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Jerry Buss put together what was then thought to be a wild business deal to purchase the Lakers and related assets for $67.5 million in 1979.

Buss had a degree in chemistry, but his money came from real estate holdings and loans that moved between third parties to help him obtain the Lakers, Kings and the Forum from Jack Kent Cooke, who was going through a costly divorce.

Buss’ vision was to infuse Hollywood glamour into an NBA team few in Los Angeles seemed to care about, win championships and share that glory with his family.

Buss realized his Hollywood dream in more ways than he ever could have imagined, with his death in 2013 from complications from cancer touching off battles among his six children over control of the Lakers.

Lakers owner Jerry Buss, center, with children Janie, from left, Jeanie, Johnny and Jim in 1979.

(Gunther/mptvimages.com)

At least two siblings have tried to oust another from a leadership role. One sibling reportedly said two others never should have been born. And one sibling managed to fire the five others from jobs with the team.

The rifts mirror the HBO hit show “Succession.” Buss’ tenure and the family drama has been direct inspiration for two television shows and was chronicled in a docuseries the Lakers produced.

The latest daggers were delivered this week, with attorneys representing Buss’ daughter, Jeanie, admonishing her five siblings — Janie, Johnny, Jim, Joey and Jesse — for announcing the Buss Family Trust was selling its 17.8% ownership of the Lakers to new buyers Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner.

The sale would yield billions for the trust, with Iger and Kushner set to purchase the franchise at a $12.5-billion evaluation for the majority ownership stake of the team and a tagalong provision extending that price to the minority shareholders.

The Buss children are already billionaires following the sale of their majority stake to previous owner Mark Walter in 2025, but in addition to a big jump in share value, the minority stake sale would remove Jeanie from her coveted role as governor.

Neither side is giving up ground, suggesting lawsuits will soon be filed to resolve the family ownership dispute.

How did we get here?

The roots of the infighting date to the early days of Jerry Buss’ team ownership.

Buss focuses on building a family business

For the first 12 seasons Buss owned the team, the Lakers won NBA championships in 1980 and 1982 against the Philadelphia 76ers, 1985 and 1987 against the hated Boston Celtics, and 1988 against the Detroit Pistons.

Former player and shrewd executive Jerry West helped build the Lakers’ rosters, Pat Riley blossomed into an elite coach, and stars Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led a collection of elite playmakers during the Showtime era.

Jerry Buss, right, talks with his children Johnny, Jim, Jeanie and Janie in 1979.

(Gunther / mptvimages.com)

The Buss family came along for the ride, with each child working on some aspect of the family business. Jeanie notably helped organize events at the Forum and was eager to take on more challenges while honoring her father’s ambition. Her father put her in charge of the team’s indoor tennis franchise when she was only 19.

As Jerry aged and new stars emerged, including Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and coach Phil Jackson, it was clear the next ownership chapter for the Lakers would be messy.

For one thing, Jerry had trouble letting go of what he built.

“I just can’t visualize myself walking away, relinquishing control,” Jerry told The Times in 2002. “My relationship with this team is a lifelong marriage.”

A clear successor emerges

By the time they reached their 40s, Jeanie took on a greater role on the business side, while Jim became a basketball executive.

Joey and Jesse, the youngest Buss children, learned about scouting and business operations.

Lakers owner Jerry Buss poses with the NBA championship trophy in 1980.

(NBAE / Getty Images)

Jerry’s health challenges could not be denied and at age 69, he scaled back his involvement.

In 2002, Jeanie emerged as Jerry’s clear successor. At the time, her siblings did not seem interested in the role.

Her biggest challenges seemed to be getting the rest of the NBA to take her seriously after previously partying with her father’s girlfriends and posing nude for Playboy magazine. She told The Times she wished the media hadn’t focused as much on her past and stood by her work moving forward.

Soon after the Lakers hired Jackson in 1999, he asked Jeanie on a date. Their ensuing relationship added challenges to business operations, but The Times reported Jerry didn’t oppose it.

Lakers owner Jerry Buss and his daughter, Jeanie, pose for a photo at the Staples Center.

(Michael Kelley / For the Times)

Jeanie joined her father at NBA board of governors meetings for three years before being the Lakers’ sole representative at the gatherings that featured no other women. She handled an array of business challenges, big and small, and helped supervise the team’s move from the Forum to the Staples Center.

In 2002, all her siblings seemed content with Jeanie emerging as the face of the Lakers’ front office. They either were driven to make a name for themselves in other lines of business or had clearly carved out roles within the Lakers organization.

“My dad likes a system of checks and balances,” Jim told The Times. “Jeanie has more of the administrative part. We all have a good relationship. There’s no jealousy or envy. It’s very smooth.”

Buss family hits troubled waters

The smooth sailing didn’t last forever.

Jeanie helped her father navigate a series of difficult decisions. The Lakers agreed with Jackson to mutually part in 2004 amid a feud between Bryant and O’Neal, the first sign Jeanie was willing to part with someone she loved for the sake of the business. Jackson returned to coach the team in 2005 and held the role until his retirement in 2011, guiding the team to five titles.

In 2013, Jerry died and Bryant ruptured his left Achilles tendon. The Buss children reportedly decided against selling the team immediately after their father’s death, with Jeanie a clear vote against the move.

In 2014, coach Mike D’Antoni’s Lakers won 27 games. In 2015, the team won 21. In 2016, the team hit rock bottom with just 17 wins. Jeanie and Jackson broke up in 2016, ending their four-year engagement. She has since married comedian Jay Mohr.

Lakers star Kobe Bryant and Lakers governor Jeanie Buss stand beside each other on the basketball court.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

In 2017, the Lakers were headed to another losing season when Jeanie fired Jim, the president of basketball operations, and Mitch Kupchak, the team’s general manager. They were replaced by Rob Pelinka, Bryant’s former agent, and Johnson, the former Showtime star turned businessman.

Shortly after the firing, Jim and his brother, Johnny, tried to remove Jeanie from the team’s board of directors, sparking a legal feud that included Jeanie filing a restraining order while she wrestled control of the team.

“It wasn’t like we were trying to get rid of Jeanie as president of the Lakers,” Johnny said during a docuseries the team produced. “We wanted Jeanie to understand that Dad would not have wanted you to just take total control, hire and fire whoever you wanted, without the rest of us being involved.”

Jeanie countered her father created a trust that put her in control.

“They tried to disregard what their father wanted,” Jeanie said in the docuseries. “That’s a betrayal of all the hard work and what he did on our behalf to make this possible. I felt that there was this desire to remove me or stab me in the heart.”

A court ultimately delivered a ruling that Jeanie is still clinging to today as she hopes to retain the family’s minority ownership of the Lakers and her role as governor.

“The co-trustees are bound to vote the Los Angeles Lakers, Inc. shares to ensure that the minimum 15% ownership requirement is maintained in order to ensure that Jeanie Buss may remain controlling owner,” a letter written this week by Jeanie’s attorney reads, citing a 2017 court ruling outlining her role. “Any attempt by the co-trustees to do otherwise and any attempt to aid or abet the co-trustees as such would constitute a breach of trust, breach of fiduciary duty and be in contempt of court.”

The ruling stipulated that co-trustees “would take all actions reasonably available to them, including voting the trust’s shares to ensure that [Jeanie] is elected as the controlling owner of the Lakers on an annual basis during [her] lifetime.”

A title masks more drama

Soon after the ruling, Jeanie included younger brothers Joey and Jesse in the search for a coach to replace Luke Walton. Her siblings continued to hold roles within the team.

With Jeanie’s power firmly defined by the court, the Lakers signed LeBron James in 2018, traded for Anthony Davis in 2019 and won a title during a season shortened by COVID in 2020. It is the sole championship the team has won since Jerry’s death.

LeBron James hugs Lakers governor Jeanie Buss after winning the 2020 NBA championship.

(Douglas P. DeFelice / Getty Images)

The run to the latest title was far from smooth.

ESPN reported that when Jesse called Jeanie to ask a question about a remark Pelinka made during Davis’ introductory news conference in 2019, she told a story of a promise made between her father and mother that Jerry would never have any other children. Jeanie’s mother reportedly was heartbroken when Jerry and his then girlfriend had Joey and Jesse.

“You should’ve never been born,” ESPN reported Jeanie told Jesse, stunning her younger brother.

The siblings still somehow continued to work in various aspects of the Lakers’ operation.

Jeanie reportedly took intense criticism of the team during the last five years personally and Joey and Jesse wondered whether she might be open to selling the franchise. At the same time, value of NBA teams soared as more billionaires moved into the space. A sale would shift the siblings from millionaires who struggled to invest in growing the Lakers’ operations into billionaires.

A climate opposed to a sale

Jerry created a trust he hoped would prevent his children from feeling pressure to sell the team.

ESPN reported he prepaid inheritance taxes to prevent his children from having to do so upon his death and added provisions to the trust allowing siblings to buy each other out and forcing shares to be redistributed among the siblings when one died rather than passing them on to the next generation of their respective families.

Joey and Jesse began exploring small shares of the team and tried to get other family members on board, ESPN reported. They had not completed their work before Jeanie announced Walter’s offer. Four of the six siblings approved selling 50% of their shares to Walter for a figure that reportedly stunned all of them. Joey and Jesse learned the sale had been approved via a post on X by ESPN’s Shams Charania.

Janie told ESPN the Buss siblings were assured their roles with the team would not change for five years.

Walter’s purchase of the majority stake of the Lakers was approved by four of the six siblings in June 2025, with Jeanie endorsing the deal. She was assured she’d represent the Lakers on the NBA board of governors for at least the next five years.

On Nov. 20, three weeks after the NBA approved the sale to Walter, Jeanie fired Joey, Jesse, Jim, Johnny and Janie, who all worked for the team in various roles.

“I don’t think my dad would be happy with the way things just went down,” Janie told ESPN. “Not at all.”

While she disagreed with the way Jeanie handled the firings, her sister said in an interview with ESPN she didn’t think she meant to hurt her family.

“Jeanie doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, and so she just has to make these tough decisions,” Janie told the network. “And she’s been having to make them … I just wish she would’ve done it differently.”

Firing the last Buss family member

Last week, the family drama flared up again.

When Walter, who is facing multiple investigations into his business practices, reached a deal to sell his majority stake to Iger and Kushner, the family resumed conversations about completely cashing out of the Lakers.

Iger pledged to honor Walter’s agreement with Jeanie to remain as governor for at least five years and spoke highly of the Buss family in multiple interviews and statements released after the deal was announced.

Six days later, five of the siblings voted to approve the sale of their minority stake to Iger and Kushner, effectively firing Jeanie as governor.

Rob Pelinka, from left, Luka Doncic and Jeanie Buss pose for a photo in Katowice, Poland, on Aug. 27.

(Marcin Golba / Associated Press)

“We have decided as a family to sell the remaining Buss Family Trust shares to the Bob Iger group as part of the ongoing transaction,” the family’s statement to ESPN read. “We love the Lakers, Laker fans and will continue to support Los Angeles; but it is time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can.”

Jeanie’s attorney has contested the sale, citing the 2017 court ruling. The attorney’s letter calls out two of Jeanie’s siblings for sending false information to ESPN: “This is just the latest instance of a years-long pattern whereby Joey and Jesse Buss leak false, defamatory and pernicious ‘information’ to Mr. Charania for the malicious purpose of doing harm to the Los Angeles Lakers so long as Dr. Buss’s chosen successor, Jeanie Buss, carries out her father’s wishes.”

Charania said he stands by his reporting.

The Buss Family Trust issued the following statement to The Times defending the five siblings’ right to sell the team:

“The Los Angeles Lakers have never been just a basketball team. They have been one of the greatest privileges of our lives. Our focus has always been on what we believe is best for the Lakers, the fans who have supported this franchise for generations and the greater Los Angeles community.

“Johnny, Jimmy, Janie, Joey and Jesse have made the decision to sell the family’s remaining stake, and we remain united in that decision. We intend to move forward thoughtfully, respectfully and through the appropriate process.

“We have tremendous respect for Bob Iger and Josh Kushner and believe they understand what the Lakers represent to Los Angeles and our incredibly loyal fan base. We are confident they will honor everything this franchise stands for while building upon the foundation our father created.”

It appears the Buss family will soon be headed back to court to decide their future as Lakers owners.

