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WASHINGTON — Nearly a quarter century after a day “etched forever into the memories of Americans,” President Trump honored the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Tuesday by vowing to “never forget.”

The event at the Ellipse was spearheaded by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and showcased a massive, 21-foot, nearly 17,000-pound steel beam recovered from the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, which had traveled for months across the country as part of the Steel Across America tour.

The steel beam will make its way through New York in a procession on Friday by retracing the steps of fallen New York City firefighter Stephen Siller. Trump’s presence at the event on Tuesday just outside the White House began a week of commemorations that will culminate in several events on Friday, including one at the Pentagon that Trump will attend.

“This battered piece of steel here today on the Ellipse is a reminder that America is blessed with a strength no fire can consume, no evil can conquer and no terror can destroy,” Trump said.

Trump noted that the Sept. 11 attacks were one of few moments in history that “divide time into really what came before” and after.

His remarks briefly dipped into the political, as Trump warned of people turning a “communistic way” — a reference to his frequent attacks on Democrats as more democratic socialists gain influence in the party.

During his remarks, Trump paid particular tribute to two men who died in the attacks: Jeffrey Palazzo, a New York City firefighter, and Welles Crowther, a young equities trader who became known as the “man in the red bandanna” after rescuing several people in the attacks.

Trump said the U.S. Coast Guard will commission a new fast-response cutter this weekend in New York in honor of Palazzo, a Coast Guard reservist who was working out of Staten Island’s Rescue Squad 5 when he responded to the attacks 25 years ago.

And the president recognized Crowther, also a volunteer firefighter, by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Crowther’s mother, Alison, and sister, Paige, accepted the award, which is considered the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In attendance were a smattering of top Cabinet officials and members of Congress, including Republican Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Dan Meuser, whose Pennsylvania district is near Shanksville, where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Trump praised at length Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm that had been housed at the World Trade Center. Lutnick lost his younger brother, Gary, as well as more than 650 employees in the attacks.

“He’s done an amazing job,” Trump said of Lutnick. “He’s rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald, and he’s given much of the profits to some of the families or the families of people who perished.”

About 150 first responders from New York, as well as some from Washington and Pennsylvania, were in attendance, Trump said.

“This steel beam represents the best of our country,” said Frank Siller, the foundation’s chairman and CEO who is the brother of Stephen Siller. “It’s important to recognize that the heroism that was exhibited that fateful day was nothing short of incredible.”

Kim writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.

It’s never too late to go back to school. But after years of deferred admission, can a new generation of students at Hillman College score high at delivering a compelling, modern take on the groundbreaking sitcom “A Different World”?

The foundation for an updated version of the popular sitcom set at a historically Black college was set three decades ago. In the 1993 series finale, the show’s central couple — smart, bespeckled math whiz Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and high-maintenance Southern belle Whitley Gilbert-Wayne (Jasmine Guy) — were embarking on their next chapter as newlyweds, relocating to Japan and expecting their first child. Before their departure, a professor jokingly quips to Dwayne: “I can’t wait to have your child in my class in the year 2014.”

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But plans for a revival — the original series itself was a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” centered on the Huxtables’ free-spirited daughter Denise (Lisa Bonet) — to suit that time frame were in limbo for years. Producer and director Debbie Allen, who joined the original series in its second season to help it better reflect the HBCU experience, actively pitched and tried to relaunch “A Different World” in the early 2010s, but those efforts were derailed by the highly publicized sexual assault allegations against the show’s creator, Bill Cosby.

“It’s very difficult,” Allen told The Times. “The biggest difficulty, just being totally transparent, was people’s hesitation to work with Mr. Cosby; to have anything to do with him. [But] we were so independent. He kind of put us on a boat and said, ‘Go.’ And that’s what we did. And he was happy to know that we were going on our way.”

In early 2023, another push began to revive the series while also distancing itself from Cosby. Now, its decades-long gap year finally complete, a new incarnation of “A Different World” is starting up classes this fall at Netflix. And it hopes to carry on the legacy of its predecessor, which was celebrated for its depiction of Black culture and life in a higher education setting during its six-season run on NBC, from 1987 to 1993, bringing HBCUs into the mainstream.

Rashida (Alijah Kai), left, Deborah (Maleah Joi Moon) and Hazel (Kennedi Reece) in Netflix’s “A Different World.” After years of trying to tell the story of a new class at fictional Hillman College, Debbie Allen, who returns as an executive producer and director, says the sequel arrives at the right moment: “If there’s any voice we need to hear from right now, it’s young people.”

(Daniel Delgado Jr. / Netflix)

Billed as a sequel series premiering Sept. 24, a Wayne offspring is our anchor for the freshman class at Hillman College, the show’s fictional historically Black college based in Virginia. Deborah Wayne (Maleah Joi Moon) is an aspiring artist forced to attend her parents’ alma mater on academic probation after her NYU acceptance is rescinded. As the youngest Wayne child, she continues the family’s legacy at the school: her older sister — the child Whitley was pregnant with at the end of the original series — and an older brother are both alums.

She’s joined by a mix of first-gen and legacy students: star quarterback Shaquille Johnson (Cornell Young IV), who is the only child of original character Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell); criminal justice major Rashida Duvall (Alijah Kai); psych major Amir Rodale (Jordan Aaron Hall); Ghanaian-Nigerian fashion merchandising student Kojo Achebe (Chibuikem Uche); and small-town pastor’s daughter Hazel Henry (Kennedi Reece).

Some of the show’s original creative team join Allen as executive producers, including Tom Werner, and original series writers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Gina Prince-Bythewood. (Mandy Summers of “That ’90s Show” is also an executive producer.) To shepherd this reimagined version of the sitcom, Allen enlisted her former “Grey’s Anatomy” colleague Felicia Pride, who was most recently part of the writing staff on “Bel-Air,” the dramatic reboot of ’90s comedy “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It was a dream call for Pride, who as a kid living in Baltimore recorded and rewatched episodes — namely, the one involving a step competition that she obsessively watched after school to learn the routine. But she was reluctant.

“I love the show so much,” Pride said, seated next to Allen inside a Netflix conference room in Los Angeles on a recent day. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be the one to mess it up.’ But she [Debbie] was so adamant that the time was now to hear from young Black America — and that, I could get with.”

Allen remembers it this way: “I don’t have an ego. I begged her. It’s the truth. To get this show back up, we’ve tried for years. But this is the time that’s right … We had inspired all these kids, not just Black kids, all young people to go to college. This was a peep into college that had never happened before, where you saw young people being responsible and living their lives and being crazy, but still dealing with what is happening in this world. If the young people in the country don’t have a voice, that country is dead. And if there’s any voice we need to hear from right now, it’s young people.”

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1. The original “A Different World”: Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), left, and Ron (Darryl M. Bell). 2. Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis), left, Freddie (Cree Summer) and Whitley (Jasmine Guy). With Netflix’s modern take, showrunner Felicia Pride wanted the series to be intergenerational: “That’s why I’m so glad that we were able to have the legacy cast in the show — I wanted it to have the heart.” (NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

The show has been credited with boosting enrollment at HBCUs. While overall HBCU enrollment rose by 26% between 1976 and 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, much of that increase occurred during the stretch of the show’s run.

Pride said she rewatched the original series, paying particular attention to the shift that materialized in Season 2 when Allen was brought on to overhaul it, as a starting point. Allen had a document of ideas detailing the types of characters she wanted to see depicted, including a star athlete, the first out queer character in the show’s universe and an African student. One major detail was a nonnegotiable: Allen wanted the show to revolve around Dwayne and Whitley’s daughter. (How they arrived at the character’s name — Deborah (pronounced Deb-OR-ah), which also happens to be Allen’s first name — is fuzzy. Pride remembers the name already being set by Allen; Allen recalls being amused upon seeing it on the page, thinking Pride had chosen the name.)

And just as in college, legacy matters on TV.

“I wanted the show to feel of now,” Pride said. “I also wanted it to be intergenerational. That was important to me, and that’s why I’m so glad that we were able to have the legacy cast in the show — I wanted it to have the heart … These [characters] were like my friends. I felt comfort in them. I felt like I could be them. It was also culture in a way that I hadn’t seen before, represented by people who look like me.”

Several familiar faces from the original make their way into the sequel, some taking on the mentor role of the older characters from the original, others representing how one gives back to the community that shaped them. Hardison and Guy lead the cast from the original series who reprise their characters, along with Bell, Cree Summer as Freddie Brooks, Charnele Brown as Kimberly Reese Boyer, Ajai Sanders as Gina Deveaux, Karen Malina White as Charmaine Brown, Jada Pinkett Smith as Lena James, Jenifer Lewis as Dorothy Dandridge Davenport and Allen as Dr. Langhorne.

Several original “A Different World” cast members reprise their roles in the new version of the series, including Charnele Brown, left, Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Darryl M. Bell and Cree Summer.

(Quantrell Colbert / Netflix)

“They were so happy to be back,” Allen said. “There was a day they were all together —”

“That was the day where I felt like, ‘Oh, this is history,’” Pride added.

“In between takes, it was just chaos,” Allen continued. “They just laughed and acted up. It was just wonderful.”

To make the new characters and their stories resonate in a deeper, more contemporary way required as large a commitment to reflecting HBCU life as the original had under Allen’s guidance. The creative team assembled two paid student councils from various HBCUs — one to advise the writers’ room on storylines and campus issues; the other worked on the show’s Atlanta set, with students hired as production assistants that had working schedules tailored to their classes. The background performers filling up scenes in the quads, classrooms and parties feature 59% HBCU students and grads. And some key characters are portrayed by HBCU alumni who bring their lived experience to the screen, including Reece, who went to Howard University.

The freshman season will explore issues that Gen Z is grappling with such as financial insecurity, learning struggles, activism in the age of social media and matters of mental health, as well as bigger systemic issues like uncertainty around funding for HBCUs and immigration enforcement. The series also doesn’t shy away from its real-world backdrop — while it doesn’t explicitly mention President Trump by name, there is reference to the state of affairs under his administration.

