lost

June 1 (UPI) — Rescue workers in Laos said they heard a knocking sound while searching flooded caves for villagers who went missing on May 19.

The search continues in the Xaisomboun province for two of seven villagers who descended into the caves searching for gold last month. The rescue workers said Monday they knocked on the cave walls and heard a “knocking response” from deep inside the cave system within the last 24 hours.

An eighth villager went into the cave with the group but was able to escape and alert of the seven others who were trapped.

“Yesterday, when we knocked, there was a signal responding back,” Kengkaj Bongkawong, head of Metta Tham Rescue Kalasin, a Thai rescue team, wrote on Facebook. “It was a knocking sound meant to be heard. Based on our initial assessment, this is considered not to be a reflection or an echo of the sound.”

The sound was discovered after the rescue team rappelled down a vertical shaft they had discovered. They report hearing a knocking response twice in the last 24 hours.

Flash flooding after the villagers went into the cave caused them to be trapped. Five of the villagers were rescued last week when a rescue team pumped water out of the cave to help them get out.

One of the villagers was trained to scuba dive and was able to swim out of the cave.

“Moving forward, it won’t just be a matter of sitting around waiting for water to be pumped out,” Bongkawong wrote.

Hollywood has been waiting for Kane Parsons since the year he was born. The 20-year-old director is the same age as YouTube’s first videos and grew up with no barriers between his creativity and an audience. “Backrooms,” his debut feature, marks the start of a new new wave of filmmakers raised by internet feedback who are ready to reinvigorate the industry.

Young Steven Spielberg screened his 8mm reels for his neighborhood. Parsons uploaded his early shorts online where he could analyze the mass response. When one, an unsettling nine-minute experiment about a warren of dingy carpets, taffy-yellow walls and gridded drop ceilings clicked with 78 million viewers, he made sequels. A24 offered Parsons a deal before he finished high school. He’s graduating into multiplexes having spent his adolescence writing, directing, editing, composing and market-testing what people want to watch. I’d toast to that, but Parsons isn’t old enough for Champagne.

Given that backdrop, “Backrooms” would be one of the year’s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine. But it’s better than fine — it’s a work of honest-to-goodness art. Working with screenwriter Will Soodik, Parsons has gone back into that banal maze to find an uncannily mature story about loss and stagnation, about how our self-serving narratives barricade us from emotional growth.

Set in 1990, “Backrooms” has the fritz of an old VHS tape. (Like so many other Gen Z kids, Parsons is nostalgic for a pre-smartphone era he never knew.) A failed architect-turned-furniture salesman named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, superbly expressive) tumbles through a portal in his store’s basement to the backrooms of the title — less Alice in Wonderland, more Alice in Wonderbland.

“It’s like it was made by a bunch of construction workers on acid,” he muses. The hallways lead to more hallways, the overhead fluorescents whine like hornets. Someone — or something — has piled lamps and stools into the center of one room, scattered chairs in another and embedded shoes into the floor as though the ground were made of sand. The disorder looks like the wreckage of an unknown chaos. Aboveground, Clark is trapped in his own resentments, throwing temper tantrums like a toddler. Down here, frustration feels natural.

Should he be afraid? And if so, then what of?

Distant thuds warn that Clark isn’t alone. Soon after, three other characters follow Clark into this liminal space: his loud employees Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) and his exasperated therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who is haunted by flashbacks of her agoraphobic mother. There’s also a mysterious man in a lab coat (Mark Duplass) who works for a company that factors into the backrooms’ preexisting internet lore, but doesn’t have much purpose in this script. It’s fine just to see Duplass as a gesture toward corporate apathy. More beings will appear too and cinematographer Jeremy Cox’s deliberately low-fi look forces you to do triple and quadruple takes to comprehend what you’re even seeing.

How does a 20-year-old fathom adult-sized discontent? Lord knows, but Parsons does. One theory is that today’s 20-year-olds were just launching into teenhood when the pandemic teleported them from their classrooms to isolated computer screens. Meanwhile, they overheard their parents fret that society might be forever hollowed out. When a young person looks toward the future, what do they see? Probably not an office building bustling with entry-level jobs.

Think about how the act of buying a couch no longer involves interacting with a salesman like Clark, but peering at a pixelated living room that doesn’t actually exist with a couch that changes colors at a tap. Think about how lately the internet at large feels human-less. Then layer that emptiness over the images here.

