list.”
CHICAGO — A spate of shootings in Chicago has led to seven deaths and at least 38 injuries since Friday evening, police say, prompting President Trump to renew his call for a military intervention in the nation’s third-largest city.
It is the latest in a series of threats made and interventions ordered by the Republican president against a Democratic-led city, including Los Angeles.
“Why isn’t Governor Pritzker calling me for help. I could make Chicago a safe City in ONE MONTH, in ONE YEAR, it would be one of the safest!!!” Trump said in a Sunday morning post on social media.
The office of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender who has repeatedly rebuffed Trump’s calls for a military intervention, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under Trump, National Guard troops have been deployed on crime-fighting missions in Democratic-led cities including New Orleans, Washington and Memphis, Tenn.; and Marines and Guardsmen were sent to L.A. last year amid protests over federal immigration raids.
Although Chicago Police Department data show a slight increase in shooting incidents compared with the first half of last year, violent crime rates have generally dropped in the city over the last few years, in parallel with national trends.
Preliminary information shared by Chicago police indicate there have been at least two dozen shooting incidents since 5 p.m. Friday. Those killed by gunfire include a 21-year-old shot in the chest Sunday, an 18-year-old shot in the armpit Saturday evening and a 50-year-old shot in the chest Friday.
At least 12 people in a crowd on a Chicago street suffered gunshot wounds Friday evening after an SUV pulled up and two people inside started shooting, police said.
The eight men and four women in the group ranged in age from 17 to 47. They were being treated at four hospitals. Police said another man suffered unknown injuries and refused medical treatment.
That shooting happened on Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S. Earlier Friday, former President Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama welcomed the first visitors to his presidential center on the South Side.
“What should have been a night of celebration and community reflection for Juneteenth was shattered by a horrific act of violence,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said in an X post Saturday. “My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their loved ones.”
“Violence has no place in our city, and those responsible will be held accountable,” he said.
Unlike the movies, where directors get the glory, TV directors sit lower in the hierarchy, below creators, producers and actors. In most series, which might employ several over a season, they are interchangeable — which isn’t to say they aren’t valuable, transforming words on a page into a four-dimensional living thing. But a director hired to helm a pilot, as James Burrows, who died Friday at 85, was again and again — almost as a lucky charm — helps set the tone for the series. Jake Kasdan’s input was crucial to the feel (and philosophy) of “Freaks and Geeks,” as Hiro Murai’s was to “Atlanta” (and most recently “Widow’s Bay”). In some cases a director is a co-creator in all but title and union affiliation. A show might subsequently pass to later hands, but they’ll be honoring its established look and feel.
But Burrows was more than a little well known. If you sat through the opening credits of “Taxi,” whose pilot he directed along with 74 other episodes — and why wouldn’t you, with its pleasing Bob James theme and Checker Cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge — you would have seen his name for weeks on end. You might have noticed it on “Cheers,” which he co-created and for which he directed 236 episodes, or on “Will & Grace” (246 episodes), or “Frasier,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Caroline in the City,” “Two and a Half Men,” “2 Broke Girls,”“The Neighborhood” or, just last year, “Mid-Century Modern” — all series whose pilots he directed. You might have caught it on episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Phyllis,” “Rhoda” or “Laverne & Shirley,” until you began to think that maybe there was nobody else directing network multi-camera situation comedies, the most human of television formats and a specialty from which he rarely strayed.
And you might have seen him as himself this year in the third season of Lisa Kudrow’s “The Comeback,” as the man she enlists to save a television pilot from hacky AI jokes. “Surprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke,” he says.
“As director, I am there to help create the ensemble, to do everything I can to foster a community among the company, and to train a new set of actors to behave as a group and respect one another,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, “Directed by James Burrows.” He famously took the cast of “Friends” to Las Vegas before the show premiered in order to foster bonds in a soon-to-be-impossible state of anonymity. “I guess I have a gift for creating families,” he told the New York Times in 2023.
But if “Friends” refers to the characters and the people who play them, it includes the audience too. Burrows’ talent was to midwife a real relationship between the viewer and the viewed, “You want to go where everybody knows your name,” runs the “Cheers” theme, and where you know everyone’s name. The families he excelled at creating were yours as well, and one watched knowing that these things happened in real time in real space, and that you could be in the room, if you made the effort. Tickets were available.
The son of Abe Burrows, who wrote or co-wrote the books for “Guys and Dolls,” “Can-Can” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and co-created the radio comedy “Duffy’s Tavern” — set, like “Cheers,” in a bar, though the younger Burrows denied any influence — he’d been directing dinner theater when he had the idea to write to Mary Tyler Moore, whom he’d met on the set of a never-opened “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” musical. His stage experience (and his Yale School of Drama degree, presumably) proved eminently transferable to the proscenium reality of multi-camera situation comedy.
What Burrows shows share — the ones we remember, at least, out of many we don’t — is that they’re fundamentally joyful. They lack cynicism. They’re expressive of their times without being showily edgy. They walk a line between freshness and familiarity, which makes one want to return week after week. They may push an envelope — “Friends” was something new, after all — but subtly. We can assume, given his reputation and the fact that he could have retired on “Cheers” alone, that he liked what he did and did what he liked, and regard his choice of projects as a form of personal expression in itself, the basis of a body of work that has and will live on.
Diversity in last year’s streaming films followed the same downward trend as theatrical releases, a new study found, with the percentage of people of color directing, writing and leading films diminishing.
In past years, streaming was considered a more accessible outlet for early-career female or BIPOC filmmakers, which was reflected in data about gender and racial representation. According to Part 2 of UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report, which was released Wednesday and analyzed all of the original English-language films distributed on major streaming platforms in 2025, that trend reversed across every category studied.
