July 29 (UPI) — The Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern corporations announced Tuesday the companies will merge to create America’s first transcontinental freight railroad.
The agreement will see Union Pacific purchase Northern Southern for stock and cash, at an implied $85 billion for Norfolk Southern, which creates a combined organization worth more than $250 billion.
Not to be confused with transcontinental rail service, which has been available since 1869 when the famous “Golden Spike” linked Union Pacific with the Central Pacific railroads in Promontory Summit, Utah, when it comes to freight such service requires a transfer of goods from one railroad company to another.
However, the deal made between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern will create a seamless connection that rolls over 43 states and more than 50,000 route miles from coast to coast. The service will link around 100 ports and is intended to upgrade the American supply chain, while also increasing employment opportunities and securing union jobs.
“Railroads have been an integral part of building America since the Industrial Revolution, and this transaction is the next step in advancing the industry,” said Union Pacific Chief Executive Officer Jim Vena in a press release. “Imagine seamlessly hauling steel from Pittsburgh, Pa., to Colton, Calif., and moving tomato paste from Heron, California to Fremont, Ohio. Lumber from the Pacific Northwest, plastics from the Gulf Coast, copper from Arizona and Utah, and soda ash from Wyoming.”
“It builds on President Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a transcontinental railroad from nearly 165 years ago and advances our Safety, Service and Operational Excellence Strategy,” said Vena. “I am confident this historic transaction will enhance competition to benefit customers, communities, and employees while delivering shareholder value.”
The combined service will result in quicker and more capable freight service that would cut down on interchange delays while expanding on modes of freight transport and opening new routes that can better compete with truck transportation of goods, the companies said.
“Norfolk Southern, like Union Pacific, is a railroad integral to the U.S. economy, with a storied 200-year legacy of serving customers across 22 states in the eastern half of the nation,” said CEO of Norfolk Southern Mark George in the release. “Our safety, network, and financial performance is among the best we’ve had as a company, as is our customer satisfaction.”
“And it is from this position of strength that we embark on this transformational combination,” George added. “We are confident that the power of Norfolk Southern’s franchise, diversified solutions, high-quality customers and partners, as well as skilled employees, will contribute meaningfully to America’s first transcontinental railroad, and to igniting rail’s ability to deliver for the whole American economy today and into the future.”
George has been the CEO of Norfolk Southern since September of last year, when the company removed former CEO Alan Shaw and legal head Nabanita Nag after an investigation revealed they engaged in a relationship that violated company policy.
Three earthquakes, one with a magnitude of 7.4, recorded near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, capital of Russia’s Kamchatka region.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) says there is no longer a danger of tsunami waves on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula after three earthquakes – the larger with a magnitude of 7.4 – struck in the sea nearby.
The warning was issued earlier on Sunday after the quakes were recorded off the Pacific coast of Russia, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
(Al Jazeera)
The epicentres of a series of earthquakes – the others measuring 6.7 and 5 – on Sunday were about 140km (87 miles) east of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, capital of Russia’s Kamchatka region, which has a population of more than 160,000.
According to the USGS, the quakes hit the same area off the coast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky within 32 minutes.
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake was at a depth of 20km (12 miles). There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The PTWC initially said there was a danger of major tsunami waves but later downgraded its warning before finally saying the danger had passed.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry also issued a tsunami warning following the second quake, urging residents of coastal settlements to stay away from the shore.
A separate tsunami watch issued for the state of Hawaii was later lifted.
Germany’s GFZ monitor also confirmed that at least one magnitude 6.7 earthquake was recorded off the east of Kamchatka region on Sunday. GFZ later updated it to magnitude 7.4.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is located in the Kamchatka region, facing the Pacific, northeast of Japan and west of the US state of Alaska, across the Bering Sea.
The Kamchatka Peninsula is the meeting point of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, making it a seismic hot zone. Since 1900, seven major earthquakes of magnitude 8.3 or higher have struck the area.
On November 4, 1952, a magnitude 9 earthquake in Kamchatka caused damage, but no deaths were reported despite setting off 9.1-metre (30-foot) waves in Hawaii.
Erick is expected to rapidly intensify and reach major hurricane strength as it approaches Mexico’s coast.
Hurricane Erick is forecast to bring heavy rain, strong winds, storm surge and possible mudslides to southern coastal Mexico, the United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) has said, causing potential “life-threatening flooding and mudslides.”
Initially a tropical storm, Erick grew into a Category 1 hurricane on Wednesday, packing maximum sustained winds of 120km/h (75 mph), the meteorological centre said. It was located 255km (158 miles) from the town of Puerto Angel in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
“Rapid strengthening is expected today, and Erick may reach major hurricane strength when it approaches the coast of southern Mexico Thursday,” the NHC said.
