people

WASHINGTON — Maria Eugenia Torres Ramirez was having dinner with her family in Los Angeles on Friday night when the flood of messages began. Word had begun to circulate that the U.S. was invading Venezuela and would seize its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Torres Ramirez, 38, fled her native country in 2021, settled in L.A. and has a pending application for asylum. Her family is scattered throughout the world — Colombia, Chile and France. Since her parents died, none of her loved ones remain in Venezuela.

Still, news that the autocrat who separated them had been captured delivered a sense of long-awaited elation and united the siblings and cousins across continents for a rare four-hour phone call as the night unfolded.

“I waited for this moment for so long from within Venezuela, and now that I’m out, it’s like watching a movie,” said Torres Ramirez, a former political activist who opposed Maduro. “It’s like a jolt of relief.”

Many Venezuelans across the U.S. celebrated the military action that resulted in Maduro’s arrest. Economic collapse and political repression led roughly 8 million Venezuelans to emigrate since 2014, making it one of the world’s largest displacement crises.

About 770,000 live in the U.S. as of 2023, concentrated mainly in the regions of Miami, Orlando, Houston and New York. Just over 9,500 live in L.A., according to a 2024 U.S. Census estimate.

In the South Florida city of Doral, home to the largest Venezuelan American community, residents poured into the streets Saturday morning, carrying the Venezuelan flag, singing together and praising the military action as an act of freedom.

In Los Angeles, a different picture emerged as groups opposed to Maduro’s arrest took to the streets, though none identified themselves as being of Venezuelan descent. At a rally of about 40 people south of downtown Los Angeles, John Parker, a representative of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, called the raid a “brutal assault and kidnapping” that amounted to a war crime.

The United States’ intervention in Venezuela had nothing to do with stopping the flow of drugs, he said, and everything to do with undermining a legitimate socialist government. Parker called for Maduro to be set free as a few dozen protesters behind him chanted, “Hands off Venezuela.”

Parker said when he visited Venezuela a few weeks ago as part of a U.S. peacemaking delegation, he saw “the love people had for Maduro.”

A later demonstration in Pershing Square drew hundreds out in the rain to protest the U.S intervention. But when a speaker led chants of “No war in Venezuela,” a woman draped in a Venezuelan flag attempted to approach him and speak into the microphone. A phalanx of demonstrators circled her and shuttled her away.

At Mi Venezuela, a restaurant in Vernon, 16-year-old Paola Moleiro and her family ordered empanadas Saturday morning.

A portion of one of the restaurant’s walls was covered in Venezuelan bank notes scrawled with messages. One read: “3 de enero del 2026. Venezuela quedo libre.”

Venezuela is free.

Around midnight the night before, Paola started getting messages on WhatsApp from her relatives in Venezuela. The power was out, they said, and they forwarded videos of what sounded like bomb blasts.

Paola was terrified. She’d left Venezuela at age 7 with her parents and siblings, first for Panama and later the U.S., in 2023. But the rest of her family remained in Venezuela, and she had no idea what was going on.

Paola and her family stayed up scanning television channels for some idea of what was happening. Around 1:30 a.m., President Trump announced that U.S. forces had captured Maduro.

“The first thing I did, I called my aunt and said, ‘We are going to see each other again,’” she said.

Because of the Venezuelan state’s control over media, her relatives had no idea their leader had been seized by U.S. forces. “Are you telling me the truth?” Paola said her aunt asked.

Paola hasn’t been home in nine years. She misses her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking, especially her caraotas negras, or black beans. As a child, she said, certain foods were so scarce that she had an apple for the first time only after moving to Panama.

Paola said she was grateful to Trump for ending decades of authoritarian rule that had reduced her home country to a shell of what it once was.

“Venezuela has always prayed for this,” she said. “It’s been 30 years. I feel it was in God’s hands last night.”

For Torres Ramirez, it was difficult to square her appreciation for Trump’s accomplishment in Venezuela with the fear she has felt as an immigrant under his presidency.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” she said. “Throughout the course of this whole year, I have felt persecuted. I had to face ICE — I had to go to my appointment with the fear that I could lose it all because the immigration policies had changed and there was complete uncertainty. For a moment, I felt as if I was in Venezuela. I felt persecuted right here.”

During a news conference Saturday morning, Trump said Maduro was responsible for trafficking illicit drugs into the U.S. and the deaths of thousands of Americans. He repeated a baseless claim that the Maduro government had emptied Venezuela’s prisons and mental institutions and “sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives.”

“They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer, and we have now a border where nobody gets through,” he said.

Trump also announced that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.

“We’ll run it professionally,” he said. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world go in and invest billions and billions of dollars and take that money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela.”

Torres Ramirez said that while she’s happy about Maduro’s ouster, she’s unsure how to feel about Trump’s announcement saying the U.S. will take over Venezuela’s oil industry. Perhaps it won’t be favorable in the long term for Venezuela’s economy, she said, but the U.S. intervention is a win for the country’s political future if it means people can return home.

Patricia Andrade, 63, who runs Raíces Venezolanas, a volunteer program in Miami that distributes donations to Venezuelan immigrants, said she believes the Trump administration is making the right move by remaining involved until there is a transition of power.

Andrade, a longtime U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t been to Venezuela in 25 years — even missing the deaths of both parents. She said she was accused of treason for denouncing the imprisonment of political opponents and the degradation of Venezuela’s democracy under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. She said she worries that Venezuela’s remaining political prisoners could be killed as payback for Maduro’s arrest.

“We tried everything — elections, marches, more elections … and it couldn’t be done,” she said. “Maduro was getting worse and worse, there was more repression. If they hadn’t removed him, we were never going to recover Venezuela.”

While she doesn’t want the U.S. to fix the problems of other countries, she thanked Trump for U.S. involvement in Venezuela.

She said she can’t wait to visit her remaining family members there.

CARACAS, Venezuela — It was about 2 a.m. Saturday Caracas time when the detonations began, lighting up the sullen sky like a post-New Year’s fireworks display.

“¡Ya comenzó!” was the recurrent phrase in homes, telephone conversations and social media chats as the latest iteration of U.S. “shock and awe” rocked the Venezuelan capital. “It has begun!”

Then the question: “¿Maduro?”

The great uncertainty was the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro, who has been under Trump administration threat for months.

The scenes of revelry from a joyous Venezuelan diaspora celebrating from Miami to Madrid were not repeated here. Fear of the unknown kept most at home.

Hours would pass before news reports from outside Venezuela confirmed that U.S. forces had captured Maduro and placed him on a U.S. ship to face criminal charges in federal court in New York.

Venezuelans had watched the unfolding spectacle from their homes, using social media to exchange images of explosions and the sounds of bombardment. This moment, it was clear, was ushering in a new era of uncertainly for Venezuela, a nation reeling from a decade of economic, political and social unrest.

Government supporters display posters of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, right, and former President Hugo Chávez in downtown Caracas on Saturday.

(Matias Delacroix / Associated Press)

The ultimate result was an imponderable. But that this was a transformative moment — for good or bad — seemed indisputable.

By daybreak, an uneasy calm overtook the city of more than 3 million. The explosions and the drone of U.S. aircraft ceased. Blackouts cut electricity to parts of the capital.

Pro-government youths wielding automatic rifles set up roadblocks or sped through the streets on motorcycles, a warning to those who might celebrate Maduro’s downfall.

Shops, gas stations and other businesses were mostly closed. There was little traffic.

“When I heard the explosions, I grabbed my rosary and began to pray,” said Carolina Méndez, 50, who was among the few who ventured out Saturday, seeking medicines at a pharmacy, though no personnel had arrived to attend to clients waiting on line. “I’m very scared now. That’s why I came to buy what I need.”

A sense of alarm was ubiquitous.

“People are buying bottled water, milk and eggs,” said Luz Pérez, a guard at one of the few open shops, not far from La Carlota airport, one of the sites targeted by U.S. strikes. “I heard the explosions. It was very scary. But the owner decided to open anyway to help people.”

Customers were being allowed to enter three at a time. Most didn’t want to speak. Their priority was to stock up on basics and get home safely.

Rumors circulated rapidly that U.S. forces had whisked away Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

There was no immediate official confirmation here of the detention of Maduro and Flores, both wanted in the United States for drug-trafficking charges — allegations that Maduro has denounced as U.S. propaganda. But then images of an apparently captive Maduro, blindfolded, in a sweatsuit soon circulated on social media.

There was no official estimate of Venezuelan casualties in the U.S. raid.

Rumors circulated indicating that a number of top Maduro aides had been killed, among them Diosdado Cabello, the security minister who is a staunch Maduro ally. Cabello is often the face of the government.

But Cabello soon appeared on official TV denouncing “the terrorist attack against our people,” adding: “Let no one facilitate the moves of the enemy invader.”

Although Trump, in his Saturday news conference, confidently predicted that the United States would “run” Venezuela, apparently during some undefined transitional period, it’s not clear how that will be accomplished.

A key question is whether the military — long a Maduro ally — will remain loyal now that he is in U.S. custody. There was no public indication Saturday of mass defections from the Venezuelan armed forces. Nor was it clear that Maduro’s government infrastructure had lost control of the country. Official media reported declarations of loyalty from pro-government politicians and citizens from throughout Venezuela.

In his comments, Trump spoke of a limited U.S. troop presence in Venezuela, focused mostly on protecting the oil infrastructure that his administration says was stolen from the United States — a characterization widely rejected here, even among Maduro’s critics. But Trump offered few details on sending in U.S. personnel to facilitate what could be a tumultuous transition.

Meantime, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez surfaced on official television and demanded the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, according to the official Telesur broadcast outlet. Her comments seemed to be the first official acknowledgment that Maduro had been taken.

“There is one president of this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro,” the vice president said in an address from Miraflores Palace, from where Maduro and his wife had been seized hours earlier.

During an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council, Telesur reported, Rodríguez labeled the couple’s detention an “illegal kidnapping.”

The Trump administration, the vice president charged, meant to “capture our energy, mineral and [other] natural resources.”

Her defiant words came after Trump, in his news conference, said that Rodríguez had been sworn in as the country’s interim president and had evinced a willingness to cooperate with Washington.

“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.

Pro-government armed civilians patrol in La Guaira, Venezuela, on Saturday after President Trump announced that President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country.

(Matias Delacroix / Associated Press)

Somewhat surprisingly, Trump also seemed to rule out a role in an interim government for Marina Corina Machado, the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize laureate and longtime anti-Maduro activist.

“She’s a very nice woman, but doesn’t have respect within the country,” Trump said of Machado.

Machado is indeed a controversial figure within the fractured Venezuelan opposition. Some object to her open calls for U.S. intervention, preferring a democratic change in government.

Nonetheless, her stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, did win the presidency in national balloting last year, according to opposition activists and others, who say Maduro stole the election.

“Venezuelans, the moment of liberty has arrived!” Machado wrote in a letter released on X. “We have fought for years. … What was meant to happen is happening.”

Not everyone agreed.

“They want our oil and they say it’s theirs,” said Roberto, 65, a taxi driver who declined to give his last name for security reasons. “Venezuelans don’t agree. Yes, I think people will go out and defend their homeland.”

Special correspondent Mogollón reported from Caracas and staff writer McDonnell from Boston. Contributing was special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City.

The tiny Greek island is offering incentives to families and skilled workers to relocate there, including free food, accommodation, and a monthly stipend.

Ever fancied packing up and moving to a picturesque Greek island, complete with whitewashed buildings, a charming harbour, and shimmering turquoise waters?

It might seem like a pipe dream, but thanks to an initiative from the tiny island of Antikythera, it could become your reality.

Nestled in the Aegean Sea between Crete and the Peloponnese, this stunning island is rolling out the welcome mat for families and skilled workers, offering free grub, digs, and a monthly allowance.

In a bid to boost its dwindling population, Greece is dishing out €500 per month to newcomers on Antikythera for three years after they settle in.

That’s a tidy sum of €18,000 in total, or roughly £15,000. The island offers a tranquil, rural lifestyle, complete with breathtaking beaches and the balmy Greek climates.

“Antikythera has only 45 permanent residents as of now, so it’s a tranquil and close-knit community,” shares Wayne Mills, Head of Operations at Seven Seas Worldwide, an international shipping firm.

“They’re especially keen to attract young families to revitalize the island and bring back youthful energy, so you’ll no doubt be extremely popular as soon as you arrive!”

In response to falling populations and brain drains, numerous countries are laying out the welcome mat to lure new inhabitants to specific regions. Most of Antikythera’s residents are over 50, and children are few and far between.

According to Elxis, a Greek real estate and legal services provider, the scheme has been organised by the Greek Orthodox Church of Kythera, which also covers Antikythera, to attract bakers, fishermen, and families with children.

Aimed at a total of five families, applicants will be interviewed before receiving the financial incentive to relocate to Antikythera.

Andrea Harhalakis, the president of Antikythira, told Iefimerida.gr that “we need young families, large enough to make Antikythira alive and full of children’s voices.”

However, there is a catch. Whilst families wishing to relocate to the island will have their choice of a new house, the properties have not yet been constructed due to delays in paperwork.

As a result, Antikythira has not yet welcomed any families through this programme. For updates on construction progress, interested parties are advised to contact Kythira’s Tourism Department.

The island, covering a mere 7.89 square miles, can be reached by ferry from the nearby island of Kythira or from Kissamos port in Crete.

Antikythera, with its sparse population and secluded setting, offers an authentic taste of traditional Greek island life.

During the winter months, there’s only one small shop selling basic foodstuffs and vegetables. However, the island is equipped with electricity and internet access.

Antikythera is renowned for the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek analogue computer dating back to approximately 150-100 BCE.

This contraption was utilised to forecast astronomical positions, eclipses, and potentially other celestial events.

Unearthed in 1901 from a shipwreck off the island’s coast, it’s hailed as one of antiquity’s most significant technological relics.

The Antikythera shipwreck (around 70-60 BCE) ranks among the richest ancient wrecks ever discovered, brimming with artefacts such as statues, coins, and luxury items.

The island is also acclaimed for its raw beauty and wildlife. Antikythera serves as a crucial pit stop for migratory birds journeying between Europe and Africa, making it a birdwatcher’s paradise.

Anthony Joshua’s driver has been charged after a crash in Nigeria injured the boxer and killed two of his team members, police have said.

Adeniyi Mobolaji Kayode, 46, was charged at the Sagamu Magistrate Court on Friday. Police sources told the BBC the charges included causing death by dangerous driving.

Joshua’s personal trainer, Latif Ayodele, and strength coach, Sina Ghami, died on Monday after the vehicle they were travelling in crashed into a stationary truck on a highway in Ogun State, near Lagos.

The former heavyweight champion was taken to hospital with injuries after the crash and was discharged on Wednesday.

Prosecutors brought four charges against Mr Kayode – causing death by dangerous driving, reckless and negligent driving, driving without due care, and driving without a valid driver’s licence, a police source told the BBC.

The case has been adjourned until 20 January.

Pete Holmes understands the art of conversation — especially the way to get people to open up about their secret weird tendencies.

