California leaders denounced reports Tuesday that the Trump administration is preparing to strip the name of slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk from a naval ship honoring his legacy, calling it a slap in the face for the LGBTQ+ community just as Pride month begins.
Milk was elected as a San Francisco supervisor in the 1970s, becoming one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country. After he was assassinated in San Francisco City Hall in 1978, he became an icon of the gay rights movement, with images of his face becoming synonymous with the struggle for gay rights.
Milk had served in the Navy prior to becoming an activist and political figure, and LGBTQ+ advocates and service members fought for years to have his legacy formally recognized by the Navy.
The outlet Military.com first reported Tuesday afternoon that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, an oiler built in San Diego as part of a series of vessels named for civil rights leaders. It was launched in 2021.
The Pentagon would not confirm or deny that the ship would be renamed.
In a statement to The Times, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said Hegseth “is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all [Department of Defense] installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” and that “any potential renaming(s) will be announced after internal reviews are complete.”
The Pentagon would not say whether such a review had been launched for the USNS Harvey Milk. The Navy referred questions to the Pentagon.
The removal of Milk’s name would be in line with a broader push by Hegseth and other leaders in the Trump administration to remove formal acknowledgments of queer rights and other programs or messages promoting diversity, equity and inclusion across the federal government.
Leaders in California — where Milk is often hailed as a hero — were quick to denounce the idea of stripping his name from the vessel.
San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk speaks to reporters in October 1978, weeks before he was assassinated.
(James Palmer / Associated Press)
Trump and Hegseth have also issued a sweeping ban on transgender people serving in the military.
“Harvey Milk wasn’t just a civil rights icon — he was a Korean War combat veteran whose commander called him ‘outstanding,’” Newsom said. “Stripping his name from a Navy ship won’t erase his legacy as an American icon, but it does reveal Trump’s contempt for the very values our veterans fight to protect.”
“Our military is the most powerful in the world — but this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos,” she wrote. “It is a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, who is gay and once represented the same district as Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said in an interview with The Times that the move was all “part of Trump’s systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”
“They want us to go away, to go back in the closet, not to be part of public life,” Wiener said. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
After graduating from college, Milk enlisted in the Navy in 1951 and was stationed in San Diego. According to the Harvey Milk Foundation, he resigned at the rank of lieutenant junior grade in 1955 “after being officially questioned about his sexual orientation.”
He moved to San Francisco in 1972, opened a camera shop on Castro Street, and quickly got into politics — rallying the growing local gay community to fight for rights and build strategic alliances with other groups, including organized labor and the city’s large Asian and Pacific Islander community.
Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, and helped lead efforts to defeat a 1978 ballot initiative that would have barred gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools statewide — a major political win for the LGBTQ+ community.
Wiener called Milk “an absolute hero” who “died for our community” and deserves the honor of having a naval vessel named after him.
“A group of LGBTQ veterans worked for years and years to achieve this goal of naming a ship for Harvey, and to have that taken away so casually, right during Pride month, is heartbreaking and painful,” Wiener said.
Removing his name would mean more than scrubbing a stenciling off the side of a ship, Wiener said, “especially now with the attacks on our community, and so many young LGBTQ people [seeing] so much negativity towards our community.”
Milk was a “very visible role model for young queer people, and he gave people hope in a way that hadn’t happened before from any high-profile queer leader, and he was murdered because of his visibility and leadership for our community,” Wiener said, and for young queer people today “to see the name of a gay man on the side of a military vessel, it’s very, very powerful.”
U.S. officials first announced in 2016 that a ship would be named for Milk, as well as for abolitionist Sojourner Truth, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, suffragist Lucy Stone and U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
At an event marking the start of construction on the ship in 2019, Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk said the naming of the ship after his uncle “sends a global message of inclusion” that did not just say the U.S. will “tolerate everyone,” but that “we celebrate everyone.”
The morning after a man hurled Molotov cocktails at a crowd of Jewish Americans in Boulder, Colo., Rabbi Noah Farkas celebrated the first day of Shavuot in the usual way: He read the Torah about the giving of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai.
But Farkas, the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, said what was supposed to be a holiday celebrating the establishment of law and order was marred by the weekend violence.
“The community is terrified,” Farkas said outside Temple Ramat Zion in Northridge.
“It’s remarkable to me that those who want to assault us are coming up with ever new and novel ways to do harm to us and to try to kill us.”
Twelve people between the ages of 52 and 88 were burned in the Colorado attack. A man — identified by law enforcement as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, an Egyptian citizen who had overstayed his tourist visa — used a “makeshift flamethrower” to attack demonstrators marching peacefully in a weekly event supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza.
According to an FBI affidavit, the attacker yelled “Free Palestine!” — the same cry uttered by the suspect in a May 21 incident in which two Israeli Embassy aides were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
The back-to-back attacks have unnerved many Jewish Americans — particularly as they come just a month after a man set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. A suspect later said the fire was a response to Shapiro’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.
“We are in a completely new era for antisemitic violence in the United States,” said Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino. “We are now at a point of extraordinary national security concern with respect to protecting Jewish communities across the U.S. and worldwide.”
Anti-Jewish hate crimes, Levin said, hit record levels nationally in 2023 and 2024. In 2023, the last year that the FBI has available data, anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 63% to a record 1,832 incidents, Levin said. Last year, religious hate crimes were up significantly in major U.S. cities, Levin said, with anti-Muslim hate crimes rising 18%, and anti-Jewish ones rising for the fourth consecutive year, up 12% to a new record.
“Over the last decade, we’re seeing more mass casualties attacks and they’re becoming more frequent and more fatal,” Levin said. “It used to be that anti-Jewish hate crimes, unlike a lot of other hate crimes, were much more tied to property damage and intimidation. Now were seeing just a slew of high intensity types of attacks.”
The attacks in the U.S. come as United Nations officials and aid groups warn that the situation in Gaza has become increasingly dire, with Palestinians in Gaza on the brink of famine as Israel continues its 19-month military offensive against Hamas militants.
Two weeks ago, Israel agreed to pause a nearly three-month blockade and allow a “basic quantity” of food into Gaza to avert a “hunger crisis” and prevent mass starvation.
On Sunday, Gaza health officials and witnesses said more than 30 people were reported killed and 170 wounded as Palestinians flocked to an aid distribution center in the southern Gaza, hoping to obtain food. The circumstances were disputed. Witnesses said Israeli forces fired on crowds about 1,000 yards from an aid site run by a U.S.-backed foundation, but Israel’s military denied its forces fired at civilians.
Levin attributed the rise in violence in the U.S. to a number of factors, including the Israel-Hamas war and the “increasingly unregulated freewheeling online environment.” Horrifying imagery coming out of the Middle East, Levin said, was amplified on social media by those who ascribed responsibility to anyone who believes Israel has a right to exist, or is Jewish, or wanted hostages to be released.
“What happens is angry and unstable people not only find a home for their aggression, but a honed amplification and direction to it that is polished by this cesspool of conspiracism and antisemitism,” Levin said.
In Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson neighborhood, the mood was subdued Monday as a smattering of Orthodox families made their way to services to observe Shavuot. Many kosher establishments were closed and armed guards flanked entrances to larger Jewish centers and temples.
On Pico Boulevard, a 25-year-old Orthodox man carried a prayer shawl close to his chest as he headed to a service at a temple just before noon. He had slept just a few hours after staying up all night reading the Torah.
Despite the news of the attack in Colorado, the man — who identified himself as Laser — carried an easy smile.
“It’s a joyous holiday,” he said.
The Colorado attack was horrifying, he said, but it was not anything new and paled in comparison with the feeling that descended on the Jewish community in Los Angeles and across the world after Oct. 7.
“It’s never good to see or read about those types of things,” he said. “We just pray for the ultimate redemption, for peace here, peace abroad, peace around the world.”
At Tiferet Teman Synagogue, a man standing at the door repeatedly apologized to a Times reporter, saying that he would not discuss the event that happened in Colorado.
“I’m not going to invite politics into the community,” he said. “God bless you all.”
Others observing the holiday declined to have their photo taken and many of the businesses were closed. A quiet buzz pervaded Pico Boulevard as Orthodox members of the community made their way to services, many of them trying their best to avoid eye contact.
A Persian Jewish man from Iran said he has always been hesitant about religious violence. The man, who declined to give his name, was on his way to service.
“You always have to keep your eyes open,” he said. “No matter where you are in the world.”
Noa Tishby, an Israeli-born author who lives in L.A. and is Israel’s former special envoy for combating antisemitism and delegitimization, said that many Jewish people were afraid to congregate.
“The Jewish community feels under siege,” she said. “People are removing their mezuzahs from their doorsteps. They’re removing Jewish insignia from themselves, removing their Star of David or hiding it. They’re afraid to go to Jewish events.”
Tishby said that the Colorado attacker appeared to be motivated by antisemitism: the views and beliefs of the victims didn’t matter.
“What if that particular woman that man tried to burn alive yesterday, what if she was a Bibi hater, would that appease him?” Tishby asked, using a nickname for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The answer is no. He doesn’t know what her political opinions are in America or in Israel. He just burned her because she was Jewish.”
Antisemitism, Tishby argued, was a shape-shifting conspiracy theory that had evolved into anti-Zionism.
“What happened is that the word Zionist is now a code name for Jew,” she said. “We have been warning for decades that anti-Zionism is the new face of antisemitism…. They’re taking all the hate, everything that’s wrong in the world right now, and they’re pinning it on the Jewish state.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was quick to denounce the attack Sunday as “an atrocious affront to the very fabric of our society and our beliefs here in Los Angeles.” In a statement, she said she would call an emergency meeting at City Hall addressing safety and security across the city immediately after Shavuot.
“LAPD is conducting extra patrols at houses of worship and community centers throughout LA. Anti-Semitism will not be tolerated in this city,” she said.
After speaking to Bass on Sunday, Farkas said that he planned to meet in person with the mayor on Wednesday after the Shavuot holiday to have a “real, frank conversation” about antisemitism.
“There is a cycle that we go through where our hearts are shattered and yet we have to keep enduring,” Farkas said. “And it makes us call into question the commitment of our wider community and our government to the safety of the Jewish community.”
She showed that the coupons include a free Lidl tote bag, a bakery item, and fresh fruit.
Chloe said: “So go to Lidl and get a pastry and some fruit, or you could even get stuff to make avocado on toast. There’s loads of options.”
She added: “You’ve got a free breakfast and a bag to carry it home in.”
In the caption section, Chloe also explained that there’s “no minimum spend so you can get these freebies without buying anything else.”
Five Lidl rosés you need this summer, according to a wine expert – a £6.99 buy is as light & crispy as £22 Whispering Angel
The video received 78.5 views and 74 comments after four days of being shared on her account.
Many wanted to share their excitement after hearing the news.
One wrote: “Got mine. Thank you for sharing.”
A second added: “Free strawberries! I’m going to get everyone in my house to download it!”
Whilst a third said: “It’s true, I had also downloaded the Lidl app, from which I also got this shopping bag, muffins and many other things.”
4
There are specific steps to take when downloading the app
Why do Aldi and Lidl have such fast checkouts
IF you’ve ever shopped in Aldi or Lidl then you’ll probably have experienced its ultra-fast checkout staff.
Aldi’s speedy reputation is no mistake, in fact, the supermarket claims that its tills are 40 per cent quicker than rivals.
It’s all part of Aldi’s plan to be as efficient as possible – and this, the budget shop claims, helps keep costs low for shoppers.
Efficient barcodes on packaging means staff are able to scan items as quickly as possible, with the majority of products having multiple barcodes to speed up the process.
It also uses “shelf-ready” packaging which keeps costs low when it comes to replenishing stock.
Hailing from some of today’s funniest TV series, six actors gathered recently for an uninhibited conversation about what it takes to make people laugh at The Envelope’s Emmy Roundtable for comedy actors.
In Netflix’s “Running Point,”Kate Hudson plays Isla, a woman who becomes pro basketball’s first girl boss when she takes over the family franchise. In ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” Lisa Ann Walter portrays Melissa Schemmenti, a tough grade school teacher in Philly’s underfunded public education system. With Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern,” Nathan Lane takes on the role of Bunny, an aging gay man who brings together a chosen family when he invites two friends to reside in his Palm Springs home. “Hacks” co-creator Paul W. Downs does double duty as Jimmy, the manager to legendary comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) in the Max series. Bridget Everett, creator of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere,” plays Sam, a cabaret singer who moves back to her family’s sleepy Kansas town to take care of her dying sister. And David Alan Grier stars as Dr. Ron, a devoted physician and cranky veteran who’s seen it all in the overrun ER of a small-town hospital in NBC’s “St. Denis Medical.”
