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Todd Bridges has taken steps to make his split from Bettijo Hirschi official after announcing in January that he and his spouse had separated.

The former “Diff’rent Strokes” actor, 60, filed paperwork asking to end his marriage Tuesday in Arizona, Us Weekly reported Thursday. This will be the second divorce for both parties.

A representative for Bridges didn’t respond immediately to The Times’ request for confirmation and comment.

Bridges announced in January that he and Hirschi were heading their separate ways after getting married in 2022. At the time, he called the decision a “difficult” one for him.

“This was not an easy choice, and it comes with a heavy heart, but also with love and gratitude for the life we shared,” he said in a statement to The Times. “I thank God for the time we’ve had together, the lessons we’ve learned, and the family we’ve built. Even in this season of change, I trust He is guiding us both toward healing, peace, and new beginnings.”

Bridges said at the time that he would “continue to lift my former partner up in prayer, wishing them joy and fulfillment in the chapters ahead.”

The two met in January 2022; they married nine months later, after a brief engagement. Hirschi told Tamron Hall last year that a friend who wrote a new dating profile for her showed it to Bridges as “market research.” The friend then told Hirschi that Bridges wanted to get in touch.

“She’s a lot like my mom,” Bridges told Hall.

During a contentious spousal support dispute in 2025, Hirschi described the “Everybody Hates Chris” veteran as “semi-retired,” Us Weekly reported in February. The documents came as part of a battle Hirschi fought with first husband Heath Hirschi after marrying Bridges. At the time, Us said that Bettijo was claiming monthly expenses of around $16,550 and said Bridges made only “about $700” a month in 2024 unless he obtained “contract work.”

The Hirschis, who divorced in 2020, share four children, two of them minors, the outlet said. Heath Hirschi wanted out of paying $2,700 a month in spousal support payments after his ex married someone his legal team called a “well-known Hollywood actor.” Us said that in December 2025, the court revised the former couple’s agreement to $1,206 per month in child support, with $43,401.96 due for unpaid past support.

Bridges, meanwhile, has about a dozen acting credits since 2020, according to IMDb, which also says he worked on several new projects in various stages of production.

He also has two adult offspring: Daughter Bo is from a previous relationship with Amanda Rushing; he shares son Spencir, 27, with his first wife. Spencir Bridges was, like his dad, a child actor, with roles in the 2007 movie “Daddy Day Camp” and, in 2005, the TV series “ER.” Spencir’s most recent acting credits were in 2009 when he appeared in the series “iCarly” and in the TV movie “The Three Gifts.”

Todd Bridges is the last surviving original cast member of the hit sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes,” which ran from 1978 to 1986. Conrad Bain played Phillip Drummond, a wealthy Park Avenue businessman and father of Kimberly (Dana Plato). Drummond adopted sons Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Bridges), who were from Harlem. The character of housekeeper Edna Garrett, played by Charlotte Rae, was spun off in 1979 into a second hit series, “Facts of Life,” which ran until 1988.

Plato, who played Bain’s daughter Kimberly, died in 1999 from an overdose when she was 34. Bain died of natural causes in January 2013, at age 89, while Rae died in August 2018 at 92.

Gary Coleman died in May 2010 at age 42 after suffering a brain hemorrhage in an accidental fall at his home in Utah.

April 3 (UPI) — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was taken to a Philadelphia hospital after a Federalist Society dinner in his honor last month, the court confirmed Friday.

Alito “felt ill during an event in Philadelphia” on March 20, a Supreme Court spokesperson said in a statement to the media.

“Out of an abundance of caution, he agreed with his security detail’s recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home,” spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said. “After that examination and the administration of fluids for dehydration, he returned home that night, as previously planned. Justice Alito was thoroughly checked by his own physician, and he returned to work the following Monday for oral argument.”

Alito, 76, is the court’s second-oldest justice. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005.

Sources told ABC News that those who saw him at the event said he looked tired and was not as engaging as usual. They said he stayed seated when people came by to greet him during the dinner.

The dinner capped off a daylong symposium by the society titled, “An Examination of the Jurisprudence of Samuel Alito,” which featured several of his former law clerks, law professors and attorneys who practice before the court. It was at the University of Pennsylvania law school.

Alito was not there during the day, as he was driving from Washington. The court was in session to hand down opinions, but Alito was on the road.

The Afghan man had fled the Taliban for refuge in upstate New York when U.S. immigration authorities ordered him deported to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas Chick-fil-A when she was arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was being sent to Ecuador.

There’s the Mauritanian man living in Michigan told he’d have to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother in Ohio told she’d be sent to Ecuador and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and so many others across the country ordered sent to Honduras.

They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they suddenly faced so-called third-country deportation orders, destined for countries where most had no ties, according to the nonprofit group Mobile Pathways, which pushes for transparency in immigration proceedings.

Yet few have been deported, even as the White House pushes for ever more immigrant expulsions. Thanks to unexplained changes in U.S. policy, many are now mired in immigration limbo, unable to argue their asylum claims in court and unsure if they’ll be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they’ve never seen.

Some are in detention, though it’s unclear how many. All have lost permission to work legally, a right most had while pursuing their asylum claims, compounding the worry and dread that has rippled through immigrant communities.

And that may be the point.

“This administration’s goal is to instill fear into people. That’s the primary thing,” said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, which has been fighting the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. The fear of being deported to an unknown country could, advocates believe, drive migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their home countries.

Things may be changing.

In mid-March, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal officials told field attorneys with the Department of Homeland Security in an email to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations tied to asylum cases. The email, which has been seen by the Associated Press, did not give a reason. It has not been publicly released, and Homeland Security did not respond to requests to explain if the halt was permanent.

But the earlier deportation cases? Those are continuing.

An asylum seeker says she’s in panic over possibly being sent to a country she doesn’t know

In 2024, a Guatemalan woman who says she had been held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by members of a powerful gang arrived with her 4-year-old daughter at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum. She later discovered she was pregnant with another child, conceived during a rape.

In December, she sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and listened as an ICE attorney sought to have her deported.

The ICE attorney didn’t ask the judge that she be sent back to Guatemala. Instead, the attorney said, the woman from the Indigenous Guatemalan highlands would go to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the globe to Uganda.

Until that moment, she’d never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.

“When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive,” the woman said after the hearing, her eyes filling with tears. “When I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from U.S. immigration authorities or the Guatemalan gang network.

There have been more than 13,000 removal orders for asylum seekers

ICE attorneys, the de facto prosecutors in immigration courts, were first instructed last summer to file motions known as “pretermissions” that end migrants’ asylum claims and allow them to be deported.

“They’re not saying the person doesn’t have a claim,” said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They’re just saying, ‘We’re kicking this case completely out of court and we’re going to send that person to another country.’”

The pace of deportation orders picked up in October after a ruling from the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which sets legal precedent inside the byzantine immigration court system.

The ruling from the three judges — two appointed by former Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and the third a holdover from the first Trump administration — cleared the way for migrants seeking asylum to be removed to any third country where the U.S. State Department determines they won’t face persecution or torture.

After the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of ending asylum claims.

More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered deported to so-called “safe third countries” after their asylum cases were canceled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways. More than half the orders were for Honduras, Ecuador or Uganda, with the rest scattered among nearly three dozen other countries.

Deported migrants are free, at least theoretically, to pursue asylum and stay in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.

Deportations have been far more complicated than the government expected

Immigration authorities have released little information about the third-country agreements, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, or the deportees, and it’s unclear exactly how many have been deported to third countries as part of asylum removals.

According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracker run by the groups Refugees International and Human Rights First, fewer than 100 of them are thought to have been deported.

In a statement, Homeland Security called the agreements “lawful bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to pursue protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims.”

“DHS is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” said the statement, which was attributed only to a spokesperson. There are roughly 2 million backlogged asylum cases in the immigration system.

But deportations clearly turned out to be far more complicated than the government expected, restricted by a variety of legal challenges, the scope of the international agreements and a limited number of airplanes.

Mobile Pathways data, for example, shows that thousands of people have been ordered deported to Honduras — despite a diplomatic agreement that allows the country to take a total of just 10 such deportees per month for 24 months. Dozens of people ordered to Honduras in recent months did not speak Spanish as their primary language, but were native speakers of English, Uzbek and French, among other languages.

And while hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants have been ordered sent to Uganda, a top Ugandan official said none have arrived. U.S. authorities may be “doing a cost analysis” and trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people on board, Okello Oryem, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, told the Associated Press.