It’s what helped Holmes, known for his youth pastor aesthetic and wholesome jokes, build his more than 20-year-long comedy career (his next show is Jan. 21 at Largo at the Coronet) and create his semi-autographical HBO series “Crashing.”

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.

In 2011, Holmes launched “You Made It Weird,” an interview-style podcast that delves into topics like the meaning of life, mental health, art and everything everything in between. More than 1,000 episodes later, he is celebrating the 14th anniversary of the show and has recently signed with podcast network Lemonada Media (which is also home to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ “Wiser Than Me,” “The Sarah Silverman Podcast” and “Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know”).

“I’ve never for a second considered stopping, which is a good sign that you’re doing something you’re supposed to do,” says Holmes, whose guests have included John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph, Anna Kendrick, Kenan Thompson and Henry Winkler. Once a week, Holmes co-hosts the show with his wife of eight years, Valerie Chaney.

His nervous system also assures him that he’s found the right project. While Holmes says he feels “tense” before his stand-up sets, there’s a sense of comfort in sitting face to face with someone and simply having a conversation. “When I’m doing my podcast, especially in person, there’s very, very little tension,” he says. “It’s the thing in show business, I’ve found, that winds me up in a bad way the least.”

Here’s how Holmes would spend an ideal Sunday in L.A. with Chaney and their 7-year-old daughter, Lila.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

8 a.m.: Visit a coffee shop with a sense of humor

My daughter and I are both morning people, which really works out because her mom is not a morning person. So we get up early and we’ll color, make breakfast, that sort of stuff. But if we were all getting up together — which is what my wife would want to do even though she doesn’t like it — we would go to Bru in Los Feliz. I love recommending Bru to people because it’s in an “I Think You Should Leave” sketch. Tim Robinson is leaving a job interview and he’s pulling the door, but it’s one that you have to push, and he doesn’t want to look stupid so he keeps pulling it. They actually have a little plaque up that says something cool about it without being too obvious. I like drinking espresso by itself, Val likes oat milk lattes and Lila would get a steamed milk because she wants to feel like a grown-up. It’s very cute.

10 a.m.: Read at least seven children’s books at Skylight

Afterward, we’d go to Skylight Books, which is nearby. I can tell you from experience, they’re incredibly generous with allowing you to read your kids seven books without any trouble. On principle, I’ll buy at least one of the books on our way out, because that’s exactly what people are talking about when they’re like, “Shop local.”

11 a.m.: Drink a terrible dark green juice

Then we’ll walk to the Punchbowl and I’m gonna get a terrible dark green juice that nobody wants and would make a goat go blind. I love it because I’m 46 and now I eat almost exclusively for how it’s going to make me feel. So it’s very uncool but that’s what I’m doing. My wife and daughter are going to get a smoothie called the honeybee, which is very sweet and delicious.

Noon: A pancake for the table at Kitchen Mouse

We would go to Kitchen Mouse in Highland Park. It’s really hip. The last time I was there, I ran into Phoebe Bridgers. Literally rock stars are at Kitchen Mouse and there’s a little kids area where my daughter can play with like a fake hamburger and a child she just met. I get the same thing every time: the breakfast sandwich and a snickerdoodle pancake for the table. If you and I went to breakfast together, I would never ask, “Do you want a pancake for the table?” because I don’t need you to be my accomplice. I know you want a pancake for the table because guess who wants pancakes? Everyone. This is going to reverse the juice that I had earlier, but it’s going to be worth it.

2 p.m. Enjoy an Angry Samoa donut at the park

We have friends who live in Highland Park, so we’d visit them and we’d all take a walk to Donut Friend, and eat the donuts at the little park nearby. The park has giant bugs and a tube slide. When you’re 46 and have kids, sitting down is your heroin. Not to keep mentioning veganism, but Donut Friend has really good vegan donuts. You gotta get the Angry Samoa, which is a Girl Scout cookie.

I once went to Donut Friend while I was tripping on LSD and it was the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. I think it might’ve been my birthday and I was coming down. I’m not a crazy person. I just couldn’t believe that there was another person standing there with all of the donuts in the world. It felt so overwhelmingly loving that they were like “Which donut can I give you?” I was just floored by the generosity. I was probably making an a— of my myself like laughing in that sort of hippie way. Not like a drunk way but like a benevolent alien who couldn’t believe that this planet had donuts. They gave me one and I wish I could’ve seen myself eating it. My wife was there. She doesn’t do psychedelics, so she was just watching me, sort of babysitting me, to be honest. While I’m eating the donut, she was just laughing so hard at just how happy I was. I wouldn’t do that on a normal Sunday. That’s a rare thing for me, but that’s a true Donut Friend story.

4 p.m.: Feel fancy at the Huntington

The greatest hack of parenting is the Huntington. Speaking of Phoebe Bridgers, she mentions in her track “Garden Song,” jumping over the fence [at the Huntington], which I always think is a cute detail. I think they filmed “Beverly Hills Ninja” at the Japanese Gardens there. One of my favorite L.A. things to do is the white glove tea service. It’s not that expensive and you just feel fancy. We’ll also stop at the Chinese [garden] and get noodles there because every step of the way there’s just constant eating.

7 p.m.: Vegan food done right

If it were just Valerie and I, I would want to go to Crossroads [Kitchen]. I love it to death. When the pandemic happened, they would text us and ask if we were OK and if we needed food. We were like “What do you got?” and the manager brought it over. If anyone’s wondering if that’s like a famous thing, I really don’t think so. I really just think they’re really about serving the community because I’m not famous like that [laughs]. We’ve been there enough, we’ve had enough conversations and it’s a real staple for us.

It’s a vegan restaurant and I’ve had meat-eating friends say that their carbonara is their favorite. It’s not like one of those vegan places that’s trying to trick you or deep-fry their way around things. They’re just actually making you eat really delicious things that just happen to be like artichokes. I’ve had so many birthdays there and you can tell this is where people who are looking for the best food in L.A. are going.

9 p.m.: Catch whatever is playing at Largo

My favorite thing that I get to do once a month is Largo at the Coronet. I literally once had a dream about a magical venue that feels safe and the crowd is always good and you just felt warm. Like if twinkle lights became a venue. That’s Largo. It’s the only place where if somebody’s visiting L.A., I would say just go to Largo. It doesn’t matter who’s performing. One night it might be me, the next night it might be Chris Fleming, and then it might be Sarah Silverman. Then it might be improvised Shakespeare, and then it might be a live podcast. It doesn’t matter. If Flanny [Mark Flanagan] booked it, it’s exceptional. He’s from Belfast and he’s sort of mythic.

11 p.m.: Eat at Norms

Norms is literally one block away from Largo, and if Val and I were really having a kid-free night, she, Flanny, and I would go there to eat our celebration. Judd Apatow does the show a lot and he loves food, so he’d be there too. You get a milkshake or you get some fries, but it’s open for 24 hours. I think L.A. gets a bad rep for not having diners. Granted in New York, they’re everywhere.

Midnight: Enjoy “blue couch time”

It doesn’t matter what time it is when we get home, we have to watch at least one episode of something. “30 Rock” or right now we’re watching “Black Rabbit,” but that’s not a good wind down show. Our couch is blue so we call it “blue couch time” and it’s a ritual we just don’t miss. It doesn’t even matter what we’re watching. We just want to be on that couch, even if it’s just for 12 minutes. I can’t go from the car to the bed. I want to go from the car to something else, then to bed. That’s why houses have entryways or a mud room. There’s supposed to be a threshold that you cross over, take off your coat and your shoes. You’re entering a new space. For us, it’s the blue couch.

Russia has accused Ukraine of killing at least 24 people, including a child, in a drone attack on a hotel and cafe where New Year celebrations were taking place in a Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region.

Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed governor of the region, first made the claim in a statement on Telegram before Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and senior politicians later accused ⁠Ukraine of carrying out “a terrorist attack”.

Saldo also published photos of what he wrote was the aftermath of the attack, which Al Jazeera has not been able to verify.

At least one person’s body was visible in the images beneath a white sheet.

The building showed signs that a fierce fire had raged, and there were what appeared to be bloodstains on the ground.

In the statement, ​Saldo said three Ukrainian drones had struck the site of New Year ‌celebrations in Khorly, a coastal village, in what he said was a “deliberate strike” against civilians. He said many people were burned alive.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said initial information indicated that 24 people had been killed, and that 50 people had been injured.

“There is ‌no doubt that the attack was planned in advance, with ⁠drones deliberately targeting areas where civilians had gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve,” the ministry said in a statement, calling the attack “a war crime”.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Telegram that ‌Ukraine’s backers in the West were ultimately to blame.

Senior politicians, including the speakers of both houses of Russia’s parliament, condemned Kyiv.

Kherson is one of the four regions in Ukraine ‍that Russia claimed as its own in 2022, a move Kyiv and most Western countries denounced as an illegal land grab.

Ukraine’s ‍military ‍did not comment on Moscow’s claim, but it said it had hit Russia’s Ilsky ⁠oil refinery in ​the Krasnodar region overnight, ‍adding that the results of the attack ‍were still ⁠being confirmed.

In a statement on Telegram, the military also said it hit the ​Almetyevsk ‌oil facility in Russia’s Tatarstan region.

The Almetyevsk facility is ‌more than 965km (600 ‌miles) from ⁠the nearest part of Ukraine, and even further ‌from the nearest territory currently controlled by ‍Kyiv.

Russia releases video of ‘attack’ on Putin’s residence

On Tuesday, Moscow claimed that Ukraine launched a long-range drone attack against one of President Vladimir Putin’s official residences in northwestern Russia, which Kyiv has denounced as a “lie”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry released a video on Wednesday of a downed drone it said was involved in the attack.

The night-time clip showed a man in camouflage, a helmet and a Kevlar vest standing near a damaged drone lying in snow.

The man, with his face covered, talks about the drone. Neither the man nor the Defence Ministry provided any location or date.

The video and claims could not be independently verified.

Peace talks

Kyiv has called the allegations of an attack on Putin’s residence a ruse to derail ongoing peace negotiations, which have ramped up in recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic.

In his New Year’s address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a peace deal was “90 percent ready” but warned that the remaining 10 percent, believed to include key sticking points such as territory, would “determine the fate of peace, the fate of Ukraine and Europe, how people will live”.

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Wednesday that he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had had a “productive call” with the national security advisers of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Ukraine to discuss the “European peace process”.

“We focused on how to move the discussions forward in a practical way on behalf of [Trump’s] peace process, including strengthening security guarantees and developing effective deconfliction mechanisms to help end the war and ensure it does not restart,” Witkoff said in a post on X.

Lead Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov also reaffirmed that European and Ukrainian officials plan to meet on Saturday, while Zelenskyy is due to hold talks next week with European leaders.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russia attacked the Odesa region overnight, targeting civilian infrastructure in several waves of drone attacks, according to regional head Oleh Kiper.

In a post on Telegram, Kiper said a two-storey residential building was damaged and that a drone hit an apartment on the 17th floor of a high-rise building without detonating. No casualties were reported.

In its daily report, the air force said air defence forces had downed or suppressed 176 of 205 drones targeting Ukraine overnight.

It said 24 drone hits were recorded at 15 locations, and the attack was ongoing.

This article contains spoilers from the series finale of “Stranger Things.”

At this moment, somewhere on the internet, “Stranger Things” fans are rabidly and rapidly giving their feedback on how the series resolved the years-long plight of horrors faced by their favorite ragtag troop from Hawkins. But for Noah Schnapp, it didn’t matter how the story concluded. When filming on the final season wrapped last December, it was a bleak ending. At least initially.

The Netflix drama, to this point, had taken up half of Schnapp’s life. When he was 11, he began portraying Will Byers, the baby-faced boy who was abducted while biking home at night from a friend’s house and pulled into an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. It was the catalyst that linked Will to its powerful creatures that tormented him and his inner circle for years. All the while, Schnapp and his fictional alter ego became increasingly intertwined. Like Will, he was a boy coming of age in his own upside down dimension — fame — while stepping into his true self.

“I will never forget that last day and how that last scene felt — it was just so surreal,” he said. “The goodbye was hard. I grappled with this feeling like my life is over and I’m in a crisis, this is my whole identity and all I’ve ever known, and now it’s ending.”

But for Will, “Stranger Things,” created by Matt and Ross Duffer, concluded on more hopeful terms. He began the two-hour series finale — released in the closing hours of 2025, both on the platform and in select movie theaters nationwide — knowing he had no secrets that could be weaponized against him, making him better positioned to help put an end to the Upside Down — and its otherwordly creatures.

Over two separate interviews from New York — a video call and, later, a phone call 20 minutes after I viewed the final episode — Schnapp discussed the complexity of amassing fame as a child actor, the parallel sexual identity journeys he and his character took, and life after “Stranger Things.”

Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Steve (Joe Keery), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Robin (Maya Hawke) in “Stranger Things.”

(Netflix)

How does it feel to have it finally be out there?

Oh, man, it’s such a relief, honestly. No more worrying. It’s a happy, happy relief.

How did you spend the past two hours? I know you saw the finale with the cast already. Did you watch it again with the public?

Absolutely not. I’m celebrating the New Year, trying not to over stress about what people are saying and stay distracted.

So you’re not going to look at fan reaction tonight?

Probably not. My friends are texting me already, like, “Oh my God, I loved it,” or “Oh my god, I’m sobbing right now.” But no, I haven’t checked anything online.

We get a glimpse of Will’s fate. This idea that he finds his place, deep happiness and acceptance … and maybe love. What did you think of Will’s ending?

I think it was perfect. It felt really hopeful to see what the future can hold for a character like that, that I also kind of relate to, at least in terms of sexual identity. It was nice to see him get his happy ending and learn that it was it was never about Mike. It was about finding the person that was right for him, and in the meantime, kind of just loving himself. I’m just happy he got his happy ending. That’s that’s what he deserved.

Do you think he’ll remain good friends with Mike, Dustin, Caleb, Max — everyone?

Of course. They are forever tied together. Their books stand on the shelf, all next to each other, and especially Mike. They have that conversation which was actually written — now I can say it. It was not originally in the script, but I had the Duffers include it.

Oh, tell me about that. Why did you think it was important for them to have that conversation?

That scene on the tower, it’s a short little moment, but I felt like, with the coming out scene, there wasn’t enough closure between Will and Mike. So they included that moment, just so you get to see that Mike loves him as a best friend, and they will always be friends, which was nice. This relationship has been a slow burn for so many years, and so many people have an attachment and hopes for how it would come to a close. The coming out scene was so focused on on Will’s feelings that there wasn’t time for them to have a separate conversation, so I just felt like it was necessary for them to close out their specific chapter together. It feels very real to many situations I’ve had in my life where I’ve had a best friend that I’ve fallen for, and they ended up being straight and they love me still, just the same. It doesn’t make things weird. It felt very authentic to many experiences I’ve had in my life, and I’m glad it ended positively for him.

Series finales leave viewers to fill in the blanks beyond the chapters they close. We don’t have a real sense of how these characters are going to process the aftermath of what they’ve experienced, or how they’ll handle the trauma. Is that something you think about?