Actors Jordan Aaron Hall, left, Cornell Young IV, Chibuikem Uche and Dasan Frazier are part of the new class of students at Hillman College in “A Different World.”

(Eli Joshua Ade / Netflix)

But this version of “A Different World” departs from its source material in its narrative format and tone. The original series was a multi-camera sitcom taped in front of a studio audience — and Allen initially thought any sequel of it would follow that same blueprint. But when the new series found its home at Netflix, it became a 10-episode single-camera dramedy. (Allen directed three episodes in the season, including the premiere, which set the cinematic style of the series.) As if to signal this iteration hasn’t completely deviated from its roots, in the show’s opening moments, Deborah Wayne coolly flicks the iconic flip-up frames made famous by Hardison’s Dwayne. And its memorable theme song that had versions from Phoebe Snow, Aretha Franklin and Boyz II Men hasn’t gone anywhere: Brandy was tapped to give a fresh spin on it that helps straddle the line between generations.

Now, Allen and Pride are on the cusp of seeing how this long-gestating idea will fare in the streaming world.

“You play the cards you’re dealt,” Allen said. “It took a while, but it was right for it not to happen until now. Right now is when we need it. Young people are struggling to find hope and inspiration and guidance, connection …”

Allen’s hope is that the show will have enough seasons to let the characters evolve: “On Netflix, not too many shows go past three, maybe four [seasons],” Allen said. What’s the goal? “At least three.”

Pride isn’t thinking ahead to graduation just yet. She’s still thinking about surviving the first day of school with this different (but familiar) show made for a different world.

“I came to understand we can never re-create the original show, and … even trying to pursue that is just not the thing to do,” Pride said. “It was a different time. It was a different everything, and it should stand on its own. What I wanted to do, personally, was just [focus on]: How can we capture that spirit and hopefully have a show that young people today can see themselves in, and that people [who watched the original] can also enjoy and be proud of?”

Holidaymakers heading abroad are being urged to check an important easyJet rule before boarding the plane

For many travellers, there are a few items that automatically make it into a suitcase before a holiday begins. But one increasingly common gadget comes with restrictions that could catch passengers out if they arrive at the airport with too many.

The warning is particularly relevant to anyone who likes to carry several charging accessories when travelling. EasyJet has issued a reminder to customers that there is a maximum number they can take with them, alongside rules about where the items must be packed and how they can be used during a flight.

Power banks are the accessory in question, with easyJet allowing a maximum of two per passenger. The airline says they must be carried in cabin baggage only and should ideally be kept somewhere they can be easily monitored.

There is another important restriction once passengers are on board, as easyJet says power banks cannot be charged or used to charge other devices during the flight. Its guidance also says power banks must be individually protected, such as by keeping them in their original packaging or a plastic bag.

The rules are part of wider aviation safety measures around lithium batteries, which can pose a fire risk if they are damaged or develop a fault. The UK Civil Aviation Authority says power banks must be carried in carry-on baggage, individually protected when not in use and must not be recharged during a flight.

It also says power banks should not be used to charge other portable electronic devices while on board. Guidance confirms that a maximum of two power banks can be carried per person, although batteries with higher capacities can be subject to additional airline approval requirements.

For easyJet passengers, that means checking the number of chargers in your cabin bag before heading to the airport. Anyone carrying three power banks would be over the airline’s stated limit, even if each individual device would otherwise meet the relevant requirements.

Passengers should also avoid putting them into checked luggage, as easyJet specifically prohibits power banks from being carried in the hold. The airline recommends keeping them somewhere they can be monitored, which means they should remain accessible during the journey rather than being buried inside a suitcase.

The CAA’s advice is similarly clear that spare lithium batteries and power banks belong in the cabin rather than checked baggage.

The reason for keeping them close to passengers is that a battery problem can be identified and dealt with more quickly in the cabin.

Thousands of union workers, their family members and supporters marched through the streets of industrial Wilmington on Monday, taking part in a Labor Day parade whose festive mood overshadowed their serious concerns about the future.

Jesse Munoz, a 63-year-old longshoreman, who belongs to International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 13, talked of how automation has eliminated more than 2,000 jobs over the last 15 years or so and worries that foreign-owned companies will do more to shrink the workforce and worsen working conditions.

“The concern is the future,” Munoz said. “I have a son that’s on a list to become a casual worker, which is a worker that will accumulate his hours, and then hopefully within time become a regular member of the union. But the future is not as promising as we would like it to be.”

“If you eliminate the workforce, you eliminate taxes. You eliminate pensions,” he said.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union members throw candy to onlookers at Monday’s Labor Day parade.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The Wilmington rally joined Labor Day events throughout the nation Monday, a holiday that also marks a prime campaign opportunity for candidates in midterm elections and other political races.

The first U.S. Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882, with 10,000 marchers. In 1894, President Cleveland signed a congressional act establishing the first Monday of September as a legal holiday, which has become known for promotional sales as well as a day off for many.

The holiday has particular resonance in Southern California, where the labor movement remains large in numbers and powerful in political influence. Across the nation, that’s far from a given.

The number of workers represented by unions rose by 463,000 in 2025, according to data collected by the pro-labor American Prospect, and national density — meaning the number of U.S. workers who are unionized — edged from 9.9% to 10.0%. However, private-sector union density stayed at 5.9%, meaning the numerical gain came chiefly from government employment.

Munoz said he has a message for President Trump, who has used steep tariffs on foreign-made goods in an attempt to return more manufacturing to the United States, leading to price increases domestically.

“Stop those tariffs and stop this automation,” Munoz said. “Just get the people back to work. Help the economy build itself up again with the workers, not with politicians.”

Giovanna Mendez, right, hugs her sibling’s elementary school teacher during the Labor Day parade in Wilmington.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

While the Wilmington crowd was heavily Democratic, one longshoreman in his early 60s showed it was possible to be pro-labor and pro-Trump.

“We’re a lot better than when [President] Biden was in, way better,” said the worker, who also spoke of his union as “wonderful.”

Jordan Gonzales, a 20-year longshoreman, expressed worries about the future of trade work.

“A lot of people would rather be in the office and in the AC,” said Gonzales. “We’ve lost our workers that are outside of an office.”

He was enjoying a hearty free breakfast at a union hall and looking forward to his 12-year-old’s marching band performance in the parade, where she played a glockenspiel.

Participating school bands included San Pedro High, Banning High, Harry Bridges Middle, Port of Los Angeles High and Garfield High.

Delegations from many unions marched with their local chapters and a procession of restored and souped-up cars completed the picture. L.A. Mayor Bass was front and center behind the banner of the shore workers.

Politicians at work on Labor Day

In the pre-parade free breakfast inside the Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Memorial Assn. cavernous meeting hall, a parade of elected and aspiring politicians introduced themselves, straining to be heard and noticed in brief remarks over a sometimes inattentive din.

Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor spoke briefly, thanking union members for their daily labors and campaign support.

“None of us should forget where we came from,” Becerra said. “Let us work hard,” he said, referring to election day. “November 3rd belongs to us just the way Labor Day belongs to us.”

Also on hand were both Los Angeles mayoral candidates: incumbent Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.

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1. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks to security during the Labor Day parade in Wilmington. 2. L.A. mayoral candidate Nithya Raman greets parade watchers. (Photographs by Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Bass praised the city and union movement for positive strides “even in the midst of Donald Trump, who has done everything he can do against working people, including invading our city, but we are back, and we stay united, and we’re going to continue to do that,” she said. “L.A. is a labor city, and I am there with you 100%.”

Labor leaders also are almost 100% behind her in terms of endorsements. One exception is the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, which endorsed Raman. The union represents about 65,000 members across 10 states.

“We need more housing in L.A.,” said Doug Hicks, the union’s vice president and director of organizing. “How many cranes are there in downtown Los Angeles today?”

In her brief breakfast remarks, Raman, an L.A. City councilmember, said that “automation, AI, are taking away jobs all over this country, and it is up to us to step up and fight back, and that is why I’m here to stand alongside the workers of this country.”

Master carpenter Joseph W., who did not want to give his last name, declined to speak about endorsements, focusing instead on the challenges of workers.

“We build the houses, but we can’t buy them,” he said. In 1977, his dad bought a house in Norwalk in 1977 for less than $50,000. Now that property is worth close to a million dollars.

“That’s 20 times what my dad paid for it,” said Joseph, who is 55 and rents his own home. “I don’t make 20 times what my dad got paid.”

The younger workers included members of ILWU Local 56, the “ship scalers” union, which cleans up hazardous materials and provides environmental remediation both in the ports and beyond. Its members were involved in wildfire cleanups and removing waste from the hazardous Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights in June.

Two members of the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters bump fists after Monday’s Labor Day parade.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Evan Briseno, 18, would like to move on to safer work before his health is potentially affected. But fellow union member Francisco, 21 — who declined to give his last name, wants to move up in the trade, while noting that some areas are so dangerous that every patch of skin needs to be covered.

Neither follows politics, but they’re both concerned with workplace safety issues.

Other unions included Teamsters, Service Employees International, SAG-AFTRA (for performers) and teachers — along with their students.

Mark Ramos wore multiple hats as chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Western States Council and UFCW Local 1428.

Ramos said one current union battle is to make self-serve checkout lines manageable for the workers who must supervise them.

WASHINGTON — A sporadic global trade war led by President Trump is fueling inflation across the U.S. economy, elevating prices on everyday goods, as the war with Iran sends the price of gas on a roller coaster.

Aggressive tax cuts have pushed the national debt past $40 trillion, driving a growing crisis in the bond market. And an unprecedented immigration crackdown is disrupting the labor supply in agriculture, construction, hospitality and food processing, raising prices even further.

Approaching the halfway point of Trump’s second term, a president who won reelection based on a promise to turn the economy around now faces a reckoning in the midterm elections centered largely on his economic record.

Trump’s economic agenda has emerged as an increasingly awkward liability for Republicans heading into the November elections, leaving lawmakers to defend policies that have delivered political pain at home, even as the White House argues they will pay off in the long run.