The share of streaming films directed by women declined to just over 23%, the lowest it’s been since 2022, when the annual study began analyzing streaming and theatrical films separately. Among those female directors, an overwhelming majority (81%) were allotted budgets below $20 million, while more than a quarter of the films directed by white men exceeded $50 million.
Only about 31% of streaming films last year had BIPOC directors, down 10% since 2024, when the proportion more closely reflected U.S. demographics.
“This is an industry in flux — and in reverse, especially when it comes to diversification,” Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost and the report’s co-founder, said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with theatrical films, we’re now seeing the impact of this current political climate in very meaningful and concrete ways,” he continued. “As budgets tighten, opportunities for filmmakers of underrepresented backgrounds are always the first to be squeezed out.”
Despite losing ground behind the scenes and in front of the camera, women and people of color continued to drive streaming viewership in 2025, the report found.
The year’s biggest streaming hit, “KPop Demon Hunters,” was also the most-watched original Netflix film of all time, and according to Neilsen ratings, it was most streamed by women in Latinx households, followed by women in Asian and Black households. The report acknowledged the film as a “bright spot” in a disappointing year for diversity.
Michael Tran, a sociologist who co-authored the report, noted that the film’s impact and earnings potential could have been even greater with a theatrical release.
“It was a missed opportunity for theaters,” Tran said. “We’ve tracked how diverse films tend to succeed at the box office, here and abroad. For ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ we could have been talking about record-breaking box office receipts in addition to topping the ratings.”
When “KPop Demon Hunters” did briefly screen in theaters — for two days last August, with over 1,750 locations domestically and more than 1,150 sold-out screenings — it was the No. 1 movie that weekend, earning about $18 million in ticket sales (though Netflix does not report exact box office figures).
Data from the report also indicated that streaming films with at least somewhat diverse casts tended to outperform in terms of audience and social media engagement.
However, overall cast diversity in streaming films declined in 2025. For the first time since 2022, films with a majority-BIPOC cast did not represent the plurality of streaming titles. Most notably, the percentage of lead actors of color dropped from a high of 51% in 2024 to 36% in 2025.
Report authors called it an “industry-wide chilling effect” reminiscent of a similar decline in diversity among theatrical films in 2024. That said, streaming films continued to star BIPOC leads more often than their theatrical counterparts, the study found.
The overall number of streaming films also declined. While the annual UCLA report typically examines the top 100 original, English-language movies across streaming platforms, this time, there were only 89 for researchers to analyze.
In addition to studying race and gender demographics in the film industry, the report also examined on-camera representations of disability. According to the study, while adults with a disability make up at least 26% of the U.S. population, actors with a known disability represented 6.5% of total streaming movie actors, which is in line with the previous year.
According to the study’s authors, streamers hoping to compete in a fast-paced, globalized market should increase their diversity efforts in light of these results.
“Kids under 18 are already majority BIPOC. There’s no going back if a studio wants to be profitable and relevant to Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” said report co-founder and co-author Ana-Christina Ramón. “Severing all brand loyalty now will only make it more difficult to regain long-term subscribers in the future.”
NEW YORK — A nationwide network of charitable foundations is encouraging its members to emphasize their positive contributions to American life, a 250th anniversary campaign aimed at quelling what it calls the “greater intensity” of scrutiny felt from the federal government and populist movements.
Popular notions of philanthropy as merely a game for the ultrawealthy to fund partisan projects and commit fraud have left the sector vulnerable to political attacks, as the Council on Foundations sees it, influencing policies that hamper essential community services. The advocacy group, which represents about 1,000 nonprofits, hopes to overcome what CEO Kathleen Enright calls the sector’s “perception gap” with its “Generosity Builds” campaign, launched Monday.
Enright believes most Americans don’t recognize their reliance on the charitable sector. Just about 1 in 20 adults said they or anyone in their immediate family received nonprofit services in the past year, according to a 2023 Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy report.
“This week, I got an MRI at Georgetown University Hospital, I participated in my church at St. Columba’s, my daughter was inducted into National Junior Honor Society. Four or five nonprofits have been instrumental in my life this week,” she said. “Folks just aren’t putting that tag on it.”
And that tag is growing increasingly important, Enright said. Last year, negotiations over President Trump’s tax and spending bill included proposals to levy new taxes on private foundations that Enright said would have taken resources from communities if they made it into the final law.
The battle over defining what nonprofits actually do has recently been amplified from the highest rungs of the Trump administration, which has upended decades of partnerships built with nonprofits. Trump froze, cut or threatened a sweeping range of social service grants characterized by the White House as “government largesse that’s often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse.” More recently, the Department of Justice charged the Southern Poverty Law Center — a civil rights nonprofit accused by Republicans of targeting conservatives in its work tracking extremists — with defrauding donors through payments to informants.
Vice President JD Vance described the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Harvard University endowment as “cancers on American society” back as a 2021 U.S. Senate candidate, telling Tucker Carlson that “we are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country and they call it a charity.”
“All across our country, we have nonprofits — big foundations — that are effectively social-justice hedge funds,” he said in a talk that year on “woke capital.”
Narratives about nonprofits being “overly politicized” or wasteful are “extreme minority stories” that don’t reflect how philanthropy operates, according to Enright.
Across many surveys, trust in the nonprofit sector has remained higher than most others. But its impact is sometimes difficult to measure and explain. The sector hasn’t faced an environment this challenging in almost six decades, according to Kathryn Thomas, the vice president of communications for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan.
She cited the congressional effort to increases taxes on foundations’ investment incomes and acknowledged the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts.