The talented group spoke with The Times about their respective shows, typecasting and the risks one takes to make great comedy. Read on for excerpts from our discussion — and watch video of the roundtable above.
The 2025 Emmy Comedy Roundtable: Kate Hudson, left, Paul W. Downs, Bridget Everett, Nathan Lane, Lisa Ann Walter and David Alan Grier.
The best comedy pushes boundaries, which means it can also skirt the edge of offensive. How do you know if you’ve gone too far, or haven’t pushed it enough?
Downs: In the “Hacks” pilot, Jean Smart’s character, Deborah Vance, says there is no line. I think there’s nothing off limits, because it’s really about execution and thoughtfulness. The thing that makes edgy comedy not funny is when it causes harm, when it’s something that’s punching down, when it’s not something that can bring people together. That, to me, isn’t worth it. But there’s nothing that’s too taboo, because that’s what comedy is for. It’s to examine things, explore things, get close to the edge.
Everett: I think that comedy is about making people feel good. I want to make people feel joy. So as long as I’m not hurting anybody’s feelings, I think everything’s on the table.
Grier: I don’t think you know the edge and that’s why it’s dangerous. I’ve done things where I thought, “This is too much,” and things where I thought, “We didn’t go far enough.” So you have to play that game. My intention is never to anger and offend, but you do have to put yourself in that position and take a chance, especially with comedy. You can prescreen it, but who are you prescreening it to? Sixty-year-old white women? High school kids? You have to take a chance.
Kate Hudson of “Running Point.”
Hudson: I’m not a stand-up [comedian], so it’s fun to watch people walk that line. It’s exciting. What are they going to say? Is it going to be offensive? Is it not? Is it going to be brilliant? That’s part of what’s fun about being an audience of adult comedy. But I don’t like mean comedy. It’s really hard for me to see. I’ve been asked to do roasts a million times, and I just can’t do it. It just doesn’t move me in any way.
Lane: I was asked. This was the biggest mistake of my life. … A Friars [Club] Roast that was going to happen. [Jerry Lewis] was going to be roasted. And Richard Belzer said to me, “Oh, Nathan, would you be a part of it? Would you do it? It would mean a lot to Jerry.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll do the roast.” And then I’m suddenly there and I’m sitting next to Paul Shaffer and Jeff Ross, who apologized in advance for what he might say. And I realized then that, “Oh, you’re not getting up and just roasting this person. You’re attacked. You’re on the dais.” So I thought, “Oh, what have I gotten into?” And I had asked them, “Please let me go first.” And I had worked out jokes. I had a couple of writers help me, and there was an initial joke, which was, “The only reason I agreed to do this was because I thought by the time it happened, Jerry would be dead.”
Walter: I’m on a show that’s got a lot of kids, and families can watch it together, which was [creator] Quinta Brunson’s intention. But there are things that the kids won’t get and that adults get. Melissa Schemmenti gets bleeped out regularly because she curses. She’s South Philly! As a comic, I only am interested in edge, that’s where I want to live … It’s easier to make a point and get ears when you’re making people laugh. And we do that on the show quite frequently. They’ll do a storyline about the school-to-prison pipeline, but it’s not ham-fisted, it’s not preachy. It’s edgy and it’s all within jokes. Anytime you’re making people laugh, I think you can say whatever you want.
What’s the strangest or most difficult skill you’ve had to learn for a role?
Hudson: In “Almost Famous,” [director] Cameron [Crowe] wanted me to learn how to roll cigarettes fast with one hand. And so I was learning how to roll, and I got really good at it really fast. And then when we were doing camera tests, I was doing it and I was smoking. And he was like, “No.” And I was like, “What? I just spent months trying to learn how to do that!” Then I started rolling my own cigarettes and got into a really bad habit and then spent years trying to quit.
Paul W. Downs of “Hacks.”
Downs: On “Broad City,” I had to learn and do parkour. It’s high skill level and high risk. You know, when you jump off buildings and roll around … [leap] off chairs and over fire hydrants. I did it, but not a lot of it ended up onscreen. Just the most comedic moments. I jumped between buildings and they didn’t even put it in!
Lane: When I did “Only Murders in the Building,” they said, “So you have a deaf son and you’re going to have scenes with him in ASL [American Sign Language].” It was challenging. I had a coach and I would work with him. And the wonderful young actor, James Caverly, who is Deaf … he was very supportive. If I had to become fluent, it would’ve taken six months to a year to do it well. But I had an advantage; they said, “Oh, your character is embarrassed by having a deaf son, so he didn’t learn it until later in life. So he’s not that good at it.” But it was a great thing to learn. I loved it.
Grier: I did an episode of a sitcom in which it was assumed, unbeknownst to me, that I was very proficient playing an upright bass. This is not true. I played cello as a child. I had to play this upright bass and as a jazz musician. It was horrible. Your fingers swell and blister and bleed. Of course, I went along with it because that’s what we’re all supposed to do. But by Day 4, my fingers were in great pain. I never mastered it. But I did want to ask them, “Who told you I could play?”
Everett: I did a little trapeze work, but since the knee thing, I can’t anymore … [Laughs]
Lane: This was the independent film about the Wallendas, right?
Everett: The truth is I’ve never had to do anything. Really. I had to rollerblade once in a Moby video, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to stack up against all this, so maybe we should just move on to the next person. I would do trapeze, though. I’ll do anything. Well, not anything. Can we just edit this part out in post?
Hudson: I’m in love with you.
Walter: In a movie I did where I started out as the nosy neighbor, I found out that I was going to be a cougar assassin and I had to stunt drive a Mustang and shoot a Glock. It was a surprise. Literally. When I got to set, I saw my wardrobe and went, “I think I’m playing a different character than what I auditioned for.” … They put the car on a chain and I got T-boned. I was terrified, but then I was like, “Let’s go again!” That was the most dangerous thing until I had to do a South Philly accent as Melissa, and do it good enough so that South Philly wouldn’t kill me. That was probably more dangerous.
David Alan Grier of “St. Denis Medical.”
Let’s talk about typecasting. What are the types of roles that frequently come to you, where you’re like “Oh, my God, not again!”
Lane: Oh, not another mysterious drifter.
Hudson: Rom-coms. If I can’t get a job doing anything else, I can get a job doing a romantic comedy. When you have major success in something, you realize the business is just so excited [that] they want you in them all the time. It really has nothing to do with anything other than that. It’s something that I’m very grateful for, but you’re constantly having to fight to do different things. I’d be bored if I was constantly doing the same thing over and over again. But it’s just how the business works. Once you’re in that machine, they just want to keep going until they go to somebody else.
Walter: I can’t tell you how bored I am with being the gorgeous object of men’s desire. I named my first production company Fat Funny Friend … But as a mother of four in Los Angeles, I didn’t really have the luxury of saying, “I want to branch out.” But I did say, “Can I play someone smart?” My father was a NASA physicist. My mother was brilliant. I was over doing things I could do in my sleep, always getting the part of the woman who sticks her head out of the trailer door and goes, “I didn’t kill him, but I ain’t sorry he’s dead!” … It’s like, “Can I play someone who has a college education?” And I did, finally, but it took Quinta to do it.
Grier: I’ve found that the older I’ve gotten, the roles I’m offered have broadened. And I’ve played a variety of really challenging great roles because I’m old now. That’s been a real joy because I didn’t really expect that. I just thought I’d be retired. I did. So it’s been awesome.
Nathan Lane of “Mid-Century Modern.”
Lane: There was an article written about me, it was sort of a career-assessment article. It was a very nice piece, but it referred to me as the greatest stage entertainer of the last decade. And as flattering as it was, I can find a dark cloud in any silver lining. I felt, “Oh, that’s how they see me?” As an “entertainer” because of musicals and things [I did] like “The Birdcage” or “The Lion King.” I’d been an actor for 35 years and I thought, “I have more to offer.” So I wound up doing “The Iceman Cometh” in Chicago … and that would change everything. It was the beginning of a process where I lucked out and got some serious roles in television, and that led to other things. But it was a concerted effort over a period of 10, 15 years, and difficult because everybody wants to put you in a box.
Is it difficult in the industry to make the move between drama and comedy?
Walter: It’s a lifelong consternation to me that there is an idea that if you are known comedically, that’s what you do. We are quite capable of playing all of the things.
Grier: I remember seeing Jackie Gleason in “The Hustler.” I loved it. He was so great. Robin Williams also did serious. I think it’s actually harder when you see serious actors try to be comedians.
As a mother of four in Los Angeles, I didn’t really have the luxury of saying, ‘I want to branch out.’ But I did say, ‘Can I play someone smart?’ My father was a NASA physicist. My mother was brilliant. I was over doing things I could do in my sleep, always getting the part of the woman who sticks her head out of the trailer door and goes, ‘I didn’t kill him, but I ain’t sorry he’s dead!’
— “Abbott Elementary” actor Lisa Ann Walter on being typecast
Downs: One of the things about making “Hacks” is we wanted to do something that was mixed tone, that it was funny and comedic but also let actors like myself, like Jean, all of these people, have moments. Because to us, the most funny things are right next to the most tragic things.
Hudson: And usually the most classic. When you think about the movies that people know generation after generation, they’re usually the ones that walk the line. And they’re the ones that you just want to go back and watch over and over and over again.
Bridget Everett of “Somebody Somewhere.”
Everett: I haven’t had a lot of experience with being typecast because I’ve been in the clubs for a long time doing cabaret. But on my show, Tim Bagley, who plays Brad … he’s been doing the same characters for I don’t know for how long. So we wrote this part for him, and one of the most rewarding things for me on this show was sitting behind the monitor and watching him get to have the moment he deserved … It’s one of the greatest gifts to me as a creator to have been part of that. It’s a whole thing in my show. We’re all getting this break together. We’ve all struggled to pay our rent well into our 40s. I waited tables into my 40s, but you don’t give up because you love doing it.
I’m sure many of you are recognized in public, but what about being mistaken for somebody else who’s famous?
Grier: I went to a performance of a David Mamet show on Broadway. I went backstage, and this particular day, it was when Broadway was raising money to benefit AIDS. There was a Midwestern couple there with their young son and they saw me, and the house manager said, “This couple, they’re going to give us an extra $1,000 if you take a picture with them. Would you mind?” I’m like, “Yeah, cool.” So I’m posing and the dad goes, “It is our honor to take a picture with you, Mr. LeVar Burton.” Now in that moment, I thought if I say no, people will die. So I looked at them and I went, “You liked me in ‘Roots?’” He said, “We loved you.” Click, we took the picture. I’m not going to be like, “How dare you?!”
Walter: Peg Bundy I got a couple of times. But as soon as I open my mouth, they know who I am. I can hide my hair, but as soon as I talk, I’m made.
Hudson: I’ve had a lot of Drew Barrymore. And then every other Kate. Kate Winslet, Katie Holmes … I’ve gotten all of them.
Walter: Do you correct them?
Hudson: Never. I just say yes and sign it “Cate Blanchett.”
Lisa Ann Walter of “Abbott Elementary.”
I’d love to know who everybody’s comedic inspiration was growing up.
Walter: My dad used to let me stay up and watch “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “Laugh-In.” I got to see Ruth Buzzi, rest in peace, and Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin. Jo Anne Worley. All these funny women. That’s what made me think, “You can get a job doing this, the thing that I get in trouble for at school?!”
Grier: My comedy hero was Richard Pryor. I was this Black little boy in Detroit, and George Jessel would come on “The Mike Douglas Show” and he might as well have been speaking Russian. I’m like, “How can this be comedy?” Then I saw Richard Pryor, and he was the first comic who I just went, “Well, this guy’s hilarious.”
Downs: I remember one of the first comedies that my dad showed me was “Young Frankenstein.” I remember Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman and Madeline Kahn. All of these women. I was always like, “They’re the funniest ones.”
