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America’s longest government shutdown is becoming more painful by the day.

At least 40 million Americans are struggling to get food, more than a million federal workers haven’t been paid, health insurance premiums are rising, and flights are getting disrupted.

Congress has been locked in a standoff over a bill to fund government services, with Democrats demanding tax credits that will make health insurance cheaper for millions of Americans and an end to federal agency cuts.

Democrats won decisive victories in state and local elections this week. President Donald Trump is blaming the shutdown for this setback to the Republican Party.

So, will he now be willing to negotiate? Can the two sides agree to a comprise?

Presenter: Bernard Smith

Guests:

Mark Pfeifle – Republican strategist

Jeremy Mayer – Professor of political science at George Mason University

David Bolger – Democratic strategist

Russian President Vladimir Putin today ordered his top officials to draft proposals on possible nuclear weapons testing. Putin was reacting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media posting last week, stating the U.S. would begin conducting new testing. 

It remains unclear whether Trump was referring to restarting live nuclear detonations or tests on the reliability of warhead delivery systems, like the one conducted today with an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, which already occur regularly. U.S. officials have appeared to clarify, at least to some degree, that Trump’s testing will be limited to delivery systems and the nuclear deterrent apparatus, not detonations. Still, there are questions as to his true intent, which could always change. Regardless, Russian officials “assess that Washington is aiming to prepare and conduct nuclear tests,” according to the official Russian TASS news outlet.

Given Trump’s Truth Social post, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov told Putin that it was “advisable to prepare for full-scale nuclear tests” immediately. He added that Russia’s Arctic testing site at Novaya Zemlya could host such tests at short notice. The site is widely believed to have been used for the recent launch systems test of Russia’s mysterious Burevestnik (also known to NATO as SSC-X-9 Skyfall) cruise missile

Belousov offered no further details, so we asked several nuclear weapons experts for their assessments on how quickly Russia could detonate a nuclear device – something it hasn’t done since 1990 – and what it would entail to make it happen. Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

Hans
Kristensen — Director, Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists. Writes the bi-monthly Nuclear Notebook and the world nuclear forces overview in the SIPRI Yearbook.

“Short notice is relative. The quickest would be to drive a warhead into an existing tunnel and seal it off. But that wouldn’t give them any new data and probably risk a leak.

So, unless they already have one prepared, if they want to do a new fully instrumented test, I suspect it would involve preparing a tunnel, the device, and rigging all the cables and sensors to record that data. There has been a lot of tunnel-digging at Novaya Zemlya for quite some time for their existing experiments, so presumably a new fully instrumented test would be in addition to that. 

Preparing a new one would probably take several months, possibly six-plus, but difficult to estimate because we don’t know what they already have prepared.“

Jon B. Wolfsthal, Director of Global Risk, American Federation of Scientists.

“Russia also has an active nuclear maintenance program as does the U.S. However, Russia tests near the Arctic Circle at Novaya Zemlya Island. As a result, they can really only – barring a real emergency – test in summer and late fall. So it would take them some time, and at least until next year. 

However, if they want to gain a lot of technically useful data from a test, it may take them longer. Just to conduct a basic test could take less than 12 months. But as I have said, this is what an arms race looks like. Action/reaction cycles. Russia will test if we do. I suspect they will not if we do not. 

I don’t know what Russia would test. It would not have to be a massive bomb to be useful. You generally only need to test the first stage of a thermonuclear device to get useful data. It could be as small as 1 to 5 kilotons or up to 15 to 20, but there is no way for people outside of the Russian scientific community to predict well.”

Daryl G. Kimball has been Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) and publisher and contributor for the organization’s monthly journal, Arms Control Today, since September 2001.

“The U.S., China, and Russia all have ‘nuclear test readiness’ plans and I would assess that Russia would be able to resume nuclear explosive testing more quickly than the United States. 

I just know it would be less than the optimistic 24-36 months for a full-scale underground contained nuclear test explosions at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). Russia would not be encumbered by the same safety and environmental safeguards and domestic political obstacles that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would have to deal with in order to conduct a full-scale multi-kiloton nuclear explosion underground at the former U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada.

But, most importantly, there is no technical, military or political reason why Putin or Trump should order the resumption of nuclear explosive testing, and Defense Minister Belousov’s comments are counterproductive and irresponsible. 

The United States and Russia deploy some 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads and they possess other sub-strategic nuclear weapons. Their arsenals consist of various, well-tested warhead types. The United States conducted more than 1,030 nuclear test explosions and Russia 715, the vast majority of which were to proof-test new warhead designs. Neither side needs to or wants to develop a new warhead, so any new nuclear test explosions would be purely for ‘show,’ which would be extremely irresponsible.“

Ankit
Panda — Expert on nuclear policy, Asia, missiles, & space. Stanton Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Author of ‘Kim Jong Un and the Bomb.’

“We know from both open source and official U.S. assessments that the Russians maintain a relatively high level of test readiness at Novaya Zemlya. They’ve also strongly emphasized the parity principle on the testing issue, so it makes sense that they’d take these steps given Trump’s recent comments. 

They want to be positioned so that if the U.S. tests, they can follow quickly. The specific timeline of Russian readiness is difficult to nail down, but they could test probably without significant instrumentation without much difficulty. I would think weeks if there was sufficient political demand for a rapid demonstration.“

Stephen
Schwartz — Editor/Co-author ‘Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940‘.

“The United States has an enormous advantage in nuclear testing over every other country in the world, partly because we conducted more tests than everyone else combined (1,030, involving 1,149 individual detonations), and because we have a very elaborate and well-funded ($345 billion to date) Stockpile Stewardship program. Since 1996, this has enabled us to ‘test’ our nuclear bombs and warheads via extremely powerful computers, eliminating the need for actual underground tests and providing us with critical insights into our weapons we could not obtain from physical nuclear testing alone.

So given that, and given Trump’s recent out-of-the-blue demand that we resume nuclear testing immediately, it is unfortunately not surprising that Russia is responding the way that it is. In Russia, as in the United States, there are political and military leaders and weapons scientists who have never given up on one day resuming nuclear testing. Russia, like the United States, has long maintained a readiness program to resume nuclear testing. It is an unfortunate escalation of at least rhetoric at this point, sliding the United States and Russia, and perhaps also China and maybe North Korea and other states further down the road toward resuming nuclear testing, which has not happened in decades.

Right now, we and the Russians conduct what are known as subcritical tests, which are tests that do not result in a nuclear yield, but nevertheless provide useful scientific information that can make our weapons more safe and reliable. 

Russia could probably resume underground nuclear testing pretty quickly. Satellite imagery from 2023 and this past July indicates that they’ve been doing some work at the test site to expand the facilities there and potentially make them more ready to resume nuclear testing. I suspect Russia could probably do this faster than the United States. Our testing would take place in Nevada – at least that’s the only test site that we have available right now, and it would probably take on the order of one to three years (for the U.S.) to do a fully instrumented test.

We can’t see inside the [Russian] buildings that have gone up, so we don’t know exactly what’s going on there. But, if I have to guess, and it is only a guess, I would say a matter of several weeks to several months, perhaps [for a Russian test]. But it really depends on what their intentions are. 

If they simply want to blow something up to demonstrate that they’ve returned to doing that kind of testing that can be done fairly quickly if they want to actually have a scientifically and militarily useful test where there’s all sorts of diagnostic equipment and they’re able to measure the results, and determine something about the test other than the fact that it simply went off, that could take more time.

If they’ve been planning and preparing, if they have personnel and equipment there, they could probably do something fairly quickly – on the very short end, potentially a matter of a few weeks to perhaps a few months. It could be longer; it could be a matter of six months. But again, if you only want to send a political message that we are resuming nuclear testing, you can take a nuclear bomb or warhead out of your stockpile and transport it to Novaya Zemlya, stick it in an underground tunnel, seal it off and detonate it.“

We reached out to the White House to see what concern, if any, they have about Putin’s order for proposals on how to resume nuclear testing. We are waiting for a response. The experts we spoke with, however, voiced their own worries.

“As for concerns, Russia’s testing could enable them to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons via computer simulations where now it is hard for them to do so,” explained Wolfsthal. “Russia could close the testing advantage the U.S. now possesses.”

Contact the author: [email protected]

Long Beach Poly, a 12-time Southern Section football champion, announced on Friday it will not participate in this season’s football playoffs despite finishing second in the Moore League. The school earlier this season had six transfer students declared ineligible for providing false information on paperwork to the Southern Section, a violation of CIF bylaw 202.

Here’s the statement from the Long Beach Unified School District:

“Long Beach Poly High School acknowledges the recent CIF ruling related to violations of CIF Bylaw 202 within its football program. In accordance with that ruling, and as part of an ongoing internal investigation, Poly will withdraw from postseason play.

“The school is fully cooperating with CIF and the District, as a thorough review of our processes and systems is conducted to ensure full compliance with CIF rules and District policy. While student and employee matters are confidential, our commitment remains to support our students while upholding the integrity of our athletic programs.”

San Juan Hills became the latest school to announce forfeits on Friday for using ineligible players. Two transfer students had been in the transfer portal listed as “under review.” The school will forfeit nine games and is now 1-9. Both players were held out of a game on Thursday.

Norco earlier this week forfeited six games, dropping to 1-9 after a win on Thursday.

This crackdown by the Southern Section against students providing false information started during the summer when schools began submitting transfer paperwork. The Southern Section is using new technological tools to verify information. Bishop Montgomery received the harshest punishment, with 24 players declared ineligible, forcing the school to cancel its football season.

Other schools found to have ineligible players this season include Long Beach Millikan, Compton, Bellflower, Victor Valley and Orange Lutheran.

Southern Section commissioner Mike West said last month, “We’ve had a real influx of fraudulent paperwork. It’s been significant and very disheartening.”

At least 229 flights have been cancelled

A massive airline system failure has left thousands of travellers facing lengthy delays. Alaska Airlines called for a temporary ground stop early on Friday morning (October 24) which resulted in at least 229 flights being axed.