“In an era when everything is under partisan attack and there’s so much polarization, we really have to do a better job of emphasizing why we exist,” Thomas said.
Enright said the story of philanthropy is not one where a rich person “saves the day.” She sees growing concerns about billionaires’ influence fueling suspicion about philanthropists’ motivations. Some argue the charitable sector allows moneyed interests to decide how tax dollars are spent rather than elected officials.
The campaign will emphasize that most donors “have just a little bit more than they need and therefore want to give back,” she said, especially at the local level.
“Money does not solve problems. It’s a tool that creative people and institutions inside communities use to solve problems,” she said. “The real heroes of most of these stories are nonprofit leaders, religious leaders, civic leaders who just roll up their sleeves and get something done — but do it with some financial underpinning by charitable foundations.”
That’s the story told by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in Sarasota, Florida. A 10-apartment affordable housing complex for military veterans opened last year with the foundation’s support.
The area has an “embarrassingly high” number of veterans without housing, according to Jon Thaxton, the foundation’s director of policy and advocacy. Many are priced out in Sarasota, increasingly a luxury destination with high real estate prices.
Local donors had been trying to build a similar project when they approached the foundation in 2020 for help. Thaxton secured land already vested for affordable housing, corralled $2.2 million in donations, got $800,000 from the city and won the backing of their U.S. representatives.
The foundation’s leaders believe their track record made that possible. Phillip Lanham, the president and CEO, noted the project was completed across multiple election cycles and a pandemic, suggesting that community foundations are well situated to “play the long game.”
“Most people think that foundations like us deal with money and donors. We really don’t. We deal with relationships and trust,” Thaxton said. “That’s our commodity. That’s what we earn. That’s what we save. And that’s what we contribute back to the community.”
The Council on Foundations will also elevate examples of early, ordinary philanthropists as part of its case for philanthropy as an integral “part of the American story.” Enright credited a formerly enslaved man with donating land in North Carolina that became an African Methodist Episcopal church that endures as a pillar of the local community.
Lillian Kuri, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, welcomed the focus on everyday philanthropists. The Cleveland Foundation is considered the first community foundation, established in 1914 by lawyer Frederick Harris Goff as a way to fund durable change in the city.
The foundation aims to find new ways to expand today’s tent of philanthropists dedicated to improving their surrounding areas. It announced new investments this week in a fund dedicated to turn vacant industrial land into job-ready work sites. They’ve also launched a fund that allows donors to invest in major Northeast Ohio companies, supporting local business growth while that money increases into a sizable amount that can be donated to nonprofits.
“Generosity cuts across everybody,” she said, adding that community foundations offer “a way for everyday people — not just the largest, wealthiest people — to participate in the change they want to see in their communities.”
Several studios in Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox gaming division, including Montreal-based Compulsion Games and San Francisco-based Double Fine, are in active negotiations to spin off as they try to thwart closure, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Cambridge, England-based Ninja Theory, the maker of Hellblade, is also in conversations with Xbox, as are several other studios across the portfolio that are at risk of being shuttered.
The studios may still have the opportunity to buy themselves back from Xbox and go independent, although many employees will probably lose their jobs as a result, said the people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Employees at several studios have been informed of the situation and given permission to seek new work but were told that the status of the studios is still in flux.
An Xbox spokesperson declined to comment.
The potential closures are part of a broader reorganization being overseen by Asha Sharma, who took over as Xbox’s new chief executive in February.
Last week, Bloomberg News reported that the gaming division is planning significant layoffs. Sharma sent out a memo to staff lamenting the bleak state of the business, which has seen revenue and margins plummet in recent years. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” she wrote.
Compulsion Games, Double Fine and Ninja Theory all made award-winning games that were not commercial hits. But even some of Xbox’s more commercially successful studios are not yet sure how they will fit into Sharma’s new mandate, which will prioritize the biggest franchises as the company looks to return to growth.
Compulsion Games is the developer behind South of Midnight, which was released last year. Double Fine, best known for the Psychonauts series, released the smaller games Keeper and Kiln over the last year.
Xbox is facing the current challenges despite having made major purchases in recent years, including its acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. for $69 billion in a deal that closed in 2023.
Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan stepped down last week ahead of the layoffs, said the people familiar with Microsoft’s plans. Gaming newsletter the Game Business previously reported his departure.
“Nothing has changed since the last time I talked about all this,” Rogen said, “and I haven’t worked with him in a really long time and I have no plans to.”
The actors got their start in Hollywood on the cult classic TV show “Freaks and Geeks.” At the time, Rogen was 16 and Franco was 21. As they continued to make their way through the industry, they became known for a string of well-loved early-2000s and 2010s comedies including “This Is the End,” “The Disaster Artist” and “Pineapple Express.”
Franco’s illustrious movie career came to a halt when five women, including several of his acting students, accused him of sexual exploitation. Some of the allegations included removing protective plastic guards covering actresses’ vaginas during the filming of intimate scenes, and Franco getting angry when actresses didn’t want to go topless.
Two of the accusers filed a class action in 2019, claiming sex discrimination, sexual harassment, fraudulent business practices and intimidation. Franco settled the case in 2021 for $2.2 million.
Rogen and Franco’s friendship has been a point of contention for the actor, as Rogen continues to climb the ranks in Hollywood. Just last year, “The Studio,” a show that Rogen created, writes, stars in, directs and produces won 13 Emmys and is currently filming its second season.
Rogen previously said he regretted saying that he could work with Franco again after the allegations surfaced.
“What I can say is that I despise abuse and harassment and I would never cover or conceal the actions of someone doing it, or knowingly put someone in a situation where they were around someone like that,” Rogen said in 2021, in an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times. “I also look back to that interview in 2018 where I comment that I would keep working with James, and the truth is that I have not and I do not plan to right now.”