Hudson: My era growing up was Steve Martin, Martin Short, Albert Brooks, Mel Brooks. But women were, for me, the classics. Lucille Ball.
Walter: There was a time when I was growing up where women really dominated comedy. They were your mom [nods at Hudson, Hawn’s daughter], Whoopi [Goldberg], Bette Midler. The biggest stars of the biggest comedies were women, and then that all went away for a really long time. I think it found its way back with Judd Apatow and then he made “Bridesmaids.”
Hudson: I tried really hard to make edgy comedy and studios wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t. It took Judd to convince the studio system that women are ready. That we can handle rated-R. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was a ton of rated-R comedy with women. But for some reason, it just all of a sudden became like, “Oh, there’s only 1½ demographics for women in comedy.” I always felt like it was an uphill battle trying to get them made. Then I remember when Jenji [Kohan] came in with “Orange Is the New Black.” That was really awesome.
Lane: Above all, it was always Jackie Gleason for me. He was such an influence. He was hilarious, and of course, very broadly funny, but then there was something so sad. It was such pathos with him. … He was this wonderful, serious actor, as well as being Ralph Kramden.
Everett: There’s nobody that taught me more about how to be funny than my mom. She just had this way of being that I have used in my live shows. It’s led to where I am now. She used to wet her pants [laughing] so she had to put towels down on all the chairs in the house. She just didn’t care. That shows you to not care, to go out there. I live in fear, but not when I feel like she’s with me.
Grier: That’s the edge. You’re either going to weep or you’re going to [laugh] until you urinate.
What Felix Mallard has grown to appreciate about living in L.A. is that there’s a pocket of town to match every vibe — even if that vibe is “Aussie,” which his proudly is, having moved from Melbourne seven years ago.
“There are a lot of places that remind me of home,” says the 27-year-old actor, who plays tough-shelled Marcus in Netflix’s “Ginny & Georgia,” which returns for its third season next week. “The coastal cities and certainly some parts of Silver Lake and Echo Park feel very Melbourne. They feel very hipster. I mean, that word has changed so much — I don’t know if bohemian is the right word either. But there’s a sense of wanting to engage with good food, good coffee and good art. That kind of thing is very important to people from Melbourne.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
As he carves his own space in Los Angeles, Mallard has been captivating Gen Z audiences with his nuanced roles, ones that tend to resonate with young men amid all of the distinct pressures they face. Last year, he starred in the romantic drama “Turtles All the Way Down,” the film adaptation of John Green’s young adult novel that explores the complexities of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’s now set to headline “Nest,” a movie about a young family whose home is invaded by deadly arachnids. (“It’s a quiet meditation on masculinity and being a father, wrapped up in a really fun spider horror movie,” he explains. “A real one-two punch.”)
For Mallard, a perfect Sunday in L.A. involves surfing (a must), playing music loudly (he knows his way around the guitar, bass, piano and drums) and trekking from West L.A. to the Eastside in the name of adventure. Here’s a play by play.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
5:30 a.m.: Chase the waves I’d get up early and have a surf. The funny thing with surfing in L.A. is that you have to go where the waves are good. So it could be anywhere — Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, Malibu or Ventura. You’ve got to check the Surfline app and kind of know the seasons as well, like how winter brings north swells and summer brings south swells. But it’s a guessing game. You kind of throw a dart and follow it, you know? There’s a nice crew of Aussies, Kiwis and Americans. We all try and surf together, which is really sweet.
8 a.m.: Post-surf burritos Now I’ll probably be in a raggedy flannel top and some track pants and some Birkenstocks. Really just kind of half asleep. But it’s mandatory after a surf to get a breakfast burrito. There’s a really, really good place in Hermosa Beach called Brother’s Burritos. They don’t do the typical kind of massive breakfast burrito. Theirs come in two little bite-size burritos, which is perfect for breakfast, you know? And then there’s another place in West L.A. called Sachi.LA that’s just off the Culver loop. It’s a really cool, funky little coffee shop and cafe with a little record store next door — the perfect kind of vibe after having a surf and being in nature all morning. I really try to enjoy the peace that comes after that.
9:30 a.m.: Catch up on shows I’m going home and catching up on the week’s shows. Right now, I’m really deep into “Hacks” — obsessed with it. I feel like I came to it quite late and I’ve had to make up for lost time. And I’m really, really loving “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney,” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.” I feel like if you’re going to check in with the news these days, it’s got to be in a format that’s digestible. I think John Oliver has a really great way of doing that, presenting the outrage and the absurdity in a fun context.
Noon: Try to find the joy of cooking I’ve always found it such a challenge to see cooking as the expression of love that I know it is — I just haven’t had the inspiration. But Jamie Oliver’s books have really helped me because he explains recipes in a way that teach you the fundamentals. He’s got this cookbook, “One-Pan Wonders,” with an herb-y chicken tray bake that’s really simple. You can put the vegetables at the bottom of the tray — and a lot of rosemary and a lot of lemon — and put the chicken on the bars above the tray, so that when it cooks, the chicken fat drops into the vegetables and creates this really lovely flavor in the veggies. And then you finish it off with some lemon and olive oil. So that’s the one I think I can do. But if anyone has seen that recipe, they’ll know it’s the easiest one in the book, so I’m not trying to brag here.
1 p.m.: Get lost in the music It’s always a struggle to get up off the couch, but once there’s been some food, I’m off to play some music. There was this beautiful, really fun, cheap, grungy rehearsal studio in Culver City called Exposition Studios. It would be, like, $25 or $30 an hour, and you could rent instruments and rent a room and just play as loud and as long as you want. It’s not there anymore, but there are a few other places like that around town. I’ve gone to Pirate Studios in West Adams a couple times, and just anywhere I can play some music, really, really loud.
I’ve got an EP of songs that I’m working my way through. It’s very grungy, very emotion-based. It’s probably quite angsty. There’s a lot of anger in there, and then I think maybe a lot of sadness. It’s touching on a lot of the uglier sides of our psyche that we all have.
4 p.m.: Car entertainment Now we start preparing the journey east. Because it’s L.A., you can’t pretend that you’re not going to spend some part of your day in traffic. So a podcast is a must. I’ll be listening to Louis Theroux. I just love how he asks questions, how he kind of gives a space for his guests to either showcase who they are or maybe unknowingly reveal parts of themselves they may not even intend to. How he holds the space for that is quite impressive, and it’s a good distraction while you’re driving.
5 p.m.: Fuel up with burgers We’re going to Burgerlords. They do a really simple menu. You can get a smashburger, I think a vegan burger, and something else, and they’ve got a really nice selection of craft beers. And it’s kind of like a redone version of a ‘50s diner inside.
7 p.m.: Let loose at a punk show From there, we’ll go to Zebulon. I love it. I don’t see too many venues with an indoor-outdoor kind of space. They have a big garden, so you can go and take a break outside and then come back in and enjoy that change of pace. It’s one of my favorite spots in L.A. to go and watch music, for sure.
The last time I went, we saw the Spits. They’re, you know, really proper punks. And then another time, we saw a band called Spy, and they were supported by Fentanyl, Blood Stained Concrete and Yard, which is a Polish hardcore band. So any time we’re out there, it’s usually for a bit more of a hardcore kind of scene. And they’re the most fun gigs to go to. Everyone’s there to release some tension, some energy. The fans are always super, super, super die-hard fans.
Midnight: Straight to bed
I’ll make the trek home and tuck into bed. That’s usually about midnight. I’d like to say it’s earlier and that I’m, like, healthy, but I’m not.
“Do y’all think — I want to ask y’all a real question — do you think, if I ever came back to TV, do you know where the only place I would ever come back to is?” Kotb asked her former colleagues after replacement co-host Craig Melvin inquired about that rumor. “Right here. This is the spot.”
“Delete, not true,” she said of the Clarkson rumor.
Something that is true? Kotb revealed that she left “Today” in part to take care of 6-year-old daughter Hope, who was diagnosed about two years ago with Type 1 diabetes. Previously known as juvenile diabetes because it’s most often diagnosed in childhood, the autoimmune disorder can occur in adults as well.
Hope’s health issues arose more than two years ago, she said. Now the child has to use synthetic insulin regularly to stay well, since her condition prevents insulin production by her pancreas.
“As anyone with a child who has Type 1 [knows], especially a little kid, you’re constantly watching, you’re constantly monitoring, you’re constantly checking, which is what I did all the time when I was [at ‘Today’],” she told Melvin and Savannah Guthrie. “You’re distracted.”
Hope, however, is just like “every other kid” except for about five minute at breakfast, lunch, dinner and sometimes overnight, Kotb said.
But being there for her daughter had become nonnegotiable, she told People in a story published Wednesday, so “Today” had to become part of yesterday. No more alarms going off at 3:15 a.m. every morning.
Now she sleeps in until 4:30 a.m. She also just launched a new wellness venture, Joy 101. But her children remain her focus.
“I really wanted to and needed to be here to watch over [Hope]. So, whenever she needs anything, and it can happen at night, multiple times, I’m up — I’m up up up,” she said.
“But I would never, ever want Hope to one day grow up and say, ‘Oh, my mom left her job because [of me].’ It wasn’t that alone. But if you look at it cumulatively, it was a part of that decision.”
Hope, Kotb told People, “is a happy, healthy, rambunctious, amazing kid, and we have to watch her. Diabetes is a part of her, but not all of her. I hope it shapes her but never defines her.”
Shawn Kemp’s name has long been synonymous with prodigious talent, a ton of trouble and wasted opportunity.
Now he’ll likely also be known for a jail sentence.
Kemp, 55, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault Tuesday for shooting at two men inside a vehicle in a Tacoma, Wash., mall parking lot. The plea was part of an agreement in Pierce County Superior Court in which prosecutors will recommend nine months of confinement in the county jail when Kemp is sentenced in August.
Kemp was initially charged with one count of first-degree assault with a firearm enhancement after the March 2003 shooting, and prosecutors last week added another count of assault as well as a drive-by shooting charge. No one was hurt, but the Toyota 4Runner the men were inside and another vehicle were damaged.
Kemp contended in a court filing that he fired in self-defense after one of the men shot at him. The 4Runner drove off before Tacoma police arrived, and and an empty holster was found inside the vehicle when it was discovered abandoned days later.
“Shawn is committed to moving forward in a positive direction,” Kemp’s attorney Tim Leary told the Seattle Times. “He was presented with an offer from the state that allows him to take responsibility, but I think also recognizes the self-defense nature of how this transpired.”
Seattle SuperSonics’ Shawn Kemp going in for a dunk against the Houston Rockets during their NBA playoff game May 5, 1997, in Houston.
Kemp was arrested in 2006 for drug possession in Washington after he was found with cocaine, marijuana, and a pistol.
Growth has been halting, however, even for someone who sprouted 13 inches between the ninth and 11th grades, topping out at 6-foot-10. His weight ballooned during his career from 230 pounds to more than 300, yet he remained capable of dominating on the court.
That was long ago, though. And on Tuesday in court, his attorney explained that Kemp’s truck was broken into on March 8, 2023, when he and other employees who worked at his marijuana dispensary, Kemp’s Cannabis, were attending a concert in Seattle.
According to court documents, Kemp’s cellphone and game-worn Kemp and Gary Payton jerseys were among the items stolen. Kemp used a phone tracking app to look for the thieves, and confronted the driver of the 4Runner in a Tacoma mall parking lot.
A man in the back seat shot at Kemp with a handgun, according to the filing, and Kemp returned fire. The 4Runner fled, and when the vehicle was found abandoned days later, an empty holster was found inside but there was no gun, documents said.
As part of his plea, Kemp cannot possess a firearm. In addition to the proposed nine-month sentence, Kemp will spend one year in community custody and pay restitution.
“His plan is to tell the community about the dangers of gun violence, really to be a positive influence on youth,” Aaron Kiviat, another of Kemp’s attorneys, told the Seattle Times.
In a statement outlining the plea agreement, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Howe said that the case should be resolved ahead of trial because the two alleged victims were illegally in possession of Kemp’s belongings.
Both alleged victims are currently serving prison sentences in other cases. One is serving a seven-year sentence, in part for a July 2023 shooting in which he mistook the victim for Kemp. The same man recently filed a civil suit against Kemp stemming from the mall shooting.