Aug. 14 (UPI) — The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is returning home after a lengthy, record-breaking deployment which some crew members’ families said caused their loved ones to attempt suicide, Navy officials announced Friday.

The vessel will be replaced in the Middle East by another aircraft carrier, President Donald Trump later told reporters, while dismissing concerns over the mental well-being of its sailors and Marines during its 266-day deployment.

The USS Abraham Lincoln “crushed their deployment and will return home soon as part of a planned rotation,” acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said in a social media statement. “Details will come but let me be clear: the safety and security of our Sailors and Marines always comes first.”

The Lincoln’s time at sea “was extended because the mission demanded it. Deployments are hard,” he added, while criticizing what he called a “dishonest” portrayal of the crew’s health situation by media allegedly attempting to “paint our warriors as victims.”

Families of sailors serving on the ship have told reporters several crew members have tried to jump overboard or have been stopped from doing so in recent months as the Lincoln’s deployment reached record-setting proportions.

This prompted Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to voice “serious concerns” about the length of the warship’s deployment as well as additional reports of supply shortages and contaminated water.

Cao on Friday admitted that “a small number of mental health cases were treated with no loss of life” and that meal plans “were adjusted” when fresh resupply was unavailable “without a single meal being missed.

“There is no question our young men and women have been pushed to their limits-but they have never broken,” he said. “They are rightly tired — but have never been out of the fight.

“However, it is clear, knowing the whole story, our force and their families are not victims. They are the epitome of American strength and resilience.”

The Abraham Lincoln will be replaced in the Middle East by the USS George Washington, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump, meanwhile confirmed another carrier is on its way, telling reporters that the Lincoln “is moving right now or very shortly and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.”

He responded, “no, they’re not,” when asked if sailors’ families are concerned, and questioned whether the 266-day deployment was too long, he answered, “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.”

Democratic lawmakers and military families are pressing the Pentagon for answers after reports emerged that thousands of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have endured food shortages, plumbing failures and severe fatigue during deployment that has stretched more than 260 days.

The roughly 5,000-person crew, which left San Diego in November and has been stationed in the Middle East to support the U.S. war against Iran, has spent a record amount of uninterrupted time at sea. Now, families of those on board have begun speaking out publicly, describing concerns about mental health and supply issues aboard the aircraft carrier.

Since those reports — which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth characterized as “completely misrepresented” — the U.S. military announced plans to send the USS George Washington, a Pacific-based aircraft carrier, to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln.

But when asked Friday for a reaction, Trump downplayed families’ concerns and characterized the length of the deployment as “not nearly long enough.”

The president’s remarks stand in contrast to the concerns raised by lawmakers and military families, including reports by the Military Times and the Stars and Stripes that sailors tried to jump overboard as the deployment kept going.

“The plans in the works to relieve the USS Lincoln are not enough,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Diego) wrote in a letter to Hegseth on Thursday. “We need clear and honest information from the Department of Defense about the operational failures that led to the problems aboard the USS Lincoln to ensure this never happens again.”

Morale aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier already is difficult to maintain without a record-breaking stint, said Julie Roland, a retired veteran Navy lieutenant commander who worked briefly on the USS Lincoln.

Between the lack of sun below deck for some nonpilot personnel and rooms packed with triple-bunk beds, the conditions on vessels like the Lincoln can be difficult to bear. Although service members expect such difficulties, the situation on the USS Lincoln raises additional concern among sailors, Roland said.

“I know what months at sea does to a person even when the ship has hot chow and working plumbing,” Roland said. “The warrior ethos shouldn’t have to include bravely facing water contamination. … Even warfighters need basic care.”

Roland added that she was not surprised to hear complaints of poor living conditions from sailors on board, given that their few days of reprieve for port call constantly were being delayed. She said she received videos showing trash being tossed overboard because of broken incinerators, heard stories of a lack of proper medical supplies and kept in touch with one sailor who detailed his mental health deterioration as days dragged on aboard the Lincoln.

“The magnitude of difference between official information from the Department of Defense and firsthand reports from the crew should be troubling, and may have serious implications about what else the Pentagon may be withholding regarding the conflict in Iran,” Roland added.

In his letter to Hegseth, Levin said the Trump administration needs to answer concerns from military families and loves ones about the conditions aboard. He said he heard concerns about moldy showers, broken toilets, lack of hot water, lack of access to fresh produce and supply shortages.

Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, also demanded answers from U.S. military leaders on what she called “horrific” reports of the conditions aboard the ship.

Tensions over the situation also prompted military leaders to hold in-person and virtual meetings last week with the families of the sailors and Marines. Both meetings were combative, according to a recording obtained by MS NOW.

During the in-person meeting at the Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, Navy leaders were unable to tell families when their loves ones would be relieved from duty. Spouses, in turn, asked what was being done to address issues of mental health and exhaustion, MS NOW reported.

Concerns about mental health deteriorating on these types of deployments are well-founded.

A study of nearly 1,000 sailors published in the journal Military Medicine in January 2025 found that service members aboard Navy ships suffer the highest rates of “serious psychological distress” compared to other branches of the U.S. military. Among the reasons are “unique stressors, such as poor habitability, noise and demanding scheduled that leave inadequate time for sleep and rest,” the study found.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the USS Abraham Lincoln was not an “isolated case” and demanded an inquiry.

“Recent carrier deployments have repeatedly stretched beyond their original anticipated duration, suggesting that extended deployments may be becoming a feature rather than an exception of the Navy’s force-generation model,” Blumenthal wrote.

Hegseth told reporters on Thursday that “some deployments are longer than others.”

“What they do in those high seas and those austere conditions with less port calls, it’s incredible. And Americans don’t understand what it’s like to do that,” he said, while adding that he wants “folks rotated as quickly as possible.”

In a message to the crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth said: “We’re going to do everything we can for you. We are so grateful for the dedication of that crew and others.”

Davina McCall was visibly moved on Long Lost Family as she made a life-changing discovery

Davina McCall struggled to keep her emotions under control during the latest epsidoe of the heartwarming ITV series.

The beloved TV presenter fought back tears during an emotional episode of Long Lost Family which aired on Monday (August 10 ) after revealing to 76-year-old Christine that the search for her biological family had uncovered her birth certificate and an unknown brother.

Christine left in a train carriage at Waterloo station in 1949. She was discovered and taken into care, beginning a life in which the identity of her birth parents remained one of the greatest unanswered questions she carried with her.

She has spent much of her life wondering about her biological family and where she had come from. Although she had always questioned whether she would ever discover the truth, she admitted she never expected the moment to actually happen.

Away from the cameras, Davina had already broken the heartbreaking news that Christine’s birth parents had been found but had sadly died.

Speaking to Christine, Davina asked: “How are you?” Christine replied: “It was a bit of a shock. Oh, my gosh. It’s actually happening.” She explained that she had been struggling to process everything, saying that her mind had been “addled” since learning what the Long Lost Family team had discovered.

Christine admitted that she had never really expected to find her birth mother alive. She said: “I didn’t think my mother would be alive now. I’m 76 this year, but there’s always been that question. ‘Who’s my family?’” But Davina then revealed something that made the emotional moment even more poignant.

The presenter was visibly moved as she told Christine: “I want to show you something today. It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to do this for someone. I have a birth certificate.”

Christine was visibly overwhelmed by the discovery. “Oh, goodness. So my birth was registered,” she said. Davina, visibly emotional herself, confirmed that it was. She explained that Christine’s birth mother, Joyce, was just 22 years old when she gave birth to her.

For Christine, the information was difficult to absorb. “It is a lot to take in. Oh, my goodness. So I was born in Portsmouth,” she said.

Davina confirmed that Christine had been born in hospital. The discovery appeared to answer some of the questions Christine had carried with her for decades.

Christine began trying to piece together what may have happened to her young mother. She reflected: “So, she’s looked after, and I was looked after. She must have left the hospital and gone straight up to Waterloo. But it doesn’t have the father. Probably couldn’t look after me on her own.”

Then Christine asked the question that would lead to another extraordinary discovery. “Did she have any more children?” Davina replied simply: “She did.” Christine immediately reacted with shock. “Oh, my gosh. This just gets better,” she said.

Davina then revealed that Christine had a brother named Barry — and that he had been born just one year before her. Christine wanted to know what had happened to him and asked whether Barry had stayed with their mother.

But Davina revealed that Barry had also been fostered. Davina explained: “Barry has got a birth certificate and that’s what your birth mother’s name is on it. He was the key to everything.”

Later on in the show Christine finally reunited with brother Barry. The reunion was particularly poignant given that Christine had already learned the heart breaking news that her biological parents had both died.

Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace is available to stream on ITVX

WASHINGTON  — Fear was growing in hospitals across the country in 2009 as a frightening epidemic that came to be called the H1N1 swine flu swept across the globe.

From Galveston, Texas, where a hospital ran out of test kits, to Loma Linda University Medical Center in San Bernardino, which had to set up tents to handle a crush of patients, to New York, where hospitals scrambled to bring on extra emergency staff, it appeared the nation’s healthcare system would be overwhelmed.

The worst did not materialize. The lesson, though, was clear: The nation needed larger caches of standby medical supplies and hospitals that were better prepared to handle a surge of infected patients.

A decade later, the coronavirus crisis is exposing many of the same gaps. Inadequate supplies of protective masks, ventilators, intensive care beds and other medical resources are forcing mass closures of schools and businesses and restrictions on everyday activities as public officials rush to slow the virus so America’s medical system isn’t overwhelmed.

“So much that was predicted has come to pass,” said Marcia Crosse, former head of the healthcare section of the Government Accountability Office. Since the early 2000s, the GAO, the federal government’s leading internal watchdog, has issued a steady stream of reports about poor pandemic planning.

As the current crisis has widened, President Trump has attempted to deflect responsibility for his administration’s poor planning, suggesting the coronavirus outbreak was inconceivable.

“Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion,” the president said Thursday.

The opposite is true. The GAO, public health experts and others issued a steady drumbeat of warnings that America would sooner or later face a widespread infectious disease outbreak or a major bioterrorism attack and was woefully unprepared.

In both 2018 and 2019, U.S. intelligence agencies issued insistent warnings in their annual Worldwide Threat Assessment.

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the 2019 report noted.

That is only the most recent warning. As early as 2003, the GAO cautioned that many urban hospitals lacked enough ventilators to treat a large number of patients suffering from respiratory problems that would be expected in an anthrax or botulism outbreak.

“Ventilators have long been recognized as a weak link,” said Crosse, who spent 35 years at GAO before retiring in 2018.

Today, a lack of ventilators is emerging as a potentially critical shortfall because patients hit hardest by COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, often suffer severe respiratory problems.

Federal policymakers concentrated heavily on pandemic preparedness in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and anthrax scare in 2001, which both exposed gaps in the nation’s emergency response system.

In 2005, the administration of President George W. Bush published a landmark “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.” The document, among other things, highlighted the need for plans to distribute necessary medical supplies from the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile and to support state and local efforts to “surge” medical personnel and facilities to handle an outbreak.

Medical equipment such as masks and protective clothing in particular were given high priority as planners recognized that doctors, nurses and other medical staff were most vulnerable.

After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks, which filter out airborne particles, be replenished by the stockpile, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

That didn’t happen, according to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Assn.

The stockpile drew down about 100 million masks during the 2009 epidemic, Johnson said.

“Our association is unaware of any major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown,” he said.

Last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that available supplies included just 12 million N95 masks and 30 million surgical masks, a tiny fraction of the 3.5 billion masks one of Azar’s deputies later testified the nation’s healthcare system would need.

Already across the country, there are signs of medical centers running out of protective equipment, compounding the challenges caused by the federal government’s inadequate supply of coronavirus testing kits.

At Sinai Health System, which serves largely low-income patients on Chicago’s South and Southwest sides, hospital officials started signing out masks and other protective equipment as carefully as they handle narcotics.

“We’ve never had to do that before,” said Karen Teitelbaum, the system’s chief executive.

These shortages are particularly appalling, said Jeffrey Levi, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University and former head of the Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit public health advocacy group.

“Every time we have an emergency, protecting healthcare workers has been the No. 1 policy issue,” Levi said. “To have neglected that is shocking.”

Making the case for investments in material and hospital planning has long been challenging as most people have difficulty envisioning a major disaster, acknowledged Dr. Eric Toner of Johns Hopkins University, an authority on pandemic preparedness.