The actor is still hesitant to detail the nuances of his friendship with Franco. He told the New York Times that it’s “a very personal thing.”
“There’s the public-facing side of it, which I’ve spoken about, and I have the same stance publicly that I’ve had, and I think the proof is in the pudding — I have not worked with him in years,” Rogen said. “But the personal side of it is just so nuanced, and it involves people that I don’t know if I should be dragging into this.”
The city witnessed Carl Lewis win four Olympic gold medals, cheered Valerie Brisco-Hooks’ historic golden double and watched Edwin Moses extend his 400-meter hurdles unbeaten streak. L.A. has history with track and field.
Now when Ato Boldon, a UCLA Hall of Famer and four-time Olympic medalist for Trinidad and Tobago, looks to this weekend’s L.A. Grand Prix and the city’s future with the sport, he wonders what it holds.
“I’ve always felt like L.A. needs a signature event,” Boldon said, “and with the Olympics coming up in two years, you look at the quality of this event this weekend, and you’re like, yeah, this is the kind of meet they should have all the time.”
At the halfway mark of the Olympic quadrennium, the USA Track & Field event serves as an important checkpoint for the sport’s hope to break out of the four-year popularity cycle.
The two-day event, which begins Saturday with the women’s hammer throw at the South Bay Athletic Club, features 18 Olympic or world champions competing primarily at USC’s Allyson Felix Field. Sunday’s marquee competition beginning at 1 p.m. will be televised on NBC.
With USA Track & Field building toward a home Olympics, L.A. has been a critical but stubborn market to conquer. Last year’s L.A. Grand Prix, which would have been the third edition of the meet, was canceled in April. The decision, USA Track & Field Chief Executive Max Siegel said, came down to another meet scheduled in the same venue within the same month.
But that competing event, part of Michael Johnson’s upstart Grand Slam Track league, was canceled only weeks before it was set to take place at UCLA’s Drake Stadium, leaving L.A. without a major track competition last summer.
“We knew last year when we canceled the meet that we had every intention leading up to the Olympics to be present in the L.A. market,” Siegel said.
The city knows great track. UCLA boasts legends such as Rafer Johnson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith-Joyner. USC, which boasts more Olympians than any other U.S. university, had athletes win nine Olympic medals in track and field at the 2024 Games in Paris, including double gold medals for Rai Benjamin in the 400-meter hurdles and 4×400-meter relay and a 4×100-meter relay championship for TeeTee Terry.
After Terry ran the second leg of the relay, Sha’Carri Richardson’s stare down at the end of her anchor leg became one of the iconic shots of the Paris Games, where 70,000 people packed Stade de France and millions more tuned in for one of the most-watched Olympics.
But the sport is back in the shadows like it always seems to be outside of Olympic years, said Boldon, now NBC Sports’ track and field analyst. There have been several attempts to penetrate the U.S. sports consciousness since the successful Paris Games. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian launched Athlos, a women’s track and field meet that began in New York City in 2024 and added a stop in London to its 2026 schedule. Grand Slam Track, founded by the Olympic legend Johnson and touting major names including Gabby Thomas and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, filed for bankruptcy last year, after completing only three of four planned events in its first season, and is only now emerging from it.
This year’s inaugural USATF Tour aims to organize the fragmented sport by streamlining the calendar and working with existing event coordinators to provide resources, including prize money and travel for top athletes, marketing and drug testing. The tour, which was in College Station, Texas, last week for the Lone Star Grand Prix, has 17 events in 10 states.
American Tara Davis-Woodhall after winning the women’s long jump at the 2025 world championships in Tokyo.
(Ashley Landis / Associated Press)
“I feel like LA28 gives the country something to organize around,” said Siegel, who hopes track and field can rise to be among the five most popular sports in the United States. “People are paying more attention to athlete stories in anticipation of what’s going to happen on U.S. soil.”
There is no shortage of stories at the L.A. Grand Prix. Almost everyone who matters in American track and field will be there, Boldon said. Kenny Bednarek, the silver medalist in the 200 meters in Paris, will line up in the 100 meters against Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, who took gold in the 200 in 2024.
Tara Davis-Woodhall, the reigning Olympic long jump champion, will compete in her signature event and race in the 100-meter hurdles for just the second time in the last five years. Her husband, Hunter Woodhall, will race in the 400 meters on Saturday, when Para athletes will be among those competing in the L.A. Distance Classic at Allyson Felix Field.
Richardson will run her first 100-meter race of the season. The 2024 Olympic silver medalist could be in line to end a three-decade gold medal drought in 2028. No U.S. woman has stood atop an Olympic podium for the 100 since 1996, when Gail Devers won in Atlanta.
Such a stacked field outside of an Olympic year on U.S. soil could be a sign of a changing tide for track and field, Boldon said. The L.A. Grand Prix is a gold-level event on the World Athletics Continental Tour, the second-highest tier of single-day international competition. As athletes vie for world ranking points, the event could be a true Olympic preview two years before the Games begin at the Coliseum.
“This,” Boldon said, “is not a normal week in our sport.”
WASHINGTON — The relationship between President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron started simply enough, with a handshake, nearly a decade ago.
But even then, there were signs of strain in their relationship — tensions that could be on full display during next week’s G7 summit in France.
Back in 2017, Trump was a brash businessman just elected to America’s most powerful office, and Macron was an upstart politician who had won his race in a landslide. At a NATO summit in Brussels, they clinched hands far longer than most people do when they meet for the first time. Neither seemed to want to be the first to break a grip so tight that it exposed white knuckles.