The number of passengers – including Britons – who may have been delayed or impacted remains unclear. Horizon Air, a subsidiary of Alaska Airlines, was also hit by the disruption. Flight operations have now resumed.

The carrier emphasised that safety was never compromised during the breakdown, which stemmed from a malfunction at the airline’s primary data centre. Matas Cenys, head of product at Saily, explained that even small technical faults can paralyse vital processes, creating chaos for travellers.

They explained: “Airlines today operate on highly interconnected digital systems. When one system fails, the effects can spread across the entire network, grounding flights and disrupting operations. This is why Alaska Airlines’ recent outage, while labeled a ‘technical error’, caused widespread cancellations and delays. Even minor glitches can freeze critical processes because redundancy systems are not always perfect.

“Airlines’ digital systems are like a row of dominoes. Each system – scheduling, crew assignments, baggage, gates – depends on the one before it. If a single one falls, even from something small, like a database error, it can trigger a chain reaction that stops the whole operation. Most passengers never see these links, but that’s how flights keep running on time.

“There’s also a cybersecurity overlap. Even when outages are accidental, system downtime can create potential opportunities for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. During a disruption, normal safeguards and monitoring may be reduced or delayed, allowing malicious actors to target systems before defences are fully restored.

“Travel runs on trust that systems will work, flights will depart, and bags will arrive. Every outage chips away that confidence. Rebuilding it will require transparency and visible investment in resilience.

“Every outage has a huge human cost. Travelers get stranded in airports, tired and nervous, and airport workers have to operate under stress trying to manage the chaos. This incident should serve as a reminder to the entire travel and tech industry to reassess and reinforce their IT systems.”

John Carpenter has this one recurring nightmare.

“I’m in a huge, massive town I don’t really know,” he says, “and I’m looking for the movie district. And inevitably all the theaters are closed down. They’re all closed down. That’s what the dream is.”

I’m visiting Carpenter at his longtime production house in Hollywood on one of L.A.’s unjustly sunny October afternoons. A vintage “Halloween” pinball machine and a life-size Nosferatu hover near his easy chair. I tell him I don’t think Freud would have too much trouble interpreting that particular dream.

“No, I know,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have too much trouble with that either.”

Nonetheless, it truly haunts him — “and it has haunted me over the years for many dreams in a row,” he continues. “I’m either with family or a group, and I go off to do something and I get completely lost. [Freud] wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring that out either. I mean, none of this is very mysterious.”

Carpenter is a gruff but approachable 77 these days, his career as a film director receding in the rearview. The last feature he made was 2010’s “The Ward.” His unofficial retirement was partly chosen, partly imposed by a capricious industry. The great movie poster artist Drew Struzan died two days before I visited — Carpenter says he never met Struzan but loved his work, especially his striking painting for the director’s icy 1982 creature movie “The Thing” — and I note how that whole enterprise of selling a movie with a piece of handmade art is a lost one.

“The whole movie business that I knew, that I grew up with, is gone,” he replies. “All gone.”

John Carpenter with John Mulaney, appearing as a part of “Everybody’s in L.A.” at the Sunset Gower Studios in May 2024.

(Adam Rose / Netflix)

It hasn’t, thankfully, made him want to escape from L.A. He still lives here with his wife, Sandy King, who runs the graphic novel imprint Storm King Comics, which Carpenter contributes to. He gamely appeared on John Mulaney’s “Everybody’s in L.A.” series on Netflix and, earlier this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. gave him a Career Achievement Award — a belated lovefest for a veteran who was sidelined after “The Thing” flopped, cast out into indie darkness and was never personally nominated for an Oscar.

The thing that does keep Carpenter busy these days (other than watching Warriors basketball and playing videogames) is the thing that might have an even bigger cultural footprint than his movies: his music. With his adult son Cody and godson, Daniel Davies, Carpenter is once again performing live concerts of his film scores and instrumental albums in a run at downtown’s Belasco this weekend and next.

The synthy, hypnotic scores that became his signature in films like “Halloween” and “Escape from New York” not only outnumber his output as a director — he’s scored movies for several other filmmakers and recently made a handshake deal in public to score Bong Joon Ho’s next feature — but their influence and popularity are much more evident in 2025 than the style of his image-making.

From “Stranger Things” to “F1,” Carpenter’s minimalist palette of retro electronica combined with the groove-based, trancelike ethos of his music (which now includes four “Lost Themes” records) is the coin of the realm so many modern artists are chasing.

Very few composers today are trying to sound like John Williams; many of them want to sound like John Carpenter. The Kentucky-raised skeptic with the long white hair doesn’t believe me when I express this.

“Well, see, I must be stupid,” he says, “because I don’t get it.”

“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Carpenter is quick to put himself down. He always says that he scored his own films because he was the only composer he could afford, and that he only used synths because they were cheap and he couldn’t properly write music for an orchestra. When I tell him that Daniel Wyman, the instrumentalist who helped program and execute the “Halloween” score in 1978, praised Carpenter’s innate knowledge of the “circle of fifths” and secondary dominants — bedrocks of Western musical theory that allowed Carpenter’s scores to keep the tension cooking — he huffs.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Carpenter says, halfway between self-deprecation and something more rascally. “It all comes, probably, from the years I spent in our front room with my father and listening to classical music. I’m sure I’m just digging this s— out.”

Whether by osmosis or genetics or possibly black magic, Carpenter clearly absorbed his powers from his father, Dr. Howard Carpenter, a classically trained violinist and composer. Classical music filled the childhood home in Bowling Green and for young John it was all about “Bach, Bach and Bach. He’s my favorite. I just can’t get enough of Johann there.”

It makes sense. Bach’s music has a circular spell quality and the pipe organ, resounding with reverb in gargantuan cathedrals, was the original synthesizer.

“He’s the Rock of Ages of music,” says Carpenter, who particularly loves the fugue nicknamed “St. Anne” and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “Everybody would go back to Mozart or Beethoven. They are astonishing — Beethoven is especially astonishing — but they’re not my style. I don’t feel it like I do with Bach. I immediately got him.”

Carpenter was also a film score freak since Day 1. He cites the early electronic music in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet” and claims Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin as his two all-time favorites. Just listen, he says, to the way Tiomkin’s music transitions from the westerny fanfare under the Winchester Pictures logo to the swirling, menacing orchestral storm that accompanies “The Thing From Another World” title card in that 1951 sci-fi picture that Carpenter remixed as “The Thing.”

“The music is so weird, I cannot follow it,” he says. “But I love it.”

Yet Carpenter feels more personally indebted to rock ‘n’ roll: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors. He wanted to be a rock star ever since he grew his hair long and bought a guitar in high school. He sang and performed R&B and psychedelic rock for sororities on the Western Kentucky campus as well as on a tour of the U.S. Army bases in Germany. He formed the rock trio Coupe de Villes with his buddies at USC and they made an album and played wrap parties.

He also kept soaking up contemporary influences, listening to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” while location scouting for “Halloween.” Peter Fonda later introduced Carpenter to Zevon and he wanted the director to adapt the song into a film that never happened (starring Fonda as the werewolf, but “this time he gets the girl,” Carpenter recalls). In the ’80s he blasted Metallica with his two boys and he still loves Devo.

It’s incredibly rare for a film director to score their own films, rarer still for one to spend decades on stage as a performing musician. The requisite personalities would seem diametrical.

“My dad was a performing musician, so it was just part of the family,” Carpenter says. However, until 2016, when Carpenter first toured with his music, he was consumed with stage fright. “I had an incident when I was in a play in high school,” he says. “I went up and I forgot my lines. Shame descended upon me and I had a tough time. I was scared all the time.”

The director credits his touring drummer, Scott Seiver, for helping him beat it.

“Your adrenaline carries you to another planet when that thing starts,” he sighs with pleasure. “You hear a wall of screaming people. It’s a big time.”

He pushes back against the idea that directors “hide behind the camera.”

“The pressure, that’s the biggest thing,” Carpenter says. “You put yourself under pressure from the studio, you’re carrying all this money, crew, you want to be on time.”

He remembers seeing some haggard making-of footage of himself in post-production on “Ghost of Mars” in 2001 and thinking: Oh my God, this guy is in trouble. “I had to stop,” he says. “I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t take this kind of stress — it’ll kill you, as it has so many other directors. The music came along and it’s from God. It’s a blessing.”

John Carpenter is grateful but he doesn’t believe in God. He believes that, when we die, “we just disperse — our energy disperses, and we return to what we were. We’re all stardust up there and the darkness created us, in a sense. So that’s what we have to make peace with. I point up to the infinite, the space between stars. But things stop when you die. Your heart stops, brain — everything stops. You get cold. Your energy dissipates and it just… ends. The End.”

This is not exactly a peaceful thought for him.

“I mean, I don’t want to die,” he adds. “I’m not looking forward to that. But what can you do? I can’t control it. But that’s what I believe and I’m alone in it. I can’t put that on anybody else. Everybody has their own beliefs, their own gods, their own afterlife.”

He describes himself as a “long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist.”

“I have hope,” he says, “put it that way.” Yet he looks around and sees a lot of evil.

“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter, who has long used cinematic allegories to skewer capitalist pigs and bloodthirsty governments. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men. You see pictures of lions taking down their prey and you see the face of the prey and you say: ‘Oh, man.’ Humans do things like that and enjoy it. Or they do things like that for power or pleasure. Humans are evil but they’re capable of massive good — and they’re capable of the greatest art form we have: music.”

The greatest?

“You don’t have to talk about it. You just sit and listen to it. It’s not my favorite,” he clarifies, alluding to his first love, cinema — “but it’s the one that transcends centuries.”

Music has always been kinder to him than the movie business. That business recently reared its ugly head when A24 tossed his completed score for “Death of a Unicorn.” (At least he owns the rights and will be putting it out sometime soon.) In addition to the high he gets from playing live, he is currently working on a heavy metal concept album complete with dialogue. It’s called “Cathedral” and he’ll be playing some of it at the Belasco.

It’s essentially a movie in music form, based on a dream Carpenter had. Though not one he finds scary. What scares Carpenter, it seems, is not being in control.

