other

Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.

Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.

He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.

Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.

His something.

“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”

Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.

It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”

Recently, her husband caught up.

To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.

Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.

(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)

“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.

But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.

“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”

Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.

Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.

But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”

For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”

Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.

“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.

Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”

If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.

“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.

Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “

The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.

Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.

“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”

If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.

Surprise! The 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival lineup is out and it’s topped by pop stars.

Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G will headline the twin weekends of the festival, which return to the Empire Polo Club in Indio April 10-12 and 17-19, 2026.

Other notable acts include elder statesmen such as Iggy Pop, David Byrne and Devo, rock acts including the Strokes and Turnstile, pop star Addison Rae, Laufey, EDM superstar Kaskade, rapper Young Thug and dozens of others.

The bottom of the festival poster also announces something called “The Bunker Debut of Radiohead Kid A Mnesia.” The British rock band Radiohead recently announced European tour dates.

Also at the bottom of the poster, which has become a place for the festival to announce special engagements, is the world premiere of Anyma’s “Æden.” Anyma, the project of producer and artist Matteo Miller, was the first electronic act to headline Sphere in Las Vegas.

At the top of the poster for Friday, listed between the XX and Disclosure is an act called Nine Inch Noize. German producer Boys Noize joined Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails’ on the band’s recent tour and also labeled a live collaboration as Nine Inch Noize System on Instagram.

Since its inception in 1999, Coachella has included a diverse range of musical styles, but also less-than-expected acts, such as the colorful monsters of the show Yo Gabba Gabba! and the L.A. Phil earlier this year. For 2026, another beloved L.A. institution is on the bill: Bob Baker Marionettes, of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, are listed on the poster for Friday.

Coachella has given a spotlight to some of the world’s biggest K-pop and J-pop acts in recent years and in 2026 acts including Bigbang, Fujii Kaze, and Taemin.

The 2026 edition is also a makeup show of sorts for FKA Twigs, who had to cancel her 2025 North American tour, including stops at Coachella, due to visa issues. Promoter Goldenvoice has traditionally released the festival’s lineup in January, three months or so before the event.

Tickets start at $649 for a three-day pass for Weekend 1 and $549 for Weekend 2. (If you buy a 4-pack of tickets you can save $10 per pass.) VIP passes for Weekend 1 start at $1,299 and are $1,199 for Weekend 2.

New for 2026 is a group camping option, which allows people who want to camp together to arrive at different times. There’s a 10-spot minimum and a 20-spot maximum. Each camping spot is $160.

Passes go on sale to the general public at 11 a.m. Pacific on Friday, Sept. 19 at www.coachella.com.

See the full Coachella 2026 lineup.

BASKING RIDGE, N.J.  — After years of complaints from the right about “cancel culture” from the left, some conservatives are seeking to upend the lives and careers of those who they believe disparaged Charlie Kirk after his death. They’re going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech.

Just days after the conservative activist’s death, a campaign by public officials and others on the right has led to the firing or other punishment of teachers, an Office Depot employee, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming. A Florida reporter was suspended for a question posed to a Republican congressman.

This past weekend, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s death.

“This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,” Duffy said on the social media site X.

As elected officials and conservative influencers lionize Kirk as a warrior for free expression who championed provocative opinions, they’re also weaponizing the tactics they saw being used to malign their movement — the calls for firings, the ostracism, the pressure to watch what you say.

Such tactics raise a fundamental challenge for a nation that by many accounts appears to be dangerously splintered by politics and a sense of moral outrage that social media helps to fuel.

The aftermath of Kirk’s death has increasingly become a test of the public tolerance over political differences. Republicans are pushing not only to punish the alleged killer but those whose words they believe contributed to the death or dishonored it. At the same time, some liberals on social media have criticized those, such as actor Kristin Chenoweth, who expressed sympathy online over Kirk’s death.

“This pattern that we’ve seen for decades seems to be happening much more now and at this moment than it ever has before,” said Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He dates the urge to persecute people for their private views on tragedies at least to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “If there was ever time to support the better angels of our nature, it’s now.”

Goldstein noted that it’s unpopular speech, such as people applauding Kirk’s shooting, that stands as the greatest test of acceptance of the 1st Amendment — especially when government officials get involved. “The only time you’re really supporting free speech is when it’s unpopular,” Goldstein said. “There’s no one out there trying to stop people from loving puppies and bunnies.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has cautioned that the motive for the slaying has not been confirmed. He said the suspect in custody clearly identifies with the political left and had expressed dislike of Kirk before the shooting. But he and other authorities also say the suspect was not known to have been politically engaged.

Kirk was seen as an architect of President Trump’s 2024 election win, helping to expand the Republican outreach to younger voters. That means many conservatives see the remarks by liberals as fomenting violence rather than acts of political expression.

“I think President Trump sees this as an attack on his political movement,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on NBC as he noted the two assassination attempts against Trump as well as Kirk’s killing. “This is unique and different. This is an attack on a movement by using violence. And that’s the way most Republicans see this.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is running for governor, called on social media for the firings of an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University and professors at Austin Peay State University and Cumberland University.

All three lost their jobs for comments deemed inappropriate for expressing a lack of sympathy, or even for expressing pleasure, in the shooting of Kirk. One said that Kirk “spoke his fate into existence,” an apparent reference to the activist’s comments that some view as having fueled America’s current environment of political fury.

Because conservatives previously said they felt “canceled” by liberals for their views, Trump on his first day back in office signed an executive order prohibiting everyone in the federal government from engaging in conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

In February at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance criticized the preceding Biden administration for encouraging “private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. He assailed European countries as censoring political speech.

“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree,” Vance said at the time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has cracked down on immigrants and academics for their speech.

Goldstein noted that Trump’s State Department in the minutes after Kirk’s death warned it would revoke the visas of any foreigners who celebrated Kirk’s killing. “I can’t think of another moment where the United States has come out to warn people of their impending cancellation,” Goldstein said.

The glimmer of bipartisan agreement in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting was in a sense that social media was fueling the violence and misinformation in dangerous ways.

“I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us,” Cox, the Utah governor, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added: “The most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains [to] get us addicted to outrage.”

But many Republican lawmakers have also targeted traditional news media that criticized Trump for contributing to a toxic political climate for his consistent rhetoric painting anyone against him as an enemy.

On Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) blamed news outlets for having guests on who called Trump a fascist or compared him to Hitler.

Such statements have been born out of Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss, his pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters and a range of other actions, including deportations, deployment of the National Guard in American cities, mass firings of federal employees and his scorn for the historical limits on the power of the presidency.

But for Britt, those expressions were unfair, inaccurate and triggered violence.

“There must be consequences with regards to people spewing that type of hate and celebration in the face of this,” Britt said. “And I believe that there will be.”

Boak and Riccardi write for the Associated Press and reported from Basking Ridge and Denver, respectively. AP writer Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed to this report.

With the Taliban barring women from college in her native Afghanistan, Bahara Saghari set her sights on pursuing higher education in the United States.

Saghari, 21, practiced English up to eight hours per day for several years, eventually winning an offer to study business administration at a private liberal arts college in Illinois. She was hoping to arrive this fall, but her plans were derailed again, this time by President Trump’s travel ban.

“You think that finally you are going to your dream, and then something came up and like, everything’s just gone,” Saghari said.

Thousands of students are among the people affected by the Trump administration’s travel ban and restrictions on citizens from 19 countries, including many who now feel stranded after investing considerable time and money to come to the U.S.

Some would-be international students are not showing up on American campuses this fall despite offers of admission because of logjams with visa applications, which the Trump administration slowed this summer while it rolled out additional vetting. Others have had second thoughts because of the administration’s wider immigration crackdown and the abrupt termination of some students’ legal status.

But none face bigger obstacles than the students hit with travel bans. Last year, the State Department issued more than 5,700 F-1 and J-1 visas — which are used by foreign students and researchers — to people in the 19 ban-affected countries between May and September. Citizens of Iran and Myanmar were issued more than half of the approved visas.

U.S. still the first choice for many

Pouya Karami, a 17-year-old student from Shiraz, Iran, focused his college search entirely on the U.S. No other country offers the same research opportunities in science, he said. He was planning to study polymer chemistry this fall at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, but he had to shelve those plans because of the travel ban.

Karami deferred admission until next year and is holding out hope. He is still preparing for his embassy interview and reaching out to U.S. politicians to reconsider the travel ban’s restrictions on students.

“I’m doing everything I can about it,” he said.

The full travel ban affects citizens from 12 countries spanning Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. It blocks most people from obtaining new visas, although some citizens from the banned countries are exempt, such as green card holders, dual citizens and some athletes. Seven other countries have tighter restrictions that also apply to student visas.

When Trump announced the travel ban in June, he cited high visa overstay rates and national security threats from unstable or adversarial foreign governments as reasons for putting countries on the list. He has called some of the countries’ screening processes “deficient” and said he plans to keep the ban in place until “identified inadequacies” are addressed.