Nevertheless, a friendship was born. And early on, Macron seemed to be the one European leader with a knack for managing his mercurial, three-decades-older counterpart.
Macron invited the Republican president to join him for Bastille Day celebrations in July 2017, including an Eiffel Tower dinner date with their wives. Trump reciprocated by making Macron the guest of honor the following year at his first White House state dinner, the highest diplomatic honor the United States can extend to an ally.
But by the end of Trump’s first term, the bromance had faded. And in his second term, the leaders now openly trade barbs, disagreeing over tariffs, Ukraine and the Iran war. That dynamic will be scrutinized next week when Trump and the leaders of Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan join Macron in the French lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains for the G7 summit.
Trump’s long-simmering frustrations with US allies could be on display
There could be awkward moments between Trump and Macron, as well as among Trump and the other G7 leaders he’s criticized for not joining him in Iran.
“But I also think European leaders are quite professionals when it comes to politics, and in some ways diplomacy at this point, and will maybe see it as an opportunity as well,” Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview.
Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said the Trump-Macron relationship has been further complicated by the Iran war and Trump’s complaints “that Europeans weren’t helping, when they hadn’t been consulted, and their interests are very much affected by this.”
“I think that was a negative for Macron,” Volker said.
Trump joined Israel in a war against Iran over its nuclear program back in February without consulting other U.S. allies. He then complained publicly when European countries spurned his requests for their help.
Waning support for Ukraine in its war against Russia from the Trump administration “has really irritated the French,” Volker said. “They feel this is important and we’re not paying attention to it.” Macron invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to join the leaders’ discussions on Tuesday.
Macron is the G7 member who has dealt with Trump the longest
In Trump’s first term, Macron appeared confident that he could persuade and influence the U.S. leader, but the relationship increasingly has come to be defined by their disagreements.
Macron now says he is “careful” about Trump’s statements, suggesting he no longer takes them at face value. Their relationship remains cordial as each calls the other “my friend.” But the relationship has also experienced some ups and downs.
As president-elect, Trump attended the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in late 2024 at Macron’s invitation. After Trump began his second term in 2025, Macron was an early Oval Office visitor. The president wrote on social media that he was “delighted” to welcome Macron back to the White House and said the relationship with France has been “very special.”
But at one point during the meeting, the French president publicly corrected Trump after he wrongly suggested that Europe would recover the money it had provided to support Ukraine. With a smile, Macron touched Trump’s forearm and replied, “We provided real money.”
Macron also condemned as “brutal and unfounded” new tariffs that Trump slapped on steel, aluminum and a broader range of European imports in early 2025.
But there have also been some lighter moments mixed with the tensions.
A documentary aired last year on French television showed Macron telling Trump during a phone call that Zelenskyy had agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal. Trump replied, “You’re the greatest.”
Macron has often said he can reach Trump directly whenever he needs to — and proved his point during last year’s U.N. General Assembly session in New York. After police officers blocked the French leader from crossing a street because traffic had been halted for Trump’s motorcade, Macron whipped out his cellphone and dialed the U.S. president.
“How are you?” Macron said. “Guess what? I’m waiting in the street because everything is frozen for you!”
‘This is not a show,’ Macron has said about Trump’s NATO ambiguity
Macron has argued that Trump’s “America first” policies bolstered his case for a stronger European defense capability that would lessen reliance on the United States.
In April of this year, as Trump sent mixed signals about Washington’s commitment to NATO after the start of the war in Iran, Macron delivered some of his sharpest criticism of the U.S. president.
“There is too much talk, and it’s going in all directions,” Macron said. “We all need stability, calm and a return to peace. This is not a show.”
“You have to be serious, and when you want to be serious, you don’t say the opposite every day of what you said the day before,” he said.
Trump, while mimicking a French accent, recently has taken to reenacting a conversation he says he had with Macron over drug prices and tariffs. Trump also poked Macron by telling a private luncheon in April that his wife, Brigitte Macron, treats her husband badly. The comments were in a video the White House had posted on its YouTube channel before blocking access.
Macron didn’t see any humor in Trump’s comments. “The remarks I heard were neither elegant nor appropriate,” he said. “They do not deserve a response.”
Still, Macron has tried to accommodate Trump’s schedule to ensure his presence at the summit in Evian-les-Bains, knowing that he has a record of leaving such gatherings early.
Macron originally had set Sunday, which is Trump’s 80th birthday, as the opening day of the summit, but he pushed the start back a day because Trump is celebrating the occasion with a UFC show staged on the White House grounds.
Superville and Corbet write for the Associated Press. Corbet reported from Paris.
New surveillance footage and other evidence from Southern California Edison confirms that a century-old, idle transmission line that the utility failed to remove ignited last year’s deadly Eaton wildfire, lawyers for insurers said in a court filing.
Video obtained from a surveillance camera at Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club in Pasadena shows two bright flashes occurring in the location of the tower holding the idle line at 6:11 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025.
The flashes correspond to the time that Edison recorded two faults, three seconds apart, on another transmission line more than five miles away, the lawyers said in the filing, citing new data provided by the utility.
Soon after the faults, residents nearby recorded videos of a fire burning at the base of the tower, which is known as M16T1.
“Southern California Edison has spent the last sixteen months attempting to forestall the inevitable legal consequences of razing a large swath of the communities of Altadena and Pasadena to the ground,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
“The Eaton Fire could not have occurred if SCE had simply disassembled and removed Structure M16T1,” the lawyers added.
The lawyers filing the May 18 motion represent property insurers that paid tens of millions of dollars to residents who lost their homes. Their motion asks the judge to order a judgment in the insurers’ favor that would make Edison liable for the damage under inverse condemnation, a legal doctrine in the state constitution.