That happened to him in the movie world, it’s happening more and more as what he calls the “frailties of age” mount and it happens in that nightmare about getting lost in a big city and not finding any theaters.

“But I can’t do anything about it,” he says. “What can I do? See, the only thing I can do is what I can control: music. And watching basketball.”

RALEIGH, N.C. — Democrats rallying Tuesday against a new U.S. House map proposed by North Carolina Republicans seeking another GOP seat at President Trump’s behest acknowledged they’ll probably be unable to halt the redraw for now. But they vowed to defeat the plan in the long run.

The new map offered by Republican legislative leaders seeks to stop the reelection of Democratic Rep. Don Davis, one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives, by redrawing two of the state’s 14 congressional districts. Statewide election data suggest the proposal would result in Republicans winning 11 of those seats, up from the current 10.

The proposal attempts to satisfy Trump’s call for states led by Republicans to conduct mid-decade redistricting to gain more seats and retain his party’s grip on Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats need to gain just three more seats to seize control of the House, and the president’s party historically has lost seats in midterm elections.

With Republicans in the majority in both General Assembly chambers and state law preventing Democratic Gov. Josh Stein from using his veto stamp against a redistricting plan, the GOP-drawn map appeared headed to enactment after final House votes as soon as Wednesday. The state Senate gave its final approval early Tuesday on a party-line vote. A House redistricting committee debated the plan later Tuesday.

Still, about 300 protesters, Democratic Party officials and lawmakers gathering outside the old state Capitol pledged repeatedly Tuesday that redrawing the congressional map would have negative consequences for the GOP at the ballot box in 2026 and beyond. Litigation to challenge the enactment on the map also is likely on allegations of unlawful racial gerrymandering.

“We know we may not have the ability to stop the Republicans in Raleigh right now … but we are here to show that people across this state and across this nation are watching them,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said to cheers.

The gathering served Democrats to censure state Republicans they accuse of agreeing to kneel to Trump through a corrupt redrawing of district lines to target Davis.

State GOP leaders defended their action, saying Trump has won the state’s electoral votes all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly — and thus merits more potential support in Congress.

The national redistricting battle began over the summer when Trump urged Republican-led Texas to reshape its U.S. House districts. After Texas lawmakers acted, California Democrats reciprocated by passing their own plan, which still needs voter approval in November.

Republicans argue that other Democratic-leaning states had already given themselves a disproportionate number of seats well before this national redistricting fight started.

“It is incumbent upon us to react to this environment, to respond to this environment, and not let these tactics that have happened in blue states dominate the control of Congress,” state Sen. Ralph Hise, the map’s chief author, said during Tuesday’s Senate debate.

Seminera and Robertson write for the Associated Press.

The sports court on Carnival Radiance.

(Carnival Cruise Line)

Sails to: Ensenada, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, La Paz, Cabo San Lucas and Catalina Island via three- to five-day wintertime voyages
Cost: Starting at about $200 per person

Carnival Radiance is one of the cruise line’s oldest vessels, having launched in 2000 under its original name, Carnival Victory. Following a $200 million refresh in 2021, it’s become a staple along the Long Beach waterfront.

The 2,984-guest ship offers a variety of shorter trips, which first-time cruisers may appreciate. Some of its staterooms connect, allowing extended families to vacation together. And most of its outdoor activities — such as mini-golf, a sports court and a two-level ropes course — are conveniently clustered together. Nearby are waterslides and pools, one of which sits under a large movie screen.

Like Carnival Firenze, Radiance also has NASA and Dr. Seuss-themed activities, in addition to an at-sea Build-a-Bear workshop and “Zumbini,” a kid-friendly Zumba class.

Picky eaters need not fret. Radiance has 15 dining options, nine of which are included in the cost of your cruise. A few have celebrity names attached to them: along with Guy Fieri’s Burger Joint and barbecue restaurant, there’s also a chicken counter from basketball star Shaquille O’Neal.

If you’ve tested the waters with a short Carnival Radiance cruise and can’t get enough, the ship will also be embarking on a 14-day round-trip voyage in early January to Kahului, Maui; Honolulu, Oahu; Nawiliwili, Kauai; Hilo, Hawaii; and Ensenada, Mexico.

At last month’s meeting of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force in Redlands, Director Patrick Wright remembered the group’s early days: “Candidly, when I started this job, we got an earful from Southern California.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom created the task force in 2021 and at the time, Southern California’s wildfire experts told Wright that he and other state leaders “didn’t understand Southern California was different. Its vegetation is different. Its fire risk is different.”

It’s true — the coastal chaparral native to much of Southern California is entirely different from the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra.

More than a century of humans attempting to suppress nearly every fire meant the low-intensity burns that northern forests relied on every 5 to 20 years to promote regeneration no longer came through to clear the understory. As trees and shrubs grew in, they fueled high-intensity fires that decimated both the forest and communities.

Meanwhile in Southern California, as humans settled into the wildlands, they lit more fires. Discarded cigarettes, sparking cars, poorly managed campfires, utility equipment and arsonists lit up hundreds or thousands of acres. Here, the native chaparral is adapted to fire coming every 30 to 130 years. The more frequent fires didn’t allow them to grow, make seeds and reproduce. Instead, what’s grown in places where chaparral used to be are flammable invasive grasses.

But when I first moved to Southern California and started covering the wildfires devastating our communities, I had only heard the northern version of the story.

The fire problem in Northern California is more widely understood. “Smokey the Bear, only you can prevent forest fires — everybody kind of knows, intuitively, what a forest fire is,” said Michael O’Connell, president and chief executive of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy — and one of the people who (respectfully) gave Wright an earful.

Meanwhile, ember-driven fires in Southern California are “like someone lobbing grenades from five miles away,” he said.

Experts in both NorCal and SoCal agree on how we ought to protect ourselves once a ferocious fire breaks out: Across the board, we need to harden our homes, create defensible space and ensure we’re ready to evacuate. But how to prevent devastating fires differs.

The forest thinning and careful reintroduction of intentional “good” fire in the Sierra don’t exactly translate to the Santa Monica Mountains, for example.

The problem here in the south is more vexing: How do we reduce the number of fires we spark?

One way is with groups like Orange County Fire Watch and Arson Watch in Topanga and Malibu, which go out on days when the wind is high and try to spot fires before they start. A new effort, celebrated by the task force, to reduce ignitions along SoCal roadways by clearing flammable vegetation is also underway.

But, while NorCal has a plethora of studies affirming the effectiveness of forest thinning and burning, there is little research yet on SoCal’s proposed solutions.

“We really do, now, understand what the problem is that we’re trying to deal with,” O’Connell said. “How do you get that done? That’s more complicated.”

And the vast majority of state funding is still geared toward northern fuel management solutions — not keeping fires from sparking. (The task force also still measures progress in acres treated, a largely meaningless metric for Southern California’s chaparral.)

Yet, O’Connell is hopeful. At the task force’s first meeting in SoCal — where Wright got an earful — leaders didn’t yet have a grasp of SoCal’s wildfire problem. Now, they’re letting SoCal’s land managers and researchers lead the way.

“If it weren’t for the task force, I think we would be in big trouble, frankly,” O’Connell said. The task force leaders “have not only understood [the problem] but have accepted it and run with that.”

Here’s the latest on wildfires

Federal firefighters are in their third week without pay, as the U.S government shutdown drags on. According to the U.S. Forest Service — the largest federal firefighting force in the country — fire response personnel will continue to work through the shutdown, although prevention work, including prescribed burns and forest thinning, will be limited.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would increase the salaries of Cal Fire firefighters to more closely match those of local fire departments. Meanwhile, efforts championed by the state to build a series of fuel breaks in the Santa Monica Mountains are underway. Some ecologists worry about the damage the fast-moving project could do to the environment; others say the state is not moving fast enough.

Last week, federal prosecutors announced the arrest of a suspect they believed intentionally started the Palisades fire on Jan. 1. The announcement has led to calls for both the Los Angeles Fire Department, responsible for putting out the Jan. 1 fire, and California State Parks, whose land the fire started on, to be held accountable.

And the latest on climate

A turning point and a tipping point: Global energy production turned a corner in the first half of the year, with renewables such as solar and wind generating more electricity than coal for the first time. And, the Earth is reaching its first climate change tipping point: Warm water coral reefs can no longer survive, according to a report published by 160 scientists.

With the 2025 state legislative session wrapped up, some important climate bills are now law. One law extends California’s cap-and-trade program — which limits how much greenhouse gas polluters can emit and enables them to trade emission allowances at auction — from 2030 to 2045. Newsom also signed a bill to make oil drilling in Kern County easier while making offshore drilling more difficult and another to push local governments to increase electrification efforts.

Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report how much water they use. He was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements” on the centers, he wrote in a message explaining his veto, noting that “California is well positioned to support the development of this critically important digital infrastructure.”

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.

There are several Nike-sponsored billboards popping up around town featuring Long Beach Poly freshman 800-meter runner Laila Kirk, who is a two-time national AAU champion.

It’s setting the stage for her high school debut this spring for the Jackrabbits.

She certainly has lots of ties to track and field.

Her mother, Angelita, ran track at Poly and Washington State. Her father, Lamarr, ran track at Dorsey and Washington State. Her grandmother, Margaret Hemmans-Green, ran track at Manual Arts and El Camino College. Her grandfather, Ted Green, was a long jumper at Manual Arts.

Laila had a best 800 time of 2:07 last spring. She also ran the 400 in 54.72.

Long Beach Poly has a long history of producing outstanding track and field athletes, but few 14-year-olds have appeared on billboards before their first race in high school.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Last week, a ceasefire was announced after two years of genocide in Gaza. The bombs have stopped falling, but the devastation remains. The majority of homes, schools, hospitals, universities, factories, and commercial buildings have been reduced to rubble. From above, Gaza looks like a grey desert of rubble, its vibrant urban spaces reduced to ghost towns, its lush agricultural land and greenery wiped out.

The occupier’s aim was not only to render the Palestinians of Gaza homeless but also unable to provide for themselves. Uprooting the dispossessed and impoverished, those who have lost their connection to the land, is of course much easier.