Polling on Trump’s handling of the economy has remained in precariously low territory throughout the summer, entering Labor Day weekend with less than a third of Americans supporting his job performance on their most pressing concerns. One recent poll, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that only 22% perceive the economy in a good or fair state.

Shoppers at Lincoln Heights Certified Farmers Market in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

And Americans’ confidence in the economy is unlikely to improve much ahead of election day, Nov. 3, in part because bad economic news has shown to sink confidence fast. Good news takes much longer to win people back, experts said.

“Voters’ opinion of the economy has mostly hardened,” said Aaron Klein, chair of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “People vote the economy of the spring and summer, not November.”

Good news has been harder to come by.

Heading into the holiday weekend, Trump dismissed communities opposed to data-center construction as “backwards and poor.” A rapidly escalating trade dispute with Canada threatens Republican gains in battlegrounds along the northern border that could determine control of the Senate.

Sean Zabriskie, center, helps his son Connor, 7, try on hockey pants at The Ice Box Hockey shop in Harbor City. The trade war between the U.S. and Canada is affecting products like hockey gear, most of which is made in Canada and imported to the U.S.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

And fresh polling found that more than 90% of Americans believe corruption is rampant in Trump’s government, even as the president spends hundreds of millions of dollars on vanity projects across the capital.

Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican senator from Maine seeking another term in a strategically critical race, chastised the Trump administration for its latest trade spat with Ottawa as “making the job harder” of securing reelection.

“There’s just nothing good you can say about them,” Collins said of the tariffs.

Trump has pushed back on criticisms of his record, declaring the country has “the greatest economy we’ve ever had” and touting what he calls a manufacturing boom, all while distancing himself from potential midterm losses.

“I’m not affected by the election,” Trump told reporters last week. “I’m not running. But my party’s running, and I’m going to help my party.”

But Rep. Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and speaker of the House, said last week that the midterms would serve as a referendum on Trump’s presidency.

Rep. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward) and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La. ) arrive for a ceremonial swearing-in at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 2.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

“Even though his name isn’t in the midterm, his legacy is,” Johnson said. “The America First priorities and principles are. His administration is.”

Several embattled incumbents fear that’s the case and are distancing themselves from the president. Several Republican lawmakers — including Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan and Zach Nunn of Iowa — plan on skipping a midterm GOP convention called by Trump for this week in Texas.

Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, said that gas prices were a chief frustration among Americans, and found that consumer sentiment soured rapidly once it became clear the conflict in Iran would not be short-lived.

“Consumers are absolutely not feeling great about the economy right now, and the factors that are underpinning their frustrations with the economy at this time are factors that are pretty tough to turn around on short notice,” Hsu said.

Even if the Iran conflict reached a resolution, confidence in the economy is likely to change only when the prices are reflected at the gas station, she said.

“When it comes to the views of the economy, it’s really about what’s happening to my wallet,” Hsu said.

During a White House press media briefing on Thursday,Vice President JD Vance acknowledged the Iran war has led gas prices to rise and that he does not know when Americans can expect those prices to go down.

Vice President JD Vance talks to reporters during a news briefing at the White House on Sept. 3.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

“The reason gas prices are so high now is because the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping,” Vance said. “Gas, frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts. But I am not going to make a promise about when it is going to return to $3.”

The day after Vance spoke, diesel hit a record all-time high of $5.85 a gallon. In California, it sold for as much as $7.71.

Yet Trump has tried to downplay the economic pressure the war in Iran is placing on Americans, in particular as the Strait of Hormuz — a vital shipping corridor for oil and gas — remains under threat by Iranian troops.

Diesel prices over $7 a gallon are displayed at a gas station in Los Angeles on Aug. 21.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

“We have the Strait of Hormuz in extremely good shape,” Trump said, adding that the U.S. Navy has escorted ships through the channel. “A lot of oil is coming out. That’s why you haven’t seen the price of oil going the way they thought it might have to go.”

Trump on Monday also touted an agreement with the Venezuelan government to develop a vast amount of the South American country’s oil reserves. Asked how he sees the deal affecting American consumers, Trump said: “Ultimately prices are going to come down.”

One of the Arts of War statues, newly covered in gold leaf, is visible at Arlington Memorial Bridge near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

“Now, will it happen before the election? I can’t tell you that. But I think people are very smart,” he said.

For some Americans, the economic pressures are a key driver ahead of the midterm elections.

Monica Escalante, a home care provider who is a member of the United Domestic Workers union, said she started feeling the pinch on her wallet after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on a number of products she buys at the grocery store. Gas, she noticed, became harder to cover after the Iran war started.

Escalante, who lives in Bakersfield, said she also has to drive her client to the grocery store, and that mileage reimbursements are not enough to cover her costs.

“It’s really hard when I don’t have the money for gas, and she doesn’t have the money for gas. Then it is like: What do we do?” she said. “It is either she’s borrowing or I’m trying to figure out how I can get gas in my tank.”

An Israeli air attack on Kfar Reman in southern Lebanon has killed at least 10 people, including an infant, with at least two others missing.

The attack early on Monday on the town in the Nabatieh district comes a day after at least seven people were killed and 20 others were wounded in Israeli air raids on the nearby town of Arab Salim.

The Israeli military also struck a residential area in the town of Deir al-Zahrani in southern Lebanon overnight after it issued a forced evacuation order. The army says it targeted a building near a Hezbollah facility, which it claims was used to launch an explosive drone.

Attacks continued despite a United States-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon in June.

Reporting from Kfar Reman on Monday after overnight strikes, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said “uncertainty and fear” are the prevailing feelings in southern Lebanon. “Among the dead are children, including a two-month-old infant,” she said.

“People just do not know what is next. There’s been a wave of Israeli attacks over the past 48 hours. Civilians are being killed. Residential homes are being destroyed,” she said, adding, “Recovery efforts by civil defence workers are continuing. They’ve been here throughout the night.”

DES MOINES — Alongside the familiar sounds of roosters crowing and thrill seekers screaming on rides at the recent Iowa State Fair, there was a chorus of boos from Turning Point Action activists who were heckling Democratic politicians making their way through the crowds.

Videos of the confrontations got hundreds of thousands of views on social media, a burst of attention for a conservative youth organization that is charting its next chapter after last year’s fatal shooting of its leader Charlie Kirk. But the true test of Turning Point Action’s clout was unfolding inside the exhibition center, where staff members were registering voters, handing out buttons and signing people up for social events.

“Building the foundation for 2028,” said one of the fliers.

While Democrats have punted Iowa from the top of its presidential primary calendar, the state’s caucuses will still kick off Republicans’ next nominating process. Turning Point Action is positioning itself to shape that contest, a reminder that preparations for the next White House campaign are already in motion even though no candidates have announced and the midterm elections are still two months away.

Turning Point Action wants at least one staffer in each of Iowa’s 99 counties to mobilize the conservative grassroots.

“It is important to us to see high voter participation in the caucuses,” said Tyler Bowyer, the organization’s chief operating officer. “That’s your measuring stick.”

In addition to Iowa, Turning Point Action grew its footprint in New Hampshire and Nevada for this year’s midterms, which could also help in 2028.

The likely beneficiary of this initiative would be Vice President JD Vance, who is widely expected to launch a presidential campaign. Turning Point leaders including Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, have been clear they’re ready to throw their support behind Vance if he jumps in.

More than a dozen Republican officials, activists, lawmakers and strategists in Iowa said Turning Point’s imprint in the state was visible but still something of a mystery, and some privately question whether the organization’s impact will match the buzz it generates online.

But others have eagerly welcomed the organization to the state.

“A year ago, Iowa was virgin — no Turning Point. And many of us complained,” said Kelley Koch, a former Dallas County Republican chair, to a gathering of MAGA Nation Iowa, the grassroots organization she founded. “Finally, Turning Point Action listened to us.”

Early state investments could benefit Vance

When asked about his 2028 ambitions, Vance demurs and says he’s focused on his current job, but he’s expected to be an immediate Republican front-runner if he decides to seek the presidency. Bowyer said Turning Point Action wants to be supportive without “being pushy.”

“We haven’t officially endorsed as an organization yet because no one’s announced, right? But, you know, depending on who announces and when we endorse — yeah, of course we’ll be out campaigning on behalf of who we endorse,” he said.

Bowyer said Vance can bridge the gap between the Make America Great Again movement, which President Trump launched more than a decade ago, and younger voters who were attracted to Charlie Kirk’s brand of conservatism.

“It’s a natural fit,” he said.

Bowyer acknowledged that Turning Point Action’s growing infrastructure in early primary states could cause some agitation on the right if it is seen as throwing its weight behind one candidate. But, he said, “that’s not why we do it,” describing the goal as boosting turnout in the Iowa caucuses to send a strong signal heading into the general election.

Other potential candidates include Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State. Rubio, however, has said he wouldn’t run against Vance.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has not announced a campaign, but he has already made several visits to Iowa this year and said in a recent podcast hosted by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that “it’s no secret that I want to be president.”

Looking to grow the grassroots

Although Iowa has shifted rightward over the last decade, it’s considered a political battleground in this year’s midterm elections because of Trump’s sagging approval ratings, declining access to healthcare and tariff-driven turmoil in the agricultural industry.

Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds, both Republicans, are retiring, and there are fiercely contested races to replace them. Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson are seeking the Senate seat, while Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn want to be governor. Two battleground congressional districts will help determine control of the House as well.

The spotlight on Iowa this year is an opportunity for Turning Point Action to demonstrate its clout.

The organization said it hired four staffers on the ground last year. After Lahn’s surprise win over Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra, Turning Point Action said it would double its staffing in the state before the midterms.

Young activists regularly post on social media from county fairs and Republican committee meetings. They upload selfies on sidewalks or stoops to show days spent knocking on doors.

“We’re newer in Iowa,” a Des Moines-based senior field staffer, Kylie Kloewer, told a visitor who stopped by Turning Point Action’s booth at the state fair.