Courts have ruled that the doctrine requires private utilities such as Edison to pay for property they destroy, even if they haven’t been found to have acted negligently.
Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said the company did not learn about the existence of the swim club video until the lawyers submitted it in court with their filing.
“It’s very disappointing and inappropriate that this video was not produced in discovery,” she said. “We hope that video has been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”
Dunleavy said the company believes the lawyers’ motion “is wrong on the facts and the law.”
“We’ll respond more fully in our own court filing,” she said.
Attorneys for the insurers did not respond to requests for comment.
In a February 2025 letter to state regulators, Edison said it had detected a single fault on a line more than five miles away from Altadena about 6:11 p.m. on the night the fire ignited. It said the fault caused a brief surge of electricity on its four live transmission lines in Eaton Canyon.
The company said in the letter that it was looking into whether the power surge could have caused electricity to jump to the idle line that runs parallel to the live wires through a process called induction.
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, later said that a leading theory of the fire’s ignition was that the idle line became energized briefly through induction, sparking the fire.
At the same time, the company has not accepted blame for the fire, saying repeatedly that its own confidential investigation into the cause, as well as a separate inquiry by Los Angeles County and state fire officials, is continuing.
According to the court filing, evidence obtained by the lawyers shows that the company stopped using the transmission line in 1971 and designated it as “out-of-service.”
“The declaration of Out of Service shall only be used when the line … or piece of equipment is expected to remain permanently out of service,” Edison stated in an internal document known as a system operating bulletin, according to the filing.
Edison executives told The Times last year that they left the line in place because they believed it might be needed in the future.
“We have these inactive lines still available because there is a reasonable chance we’re going to use them in the future,” Shinjini Menon, Edison’s senior vice president of system planning and engineering, said then.
Dunleavy said Friday that the idle lines are kept in place for a variety of reasons, including to preserve the right of way Edison had obtained to construct them and to support future needs for more electricity as the state aims to meet its clean energy goals.
Last year, The Times reported that state regulators, knowing old electric lines posed hazards, proposed a rule in 2001 that would have forced Edison and other utilities to remove idle lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.
Under pressure from Edison and the other companies, the rule was weakened to allow utilities to keep the unused lines in place until executives decided they were “permanently abandoned.”
In their May 18 filing, the lawyers said Edison executives had known about the risk of induction for more than 100 years. They cited a 1923 contract between Edison and Pacific Electric Railway Co. that said that “leakage of electricity or induction from or between” conductors was an inherent risk of operating multiple electrical circuits in proximity.
“That’s why SCE grounds idle lines and inspects them,” Dunleavy said of the risk.
Copies of Edison’s fault records from that night, its operating bulletin and thousands of other documents, including depositions, are sealed from public view under a protective order that Edison and lawyers for the victims asked the judge to approve last year.
The company said last week that it had so far received more than 3,500 claims from about 10,000 people. It said it had extended nearly 1,900 offers to those people, totaling more than $650 million.
The law shields utilities from the damages of fires sparked by their equipment as long as they follow certain requirements, including submitting a plan to state regulators for reducing the risk that their equipment sparks fires. Regulators review the plan and track whether the utilities are making progress in reducing the fire risk.
In the last 10 years, Edison’s rates increased by 101%, according to an April report by the public advocates office at the California Public Utilities Commission.
Despite the spending, Edison’s electric lines sparked more fires in 2024 than in 2019. The company blamed the increase on erratic weather that created more dried vegetation.
NEW YORK — Donald Trump was booed loudly by fans inside Madison Square Garden when he was shown on video screens during the national anthem prior to Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday night.
Trump was shown for several seconds giving a military salute. The boos ended when the U.S. flag followed him on the screens, and fans cheered when New York Knicks players were shown. Mentions of the San Antonio Spurs also elicited loud boos.
Trump is watching from Knicks owner James Dolan’s suite, along with granddaughter Kai, personal adviser Boris Epshteyn and Cabinet secretaries Lee Zeldin, Sean Duffy and Doug Burgum. He is the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
Trump’s Marine One helicopter flew from his home in New Jersey and landed near Wall Street before his motorcade made its way up through Manhattan and to the arena roughly an hour before tipoff. He encountered a handful of people making rude gestures, and outside the area, one group held signs saying “Trump must go.”
He settled into Dolan’s suite shortly afterward.
During the afternoon before Trump’s arrival, the New York Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service set up a large perimeter surrounding Madison Square Garden. Fans lined up to get inside the arena more than four hours before tip-off, in a scene more closely resembling New Year’s Eve in Times Square than the usual leadup to a basketball game.
They were required to provide a ticket or pass to get past various checkpoints, along with going through a Transportation Security Administration-style magnetometer. Secret Service personnel and police were positioned at every corner and in large numbers. Daily commuters, tourists and fans were all confounded at various times as they tried to maneuver the security.
New Yorkers forced to adjust
After traveling from his new home in Florida for the game, Knicks fan Greg Weldon said the main inconvenience he’s faced so far has been the lack of information.
“We’ve asked so many cops, Secret Service, guys with machine guns, what to do, where should we go,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
Knicks coach Mike Brown and Spurs counterpart Mitch Johnson downplayed any concept of being inconvenienced by the closures and enhanced security because of Trump.
“There’s a lot going on, and I’d much rather be a part of it than not,” Johnson said.
With security stepped up, a watch party outside was canceled, and ticket holders were not allowed to bring bags inside the Garden. Fans had gathered near the arena to watch games during this playoff run, during which the Knicks have won 13 games in a row to reach the Final for the first time since 1999 and move two victories from their first NBA title since 1973.