‘This kind of breaks my heart’

In Myanmar, the family of one 18-year-old student made his education their top priority, saving paychecks for him to go abroad for college. They risked their stability so he could have the chance to live a better life, said the student, who asked to be identified by only his nickname, Gu Gu, because he is worried about being targeted by the Myanmar or U.S. government for expressing criticism.

When he shared a screenshot of his acceptance letter to the University of South Florida in a family group chat, it exploded with celebratory emojis, Gu Gu said. He had been waiting for visa appointments to be announced when, one night, his mother woke him to ask about news of a U.S. travel ban. In an instant, his plans to study at USF this fall were ruined.

Many students his age in Myanmar have been drafted into the military or joined resistance groups since the military ousted the elected civilian government in 2021. While a civil war rages, he had been looking forward to simple freedoms in the U.S. like walking to school by himself or playing sports again.

“I was all in for U.S., so this kind of breaks my heart,” said Gu Gu, who was unable to defer his acceptance.

Students forced to look elsewhere

Saghari, the Afghan student, postponed her July visa interview appointment in Pakistan to August after learning of the travel ban, but ultimately canceled it. Knox College denied her request to defer her admission.

She later applied to schools in Europe but encountered issues with the admissions process. A German university told Saghari she would need to take another English proficiency test because an earlier score had expired, but taking the test the first time was already a challenge in Afghanistan’s political climate.

She has been accepted to a Polish university on condition she pay her tuition up front. She said her application is under review as the school validates her high school degree.

Amir, a 28-year-old Iranian graduate who declined to provide his last name for fear of being targeted, wasn’t able to travel to the U.S. to take a position as a visiting scholar. Instead, he has continued to work as a researcher in Tehran, saying it was difficult to focus after missing out on a fully funded opportunity to conduct research at the University of Pennsylvania.

His professor at Penn postponed his research appointment until next year, but Amir said it feels like “a shot in the dark.”

He’s been looking at research opportunities in Europe, which would require more time spent on applications and potentially learning a new language. He still would prefer to be in U.S., he said, but he isn’t optimistic that the country’s foreign policy is going to change.

“You lose this idealistic view of the world. Like you think, if I work hard, if I’m talented, if I contribute, I have a place somewhere else, basically somewhere you want to be,” he said. “And then you learn that, no, maybe people don’t want you there. That’s kind of hard to deal with it.”

Seminera writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Todd Feathers contributed to this report.

Two assassination attempts on President Trump. The assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of others. The shooting death of a top healthcare executive. The killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington. The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob intent on forcing the nation’s political leaders to their will.

And, on Wednesday, the fatal shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative political activists — close Trump ally Charlie Kirk — as he spoke at a public event on a university campus.

If it wasn’t already clear from all those other incidents, Kirk’s killing put it in sharp relief: The U.S. is in a new era of political violence, one that is starker and more visceral than any other in decades — perhaps, experts said, since the fraught days of 1968, when two of the most prominent figures in the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were both assassinated in a matter of months.

“We’re very clearly in a moment where the temperature of our political discourse is extremely high,” said Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who has studied religion and the far right in modern politics. “Part of what we see when that happens are these outbursts of political violence — where people come to believe that violence is the only solution.”

While the exact motives of the person who shot Kirk are still unknown, Braunstein and other experts on political violence said the factors shaping the current moment are clear — and similar to those that shaped past periods of political violence.

Intense economic discomfort and inequity. Sharp divisions between political camps. Hyperbolic political rhetoric. Political leaders who lack civility and constantly work to demonize their opponents. A democratic system that many see as broken, and a hopelessness about where things are headed.

“There are these moments of great democratic despair, and we don’t think the political system is sufficiently responsive, sufficiently legitimate, sufficiently attentive, and that’s certainly going on in this particular moment,” said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who teaches about the separation of powers and co-authored “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy.”

“If we think there are no political solutions, there are no legal solutions, people are going to resort to forms of self help that are really, really deeply troubling.”

Michaels said the country has been here before, but also that he worries such cycles of violence are occurring faster today and with shorter breaks in between — that while “we’ve been bitterly divided” for years, those divisions have now “completely left the arena of ideas and debate and contestation, and become much more kinetic.”

Michaels said he is still shaken by all the “defenses or explanations or rationalizations” that swirled around the country after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December — which some people argued was somehow justified by their displeasure with UnitedHealthcare’s policies or frustration with the American healthcare system.

That the suspect, Luigi Mangione, would attract almost cult-like adoration in some circles seemed like an alarming shift in an already polarized nation, Michaels said.

“I understand it is not the beliefs of the typical person walking down the street, but it’s seeping into our culture slowly but surely,” he said — and in a way that makes him wonder, “Where are we going to be in four or five years?”

People across America were asking similar questions about Wednesday’s shooting, wondering in which direction it might thrust the nation’s political discourse in the days ahead.

How will Kirk’s many conservative fans — including legions of young people — respond? How will leaders, including Trump, react? Will there be a shared recognition that such violence does no good, or fresh attempts at retaliation and violence?

Leaders from both parties seemed interested in averting the latter. One after another, they denounced political violence and defended Kirk’s right — everyone’s right — to speak on politics in safety, regardless of whether their message is uplifting or odious.

Democrats were particularly effusive in their denunciations, with Gov. Gavin Newsom — a chief Trump antagonist — calling the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Former President Obama also weighed in, writing, “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Many seemed dismissive of such messages. In the comments on Obama’s post, many blamed Obama and other Democrats for rhetoric demonizing Republicans — and Trump and his followers in particular — as Nazis or racists or fascists, suggesting that the violence against Kirk was a predictable outcome of such pitched condemnations.

Trump echoed those thoughts himself Wednesday night, blaming the “radical left” for disparaging Kirk and other conservatives and bringing on such violence.

Others seemed to celebrate Kirk’s killing or suggest it was justified in some way given his own hyperbolic remarks from the past. They dug up interviews where the conservative provocateur demonized those on the left, suggested liberal ideas constituted a threat to Western civilization, and even said that some gun violence in the country was “worth it” if it meant the freedom to bear arms.

Experts said it is important to contextualize this moment within American history, but with an awareness of the modern factors shaping it in unique ways. It’s also important to understand that there are ways to combat such violence from spreading, they said.

Peter Mancall, a history professor at USC, has delved into major moments of political violence in early American history, and said a lot of it stemmed from “some perception of grievance.”

The same appears to be true today, he said. “There are moments when people do things that they know are violating their own sense of right or wrong, and something has pushed them to it, “ he said. “The trick is figuring out what it is that made them snap.”

Braunstein said that the robust debate online Wednesday about the rhetoric of leaders was a legitimate one to have, because it has always been true that “the way our political leaders message about political violence — consistently, in public, to their followers and to those that don’t support them — really matters.”

If Americans and American political leaders truly want to know how we got here, she said, “part of the answer is the intensification of violent political rhetoric — and political rhetoric that casts the moment in terms of an emergency or catastrophe that requires extreme measures to address it.”

Democrats today are talking about the threats they believe Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law and to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and others in extremely dire terms. Republicans — including Kirk — have used similarly charged rhetoric to suggest that Democrats and some of those same groups, especially immigrants, are a grave threat to average Americans.

“Charlie Kirk was one of many political figures who used that kind of discourse to mobilize people,” Braunstein said. “He’s not the only one, but he regularly spoke about the fact that we were in a moment where it was possible that we were going to see the decline of Western civilization, the end of American society as we know it. He used very strong us-vs.-them language.”

Particularly given the wave of recent violence, it will be important moving forward for politicians and other leaders to reanalyze how they speak about their political disagreements, Braunstein said.

That’s especially true of Trump, she said, because “one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a moment like this is for a political leader to call for violence in response to an act of violence,” and Trump has appeared to stoke violence in the past, including in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and during racist marches through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Charlie Kirk speaks during a town hall meeting in March in Oconomowoc, Wis.

(Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press)

Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, agreed messaging is key — not just for responding to political violence, but for preventing it.

Since 2022, Wintemute and his team have surveyed Americans on how they feel about political violence, including whether it is ever justified and, if so, whether they would personally get involved in it.

Throughout that time frame, a strong majority of Americans — about two-thirds — have said it is not justified, with about a third saying it was or could be.

An even smaller minority said they’d be willing to personally engage in such violence, Wintemute said. And many of those people said that they could be dissuaded from participating if their family members, friends, religious or political leaders urged them not to.

Wintemute said the data give him “room for hope and optimism,” because they show that “the vast majority of Americans reject political violence altogether.”

“So when somebody on a day like today asks, ‘Is this who we are?’ we know the answer,” he said. “The answer is, ‘No!’”

The job of all Americans now is to reject political violence “out loud over and over and over again,” Wintemute said, and to realize that, if they are deeply opposed to political policies or the Trump administration and “looking for a model of how to resist,” it isn’t the American Revolution but the civil rights movement.