This was the goal when Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered my family’s plot of land in the eastern part of Maghazi refugee camp and uprooted 55 olive trees, 10 palms and five fig trees.

This plot of land was offered to my refugee grandfather, Ali Alsaloul, by its original owner as a place to shelter in during the Nakba of 1948. Ali, his wife, Ghalia, and their children had just fled their village, al-Maghar, as Zionist forces advanced on it. Al-Maghar, like Gaza today, was reduced to rubble; the Zionists who perpetrated the crime completed the erasure by establishing a national park on its ruins – “Mrar Hills National Park”.

Ali was a farmer and so were his ancestors; his livelihood had always come from the land. So when he settled in the new location, he was quick to plant it with olive trees, palms, figs and prickly pears. He built his house there and raised my father, uncles and aunts. My grandfather eventually bought the land from its generous owner, by paying in installments over many years. Thus, my family came into the possession of 2,000 square metres (half an acre) of land.

Although my father and his siblings married and moved out of their family home, this plot of land remained a favourite place to go, especially for me.

It was just two kilometres away from our house in Maghazi refugee camp. I enjoyed doing the 30-minute walk, part of which went through a complete “jungle”: a stretch of green populated with clover, sycamore, jujube and olive trees, colourful birds, foxes, leashed and unleashed dogs and many beehives.

Every autumn, in October, when the olive picking season began, my cousins, friends and I would gather to collect the olives. It was an occasion that brought us closer together. We would get the olives pressed and get 500 litres (130 gallons) of olive oil from the harvest. The figs and dates were made into jams to have for breakfast or for suhoor during Ramadan.

The rest of the year, I would often meet my friends Ibrahim and Mohammed between the olive trees. We would light a small fire and make a kettle of tea to enjoy under the moonlight, while we talked.

When the war started in 2023, our land became a dangerous place to go. The farms and olive groves around it were often bombed. Our plot was also hit twice at the beginning of the war. As a result, we could not harvest the olives in 2023 and then again in 2024.

When the famine took hold of Gaza in the summer, we started sneaking into the plot to get some fruit and some firewood for cooking, since a kilo of that cost $2. We knew that Israeli tanks might storm in at any moment, but we took the risk anyway.

Seven families – we, friends and neighbours – benefited from the fruit and wood of that land.

One day in late August, a friend of mine called me with a terrible rumour he had heard: the Israeli tanks and bulldozers had advanced into the eastern part of Maghazi and levelled it all, uprooting trees and burying them. I gasped; our lifeline was gone.

Days later, the rumour was confirmed. The Israeli army had uprooted more than 600 trees in the area, mostly olive trees. Those who had fled from the area shared what they had seen. What was once a lush green stretch of land had been bulldozed into a yellow, lifeless desert.

Earlier in August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 98.5 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land had been damaged or made inaccessible. I guess the destruction of our plot shrank that 1.5 percent remaining land even further.

As Israel was completing the erasure of Palestinian agricultural land, it started allowing commercial but not aid trucks into Gaza. The markets were flooded with products with packaging covered in Hebrew.

Israel was starving us, destroying our ability to grow our own food, and then making us buy their products at exorbitant prices.

Ninety percent of people in Gaza are unemployed and can’t afford to buy an Israeli egg for $5 or a kilo of dates for $13. It was yet another genocidal strategy that forced the two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to choose between two horrible options: dying from hunger or paying to support the Israeli economy.

Now, aid is finally supposed to start coming into Gaza under the ceasefire agreement. This may be a relief to many starving Palestinians, but it is not a solution. Israel has rendered us fully dependent on aid, and it is the sole power that determines if, when and how much of it enters Gaza. Per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza experience some level of food insecurity.

Much of Gaza’s agricultural land remains out of reach, as Israel has withdrawn from just a part of the Gaza Strip. My family will have to wait for the implementation of the third phase of the ceasefire deal – if Israel agrees to implement it at all – to see the Israeli army withdraw to the buffer zone and regain access our land.

We have now lost our land twice. Once in 1948 and now again in 2025. Israel wants to repeat history and dispossess us again. It must not be allowed to convert more Palestinian land into buffer zones and national parks.

Getting back our land, rehabilitating and planting it is crucial not just for our survival, but also for maintaining our connection to the land. We must resist uprooting.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A GHOST bridge that has stood unfinished for more than a decade between China and North Korea could finally be nearing completion.

The over pass stood abandoned for so long that farmers used the road to dry crops.

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The bridge – which was completely funded by China – was completed on the Chinese side in 2014, costing the nation $350 million.

China went all out on the project, developing a new city at its end of the road.

Despite Chinese productivity and complete financial aid on the project, the North Korean end remained untouched until 2019, leaving apartment complexes, stores and more lying vacant on the Chinese side.

The cash-strapped nation only needed to build about two miles of road to complete the inter-country link.

The incomplete over pass opened into a paddy field on North Korea’s side of the river, as neither side lifted a finger to complete the project, rendering the link between nations a bridge to nowhere for five more years.

Meanwhile, in downtown Dandong, on the Chinese side, buses and trucks have been forced to wait for hours to get across the original link between the two nations – the Old Friendship Bridge.

The Old Friendship Bridge was constructed in the late 1930s and was originally named the Sino-Korean Friendship bridge.

The US bombed the Friendship Bridge during the Korean War to stop Chinese forces from interfering and aiding North Korea.

The connecting road was patched up after fighting stopped, and still serves as a link between Beijing and Pyongyang to this day.

The narrow road and rail bridge connecting the downtown areas of Sinuiju and Dandong has been the busiest border port between the two nations over recent years, as bilateral trade has increased.

However, the new signs of construction on the New Yalu River Bridge signal that China and North Korea are preparing to boost trade.

North Korea embodied the full meaning of a hermit when it shut its doors to the outside world during the Covid pandemic.

Since the border closure eased in 2023, both nations have kept up appearances and increased trade and business exchanges.

Despite North Korea previously shutting its borders, the work on the bridge had largely been completed.

Construction on the Kim Jong Un’s side began in February 2020, but was halted the following August, after digging work took place across around 111 acres (45 hectares) of land.

Following the border closure, satellite imagery showed farmers making use of the unfrequented road by drying crops on the tar.

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Since hesitantly opening back up, the nation has also shown signs of strengthening its international relationships.

Despite this, uncertainty still bubbles below the surface, as North Korea has openly prioritised strengthening its relationship with Moscow.

Signalling the shift in international relations, tourism into the notoriously closed-off nation resumed with Russia, where it has not with China.

Fresh construction on the bridge is the latest signal of North Korea realigning to its closest neighbour.

Building has resumed on the North Korean side of the New Yalu River Bridge, marking the first movement on the development in five years.

New images from Planet Labs of the notoriously unopened bridge surfaced, showing evidence of new excavation.

Blue-roofed structures also popped up, believed to be related to long-term construction plans on the site.

NK News reported the size of the development could link it to a plan by Chinese company Five Continents International Development Corporation (FCIDC) to construct an economic park in North Korea’s Sinuiju region.

The exact location of this project, however, has not been confirmed.

The new construction on the bridge could be in preparation to connect to a planned large customs complex to match one built on the Chinese side of the bridge.

In 2018, FCIDC suggested that the Sinuiju “Heyuan” International Logistics and Trade City (SILTC) would be located close to a border connection point.

A spokesperson said the economic park would have: “its own customs and border inspection, where transit goods can directly enter … avoiding the congestion of Dandong-Sinuiju Port … and greatly improving cargo flow.”

Wang Ruoming, one of the lead project coordinators based in China, fuelled the rumours earlier in the year with a social media post hinted at the project’s revival.

He reposted a computer rendering of the economic park on his Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) profile in January, saying: “2025 is destined to be a year of good fortune”.

The New Yalu River Bridge features a four-lane road, while China’s sprawling new customs port appears ready to handle dozens of cargo trucks at a time. 

The border between North Korea and China runs in the direct centre of the river.

GET ready for all the laughs as our fave teller of ridiculous stories is back with a sure-fire hit.

Bathroom salesman Matt has lost his job, his home and his girlfriend Harriet.

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So when he’s offered a new job that comes with a fab apartment, he hopes he’ll be able to win her back.

Except, maybe Harriet didn’t leave of her own accord at all. . .

10 lucky Fabulous readers will win a copy of this new novel in this week’s book competition.

To win a copy, enter using the form below by 11:59pm on October 18, 2025.

For full terms and conditions, click here.

The first big customer for The Trade Desk‘s (TTD 1.33%) TV operating system (OS) is finally here. The ad-buying platform announced on Wednesday that it will co-develop a custom version of its Ventura TV OS with DirecTV, pairing DirecTV’s consumer interface with Ventura’s ad-tech plumbing and app store. The announcement arrives nearly a year after Ventura was introduced, giving investors their first look at how the company plans to bring its TV platform to market.

For readers newer to the story, The Trade Desk operates a software platform that helps advertisers buy and measure digital ads across the internet. The company has been pushing deeper into connected TV (CTV) for years. Ventura is the boldest step yet — a TV operating system meant to give manufacturers and content companies an alternative to platforms that also own content or a streaming service.

Image source: Getty Images.

What Ventura is and why DirecTV matters

Ventura is pitched as a neutral operating system for smart TVs and other screens. The company said in its announcement of Ventura that it is designed to provide a “much cleaner supply chain streaming TV advertising, minimizing supply chain hops and costs — ensuring maximum ROI for every advertising dollar and optimized yield for publishers.” In other words, The Trade Desk believes it will support a supply chain that lets advertisers measure performance more precisely and ultimately optimize spending better.

Importantly, Ventura is not tied to a house streaming service, which the company argues reduces conflicts of interest and keeps it a more unbiased partner for publishers, TV makers, and retailers. This is a pointed contrast with incumbents like Roku or Amazon‘s Fire TV, which operate platforms while also owning major ad-supported channels and inventory.

DirecTV gives Ventura an on-ramp that consumers recognize. The partners plan to integrate DirecTV’s familiar interface — including access to MyFree DirecTV (its free ad-supported TV service), optional genre packs, and premium bundles — into a Ventura build that any third-party TV manufacturer, retailer, hotel, or venue could deploy.