Hospitals also are under pressure to keep margins thin and eliminate spending on staff and supplies that aren’t used all the time.

The budget crunch represents a particular challenge for so-called safety-net hospitals, institutions that serve many uninsured patients and those covered by Medicaid, and consequently collect less revenue. These same hospitals are now expecting a large surge in coronavirus patients but have limited resources to ramp up staffing and add intensive care beds if needed.

“Cash is very limited,” said Charlie Shields, chief executive of Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City. Shields said the finances are under even more stress since the hospital canceled elective procedures and shut down its dental services to prepare for the pandemic, moves that reduce hospital revenue.

Toner at Johns Hopkins noted these kinds of strains are why the federal government should have provided a stronger backstop.

“The argument we’ve made for 20 years is that if we want to have prepared healthcare institutions, this has to be a societal responsibility, and that means a government responsibility.”

After 9/11, the federal Hospital Preparedness Program was created in 2002 to help hospitals plan for public health emergencies and terrorist attacks.

But as time passed, the program was steadily cut. In 2007, Congress trimmed $44 million from the program’s budget. In 2014, lawmakers cut $120 million.

Overall, money for the program has been slashed by about half since 2003, said John Auerbach, chief executive of the Trust for America’s Health.

Auerbach, who was Boston health commissioner for nine years, said he and other public health officials routinely pleaded with Congress to restore the spending.

He said lawmakers frequently offered the same response: “Do we still need that?”

The Inter Miami forward, 39, also became an eight-time Ballon d’Or winner and won the Champions League four times with Barcelona, plus 10 La Liga titles in 17 seasons in their first team.

Jorge supported his local team Newell’s Old Boys and Lionel joined the club when he was seven years old.

The family relocated to Spain in February 2001 after Lionel was signed by Barca aged just 13, and although Messi’s mother and three siblings soon moved back to Rosario, his father stayed with him in Barcelona.

“Jorge was the pillar and the person who supported with vision, rigor and affection the career of the greatest player of all time alongside his wife, Celia Cuccittini,” Newell’s Old Boys posted on X., external

“His constant companionship and behind-the-scenes leadership were essential in backing every step of Lionel, from his beginnings at Malvinas [youth academy] to the pinnacle of world football glory.

“Thank you for teaching him to love these colours.”

The club added that they “embrace with affection Celia, Lionel, Rodrigo, Matias and Maria Sol, and all their loved ones and close ones in this difficult moment”.

Barcelona thanked Jorge “for his commitment to our club, for entrusting us with the beginnings and the most glorious years of his son Leo’s football career”.

The Argentine Football Association said it “deeply mourns with sadness and sorrow the passing of Jorge Messi, father of our captain and emblem, Lionel Messi”.

It added: “From here, we stand in solidarity with the entire family during this difficult time and send the most heartfelt, warm and affectionate embrace.”

The Messi family responded after an Argentine television presenter falsely reported Jorge had died during Argentina’s opening game at this summer’s World Cup.

The presenter later resigned, while the family expressed their “deep discomfort with the lack of sensitivity, respect and discretion with which some people have treated what is strictly a private family matter”.

When I pulled into the parking lot near Long Beach’s F&M Bank Amphitheater with just 30 minutes until the opening of the show on a recent Friday, my heart raced.

“Do you think we’ll make it in time?” I asked my boyfriend, worried.

We were heading to Ice Cube and Mike Epps’ “Everyday’s Friday” concert and comedy show — a celebration of the cult classic “Friday” movie franchise — so a huge turnout was guaranteed. And ever since F&M Bank Amphitheater opened earlier this summer, my social media feeds have been flooded with complaints about Long Beach’s new temporary waterfront venue. Concertgoers have cited uncomfortable seating, sky-high parking rates and long shuttle wait times.

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Those comments swirled in my head as I hustled toward the shuttle pickup line near the Pike Outlets. But to my surprise and relief, a bus arrived within a few minutes. After a roughly 15-minute drive through mild traffic, we made it to the venue just in time to see Epps tease a few audience members during his opening comedy segment.

The 11,000-seat F&M Bank Amphitheater has gotten a lot of buzz in the two months it’s been open, with conversations surrounding its funding, noise concerns in the neighborhood and the purpose of the venue for the city of Long Beach. My mission was simply to see what it’s like to experience a show. The verdict? If you’re not expecting luxury and you arrive with a healthy dose of patience, it’s a treat.

Here’s a rundown, starting with getting to the amphitheater. Because the venue doesn’t have its own parking lot, the options are rideshare, the bus, e-scooters, bikes (with storage available at the venue), taking a water taxi ($5 per way) or paying $55 for reserved spaces, then taking the free shuttle.

Walking inside felt less like entering a temporary venue and more like stepping into a mini music festival. The pathway toward the security checkpoint was adorned with a bright abstract mural, hanging lights and swaying palm trees. A display of lowriders greeted us alongside a massive mural of iconic scenes from the film “Friday,” including Cube and Chris Tucker’s legendary “Dammnnnn” moment. Deeper into the grounds, fans delighted in interactive art installations — from a replica of Pinky’s Records & Discs to Craig’s front porch. Nearby were even more classic lowriders that drivers made bounce and dance for the crowd. The layout made the space feel more expansive and interactive than just watching a performance.

The spacious F&M Bank Amphitheater felt like a mini music festival with food trucks, art installations and more.

(Daniel Rojas)

Food trucks and bars were scattered throughout, serving up tacos, burgers, hot dogs and other hand-held bites. I ordered a smashburger with fries — which was decent though the line moved slowly — and paired it with a cocktail, which was moderately priced by L.A. standards ($19 for premium liquor). Grab-and-go beers and seltzers were easily accessible although I didn’t spot any refillable water stations around the venue.

And a major thing to note is the venue’s only restrooms are Porta Potties. I was instantly grateful that I’d brought hand sanitizer as there weren’t any hand-washing stations near the entrance. Fortunately, a second portable toilet area deeper inside the venue had working sinks and held up well throughout the show.

Thousands of fans attended the “Everyday’s Friday” event, which celebrated the “Friday” movie franchise.

(Daniel Rojas)

Much like shows at the Hollywood Bowl, the concert kicked off a few minutes after 7 p.m. With our burgers and margaritas in hand, my boyfriend and I nestled into our seats in the center 300 section, which gave us a clear, unobstructed view of the stage. Thanks to the tiered bleacher-style seating, almost every seat in the house offers a great vantage point. The actual seats were hard and mildly uncomfortable, but we didn’t mind this because we stood up for most of the show. Some attendees opted to hang out at one of the many picnic tables sprinkled around the venue.

By the time Houston rap legend Scarface — who’s known for his use of heavy bass — hit the stage I realized just how crisp the sound quality was. Even when we left our seats for a quick bathroom break, I could still hear the music clearly. The sound combined with lasers and immersive backdrop visuals of scenes from the films elevated the show experience.

Thanks to the tiered bleacher-style seating, almost every seat in the venue offers a great vantage point of the stage.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

It’s difficult to ignore the picturesque views of the harbor and famed Queen Mary, particularly at sunset. (On certain concert days, the Queen Mary offers free admission.) It felt like the perfect setting for a show that celebrated the beloved film, its soundtrack and most importantly West Coast hip-hop culture.

About two-thirds into Ice Cube’s set, I noticed small groups of people sneaking toward the exit. Mindful of the online horror stories about post-show delays, my boyfriend and I decided to duck out early to beat the rush. By the time we made it outside, people were already power-walking toward an expanding line. Security seemed scrambled, first directing a large crowd of us to the far side of the pickup zone, which sparked confusion and frustration, then waving us back. Unlike the Hollywood Bowl, which has fleets of shuttles ready to go, F&M Bank Amphitheater’s shuttle operation felt a bit leaner. Still, a bus arrived within 10 minutes, and despite initially driving to the wrong drop-off spot, the driver quickly course-corrected and got us back on track.

V.I.P Records, a store that helped launch the careers of artists like Snoop Dogg and Warren G, had a booth at the event.

(Daniel Rojas)

As an avid concertgoer, I enjoyed the overall experience at the F&M Amphitheater. It delivered on all the key elements I look for in a show: pristine sound, engaging visuals and a seamless entry. While the venue still has some post-show shuttle kinks to smooth out — an expected growing pain for a new space — it successfully turns a temporary layout into a lively entertainment venue that could soon evolve into a permanent “Long Beach Bowl.” For music lovers and promoters alike, that’s worth celebrating.

England’s Jazmin Sawyers was finally able to put previous disappointments at major championships behind her by winning the women’s long jump at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

The 32-year-old bounced back from serious injury to celebrate a gold medal on a night when there was a silver for England’s mixed 4x400m relay team and a bronze for pole vaulter Owen Heard.

Sawyers finished just outside the medals in fourth place at the previous games in Birmingham four years ago, failed to qualify for the final of the 2023 World Championships and was then forced to miss the 2024 Olympics.

She had to undergo surgery after rupturing her Achilles tendon on her take-off leg and so, rather than competing in Paris ended up commentating for the BBC.

But the Stoke-on-Trent born athlete put all those setbacks behind her on a memorable evening at Scotstoun with her fourth jump of 6.93m proving to be enough to claim the gold medal ahead of Nigeria’s Ruth Usoro (6.87m) and Brooke BuschKuehl of Australia (6.80m).

“It hasn’t properly hit me how this is the thing I’ve been telling myself all the horrible bits are for,” she said.

“The feeling is overwhelming. I will do the horrible bits 100 times over, I’ll do it and do it and do it. This is amazing.”

Sawyers will now turn her attention to competing for Great Britain at the European Championships in Birmingham, which start on 10 August, but is keen to hang on to the memories Glasgow has given her.

“Twelve years ago almost to the day, I won a silver here in Glasgow (2014 Commonwealth Games) at my first major championships. It was a shock silver and I’ve held Glasgow close to my heart ever since,” she added.

“It was the start of my career and so sensational and I had the time of my life. I take that as one of the best moments of my entire career, but when you’ve done that there’s only one thing to do which is to upgrade.”

The new series of ITV’s Long Lost Family begins with an emotional story of a search for a family.

A remarkable new series of Long Lost Family on ITV uses DNA technology and painstaking detective work to reunite two foundlings with family members they lost contact with or never met.

In December 1960, David Stevenson was discovered inside a locked apartment block in North-West London. He was found in the corridor up on the second floor, outside one of the flats. He was several days old and cold, but well fed. For Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace, 65-year-old David returns to the flats more than six decades on still with burning questions about why he was left in such a specific place and whether this provides any clues as to who his birth parents are.

David says: “This place is part of me and part of my identity, no question. This is where my story starts here, so coming back here is emotional. Babies are often left at a police station or a hospital. Whoever put me here…this is a locked private block. Were some of the other residents somehow involved? The WPC arrived and discovered me on the floor with people milling round.”

Although some residents were investigated by the police, enquiries failed to help identify David’s birth parents or link them to him. David was adopted by the Stevenson family and had a happy childhood in nearby Edgware. He grew up knowing about his start in life, but for a long time he wasn’t curious to know more.

“I did know that I was a foundling but as far as I was concerned I had a mum and dad and it wasn’t a problem for me.”

He now has three sons of his own. They reflect on the risks involved with searching – the answers could be upsetting. David is also conscious of the experience of his birth mother.

“If I find my birth mother and she didn’t tell anyone and she wasn’t keen on that secret turning up that would be hard because it would be rejection all over again. The consensus from the police doctor was that I was a result of an unattended birth. and that must be a traumatic experience for any woman,” he says.

With his sons now grown up, David remarried and now lives with his second wife Julie. In 2009 they launched a national appeal for information. Ultimately it did not provide answers, but it did mark the start of a decade of their own extensive investigative work.

Using the apartment building as their primary clue, they developed several hypotheses about the residents. More recently David has turned to searching through DNA, which revealed that he has both Dutch and French heritage. While this is a significant development, the search has stalled, leaving him still not knowing who his birth parents are. Thankfully the LLF team get a breakthrough on David’s search.

There is a strong connection to a particular Dutch family. Two family members, including a woman called Marianne agree to take DNA tests. The pair of them testing enables LLF expert Ariel Bruce to – with certainty – identify David’s birth mother. Her name is Petra and she sadly died in 2010. Upon seeing a photo of David, the family immediately see a likeness to Petra.