Of course. The story leads the audience to hope that these characters come to acceptance and peace after all these years of suffering. We end together as a group, this show started together as a group in Mike’s basement, and it’s right back to that core lesson of the show — believing in the magic of childhood and friendship and nurturing that and keeping that alive. And when they all say, “I believe that Eleven still exists,” I think it’s a metaphor that they’re saying they believe that the magic of childhood will exist forever and they hold on to that and take that with them into their lives.

I want to talk more about Eleven. Before we get to the theory that Mike has, what do you remember about shooting the scene where Eleven decides to stay back? Each one of you were so emotional in that moment.

I think of Millie as my own sister, so I tried to just make it feel as real as possible for me and imagine what that would feel like to see my own sister be taken from me. And it was so easy to access the emotions for that, because Millie does feel like family to me. I personally believe that she [Eleven] is still alive. I am hopeful about it. What I think is interesting is so many people expected so many people to die, a big massacre —

Did you think that it would go that way, at any point?

Our show has never been a show that’s killing off main characters left and right. I think, too, the big part of this season was tying it back into Season 1 and bringing things full circle. Eleven’s goodbye scene with Mike felt really perfectly full-circle and not traumatic and left the viewers with a question, but still hopeful and satisfied. I’m sure everyone’s going to have lots to say, positive and negative as they always do — that’s OK — but I personally loved how the Duffers closed it.

Earlier in the episode, there’s the exchange between Will and Henry, where Will is in his mind, and he sees what happened to Henry in that cave and is trying to appeal to his humanity. What did that unlock for you about the journey of these two young men and how they navigated their respective traumas?

It was satisfying for me as a viewer to understand these two characters, though, they are so polar opposite in their places in the story, are really inherently the same and come from the same emotions and sensitivity. The only difference is that the villain gives into this evil and Will fights it. It was just really cool as an actor to play those parallels and shooting it, we had to move in the same physical ways when his hand goes back in the same way — and watching how he [Jamie Campbell Bower] did a scene and matching it perfectly was really fun.

There were quite the needle drops in this episode from Prince — “When Doves Cry” and “Purple Rain.” Also “Heroes” from David Bowie. Were these songs played a lot on the set while filming this last episode?

“Heroes” by David Bowie, they were playing over and over on those last takes. “Purple Rain,” they were playing out loud. Usually we don’t get to actually listen to songs while we’re filming, but just to get a vibe, they were playing it on the speakers while we were in the truck. It was a fun episode to film, and also so difficult because they didn’t give us the freaking script for Episode 8 for so long. They were so lock and key about it. And you’re reading it in parts. We didn’t get a screener for it, so I only got to watch it once recently. It felt like watching a brand new episode when I watched it. When those credits hit … man.

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1. Will Byers (Schnapp) “comes out” to his inner circle in Episode 7. (Netflix) 2. Will (Schnapp) is embraced by his brother and friends — Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard). (Netflix)

Will had a big moment in Episode 7. Fans have long felt that the undercurrent of Will’s journey was his sexuality. How was it to face that moment as Will?

I knew this scene and this moment was coming for years, and I’d just been anxiously awaiting it, to see how it would be written, how I would perform in it. I’d been building it up in my head for years. I remember reading it alone in my room for the first time and I just cried. Then in the performance, I was so nervous because I always thought it would be a one-on-one with Joyce, but it was the full cast. It also came at a time close to when I came out personally and I never had that moment to come out to the whole cast in my own life. It almost felt like this extra pressure of, “Oh, it’s this personal thing too that I’m now having to share with them” and “are they gonna judge me personally for …” I don’t know, there’s all these layers of pressure for the performance, and the personal part of it and making sure it’s good.

We were filming the scene on the stages at like 3 a.m. and I was so tired and worried that I would mess it up, but it was cathartic as hell. I totally felt a stronger bond with everyone in the cast. Regardless of the critics and the excitement of the show, this is actually going to touch so many kids out there. If I was sitting there watching that at 12 years old with my parents and saw how all the characters hug him after it and embrace him and cheer him on and say, “We love you,” I might have come out right there and then too. I think this will have a real positive impact on so many young little boys and girls out there like me.

How would you say your relationship to your identity has changed as you’ve gotten older? How did Will help you? And how do you think you helped Will?

When I was younger, I always felt this pressure — like interviewers would ask me, “Do you feel a personal connection? Anything personally close to the character?” I would always kind of deflect. And I would say, “Well, no, he’s [Will] not queer. He’s just growing up slower, and he’s suffering from his trauma.” I felt defensive over Will, to almost make sure that he wasn’t gay because I felt it personally, and I was kind of like compensating for it. Our stories there were intertwined and, eventually, as I got older, I noticed how people, they really dive deeper into that sexual identity for him. And I saw people with such positive reactions to it. It definitely had an impact on me, like, “Oh, people don’t care as much as I used to think they did.” It helped me in my own journey. I think having accepted it publicly before having done this scene, changed everything for me. It allowed me to to fully be vulnerable and feel all the real emotions as much as possible in that scene, which was my goal, to make it feel just like I was living it. If I was still hiding, I wouldn’t have been able to really authentically show that.

Noah Schnapp on connecting with his character’s coming out journey: “I think having accepted it publicly before having done this scene, changed everything for me. It allowed me to to fully be vulnerable and feel all the real emotions as much as possible in that scene, which was my goal, to make it feel just like I was living it.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

You said you knew about Will’s sexuality for years — was it since the start of the show or did that conversation come later?

To be honest, we never sat down and had an explicit conversation of “Look, your character is gay.” It was more just hinted at from the beginning. I always thought about it, but pushed it down because of my own internal things. I think by Season 3 and 4, it became so obvious that it didn’t have to be said. It was just clear. I think once we got to Season 5, there was this unspoken, agreed upon thing that it was coming. It’s been building to this moment of acceptance so it’s going to be this season. It wasn’t in the first six after the table read, so then I started needling them, like, “Is it in [Episode] 7? Is it in 8? How are you going to write it? I need to see, I need to see, I need to see.” And they’re like, “just let us write it.” They were nervous. I could tell they were scared to have others see it because I’m sure it’s hard to write something like that and not make it corny or inauthentic.

Because most people don’t have a big coming out moment like that.

That’s also the thing. What I struggled with in the scene was I wanted to make sure I’m not coming out as Noah in 2023 on TikTok. This is Will coming out in 1987, or whatever year it is — it’s a totally different landscape, and you really have to separate the two as much as it was part of my own journey.

Your character is coming out at a time when he would be considered, for lack of a better term, the monster.

Totally. It’s such a good queer character. It’s so well-written, with the monster and Vecna as the parallel of his own identity; to harness these powers, he has to accept his own inner struggles.

How does your experience of coming out as a young adult under the spotlight parallel the fears Will feels in this fictional world populated by monsters?

It was different. It’s the pressures of the job and the career. I was like, “Why do I have to talk to my agents and my publicists about my sexual identity, who I want to be with in bed?” But they’re like, “No, this is something you have to consider because it affects the roles you get and how people perceive you. This is a conversation we have to have if you tell the public or if you just keep it personal.”

With Will, in the ‘80s, he’s suffering from this whole AIDS epidemic that was going on during the Reagan administration, where the president wouldn’t even acknowledge that gay people existed. If you were, if you did come out, people thought that you were contagious and had a disease and would get other people sick. It was a totally different landscape. I really made sure to educate myself on that difference. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to take some personal anecdote into it. Right before the scene, I reread all the “coming out” texts I sent and tried to listen to the songs that I would listen to when I was trying to build up the courage to come out to my mom. I did try to bring in myself to [that scene], but also understand that it’s not exactly the same.

Is it too personal to ask you to share the name of one of the songs?

This is so embarrassing, but I listened to “Brave” by Sarah Bareilles because she’s like, “Say what you want to say, and let the words fall out …” It would always just give me the confidence. Every time. Every person I came out to, I listened to that before and was like, “OK, I can do it now.”

In Vol. 1 of the final season of “Stranger Things,” Will Byers (Schnapp) develops significant powers that allow him to control Demogorgons and fight Vecna by channeling the Upside Down’s hive mind.

(Netflix)

I want to return to that other moment this season, which had the fandom on the edge of their seat: Will coming into his powers. Have you seen the TikToks of people recording themselves as they watched that reveal?

Yeah. I’m fully on TikTok, but I’ve made sure to have my friends keep me up to date and send me the edits and what people are saying. My friends were sending me TikToks to be, like, “Noah, people are saying Will is hot.” I’m like, [bashfully hides his face with his hands] “What?” I knew people would freak out at the reveal, it’s such an exciting moment. But I did not at all expect people would be calling Will Byers hot. That’s funny, but it’s cool. As a kid, I always wanted to be the Spider-Man, and this was kind of my Spider-Man-superhero “Save the Day” moment. And it’s so fun doing that stuff because there are no rules. And the Duffers definitely put a lot of trust into me with that this year.

It was a demanding sequence — you popped your blood vessels.

I look back at some of those scenes and I was giving too much for what it was, these little moments. You never know how they cut it together and what ends up being important and what ends up being a tiny little moment. A lot of this stuff is very physical that they have me do, and it was me screaming all night, at the top of my lungs. Even the way my neck tensed up — I couldn’t, move my neck after some of these days because you’re straining.

The show is, in part, about kids coming of age. Tell me about your upbringing and life in Scarsdale, N.Y., before “Stranger Things.”

I had a very normal childhood. All the guys were into sports; I tried doing that growing up, and I just hated it and never felt like I was good at it or fit into those boys and what they were doing. I remember my dad being like, “He’s gonna do sports.” And my mom was like, “No, stop putting him in sports. He’s picking the flowers at the outside of the baseball field. That’s not for him. Let’s put him in the arts.” They put me in this class where you do acting, singing, dancing. And I just thrived. I did that for a few years and the teacher saw that I loved it so much and recommended that I audition in front of an agent. I started doing real auditions. By fifth grade, sixth grade, I got my first films. It was a great place to grow up and having that normal childhood and not growing up too fast was always very important to me. And still now, that’s why I’m in college and didn’t just rush into adult life.

You say that, but your first big on screen role was as Tom Hanks’ son in ”Bridge of Spies,” which was directed by Steven Spielberg. What stands out from that experience?

I just look back and think like, how crazy that my first thing was with these legends of Hollywood. I remember Tom Hanks never sticking to a script; he always just made it work for what was right for the scene, right for the character. They’re just so down to earth, such great people. And what a place to start.

Would you say you were ambitious as a child? How did you view the acting thing?

I looked back at a video the other day — I was 9 or 10. I went to a pond with my mom, and I was like, “One day, I’m gonna be a huge actor. And following my dreams.” It made me realize, when I was younger, I did have that passion and hope to do this long term.

“I went to a pond with my mom, and I was like, ‘One day, I’m gonna be a huge actor. And following my dreams,’” Schnapp recalls. “It made me realize, when I was younger, I did have that passion and hope to do this long term.” (Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

I will never know what it’s like to be a young person thrust into the global spotlight. I want you to pretend like I am an alien or a Demogorgon with no concept of this world, and tell me what it has been like growing up in the spotlight.

My problem was I’m so unapologetically myself, and I’ve always been like that, so I never learned to be properly media trained and curated into a certain way. I always just existed and did what I wanted to do. I learned over time, it’s good to create some privacy and distance for your own mental health. When the show came out, I was 10 years old. I was at camp and I didn’t have any contact with the outside world and my mom would send me emails that I was getting fan pages and blue check marks, and people started recognizing me, and I loved it. I love my fans so much. I would get their phone numbers and meet up with them, and my parents would be like, “Noah, this is not normal. You need to create boundaries with them.” Now I look back, and more of my life has been this than not now, so it’s all I’ve ever known was being famous and it just feels normal.

Coming of age on its own is so hard. You’re leaving one stage of your life and going into another. But to do that and have everything you say, your mistakes magnified, seems overwhelming.

It’s the worst; the fact that it’s all public, every weird look I’ve worn, every bad thing I’ve said. I hate that, but it is what it is. That’s what it is growing up in the spotlight, everything has its pros and cons.

Has there a moment where it felt too overwhelming? How do you protect yourself?

Every few weeks I’m like, “Oh, this is too overwhelming. I can’t do this anymore.” When I put my phone away, it all becomes OK. I learned that social media and all that is not real life. It just feels like so much pressure when you live so deep in your phone and what everyone’s saying and having to live up to these standards and feel like your life is over if you don’t do this, or this person doesn’t like whatever. Trying to please everyone in this industry is impossible and the only way to accept that is to detach from the online world and just live in the real world. I remember how much I love it and how many real, loving fans support me, and how I actually make a difference in a lot people’s lives, genuinely, and that actually matters.

Noah Schnapp says Winona Ryder, who played his mother Joyce on “Stranger Things,” was a motherly figure in real life, too. “I adore her truly.”

(Netflix)

Winona Ryder plays your mom, and she knows what it’s like navigating fame at a young age. Did she give you any advice or was she protective of you on set?

So protective. She always says, she never had kids, so we were her secondary children. I look back at our texts from 2017, when the show was first starting, and I had to do my first crying scene or all these “first” things I was so nervous for, and she would send these paragraphs being like, “Oh, sweetie, you’re nervous. Don’t worry a second. Come meet me before the scene. I’ll sit down with you and we’ll run through it. I’ll make sure you’re OK.” I remember I sent her a picture and I had this rope burn from Season 2 because I was screaming in a chair and my wrists were all scabbed and I was crying because it hurt, and she ran me to the set medic and stayed with me all night and made sure I was OK. She was such a mother figure to me, and I adore her truly. Even now, it’s nice to see our relationship has grown from her being protective over me to me feeling protective over her.

We see Nancy, Jonathan, Steve and Robin up on the rooftop talking about not losing touch, making a point of staying in contact. There’s also Dustin’s valedictorian speech. Each had moments that felt like they paralleled the ending of this unique experience you’ve all gone through together. Did you all make a similar pact?

Oh, absolutely. That day of graduation, we felt like we were really graduating. I loved the coda part of the episode. That last day of shooting was hard, when I was putting my book on the shelf, that was when they told me, “OK, Noah, this is your last shot.” I broke down. I couldn’t do the freaking take, every time, it was just so emotional. Luckily, there’s one that I’m little less emotional, but that day was just so sad. I remember when they said “Cut!”, and that was it, and we — me, Caleb, Gaten, Finn and Sadie — standing in that little set, arms around each other, huddled up, not saying any words, just crying. It was complete silence outside. There were hundreds of people waiting [outside on the set] for us to cheer and celebrate, and we were waiting in there, like, “We go out when we’re ready.” We all agreed, gathered ourselves and walked out of that set to 100 people cheering, screaming, there was confetti dropping, clapping and we gave speeches. It didn’t feel real. You’re so in it for so many years, and then it’s just over.

What do you remember about the day after wrapping?

We ended up sleeping on the set. We made a little fort in the D&D basement. It was so cute, so wholesome — a perfect way to end it. I remember driving back with Caleb [McLaughlin, who plays Lucas] the next morning and he dropped me off. It was really foggy that day, really gloomy, and just so somber and tense. And we said goodbye so quietly. It felt like we left a funeral, like grieving something. The next day, I had to fly to L.A. for a call back, and I was just sitting alone in a hotel room — I felt so empty. This is all I’ve this all I’ve ever been attached to, this is my whole identity, my whole life. But then, the next day, I was like, “Oh, life keeps going. And it’s OK.” It was really just that one day after that was tough.