In other words, an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) can ship a TV that boots into DirecTV’s experience, but the advertising marketplace and measurement behind the scenes will run on Ventura. As Matthew Henick, senior vice president of Ventura TV OS, put it, “TV manufacturers deserve more choice in how they build their businesses,” adding that the goal is a “more transparent and equitable ecosystem” for advertisers and publishers.

Financially, The Trade Desk enters this next phase during a time when investors are dubious about how sustainable its high growth rate is. Second-quarter revenue grew 19% year over year to $694 million, and customer retention stayed above 95% while adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) margin was an impressive 39%. But this growth rate was down from Q1, and management expects even lower growth in Q3. While tough comparisons to year-ago quarters (due primarily to political advertising spending last year) are weighing on results, some investors worry that increasing competition is also to blame.

A catalyst — and a potential distraction

A credible distribution partner could help The Trade Desk push Ventura into living rooms quickly. If OEMs adopt this DirecTV-skinned version, Ventura may improve ad transparency, streamline supply paths, and potentially lower take rates in CTV — outcomes that could make its core ad-buying platform more attractive as its marketers benefit from better economics when buying Ventura OS inventory.

But investors should be cautious about extrapolating too much from a single partnership. Building and supporting a TV OS is expensive and operationally messy. The business model relies on lining up multiple constituents (OEMs, publishers, retailers, and distribution partners) and then demonstrating that stakeholders can earn more money on Ventura than on incumbent platforms. That process takes time. It is also possible the effort will distract management from the day-to-day of strengthening Kokai, its artificial intelligence (AI)-forward ad-buying platform.

Additionally, The Trade Desk’s valuation arguably already prices in success with both its core business and in new ventures. Even after a tough stretch for the stock, shares trade at close to 10 times sales — a premium that implies steady execution and continued share gains across CTV and the open internet. If Ventura ramps slowly, or if macroeconomic headwinds suppress large brands’ ad budgets (as The Trade Desk management warned of in its last earnings call), that premium may be hard to defend. And competition isn’t standing still: Platform owners with their own channels can bundle distribution, data, and ad inventory in ways Ventura will need to match, with clear economic benefits for partners.

None of this diminishes the strategic logic. If Ventura delivers an OS that reduces friction for viewers and advertisers while improving monetization for content owners, this could lead to a cleaner and more efficient supply chain for CTV, ultimately benefiting The Trade Desk’s core platform and making it more valuable over time. The DirecTV tie-up is an important first step toward testing that thesis in the wild.

Oct. 3 (UPI) — Officials at Long John Silver’s are replacing the chain’s former logo that featured a fish with one that features a chicken to share its “long-held secret.”

The new logo is designed to inform consumers that the seafood chain also offers chicken entrees.

“Guests have been telling us for years that our chicken is a best-kept secret,” said Christopher Caudill, senior vice president of marketing and innovation at Long John Silver’s, in a news release on Friday.

“Our hand-battered chicken strips — known as Chicken Planks — are every bit as crave-worthy as our legendary fish,” Caudill added. “It’s time we let that secret out.”

The Louisville, Ky.-based restaurant chain announced the change on Friday that will include a new wrap on the Long John Silver’s Front Row Motorsports car during the South Point 400 NASCAR race in Las Vegas on Oct. 12.

The restaurant chain tested its chicken-based products at its flagship restaurant in Louisville and received “overwhelmingly positive” feedback from its customers.

That feedback helped prevent the restaurant’s leaders from chickening out on the logo change following the recent uproar that occurred when Lebanon, Tenn.-based Cracker Barrel recently tried to change its longtime logo.

Cracker Barrel’s logo briefly removed an image of a seated elderly man resting his left elbow and forearm on a wooden barrel from its logo.

The change generated unexpected pushback from consumers and others, including President Donald Trump, who criticized the move on social media.

Cracker Barrel officials soon after announced they were canceling the logo change.

The United States federal government shut down at 12:01am East Coast time (04:01 GMT) on Wednesday after Congress failed to pass a new spending bill, forcing operations considered inessential to close.

President Donald Trump has threatened to use the budget deadlock to push through mass layoffs of federal employees.

Democrats and Republicans remain divided over spending priorities as Democrats push to protect healthcare, social programmes and foreign aid while Republicans demand cuts.

This is not the first time Washington has faced such a standoff. The graphic below shows every US funding gap and government shutdown since 1976, including how long each lasted and under which administration it occurred.

What is a government shutdown?

A government shutdown happens when Congress does not agree on a budget, so parts of the federal government have to close until a spending plan is approved.

Shutdowns tend to happen in October because the government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30.

How many times has the government shut down?

The current budget process was established in 1976. Since then, the government has had 20 funding gaps, resulting in 10 shutdowns.

A funding gap occurs whenever Congress misses the deadline to pass a budget or a stopgap spending bill (also called a continuing resolution), leaving the government without legal authority to spend money.

• A single shutdown can involve multiple funding gaps if temporary funding measures expire before a long-term agreement is reached.
• A shutdown happens only if government operations actually stop because of that funding gap.

Before the 1980s, funding gaps did not usually lead to shutdowns, and agencies kept operating, assuming funding would be restored soon.

After 1980, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued legal opinions stating that, under federal law, agencies may not spend money without congressional approval. Only essential services – such as national security, air traffic control and law enforcement – could continue.

Since 1982, with this new legal basis in place, funding gaps have more often resulted in full or partial government shutdowns until Congress resolves the standoff.

When was the last government shutdown?

The last government shutdown occurred in December 2018 and January 2019 after President Donald Trump, then in his first term, and Democratic politicians hit an impasse over the president’s request for $5bn in funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border, a demand the Democrats opposed.

When was the longest shutdown?

The last shutdown was also the longest in US history, lasting 35 days from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, when Trump announced he had reached a tentative deal with congressional leaders to reopen the government for three weeks while negotiations on the border wall continued.

What happens during a shutdown?

During a government shutdown, nonessential federal services are halted or reduced, and many government employees are furloughed, or placed on unpaid leave.

Meanwhile, essential personnel – such as military service members, law enforcement officers and air traffic controllers – are required to keep working, often without pay until funding is restored.

How are government shutdowns resolved?

Shutdowns are typically resolved when Congress passes a continuing resolution, which provides short-term funding while negotiations for a longer-term budget continue.

Since 1990, every shutdown has ended through the passage of a continuing resolution.

Which services are halted?

A shutdown primarily affects nonessential federal employees as well as people and businesses that rely on government services.

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer. As of November, it had a little more than 3 million workers – about 1.9 percent of the civilian workforce – according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported by the Pew Research Centre.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that if funding lapses in fiscal year 2026, about 750,000 federal employees could be furloughed each day, and their lost pay would add up to about $400m daily. The exact number of furloughed workers could change over time because some agencies might increase layoffs the longer a shutdown continues while others could bring some employees back.

Past shutdowns have affected numerous services and agencies, including:

• National parks and monuments
• Federal museums
• Federal research projects
• Processing of certain government benefits
• IRS taxpayer services

Which services are still in operation?

Even during a shutdown, many core government functions remain in operation. Some continue because they are classified as essential for public safety and welfare while others are funded separately from the annual budget process through mandatory or self-sustaining programmes. Examples include:

• Social Security and Medicare benefits
• The military and federal law enforcement
• US Postal Service
• Air traffic control
• US Passport Agency

Seemingly every time President Trump speaks about race or what it means to be an American, he sparks outrage.

His purposeful use of divisive and inflammatory language to energize his political base isn’t new in American politics, though. It’s part of a legacy of racism going back to the country’s founding, when the authors of the Constitution gave slaveholders immense political power while allowing them to treat enslaved Africans as less than human.

“It taps into this racial resentment toward Black people that is deep-seated,” said Pearl Dowe, a professor of political science and African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta. “Politicians use it because it works.”

Trump’s tactics served him well in 2016, but they feel out of step in an election year that has seen a dramatic shift in the public’s attitudes about race.

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and protests against police brutality that have spread to all 50 states, Americans of various backgrounds, including many white people who live in conservative strongholds, seem eager to make amends for the bigotry and injustice the country has inflicted on Black people.

In a Civiqs poll conducted in early July, 53% of registered voters said they supported Black Lives Matter, up from 38% who said they supported the movement in the summer of 2017, after the violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Va.

Russell Riley, a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said that since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, Americans have come to expect something different from what Trump has offered so far — at the very least, a show of common cause with those demonstrating for racial progress.

“When Lyndon Johnson — a Texan — went before Congress and said, ‘We shall overcome,’ that changed the job description of every president since,” said Riley, who co-chairs the Miller Center Presidential Oral History Program at UVA. “Even with Nixon and Reagan, who trafficked in the seamier side of politics, there was some acknowledgement of the need for racial equality.”

Trump’s combativeness comes off as extreme and retrograde by comparison — whether he’s portraying Black Lives Matter activists as hellbent on “ending America,” summoning federal agents to face off with protesters or retweeting a video showing one of his supporters shouting “white power.”

And yet he rejects any notion that he’s fanning old racial hatred.

To understand this disconnect, Trump’s critics should know that he and many other Americans hold a competing view of the country, said Spencer Critchley, former communications consultant for Barack Obama.

They simply don’t see America as inherently unfair and racist, Critchley said. They believe the U.S. possesses a distinct identity and noble traditions that must be fiercely defended, not challenged.

An image of George Floyd was projected onto the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., during protests against police violence and racism.

(Steve Helber / Associated Press)

Given that outlook, no one should be surprised that Trump — who launched his 2016 campaign by disparaging Mexicans as rapists and murders, called NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem “sons of bitches” and refers to COVID-19 as the “Kung Flu” — resorts to the same formula of crude references and bigoted slights that helped previous presidential candidates curry favor with white voters, Critchley said.

“There’s this overlap between ethnic nationalism and racism,” said Critchley, author of the new book “Patriot of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens Next.” “It’s built into the foundation of the country, but he does have an instinctual sense of how to exploit it.”