Show host Nicky Campbell travels to the Netherlands to meet with Marianne – David’s aunt and his first cousins Saskia and Bart. He wants to see how they are dealing with the news and to learn more about Petra. It transpires that nobody in the family ever knew that she was pregnant and gave up a baby in London. They are left with mixed feelings. They are desperately sad that Petra had to endure this alone but delighted to be able to meet their new cousin and welcome him into the family.

After finishing school, Petra moved to Paris to work as an Au Pair and was living there when David was conceived. This tallies with David’s French DNA and the thinking that his birth father is French. She then moved to London and subsequently parted with David.

She grew up in a strict Catholic household where news of her pregnancy would not have been tolerated. Marianne says: “It was parents after Second World War. They would be angry.”

Bart adds: “They were Catholic and they would also have been very concerned with what society would think of having a child born out of wedlock.”

The sad news that Petra has died is shared with David away from the cameras. French privacy laws mean that DNA testing is very uncommon in France and so Ariel and the team are not able to identify his birth father. Referring to the death of Petra, David tells host Davina McCall: “It’s a shame because it closed an avenue that might have been open to me.”

Davina explains that the nature of Petra’s relationship with David’s birth father is unknown, along with any possible connections to the building where David was found. She describes Petra’s strict upbringing in The Netherlands and explains that she never confided in her family about giving birth at 20. David is quite affected by learning that after returning to the Netherlands, she did not have any more children.

David says: “Oh wow. I find that surprising. And quite sad actually, you know, not having a family, having given up the one child that she did have.”

Davina then reveals that Petra has family members in Rotterdam who were all too willing to take DNA tests. She passes on a letter that they have written him, where they explain that they would love to meet and share as much information about Petra as they can. David is moved by this gesture.

He says: “To meet people close to Petra would be very nice. To put a name to my mother and a picture, it’s a profound feeling. That is amazing.

“I’ve often said I’m not looking for another family, you know. All I want to know is where did I come from? But seeing these[photos] and reading the letter, you know, I want to meet these people. Yeah, that’s as big as it can be.”

After travelling to Rotterdam and has an emotional first meeting with Marianne, Bart, Saskia and another first cousin Jan. They share details about Petra, her personality and interests. David concludes: “One of the most rewarding things…is to hear them talk about her, and, and it’s helped me form an idea of her character. I’m very excited abut the future. There was nothing but love from them.”

Petra’s sister Marianne tells him: “She would love you and you would love her.”

The other search on next week’s programme sees Sarah Gray search for her birth mother.

She was found inside a Leicester telephone box in June 1983. Just a newborn baby, she was discovered by a woman going to make a phone call. Now a mother herself of 3-year-old twins, she often reflects on her own beginnings. She had a very happy and fulfilling adoption but her start in life was never openly discussed.

“I think you know in your family the conversations that can come up freely, and I think there’s a time and a place for certain things and I didn’t push it.”

Returning to the telephone box she sees that it’s on a busy road where there would have been lots of passers-by.

Sarah, 43, said: “Whoever it was has left me in a public phone box right next to a bus stop, next to a community centre… they definitely wanted me to be found.”

The search team make incredible strides with Sarah’s case and identify her birth mother. Davina is able to finally bring Sarah some answers about who she is and where she comes from, Sarah’s mother – who is alive – wants contact and a meeting to be done off camera.

* Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace Series 8 begins on Monday night at 9pm on ITV and ITVX.

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Governments have become remarkably efficient at producing information. During crises, official statements, emergency regulations and public updates appear almost instantly. Yet recent global emergencies have exposed a fundamental paradox: more information does not necessarily create greater public trust.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated this with exceptional clarity. Around the world, governments introduced unprecedented public-health measures, revised policies at remarkable speed and communicated with citizens almost continuously. Despite these efforts, public responses varied dramatically. Accurate information competed with rumours, institutional confidence fluctuated and misinformation often spread faster than official corrections.

The challenge extended well beyond the pandemic. Whether societies face natural disasters, armed conflicts, cyberattacks or public-health emergencies, governments confront the same question: how can accurate information become trusted information?

Most discussions of crisis communication focus on governments and public institutions. Established frameworks such as the CDC’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) model and Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) have shaped modern practice by emphasising transparency, consistency and timely communication.

These principles remain indispensable.

Yet they share an important assumption-that once reliable information is produced, effective communication naturally follows.

Recent experience suggests otherwise.

Between governments and citizens lies an often-overlooked stage of communication. Official information rarely reaches the public directly. Instead, journalists, editors, producers and broadcasters interpret complex events, provide context and translate institutional language into messages ordinary audiences can understand.

This intermediary role becomes especially important during uncertainty.

People rarely judge information on facts alone. They also respond to clarity, consistency and the credibility of those delivering the message. Two governments may release nearly identical information yet receive very different public reactions because the communication itself inspires different levels of confidence.

Television illustrated this particularly well during the COVID-19 pandemic. While social media accelerated both verified information and misinformation, television remained one of the most trusted sources of crisis reporting because journalists explained changing regulations, interpreted complex developments and provided continuity during uncertain periods.

In such moments, credibility becomes inseparable from presentation.

This raises a broader question. If governments are responsible for making decisions, who ensures those decisions are understood?

Despite its practical importance, that question has received surprisingly little attention.

One researcher exploring this overlooked dimension of crisis communication is Kazakh journalist Kydyr-Zhan Mukhatayev. His work examines what happens after official information reaches television audiences.

Using Kazakhstan’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, Mukhatayev argues that broadcasters should not be viewed as passive channels transmitting government messages. Through editorial judgement, presentation and audience engagement, they actively influence how information is interpreted, trusted and ultimately acted upon.

When Information Isn’t Enough

A Case Study with Broader Implications

Mukhatayev explores this relationship through two complementary studies based on Kazakhstan’s broadcasting experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first examines the professional role of television journalists during prolonged uncertainty. Rather than focusing exclusively on government communication, it considers how broadcasters themselves contributed to public understanding through responsible reporting, editorial judgement and effective communication.

The second expands the discussion beyond the pandemic, presenting crisis broadcasting as an interconnected system in which institutional credibility, journalism, visual communication and audience psychology continuously influence one another.

Although grounded in Kazakhstan’s experience, the questions raised extend far beyond one country. They suggest that successful crisis communication depends not only on what governments say but also on how professional media transform official information into messages citizens are prepared to understand, trust and follow.

How Trust Is Actually Built

Mukhatayev’s research brings these elements together into a single analytical perspective. Rather than viewing broadcasting as a channel for delivering official information, it presents television journalism as an active component of crisis management capable of strengthening-or undermining-public confidence.

Beyond COVID-19

The Next Crisis Will Test More Than Governments

There’s nothing worse than realising your passport is about to expire when you have a trip booked – but the good news is that you don’t have to instantly cancel your holiday

If you’ve got a holiday booked and have just discovered your passport needs renewing, then you may be wondering what your options are for getting a last-minute passport.

The HM Passport Office advises that a renewal takes about three weeks from the date it receives your documents, with online applications tending to be much faster than paper forms. While it’s an unofficial site, PassportWait is also a good place to check current processing times, as this is based on crowdsourced data. Currently, it shows an average processing time of 25 days.

Here’s a breakdown of the fastest options and how you can apply for them. It’s worth remembering that the rules for adult and child passports are different, and not every option is available for under 16s.

1 day Premium

The one day Premium service is the quickest option for a renewal, but it means you need to book an appointment at your nearest passport office. This service can only be used for renewing an adult passport issued after 31 December 2001.

You simply take your old passport and any other requested documents to the meeting, and your new passport will be ready to collect four hours after your appointment.

But this is an expensive option. It costs £239.50 or £253.50 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport, whereas a standard renewal is priced at £102.

1 week Fast Track

The Passport Office also offer a 1 week Fast Track option which can be used to renew, replace or change an adult or child passport. It can also be used to apply for a first child passport if you need one last-minute.

Again, you’ll be given a list of documents to bring along, and for adult passports these get checked and returned at the appointment. If you’re applying for a child passport, the documents are left with the Passport Office and will be returned to you later.

Your new passport is then delivered to your home one week later by Royal Mail tracked delivery. This service is also more expensive than standard passport renewals due to the short turnaround time. For adults, the fee is £192 for a standard passport or £206 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport.

For a child’s passport, the fee is £156.50 or £170.50 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport. The usual cost for an under 16’s passport is £66.50.

Passport office locations

There are seven passport offices across the UK where you can make an appointment for the 1 day Premium or 1 week Fast Track service. At busy times, it can be difficult to get an appointment, so if you can be flexible about which location you visit this can help you get a slot faster.

• London HM Passport Office – E16 1DR
• Peterborough HM Passport Office – PE2 8YY
• Newport HM Passport Office – NP20 2DW
• Liverpool HM Passport Office – L3 9BP
• Durham HM Passport Office – DH1 1SL
• Glasgow HM Passport Office – G4 0BT
• Belfast HM Passport Office – BT1 3GN

Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com

Spain’s players looked like they were ready to explode as they waited for team captain Rodri to lift the World Cup trophy into the air following their 1-0 win over Argentina in Sunday’s final.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino looked a bit anxious as he wanted the newly crowned champions to have their moment but didn’t want to offend a good friend who happens to be one of the most powerful men in the world.

And President Trump looked rather clueless as he lingered on the stage at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., for an awkward amount of time following the trophy presentation.

Trump had watched the championship game from a luxury box with Infantino and First Lady Melania Trump, among many others. He was booed by the crowd during the national anthems and again when he took the field with Infantino after the game for the awards ceremony.

After presenting silver medals to Argentina’s players and gold to Spain’s, Trump and Infantino carried the World Cup trophy together across the stage and handed it to Golden Ball winner Rodri, who was standing in front of his teammates as they awaited their big moment.

The presidents of FIFA and the U.S. both shook hands with Rodri, but only one of them quickly moved off to the side. When Trump hung around to shake hands and speak with midfielder Gavi, Rodri put his hand on the president’s shoulder and appeared to gently nudge him toward the side of the stage away from the group.

As he walked off, Trump shook hands and talked with a few other players, then stopped and stood directly next to the group of players. Infantino sprinted across the stage and appeared to attempt to usher Trump out of frame.

Trump stayed put, however, clapping and smiling until Rodri thrusted the trophy skyward and gold confetti shot from cannons behind them to officially start the celebration. Then Trump strolled away to join Infantino, leaving La Roja’s players to celebrate on their own.

It could have been much worse … like, say, at last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup final, which was also held at MetLife Stadium. Trump accompanied Infantino onstage to present the trophy to Chelsea — but did not accompany him off the stage immediately following the presentation.

Instead, Trump remained out there front and center among the Chelsea players, much to the visable confusion of some of them. He stood right next to Reece James, clapping and smiling as the team captain hoisted the trophy in triumph and a massive celebration erupted around him.

As the president of one of the three 2026 World Cup host countries (with Canada and Mexico), Trump’s presence has loomed large. In December, Infantino awarded Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize during the tournament’s final draw in December.

Earlier this month, Trump called Infantino to have FIFA reconsider a red card against U.S. striker Folarin Balogun that would have prevented the star player from taking part in the American’s round of 16 game against Belgium (the penalty was rescinded, causing international uproar, but the U.S. still lost the game 4-1).

“You don’t need people to compliment you, Mr. President,” Infantino said Friday during a reception hosted by the president at Trump Tower in Manhattan, “but this World Cup would not have been such an incredible success without you,”

BEIRUT  — President Trump long railed against forever wars.

For years, whether as president or candidate, he flayed electoral opponents and previous presidents with his signature barbs, calling their entanglements a “complete waste of time” (Afghanistan), “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country” (Iraq) and “stupid” (Ukraine).

Yet he now appears to be stumbling into a forever war of his own.

From the first days of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Trump and his officials insisted their adventure abroad would be the exception, that the conflict would end in a matter of weeks.

Now, 4½ months later, after a torturous, start-stop vacillation between truce and war, the U.S. is pressing on with a fight that has no end in sight — or even a clear definition of what an acceptable end would be.

In the last week, the ceasefire collapsed, with the U.S. and Iran trading daily waves of strikes, leading to the deaths of two American servicemen on Friday when Iranian ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, where U.S. assets and personnel are stationed.

On Sunday, as the U.S. and Iran launched more air assaults, the U.S. announced that a service member was killed Saturday in Iraq during the controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.