Forecasts predicted rainfall across the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, as well as less heavy rains for the states of Chiapas, Michoacan, Colima and Jalisco.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum urged the population to be alert.
The storm’s projected path would take its centre near the renowned resort of Acapulco, which was devastated in October 2023 by Hurricane Otis, a Category 5 hurricane that killed at least 52 people, and left a trail of destruction, after the storm severely damaged almost all of the resort’s hotels.
John, a Category 3 storm that hit in September last year, caused about 15 deaths.
On a recent walk through the charred and twisted remains and scraped-flat plateau of the Pacific Palisades, local historian Randy Young paused a couple of hundred yards into the mouth of Temescal Canyon, above Sunset Boulevard, to let the eerie randomness of the January flames sink in. So much was erased in so little time, leaving the lasting impression, whether from afar or close-up, of a wasteland — a place almost wiped off the map.
But here, in the narrows of the canyon, where Temescal Creek tickled the roots of sycamores and cooled the air beneath the heavy branches of valley oaks, Young lighted up with the enthusiasm of an amateur botanist.
“The oak trees took all of the fire’s embers. They caught them like catcher’s mitts,” said Young, who grew up in adjacent Rustic Canyon and until recently lived in a Palisades apartment near Temescal.
The 1920s Chautauqua Conference Grounds in what became Pacific Palisades included a grocery and meat market.
(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)
Those trees, and the green (and thus less flammable) edges of the creek, helped to save a row of small, wooden cottages and a cluster of wood-shingled, pitched-roof buildings that were the remains of the 77-acre Chautauqua Assembly Camp, once the thriving nucleus of a 1920s effort to shape the Palisades as a spiritual and intellectual lodestar on the California Coast. The Chautauqua movement — founded in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, N.Y., to better train Sunday-school teachers — swept the country in the late 19th century, blossoming into a network of assemblies drawing rural and working-class Americans hungry for education, culture and social progress. While short-lived, the local camp would form the blueprint for Pacific Palisades to this day.
Young, who has co-written books about the Palisades and its surrounding communities, stepped onto the short boardwalk fronting a modest wooden structure. “This was the grocery store and meat market,” he noted. Rounding the slope at the back, he pointed to an old Adirondack-style dining hall — now called Cheadle Hall but originally Woodland Hall — its simple post-and-beam and wood wainscoting preserved from the early 1920s. He also spoke of what had been lost over the decades: Across the glade had stood a barnlike, three-tiered auditorium. Nearby, he said, had been a log-cabin library. Up and down the canyon were dozens of river-rock cottages and timbered casitas, and 200 canvas tents raised on wooden platforms.
South of Sunset Boulevard (then known as Marquez Road), on a site that now includes Palisades Charter High School, was the Institute Camp, containing an amphitheater carved out of a natural bowl, where thousands of summertime campers would hear the likes of Leo Tolstoy’s son, Illya, speaking on “The True Russia,” or Bakersfield-born Lawrence Tibbett, who would become one of the country’s greatest baritones, perform selections from his Metropolitan Opera repertoire. The Institute Camp also housed the Founders Oak, a tree that marked the site of the community’s 1922 founding ceremony, and lots for independent groups, like the WE Boys and Jesus our Companion (J.O.C.), Methodist-affiliated clubs who made a former Mission Revival home into the Aldersgate Lodge (925 Haverford Ave.) in 1928.
A 1922 Thanksgiving gathering fills rows of the since-destroyed amphitheater set under oaks and sycamores in Temescal Canyon.
(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)
In the sylvan canyon, the Palisades Chautauqua offered a bewildering array of ways to lift oneself up: hiking and calisthenics, elocution and oratory, homemaking and child psychology, music, history, politics, literature and theater. Tinged with piety, these were, in their own words, “high class, jazz-free resort facilities.”
The official dedication of the Palisades Chautauqua on Aug. 6, 1922, would be the last of its kind in the country. It was spearheaded by Rev. Charles Holmes Scott, a Methodist minister and educational reformer who dreamed of creating the “Chautauqua of the West.” The influence of the movement was so central to the Palisades’ identity that in 1926, one of its main thoroughfares — Chautauqua Boulevard — was named in its honor.
Scott, inspired by the Chautauqua tradition’s ideals of self-transformation, envisioned Pacific Palisades as a place where character would matter more than commerce. “Banks and railroads and money is always with us. But the character and integrity of our men and women is something money cannot buy. We will prove the worth of man,” Scott declared. Residents signed 99-year leases to ensure the community’s cooperative nature. The leasehold model was also meant to prevent speculation, fund cultural facilities and events, and uphold moral standards. Alcohol, billboards and architectural extravagance were all prohibited — as was, alas, anyone who wasn’t Protestant or white.