What Trump fails to take seriously enough, Critchley said, is that successive generations of Americans have been denied the privileges and opportunities that make the country special. They love the country too, but they’ve been tormented by it instead of embraced.

In the 1960s, TV viewers watched in horror as footage showed violence against Black demonstrators: the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis and other activists in the South being beaten and attacked with water canons, police clashing with Black people during uprisings in Detroit and Newark and Watts.

They saw the hurt and anguish in the eyes of Black Americans who poured into the streets after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Even though Black Americans won the basic right to vote, to sit at lunch counters next to white patrons and send their children to integrated schools, racism lived on.

Alabama’s George Wallace ran for president in 1968 as a backlash against the civil rights movement, five years after declaring “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Richard Nixon ran that same year by appealing to the “silent majority” of conservative whites who felt threatened by social change and promised to respond to civil unrest with “law and order.”

In his July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump called Black Lives Matter protesters agitators who want to “end America” and vowed to protect monuments honoring what he described as the nation’s heritage, though some have been derided as emblems of white supremacy.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

A generation later, Ronald Reagan chose the Neshoba County Fair outside Philadelphia, Miss., to launch his 1980 general election campaign and tout “states’ rights,” a phrase that was popular with opponents of federal civil rights legislation. The county was the site of the 1964 murders of three voting-rights activists by white supremacists.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, refused to apologize for an attack ad featuring a convicted felon named Willie Horton that critics said stereotyped Black men as dangerous.

Trump’s campaign encompasses all those approaches: He demonizes entire ethnic groups as not fully American, lashes out at protesters and insinuates that white people, not people of color, are the ones most in need of protection.

In recent days, Trump has tried to stoke the fears of suburban white women, telling viewers of a town hall targeting Wisconsin voters that Democrats are planning to “eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.”

Black Americans are on average three times more likely than whites to be killed by police, according to a Harvard study released in June that analyzed 5,494 police-related deaths between 2013 and 2017. But in a recent CBS News interview, Trump responded to a question about why Black people continue to be killed by the police by distorting the truth: “So are white people,” he said. “More white people.”

He also said that those who fly the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for many Black people, are celebrating their heritage and practicing their 1st Amendment right to free speech.

“When Donald Trump talks about ‘heritage,’ he means who has the heritage to be an American citizen,” Dowe said.

“He’s deliberately pandered to the idea that America is a nation rooted in white culture and power,” she said. “Others that reside here just reside; they are not due the full rights of citizenship. If others — people of color — stake their rights to citizenship and equality, then the way of life that white people are comfortable with will be no more.”

Democrats have also fostered discord and condoned racial bigotry. Riley noted that Andrew Jackson approved the use of mob violence against Southerners who subscribed to abolitionist literature, citing his belief that anti-slavery activists were trying to incite enslaved Africans to rise up.

For decades, the party tolerated leaders among their ranks who openly advocated for white supremacy and racial segregation.

Woodrow Wilson, who once wrote that Black people were “an ignorant and inferior race,” permitted a screening of “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House, even though it presents Ku Klux Klansmen as heroes.

In more recent years, both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have faced accusations of racism over their support of criminal justice reforms in the 1990s that have contributed to mass incarceration of Americans of color.

A Trump rally in 2016. The president often uses such racially charged expressions to appeal to his majority-white base and to draw a distinction between his vision of America and that of the Democrats.

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Trump, however, is on another level with his defense of Confederate symbols and his casting of protesters as traitors, historians say.

The same us-versus-them mentality and ethnic nationalism were at play when he questioned whether the Hawaii-born Obama, the country’s first black president, was a U.S. citizen.

Riley believes Trump’s insistence on reigniting familiar culture wars to woo voters reveals he has a “tin ear” when it comes to sensing what the country needs at a time of profound distress.

Americans face crisis and uncertainty at every turn — not just the police killings of Blacks and Latinos but the government’s fumbled response to a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 147,000 Americans and caused swaths of the country to halt their reopening plans, prolonging the worst jobs slump since the Great Depression.

“Maybe he’s going to be headstrong and hidebound, and do whatever he’s going to do,” Riley said, “but he’s failed to understand what can happen when he does these antagonistic things.”

With Trump prodding an already jittery nation with a daily barrage of falsehoods and racist provocations, the country appears to be lurching toward a level of chaos that he won’t be able to manipulate.

Dowe borrowed an expression that her 87-year-old mother, Barbara Ford, relies on for high-anxiety times like these: “Something’s got to give.”

“At some point,” Dowe said, “things that are negative and evil must give way to the truth and what is right.”

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — On a hill in Sonoma County, François Piccin yearns to return home.

In fall 2017, Piccin and his wife lost their ranch house when the Tubbs fire roared through Northern California’s famed wine region. Contractors found themselves in high demand and overbooked, and the one the couple hired abandoned the project halfway through. In the time it took to find a new builder, the price tag rose by a third to $2.4 million, forcing the Piccins to sell a rental property they owned to pay the bill.

The home remains unfinished and their lives unsettled.

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“Financially, what we’ve done doesn’t make sense,” said Piccin, 66, standing this summer amid cardboard delivery boxes and stray cabinet drawers in his future kitchen. “But emotionally, psychologically, it is a mandate. We need to have this done to be able to close a chapter and turn the page.”

Over the last eight years, wildfires have burned down more houses than at any other time in California history. From the Piccins’ property in wine country to foothills below the Sierra Nevada to canyons overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the wreckage stubbornly resists recovery.

François Piccin has been attempting to rebuild his home since the 2017 Tubbs fire but had significant problems with his contractor. He now has a new contractor and is almost finished.

To better understand what Los Angeles might expect after January’s fires, The Times examined the five other most destructive wildfires from this period to document how communities have responded in the wake of disaster.

In total, nearly 22,500 homes were lost in the five blazes, which occurred from 2017 to 2020. Just 8,400 — 38% — had been rebuilt as of April per the Times analysis.

It’s not for lack of trying. In more than 50 interviews, wildfire-affected homeowners and renters, builders, academics, aid workers and government officials described the myriad ways rebuilding has failed. Insurance came up short. Construction costs soared. Red tape stifled. Life intervened. The desire of many fire survivors to return to their homes ran aground amid the challenges.

Now, with 13,000 homes lost this year in Los Angeles County, these experiences offer a scope into the future. Immediately after the blazes, the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena vowed to come back as they were before. Elected officials promised to do everything in their power to make that happen. But the same was said when the earlier fires reduced other areas to rubble.

Scars from the 2020 North Complex fire remain in Berry Creek.

Not all communities devastated by wildfire have struggled the same, the Times analysis shows. Some have rebounded. Almost 80% of the 4,700 homes burned down in the Tubbs fire have returned. Other places remain deserted. The 2020 North Complex fire destroyed 1,500 homes in Berry Creek and nearby rural areas in the pine forests of Butte County. Seventy-two have been rebuilt.

The differences in the pace of construction reveal patterns. Wealthier, flat, suburban areas have tended to rebuild faster than poorer, hilly, rural areas.

But affluence and urbanity haven’t always played decisive roles. In the middle-class neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, 93% of property owners have rebuilt after the Tubbs fire, The Times found. That rate is almost 20 percentage points higher than the wealthier nearby community of Fountaingrove. More homes have returned after the 2018 Carr fire in Redding and surrounding old mining towns in Shasta County than after the similarly destructive Woolsey fire, which affected Malibu and coastal L.A. County the same year.

Homeowners’ decision to rebuild is highly individualized. Tangible issues, including their insurance coverage and savings, mix with intangibles like family dynamics, the trauma of losing a home and the deluge of choices needed to build a new one. Whatever control fire survivors have over these variables, they have none over many others, such as construction costs, mortgage rates and the restoration of public infrastructure. Even how a fire began matters. When private utilities are at fault, the resulting payouts can make it easier to construct a replacement. But that’s not the case with fires attributed to natural causes.

Indeed, permit applications rose each time survivors of the 2018 Camp fire received installments from a settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric, whose power lines caused the blaze that burned down nearly 14,000 homes in Butte County. North Complex survivors received no such payout. Lightning started that fire.

Many residents initially intent on rebuilding and returning to their properties gave up and decided to move on.

Fountaingrove neighborhood in Santa Rosa eight years after Tubbs fire. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Richard and Pamela Klein spent nearly $200,000 on plans to build a replacement house atop a winding road in Fountaingrove. The terrain made for arduous access to their property and their contractor told them building costs would soar unless they convinced their neighbors to let them truck materials through their then-empty lots. The Kleins offered to pay for the privilege, but the neighbors didn’t agree. Two and a half years after the Tubbs fire, the couple sold their one-acre parcel and moved to the Lake Tahoe area.

“If we knew that we were going to face these hurdles up front, we wouldn’t have even thought of rebuilding,” said Richard Klein, 65.

Though devastated L.A. neighborhoods look more like those that burned in the Tubbs fire than in the mountainous country of the North Complex, experts say that no matter the circumstances property owners and politicians vastly underestimate the time, difficulty and expense of rebuilding.

Home construction on Hartzell Street in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in August.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s a marathon sprint,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute, where he studies disaster response. “It’s going to take a really long time and it’s going to be really intense for a very long time.”

When rebuilds go fast

A month after the Carr fire devoured his home in Redding, Mark Chitwood believed his rebuild was moving too slowly.

He couldn’t get ahold of his insurance adjuster, so he searched for phone numbers of company executives. He found one and unloaded his grievances on her.

Ed Bledsoe, 76, surveying his Redding home and belongings destroyed by the Carr fire in August 2018.

(Los Angeles Times)

“To say the least, I was a little pissed off,” said Chitwood, 64. “I’m not one to sit around and wait for things to happen.”

Within days, a new adjuster arrived. The check followed and Chitwood got going. A local Realtor, Chitwood and a contractor friend had built 120 new houses together, including, only four years before the fire, his home and others in the upscale Land Park subdivision. The house’s foundation survived, so Chitwood kept the same footprint, redesigned the interior and hired his friend to do the work.

In March 2019, just eight months after the blaze, Chitwood entered a finished three-bedroom house, one of the fastest rebuilds in any of the five fires analyzed by The Times.

