Dodgers president Stan Kasten wants to make it clear that majority owner Mark Walter will not sell the team.
Following Walter’s decision to sell his majority stake in the Lakers, questions about his majority ownership of the Dodgers were raised amid his company’s financial difficulties, which include a federal probe of his businesses. But Kasten said it will have no effect on Walter’s majority ownership of the Dodgers.
“The Dodgers are not being sold,” Kasten said. “They’re not going to be sold. They’re not for sale. There’s no process that has been started to sell [the franchise]. Period. … I just wanted this to be clear because this question keeps coming up. I understand the questions; I do. The Lakers thing was what we call sui generis, one of those one-of-a-kind things. Really has nothing to do with what’s happening with [the Dodgers] or the other teams.
“I wanted you to hear it definitively: We are not selling the Dodgers. We are continuing with our plans going forward, like we always have had them. This comes from Mark. He’s gung-ho about continuing to try to win, again, including next year, subject to whatever next year’s climate looks like.”
Kasten added that he doesn’t expect the Dodgers’ operations to be interrupted, describing the franchise as “very stable, well-managed, and [with] very solid ownership.”
“I know nothing involving the Dodgers is part of the investigation,” Kasten said. “I’m promising you, when it’s over, you’re going to realize [things] are being mischaracterized. You don’t have to trust me, but I’m telling you.”
When Kasten was asked about reports Walter is trying to sell his stake in English Premier League team Chelsea FC and tried to cash out of lucrative TV deals with Charter Communications, he said they were mischaracterized.
“Those things don’t go together for a bunch of reasons I’m not going to get into today,” Kasten said.
Kasten took a similar tone when asked about reports of Walter having to repay insurance companies.
“I’m not in that part of the investigation,” Kasten said. “Things are going on behind the scenes, obviously, in connection with that. I’m not privy to all of them, don’t need to know, don’t want to know. But one thing we are all certain about: the sports portfolio is going to remain intact.”
Walter has additional ownership stakes in the Sparks, the Cadillac Formula One team, the Professional Women’s Hockey League and the Billie Jean King Cup tennis event.
“I can tell you from the guy running the team, knowing how the business runs and what it can support in terms of revenues and expenses — the Dodgers aren’t going anywhere,” Kasten said. “I feel that very strongly, and Mark feels even stronger than I do. I’m 74. I don’t know how long I’m going to be running it, but Mark, I think, is going to be running it a lot longer.
“I think Mark has done an extraordinary job as an owner, and all he’s ever cared about is providing the best experience in order to make us more money, to make this project successful,” Kasten added. “I think so far it has been; I expect that to continue far into the future.”
In 2022, Joshua Cain and his partner, André Reyes, stepped into the foyer of the home on Monrovia’s South Ivy Avenue and gaped in wonder. The red and white Victorian farmhouse had belonged to their friend, the late Steve Baker, who served as the city’s longtime historian and had packed the property with thousands of antique relics over his lifetime.
André Reyes, Jeff Godbold and Joshua Cain transformed Steve Bakers home into an inn with modern comforts.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Cain rattled off a few of the treasures: “Nineteenth-century etched glass dishes stacked up to the ceiling in the dining room, dozens of antique plumbing fixtures in the backyard, and five pump organs, of which we saved two.” And then there were oil lamps. Hundreds and hundreds of oil lamps.
Baker was known to regale locals with the history of their own homes and the founding Monrovians who lived there before them. One day in 2021, the couple had left the front door of their restored 1887 Monrovia home open and Baker wandered in uninvited. Reyes found him standing in his living room, wearing his signature top hat.
“Excuse me, who are you and how can I help you?” Reyes recalled asking.
Inn guests can ride one of the Viribus bikes lined up near the Blair House porch.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Baker introduced himself and said he appreciated the thoughtful period-appropriate restoration, the work of Cain and Reyes, who are preservationists. He asked them where they procured the redwood to renovate their shingle roof and the trio spent the rest of the morning excitedly discussing restoration techniques and comparing notes.
Over the next year, Cain, Reyes and Baker grew closer as fellow members of the Monrovia Historic Preservation Group, bonding over their desire to preserve the town’s historic character, especially its Victorian homes.