Sparse yet gripping, “Backrooms” and its minimalist story accommodate the audience’s own free-ranging imagination. The infinite size of these drab catacombs triggers sense-memories of feeling small and confused in an ordinary place that feels all wrong. It’s a time travel trip back to childhood — mass entertainment made intimate — with Parsons tossing us scraps of Clark and Mary’s personal histories like a breadcrumb trail. I remembered what it felt like to get lost in a motel on a road trip with my grandparents. More recently, I tidied the home of a friend who was in the hospital, the pill bottles and crumpled blankets left in situ as evidence of someone else’s pain. “Backrooms” felt like that, too.

There’s an incredible special effects shot where the camera sinks through the floor of Mary’s living room to find a mutation of the same room — and then another and another — each replica deteriorating further from reality until it becomes a new room altogether that would fit right into the backrooms. This, we wordlessly understand, represents how memories of the past can be at once factually inaccurate and emotionally true. We’ve all been bewildered kids, Parsons more recently than most. Some of the most powerful people on Earth still behave like they’re stuck in that headspace.

Describing “Backrooms” as a horror film doesn’t feel exactly right. It’s a surrealist painting in motion, the equivalent of staring at Salvador Dali’s wasteland of melting clocks until it makes gut-sense. Dali made that famous masterpiece, “The Persistence of Memory,” in 1931, a breath-holding moment between wars when daily life looked normal enough but vibrated with the dread that no, things were definitely not OK. Kids don’t know that, but they vibe with Dali anyway because he keys into their suspicion that the world doesn’t really obey the rules.

That anxiety hums through “Backrooms.” It’s why millions of people watched and shared the original short. Yet as fraught as it sounds — and as abruptly as it ends — I left elated. A major new moviemaking talent has arrived and he’s the beginning of a movement. Other internet-honed young filmmakers will follow with their own fresh insights into genres like action, comedy and romance. Kane Parsons is just the first one through Hollywood’s labyrinth.

Mexico’s consulate in Los Angeles helps thousands of citizens each week, assisting them with registering births, obtaining passports and, increasingly since President Trump’s second term began, accessing legal help for loved ones who have fallen afoul of his administration’s immigration policies.

Although it serves the country’s biggest Mexican community, all 53 Mexican consulates in the U.S. provide services that make Mexican people’s lives easier — just like the nine U.S. consulates in Mexico improve the lives of Americans south of the border.

The U.S. State Department has launched a review that might lead to the closure of an unknown number of Mexican consulates. Although it hasn’t said why, the review is happening against the backdrop of the immigration crackdown, some thorny bilateral issues and far-right theories that the consulates have been interfering in U.S. politics and encouraging Mexicans to migrate northward.

Azucena Aviles, a 33-year-old mother who drove more than an hour to the L.A. consulate this month to renew her Mexican passport and get one for her daughter, said consular services are invaluable — especially in California, which is home to nearly 13 million people of Mexican descent, including an estimated 1.7 million who are in the U.S. illegally.

“It wouldn’t be fair if they messed with the Mexican people, especially with our support systems, which come from the Mexican consulate and which, in some way, help or protect our fellow Mexicans,” she said.

Trump has been exerting growing pressure on Mexico, with questions looming over issues including human rights, national sovereignty and regional diplomacy.

His administration has given only the broadest of explanations for launching its review.

“Department of State is constantly reviewing all aspects of American foreign relations to ensure they are in line with the President’s America First foreign policy agenda and advance American interests,” Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of State for global public affairs, wrote in an email.

Among the possible reasons for the review is that it could somehow fit into the Trump administration’s immigration efforts to deport people in the U.S. illegally. The largest contingent of such people — an estimated 4.3 million, according to the Pew Research Center — are Mexican.

Relations between the two countries could also play a role, with Trump increasing pressure on Mexico in the run-up to free trade negotiations important to both nations’ economies, taking a more aggressive approach toward the U.S.’ southern neighbor and even threatening to take military action against Mexican cartels.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has avoided head-on conflicts with Trump and instead relied on diplomacy, including sending top officials to Washington and seeking to maintain a strong relationship with the Trump administration by cracking down on Mexican cartels. Sheinbaum and her predecessor have also been key allies in slowing migration to the U.S. and speeding up the deportation of other Latin American migrants.

But Sheinbaum has taken a firmer stance in regards to the deaths of Mexicans in U.S. immigration detention centers, calling them unacceptable and saying the conditions in such lockups were “incompatible with human rights standards and the protection of life.” She instructed Mexican consulates to visit detention centers daily to help ensure detained citizens are being held in safe conditions.

Relations rapidly deteriorated in recent weeks after the U.S. indicted several Mexican officials on drug trafficking charges, and two CIA officers died following an anti-narcotics operation in northern Mexico — American involvement that Sheinbaum said her government had not authorized. That drug raid raised uncomfortable questions in Mexico about the extent of U.S. involvement in domestic security operations.