When he walked into his new living room and sank into his new recliner it felt like home again.

Chitwood’s story ticks many of the boxes recovery experts say are needed to return rapidly. Living in a subdivision with houses close together allowed debris cleanup to move efficiently. His insurance paid out in full with only the brief delay. His prior experience building houses gave him a huge advantage navigating the process.

“For me, it was easy to do,” Chitwood said. “A lot of people were overwhelmed.”

The reasons individual homeowners and entire neighborhoods can rebuild fast after fires come down to personal circumstance and community dynamics. People with high incomes or substantial savings have clear advantages, but that’s not all that matters.

Few empty lots remain in the neighborhood of Coffey Park, where local advocacy groups expedited the rebuilding process after the 2017 Tubbs fire.

Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and Fountaingrove neighborhoods saw most of their development in the 1980s and ‘90s, the former made up of planned subdivisions with look-alike starter homes and the latter a hilly refuge for luxury custom living.

In October 2017, the Tubbs fire blazed through Fountaingrove before jumping the 101 Freeway to Coffey Park. It wiped out both areas, taking a similar number of homes in each and 2,700 between them.

Fountaingrove’s relative affluence didn’t mean residents returned more quickly. Like the Kleins, many struggled with the logistics of building custom homes on large, irregularly shaped lots amid sloping terrain.

An October 2017 aerial view of homes destroyed by the Tubbs fire in the Mark West community in Sonoma County.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

By contrast, Coffey Park is flat and divided into compact, similarly sized parcels. The layout provided an incentive for homebuilders to develop a handful of models that could fit on most properties. Builders had multiple homes under construction at the same time, allowing them to work quickly and at scale with little lag time between jobs across the cul-de-sacs. The process provided more predictable costs and timelines for builders and residents, and opened opportunities unimaginable in the hills across the freeway.

Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park has seen more progress rebuilding than wealthier Fountaingrove

N

City of Santa Rosa, California Department of Fire Protection and Forestry, U.S. Census, U.S. Geological Survey

Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES

Before the fire, Jeff Okrepkie and his wife were Coffey Park renters. They wanted to remain in the neighborhood and planned to use the money they received from their renters insurance as a down payment on a new house. Various prospects fell through until Okrepkie noticed that a builder had purchased a lot on their old street to store materials for other homes under construction.

The builder and Okrepkie worked out a deal: He’d select a design from the builder’s catalog of homes and buy the property once all the construction, including theirs, was complete. They signed a contract and Okrepkie eagerly watched its progress in the construction pipeline.

“I was house number 82,” Okrepkie said. “I found out where 81 was and I would go see what they were doing and say, ‘Oh, they’re doing windows? Cool, I’m getting windows next week.’’’

Okrepkie’s family, which by then included two young children, moved in 2½ years after the fire.

Coffey Park residents gathering in October 2018 for a “Wine Wednesday” on Scarlett Place during rebuilding after the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Unlike in Fountaingrove’s spread-out hills, rebuilding in Coffey Park become a communal event. Soon after the fire, Okrepkie and neighbors formed a group called Coffey Strong. The organization advocated for area survivors, served as a sounding board to vet contractors and, at times, functioned as group therapy. For years, neighbors would hold weekly get-togethers, at first on burned-out lots and later at housewarming parties. They called the gatherings “Wine Wednesdays,” a name that captured their imbibing and venting.

The organization operated as a virtuous circle for rebuilding, encouraging residents to keep going, said Okrepkie, 46.

“Indirect social pressure existed,” said Okrepkie, who has since been elected to the Santa Rosa City Council. “Like, ‘I don’t want to be the last one in.’ The thing you tend to really miss is your community.”

Coffey Park’s location provided an additional advantage over Fountaingrove when it came to insurance. Before the fire, insurance in Coffey Park was more affordable because the neighborhood was considered at lower risk of burning. Combined with lower property values and cheaper rebuilds, many Coffey Park residents had purchased enough coverage to finance their return, as noted by Grist reporter Jake Bittle. The topography of Fountaingrove was a significant fire hazard. No matter its relative wealth, the significant expense of insuring high-value homes in a high-risk neighborhood meant that homeowners there had lesser coverage. Payouts were too small to pay for their costlier, custom rebuilds.

Racing the insurance clock

Insurance companies had to provide coverage for temporary living expenses for two years, which meant that if Tubbs survivors were going to return, many needed to do so relatively quickly. Coffey Strong later lobbied for a change in state law that required companies to cover such expenses for three years in future fires.

Without that private subsidy, survivors would have to pay the mortgage on their destroyed property and the rent for their temporary housing — on top of any gaps in construction costs not covered by insurance for the new home.

City officials were acutely aware of the insurance deadline, said Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s director of planning and economic development. Osburn said the city gave homeowners breaks on many rules, including reducing fees and landscaping requirements, to help people meet the target.

“It was two years or bust,” Osburn said. “We were working under that timeline. If we don’t get this done in two years, then they’re going to sell the property.”

Osburn said it was important to city officials not only that homes were rebuilt, but also that original owners could come back. Structures don’t make up a neighborhood’s character, he said, the people who live there do.

“You really want to maintain the fabric of your community,” he said.

The two-year mark fell squarely in the largest surge of construction in Santa Rosa and elsewhere after the Tubbs fire. Nearly 60% of all the houses that have been rebuilt were finished between 1 1/2 and 3 1/2 years following the blaze, The Times found. Over the nine-month peak of rebuilding, more than three families a day were moving back into their homes.

Few empty lots remain in the neighborhood of Coffey Park, where local advocacy groups expedited the rebuilding process after the 2017 Tubbs fire.

The dearth of construction after the North Complex fire makes it an outlier. But although the pace and extent of building after the Carr, Camp and Woolsey fires have been slower and smaller than after Tubbs, a general pattern has held. In all of them, it took seven to nine months for the first house to be completed. Development rose from there and reached its monthly peak between the second and third year. By year four, progress dropped significantly.

This consistency in the trajectory of rebuilding indicates that permitting stagnation is attributable to the passage of time rather than declining once a certain percentage of homes are rebuilt.

For instance, a majority of the 1,100 houses lost in the Carr fire remain vacant lots seven years later. Of properties with rebuilt homes, about half were occupied between 14 months and 2 1/2 years after the blaze. Now, new completions have trickled to fewer than three a month, less than 20% of that peak period.

Why rebuilds stall

Weeks after the Camp fire destroyed swaths of Butte County in November 2018, Pat Butler returned to her five-acre property in the rolling hills of Concow.

At first, she stayed in a 19-foot metal travel trailer that hadn’t burned. Living off the grid like many in the area, Butler, then 65, was lucky one of her water tanks survived so she could bathe. Her bathroom became a toilet she fastened on top of her septic tank outside and exposed for her neighbors to see — had any of them come back.

Pat Butler has lived on her rural property for nearly three decades. All but one small structure burned in the Camp fire. She moved back within a month and years later with assistance of nonprofits began rebuilding.

Alyssa Hofman, left, of the Tiny Pine Foundation designed and helped build Pat Butler’s new home.

Butler was uninsured. She received assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but it wasn’t enough to start on a new home. She remained in the trailer for two years.

Eventually, an aid group got Butler a camper where she set up rudimentary solar panels and built a porch. With the help of more private aid, the rebuilding process began.

They poured the foundation for her 400-square-foot home on May 12, 2023, a date Butler commemorated in the cement. Every few months, volunteers would come two weeks at a time from Connecticut, Hawaii, Michigan and Washington to assist with the framing, siding and painting. In between, Butler and a local charity worker worked on the house themselves.

She moved in Christmas Eve.

“This past winter was the first in six years that my feet were warm,” said Butler, now 71.

Pat Butler moved into her rebuilt home last Christmas Eve. “This past winter was the first in six years that my feet were warm,” she said.

Butler could stay because of her dedication to her land and the private assistance she received. But for the vast majority of fire survivors in poor, rural areas, the obstacles to rebuilding have been too great.

Many faced the same challenges with topography that those in Fountaingrove did, but without the financial resources to make up for it. Multiple studies have shown that those living in rural areas are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured. And a lack of essential infrastructure only has added to the hurdles.

Nowhere are the disparities between suburban and rural more clear than in the aftermath of the Carr fire. Redding residents had higher incomes and better insurance than survivors from the unincorporated areas of Shasta County, said Rebecca Ewert, a Northwestern University sociologist who wrote her PhD thesis on Carr fire recovery.

Rebuilding homeowners in Redding also had access to a central sewer system, had their electricity restored by the local utility and street repairs handled by the city. Many residents of unincorporated communities had none of these, Ewert said. Instead, they had to pay upward of tens of thousands of dollars to fix damaged septic systems, reinstall their own power poles and repave the asphalt melted from private roads.

“There were so many additional steps and costs that people in the rural areas had to navigate before even starting to rebuild,” Ewert said.

The Times data show the results of the inequities. Nearly three-quarters of the 260 homes the Carr fire destroyed in Redding have been rebuilt. In unincorporated Shasta County, where 817 houses burned down, fewer than 40% have returned.

Rebuilding after the Camp fire has been even slower, and not only because of the challenges affecting rural areas.

The wildfire remains by far the most destructive in state history, with more homes burned down than the two January blazes in Los Angeles combined. Besides Concow and other sparsely populated unincorporated communities in Butte County, the fire wiped out the 26,000-person town of Paradise. Unprecedented public works and economic problems were left in its wake.

It took two years just to begin cutting down 50,000 dead and dying trees from properties in the burn scar. Paradise’s roads made it through the fire but didn’t survive the cleanup. The parade of dump trucks carting out tons of wreckage buckled the streets; repaving operations continue today. Paradise’s hospital, the town’s largest employer, shuttered permanently, dealing a blow to the jobs and the tax base unlike any faced by survivors of the Tubbs fire in wine country and Woolsey fire in Los Angeles.

The hurdles have fueled a mass exodus. Nearly five years post-fire, property owners were twice as likely to have sold their land as rebuilt their homes, an analysis by the Butte County Assessor’s Office found.