“We are looking forward to bringing back watch parties for Game 4,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference Monday. “But I think New Yorkers are used to presidents coming to town, and they understand that that generally means lockdowns of areas and that’s what you’re going to see tonight at the Garden.”
Incidents heighten attention to Trump’s security
This is the latest major sporting event Trump has attended during his time as president, and the security measures have created major hassles for fans.
Thousands of fans missed the start of last year’s U.S. Open men’s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner because of lengthy security lines. Even though the U.S. Tennis Assn. pushed back the start of the match by a half hour, many fans still couldn’t get in because added measures meant that they had to go through screening not only when they arrived at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, but again in front of the steps into Arthur Ashe Stadium, where Trump watched from a suite.
Federal law enforcement officials have been reexamining Trump’s security in light of three incidents in the past two years: a shooting at a 2024 rally in Butler, Penn.; the discovery of a man armed with a rifle as Trump played golf in West Palm Beach, Fla., later that year; and the recent shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner.
Asked Sunday his thoughts on Trump attending, Knicks center Mitchell Robinson said: “Cool, I guess. We can still get out there and play [no matter] who’s here and who’s not.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other dignitaries were also at the game.
It was already hard enough for Knicks fans to get inside Madison Square Garden because of astronomical ticket prices. The get-in price for a ticket is higher than the average cost of monthly rent in New York, surging over $5,000. The best seats are tens of thousands of dollars. Mamdani said he bought his ticket, which he said was standing room only, for about $1,000 directly from Madison Square Garden.
The difficulty of seeing the game in person has prompted fans to crowd bars, streets and watch parties all over the city. The watch party near the Garden has become a major event all through the playoffs, but with Trump attending, that event was moved a few blocks away outside the security perimeter, at Bryant Park.
“We improvise,” said Knicks guard Jose Alvarado, who is a New York native. “We’re New Yorkers. We’re going to find a way to watch a game, and that’s what we’re doing.”
There’s no crying in baseball, but Kim Ng works in softball now. And as commissioner of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the former Dodgers assistant general manager has been fielding lots of tearful feedback from fans overcome by the fact that softball players finally, finally have a big league of their own.
“I can’t even tell you the number of people that have approached me, just openly sobbing with happiness,” she said. “It’s been incredible, experiencing all of that and understanding how long people have been waiting for something like this.”
It really is like that. Ask Lisa Fernandez, softball pioneer and total boss: “I’ll be watching and get emotional, just looking at how far this game has come.”
With MLB backing the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL, for a second season and Ng back to steer it, sustainable professional softball is starting to feel real.
Former UCLA pitcher Rachel Garcia plays for Athletes Unlimited Team McQuillin.
(Grant Halverson / Getty Images)
Fernandez remembers when it was a huge deal to get one softball game on TV, and now ESPN will broadcast 50 AUSL games and ABC will carry the championship. And after last year’s four-team 10-city barnstorming tour, the league will add two teams and anchor itself to locations in North Carolina, Illinois, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Utah.
The ball gets rolling on Tuesday, just days after the conclusion of the Women’s College World Series — which last season averaged a record 1.3 million viewers on ESPN, including pulling 3.9 million for UCLA’s thriller against Tennessee.
Big steps, baby steps. All going the right direction.
“I would hope that we are the major league baseball of softball,” Ng, 57, said in a phone conversation. “That is a good number of teams, spread out across the country, with a huge following, all of our games televised.
“That’s the goal. To be the MLB of softball.”
Ng spent more than 30 years in the MLB, including a decade-long stint with the Dodgers. She was also the first woman to serve as a big-league general manager, leading the Miami Marlins from 2020 through the 2023 season. She declined her option after the team made its first full-season playoff appearance in two decades and then announced plans to introduce a president of baseball operations position that would’ve siphoned away some of her say-so.
Miami Marlins general manger Kim Ng, left, sits in a golf cart and talks with manager Marlins Skip Schumaker during a 2023 spring training workout.
(Lynne Sladky / Associated Press)
“Breaking that glass ceiling, that’s special to me,” Ng said. “But I think in a different way, this [work with the AUSL] is for sure one of the more meaningful things I’ve done.”
She said a former MLB colleague recently asked her about the AUSL: “I said, ‘I’m working for the women now.’”
The former co-worker corrected her: “You were always working for the women.’”
Before that, as a kid, she was a softball infielder in Long Island and then at the University of Chicago. “I was scrappy,” Ng said, “which is definitely how I describe my personality and the way I approach most things in life.”
It’s served her well. And now it’s serving softball, a sport that for decades has been among the most popular for girls in America, even without long-term playing prospects or pro players to strive to emulate.
Compare it with basketball: About three-quarters of the WNBA’s current players have never even lived in a world without an established professional women’s basketball league in America.
UCLA star hitter Megan Grant will play in the Athletes Unlimited softball league after wrapping up her record-setting college career.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The NBA-backed WNBA is celebrating its 30th season this summer with a lucrative new CBA and 15 teams, two of them expansion franchises, including one in Canada, and the Bay Area-based Golden State Valkyries valued at $850 million.
The AUSL is about to embark on Year 2.
There have been attempts to start up professional softball leagues before. Those weren’t just long shots, more like Megan Grant moonshots.
But now we have Bryanna Lopez, a 12-year-old catcher from Alhambra, sitting in the Easton Stadium stands at UCLA, watching her heroes play and telling me, without hesitation: “I want to play professional softball. It’s a really big dream.”
And a really big deal.
For players and a growing audience of folks like Kaitlyn Laabs, the superfan in a chef’s hat at UCLA games, who want to watch the home run queen Grant continue to mash. To see her teammates Jordan Woolery keep flaunting her flashy slash line and Taylor Tinsley sharpening her wicked arsenal of pitches.