The booth featured signs declaring that there are only two genders and one that said “men can’t get pregnant,” the kind of confrontational culture war messaging that Charlie Kirk practiced on college campuses. Some people nodded and chuckled, while others raised their eyebrows as they wandered by.

Those who walked up to the table could sign up for social clubs that host events, including barbecues and volleyball games.

“Any involvement is success,” said Kelsey Newberry, who is based in the organization’s Phoenix headquarters and was helping at the Iowa State Fair. “You’re bringing people together as a community. The more you talk to your neighbors, the better.

“And even if they’re not ready to get activated now,” Newberry added, “being around like-minded people might encourage them in the future.”

Fingerhut and Price write for the Associated Press. Price reported from Washington.

California is poised to be the first state in the nation to allow people to identify their Jewish heritage on state forms, sparking debate within the community about identity and the merits of being singled out.

Some Jews believe the move would help people understand the community better, particularly on issues such as health and hate crimes. But some are wary about providing too much information given the history of government-sanctioned persecutions against Jewish people.

The state recognizes nearly 50 racial and ethnic identities for data collection, but it considers Jewish identity only as a religion, not an ethnicity.

Senate Bill 1387, which lawmakers passed Aug. 31, seeks to require state agencies to include a box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, ranging from public assistance programs to college applications.

The goal is to improve the accuracy of state data to better understand the needs of Jewish communities, according to the bill’s author, state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles). The bill, which received broad support in the Assembly and Senate, will head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk in the coming weeks for a signature or veto.

The proposed law has gone beyond data collection within the Jewish community, prompting discussions and disagreements over whether being Jewish is religious, cultural or a blend of many things. For some, it’s evoked anxiety about the historical dangers of tracking Jews.

Stern doesn’t mind the debate. In fact, he says, it speaks to a core part of Jewish identity.

“I love that the Jewish tradition is us arguing with each other,” he said. “It is such a beautiful part of our heritage to debate these kinds of things and what it means to be Jewish, and I love making space for that.”

California has broadened the list of racial and ethnic categories people can select in recent years. Newsom last year signed a similar bill that created a category for Middle East and North African individuals separate from the “white” designation that had previously encompassed those ethnicities.

California is home to an estimated 1.2 million Jewish people, representing the second-largest Jewish population in the United States after New York. And for most American Jews, Jewish identity is not one size fits all.

“The difficulty here, I think, is that Jewishness doesn’t fit neatly into the categories Americans normally use,” said Jeffrey Kopstein, the chancellor’s professor of political science at UC Irvine. “So, of course, to non-Jews, Jews are often thought of as a religion, but Jewish identity also has historically involved ancestry, culture and peoplehood.

“Many people who are entirely secular nevertheless understand themselves and are understood by others as Jews,” he added.

A Pew Research study published in 2021 found that about 1 in 5 Jews in the United States — roughly 19% of respondents — said that being Jewish is about a combination of religion, ancestry and culture. About 22% said being Jewish is a matter of culture, while 21% said it was a matter of ancestry. About half as many — roughly 11% — said being Jewish is mainly about religion.

The study found that religion is not central to the lives of most Jews living in the United States. Still, identifying as Jewish matters greatly to them, with three-quarters of Jewish Americans saying that “being Jewish” is very important or somewhat important to them, according to Pew.

Jewish California, a Jewish advocacy group that sponsored the bill, wrote in a statement that when Jewish ethnicity is absent from data, disparities in healthcare, education and discrimination are less likely to be identified or addressed. Data collection, it says, “signals to the public how communities are understood.”

“When California recognizes Jews only as a religion, it reinforces a narrow and incomplete understanding of Jewish identity, encouraging the misconception that Jews are defined solely by belief or worship rather than by a rich and distinct culture, history, peoplehood, and shared experience. That misunderstanding leads to generalizations, creating fertile ground for bias and discrimination,” the group wrote in a statement.

But opponents argue that the bill oversimplifies Jewish identity and could potentially make people more of a target for antisemitism, which saw a nationwide surge after the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023.

In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League tallied 6,274 incidents of antisemitism in the United States, down from 9,354 incidents the year prior. Last year’s numbers were still about five times higher than a decade ago, according to the ADL.

Cat Zavis, a rabbi at Beyt Tikkun, told the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee in June that the bill erases the diversity of Jewish people whose families come from a variety of places including the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Europe.

“Jews are not a single ethnicity. Judaism is a religion,” she said. “Many Middle Eastern and North African Jews have spent years working to have their distinct histories recognized. Their stories are not the same as those of Ashkenazi Jews. They have different experiences of displacement, discrimination, privilege and identity. By collapsing all Jews into a single ethnic category, this bill makes those communities invisible.”

Stern says people will still be able to check multiple racial and ethnic identification boxes on forms to encompass all the ways they identify.

Groups have also raised concerns about the government maintaining records on Jews, which is reminiscent for some of the trauma of the Holocaust. In the 1930s, the Nazi government used a variety of forms of public data including tax returns and census records to help identify Jews who would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps where millions were killed.

“History offers a clear warning: when Jewish identity is officially distinguished from that of all other ethnic groups, the results have too often been catastrophic,” the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an advocacy organization that bills itself as the largest Jewish group supporting Palestine, wrote in a statement.

Supporters of the bill say identifying as Jewish under the law is strictly voluntary. For Stern, the root of the bill is empowerment.

As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, Stern wasn’t as religious as he is now, but he was still singled out for being Jewish. Other students drew swastikas on his backpack. Antisemitic cartoons appeared in his school newspaper.

“Some stuff happened where I went from being a normal kid blending in to suddenly realizing I had an identity and it was one that was sort of defined by being called out for it,” he said. “Back then, there were no forms on campus, or applying for college, that had an opportunity for me to identify as Jewish, even though I was being identified by other people that way.”

He hopes the proposed law will give people the chance to own their Jewish identity on their terms.

“Maybe this is one place where people who are excellent at disagreeing with each other can all kind of agree that there ought to be a space for us,” he said.

Free and fair elections are foundational to our representative democracy. A government intended to reflect and honor the will of the people works only if the people can express their will. That’s why we have elections.

But don’t take the word of your friendly political columnist.

John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman and hero of the civil rights movement, said voting is precious and “the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society.” Former President Reagan called the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties.”

Alas, we have a president who believes his most precious right, apart from lining his silken pockets, is nursing his over-ripened ego. Donald Trump can’t stand the fact he lost the 2020 election — which he most emphatically did — and so he’s built a carapace of lies: about illegal ballots, rigged election machinery, rampant voting by noncitizens, and so on.

Worse than his deceit — which has deeply undermined faith in our elections and the dedicated people who run them — is Trump’s brazen efforts to rig the system by disenfranchising millions of voters, all so he can keep Democrats from winning office.

Reagan, no less than Lewis, probably is turning cartwheels in his grave.

But there’s a chance to push back. In November, voters in 26 states will elect a secretary of state, choosing the officials who will oversee the 2028 presidential race throughout most of the country. What could possibly go wrong?

Let’s hope we don’t find out.

The secretary of state used to be one of those ministerial posts that few outside government knew or much cared about; from a political standpoint, the office and its occupant seemed dull and dry as Melba toast. That changed after 2000, when Republican Katherine Harris placed her weighty thumb on the scale and helped deliver Florida’s 25 electoral votes, and the White House, to George W. Bush.

What really politicized the office of secretary of state, though, was Trump’s obsessive compulsion with his 2020 defeat.

Spurred by his incessant lies about supposed fraud, allies and opportunists set out to hijack the country’s election machinery and do Trump’s dirty work from the inside. In 2022, a group calling itself the America First SOS Coalition endorsed a slate of cranks and quacks who ran for secretary of state in 14 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

FILE – Tina Peters, former Mesa County, Colo., clerk, listens during her trial, March 3, 2023, in Grand Junction, Colo. (Scott Crabtree/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP, Pool, File)

(Scott Crabtree / Associated Press)

Thankfully, all of them lost, save for one candidate in Indiana. Among those defeated was Tina Peters, the former county elections chief in Mesa County, Colo., who went on to infamy, and prison, for orchestrating a security breach aimed at “proving” 2020 votes were stolen from Trump. (Never mind that he won the county by nearly 30 percentage points.)

The SOS Coalition apparently is defunct; its website address now leads to an online gambling portal.

But more than two dozen election deniers ran for secretary of state this year, according to States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that works to promote fair and secure elections nationwide. Six of those candidates won their primaries and made it to November’s ballot, including in three states — Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin — that promise to be key once more to picking the next president.

The stakes in those races are considerable, said Peverill Squire, a University of Missouri expert on state elections. “Who’s going to be administering [election] rules? How they’re going to interpret those rules?” he said, offering examples of the office’s import. “Whether they’re going to try to make it more difficult to vote, or easier to vote. Whether they’re going to try to engage in activities that will further raise doubts in some people’s minds about how fairly the election has been conducted.”

Nevada Republican Jim Marchant is among the election deniers running for secretary of state in November. He lost four years ago after promoting Donald Trump’s false claims he beat Joe Biden.

(Ricardo Torres-Cortez / Associated Press)

The contest in Nevada is a rerun of 2022, when Democrat Cisco Aguilar narrowly defeated Republican Jim Marchant. Undeterred, Marchant continues to spout gibberish about sabotaged voting machines and other far-fetched claims of election chicanery. Among the remedies he’s floated, according to the Nevada Independent, is using technology to measure voters’ heartbeat as a way to verify their identity.

Um…

Meanwhile, in Arizona, incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who was sanctioned by the State Bar for pursuing baseless claims of 2020 election fraud. One of his Trump-inspired lawsuits was swiftly rejected by a federal judge who noted its conspicuous lack of “relevant or reliable evidence” — thus raising doubts not just about Kolodin’s discernment but also his capacity to cover even the basics.

In Wisconsin, where elections are overseen by a six-member, bipartisan commission, Republican Jay Schroeder is running on a pledge to dismantle that fair-minded system, calling it a “failed experiment.” Had he been secretary of state in 2020, Schroeder told NBC News, he would not have certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

That’s all you need to know, Wisconsin.

