month

The WNBA and its players union will not agree to another extension of the collective bargaining agreement after the deadline passes Friday night, WNBPA vice president Breanna Stewart said.

That does not mean players will strike or the league will lock them out. Stewart told reporters Thursday at a practice for the Unrivaled three-on-three league that players would continue to negotiate in good faith.

With the deadline just before midnight Friday, the league wouldn’t confirm that the sides won’t reach an extension. A spokesman did say the league would “continue to negotiate in good faith with the goal of reaching a deal as quickly as possible.”

“Our focus remains on reaching an agreement that significantly increases player compensation while ensuring the long-term growth of the business,” a spokesperson said.

The league and the players had two previous extensions and met several times this week. Any stalled negotiations could delay the start of the season. The last CBA was announced in the middle of January 2020, a month after it had been agreed to.

It easily could take two months from when a new CBA is reached to get to the start of free agency, which was supposed to begin this month.

While a strike or lockout isn’t imminent, both sides could change their viewpoints.

Stewart said calling a strike is “not something that we’re going to do right this second, but we have that in our back pocket.” The league hasn’t been considering a lockout, according to a person familiar with the decision. The person spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations.

As of Thursday, the sides remained far apart on many key issues, including salary and revenue sharing, and it seems unlikely a deal could be reached before Friday’s deadline.

Revenue sharing a sticking point in talks

The league’s most recent offer last month would guarantee a maximum base salary of $1 million that could reach $1.3 million through revenue sharing. That’s up from the current $249,000 and could grow to nearly $2 million over the life of the agreement, a person with knowledge of the negotiations told AP. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations.

Under the proposal, players would receive in excess of 70% of net revenue — though that would be their take of the profits after expenses are paid. Those expenses would include upgraded facilities, charter flights, five-star hotels, medical services, security and arenas.

The average salary this year would be more than $530,000, up from its current $120,000, and grow to more than $770,000 over the life of the agreement. The minimum salary would grow from its current $67,000 to approximately $250,000 in the first year, the person told the AP.

The proposal also would pay young stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers, who are all still on their rookie contracts, nearly double the league minimum.

The union’s counter proposal to the league would give players around 30% of the gross revenue. The players’ percentage would be from money generated before expenses for the first year and teams would have a $10.5-million salary cap to sign players. Under the union’s proposal, the revenue sharing percent would go up slightly each year.

Union wants expansion fees included; league saying no

The union feels that the $750 million in expansion fees that the league just received with the addition of franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia by 2030 should be considered revenue and included in projections. The league says that the money actually goes to all the current teams to make up for the future money they’ll be losing by dividing the total revenue by more franchises.

Other major sports leagues like the NBA, NHL and NFL don’t include expansion fees in their revenue-sharing structures. Major League Baseball’s salary structure is not tied to its revenue, so expansion fees don’t matter.

League wants players to pay for own housing

With the potential new minimum salary at approximately $250,000, the WNBA has said that like most every other pro league, players should pay for their own housing.
The union’s stance is that teams should continue to pay for players’ housing.

Why stalled negotiations could delay the season

An extended delay in getting a deal done could cause a number of problems, specifically getting the season started on time or even played for several reasons. There are several factors that indicate that time is near:

• Free agency: With nearly all the veterans free agents this offseason, this will be the biggest year in the league’s history as far as potential movement. Free agency was supposed to start this month. However, once a new CBA is reached, it could take both parties two months to get free agency started.
• Revenue-generating events could be delayed: The release of the schedule has been delayed. In the past the league tried to get it out before the holidays so teams could sell tickets. With so many players potentially changing teams as free agents, new merchandise wouldn’t be able to be sold.
• Expansion draft: With Portland and Toronto entering the league this year, an expansion draft has to be held. Last year when Golden State came into the WNBA, a draft was held in December. Teams need to figure out who they will be protecting from being selected in the draft, and that is made more complicated because of all the free agents.

LAAX, Switzerland — Two-time Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim said Thursday that she dislocated her shoulder in training and doesn’t know whether she will be able to compete at the Winter Games in Italy next month.

Kim posted footage of her fall from earlier this week on the halfpipe in Laax, Switzerland, where the world’s top snowboarders compete later this month in a key pre-Olympic tune-up. She landed a jump cleanly but lost an edge and went skittering across the pipe, face down.

Kim, who did not say which shoulder she hurt, said she is “trying to stay optimistic” about competing at the Olympics but “[doesn’t] have much clarity now.” The 25-year-old said she has an MRI scheduled for Friday that will reveal the extent of the damage.

“The positive thing is, I have range, I’m not in that much pain. I just don’t want it to keep popping out, which has happened,” she said. “I’m just trying to stay really optimistic. I feel really good about where my snowboarding is at right now, so I know the minute I get cleared and I’m good to go, I should be fine.”

Kim’s absence would deprive the Winter Games of one of its biggest stars and one of its best storylines. She is trying to become the first action-sports athlete to win three straight gold medals. Shaun White took home three golds, but they were spread out over five Games.

Kim was the breakout star of the 2018 Olympics, a bubbly teenager taking gold in her parents’ home country of South Korea. Four years ago in China, she won again, with that victory punctuated by her messages about the ups and downs of success and fame.

If healthy, she would be the heavy favorite to win again, but this injury off “the silliest fall,” as she called it, puts all that in question. Qualifying for the women’s halfpipe begins Feb. 11.

The Laax Open is scheduled for next weekend, and even if Kim were to get a clean bill of health, there is a chance she would head into the Olympics without having competed in the final of a contest this season.

Kim qualified for the U.S. team last year and has kept a light schedule. She fell during warm-ups for the final in Copper Mountain, Colo., last month and pulled out after hurting her shoulder then, as well. That injury was not believed to be serious.

With receiver Davante Adams and safety Quentin Lake returning to the lineup, the Rams are near full-strength for their NFC wild-card game against the Carolina Panthers on Saturday at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.

Adams, who leads the NFL with 14 touchdown catches, sat out three games because of a hamstring injury. He rejoins an offense that led the NFL in offense and scoring.

But Lake could be the main difference-maker for the Rams in a rematch of the Nov. 30 game between the teams.

Lake sustained an elbow injury during a Nov. 16 victory over the Seattle Seahawks and did not play in the Rams’ 31-28 defeat by the Panthers, a game in which Bryce Young passed for three touchdowns and the Rams gave up 164 yards rushing.

So coach Sean McVay is looking forward to having Lake back.

“It’s big because he’s so versatile and he’s so physical,” McVay said, adding, “He’s got this presence where you just feel better.”

In their loss to the Panthers, quarterback Matthew Stafford had two passes intercepted, one that was returned for a touchdown. He also lost a fumble.

Stafford of late has recaptured the form that has made him a favorite to win his first NFL most valuable player award. He has been named NFC offensive player of the month two months in a row.

So keeping the ball in Stafford’s hands and eliminating turnovers will be key for the Rams if they want to avenge their Week 13 loss to the Panthers.

A HUGE festival that is completely free to visit will land in the UK next month.

Bristol Light Festival will return to Bristol for 10 nights next month, between February 19 and 28.

One of the headline events recently announced will be an installation called The Lite Series.

Visitors will be able to see a number of illuminated hot air balloons gathered by Cameron Balloons, which when fired will create a burst of colour in the balloon.

The more people who fire the hot air balloons, the brighter they get and more sound plays from them.

Jess Siggers, marketing manager at Cameron Balloons, said: “Bristol’s skyline has been shaped by our balloons for generations, so we’re thrilled to bring that heritage back down to earth in an entirely new way for Bristol Light Festival.

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“The Lite Series invites everyone to feel the magic of ballooning up close.

“It’s playful, it’s interactive and above all, it celebrates the engineering and imagination that Bristol is famous for.”

Another exhibit at the festival will be an installation by artist Liz West, who will transform Cabot Circus’ multi-storey car park into a light show.

The entire festival will sprawl across the city and will host a number of events for the public to get involved in.

Other details about the festival will be announced in the coming weeks but in previous years activities and events have included a Neon Kids Rave.

The rave was free of charge and kids even ate for free.

Other family-friendly activities have included art clubs as well.

It isn’t just about families though, as there are plenty of adult activities on as well such as paint in the dark, dine in the dark and run club events.

And there are usually photography and walking tours.

A number of venues around the city usually have offers too, such as cheap drinks.

Last year’s festival brought in £11million to the city, with visitors spending £9.4million across the event.

Many people have taken to social media to express their excitement for the festival.

One person commented: “We’re coming up from Cornwall again for the festival ! Can’t wait was brilliant last year !”

Another added: “I can’t wait to return to epic Bristol.”

A third person said: “One of the highlights of Winter – can’t wait to see what spectacular light you’ll be bringing to the darker months!”

If you are looking for somewhere to stay in the city, there is a spa hotel with an award-winning restaurant and salt sauna.

Or you could head to another hotel with a sauna, that is opposite the historic railway station.

And for inspiration on what to do when you are there, the city has street art tours, 19th century hotels and ‘top-notch’ cuisine.

In other festival news, pop megastar in talks to play massive UK festival comeback show nine years after last British concert.

Plus, new farm-themed festival to launch in the UK and Jeremy Clarkson is headlining – with live music and tractor shows.