“People did not paint over how terrible things were,” he said. “People said, ‘I will resist, but I will resist without violence. Violence may be done to me, I may die, but I will not use violence.’”

A woman who worked as a hairstylist for Fox Sports has resolved most of a lawsuit that alleged former host Skip Bayless made repeated, unwanted advances toward her — including an offer of $1.5 million to have sex with him.

Noushin Faraji is still seeking class-action status for her and others who worked at Fox in California over her allegations of unpaid wages and business expenses.

Fox Sports said in a statement: “We are pleased that this matter has been resolved. There will be no further comment.”

An attorney listed for Bayless in the lawsuit, Robert H. Platt, did not immediately respond to an email from the Associated Press seeking comment.

Faraji had claimed Fox executives fostered a hostile work environment that allowed senior managers and on-air personalities including Bayless to abuse workers without fear of punishment. The AP does not generally identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted or subjected to abuse unless they have publicly identified themselves, as Faraji had in filing the lawsuit.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Laura A. Seigle granted Faraji’s request to dismiss several allegations because “those claims were resolved,” according to an order by the judge filed this week. The judge’s order does not include details on the resolution.

The individual allegations that were dismissed include sexual battery, failure to prevent harassment and wrongful termination. Faraji was seeking unspecified damages when her lawsuit was filed in January.

Claims that remain for Faraji and allegedly others include failure to pay minimum wages and failure to reimburse business expenses, according to the judge’s order.

Faraji was a hairstylist at Fox for more than a decade. She claimed in her lawsuit that the advances by Bayless, which began in 2017 and continued until last year, included lingering hugs, kisses on the cheek and comments from Bayless that he could change Faraji’s life if she had sex with him.

In 2021, she claimed in the suit, Bayless offered Faraji $1.5 million for sex and, after she refused, later threatened her job.

Bayless worked for Fox Sports until 2024 when his show was canceled after its ratings plummeted with the departure of his co-host, Shannon Sharpe.

Faraji said she was fired in 2024 based on “fabricated” reasons. The lawsuit said she initially remained quiet about her treatment at Fox, believing she could be in danger if she went public.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Florida will work to phase out all childhood vaccine mandates in the state, building on the effort by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to curb vaccine requirements and other health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DeSantis also announced on Wednesday the creation of a state-level “Make America Healthy Again” commission modeled after similar initiatives pushed at the federal level by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

On the vaccines, state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as an “immoral” intrusion on people’s rights bordering on “slavery,” and hampers parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.

“People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions,” said Ladapo, who has frequently clashed with the medical establishment, at a news conference in Valrico, Florida, in the Tampa area. “They don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body. Take it away from them.”

The state Health Department, Ladapo said, can scrap its own rules for some vaccine mandates, but others would require action by the Florida Legislature. He did not specify any particular vaccines but repeated several times the effort would end “all of them. Every last one of them.”

Florida would be the first state to eliminate so many vaccine mandates, Ladapo added.

In Florida, vaccine mandates for child day care facilities and public schools include shots for measles, chickenpox, hepatitis B, Diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), polio and other diseases, according to the state Health Department’s website.

Under DeSantis, Florida resisted imposing COVID vaccines on schoolchildren, requiring “passports” for places that draw crowds, school closures and mandates that workers get the shots to keep their jobs.

“I don’t think there’s another state that’s done as much as Florida. We want to stay ahead of the curve,” the governor said.

The state “MAHA” commission would look into such things as allowing informed consent in medical matters, promoting safe and nutritious food, boosting parental rights regarding medical decisions about their children, and eliminating “medical orthodoxy that is not supported by the data,” DeSantis said. The commission will be chaired by Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Florida first lady Casey DeSantis.

“We’re getting government out of the way, getting government out of your lives,” Collins said.

The commission’s work will help inform a large “medical freedom package” to be introduced in the Legislature next session, which would address the vaccine mandates required by state law and make permanent the recent state COVID decisions relaxing restrictions, DeSantis said.

“There will be a broad package,” the governor said.

Anderson writes for the Associated Press.

Graham Greene, the Oscar-nominated actor who helped open doors for Indigenous actors in Hollywood, died on Monday in Toronto after battling a long illness, Deadline and others report. The Canadian actor was 73.

Born in Ohsweken, on the Six Nations Reserve, Greene saw his Hollywood profile catapult after Kevin Costner cast him as Kicking Bird (Ziŋtká Nagwáka) in 1990’s “Dances With Wolves,” which won the Academy Award for best picture and earned Greene an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

During his screen career, which began with the 1979 Canadian drama series “The Great Detective,” Greene was cast in more than 180 films and TV shows. His first movie role was in 1983’s “Running Brave.”

He went on to star in several other high-profile films including “Maverick,” “The Green Mile,” “Die Hard With a Vengeance” and “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2.” The actor also appeared in “Tulsa King,” “Riverdale” and as Maximus in the final season of the Emmy-nominated show “Reservation Dogs,” which was among his final roles.

Graham Greene, right, and Kevin Costner in “Dances With Wolves.”

(Courtesy of Orion Pictures Corp.)

At the time of his death, he had eight upcoming projects, including the Stefan Ruzowitzky-directed thriller “Ice Fall,” which he had completed filming with Joel Kinnaman and Danny Huston. It’s scheduled to be released in October.

“He was a great man of morals, ethics and character and will be eternally missed,” Greene’s agent Michael Greene (no relation) said in a statement released to several outlets, including Deadline and TMZ. “You are finally free. Susan Smith is meeting you at the gates of heaven,” he added, referring to the actor’s former agent, who died in 2013.

Graham Greene and Molly Kunz in a scene from the 2021 drama “The Wolf and the Lion.”

(Emmanuel Guionet / Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment)

Outside of his acting career, Greene won a Grammy in 2000 for best spoken word album for children for his work on “Listen to the Storyteller.” He is also a Gemini and Canadian Screen Award winner and an Independent Spirit nominee. In 2021, he was immortalized with a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, and earlier this year, he received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in his native country.

Graham Greene in 2022 at the unveiling of his commemorative plaque for Arts & Entertainment on Canada’s Walk of Fame at Beanfield Centre in Toronto.

(Mathew Tsang / Getty Images)

In 1991, Greene told The Times that “Dances With Wolves” “was certainly the biggest film I’ve done. It’s made definite changes in my life — I’m more popular with the media, scripts are being offered to me from people I’ve never heard of. On the other hand, I’m being inundated. It’s good in a way. I shouldn’t complain.”

Greene is survived by his wife of 35 years, Hilary Blackmore; daughter Lilly Lazare-Greene; and grandson Tarlo.

Backed by a hefty list of prominent endorsers, Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis has officially kicked off her bid for a southeast L.A. County congressional seat, should new district maps be approved by California voters in November.

“I’ve been standing up for the people — and against Trump — as a Supervisor, and now it’s time to campaign for the House and fight for the people and democracy in the Congress,” Solis said in a statement Friday.

The former secretary of Labor, 67, previously served in Congress and the statehouse before becoming a county supervisor.

Solis’ campaign launch included endorsements from five sitting members of Congress, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, among others.

The heavyweight list speaks to the legislator’s deep backing in local Democratic politics. It also doubles as a warning to other potential candidates about the establishment firepower behind Solis’ nascent campaign, despite the seat she’s angling for not actually existing yet.

Solis would run in the redrawn 38th District, which is currently represented by Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Whittier). Should the maps pass, Sánchez is likely planning to run in the redrawn 41st District, which will include her home of Whittier, leaving the new 38th District without an incumbent candidate. Both districts will be heavily Democratic.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to redraw California’s district maps to favor Democrats will be decided by voters in a Nov. 4 special election — a decision that could potentially determine the balance of power in the Congress in 2026. The plan punches back at President Trump’s drive for more GOP House seats in Texas and other states.

The Times reported this month that Solis was lining up support for a potential candidacy even before the new maps were finalized. At least one California lawmaker told The Times that Solis referred to the district as “my seat” when asking for backing — a reference to the seat she once held, even though the new district doesn’t yet exist. Solis confirmed her candidacy to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune on Thursday.

Along with Sanchez, former Obama administration staffer TJ Adams-Falconer has also filed campaign fundraising paperwork in the district.

Gilbert Arenas and Skip Bayless have made news lately for reasons they would rather forget. Now, they will attempt to put an entertaining spin on NFL news in a digital program launching Tuesday and airing three times a week.

Arenas, a Van Nuys Grant High product who played 11 seasons in the NBA, will rebrand his current channel. Bayless, who had long runs on ESPN’s “First Take” and FS1’s “Undisputed,” will be featured on “The Arena: Gridiron” along with former NFL coach Jay Gruden and former NFL cornerback Aqib Talib.