Great amounts of time, energy and resources are being devoted this election to races for Congress and for statehouses across the country, which makes sense.

Control of both the House and Senate are in play on Nov. 3. There are more than a dozen gubernatorial contests with at least some degree of competition, including close races in Ohio, Georgia and Wisconsin.

But with so much riding on the outcome, it’s also worth paying heed to those down-ballot races for secretary of state.

You can’t keep elections on the straight and narrow if the people running them are crooked.

When partygoers in Ibiza were enjoying a fun evening of drinks and good music, the last thing they expected was for a 90s icon to take to the stage and start DJing

Ibiza is the perfect holiday destination for people who want to let their hair down and dance the nights (and maybe days) away. From Pacha to Amnesia, there are so many clubs to choose from that will guarantee you a good night filled with good music, and whoever is DJing is likely to put on a really good show.

But people were left gobsmacked when a woman got up to DJ in the party capital, and they realised who was performing. She’s a complete legend who has a whopping nine number one singles under her belt and two number one albums.

Have you guessed who it might have been DJing in Ibiza yet? Here are some other clues…

She rose to fame with four other bandmates, and their hits included ‘Too Much,’ ‘Holler / Let Love Lead the Way,’ and, of course, if you hadn’t already guessed it, ‘Wannabe’.

But it was 52-year-old Mel C holding it down on the decks playing millennial banger after banger in Ibiza, and her set went down a storm with fans.

Mel C was bringing the vibes and the sass as she boogied in an outfit that showed her rock-hard abs – she is Sporty Spice after all.

Kevin Coundon, who posts on Instagram as @mr.kevin.at.home, shares lifestyle content and more, and on top of his video of Mel C, he wrote: “POV: Ibiza finally starts playing music for the millennials”.

First off, Mel remixed ‘King of my Castle’ by Wamdue Project, which came out in 1997, then a snippet of ‘You’ve Got the Love’ by Candi Staton was remixed, too. Then, the last snippet showed Mel C singing along to DJ Rui Da Silva’s ‘Touch Me’.

Kevin captioned his video: “Who decided Ibiza had an age limit anyway? Good music, an incredible crowd and one of those nights where you completely forget what time it is… and we did!”

In the comments, people raved about how much of a “legend” she is, saying “she was the most last Saturday” when they saw her DJing.

“Wow, I wish I was there,” someone wrote, with another saying that she was “an icon and goals”.

Another wrote: “What a night”. Someone else noted: “Our kind of party.”

A different social media user also said: “Always thought Mel would smash it as a DJ. Mixy Spice now. I liked her solo stuff.”

One more also responded: “That’s Sporty Spice? Wow, playing the tuuuunnnneeesss.”

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Do you believe in ghosts?

Andrew Scott considers the question and looks at me with a mischievous grin, retreating to a corner of the restaurant booth where we’re catching up a few hours before his new movie, “Elsinore,” the most personal film he has ever made, premieres at the Telluride Film Festival.

Scott turns over the question again. “Do I believe in ghosts?”

It feels like a reasonable thing to ask. Three years ago at Telluride, the yearning romantic fantasy “All of Us Strangers” memorably premiered, featuring Scott playing a character who worked through unresolved trauma by talking to the dead. Ghosts are elsewhere in his work, metaphorical (“Vanya”) and literal (“Hamlet”).

“If I had a gun put to my head — which you don’t have to — I would say that I don’t believe in them,” Scott says. “But the idea of the afterlife and where we will go is still really fascinating to me. Dreams and the subconscious, too. I don’t know what went on consciously in the world outside my hotel room here last night. I was perfectly content to be asleep. And I like the idea of thinking about death that way. I’ll just be asleep. It’ll be OK. It’s the undiscovered country.”

“The movie for me is about time,” says Andrew Scott. “What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

Dropping a line from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in this context feels unavoidable. In the powerfully moving “Elsinore,” Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who, as he was secretly dying from AIDS, played Hamlet in a 1989 Royal National Theatre production, still considered one of the great performances in London theater history. Charleson was 40 at the time, known for playing Scottish Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell in “Chariots of Fire.” He died eight weeks after leaving the National Theatre stage. “Elsinore” captures that journey in all of its glories and taxing challenges.

“That he would go for treatment in the morning and then play this Olympian role is just endlessly moving,” Scott says. “I don’t know how he did it.”

With our pint glasses filled with water as we adjust to Telluride’s altitude, we try to figure it out.

Charleson playing Hamlet, scaling the Everest for actors, reminded me of David Bowie making “Blackstar” as he was dying. As an artist, you’re not often given the chance to shape the narrative of your own end.

Being offered Hamlet doesn’t happen to every actor. To take it and turn it into something generous and useful — useful is a word I love about acting, that it’s useful to people.

When people are feeling down, they can watch a movie they love.

And see themselves. That can’t be underestimated.

What’s your go-to movie?

I will always watch “Bridesmaids” when it comes on TV. Comedy is precious to me. Laughing is precious to me. I don’t see it as the antithesis of tragedy. I think they’re one and the same.

The last time we talked, around the time of “Ripley,” you wanted to put out into the universe the idea of starring in a musical or a comedy. That hasn’t happened by the strictest definition. But you seem to be saying that genre labels don’t matter.

The reason, hopefully, that “Elsinore” is moving is that we approach some of the stuff with quite a bit of lightness. The effect is tragic and there are some heavy things in it. But my job, what I prioritized, is keeping it light.

You are seen dancing to Ethel Merman’s disco album. It doesn’t get much lighter than that.

My favorite actors are the ones that are funny. I worked with Lisa Kudrow last year on “The Comeback,” and yes, of course, she’s very funny. But if you look at that performance she gives toward the end, it’s so moving. People come away from things that are labeled comedies and go, “I just laughed at that.” Or people come away from things that maybe were really sad and say, “I was just devastated by that.” I think the job is to get rid of categorizing and make it more fluid.

Like life. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, the bear, he eats you.

Exactly! I don’t love things that are overly serious. One of my big dreams for this film — and I do wish so much for this film because it’s so personal — is that people don’t feel like that they’re going to see something that’s depressing. I didn’t want to fetishize Ian’s death.

What do you hope audiences take away from watching it?

That they see themselves in it. You know, it doesn’t end well for any of us. The movie for me is about time. What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.

Speaking of time, next month you’re going to be celebrating a milestone, turning 50. Or not celebrating. I don’t know how you feel about birthdays.

I don’t love my birthday.

Any year?

My friends have said to me, “You gotta make some plans.” I love a party. Which is to say, I love other people’s parties. What I usually do is I leave it to the last minute and send texts around, saying, “I understand if you don’t want to come, but I might do this.” And then you do something small. I read something yesterday where you should go to your own parties like you’re a guest. I think that’s a very good way to to do it.

What about just being around for half a century? Is that in your head? You’re the one who just said it doesn’t end well for any of us.

I’ve definitely thought about it more. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ve thought, “Jesus, what?” I’m sure that’s because of my mom dying and that I’m approaching my mortality. Again, how am I going to use my time? One of the reasons I was so ferocious about getting “Elsinore” made was that I would put all of myself into this and then maybe I can chill out a bit more.

Andrew Scott in the movie “Elsinore.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

The personal aspects of this movie are striking. In addition to producing “Elsinore,” you yourself have played Hamlet on stage. You’re also a gay actor portraying someone who, at the time, would have torpedoed his career by coming out.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the movies and would read Premiere and Empire magazine. Around 16 or 17, I started to realize that maybe if you’re gay, you wouldn’t be invited to movies. And I wasn’t wrong in thinking that, because there weren’t many examples. So I would omit things in interviews. I wouldn’t lie, but I really understood that about Ian’s generation.

There’s a melancholy moment in the movie where he says, “I wanted to be in the movies. I didn’t scale the heights.”

What a gorgeous little dream. A young boy goes, “I want to be in the movies.” And then to have that knocked out of you bit by bit. You’re not even going to be seen for the audition. Or, “Are you being a little fruity there?”

Did people tell you not to talk about being gay?

Very well-meaning people said to me, “Just keep that [private] because you’re not obviously gay,” which I often think is such an insult to say to people. “So maybe you can get away with it.” And I was like, OK. And I did that for awhile. But it was so insidious. When audiences think of acting, they think of actors pretending, like you’re putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So the fact that there was this whole section of gay actors who weren’t allowed to do that is awful. I’m so grateful that I get to do that.

What do you remember about the late ’80s and early ’90s in terms of navigating the AIDS epidemic?

It makes me emotional. It was extraordinary just to to have lived through that time and to be completely abandoned by your government, who wouldn’t even say the name of the illness. When I was a young adult, that’s what I was scared of. If you go for a sexual health screening, you go, “My God, am I going to die?” I remember going into those situations, and with no cause for such concern, feeling like I’m going to be punished for expressing myself in that way, because that’s the way the world was set up.

Let’s get back to Ethel Merman.

Please! [Laughs]

There’s that stanza in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that goes: “There’s no people like show people / They smile when they are low.” Would you say that sums up the spirit of “Elsinore” about as well as any couplet could?

Yes, it’s so much about the power of community and show people. It’s about show people and smiling and getting on with the show.

When did you first feel that power of community?

Putting on “The Wizard of Oz” in a school play when I was about 10.

What part did you play?

Guess.

Dorothy?

[Laughs] No, a friend of Dorothy. Oh, come on. One more guess.

The Cowardly Lion?

No. The Tin Man. My mom sprayed me silver, in my hair and everything. We had a probably bit of aluminum foil and I had a funnel. I loved it so much. And I remember having a really extraordinary feeling of surprise, knowing the audience was there. For such a shy boy, when I had to do the big number, “If I Only Had a Heart,” it went to another level, better than rehearsal. I suppose the little showman, the little 10-year-old silver showman, came out.

SHE is one of the most recognisable women in music – but what does it take for some people to be convinced Avril Lavigne is not who she says she is?