Exactly one year ago, I drove up Pacific Coast Highway just before dawn.

Toppled utility poles and downed wires littered the street. In a tunnel of thick black smoke, flurries of glowing red embers raced across the road, out to sea. Hours passed, but the sun never rose. Everything was gone.

In the face of all this horror, everyday people responded not with fear or hate, but with courage and love. It’s human nature — a reflex to disaster more certain than the sunrise.

Amid a chaotic evacuation in the Palisades, I watched residents use their minivans to pick up their neighbors who had been traveling on foot and shuttle them to safety. A volunteer community brigade marched door to door ensuring others got the evacuation orders.

In Altadena, employees with the small local water utilities raced across town protecting and fixing the water systems firefighters relied on. Afterward, hundreds volunteered with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to clear debris from the streets, parks and churches of Pasadena.

In the year that’s followed, the same locals have stepped up to hold their governments accountable and fill in where leadership was vacant — even when some people, including some of their peers — considered that work controversial. They’ve all nonetheless helped their neighbors in tangible, meaningful, ways.

Here are their reflections (edited for length and clarity) on the year and the futures they imagine.

Keegan Gibbs leads the Community Brigade program with the Los Angeles County Fire Department. During the Palisades fire, the group’s roughly 50 volunteers went door to door ensuring residents had evacuated, fought spot fires and transported animals to safety. The group also routinely helps homeowners understand how to harden their homes against wildfire. This fall, the brigade doubled its size, with new recruits going through basic firefighter training.

Gibbs: Across Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains, the Community Brigade envisions a critical mass of residents who have taken responsibility for their home “ignition zone,” creating neighborhoods where wildfire can move through the landscape without becoming a community-level disaster.

In this future, the Brigade is a trusted local institution and a proven model — demonstrating that shared responsibility and disciplined preparation can fundamentally change wildfire outcomes and be adapted across the West.

Kari Nadeau, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, helps lead the LA Fire HEALTH Study, a first-of-its-kind research effort by universities and hospitals to understand the fires’ contamination and the subsequent health impacts over a 10-year period. The researchers have found that firefighters who fought the L.A. blazes had elevated levels of mercury and lead in their blood compared with other wildland firefighters and that the fires corresponded with increased emergency room visits for heart attacks and respiratory illnesses.

Nadeau: I think,10 years from now, we’re going to look back and say, we really tested for as many exposures as we could in the air, water and soil, and then we looked at whether or not they affected short-term and long-term health outcomes. That will not only help L.A. and policymakers, but it’ll also be scalable to the rest of the world — because the human body is the human body.

Jane Lawton Potelle founded Eaton Fire Residents United, a grassroots organization of residents with still-standing homes contaminated by the Eaton fire. The group — led mostly by women — assembled the first comprehensive evidence of widespread contamination within homes. Now, they’re pushing public health agencies to adopt best practices to remediate homes and keep residents safe, and they’re calling on insurance regulators to ensure survivors have the financial means to follow them.

Potelle: If the government doesn’t intervene, then five to 10 years from now our communities will still be living with contamination in homes and soil, driving preventable health harms while shifting massive long-term costs onto families.

EFRU hopes to see the “clearance before occupancy” approach communitywide so that all surviving homes, schools, businesses and public spaces affected by fallout from the L.A. fires have been restored to verifiably safe and healthy living conditions.

Spencer Pratt, second from right, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, at an anniversary event where he announced he was running for mayor.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Spencer Pratt is a reality TV star-turned-fire accountability advocate, turned mayoral candidate who has successfully lobbied Congress to open an investigation into the handling of the Palisades fire response and recovery. He has helped lead and publicize lawsuits against the city and state and provided some of the first evidence that the Los Angeles Fire Department knowingly left the Lachman fire smoldering, limited its firefighting operations to avoid sensitive plants and subsequently covered it up.

Pratt: The most important lesson I learned this past year is that you cannot rely on our state and local government. … I remain hopeful that we can rebuild our family town. If the state and local government won’t give us the opportunity to start, I will continue asking the federal government to step in and help. There has to be a way to cut through the red tape and get people back to their hometown.

Pablo Alvarado is the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which not only cleared Pasadena’s streets but also trained hundreds of workers on how to safely operate in the burn areas, distributed more than a thousand personal protective equipment kits, and provided assistance to more than 13,000 families affected by the fires and ICE raids.

Alvarado: We don’t know what this political year will bring, or what the next five or 10 years will look like. But we do know this truth: Rebuilding will happen, and it is impossible to do it without migrant labor. Our work makes reconstruction possible. Yet while our labor is welcomed, our rights are not respected.

From Katrina to these fires, we have learned the same lesson again and again: No one is coming to save workers — not FEMA, not local governments, not corporations. That is why our message has always been clear: Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. Only the people save the people.

Hundreds of Palisades fire survivors gather in Palisades Village to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Palisades fire on Wednesday. Residents and others were demanding that the government help accountable for its missteps, demand relief for those trying to rebuild and demand for more comprehensive emergency planning.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

More recent wildfire news

On Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of the fires, survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires returned to their communities to mourn the loss of their neighborhoods and neighbors, and to demand accountability and action from their governments. You can read our coverage here.

A year into recovery, Times reporter and Altadena native Colleen Shalby reflects on her community’s devastating loss, the pride she feels for her hometown and her persistent hope for the next generation of Altadenans.

At a fire anniversary protest in the Palisades, Spencer Pratt announced his candidacy for Los Angeles mayor. “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles, and I’m done waiting for someone to take real action,” he said.

The city of Los Angeles routinely ignored state fire safety regulations dictating the width and slope of roads for evacuation and firefighter access as it permitted development in areas with very high fire hazard, a new lawsuit alleges.

A few last things in climate news

Federal tax credits for residential solar, batteries and heat pumps expired at the end of 2025, reports Bloomberg’s Todd Woody. Tariffs probably will also push up prices for solar panels and batteries, which are primarily imported from China and Vietnam and other countries.

One company with deep ties to California stands to benefit from President Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela: Chevron. It is the only foreign oil company to maintain continued operations in Venezuela through decades of tumultuous politics, The Times’ Jack Dolan reports.

As Congress works to avert an end-of-January government shutdown, its latest spending package would largely keep the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget intact, reports Liza Gross for Inside Climate News. The Trump administration had initially proposed a 55% cut to the agency’s budget; the latest proposal cuts it by only 5%.

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.

CARACAS, Venezuela — The United States hit Venezuela with a “large-scale strike” early Saturday and said its president, Nicolás Maduro, had been captured and flown out of the country after months of stepped-up pressure by Washington — an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Trump on social media hours after the attack.

Multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas, the capital, as Maduro’s government immediately accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations. The Venezuelan government called it an “imperialist attack” and urged citizens to take to the streets.

It was not immediately clear who was running the country, and Maduro’s whereabouts were not immediately known. Trump announced the developments on Truth Social shortly after 4:30 a.m. ET. Under Venezuelan law the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would take power. There was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement after the strike.

“We do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores,” Rodriguez said. “We demand proof of life.”

Maduro, Trump said, “has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow.” He set a news conference for later Saturday morning.

The legal implications of the strike under U.S. law were not immediately clear. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) posted on X that he had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who briefed him on the strike. Rubio told Lee that Maduro “has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.”

The White House did not immediately respond to queries on where Maduro and his wife were being flown to. Maduro was indicted in March 2020 on “narco-terrorism” conspiracy charges in the Southern District of New York.

Maduro last appeared on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials in Caracas.

The explosions in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, early on the third day of 2026 — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report hearing and seeing the explosions. It was not immediately clear if there were casualties on either side. The attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes and it was unclear if more actions lay ahead, though Trump said in his post that the strikes were carried out “successfully.”

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ban on U.S. commercial flights in Venezuelan airspace because of “ongoing military activity” ahead of the explosions.

The strike came after the Trump administration spent months escalating pressure on Maduro. The CIA was behind a drone strike last week at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.

For months, Trump had threatened that he could soon order strikes on targets on Venezuelan land following months of attacks on boats accused of carrying drugs. Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power.

Some streets in Caracas fill up

Armed individuals and uniformed members of a civilian militia took to the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. But in other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.

Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape sky as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed an urban landscape with cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. Unintelligible conversation could be heard in the background. The videos were verified by The Associated Press.

Smoke could be seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power.

“The whole ground shook. This is horrible. We heard explosions and planes,” said Carmen Hidalgo, a 21-year-old office worker, her voice trembling. She was walking briskly with two relatives, returning from a birthday party. “We felt like the air was hitting us.”

Venezuela’s government responded to the attack with a call to action. “People to the streets!” it said in a statement. “The Bolivarian Government calls on all social and political forces in the country to activate mobilization plans and repudiate this imperialist attack.”

The statement added that Maduro had “ordered all national defense plans to be implemented” and declared “a state of external disturbance.” That state of emergency gives him the power to suspend people’s rights and expand the role of the armed forces.

The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, issued a warning to American citizens in the country, saying it was “aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas.”

“U.S. citizens in Venezuela should shelter in place,” the warning said.

Reaction emerges slowly

Inquiries to the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command since Trump’s social media post went unanswered. The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country to the north, was off limits “due to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted his potential concerns, reflecting a view from the right flank in the Congress. “I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Lee said on X.