Arenas was arrested July 30 and charged along with five others with conspiracy for allegedly running illegal poker games at his Encino mansion, court records show. Arenas, 43, rented out the mansion “for the purposes of hosting high-stakes illegal poker games,” according to a news release issued by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

The three-time All-Star guard — who went by the nickname “Agent Zero” according to federal authorities — was charged with conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business, operating an illegal gambling business and making false statements to federal investigators.

Among the others charged was Yevgeni Gershman, 49, a.k.a. “Giora,” of Woodland Hills, who the U.S. attorney’s office described as “a suspected organized crime figure from Israel.” Arenas pleaded not guilty and was released on a $50,000 bond.

Bayless has also been sifting through court filings. He is a defendant along with Fox Sports, broadcaster Joy Taylor and executive Charlie Dixon in a lawsuit by former FS1 hairstylist Noushin Faraji, who alleged that Bayless offered her $1.5 million for sex.

Faraji filed a request to dismiss the lawsuit this month in L.A. Superior Court, which legal experts said is an indication that a settlement has been reached.

Bayless told the Athletic that he isn’t bothered by the criminal charges against Arenas.

“I’ve talked to Gil,” he said. “He has no concerns. I mean, he’s obviously concerned, but he believes he did nothing at all wrong, except rent out his space, and I believe in him.”

Underdog, a five-year-old gaming and media firm, will own and produce the show. Arenas’ two digital basketball programs under “Gil’s Arena” have become one of Underdog’s biggest draws.

Shifting to football prompted the addition of Bayless, whose spirited back-and-forth on social media with Arenas grew into a professional relationship.

“I’m back in the saddle in the debate arena,” Bayless said. “I live for this. I love this.”

For Patricia Sinay, one of the highlights of her life was serving on the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which spent well over a year painstakingly plotting out the state’s political boundaries.

“I got to witness democracy at its core,” said Sinay, 58, who lives in Encinitas and works as a consultant in the world of nonprofits.

“There were 14 very diverse people who came at this work from different backgrounds,” she said. “Some may have known more than others about redistricting. But by the end we were all experts and focused on the same thing, which was creating fair maps for the people of California.”

Now, a good deal of that work may come undone, as voters are being asked to scrap the even-handed congressional lines drawn by Sinay and her fellow commissioners in favor of a blatantly gerrymandered map that could all but wipe out California’s Republican representation in Congress.

Sinay, a Democrat, is ambivalent.

She understands the impetus behind the move, a tit-for-tat response to a similar Republican gerrymander in Texas, done at President Trump’s behest to shore up the GOP’s chances ahead of a perilous 2026 midterm election.

“I think what President Trump requested is absolutely abhorrent. I think that Texas doing this is absolutely abhorrent,” Sinay said. “I do not support the actions of the current administration. I think that their actions are absolutely dangerous and scary.”

But, she said, “I don’t think this is the best way to stop what the administration is doing.”

Sinay noted Republicans have more gerrymandering opportunities nationwide than Democrats, should political adversaries go that route, and she questioned the cost of California’s Nov. 4 special election, which could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

“There are too many people right now that are hurting that could use that money in much better ways,” Sinay said.

Other commissioners disagree.

Sara Sadhwani, 45, a Democrat who teaches political science at Pomona College, spoke at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rally kicking off the gerrymandering effort and testified before the state Senate, urging lawmakers to put the matter before voters so they can give Democrats a lift.

“These are extraordinary times,” Sadhwani said, “and extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.”

Trena Turner, a pastor in Stockton and fellow commissioner, said she’s tremendously proud of the commission’s work and believes its impartial approach to political line-drawing is a model the rest of America should embrace.

But, she said, “I don’t think we should be playing by individual rules, different rules from state to state,” given what’s taken place in Texas and the threat of GOP gerrymandering in other places, such as Florida.

“The voices that we need to speak up for now are not just our individual congressional districts,” said the 64-year-old Democrat. “We need to speak up for the voices of our nation, for the soul of our nation.”

Neal Fornaciari, a Republican who chairs the redistricting commission, said individual members are speaking strictly for themselves. (Though its map-making function was completed at the end of 2021, the commission remains in existence.)

Commissioners “are exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech,” said Fornaciari, 63, a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Shingletown, in the far north of California. But, he emphasized, “The commission is in no way involved in this redistricting effort.”

He even declined to state his personal views on the Democratic gerrymander, lest someone mistakenly assume Fornaciari was speaking on the commission’s behalf.

The body was created in 2008 when California voters approved Proposition 11, also known as the Voters First Act. Spearheaded by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the measure sought to bring balance to legislative races by taking redistricting away from lawmakers, who tended to draw the state’s political lines to suit their interests and minimize competition.

In 2010, voters extended the commission’s oversight to congressional races.

Consisting of 14 members, the panel is divided among five Democrats, five Republicans and four members with no party affiliation. More than 30,000 Californians applied for the positions.

The 14 who landed the job survived a grueling selection process, overseen by the nonpartisan state auditor, which involved detailed questionnaires, multiple essays and face-to-face interviews. The final lineup included a seminary professor, a structural engineer and an investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Over the course of 16 months — and through days sometimes lasting 12 hours or more — commissioners produced 176 maps. They created district boundaries for 52 members of Congress, 120 state lawmakers and four members of the Board of Equalization, which oversees tax collection in California.

Commissioners worked for free, receiving no salary, though they did get a $378 per diem on days they spent in session.

It’s a point of pride that no one sued to overturn the commission’s work, a rarity in the highly litigious field of redistricting.

“Most of the time if you watched our meetings I doubt if you could have correctly guessed all our political affiliations,” Russell Yee, a Republican commissioner, said in an email. “We approved our final maps unanimously. We proved that citizens can rise above political, racial, regional, and generational differences to do the public’s work together in an open and successful manner.”

(All commission meetings were open to the public, with proceedings livestreamed on the internet.)

Yee, 64, the academic director at a small Christian study center in Berkeley, said he was generally opposed to the Democratic gerrymandering effort “because two wrongs don’t make a right. The ends do not justify the means.”

However, while Yee leans against Proposition 50, as the November ballot measure has been designated, he will “keep listening with an open mind.”

Even if voters crumple up and toss the congressional maps Yee and others drafted, none felt as though their labors were wasted. For one thing, they said, the other political boundaries, for state legislative contests and the Board of Equalization, will remain intact. And the congressional lines yielded a set of highly competitive races in 2020 and 2024.

“We’ve shown twice now that independent, citizen redistricting can work well even in a state as populous, demographically diverse, and geographically complex at California,” Yee said.

For her part, Sinay, the nonprofit consultant, is uncertain about Proposition 50.

One thing she wants, Sinay said, is reassurance “this isn’t a permanent power grab” and that congressional redistricting will, in fact, revert to the commission after the next census, as Newsom and gerrymandering proponents have promised. Sidelining self-interested politicians is definitely a better way to draw political maps, she suggested, but ultimately it’s up to voters to decide.

“I will definitely support whatever the people of California want,” Sinay said.

COTTONWOOD — When the talk turned to politics at the OK Corral bar in this historic stagecoach town on Tuesday night, retired nurse Ovie Hays, 77, spoke for most of the room when she summed up her view of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan.

“I don’t want Democrats around,” she said. “They have gone too far in controlling us. We won’t have a say in anything.”

Nearby, a man in hard-worn cowboy boots agreed with Hays — using much more colorful language. He works as a ranch hand and said he’d just come from fixing a goat pen.

“The morons in charge, and the morons that put [those] morons in charge need to understand where their food comes from,” he said. He declined to see his name printed, like a lot of folks in this part of Shasta County and neighboring counties.

In its current form, California’s 1st Congressional District, which sweeps south from the Oregon border almost to Sacramento, is larger than Massachusetts or Maryland or eight other states.

This is farm and forest country. From the glittering peaks and dense forests of Mt. Shasta and the Sierra Nevada, rivers course down to the valley floor, to vast fields of rice, endless orchards of peaches and golden, rolling grassland full of more cows than people. Voters here are concerned with policies that affect their water supply and forests, given that the timber industry limps along here and fires have ravaged the area in recent years.

This is also Republican country. For the last 12 years, this district has been represented by Congressman Doug LaMalfa, a rice farmer from Oroville who is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.

During a Chico town hall meeting, attendees hold up red cards to indicate their opinion on a statement made by Rep. Doug LaMalfa.

(Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee)

But if voters approve the redistricting plan in November, the deep-red bastion that is LaMalfa’s district will be cleaved into three pieces, each of them diluted with enough Democratic votes that they could all turn blue. The northern half of the district would be joined to a coastal district that would stretch all the way down to the Golden Gate Bridge, while the southern half would be jigsawed into two districts that would draw in voters from the Bay Area and wine country.

Northern California finds itself in this situation because of power plays unleashed by President Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Newsom and others. To ensure GOP control of the House of Representatives, Trump pressured Abbott to redraw Texas’ congressional maps so Republicans could take more seats. Newsom responded by threatening to redraw California’s maps to favor Democrats, while saying he’d holster this pistol if Texas did the same.