The punk-pop icon rose to international stardom in the Noughties – but as her popularity peaked, a strange and startling rumour was also gaining traction in the shadows.

The theory is as puzzling as it is disturbing – a dead Avril, a body double named Melissa and a supposed Hollywood cover-up – and like the catchiest pop song, it refuses to leave.

Born in 1984 in Canada and raised in a strict Christian household in sleepy Napanee, Ontario, Avril grew up in a small town of roughly 5,000 where her parents closely monitored her music choices.

But the precocious teenager was already plotting her escape, writing poems, learning guitar and gravitating towards the town’s grunge scene before her singing talent caught the eye of her first manager at a 1999 bookstore performance, aged just 14

With her parents’ blessing, she quit school and headed to New York with her brother, where she worked with a professional producer before landing a two-album deal worth around $1.25million at just 16.

Avril’s 2002 album debut saw her rise to fame go stratospheric. However it also contained the germ of the conspiracy theory that would go on to haunt her for years.

The album, titled Let Go, would later be believed by theorists to be a symbolic reference to her being replaced by another lookalike young woman.

Adding fuel to the conspiracy was the star’s grief following her grandfather’s death in 2003 – which believers would later say was the final chapter in the “original Avril” story. They claim that grief was so overwhelming, tragic Avril took her own life.

The bizarre theory appears to have first appeared nine years later when in 2011, a Brazilian fan page called Avril Está Morta – meaning Avril is Dead – launched the morbid rumour into the world.

It claimed the eyeliner-clad star was no longer alive – and had been replaced by an eerily similar young woman.

For years, internet sleuths have remained convinced that the Sk8er Boi singer died by suicide shortly after achieving mainstream fame, allegedly overwhelmed by her grief and the pressures that came with becoming a global pop star.

But the story doesn’t end with her supposed death.

Her record label at the time, desperate to protect its lucrative investment, allegedly concealed the tragedy and brought in an actress named Melissa Vandella to replace Avril.

The theory claims Avril’s then-label, Arista Records, buried her death and installed Melissa in her place to keep the lucrative hitmaker churning out music. The Sun has contacted Arista Records for comment.

Melissa, believers say, looked sufficiently like the singer to fool the world – allowing the machinery of Avril’s career to keep moving while the real star was supposedly gone.

While deeply distressing, at that time the macabre theory was at least only circulating on the fringes of the internet.

That was until American journalists at BuzzFeed tweeted about the Brazilian blog and the obscure rumour was thrust into mainstream music folklore.

In 2017, a viral thread racked up hundreds of thousands of retweets, exposing millions of social media users to the supposed Avril “clone” theory.

The chilling truth behind this morbid phenomenon says more about those spreading it than its star subject.

Experts say these theories can often come from people who are seeking a purpose in life.

They will find and obsess over even the most minor changes in the life of another person – often a high-profile celeb – to feel as though they have achieved something.

Daniel Joll, an assistant Professor in Social Psychology at the University of Nottingham, tells The Sun: “Conspiracy theories are a fertile ground for people feeling uncertainty in life.

“When they find something they can be a part of and investigate, it makes them feel like they’re almost becoming a journalist and that makes them feel important.

“This is also about people wanting to be unique by saying something or being a part of something that is out of the ordinary.”

Conspiracy theorists began comparing photographs from the beginning of Avril’s career with images taken after the rumours started, searching for proof that the woman in front of the cameras was not the same person.

Online truth-seekers even saw that she once wrote “Melissa” on her hand in a photoshoot.

To believers, it was practically a confession hiding in plain sight.

But that is where the theory’s elaborate house of cards begins to wobble.

The “Melissa” photograph was later explained as part of a promotional photoshoot in which Lavigne wrote supporters’ names on her skin and on paper.

Theorists still argue this was either an intentional leak by the body double signalling her true identity, or an insidiously dropped clue by her record label.

It is catnip for the internet: just outrageous enough to be dismissed, yet just plausible enough to make you wonder whether there might be something hiding beneath the surface.

Avril is far from the first celebrity to become the subject of a completely unverified cloning conspiracy theory.

One of the most famous examples dates back to 1969, when fans became convinced Beatles legend Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and been secretly replaced by a lookalike.

The theory exploded after The Beatles released Abbey Road, with fans scouring songs and album artwork for supposed clues.

Some even believed John Lennon could be heard saying “I buried Paul” in Strawberry Fields Forever.

John later said the line was actually “cranberry sauce”, while McCartney himself dismissed the rumours in a November 1969 interview with Life magazine.

Fans have also claimed Tupac Shakur faked his death, while a 2020 music video featuring a deepfake of the rapper reignited speculation.

What is key to giving these theories life is that they are outrageous enough to grip people while remaining vaguely believable.

Prof Jolley adds: “The reason why people are so stuck on Avril is because the theory is plausible.

“When there is the slightest chance of plausibility, people will cling onto it and keep going and keep digging.

“This one feels plausible because it could be true. The possibility of truth can tickle people’s fancy.”

Every perceived alteration became another piece of their puzzle.

Early Avril had become synonymous with the scruffy skater-punk image that helped make her famous, often appearing in baggy trousers and neckties.

Suddenly snaps of the eyeliner smeared rock queen appeared to have had been wiped off the internet.

Her trademark middle finger was tucked away, while the loose tie slung over a shirt – once part of her pop-punk armour – had been consigned to fashion history.

The woman who emerged afterwards looked markedly more polished, with skirts and dresses replacing the tomboyish uniform and pink make-up softening the rebellious image.

Some went as far as being convinced that the shady puppet masters of the Illuminati had cloned Avril and replaced her with an actual laboratory-grown clone rather than a hired lookalike. Bizarre, right?

The Illuminati, believers claim, is an elite society that frequently targets the world’s biggest pop stars and turns them into puppets of their secret cabal.

The new bubble-gum pink pop girl was allegedly spotted glitching during red-carpet interviews where she paused, blinked rapidly, and answered questions flatly.

Believers refer to these as “clone glitches” or memory-wipe side effects.

Theorists started using photo overlay tools to track subtle shifts in Avril’s facial symmetry, jawline angle, and earlobe detachment.

The theory claimed bones do not radically change shape after adolescence; therefore, differences in the bridge of her nose and her jaw structure prove a physical imposter.

Professor Jolley adds: “These theories are made up to captivate our attention.

“I believe clones are just an intriguing application.”

And then came the clue conspiracy theorists found hardest to scribble away: Avril’s handwriting.

To believers, the change was more than a few wonky letters.

They began placing samples of Lavigne’s handwriting from different periods side by and poring over the shapes, slants and flourishes as though they were forensic investigators examining a ransom note.

Every loop, every letter and every flick of the wrist became potential evidence.

Conspiracy theorists claiming that the handwriting before and after the alleged switch looked fundamentally different.

Then, Under My Skin, Avril’s second album released in 2004, became another supposed treasure trove for believers hunting for hidden messages.

Slipped Away is also repeatedly cited as evidence, with its lyrics about someone disappearing and life changing forever interpreted as a veiled admission of Avril’s supposed death.

My Happy Ending has also been dragged into the theory, with fans searching its lyrics for signs of guilt, grief or a woman struggling beneath an identity that was never hers.

Appearing on Call Her Daddy podcast with host, Alex Cooper, Avril directly addressed the long-running internet theory and laughed it off calling it “dumb”.

The host, half joking and half serious, asked her: “So, is your name Avril Lavigne or Melissa Vandella?” The singer wasn’t too bothered and replied: “Obviously I’m Avril Lavigne.” Obviously…

The 39-year-old went on: “On one end, everyone’s like, ‘You look the exact same. You haven’t aged a day.’ But then other people are like, there’s a conspiracy theory that I’m not me.

“Honestly, it’s not that bad. It could be worse, right?” Lavigne laughingly admitted. “I feel like I got a good one. I don’t feel like it’s negative. It’s nothing creepy.”

Cooper told the star: “What’s crazy is you haven’t aged. I’m staring at you. And, like, I’m picturing you with your auburn hair. And I’m like, oh my God. You literally look the same from when you were younger.”

It’s all fun and games turning freckles into “evidence” – counting spots on an arm as though a decade of sun exposure somehow comes with a cloning certificate.

But behind the bizarre conspiracy theories was a very real battle. Lavigne, who was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2013, later described that period as the “worst time of my life”.

The Sun has reached out to Avril Lavigne’s management and past and current record labels for comment.

Cheer captain. Student body president. Leader for Shoes for Souls, a nonprofit that gives out shoes to people in need.

Sarah Sobel is one busy teenager at Sierra Canyon High. She knows how to be organized, which her father, David, an assistant athletic director, probably offered some tips to follow.

Sarah took over running Shoes for Souls from her sister, Lindsay, who created the organization in 2016. More than 70,000 shoes have been donated.

High school is a balancing act between academics, school activities and other responsibilities. So far, Sarah is finding time to do all of it.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

Good vibes weren’t invented in Marin County. But reading “Morning in Marin,” David Perlis’ history of the place and its outsize cultural influence for much of the 20th century, you get the sense it served as America’s leading countercultural way station.

Hosts of spiritual-minded sorts called it home: Alan Watts popularized Zen Buddhism in the ’60s, alongside poets Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth. Francis Ford Coppola decamped there to write his script for “The Godfather,” and it’s where his compatriot George Lucas conjured up the “Star Wars” universe. (The cuddly Ewoks in “Return of the Jedi” were named after the region’s Miwok tribe.) Jack Kerouac sought enlightenment there; his compatriot Neal Cassady was imprisoned there, in San Quentin. It was the Grateful Dead’s retreat, Robin Williams’ launchpad, and the solid ground upon which Philip K. Dick questioned reality.

Why all these people, in this place, at that time? Perlis, an artist, radio host and Marin native, doesn’t strive for sociological or demographic explanations. His strategy is to sinuously move from moment to moment, artist to artist, as if in one continuous tracking shot, pausing only for a moment to catch some of the interesting characters he spots along the way. Over there, film critic Pauline Kael; and there, poet and sitcom star Suzanne Somers; and look, there’s bar-band singer Hugh Cregg, who’ll eventually use the stage name Huey Lewis.