It was not clear if the U.S. Congress had been officially notified of the strikes.

The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.

Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep reservations and flat out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling on boats near the Venezuelan coast and the Congress has not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.

Regional reaction was not immediately forthcoming in the early hours of Saturday. Cuba, however, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, called for the international community to respond to what president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called “the criminal attack.” “Our zone of peace is being brutally assaulted,” he said on X. Iran’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes.

President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: “Long live freedom, dammit!”

The U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean since early September. As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes is 35 and the number of people killed is at least 115, according to numbers announced by the Trump administration.

They followed a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America, including the arrival in November of the nation’s most advanced aircraft carrier, which added thousands more troops to what was already the largest military presence in the region in generations.

Trump has justified the boat strikes as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. and asserted that the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.

Cano and Toropin write for the Associated Press. Toropin and AP journalist Lisa Mascaro reported from Washington.

The city is, by some counts, the hottest in the world. However, in January, the coldest time of the year, the thermometer rarely rises much higher than 20 °C, while staying in the balmy mid-teens

It’s possible to get to the hottest city in the world for £78 this month.

Kuwait City is, by all measures, ferociously hot. On July 21, the mercury reached 53.9C in Mitribah, which is near to the Capital. That temperature was verified by the World Meteorological Organization as the highest ever recorded in Asia.

Given how dangerous such high temperatures can be, it’s advisable to visit Kuwait in the winter or spring months, rather than the summer. In January, the coldest time of the year, the thermometer rarely rises much higher than 20 °C, while staying in the balmy mid-teens.

If escaping the UK’s frosty shores for a spot of Kuwaiti sunshine appeals, then you’re in luck. Flight prices are relatively low at this time of the year. Skyscanner lists flights from London for £78 return this January, with services from Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester coming in at under £100.

Waleed Alkhamees has lived his whole life in Kuwait City – a destination the tour guide describes as one that “no one ever moves away from”. Yet this Middle Eastern metropolis holds the dubious distinction of being the planet’s most scorching urban centre. During 2021, the mercury climbed above 50C (122F) for 19 consecutive days.

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When we caught up with Waleed, he told us how locals deal with the weather. “Everybody is trying to keep indoors, as everywhere in Kuwait is air-conditioned. Most of the locals escape from the heat and go outside Kuwait during the summer. Businesses close down. By law you can’t work outdoors from 10am to 5pm, so the workers work from midnight until the morning.”

Waleed has observed the average temperatures inching up year on year. Each summer, he notes, it seems to get a tad hotter. While it’s always been a place where the mercury soars, residents of the largely concrete city are finding themselves making more and more adaptations just to manage.

The state heavily subsidises electricity – funded alongside healthcare and education from vast oil reserves that keep the tax rate at zero – enabling most of the 3.3 million city dwellers to run their air conditioning units non-stop.

Nearly all enclosed public spaces are filled with artificial cold air throughout the day and night, while streets are enveloped in clouds of cooling water. A government prohibition on outdoor work from 10am to 5pm during the summer months aims to prevent people from collapsing and dying in weather conditions that pose a constant threat to human health.

However, if you visit Kuwait City in the summer, you might notice that this rule isn’t strictly enforced. Workers, often recent immigrants, defy the heat and the ban to labour on the streets, their bodies fully covered from head to toe for some respite from the relentless sun.

Waleed guides tourists around the city, showcasing landmarks such as the spaceship-like Kuwait Towers, which tower over the city as a clear symbol of its wealth in a style reminiscent of the 1970s. The Grand Mosque and the old Souk are the other major attractions.

His tour groups typically comprise around 80% Americans, with the remainder being European visitors – a demographic that mirrors the significant US military presence at Camp Arifjan in the country’s south-east. Even during the scorching months of June and July, tours operate year-round, with visitors seldom stepping out of air-conditioned vehicles whilst discovering the city.

Western travellers seeking a refreshing beer in the evening will be disappointed in Kuwait, which maintains a rigorous and strictly enforced alcohol ban, even within hotels frequented by tourists. For those brave enough to trust their sun cream, the city’s coastline proves particularly attractive.

The expansive sandy shoreline ranks among the longest in the Middle East and boasts excellent diving locations.

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Despite the unrelenting heat – so extreme it forces pigeons to stay grounded during parts of the day and has even killed off marine wildlife in the bays – Waleed insists his fellow citizens have no intention of leaving.

“Kuwait City has gotten hotter. For years now. It is hotter and hotter every year. I am worried about global warming. It’s half a degree every couple of years. But we won’t move away. Kuwaitis never move away. There are lots of benefits in Kuwait,” he explained.

“The currency is the highest currency in the world, we pay zero tax, everything is subsidised by the government, fuel cost is half that of Saudi Arabia. Medication and education is free. People, they don’t move away.”

A U.S. Army squadron tasked with a reconnaissance mission in South Korea was deactivated last month, a congressional report showed Thursday, amid speculation that Washington could consider a troop drawdown in the allied country in a force posture adjustment.

The 5th Air Cavalry Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment (5-17 ACS) at Camp Humphreys, a key U.S. base in Pyeongtaek, some 60 kilometers south of Seoul, ceased its operation on Dec. 15, a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report said, citing information from the U.S. Army. It had served in Korea to support the 2nd Infantry Division since May 2022.

Its deactivation as part of an Army transformation initiative came amid lingering concerns that U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration could seek a ground troop reduction of the 28,500-strong U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) as part of an adjustment to better counter threats from an assertive China.

5-17 ACS is known to have had hundreds of personnel, as well as aviation and reconnaissance assets, including AH-64E Apache helicopters and RQ-7B Shadow drones. It is unclear whether the deactivation means the pullout of the unit’s personnel and assets or whether there will be a replacement unit.

Comment from the U.S. Army on the deactivation was not immediately available.

A day after the 5-17 ACS deactivation, the Army restructured the 2nd Infantry Division’s Combat Aviation Brigade Medical Evacuation (CAB MEDEVAC) unit, the CRS report said without elaboration.

5-17 ACS was activated in 2022, taking over the role of what had been rotational air cavalry squadrons to provide more stability to U.S. defense operations and enhance defense readiness in South Korea.

Speculation about a potential U.S. troop cut in Korea has persisted as Washington calls for Seoul to take greater responsibility for its own defense while seeking to bolster U.S. capabilities to better address potential China-related contingencies, including those related to Taiwan.

That speculation was reinforced as last year’s key security document between Seoul and Washington omitted language committing the U.S. to maintaining the “current” USFK troop level, with U.S. officials emphasizing the importance of “capabilities” rather than the troop numbers.

Last May, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. was weighing the idea of pulling out roughly 4,500 troops from South Korea and moving them to other locations in the Indo-Pacific, including Guam. The Pentagon dismissed it as “not true,” reaffirming that America remains “fully” committed to the defense of South Korea.

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Actor Mickey Rourke faces eviction from his Los Angeles home after failing to pay rent.

Rourke, whose birth name is Philip Andre Rourke Jr., received a three-day notice to pay rent or vacate the premises on Dec. 18 and had failed to comply, according to court documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday.

At the time of the notice, he owed $59,100 in unpaid rent.

A representative for Rourke did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In March, Rourke signed a lease for the three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house for $5,200 a month; it was subsequently raised to $7,000 a month, states the court filings.

A Zillow listing describes the property as a “nicely upgraded Spanish bungalow” built in 1926. Raymond Chandler was said to have resided there for two years in the 1940s.

The property’s owner, Eric Goldie, is requesting compensation for attorney‘s fees and for damages. A lawyer for Goldie was unavailable for comment.

A former boxer, Rourke, 73, turned to acting with small roles in the 1980 film “Heaven’s Gate” and “Body Heat” a year later, before earning acclaim for his role in 1982’s “Diner.”

After a slate of leading roles in a number of movies including “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” “9 1/2 Weeks” and “Rumble Fish,” Rourke‘s film career took a nosedive, with his off-screen antics frequently overshadowing his acting.

“I lost everything. My house, my wife, my credibility, my career,” he told The Times in an interview in 2008. “I just all had all this anger from my childhood, which was really shame, not anger, and used it as armor and machismo to cover up my wounds. Unfortunately, the way I acted really frightened people, although it was really just me who was scared. But I was like this person who was short-circuited and I didn’t know how to fix myself.”

In 2005 he reemerged with the neo-noir action thriller “Sin City.”

Three years later, Rourke’s portrayal of aging, washed up wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, in the Darren Aronofsky film “The Wrestler,” earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for lead actor.

Rourke’s return to the big screen has not been an entirely smooth ride.

In April, he agreed to exit “Celebrity Big Brother UK” after producers warned him over the use of “inappropriate language and instances of unacceptable behavior,” according to a statement a spokesperson for the show released at the time.

His remarks allegedly included comments about JoJo Siwa’s sexuality

Following his departure from the reality show, his manager announced that he was pursuing legal action over a pay dispute, claiming that the show had disrespected her client by “publicly embarrassing him” and declined to pay him, according to People.

NEW UK passports are being introduced in the UK – with a very different front cover and inside look.

From this month, all new passports issued will have King Charles‘ coat of arms.

This replaces the Queen Elizabeth II coat of arms, which has been on the front for decades.