When Baker died abruptly in 2022, the couple set out to honor his dream of transforming his home into a restored inn with modern comforts (read: air conditioning and electricity). With Cain’s business partner Jeff Godbold, they purchased Baker’s 1887 home (originally bought by Baker’s great-grandfather Bradford Arthur in 1888) along with the estate’s more ornate Eastlake Queen Anne Victorian-style Blair House next door, built the same year by architect Luther Reed Blair. After three years of renovation, the Arthur Blair Historic Inn opened to guests this summer. Set across three homes and with 11 guest rooms, it’s a rare place where both locals and out-of-towners can escape the demands of the city and play board games in a room filled with Victorian books or borrow one of the cheery robin’s egg-blue Viribus bikes and ride to the coffee shops, bakeries or parks around town.
The Blair House parlor.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
One thing to note: There are no TVs on the premises.
“You won’t be staying in a gray and white corporate hotel doomscrolling or watching television,” Cain said.
Staying at the Arthur Blair is meant to feel like entering a time warp. “You can imagine stepping off the train in 1880s Monrovia and going and staying in this exact inn in the prettiest little town in the Old West,” Cain said.
Restoring the home was no easy task for Cain, Reyes and Godbold, who worked with along with design assistant Jorge Ochoa. While Baker had meticulously preserved the vintage collectibles in his family’s historic home, he often struggled to afford structural repairs. Time had punctured the roof with 20 holes and whenever it rained, Baker would run around placing buckets under them and emptying them when they were full, like a game of Whac-A-Mole.
The rooms feature many vintage collectibles that Steve Baker had meticulously preserved. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
But Cain, an interior decorator for 25 years, wasn’t daunted by the chaos that came with such an extensive project. “I’m a glass half full person and I like to take risks,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve done much more with much less.’”
The team revived original furnishings and interior and exterior walls, while constructing a new ADA-compliant Victorian carpenter gothic cottage with stylish board and batten siding, modeled after a 19th-century Sears kit house. They often used salvage materials from Cain and Baker’s collection.
For the buildings to join the National Register of Historic Places — a goal for the team — intact elements like the Arthur House’s original timber frame, Italianate cast-iron mantelpiece and redwood millwork fitted by hand over a century ago needed to be polished up. And some features that had previously been eliminated needed to be returned to the home, including original roofing, porches and even light switches.
Each of the 11 guest rooms features unique, textures and personalities. One of two rooms at the Saxony Cottage has a spiral staircase that leads to an upstairs bedroom.(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
It would’ve been easier to create fresh builds or buy new decor and furnishings, Cain admits, but then it wouldn’t feel like the right setting to him. “We restore for a sense of time and place,” he said.
The team hit a speed bump with the Blair House’s front porch spindles, which had been removed. They located an original spindle and replicated it, including the complex crane cutouts. “I could’ve just gone online to Home Depot, cut their spindles in half and thrown them up on the porch,” Cain said. “But instead, I took the original ones to my carpenter and we had to pull the porch apart to reinstall them, and then we painted them eight different colors.”
The Arthur House and the Blair House are a study in contrasts: a simple two-story farmhouse with plain wood siding and a sturdy brick chimney, plopped right next to a flashy showpiece featuring a roofline with projecting gables. In the front gardens, yellow and red roses bloom to match the houses’ exteriors; in the back, a sunny 4-foot cocktail pool with a natural limestone border awaits guests. Each of the 11 guest rooms is different — the classic heritage king, for instance, melds lush silk vermilion drapes with dark wood paneled ceilings and striped blue wallpaper, much of which Baker saved from the 1980s, and which Reyes and Ochoa painstakingly applied.
A writing desk in the Blair House’s Luther Reed Suite.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The inn will soon open a restaurant, Viola’s Bar and Bistro (named after Baker’s grandmother), serving French cuisine with Southern tinges on the vintage servingware Baker collected. The Arthur House parlor is already open to the public for drinks and dining, and features a pump organ that guests can play.
The two parlors in the Blair House, reserved for inn guests only, are a Victorian dream, each adorned with 1880s Eastlake restored mahogany parlor sets, including settees, rockers, bustle benches and side chairs, reupholstered with colorful period appropriate fabric and trim. A highlight is a circa 1874 Haine Brothers solid rosewood square grand piano.