The former Pine Grove Mobile Home Park in Paradise following the 2018 Camp fire. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Overall, about a quarter of the homes lost to the Camp fire have been rebuilt. The pace lags behind both the Carr and Woolsey fires, which have rebuilding rates of 47% and 41%, respectively.

How government tilts the playing field

In the wake of these major wildfires, the federal government has provided substantial funding for recovery. It has allocated more than $1.5 billion toward long-term relief efforts following the five fires and other disasters in California from the same years. The dollars are on top of assistance FEMA provided to individuals immediately after the fires.

Yet the money almost always came with strings attached, leaving survivors and recovery workers maneuvering to match the funding with actual needs. The same is true for other federal and state programs that disaster-affected areas could tap for rebuilding.

After the Camp fire, Butte County pursued a state grant to pay for a small community wastewater system in a commercial area that burned. Officials reasoned it would be best to install when no one was living there and that its completion could spur the return of homes and businesses. But the state turned down the request because only populated areas were eligible.

A November 2018 photo shows the remains of the Ridgewood Mobile Home Park in Paradise following the Camp fire.

(Los Angeles Times)

“Nobody after a disaster hands you a pot of money and says, ‘Go do the best and highest,’ ” said Katie Simmons, deputy chief administrative officer for Butte County, who is overseeing recovery efforts. “It’s like, ‘Go do the impossible and then we might reimburse you.’ ”

The other primary way that government affects rebuilding is through permitting. Officials at all levels promised to streamline the process. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown touted his actions “to cut red tape” while touring fire-ravaged Malibu after the 2018 Woolsey fire. Gov. Gavin Newsom committed to doing the same within days of January’s fires in L.A.

Yet many survivors remain stuck, especially where rules are the strictest. Along the California coastline, overlapping layers of regulations make it hard to build at any time. When fire strikes, homeowners can find the circumstances unforgiving.

Seated on what’s left of the foundation of their home, Gene Zilinskas, 85, from left, his wife, Dagmar, 93, and daughter Beatrix Zilinskas reflect on the loss of their house in the Woolsey fire in Malibu in August. The Zilinskas family has been trying to rebuild the property since the 2018 fire.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In a canyon overlooking Paradise Cove, melted steel beams protrude from a concrete foundation that survived Woolsey. It served as the base for the Zilinskas family’s once, and they hope future, home. But nearly seven years after the blaze, they haven’t secured their permits.

Their old home, completed in the early 1990s, was three floors. But they’re shrinking the new house into two. Gene Zilinskas, a retired sonar engineer, is 85 and his wife Dagmar, a former art teacher, is 93. They want fewer stairs than before. They’ve planned for two bedrooms, a kitchen and main living area on the top floor with a bedroom for their daughter below, a layout that also adapts to the hillside and their remaining foundation. But the plan conflicted with city of Malibu rules that say second stories can’t be larger than the first.

Gene Zilinskas is seen through a window frame of his house that was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

That dispute was among many that the family has needed to resolve with permitting officials. They’ve now run into topographical problems with widening their driveway to meet new fire access requirements. The Zilinskases now are on their third architect. The first, fed up with failing to get the home approved, quit. The second died.

“There’s this sense of powerlessness, of not being the captain of your own ship,” said their daughter Beatrix Zilinskas. “Everybody is chronically depressed, this feeling of having absolutely no say so with what’s going on in your life.”

Because of their ages and the time it has taken to receive a permit, the elder Zilinskases believe it’s unlikely they’ll ever walk into their new home.

Malibu officials said the city had trouble verifying records from the Zilinskases’ previous house and aligning the new plans with updated building codes, especially with the multiple architects.

“I feel so bad for the family,” said Yolanda Bundy, Malibu’s community development director. “They’re almost there.”

Bundy said Malibu has changed its rebuilding rules after Woolsey. The city hopes it will make the process smoother for the hundreds more Malibu residents who lost their homes in January’s Palisades fire. The city is assigning its most experienced planners to handle rebuilding rather than relying on contract workers as they did before. Recently, the city updated its codes to make issues like the second-story rule that ensnared the Zilinskases easier to overcome, she said.

“We are really listening and trying to be more flexible,” Bundy said.

With little sign of California’s unprecedented era of wildfire ending, many other communities may have to learn similar lessons. Decades of homebuilding in forests and foothills have left millions of residents exposed as climate change fuels longer, hotter and drier fire seasons.

Seventy percent of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state history have burned since 2017, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. All but two have occurred after the turn of the century and none before 1991. The Tubbs fire from fall 2017 was the worst until Camp a year later. The Eaton and Palisades fires then jumped to second and third on the list.

“We’ve created this risk,” said Rumbach of the Urban Institute. It’s only now we’ve realized, he said, that “the check comes due.”

It was a particularly busy Thursday morning for the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach.

The area, which is home to an array of independently owned businesses and small restaurants, both of which boast unique facades from storefront to storefront, saw hundreds of eager fans start lining up outside its doors as early as 8 a.m.

Many crowded around one store in particular: Fingerprints Music, which only recently began to call Bixby Knolls its home — in April — after a roughly 15-year residency in downtown Long Beach. As crowd control barricades began springing up and artist security personnel lingered outside the famed vinyl record shop, passersby and neighbors alike began to ponder what could be going on.

It was simple: Cardi B.

The “Bodak Yellow” singer managed to squeeze in a meet-and-greet event at the store to commemorate last week’s release of her sophomore album, “Am I the Drama?” A link to tickets dropped on Fingerprints Music’s website on Sept. 9, which fans barely gave a chance to breathe.

“I follow her on Instagram — I have hard notifications on every platform — so, as soon as the video went up, I rushed to the website and bought it,” said Gerardo Torres of Gardena. “I was probably one of the first few [to buy tickets], less than five minutes after she announced it I already had mine.”

Arlene Heaton, left, of Kern County and Gerardo Torres of Gardena hold a Cardi B flag.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Torres stood near the front of the line, which he joined around 10:30 a.m. Next to him was Arlene Heaton of Rosamond, who had just driven three hours from the Kern County community to arrive at the same time. The two met in line and quickly became friends — she donning a rhinestone-studded ensemble and he draping a flag depicting Cardi B around his shoulders.

“If she would’ve been three hours away, I would have been there as well!” Torres added.

“It took about 10 minutes [to sell out],” Heaton said. “I love the album and I just had to get the CD… I wanted to support her and I came all the way from Rosamond to see this happen — history, this is history.”

Though the event was scheduled for a 2 p.m. start, it wasn’t until 2:30 that Cardi arrived on the scene. A few fans trickled out from behind the store, rejoicing that they’d seen her arrive.

Moments later, security formed a human barrier around the entrance, and Cardi stepped out of the store with a megaphone. Whatever she said was rendered unintelligible among the thunderous cheers of fans who surged forward, putting her entourage to the test.

“I do music myself, I’m not a fan of many, but her? Oh, my God, there was no way. I got up at like 8 in the morning; I set my alarm for 6:30,” said Curshawn Watts, who called herself the “Queen of Compton.” “I was out here! I didn’t care how early I had to be here — I had to be here!” Watts said.

Curshawn Watts, a rapper who calls herself the “Queen of Compton,” holds a CD of Cardi B’s “Am I the Drama?” at Thursday’s meet-and-greet in Long Beach.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

She’d been waiting since 10 a.m. and said the heat didn’t bother her: “It’s worth it all, baby!” she declared.

As fans made their way into the store, they were greeted by the sound of tracks from Cardi’s new album playing on the store speakers. “Am I the Drama?” vinyl records and CDs filled out the shelves, and portraits of Cardi stood above them.

Nestled in the back corner behind a black curtain sat the woman herself, visibly pregnant, in brown snakeskin heels, denim shorts, and adorning various gold statement pieces. She had confirmed in a CBS interview last week that she and NFL star Stefon Diggs were expecting a child.

An estimated 1,200 fans arrived on the blistering day in Long Beach, though only 800 were able to secure a guest list spot to see the 32-year-old hip-hop artist. Others assembled nearby, hoping for a chance to merely lay eyes on her or, perhaps, to get lucky enough to join the meet-and-greet.

Indeed, Fingerprints Music and Cardi B accommodated around 200 to 300 more people toward the tail end of the event from among those who didn’t make the list. The event lasted until well after 5 p.m.

By that time, the somewhat chaotic nature of the meet-and-greet’s afternoon heights had settled down. Street vendors no longer camped outside, artists wrapped up their pieces for sale, and the weather began to cool.

Cardi B prepares to take a photo with a fan at the meet-and-greet.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“We don’t usually do that, but everyone seemed pretty chill,” said Rand Foster, owner of Fingerprints Music. “For somebody at that caliber to be that open was really refreshing.”

Cardi B even stayed overtime to do a surprise signing of an exclusive alternate cover of her album. Four photos from a courtroom appearance she made in August embellish that variant.

Foster said he considered Thursday’s event, the largest the store has held since moving to its new location, to be a resounding success. He noted that when the store was downtown, the store once hosted an Ozzy Osbourne meet-and-greet that had a roughly 2,300-person turnout.

At its location in Bixby Knolls, the store is still feeling out its neighborhood. Foster said not only did the event bring extra traffic to other businesses, but he “didn’t hear any neighbors put out by it.”

Cardi B could have easily opted for a location more central to Los Angeles, such as Amoeba Music, so many fans were surprised and happy to see Long Beach get some love.

One man, who called himself Mr. Boug’e and sported a uniquely curled beard, said it came down to Long Beach being “dope.”

Mr. Boug’e holds up two vinyl record variants of Cardi B’s latest album, “Am I the Drama?”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“I call it Strong Beach,” he joked. “She got love everywhere — it don’t matter. It can be in an alley… or Alaska; they gon’ love her.”

Foster, whose shop has a long-standing relationship with its Hollywood peers at Amoeba, said the decision by Cardi B’s team to hold her meet-and-greet in Long Beach probably also came down to logistics.

“Anybody who is doing this kind of event and doing it with an eye towards longevity has to be respectful to the neighbors,” he explained. “Our line got about six blocks long; I think that would be tough on Hollywood Boulevard.”