On March 9, the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, of Glendale, Ky., then the seventh U.S. service member to die in combat during the Iran war, are transferred at Dover Air Force Base, Del.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)

The deaths in Jordan were the first combat fatalities since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. One soldier remains missing, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command.

Including the most recent casualties, 17 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded since the war began, the Pentagon says.

In Iran, at least 57 people have been killed and more than 517 injured in U.S. attacks in the last three weeks, according to Iranian health authorities. The death toll since the beginning of the war has surpassed 3,500, and more than 27,000 have been wounded.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have — in the telling of Trump and various officials — decimated Iran’s navy and air defenses, eviscerated multiple layers of its leadership and bombed tens of thousands of targets across the country.

Despite that military pressure, and Trump’s insistence that members of Iran’s leadership “want to make a deal” (he’s said that an accord was on hand no less than 46 times since the start of the war), Tehran has refused to surrender its nuclear and missile arsenals and continues to support its regional militia allies.

Iran has also created a new pressure point to use against adversaries by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flowed before the war. And it has widened the war’s footprint by targeting countries hosting American military assets.

Trump has vowed to expand bombings to include civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges in what he says is a bid to force Iran into negotiations once more.

He has also brought additional forces to the Middle East. According to Centcom, there are now 50,000 troops in the region, along with 20 naval warships and hundreds of warplanes.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, declined to comment on the deployments, though on Sunday the New York Times reported that the U.S. was sending to the region F-16 fighter jets from Germany and stealthy F-35 jets from Britain.

For observers, those moves signal that Trump is falling into an escalation trap.

“From Trump’s perspective, the easiest way to demonstrate resolve and power is by just bombing Iran and seeing what that brings about,” said Andreas Boehm, a Middle East expert and lecturer on international law at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Although those strikes seem tactically impressive, they have not helped him strategically, he said.

“In reality, it doesn’t change the situation because the Iranians won’t budge. And if you confuse tactical and strategic success, then you’re not going anywhere in any kind of war,” Boehm said.

An escalation on Washington’s part is also certain to spark a similar reaction from Tehran, said Vali Nasr, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

“Iran gets a vote here,” Nasr said, adding Iran could up the ante by closing Bab al Mandab, the vital strait connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. It could also widen attacks on infrastructure in Persian Gulf countries — moves that would trigger an even bigger ripple effect across global markets.

“Trump thought wars in the Middle East would be like Venezuela: a big in-and-out without a prolonged war,” Nasr said, referring to the Trump administration’s strike that saw U.S. forces abduct Venezuelan leader Nicholás Maduro and force the remaining members of his government to submit to U.S. control.

“And the reality is that it’s backfired,” he said.

Trump is not the first American president to think a foreign engagement wouldn’t last long. Whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, U.S. leaders dispatched troops on operations they thought would last weeks or months, dismissing warnings that they would be bogged down in years-long occupations.

Iran would be an especially sticky quagmire if Trump were to commit ground troops.

The country’s area — about 636,000 square miles — is more than double the size of Afghanistan, almost four times the size of Iraq, and five times the size of Vietnam — all nations where the U.S. struggled to prevail against adversaries not as well equipped and arguably less ideologically motivated than its adversaries in Iran.

Meanwhile, for a president whose central foreign policy campaign promise was no more wars, the growing number of casualties, along with the escalating damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. assets and allies, has exposed cracks in the support the Teflon-like Trump has enjoyed from his advocates.

Onetime MAGA acolytes, including flagship conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones, have already turned on the president over the war and other issues. And Republican figures who had tied their star to Trump fear a drubbing in the midterms so long as the war continues.

If negotiations were to resume, it’s unclear whether Trump and his coterie of negotiators have the stamina or the foreign service expertise to bring about an accord.

After all, the 2015 Obama-era deal aimed at reining in Tehran’s nuclear program took 600 days and hundreds of diplomats and technical experts to negotiate.

With Trump relying on unconventional fixers such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate investor Steve Witkoff, not to mention his evisceration of the diplomatic corps, an agreement of that scale appears unlikely.

“Everything is dependent on the mood of one man,” Nasr said.

“It’s not the system that’s making the decision; it’s not the country making the decision,” he said. “It’s one man, and it depends how he feels like at one particular point in time.”

Tehran too may be less amenable to negotiations with Trump, given his history: During his first term, he pulled out of the nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a leading Iranian general.

In his second term, he launched bombing campaigns on Iran during negotiations — twice. And Iran accused the U.S. of repeatedly violating the April ceasefire and the memorandum of understanding signed in June.

Asked on NewsNation on Sunday about Iran’s announcement that it would no longer abide by the memorandum, Trump said, “I couldn’t care less.”

Such factors, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, lead to a formula for prolonged conflict.

“It’s a forever war in the making, and the reason why is that Trump has proven he’s impossible to negotiate with,” Vaez said.

If an agreement as superficial as the memorandum of understanding — which deferred thornier issues for late negotiations — was derailed, then there’s little option other than repeated cycles of violence.

“Once you’ve proven that diplomacy doesn’t work,” he said, “then there’s only war.”

Spanish fans spent the night partying in Madrid after their team defeated Argentina 1-0 in the final of the World Cup. Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler reports from the heart of the celebrations in Madrid.

The EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) has sparked massive airport queues across Europe – with people complaining that they’ve had to wait hours to enter countries after landing

Brits looking forward to a European getaway this summer have been issued a major travel warning by an airport boss after the EU implemented its new border system.

Officials implemented the new passport control system, named the Entry/Exit System (EES), on October 12 last year, requiring British citizens travelling to the Schengen area to register biometric details – including fingerprints and a photo – on arrival. The arrangements have caused massive pileup queues in airports across the area, and the system itself is reportedly plagued with bugs.

A boss at one of the busiest airports in the EU, located in one of the most visited cities on the continent, has warned that the system has nearly tripled the amount of time it is taking Brits to travel through passport control.

Ivan Bassato, the Chief Aviation Officer at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, told the BBC that large numbers of passengers are using the €12 million (£10.2 million) self-service “kiosks”. While recent updates to the system have “improved things significantly” with the e-gates, issues remain for UK nationals, who are now taking much longer to get through the border.

He said the average time has extended from seven to 20 minutes, and the process is still taking much longer than it would have before the EES rollout.

Mr Bassato said: “We are not at the point where you have the same quality of the process [as] before the EES.” The official added that the airport was “absolutely not okay with” waits lasting between one to two hours, urging: “I think that we need to fix urgently certain aspects of the system.”

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has previously warned Brits travelling into the Schengen area that they should be “prepared to wait” as the EES is implemented, especially if it is their first visit.

The Government’s portal advises: “On your first visit to the Schengen area, you may be asked to create a digital record at the port or airport on arrival. You may be asked to submit your fingerprints and have your photo taken at dedicated booths. You don’t need to provide any information before travelling to a Schengen area country.

“The checks may take slightly longer than previously, so be prepared to wait during busy times.” Brits travelling into Rome have encountered lengthening wait times lasting hours.

Speaking to the BBC, Carl, who had travelled to the Italian capital with his family, said he was bowled over by the amount of time it took to enter the country. He said: “It was two hours queuing, from getting off the plane to getting through with children. I knew it was going to be bad, but not as bad as that.”

One traveller entering from outside the EU said in a post on Reddit that, on entry to Fiumicino, they encountered a non-EU immigration line that wrapped through duty free.

They wrote: “Flight was at 11:15 today. Arrived at FCO at 8:45. Checking in and security was a breeze. Immigration line was extremely long for non-EU passports. Wrapped through duty free into the domestic terminal. The line finally moved enough that was I was on gate side of duty free at 9:30. Made it through immigration around 9:55.

“Worth noting that we had fast pass in security and priority check in for bags. Much more time needed if we didn’t.” The European Commission has insisted that disruption in EU airports is limited, and that member states would receive continued EES support.

Tuchel can continue to rely on captain Kane – for now.

The Bayern Munich striker will be 36 when the next World Cup rolls around, but seems in no mood to hand up his England boots.

Kane – who scored six goals at this World Cup, but was an unused substitute against France – told the BBC: “One of the best England groups that I have ever been a part of.

“When you see the boys around the hotel, when you see us training on the pitch, when you see us in the changing room, it is a unique group. We had that bond and had so much belief in each other.”

On Tuchel, Kane added: “It is his first major tournament. I think he has learned a lot of the squad, the campaign, the travel and the games and what it takes – the pressure.”

One of England’s wounds that was deepened by the win over France was Tuchel’s decision not to send on Bukayo Saka against Argentina.

The Arsenal winger, an unused substitute in the semi-final, scored a hat-trick on Saturday against Les Bleus – then afterwards said he is fully fit, having endured some injury worries earlier in the North American campaign.

“Of course, I would love to have played more but it’s too late to talk about that,” Saka told BBC One. “I try to do my talking on the pitch and it’s done now, move on. I’m fit.”

On noise around the manager, he said: “I think that’s just part of the game… it’s how you react to it, how you use it as fuel and today we finished strong and that’s all we could really do and we did that.”

England’s twisting World Cup 2026 story has a bittersweet ending – with a thrilling victory in the game no-one wants to be a part of.

But how this campaign will ultimately be remembered might not be truly determined until after this team have produced their sequels.

The U.S. Navy expects the stealthy destroyer USS Zumwalt, with its new launchers for Intermediate-Range Conventional Prompt Strike (IRCPS) hypersonic missiles, to be formally returned to service by September. Upgrade work on the ship, which started back in 2023, is some 10 months behind schedule. One contributing factor in the delay was the first full shutdown of the notoriously complex Integrated Power System (IPS) since the ship was delivered to the Navy six years ago. IPS is a power plant that provides massive amounts of electricity to propel the ship and run its advanced systems.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a congressional watchdog, provided new details on the hypersonic missile upgrades for USS Zumwalt, also known by its hull number DDG-1000, in a report released today. The four new launch tubes, each of which will be able to hold three IRCPS missiles, notably take the place of the destroyer’s original pair of 155mm Advanced Gun Systems (AGS).

Zumwalt has also been receiving other improvements, including expanded fuel capacity allowing for increased range and endurance, as well as undergoing routine maintenance, in parallel to the IRCPS integration. The Navy refers to all of this work, collectively, as the Build Yard Modernization Period (BYMP).

The Navy’s other two Zumwalt class destroyers – the USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) and the future USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) – are set to receive the same complete slate of modifications. Work on the Lyndon B. Johnson is already underway as part of the larger process of delivering that ship, which is now scheduled for April 2027. The service also eventually plans to integrate IRCPS onto Block V Virginia class submarines.

The Navy’s IRCPS program is also being run in close cooperation with the U.S. Army. The missile at the core of IRCPS is the same one the Army is working to field in ground-based configuration, which it calls Dark Eagle.

The weapon itself consists of a multi-stage ballistic missile-like rocket booster with an unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicle on top. The booster gets the vehicle to an optimal speed and altitude, after which it is released. After separating from the booster, the vehicle glides along a relatively shallow flight path within the Earth’s atmosphere to its target, maneuvering along the way, sometimes erratically. In general, hypersonic boost-glide vehicles offer a combination of speed, flight trajectory, and maneuverability that creates distinct challenges for enemy forces. The vehicles are difficult to spot and track, let alone intercept. Their speed limits the time an opponent has to react in other ways. The ability to pierce enemy air defenses and rapidly strike very high-value targets, even ones that may be fleeting, is what makes hypersonic weapons of this type attractive.

“Over the past year, the cost and schedule performance on the first ship to undergo this [IRCPS and other upgrade] work, the DDG 1000, has degraded,” according to GAO’s report. “Program officials reported that the primary cause of recent delays is unplanned work.”

As already noted, one “source of unplanned work and delays per program officials is that this is the first time that the Navy has shut down and restarted key DDG 1000 class ship systems,” per GAO. “For example, equipment failures in the ship’s complex electrical system, which is akin to a small power plant, contributed to delays.”

Zumwalt‘s IPS is a hybrid-electric system that combines gas turbines and electric generators. Hybrid propulsion is not unique, broadly speaking, to this class of ships, but the DDG-1000 design takes it to a completely different level. IPS can generate up to “approximately 78 megawatts of power, nearly what a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier generates,” according to the Navy. It is also said to be able to pump out 58 megawatts of reserve power even while cruising at 20 knots. This level of power generation is essential to support the ship’s array of advanced capabilities, but it also comes with complexities that have proven troublesome over the years.