To your point, this isn’t your first professional on screen role, but it is your longest. How do you feel you’ve grown as an actor across these 10 years, these five seasons?

This show has taught me so much. When I was younger, I felt like scared to have any kind of opinion or perspective or speak up on what I felt was right for the character; now, I’m like, “No, I played this character for 10 years. I have a right to say, ‘No, he would wear this’ or ‘he would say this’ or ‘this scene doesn’t work or represent the story well.’” Just learning to not be bound to the script; it’s OK to play and explore and try different things. That’s what makes it feel authentic when you have those spontaneous little moments that aren’t written. I’m excited to continue to learn and grow in different ways in film and theater.

So it feels like the right time for you to say goodbye to Will?

Totally. It’s kind of crazy how right of a time it is. I’m graduating in a few months at the same time as this show is ending. I’m an adult now. It all happened at the right time, and this season came at the perfect time with my sexual identity journey. Everything was timed really well.

Are you thinking about what you want next? The kind of projects you want to do or the way you want to move through your career?

Oh my God, absolutely, the second I wrapped last year, I was like, “What’s next?” I’d love to do theater. I loved doing that as a kid and want to explore that. And do other films. But no set path, I’m just excited for what’s next.

The Duffer Brothers call you in 10 years and say we have an idea for how to revisit Will Byers, are you in?

I think my work is done with that character. The story for him has been told. So if that ever happened, I would honestly probably stray away from that. But of course, I would love to work with the Duffers again on another project. But this story is done.

NEW YORK — By nearly any measure, 2025 has been a rough year for anyone concerned about freedom of the press.

It’s likely to be the deadliest year on record for journalists and media workers. The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman “piggy.” And the ranks of those doing the job continues to thin.

It’s hard to think of a darker time for journalists. So say many, including Timothy Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter and now program director for journalism and disinformation at PEN America. “It’s safe to say this assault on the press over the past year has probably been the most aggressive that we’ve seen in modern times.”

Tracking killings and assaults against journalists

Worldwide, the 126 media industry people killed in 2025 by early December matched the number of deaths in all of 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and last year was a record-setter. Israel’s bombing of Gaza accounted for 85 of those deaths, 82 of them Palestinians.

“It’s extremely concerning,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Unfortunately, it’s not just, of course, about the sheer numbers of journalists and media workers killed, it’s also about the failure to obtain justice or get accountability for those killings.

“What we know from decades of doing this work is that impunity breeds impunity,” she said. “So a failure to tackle journalists’ killings creates an environment where those killings continue.”

The committee estimates there are at least 323 journalists imprisoned worldwide.

None of those killed this year were from the United States. But the work on American soil has still been dangerous. There have been 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of those reports came from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.

It’s impossible to look past the influence of Trump, who frequently seethes with anger at the press while simultaneously interacting with journalists more than any president in memory — frequently answering their cell phone calls.

“Trump has always attacked the press,” Richardson said. “But during the second term, he’s turned that into government action to restrict and punish and intimidate journalists.”

Journalists learn quickly they have a fight on their hands

The Associated Press learned that quickly, when Trump limited the outlet’s access to cover him after it refused to follow his lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico. It launched a court fight that has remained unresolved. Trump has also extracted settlements from ABC and CBS News in lawsuits over stories that displeased him, and is suing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Long angry about a perceived bias against conservatives on PBS and NPR newscasts, Trump and his allies in Congress successfully cut funding for public broadcasting as a whole. The president has also moved to shut down government-run organizations that beam news to all parts of the world.

“The U.S. is a major investor in media development, in independent media outlets in countries that have little or no independent media, or as a source of information for people in countries where there is no free media,” Ginsberg said. “The evisceration of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America is another blow to press freedom globally.”

Others in his administration take Trump’s lead, like when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a web portal to complain about outlets or journalists being unfair.

“It’s part of this overall strategy that we’re seeing from certain governments, notably the United States, to paint all journalists who don’t simply [repeat] the narrative put out by the government as fake news, as dubious, as dodgy, as criminal,” Ginsberg said.

Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has portrayed journalists as dark figures skulking around Pentagon halls to uncover classified secrets as his rationale for enacting restrictive rules for coverage.

That’s led to the most notable example of journalists fighting back: most mainstream news outlets gave up their credentials to work in the Pentagon rather than agree to these rules, and are still breaking stories while working off-site. The New York Times has sued to overturn the rules. The newspaper also publicly defends itself when attacked by the president, such as when he complained about its coverage of his health.

Despite the more organized effort against the press, the public has taken little notice. The Pew Research Center said that 36% of Americans reported earlier this year hearing a lot about the Trump administration’s relationship with the press, compared to 72% who said that at the same point in his first term.

Pew’s polling shows that trust in news organizations has declined over the last decade, and journalists are likely to elicit little sympathy when their work becomes harder.

“Really, the harm falls on the public with so much of this because the public depends on this independent reporting to understand and scrutinize the decisions that are being made by the most powerful office in the world,” Richardson said.

Some reasons for optimism

The news industry as a whole is more than two decades in to a retrenchment caused largely by a collapse in the advertising market, and every year brings more reports of journalists laid off as a result. One of the year’s most sobering statistics came in a report by the organizations Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News: in 2002, there were 40 journalists for every 100,000 people in the United States; by this year, it was down to a little more than eight.

Asked if they could find reasons for optimism, both Ginsberg and Richardson pointed to the rise of some independent local news organizations, shoots of growth in a barren landscape, such as the Baltimore Banner, Charlottesville Tomorrow in Virginia and Outlier Media in Michigan.

As much as they are derided in Trump’s America, reporters at mainstream media outlets are still working hard and able to set the nation’s agenda with their reporting, noted influential Axios CEO Jim VandeHei in a recent column.

As he told the AP: “Over time, people will hopefully come to their senses and say, ‘Hey, the media like anything else is imperfect but, man, it’s a nice thing to have a free press.’”

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is not the first president to want more room at the White House for entertaining, says the longest-serving top aide in the executive residence, offering some backup for the reason Trump has cited for his ballroom construction project.

Gary Walters spent more than two decades as White House chief usher to presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush — a role that is akin to being the general manager of the residence.

“All the presidents that I had an opportunity to serve always talked about some possibility of an enlarged area” for entertaining, Walters said in an interview with the Associated Press about his recently published memoir.

Trump has been talking about building a White House ballroom for years, even before he entered the political arena. In July, the White House announced a 90,000-square-foot space would be built on the east side of the complex to accommodate 650 seated guests at a then-estimated cost of $200 million. Trump has said it will be paid for with private donations, including from him.

The Republican president later upped the proposed ballroom’s capacity to 999 people and, by October, had demolished the two-story East Wing of the White House to build it there. In December, he updated the price tag to $400 million — double the original estimate.

Images of the East Wing being demolished shocked historians, preservationists and others, but Walters said there is a long history of projects on the campus, ranging from conservatories, greenhouses and stables being torn down to build the West Wing in 1902, to the expansion of the residence with a third floor, to the addition of the East Wing itself during World War II to provide workspace for the first lady, her staff and other White House offices.

“So there’s always been construction going on around the White House,” Walters said.

Other presidents bemoaned the lack of space for entertaining

When Walters was on the job, the capacity of the largest public rooms in the White House was among the first topics he discussed with the incoming president, first lady and their social secretary, he said. The presidents he served all talked about the limited number of people the White House could handle.

When set up for a state dinner, the State Dining Room can hold about 130 people: 13 round tables each with seating for 10, Walters said. The East Room can accommodate about 300 chairs — fewer if space is needed for television cameras.

Trump complains often that both rooms are too small. He also has complained about the use of large tents on the south grounds, the main workaround for big events such as ritzy state dinners for foreign leaders. Walters said the tents had issues.

“When it rained, the water flows downhill and the grass became soggy, no matter what we tried to do,” Walters said. “We dug culverts around the outside of the tent to try and get the water.” Tents damaged the grass, requiring more work to reseed it, he said.

Walters admitted it was a bit jarring to see the East Wing torn down, and said he had fond personal memories of the space. “I met my wife at the White House and she worked in the East Wing, so that was a joy for me,” said Walters, 79.

His wife, Barbara, was a receptionist in the visitors office during the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The couple recently celebrated 48 years of marriage.

Broken bones alter usher’s career trajectory

Walters owes his place in history as the longest-serving White House chief usher to the misfortune of a broken ankle.

He was 23 in early 1970, honorably discharged from the Army and looking for a job that would allow him to finish college at night. The Executive Protective Service, a precursor to the U.S. Secret Service, was hiring and accepted him.

But shortly before the graduation ceremony, Walters broke an ankle playing football. He could not patrol out of uniform, wearing a cast and hobbling around on crutches, so he was given a temporary assignment in the White House Police Control and Appointments Center. He stayed for five years.

“This injury also changed the course of my career,” Walters wrote in his memoir, “White House Memories: 1970-2007: Recollections of the Longest-Serving Chief Usher.” He gained an ”in-depth knowledge of the ways and security systems of the White House that would ultimately greatly benefit me in my future role in the Usher’s Office.”

A few months after being promoted to sergeant in 1975, he learned of an opening in the Usher’s Office. He applied and joined as an assistant in early 1976.

A decade later, he was elevated to chief usher by Reagan, who gave Walters the top job in the residence overseeing maintenance, construction and renovation projects, and food service, along with administrative, financial and personnel functions. He managed a staff of about 90 butlers, housekeepers, cooks, florists, electricians, engineers, plumbers and others.

Walters retired in 2007 after 37 years at the White House, including a record 21 years as chief usher. He served under seven presidents, from Nixon to George W. Bush.

In that time, Walters saw a broad swath of presidential history: the only president who ever resigned, an appointed vice president become the only unelected president, a president be impeached and stay in office, a father and son become president and the Supreme Court decide the most closely contested presidential election in U.S. history.

He’s often asked what he liked most about his work and “without hesitation I say it is getting to know and interact directly with the president, first lady, and other members of their family. It was an honor to get to know them with my own eyes and ears,” Walters wrote.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

Zohran Mamdani will become mayor of New York City as the clock ticks over into 2026 — but the celebrations are set to last through New Year’s Day.

The Democrat’s team is planning two separate swearing-in ceremonies Thursday — a small, private one with his family in an old subway station around midnight, followed by a large event in the afternoon that will include a public block party outside City Hall.

As a new mayor’s term begins immediately with the new year, it has been customary for the city’s incoming leaders to hold two events. Departing Mayor Eric Adams held his initial swearing-in at Times Square shortly after the famous ball drop, while Adams’ predecessor Bill de Blasio took his first oath at home in Brooklyn.

For his part, Mamdani will take his initial oath at the former City Hall subway station in Manhattan — one of the city’s original stops on its subterranean transit system, known for its tiled arches and vaulted ceilings.

New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, a political ally and notable foe of President Trump, will administer the oath of office.

The old City Hall stop was designed as the flagship station of the city’s first subway line, but was decommissioned in 1945. These days, outside of occasional guided historical tours, locals can usually only catch a glimpse of it by staying on the 6 train after its last stop downtown when it turns around to head north.

In a statement, Mamdani’s office said the choice to be sworn in at the station reflected his “commitment to the working people who keep our city running every day.”

“When Old City Hall Station first opened in 1904 — one of New York’s 28 original subway stations — it was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives,” Mamdani said.

“That ambition need not be a memory confined only to our past, nor must it be isolated only to the tunnels beneath City Hall: it will be the purpose of the administration fortunate enough to serve New Yorkers from the building above,” he said.

On Thursday afternoon, Mamdani will be sworn in again, this time by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of his political heroes, on the steps of City Hall in a ceremony. It’s scheduled to kick off at 1 p.m. with opening remarks from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another political ally and a fellow New Yorker.

Mamdani’s transition formed an inaugural committee that includes actor John Turturro, playwright Cole Escola and writer Colson Whitehead, as well as advocates, small business owners and campaign workers who the incoming mayor’s office says have “provided perspective, guidance, and cultural sensibility” for the ceremony.

The public swearing-in will be accompanied by a block party along a stretch of Broadway leading up to City Hall. Mamdani’s office expects thousands of people to attend and says there will be performances, music and interfaith elements.

Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press.

Yes, Oprah Winfrey has discussed her weight loss and weight gain and weight in general before — many, many times before. The difference this time around, she says, is how little food noise there is in her daily life, and how little shame. It’s so quiet, in fact, that she can eat a whole croissant and simply acknowledge she had breakfast.

“Food noise,” for those who don’t experience it, is a virtually nonstop mental conversation about food that, according to Tufts Medicine, rarely shuts up and instead drives a person “to eat when they’re not hungry, obsess over meals and feel shame or guilt about their eating habits.”

“This type of obsessive food-related thinking can override hunger cues and lead to patterns of overeating, undereating or emotional eating — especially for people who are overweight,” Tufts said.

Winfrey told People in an exclusive interview published Tuesday that in the past she would have been thinking, “‘How many calories in that croissant? How long is it going to take me to work it off? If I have the croissant, I won’t be able to have dinner.’ I’d still be thinking about that damn croissant!”

What has changed is her acceptance 2½ years ago that she has a disease, obesity, and that this time around there was something not called “willpower” to help her manage it.

The talk show host has been using Mounjaro, one of the GLP-1 drugs, since 2023. The weight-loss version of Mounjaro is Zepbound, like Wegovy is the weight-loss version of Ozempic. Trulicity and Victroza are also GLP-1s, and a pill version of Wegovy was just approved by the FDA.

When she started using the injectable, Winfrey told People she welcomed the arrival of a tool to help her get away from the yo-yo path she’d been on for decades. After understanding the science behind it, she said, she was “absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself” after so many years of weathering public criticism about her weight.

“I have been blamed and shamed,” she said elsewhere in that 2023 interview, “and I blamed and shamed myself.”

Now, on the eve of 2026, Winfrey says her mental shift is complete. “I came to understand that overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating,” she told the outlet. “And that’s the most mind-blowing, freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult.”

She isn’t even sharing her current weight with the public.

Winfrey did take a break from the medication early in 2024, she said, and started to regain weight despite continuing to work out and eat healthy foods. So for Winfrey the obesity prescription will be renewed for a lifetime. C’est la vie seems to be her attitude.

“I’m not constantly punishing myself,” she said. “I hardly recognize the woman I’ve become. But she’s a happy woman.”

Winfrey has to take a carefully managed magnesium supplement and make sure she drinks enough water, she said. The shots are done weekly, except when she feels like she can go 10 or 12 days. But packing clothes for the Australian leg of her “Enough” book tour was an off-the-rack delight, not a trip down a shame spiral. She’s even totally into regular exercise.

Plus along with the “quiet strength” she has found in the absence of food noise, Winfrey has experienced another cool side effect: She pretty much couldn’t care less about drinking alcohol.

“I was a big fan of tequila. I literally had 17 shots one night,” she told People. “I haven’t had a drink in years. The fact that I no longer even have a desire for it is pretty amazing.”