It is thought as many as 300 have already been issued in the country already.

The pages inside the passport are also getting a new look.

Four of the UK’s most famous landscapes will feature on the pages, from each of the four UK nations.

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Ben Nevis, the Lake District, Three Cliffs Bay and the Giant’s Causeway are all illustrated in watercolour across the inside pages.

But inside the passport will also be a range of new features which will make it the ‘most secure passport in history’.

Each page has a unique passport number using laser marking, while new translucent designs and holographs have also been added.

Migration and citizenship minister Mike Tapp said the redesign is “a new era in the history of the British passport”.

He added: “It also demonstrates our commitment to outstanding public service – celebrating British heritage while ensuring our passports remain among the most secure and trusted in the world for years to come.”

The biggest change to the UK passport came back in 2020 when it reverted back to navy, from burgundy.

This was due to the UK leaving the EU, with the European Union wording also removed from the front.

Burgundy passports are still able to be used until they expire, although there are some rules still catching people out.

Before, up to 10 months could be rolled over from old passports to new ones, making some have as much as 10 years, 10 months on them.

However, new rules no longer allow those extra months, meaning your expiry date may be incorrect.

Thousands of Brits are thought to have been caught out by the confusing rules.

To avoid this, make sure to look at the start date and add on 10 years, to get your real expiry date.

And check the rules of the country you are visiting too – some require as many as six months left to be allowed to enter.

And here is why you should avoid certain stamps in your passport.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has indicated that the U.S. has “hit” a facility in South America as he wages a pressure campaign on Venezuela, but the U.S. offered no other details.

Trump made the comments in what seemed to be an impromptu radio interview Friday.

The president, who called radio host John Catsimatidis during a program on WABC radio, was discussing U.S. strikes on alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, which have killed at least 105 people in 29 known strikes since early September.

“I don’t know if you read or saw, they have a big plant or a big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So, we hit them very hard.”

Trump did not offer any additional details in the interview, including what kind of attack may have occurred. The Pentagon on Monday referred questions to the White House, which did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or one of the U.S. military’s social media accounts has in the past typically announced every boat strike in a post on X, but they have not posted any notice of any strike on a facility.

The press office of Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment on Trump’s statement.

Trump for months has suggested he may conduct land strikes in South America, in Venezuela or possibly another country, and in recent weeks has been saying the U.S. would move beyond striking boats and would strike on land “soon.”

In October, Trump confirmed he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. The agency did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.

Along with the strikes, the U.S. has sent warships, built up military forces in the region, seized two oil tankers and pursued a third.

The Trump administration has said it is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and seeking to stop the flow of narcotics into the United States.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from power.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in an interview with Vanity Fair published this month that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro ‘cries uncle.’”

Price writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Konstantin Toropin in Washington and Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of federal immigration judges in California have been fired, retired or quit since the start of the Trump administration.

The reduction follows a trend in immigration courts nationwide and constitutes, critics say, an attack on the rule of law that will lead to yet more delays in an overburdened court system.

The reduction in immigration judges has come as the administration scaled up efforts to deport immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Trump administration officials have described the immigration court process, in which proceedings can take years amid a backlog of millions of cases, as an impediment to their goals.

Nationwide, there were 735 immigration judges last fiscal year, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the arm of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. At least 97 have been fired since President Trump took office and about the same number have resigned or retired, according to the union representing immigration judges.

California has lost at least 35 immigration judges since January, according to Mobile Pathways, a Berkeley-based organization that analyzes immigration court data. That’s down from 132. The steepest drop occurred at the San Francisco Immigration Court, which has lost more than half its bench.

“A noncitizen might win their case, might lose their case, but the key question is, did they receive a hearing?” said Emmett Soper, who worked at the Justice Department before becoming an immigration judge in Virginia in 2017. “Up until this administration, I had always been confident that I was working in a system that, despite its flaws, was fundamentally fair.”

The administration intends to fill some judge positions, and in new immigration judge job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere seeks candidates who want to be a “deportation judge” and “restore integrity and honor to our Nation’s Immigration Court system.”

The immigration judges union called the job listings “insulting.”

Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that he was elected to “remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that.”

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he added.

The National Assn. of Immigration Judges said it expects a wave of additional retirements at the end of this month.

“My biggest concern is for the people whose lives are left in limbo. What can they count on when the ground is literally shifting every moment that they’re here?” said Amber George, who was fired last month from the San Francisco Immigration Court. “Our government institutions are losing their legitimacy.”

Because immigration courts operate under the Justice Department, their priorities typically shift from one presidential administration to the next, but the extreme changes taking place have renewed longtime calls for immigration courts to become independent of the executive branch.

The Trump administration recently added 36 judges; 25 of them are military lawyers serving in temporary positions.

This summer, the Pentagon authorized up to 600 military lawyers to work for the Department of Justice. That took place after the department changed the requirements for temporary immigration judges, removing the need for immigration law experience.

The Department of Justice did not respond to specific questions, but said judges must be impartial and that the agency is obligated to take action against those who demonstrate systemic bias.

Former judges say that, because terminations have happened with no advance notice, remaining court staff have often scrambled to get up to speed on reassigned cases.

Ousted judges described a pattern: In the afternoon, sometimes while presiding over a hearing, they receive a short email stating that they are being terminated pursuant to Article II of the Constitution. Their names are swiftly removed from the Justice Department website.

Jeremiah Johnson is one of five judges terminated recently from the San Francisco Immigration Court.

Johnson said he worries the Trump administration is circumventing immigration courts by making conditions so unbearable that immigrants decide to drop their cases.

The number of detained immigrants has climbed to record levels since January, with more than 65,000 in custody. Immigrants and lawyers say the conditions are inhumane, alleging medical neglect, punitive solitary confinement and obstructed access to legal counsel. Requests by immigrants for voluntary departure, which avoids formal deportation, have surged in recent months.

Many of those arrests have happened at courthouses, causing immigrants to avoid their legal claims out of fear of being detained and forcing judges to order them removed in absentia.

“Those are ways to get people to leave the United States without seeing a judge, without due process that Congress has provided,” Johnson said. “It’s a dismantling of the court system.”

A sign posted outside the San Francisco Immigration Court in October protests enforcement actions by immigration agents. The court has lost more than half of its immigration judges.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

The judges in San Francisco’s Immigration Court have historically had higher asylum approval rates than the national average. Johnson said grant rates depend on a variety of circumstances, including whether a person is detained or has legal representation, their country of origin and whether they are adults or children.

In November, the military judges serving in immigration courts heard 286 cases and issued rulings in 110, according to Mobile Pathways. The military judges issued deportation orders in 78% of the cases — more often than other immigration judges that month, who ordered deportations in 63% of cases.

“They’re probably following directions — and the military is very good at following directions — and it’s clear what their directions are that are given by this administration,” said Mobile Pathways co-founder Bartlomiej Skorupa. He cautioned that 110 cases are a small sample size and that trends will become clearer in the coming months.

Former immigration judges and their advocates say that appointing people with no immigration experience and little training makes for a steep learning curve and the possibility of due process violations.

“There are multiple concerns here: that they’re temporary, which could expose them to greater pressure to decide cases in a certain way; and also they lack experience in immigration law, which is an extremely complex area of practice,” said Ingrid Eagly, an immigration law professor at UCLA.

Immigration courts have a backlog of more than 3 million cases. Anam Petit, who served as an immigration judge in Virginia until September, said the administration’s emphasis on speedy case completions has to be balanced against the constitutional right to a fair hearing.

“There are not enough judges to hear those cases, and this administration [is] taking it upon themselves to fire a lot of experienced and trained judges who can hear those cases and can mitigate that backlog,” she said.

Complementary bills introduced in the U.S. Senate and House this month by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) would prevent the appointment of military lawyers as temporary immigration judges and impose a two-year limit of service.

“The Trump administration’s willingness to fire experienced immigration judges and hire inexperienced or temporary ‘deportation judges,’ especially in places like California, has fundamentally impacted the landscape of our justice system,” Schiff said in a statement announcing the bill.

The bills have little chance in the Republican-controlled Congress but illustrate how significantly Democrats — especially in California — oppose the administration’s changes to immigration courts.

Former Immigration Judge Tania Nemer, a dual citizen of Lebanon and the U.S., sued the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi this month, alleging that she was illegally terminated in February because of her gender, ethnic background and political affiliation. In 2023, Nemer ran for judicial office in Ohio as a Democrat.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, seen here at the White House in October, has dismissed complaints by a former immigration judge who alleged she was fired without cause.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

Bondi addressed the lawsuit in a Cabinet meeting.

“Most recently, yesterday, I was sued by an immigration judge who we fired,” she said Dec. 2. “One of the reasons she said she was a woman. Last I checked, I was a woman as well.”

Other former judges have challenged their terminations through the federal Merit Systems Protection Board.

Johnson, of San Francisco, is one of those. He filed his appeal this month, claiming that he was not given cause for termination.

“My goal is to be reinstated,” he said. “My colleagues on the bench, our court was vibrant. It was a good place to work, despite all the pressures.”

Almost everything was bad.