“You can’t be doing one, two people” at a time,” Oryem said. “Planeloads — that is the most effective way.”

Many immigration lawyers suspect that the March email ordering a halt in new asylum pretermissions could indicate a shift toward other forms of third-country deportations.

“Right now they haven’t been able to remove that many people,” said the ACLU’s Mehta. “I do think that will change.”

“They’re in a hiring spree right now. They will have more planes. If they get more agreements, they’ll be able to send more people to more countries.”

Sullivan writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — This is not the run up to the midterm elections that Republicans wanted.

A year and a half after winning the White House by promising to lower costs and end wars, Donald Trump is a wartime president overseeing surging energy costs and an escalating overseas conflict that many in his own party do not like.

He offered little clarity to a nation eager for answers this week during a prime-time address from the White House, his first since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago, simultaneously suggesting that the war was ending and expanding.

“Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”

Trump’s comments come roughly six months before voters across the nation begin to cast ballots in elections that will decide control of Congress and key governorships for Trump’s final two years in office. For now, Republicans, who control all branches of government in Washington, are bracing for a painful political backlash.

“You’re looking at an ugly November,” warned veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. “At a point in time when we need every break possible to hold the House and Senate, our edge is being chipped away.”

Republicans confront evolving political landscape

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the political landscape has shifted.

At this time last year, many Republican leaders believed there was a path to preserve their narrow House majority and easily hold the Senate. Now they privately concede that the House is all but lost and Democrats have a realistic shot at taking the Senate.

Republicans are also struggling to coalesce around a clear midterm message on Iran.

The Republican National Committee has largely avoided the war in talking points issued to surrogates over the last month. The leaders of the party’s campaign committees responsible for the House and Senate declined interview requests. Many vulnerable Republican candidates sidestep the issue, unwilling to defend or challenge Trump publicly.

The president remains deeply popular with Republican voters, and he has vocal supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“That was the best speech I could’ve hoped for,” he wrote on social media after Trump’s address on Wednesday evening. Graham said Trump “gave the American people a clear and coherent pathway forward.”

Trump made little effort to sell the conflict to Americans before the initial attack. Five weeks later, at least 13 U.S. service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Thousands more troops have converged on the region, and the Pentagon requested $200 billion in new funding.

The Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for a fifth of the world’s oil, remains closed. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $4.08 on Thursday, according to AAA, almost a full dollar higher than on President Joe Biden’s last day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump insisted that gas prices would fall quickly once the war concluded but offered no solution for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he invited skeptical U.S. allies to do it themselves.

He insisted that the war would be worth it.

“This is a true investment in your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s future,” Trump said. “When it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who was once among Trump’s most vocal allies in Congress, lashed out against his Iran policy.

“I wanted so much for President Trump to put America First. That’s what I believed he would do. All I heard from his speech tonight was WAR WAR WAR,” she wrote on social media. “Nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans.”

Time is not on Trump’s side

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the U.S. military action in Iran has “gone too far,” according to AP-NORC polling from March. Roughly a third approve of how he’s handling Iran overall.

The possibility of sending U.S. forces into Iran also appears politically unpalatable.

About 6 in 10 adults are “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to deploying U.S. troops on the ground to fight Iran. That includes about half of Republicans. Only about 1 in 10 favor deploying troops.

At the same time, Trump’s approval ratings have remained consistently weak. About 4 in 10 Americans approve of how he’s handling the presidency, roughly in line with how it’s been throughout his second term.

Republican strategist Ari Fleischer, a senior aide in former President George W. Bush’s administration, acknowledged that Trump has not received the polling bump in this war that Bush got after invading Iraq.

Bush, of course, worked to build public backing for the Iraq War before going in. Immediately after the 2003 invasion, Bush’s popularity soared, as did the stock market.

Public sentiment and the economy soured only after the conflict stretched on. It ultimately spanned more than eight years, spawning a generation of anti-war Republicans — and sowing the seeds of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

“My hope is that the Trump experience is the exact opposite of the Bush experience,” Fleischer said.

He said Trump must win the war decisively and quickly to avoid a further backlash, saying there could be a “very significant political upside if things end well, oil comes down and markets rally.”

Fleischer added that Trump’s actions will matter much more than his words.

“Ultimately, he is not going to get judged on his persuasion or his explanations or his assertions, he’s going to get judged on results,” he said.

Peoples writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

When I cracked open retired firefighter Bruce Hensler’s 15-year-old book, Crucible of Fire, I felt I had found an oracle.

Before 15 out of California’s 20 most destructive fires on record, Hensler described large chunks of cities burning to the ground, insurance companies jacking up premiums after realizing they wildly underestimated the risk and politicians failing to enforce the few fire safety rules on the books.

He even describes the fire chief of a decimated city criticizing city its politicians for failing to properly prepare for such a disaster, resulting in the city ousting the chief. (Sound familiar, Palisadians?)

Yet Hensler wasn’t trying to predict what would unfold in California’s wildland-urban interface in the 21st century. He was simply telling the story of the late 1800s and early 1900s in the Eastern U.S.’ downtowns of dense, wooden buildings.

Spoiler: Firefighters, policymakers, local advocates and, notably, insurance professionals figured out how to stop it from happening. Here’s how they did it.

The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the Civil War, transformed Northeastern cities into denser and denser wooden tinderboxes filled with tons of humans more than capable of accidentally generating sparks.

Fire departments, inspired by the war, were already reorganizing under a new paramilitary structure to more quickly and aggressively respond to blazes although most were still primarily volunteer-based. And beyond a few ad hoc fire safety laws that were scarcely enforced, cities’ building codes and water infrastructure naively lagged far behind the threat cities were creating.

So, cities started burning.

In 1866, a Fourth of July firecracker burned down much of Portland, Maine.

The destruction — more than $240 million in damage in today’s dollars — seriously spooked insurance companies focused on downtown industrial properties. Within days, they joined together to form the National Board of Fire Underwriters to try to stabilize their industry and promote fire-safety measures.

It wasn’t enough. A barn fire burned down Chicago in 1871 — more than $4 billion in damage in today’s dollars. A warehouse fire burned down Boston the next year — causing more than $1 billion in damage.

After the Boston fire, the board raised rates by 50% in large cities and began hurling ham-fisted threats to pull coverage altogether if cities didn’t get their act together and address their tinderbox problems quickly.

Over the next few decades, the board slowly got its own act together: It began collecting data on what caused cities to burn and funded a lab to run experiments. After Baltimore burned in 1904, the board released its own national fire-safety building codes based on that knowledge and created a grading scale to identify the risk of different cities based on their fire departments and water utilities as well as how closely their building practices aligned with the board’s building and electrical codes.

For politicians who dragged their feet because bolstering a water system or fire department is costly and designing a fire-safe building is, quite frankly, more cumbersome, the grading system made maintaining the status quo no longer viable — try explaining to your constituents that insurance rates in town are through the roof simply because the city won’t adopt the board’s new codes.

At some point, cities no longer burned down, only blocks or buildings did. As fire departments and cities continued to adopt new tech (with some pushing from the insurance industry) — motorized fire engines to replace horse-drawn ones, and later, smoke detectors and indoor sprinklers, then air tanks that allowed firefighters to enter buildings — fires didn’t often spread past a single floor or room.

These reforms, targeted mainly at commercial and industrial buildings in dense downtowns, largely missed the looming crisis in suburban residential areas that were slowly building themselves into a different kind of tinderbox that burned from the outside in.

In those areas, we’ve already seen many of the same dynamics play out: first the insurance rate hikes, then the cancellations. Now, some conversations and many heated debates — often driven by the insurance industry — are taking place around what we ought to do to protect our urban-wildland interface areas and how we can make them insurable again.

Organizations such as the Institute for Business & Home Safety play the role of the National Board of Fire Underwriters. Insurance wildfire models are starting to play the role of the grading scale, and policies such as Zone Zero, the national building codes.

As Hensler wrote in 2011, we now “accept building fires as commonplace but no longer expect them to consume adjacent buildings or blocks.”

It reminds me of a text Keegan Gibbs, who leads the Community Brigade program with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, sent me when I asked what he hopes to see in 10 years’ time: “neighborhoods where wildfire can move through the landscape without becoming a community-level disaster.”

More recent wildfire news

State Farm reached a deal with California last month to keep a 17% rate hike that took effect after the 2025 L.A. County fires, my colleague Paige St. John reports. The state initially rejected State Farm’s 22% rate hike request but eventually offered a temporary approval of the 17% hike last year. State Farm — which said it paid $6.2 billion in claims last year, largely from the L.A. County fires — said the increase enables the company to continue serving Californians.