Nicknamed the “Reign Man,” Kemp made $91,572,963 during his 15-year NBA career that ended in 2004. He was a six-time All-Star and helped the Seattle SuperSonics to the NBA finals in 1996 when he averaged a career-high 21.2 points a game. Kemp also played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Portland Trail Blazers and Orlando Magic.
Kemp reflected on the ups and downs of his career on the All the Smoke podcast with former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, saying, “Going through some problems and stuff that I went through in my career also hurts you at the end. But I think when you look at the good side of it, and you compare the numbers and stuff, I’m right there with some of the best ones.”
As mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd raged across Los Angeles in late May 2020, the LAPD had an unexpected problem.
After a week of demonstrations, officers had fired so many “less-lethal” crowd control projectiles made of rubber that the department’s stockpile was running low.
Scrambling to buy more, officials arranged for two reserve officers to fly a private plane to Casper, Wyo., to pick up 2,000 additional rounds from an arms wholesaler called Safariland, according to LAPD emails reviewed by The Times.
The days and weeks that followed brought more unrest in the streets, with police criticized for indiscriminately firing rubber rounds into crowds, injuring scores of people with shots to the face or torso.
Multiple reports and activists assailed the department’s response to the protests as a botched operation that resulted from poor planning, inadequate training and failure to learn from past mistakes.
According to The Times’ analysis of LAPD data released by the L.A. city attorney’s office, police actions related to the George Floyd protests have cost $11.9 million in settlements and jury awards. Scores of other pending lawsuits represent potentially tens of millions more in liability exposure.
Yet five years removed from Floyd’s killing, police backers say public opinion has largely swung back in favor of aggressive law enforcement, pointing as proof to last year’s passage of tough-on-crime legislation and ousting of progressive prosecutors.
Last month, President Trump issued an executive order promising to “unleash high-impact local police forces” in his administration’s campaign against “criminal aliens.”
The U.S. Department of Justice moved last week to cancel settlements to overhaul police departments in Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis. The federal oversight was part of the national reckoning with racism and police brutality that followed the law enforcement killings of Breonna Taylor and Floyd, who was pinned to the pavement by a police officer for nearly 10 minutes before dying.
The push to overhaul the LAPD that began in 2020 did not result in sweeping changes, but the Police Department has in some ways come to resemble the slimmed-down version sought by some activists.
While its multibillion-dollar budget has only grown, the number of low-level arrests and traffic stops have plummeted, and staffing shortages have forced the department to focus more on responding to and solving violent crimes.
Today, the department is nearly 1,300 officers smaller than it was when Floyd died, with fewer cops on the force than at any point since 1995, mirroring nationwide declines in police staffing.
On Thursday, the L.A. City Council signed off on a $14-billion spending plan for 2025-26 that cuts funding for police recruitment in order to avoid laying off hundreds of city workers. The council provided enough money for the LAPD to hire 240 new officers over the coming year, down from the 480 proposed by Mayor Karen Bass last month.
Asked in a news radio appearance last week whether Floyd’s death had changed policing, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said it had, largely with the slump in hiring.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, center, and Capt. James Hwang perform the uniform inspection during graduation for recruit class 11-24 on May 2.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The department lost scores of cops who didn’t “feel support,” he said, and recruitment continues to prove challenging.
“So that has had a negative impact on the profession overall,” he told public radio station KCRW. “We have to restore morale within the organization; we have to restore pride within the profession.”
Following years of calls for embracing alternatives to traditional policing, LAPD officials and city leaders are continuing to explore ways to hand off calls involving substance abuse, homelessness and mental illness. Officers are also no longer responding to minor traffic accidents.
Efforts to limit police traffic involvement have gained some traction, and a controversial policy enacted by former Chief Michel Moore still restricts so-called pretextual stops of motorists or pedestrians that critics say led to the disproportionate harassment of Black and brown Angelenos. The department has also taken steps to try to limit dangerous pursuits by asking supervisors to monitor them in real-time, and if the chase proves too dangerous, to call them off.
Police data show violent crime continues to drop from pandemic highs, with the exception of aggravated assaults and robberies in certain parts of the city. Property crimes, including most burglaries, have also started to trend downward.
Some efforts at reform have stalled, including a proposal to overhaul the department’s disciplinary system for officers. Another plan that would have replaced LAPD officers with unarmed transportation workers on traffic stops sputtered amid debates around jurisdiction and funding.
Art Acevedo, who began his career with the California Highway Patrol before serving as police chief in several major cities including Houston and Miami, blamed movements to “defund” and “abolish” police for polarizing the debate on how to move forward.
Acevedo, who applied for the LAPD chief’s job that eventually went to McDonnell, said police unions and allies weaponized such rhetoric because it “effectively equated advocating for police reform as one and the same as advocating for defunding the police.”
“That movement created a backlash that has translated into a diminished appetite” for reform, he said.
Acevedo also worried about officers feeling emboldened to bend or break the rules in the current climate: “You don’t want to re-create the perception, real or not, that it’s open season for bad policing, because you’re going to have that small percentage that’re going to act on that belief that they’re not going to be held accountable.”
Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, shared similar concerns.
“I think they absolutely feel unleashed,” she said of police. “Not that they were ever on a leash.”
Part of the problem, Abdullah said, is public fatigue over the seemingly constant barrage of troubling incidents.
“People don’t have the bandwidth to respond with the kind of outrage that they would when you saw the beatings at Pan Pacific Park,” said Abdullah, referring to the LAPD’s response to protests in 2020.
John Burton, an attorney who filed lawsuits on behalf of several people who were wounded by less-lethal rounds during L.A. protests in 2020, said that most changes to the LAPD have been around the edges, but the department hasn’t addressed its culture of aggression.
The lack of progress, he said, is obvious in the LAPD internal affairs investigations he’s reviewed that rarely found anything wrong with officers’ use of force — even in the face of overwhelming video evidence. More than a few officers mentioned in his lawsuits have since been promoted, he said, even after he accused them of lying in police reports.
LAPD supervisors looked the other way, he said, because they are “very protective” of their officers.
Burton also noted that rubber projectiles are still being used, despite little evidence the weapons helped rein in chaos on the streets. Police also once faced criticism last year for the handling of pro-Palestinian protests on the USC and UCLA campuses.
“The thought that you’re going to stop somebody from throwing a rock at the cops by shooting one of these first is a fantasy,” he said. “They can cause very serious injuries.”
If you are only going to be in one part of a movie, it’s best if it’s the most memorable part. For example, a thrilling set-piece that sets the template for an entire franchise.
So it was for actor Rolf Saxon, who appeared as a befuddled CIA analyst in the very first “Mission: Impossible” film. The sequence, in which Tom Cruise dangles from the ceiling of a stark white vault room to infiltrate the computer system overseen by Saxon’s character, is now the stuff of action-cinema history.
From a throwaway punchline in that 1996 film — exiling Saxon’s William Donloe to a remote radar station in Alaska — comes one of the most unexpected storylines in the new “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” His part in the new film is substantially larger and provides the film with some of its emotional heft, making Saxon’s return as Donloe a triumph. (A rather memorable knife makes a comeback as well.)
For Saxon’s work in the first film, he was in the same physical space as Cruise but their two characters never interacted and had no dialogue together. So a moment late in the new film when Donloe makes a heartfelt expression to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of what his life has been like all these years in Alaska provided relief for the character of Donloe — and for the actor portraying him too.
“It was something I was hoping for, and then it happened,” says Saxon, 70. “It’s a great scene. Working with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, that’s kind of cool too.”
Rolf Saxon in the first ‘Mission: Impossible’ from 1996.
(Paramount Pictures)
Finally sharing a proper scene with Cruise also gave Saxon some insight into the reason Cruise has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for more than 40 years.
“There’s no question why he is,” Saxon says. “The energy that he personally brings into a room, I’ve never witnessed before. It’s focused, it’s practiced. I know this sounds like I’m supposed to say this about him, but it’s true. This guy’s unbelievable. And he does those effing stunts.”
Saxon is impressed, too, by the real-life mission Cruise is often vocal about. “His whole raison d’être is to enhance the industry that’s given him so much and bring people in, bring them back to theaters. And I just applaud that on my feet.”
Rolf Saxon as William Donloe in the movie “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”
(Giles Keyte / Paramount Pictures)
Having had a steadily successful career between his two “Missions,” Saxon lives in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California but was recently on a Zoom call from New York City the day after attending the new film’s U.S. premiere there. It was Saxon’s second time seeing the movie, having also attended a premiere in London just a few days earlier.
Born in Virginia, Saxon studied acting in England, where he would land parts in numerous British TV series as well as assorted film and theater roles. Throughout his career he has also done voice-over work for video games, including the “Broken Sword” series, and was the narrator for the American edition of the popular children’s show “Teletubbies.”
According to Saxon, much of the business of what Donloe does onscreen in the first movie directed by Brian De Palma came from an unexpected interaction on set.
“I was given the script,” he recalls, “I read it and I thought, OK, there’s not a lot to do here. And then one day I was messing around on set, joking around, there was some downtime. And I got a tap on the shoulder from the first [A.D.], who said that Brian De Palma wanted to have a word with me. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’
“And I walked over and he had a very stern demeanor. Great guy, but he just always looked angry and he said, ‘You’re playing around on set.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. De Palma.’ He said, ‘Could you do that again?’ I said, “Sure, of course.” What am I going to say to say, no? He said, ‘OK, after lunch, we’re going to have you messing around onstage. We’ll film that.’” All of Donloe’s memorable physical mishaps — the vomiting, the double take — were Saxon improvs.
The vault sequence has become one of the signature set-pieces of the first film, seemingly lifting from both the silent heist in “Rififi” and the spacewalk of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and setting a stunts-centric guide for the franchise to come. To perform the scene, Cruise spent hours in a harness suspended from the ceiling.
“I mean, it was a long time,” says Saxon. “And they’d bring him down sometimes, but he’s that guy. He does what needs to be done. I was in the room a number of times with him, while he was filming it, but [our characters] never were supposed to meet.”
Saxon recalls that while shooting the first “Mission” film, he and Cruise shared a makeup room at the studio in England. One day the woman who did Cruise’s makeup wasn’t there because her son had an accident at his school. As soon as Cruise heard the news, he called his private on-call doctor and sent him to attend to the boy.
“And he hung up the phone, said, ‘Shut the door,’” remembers Saxon. “And he said, ‘This stays between us. If this comes out, it’s somebody in this room. I’m going to find out who it is and that’ll be your last day on the film.’ He wanted no publicity. He did it for this lady and her son. And the boy was fine, he was mildly concussed. When she came back the next day, there was a massive bouquet of flowers, saying ‘Welcome back.’ And then nothing was ever said of it again. That’s the kind of guy he is. And it took me two years before I would tell that story.”
Saxon had never had reason to encounter Cruise in the intervening years, because, as he says, “I’m an actor but I’m not a star.”
Director Christopher McQuarrie, standing, gives notes to the cast, including Saxon, on the set of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”
(Antonio Olmos / Paramount Pictures)
The call for the new film first came in January of 2022, and Saxon began shooting on the film in August of that year, finishing in July of 2024. (Saxon’s casting was announced via director Christopher McQuarrie’s Instagram in March 2023.) This time around, Donloe becomes a vital part of the team and is in the middle of the action at the film’s climax. In his years in Alaska he has even married an Inuit woman, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk).
“The feeling on this set was one of warmth and inclusivity — welcoming,” says Saxon. “I was on it for almost three years, but people were on it for over five years. This schedule for the filming was very erratic, and [McQuarrie] kept very calm. McQ and Tom, they worked very much in tandem. I loved coming to work every day. Not that I didn’t with Brian’s stuff, but this was just a joy, and I was much more a part of it than I was in the first one. I was much more part of the team, the core group that was working.”
For “The Final Reckoning,” a sequence meant to take place in Alaska, with a team of agents arriving to the remote cabin occupied by Donloe and Tapeesa, was actually shot in Svalbard, an archipelago north of Norway.
“We were staying on a ship,” says Saxon. “We went to Longyearbyen, which is the furthest most populated area in the world. Then we took a six-hour ride north on the ship, parked on the glacier. And that’s where we lived for two weeks. Polar bears, walruses, reindeer and us. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life.”
The cave sequence that is part of the movie’s action finale is set in South Africa but was shot in the Middleton mines in England’s East Midlands.