Years of tit-for-tat tariffs between the two countries have also added strain.

A review of foreign consulates is “usually a sign that a bilateral relationship is in a very, very rocky moment,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S. In Mexico’s case, it comes at “the worst moment of the U.S.-Mexico relations” in decades, given all the current points of contention, he said.

Further straining relations is a theory being amplified by Peter Schweizer, a writer with a following among Trump loyalist who has claimed that Mexican consulates interfere in U.S. politics and encourage migration to the U.S. Experts say that although a few Mexican consulate officials may have sought to influence politics back home, there is no evidence of them interfering in U.S. elections.

In response to the State Department review, Sheinbaum said the idea that Mexican consulates are “playing politics in the United States is completely false.” She said the job of consulates anywhere is to “always protect” citizens.

Sarukhan too said that although consulates defend the rights of Mexican citizens, there is no evidence that they are interfering in U.S. elections.

Whatever the reasons for the consulate review, it has stoked worries.

During a weekly public forum at the L.A. consulate, a woman who didn’t give her name and whose husband had been in U.S. immigration detention asked for help finding him a lawyer, highlighting one crucial service consulates provide for their citizens.

An older man said he had heard about the review and asked about possible closures.

Carlos González Gutiérrez, Mexico’s top diplomat in Los Angeles, responded that, as Sheinbaum said, there would be “no reason whatsoever” for the U.S. to close a Mexican consulate.

Indeed, consulates would have significant, devastating effects for Mexican immigrants,” especially in isolated areas, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute.

Every day, consular officials go to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding center in downtown Los Angeles to identify and interview as many detained Mexican nationals as they can.

González Gutiérrez, 62, begins every weekly public forum by noting how many detained Mexicans consular officials have interviewed since the immigration crackdown began in Los Angeles last June.

At that May 11 meeting, the figure stood at 1,940. Nearly half had deep roots in the U.S., he said. About 46% have been deported, 35% have children born in the U.S., 69% entered the country through a port of entry, 6% overstayed a visa and 2.5% requested asylum. Most were men, and many worked in construction, agriculture, gardening and the service industry.

He also disputed the claim that Mexican consulates are interfering in U.S. politics.

“We are guests of this country’s government, just as U.S. consuls are guests of the Mexican government. In that sense, we are neither activists nor spies,” said González Gutiérrez. “We carry out our work openly, within a pluralistic and democratic society.”

Pineda and Janetsky write for the Associated Press. Janetsky reported from Mexico City.

PLANO, Texas — As it turned out, it would never be enough.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn tried for more than a year to show President Trump and Texas Republicans that he and the president were on the same team.

Cornyn posted a photo of himself reading Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” He proposed legislation to rename a stretch of interstate in Trump’s honor. Perhaps most glaringly, the Senate institutionalist who long supported the filibuster reversed his position in a failed effort to advance voting restrictions that are a priority for the president.

None of it worked. On Tuesday, Cornyn became the latest in a line of Republicans who lost their primaries after falling out of favor with a president with little tolerance for dissent and a seemingly insatiable appetite for retribution. The four-term senator lost by double digits to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Trump endorsed last week as “a true MAGA Warrior.”

Cornyn, on the other hand, “was VERY disloyal to me,” Trump wrote on social media.

Trump’s intervention in the Texas runoff came after weeks of successfully backing primary challengers in Indiana, Louisiana and Kentucky as revenge against incumbents who broke with his agenda.

Cornyn’s attempt to avoid the same fate made even some of his supporters wince.

“You look at the positions he took to please the president and the groveling and whatever,” said former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican and Trump critic who didn’t seek reelection during the president’s first midterm in 2018. “It was rather painful to watch.”

Trump took an uncommonly equanimous approach to Tuesday’s results the following morning.

“Congratulations to Ken Paxton on such a tremendous win, and to John Cornyn for having run a strong and powerful race but, more importantly, having had a truly great career,” he wrote on social media. “John will remain my friend for a long time to come, as we both watch Ken become a fantastic, common sense Senator, one who is respected by all.”

Cornyn started early with ad touting pro-Trump voting record

Cornyn’s loss wasn’t for a lack of political gymnastics and astronomical campaign spending.

His campaign began running an advertisement last summer — part of an astounding nearly-$100-million air war by the senator and allied groups — with Cornyn looking into the camera and saying, “I voted with President Trump 99% of the time.”

On Cornyn’s campaign homepage, Trump and Cornyn stand side-by-side with thumbs pointed upward in an image aimed at projecting solidarity. Deeper in the website, the category titled “The Trump-Cornyn Record” notes the senator’s role securing votes for Trump’s signature 2017 tax cut bill.