The Palisades Assn., under Scott’s guidance, purchased nearly 2,000 acres of mesa, foothills and coastline. Pasadena landscape architect Clarence Day drew up the first plans, establishing a new axis, Via de la Paz, or Way of Peace, eventually home to Pacific Palisades United Methodist Community Church (1930) and terminating at a neoclassical, Napoleonic-scaled Peace Temple, atop Peace Hill. He laid out two tracts: Founders Tract I, a tight-knit grid of streets (now known as the Alphabet Streets) for modest homes above Sunset Boulevard, and the curving Founders Tract II, closer to the coast with larger lots for more affluent residents.
Soon after, Day was replaced by the renowned Olmsted Brothers, who refined the layout to follow natural contours, planted thousands of trees and designed a stately civic center in which they wanted to include a library, hotel, lake, a park with a concert grove and a far larger, permanent auditorium. Only one major element of that center was realized: Clifton Nourse’s Churrigueresque-style Business Block building at Swarthmore and Sunset, completed in 1924.
Residents gather on Peace Hill on Easter Sunday in 1922.
(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)
By the end of 1923, it seemed as if the Palisades was destined to become a boom town, with 1,725 people making down payments totaling more than $1.5 million on 99-year renewable leases. In early 1924, demand slumped, never to revive. To preserve the dream, in 1926 Scott abandoned the lease-only model and began selling lots. That same year the association borrowed heavily to purchase 226 more ocean-view acres from the estate of railway magnate Collis P. Huntington, installing underground utilities and ornamental street lighting in an area that would become known as the Huntington Palisades. Debt soared from $800,000 in 1925 to $3.5 million by the end of 1926.
As the 1929 stock market crash hit and revenue dried up in the Great Depression, the association collapsed. Its assets were sold off. Grand plans, like the Civic Center and the Peace Temple, were abandoned. The dream withered.
“There wasn’t a moment where they said ‘we’re stopping,’” Young said. “It just sort of petered out.”
Yet fragments endured, stubbornly. In 1943, the Presbyterian Synod purchased the Chautauqua site and operated it as a retreat. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, local activists fought off a plan to extend Reseda Boulevard right through Temescal Canyon (though buildings like the library and assembly hall had already been torn down in anticipation of the roadway). In 1994, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy acquired the land. Today, it survives as the city-run Temescal Gateway Park, its board-and-batten cabins and rustic halls weathered but largely intact.
The Business Block — since January a fire-blackened shell awaiting its undetermined fate — narrowly escaped demolition in the 1980s when a developer proposed replacing it with a concrete and glass mall. A preservationist campaign under the slogan “Don’t Mall the Palisades” saved the structure.
But by then, the character of the Palisades had begun to shift. Faint echoes of the quiet, rustic past remained, but modest bungalows had given way to mansions. The artists, radicals and missionaries were largely gone.
“It’s not Chautauqua anymore — it’s Château Taco Bell,” Young quipped, of much of the area’s soulless new built forms.
Today, thanks to the fire’s brutality, the original Chautauqua sites offer something unusual: a landscape where past and present momentarily coexist. Slate roofs held firm. Ancient oak groves performed better than modern landscaping. For Young, the fires stripped away modern gloss to reveal what continues to matter.
“When you go through a fire,” he said, “you get down to the basics.” He added: “The fires brought us back to 1928.”
Pacific Palisades is one of a long list of failed California utopias. Like Llano del Rio, the socialist settlement in the Antelope Valley, or the Kaweah Colony, a cooperative in the Sierra foothills, it was a high-minded gamble dashed on the shoals of capitalism and human nature. The idealistic outpost lingers, etched into the land, embossed in the Palisades’ deeper memory. The dream may no longer be intact, but its traces are still legible.
Pacific Palisades will reopen to the general public Saturday, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell told The Times Friday afternoon.
The affluent coastal enclave has remained closed to the public since the devastating January wildfires, months after other fire-damaged neighborhoods reopened. Access to the neighborhood was limited to residents and workers with passes. Dozens of LAPD officers have been staffing 16 checkpoints on major streets into the community, according to the mayor’s office.
Those checkpoints will no longer be staffed as of Saturday, but there “will still be a heavy police presence for the foreseeable future there,” McDonnell said.
The decision was made in conjunction with Mayor Karen Bass, with input from members of the community, McDonnell said. Bass did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The city is bracing for widespread demonstrations against the Trump administration on Saturday that will include a heavy law enforcement presence. The need to shift personnel to other parts of the city ahead of the protests was “a factor” in McDonnell’s decision, but he said it was also a necessary evolution months after the fires.