“This was in many ways a dream job,” says Saxon. “The people I’m working with, the thing I’m working on and the places I got to go to work. It’s just like, what would you really like to do? Here it is.”
Hayley Atwell, left, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Greg Tarzan Davis and Pom Klementieff in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”
(Paramount Pictures)
From his initial conversations with McQuarrie, Saxon knew that his part would be significantly larger than in the first film. But even then it developed over the course of production. McQuarrie informed him that some scenes Saxon initially shot were no longer going to be used and due to rewrites, the actor would now be part of the climactic finale.
“He said, ‘We really like what you did, but we’ve had a story alteration, so we can’t use that. So we’re going to put you in in other ways,’” says Saxon. “And that was kind of like, ‘Oh, no’ and ‘Oh, yeah’ at the same time. Which is kind of the way this worked the whole way through.”
Among the actors in his scenes this time out, Saxon had previously worked with Simon Pegg on the 1999 British sitcom “Hippies.” He also discovered that he and Hayley Atwell had attended the same drama school in London, though some years apart. Also returning was Henry Czerny, whose character in the initial film sent Donloe to Alaska in the first place.
NEW YORK — MAY 19 2025: Actor Rolf Saxon for the movie “Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning” posing with the knife from the original Mission: Impossible film, photographed at the Museum of Moving Image
(Justin Jun Lee/For The Times)
As to whether he had ever imagined returning to the franchise, Saxon holds his arms out wide, saying, “Just a little dream.”
He adds, “I thought about writing Chris or Tom, ‘Dear Tom, here’s what I think we could do with Donloe.’ Or, ‘What about this with Donloe?’ And at one point, after listening to a friend, I drafted a letter to him. The next day I woke up and I thought” — he mimes wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it away — ‘That’s never going to happen.’ And then years later, bang, it did.”
Saxon said he has never been recognized by anyone for the part of Donloe. (That is likely about to change.) If pressed, his favorite of the “Mission: Impossible” films has remained the first one. Up to now.
“I suppose closure is one way of putting it,” says Saxon. “It’s been much more fun, this one. The other one, I did my job and I enjoyed doing it. But this one I got to really investigate. It’s like remounting a production onstage, or coming back to a project you did 20 years ago, 30 years ago and getting to redo it with what you know now, particularly with the excitement of a larger part. It’s fantastic. It’s another reason this is such a gift.”
Once more we’re litigating Joe Biden’s catatonic debate performance, his lumbering gait, his moth-eaten memory and his selfish delusion he deserved a second term in the White House while shuffling through his ninth decade on earth.
“Original Sin,” a book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, published this week, is chock-full of anecdotes illustrating the lengths to which Biden’s family and palace guard worked to shield his mental and physical lapses from voters.
John Robert Greene is not at all surprised.
“It’s old news, hiding presidential illness,” said Greene, who’s written a shelf full of books on presidents and the presidency. “I can’t think of too many … who’ve been the picture of health.”
Before we go further, let’s state for the record this in no way condones the actions of Biden and his political enablers. To be clear, let’s repeat it in capital letters: WHAT BIDEN AND HIS HANDLERS DID WAS WRONG.
But, as Greene states, it was not unprecedented or terribly unusual. History abounds with examples of presidential maladies being minimized, or kept secret.
Grover Cleveland underwent surgery for oral cancer on a yacht in New York Harbor to keep his condition from being widely known. Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke, a fact covered up by his wife and confidants, who exercised extraordinary power in his stead.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy both suffered serious, chronic ailments that were kept well away from the public eye.
Those surrounding Ronald Reagan downplayed his injuries after a 1981 assassination attempt, and the Trump administration misled the public about the seriousness of the president’s condition after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 a month before the 2020 election.
The capacity to misdirect, in Biden’s case, or mislead, as happened under Trump, illustrates one of the magical features of the White House: the ability of a president to conceal himself in plain sight.
“When you’re in the presidency, there is nothing that you can’t hide for awhile,” Greene, an emeritus history professor at Cazenovia College, said from his home in upstate New York. “You’ve got everything at your disposal to live a completely hidden double life, if you want. Everything from the Secret Service to the bubble of the White House.”
Greene likened the Neoclassical mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to a giant fish bowl — one that is painted from the inside. It’s highly visible, but you can’t really see what’s happening in the interior.
That deflates the notion there was some grand media conspiracy to prop Biden up. (Sorry, haters.)
Yes, detractors will say it was plain as the dawning day that Biden was demented, diminished and obviously not up to the job of the presidency. Today, Trump’s critics say the same sort of thing about him; from their armchairs, they even deliver quite specific diagnoses: He suffers dementia, or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.
That doesn’t make it so.
“It’s a very politicized process. People see what they want to see,” said Jacob Appel, a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, who’s writing a book on presidential health.
“You can watch videotapes of Ronald Reagan in 1987,” Appel said, “and, depending on your view of him. you can see him as sharp and funny as ever, or being on the cusp of dementia.” (Five years after leaving the White House, Reagan — then 83 — announced he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.)
To an uncomfortable degree, those covering the White House — and, by extension, the public they serve — are forced to rely on whatever the White House chooses to reveal.
“I don’t have subpoena power,” Tapper told The Times’ Stephen Battaglio, saying he would have eagerly published the details contained in his new book had sources been willing to come forth while Biden was still in power. “We were just lied to over and over again.”
It hasn’t always been that way.
In September 1955, during his first term, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while on a golf vacation in Denver. “”It was sudden,” said Jim Newton, an Eisenhower biographer. “One minute he’s fine and the next minute he was flat on his back, quite literally.”
The details surrounding Eisenhower’s immediate treatment remain a mystery, though Newton suggests that may have had more do with protecting his personal physician, who misdiagnosed the heart attack as a bout of indigestion, than a purposeful attempt to mislead the public.
From then on, the White House was forthcoming — offering daily reports on what Eisenhower ate, his blood pressure, the results of various tests — to a point that it embarrassed the president. (Among the information released was an accounting of Ike’s bowel movements.)
“They were self-consciously transparent,” Newton said. “The White House looked to the Wilson example as something not to emulate.”
Less than 14 months later, Eisenhower had sufficiently recovered — and voters had enough faith in his well-being — that he won his second term in a landslide.
But that 70-year-old example is a notable exception.
As long as there are White House staffers, campaign advisers, political strategists and family members, presidents will be surrounded by people with an incentive to downplay, minimize or obfuscate any physical or mental maladies they face while in office.
All we can do is wait — years, decades — for the truth to come out. And, in the meantime, hope for the best.
Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have laid out their clearest plan yet for the “Golden Dome” missile defence programme, which would include putting weapons in space for the first time.
Speaking from the White House on Tuesday, Trump said he had “officially selected an architecture” for the system, designed to take down “hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles and advanced cruise missiles”.
“I promised the American people that I would build a cutting-edge missile defence shield to protect our homeland from the threat of foreign missile attack,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
The Golden Dome system, he added, would include “space-based sensors and interceptors”.
“ Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they’re launched from space,” Trump continued. “We will have the best system ever built.”
The announcement comes just less than four months after Trump signed an executive order kicking off the programme’s development. General Michael Guetlein – who currently serves as the vice chief of space operations at Space Force, a branch of the US military – is slated to manage the programme.
Speaking at the event, Hegseth hailed the plan as a “game changer” and a “generational investment in security of America and Americans”.
The White House displays posters for the proposed Golden Dome missile defence shield [Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press]
The White House did not immediately release further details about the missile defence system, and the Pentagon is reportedly still working out its capabilities and requirements.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this month that the space-based components of the Golden Dome alone could cost as much as $542bn over the next 20 years.
It noted that a high number of sensors and interceptors would be needed for a space-based system to be effective, particularly as foreign militaries like North Korea’s grow more sophisticated.
But on Tuesday, Trump outlined a much lower price tag and timeline.
“It should be fully operational before the end of my term. So, we’ll have it done in about three years,” Trump said.
He estimated the total cost to add up to about $175bn, adding that he planned to use existing defence capabilities to build the system.
But the funding for the programme has so far not been secured. At Tuesday’s news conference, Trump confirmed that he was seeking $25bn for the system in a tax cut bill currently moving through Congress, although that sum could be cut amid ongoing negotiations.
There is likely to be some variation in the total cost of the project. The Associated Press news agency, for example, cited an unnamed government official as saying that Trump had been given three versions of the plan, described as “medium”, “high” and “extra high”.
Those tiers corresponded to how many satellites, sensors and interceptors would be put in space as part of the programme. The news agency reported that Trump chose the “high” version, which has an initial cost ranging between $30bn and $100bn.
Questions over viability
As he explained his plans for the Golden Dome on Tuesday, Trump cited several inspirations, including Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defence system, which is funded in part by the US.
He also pointed to the work of a fellow Republican, the late President Ronald Reagan, who served in the White House during the Cold War in the 1980s.
As part of his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, Reagan had proposed a barrier to nuclear weapons that included space-based technology.
“ We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,” Trump said.
But questions have persisted over the viability of a space-based defence system, its price, and whether it could ignite a new arms race.
Democrats have also questioned the possible involvement of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is a frontrunner among the technology companies seeking to build key components of the system.
A group of 42 Democratic lawmakers have called for a probe into Musk’s role in the bidding process, pointing to his position as a special adviser to Trump and his substantial campaign donations to the president.
“If Mr. Musk were to exercise improper influence over the Golden Dome contract, it would be another example of a disturbing pattern of Mr. Musk flouting conflict of interest rules,” the Democrats wrote in a letter, calling for the probe.
On Tuesday, Trump did not directly respond to a question about which companies would be involved in the Golden Dome. Instead, he highlighted that the system would boost industries in states like Alaska, Indiana, Florida and Georgia.
He added, “Canada has called us, and they want to be a part of it. So we’ll be talking to them.”
In “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” playwright Lucas Hnath cheekily proposes an answer to a question that has haunted the theater for more than a century: Whatever happened to Nora after she walked out on her marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama, “A Doll’s House”?
The door slam that concludes Ibsen’s play ushered in a revolution in modern drama. After Nora’s exit, anything was possible on the stages of respectable European playhouses. Conventional morality was no longer a choke hold on dramatic characters, who were allowed to set dangerous new precedents for audiences that may have been easily shocked but were by no means easily deterred.
Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
“A Doll’s House, Part 2,” which opened Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse under the direction of Jennifer Chang, is a sequel with a puckish difference. Although ostensibly set 15 years after Nora stormed out on Torvald and her three children, the play takes place in a theatrical present that has one antique-looking shoe in the late 19th century and one whimsical sneaker in the early 21st.
The hybrid nature of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” isn’t just reflected in the costume design. The language of the play moves freely from the declamatory to the profane, with some of its funniest moments occurring when fury impels a character to unleash some naughty modern vernacular.
More crucially, comedy and tragedy are allowed to coexist as parallel realities. Hnath has constructed “A Doll’s House, Part 2” as a modern comedy of ideas, divided into a series of confrontations in which characters get to thrash out different perspectives on their shared history.
Elizabeth Reaser in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Chang stages the play like a courtroom drama, with a portion of the audience seated on the stage like a jury. The spare (if too dour) set by Wilson Chin, featuring the door that Nora made famous and a couple of rearranged chairs, allows for the brisk transit of testimony in a drama that lets all four characters have their say.
Nora (played with a touch too much comic affectation by Elizabeth Reaser) has become a successful author of controversial women’s books espousing radical ideas about the trap of conventional marriage. She has returned to the scene of her domestic crime out of necessity.
Torvald (portrayed with compelling inwardness by Jason Butler Harner), her stolid former husband, never filed the divorce papers. She’s now in legal jeopardy, having conducted business as an unmarried woman. And her militant feminist views have won her enemies who would like nothing more than to send her to prison.
Kahyun Kim in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Nora needs Torvald to do what he was supposed to have done years ago: officially end their marriage. But not knowing how he might react to her reemergence, she makes arrangements to strategize privately with Anne Marie (Kimberly Scott), the old nanny who raised Nora’s children in her absence and isn’t particularly inclined to do her any favors.
After Torvald and Anne Marie both refuse to cooperate with her, Nora has no choice but to turn to her daughter, Emmy (crisply played by Kahyun Kim). Recently engaged to a young banker, Emmy has chosen the road that her mother abandoned, a distressing realization for Nora, who had hoped that her example would have inaugurated a new era of possibility for women.
