new york

Citing concerns about affordability, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing revising the state’s 2019 climate law, asking to delay implementation by several years and to adopt a different greenhouse-gas accounting method.

The changes would effectively water down a law viewed as one of the most ambitious state climate policies in the U.S.

Hochul called the law’s current targets “costly and unattainable” in a statement released Friday. “This is solely out of necessity — to protect New Yorkers’ pocketbooks and economy,” she said.

The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act targets a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2030 and an 85% cut by 2050. As of 2023, the state had lowered its emissions by about 14%.

Meeting the 2030 deadline would drastically drive up energy bills for New Yorkers, Hochul, a Democrat, has said. Regulations to implement the law are already delayed; Hochul wants to push them back to 2030 and create a new emissions target for 2040.

Energy bills have surged around the U.S., partly as a result of AI-driven demand. As of November, the average residential electricity price in New York was 26.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, ranking eighth highest in the country, according to Empire Center, a nonprofit think tank in Albany. The Iran war has sent oil and gas prices surging.

The proposed weakening of the law comes amid the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal climate regulations and clean energy incentives, which environmentalists have looked to Democrat-led states and cities to counter.

“Lots of people around the country — really around the world — have been looking to see how New York does in implementing this strong climate law,” said Michael Gerrard, a Columbia University law professor who directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

“If a very blue state like New York moves backwards on climate change as well, that’s a negative sign for the country,” he said. “If you can’t do it here, can you do it anywhere?”

Hochul, who is running for reelection this year, is seeking to advance changes through the state’s budget, which is due April 1. The proposal is expected to meet resistance from some Democratic lawmakers.

“We will negotiate with the governor,” said State Sen. Pete Harckham, who chairs the body’s environmental conservation committee. “We’ll be able to get to, I think, a resolution of this.”

Policymakers including Harckham and State Sen. Liz Krueger, who chairs the finance committee, penned a letter to Hochul earlier this month urging her not to back a delay.

Given Washington’s war on climate policy, they wrote, “it is incumbent on states like New York to reject this new wave of climate denial and put forward bold policies that will save New Yorkers money, reduce pollution and protect a livable climate.”

Krueger said Friday the proposed changes would increase the likelihood that the climate law will never be fully enacted.

“This is a serious problem,” she said. “We need to be spending the money for the infrastructure to help meet the targets.”

Business groups and Republicans in Albany have argued that implementing the law as it stands would drive up costs and worsen the affordability crisis. State Sen. Tom O’Mara has urged changes. “It is time [to] amend the CLCPA to account for economic realities,” he said in a statement. The Business Council, representing New York companies, last month said the deadlines stipulated “are proving unachievable.”

Even some Democrats have advocated for amendments. State Assemblymembers Carrie Woerner and John T. McDonald said last week that “the reality is difficult to ignore: New York is not on track to meet the CLCPA’s targets on the timeline written into law.”

“The real question is whether New York can remain committed to deep decarbonization while adapting its strategy to today’s conditions,” they added. “The goal should not be abandoning ambition. It should be pursuing it intelligently.”

In 2025, environmental groups sued Hochul’s administration after the state failed to set up a regulatory program for the climate law.

“The main effect of these proposed changes is to allow the Hochul administration to do nothing for at least the next four years,” said Rachel Spector, deputy managing attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization that represents the groups. “These proposals will do nothing to benefit New Yorkers. The only beneficiaries would be Hochul along with gas utilities and corporate polluters.”

Hochul also wants to align New York’s emissions-counting standards with other U.S. states and the international community. That might mean switching from a 20-year emissions-counting methodology to a 100-year one. The shorter timeframe highlights the pollution impact of methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas and the main component of natural gas. The 100-year metric essentially balances out short- with longer-lived gases like carbon dioxide.

“It’s ultimately a way to cheat on a test,” said Liz Moran, New York policy advocate at Earthjustice.

In October, a judge ruled in favor of the environmental groups, putting pressure on Hochul to enact a so-called cap-and-invest program that would help generate revenue for the state to transition to renewable energy.

However, a memo released in February by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority concluded that implementing the policy would result in rocketing energy bills for New Yorkers.

It modeled a scenario in which the law were “implemented with regulations to meet the 2030 targets” and found that upstate New York households relying on oil and natural gas “would see costs in excess of $4,000 a year.”