The California Legislature is expected to approve a plan Thursday that would put new maps on the November ballot, along with a a constitutional amendment that would override the state’s voter-approved, independent redistricting commission. If voters approve the new maps, they would go into effect only if another state performs mid-decade redistricting. Under the proposal, Democrats could pick up five seats currently held by Republicans, while also bolstering some vulnerable Democratic incumbents in purple districts.

Now, voters in Northern California and other parts of the state find themselves at the center of a showdown.

The Silver Dollar Saloon in Marysville, a part of Northern California where a number of voters say that urban California doesn’t understand the needs of rural California.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

And from Marysville to Redding this week, many — including those who call themselves Democrats — said they were outraged at what they saw as another example of urban California imposing its will on rural California, areas that city people generally ignore and don’t understand.

“Their needs and their wants are completely different than what we need here,” said Pamela Davis, 40, who was loading bags of chicken feed into the back of her SUV in Yuba City. Her children scrambled into their car seats, chatting happily about the cows and ducks they have at home on their farm.

Davis, who said she voted for LaMalfa, said voters in California’s cities have no understanding of water regulations or other policies vitally important to agriculture, even though what happens in farming areas is crucial to the state overall.

“We’re out here growing food for everybody,” she said. “Water is an issue all the time. That kind of stuff needs to be at the top of everybody’s mind.”

For years, folks in the so-called north state have chafed at life under the rule of California’s liberal politicians. This region is whiter, more rural, more conservative and poorer than the rest of the state. They have long bemoaned that their property rights, grazing rights and water rights are under siege. They complain that the state’s high taxes and cost of living are crushing people’s dreams. The grievances run so deep that in recent years many residents have embraced a decades-old idea of seceding from California and forming a “State of Jefferson.”

At the Riviera Mobile Estates community in Anderson, Calif., a “State of Jefferson” flag flies alongside the Stars and Stripes.

(Los Angeles Times)

Some residents, including LaMalfa, said if redistricting were to go through, it could further fuel those sentiments. And even some voters who said they abhorred Trump and LaMalfa and planned to vote in favor of the redistricting plan said they worried about the precedent of diluting the rural vote.

Gail Mandaville, 76, was sitting with her book group in Chico and said she was in favor of the plan. “I just am really, really afraid of the way the country is going,” the retired teacher said. “I admire Newsom for standing up and doing something.”

Across the table, Kim Heuckel, 58, said she agreed but also wondered whether a member of Congress from a more urban area could properly represent the needs of her district. “I’m sorry, but they don’t know the farmlands,” she said. “We need our farmers.”

We do, chimed in Rebecca Willi, 74, a retired hospice worker, but “all the things we stand for are going down the drain,” and if the redistricting in Texas goes forward, “we have to offset it because there is too much at stake.”

In an interview, LaMalfa predicted that California’s voters would reject the redistricting plan. “We’re not going anywhere without a fight,” he said.

But should it pass, he predicted that his constituents would suffer. “We don’t have Sausalito values in this district,” he said, adding that politicians in the newly redrawn districts would be “playing to Bay Area voters; they won’t be playing towards us at all.”

One of the biggest issues in his district recently, he noted, has been concern over wolves, who have been roaming ranch lands, killing cattle and enraging ranchers and other property owners. With redistricting, he said, “if it doesn’t go to the dogs, it will go to the wolves.”

Alan Shearer was in his prime and in the starting lineup for Blackburn when the English Premier League kicked off its first season 33 summers ago.

Shearer scored two goals that day in a 3-3 draw with Crystal Palace. But he had no idea that season would give birth to the most dominant force in the history of club soccer — and perhaps the most dominant force in the history of international sports.

“There’s no way anyone could have predicted back in 1992 that it was going to be this incredible, huge, gigantic force that it’s become,” said Shearer, who would go on to become the leading scorer in EPL history, of the Premier League. “It is sort of chalk and cheese in terms of where it was then to where it is now.”

That’s an English way of saying the league, which kicked off a new season Friday, has progressed.

International soccer is a sport ruled by money, and the Premier League became the best league in the world because it’s also the richest. Six of the 10 wealthiest teams in the world play in the EPL, where the average franchise value is $1.5 billion, according to Sportico. And the 20 teams combined to earn more than $8.5 billion in commercial revenue in 2023-24, according to Deloitte.

That’s allowed the EPL to outbid others for the top talent, resulting in deeper rosters and a level of play no other league can match.

Other leagues may have one or two better teams — France’s Paris Saint-Germain, for example, is the reigning European champion and Spain’s Real Madrid has won 15 continental titles, more than twice what any English club has won — but top to bottom, no league is as competitive as the EPL. That’s why its games are broadcast in 189 countries to a potential audience of 4.7 billion people, part of an international and domestic broadcast package valued at $5.1 billion a season, according to CNBC.

“It is where it is because of the interest and because of how many people want to watch it,” said Shearer, now a soccer pundit for the BBC. “We’ve got, without a doubt, a lot of the best players in the world. We’ve got the best atmosphere in the world. The finances are there.

“Basically everyone wants to be a part of it. And whilst that is the case, it’s only going to get bigger.”

It certainly didn’t start that way. The Premier League formed when English soccer was emerging from a low point that threatened to sink it. In the mid 1980s, hooliganism was rife, English teams were banned from European competition for five years following a deadly clash between Liverpool and Juventus supporters in Belgium, and the Football League First Division, the country’s top level since 1888, lagged well behind Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga in attendance and revenue. As a result, the best English stars, not to mention international talent, played elsewhere.

By 1990 the situation had gotten so bad, England’s top clubs — Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool and Everton, known collectively as the “Big Five” — had begun discussions to form a breakaway league that would have commercial independence, allowing it to increase revenue by negotiating its own broadcast and sponsorship deals.

Two years later, the Premier League debuted.

The revenue growth that EPL has enjoyed in the three decades since is well beyond the wildest dreams of the league’s founding fathers. And that’s turned around an exodus of top players out of England; now nearly three-quarters of Premier League players are foreign-born, among them Egypt’s Mo Salah, Norway’s Erling Haaland and Sweden’s Alexander Isak.

Manchester City’s Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring against Wolverhampton on Saturday.

(Dave Shopland / Associated Press)

But what has really made the Premier League great is its relative balance. Although just seven teams have won a title in the league’s 32 seasons, that qualifies as parity in Europe, where Bayern Munich has won 12 of the last 13 German championships, PSG has won 11 of the last 13 French crowns and just one team not named Real Madrid or Barcelona has won the Spanish league in the last 21 years.

In the Premier League, on any given weekend every game is in doubt. That competitiveness is why three EPL teams have won the UEFA Champions League since 2019 and in two of those three seasons, the European champion didn’t win the Premier League title. This summer Chelsea won the FIFA Club World Cup, making it arguably the best team on the planet, two months after finishing fourth in the Premier League table.

“One week the team at the bottom can beat the team at the top and that’s not a fluke,” said Shearer, who played for a Newcastle team that finished second in the EPL in consecutive seasons, then fell to 13th in each of the next two. “I don’t see that jeopardy in other leagues at all. That’s why the Premier League works and why the Premier League is the most watched.”

The challenge now for the Premier League is staying on top. When the EPL came into being, Serie A and La Liga were widely considered the best leagues in the world, winning a combined six Champions League titles between 1990 and 2000. But financial issues, tactical stagnation and a lack of investment in infrastructure combined to sink Italian soccer while La Liga became so top-heavy, with superclubs Barcelona and Real Madrid choking off all competition, that it became a league of two Goliaths and 18 Davids.

Shearer said there are lessons to be learned from those experiences.

“Every huge business has to evolve and keep going forward and keep improving,” he said. “The Premier League is no different. Since that very first day when I ran out for Blackburn against Crystal Palace to what it is now, there’s been improvement. Whilst the interest is there, whilst the finance keeps coming in, whilst we all want to watch, it is getting bigger and better.

“But yeah, you have to keep an eye on your competitors.”

⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.

Rob Manfred normally does what many fans consider an annoyingly effective job of keeping Major League Baseball’s strategic plans out of the public square.

So maybe the MLB commissioner was caught in an unguarded moment, staring down at a diamond from the ESPN “Sunday Night Baseball” booth in the cozy confines of Williamsport, Pa., and the Little League World Series.

Or maybe his comments were calculated. Either way, he spoke freely about how expanding from the current 30 teams could create an ideal chance to reset the way teams are aligned in divisions and leagues.

Manfred was asked on air for a window into the future. Expansion, realignment, both?

“The first two topics are related, in my mind,” he replied. “I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign. I think we could save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel. And I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for entities like ESPN, because you’d be playing out of the East and out of the West.”

Taking that thinking to an extreme would put the Dodgers and Angels in a division with, say, the San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, Las Vegas Athletics and Seattle Mariners.