Hnath works out the puzzle of Nora’s dilemma as though it were a dramatic Rubik’s Cube. The play hasn’t any ax to grind. If there’s one prevailing truth, it’s that relationships are murkier and messier than ideological arguments.
Jason Butler Harner in “A Doll’s House Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Nora restates why she left her marriage and explains as best she can the reasons she stayed away from her children all these years. But her actions, however necessary, left behind a tonnage of human wreckage. “A Doll’s House, Part 2” offers a complex moral accounting. As each character’s forcefully held view is added to the ledger sheet, suspense builds over how the playwright will balance the books.
Each new production of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” works out the math in a slightly different way. The play had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2017 in an elegant production that was somewhat more somber than the Broadway production that opened shortly after and earned Laurie Metcalf a well-deserved Tony for her performance.
The play found its voice through the Broadway developmental process, and Metcalf’s imprint is unmistakable in the rhythms of Nora’s whirligig monologues and bracing retorts. Metcalf is the rare actor who can lunge after comedy without sacrificing the raw poignancy of her character.
Elizabeth Reaser, left, and Kimberly Scott in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Reaser adopts a humorous mode but it feels forced. More damagingly, it doesn’t seem as if Hnath’s Nora has evolved all that much from the skittishly coquettish wife of Ibsen’s play. The intellectual arc of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” suffers from the mincing way Reaser introduces the character, with little conviction for Nora’s feminist principles and only a superficial sense of the long, exhausting road of being born before your time.
The early moments with Scott’s Anne Marie are unsteady. Reaser’s Nora comes off as a shallow woman oblivious of her privilege, which is true but only partly so. Scott has a wonderful earthy quality, but I missed the impeccable timing of Jayne Houdyshell’s Anne Marie, who could stop the show with an anachronistic F-bomb. Chang’s staging initially seems like a work-in-progress.
The production is galvanized by the excellent performances of Harner and Kim. Harner reveals a Torvald changed by time and self-doubt. Years of solitude, sharpened by intimations of mortality, have cracked the banker’s sense of certainty. He blames Nora for the hurt he’ll never get over, but he doesn’t want to go down as the paragon of bad husbands. He too would like a chance to redeem himself, even if (as Harner’s canny performance illustrates) character is not infinitely malleable. Bad habits endure.
Kimberly Scott in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Kim’s Emmy holds her own against Nora even as her proposed solution to her mother’s dilemma involves some questionable ethics. Nora may be disappointed that her daughter is making such conformist choices, but Emmy sees no reason why the mother she never knew should feel entitled to shape her life. The brusquely controlled way Kim’s Emmy speaks to Nora hints at the ocean of unresolved feelings between them.
The production is somewhat hampered by Anthony Tran’s cumbersome costumes and Chin’s grimly rational scenic design. Elizabeth Harper’s lighting enlivens the dull palette, but I missed the surreal notes of the South Coast Repertory and Broadway stagings. Hnath creates his own universe, and the design choices should reflect this wonderland quality to a jauntier degree.
But Chang realizes the play’s full power in the final scene between Nora and Torvald. Reaser poignantly plunges the depths of her character, as estranged husband and wife share what the last 15 years have been like for them.
“A Doll’s House” was considered in its time to be politically incendiary. Hnath’s sequel, without squelching the politics, picks up the forgotten human story of Ibsen’s indelible classic.
‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’
Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave.
When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (check for exceptions); ends June 8
Daniel Cruz was brought in from the Burbank-based media and entertainment giant last fall to work some magic with a college operation in need of new concepts. Six consecutive years of running in the red has led to a staggering $219.5-million deficit that won’t be wiped away with the waving of any wand.
One solution might be surprisingly simple: Give the fans what they want, and they’ll keep coming back.
That’s why Cruz has spearheaded efforts to overhaul the school’s ticket operations and build a courtside lounge inside Pauley Pavilion, not to mention maximize revenue from a planned field-level club at the Rose Bowl. They’re all measures intended to enhance the fan experience and build brand loyalty.
“Essentially, what I’m trying to do is just trying to set us up for success and do things differently,” said Cruz, UCLA’s new deputy athletics director and chief revenue officer, “because the old way of how college athletics normally conducts business, it’s not working.”
As part of a partnership scheduled to be announced Tuesday, UCLA is switching from its longstanding in-house ticketing agency to Elevate, which will modernize operations and build a customer database that allows more targeted marketing. Elevate will handle both primary and secondary ticket sales, preventing unaffiliated brokers from undermining sales and devaluing tickets.
There’s also going to be dynamic pricing that will allow lower prices for less desirable games, something that was impossible under the school’s previous antiquated system.
“It’s going to be huge because we are now professionalizing how we go to market, how we price things,” Cruz said. “I get a lot of complaints from fans that they think ticket prices are too high for certain games and they may be right, so how do we pull those levers to make it accessible on games that it’s not full, so we can get people in?”
A new field-level club in the south end zone of the Rose Bowl could create heavy demand at a stadium that is routinely less than half full. The club, set to open in time for the 2026 season, is expected to host a restaurant-bar setup that will allow fans to walk onto the field, watch players come out of a nearby tunnel and grab something to eat before returning to a section of 1,200 plush, extra-wide seats.
The Rose Bowl is planning to build a new field-level club for fans attending UCLA football games.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
The Rose Bowl has agreed to foot the estimated $20-million construction cost and let UCLA keep the premium seating ticket revenue, Cruz said, as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement. The stadium will utilize the club for other events that it hosts such as concerts.
Given that the Rose Bowl has kept all of the existing suite revenue for UCLA games as part of its lease agreement with the school, the new arrangement could be considered something of a coup for the Bruins.
Another revenue opportunity involves a massive stage on the north side of the stadium overlooking the adjacent country club that will allow UCLA to bring in DJs and musical acts for pregame festivities. UCLA will sell cabana space, food and premium parking to provide a tailgate experience for both football fans and others who just want to have a good time.
“How do we attract fans who maybe don’t normally come to a football game, right?” Cruz said. “It’s a whole-day experience — come, enjoy concierge service with your friends, enjoy a great football game and that atmosphere that we’re trying to generate.”
Additional revenue has already been raised from sponsorships involving players wearing UCLA uniforms as part of new co-branded advertisements; for example, star center Lauren Betts is featured in multiple billboards for La Victoria salsas and sauces.
Cruz also has plans to elevate the fan experience at Pauley Pavilion. He wants to use the existing infrastructure to create a courtside donor lounge that could be in place before the start of next season. The lounge, which would provide a more upscale experience than the Pavilion Club, could come with a naming-rights deal and a membership fee for high-level donors.
There’s also been discussions about revamping the Pavilion Club to provide more segmented experiences; perhaps one section would cater to young alumni with a DJ and open bar while another would serve other alumni who want a more relaxed atmosphere where they can catch up with friends over a pregame meal.
“That’s a really big room, so how do we cut that up and divide that to make a better experience for everybody?” Cruz said. “We’ve got so many folks that we’re trying to cater to and I want to be sensitive to that and I want to create an experience for them that makes it so they want to come back.”
UCLA students cheer during a men’s basketball game against USC at Pauley Pavilion on March 8.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
One development that could be a season away would certainly please fans who have groused about too many empty seats in the lower level being shown on television. Cruz said he wanted to flip the lower-level stands and team benches to the seating configuration that existed before the Pauley Pavilion renovations, allowing the students who pack their section to be showcased on broadcasts.
“That section is always full of students,” Cruz said. “We could be playing Idaho State and it’s full with students all the time, so the rest of the country needs to see that.”
Why not just move the TV cameras? Cruz said it would cost $6 million to transfer all the wiring and fiber optics built into the current platforms that were specially built for the cameras.
Men’s basketball coach Mick Cronin and Cori Close, his women’s basketball counterpart, have agreed to the potential move, Cruz said, as have the fans he’s canvassed about switching seats.
In the meantime, UCLA is partnering with a global sports and entertainment company to improve the in-game experience for fans, including new ways to keep the energy flowing during timeouts while the Bruins are in the midst of a big run instead of relying on scoreboard ads and awkward silences.
Cruz said he’s converting some of his department’s marketing staff into fan experience specialists to improve fan retention.
“How do we create an experience where it’s like, man, that was fun, I want to come back?” Cruz said. “That leads to more revenue and it also leads to a larger pathway for our alumni and students to make them want to come back. How do we create that cycle of, yeah, they care, they want us here, and I want to come back?”
If winning is the greatest promotion in sports, Cruz is trying to show that listening may not be far behind.
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Kat Renfroe was at Mass when she saw a volunteer opportunity in the bulletin. Her Catholic parish was looking for tutors for Afghan youth, newly arrived in the United States.
There was a personal connection for Renfroe. Her husband, now retired from the Marine Corps, had deployed to Afghanistan four times. “He just never talked about any other region the way he did about the people there,” she said.
She signed up to volunteer. “It changed my life,” she said.
That was seven years ago. She and her husband are still close to the young man she tutored, along with his family. And Renfroe has made a career of working with refugees. She now supervises the Fredericksburg migration and refugee services office, part of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington.
That faith-based work is now in peril. As part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, his administration banned most incoming refugees in January and froze federal funds for the programs. Across the country, local resettlement agencies like hers have been forced to lay off staff or close their doors. Refugees and other legal migrants have been left in limbo, including Afghans who supported the U.S. in their native country.
The upheaval is particularly poignant in this part of Virginia, which boasts both strong ties to the military and to resettled Afghans, along with faith communities that support both groups.
Situated south of Washington and wedged among military bases, Fredericksburg and its surrounding counties are home to tens of thousands of veterans and active-duty personnel.
Virginia has resettled more Afghan refugees per capita than any other state. The Fredericksburg area now has halal markets, Afghan restaurants and school outreach programs for families who speak Dari and Pashto.
Many of these U.S.-based Afghans are still waiting for family members to join them — hopes that appear on indefinite hold. Families fear a new travel ban will emerge with Afghanistan on the list. A subset of Afghans already in the U.S. may soon face deportation as the Trump administration ends their temporary protected status.
“I think it’s tough for military families, especially those who have served, to look back on 20 years and not feel as though there’s some confusion and maybe even some anger about the situation,” Renfroe said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced in April that it was ending its decades-old partnership with the federal government to resettle refugees. The move came after the Trump administration halted the program’s federal funding, which the bishops’ conference channels to local Catholic Charities.
The Fredericksburg Catholic Charities office has continued aiding current clients and operating with minimal layoffs thanks to its diocese’s support and state funds. But it’s unclear what the local agency’s future will be without federal funding or arriving refugees.
“I’ll just keep praying,” Renfroe said. “It’s all I can do from my end.”
A legacy of faith-based service
Religious groups have long been at the heart of U.S. refugee resettlement work. Until the recent policy changes, seven out of the 10 national organizations that partnered with the U.S. government to resettle refugees were faith-based. They were aided by hundreds of local affiliates and religious congregations.
Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington has been working with refugees for 50 years, starting with Vietnamese people after the fall of Saigon. For the last 10 years, most of its clients have been Afghans, with an influx arriving in 2021 after the Taliban returned to power.
Area faith groups like Renfroe’s large church — St. Mary’s in Fredericksburg — have been key to helping Afghan newcomers get on their feet. Volunteers from local congregations furnish homes, provide meals and drive families to appointments.
“As a church, we care deeply. As Christians, we care deeply,” said Joi Rogers, who led the Afghan ministry at her Southern Baptist church. “As military, we also just have an obligation to them as people that committed to helping the U.S. in our mission over there.”
Rogers’ husband, Jake, a former Marine, is one of the pastors at Pillar, a network of 16 Southern Baptist churches that minister to military members. Their flagship location is near Quantico, the Marine base in northern Virginia, where nearly 5,000 Afghans were evacuated to after the fall of Kabul.
With Southern Baptist relief funds, Pillar Church hired Joi Rogers to work part time as a volunteer coordinator in the base’s makeshift refugee camp in 2021. She helped organize programming, including children’s activities. Her position was under the auspices of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which the government contracted to help run the camp.
For Pillar’s founding pastor, Colby Garman, the effort was an easy decision. “It was affecting so many of the lives of our families here who had served in Afghanistan.”