So back to that croissant. How did she feel after she scarfed it down?

“I felt nothing,” she said. “The only thing I thought was, ‘I need to clean up these crumbs.’”

For faith leaders supporting and ministering to anxious immigrants across the United States, 2025 was fraught with challenges and setbacks. For many in these religious circles, the coming year could be worse.

The essence of their fears: President Trump has become harsher with his contemptuous rhetoric and policy proposals, blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages and, in a social media post, demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.”

Haitians who fled gang violence in their homeland, as well as Afghans allowed entry after assisting the U.S. in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, now fear that their refuge in America may end due to get-tough policy changes. Somali Americans, notably in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, worry about their future after Trump referred to them as “garbage.”

After Trump’s slurs, the chair of the Catholic bishops conference’s subcommittee on racial justice urged public officials to refrain from dehumanizing language.

“Each child of God has value and dignity,” said the bishop of Austin, Texas, Daniel Garcia. “Language that denigrates a person or community based on his or her ethnicity or country of origin is incompatible with this truth.”

Here’s a look at what lies ahead for these targeted immigrant communities, and the faith leaders supporting them.

Haitians in limbo

In 2024, Trump falsely accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. It worsened fears about anti-immigrant sentiment in the mostly white, blue-collar city of about 59,000, where more than 15,000 Haitians live and work.

Thousands of them settled in Springfield in recent years under the Temporary Protected Status program.

Their prospects now seem dire. The TPS program, allowing many Haitians to remain legally in Springfield and elsewhere, expires in early February.

“It’s going to be an economic and humanitarian disaster,” said the Rev. Carl Ruby, pastor of Central Christian Church — one of several Springfield churches supporting the Haitians.

Ruby and Viles Dorsainvil, a leader of Springfield’s Haitian community, traveled recently to Washington to seek help from members of Congress.

“Every single legislator we’ve talked to has said nothing is going to happen legislatively. Trump’s rhetoric keeps getting harsher,” Ruby said. “It just doesn’t feel like anything is going our way.”

Many Haitians fear for their lives if they return to their gang-plagued homeland.

Faith communities have come together to support immigrants in the face of Trump’s crackdown, Ruby said.

“It’s increasing our resolve to oppose this,” he said. “There are more and more churches in Springfield saying we will provide sanctuary. … We will do whatever it takes to protect our members.”

Afghan refugees

Trump suspended the U.S. refugee program on the first day of his second term. Halting the program and its federal funding affected hundreds of faith-based organizations assisting refugees.

Among them was Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, which serves the region around Washington, D.C., and lost 68% of its budget this year. The organization laid off two-thirds of its staff, shrinking from nearly 300 employees to 100.

Many of its employees and nearly two-thirds of its clients are Afghans. Many worked with the U.S. in Afghanistan and fled after the Taliban’s takeover from a U.S.-backed government in 2021.

The Trump administration announced new immigration restrictions after an Afghan national became the suspect in the Nov. 26 shooting of two National Guard members in Washington.

“It shook up our team. It was awful,” said Kristyn Peck, CEO of LSSNCA.

Peck said there is increased fear among Afghans on her staff and a false public narrative that Afghan immigrants are a threat.

“A whole group of people have now been targeted and blamed for this senseless act of violence,” she said.

She still finds reasons for hope.

“We continue to do the good work,” Peck said. “Even in challenging moments, we just continue to see people putting their faith into action.”

Volunteers have stepped up to provide services that employees no longer have funding to provide, including a program that helps Afghan women with English-language and job-skills training.

U.S.-based World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization overseen by the National Association of Evangelicals, has joined left-of-center religious groups decrying the new crackdown on Afghan refugees.

“When President Trump announces his intention to ‘permanently halt’ all migration from ‘Third World countries,’ he’s insulting the majority of the global Church,” declared World Relief CEO Myal Greene. “When his administration halts processing for all Afghans on account of the evil actions of one person, he risks abandoning tens of thousands of others who risked their lives alongside the U.S. military.”

Somalis targeted by Trump

In mid-December, imams and other leaders of Minnesota’s Somali community established a task force to tackle the fallout from major fraud scandals, a surge in immigration enforcement, and Trump’s contemptuous words toward the largest group of Somali refugees in the U.S.

“We’re not minimizing the crime, but we’re amplifying the successes,” said imam Yusuf Abdulle.

He directs the Islamic Association of North America, a network of more than three dozen mostly East African mosques. About half are in Minnesota, which, since the late 1990s, has been home to growing numbers of Somali refugees who are increasingly visible in local and U.S. politics.

“For unfortunate things like fraud or youth violence, every immigrant community has been through tough times,” Abdulle said. “For the number of years here, Somali is a very resilient, very successful community.”

Even though most Somalis in Minnesota are U.S. citizens or lawfully present, Abdulle said, many deserted local businesses and mosques when immigration enforcement surged.

The new task force includes more than two dozen faith and business leaders, as well as community organizers. Addressing their community’s fears is the first challenge, followed by increased advocacy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“Every election year the rhetoric goes up. And so we want to push back against these hateful rhetorics, but also bring our community together,” said community leader Abdullahi Farah.

Faith leaders respond

In mid-November, U.S. Catholic bishops voted overwhelmingly to issue a “special message” decrying developments causing fear and anxiety among immigrants. It marked the first time in 12 years that the bishops invoked this urgent way of speaking collectively.

“We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care,” said the message. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

The bishops thanked priests, nuns and lay Catholics accompanying and assisting immigrants.

“We urge all people of goodwill to continue and expand such efforts,” the message said.

The presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Yehiel Curry, issued a similar pastoral message last month thanking ELCA congregations for supporting immigrants amid “aggressive and indiscriminate immigration enforcement.”

“The racial profiling and harm to our immigrant neighbors show no signs of diminishing, so we will heed God’s call to show up alongside these neighbors,” Curry wrote.

HIAS, an international Jewish nonprofit serving refugees and asylum-seekers, has condemned recent Trump administration moves.

“As a Jewish organization, we also know all too well what it means for an entire community to be targeted because of the actions of one person,” HIAS said.

“We will always stand in solidarity with people seeking the opportunity to rebuild their lives in safety, including those being targeted now by harmful policies and hateful rhetoric in the Afghan American and Somali American communities.”

Crary, Dell’Orto, Henao and Stanley write for the Associated Press.

MINNEAPOLIS — A surge of federal officers in Minnesota follows new allegations of fraud by day care centers run by Somali residents.

President Trump has previously linked his administration’s immigration crackdown against Minnesota’s large Somali community to a series of fraud cases involving government programs in which most of the defendants have roots in the east African country.

Surge in federal officers

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel both announced an increase in operations in Minnesota this week. The move comes after a right-wing influencer posted a video Friday claiming he had found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud.

Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families, said at a Monday news conference that state regulators took the influencer’s allegations seriously.

Noem posted on social media that officers were “conducting a massive investigation on childcare and other rampant fraud.” Patel said the intent was to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs.”

Past fraud in Minnesota

Minnesota has been under the spotlight for years for Medicaid fraud, including a massive $300-million pandemic fraud case involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said it was the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam and that defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
In 2022, during President Biden’s administration, 47 people were charged. The number of defendants has grown to 78 throughout the ongoing investigation.

So far, 57 people have been convicted, either because they pleaded guilty or lost at trial.

Most of the defendants are of Somali descent.

Numerous other fraud cases are being investigated, including new allegations focused on child care centers.

In news interviews and releases over the summer, prosecutor Joe Thompson estimated the loss from all fraud cases could exceed $1 billion. Earlier this month, a federal prosecutor alleged that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.

Crackdown targeting Somalis

Trump’s immigration enforcement in Minnesota has focused on the Somali community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is the largest in the country.

Trump labeled Minnesota Somalis as “garbage” and said he didn’t want them in the United States.

About 84,000 of the 260,000 Somalis in the U.S. live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The overwhelming majority are U.S. citizens. Almost 58% were born in the U.S and 87% of the foreign-born are naturalized citizens.

Among those running schemes to get funds for child nutrition, housing services and autism programs, 82 of the 92 defendants are Somali Americans, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for Minnesota.

Republicans have tried to blame Walz

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”

The fraud could be a major issue in the 2026 gubernatorial race as Walz seeks a third term.

Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud but allowed that the $1-billion estimate could be accurate. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.

Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few.

NEW ORLEANS, La. — A National Guard deployment in New Orleans authorized by President Trump will begin Tuesday as part of a heavy security presence for New Year’s celebrations a year after an attack on revelers on Bourbon Street killed 14 people, officials said Monday.

The deployment in New Orleans follows high-profile National Guard missions the Trump administration launched in other cities this year, including in Washington and Memphis, Tennessee. But the sight of National Guard troops is not unusual in New Orleans, where troops earlier this year also helped bolster security for the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.

“It’s no different than what we’ve seen in the past,” New Orleans police spokesperson Reese Harper said.

The Guard is not the only federal law enforcement agency in the city. Since the start of the month, federal agents have been carrying out an immigration crackdown that has led to the arrest of at least several hundred people.

Harper stressed that the National Guard will not be engaging in immigration enforcement.

“This is for visibility and just really to keep our citizens safe,” Harper said. “It’s just another tool in the toolbox and another layer of security.”

The Guard is expected be confined to the French Quarter area popular with tourists and won’t be engaging in assisting in immigration enforcement, Harper said. Guardsmen will operate similar to earlier this year when they patrolled the area around Bourbon Street following the vehicle-ramming attack on Jan. 1.

The 350 Guard members will stay through Carnival season, when residents and tourists descend on the Big Easy to partake in costumed celebrations and massive parades before ending with Mardi Gras in mid-February.

Louisiana National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Noel Collins said in a written statement that the Guard will support local, state, and federal law enforcement “to enhance capabilities, stabilize the environment, assist in reducing crime, and restoring public trust.”

In total, more than 800 local, state and federal law enforcement officials will be deployed in New Orleans to close off Bourbon Street to vehicular traffic, patrol the area, conduct bag searches and redirect traffic, city officials said during a news conference Monday.

The extra aid for New Orleans has received the support of some Democrats, with Mayor LaToya Cantrell saying she is “welcoming of those added resources.”

The increased law enforcement presence comes a year after Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove around a police blockade in the early hours of Jan. 1 and raced down Bourbon Street, plowing into people celebrating New Year’s Day. The attacker, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran who had proclaimed his support for the Islamic State militant group on social media, was fatally shot by police after crashing. After an expansive search, law enforcement located multiple bombs in coolers placed around the French Quarter. None of the explosive devices detonated.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, 100 National Guard members were sent to the city.

In September, Gov. Jeff Landry asked Trump to send 1,000 troops to Louisiana cities, citing concerns about crime. Democrats pushed back, specifically leaders in New Orleans who said a deployment was unwarranted. They argued that the city has actually seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime rates in recent years.

Cline and Brook write for the Associated Press. Cline reported from Baton Rouge.

This is a column about lies. Big lies. Presidential lies. Dumb lies. The type of lies that have made life in the United States a daily dumpster fire of bad news. The kind of lies that would’ve made Frank Sinatra want to knock out a palooka.

More on Ol’ Blue Eyes in a bit.

For now let me tell you about one victim of President Trump’s mountain of lies whose brush with the administration defined our 2025.

On June 7, Brayan Ramos-Brito drove east on Alondra Boulevard from Compton toward a Chevron in Paramount to buy some snacks. It was his day off. It also was the weekend when Trump unleashed his deportation Leviathan on Southern California in a campaign that hasn’t stopped.

Ramos-Brito, a cook, had no idea that was going on as traffic froze on Alondra in front of a Home Depot. A “stay-at-home type of guy,” he didn’t even vote in the 2024 election because “politics isn’t my thing.”

But as the slender 30-year-old sat in his car, he saw federal immigration agents who had gathered across the street from the Home Depot fire flash-bang grenades at protesters who were screaming at them to leave. That’s when the moment “got to me.”

Ramos-Britos, a U.S citizen, got out of his car to yell at la migra, accusing those who looked Latino of being a “disgrace.” He said one of them shoved him into a scrum of protesters. After that, “all I remember were knees and kicks” by agents before they dragged him on the pavement and into the back of a van.

For hours Ramos-Brito and others stayed zip-tied inside as “craziness” erupted outside. Hundreds more residents arrived, as did L.A. County sheriff’s deputies. Smoke from blazes set by the former and tear gas canisters tossed by the latter seeped inside the van — “we kept telling agents we couldn’t breath, but they just ignored us.”

Photos and footage from the Paramount protest went viral and sparked an even bigger rally the following day near downtown L.A. that devolved into torched Waymo cars and concrete blocks hurled at California Highway Patrol vehicles. Soon, Trump called up the National Guard and Marines to occupy the City of Angels under the pretense that anarchy now ruled here — even though protests were confined to pockets of the metropolis. Siccing the National Guard on cities is something Trump has since tried to replicate across the country in any place that has dared to push back against immigration sweeps.

Ramos-Brito spent two weeks in a detention facility in Santa Ana stuffed in a cell with undocumented immigrants facing deportation. He faced federal felony charges of assaulting a federal agent and was accused of being one of the Paramount protest’s ringleaders as well.

Prosecutors tried to scare him into pleading guilty with threats of years in prison. Despite having no money to hire a lawyer, he refused: “I wasn’t going to take the blame for something I didn’t do.”

Federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega represented Ramos-Brito during a two-day September trial. Ortega screened video footage to the jury that proved his client’s version of what happened and easily caught federal agents contradicting each other and their own field reports.

The jury took about an hour to acquit Ramos-Brito on misdemeanor assault charges. He wants to move on — but the mendacity of the administration won’t let him.

The lies it used to try to railroad an innocent man turned out not to be an aberration but a playbook for Trump’s 2025.

The stretch of Alondra Boulevard in Paramount where a June 7 protest against immigration agents resulted in the arrest of 30-year-old Compton resident Brayan Ramos-Brito on allegations he assaulted one of them. A jury found him not guilty.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

Lies, of course, have fueled the president’s career from the days he was was a smarmy New York developer riding the coattails of his daddy. This year he and his apologists employed them like never before to try to consolidate their grip on all aspects of American life. They lied about the economy, about the contents of the Epstein files, about the efficacy of vaccines, the worth of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, our supposed noninterventionist foreign policy and so much more.

Above all, or at least most malignantly, Trump and his crew lied about immigrants. The big lie. The lie they thought everyone would believe and thus would excuse all the other lies. They have lied about and maligned just about anyone they don’t see worthy of being a so-called “heritage American,” aka white.

Trump ran for reelection on a promise to focus on targeting “the worst of the worst” but has shrugged his shoulders as most of the people swept up in raids have no criminal record and are sometimes even citizens and permanent residents. He vowed that deporting people would improve the economy despite decades of studies showing the opposite. Trumpworld insists immigrants are destroying the United States — never mind that the commander in chief is the son of a Scotswoman and is married to a Slovenian while vice president JD Vance’s in-laws are from India.

The administration maintains unchecked migration is cultural suicide even as cabinet members sport last names — Kennedy, Rubio, Bondi, Loeffler — once seen by Americans of past generations as synonymous with invading hordes.