Integrated Power System (IPS)

In addition, “the unplanned work addresses the need for more cabling than was anticipated in the initial project design, as the contractor cut and removed more cabling than planned from the forward part of the ship for CPS missile launch tube installation,” the report adds. “The additional cabling was needed to match changes to the ship configuration since new construction cables were installed as part of the BYMP.”

Overall, “program officials noted that the Navy modified the BYMP contract with Huntington Ingalls in August 2025 to add 230,000 hours – at a cost of $20 million – for unplanned work,” according to GAO. “The program reported increasing its estimate to upgrade all three ships from $1.8 billion to at least $2 billion.”

GAO says the Navy also stressed that this is the first time it has ever integrated a hypersonic weapon onto one of its warships, and that it has been a learning experience. The service says it is working to ensure that useful lessons are being woven into ongoing work on Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as USS Michael Monsoor‘s future BYMP availability, which is slated to begin before the end of the year.

The timeline for delivery of the Lyndon B. Johnson and the upgrade schedule for Michael Monsoor are already delayed, as can be seen in the GAO graphic below. Delays have also pushed back the target date for a first live-fire at-sea IRCPS launch, a milestone now set to come next year.

The Navy and the Army have conducted several land-based launches as part of a test plan that has suffered its own setbacks in the past.

The Zumwalt class, as a whole, has suffered various trials and tribulations over the years due to a variety of factors. This includes persistent technical difficulties with various systems, especially the main AN/SPY-3 radar. There have been signs for years now that the Navy could replace the AN/SPY-3 with a version of the newer AN/SPY-6. A growing number of other Navy ships are already sailing with or are set to receive AN/SPY-6 variants. The ships have also seen other cutting-edge capabilities watered down.

Challenges facing the Zumwalt class destroyers have been compounded by the prior decision to slash planned orders for these ships from 32 to just three. This has also made the ships extremely expensive to acquire, operate, and sustain. In a separate annual assessment of major U.S. military programs released earlier this month, GAO reported that the unit cost of each of the destroyers had risen to just over $10.6 billion (inclusive of research and development costs). The total acquisition cost of the DDG-1000 program is now nearly $32 billion. For comparison, the price tag on a new Flight III Arleigh Burke class destroyer is around $2.5 billion, according to data released last year by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Broader questions have been raised about the roles and missions that the trio of Zumwalt class ships can be reasonably expected to perform. IRCPS will give the members of the Zumwalt class a new, very-long-range, high-value strategic strike role. The Navy sees this as a key capability for future high-end fights, such as one against China in the Pacific.

At the same time, GAO’s report today also highlights the small number of missiles the Navy and the Army are in the process of acquiring now for IRCPS and Dark Eagle. Prime contractor Lockheed Martin still has limited capacity to produce them, too.

“Navy data indicate that the contractor facility operations are not currently able to meet demand, making it difficult for Lockheed Martin to keep production commitments,” according to GAO. “Specifically, the facility is currently capable of producing a maximum of six to seven rounds a year out of the 12 rounds per year necessary to stabilize production.”

“Over the past 5 years, CPS costs estimates have fluctuated, driven by factors such as the Navy’s removal or addition of host platforms, revisions to total quantities, planned periodic capability insertions, and production time frames to date, among others,” per GAO’s report. “In fiscal year 2020, early in the MTA [middle tier acquisition] rapid prototyping phase, the Navy estimated it would cost about $31 billion in total lifecycle costs for a program that would deliver 262 missiles. In 2024, the Navy increased its estimate of the total cost to acquire CPS by about 30 percent while reducing the number of missiles to be procured – now $41 billion in total lifecycle costs for 224 missiles.”

“These missile quantities do not reflect a specific program requirement, according to CPS program officials, but rather modeling based on various inputs, including budget documents, analyses of industrial base capacity, and direct, ongoing collaboration with the U.S. Strategic Command and the requirements sponsor – OPNAV N97 [the Undersea Warfare Division within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations],” the report also notes. “Additionally, the Army is planning to spend more than $10 billion to procure 48 missiles and associated ground support equipment.”

As of April 2026, the average estimated unit cost for each missile was pegged at approximately $67 million. GAO points out that “the exact unit cost will depend on the contractor’s efficiency in production, which is, in part, dependent on stable annual procurement funding for the missile.”

USS Zumwalt‘s formal return to the fleet as the Navy’s first vessel equipped to fire hypersonic missiles will be an important milestone. However, signs still very much point to IRCPS being a relatively limited and costly capability, likely to be held in reserve for very high-priority targets, at least in the near term.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Elizabeth Kobliha knows her one-eyed cat Likho has more friends than she does. So much so that on his 15th birthday last Saturday, the sidewalk outside her downtown Long Beach store where he spends most of his time transformed into a makeshift fair.

There were vendors selling peach cobbler, watches, hot dogs and offering tattoos and face paint. A DJ spun records in celebration.

“He’s a very good businessman. We’ve got stickers, T-shirts, keychains, and buttons [of him], and it all goes under his account, his name,” Kobliha said of the cat.

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Before Likho roamed the 7,000-square-foot Long Beach Vintage Etc, there was Apollo. The “big rag doll” came in with health problems but was the perfect shop cat. Apollo, a Maine coon who died at 13 following a seizure a year after his arrival in 2015, had curbed the shop’s mouse problem and brought “so much love and energy.”

Similarly, Likho, a one-eyed Russian Blue, also was ailing when Kobilha took him in at 8 years old, but she wanted him anyhow.

“I always wanted to open my own shop so I can have a shop cat,” Kobliha says, adding she was inspired by bookstores with cats “just chilling.”

Vendors line the sidewalk for Likho’s birthday party. The cat is a local celebrity.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

In 2016, Kobliha was swiping through Facebook when a video stopped her scroll. In it, a woman inside of a hoarder’s garage bobbed a feather toy in front of Likho, who jumped up to catch it.

The post was made by Sia Barbi in collaboration with animal rescue group Stray Cat Alliance after the cat had been abandoned at the Hancock Park home. During the early ‘90s, Sia and identical twin sister, Shane, made waves in the fashion and pop culture worlds, often modeling for Chanel, Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier. Their rise to fame began after the Los Angeles Times covered a Sunset Boulevard billboard featuring the twins wearing little clothing that had been causing car accidents.

“Guys of a certain generation would get very hot and bothered over them,” Kobliha said of the Barbi twins. As they exited the modeling industry, they pivoted into animal activism and volunteering for rescue groups and trap, neuter and return programs for cats.

Elizabeth Kobliha holds her cat Likho. When she opened her vintage store, she knew she wanted a shop cat just like chill bookstore cats.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Kobliha wanted to adopt Likho, but first he’d need a $3,000 operation to remove an infected eye, paid for by the Stray Cat Alliance.

“They took care of everything, then we had to wait because he had to recuperate,” she recalls. “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if it doesn’t work out? What if the cat gets here and is just absolutely bonkers?’”

That fear was for nothing. Likho, who lives at the shop full-time, acclimated within a day. “He has been a beautiful addition ever since then,” Kobliha says.

He’s since become the face of the shop, with a mural dedicated to him outside to welcome customers. That was done by local muralist LaJon Miller, who worked on another on the sidewalk during Likho’s party.

“I got adopted into it,” he says of the Likho fandom. “He’s been my muse on this street for a while. … He just roams around the store, chills, does his little nap thing, and hangs out with everybody, so he’s very social.”

Likho has never harmed the centuries-old objects in her shop, Kobliha says, but he has spooked suspected ghosts.

LaJon Miller, who calls Likho his muse, paints a portrait of the cat on the sidewalk outside of Long Beach Vintage Etc.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Kobliha believes ghosts once connected to shops at the 1922 building — a former patron of a grocery store shamed for his obesity and a former furniture shop owner who died by suicide — still roam her store’s stalls.

“We see shadow figures … there’s a certain area where they pass back and forth. They don’t do anything, but they’re scary as hell,” Kobliha says of unusual sightings. “Likho is very protective, and we do feel really safe when he’s around.”

“It is a little weird, though, when he’s sleeping, and then suddenly he will jump up and look around,” she adds.

Likho’s biggest fan may be a man named Dom Gomez. He lives within walking distance of the shop, and tends to visit after long shifts at a restaurant aboard the Queen Mary. He stopped by the birthday party wearing his work uniform: a white, button-down shirt and black slacks. His hair slicked; his hands behind his back.

Likho’s face graces merchandise at Long Beach Vintage Etc like this fan.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

When he speaks of Likho, he speaks with a tender cadence and dignified countenance, as if he were his own.

“Time flies, you know?” he says, smiling, of visiting Likho over the years. “He gets a lot of love from all the ladies that work here and myself … he has a lot of fans. I don’t know who’s more famous, Muhammad Ali or Likho the Cat.”

On a previous birthday, Gomez wanted to get Likho a gift. He settled on a kid’s denim jacket he modified for a cat with a patch for the Cure on the back but, regrettably, it was a “little too big.” Next year, he’ll give it another shot with a sweater.

“That’s my little buddy right there,” he says. “Today is a special day. I didn’t know a cat could live that long, but I think he’s still got a lot of energy to live … maybe another 100 years, I hope.”

WASHINGTON — After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he had finally had enough of the man who was championed by the mob that stormed the pillar of American democracy: President Trump.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president,” an emotional Graham said once authorities cleared the rioters and allowed senators to reclaim their chamber to certify Joe Biden’s election win. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

It wasn’t, of course.

Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died unexpectedly Saturday night at 71, realized that his party’s future was inextricably tied to Trump and quickly reverted back to being a staunch defender. The shift made what had once seemed like a final rupture into just another twist in the topsy-turvy relationship between the powerful senator and the president who came to dominate their party.

“Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Graham said in May 2021, just four months after the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Trump, who called Graham a “true American Patriot” in a social media post Sunday, appeared shocked by the senator’s sudden death.

“I just can’t believe it,” the president said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He was like a member of the family.”

Graham often advised Trump on foreign affairs, particularly on matters pertaining to Israel, Ukraine and Iran. He was a frequent visitor at the White House.

“At the end of a particularly thrilling and rollicking meeting in the Oval Office, Lindsey Graham turned to the room and said: ‘I’ve never had this much fun in my life,’” Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X. He said such gatherings “were filled with camaraderie, kinship and uproarious laughter.”

Trump recalled that during his last conversation with Graham, he told his friend, “We’ll see you soon, come over anytime you want.”

‘Unfit for office’

The senator and Trump first clashed while competing for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Graham described Trump as “unfit for office,” and was angered when Trump denigrated the military service of Graham’s close friend Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Trump, while talking about McCain’s years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said, “I like people that weren’t captured.”

Trump got mad enough at Graham to release the senator’s personal cellphone number. That prompted a viral video in which the senator dramatically destroyed a series of flip phones. He smashed one with a meat cleaver and another with a golf club, then used lighter fluid, a blender and toaster oven to pulverize others before tossing one off the roof.

Graham eventually likened Trump’s winning the nomination to “being shot in the head” and said he refused to vote for Trump that November. But the pair later bonded over golf and what Graham described as a mutual and irreverent sense of humor.

Trump and Graham began so frequently hitting the links together that the senator started seeing it as something of a career builder, leaning heavily into the kind of over-the-top flattery Trump relishes. In 2017, Graham joked that Trump had beaten him “like a drum” on the course, even worse than in the presidential primary.

“Their true friendship could only be seen behind the curtain,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said on ABC’s “This Week.” Scott said that relationship was forged as political adversaries but was strengthened by spending 100-plus hours golfing together.

During Trump’s first term, Graham helped advance Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, lent credibility to the White House’s legislative agenda and even at times became part of the president’s inner circle. He frequently said Trump was maturing in politics and growing on the job.

Graham’s political divergence with McCain, who died in 2018, was never more clear than in 2017, when McCain voted against a Trump-backed plan to overturn the Affordable Care Act, former President Obama’s signature healthcare law. The effort had been co-sponsored by Graham.

A short-lived split, an alliance reignited

In his floor speech after the Capitol attack, Graham said that “he’d never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country.” But the break with Trump ended quickly.