Cornyn has also been championing provisions in Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation to finance work on the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The senator had dismissed the project as “naive” during Trump’s 2016 campaign. But in January, he stood along a section of completed wall in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley touting the measure’s $11 billion for Texas contractors’ work at “the direction of the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful.”

Cornyn’s 2023 dismissal of Trump’s return glares in background

Cornyn’s praise for his party’s leader and president were not unusual, but they clash with a statement Cornyn made in May 2023, when Trump was mounting his presidential comeback campaign.

“Trump’s time has passed him by,” he told reporters. “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.”

Trump would go on to easily win the nomination and carry every battleground state in the general election.

Cornyn would hew closely to the president for the first 16 months of his second administration, hoping at the outside chance of his endorsement or to keeping him from weighing in at all.

But Trump did not forget the past slights.

“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” he wrote on social media while endorsing Paxton.

Smaller gestures, and one big one

Cornyn has playfully worked to promote Trump fandom, last year posting a picture on social media of himself thoughtfully peering into the pages of Trump’s 1987 memoir and business advice book, “The Art of the Deal.”

In a more obvious gesture, he proposed designating a section of a U.S. highway from the Texas Gulf Coast to Montana as “Interstate 47,” to honor a 47th president with a well-documented love of naming things after himself. In a news release about the proposal, filed just over two weeks before Tuesday’s runoff, Cornyn said it would be known as the “Trump Interstate.”

The more tectonic shift occurred in March, after Trump had teased a possible endorsement of either Cornyn or Paxton in the runoff.

Paxton swiftly said he would consider dropping his candidacy if the Republican-controlled Senate lifted the filibuster and passed the SAVE America Act, a series of voting restrictions that Trump has described as an essential part of his agenda.

The following week, Cornyn wrote an op-ed in the New York Post — Trump’s favorite hometown newspaper — backing away from his previous support of the filibuster. He vowed to “support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary” to get the bill “through the Senate and on the president’s desk for his signature.”

Flake watched with unease.

“I know John and his long-held positions on the filibuster and the Senate’s institutions,” he said. “No office is worth that.”

Beaumont and Bedayn write for the Associated Press. Bedayn reported from San Antonio. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

The Canary Islands are experiencing a tourism crisis, with activists warning the coastline is unsustainable as locals say the ‘land is being destroyed and speculated on’

The Canary Islands have witnessed mounting demonstrations in recent years. Frustration has been building amongst residents, who argue the surge in tourism to the sun-soaked Spanish archipelago is unmanageable. They point to outdated regulations that allow property speculators to purchase land for hotels and holiday flats, while paying only minimal tax.

Consequently, Canarians claim they receive the lowest average salaries in Spain and face difficulties securing affordable accommodation. Yet now they have a further complaint against holidaymakers. The islands are suffering coastal erosion at an alarming pace. Campaigners say the Canary Islands’ coastline is on the brink of disaster.

Each year, based on a report from SOS Costas Canarias, approximately 21⁄2 miles of coastline disappears. Anne Striewe, the foundation’s director, states that hotels, apartment blocks, housing estates and marinas, amongst other structures, are being constructed on this “lost” territory.

The organisation cautions that throughout the eight islands, roughly 18% of the territory within the first 500 metres from the sea has already been developed. Beyond protected natural areas (PNAs), this figure skyrockets: it surpasses 40% on multiple islands and coastal sections, reaching 43% in Lanzarote and Gran Canaria.

Nearly 20% of the living space on the Canary Islands is dedicated to tourism – in comparison to around 4% on the Spanish mainland. Five municipalities on the Canaries possess more tourist beds than permanent inhabitants: Yaiza (Lanzarote), Pájara (Fuerteventura), Mogán (Gran Canaria), San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria) and Adeje (Tenerife).

Ms Striewe highlights that, beyond holiday accommodation, there is a vast array of tourist-related infrastructure including access roads, golf courses and desalination plants, which fail to show up in hotel occupancy figures yet remain part of the same problem.

Sharon Backhouse, director of GeoTenerife, told Sky News that the Canary Islands are a “biodiversity jewel in the Atlantic,” yet local authorities provide minimal protection for the islands’ natural habitats.

She warned that each year more “beautiful landscapes are cemented over” to make way for new tourist resorts.

She added: “The problem with these resorts is that we just don’t have enough resources in terms of water, what happens to all the rubbish, how is it all recycled.”

Carmelo Javier León, director of the UNESCO Chair in Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPCG), describes a conflict between those who wish to protect the islands’ natural beauty and “the development of ever more accommodation options.”