Author David Perlis

(Jordan Blackman)

Still, Perlis breaks the flow just enough to offer a few reasons why the region became America’s affluent bohemia. It is, of course, gobstoppingly gorgeous, with Mount Tamalpais, Stinson Beach, Point Reyes and Bolinas practically designed to be edenic retreats. (Fairfax, he writes, is “ribboned with waterfalls, tufted with moss.”) Its isolation made it a counterculture haven for those looking to avoid San Francisco’s bustle: Gay poet Elsa Gidlow made her home there in the 1940s, among the first of many misfit pioneers. Wreckage from the 1906 earthquake was used to build the first “arks,” houseboats in Sausalito, providing a quirky infrastructure. Add some slow-growth initiatives, and you get artsy scrimping arrivistes; add LSD, legal until 1966, and you have a party.

So by the late ’60s, Marin had become a haven for a particular type: creative, interested in Eastern spirituality and profoundly disinterested in social convention (not to mention conspicuously white). Perlis’ portrait of the county at the height of the decade suggests a region that had escaped — or at least refused to look at — the worst of America’s turmoil. “Despite atomic bombs, rampant racism, political violence, and the war in Vietnam and Marin, there is hope, a sincere, emphatic belief, in an imminent inner revolution,” he writes. “When Zen, acid, or whatever your trip is, opens enough minds that people can outgrow this absurd, unwinnable conflict with nature and themselves.”

Perlis writes that with a slight smirk — of course nobody outgrew the conflict. Sure, a lot of people made a mint on the dream of transcendence: The Grateful Dead became a premier touring act, Lucas taught the country the ways of the Force and Sausalito’s Record Plant became the studio of choice for Sly Stone, Fleetwood Mac and more. But in the process, Marin became a kind of parody of itself, satirized by the writer Cyra McFadden in her 1977 novel, “The Serial.” In a world of what Perlis calls “swimmable wealth,” enlightenment sure looked a lot like narcissism in caftans. “I have no idea how I manage to do it,” Dick muses about his productivity at one point, prompting Perlis to bluntly break into the narrative: “I do. Drugs.”

Perlis could have gone further than that. One of the peculiarities of the Marin cultural scene, at least in Perlis’ reckoning, is that it hardly seems like a scene at all. Otis Redding and Frank Herbert and Linda Ronstadt and Anne Lamott and Shel Silverstein and Van Morrison all had little in common and interacted even less; if Marin was an incubator, it’s one where every egg hatched a different, brand-new species. Communal activity seemed relegated to the checkout aisles where locals kibbitzed over “The Serial,” or druggy extravaganzas that would in time claim Dick and various Dead members and associates as victims.

The irony, as the region stumbled into the ’80s, is that between its wealth and carefully cultivated isolation, Marin came to exemplify the ethos of conformist America: every man for himself. The actor Peter Coyote resisted: “When a Buddhist is thinking about shooting out traffic lights, it’s time to leave,” he quips. Others dug in: Huey Lewis and the News climbed the charts with a song titled “Hip to Be Square,” though to his credit, he explains to Perlis that it was meant to be a song about the difficulty of reconciling affluence and bohemian values. The man knows where he lives.

Perlis’ book isn’t a dismissal of Marin’s cultural moment, or even really a critique of it: His story is more something to be wondered at, like fog rolling over Mount Tamalpais. And Perlis’ storytelling skills make it seem like good fun as he pingpongs from artist to artist, each somehow inventing a meaningful, or at least recognizable, cultural touchstone. Marin gave us New Age music and Pablo Cruise; it also gave us Jim Carroll’s indelible punk classic, “People Who Died.” But one of the things to wonder at amid the good vibes is whether a different, more coherent, more sober scene would have been more meaningful, more enduring.

A regular contributor to The Times, Athitakis is a writer in Arizona and the author of “The New Midwest.”

This article appears in the September 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.

The European Investment Fund (EIF) has appointed Jean-Christophe Laloux as its next CEO, effective Jan 1. He will succeed Marjut Falkstedt, who plans to retire. 

Laloux currently leads the European Investment Bank’s lending and advisory operations in the EU and has spent more than two decades at the EIB. He has helped develop financing tools for high-growth technology companies, infrastructure, climate projects, and private-sector investment, including venture debt, risk-sharing mechanisms, and project finance. 

EIF Chair Nadia Calviño praised Laloux’s track record in developing innovative financing tools to support Europe’s technological competitiveness. Before joining the EIB in 1999, Laloux worked at Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers. —Anthony Noto

Mike Jool and Adeel Khan will take the reins of Barclays’ investment bank business in February as co-CEOs, subject to regulatory approval. Jool will join the bank early next year from Bank of America, where he most recently co-headed global investment banking. Khan currently leads Barclays’ global markets.

Each will have a seat on the bank’s group executive committee. “Since 2023, our investment bank has delivered a strong performance, growing revenues and returns and driving a more integrated service for clients,” said C.S. Venkatakrishnan, Barclays Group chief executive.

“As we enter the next stage of our strategy, and reflecting the ambition we have for our investment bank, Adeel and Mike will form a strong partnership to deliver an even stronger, more integrated service to our clients.”—Rob Daly

Standard Chartered PLC confirmed the appointment of Manus Costello as Group CFO and executive director. Costello’s appointment, initially announced in May, formalizes his role atop the emerging markets-focused banking group. 

The 25-year industry veteran spent 14 years at AllianceBernstein, rising to global head of research, and earlier served as senior director of equity research at Merrill Lynch.  

Since joining Standard Chartered in 2024 as global head of Investor Relations, Costello has made “a significant contribution to the group’s strategic positioning and engagement of stakeholders, while also bringing strong rigor and an entrepreneurial mindset to the role,” CEO Bill Winters said in a press release. —Luca Ventura

Swiss private bank Julius Baer appointed Peter Burrill as CFO and member of the Executive Board, effective August 17, subject to regulatory approval. He joins from Standard Chartered, where he was interim group CFO for nine years. Before that, Burrill spent nearly four years at Deutsche Bank as group controller and co-head of group finance, He succeeds Evie Kostakis after a top management shake-up. 

“We are delighted to welcome Pete to Julius Baer,” Bollinger said in a press release. “He brings profound depth and breadth of financial expertise, having led the full range of finance and regulatory functions. With extensive international experience across our core markets and working at a bank strongly focused on wealth management, he will be an outstanding addition to our team.” —LV

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer whose work advocated fiercely for working landscapes and working people, died “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky., according to his family. He was 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death. On Thursday, she told The Times that her father, until about six months ago, was still writing regularly in his cabin on the banks of the Kentucky River, a place he called “camp,” where many of his more than 50 volumes of poetry, short stories, essays and novels were written.

Berry championed sustainable farming and rural community preservation and railed against industrial agriculture and corporate agribusiness.

“He was fierce and he was fearless, and he remained fearless,” she said, explaining that her family taught her the erosion of rural places wasn’t inevitable but “destruction by design,” engineered by corporate interests and political policies.

Berry, whose writings were often fueled by an anger toward the forces that have driven the destruction of the rural land and communities that he dedicated his life to defending, softened in his final years, according to his daughter. “He was always a tender man, and that part of him got stronger. He was rereading a lot of books that he had loved in his life, and he told me he was looking for the tenderness in the books, and that’s a lovely thing.”

Berry’s most influential work began with a list of the problems he’d observed in modern agriculture, scribbled onto a legal pad as he traveled the long stretch of road between Kentucky’s Henry County and Spokane, Wash., where Berry would deliver a speech at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium in 1974.

“I was asked to talk about labor-intensive microsystems agriculture. That’s not my language, and it’s not the sort of language that I wish to use because it’s the way people speak when they don’t want to be understood by most people,” he began.

Berry spoke of the six generations of farmers who worked his land before him, and the concerns for farming communities and their agricultural economy that he inherited from his father. He decried “the experts and politicians who have prescribed, encouraged, and applauded the disintegration of such farming communities all over this country into our allegedly miraculous modern American agriculture.”

The speech would later become Berry’s 1977 manifesto “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture,” which launched a sustainable-farming movement and cemented Berry’s authority on agrarian issues on the national stage.

Beyond his cultural critiques, Berry wrote notable novels including “The Memory of Old Jack,” “Jayber Crow” and “Hannah Coulter.” He was a prolific poet as well. His verse included his debut collection, “The Broken Ground,” and his celebrated Sabbath Poems series, which explored living in harmony with the land.

Over the course of his career, he was honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other accolades. In 2010, Berry was awarded the National Humanities Medal by then-President Obama for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Wendell Erdman Berry was born on Aug. 5, 1934, in Louisville, Ky., to John Marshall Berry Sr., a lawyer and tobacco farmer, and Virginia Perry Berry. Wendell was the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls. In high school, his parents shipped him off to Millersburg Military Institute, a former military boarding school in Kentucky, where rather than conform to the teachings, he later wrote that his takeaway was, “Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

He went on to study English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky. There he met and wooed Tanya Amyx, who would become his wife and the mother of his two children, Mary and Pryor. He landed a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford in 1958, and in 1961 he was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to pack up the family and live in Tuscany and southern France.

After Berry’s scholarly pursuits took him to the West Coast, then Europe, then the East Coast, where he taught at New York University, he accepted a job at the University of Kentucky, allowing him to return home and back to his roots, on a farm near the river.

Then-President Obama presents the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Wendell Berry during a ceremony March 2, 2011, in the East Room of the White House.

(Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

“Within a few years, Mom and Dad were raising 85% of the food we were eating,” Mary told The Times. “We had a milk cow, raised hogs for our own use, and by the time I was a teenager, I resented the whole thing pretty seriously, and I remember saying to them more than once, ‘I did not choose to live this way, and I don’t know why we have to do everything the hardest way possible.’ We had no television. … But I was in a heck of a position with my parents because I never really thought they were wrong about anything, and I still don’t.”