Weeks later, Trump invited Graham for golf and dinner at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, reigniting their alliance. During Trump’s 2024 campaign, Graham was a frequent Trump surrogate on television, promoting U.S. military strength that he said would advance “America first” policies.

Graham never shed his more traditional Republican foreign policy views, including outspoken support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion — even as Trump frequently wavered in supporting Kyiv, sometimes castigating Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and praising Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The senator was also a leading voice pushing the White House to more fully embrace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and take a harder line against Iran, and he was a leading advocate of Trump’s ongoing war with Iran. After the U.S. and Israel attacked in February, Graham staunchly defended the action and working to counter many among Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base who supported the president’s longtime assertions that “America first” meant avoiding such military conflicts.

“To those who say Iran is stronger now than before, that is an insult to the American military and it is delusional thinking because the Iranian economy is in shambles,” Graham posted on social media June 19.

Graham’s admiration for Trump went far beyond Iran. When the senator clinched the South Carolina Republican primary last month, he suggested the president was just short of a deity.

“I want to start with a bunch of thank yous. I want to thank the big guy, God. Trump comes later,” Graham laughed. “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God, but we’re gonna start with him.”

Weissert writes for the Associated Press.

Tehran, Iran – Three weeks after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding to extend their ceasefire, their truce remains fragile.

Three tankers have been hit in the Strait of Hormuz over the past two days, even as Iran and the US are expected to restart mediated negotiations to end the war next week, after the funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The US military on Wednesday launched large air attacks on Iran’s southern provinces, which prompted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s regular army to fire missiles and drones on US interests in Bahrain and Kuwait. Both sides accused each other of violating the understanding signed last month.

But even if a long-term resolution is eventually reached and Western sanctions on Iran are lifted, analysts say that it will take time for the country’s economy to recover.

The economy has been strained by years of local mismanagement and corruption; stringent Western and United Nations sanctions; and, more recently, damage sustained from two wars in a year with the US and Israel, deadly nationwide protests in January, and internet shutdowns.

When numbers tell a story

A falling purchasing power has pushed millions into poverty. Inflation has recently climbed to levels not seen since World War II, when Allied forces occupied Iran, took over railways and food supplies, and contributed to a deadly famine.

The latest report by the Statistical Center of Iran for Khordad, the third month of the Persian calendar that ended on June 21, showed inflation increasing by 88.6 percent compared to the same month of the year before. Inflation was up by nearly 6 percent compared to the second month of the current year.

Food inflation was skyrocketing at almost 134 percent in Khordad compared to the corresponding month a year earlier, with oils and fats surging by more than 278 percent, red meat and poultry by over 178 percent, and bread and cereals by nearly 139 percent.

Unemployment is at 7.5 percent during the current calendar year, according to the latest report by the statistical centre released at the end of June. But labour participation is at just 40 percent, meaning that most working-age people are operating outside the official labour force – including students, retirees, those engaged in irregular informal work, and those not seeking paid work.

The job-quality picture is also grim, as salaries are perennially falling behind expenses, as over 38 percent of officially employed people work more than 49 hours a week, and as youth unemployment is at over 20 percent, the centre reports.

The base monthly minimum wage equals only about $95 using the current open market exchange rate of the US dollar in Tehran. The rate has climbed to 1.75 million rials per greenback over recent days, not far from its all-time low of 1.9 million in May.

The damage — and the road to recovery

Due to a heavy budget crunch, the only relief the government is able to offer amounts to a few dollars’ worth of monthly cash subsidy and electronic coupons for purchasing essential goods.

A late June report by the Central Bank of Iran for the previous calendar year that ended on March 20 showed that gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the year stood at minus 0.7 percent, and gross fixed capital formation, a primary indicator of productive capacity and economic growth, was at nearly minus 12 percent. Imports were down 16.6 percent, as were exports by close to 5 percent.

The damage from nearly 40 days of heavy bombardment during the war, the longest nationwide state-imposed internet shutdown in any country, and a US naval blockade of Iran’s southern ports — the full extent of which remains undisclosed to the public — has only exacerbated Iran’s economic woes. The International Monetary Fund has projected that Iran’s real GDP will shrink by 6.1 percent in 2026.

Still, Mahdi Ghodsi, a senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, said that part of the recent job losses could be recoverable if there is a credible halt to military escalation, restoration of transport and logistics links, more predictable access to energy and fuel, and functioning internet and payment systems.

“In that case, some temporary layoffs in services, retail, transport, construction and small businesses could be reversed relatively quickly, because these activities are highly sensitive to uncertainty and disruptions rather than necessarily destroyed productive capacity,” he told Al Jazeera.

Longer-term challenges

But Ghodsi cautioned that part of the damage is likely to be more persistent.

“Where factories have lost machinery, inventories, imported inputs, workers, working capital, or access to energy, reopening is not simply a matter of returning to normal,” he said, adding that in some cases, full recovery may take years and require large investments, including foreign financing.

Last week, leading satellite imaging provider Planet Labs restored access to imagery for nearly 800 sites across Iran impacted during the war, after lifting earlier restrictions it had placed in response to a US government request to delay or suspend access.

Some Iranians on social media highlighted massive damage done to Iran Electronics Industries (SAIran), a state-owned defence industry heavyweight specialising in optics, communications, semiconductors and medical equipment, among other things.

But along with numerous military-linked sites and assets, and nuclear facilities built over decades now reduced to rubble, Iran’s industrial capacity and civilian infrastructure were also extensively targeted by US and Israeli warplanes and vessels during the war.

Oil and gas facilities, petrochemical and steel giants, electricity outposts, as well as maritime ports, airports, roads, bridges and residential units were significantly damaged.

Work on rebuilding facilities and recovering lost capacities has begun during the period of reduced military hostility over recent weeks, with some airports and industrial units restarting operations.

But a full recovery still appears distant and more destruction could still lay ahead. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened extensive attacks against Iran’s electricity grid and infrastructure like bridges if the war resumes.

Economist Ghodsi said the government’s limited fiscal capacity remains one of the central problems, since the state has already faced struggles in financing not only regular expenditures and salaries, but also obligations across public and semi-public sectors. “This fiscal weakness has been one of the drivers of inflation, as budgetary pressures are partly shifted onto the banking system and the central bank through monetary financing,” he said.

Domestic fissures

Speaking at a state-organised event in Tehran last month, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian expressed concerns about another nationwide protest as public discontent remains high.

“Our most important strength is our unity, and the unity of our people. What I fear is that we fail to serve the people right and they are dissatisfied and come to the streets to protest. Then our might collapses,” he said.

Senior officials spearheading the mediated talks with Washington have backed the process as the viable path to delivering a better economy to the suffering Iranian population.

But hardliners within the system, who perceive Iran to have attained a major victory against superior military powers during the war, continue to vociferously reject giving any concessions.

During Khamenei’s funeral procession in Tehran on Monday, Pezeshkian was filmed getting heckled by anti-deal mourners who demanded blood vengeance for the slain supreme leader and shouted “Death to the compromiser” and “Death to the traitorous homeland-seller”.

The U.S. has attacked Venezuela through various means for decades and kidnapped President Maduro but is now claiming to assist with earthquake relief. If it’s role in Haiti is any guide, that so-called aid from the U.S. is a Trojan Horse bringing more plunder and control.

For decades, the U.S. has waged a carefully planned and unrelenting attack on Venezuela’s economy using unilateral coercive measures, commonly known as economic sanctions, to destabilize and destroy the country’s socialist Bolivarian government. Though the earthquakes that devastated the nation were not caused by the U.S., the destabilization of the Venezuelan government, economy, and infrastructure was. The damage from those sanctions was so pervasive that any natural disaster large enough would be catastrophic, leading to foreign aid being used not only to produce enormous capitalist profits for foreign interests but also to bring the country more firmly under U.S. control. This is the situation Venezuela faces today.

George W. Bush imposed the first coercive measures against Venezuela in 2006. Democratically elected President Hugo Chávez had the nerve to criticize the U.S. for its bloodthirsty response to 9/11 and refused to support or participate in the U.S. sham counterterrorism efforts. Chávez did so in a very public and embarrassing way for Bush, as he declared from the lectern at the United Nations that George W. Bush was the devil, and that the podium that Bush had just delivered his own remarks from still smelled like sulfur. Bush responded by declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terror along with Cuba and Iran (notice a pattern here). Bush also claimed that Venezuela refused to adhere to international counternarcotics agreements, breathing life into the claim that the Bolivarian government was a sponsor of narcoterrorism. But even before that, in 2004, Bush restricted non-humanitarian aid to the country, claiming they weren’t doing enough to stop human trafficking. Bush did all of this after the failed U.S.-backed coup against Chávez in 2002 that was tied to his administration. 

The aggression toward Venezuela did not end with the Bush presidency. In December 2014, Obama signed the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act after U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of State claimed that the Venezuelan government was committing human rights abuses against government opposition members. This was done in response to the Maduro government charging opposition members with engaging in conspiracies to overthrow him. Obama imposed sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials, and in  March 2015, he issued an Executive Order implementing these sanctions and expanded them to block their visas and freeze the U.S. property of the targets. Obama publicly declared Venezuela an “…extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States.” 

In response, President Maduro said in a nationally televised speech, “President Barack Obama, representing the U.S. imperialist elite, has personally decided to take on the task of defeating my government and intervening in Venezuela to control it.” One of the impacted Venezuelan officials, Diosdado Cabello, said, “What is being planned are attacks against our land, against our country, military attacks.” It took the U.S. a few years, but…

President Donald Trump imposed more, wider-reaching economic coercive measures in 2017 during his first term. In addition to recognizing unelected opposition figure Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, Trump also sanctioned the state-run oil company PDVSA, denying the government access to U.S. financial markets. He froze PDVSA’s assets and finally imposed a near-complete economic embargo on the country. And in 2020, the Trump Justice Department indicted President Maduro on charging the president and 14 others with narcoterrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and gun charges. It also accused him of coordinating with the leftist guerrilla peasant militia Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Founded as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, which sought to redistribute land and resources that the Colombian government denied to the desperately poor peasants in rural areas. After years of fighting with the government, FARC was officially dissolved in the 2016 Peace Accord with the Colombian government. They are now a legal left-wing political party, initially called the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force and later renamed the Comunes (Commons). Trump then issued a $15 million bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest. Not to be outdone in attempting to enact regime change in Venezuela, President Joe Biden doubled the bounty to $25 million, with no additional indictments added.

The measures barred Venezuela from importing equipment, spare parts, and industrial chemicals to maintain its oil production facilities and shipping capabilities. Oil infrastructure across the country deteriorated, and oil production was driven far below the previous 3 billion barrels a day at its 2008 height to barely above 300,000 barrels a day.  

While many people accurately note that the U.S. is after control of Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, the country’s mineral wealth is also crucial to the U.S. and much of the world, as it includes bauxite and rare earth minerals critical for weapons systems, satellite manufacturing, and AI technologies. When we consider the struggle we are engaging in to stop the proliferation of these technologies from being used to violate our privacy, whatever freedom we have left, our environment, and our very lives, consider that the U.S. pursuit of these materials has already directly caused the instability, suffering, worsened health outcomes, and deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.

Venezuela relies largely on oil exports to fund its public sector commitments; the collapse of oil exports crippled its primary source of public revenue, making it impossible to import essential goods like food and medicine. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that 40,000 Venezuelans died due to economic coercive measures between 2018 and 2019 alone. Former U.S. Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated the deaths to have been over 100,000 by 2020. But this is neither unexpected nor unwanted by the U.S. government. Economic sanctions are designed to cause so much hardship for the people of a country that they will rise up in frustration and anger at their own government. U.S. officials understood that imposing economic sanctions on the country would prevent it from importing not just materials to maintain the oil sector but also necessities for the Venezuelan people, such as food, medicine, fuel, and even toilet paper. But public infrastructure, from hospitals and office buildings to apartment buildings and water systems, also fell into disrepair as materials needed to maintain it could not be imported due to sanctions. With the physical buildings weakened, the country was far more vulnerable to disasters like the June 2026 earthquakes than it would have been had the sanctions not been in place.