The authors of the SOS Costas Canarias report are demanding an immediate halt and the scrapping of planning permissions for undeveloped coastal land.

They argue that the seemingly relentless construction not only obliterates irreplaceable natural habitats and undermines the very scenic beauty that attracted tourists to the islands in the first place, but also dramatically heightens the risk of localised flooding. Approximately 80,000 inhabitants are already vulnerable to coastal flooding risk, yet almost half of flood-susceptible territory has already been designated for housing.

Irma Ferrer, a lawyer for Urban Planning Transparency and Civic Action Against Corruption, highlights that this demonstrates the institutions are failing to operate properly. “In urban planning and environmental matters, legislation is not enacted to defend the public interest,” she complains.

She added that the islands now possess an economy which is essentially “based on the destruction of the land and on speculation.”

Natalie King visited Transport for London’s lost property office, which holds about 80,000 items waiting to be reunited with their owners at any one point, including some truly bizarre things people have left behind

Sometimes the behaviour of my fellow humans confuses me, and no more so than when I’m standing in front of a selection of items that people have somehow managed to leave behind on public transport.

A handbag? Understandable. A passport or phone? Also easily lost from a pocket when changing tube lines. But I do wonder how forgetful you have to be to leave behind two dining room chairs, a taxidermied fox, or a 1980s-era wedding dress complete with giant puffy sleeves.

Transport for London (TfL) runs its lost property office from a warehouse deep in East London, and from the outside it’s typical of the kind of vast grey warehouses that you find tucked away on industrial estates. But inside, it’s packed with 80,000 perfectly catalogued and sorted items, each one trying to find its way home to its owner.

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I was taken on a tour of the facility by Diana Quaye, performance manager for the site, who oversees the meticulous cataloguing of every item that comes through the doors. And with around 5,000 items being left behind on buses, tubes, or the back of taxis each week, it’s a huge undertaking, with 44 staff in the office and warehouse.

Many of the items you find are things you’d expect. About 80 phones a day are logged by the team, with the IMEI numbers put into the system to help reunite them with their owners. Bags are searched for clues that could help match them to their rightful owners.

But amongst the colorful array of umbrellas and never-to-be-finished paperbacks, the team often digs up some unusual items that clearly have interesting tales behind them. And while most items that aren’t reclaimed after 90 days either end up in a charity shop or at auction, a few of the most unusual items make their way into the warehouse’s collection.

One member of staff who has seen their fair share of oddities is Marilyn Palmer, a property manager with 36 years of experience reuniting people with their belongings. She happily shares some of the more unusual items and the stories behind them.

“We had a park bench in that some guys on a stag do decided they would lift it from a park in Acton, try and get it on the tube, couldn’t get it over the barrier and then left it.”, she tells me. “We managed to get it back to the park because it had a plaque on it that was dedicated to a husband, so we contacted the council and got it delivered back to where it should be.”

Other unusual items include: “A double bed. And two massive 70-inch screens that were left in a taxi. The taxi dropped (the passenger) off, thinking he was coming back, and he never did. But they did come and claim them.”

And if you think a giant telly is an expensive thing to lose, Marilyn went on to tell me the story of their most expensive find to date.

“We got in a necklace and earring set, and it was in an old-fashioned, sort of like 1920s oyster-shaped box, presentation box. When we got it valued, we didn’t have an inquiry at the time; we thought I’d kept it aside just in case an inquiry came in later. The necklace alone was £125,000.

“It turns out a mother or grandmother had lent it to a daughter on her wedding day. They’d used the taxi to go to the airport, to go on their honeymoon. They then trawled back and we managed to find it. She was really grateful. She’s since passed away as well. She was just grateful to have it.”

It’s not just objects that get left behind. Sometimes it’s people. “We’ve had ashes over the years that we’ve managed to get back. One we had for seven years. And we finally reunited them with family in Germany,” she said.

“One of the office assistants working at the time was fluent in German, so every so often we’d get them out, and we’d try again, and she’d written a letter to them in German, and they managed to track with the information that we’d had. We finally managed to track them down and got them back after seven years,” she added.

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Sadly, not every item gets back to its owner. Diana tells me the return rate is about 12%, and that’s partly because people don’t know that they can ask TfL for help finding their property. She admits: “I think if I left my mobile phone or something like that before I worked here, I’d be thinking ‘oh my God, insurance’, I’d go through that whole process.

“But now, if I lose anything, I automatically go online and fill out a form because it’s more than likely it will be here, as you can see,” she adds, gesturing at the warehouse floor and the thousands of items waiting to find their way home.

Find out more about TfL’s lost property office here.

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