A monthlong heat dome over the American West, fueled by climate change, has melted mountain snowpacks significantly this year, writes fellow Boiling Point host Ian James. With more time for vegetation to dry out, the early melting brings an increased risk of wildfire across the region this year.

In fact, acreage burned this year is nearly triple the 10-year average, reports Tim Casperson of newsletter the Hotshot Wake Up. The uptick has been fueled by a series of fires in Nebraska that has stunned many of the state’s ranchers as it decimated the hay that cattle rely on and stressed pregnant cows, reports Anila Yoganathan at the Flatwater Free Press.

A few last things in climate news

The U.S. Forest Service announced a major reorganization effort Tuesday that will move its headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, close research and development facilities in more than 30 states and shift management from broader regional offices to more localized state offices, reports Christine Peterson for High Country News. Former Forest Service employees and tribal leaders expressed concern that the move would uproot thousands of employees, scattering specialized regional knowledge. The chief of the Forest Service said the plan is intended to make the agency more “nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves.”

Gas prices in Los Angeles surged to $6 per gallon this week after the U.S. and Israel’s and the U.S.’s attack on Iran prompted the nation to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, California’s petroleum market watchdog is warning that some of the inflated price may be due to price gouging, my colleague Blanca Begert reports. In January, refineries were making 49 cents on the gallon, the watchdog group said; now, it’s closer to $1.25.

Honda is scrapping plans to build and sell three new electric-vehicle models in the U.S. after the Trump administration abandoned Biden-era policy goals to increase EV manufacturing and adoption, Dan Gearino reports for Inside Climate News. It comes after similar moves by Ford and Ram.

Finally, Heatmap News, in collaboration with MIT, has launched a new tool tracking electricity prices across the country on a month-to-month basis all the way down to the Zip Code level. You can check it out 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 wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Spring has sprung in Los Angeles. In just a couple weeks, thousands of music lovers will make the trek to Indio’s Empire Polo Club for the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, with dozens of L.A. chefs joining them. While in the desert, many festival goers take a detour through neighboring Palm Springs to explore museums, restaurants and bars before the dry climate climbs into the triple digits.

Closer to home, Los Angeles’ food scene is mourning the loss of two legendary haunts forced to permanently close their doors. After months of extensions, Cole’s French Dip closed at the end of March, though owner Cedd Moses said he was still hopeful that the city’s longest-running public house and rumored creator of the French dip sandwich would sell to a new owner. In Echo Park, Taix restaurant closed after 99 years of operation to make way for a six-story housing complex.

But it’s not all bad news for local restaurants. In Melrose Hill, a Bangladeshi chef has returned to the kitchen after a two-decade-long break from the industry. Across town, a viral smashburger spot from a celebrated chef is drawing lines for its juicy Wagyu patties. And for those heading to the desert, restaurant critic Bill Addison insists a modern Mexican pop-up is worth the weekday trip. Here are 13 places to put on your dining agenda this month:

RYANAIR boss Michael O’Leary has warned jet fuel supplies could be disrupted in May as the war in Iran chokes off global oil routes.

The budget airline kingpin warned that holidaymakers could face a summer of uncertainty if the Middle East war continues to throttle global oil routes.

Prices have spiralled since the outbreak of fighting at the end of February, with Iran blocking vital tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Speaking to Sky News, the airline chief revealed that while Ryanair is “reasonably well hedged” on 80% of its fuel, the company is being forced to shell out nearly double for the remaining 20%.

O’Leary confirmed the airline is paying around $150 a barrel for the unhedged portion of its supplies.

The outspoken boss warned that while rising costs are a major headache, the more “immediate concern” is whether there will be enough fuel to keep planes in the sky.

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He admitted that the industry is at the mercy of the conflict and the ongoing blockade of the world’s most important shipping passage.

“Fuel suppliers are constantly looking at the market. We don’t expect any disruption until early May, but if the war continues, we do run the risk of supply disruptions in Europe in May and June, and we hope the war will finish sooner than that and the risk to supply will be eliminated,” he said.

O’Leary calculated that the threat to the airline’s operations is now a very real possibility for millions of passengers planning their early summer getaways.

He warned that there is a “reasonable risk” that between 10% and 25% of supplies could be at risk through May and June, adding that like everyone else in the industry, he hopes the war ends sooner rather than later.

The Ryanair chief made it clear that the fate of the summer season rests on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

He stated that if the war finishes by April and the shipping lane reopens, then there is “almost no risk to supply.”

Despite the looming threat of shortages, O’Leary struck a defiant tone regarding his own flight schedule.

He told Sky News that he does not expect to cancel any flights, even as some of Ryanair’s rivals struggle to cope with the volatile market.

However, the pressure on the industry is mounting across the board.

EasyJet boss Kenton Jarvis has already sounded the alarm for passengers’ wallets, warning that European consumers should expect higher ticket prices towards the end of summer when existing fuel hedges come to an end.

So far, a number of airlines have already said they will be raising the cost of flights due to the fuel crisis.

Cathay Pacific, AirAsia and Thai Airways are just some that are increasing fares, along with Air New Zealand.

United Airlines said it could eventually see fares increase as much as 20 per cent.

Other airlines have said they are cancelling flights altogether.

United Airlines confirmed that it would be cutting five per cent of flights for the next few months, which works out to around 250 a month.

Air New Zealand has cancelled 1,100 fights, affecting 44,000 passengers, while Scandinavian airline SAS also cancelled 1,000 flights.

Yemen’s Houthis have attacked Israel for the first time, a month after US and Israeli forces began striking Iran, opening up a new front in a rapidly escalating conflict that has killed thousands of people, displaced millions and rattled the global economy.

The Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen, entered the fray on Saturday with two missile and drone attacks on Israel in the space of fewer than 24 hours. The Israeli army said the attacks were intercepted, but the Iran-aligned group pledged to continue fighting in support of “resistance fronts in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran”.

The Houthis had sat out of the hostilities until now, in contrast with their stance during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, when their attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea upended commercial traffic worth about $1 trillion a year.

Their widely anticipated involvement in the latest conflict comes just as Iran has throttled traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital chokepoint for about a fifth of the world’s oil, raising fears that the Yemeni group will again disrupt Red Sea traffic by blocking the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

Reporting from Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, Al Jazeera’s Yousef Mawry described Bab al-Mandeb as the group’s “ace”.

“They want to make Israel pay economically. They want to disrupt their trade routes. They want to disrupt the imports and exports in and out of Israel,” he said.

‘Civilians bearing brunt of war’

The Houthi attacks came after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington expected to conclude its military operations against Iran within weeks, even as a new deployment of US Marines has begun to arrive in the region, so US President Donald Trump would have “maximum” flexibility to adjust the strategy as needed.

With no immediate diplomatic breakthrough in sight as both the US and Iran harden their positions, many fear that the US-Israel war on Iran, which started on February 28 and has since engulfed the region, will spiral out of control.

The US and Israel continued their bombardment over the past 24 hours, with the Israeli military claiming it had struck an Iranian research facility for naval weapons, while a series of loud explosions rattled Tehran as night fell on Saturday.

Iranian media said at least five people were killed in a US-Israeli attack on a residential unit in the northwestern city of Zanjan. In Tehran, authorities said the University of Science and Technology was the latest educational facility to be struck, prompting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to issue a threat against Israeli and US universities in the region.

Separately, Iran’s Fars news agency said a water reservoir in the city of Haftgel, located in western Khuzestan province, had also been attacked.

The Iranian Ministry of Health announced that 1,937 people have been killed since the start of the conflict, including 230 children. Iran’s Red Crescent Society said US-Israeli strikes had damaged more than 93,000 civilian properties.

“Civilians are bearing the brunt of this war,” Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, said.

Devastation in Lebanon

Meanwhile, Israel’s devastation of Lebanon continued apace, as the Lebanese Ministry of Health reported that 1,189 people had been killed in Israeli attacks since March 2.

The death toll has been mounting as Israeli troops have pushed further into the south, advancing towards the Litani River in their stated bid to wipe out Hezbollah and carve out a buffer zone along the lines of the “Gaza model”.

Among Saturday’s killings, an Israeli strike killed three journalists in southern Lebanon. In parallel, the Health Ministry announced that Israel had also killed nine paramedics, bringing the death toll among healthcare workers in the latest war to 51.