By the time Trump returned to the White House in 2024, despite the immense damage already done to the country’s economy and infrastructure, they had not done what successive U.S. presidents wanted: to bring about the collapse of the Bolivarian government in Venezuela. Trump imposed more measures after his return to office, doubled Biden’s bounty increase on Maduro to $50 million, and eventually carried out the violent kidnapping of President Nicholas Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores in the pre-dawn hours of January 3, 2026, with the help of the Navy and Marines of the Southern US Command (SOUTHCOM), which also carried out the indiscriminate murders of Caribbean fisherfolk in the months prior to the kidnapping. The bounty was never paid to anyone. He also added to the original 2020 indictment against Maduro by adding his now-kidnapped wife and National Assemblywoman Flores, and adding charges of “…narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States.” They are both held in separate solitary confinement cells in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, NY, awaiting their sham trials.

It is an obscenity that the same SOUTHCOM is now deploying forces to Caracas to provide post-disaster air traffic and airport support. But it is a greater crime that the U.S. has positioned itself and its interests to finally get what it wants – control of Venezuela’s oil and minerals sectors and eventual privatization of public services that define the Socialist Bolivarian government – even if it is a natural disaster that provides them the perfect opportunity to achieve it. This, after expropriating Venezuela’s oil industry and profiting from selling the stolen crude, Trump sending a measly $150 million in “aid” to the country he stole their sovereign materials from is a settler colonial level insult.

This is “disaster capitalism,” popularized by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, but a well-documented aspect of imperialist plunder. In the process of imposing economic shocks through sanctions by an external entity or through the implementation of neoliberal policies internally, Klein explains how governments and corporations exploit the shock of an unplanned, catastrophic event to impose radical, wholesale austerity and control. Disaster response becomes the vehicle for enormous foreign investment and development, foreign control of that development, and ultimately the usurpation of the existing but weakened state in favor of the foreign governments and corporate interests behind the aid money. Economic policies that would be rejected under normal circumstances are more easily imposed on an already vulnerable state when that state and its people are rendered desperate by a natural disaster. 

The use of disaster relief as a Trojan Horse for neoliberal plunder and control after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti may give us a terrifying vision of what could be in store for Venezuela today.

The earthquake in Haiti was used as a pretext for the US to assert near-total control over the country’s recovery, if not the country itself, along with its foreign allies in the UN-imposed Core Group that governs the island nation. Aid and reconstruction, and the billions of dollars for it, were directed by those and other foreign governments and contractors, bypassing the Haitian state under then-president René Préval. International entities justified this by claiming Haiti was hopelessly corrupt. What they were, however, was in disarray after the earthquake destroyed much of the government’s infrastructure, including the National Assembly and the National Palace, and years of imperialist control usurped its sovereignty. 

But this excuse was needed to justify the Haitian government seeing very little of the billions of dollars pledged for relief and reconstruction. The Associated Press reported in 2013 that CEPR found that out of the $1.15 billion pledged, only 1% went to Haitian companies. They found instead that “…the ‘vast majority’ of the money it could follow went straight to U.S. companies or organizations, more than half in the Washington area alone.” And what was constructed was for the benefit of foreign corporate and Haitian comprador interests, who had the protection of the United States government to bend Haiti to all of their will.  

The $224 million Caracol Industrial Park, built with reconstruction funds allocated through the recovery mission co-chaired by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, is a continuing example of disaster capitalism and the nefarious ways that Western imperialists profit from natural and human catastrophe.

In 2011, scores of farmers and other residents were evicted from their fertile agricultural land, far from the impact zone, to make way for its construction. They were given little notice to leave and insufficient compensation. They fought for years to secure a reparations agreement with the Haitian government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2018, which included new land, jobs, equipment, and other compensation. Many finally received reimbursement in 2020, but not all, and not nearly enough for what was taken from them by the U.S., the IDB, and USAID, who were the major funders of the project. 

The park was designed to attract foreign garment companies with tax exemptions and cheap labor, as wages were promised to be kept as low as $1.75 a day. The garment companies did come, and the Clintons promised hundreds of thousands of jobs. But fewer than 10,000 were produced, and they were at the same low rate of less than $2.00 a day that Haitians had been fighting to raise for years before the earthquake against a small group of Haitian manufacturing, import/export, and political elites controlling the country’s existing manufacturing industries with the backing of the U.S. government. When the Haitian government passed a law in 2009 to raise the country’s minimum wage for garment workers to $3 a day and $5 a day for other sectors due to the people’s agitation, foreign companies and the Haitian elite colluded with the U.S. State Department and, with a study from USAID that said raising the minimum wage would make the garment sector economically unviable, successfully blocked the legislation. 

While Bill and Hillary Clinton have never admitted involvement in suppressing Haitian wages, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State under President Barack Obama when the State Department cables that WikiLeaks published revealed the covert wage-suppression scheme that resulted in legislation being passed in the U.S. to favor the Haitian elite and foreign investors: the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Acts I & II. There was no way the Clintons were not involved, as it was the Clinton Foundation through which they did much of their work in Haiti, and Haitians hold them responsible for the abysmal outcome.

By the end of 2011, one year after the earthquake, most of the promised aid had not been disbursed, and what was went to projects unrelated to housing, feeding, or providing any aid or support to the displaced, like the Caracol Industrial Park.  The scandal was compounded by revelations that some major aid organizations achieved very little with the funds they received, so no one could really account for where the billions of dollars went, other than into the pockets of non-Haitians. 

Today, Haiti is still among the poorest countries in the world. Haitians have continued to protest not just against the minimum wage, but also the lack of sovereignty and human dignity imposed upon them as they endure a rise in U.S.-fueled gang violence, attacks on Haitian immigrants from this administration, continued control from the UN-appointed Core Group with no elected leadership chosen by them, and another UN invasion/intervention to quell unrest. 

This is the future that the U.S. wants for Venezuela. To make Venezuela like Haiti or something close to it, at least in the manner of creating a dismantled state that the U.S. can swoop into, plunder, and control. Although Haiti and Venezuela may not be perfectly similar in many ways, but the use of an earthquake to further imperialist takeover of a country already weakened by relentless Western hegemony in response to the successful liberation struggle of largely Afro-descendent and Indigenous peasantry to free themselves from European settler colonial domination and capitalist exploitation are complementary examples of how a natural disaster is be used to deepen imperialist control under the guise of aid, instead of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world using that power and money to help suffering human beings. And then the same country calls those states failed, and demonizes the government and the people as immature, unable to govern themselves, and an example of the failures of socialism or communism.

As U.S. officials are on the ground in Venezuela openly “coordinating” with the Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, it must be understood that this is done with the threat of her own indictment and imprisonment on bogus charges of narcotrafficking, human rights abuses, corruption, or grave robbing, depending on how amusing the U.S. wants to be with the sham accusations over her head. 

And now, the U.S. is poised to use this unbelievably tragic disaster as an even bigger cudgel to force the Venezuelan state to concede much, much more, seizing this opportunity to tighten its control over the country’s oil and mineral resources, effectively absorbing it into the U.S. sphere of influence, to be used as a weapon against the rest of the U.S.’s designated enemies, Cuba, China, and Russia. Venezuela has had friendly relations with all of these countries, and all countries that the U.S. is also softening up with sanctions, embargoes, and threats of worse treatment. 

We must expand and deepen the struggle against the U.S. re-colonization of the Western Hemisphere and join our struggling brothers and sisters in the Global South for an end to imperialist aggression, hegemony, and gangsterism, and we must target the enemy in whose camp we reside with clarity and purpose.

Because natural disasters will never stop happening. But disaster capitalism never has to happen again.

Not if we destroy capitalism and the empires that are erected upon it.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C., as well as a co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet available on YouTube (here and here) and Facebook.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Source: Black Agenda Report

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior expanded the situations in which their firefighters are allowed to wear N95 masks.

Starting in September, the federal government began allowing firefighters to wear the masks, but not when they were working on the fire line, only at times such as in camp and sitting in vehicles. Now they’ll be allowed to wear them during some work battling wildfires, including patrolling for areas where the blaze has jumped past fire lines and putting out smoldering remains after a fire is contained.

Masks are still prohibited during firefighters’ most grueling tasks — digging lines to stop fires and directly attacking flames. And the masks they’re using, N95s, do not protect against all of the toxic substances in wildfire smoke.

Nonetheless, health experts applauded the move as a step in the right direction.

Here’s why it took so long to get here:

Research has linked wildfire smoke to a range of long-term health issues, including respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

“The fire service knows that,” said Rachael Jones, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “They all have stories” of lung damage or cancer, either their own or their coworkers’.

But this wasn’t always common knowledge.

“The verbiage was that wildland smoke was benign,” one firefighter told Jones’ colleagues for a recent study on firefighters’ thoughts on mask use. “It was like sitting around a campfire.”

Even as scientists and fire officials came to terms with the very real long-term health risks, some firefighters still had concerns that masks could muffle communication, make it hard to breathe and interfere with other equipment. That slowed adoption.

Missing crucial orders because a voice is muffled, or struggling to pull out an emergency fire shelter because a mask is in the way, could be the difference between life and death.

“These are not trivial things when the fact is that they reflect life safety outcome,” Jones said.

Deciding on the right type of mask or respirator has slowed adoption too. There are no commercially available respirators that protect against all of the dangerous pollutants in wildfire smoke.

Scientists have not even fully determined which pollutants pose the greatest risks to firefighters, further complicating a choice.

N95s filter for solid particles in the air but not dangerous gases. Heavy smoke or sweat can cause them to clog.

Half-face respirators — often gray rubber with pink canisters — offer different filters for different gases, but none can filter all of the concerning gases in wildfire smoke. The masks and backup canisters are also much bulkier to carry around than N95s.

Respirators that can filter out all of the “literally hundreds” of concerning compounds in smoke “just simply don’t exist,” said Matt Rahn, research director for the Wildfire Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting firefighters.

The result: “In our pursuit for perfection in finding the best respiratory devices for firefighters, we’ve basically fallen into a decision paralysis of doing nothing,” Rahn said. “It’s been that way for years.”

The federal government acknowledges the limitations of N95s in its educational material for firefighters. In a statement to The Times, the Forest Service said it will begin studying different respirators in a small pilot program to “determine if their use will be suitable for the wildland fire environment.”

The Forest Service said that N95s are already “readily available” to its firefighters and that it has more than 30,000 of them.

More recent wildfire news

Many in the western United States will have to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday with fewer fireworks due to heightened wildfire risk. Utah’s governor restricted fireworks statewide through July 5 as multiple wildfires raged in the state and the National Weather Service issued a rare “Particularly Dangerous Situation” warning, Kathy McCormack reports for the Associated Press. California officials, meanwhile, warned of zero tolerance for illegal fireworks, with some local governments recently increasing fines, Kassia Bonesteel reports for CBS News.

Three federal wildland firefighters were killed and two were injured by the fast-moving Knowles fire in Colorado on Saturday. As a ground crew began some of the first attacks on the fire, an order came over the radio to “get out of there now,” CNN reported. Within minutes, the crew was forced to deploy their emergency shelters, a desperate last line of defense when escape is impossible. Firefighters lined the streets of Grand Junction, Colo., on Sunday in a procession for their fallen colleagues.

Much of the western U.S. is facing above normal fire potential after one of the hottest and driest winters in recent years. Coastal Southern California, conversely, is facing average wildfire potential, fire weather analysts say, thanks to monsoon breezes bringing damp air from the tropics.

A few last things in climate news

A pair of hazardous chemical crises in Greater Los Angeles — at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove and a warehouse in Boyle Heights — have left Californians questioning why environmental and public health agencies such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health failed to address known risks, a team from CalMatters and the LA Local reports.

The Boyle Heights warehouse fire coincided with a spike in emergency room visits for smoke inhalation and throat pain, my colleague Hayley Smith found. Meanwhile, the water used to fight the toxic blaze ended up in the Los Angeles River, The Times’ Mack Baysinger reports. Local organizers collected water samples for testing as L.A. County public works deployed floating barriers to contain the runoff.

The headwaters of the Colorado River, a vital source of water for 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland, is drier than anyone can remember, my colleague Ian James reports. As seven U.S. states and Mexico remain gridlocked in complex debates over use of the river, it’s a stark reminder that the climate of the 21st century will leave less for everyone.

Europe is facing its second major heat wave of the year, with France recording its hottest day ever, Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News. As residents struggled to handle the extreme heat, worsened by climate change, so did climate infrastructure championed to combat it. Trains were halted as the heat risked buckling tracks and nuclear reactors were slowed or powered off as the cooling water they discharged became too hot, the New York Times’ Chico Harlan reported.

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.