Manhattan

Kristen Nuss was covered in sand, dulling her neon two-piece swimsuit. A white lei hung around her neck as she attempted to balance her champion’s plaque awkwardly in one hand.

“This thing is heavy,” she said, “my arm is getting sore.”

Despite her and partner Taryn Brasher repeating as AVP Manhattan Beach Open champions — grinding out a 15-21, 21-18, 15-13 victory over former USC standouts Megan Kraft and Terese Cannon — on Sunday, the weight of both the hardware and the title wasn’t lost on Nuss.

“This is Wimbledon,” Nuss said. “It’s the granddaddy of them all. My mom always said she wanted me to play at Wimbledon. … This is definitely one of the most coveted trophies right here.”

Partners since 2021, Nuss and Brasher were greeted with a roar before the first serve. On the other side of the net, Kraft and Cannon seemed to be the underdogs to the Paris Olympians.

But as the former Trojan duo snatched the opening set, fans pressed shoulder to shoulder along the railings and bleachers, pulled into the possibility of a rally from the defending title-holders.

Kraft’s heavy serve and Cannon’s long reach at the net gave them the first game at 21-15. During the changeover between games, Brasher and Nuss zeroed in on the cracks by serving together and passing cleaner.

“We don’t like first sets,” Nuss joked. “That is something we’ve learned this year especially … we should just not play the first set. But we know we can battle back no matter what.”

Kristen Nuss dives for a ball during the women’s championship match at the Manhattan Beach Open on Sunday.

(Katelyn Mulcahy / For The Times)

Down three points in the second set, Nuss and Brasher rallied and took a 21-18 win. And in the third set, with the teams even at five, Nuss — the smallest player on the sand — swung above her size, disguising her shots by glancing one way and spiking the ball the other.

“There is nothing — no deficit — that is going to scare Kristen,” Brasher said.

Under the scorching Manhattan Beach sun, fans stayed jammed along the railings. But the second final would not follow the same fairytale ending.

For Phil Dalhausser and Trevor Crabb, this year’s Manhattan Beach Open doubled as both a curtain call and a chance to win a title.

Miles Evans, left, and Chase Budinger celebrate after winning the Manhattan Beach Open men’s title Sunday.

(Katelyn Mulcahy/For The Times)

For the former, it was the final time he’d ever tower over California sand — a four-time Olympian, International Volleyball Hall of Famer and seven-time Manhattan Beach Open champion competing in the second-to-last AVP event of his career. Crabb entered the weekend looking to win the tournament for the second straight year.

But Chase Budinger and Miles Evans had other plans, racing through the final and burying the storybook ending 21-19, 21-16 to clinch the men’s title.

Budinger and Evans tipped their caps to Dalhausser — recognizing the veteran who is a legend in the sport.

“[Dalhausser] is the best player to ever play the game,” Budinger said. “So every time I step on the court playing against him, I really try to cherish those times with him — those memories, those battles — because he’s such an unbelievable player.”

Dripping in champagne and holding his plaque, Evans said the triumph was validation for all the work the duo has put in to break through since pairing up in 2023.

“Hopefully this is the beginning of great things for us,” he said.

NEW YORK — An off-duty U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was shot in a Manhattan park after an apparent robbery gone wrong, New York City police and federal officials said Sunday.

The 42-year-old officer was in stable condition after the Saturday attack and is expected to survive. A spokesperson for the New York Police Department said there was no indication the shooting was politically motivated.

The agent, who was not in uniform, was sitting in a park beneath the George Washington Bridge when he was approached by a man riding on the back of a moped, who shot him in the face and arm, police said. The off-duty officer returned fire as the moped sped off.

No arrests had been made as of Sunday afternoon, according to a police spokesperson.

The Department of Homeland Security shared video online of the two men on a moped, alleging the shooter was caught entering the country illegally in 2023 but released.

The NYPD spokesperson said they had no information about the source of that claim.

In a social media post Sunday afternoon, President Trump seized on the shooting, alleging it was evidence of Democrats’ failures to secure the border. “The CBP Officer bravely fought off his attacker, despite his wounds, demonstrating enormous Skill and Courage,” he wrote.

The shooting comes as federal officials say there has been a surge of attacks on agents carrying out Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Enforcement officers involved in the crackdown often cover their faces, which critics say spreads fear and panic across communities and imperils citizens as well as immigrants without legal status. The Trump administration defends masking, which it says is needed to avoid harassment of agents in public and online.

On Sunday, the acting director of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, said he would allow agents to continue covering their faces, which he called a safety measure “If that’s a tool that the men and women of ICE that keeps themselves and their families safe, then I will allow it,” he said.

NEW YORK — The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reached its crescendo as New York and other major cities in the U.S. and around the world hosted parades and marches Sunday.

Pride celebrations are typically a daylong mix of jubilant street parties and political protest, but this year’s iterations took a more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ rights.

The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.” San Francisco’s Pride theme was “Queer Joy Is Resistance,” while Seattle’s was simply “Louder.”

Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt “validated” as he marveled at the size of the city’s celebration, the nation’s oldest and largest.

“With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they’re trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,” he said, wearing a vivid, multicolored shirt. “And it just shows that they’ve got a fight ahead of them if they think that they’re going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.”

Doriana Feliciano, who described herself as an LGBTQ+ ally, held up a sign saying, “Please don’t lose hope,” in support of friends she said couldn’t attend Sunday.