Many Democrats and environmental advocates have pushed back on the narrative that climate policy is spiking costs. Harckham said the solution to improving affordability and lowering emissions is clear: “It’s renewable energy.”

“We set a law for ourselves,” he added. “We should be held accountable to it.”

Raimonde writes for Bloomberg.

LONDON — Years before the rise of Instagram, Banksy figured out that the key to real influence lay in not being famous, exactly, but in being anonymous.

The mystery of his identity has long been part of the value of his art, which for decades and across continents defied authority from public walls and self-shredded on the auction block. Now, Banksy’s apparent unmasking by the Reuters news agency has generated talk about whether the works themselves retain their cultural and financial value.

It also raises the question: Why pop the balloon of his mystique in the first place? Many Banksy fans mourned the loss of the mystery and lashed out at the news outlet. One said it was like being told without warning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

“I feel like they are telling me how a magic trick is done,” said Thomas Evans, a Denver-based artist on Instagram. “Sometimes I just want to enjoy the magic trick.”

But some art experts say the murals and the message will survive Banksy’s naming because his appeal wasn’t driven solely by his anonymity. He and his works — dark and mischievous — stand as witnesses to injustice, oppression and inequality around the world, from the artist’s native England to walled-off Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank and war-ravaged Ukraine. Subtract his anonymity, they say, and the work still inspires reflection and discussion.

“People buy his works because they absolutely love it,” said Acoris Andipa, director of the Andipa gallery in London. “The main feedback that I get is that they really, frankly, don’t care if they know who he is.”

Naming the ghost — and the backlash — is engagement, too

Banksy, long thought to have been born Robin Gunningham around 1972, grew out of a tradition of street artists who viewed the undercover act of posting their art in public as a subversive form of expression. The postindustrial landscape of his native Bristol was his canvas and gallery. The walls of London, New York and elsewhere gave him a global stage just before the rise of social media.

Banksy’s apparent identity has been an open secret among protective fellow artists, and long been easy to find online for those who wanted to know. The Daily Mail reported in 2008 “compelling evidence suggesting” that was the artist’s birth name. It has been published by other news outlets, including the Associated Press in 2016, as part of their coverage of the detective work.

Reuters reported recently that after the Daily Mail’s story, Banksy changed his legal name to David Jones — the second most-popular name in Britain. It’s also the given name of the late David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust rock ‘n’ roll avatar inspired a 2012 Banksy painting of Queen Elizabeth II.

Bansky’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the artist’s spokeswoman declined to participate in this story.

Reuters pieced together that a David Jones traveled to Ukraine with a well-known associate of Banksy’s in late 2022 — just before the artist’s work began appearing on buildings that had been bombed by Russia. Banksy later confirmed that he’d created seven murals in the war zone, including one of a child flipping over a grown man who is wearing a black belt. Russian President Vladimir Putin practices judo.

There’s evidence that even some in the establishment he was protesting have accepted Banksy. They didn’t arrest him, for example, after the Royal Courts of Justice removed a Banksy stencil depicting a judge in a traditional wig and gown beating an unarmed protester with a gavel. Some street artists groused that they might be arrested for creating such graffiti — but when it’s a Banksy, it’s art.

The artist wasn’t always so elusive

On Sept. 17, 2000, a Robin Gunningham was arrested for defacing a Marc Jacobs billboard atop a building on Hudson Street in New York.

In a handwritten signed confession, he described the work on the night in question: “I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decided to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property,” he wrote in court records unearthed by Reuters and confirmed by the AP. “I painted eyeshadow a new mouth and a speach bubble” on the photo of a male model. He was charged with a misdemeanor.

The artist doesn’t need an alleged naming to make news. He created multiple works in London in 2025, and grabbed headlines elsewhere for having his art sold or auctioned for millions. But Banksy has courted a public image centered around morality, justice and guerrilla tactics — he’s often likened to Robin Hood or Batman.

“Banksy woz ere,” he wrote with his animal murals at the London Zoo, which were removed in 2024.

Still, along with the sadness, there’s ample speculation in the art world and on social media that the artist himself orchestrated this round of naming. He didn’t deny the Reuters story.