Would that collection — let’s call it the Pacific Division — be part of the American or National League? Maybe neither. Instead, geographic realignment could result in Eastern and Western Conferences similar to the NBA.

Pushback from traditionalists might be vigorous. Call them leagues, call them conferences, geographical realignment would make for some strange bedfellows.

Former MLB player and current MLB Network analyst Cameron Maybin posted on X that making sure the divisions are balanced is more important than geography.

“Manfred’s realignment talk isn’t just about moving teams around, it tilts playoff balance,” Maybin said on X. “Some divisions get watered down others overloaded and rivalries that drive October story lines we love, vanish. Baseball needs competitive integrity not manufactured shakeups.”

Yet Manfred makes a persuasive argument that grouping teams by geographic location would have its benefits.

“That 10 o’clock time slot where we sometimes get lost in Anaheim would be two West Coast teams,” he said. “Then that 10 o’clock spot that’s a problem for us becomes an opportunity for our West Coast audience. I think the owners realize there is a demand for Major League Baseball in a lot of great cities, and we have an opportunity to do something good around that expansion process.”

Manfred said in February that he’d like expansion to be approved by 2029, his last year as commissioner. MLB hasn’t expanded since the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays were added in 1998.

Expansion teams “won’t be playing by the time I’m done, but I would like the process along and [locations] selected,” Manfred said.

Several cities are courting MLB for a franchise, and the league is reported to be leaning toward Nashville and Salt Lake City as favorites. Portland, Orlando, San Antonio and Charlotte are other possibilities.

The Times’ Bill Shaikin has pointed out that geographical realignment would be tied to schedule reform that could help kindle rivalries and encourage fans to visit opposing ballparks that are within driving distance.

The future home of the Rays is in flux, and that decision likely will precede MLB choosing expansion cities, even after the recent news that Florida developer Patrick Zalupski has agreed to pay $1.7 billion for the team.

Zalupski’s team of investors reportedly prefers to keep the Rays near Tampa. If that becomes gospel, MLB can turn its attention to choosing where new teams would call home.

And soon afterward, if Manfred’s vision comes to fruition, geographical realignment would follow, and the Southern California Freeway Series could become just another series between divisional rivals.

In a police department with a long tradition of colorful nicknames — from “Jigsaw John” to “Captain Hollywood” — LAPD Sgt. Joseph Lloyd stands out.

“The Grim Reaper.”

At least that’s what some on the force have taken to calling the veteran Internal Affairs detective, usually out of earshot.

According to officers who have found themselves under investigation by Lloyd, he seems to relish the moniker and takes pleasure in ending careers, even if it means twisting facts and ignoring evidence.

But Lloyd’s backers maintain his dogged pursuit of the truth is why he has been entrusted with some of the department’s most politically sensitive and potentially embarrassing cases.

Lloyd, 52, declined to comment. But The Times spoke to more than half a dozen current or former police officials who either worked alongside him or fell under his scrutiny.

During the near decade that he’s been in Internal Affairs, Lloyd has investigated cops of all ranks.

When a since-retired LAPD officer was suspected of running guns across the Mexican border, the department turned to Lloyd to bust him.

In 2020, when it came out that members of the elite Metropolitan Division were falsely labeling civilians as gang members in a police database, Lloyd was tapped to help unravel the mess.

And when a San Fernando Valley anti-gang squad was accused in 2023 of covering up shakedowns of motorists, in swooped the Reaper again.

Recently he was assigned to a department task force looking into allegations of excessive force by police against activists who oppose the government’s immigration crackdown.

At the LAPD, as in most big-city police departments across the country, Internal Affairs investigators tend to be viewed with suspicion and contempt by their colleagues. They usually try to operate in relative anonymity.

Not Lloyd.

The 24-year LAPD veteran has inadvertently become the face of a pitched debate over the LAPD’s long-maligned disciplinary system. The union that represents most officers has long complained that well-connected senior leaders get favorable treatment. Others counter that rank-and-file cops who commit misconduct are routinely let off the hook.

A recent study commissioned by Chief Jim McDonnell found that perceived unfairness in internal investigations is a “serious point of contention” among officers that has contributed to low morale. McDonnell has said he wants to speed up investigations and better screen complaints, but efforts by past chiefs and the City Council to overhaul the system have repeatedly stalled.

Sarah Dunster, 40, was a sergeant working in the LAPD’s Hollywood division in 2021 when she learned she was under investigation for allegedly mishandling a complaint against one of her officers, who was accused of groping a woman he arrested.

Dunster said she remembers being interviewed by Lloyd, whose questions seemed designed to trip her up and catch her in a lie, rather than aimed at hearing her account of what happened, she said. Some of her responses never made it into Lloyd’s report, she said.

“He wanted to fire me,” she said.

Dunster was terminated over the incident, but she appealed and last week a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted a reprieve that allows her to potentially get her job back.

Others who have worked with Lloyd say he is regarded as a savvy investigator who is unfairly being vilified for discipline decisions that are ultimately made by the chief of police. A supervisor who oversaw Lloyd at Internal Affairs — and requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media — described him as smart, meticulous and “a bulldog.”

“Joe just goes where the facts lead him and he doesn’t have an issue asking the hard questions,” the supervisor said.

On more than one occasion, the supervisor added, Internal Affairs received complaints from senior department officials who thought that Lloyd didn’t show them enough deference during interrogations. Other supporters point to his willingness to take on controversial cases to hold officers accountable, even while facing character attacks from his colleagues, their attorneys and the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League.

Officers have sniped about his burly build, tendency to smile during interviews and other eccentricities. He wears two watches — one on each wrist, a habit he has been heard saying he picked up moonlighting as a high school lacrosse referee.

But he has also been criticized as rigid and uncompromising, seeming to fixate only on details that point to an officer’s guilt. People he has grilled say that when he doesn’t get the answer he’s looking for, he has a Columbo-esque tendency to ask the same question in different ways in an attempt to elicit something incriminating.

And instead of asking officers to clarify any discrepancies in their statements, Lloyd automatically assumes they are lying, some critics said.

Mario Munoz, a former LAPD Internal Affairs lieutenant who opened a boutique firm that assists officers fighting employment and disciplinary cases, recently released a scathing 60-page report questioning what he called a series of troubling lapses in the LAPD’s 2023 investigation of the Mission gang unit. The report name-drops Lloyd several times.

The department accused several Mission officers of stealing brass knuckles and other items from motorists in the San Fernando Valley, and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body-worn cameras.

Munoz said he received calls from officers who said Lloyd had violated their due process rights, which potentially opens the city up to liability. Several have since lodged complaints against Lloyd with the department. He alleged Lloyd ultimately singled out several “scapegoats to shield higher-level leadership from scrutiny.”

Until he retired from the LAPD in 2014, Munoz worked as both an investigator and an auditor who reviewed landmark internal investigations into the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the Rampart gang scandal in which officers were accused of robbing people and planting evidence, among other crimes.

Munoz now echoes a complaint from current officers that Internal Affairs in general, and Lloyd in particular, operate to protect the department’s image at all costs.

“He’s the guy that they choose because he doesn’t question management,” Munoz said of Lloyd.

In the Mission case, Munoz pointed to inconsistent outcomes for two captains who oversaw the police division accused of wrongdoing: One was transferred and later promoted, while another is fighting for his job amid accusations that he failed to rein in his officers.

Two other supervisors — Lt. Mark Garza and Sgt. Jorge “George” Gonzalez — were accused by the department of creating a “working environment that resulted in the creation of a police gang,” according to an internal LAPD report. Both Garza and Gonzalez have sued the city, alleging that even though they reported the wrongdoing as soon as they became aware of it, they were instead punished by the LAPD after the scandal became public.

According to Munoz’s report and interviews with department sources, Lloyd was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking the Mission case open.

It began with a complaint in late December 2022 made by a motorist who said he was pulled over and searched without reason in a neighboring patrol area. Lloyd learned that the officers involved had a pattern of not documenting traffic stops — exploiting loopholes in the department’s auditing system for dashboard and body cameras. The more Lloyd dug, the more instances he uncovered of these so-called “ghost stops.”

A few months later, undercover Internal Affairs detectives began tailing the two involved officers — something that Garza and Gonzalez both claimed they were kept in the dark about.

As of last month, four officers involved had been fired and another four had pending disciplinary hearings where their jobs hung in the balance. Three others resigned before the department could take action. The alleged ringleader, Officer Alan Carrillo, faces charges of theft and “altering, planting or concealing evidence.” Court records show he was recently offered pretrial diversion by L.A. County prosecutors, which could spare him jail but require him to stop working in law enforcement. Carrillo has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In an interview with The Times, Gonzalez — the sergeant who is facing termination — recalled a moment during a recorded interrogation that he found so troubling he contacted the police union director Jamie McBride, to express concern. McBride, he said, went to Lloyd’s boss, then-deputy chief Michael Rimkunas, seeking Lloyd’s removal from Internal Affairs.