Now that Cain and Reyes have built it, they wonder who will come. Cain has a hunch the clientele will be as special as the place itself. “Monrovia is not a tourist haven, so guests to our inn will be destination-oriented,” Cain says. “People who come here will want the experience of letting Monrovia unfold around them as they’re experiencing the inn.”
The pool at the Arthur Blair Historic Inn.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
In the future, Cain and Reyes, who also co-own Visalia’s JD Hyde Historic Inn, hope to create a nationwide alliance for high-quality inns offering historic charm, so that guests can find more of the same unique properties that connect visitors to time and place.
“It’s very deliberate to call this a restoration and not a renovation,” Reyes said. “We are preserving and restoring the past for future generations to see what happened in 1887 in Monrovia — and how and why.”
Paramount Skydance must wait until March to defend its proposed $111-billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — a blockbuster deal that would reshape Hollywood by uniting two storied studios.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín scheduled a March 2 trial to decide the merits of an antitrust challenge brought by 12 state attorneys general, led by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. The states are teaming up to try to derail Paramount’s merger, and have snared preliminary victories — prompting a concession from Paramount to put the merger on hold until after the trial.
Paramount had asked for a Nov. 4 trial date.
Tech scion David Ellison wants to add HBO, CNN, HGTV, Food Network and the Warner Bros. studio to his smaller stable of Paramount properties. The trial will span 12 days and conclude March 19, the judge wrote in her order.
“We will continue to vigorously defend the transaction and remain committed to closing as soon as possible so its benefits for the creative community and consumers can be realized,” Paramount said in a statement.
“Looking back on the past twelve months, I’m incredibly proud of how our team has turned those priorities into measurable progress, reflecting their talent, hard work, and dedication,” Ellison wrote in a Tuesday letter to shareholders as the company released its second-quarter earnings.
Results were mixed.
Revenue inched up 1% to $6.91 billion compared to the year-ago period, when Paramount was controlled by media heiress Shari Redstone.
The company’s studios and streaming divisions turned in stronger performances but costs, including $153 million in merger-related expenses, weighed on the corporate entity.
Profit declined 28% to $41 million, or 4 cents a share, compared to $57 million in the year-earlier period.
Paramount said it now has 81.6 million streaming customers, an increase of 2 million from the first quarter.
Streaming operations produced $2.5 billion in revenue, a 9% boost from the same quarter a year ago. Paramount+, which boasts the Taylor Sheridan-produced “Landman” and “Dutton Ranch,” also televised President Trump’s birthday extravaganza, the UFC Freedom 250 fights in June from the White House lawn.
Coverage of the FIFA World Cup in some Latin American countries assisted the streaming results. (Fox and Telemundo broadcast the highly rated soccer matches in the U.S.)
Studios revenue increased 16% to $1.3 billion, boosted by Paramount’s television studios and its licensing deals as well as the ability to consolidate revenue from Skydance properties. During the quarter, the Melrose Avenue film studio released “Scary Movie,” which brought in $231 million in global ticket sales, surpassing expectations.
Television media, which includes the CBS network, TV stations and the company’s struggling cable channels, declined 9% to $3.1 billion. Advertising revenue fell 14% and the company felt the loss of South American television operations, Telefe and Chilevision, which it divested after the Ellison takeover.
The company revenue during the current quarter should come in around $7 billion. It also released its full-year guidance, saying it expects $30 billion in revenue, up 4% over 2025.
Paramount released the earnings after markets closed Tuesday. During regular trading, shares gained nearly 2% to close at $8.38.
California’s statewide minimum wage is set to rise next year.
Starting on Jan. 1, 2027, the statewide minimum wage will rise to $17.40 an hour, an increase Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about on Friday.
Newsom — who has been eyeing a 2028 presidential run — said in a statement that California’s fiscal policies helped turn the state into “one of the strongest economies in the world” while the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress fail to address “everyday cost pressures for working families.” The federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 per hour since 2009.
“For years, Donald Trump and Republicans have blocked efforts to raise the federal minimum wage while handing tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” Newsom said. “California has chosen a different path — one that rewards work, grows the economy, and puts working families first.”