The status of the checkpoints will be reassessed after this weekend, LAPD spokesperson Jennifer Forkish said.
Japan said J-15 warplanes operating from two Chinese aircraft carriers in the Pacific carried out risky manouvres around patrol planes.
Japan has protested to Beijing over what was described as Chinese fighter jets’ “near-miss” manoeuvres near Japanese maritime patrol planes over the Pacific where China’s two operational aircraft carriers were spotted deployed simultaneously for the first time last weekend.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported on Thursday that a Chinese J-15 warplane from the Shandong aircraft carrier flew within 45 metres (147 feet) of a Japanese P-3C maritime surveillance plane and made other “dangerous manoeuvres” during incidents on Saturday and Sunday.
“We have expressed serious concern to the Chinese side and solemnly requested prevention of recurrence,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said.
According to Japan’s defence ministry, P-3C aircraft, belonging to Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force based on the island of Okinawa, were conducting surveillance over international waters in the Pacific when they encountered Chinese warplanes.
On Saturday, a J-15 from the Shandong chased a Japanese P-3C patrol aircraft for about 40 minutes. Then, on Sunday, a J-15 fighter chased a P-3C for 80 minutes, crossing in front of the Japanese aircraft at a distance of only 900 metres (2,952 feet), the ministry said.
“Such abnormal approaches by Chinese military aircraft could potentially cause accidental collisions,” the defence ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, attaching close-up images of the J-15 jet it took on Sunday. There was no damage to the Japanese planes or harm caused to the aircraft crew, the ministry added.
Hayashi, the top Japanese government spokesperson, said Tokyo will maintain communications with Beijing at various levels and will also ensure the monitoring of airspace around Japan’s territories continues.
The last time a similar incident was reported was more than a decade ago in May and June 2014, when Chinese Su-27 fighter jets flew within 30 metres (98 feet) of Japan’s military planes.
The Kyodo news agency also reported that the Shandong aircraft carrier conducted takeoff and landing drills on Monday to the north of Japan’s southernmost Okinotori Island, inside the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The Liaoning carrier was also spotted inside the EEZ on Saturday before moving outside the zone where it also conducted takeoffs and landings on Sunday.
China’s first aircraft carrier Liaoning, arrives in Hong Kong waters, in July 2017 [File: Anthony Wallace/AFP]
Tokyo says it has conveyed an ‘appropriate message’ to Beijing over vessels’ movements.
Two Chinese aircraft carriers have been seen operating in the Pacific at once for the first time, Japan’s Ministry of Defence has said.
China’s Shandong and four other vessels on Monday sailed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.
The aircraft carrier conducted landing and takeoff drills involving its fighter jets and helicopters in waters north of the Pacific atoll of Okinotori, the ministry said.
Tokyo’s announcement came a day after Japanese officials said the Liaoning, the older of China’s two operating aircraft carriers, had entered waters near the remote island of Minamitorishima.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said Tokyo would step up surveillance and had conveyed “an appropriate message” to China, without elaborating.
On Monday, Hayashi, who is Tokyo’s top spokesman, said China’s growing maritime activity appeared to be aimed at bolstering its capability to carry out missions farther from its shores.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian on Monday defended the aircraft carriers’ movements, describing them as “fully consistent with international law and international practices”.
“Our national defence policy is defensive in nature. We hope Japan will view those activities objectively and rationally,” Lin told a regular news conference.
Hurricane Barbara became the first hurricane of the 2025 season as it strengthened into a Category 1 storm Monday off the coast of Mexico. Image by NOAA
June 9 (UPI) — Hurricane Barbara emerged as the first hurricane of the Pacific hurricane season on Monday but National Hurricane Center forecasters said she has “peaked.”
In the2 p.m. MST advisory, Barbara was in the eastern Pacific Ocean approximately 175 miles west-southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico.
The maximum sustained winds were reported to be at 75 mph at the minimum wind speed for a storm to reach Category 1 hurricane status, and was moving at 10 mph northwest.
A westward motion is expected to continue for the next couple of days, and six hours after the last advisory, Barbara has “become a little less organized.”
Forecasters said that “Barbara likely has peaked as a short-lived hurricane. The environmental conditions will become increasingly hostile along the forecast track with the storm crossing into cooler SSTs [Sea surface temperatures] and into a drier, more stable air mass.”
There are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.
Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 10 miles from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles.
Swells will affect portions of the coast of southwestern Mexico during the next few days, forecasters say. They are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.