Every January I try to escape Britain’s gloom for sun and wine that doesn’t cost £8 a glass. I convince my long-suffering husband to log off and join me on my yearly escapades to sunny and cheaper places like Sri Lanka and Costa Rica. In January 2025 I was itching for a new destination and ‘the Egypt saga’ was set in motion.

Cut back to Christmas 2024 when, fuelled by mulled wine and poor judgement, I was doom-scrolling and found a deal that stopped me in my tracks: almost four weeks in an all-inclusive resort in Hurghada, flights included, for just under £1,700 for both of us. I booked immediately. No research. No caution. I was so giddy with the adrenaline of having bagged a bargain I forgot the first rule of resort booking: always check the reviews. Always.

“How bad could it possibly be though?” I dreamed as I packed. As a freelancer I intended to ‘work’ during my extended jaunt – preferably with a pina colada in hand like I have seen other smug ‘world citizens’ do on Instagram. My husband stayed suspiciously quiet.

Our budget booking promised a “four-star resort and aqua park and private beach” so I was fully expecting spacious, stylish rooms with plush bedding, multiple delicious dining options, and peaceful pools and spas to unwind in after a busy morning doing important writing and sharing my new life on Instagram. In a plot twist no-one saw coming what we actually got was a rundown bargain-bin resort that clearly hadn’t been updated since 1987 with the ‘private beach’ a bus ride away.

While certain parts were pleasant (I really liked the towering palm trees, our room balcony, and the abundance of resident cats) there were vast areas that needed an update and some serious deep cleaning.

Shabby and dirty room decor, exposed wiring, freezing cold pools, and screeching groups of budget holiday punters who were already drunk by 10am. It seems Egypt’s idea of four stars is very different from mine. “Swanky”, apparently, is a relative term.

Because I’m “annoyingly positive” (according to my family) I earnestly declared that we would make “the best of it” while stepping over broken paving slabs as Pharrell Williams played on loop. However my eternal optimism eventually faltered when I tried to work.

The “free wifi” was confined to the smoke-filled chaotic lobby where everyone was glued to YouTube on their phones. You couldn’t send so much as an email as the connection was utterly dire. This meant we had to buy local sim cards with data, which felt like being back in the dial-up era. Work completely stalled so we headed to the pool, abandoning all hope of finishing my mountain of assignments. Future me could sort that out.

If blaring 2010-era music was stressful being hassled by resort staff while lounging by an icy pool was worse. Headphones, fake naps, and avoiding eye contact didn’t help. Every 20 seconds someone asked if we wanted a photoshoot, a massage, or tickets to the resort party. Yes, a party you’ve technically already paid for. Joy. To be fair I know next to nothing about all-inclusives. Most of my travel has been DIY so I was unprepared for many aspects of resort life.

I totally appreciate that staff earn most of their money from commissions but I’m only human; I have only so much patience for endless sales pitches when I’m trying to relax and drink lukewarm wine at 11am.

Back in our extremely basic room (certainly no Egyptian cotton sheets here) sleep escaped us as deafening music went on into the early hours. I’m pretty sure I now know all the lyrics to Rihanna’s Pon de Replay. Come, Mr DJ, won’t you turn the music down? I am old and tired.

Food-wise I also hadn’t considered how eating the same reheated trays of dubious pasta, watery stews, and charred meat from the all-inclusive buffet could get quite repetitive. And, yes, prompt several frantic loo dashes.

On top of that there was an awkward expectation to tip every time we sat down to eat even though the whole point of “all-inclusive” is that you’ve already paid to serve yourself from the questionable buffet.

Salvation did not arrive in the form of alcohol. The wine tasted like dishwater, the cocktails like ground-down Fruit Pastilles, yet I remain in awe of my fellow Brits who somehow managed to down enough terrible booze to render a rhino comatose.

The worst part, really, is that I’ve been to Egypt’s historic capital, Cairo, enough to know that Egyptian food and drink are worth celebrating.

Koshari, ful medames, tameya, grilled kebabs, stuffed vegetables, molokhiyya: I was ready to feast like a queen. Instead local options at the resort were sparse and what they did serve was a pale shadow of the rich, fragrant dishes I’d enjoyed in Cairo. One mediocre bite and I mourned my lost koshari (a bonkers mix of grains, legumes, and pasta).

So why, you might reasonably ask, did we not call it quits, check out, and head home after failing spectacularly to live the #nomad dream?

To take a short break from being a negative Nancy what actually saved us from despair was the town of Hurghada itself. This seaside strip is the second biggest town on the Red Sea and is one of Egypt’s busiest holiday destinations. Home to world-renowned coral reefs, bazaars, bars, restaurants, and hotels there’s actually plenty to do once you step outside the resort. Rather than wallow in buyer’s remorse we spent as much time as possible exploring Sakalla, the frenetic town centre, Hurghada’s marina, and the kaleidoscope-coloured coral reefs.

Who needs tacky poolside entertainment when, for around £25 each, you can hop on a dive boat and swim among shoals of fish and even pods of dolphins as you explore vibrant coral reefs? I honestly couldn’t believe that we witnessed dolphins in the wild in turquoise waters for less than the cost of a sad lunch in Britain.

This is what you need to come to Hurghada for – not cheap resorts but instead to float in clear waters as clownfish, angelfish, and parrotfish dart in and out of reefs.

Over in Hurghada’s surprisingly swish marina we discovered a large yacht harbour lined with shops with restaurants and buzzing bars offering outdoor seating. Here we escaped the beige hotel buffet and feasted on meaty shawarma and sweet, flaky baklava.

There are also plenty of excursions and day trips from Hurghada to keep you busy. Instead of paying the resort’s extortionate prices we haggled with local operators like seasoned diplomats. Best decision of the trip.

We booked a day-long desert safari by quad bike and 4×4 vehicle, including dinner and stargazing in a traditional Bedouin village, for around £23 each including pickup.

Hurghada sits at the edge of the Eastern Desert – a vast sweep of volcanic hills, sand flats, stony plateaus, and wind-carved gullies that look like a film set. It stretches from the Nile to the Red Sea and is where tourists head for quad biking, camel riding, and desert camps.

First they handed me my own quad bike. Within minutes I was tearing across the desert like I’d been cast in Mad Max, sand smacking me in the face as I tried to remember whether I’d purchased travel insurance. The desert rolled out around us in every direction: golden ridges, jagged red mountains, and the glorious sound of silence.

After my brief yet glorious action-hero era we swapped the quad bikes for a jeep. The driver treated dunes like a Top Gear challenge, launching us over rises and plummeting into valleys with the latent enthusiasm of a man who has never Googled “spinal compression injury”.

The scenery was astonishing: jagged dark-red mountains in the distance, rippled sand glowing gold, and long stretches of valley that made Britain feel very far away indeed.

Eventually, after enough bumps to rearrange my internal organs, we reached a small Bedouin village where we sipped sweet tea, learned about desert life, and watched a spectacular sunset.

As the sun dropped behind the mountains the whole landscape exploded in colour and, for the first time for the entire trip, I actually stopped complaining.

But the serenity didn’t last. Because eventually we had to return to our subpar resort where music boomed, food was abysmal, and the pool was arctic cold. And that’s when it hit me – perhaps the issue wasn’t Egypt.

The problem was my delusional belief that I could be a ‘digital nomad’ in a super-budget place where the wifi barely loads a weather app. Instagram told me I could work carefree from a sun lounger, cocktail in hand, living my best life. Reality suggests I need an actual desk, a functioning internet connection, and maybe fewer drunk tourists vomiting into a nearby plant pot. Yup, British people take all-inclusive bars extremely seriously.

Here’s the thing I should have known by now. In travel, as in life, you get exactly what you pay for. During my 20s, while backpacking on the cheap, I stayed in three-dollar-a-night hostels with sanitary conditions so questionable the Red Cross would have intervened.

I’m older now though. I like comfort and have learnt the hard way that “four-star” can mean very different things depending on the destination.

As an introduction to resort life this was certainly character-building. And while Hurghada itself was brilliant I have accepted that working in all-inclusive is a fantasy best left to influencers who only have to upload a single staged #blessed photo and lie down on the lounger again.

It’s safe to say that lessons have been learned and my ego has been checked. This travel writer has been suitably humbled and will do better. Next time I’ll stick to my DIY trips, read the fine print, and stop pretending a resort pool is a suitable workspace.

WASHINGTON — When Charlie Kirk was killed by an assassin this fall, Republican leaders credited the organization he founded for enabling President Trump’s return to power.

Now that organization is mobilizing behind Vice President JD Vance.

Uninterested in a competitive Republican primary in 2028, Turning Point USA plans to deploy representatives across Iowa’s 99 counties in the coming months to build the campaign infrastructure it believes could deliver Vance, a Midwesterner from nearby Ohio, a decisive victory, potentially short-circuiting a fractious GOP race, insiders said.

It is the latest move in a quiet effort by some in Trump’s orbit to clear the field of viable competitors. Earlier this month, Marco Rubio, the secretary of State previously floated by Trump as a possible contender, appeared to take himself out of the running.

“If Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair.

After Kirk’s widow, Erika, endorsed Vance on stage at Turning Point USA’s annual conference in Arizona last week, a straw poll of attendees found that 84% would support Vance in the coming primaries. Yet, wider public polling offers a different picture.