Lebanon’s Public Health Emergency Operations Centre said an Israeli attack on the town of al-Haniyah, in the Tyre district of southern Lebanon, killed at least seven people, including one child.

An Israeli air raid on the southern Lebanese town of Deir al-Zahrani killed a Lebanese soldier, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.

Hezbollah, which attacked Israel amid a ceasefire that Israel kept violating in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, claimed dozens of operations against Israeli forces in the past 24 hours.

Mixed messages

Trump has threatened to hit Iranian power stations and other energy infrastructure if Tehran does not fully open the Strait of Hormuz. But he has extended the deadline he had imposed for this week, giving Iran another 10 days to respond.

With the US midterm elections coming up in November, the increasingly unpopular war is weighing heavily on the president’s Republican Party.

Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on Friday that he believed Tehran would hold talks with Washington in the coming days. “We have a 15-point plan on the table. We expect the Iranians to respond. It could solve it all,” Witkoff said.

Pakistan, which has been a go-between between US and Iranian officials, will host foreign ministers from regional powers Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Egypt in Islamabad for talks on the crisis.

Pakistan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ishaq Dar spoke with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, late on Saturday, urging “an end to all attacks and hostilities” in the region.

In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Dar had told Araghchi that Pakistan remains committed to supporting efforts aimed at restoring regional peace and stability.

Dar also announced that Iran had agreed to allow 20 Pakistani-flagged vessels to transit the Strait of Hormuz, calling it a meaningful step towards easing one of the worst energy crises in modern history.

One month after US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, the conflict has escalated across the Middle East. From leadership assassinations to economic disruption, the war is reshaping the region and destabilising the global economy.

There were fireworks, there was a flyover, there was Will Ferrell screaming and Keith Williams Jr. crooning and four months of cheers unleashed by fans wearing championship belts and howling grins.

But the real stars of Thursday’s Dodger opening day show never made a sound.

They arrived silently at the end of the pregame ceremony, carefully held by two of the men who helped win them, lifted high for all those who so passionately longed for them.

They were the last two Commissioner’s Trophies, the back-to-back World Series championship trophies, the two symbols of the Dodgers domination held side by side in the afternoon sun.

Man, it was beautiful. Goodness, how they sparkled. Incredible, how they glowed.

It was almost as if they were powered by some electrical force, some sort of championship current running between them, lighting them up with a blinding power curated by the battered fingers of the two veterans who touched them.

Freddie Freeman, whose grand slam doomed the New York Yankees, held the 2024 trophy. Miguel Rojas, whose home run stunned the Toronto Blue Jays, held the 2025 trophy.

Together they brought the trophies to the dugout from center field while riding in the back of a blue convertible driven by Ferrell as part of an elaborate video skit.

It was the first time many had seen the hardware side by side, and, amid audible gasps, their power was unmistakable. The greatness of the Dodgers accomplishment came to life on a day when their new task became equally clear.

“Three-peat!” screamed one of the pregame musicians.

Welcome, Dodgers, to 2026.

While manager Dave Roberts downplayed the three-peat talk before the opening 8-2 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks, you know it’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere.

“At this moment, very minimal,” said Roberts when asked about the pressure. “…So yeah, hopefully we can keep that to a minimum throughout the season. But yeah, there’s obviously going to be a lot of talk about it.”

Thursday did nothing to dampen that talk. It was as if last season’s Game 7 against the Toronto Blue Jays was still being played. The Dodgers behaved like the exact same team with some of the same heroes.

The winning pitcher? Once again, it was Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who threw six solid innings with six strikeouts and no walks.

The game-changing play? Once again, it was Andy Pages, whose three-run home run in the fifth inning gave the Dodgers a lead they never lost.

The final big blow? Yep, Will Smith, whose two-run homer in the seventh inning clinched it.

Dodgers unveil the plaque for the 2025 World Series win.

(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)

There was even a World Series star coming out of the bullpen, new cult hero Will Klein entering the game to the night’s loudest ovation and throwing a scoreless inning.

It’s as if the Dodgers have been on the same roll for four months…with no signs of slowing. This could be crazy. This already is crazy.

Other than the cool trophies and the Diamondbacks trampling, the most notable show Thursday was unwittingly staged by Dodger Stadium itself.

Your dutiful correspondent’s first impression of his favorite place on earth upon returning here for his 37th home opener wasn’t about the deep green or brilliant blue or enduring mountainscape.

It was, when did this place become Las Vegas?

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Illuminated by the new grotesquely red Uniqlo Field billboard hanging high above center field, the stadium appears to have been transformed into something straight from NASCAR, advertisements filling every nook and cranny of the pavilion and beyond. There are giant billboards above the bullpens. There are scribbled ads on the bullpen walls. There are screaming displays for beer, soda and healthcare, the latter of which you will need if you heed too many of these ads.

The incessant sales pitches are buffeted by the usual deafening pounding music, which makes Vin Scully Avenue seem like Las Vegas Boulevard.

Was it always like this? It doesn’t seem like it. The Dodgers have always been relentless billboard salesmen, but since the arrival of Shohei Ohtani, they’ve become a global attraction with seemingly every major company on earth willing to pay for a piece of their success.

Fans will probably notice that the biggest difference this year is the $125-million sponsorship deal with Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel company that bought center field. Chavez Ravine is now officially known as Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium and, yeah, on Thursday it was awful hearing public address announcer Todd Leitz introduce it like that.

Not to worry, nobody in their right mind is ever going to call it that. Nonetheless, the whole atmosphere was weird and unsettling.

Still, it’s hard to blame the Dodgers. They’ve spent gobs of money building a two-time defending champion, and those bucks have got to come from somewhere.

You want Kyle Tucker? Live with the beer ad. You want a $1 billion rotation? Deal with the bank ad.

Dodgers Blake Snell, Kiké Hernandez, Roki Sasaki and Alex Call during player introductions before the game.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Unlike many other teams that have made baseball a haven for cheapskates, the Dodgers invest much of their revenue back into the roster.

It’s not always pretty. It can be loud and distracting and obnoxious. But it works.

As night fell on a blessed blue Thursday, the Dodgers had won their eighth straight home opener. They did it with pitching, hitting, depth, and two of the prettiest pieces of jewelry you’ve ever seen.

It was a day to celebrate the completion of the most incredible two-year journey in franchise history.

It was also a day to realize that the journey has just begun.

An On the Beach travel influencer has shared recommendations for holidaymakers

People booking holidays after payday could benefit from a travel expert’s destination tips. A travel influencer has shared six holiday trends he predicts for March and April, and the knowledge could benefit anyone looking for a ‘cheap city break’ in the coming weeks.

The tips were highlighted in a video shared by Rob Brooks, a travel enthusiast and influencer with the travel company On The Beach. Rob is well-known for posting budget-friendly travel advice, hotel reviews, and holiday tips for his 114k TikTok followers, where he goes by the username @Robonthebeach.

In a new video shared this week, the travel lover shared ‘six holiday trends’ he is ‘predicting for payday’. In the clip, Rob explained: “If I got paid today and I had seven days to book a holiday, this is exactly what I’d be doing.

“I’m Rob, I work in travel, and I spend my days deep in holiday data, what people are searching, what people are booking, what’s getting sneakily cheaper. And these are my payday predictions as a holiday expert, and more importantly, exactly how I’d use them.”

First, Rob predicted that city breaks will soar in popularity this year. He said: “Short trips are crazy popular in 2026, and I’m seeing loads of demand because people want a quick break without burning loads of annual leave. And when flights price dynamically, weekends get expensive really fast.

“So midweek is currently where the value sits on city breaks. And if I was booking one right now, I’d be looking at a midweek break in Prague, Lisbon or Barcelona. I’d try and line them up with a May bank holiday so you can stretch your time off without paying peak prices.”

Moving on, the travel enthusiast said Turkey ‘will see a surge of bookings.’ He said: “You’re getting five-star all-inclusive holidays for the same prices that you’d pay for three-star elsewhere. And interestingly, according to the data, the longer the transfer, the cheaper the holiday.”

As for when you want to book your trip, the holiday expert suggested May. Rob told viewers: “May is a perfect crossover for holidays, and I’m seeing some pretty nuts prices in some destinations where the weather is already properly warm.

“Airlines and hotels haven’t quite pushed up the prices yet in line with peak demand, but that demand is now starting to build. So if I was booking today I would lock in a holiday in May in somewhere like Morocco or Egypt, Tunisia or Turkey because they’re hot, reliable and still really good value before summer kicks in.”