This is where Frank Sinatra comes in.

Over the Christmas weekend, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media that his family watched a Christmas special starring the Chairman of the Board and his fellow paisan, Dean Martin.

“Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world,” Miller sneered. It didn’t matter that the crooners were proud children of Italian immigrants who arrived during a time where they were as demonized as Venezuelans and Somalis are now.

Take it from Sinatra himself.

In 1945 he released “The House I Live In,” a short film in which he tells a group of boys chasing one of their Jewish peers to embrace a diverse America. In 1991 as his Republican Party was launching an era of laws in California targeting illegal immigrants, Sinatra penned a Fourth of July essay for The Times opposing such hate.

“Who in the name of God are these people anyway, the ones who elevate themselves above others?” Sinatra wrote. “America is an immigrant country. Maybe not you and me, but those whose love made our lives possible, or their parents or grandparents.”

As 2025 went from one hell month to another, it really felt like Trumpworld’s lies would loom over the land for good. But as the year ends, it seems truth finally is peeking through the storm clouds, like the blue skies Sinatra sang about so beautifully.

Trump’s approval ratings have dropped greatly since his inauguration even among those who voted for him, with his deportation disaster playing a role. Judges and juries are beginning to swat away charges filed against people like Ramos-Brito like they were flies swarming around a dung pile. Under especial scrutiny is Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, the public face of Trump’s deportation ground game.

In November, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis ruled the federal government had to stop using excessive force in Chicago after months of agents firing pepper balls and tear gas at the slightest perceived insult. Her decision reasoned that Bovino’s sworn testimony about a Chicago under siege by pro-immigrant activists was “not credible” because he provided “cute” answers when he wasn’t “outright lying.”

Among the victims of those lies: Scott Blackburn, who was arrested for allegedly assaulting Bovino during an immigration raid even though videos showed the migra man tackle Blackburn like they were playing sandlot football, and Cole Sheridan, whom Bovino claimed injured his groin while arresting him during a protest; federal prosecutors quickly dropped all charges against Sheridan when they realized there was a lack of evidence to back up Bovino’s story.

And then there is Ramos-Brito, who had to endure a federal trial that hinged on Bovino insisting he was guilty of assaulting a federal agent in Paramount. He shook his head in disgust when I told him about Bovino’s continued tall tales.

“Justice was served for me,” Ramos-Brito said, “but not for others. I got lucky.”

Brayan Ramos-Brito, 30, of Compton, was found not guilty of assaulting a federal agent during June’s immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles County.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

We spoke in front of the Home Depot where the June 7 protest happened, where Trump’s year of immigration lies went into overdrive. The day laborers who used to gather there for years weren’t around. The gate where la migra and protesters faced off was closed.

Ramos-Brito still drives down that stretch of Alondra Boulevard for his snacks from the Chevron station that stands a block away from where his life forever was changed. It took him months to go public with his story. Scars remain on his ribs, back and shoulders.

“There’s times when little moments come through my head,” he acknowledged.

What finally convinced him to speak up was think about others out there like him. He now realizes speaking out against Trump’s lies is the only way to stop him for good.

“Whoever is going through the same that I did, keep fighting,” Ramos-Brito said softly. “They should look at my experience to give them hope.”

It was abundantly clear to actor-director Bradley Cooper that if “Is This Thing On?,” his comedy-drama set in New York’s stand-up scene, lacked authenticity, the film would fail. With the iconic Comedy Cellar at its heart, he found the key to unlocking that — by casting several of the real-life comedians who regularly take the stage there. Among them were two women at the top of their game right now with sold-out shows and substantial social media followings: Chloe Radcliffe and Jordan Jensen.

“Bradley fell in love with the Comedy Cellar and the relationships that go on there,” Jensen recalls.

“Is This Thing On?” is based on an anecdote from the life of British comedian John Bishop, whose career started when he stumbled into an open-mic night in Manchester, England, while temporarily separated from his wife. In the film, Will Arnett plays a fictionalized version of Bishop, Alex Novak, a finance guy, and the narrative shifts to New York.

“The idea was, ‘If we use people who aren’t comics to play comics, there’s not going to be a juxtaposition between Arnett and this super-tight group of people,’” Jensen says. “His character is this stuffy, bored guy, and he enters into this world of people who have day jobs just like him, but they step into this room, and it’s all dirty humor and busting each other’s balls.”

Radcliffe realized early on that Cooper, who also produced and co-wrote the film, understood the level of commitment required to portray the stand-up world realistically. She saw the first signs of him getting it when he screened 10 minutes of test footage for the comedians at his home, just a few blocks from the Greenwich Village club.

Comedian Chloe Radcliffe on stage as her character, Nina, in “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

“The second the test footage started, I immediately felt so confident that we are in the right hands,” she recalls. “Any lingering doubt or trepidation was totally washed away immediately, because Bradley just has such clarity of vision and taste. It was clear that he and Will had both embedded themselves deeply in the world of stand-up. Bradley wanted to capture what is real, and he was like, ‘If that means going off script, do it. If that means going to a weird place, do it.’”

Jensen adds, “I don’t think I said one actual line from the script. I would improvise something, and along the way, as I got the point across, it was OK. He might occasionally tell us to say a line, but it was in between 100% moments of improvisation, and he would be rolling camera.

“When I saw the movie, it was really moving. The way he showed it reintroduced me to it and made me be like, ‘Oh yeah, this place is f— magical.’”

Cooper wanted to capture what goes on offstage as well as on, and a significant part of that happened around a particular table at the Olive Tree Cafe, which sits above the underground comedy club. It’s where the acts gather before, after and in between their sets.

“We shot a scene around the comics’ table on the very first day,” Radcliffe says. “About a week or 10 days later, Bradley wanted to reshoot it because he looked at the footage and realized that it looked like a movie. He wanted to make something that looked like the real environment. I admire that so much. Not only is he willing to ask us for our input, but he’s also willing to go back and make new decisions based on new information.”

According to Jensen, in another scene in the cafe, the filmmaker asked whether the comedian’s coats, which PAs had removed from the shot, would be there, and when he was told they would, ordered them to be put back. The level of detail even extended to whether the comics would share fries from a single plate or have their own. It all mattered.

Comedian Jordan Jensen was used to riffing through her scenes on camera while playing her character, Jill, in “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

Radcliffe describes Cooper’s reverence for the Comedy Cellar and the comics as an appreciated display of “humility and willing” that extended to both the filmmaker and Arnett, asking for their input on techniques that would improve Novak’s set.

“We wound up chatting about things like where the funny idea is in a punch line, so you might rearrange the sentence so that the most surprising part of it comes at the end. That’s an unnatural way of delivering that sentence,” she reveals. “I would see Will running the set at the Cellar before the shoot, and he is so naturally funny that even if he went off script and started riffing, he instinctively hits punch lines. He has this natural sense of rhythm.”

However, neither the actor nor the director, who also plays Novak’s best friend, Balls, rested on their laurels. To gauge real audiences’ reactions to the material, they ran it multiple times in rooms for months before filming started. It’s something Jensen calls “the ballsiest thing I’ve ever seen a person do.”

“I would be on a show months before the movie was happening,” she says. “They’d be like, ‘Here’s Alex Novak,’ and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ I would see that it was Will Arnett and then I’d be like, ‘F—, he’s bombing. Oh, this is the movie.’”

However, the bombing was intentional, and things would change as the set progressed. She continues, “What I realized is they had written it so that the first chunk in the movie, he doesn’t do so great, the second chunk he does a little better, and the last chunk he does the best, which is how comedy works. I can’t imagine in a million years doing that and not breaking at some point, and being like, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m actually doing this for a movie.’”

While Arnett was on stage, Cooper would stand in the back of the room, taking notes, making changes and doing research. However, Jensen says watching Arnett tank, even on purpose, was “brutal.”

Will Arnett with director Bradley Cooper on the set of “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

“These were not open mic nights; they were real shows. It was Will Arnett’s reputation, and he was bombing on purpose, but it totally worked out in the long run. He was operating like a real comic up there.”

There were also little things that Arnett did, sometimes by accident, that made his delivery next-level. One example is when he breathes into the microphone.

“It was totally an improvised thing,” Jensen enthuses. “It was this moment of awkwardness that is so authentic that it makes you immediately empathize with him. You’re like, ‘Oh, man, I know that feeling of the air leaving your mouth, hitting the mic, and now everybody has heard that you’ve let out a sigh of grief.’”

Radcliffe, who plays Nina, and Jensen, who plays Jill, are close friends in real life and read for each other’s roles. Aside from being able to take Cooper and Arnett behind the curtain of the comedy scene, their relationship added an extra level of authenticity to the film and to each other’s performances.

“We’ve been really close since pre-pandemic, and she and I have a lot of similar energies,” Radcliffe muses. “We can both be trashy little gremlins. She has a level of aggression that I don’t quite step into, and I think I have a level of exasperation that she doesn’t quite step into. We play off each other really well. She’s so subversive and transgressive, and she’s got such a magnetism in where she is willing to go on stage that I think is unmatched in a lot of other comics working right now.”

Jensen, who is a big fan of Cooper’s work, recalls being starstruck when he first opened the door to his home when the cast came over to read the script for the film. “He opened the door and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bradley.’ I just looked at Chloe over his shoulder, beelined right to her, and snuggled up next to her on the couch, because I was so intimidated,” she said. “It would have still been great if she weren’t there, but having her there was the best. It’s one of those things where when I’m really old, I’ll tell people, and they won’t believe me.”

The Trump administration made work requirements for low-income people receiving government assistance a priority in 2025.

The departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development have worked to usher in stricter employment conditions to receive healthcare, food aid and rental assistance benefits funded by the federal government.

The idea is that public assistance discourages optimal participation in the labor market and that imposing work requirements not only leads to self-sufficiency, but also benefits the broader economy.

“It strengthens families and communities as it gives new life to start-ups and growing businesses,” the Cabinet secretaries wrote in a New York Times essay in May about work requirements.

Yet many economists say there is no clear evidence such mandates have that effect. There’s concern these new policies that make benefits contingent on work could ultimately come at a cost in other ways, from hindering existing employment to heavy administrative burdens or simply proving unpopular politically.

Here is a look at how work requirements could affect the millions of people who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and HUD-subsidized housing:

SNAP

What President Trumprefers to as his “Big Beautiful Bill” in July expanded the USDA’s work requirements policy for SNAP recipients who are able-bodied adults without dependents.

Previously, adults older than 54, as well as parents with children under age 18, at home were exempted from SNAP’s 80-hours monthly work requirement. Now, adults up to age 64 and parents of children between the age of 14 and 17 have to prove they’re working, volunteering or job training if they are on SNAP for more than three months.

The new law also cuts exemptions for people who are homeless, veterans and young people who have aged out of foster care. There are also significant restrictions on waivers for states and regions based on how high the local unemployment rates are.

The Pew Research Center, citing the most recent census survey data from 2023, notes 61% of adult SNAP recipients had not been employed that year, and that the national average benefit as of May was $188.45 per person or $350.89 per household.

Ismael Cid Martinez, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the people who qualify for SNAP are likely working low-wage jobs that tend to be less stable because they are more tied to the nation’s macroeconomics. That means when the economy weakens, it’s the low-wage workers whose hours are cut and jobs are eliminated, which in turn heightens their need for government support. Restricting such benefits could threaten their ability to get back to work altogether, Martinez said.

“These are some of the matters that tie in together to explain the economy and [how] the labor market is connected to these benefits,” Martinez said. “None of us really show up into an economy on our own.”

Angela Rachidi, a researcher at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, said she expects the poverty rate to decline as a result of the work requirements but even that wouldn’t ultimately affect the labor force.

“[E]ven if every nonworking SNAP adult subject to a work requirement started working, it would not impact the labor market much,” Rachidi said by email.

Medicaid

Trump’s big bill over the summer also created new requirements, starting in 2027, for low-income 19- to 64-year-olds enrolled in Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion or through a waiver program to complete 80 hours of work, job training, education or volunteering per month. There are several exemptions, including for those who are caregivers, have disabilities, have recently left prison or jail or are pregnant or postpartum.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has predicted that millions of people will lose healthcare because of the requirements.

Nationally, most people on Medicaid already work. The majority of experts on a Cornell Health Policy Center panel said that new national requirements won’t lead to large increases in employment rates among working adults on Medicaid, and that many working people would lose healthcare because of administrative difficulties proving they work.

Georgia is currently the only state with a Medicaid program that imposes work requirements, which Gov. Brian Kemp created instead of expanding Medicaid. The program, called Georgia Pathways, has come under fire for enrolling far fewer people than expected and creating large administrative costs.

Critics say many working people struggle to enroll and log their hours online, with some getting kicked out of coverage at times because of administrative errors.

And research released recently from the United Kingdom-based research group BMJ comparing Georgia with other states that did not expand Medicaid found Georgia Pathways did not increase employment during the first 15 months, nor did it improve access to Medicaid.

Kemp’s office blames high administrative costs and startup challenges on delays because of legal battles with former President Biden’s administration. A spokesperson said 19,383 Georgians have received coverage since the program began.

HUD

HUD in July also proposed a rule change that would allow public housing authorities across the country to institute work requirements, as well as time limits.

In a leaked draft of that rule change, HUD spells out how housing authorities can choose to opt in and voluntarily implement work requirements of up to 40 hours a week for people getting rental assistance, including adult tenants in public housing and Section 8 voucher-holders.

HUD also identified two states — Arkansas and Wisconsin — where it could trigger implementation based on existing state laws if and when the HUD rule change is approved. The proposal remains in regulatory review and would be subject to a public comment period.

HUD spokesman Matthew Maley declined to comment on the leaked documents, which broadly define the age of work-eligible people being up to age 61, with exemptions for people with disabilities and those who are in school or are pregnant. Primary caregivers of disabled people and children under 6 years old are also exempted.

HUD’s proposed rule change also notes that it is only defining the upper limits of the policy, allowing flexibility for local agencies to further define their individual programs with additional exemptions.

In a review of how housing authorities have tested work requirements over time, researchers at New York University found few successful examples, noting only one case where there were modest increases in employment — in Charlotte, N.C. — as compared to seven other regions where work requirements were changed or discontinued “because they were deemed punitive or hard to administer.”

Ho and Kramon write for the Associated Press.

THE list of living names in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire has shrunk to a jaw-dropping three.

Three decades after the tongue-twister song topped charts around the world, most of its human landmarks are gone. 

Out of the 59 people name-checked in the 1989 mega-hit, only Bob Dylan, rock n roll singer Chubby Checker, and “subway vigilante” Bernie Goetz are still alive. 

The grim-but-fascinating fact has been doing the rounds on social media after Bardot’s death was announced on Sunday.

One shocked fan admitted: “This is how I find out Chubby Checker is still alive.” 

Another said: “The kind of useless trivia I’ll be physically incapable of not repeating at the next dinner party.”

SCREEN GODDESS

How Brigitte Bardot became face of swinging 60s & sparked sexual revolution

DARK TIMES

Billy Joel reveals he attempted suicide twice after affair with bandmate’s wife

Billy’s catchy banger is a whirlwind history lesson.