“We’ve been told to love God and love our neighbor,” Garman said. “I said to our people, this is an opportunity, a unique opportunity, for us to demonstrate love for our neighbor.”
Christians called to care for refugees, politics aside
Within five months, as the Afghans left the base for locations around the country, the support at the camp transitioned to the broader community. Pillar started hosting an English class. Church members visited locally resettled families and tried to keep track of their needs.
For one Pillar Church couple in nearby Stafford, Va., that meant opening their home to a teenager who had arrived alone in the U.S. after being separated from her family at the Kabul airport — a situation they heard about through the church.
Katlyn Williams and her husband Phil Williams, then an active-duty Marine, served as foster parents for Mahsa Zarabi, now 20, during her junior and senior years of high school. They introduced her to many American firsts: the beach, homecoming, learning to drive.
“The community was great,” Zarabi said. “They welcomed me very well.”
She attends college nearby; the Williamses visit her monthly. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this spring, they broke fast with her and her family, now safely in Virginia.
“She has and will always be part of our family,” Katlyn Williams said.
Her friend Joi Rogers, while careful not to speak for Pillar, said watching the recent dismantling of the federal refugee program has “been very hard for me personally.”
Veterans and members of the military tend to vote Republican. Most Southern Baptists are among Trump’s staunch white evangelical supporters. For those reasons, Pillar pastor Garman knows it may be surprising to some that his church network has been steadfast in supporting refugees.
“I totally understand that is the case, but I think that is a bias of just not knowing who we are and what we do,” Garman said after a recent Sunday service.
Later, sitting in the church office with his wife, Jake Rogers said, “We recognize that there are really faithful Christians that could lie on either side of the issue of refugee policy.”
“Regardless of your view on what our national stance should be on this,” he said, “we as Christ followers should have a heart for these people that reflects God’s heart for these people.”
Unity through faith and refugee work
Later that week, nearly two dozen Afghan women gathered around a table at the Fredericksburg refugee office, while children played with toys in the corner. The class topic was self-care, led by an Afghan staff member. Along the back wall waited dishes of rice and chicken, part of a celebratory potluck to mark the end of Ramadan.
Sitting at the front was Suraya Qaderi, the last client to arrive at the resettlement agency before the U.S. government suspended new arrivals.
She was in Qatar waiting to be cleared for a flight to the United States when the Trump administration started canceling approved travel plans for refugees. “I was one of the lucky last few,” said Qaderi, who was allowed to proceed.
She arrived in Virginia on Jan. 24, the day the administration sent stop-work orders to resettlement agencies.
Qaderi worked for the election commission in Afghanistan, and she received a special immigrant visa for her close ties to the U.S. government. She was a child when her father disappeared under the previous Taliban regime.
The return of the Taliban government was like “the end of the world,” she said. As a woman, she lost many of her rights, including her ability to work and leave home unaccompanied.
She studied Islamic law during her university years. She believes the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam is wrong on the rights of women. “Islam is not only for them,” she said.
The resettlement office includes not only Catholic staffers, but many Muslim employees and clients. “We find so much commonality between our faiths,” Renfroe said.
Her Catholic faith guides her work, and it’s sustaining her through the uncertainty of what the funding and policy changes will mean for her organization, which remains committed to helping refugees.
“I’m happy to go back to being a volunteer again if that’s what it takes,” Renfroe said.
Regardless of government contracts, she wants local refugee families to know “that we’re still here, that we care about them and that we want to make sure that they have what they need.”
NEW YORK — Charles Strouse, the three-time Tony Award winner and Broadway master melody-maker who composed the music for “Annie,” “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Applause,” died Thursday. He was 96.
Strouse died at his home in New York City, his family said.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Strouse wrote more than a dozen Broadway musicals, as well as film scores and “Those Were the Days,” the theme song for the sitcom “All in the Family.”
Strouse turned out such popular — and catchy — show tunes as “Tomorrow,” the optimistic anthem from “Annie,” and the equally cheerful “Put on a Happy Face” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” his first Broadway success.
“I work every day. Activity — it’s a life force,” the New York-born composer told the Associated Press during an interview on the eve of his 80th birthday in 2008. “When you enjoy doing what you’re doing, which I do very much, I have something to get up for.”
Deep into his 90s, he visited tours of his shows and met casts. Jenn Thompson, who appeared in the first “Annie” as Pepper and directed a touring version of “Annie” in 2024, recalls Strouse coming to auditions and shedding a tear when a young girl sang “Tomorrow.” She said: “He’s so gorgeously generous and kind. He has always been that way.”
His Broadway career began in 1960 with “Bye Bye Birdie,” which Strouse wrote with lyricist Lee Adams and librettist Michael Stewart. “Birdie,” which starred Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, told the tale of an Elvis Presley-like crooner named Conrad Birdie being drafted into the Army and its effect on one small Ohio town.
Strouse not only wrote the music, but he played piano at auditions while Edward Padula, the show’s neophyte producer, tried to attract financial backers for a production that would eventually cost $185,000.
“We never stopped giving auditions — and people never gave money at all. The idea of using rock ‘n’ roll — everybody was so turned off,” Strouse said.
Finally, Padula found Texas oilman L. Slade Brown. When he heard the score, he said, in a Texas twang, “I like those songs,” pushed Strouse aside and picked out the tune of “Put on a Happy Face” on the piano.
Brown then said, “How much do you fellas need?” and wrote out a check for $75,000 to cover the start of rehearsals. “Suddenly, the world turned Technicolor,” Strouse remembered.
The popularity of “Birdie” spawned a film (with Van Dyke, Janet Leigh and Ann-Margret) in 1963 and a television adaptation with Jason Alexander and Vanessa Williams in 1995.
Strouse and Adams gave several non-musical theater stars, including Sammy Davis Jr. and Lauren Bacall, stage successes for “Golden Boy” and “All About Eve,” respectively.
But it was “Annie” (1977) that proved to be Strouse’s most durable — and long-running — Broadway hit (over 2,300 performances). Chronicling the Depression-era adventures of the celebrated comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, the musical featured lyrics by Martin Charnin and a book by Thomas Meehan.
It starred Andrea McArdle as the red-haired moppet and Dorothy Loudon, who won a Tony for her riotous portrayal of mean Miss Hannigan, who ran the orphanage. The musical contained gems such as “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” and “It’s the Hard Knock Life.”
The 1982 film version, which featured Carol Burnett in Loudon’s role, was not nearly as popular or well-received. A stage sequel called “Annie Warbucks” ran off-Broadway in 1993. The show was revived on Broadway in 2012 and made into a film starring Quvenzhané Wallis in 2014. NBC put a version on network TV in 2021 called “Annie Live!”
Strouse and Charnin, who both won Grammy Awards for the “Annie” cast album, found shards of their work included in Jay-Z’s 1998 Grammy-winning album “Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life.”
“Tomorrow” has been heard on soundtracks from “Shrek 2″ to “Dave” to “You’ve Got Mail.” In 2016, Lukas Graham used parts of the chorus from “Annie” for his “Mama Said” hit.
Strouse had his share of flops, too, including two shows — “A Broadway Musical” (1978) and “Dance a Little Closer,” a 1983 musical written with Alan Jay Lerner, that closed after one performance. Among his other less-than-successful musicals were “All-American” (1962), starring Ray Bolger, “It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman” (1966), directed by Harold Prince, and “Bring Back Birdie” (1981), a sequel to “Bye Bye Birdie.”
Among Strouse’s film scores were the music for “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968).
Theater beckoned when he and Adams got a chance in the early 1950s to write songs for weekly revues at an Adirondacks summer camp called Green Mansions. Such camps were the training ground for dozens of performers and writers.
“I would write a song and I would orchestrate it and copy the parts,” he said in the AP interview. “And rehearsal was the next day at nine, so at four in the morning, I am crossing the lake with the parts still wet. I just loved it. I never was happier.”
His wife, Barbara, died in 2023. He is survived by four children, Ben, Nick, Victoria and William.
Chad Smith remembers the night in 2003 when the Red Hot Chili Peppers played for an audience of 80,000 or so amid the rolling hills of the Irish countryside.
After a somewhat fallow period in the mid-’90s, the veteran Los Angeles alt-rock band resurged with 1999’s eight-times-platinum “Californication” and its 2002 follow-up, “By the Way,” which spawned the chart-topping single “Can’t Stop.” To mark the moment, the Chili Peppers brought a crew to document their performance at Slane Castle, where they headlined a full day of music that also included sets by Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age, for an eventual concert movie.
“Everything’s filmed now, but back then it was a big shoot,” Smith, the band’s drummer, recently recalled. “You can get a little self-conscious. At the beginning, I f— something up — nothing nobody would know, but we would know — and Flea kind of looked at me,” he said of the Chili Peppers’ bassist. “We gave each other this ‘Oh s—’ look. We laughed it off, and I don’t think I thought about it after that because the crowd was so engaged. The energy was incredible.”
Twenty-two years later, the Chili Peppers are bringing that 2003 gig to screens again — only this time they’re string puppets.
“Can’t Stop” is director David Fincher’s re-creation of the band’s rendition of that tune at Slane Castle. Part of the just-released fourth season of the Emmy-winning Netflix anthology series “Love, Death + Robots,” the animated short film depicts the Chili Peppers — Smith, Flea, singer Anthony Kiedis and guitarist John Frusciante — as dangling marionettes onstage before a veritable sea of the same. As the band rides the song’s slinky punk-funk groove, we see Flea bust out some of his signature moves and Kiedis swipe a fan’s cellphone for a selfie; at one point, a group of women in the crowd even flash their breasts at the frontman.
The puppets aren’t real — the entire six-minute episode was computer-generated. But the way they move looks astoundingly lifelike, not least when one fan’s lighter accidentally sets another fan’s wires on fire.
So why did Fincher, the A-list filmmaker behind “Fight Club” and “The Social Network,” put his considerable resources to work to make “Can’t Stop”?
“A perfectly reasonable inquiry,” the director, who executive produces “Love, Death + Robots,” said with a laugh. “First and foremost, I’ll say I’ve always wanted a Flea bobblehead — it started with that. But really, you know, sometimes there’s just stuff you want to see.”
Why did David Fincher turn the Chili Peppers into puppets? “First and foremost, I’ll say I’ve always wanted a Flea bobblehead — it started with that. But really, you know, sometimes there’s just stuff you want to see.”
(Netflix)
Fincher, 62, grew up loving Gerry Anderson’s “Thunderbirds” series featuring his so-called Supermarionation style of puppetry enhanced by electronics. But the Chili Peppers project also represents a return to Fincher’s roots in music video: Before he made his feature debut with 1992’s “Alien 3,” he directed era-defining clips including Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and “Vogue” and George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90.” (Fincher’s last big music video gig was Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” in 2013.) In addition to “Thunderbirds,” he wanted “Can’t Stop” to evoke the ’80s work of early MTV auteurs like Wayne Isham and Russell Mulcahy — “that throw 24 cameras at Duran Duran aesthetic,” as he put it.
Fincher said he knew his puppet concept would require “a band you can identify just from their movement,” which seems like a fair way to describe the Chili Peppers. He recalled first encountering the band around 1983 — “I think it was with Martha Davis at the Palladium?” he said — and was struck by a sense of mischief that reminded him of the “elfin villains” from the old Rankin/Bass TV specials.
“I feel like Finch got the spirit of me,” said Flea, 62, who’s known the director socially for years. The bassist remembered discussing “Can’t Stop” with Fincher at a mutual friend’s house before they shot it: “I was talking about how I still jump around onstage and my body still works really good. But I used to dive and do a somersault while I was playing bass — like dive onto my head. And now I’m scared to do it.” He laughed. “Some old man thing had happened where I’m scared to dive onto my face now. Finch went, ‘Well, Puppet Flea can do it.’”
Sketches of Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and bassist Flea as puppets in Vol. 4 of Netflix’s “Love, Death + Robots.”(Netflix)
After doing a day of motion capture with the band at a studio in the Valley, Fincher and a crew of animators from Culver City’s Blur Studio spent about 13 months working on “Can’t Stop.” Fincher said the hard part was giving the marionettes a feeling of suspension.
“With the mo cap, you’re capturing the action of a character who has self-determination,” he said, referring to a human Chili Pepper, “then you’re applying that to an object that has no self-determination,” meaning a puppet controlled by an unseen handler. “It’s so much trickier than it looks. But that was kind of the fun, you know? I mean, not for me,” he added with a laugh.