Sharing another tip, Rob added that all-inclusive holidays are proving popular. For his next prediction, the influencer said: “Last-minute bookings will spike. There’s a real wait and see behaviour with holidaymakers right now.”

He continued: “People are watching prices then jumping in to book as soon as they drop. And when airlines and hotels need to fill seats and rooms close to departure, that’s when prices on package holidays suddenly start to dip. If I were going for pure value, I would actually wait and book about seven days before departure, possibly even later than that. It’s risky. But when it works, it really works. I should say, please, only do this if you’re prepared and in a position to take that risk.”

Concluding his video, Rob added that he thinks people will treat themselves more this payday. “There’s definitely a bit of a go on then mindset in the UK right now, and I personally think it might be tied to the cost of living creeping up again cause people know prices are only going one way, so they’re locking in the good prices now before they go up. So if I were booking this week, I’d probably stretch my budget a little bit to book a better hotel or a nicer room and lock it in before prices inevitably climb over the next few weeks.”

Yields on government debt across European countries and the United States have been rising since the start of the Iran war.

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Investors are demanding higher yields as confidence in the global economy has cratered due to the severe negative impact of the conflict on energy markets, supply chains and Middle Eastern infrastructure.

The 2-year notes, sensitive to near-term rate expectations, have risen faster than their 10-year counterparts in a classic bear-flattening move, while longer-dated yields reflect worries over the economic drag caused by more expensive energy.

Speaking to Euronews, BCA Research’s Chief Fixed Income Strategist, Robert Timper, explained that “the aggressive bear flattening of yield curves reflects a hawkish monetary policy repricing in response to inflation fears stemming from the Iran war”.

“The front-end [2-year yields] is more sensitive to changes in monetary policy and has therefore risen more than the long-end [10-year yields] in response to investors’ anticipation of more hawkish central bank policy,” Timper added.

Historically, this specific curve behaviour often precedes an inverted yield curve, which is a well-recognised indicator of a potential economic recession.

European bonds bear the brunt of the sell-off

The repricing has been most pronounced in Europe, with the UK bond market feeling the biggest pressure.

Since the start of the conflict, the 10-year UK gilt yield has risen from 4.2% to a high of over 5% while the 2-year note yield jumped from 3.5% to a peak of 4.6%.

Timper explained to Euronews that past inflation experience has proved decisive, stating that “rate hikes in the UK are more likely than elsewhere because inflation has been more elevated than elsewhere, and the risk of inflation expectations unanchoring is therefore higher.”

On Wednesday, AJ Bell’s investment director Russ Mould highlighted the UK-specific implications in a detailed press release, noting that the 10-year gilt yield is hovering near 5% for only the third time since 2008 while the 2-year gilt yield comfortably exceeds the Bank of England base rate.

Mould also explained that the gap between the 10-year gilt yield and the FTSE 100 dividend yield has widened to more than one-and-a-half percentage points, making UK equities relatively less attractive.

Elsewhere in Europe, bond yields experienced similar surges.

Germany’s 10-year bund yield increased from 2.65% to around 3%, nearing 15-year highs, while the 2-year note yield climbed from roughly 2% to 2.65%.

In France, the 10-year OAT yield jumped from 3.2% to above 3.7%, approaching 17-year peaks, while the 2-year note yield has risen from 2.1% to over 2.8%.

As for Italy, the 10-year BTP yield was at around 3.3% before the Iran war and has now surpassed 3.9%, approaching two-year highs, while the 2-year note yield has increased from roughly 2.15% to 3%.

In every single one of these bond markets, the yield on the 2-year notes has risen faster than their 10-year counterparts.

The 30 and 20-year bond yields are also all trading higher which denotes deteriorating confidence in the long-term growth prospect of the respective European economies.

US Treasuries face comparable headwinds

Across the Atlantic, US Treasuries have followed a similar trajectory, though the sell-off has been less severe than in the UK for example.

The 10-year note yield has risen from around 3.9% to a peak of 4.4%, reached on Monday, and is currently trading at 4.37%.

Meanwhile, the 2-year note yield increased from 3.35% to a high of over 4%, and it is hovering 3.9% at the time of writing.

The yields on both notes have hit an 8-month high.

Timper’s analysis places US bond performance close to that of the euro area, reflecting broadly comparable inflation histories and policy outlooks. There is scant evidence of investors fleeing European bonds for US Treasuries as a safe-haven trade.

Speaking to Euronews, Timper explained that such shifting flows would be more visible in currency markets as the US dollar benefits from being the predominant denominator for energy exports.

For now the message from bond markets on either side of the Atlantic is consistent, the Middle East conflict has rewritten the near-term outlook for inflation, monetary policy and borrowing costs.

If I had a nickel for every time an editor has sent me an SFGate story and asked me to match it, I’d be at least a couple dollars richer. The San Francisco-based news website provides solid coverage of California public lands, especially our national parks.

So when my colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove told me the National Park Service had reportedly blacklisted SFGate, I wasn’t exactly shocked.

Recent SFGate stories have revealed efforts to limit which public lands employees can share information with the public, quoted critics of the Department of the Interior’s decision to end reservation systems at popular parks and detailed a litany of items that were previously offered at the parks but are now being reviewed for possible removal, thanks to an executive order to “restore truth and sanity” to American history, including books about Indigenous culture and educational materials for children.

But over the past month, the National Park Service essentially stopped responding to inquiries sent by SFGate reporters on dozens of subjects, national parks bureau chief Ashley Harrell wrote last week. The outlet spoke with sources, reviewed internal communications and learned that an Interior Department spokesperson had instructed the National Park Service to ignore SFGate reporters, Harrell wrote. The blacklisting was apparently prompted by a Feb. 10 article on the Interior Department’s efforts to centralize control of park service communications.

I emailed the National Park Service to learn more. “Unfortunately, SFGate has distorted the facts and has caused confusion with their reporting with the mainstream media,” a spokesperson replied. “This has caused the Department to spend countless hours correcting their false narrative with other media outlets.”

Although the statement came from a park service email address, the wording is identical to a statement provided to SFGate by an Interior Department spokesperson.

I’ve also noticed changes in how the park service handles media requests over the past year or so. Some L.A. Times inquiries — about a coyote swimming to Alcatraz and a man charged with BASE jumping in Yosemite, for instance — received prompt replies.

But others — like questions about whether the park service is relying more heavily on seasonal employees amid a decline in permanent staff — went unreturned. And some — like an inquiry for a previous edition of a Boiling Point newsletter about an interpretive exhibit under scrutiny at Death Valley National Park — were fielded by a spokesperson for the Interior Department , rather than the park itself.

I’m not alone. When our wildlife and outdoors reporter Lila Seidman wrote about a wildfire that ripped through Joshua Tree National Park during last year’s government shutdown, she received responses from the Interior Department, but emails to the park service went unreturned.

Jack Dolan, an investigative reporter who often covers public lands, said he hasn’t received meaningful responses from the National Park Service since early last year.

And Cosgrove, who writes The Wild newsletter, said that park rangers remain friendly and helpful, but any communication involves a demand for all questions in writing.

Park service sources and advocates describe all this as part of a broader effort to centralize communications from sub-agencies to the Department of the Interior. Since last year, roughly 230 communications employees have been moved from the National Park Service to the Department of the Interior — part of a broader push in which more than 5,700 employees at the 11 agencies the Interior Department oversees were shifted from the agencies to the department, according to figures provided by the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit that advocates for the park system.

What’s more, the Interior Department must now approve many park service communications that were once left up to the parks themselves, said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Assn. That includes exhibits, news releases, website updates and even social media posts, said a source within the park service who asked to remain anonymous over fears of retaliation.

The consolidation “creates significant inefficiencies and removes a layer of accountability to the parks themselves,” Garder said. “It makes it difficult for parks to act nimbly using their professional discretion to make decisions about informing the public about developments in the park,” like a closed road, wildlife hazard or natural disaster.

In an email to The Times, the park service accused National Parks Conservation Assn. employees of donating to Democratic political campaigns and pointed out the nonprofit’s X account follows progressive politicians and groups. “Our parks are nonpartisan, but the NPCA isn’t and they are using you to further raise money off of our parks while never giving those funds to our parks,” a spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

National Parks Conservation Assn.’s X account follows over 55,000 users of the platform, including both Democratic and Republican lawmakers and organizations. Garder also noted that the association’s longstanding role has been to advocate for national parks, rather than to raise money directly for them.