A CNN poll conducted in early December found that Vance held a plurality of Republican support for 2028, at 22%, with all other potential candidates, such as Rubio and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, registering in single digits.

The remaining 64% told pollsters they had “no one specific in mind,” reflecting an open field with plenty of room for other figures to gain ground.

While a recent Gallup poll found that 91% of Republicans approve of Vance’s job performance as vice president — an encouraging number entering a partisan primary — only 39% of Americans across party lines view him positively in the role, setting Vance up for potential challenges should he win the nomination.

Potential presidential candidates on both sides of the political aisle are expected to assess their chances over the next year, before primary season officially kicks off, after the midterm elections in November.

Closing out the Turning Point USA conference, Vance called for party unity amid escalating conflicts among right-wing influencers over the acceptability of racism and antisemitism within Republican politics.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said. “Every American is invited. We don’t care if you’re white or Black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring, or somewhere in between.”

Charlie Kirk, he added, “trusted all of you to make your own judgment. And we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”

Vance’s remarks drew criticism from some on the right for appearing to tolerate bigotry within the party. The vice president himself has been subjected to racist rhetoric, with Nick Fuentes — a far-right podcaster who has praised Adolf Hitler — repeatedly directing attacks at Vance’s wife and children over their Indian ancestry.

“Let me be clear — anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s—,” Vance said in an interview last week, referring to President Biden’s former press secretary. “That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.”

In the same interview, Vance praised Tucker Carlson, another far-right podcaster who has defended Fuentes on free speech grounds, as a “friend of mine,” noting that he supported Vance as Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024.

Trump has floated Vance as his potential successor multiple times without ever explicitly endorsing his nomination, calling him “very capable” and the “most likely” choice for the party.

“He’s the vice president,” Trump said in August. “Certainly he’s doing a great job, and he would be probably favored at this point.”

Several of Trump’s most ardent supporters have pushed the president to seek a third term in 2028, despite a provision of the Constitution, in the 22nd Amendment, barring him from doing so.

Trump himself has said the Constitution appears clear on the matter. But Steve Bannon, an architect of Trump’s historic 2016 campaign and one of his first White House strategists, continues to advocate a path forward for another run, reportedly disparaging Vance as “not tough enough” to lead the party to victory.

“He knows he can’t run again,” Susie Wiles, the president’s White House chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in a recent profile of her. “It’s pretty unequivocal.”

Trump, who will be 82 when he is slated to leave office, has told Wiles he understands a third term isn’t possible “a couple times,” she added.

Alan Dershowitz, a prominent constitutional law professor and a lawyer to Trump during his Senate impeachment trial, recently presented Trump with a road map to a third term in an Oval Office meeting, which he will publish in a new book slated for release next year.

Even he came away from their meeting believing Trump would pass on another bid.

“That is my conclusion based on what he has said in public,” Dershowitz told The Times.

“He has said in the past,” he added, “that it’s too cute.”

Lakers guard Austin Reaves will miss at least a month with a grade 2 strain in his left calf, the team announced Friday, one day after he left the game against the Houston Rockets at halftime.

Reaves, averaging career highs in points (26.6), assists (6.3) and rebounds (5.2), had already missed three games with what the team called a “mild” calf strain. He returned off the bench while playing on a minutes restriction against Phoenix on Dec. 23 and reprised his starting role on Christmas Day in a loss to the Rockets. But after scoring 12 points in 15 minutes in the first half, he was ruled out for the second half with “left calf soreness.”

Calf injuries have been major concerns across the NBA since three stars — Tyrese Haliburton, Damian Lillard and Jayson Tatum — suffered Achilles tears during last year’s playoffs. Haliburton and Lillard have previously dealt with calf injuries.

Lakers star guard Luka Doncic suffered a calf injury on Christmas Day last year while with the Dallas Mavericks and missed two months, during which he was traded to the Lakers.

“I know how it is to go to a calf injury. It’s not fun at all,” Doncic said Thursday after the game. “[I’ll] just be there to support him. Take your time. Calves are dangerous so take your time.”

The Lakers (19-10) are losing their second-leading scorer at a critical time of the season. They have lost three consecutive games, their only losing streak of the season, and their defense in the last 15 games has been among the worst in the league.

After the third consecutive blowout loss, coach JJ Redick questioned how much his players cared. He promised an “uncomfortable” film session and team meeting at practice on Saturday before the Lakers face Sacramento at Crypto.com Arena on Sunday.

After a difficult stretch of the schedule that included eight out of 10 games against teams with winning records, the Lakers have four of their next five against teams in the bottom of the Western Conference standings. Outside of a home game against the Eastern Conference-leading Detroit Pistons on Tuesday, the Lakers play the Sacramento Kings, the Memphis Grizzlies (on Jan. 2 and 4) and at New Orleans on Jan. 6.

Reaves’ absence could extend until the beginning of the Lakers’ Grammy road trip that begins on Jan. 20 against Denver.

Last February, I climbed into a Jeep and rumbled up a rocky shelf road that took me high above a breathtaking corner of the Mojave National Preserve. At the top was an old gold mine where an Australian company had recently restarted activities, looking for rare earth minerals.

The National Park Service had been embroiled in a years-long dispute with the company, Dateline Resources Ltd., alleging that it was operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization and had damaged the surrounding landscape with heavy equipment. Dateline said it had the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators had submitted to the Bureau of Land Management decades before.

President Trump had taken office just weeks before my visit. Environmentalists told me the conflict posed an early test of how his administration would handle the corporate exploitation of public lands.

At the time, observers weren’t sure how things would shake out. Conserving public lands is one of the rare issues that’s popular on both sides of the political aisle, they pointed out.

Almost a year later, it’s clear that the Trump administration has sided with the corporations.

Trump directed the Department of Interior to inventory mineral deposits on federal lands and prioritize mining as the primary use of those lands. He instructed officials to dramatically fast-track permitting and environmental reviews for certain types of energy and critical minerals projects — and designated metallurgical coal a critical mineral, enabling companies that mine it to qualify for a lucrative tax credit.

His budget bill lowered the royalty rates companies must pay the government to extract coal, oil or gas from public lands and provided other financial incentives for such projects while reducing the authority of federal land managers to deny them.

Under the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up millions of acres of federal land to new coal leasing and moved to rescind both the 2021 Roadless Rule, which protects swaths of national forest lands from extractive activities by barring most new road construction, and the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which puts conservation and restoration on par with other uses of BLM land like mining, drilling and grazing.

The administration is seeking to roll back limitations on mining and drilling for specific pieces of public land, including portions of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed feeding the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and a buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers overturned management plans limiting energy development on certain BLM lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Altogether, the Trump administration and its legislative allies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate protections for nearly 90 million acres of public land, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. That figure rises to more than 175 million acres if you include the habitat protections diminished by the administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the organization notes.

“All of these things represent in some ways the largest attack on our public lands and giveaway to large multinational mining corporations that we’ve seen probably since the 19th century,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, who likened the level of resource exploitation to “something like what happened during the robber baron era when there was no regulation or protection for our communities or the environment.”

Stansbury has introduced legislation that would increase the fees mining companies must pay to sit on speculative claims on federal lands and require those funds be used for conservation. She told me it’s just a tiny contribution to a larger effort to push back against the administration’s approach to initiate extraction on public lands, which she described as so frequent and pervasive that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”

“So much damage has been done, both administratively and legislatively, over the last 11 months since Trump took office,” she said.

As for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its operators back in the spring, saying Dateline Resources did not have to seek authorization from the Park Service to keep mining. The announcement was followed by public endorsements from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The company’s stock value soared, and by September, it had kicked off a major drilling blitz.

The company has already uncovered high-grade gold deposits. It’s taking a break for Christmas, but is expected to resume drilling in the new year.

More recent land news

The Pacific Forest Trust returned nearly 900 acres of land near Yosemite National Park to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation in a transfer partially financed by the state, reports Kurtis Alexander of the San Francisco Chronicle. Members of the Indigenous group were forced off their ancestral lands during the California Gold Rush, when state-sponsored militias undertook efforts to exterminate them. Some now hope the new property will bolster their decades-long push for federal recognition.

California State Parks is violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing offroaders to drive over dunes that are home to western snowy plovers, a judge recently ruled in a long-running legal case over the use of Oceano Dunes State Recreation Area along the Central Coast. Edvard Pettersson of the Courthouse News Service reports that State Parks will need a federal “take” permit to continue to allow offroading at the popular beachside spot.

California lawmakers introduced legislation to conserve more than 1.7 million acres of public lands across the state, in part by expanding the Los Padres National Forest and the Carrizo Plain National Monument, according to Stephanie Zappelli of the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

The federal public lands grazing program was created as a bulwark against environmental damage but has been transformed into a massive subsidy program benefiting a select few, including billionaire hobby ranchers and large corporations, according to an investigation by ProPublica and High Country News. The three-part series also found a loophole allowing for the automatic renewal of grazing permits has led to less oversight over the health of these lands.

A few last things in climate news

President Trump’s media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6-billion deal that some analysts have described as a major conflict of interest, my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reports.

House Republicans pushed through a bill that would overhaul the federal environmental review process in a way that critics say could speed up the approval process for oil and gas projects while stymieing clean energy, report Aidan Hughes and Carl David Goette-Luciak of Inside Climate News.