UCLA starting pitcher Taylor Tinsley and first baseman Jordan Woolery are poised to start their professional softball careers this week.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
“A lot of times, seniors come in their last year thinking it’s the end of their career, and that puts a lot more pressure,” UCLA’s Woolery said earlier this month, before the Bruins advanced to the Women’s College World Series for the third straight season. “So, for me, Megan, Tins, [the AUSL] opens us up a little bit to play free, knowing it’s not the end of the road.”
Ng’s presence, first as an adviser and starting last season as commissioner, is helping legitimize the new league.
“She’s the right person at the right time,” said Fernandez, the UCLA associate head coach, who is also the general manager of the defending champion Utah Talons. “Knowing Kim’s background in baseball, having her know the business of how to run a league, a no-brainer for me.”
Ng’s team-building acumen is helping her coach up first-time general managers. Her experience at MLB’s league office, working to grow the game internationally, ensures she’ll be patient, methodical — which is to say, the AUSL is not rushing to join the Sparks and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC in the complicated, competitive L.A. market until it’s good and ready.
“Softball just has had its ups and downs in terms of creating a solid foundation,” Ng said. “Why has it taken so long? It’s hard to say, but obviously the revenue is a huge piece of it. Now, with MLB as a major investor, they’re understanding of the idea that we’re complementary.”
MLB has invested a reported $10 million in the AUSL — in addition to offering its massive promotional platform. So after Grant hit an NCAA record-extending 39th home run, the No. 4 overall pick was interviewed by Harold Reynolds on “MLB Tonight.”
Beside Grant, who is bound for the Portland Cascade, there will be 12 other former Bruins sprinkled among the league’s six rosters. Woolery and Tinsley will team up with a few other former Bruins on the Talons.
“You’d lose a generation of players if the growth is capped,” said Laabs, the softball fan. “But right now, softball is on a rocket ship. Let’s keep on cooking, let’s keep on flying, let’s show that if you build it, they will come.”
The first rule of a primary election is: Don’t make too much of the results.
The intrepid folks who bother to cast a ballot in these first-round races are largely a group of engaged voters, and drawing conclusions from such a narrow minority is a losing game.
So however the final June results tally out, the lessons learned won’t easily translate to the larger electorate that will almost surely show up in November. But if this election doesn’t tell us much about what fall voters will do, it does tell us something about the Democratic Party that dominates this state: It’s chaotic, to put it gently. And no, that’s not entirely the fault of the “jungle” primary.
Traditional rules seem to have broken down (not a bad thing) and new ones haven’t yet emerged. The old guard has lost control, and maybe vision, and the result is more candidates willing to sidestep seniority and a wait-your-turn mentality to try their luck — especially younger progressives.
Sometimes that chutzpah works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s a mirror of the national trend of Democratic infighting and a glimpse into just how fragmented the party has become as it tries to figure out who it stands for and who it supports before the 2028 presidential election.
“I feel like I’m definitely running against major institutional forces, but that’s how it is,” state Sen. Scott Wiener told me recently. “At times we see sort of a little bit of a fortress mentality, and other perspectives are not welcome, and younger folks, newer voices are not welcome, and and that’s a dynamic that plays out in a lot of different places.”
Wiener, who could be considered king of the line-jumpers, just took the top spot in the San Francisco-centered race to represent the 11th Congressional District, the seat held by Nancy Pelosi since 1987, when Wiener was 17.
By most accounts, Pelosi and Wiener had a mostly cordial relationship until last year, when he entered the race before she announced her retirement. Though Wiener had been clear for years that he planned such a run when Pelosi stepped down, Pelosi is an icon in the city, beloved by constituents and uncontested as queen of the old guard.
Announcing his campaign before she officially made that decision — or had the chance to choose her successor — sent shock waves through the political firmament. When Pelosi endorsed Supervisor Connie Chan in May, it was seen by many as a sign of her displeasure. Chan, who had struggled to gain traction in the primary, came in second with the Pelosi boost and will face Wiener in November.
Across the state, there were other races with upstart contenders. In Southern California, Jake Levine, a progressive Democrat who served in the Obama White House, took on incumbent Brad Sherman. Sherman, who at 71 has served almost 30 years in Congress, resoundingly beat out Levine by more than 20 points.
In Sacramento, there is Mai Vang, a progressive City Council member, who is challenging Rep. Doris Matsui, another member of the old guard royalty. Vang is in a tie for second place with a Republican contender as remaining votes are counted.
And of course, there is the governor’s race itself, which included a field so determined and uncontrollable even before the fiasco of Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct scandal that the state Democratic Party started putting out its own polling in a seeming bid to convince some blue contenders to drop out. It didn’t work. Notably, progressive Katie Porter and moderate San José Mayor Matt Mahan stuck in until the bitter end. But old guard candidate Xavier Becerra came out on top.
If these races have a lesson, it’s that different Democratic voters want different things, but the party hasn’t figured out how to embrace that other than offering up the moderate middle ground.
“This is a big question to this Democratic establishment, about how big of a tent they want to build,” said Irene Kao of Courage California, a progressive advocacy organization.
She said that it “bodes well” that so many strong progressive challengers came out for the primary, because it allows a chance for candidates outside the party power structure to find an audience with voters, even if they are ultimately unsuccessful.
And where voters go, the party will eventually be forced to follow. That doesn’t necessarily mean a more progressive Democratic Party, but it likely means a more inclusive one if they want to lure the kind of low-information and low-propensity voters who make or break a general election.
“People are sick of the games, and sick of people trying to just maneuver things to get their own person in,” Wiener said. “People want to have choices.”