The move failed. Lloyd kept his job.

Rimkunas confirmed the exchange with the police union leader in an interview with The Times.

He said that while he couldn’t discuss Lloyd specifically due to state personnel privacy laws, in general the department assigns higher-profile Internal Affairs cases to detectives with a proven track record.

Gonzalez, though, can’t shake the feeling that Lloyd crossed the line in trying to crack him during an interrogation.

He said that at one point while Lloyd was asking questions, the detective casually flipped over his phone, which had been sitting on the table. On the back of the protective case, Gonzalez said, was a grim reaper sticker.

“And then as he turned it he looked at me as if to get a reaction from me,” Gonzalez said. “It was definitely a way of trying to intimidate me for sure.”

On a wide, empty stretch of Venice Beach in 1980, seven Los Angeles architects — Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Robert Mangurian and Frederick Fisher — gathered for a group portrait by photographer Ave Pildas. Clad in mismatched outfits and standing casually in the sand, they looked more like a rumpled rock band than the future of American architecture.

The resulting image, published in Interiors magazine, distilled a seismic moment in L.A.’s creative history. Those seven, gazing in their own directions yet joined in a sense of mischievous rebellion and cocky exuberance, represented a new generation that was bringing a brash, loose creativity to their work and starting to distance itself from the buttoned-up codes and expectations of the architecture establishment.

Each would go on to have a successful career, from Pritzker Architecture Prize winners to directors of architecture schools. And they and their compatriots would, for a while at least, help put a rapidly changing L.A. at the center of the built culture.

“That one photograph contains a whole world,” notes filmmaker Russell Brown, who recently directed a 12-part documentary series about that Venice architecture scene. “There was risk going on, and freedom; it was all about ideas.”

“It’s become a kind of reference point,” adds architectural journalist Frances Anderton, host of the series. “It just keeps reappearing whenever there’s a conversation about that period.”

The 1980 image is the jumping-off point for “Rebel Architects: From Venice to the World Stage,” produced by Brown’s nonprofit, Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. Four of the architects — now in their 70s and 80s — gathered for a (far less brash) new photo and an honest conversation about their early careers in L.A., and what’s transpired since for the series, which began streaming monthly on FORT: LA’s website July 1.

A native Angeleno with a background in feature and documentary filmmaking, Brown conceived of the concept after a chat with architect Robert Thibodeau, co-founder of Venice-based DU Architects. After a deeper dive into the image with Anderton, the idea for a reunion was born.

“We thought, why don’t we restage the photo and then use that as an excuse to get the guys together?” Brown explains.

He preferred a spontaneous, lighthearted group discussion to the typical documentary, with its one-on-one interviews and heavy production.

Frances Anderton, from left, Frederick Fisher, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss catch up for “Rebel Architects,” a 12-part series.

(FORT: LA)

“It’s about the chemistry between creative peers,” says Brown. “The real legacy of these architects isn’t just in the buildings. It’s in the conversations they started — and are still having.” He added: “There’s a spark that happens when they’re together … They talk about failure, competition, teaching, aging. It’s a very human exchange.”

Episode 1, titled “Capturing a Moment in L.A. Architecture,” opens with four of the surviving architects — Fisher, Mayne, Moss and Hodgetts — recreating that seminal photograph for Pildas and sitting down for an interview. (Howard was interviewed separately, Gehry declined and Mangurian died in 2023.) The group dissects the photo’s cinematic, informal composition, in which Pildas aims down from a berm, the neglected buildings behind the eclectic crew shrinking into the horizon, merging with the sand. And they remember a time in which the city’s messy urban forms and perceived cultural inferiority provided endless creative fuel, and liberation.

Pildas recalls how the original shoot came together at the request of British design editor Beverly Russell, who was looking to capture “Frank Gehry and some of his Turks.” (The international design press was gaga for L.A. at the time. Anderton notes that her move from the U.K. resulted from a similar assignment, on the “subversive architects of the West Coast,” for the publication Architectural Review in 1987.)

At the time, most of the architects were working in garages and warehouses, forming their studios and collaborating with equally norm-busting and (relatively) unheralded artists in the scrappy, dangerous, forgotten, yet exploding Venice scene. In a later episode, the architects start listing the art talents they would run into, or befriend, including Larry Bell, James Turrell, Ed Ruscha, Fred Eversley, Robert Irwin, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few.

Basquiat was then living and working in Hodgetts’ building. “It was a spectacular fusion of all this creative energy,” Hodgetts remembers. “There was no audience, there were no guardrails, and one did not feel constrained.” He adds, later: “We all felt like we were marooned on a desert island.”

Pildas, who had studied architecture before switching to design and, eventually, photography, was uniquely suited to capture the group. He had shot some of the small, quirky experiments of Mangurian and Mayne, and knew most of the others through social and professional circles. (He even knew Hodgetts from high school back in Cincinnati.)

The first attempt at the photo seemed stiff, says Pildas, so he took out a joint, which all except Hodgetts accepted, he says. The icebreaker worked. In a later image, says Pildas, Fisher is hugging Gehry’s leg, the others huddled around. “It got pretty friendly in the end,” he jokes.

Pildas argues that the photo is much more layered with meaning (not to mention nostalgia) now than it was at the time. “Back then, it was just another magazine shoot. Now, it’s history,” he says. Adds Moss: “Its relevancy, or not, is confirmed by the following years. Otherwise it’s gone.”

Frederick Fisher, from left, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts and Eric Owen Moss recreate their famous 1980 photo.

(Ave Pildas)

Each episode explores the image’s layers, and the unfolding stories that followed — the challenges of maintaining originality; crucial role of journalists in promoting their work; maddening disconnect between L.A.’s talent and its clients, along with the mercurial, ever-evolving identity of Los Angeles. The tone, like the photo, is unpretentious and playful, heavy on character and story, not theory. This was not always an easy task with a group that can get esoteric quite quickly, adds Anderton. “I was trying to keep it light,” she laughs. “I don’t think I even have the ability to talk in the language of the academy.”

“They’re cracking jokes, interrupting each other, reminiscing about teaching gigs and design arguments,” says Brown. “There’s real affection, but also a sense of rivalry that never fully went away.” Hodgetts doesn’t see it that way, however. “It was really about the joy of creating things. We wanted to jam a bit, perform together; that’s really life-affirming,” he says.

There are some revealing moments. Mayne, whose firm Morphosis is known for bold, city-altering buildings such as Caltrans HQ in downtown L.A., reflects on teaching as a way of “being the father I never had.” (His father left his family when he was a young boy.) He tenderly discusses the seminal role that his wife Blythe — a co-owner of Morphosis — has played in his career. Fisher reveals that Gehry was the chief reason he dropped everything to come out to L.A. (At the time, he was working as a display designer at a department store in Cincinnati.) “I remember seeing this architect jumping up and down on cardboard furniture. I could see there was something going on here. Something percolating,” he says. Moss opens up about his struggles to negotiate the demands of the practical world, while Hodgetts performs brilliant critiques of the others’ work, sometimes to broad smiles, others to cringes.

Notably absent from the reunion is Gehry himself, who is now 96. “He’s at a point in his life where trudging through sand for a photo wasn’t going to happen,” says Brown. “But his presence is everywhere. He’s still the elephant in the room.”

One episode explores how Gehry, about a decade older than the others, both profoundly influenced and often overshadowed the group — a reality that was perhaps reinforced by his nonchalant dominance in the photo itself. “Frank takes up a lot of oxygen,” Mayne quips. Still, all admire Gehry’s unwillingness to compromise creatively, despite often heavy criticism.

Another prevailing theme is the bittersweet loss of that early sense of freedom, and the Venice of the 1970s, with its breathtakingly low rents and abandoned charm. Today’s architects — wherever they are — face higher stakes, infinitely higher costs and tighter regulations.

“The Venice we grew up with is completely gone,” says Fisher. “But maybe it’s just moved,” noted Moss. Distinguishing L.A. as a place whose energy and attention is constantly shifting, he wonders if creative ferment might now be happening in faraway places like Tehachapi — “wherever land is cheap and ambition is high,” he says.

While Pildas was capturing the seven architects 45 years ago, he was also busy chronicling the city’s street culture — jazz clubs, boulevard eccentrics, decaying movie palaces and bohemian artists. All were featured in the 2023 documentary “Ave’s America” (streaming on Prime Video) directed by his former student, Patrick Taulère, exploring his six decades of humbly perceptive, deeply human work.

After reviewing the recreation of the photo — the architects are still smiling this time, but their scrappy overconfidence feels eons away — Pildas wonders who the next generation will be, and how they will rise.

“Maybe it’ll happen that they’ll have another picture someday with a bunch of new architects, right?” he says. “This is a fertile ground for architecture anyway, and always has been.”