The park service email confirmed that officials are “modernizing” the Department of the Interior so that it “will share one voice when communicating the priorities of the Department.”

“The unification of the communication functions will allow for a more collaborative, creative and hands-on approach to Department communications,” the statement said, “and will modernize the federal government by providing a product that is not only better for the American taxpayer but also showcases the state-of-the-art communications capabilities of the United States of America.”

I asked whether I should attribute the statement to a spokesperson for the park service or the Interior Department. The spokesperson replied that I could attribute it to either.

A quick announcement

If you’re a Southern California local, you are probably familiar with PBS SoCal. On April 22, the public media organization is premiering the seventh season of the award-winning program “Earth Focus,” which will be followed by the eighth season in May. We’re excited for the eighth season in particular, because we collaborated with the PBS SoCal team on a few stories about the complexities of rebuilding Los Angeles. You can stream the show for free at pbssocal.org/earthfocus.

More recent land news

Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest-ranking official at the Department of the Interior, has been granted an ethics waiver to work on grazing issues despite potential conflicts of interests that prompted her to recuse herself from such matters during the first Trump presidency, according to Chris D’Angelo of Public Domain.

A pair of Republican senators have officially moved to overturn the management plan for Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, casting uncertainty on its future and raising new questions about the future of public lands management, Caroline Llanes of Rocky Mountain Community Radio reports.

The Trump administration is aggressively expanding the border wall through ecologically sensitive public lands, with a portion planned for Big Bend National Park emerging as a political flash point, Arelis R. Hernández, Jake Spring, John Muyskens and Thomas Simonetti write in this Washington Post deep dive.

The Interior Department has officially pulled back more than 80% of its regulations tied to implementing the National Environmental Policy Act in a bid to streamline the environmental review process for major projects on federal public lands. Conservation groups say the changes will block public input and violate federal law, according to Hannah Northey and Scott Streater of E&E News by Politico.

The Trump administration is taking the final steps to undo the Public Lands Rule, which elevated conservation to an official use of Bureau of Land Management lands, Streater also reports. The rule allowed conservation groups to obtain leases for restoration work, similar to how the Bureau of Land Management awards leases to private contractors for extraction and development, points out Sage Marshall of Field & Stream.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service is expected to soon release an updated proposal for the rescission of the Roadless Rule, which blocked new road building and commercial logging on some 58 million acres of backcountry. The rollback would strike a big blow to hunting and fishing opportunities, according to a report from Trout Unlimited.

A few last things in climate news

Amid a global energy crisis that’s seen oil prices skyrocket, California has been particularly hard-hit due to a dearth of refineries and higher taxes and fees, all of which have left politicians, consumer groups and business interests arguing over who’s to blame, write Ivan Penn and Kurtis Lee for the New York Times.

In the latest maneuver in its campaign against renewable energy, the Trump administration will pay a French company $1 billion to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases, according to Jennifer McDermott of the Associated Press.

Southern California’s most destructive wildfires, wettest holiday season and hottest March heat wave have all taken place in the last 15 months, and there’s one clear through line connecting them all, scientists told my colleague Clara Harter.

Mosquitoes have gone year-round in Los Angeles, but business owners have indicated they’re not willing to pay to expand a promising effort to help control their numbers, my buddy Lila Seidman reports.

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.

As Operation Epic Fury slogs on for a 26th day, Iranian officials have publicly dismissed the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate a way out of the crisis. Both sides have exchanged demands for any settlement of the war as Pakistan has agreed to hold peace talks, but there appears to be no quick off ramp to this conflict. Meanwhile, the missile and drones keep launching and the bombs keep falling.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday said Iran “refused to come to a deal,” adding that President Donald Trump “does not bluff and is prepared to unleash hell.”

The Iranians claimed that they rejected any move to stop the fighting because of the demands made by the White House and, what they state, is their ongoing successful defensive strategy. They also hit back with their own peace deal demands.

Though the U.S. has started “efforts to establish a ceasefire and start indirect negotiations with Iran… Tehran considers a ceasefire and negotiations currently unjustifiable,” the official Iranian FARS news agency proclaimed on Wednesday. “While U.S. diplomatic movements for a ceasefire have increased in the past five days with mediation by some countries, experts describe the change in Donald Trump’s rhetoric as a sign of Washington’s retreat in the face of Iran’s resistance. However, according to observers, the U.S. government’s effort to maintain its prestige has caused these requests to be presented wrapped in military and media threats.”

“…the Islamic Republic of Iran, before making any decision regarding the ceasefire request presented by U.S. intermediaries, emphasizes achieving its strategic goals in confrontation with the hostile front, and only upon their fulfillment will there be a possibility to end the war (not just a ceasefire),” FARS added. “Political analysts also believe that Iran’s comprehensive resistance against the U.S., the Zionist regime, and their allies has narrowed the maneuvering space for the enemy, forcing them to seek a way out of the current situation.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Beijing for a rescheduled summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on May 14 and 15, the White House announced on Wednesday.

Trump had been scheduled to travel to China later this month but previously announced he was delaying the trip so he could be in Washington to help steward the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The Republican president had announced a rescheduled trip even though the war in Iran continues and the U.S. is pressing Tehran to accept a ceasefire proposal.

The president and First Lady Melania Trump also plan to host Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, for a White House visit later this year, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Leavitt, when asked if the new dates for Trump’s trip could suggest he believes the Iran war could end soon, offered an optimistic tone that the conflict could reach an endgame before he travels.

“We’ve always estimated four to six weeks,” Leavitt responded. “So you could do the math on that.”

The United States and Israel launched the attacks against Iran on Feb. 28.

The China trip had been planned for months but began to unravel as Trump pressured Beijing and other world powers to use their military might to protect the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for the flow of oil. The strait has been effectively closed as Iran targets energy infrastructure and traffic through it.

Trump said last week while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in the Oval Office that he would be going to China in five or six weeks’ time instead of at the end of the month. He said he would be “resetting” his visit with Xi.

“We’re working with China — they were fine with it,” Trump said then. “I look forward to seeing President Xi. He looks forward to seeing me, I think.”

Trump’s visit to China is seen as an opportunity to build on a fragile trade truce between the two superpowers, but it has become tangled in his effort to find an endgame to the war in Iran. Soon after pressing China and other nations to send warships to secure access to Middle Eastern oil, Trump indicated last week that his travel plans depended on Beijing’s response, though he added then that the U.S. didn’t need help from the allies that rebuffed his request.

Madhani writes for the Associated Press.

Replacing Griffith Park’s historic but idle swimming pool is likely to take at least three years and cost $40 million while delivering a competition pool, a neighboring recreational pool and a rehabilitated pool house with a gender-neutral bathhouse facility, city officials and designers told Los Feliz residents at an open house meeting Thursday night.

“The pool is being completely replaced. It leaks like a sieve,” said Stephanie Kingsnorth, principal of the architecture firm Perkins Eastman, addressing about 50 community members in a room next to the park’s visitor center.

Perkins Eastman, which is leading the design of the pool site, also worked on the renovation and expansion of Griffith Observatory from 2002 to 2006, when the firm was known as Pfeiffer Partners.

While neighbors look on, an artist’s rendition shows the proposed replacement of the Griffith Park Pool and rehabilitation of the pool house. The meeting was held at the Griffith Park Visitor Center Auditorium.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The pool and pool house at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard date to 1927, long before Interstate 5 was routed just east of the site in 1964. After decades as a popular spot for children’s swim lessons and recreational lap swimmers, the pool was shut down amid COVID-19 pandemic measures in early 2020. When the city tried to refill the pool, workers found that it no longer held water.

At one point early in planning to replace it, the city Bureau of Engineering forecast construction costs of $28 million. City officials say the project is complicated because of the nearness of the freeway and the Los Angeles River.

Kingsnorth said the project is nearing the end of its design development stage, with many details still under discussion.

In place of the existing seasonal pool, schematic drawings now show a new year-round competition pool, 50 meters long, 25 yards wide and from 3-foot, 6-inches to 12-foot, 9-inches deep.

Next to it, drawings show a training pool 25 yards long and 50 feet wide, with an ADA-compliant gentle slope down to about 4 feet deep.

The two-story pool house’s red tile roof, wooden trellises and Spanish Colonial Revival features will look roughly the same on the outside, Kingsnorth said, and the rehabilitation will comply with federal standards for historic structures.

But some formerly open-air areas will now be covered. An elevator and second set of stairs will be added inside, along with features to boost energy sustainability and meet modern accessibility laws. The site’s open-air showers will be rinse-only.