It rattles through headlines and pop culture moments in strict chronological order starting the year Billy Joel was born in 1949, and racing toward the late 1980s.

One of the song’s most packed lines – “Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev” – covers 1956, the year iconic French actress Brigitte Bardot shot to global fame in And God Created Woman. 

It also nods to the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. 

Music also runs through the song like a second timeline.

Chart topper Billy, now age 79, kicks things off with Cry singer Johnnie Ray in 1949, one of the first modern pop stars signed to a major label. 

He quickly follows with Bill Haley & His Comets, whose Rock Around the Clock sent rock ’n’ roll into overdrive. 

Elvis Presley turns up in 1955, Buddy Holly marks 1959 and the tragedy of the Day the Music Died, Chubby Checker dances into 1960.

Bob Dylan appears in 1961 as pop music takes a sharp turn toward protest and social change.

By the time Joel hits the mid-to-late 1960s, it’s Beatlemania and Woodstock.

Bernie Goetz gets a mention after he became a household name in 1984 for shooting four black men on a train in New York after they allegedly demanded money.

One of the men was left brain damaged and paraplegic, and the shooting became a symbol of deep racial divide in the city.

Goetz handed himself in to police nine days later and was dubbed the “subway vigilante” by local media.

Dec. 28 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s People Power Party said Sunday it expelled former lawmaker Lee Hye-hoon after she accepted a nomination to serve as planning and budget minister in President Lee Jae-myung’s administration, calling the move an act that damaged the party ahead of local elections.

The party said its Supreme Council approved a resolution to expel Lee and void her party duties as an official. It said accepting the nomination amounted to misconduct because she agreed to join a Cabinet for the rival administration while holding a party post.

In a statement, the People Power Party said Lee, as a district party committee chair, “voluntarily agreed” to the appointment and thereby aided the current government. The party described it as an act of “disloyalty” with local elections six months away.

The party also said Lee continued party activities, including work related to evaluating elected officials, without disclosing her nomination as a State Council member, which it said disrupted party order and obstructed party operations.

The party warned it would respond “decisively and strictly” to any conduct that undermines its values and responsibilities, citing party rules and its constitution.

It also condemned President Lee and Lee Hye-hoon for what it described as turning a Cabinet post tied to national finances into an object of political bargaining and urged them to publicly apologize and take responsibility.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Piling on, stripping down, looking back, pushing ahead: Musicians found all sorts of uses for the album form this year, long after the jukebox in your pocket first threatened its existence. Here are the 25 LPs that held together the shards of my attention span in 2025.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

1. Jensen McRae, “I Don’t Know How but They Found Me!”
The year’s sharpest pop songwriting came from an overachieving L.A. native who understands at 28 that romantic relationships don’t live — and certainly don’t die — between just two people. In chatty yet carefully measured tunes with nearly as many hooks as words, McRae illuminates the accumulated humiliations and misunderstandings against which every couple flails. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder whether her ex’s sister had any luck with the baby.

2. SZA, “Lana”
The only dishonest thing about “Lana,” which arrived just before Christmas last year as 15 new songs slipped under the wrapping of 2022’s “SOS,” is that SZA says it’s not an album.

3. Madi Diaz, “Fatal Optimist”
Nothing to lose and nowhere to hide.

4. Morgan Wallen, “I’m the Problem”
It’s his party, and he’ll cry if he wants to.

5. Dijon, “Baby”
An album about new parenthood that feels like new parenthood.

6. Bad Bunny, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos”
After the adventure, the homecoming.

7. Tobias Jesso Jr., “Shine”
A pop-star whisperer takes a moment to listen to himself.

8. Parker McCollum, “Parker McCollum”
Beware the Nashville authenticity play — and admit that sometimes it works.

9. Gigi Perez, “At the Beach, In Every Life”
Like an emo-folk snowglobe.

10. Justin Bieber, “Swag”
On which, having survived teen-pop stardom, he flicks another ash out on the old patio.

11. Geese, “Getting Killed”
Rock is safe in the hands of the 25-and-unders.

12. Alemeda, “But What the Hell Do I Know”
Seriously.

13. Sam Fender, “People Watching”
A pint hoisted in the heartland.

14. Lady Gaga, “Mayhem”
The second (third?) life of a showgirl.

15. Bon Iver, “Sable, Fable”
“I could leave behind the snow / For a land of palm and gold.”

16. Sabrina Carpenter, “Man’s Best Friend”
Every himbo has his day.

17. CMAT, “Euro-Country”
Hungry for love, hungry for sex, hungry for anything not cooked by Jamie Oliver.

18. Haim, “I Quit”
Lots of breakup albums seek comfort in certainty; Haim’s lives on the slippery surface of doubt.

19. Lucy Dacus, “Forever Is a Feeling”
Sensual or cerebral is a false dichotomy.

20. Summer Walker, “Finally Over It”
A sculpted eyebrow arched in perpetuity.

21. Lily Allen, “West End Girl”
[Flush-faced emoji]

22. Bruce Springsteen, “Streets of Philadelphia Sessions”
From the Boss’ “Tracks II” trove of lost albums, a more vivid depiction of Bummed-Out Bruce than director Scott Cooper’s leaden “Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

23. Zach Top, “Ain’t in It For My Health”
Nashville’s friskiest traditionalist.

24. Eddie Chacon, “Lay Low”
Shimmering slow-mo psychedelia.

25. Mariah Carey, “Here for It All”
Crinkly ’70s soul, jumping slap-bass gospel, a faithful cover of Wings’ wonderfully gloopy “My Love”: As its title promises, Carey’s 16th studio album opens its doors to a little bit of everything.

A funny thing about this year’s best films: Half of them are adaptations. As a movie lover who’s always hunting for new talent, new ideas and new stimuli, I used to view that as creative inertia. But 2025 has changed my mind.

Now I see artists drawing inspiration from the past to show that Hollywood should trust the sturdy bones that have kept it running for over a century: good yarns, bold casting, films that don’t feel made by focus groups or doomsaying bean-counters (or, God help us, AI), but by blood and sweat.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

From original tales to radical reworkings of classics both high-falutin’ and raucously lowbrow, these 10 filmmakers all know that the most vital part of the storytelling business has stayed exactly the same. They have to wow an audience. And they did.

1. ‘Sinners’

Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack in the movie “Sinners.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

A period-piece-vampire-musical mashup could have been discordant, but writer-director Ryan Coogler confidently makes all three genres harmonize. In “Sinners,” Coogler double-casts his longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan as twin bootleggers Smoke and Stack, then pits them against a pack of banjo-picking bloodsuckers helmed by a roguish Jack O’Connell. We’re expecting a big, bloody brouhaha and we get it. Underneath the playful carnage, however, the question at stake is: Why suffer the daily indignities of the Jim Crow-era South when you could outlive — and eat — your oppressors? “Sinners” is the most exciting film of 2025, both for what it is and for what it proves: that fresh blockbusters still exist and people are eager to gobble them up.

(“Sinners” is available on multiple platforms.)

2. ‘Hedda’

Tessa Thompson in the movie “Hedda.”

(Prime Video)

The stage’s iconic mean girl glides from 1890s Norway to 1950s England in this vibrant and venomous adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler.” Tessa Thompson stars as the restless housewife who needs to secure her milquetoast husband (Tom Bateman) a promotion and has a nasty habit of playing with guns. Keeping pace with her manipulative anti-heroine, writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”) makes a few calculated moves of her own, including gender-swapping Hedda’s ex into a curvaceous career woman (a haughty Nina Hoss) whose drab and geeky new girlfriend (Imogen Poots) irritates their hostess’ insecurities. As a capper, “Hedda” stages its brutal showdown at an all-night vodka-and-cocaine-fueled mansion shebang with a live jazz band, a lake for skinny-dippers and a hedge maze where former lovers are tempted to canoodle. The original play is over a century old, but every scene feels screamingly alive.

(“Hedda” is available on Prime Video.)

3. ‘Eddington’

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.”

(A24)

No film was more polarizing than Ari Aster’s COVID-set satire about a mask-hating sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), a sanctimonious mayor (Pedro Pascal) and the high-tech cabal that benefits when these two modern cowboys come to blows. “Eddington” immortalizes the bleak humor and lingo of May 2020 (think murder hornets, Antifa and toilet paper hoarders). More stingingly, it captures the mental delirium of a small town — make that an entire planet — that hasn’t yet realized that there’s a second sickness seeping in through their smartphones. Everyone’s got a device in their hand pretty much all the time, aiming their cameras at each other like pistols in a Wild West standoff. Yet no character grasps what’s really going on. (I have a theory, but when I explain the larger conspiracy, I sound cuckoo too.) This is the movie that will explain pandemic brain to future generations. With distance, I’m pretty sure the haters will come around.

(“Eddington” is available on multiple platforms.)

4. ‘One Battle After Another’

Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “One Battle After Another.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Every shot in Paul Thomas Anderson’s invigorating nail-biter is a banger: sentinels skateboarding over rooftops, caged kids playing catch with a crumpled foil blanket, Teyana Taylor’s militant Perfidia Beverly Hills blasting an automatic rifle while nine months pregnant. It’s the rare film that instantly imprints itself on the viewer. On my second watch, I was shocked by how much of “One Battle After Another” already felt tattooed on my brain, down to the shudder I got from Sean Penn’s loathsome Col. Lockjaw licking his comb to tidy his bangs. Riffing from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the central drama follows flunky anarchist Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) fumblingly attempting to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from Lockjaw’s clutches. But he’s not much help to her, and as the title implies, this is merely one skirmish in humanity’s sprawling struggle for freedom that has, and will, drag on forever. Anderson’s knack for ensemble work stretches back as far as “Boogie Nights,” yet here, even his unnamed characters have crucial roles to play. His world-building has never before felt this holistic and inspirational.

(“One Battle After Another” is now playing in theaters.)

5. ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’

Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

(Roadside Attractions)

The backstory behind this stunner couldn’t be more baroque: Director Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls”) boldly revamped a Broadway musical of an Oscar-winning drama (itself taken from an experimental novel) about two inmates in an Argentine cell who mentally escape into the movies. Each incarnation has doubled down on the sensorial overload of what came before. If you know “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” lineage, you’ll be impressed by how Condon ups the fantasy and stokes the revolutionary glamour with more Technicolor dance showcases for Jennifer Lopez’. (She’s doing her best Cyd Charisse, which turns out to be darned good.) If this is your first taste of the tale, give yourself over to the prickly but tender relationship between prisoners Luis and Valentin, played by feisty new talent Tonatiuh and a red-blooded Diego Luna. This is go-for-broke filmmaking with a wallop. As Luis says of his own version of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” playing in his head, “Call it kitsch, call it camp — I don’t care, I love it.”

(“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is available on multiple platforms.)

6. ‘A Useful Ghost’

A scene from the movie “A Useful Ghost.”

(TIFF)

Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Grand Prix winner opens with a haunted vacuum cleaner. From there, it gets even more surprising. Ghosts have infested a wealthy widow’s factory and are possessing appliances, seducing her son and cozying up to the prime minister for favors. Some of these people have died by accident, some by corporate neglect or worse. This droll spook show bleeds into romance and politics and, to our shock, becomes genuinely emotional. (It helps to remember that the military killed over 80 Bangkok protesters in 2010.) But why vacuum cleaners, you ask? The conceit is more than a sticky idea. Ordinary people can get crushed but the anger they leave behind lingers like fine dust.

(“A Useful Ghost” opens Jan. 16, 2026, in theaters.)

7. ‘The Roses’

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie “The Roses.”

(Jaap Buitendijk / Searchlight Pictures)

Technically, “The Roses” is rooted in the 1980s hit novel and subsequent blockbuster “The War of the Roses,” which starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as an estranged couple who attack each other with lawyers, poison and chandeliers. In spirit, however, this redo is pure 1930s screwball comedy. Leads Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman are skilled verbal ninjas who hurl razor-sharp insults at each other’s egos, and although their characters’ divorce happens in California, director Jay Roach lets the actors keep their snippy British accents. The script by two-time Oscar nominee Tony McNamara (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things”) adds a cruel twist to the original: This time around, the marrieds truly do try their damnedest to love and support each other. And still, their walls come tumbling down.

(“The Roses” is available on multiple platforms.)

8. ‘In Whose Name?’

Ye and Elon Musk in the documentary “In Whose Name?”

(AMSI Entertainment)

Nico Ballesteros was a high schooler with an iPhone when he entered Kanye West’s orbit in 2018. Over the next six years, the Orange County kid shot over 3,000 hours of footage as Ye (as the artist legally became known in 2021) jetted from Paris to Uganda, Calabasas to the White House, meeting everyone from Kenny G to Elon Musk on a quest to fulfill his creative and spiritual goals while incinerating his personal life and public reputation. Ye gave the documentarian full access with no editorial oversight, besides one moment in which he tells the camera that he wants the film to be about mental health. This riveting tragedy definitely is. We see an egomaniac whose fear of being beholden to anything motivates him to go off his meds, a billionaire provocateur who believes he can afford the consequences of his bigotry and, above all, a deeply flawed man who nukes his entire world to insist he’s right.

(“In Whose Name?” is available on multiple platforms.)

9. ‘Sirāt’

An image from the movie “Sirāt,” directed by Oliver Laxe.

(Festival de Cannes)

The techno soundtrack of Oliver Laxe’s desolate road thriller has rattled my house for months. Lately, I’ve spent just as much time contemplating the movie’s silence — those hushed stretches in which this caravan of bohemians speeds across the Moroccan desert looking like the only free people left on Earth. A father, Luis (“Pan’s Labyrinth’s” Sergi López), and his 12-year-old son team up with this band of tattooed burnouts in the hope of finding the boy’s runaway sister. Before long, Luis is just hoping to make it to safety, assuming anywhere safe still exists. Static on the radio warns that World War III might be underway. These outsiders click off the news and crank up the music. The paradox of “Sirāt” is that I’m dying to talk about it more but I’ve got to keep my mouth shut until people experience its dramatic twists for themselves.

(“Sirāt” returns to theaters on Feb. 6, 2026.)

10. ‘The Naked Gun’

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in the movie “The Naked Gun.”

(Frank Masi / Paramount Pictures)

Liam Neeson needed this pummeling pun-fest. So did everyone else in 2025. Director Akiva Schaffer’s continuation of the “Police Squad!” franchise let the 73-year-old “Taken” star poke fun at his own bruising gravitas. Playing the son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, Neeson kept us in hysterics with a stupid-brilliant barrage of surreal wordplay and daffy slapstick. The casting was as odd — and perfect — as rumors that he and his co-star Pamela Anderson started dating on set. This fourth sequel didn’t try to outsmart the classic Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker template. It simply told the same old story: Cop meets babe, cop and babe canoodle with a magical snowman, cop drops his trousers on live TV, this time minus the blimp. Goodyear? No, the worst — which made Neeson our hero.

(“The Naked Gun” is available on multiple platforms.)

Since I’m all jazzed-up about great movies, here are 10 honorable mentions very much worth a watch.

“The Ballad of Wallis Island”
A kooky millionaire strong-arms his favorite mid-aughts folk duo into playing a reunion show on his Welsh island. Sounds cutesy, but it’s the movie I recommended most — to everyone from my mailman to my mother. They all loved it. Join the fan club.