“We’re in a very progressive time, but there’s still hate out there, and I feel like this is a great way to raise awareness,” she said.

Manhattan’s parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds. The rolling celebration will pass the Stonewall Inn, the famed Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and energized the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The site is now a national monument. The first Pride march was held in New York City in 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Later Sunday, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world’s largest Pride events, planned to head down Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. San Francisco’s mammoth City Hall is among the venues hosting a post-march party.

Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto were among the other major North American cities hosting Pride parades on Sunday.

Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo held their events earlier this month, and others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued orders and implemented policies targeting transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirmation surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports.

Peter McLaughlin said he’s lived in New York for years but had never attended the Pride parade. The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident said he felt compelled this year as a transgender man.

“A lot of people just don’t understand that letting people live doesn’t take away from their own experience, and right now it’s just important to show that we’re just people,” McLaughlin said.

Gabrielle Meighan, 23, of New Jersey, said she felt it was important to come out to this year’s celebrations because they come days after the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.

“It’s really important to vocalize our rights and state why it’s important for us to be included,” she said.

Manhattan on Sunday also hosted the Queer Liberation March, an activism-centered event launched in recent years amid criticism that the more mainstream parade had become too corporate.

Marchers holding signs that included “Gender affirming care saves lives” and “No Pride in apartheid” headed north from the city’s AIDS Memorial to Columbus Circle near Central Park.

Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship. American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.

NYC Pride said this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.

Marcelo and Shaffrey write for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — New York City on Tuesday closed the arrival center for immigrants it had established at the Roosevelt Hotel, a once-grand Manhattan hotel that had become an emblem of the city’s fraught efforts to manage the flood of new migrants when it opened two years ago.

The midtown hotel, located blocks from Grand Central Terminal, served as the first stop for tens of thousands of immigrants arriving in the city seeking free shelter and services, with migrant families lining up and sometimes even sleeping on the street outside the hotel waiting for a bed.

Monday was the center’s last full day in operation, and the hotel was vacant as of Tuesday afternoon, according to Mayor Eric Adams’ office. Services provided at the Roosevelt, including registration, legal assistance and medical care, are now being offered to immigrants at other shelter locations, the office said.

Adams announced the city was winding down its operation at the Roosevelt and other migrant shelters in February as the surge of immigration from the U.S. border with Mexico waned.

The city is currently housing more than 37,000 migrants across 170 sites, down from a peak of nearly 70,000 last January, officials said Tuesday. During the height of the migrant wave, New York saw an average of 4,000 arrivals a week. That’s now down to less than 100 new immigrants in the week that ended June 22, according to Adams’ office.

The number of new immigrants has steadily dropped in large part to stricter immigration measures imposed during the end of former President Biden’s administration as well as a broader immigration crackdown since President Trump took office in January.

The Adams administration also placed limits on how long immigrants could remain in shelters run by the city, which is legally obligated to provide temporary housing to anyone who asks.

More than 237,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York since April 2022, with more than 173,000 of them registered at the Roosevelt, city officials have said.

In recent months, the hotel became a prime target for the Trump administration, which claimed the Roosevelt was a hotbed for gang activity. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, citing those concerns, clawed back $80 million meant to reimburse the city for costs related to housing immigrants.

The future of the storied hotel, which the city had leased from its longtime owners, Pakistan’s government-owned airline, remains unclear. Representatives for the property didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.

The Roosevelt opened in 1924 and has more than 1,000 rooms. In its heyday, the hotel was known for its in-house band, which was led by jazz great Guy Lombardo. It also served as New York Gov. Thomas Dewey’s election-night headquarters during his failed 1948 presidential campaign.

Marcelo writes for the Associated Press.

June 16 (UPI) — Two court security officers were stabbed in an apparent “targeted attack” while screening people at metal detectors in the Lower Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday morning, the New York Police Department said.

At about 9:35 a.m, the man ran into the lobby and charged the officers, WCBS-TV reported.

Both officers were taken to a local hospital in stable condition, sources told WABC-TV. One person was slashed in the face and the other stabbed in the neck. A third officer was hurt after being thrown into a barrier.

In the shooting, surveillance video shows the man taking knife out of a bag, running at one of the victims, turning around and attacking the other.

“The assaults, captured on surveillance video, appeared preliminarily to be a targeted attack of the uniformed officers working security details at the courthouse,” a spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration said in a statement. “Several court officers immediately rushed to stop the assailant, subduing him near a bank of magnetometers, disarming him and taking him into custody.”

Police said the unnamed suspect had 18 prior arrests, including assaulting an officer. He is considered emotionally disturbed with past incidents at the courthouse, officials said.

The accused assailant didn’t have a scheduled hearing at the courthouse.

“I’ve been coming here for over 20 years. I’ve never seen an incident of that nature toward the court officers,” criminal defense attorney Charles Miller told WCBS. “It’s very unlikely to see people try to come in with weapons, because there’s magnetometers that would see them. But the overwhelming majority of what I see here are fights that happen between people in the hallway, the general public, usually that are connected in some way to the case.

“That’s why the court staff is primarily here to maintain security and order. Assaults directly against them are rare.”

Patrick Cullen, president of the New York State Supreme Court Officers Association, said the courthouse is at least 15% understaffed.

“Every courthouse needs more people,” Cullen told WCBS. “If somebody came in and attacked our officers right at the entrance, we could have had 100 officers there and this still may have happened, but the fact is that if we had more officers, someone would be less inclined to do this.”