Exposing that “fertile ground” to Angelenos of all kinds is FORT: LA’s overarching goal. Founded in 2020, it offers architecture trails, fellowships and a surprising variety of programming, from design competitions to architecture-themed wine tastings. All, says Brown, is delivered, like “Rebel Architects,” with a sense of accessible joy and exploration — an especially useful gift in a turbulent, insecure time for the city.

“Suddenly, you kind of think about the city in a different way and feel it in a different way,” says Brown. “This is a place that allows this kind of vision to come to life.”

Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.

In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.

Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)

At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.

“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”

For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.

Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.

“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”

L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford plays the cornet while rehearsing his original composition in his Altadena home in 2019.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”

But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.

“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”

The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.

With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.

American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.

(David Redfern / Redferns)

He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.

“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”

He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.

Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”

Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.

(Michael Rowe / For The Times)

He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.

Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.

“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”

Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.

“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”

Receiver Konata Mumpfield made multiple plays. So did running back Jarquez Hunter and other Rams rookies during training camp and a joint practice with the Dallas Cowboys.

A true evaluation about their progress, however, cannot be completed by coach Sean McVay and his staff until the first-year players perform in a live-tackling situation.

The first opportunity for rookies and others to truly demonstrate that they are worthy of regular-season roles comes Saturday when the Rams play the Cowboys in a preseason game at SoFi Stadium.

But the most notable development for the Rams will probably occur hours before kickoff.

Quarterback Matthew Stafford, sidelined during training camp because of an aggravated disc in his back, is scheduled to go through his first significant passing workout at the Rams’ facility in Woodland Hills. McVay said the 17th-year pro would begin practicing next week.

McVay does not play starters or other significant players during preseason games, so veteran backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo will not play.

Tight end Terrance Ferguson, a second-round draft pick, probably won’t play because of a hamstring issue that has sidelined him for the last week.

Here are five things to watch Saturday when the Rams face the Cowboys at 4 p.m. PDT (ABC):

Stoner comedy legend, actor and Chicano art curator collector Cheech Marin will be honored this year at the 38th annual Hispanic Heritage Awards.

The Hispanic Heritage Foundation named Marin as a recipient of the 2025 Hispanic Heritage Award for the arts on Tuesday, one of several honors bestowed on notable public figures for their accomplishments and cultural contributions to the Latino communities.

Past awardees at the Hispanic Heritage Awards include Bad Bunny, America Ferrera, Becky G, J Balvin and others. Marin will be awarded alongside National Public Radio journalist and “Alt.Latino” host Felix Contreras and Rizos Curls co-founder and CEO Julissa Prado.

“I’m extremely honored to be receiving this Hispanic Heritage for Arts Award,” Marin said in a press release. “I accept this recognition with deep gratitude and a commitment to continue uplifting voices, building bridges, and honoring the legacy of those who came before us.”

Having spent his childhood in South-Central L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, Marin’s comedy career kicked off in the late 1960s, when he fled to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. It was during that time that he first met his future comedy partner Tommy Chong — and the rest is burned into history.

“For over five decades, Cheech Marin has reflected our cultural impact on America and the world as a comedian, actor, director, art collector, and humanitarian,” said Antonio Tijerino, the president and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, in a press release. “His groundbreaking work has not only entertained but enlightened. We are thrilled to pay tribute to Cheech and the other 2025 Honorees and tell their stories to inspire, unite, and mobilize other generations.”

Cheech and Chong’s blazing success first reached national attention after the release of their first comedy album “Cheech and Chong” in 1971. The 11-track LP was nominated for a comedy recording award at the 1972 Grammy Awards and generated the famous “Dave’s not here” line. Their second album, “Big Bambú,” was nominated for a Grammy in the same category at the 1973 award ceremony.

In 1978, the duo released the stoner comedy feature film, “Up in Smoke,” which was based in L.A. Though it was critically panned, the film became a cult classic and was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2024.

Marin’s 1987 film “Born in East L.A.” — which includes a spoof of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” — was acclaimed by critics for blending of comedy with such serious subject matters as deportation and living as an undocumented person in the U.S.

“Without saying so much as a single word that could be even remotely described as preachy, Cheech Marin makes his points about the second-class nature of American citizenship for ethnic minorities and the desperate situation in which illegal aliens find themselves,” The Times wrote in a 1987 review of the movie.

In recent years, Marin is perhaps best known for his work as a collector of Chicano art. After being a lifelong gatherer of art, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum opened to the public in June 2022.

Many consider the museum to be the largest private collection of Chicano art in the world, with more than 550 paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from Marin’s personal collection will be on permanent rotation. Nicknamed “the Cheech,” the 61,420-square-foot, two-story art museum and education center resides in what used to be the downtown Riverside Public Library, and has displayed works by artists Chaz Bojorquez, Judithe Hernández, Frank Romero, Patssi Valdez and others. It’s considered the only permanent art space to exclusively showcase Chicano and Mexican American art in the country.

“You don’t have to be Chicano to love and appreciate this work,” Marin told The Times in 2022. “Just like I don’t have to be French to appreciate Impressionism or German to appreciate Expressionism. We recognize it as part of the conversation in the history of art. And now we are part of that conversation in a more concentrated effort than we’ve ever had before.”

One of California’s largest legal cannabis companies announced Monday that it would radically revamp its labor practices in the wake of a massive immigration raid at two company facilities last month. The raid led to the death of one worker and the detention of more than 360 people, including, according to government officials, 14 minors.

Glass House Brands announced it had “terminated its relationship” with the two farm labor contractors who had provided workers to the cannabis green house operations in Camarillo and Carpinteria. It also announced that it has “made significant changes to labor practices that are above and beyond legal requirements.”

Those include hiring experts to scrutinize workers’ documents as well as hiring the consulting firm Guidepost Services to advise the company on best practices for determining employment eligibility. The firm is led by Julie Myers Wood, a former ICE director under President George W. Bush.

The company also said it has signed a new “labor peace” agreement with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters.

Glass House officials declined to comment publicly beyond what was in a press release, but a source close to the company said that officials wanted to “make sure we never have a situation that we had on July 10. We can’t have this ever happen again.”

On that day, federal agents in masks and riot gear stormed across Glass House operations in Ventura and Santa Barbara county in the state’s largest ICE workplace raid in recent memory. Agents chased panicked workers through vast green houses and deployed tear gas and less-than-lethal projectiles at protesters and employees.

One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell three stories from the roof of a greenhouse trying to evade capture. Others were bloodied from shards of glass broken or hid for hours on the roofs or beneath the leaves and plastic shrouding. More than 360 people — a mixture of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passerby—were ultimately detained, including at least two American citizens including a U.S. Army veteran.

In the wake of the raid, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Glass House had been targeted because “we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity.”

To date, neither Homeland Security nor the U.S. Department of Justice have announced any legal action regardlng the alleged trafficking and exploitation of juveniles.

In its press release, Glass House said that just nine of its direct employees were detained; all others picked up were either employees of its labor contractors or were “unassociated with the company.”

With regards to the government’s contention that it had found children working in cannabis, the company said: “while the identities of the alleged minors have not been disclosed, the company has been able to determine that, if those reports are true, none of them were Glass House employees.” California labor law allows children as young as 12 to work in agriculture, but workers must be 21 to work in cannabis.

The raid devastated Glass House and its workforce. Numerous workers were detained or disappeared, terrified to return. Those that remained were so distraught the company called in grief counselors.

Across the wider world of legal cannabis, people were also shaken. Glass House, which is backed by wealthy investors and presents a sleek corporate image in the wild world of cannabis in California, has long been known as the “Walmart of Weed.” Many in California’s cannabis industry feared the raid on Glass House was a signal that the federal government’s ceasefire against cannabis —which is legal in California but still not federally—had come to an end.

In the wake of the raid, the United Farm Workers and other organizations warned farm laborers who were not citizens — even those with legal status — to avoid working in cannabis because “cannabis remains criminalized under federal law.”

In its statement, Glass House said the search warrant served on the company the day of the raid was seeking “evidence of possible immigration violations.” A source close to the company said officials have had no further contact with the federal government since the raid.

Some farm labor advocates were unimpressed by the company’s announcement of revamped labor practices, saying it was farm workers who would pay the price.

Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, said Glass House was using farm labor contractors to avoid responsibility “while their workers are torn away from their families in handcuffs.”

“This shows the double standards of our legal system, where corporations can profit from the immigrant workers their businesses depend on, yet wipe their hands clean when it becomes inconvenient,” he said. He added that “many farmworkers are still struggling to navigate this mess of labor contractors and have not been paid for the work they did at Glass House.”

A source close to Glass House said company officials want to make sure everyone who was at work on the day of the raid receives all the wages they are owed.

Company officials authorized all workers to be paid through 11:30 pm on the day of the raid, because workers who had finished their shifts couldn’t get out because immigration agents were blocking the doors. The source said the farm labor contractors had been paid and should have released wages to all the workers.

“We don’t want anyone to be shorted,” the source said.