That “would be very much in line with his practice of stunts and satire,” observed Madeleine White, the senior sales and acquisitions consultant at London’s Hang-Up Gallery. “As they say, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’”

She noted, however, that the backlash is directed at the media — not the artist, or the potency of his work. Reuters says it opted to publish some, but not all, of the information its reporters uncovered about Banksy’s identity, because he is a public figure, whatever his name — and he’s had an outsize influence on public events and discourse. What’s more, much of his work has been done on other people’s property.

Connected to world events

Named or not, Banksy’s stardom lives, art experts say.

It endures in the wonder of his ability to erect new art under the noses of authorities well into the age of social media and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. It appeals because his spectacle and wit draw people in and the settings — the hulk of bombed buildings, for example, or Israel’s towering wall at the border of the West Bank — invite them to reflect. Now, fans are on the lookout for how and whether he’ll respond to the news of Robin Gunningham and David Jones.

Joe Syer, a Banksy expert and founder of MyArtBroker, said that the artist has always responded to world events. “And that’s where the real relevance, and value, sits,” he said.

“If anything, Banksy’s anonymity has functioned less as a celebrity device and more as a way to keep the work universally accessible, detached from personality, ego, or biography,” Syer said in an email. “It allows the work to sit in public space, politically and culturally, without being anchored to an individual in the way the mainstream press often frames it.”

Christopher Banks, founder of the New York-based Objects of Affection Collection, reads Banksy’s naming “not as a biographical event, but as a structural stress test” of the artist’s system of managing his absence.

“Banksy’s best works carry their meaning without the author. He was there,” Banks wrote, citing the artist’s murals in Ukraine and his solidarity with the war’s victims.

“The name matters less than the presence. The presence was always what the work was about.”

Kellman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michael Sisak in New York contributed to this report.

A group of attorneys general are taking legal action to block Nexstar Media Group’s proposed $6.2-billion acquisition of Tegna’s TV stations, calling the deal bad for consumer cable bills and local journalism.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento says the proposed deal by eight state law enforcers, including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, claims the proposed deal will give Nexstar too much control of local TV stations, ultimately hurting consumers by diminishing the diversity of news sources in their markets.

Bonta said in a statement that the deal will cause “irreparable harm to local news and consumers who rely on their reporting as a critical source of information.” The plaintiffs also include state attorneys general in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

The Irving, Texas-based Nexstar is currently the largest station owner in the U.S., with 164 outlets including KTLA in Los Angeles. If the merger with Tegna succeeds, Nexstar would have 265 TV stations reaching 80% of the U.S. and multiple outlets in a number of markets.

The suit also claims that the merger would give Nexstar too much leverage in negotiating fees from pay-TV providers that carry their stations. Higher fees paid to Nexstar would be passed along to consumers in their cable and satellite bills, the lawsuit asserts.

Most of Nexstar’s stations are affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, all of which carry NFL football, the highest-rated programming on TV by a wide margin. Disputes over carriage fees between station owners and pay-TV providers often result in blackouts and service interruptions to consumers.

DirecTV, which serves around 11 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S., filed a similar lawsuit in the same court on Thursday, claiming the Nexstar deal will “irreparably drive up consumer costs, reduce local competition, shutter local newsrooms, and increase both the frequency and duration of blackouts of key local teams and network programming.”

A Nexstar representative did not respond to a request to comment.

President Trump has said he favors Nexstar’s proposed deal. But every major TV station owner believes consolidation in the TV station business is necessary to thrive going forward as they battle to compete with streaming video platforms that have eaten away at their audience share.

The companies say they are at a disadvantage in competing with tech companies by being limited to owning stations in 39% of the U.S., a cap that was set in 2003.

Nexstar recently cut veteran anchors and on-air reporters from its stations in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Further reductions in local TV newsrooms would occur if Nexstar succeeds in acquiring Tegna, which would likely mean consolidation of local newsrooms in which it owns more than one station.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on whether the Trump administration may end the temporary protection that had been extended in the past to migrants who live and work in the United States.

At issue are legal protections for about 6,000 Syrians and up to 350,000 Haitians.

The court’s announcement signals the justices want to resolve this issue in a written opinion rather through emergency appeals.

Twice last year, the court’s conservatives set aside decisions from judges in San Francisco who said President Trump’s Homeland Security secretary had overstepped her authority.