On the ground floor, the building’s open-air male and female changing rooms will merge into one larger indoor gender-neutral area with private changing rooms and toilet stalls, Kingsnorth said.

“Every single toilet room and dressing room is an individual room,” Kingsnorth said.

Kingsnorth said the gender-neutral dressing room design was not mandated by state or federal restrictions but was a priority for the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. On projects like this, Kingsnorth said, “this is something that’s more common for equity and inclusion.”

Questions from the community focused on features of the pool, public access, cost and effects of the construction work.

“We’re very anxious to have the school come back, so that the kids can learn to swim,” said Marian Dodge, a longtime area resident and past president of the Los Feliz Improvement Assn.

The Griffith Park Pool, seen here in 2023, has been closed since 2020, when city workers found major leakage problems.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

The pool site is within City Council District 4, represented by Nithya Raman, who was not present. Her staffers organized the meeting and urged residents to send questions and comments to griffithparkpool@lacity.org.

The next steps, a handout from the city and design firm read, include creation of construction documents (estimated at six months), obtaining city permits (five months), selecting a construction contractor (five months), construction (18 months), and “project close-out” (six months). If that schedule is met, completion would come in a little over 40 months, around July 2029.

“This is ambitious, but we’re confident that we can get there,” Kingsnorth said.

In an hourlong presentation, followed by about a dozen questions and answers, Kingsnorth was joined by city officials, including Ohaji Abdallah, assistant division head of the Bureau of Engineering’s architectural division, and
Maha Yateem, the Recreation and Parks Department’s principal recreation supervisor for citywide aquatics.

The plan calls for three rows of shaded concrete bleachers for spectators alongside the competition pool. Yateem said the competition pool will include a diving board, adding that “we’re working on a location for that now.”

Because the project means removing tons of existing pool materials and bringing in new ones, “the construction here is going to be quite intense,” Abdallah said. He and Kingsnorth said the “haul route” of construction trucks has not been decided, and Abdallah said he and other officials are discussing the plan’s possible impact on Los Feliz Nursery School, which stands near the pool.

When considering construction costs and “soft costs” like design and environmental review, “I expect this to be about $40 million,” Abdallah said, adding that the project will be vying with other city priorities for dollars from the general fund. He also noted that current estimates were made “before the war started” in Iran and gas prices surged.

After the meeting, Kingsnorth said, “We’re ready to pause if we need to because of the outlying state of the world.”

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio won a Best Actor Oscar (his first) for his performance in “The Revenant” as an early 19th century fur trapper who is injured in a bear attack, then by turns grudgingly kept alive, abandoned and left for dead by the avaricious hunting party he had been hired to lead.

In his acceptance speech at those 88th Academy Awards, DiCaprio first thanked the film’s cast and crew. He then pivoted quickly and forcefully to the environment. “The Revenant,” he said, was … “about man’s relationship to the natural world that we collectively felt in 2015, as the hottest year in recorded history.”

The rest of what he said is worth a big block quote; to read it today, the week after the 98th Academy, during which politics and policy both receded, is bracing.

“Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, the big corporations, but who speak for all humanity, for the Indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children, and for those people whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take this award for granted.”

That year was something of a heady time for environmentalists. Barack Obama was in the middle of his second term as president of the U.S and though his climate and environmental policies were not especially progressive, in 2015 he did enact the Clean Power Plan, which had the stated goal of reducing carbon emissions locally, and “leading global efforts to address climate change” outside U.S. borders.

Further, just a couple of months after the 88th Academy Awards, the U.S. would become one the 196 parties to sign onto the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to reduce the rise of global temperatures, whose terms had been negotiated the previous fall.

Fast forward 10 years. Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2020. Joe Biden rejoined in 2021. Trump withdrew again just a few months ago. And in this second go at the White House, the Trump Administration has done everything in its power to tighten the knots tethering the U.S. to fossil fuels. It has literally forced owners of coal plants in Colorado and Washington State that want to shut them down to keep them open. Trump has fought tooth and nail in court to suspend wind energy projects that are fully permitted, under contract and under construction across the eastern seaboard. And his administration has rolled backed numerous efforts to keep climate change in check, like the allowance of state-specific fuel economy standards and the landmark fossil-fuel endangerment finding of 2009.

Meanwhile, that global temperature record that DiCaprio mentioned in his acceptance speech in 2016 seems almost trifling compared to what has happened since. It’s been surpassed six times. According to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, the three hottest years on record are 2024, 2023 and 2025.

At the 98th Academy Awards, DiCaprio was nominated again for Best Actor — his sixth in that category — this time for “One Battle After Another.” The film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Picture. DiCaprio lost in his category to Michael B. Jordan, the lead of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” so he didn’t have a chance to say anything about climate change.

But not a single one of the Oscar winners this year mentioned it.

Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” were produced by Warner Brothers, which is about to be acquired by Paramount Skydance, which in turn is owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, one the world’s wealthiest individuals and noted Trump supporter. Ellison the younger has already made decisions that have significantly defanged the climate coverage at CBS News — Paramount’s flagship news network — and it would not be shocking if CNN — part of the WB — is next.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of this show was its dearth of any language at the awards that could be considered political.

Instead of the fire we got from, say, Michael Moore in 2003, what we got was a sort of mea culpa from P.T. Anderson — who might be the definitional American Gen X director — in his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay:

“I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also, with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

I harbor the same hopes, but it might require at least acknowledging the problems first.

More culture & enviro news

One thing that does give me some optimism is that the feted films themselves did a pretty good job acknowledging climate change. According to Good Energy, a consultancy group, of the 16 scripted features that were nominated for an Oscar and met the eligibility criteria, five passed the “climate reality check.” That’s pretty good!

Relevant especially for those facing the heat wave right now in L.A. and the rest of the southwest: a study published earlier this week in Lancet attempted to quantify how rising global temperatures will impact physical inactivity in different parts of the world. Chloé Farand summed it up for the Guardian, noting the researchers’ projection of 500,000 additional annual deaths due to inactivity by 2050.

Meanwhile, Libby Rainey at LAist wrote about how the city is preparing for the inevitable heat challenges that will accompany the World Cup games this coming summer.

This isn’t brand new — in fact, it references the reporting of my former colleague Sammy Roth — but Alexandra Tey over at the Nation has a nice roundup of sports fans protesting their teams’ financial ties to fossil fuel companies. It focuses on one of the most visible of these partnerships: Citi Field, where the New York Mets play, is named for Citi group, the world’s biggest lender to oil and gas companies.

A few last things in climate news this week

With gas prices skyrocketing due to the war in Iran, some Californians have been wondering why oil companies in the state can’t just start drilling more. My colleague Blanca Begert explains why it isn’t that simple.

The related big question is will the turmoil in the middle east push countries around the world to double down on renewable energy. In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben makes the case that this could be the moment that small clean tech — think solar panels, heat pumps, induction cooktops, etc — really takes off.

Finally, somehow, some 10 million tons of manure produced at California factory farms is unaccounted for. Seth Millstein, writing for Sentient, explains how lax regulation let farms dispose of 200 Titanics’ worth of animal waste without telling anyone where or how they did it.

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.

Carly Rae Jepsen is officially in her mother era.

The Grammy-nominated “Call Me Maybe” pop star and her husband, music producer Cole M.G.N., welcomed their first child together months after tying the knot last fall. Jepsen, 40, revealed the arrival of her little one on Instagram.

“Last 2 weeks have been the best of my life,” the Canadian singer-songwriter captioned a photo shared to her Instagram story on Tuesday. The photo, a mirror selfie, shows Jepsen all smiles in a leopard-print bucket hat, white shirt and black shorts as she cradles her child, who wears a green-striped onesie.

“Welcome to the world little one,” Jepsen wrote.

“Run Away With Me” singer Jepsen and music producer Cole M.G.N. — whose full name is Cole Marsden Greif-Neil — exchanged their vows in late October at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, three years after striking up a romance in 2022. A month later, Jepsen announced she and her husband were expecting.

“Oh hi baby,” she captioned a set of baby-bump-baring photos shared to Instagram in November. In the tender maternity shoot, Jepsen cradles her bump in bed alongside Marsden Greif-Neil. Jepsen continued posting on Instagram about her maternity journey with fans, in January posting photos from the beach, from home and from fitting rooms as she spoke about finding a lullaby for her child-to-be.