The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol is likely to be removed from California milk cartons, my colleague Susanne Rust reports. The decision exposes how used beverage packaging has been illegally exported to East Asia as “recycled” mixed paper, violating international environmental law.

Wind energy is again under attack from the Trump administration, which this week ordered all major wind construction projects to halt. As The Times’ Hayley Smith notes, the White House has been consistent in slowing down clean energy development in 2025, but offshore wind has been a particular bête noire for the President.

We’ve published a comprehensive collection of stories looking back on the wildfires that burned though Altadena and Pacific Palisades last January and all that’s happened since, which columnist Steve Lopez calls “one of the most apocalyptic years in Southern California history.” Check out After the Fires here.

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 land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

OXNARD — A father who has become the sole caretaker for his two young children after his wife was deported. A school district seeing absenteeism similar to what it experienced during the pandemic. Businesses struggling because customers are scared to go outside.

These are just a sampling of how this part of Ventura County is reckoning with the aftermath of federal immigration raids on Glass House cannabis farms six months ago, when hundreds of workers were detained and families split apart. In some instances, there is still uncertainty about what happened to minors left behind after one or both parents were deported. Now, while Latino households gather for the holidays, businesses and restaurants are largely quiet as anxiety about more Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids lingers.

“There’s a lot of fear that the community is living,” said Alicia Flores, executive director of La Hermandad Hank Lacayo Youth and Family Center. This time of year, clients usually ask her about her holiday plans, but now no one asks. Families are divided by the U.S. border or have loved ones in immigration detainment. “They were ready for Christmas, to make tamales, to make pozole, to make something and celebrate with the family. And now, nothing.”

At the time, the immigration raids on Glass House Farms in Camarillo and Carpinteria were some of the largest of their kind nationwide, resulting in chaotic scenes, confusion and violence. At least 361 undocumented immigrants were detained, many of them third-party contractors for Glass House. One of those contractors, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell from a greenhouse rooftop in the July 10 raid.

Jacqueline Rodriguez, in mirror, works on a customer’s hair as Silvia Lopez, left, owner of Divine Hair Design, waits for customers in downtown Oxnard on Dec. 19, 2025.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The raids catalyzed mass protests along the Central Coast and sent a chill through Oxnard, a tight-knit community where many families work in the surrounding fields and live in multigenerational homes far more modest than many on the Ventura coast. It also reignited fears about how farmworker communities — often among the most low-paid and vulnerable parts of the labor pool — would be targeted during the Trump administration’s intense deportation campaign.

In California, undocumented workers represent nearly 60% of the agricultural workforce, and many of them live in mixed-immigration-status households or households where none are citizens, said Ana Padilla, executive director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. After the Glass House raid, Padilla and UC Merced associate professor Edward Flores identified economic trends similar to the Great Recession, when private-sector jobs fell. Although undocumented workers contribute to state and federal taxes, they don’t qualify for unemployment benefits that could lessen the blow of job loss after a family member gets detained.

“These are households that have been more affected by the economic consequences than any other group,” Padilla said. She added that California should consider distributing “replacement funds” for workers and families that have lost income because of immigration enforcement activity.

An Oxnard store owner who sells quinceañera and baptism dresses — and who asked that her name not be used — says she has lost 60% of her business since the immigrant raids this year at Glass House farms.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Local businesses are feeling the effects as well. Silvia Lopez, who has run Divine Hair Design in downtown Oxnard for 16 years, said she’s lost as much as 75% of business after the July raid. The salon usually saw 40 clients a day, she said, but on the day after the raid, it had only two clients — and four stylists who were stunned. Already, she said, other salon owners have had to close, and she cut back her own hours to help her remaining stylists make enough each month.

“Everything changed for everyone,” she said.

In another part of town, a store owner who sells quinceañera and baptism dresses said her sales have dropped by 60% every month since August, and clients have postponed shopping. A car shop owner, who declined to be identified because he fears government retribution, said he supported President Trump because of his campaign pledge to help small-business owners like himself. But federal loans have been difficult to access, he said, and he feels betrayed by the president’s deportation campaign that has targeted communities such as Oxnard.

“There’s a lot of fear that the community is living,” said Alicia Flores, executive director of La Hermandad Hank Lacayo Youth and Family Center in downtown Oxnard, on Dec. 19, 2025.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

“Glass House had a big impact,” he said. “It made people realize, ‘Oh s—, they’re hitting us hard.’ ”

The raid’s domino effect has raised concerns about the welfare of children in affected households. Immigration enforcement actions can have detrimental effects on young children, according to the American Immigration Council, and they can be at risk of experiencing severe psychological distress.

Olivia Lopez, a community organizer at Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, highlighted the predicament of one father. He became the sole caretaker of his infant and 4-year-old son after his wife was deported, and can’t afford child care. He is considering sending the children across the border to his wife in Mexico, who misses her kids.

In a separate situation, Lopez said, an 18-year-old has been suddenly thrust into caring for two siblings after her mother, a single parent, was deported.

Additionally, she said she has heard stories of children left behind, including a 16-year-old who does not want to leave the U.S. and reunite with her mother who was deported after the Glass House raid. She said she suspects that at least 50 families — and as many as 100 children — lost both or their only parent in the raid.

“I have questions after hearing all the stories: Where are the children, in cases where two parents, those responsible for the children, were deported? Where are those children?” she said. “How did we get to this point?”

Robin Godfrey, public information officer for the Ventura County Human Services Agency, which is responsible for overseeing child welfare in the county, said she could not answer specific questions about whether the agency has become aware of minors left behind after parents were detained.

“Federal and state laws prevent us from confirming or denying if children from Glass House Farms families came into the child welfare system,” she said in a statement.

The raid has been jarring in the Oxnard School District, which was closed for summer vacation but reopened on July 10 to contact families and ensure their well-being, Supt. Ana DeGenna said. Her staff called all 13,000 families in the district to ask whether they needed resources and whether they wanted access to virtual classes for the upcoming school year.

Even before the July 10 raid, DeGenna and her staff were preparing. In January, after Trump was inaugurated, the district sped up installing doorbells at every school site in case immigration agents attempted to enter. They referred families to organizations that would help them draft affidavits so their U.S.-born children could have legal guardians, in case the parents were deported. They asked parents to submit not just one or two, but as many as 10 emergency contacts in case they don’t show up to pick up their children.

Rodrigo is considering moving back to Mexico after living in the U.S. for 42 years.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

With a district that is 92% Latino, she said, nearly everyone is fearful, whether they are directly or indirectly affected, regardless if they have citizenship. Some families have self-deported, leaving the country, while children have changed households to continue their schooling. Nearly every morning, as raids continue in the region, she fields calls about sightings of ICE vehicles near schools. When that happens, she said, she knows attendance will be depressed to near COVID-19 levels for those surrounding schools, with parents afraid to send their children back to the classroom.

But unlike the pandemic, there is no relief in knowing they’ve experienced the worst, such as the Glass House raid, which saw hundreds of families affected in just a day, she said. The need for mental health counselors and support has only grown.

“We have to be there to protect them and take care of them, but we have to acknowledge it’s a reality they’re living through,” she said. “We can’t stop the learning, we can’t stop the education, because we also know that is the most important thing that’s going to help them in the future to potentially avoid being victimized in any way.”

Jasmine Cruz, 21, launched a GoFundMe page after her father was taken during the Glass House raid. He remains in detention in Arizona, and the family hired an immigration attorney in hopes of getting him released.

Each month, she said, it gets harder to pay off their rent and utility bills. She managed to raise about $2,700 through GoFundMe, which didn’t fully cover a month of rent. Her mother is considering moving the family back to Mexico if her father is deported, Cruz said.

“I tried telling my mom we should stay here,” she said. “But she said it’s too much for us without our dad.”

Many of the families torn apart by the Glass House raid did not have plans in place, said Lopez, the community organizer, and some families were resistant because they believed they wouldn’t be affected. But after the raid, she received calls from several families who wanted to know whether they could get family affidavit forms notarized. One notary, she said, spent 10 hours working with families for free, including some former Glass House workers who evaded the raid.

“The way I always explain it is, look, everything that is being done by this government agency, you can’t control,” she said. “But what you can control is having peace of mind knowing you did something to protect your children and you didn’t leave them unprotected.”

For many undocumented immigrants, the choices are few.

Rodrigo, who is undocumented and worries about ICE reprisals, has made his living with his guitar, which he has been playing since he was 17.

While taking a break outside a downtown Oxnard restaurant, he looked tired, wiping his forehead after serenading a pair, a couple and a group at a Mexican restaurant. He has been in the U.S. for 42 years, but since the summer raid, business has been slow. Now, people no longer want to hire for house parties.

The 77-year-old said he wants to retire but has to continue working. But he fears getting picked up at random, based on how abusive agents have been. He’s thinking about the new year, and returning to Mexico on his own accord.

“Before they take away my guitar,” he said, “I better go.”

Billionaire Larry Ellison has stepped up, agreeing to personally guarantee part of Paramount’s bid for rival Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison’s personal guarantee of $40.4 billion in equity, disclosed Monday, ups the ante in the acrimonious auction for Warner Bros. movie and TV studios, HBO, CNN and Food Network.