Those cases involved the temporary protection status extended to about 600,000 Venezuelans.

But those decisions did not set clear precedents, and in recent weeks, judges in New York and Washington, D.C., blocked the administration’s plan to end the special protections for Haitians and Syrians.

Frustrated by what he labeled “indefensible” decisions, Trump’s Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer advised the court to hear arguments and issue a written ruling on the issue.

The justices on Monday agreed to just that. Arguments will be heard in April, and a decision will be handed down by July.

Immigrant-rights advocates argued the repeal of the special protection would be cruel and unjust to migrants who have established lives and careers in this country.

In 1990, Congress authorized giving temporary shelter to non-citizens from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disaster or “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent them from returning there.

In 2012, the Homeland Security secretary extended this protection to Syrians in response to a “brutal crackdown” engineered by its then-President Bashar al-Assad.

Last year, citing Assad’s fall from power, Trump’s Secretary Kristi Noem proposed to cancel the temporary protection for Syrians. Lawyers for the Syrians questioned how this could be seen as an emergency requiring an immediate ruling.

They said about 6,100 Syrians who have lived here lawfully for years.

They are “highly sought-after doctors and medical professionals, reporters, students, teachers, business owners, caretakers, and others who have been repeatedly vetted and by definition have virtually no criminal history. The government apparently needs urgent authority to send them to a country in the middle of an active war,” the lawyers said.

In 2010, the Obama administration extended the protection to Haiti after an earthquake caused death and damage in Port-au-Prince, the capital.

Judges in New York and Washington blocked those repeals and said the high court had given “no explanation” for its decision upholding the repeal for Venezuelans.

Those judges said the Supreme Court’s earlier orders orders “involved a TPS designation of a different country, with different factual circumstances, and different grounds for resolution by the district court.”

Sauer pointed to a provision in the 1990 law that says judges have no authority to second-guess the government’s decision to end it.

“There is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection,” the law says.

In the three weeks since Trump’s attorney filed his emergency appeal, there have been two significant changes since then.

Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And his war launched against Iran threatens countries throughout the Mideast, including Syria.

In agreeing to hear the pair of cases, the justices did not disturb the lower court rulings that blocked the repeals for now.

On a dreary February afternoon in Chinatown, Ben Lovett, pianist and keyboardist of the British folk-rock group Mumford & Sons, was hours away from releasing his band’s sixth album, “Prizefighter.” The LP — co-produced by Aaron Dessner with guests Hozier, Gracie Abrams and Chris Stapleton — rejuvenates a catalog that includes a Grammy for album of the year in 2013. He could have been celebrating, or at least resting up for his upcoming “Saturday Night Live” gig and fall arena tour.

Instead, Lovett was calf-deep in sludgy rain water flooding the streets from a sudden downpour, standing at the roll-gate of a ripped-apart warehouse. “You’ll need this,” Lovett told a Times reporter as he handed out hardhats, walking his construction team through the still-raw hallways, shouting over a cacophony of circular saws.

In a few weeks, this site will be Pacific Electric, a new 750-capacity music venue that Lovett and his venue-developer firm TVG Hospitality have been converting for six years. It’s a small but ambitious entry into a Los Angeles venue landscape that’s recovering from fire and economic woes, yet has also seen several jolts of life recently.

Pacific Electric is a new flagship for the team at TVG, which has become an independent-scene force in the U.S. and U.K. over the last decade. Beyond his band, this project plants Lovett’s flag as an L.A. live music entrepreneur too.

“I’ve never had such a significant moment around a venue launch,” Lovett said in the soon-to-be dressing room at Pacific Electric. “It’s the seventh venue we’ve done, but it has never coincided with such an important creative moment with the band. I have to be very disciplined right now.”

Mumford & Sons led the 2010s folk revival that minted a generation of plaintive, earnest singer-songwriter acts atop the charts. While their genre peers’ fates have varied, Mumford & Sons remained perennial arena and festival headliners, with an ambitious midcareer streak in the studio. As pop culture’s tastes shifted, and his band moved around New York, L.A. and the U.K., Lovett returned to his show-producing roots in 2016 to build the 320-capacity nightclub Omeara in London.