Asked if the production involved any use of AI, Fincher said it didn’t. “It’s Blur — it’s a point of pride for them,” he said. But he also shrugged off the idea that that question has become a kind of purity test for filmmakers.
A digital rendering of the Chili Peppers as puppets.
(Netflix)
“For the next couple of months, maybe it’ll be an interesting sort of gotcha,” he said. “But I can’t imagine 10 years from now that people will have the same [view]. Nonlinear editing changed the world for about six weeks, and then we all took it for granted.
“I don’t look at it as necessarily cheating at this point,” he continued. “I think there are a lot of things that AI can do — matte edges and roto work and that kind of stuff. I don’t think that’s going to fundamentally ruin what is intimate and personal about filmmaking, which is that we’re playing dress-up and hoping not to be caught out.”
As he reportedly works on an English-language version of “Squid Game” and a sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” did making “Can’t Stop” lead Fincher to ponder the state of the music video now that MTV is no longer in the business of showcasing the form?
“Well, the audience that MTV aggregated — in retrospect, that was time and a place,” he said. “Remember, the Beatles were making music videos — they just called it ‘Help!’ There was no invention at all on MTV’s part.
“What I do miss about that — and I don’t think we’ll ever see it again — was that I was 22 years old and I would sketch on a napkin: This is kind of the idea of what we want to do. And four days later, $125,000 would be sent to the company that you were working with and you’d go off and make a video. You’d shoot the thing in a week, and then it would be on the air three weeks after that.
“You make a television commercial now and there’s quite literally 19 people in folding chairs, all with their own 100-inch monitor in the back. The world has changed.” He laughed.
“I started my professional career asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and it’s been very difficult to go the other direction.”
A key committee of the Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to cut the number of employees targeted for layoff by Mayor Karen Bass by more than half, bringing the total down to an estimated 650.
The council’s budget committee took steps to save more than 1,000 jobs by pursuing an array of cost-cutting measures, such as hiring fewer police officers and scaling back funding for Bass’ Inside Safe program, which moves homeless people into temporary or permanent housing.
Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the committee, said those and many other moves would help the city protect core services, including tree trimming, street resurfacing, street light repair and sanitation teams that address illegal dumping.
“We looked for ways to save positions — not for the sake of job counts only, but to make sure the departments can still do the work our constituents need them to do for their quality of life,” said Yaroslavsky, who represents part of the Westside.
The committee’s recommendations for the proposed 2025-26 budget now head to the full council, which is scheduled to take them up on Thursday.
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who sits on the committee, expressed some optimism after the vote.
“We were in very rough waters, and a very different landscape, when we started this process,” said Hernandez, who represents part of the Eastside. “And now there seems to be some light between the clouds.”
As part of Friday’s deliberations, the budget committee voted to recommend a slowdown in sworn hiring at the LAPD, which would leave the agency with 8,400 officers by June 30, 2026. That represents a reduction of about 300 from the current fiscal year and 1,600 compared with 2020.
The budget committee also agreed to eliminate 42 emergency incident technicians at the fire department, a move opposed by interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, while also canceling Bass’ plan for a new homelessness unit within that agency.
In addition, the five-member panel recommended a hike in parking meter fees, which is expected to generate $14 million in the upcoming fiscal year.
Yaroslavsky said the changes endorsed by the budget committee on Friday would save about 150 civilian workers in the police department.
Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso, who advises the council, said she believes that city officials will keep finding ways to reduce the number of layoffs, by transferring workers to vacant city positions or to agencies that are unaffected by the budget crisis, such as Los Angeles World Airports and the Port of Los Angeles.
“I think we’re going to be able to truly get that number down to less than 500,” she told the committee.
Bass, faced with a nearly $1-billion shortfall, released a proposed budget last month that called for the layoff of about 1,600 employees, a fourth of them civilian workers at the LAPD. Some of the largest reductions were planned at agencies that handle sanitation, street repairs and maintenance of city facilities.
Friday’s deliberations set the stage for many positions to remain intact, particularly at the Department of City Planning, which had been facing 115 layoffs. Kevin Keller, executive officer with that agency, said the committee found the funding to restore more than 100 of those positions.
“I know there’s a lot of city workers that are breathing a big sigh of relief tonight,” said Roy Samaan, president of the Engineers and Architects Assn., whose union represents planning department employees.
L.A.’s budget crisis has been attributed to a number of factors, including rapidly rising legal payouts, lower-than-expected tax revenue and a package of raises for the city workforce that is expected to add $250 million to the upcoming budget, which goes into effect on July 1.
Bass and the council have been hoping to persuade city labor unions to provide financial concessions that would help avoid more cuts. So far, no deals have been struck.
On Friday, before the committee began its deliberations, Bass said she is optimistic about avoiding layoffs entirely. At the same time, she spoke against a budget strategy that pits the hiring of police officers against the preservation of other jobs, calling it “a Sophie’s Choice.”
If the LAPD slows down hiring, it will have fewer officers in the run-up to next year’s hosting of the World Cup, she said.
“I’m not going accept that as my choice,” she said.
During the final minutes of Friday’s five-hour meeting, council members made some last-minute restorations, identifying additional funds for youth programs, tree trimming and fire department mechanics. Hernandez pushed for the committee to restore $1 million for Represent LA, which provides legal defense of immigrants facing deportation or other enforcement actions, and $500,000 for graffiti paint-out crews.
Hernandez said the city needs to stand by immigrants amid a harsh federal crackdown. And she described graffiti removal as crucial for public safety in her district.
“Getting graffiti down quickly prevents a lot more people from getting shot, prevents them from getting killed,” she said.
Had Clayton Kershaw been healthy, he likely would have been part of the Dodgers’ postseason rotation. He would have given them badly needed innings during their run to a World Series championship. And, in Year 17 of his future Hall of Fame career, he could have ridden off into the sunset, having little else to prove after playing an integral role on two championship teams.
“Yeah, if I was able to be a part of last year’s run and win a World Series and get to go out like that, that would have been really cool,” Kershaw said recently, contemplating what might have been if only he was available to pitch last October. “But I wasn’t. And it was still really fun to be part of. But it made it easier to want to come back, for sure.”
Back again, Kershaw is set to make his season debut for the Dodgers on Saturday after spending the first two months of the campaign recovering from offseason surgeries to address toe and knee injuries that sidelined him for the team’s title-winning trek through the playoffs last year.
Unlike previous offseasons, when the now 37-year-old Kershaw seemed to give retirement more serious thought, the three-time Cy Young Award winner made his mind up quickly last fall. Even before the Dodgers won their second championship in the last five years, he knew he wanted to pitch in 2025. After making just seven starts in 2024 with a 4.50 ERA, and missing the stretch run of the season when his long bothersome toe injury finally became too much, he didn’t want his career to end with him as a spectator, able only to cheer from the dugout as the Dodgers went on to win the World Series without him.
“For me, just getting back out on the mound is a big first step,” Kershaw said, ahead of what will be his first big-league outing since Aug. 30 of last year. “And then it’s the rest of the season, obviously. But just making it through Saturday and getting back out there is what I’ve thought about so far.”
To get to this point, the 18-year veteran had to endure a grueling offseason.
Days after the Dodgers’ World Series parade, Kershaw had two surgical operations: One on his left knee, where he had suffered a torn meniscus; and another on his left foot to address arthritis, a bone spur on his big toe and, most seriously, a ruptured plantar plate.
“If someone asked me, ‘What all did they do to your foot?’ I don’t know if I can answer all the way, but I know it’s not been fun,” Kershaw said, underscoring the complicated nature of a foot surgery, in particular, that he noted “only one or two baseball players” have had before.
“This one was painful,” he added, contrasting it to the relatively straightforward shoulder procedure he had the previous offseason. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is what people talk about when they talk about bad surgeries.’”
The worst part was the recovery, with Kershaw spending the better part of the next two months on crutches or in a walking boot.
“Trying to be on crutches and have four kids, it’s not easy,” he said. “Your offseason is supposed to be like, where you’re around and get to help more. And those first six weeks, I wasn’t much help. So it’s kind of a helpless feeling. And I don’t sit still well in general. So it was a hard process.”
Still, Kershaw’s commitment to come back never wavered. He was into a throwing program by the start of spring training. He began a minor-league rehab stint in the middle of April. And he posted a 2.57 ERA in five rehab starts, feeling he’d “turned the corner” with his foot over the last couple outings.
“Those last few rehab starts, I was more concerned about throwing well and getting guys out than I was [about] how my foot felt or anything like that,” he said. “So I think that was a good sign for me physically. And now, it’s just a process of figuring out how to get guys out consistently again and perform. That’s a much better place to be than seeing if you’re hurt.”
Exactly how Kershaw will fare back in the big leagues is an unknown. During his rehab stint, his fastball sat in the upper-80 mph range, a few ticks down from the already diminished velocity he’d had in recent seasons. He struck out only 16 batters in 21 innings, relying more on command and an ability to induce soft contact to navigate his way through starts.
On the other hand, Kershaw’s arm is as healthy as it’s been in years, now 17 months removed from his 2023 shoulder surgery. Even without eye-popping stuff last year, he proved to be competitive, owning a 3.72 ERA before leaving his Aug. 30 start early when his toe flared up. And simply having him back in the rotation will come as a boon for the Dodgers, who have been shorthanded recently with fellow starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki all nursing shoulder injuries.
“It’s a big shot in the arm,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Clayton has worked really hard to get healthy, and the bar is high for him, you know. He doesn’t want to just come back to be active. He wants to come back and help us win baseball games and be good. And so I know he’s excited to contribute.”
In a break from his typically stoic facade, that excitement was evident from Kershaw all week. Except when reflecting upon the departure of teammate and close friend Austin Barnes, Kershaw was smiling almost everywhere he went around the ballpark in recent days. “Is that unusual?” he deadpanned when a reporter noted the observation Thursday. He also downplayed his pursuit of 3,000 career strikeouts — he is just 32 Ks away from becoming the 20th member of the illustrious statistical club — in favor of amplifying the gratitude he felt about simply pitching in the majors once again.
“I think when you haven’t done something for a long time, and you realize that you miss it — you miss competing, you miss being a part of the team and contributing — there’s a lot of gratitude and gratefulness to get back to that point,” Kershaw said. “I definitely feel that. Now, if I go out there and don’t pitch good, it’s gonna go away real fast. So there’s a performance aspect of it, too. But I think for now, sitting on the other side of it, just super excited and grateful to get to go back out there again.”
When asked if he ever planned on hanging it up, Kershaw then laughed.
“Somebody will tell me to retire at some point, I’m sure,” he said.
But, after finishing last season injured and grinding through a long rehab this winter, that point is not now, not yet.
Eighteen years later, Kershaw still feels he has more to give.
“At the end of the day, you just want to be a contributing factor to the Dodgers,” he said. “You don’t want to just be on the sidelines. So I’m excited to get back to that.”
WASHINGTON — A humanities federation and a state council have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to reverse local funding cuts made by Trump advisor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Oregon Council for the Humanities, names DOGE, its acting administrator, Amy Gleason, and the NEH among the defendants.
The plaintiffs ask the court to “stop this imminent threat to our nation’s historic and critical support of the humanities by restoring funding appropriated by Congress.” It notes the “disruption and attempted destruction, spearheaded by DOGE,” of a partnership between the state and the federal government to support the humanities.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, maintains that DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities exceeded their authority in terminating funding mandated by Congress.
DOGE shut down the funding and laid off more than 80% of the staff at the NEH in April as part of an executive order signed by President Trump.
The humanities is just one of many areas that have been affected as Trump’s Republican administration has targeted cultural establishments including the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts. The moves are part of Trump’s goals to downsize the federal government and end initiatives seen as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which he calls “discrimination.”
The humanities groups’ lawsuit said DOGE brought the core work of the humanities councils “to a screeching halt” this spring when it terminated its grant program.
The filing is the most recent lawsuit filed by humanities groups and historical, research and library associations to try to stop funding cuts and the dissolution of federal agencies and organizations.
The funding freeze for the humanities comes when state councils and libraries have been preparing programming for the summer and beginning preparations for celebrations meant to commemorate next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Requests for comment Friday from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the White House were not immediately returned.