“Bunny”
This East Village indie by debut director Ben Jacobson is a scummy gem. A gigolo’s birthday goes very wrong. But all the characters racing up and down the stairs of his uber-New York walk-up hovel are a howl.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Rose Byrne excels equally at comedy and drama. This audit of a breakdown smashes both together and cranks the tension up to eleven. Playing a high-stress working mom of an ill child, her try-hard heroine leans in so harrowingly far, she goes kamikaze.

“Lurker”
Today’s celebrity might be viral on Instagram and unknown everywhere else. Alex Russell’s stomach-churning psychodrama stars Archie Madekwe as an L.A.-based singer on the brink of genuine fame and Théodore Pellerin as the hanger-on who endures — and exploits — the fledgling star’s power moves and hazy boundaries.

“Magic Farm”
Filmmaker Amalia Ulman’s rascally farce stars Chloë Sevigny and Alex Wolff as clickbait journalists who fly to Argentina to shoot a viral video about a singer in a bunny costume and wind up looking twice as ridiculous.

Keke Palmer, left, and SZA in the movie “One of Them Days.”

(Anne Marie Fox / Sony Pictures)

“One of Them Days”
Keke Palmer and SZA play broke Baldwin Hills roommates who have nine hours to make rent. I’d happily watch their stoner high jinks in real time.

“The Perfect Neighbor”
Pieced together primarily from police body-camera footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary unfurls in a Florida cul-de-sac where a community — adults, kids and cops — agrees that one woman is an entitled pill. The problem is she thinks they’re the problem. And she has a gun.

“Sisu: Road to Revenge”
If Buster Keaton were alive, he’d hail this grisly, mostly mute Finnish action flick as a worthy successor to “The General.” It even boasts a thrilling sequence on a train, although director Jalmari Helander also brazenly poaches from “Die Hard” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

“Train Dreams”
Trees fall in the woods and a 20th-century logger (Joel Edgerton) plays an unheard, unthanked but beautiful role in the building of America.

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”
Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) teams up with a soul-searching priest (Josh O’Connor) to solve a perplexing church stabbing. From deft plot twists to provocative Catholic theology, Rian Johnson’s crowd-pleasing murder mystery is marvelously executed.

EDMONTON, Canada — Jason Hills grew up in a rural hamlet in southern Alberta so small there were no traffic lights. Which wasn’t a problem because there wasn’t any traffic either.

But there was a curling rink.

“There was nothing else really to do,” Hills said. “So if you weren’t curling you’d go hang out at the curling rink. It’s a community thing. It’s like everyone gets together.”

In much of the world curling is a curiosity, a sport which, like luge or the biathlon, surfaces every four years at the Winter Olympics — as it will do in February in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy — then quickly fades from view.

Canada’s Tracy Fleury (R) releases the stone during a gold medal match against Switzerland at the World Women’s Curling Championship in Uijeongbu on March 23.

(JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images)

In Canada, however, it’s as much a part of the culture as poutine and maple syrup.

More than 2.3 million people — or one of every 18 Canadians — participate in the sport annually. That’s about 100 times the level of participation in the U.S. And more than 11 million Canadians watched the sport on TV in 2024, according to estimates from Curling Canada, the national governing body for the sport.

“It’s just embedded in the fabric of Canada,” said Elaine Dagg-Jackson, an Olympic bronze medalist and now one of Canada’s top curling coaches. “Canadians have a real identity with what curling is and what it stands for. It’s a gracious sport where people are being polite. They shake hands before and after the game.

“The curling rink was just a really good place to be in Canada. And still is. It just really suits the culture.”

The objectives of the sport are simple: Teams of two to four players slide 44-pound granite stones, also known as rocks, down a narrow 150-foot-long sheet of ice toward a target area called the house, aiming to get their stone closest to the center of the house. One or two players from the throwing team use carbon-fiber brooms to sweep the ice in front of the moving stone, influencing its path and speed.

A round of play ends when each team has thrown eight stones; in Olympic curling, a match consists of 10 ends, eight in mixed curling, with games typically lasting two to three hours.

The simplicity of the sport is both its charm and its curse. Because there is no running, jumping or lifting of heavy objects, everyone from young children to octogenarians can, and do, compete in amateur curling in Canada.

“It’s relatively inexpensive and it’s relatively accessible,” said Heather Mair, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. “It’s not a hard sport to play and have fun at. It’s hugely entertaining. And you can really play your whole life.

“I don’t know too many sports you could go out with your grandfather and participate. It can be really family-oriented as a sport.”

But while it looks easy, to excel at the highest levels, where millimeters separate winners from losers in competitions that can stretch for as long as seven hours over multiple days, the sport requires surprising strength, stamina, precision and agility.

Canada’s Brett Gallant curls the stone during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 17, 2022.

(LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images)

“It definitely takes a toll on your body,” Rachel Homan, a three-time Canadian Olympian and three-time world champion, said during a break in training on a bright Edmonton morning. “That part of the game is maybe overlooked; the physical toll it takes. It’s definitely demanding.”

The curling events at February’s Winter Olympics will be held at the Cortina Olympic Stadium in Cortina D’Ampezzo, one of four event clusters in and around Milan. Canada, which has medaled in curling in every Olympics in the modern era, winning a record six golds, will send a dozen athletes — including Homan, the reigning world champion — to Italy to compete in the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles.

The U.S., which has won two Olympic curling medals, both in the men’s competition, will also have a dozen curlers in Italy competing in all three events. But if the sport is a national pastime in Canada, one that competes with hockey for fans and media attention, it remains something of an oddity in the U.S., where it draws huge TV audiences every four years during the Olympics, then fades from view until the next Winter Games.

“It’s so frustrating to see curling become the next best thing to sliced bread for a month and then it comes off the radar for four years,” said Korey Dropkin, a five-time U.S. champion and a 2023 world champion in mixed doubles. “I want to see something that’s on national television in the U.S. every week. I want to be able to expose our amazing sport to the U.S. audience day in, day out.

“I hope that in the near future we’ll be able to create more opportunities for exposure for curling.”

Curling was born in Scotland in the early 16th century but grew up centuries later on the Canadian prairies, where the severe weather, rural landscape and boredom provided fertile ground.

“In many parts of the country there’s long, long winters,” Dagg-Jackson said. “The farmers would be busy all summer, but in the winter they were looking for something to do. So the old adage in Canada is you could go to any town in rural Canada and find a grain elevator and a curling rink.”

Members of the Highland Curling Club, formed in 1898, play on flooded sheets of ice on Jan. 11 in Inverness, Scotland.

(Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images)

The sport, which predates hockey by several decades, was brought to Montreal by Scottish emigrants during the colonial period, more than a half-century before Canada became a country. It then moved west as settlers pushed into what would become the central provinces, where the game was played on ponds and lakes before coming indoors.

In many ways the sport and the harsh conditions in which it thrived embodied the traditional values and traits — resilience, community, politeness, resourcefulness — that have come to define Canada’s unique “northern character.”

Mair, the Waterloo professor, has studied the role curling played in creating social and inter-generational connections and found the sport may have been more important from a mental perspective than from a physical one.

“I don’t know if you can appreciate what a Canadian winter is like, but anything that gets us out of our homes and talking to one another is really, really important,” she said. “We know how necessary it is that we spend time socializing with one another, especially in the dark winter days.”

As a result, it quickly became hugely popular, but for reasons that went beyond sport. Most curling rinks, Mair said, provide social spaces where players can visit with the people they’re competing against.

“So you’re sitting there for half an hour with people that you might never run into in any other part of your life and you start to build social relationships,” she said. “In really small rural communities, those are pretty essential. That’s kind of how it started.”

Aksarban Curling Club president Steve Taylor demonstrates how to push off the hack to deliver a stone in front of an all-ages group learning about the sport in Omaha, Neb., in 2018.

(Nati Harnik / Associated Press)

It’s also why the flat lands of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta became the earliest hotbeds of curling, which aligned well with the farming season. But the sport didn’t stay there. Curling clubs soon sprung up on Army bases and in fishing communities, in big cities and small towns, where it was taught in schools and played in retirement homes. (Curling has taken a different path in the U.S., where it has become popular in nontraditional winter-sports areas such as North Carolina, Florida, Texas and the San Francisco Bay area.)

“There were entire generations, for the most part, who really had a sense of the game,” Mair said. “The[re] were plumbers and carpenters and teachers, they had regular day jobs and yet they were these really talented athletes who would take the sport to these elite levels.

“So you could come from a teeny, tiny club and you might know someone who’s playing in the national championship.”

That romanticism inspired a radio play and novella by W.O. Mitchell, a writer and broadcaster who chronicled life on the Canadian prairies in the mid 20th century. In “The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon,” which was also adapted for television, a cobbler from a small town in rural Alberta strikes a deal with the devil to trade his soul for curling success.

American John Shuster watches Matt Hamilton, center, and Colin Hufman, left, sweep his throw during a match against Canada at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.

(Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)

But as curling moved from the prairies to the cities, the object lessons the sport taught changed as well. If Mitchell’s tale is a decades-old take on the timeless tug of war between good and evil, “The New Canadian Curling Club,” a 2018 comedy by playwright Mark Crawford in which four immigrants show up for a learn-to-curl class, is a modern exploration of multiculturalism and acceptance.

What the immigrants share, however, is a belief that understanding Canada starts with understanding curling.

“It’s weird and wonderful. And like all good things, it takes a little time to appreciate,” Mair, who teaches in the department of recreation and leisure studies at Waterloo, said of the sport. “At first glance you’re not totally sure what’s going on. And then as the layers start to kind of unfold, you realize just how interesting and complicated and engaging it can be.

“It’s fun. It really is. It’s quirky and fun. And I think we need more of that.”

But, she added, much of that has changed since curling entered the Olympics.

“We’re at a bit of a crossroads,” she said. “Elite sport is doing just fine in a lot of ways. [But] we need to have a different conversation about community sport. It’s not about a pathway to Olympic gold. It’s about rebuilding our communities and providing safe and accessible sports for everything. And curling is just so special in that way.”

Curling debuted in the Winter Games in 1924 with just three countries taking part; Great Britain, which fielded a team of Scottish curlers, won the gold medal. But the sport didn’t return to the official Olympic program for another 74 years and when it did, the exposure fueled interest in winter sports powerhouses such as China, Japan and South Korea, but also in Afghanistan, Andorra, Bolivia, the Virgin Islands, Kuwait and Mexico, which are all among the 67 members of the World Curling Assn.

“There’s a little bit of perception from America that curling is small potatoes. And it probably is compared to the big four sports,” said Marc Kennedy, a world and Olympic champion from Canada who will be competing in his fourth Olympics in Italy. “But it’s a big deal. Arguably one of the fastest-growing sports internationally. It’s massive in Asia. Some of our most popular athletes are from Japan.”

That added competitiveness — 30 countries attempted to qualify for this year’s Olympic tournament — has not only raised the stakes and professionalized the sport, it also threatens to crush curling’s gracious and polite traditions in a stampede for the top of the medal podium. In last spring’s world championship in Canada, for example, Chinese athletes were accused of touching a stone with a broom, kicking a stone and illegal sweeping — all forbidden acts.

In most other sports, that would have been considered gamesmanship. In curling, the accusations alone were an affront to the sport’s tradition and dignity.

Team Shuster’s Chris Plys throws the rock during the U.S. Olympic curling team trials in Omaha, Neb., on Nov. 20, 2021.

(Rebecca S. Gratz / Associated Press)

“In curling you always divulge that you broke a rule … and apologize,” said Dagg-Jackson, the former Olympian turned coach.

“It’s supposed to be a gentleman’s game. You’re supposed to call your own fouls,” added Chris Plys, a three-time U.S. Olympian. “Now we’re starting to see people doing questionable things.

“It’s sad because the best part of the game is just how honest everything is. And there’s people out there 1766928496 that are willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

Those athletes certainly aren’t cheating for the money since curlers, even at the highest level, have often had to work regular jobs to pay the bills. That could change this spring with the launch of the Rock League, the sport’s first professional competition, which will begin play shortly after the Milan-Cortina Olympics.

“The Rock League is going to be a huge new chapter to the sport,” said Dropkin, the Olympian who will captain the U.S. Rock League team. “That is going to present a whole lot of opportunities to curlers. Curlers now, curlers [in] the pipeline. They can actually make a living.”

The five-week circuit will feature six teams of five men and five women — one from the Asian-Pacific, two from Canada, two from Europe and one representing the U.S. — playing a variety of formats during stops in the U.S. and Canada. Competitors will not just earn money based on performance, but will receive salaries as well.

Historically the sport has relied heavily on prize money, which doesn’t go far. Kennedy’s winning five-man team at the 2025 Brier, the annual Canadian men’s championships, split $108,000 of the tournament’s $300,000 purse last March, which didn’t leave much after paying for travel and housing at the 10-day event.

The Dodgers will pay Shohei Ohtani more than that every time he comes to the plate over the next 10 seasons.

“I don’t think any of us get into curling with the idea of making millions of dollars,” said Kennedy, 43, a father of two who sold his frozen-food franchise 14 years ago to support his curling career. “You’ve got a lot of curlers out there that still play for the love of the game and for the opportunity to represent Canada at the Olympics or World Championships.

“If money was your motivation, then you’re probably in the wrong sport.”

Rachel Homan throws a rock during Canadian Olympic curling trials in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on Nov. 25.

(Darren Calabrese / Associated Press)

For Homan, 36, a mother of three young children who has traditionally relied on sponsorships, stipends from the national federation and winnings from underfunded tours such as the Grand Slam of Curling to make ends meet, the Rock League has the potential to change not only her life, but her legacy as well.

“In this league, being a part of it, might not mean anything for me financially right now. But it’s more about what you’re leaving behind and what you’re helping create,” said Homan, who will captain one of the league’s two Canadian teams.

Financing a professional league isn’t the only challenge curling will face coming out of the Milan-Cortina Games, though. Because while the Olympics may help the sport gather viewers, it has done little to reverse a steady decline in participation at the grassroots level, which is robbing the sport of its future athletes.

“It’s just hard to get young kids introduced to it and have access to it,” Kennedy said. “Back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s it was the community center. Everybody kind of learned curling, especially out west. That’s what was driving a huge part of our sport for a long time.”

Not any more. Canada, like the U.S., has seen millions of people flee rural areas for big cities over the last several decades and as a result the local curling rink is no longer the civic hub it was when Jason Hills was growing up on the frigid plains of central Alberta. And what investment there is in the sport is now being directed to events such as the Olympics, the Grand Slam of Curling or the fledgling Rock League, not to building more community rinks.

“Curling had to pivot a bit,” said Dagg-Jackson, who takes her five grandchildren curling. “It used to be all about membership, about the thousands and thousands of curlers across the country. Now those few competitive curlers that shine in the spotlight are known to all Canadians because they’re on television all the time and they draw attention to the sport.

“Fifty years ago you just waited at the rink and people showed up because it was the place to be. Big events, Olympics, pro leagues, that’s the future of curling. But the culture and the lore, the history of curling, it’ll always be there.”