Los Angeles, CA – February 19: Exterior view of the new music venue Pacific Electric, which is under construction in Chinatown and owned by Ben Lovett of the Grammy-winning folk band Mumford & Sons. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of rooms in America are owned by the promoter, so unless you are working with that promoter, you can’t play that room. I don’t like that. I think there’s something fundamentally broken with that practice,” he said. “I wanted to prove out that idea, but I had to learn everything, like how you get a liquor license. It wasn’t perfect, but the intent was so pure.”

Two years and a couple U.K. venues later, TVG got an unexpected call from the city of Huntsville, Ala., to build the Orion Amphitheater, an 8,000-capacity anchor venue for the massive civic project Apollo Park. The futuristic Grecian agora, which opened in 2022, was beyond anything they’d built before — similar to Red Rocks in Colorado or Forest Hills Stadium in New York. Suddenly, Lovett and TVG were players in the U.S. too.

“When I’m off the road, I drop my kid at school and I go to work. I sit in an office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Lovett said. “That’s not common, but there are people I really admire like Pharrell Williams who have a foot in entrepreneurship while also being a creator of songs. By doing a day’s work with TVG, sitting down at the piano can still feel like a hobby.”

Lovett, who lives in L.A., had long wanted something closer to home. The industrial northern pocket of Chinatown housing Pacific Electric is well-known to ravers and foodies — Insomniac’s Naud Street warehouse is close by, and the upscale cocktail bar Apotheke and pan-Asian restaurant Majordomo are around the corner. But besides festivals at Los Angeles State Historic Park, there hadn’t been much of a live music presence in the area (a plan to open an outpost of the NYC venue Baby’s All Right was thwarted by the pandemic).

Pacific Electric will be on the small side for a theater, a more intimate peer of downtown’s Regent or Bellwether. But Lovett’s plowed 20 years of notes from touring into the space — from the serene sandstone-hued dressing rooms with a piano and built-in laundry facilities, to a fully-separated horseshoe bar area to keep fan drink lines moving. There’s no bad sightline in the space, from either the ground floor or upper level balcony, which looks out over a stage wreathed in pink neon and wood cutouts evoking the industrial cityscape outside.

“Keeping the dirt under my fingernails with projects like this, and watching shows as often as I do, you realize how hard and how much creativity and magic there are around shows,” Lovett said. “It’s never a given to have an audience.”

To manage the venue, TVG brought on Stacey Levine, a veteran of the Palladium, Wiltern and Theatre at the Ace Hotel (now the United Theater on Broadway). While her management experience is in larger, historic venues, the chance to build something from scratch with an artist’s insight was enticing.

“People really want to get off their phones and back into independent venues, and this little pocket of downtown is about to pop off,” Levine said. “It’s very cool and close to different areas of L.A. But the venue is also really artist-focused. At 750 capacity, do you often have really nice dressing rooms? Probably not. But this is like welcoming artists into a nice hotel.”

Pacific Electric is independent in the sense that it’s not wholly exclusive for either promoter conglomerate (they plan to work with both Live Nation, AEG and others). Lovett, who cited the San Francisco concert impresario Bill Graham as a model for his company, said, “I love the opportunity to back an artist and be their advocate, and they should be able to work in any room they want to. I’ll die on that hill.”

The music won’t lean especially Mumford-ish. Its first show, with the synthwave group TimeCop1983, is slated for March 20, with a Robyn-themed club night, heavy rockers Militarie Gun and a big comedy slate from the Netflix Is a Joke festival up next.

L.A.’s nightlife — particularly in downtown — is still recovering from the pandemic-era culling of live venues and hospitality. After the malaise that’s ripped through L.A.’s entertainment economy of late, and a year of fires, ICE raids and other withering events in Los Angeles, Pacific Electric will have its work cut out to build its regular audience.

But new venues like South Pasadena’s Sid the Cat Auditorium and Re:Frame in Atwater Village have taken similar big swings in recent months. Lovett sounded hopeful that L.A. has plenty of room for more.

“I operated five venues in the pandemic, and conversations abounded like ‘Is this the death of live experiences?’” Lovett said. “My take was different, which was the one thing that we couldn’t figure out how to fix, was how to spend time together. Our greatest void was human interaction. We’re always going to trend towards congregation. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t do this.”