Not everyone agreed. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton took to social media on Friday to decry the minimum wage increase as an “attack on workers” that will “crush small businesses.”
The current minimum wage in California for all employers is $16.90 an hour, though some workers must be paid more to comply with city and county rules and other state laws.
California’s minimum wage automatically increases each year to keep pace with inflation. The current system was established in 2016, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a first-in-the-nation plan to gradually boost the state’s hourly minimum wage to $15 an hour, then adjust the wage annually based on inflation starting in 2024.
“This is about economic justice, it’s about people,” Brown said during the bill signing.
The specific amount of the minimum wage increase is tied to inflation — as measured by the federal consumer price index — and capped at 3.5%, according to state law. The state director of finance is responsible for calculating the adjusted minimum wage on or before Aug. 1 each year.
California has the highest minimum wage out of all 50 states, according to the governor’s office. (Only Washington, D.C.’s, minimum wage ranks higher, at $18.40.)
Researchers have been split on the economic impacts of the pay increase for fast-food workers, which chains like Pizza Hut and Cinnabon have fought. (Earlier this year, a major Carl’s Jr. franchisee cited the $20 fast-food minimum wage when he applied for bankruptcy protection.)
California also has higher minimum wages for healthcare workers at large facilities as a result of a union-backed bill Newsom signed in 2023. Under the legislation, many healthcare workers’ minimum wages in July rose from $24 an hour to $25 an hour.
Some cities in California, including Emeryville and West Hollywood, have opted to impose even higher city minimum wages exceeding $20 per hour.
Most states have minimum wages above the federal minimum. Five Republican-led states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — do not have an independent state minimum wage and default to the federal minimum.
While a 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that two-thirds of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a deep partisan split over the issue remains.
Netflix and AMC Global Media, the network that originally aired the zombie series, inked a new five-year co-streaming deal, according to a press release on Thursday. Both companies will be able to show the original “The Walking Dead” series and its six spinoffs on Netflix and AMC+. The deal is valued at $500 million, AMC Global Media said in its second-quarter earnings report.
“This deal creates a global destination for this universe — all shows, all episodes — making the franchise more accessible than ever to fans around the world. In addition, the co-exclusive agreement allows us to bring the original series to AMC+ for the first time early next year,” Kristin Dolan, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “This agreement is a fantastic result for our companies, for the fans and for this timeless IP.”
AMC Global Media is renting the franchise, not selling it. The five-year licenses run separately for each show, with start dates that vary based on territory and the expiration of existing streaming deals. The rights to “The Walking Dead” revert to AMC Global Media when the term ends.
The company also keeps global rights to run the “Walking Dead” universe on its own services throughout. Dolan told investors the agreement would supply what she called “a meaningful source of cash flow for years to come,” framing it as evidence that the company’s library still commands premium prices even as its cable business shrinks.
The agreement will extend the franchise’s reach on Netflix in places like the U.K., Italy, Australia and New Zealand — making episodes available beginning in 2027.
“The Walking Dead” premiered on the AMC network in 2010, introducing audiences to the high-stakes world of a zombie apocalypse. In 2011, the series began streaming exclusively on Netflix in the U.S. The show aired for 11 seasons and became one of AMC’s most influential shows. Other popular programs from the network include “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
“Audiences have discovered and loved ‘The Walking Dead’ on Netflix for nearly 15 years and the show continues to attract new fans,” Lori Conkling, Netflix’s vice president of licensing, said in a statement.
The deal landed alongside a rough quarter. AMC Global Media reported second-quarter revenue of $547 million, down 9% from a year earlier, and a loss of 51 cents a share, compared with 91 cents in profit in the same period last year. Operating income fell to about $16 million from $64 million.
Netflix’s second-quarter earnings showed mixed results. The company‘s revenue rose 13% to $12.6 billion; its net income was $3.4 billion, up 9% from a year ago; and its advertising business is on track to reach $3 billion in revenue this year, double the amount in 2025.
The same filing offered some details on Netflix’s acquisition of InterPositive, the AI post-production startup founded by Ben Affleck, for $587 million in cash in March.