Foreign minister Wang Yi is meeting top diplomats from 11 Pacific nations in the Chinese city of Xiamen.
China is hosting a high-level meeting with 11 Pacific Island nations as it seeks to deepen ties and build what it calls a “closer” community with “a shared future” in the strategic region.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is chairing the meeting in the city of Xiamen on Wednesday.
The president of Kiribati, Taneti Maamau, and top diplomats from Niue, Tonga, Nauru, Micronesia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands, Fiji and Samoa are attending.
The two-day meeting is the third such gathering, but the first to happen in person in China.
Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said the diplomats are expected to discuss trade, infrastructure development, poverty alleviation, sustainability and climate change.
“For China, this is an opportunity to extend its influence and expand economic ties at a time when the United States is showing very little interest in this region, and we know increasingly that many of those countries are more aligned on China on things like investment, infrastructure, trade and even security assistance,” she said.
Global uncertainty
The meeting comes as United States President Donald Trump’s cuts to foreign aid and the threat of tariffs fuel global uncertainty. Analysts say this has left the door open for China to step in.
“This lack of certainty makes the US a very challenging partner to work with,” said Tess Newton at the Griffith Asia Institute. “Whereas other partners including China can offer, well you know we were here yesterday, we’re here today, and we expect to be here tomorrow.”
The Chinese foreign ministry, announcing the meeting last week, said the objective of the meeting was to “jointly build an even closer China-Pacific Island countries community with a shared future”.
Analysts say that for Beijing, that translates to greater economic aid, diplomatic engagement and the pursuit of a regional security pact.
China has already signed a security accord with the Solomon Islands in 2022, a year after deploying police to the ground in the capital, Honiara, following a series of riots there.
Beijing has also sent advisers to Vanuatu and Kiribati and wants to lock in a similar pact with other island nations.
“What China is trying to do … is to insert itself as a security player and in some cases through the angle of contributing to the individual security needs of Pacific countries such as policing,” said Mihai Sora, director of the Pacific Islands Program at the Lowy Institute in Australia.
The meeting in Xiamen is “an opportunity for China” to push its goals “in its own space, on its own turf and on its own terms,” he added.
Taiwan
The topic of Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its own and lies off the coast of Xiamen, is also expected to be discussed at this meeting.
China has been gradually whittling away at the number of countries in the Pacific that retain ties with Taiwan, and in January of last year, Nauru also switched recognition to Beijing.
Taiwan now has three remaining allies in the region – Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu.
Al Jazeera’s Yu said the region is of strategic, military and diplomatic significance for China.
“If you look at the region, these countries are very small, their economies are small and only one of them has a population that exceeds one million. That is Papua New Guinea,” she said.
“But the region is strategically extremely important to Beijing because it’s home to crucial shipping lanes, deep sea cables, deep sea ports and potential mineral deposits underwater. Militarily, it could be strategically important, because if there could be any conflict in the future, this area could be important in terms of launching potential forward attacks on US territory, and also US ally Australia is very close by.”
HONOLULU — Environmentalists are challenging in court President Trump’s executive order that they say strips core protections from the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and opens the area to harmful commercial fishing.
On the same day of last month’s proclamation allowing commercial fishing in the monument, Trump issued an order to boost the U.S. commercial fishing industry by peeling back regulations and opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.
The monument was created by President George W. Bush in 2009 and expanded by President Obama to nearly 500,000 square miles in the central Pacific Ocean.
A week after the April 17 proclamation, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them a green light to fish commercially within the monument’s boundaries, even though a long-standing fishing ban remains on the books, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Honolulu.
The first longline fisher started fishing in the monument just three days after that letter, according to Earthjustice, which has been tracking vessel activity within the monument using Global Fishing Watch.
The Department of Justice declined to comment Friday.
The lawsuit noted that commercial longline fishing, an industrial method involving baited hooks from lines 60 miles or longer, will snag turtles, marine mammals or seabirds that are attracted to the bait or swim through the curtain of hooks.
“We will not stand by as the Trump administration unleashes highly destructive commercial fishing on some of the planet’s most pristine, biodiverse marine environments,” David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said in a statement. “Piling lawlessness on top of lawlessness, the National Marine Fisheries Service chose to carry out President Trump’s illegal proclamation by issuing its own illegal directive, with no public input.”
Designating the area in the Pacific to the south and west of the Hawaiian Islands as a monument provided “needed protection to a wide variety of scientific and historical treasures in one of the most spectacular and unique ocean ecosystems on earth,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit added that allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion harms the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous people of the Pacific.
Johnston Atoll is the closest island in the monument to Hawaii, about 717 nautical miles west-southwest of the state.