On Tuesday, she channeled a Frankie Valli classic to express her “Emotion” about being a mother: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Last year, Jepsen celebrated 10 years of her cult-favorite album “Emotion,” the follow-up to her 2012 smash hit “Call Me Maybe.” She celebrated the milestone with a lively anniversary concert in August at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, featuring celebrity guests and moments of reflection.

“I had brought a little suitcase, and I kept calling my parents and saying, ‘Send more clothes!’” Jepsen said, recalling her move to Los Angeles from her native Canada when she was 26. “Five years later, I was like, I think I live here now. I’m very happy to say L.A. has become my home.”

Pop music critic Mikael Wood contributed to this report.

Four of the five members of the Board of Fire Commissioners, which oversees the Los Angeles Fire Department, are stepping down at a time when the department is under intense scrutiny because of its missteps in handling the devastating Palisades fire.

The departures, which include board President Genethia Hudley Hayes, come after the agency’s top watchdog, Independent Assessor Tyler Izen, retired this month.

The fire commissioners are appointed by the mayor and are supposed to provide civilian oversight for the Fire Department. But during critical discussions about the Palisades fire, the commissioners have largely been quiet.

Addressing the LAFD’s failure to fully extinguish the Lachman fire, which later reignited into the Palisades fire, Chief Jaime Moore conceded at a January board meeting that mop-up procedures needed to be strengthened. Moore also admitted that the LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades fire was softened to shield top brass from scrutiny.

The commissioners did not ask any questions about Moore’s remarks and only praised him.

In an interview at the time, Hudley Hayes said she did not know who ordered the changes to the after-action report — and despite her oversight role, was “not particularly” interested in finding out.

“Our job is to take the report that we have in front of us. Our job is to make sure those recommendations that came to us from a public report are taken care of,” said Hudley Hayes, a former school board member who said she was first appointed to the commission by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, served eight years and then was appointed again by Mayor Karen Bass.

On Monday, Corinne Tapia Babcock, one of the four commissioners stepping down, said that by the time items come to the board, they often have already been negotiated by the fire chief, the mayor and the City Council.

“It’s more of an approval, ceremonial role,” she said.

After Babcock said she wasn’t planning to stay on past the end of her term in June, Bass’ office asked her to serve instead on the Board of Fire and Police Pension Commissioners, and she accepted.

On her way out, Babcock said she suggested that the fire commission be expanded to seven seats, instead of five, to include an active and a retired LAFD member.

“I think there could be more opportunity for the commission to have more of a say if there was some lived experience,” said Babcock, whose father is a retired fire chief.

Jimmie Woods-Gray, whose term was set to expire in 2028, is also stepping down. She said family commitments have left her with less time to devote to the board.

She said she is leaving with some frustrations about the management of the LAFD, including its reluctance to refer allegations of wrongdoing by its members to an independent investigation rather than an internal inquiry.

“One of the problems I’ve always had with the Fire Department is that they always investigate themselves,” she added.

Hudley Hayes, whose four-year term would have expired in June 2027, said the tumult within the LAFD had no bearing on her exit, which she had been planning since before the Palisades fire. After the fire, Bass and an aide asked her to stay on, Hudley Hayes said.

“For me, it’s time,” she told The Times on Tuesday, adding that her last day would be March 30. “At 81, it’s time for me to take care of Genethia.”

The one remaining commissioner is Elizabeth Garfield, a retired lawyer who represented the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the labor union for LAFD firefighters, in negotiating three collective bargaining agreements. She was appointed in September.

Bass has named four new commissioners to replace the departing ones: John Pérez, a former speaker of the California Assembly who will step down from the Board of Harbor Commissioners to join the fire commission; Jerry P. Abraham, a physician who is the director of public health, integration and street medicine at Kedren Health; Jose Campos Cornejo, a manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; and Yolanda Regalado, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy whose three brothers were firefighters and who now owns a cafe in San Pedro.

Yusef Robb, a Bass spokesperson, said in a statement that the mayor “is confident that her reform agenda for the Fire Department will not only continue, but will accelerate under the fresh perspective and leadership of her new appointees.”

LAFD spokesperson Stephanie Bishop said the agency “welcomes the new members of the Fire Commission and looks forward to working alongside them.”

Sharon Delugach, who was vice president of the fire commission and whose term was set to expire in 2029, bid farewell at a meeting this month.

“I still intend to help and fight and advocate,” she said. “I’m only leaving because I don’t feel like I’ve got the time at this point to be the kind of commissioner I want to be. I don’t want to just come to meetings.”

Delugach did not return a call Tuesday for comment.

Izen retired this month as the LAFD’s independent assessor, who reports to the commission and conducts audits of operations and the department’s handling of complaints. He could not be reached for comment.

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

ORLANDO, Fla. — College Republicans have sued the University of Florida’s president on free speech grounds over the school’s decision to deactivate its chapter after being notified that at least one member engaged in an antisemitic act.

The University of Florida College Republicans filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court against interim president Donald Landry, asking a judge to stop the enforcement of the school’s decision and to restore access to facilities on the Gainesville campus.

“The University of Florida punitively deactivated and shut down the UFCR, in response to alleged viewpoints expressed by a member of UFCR, and in an effort to silence the club and chill its future speech,” the group said in its lawsuit.

UF spokeswoman Cynthia Roldan Hernandez said in an email that the university doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

Officials at the University of Florida said over the weekend that they had been informed by the Florida Federation of College Republicans that the federation had disbanded the Gainesville campus’ chapter after determining that some members had “engaged in a pattern of conduct that violated its rules and values, including a recent antisemitic gesture.”

When the Florida Federation of College Republicans is ready, the university will assist with reactivating the campus chapter under new student leadership, UF officials said in a statement.

The deactivation wasn’t based on any university policy or rule, and it was only based on a member’s expression of a viewpoint “which was alleged to be antisemitic,” the lawsuit said.

The university also didn’t provide the College Republicans with adequate notice and didn’t give the chapter an opportunity to explain its side of the story, according to the lawsuit.

The deactivation effort at the University of Florida campus marks the second time this month that a public university in Florida has taken action against a Republican group accused of being involved in racist or antisemitic behavior.

Earlier this month, Florida International University in Miami launched an investigation into a group chat started by an official with the Miami-Dade chapter of the Republican Party that included violently racist slurs, antisemitic comments and misogynistic language. The chat involved students and several top conservative leaders at Florida International University.

Last fall, New York’s Republican State Committee suspended a Young Republican organization following the release of a group chat that included jokes about rape and flippant commentary on gas chambers.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.

MEXICO CITY — Cuba has begun direct talks with the United States in an effort to solve “bilateral differences” between the two countries, Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel said Friday.

The comments, broadcast nationwide in Cuba, are the first confirmation of bilateral talks between two governments that have been fierce adversaries for almost 70 years, since Fidel Castro’s revolution toppled the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

What exactly the talks are about remains unclear, but the Trump administration—which has choked off oil supplies to the island, triggering a severe energy crisis—has been insisting that Cuba’s communist government must change.

In a statement released on social media, Díaz Canel said, “The primary purpose of this conversation is, firstly, to identify the bilateral problems that require a solution—based on their severity and impact—and, secondly, to find solutions for these identified problems.”

Rumors of direct talks between the two nations have been circulating for months, but neither Washington or Havana had confirmed the talks until now.

On Tuesday, the Cuban ambassador to the United States, Lianys Torres Rivera, told The Times that the Cuban government was “ready to engage with the U.S. on the issues that are important for the bilateral relations, and to talk about those in which we have differences.”

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, have been insistent that the current government must change.

“It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” Trump told Latin American leaders gathered in Florida on Saturday.

“It wouldn’t matter because they’re down to, as they say, fumes. They have no energy. They have no money. They’re in deep trouble,” Trump said.

Trump responded to the Cuban leader’s willingness to negotiate on Friday morning by amplifying a news article with the headline:”Cuba confirms talks with Trump officials, raising hopes for US deal.” He posted that on his Truth Social account.

Rolling blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, a lack of gasoline and other shortfalls have become everyday occurrences on the island, home to 10 million. Images of uncollected garbage rotting on Havana’s streets have been broadcast across the globe. A lack of jet fuel has bludgeoned the critical tourism sector.

“The status quo is unsustainable,” Rubio said last month. “Cuba needs to change…And it doesn’t have to be change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next.”

The Cuban announcement comes 13 days after the U.S. attacked Iran and two months after U.S. forces, deployed by Trump, deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a longtime Cuban ally, and brought him to New York to face drug trafficking charges.