Ellison, whose son David Ellison is chief executive of Paramount, agreed not to revoke the Ellison family trust or adversely transfer its assets while the transaction is pending. Paramount’s $30-a-share offer remains unchanged.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s board this month awarded the prize to Netflix. The board rejected Paramount’s $108.4-billion deal, largely over concerns about the perceived shakiness of Paramount’s financing.

Paramount shifted gears and launched a hostile takeover, appealing directly to Warner shareholders, offering them $30 a share.

“We amended this Offer to address Warner Bros. stated concerns regarding the Prior Proposal and the December 8 Offer,” Paramount said in a Monday Securities & Exchange Commission filing. “Mr. Larry Ellison is providing a personal guarantee of the Ellison Trust’s $40.4 billion funding obligation.”

The Ellison family acquired the controlling stake in Paramount in August. The family launched their pursuit of Warner Bros. in September but Warner’s board unanimously rejected six Paramount proposals.

Paramount started with a $19 a share bid for the entire company. Netflix has offered $27.75 a share and only wants the Burbank studios, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service. Paramount executives have held meetings with Warner investors in New York, where they echoed the proposal they’d submitted in the closing hours of last week’s auction.

On Monday, Paramount also agreed to increase the termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion, matching the one that Netflix offered.

Warner Bros. board voted unanimously to accept Netflix’s $72-billion offer, citing Netflix’s stronger financial position, the board has said.

Three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds representing royal families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to provide $24 billion of the $40.4-billion equity component that Ellison is backing.

The Ellison family has agreed to cover $11.8-billion of that. Initially, Paramount’s bid included the private equity firm of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, but Kushner withdrew his firm last week.

Paramount confirmed that the Ellison family trust owns about 1.16 billion shares of Oracle common stock and that all material liabilities are publicly disclosed.

“In an effort to address Warner Bros.’s amorphous need for ‘flexibility’ in interim operations, Paramount’s revised proposed merger agreement offers further improved flexibility to Warner Bros. on debt refinancing transactions, representations and interim operating covenants,” Paramount said in its statement.

Paramount has been aggressively pursuing Warner Bros. for months.

David Ellison was stunned earlier this month when the Warner Bros. board agreed to a deal with Netflix for $82.7 billion for the streaming and studio assets.

Paramount subsequently launched its hostile takeover offer in a direct appeal to shareholders. Warner Bros. board urged shareholders to reject Paramount’s offer, which includes $54 billion in debt commitments, deeming it “inferior” and “inadequate.” The board singled out what it viewed as uncertain financing and the risk implicit in a revocable trust that could cause Paramount to terminate the deal at any time.

Paramount, controlled by the Ellisons, is competing with the most valuable entertainment company in the world to acquire Warner Bros.

Executives from both Paramount and Netflix have argued that they would be the best owners and utilize the Warner Bros. library to boost their streaming operations.

In its letter to shareholders and a detailed 94-page regulatory filing last week, Warner Bros. hammered away at risks in the Paramount offer, including what the company described as the Ellison family’s failure to adequately backstop their equity commitment.

The equity is supported by “an unknown and opaque revocable trust,” the board said. The documents Paramount provided “contain gaps, loopholes and limitations that put you, our shareholders, and our company at risk.”

Netflix also announced Monday that it has refinanced part of a $59 billion bridge loan with cheaper and longer-term debt.

Bloomberg contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers unhappy with Justice Department decisions to heavily redact or withhold documents from a legally mandated release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein threatened Saturday to launch impeachment proceedings against those responsible, including Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general.

Democrats and Republicans alike criticized the omissions, while Democrats also accused the Justice Department of intentionally scrubbing the release of at least one image of President Trump, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggesting it could portend “one of the biggest coverups in American history.”

Trump administration officials have said the release fully complied with the law, and that its redactions were crafted only to protect victims of Epstein, a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender accused of abusing hundreds of women and girls before his death in 2019.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), an author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the release of the investigative trove, blasted Bondi in a social media video, accusing her of denying the existence of many of the records for months, only to push out “an incomplete release with too many redactions” in response to — and in violation of — the new law.

Khanna said he and the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), were “exploring all options” for responding and forcing more disclosures, including by pursuing “the impeachment of people at Justice,” asking courts to hold officials blocking the release in contempt, and “referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice.”

“We will work with the survivors to demand the full release of these files,” Khanna said.

He later added in a CNN interview that he and Massie were drafting articles of impeachment against Bondi, though they had not decided whether to bring them forward.

Massie, in his own social media post, said Khanna was correct in rejecting the Friday release as insufficient, saying it “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

The lawmakers’ view that the Justice Department’s document dump failed to comply with the law echoed similar complaints across the political spectrum Saturday, as the full scope of redactions and other withholdings came into focus.

The frustration had already sharply escalated late Friday, after Fox News Digital reported that the names and identifiers of not just victims but of “politically exposed individuals and government officials” had been redacted from the records — which would violate the law, and which Justice Department officials denied.

Among the critics was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who cited the Fox reporting in an exasperated post late Friday to X.

“The whole point was NOT to protect the ‘politically exposed individuals and government officials.’ That’s exactly what MAGA has always wanted, that’s what drain the swamp actually means. It means expose them all, the rich powerful elites who are corrupt and commit crimes, NOT redact their names and protect them,” Greene wrote.

Senior Justice Department officials later called in to Fox News to dispute the report. But the removal of a file published in the Friday evening release, capturing a desk in Epstein’s home with a drawer filled of photos of Trump, reinforced bipartisan concerns that references to the president had been illegally withheld.

In a release of documents from the Epstein family estate by the House Oversight Committee this fall, Trump’s name was featured over 1,000 times — more than any other public figure.

“If they’re taking this down, just imagine how much more they’re trying to hide,” Schumer wrote on X. “This could be one of the biggest coverups in American history.”

Several victims also said the release was insufficient. “It’s really kind of another slap in the face,” Alicia Arden, who went to the police to report that Epstein had abused her in 1997, told CNN. “I wanted all the files to come out, like they said that they were going to.”

Trump, who signed the act into law after having worked to block it from getting a vote, was conspicuously quiet on the matter. In a long speech in North Carolina on Friday night, he did not mention it.

However, White House officials and Justice Department leaders strongly pushed back against the notion that the release was somehow incomplete or out of compliance with the law, or that the names of politicians had been redacted.

“The only redactions being applied to the documents are those required by law — full stop,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche. “Consistent with the statute and applicable laws, we are not redacting the names of individuals or politicians unless they are a victim.”

Other Republicans defended the administration. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, said the administration “is delivering unprecedented transparency in the Epstein case and will continue releasing documents.”

Epstein died in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He’d been convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution in Florida, but served only 13 months in custody in what many condemned as a sweetheart plea deal for a well-connected and rich defendant.

Epstein’s crimes have attracted massive attention, including among many within Trump’s own political base, in part because of unanswered questions surrounding which of his many powerful friends may have also been implicated in crimes against children. Some of those questions have swirled around Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before the two had what the president has described as a falling out.

Evidence has emerged in recent months that suggests Trump may have had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their friendship.

Epstein wrote in a 2019 email, released by the House Oversight Committee, that Trump “knew about the girls.” In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to help him sexually abuse girls, Epstein wrote that “the dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned.”

Trump has ardently denied any wrongdoing.

The records released Friday contained few if any major new revelations, but did include a complaint against Epstein filed with the FBI back in 1996 — which the FBI did little with, substantiating longstanding fears among Epstein’s victims that his crimes could have been stopped years earlier.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the president’s most consistent critics, wrote on X that Bondi should appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain under oath the extensive redactions and omissions, which he called a “willful violation of the law.”

“The Trump Justice Department has had months to keep their promise to release all of the Epstein Files,” Schiff wrote. “Epstein’s survivors and the American people need answers now.”

BUCHAREST, Romania — American rapper Wiz Khalifa was sentenced by a court in Romania on Thursday to nine months in jail for drug possession, more than a year after he took part in a music festival in the Eastern European country.

Khalifa was stopped by Romanian police in July 2024 after allegedly smoking cannabis on stage at the Beach, Please! Festival in Costinesti, a coastal resort in Constanta County. Prosecutors said the rapper, whose real name is Cameron Jibril Thomaz, was found in possession of more than 18 grams of cannabis, and that he consumed some on stage.

The Constanta Court of Appeal handed down the sentence after Khalifa was convicted of “possession of dangerous drugs, without right, for personal consumption,” according to Romania’s national news agency, Agerpres. The decision is final.

The decision came after a lower court in Constanta County in April issued Khalifa a criminal fine of 3,600 lei ($830) for “illegal possession of dangerous drugs,” but prosecutors appealed the court’s decision and sought a higher sentence.

Romania has some of the harsher drugs laws in Europe. Possession of cannabis for personal use is criminalized and can result in a prison sentence of between three months and two years, or a fine.

It isn’t clear whether Romanian authorities will seek to file an extradition request, since Khalifa is a U.S. citizen and doesn’t reside in Romania.

The 38-year-old Pittsburgh rapper rose to prominence with his breakout mixtape “Kush + Orange Juice.” On stage in Romania last summer, the popular rapper smoked a large, hand-rolled cigarette while singing his hit “Young, Wild & Free.”