When Mary would gripe, she said, her dad would laugh or “just keep working.” But “he talked about what we were doing and why we were doing it,” she said. “He told my brother and me from the time I can remember to look and see that this is good and don’t forget, and I have not forgotten.”

In 2011, when Berry was nearly 80 years old, he joined a high-profile sit-in at the office of Kentucky’s then-Gov. Steve Beshear to protest the destructive mountaintop strip-mining of coal. In an interview with Bill Moyers shared by the Berry Center in 2025, Berry said that he and his compatriots had had enough of the state government ceding control of resources to the coal companies. “In our society,” he said, “people with money are bigger and more powerful and more noticeable and count more as citizens than people without much money. … So we did confront the governor and tell him we weren’t going to leave.”

His attempt at civil disobedience was turned on its head when the governor invited Berry and the Kentucky Rising activists to stay.

“We did stay,” he said. “The whole weekend.”

“We were beautifully treated by the security staff and people who sent us food and bedding and good wishes and even came in and gave us massages. And it was altogether one of the loveliest weekends I’ve ever spent in my life.”

Berry continued writing into his old age.

Next month, Counterpoint Press will posthumously release “Dispatches From Rural America,” a collection of 15 essays. In one, “The Problem Is Industrialism,” Berry wrote about a 2021 conversation he had with a friend of more than 40 years, author Wes Jackson.

“To the extent that we were talking in earnest, our subject was the set of calamities that the media and the commentators frequently take up, typically dealing with each one in isolation from the others and representing each as an emergency more or less apocalyptic, and in tones recalling a number of vernacular alarms, from ‘Last chance for beer’ to ‘Prepare to meet God.’”

He continued later that the two discussed how industrialism “grows only by consuming, once and for all, the living world.”

Mary said she wanted people to know that, yes, her father was worried and wouldn’t have written so much if he weren’t terribly concerned about the future of rural America, but she wants people to understand that he was a man of great hope.

“Hope he felt was a duty, and I learned that from him,” she said. “As he said in one of his many poems, hope is what we owe people younger than ourselves.”

Mary said she was continuing her father’s work through the Berry Center, a nonprofit that aims to put Berry’s writings to work and advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.

Berry is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years, Tanya, his daughter Mary, son Pryor, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Missouri Supreme Court has unanimously blocked new congressional districts backed by President Trump from being used in the November election and ordered a statewide vote on whether to uphold or reject the new map.

The decision Thursday marks a rare setback for Republicans in a national redistricting battle. Republicans had hoped Missouri’s new gerrymandered congressional boundaries could help them win an additional seat and hold on to their slim House majority in the midterms.

Missouri Atty. Gen. Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, said she would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the decision “has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis.”

Missouri’s new districts were used in the August primaries. But the state Supreme Court said they cannot be used in the November general election — or ever again, unless voters first uphold the new districts passed by the Republican-led Legislature.

The court ruled that the new districts were effectively placed on hold last December, when opponents submitted more than 300,000 petition signatures seeking to put the map to a vote of the people. Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until primary election day in August to reject the petition. He asserted that the referendum process cannot be used for congressional redistricting. A lower court agreed, but the Supreme Court overturned Hoskins’ decision.

“The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” the court said in its ruling. The legislation containing the new districts “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters.” As a result, the congressional map adopted after the 2020 census “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”

Hanaway, whose office represented Hoskins, called the ruling an unprecedented violation of federal law. So did Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe, who proposed the new congressional map to lawmakers to favor the GOP.

“Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election,” Hanaway said in a statement.

Court ruling hinged on referendum rights

The Missouri Constitution does not specifically say a referendum petition can be used for a congressional redistricting law passed by the Legislature. But the Supreme Court ruled that a constitutional provision allowing a referendum on “any act” of the Legislature encompasses congressional redistricting.

It rejected assertions from Hanaway’s office that federal law prohibits referendum petitions on congressional redistricting.

“This is what democracy looks like,” said Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, which sponsored the referendum petition. “The people of Missouri demanded a voice, and the court just confirmed what we’ve been saying all along. People, not politicians, will have the final say.”

Hoskins, acknowledging the loss, vowed to continue “the war to preserve our constitutional republic.”

The ruling, which capped a year of political maneuvering and legal wrangling, was one of two to go against Republican officials Thursday. The Supreme Court also ruled that Hoskins had wrongly rejected a petition for a ballot proposal making it difficult for politicians to change measures enacted by voters through ballot initiatives. The court also ordered that measure to be placed on the November ballot.

Missouri redistricting targeted longtime Kansas City lawmaker

Missouri currently has six Republicans and two Democrats in the U.S. House.

After Trump urged Republicans to redraw congressional districts to their advantage, Kehoe called lawmakers into a special session last year to reconfigure the 5th Congressional District, held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.

Cleaver, who was unopposed in the August primary, has carried the Kansas City-based district with at least 60% of the vote in each of the last two elections.

Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin won an August primary in the gerrymandered 5th District, which had been stretched eastward to include rural Republican areas. About 59% of the district’s voters were new under the revised map, according to an Associated Press estimate.

Cleaver had not posted campaign signs in many of the new rural areas, explaining that he was waiting for the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision. But he had vowed to continue his reelection campaign regardless of the outcome.

“Despite the cynical and deeply shameful attempt to silence many of our neighbors, the people fought back and won,” Cleaver said in a social media post Thursday.

Brattin, a Marine veteran and founding member of the conservative Missouri Freedom Caucus in the state Legislature, said the decision disenfranchises thousands of primary voters who now will be shifted to different districts with candidates they didn’t get to choose.

The court “handed Democrats a decision they desperately needed in their effort to help national Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives,” Brattin said in a statement.

Redistricting battle spread to over a quarter of states

Congressional districts typically are redrawn at the start of each decade, based on new census data. But Trump’s quest for a midterm election advantage triggered an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle that spread to more than a dozen states, including California — and triggered a dozen lawsuits in Missouri alone.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruling was one of only a few nationally to go against Republicans’ redistricting efforts.

Prior to its latest ruling, Missouri’s top court already had rejected claims that the special session was illegal, mid-decade redistricting isn’t allowed and the new districts aren’t compact enough.

After the Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday, a few hundred people chanted, “Let us vote!” while rallying outside the courthouse. Grant Christensen, of Jefferson City, said he had signed the referendum petition to put the map to a vote.

“Gerrymandering is the same as voter suppression,” Christensen said. “Cutting up districts in order to steer them to vote one way or the other is not fair.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press.

The exterior of the two-story, beige-colored building looks like any other drab office space near the Hollywood Burbank Airport. But on a recent weekday afternoon, the inside was bustling with activity: hairstylists carried brightly colored wigs between soundstages, a prop artist was building a fake leg for an upcoming video and YouTube stars gathered in a lobby, fidgeting with their phones while they waited to film their next scene.

They were among more than 100 employees of Smosh Productions, which this spring moved into the 32,000-square-foot facility, from a much smaller location in the city, to accommodate their programming needs.

It’s the latest creator-run company deepening its roots in Burbank, a neighborhood long defined by such iconic studios as Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures.

Other influencer-led companies that have expanded production footprints in the city include Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal’s Mythical Entertainment and Alan Chikin Chow.

Internet content production is one of the few growth categories left in a Los Angeles production landscape that keeps shrinking.

“Being ‘Media City’ is a part of Burbank’s tagline. And it’s still true; we are just a different kind of media,” said Katelyn Hempstead, Smosh’s executive coordinator, on a tour of the new facility.

The company, owned by pioneering YouTubers Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, produces up to 10 hours of internet content weekly across five channels. Its programming ranges from sketch comedy to games and challenges for their fans.

Shoot days for digital productions rose 47% in the second quarter to 661 compared with the same period a year ago — even as the overall number of on-location shoot days dropped 13% during that period, according to FilmLA, the nonprofit group that tracks local filming.

“When people have an opportunity to work for a few days on a vertical series or [when] they make an income out of being an influencer and producing regular content for their various social channels, that does help the economy,” said Philip Sokoloski, a spokesman for FilmLA. “They still purchase things. They still utilize equipment. They may rent things from local supply houses.”

Cameras inside the “Who Meme’d It?” studio at Smosh Studios in Burbank.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Burbank has more than 1,000 media and entertainment companies that generate about 66,000 jobs.

Although the city does not give a breakdown of jobs by category, the creator economy has fueled some of the growth in the city’s entertainment employment over the last six years, said Patrick Prescott, Burbank’s community development director.

Most occupy flexible industrial space in the Airport district, leasing space for $1.65 to $2.81 a square foot, he said.

“It’s definitely a transitional period,” Prescott said. “There’s still something really valuable about sitting in a theater with a bunch of other people. But there’s also a lot of scrolling going on. Who’s generating that content? A lot of it’s generated here.”

Filmmakers work in the theater set at Dhar Mann Studios.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Due to anemic production activity, soundstages across L.A. have struggled to fill their studio spaces. That has opened up opportunities for new types of internet productions to fill at least some of the gap, said Sam Glendon, an industrial broker who’s handled several such deals. Creators building out their own space can pick up a discounted soundstage as a result, he said.

“There’s been this big supply-and-demand imbalance,” Glendon said. “It’s still a very niche type of clientele, but I’m certainly searching YouTube much more for who these people are and how many followers they have. Five years ago, I never did that.”

Controlling a studio matters to creators because it lets them move fast without a major studio’s bureaucracy, and platforms such as YouTube reward a steady, frequent posting cadence.

Alan Chikin Chow, behind the scripted YouTube high school drama series “Alan’s Universe,” moved his 13-person operation into a 10,000-square-foot Burbank facility in 2024 after outgrowing his Koreatown apartment.

“YouTube creators are the new trendsetters, and so we wanted to be associated with the big media in Burbank,” said Moris Zingman, the show’s lead producer. Proximity to the Warner Bros. lot helps land celebrity guests, too — Jacob Moncrief, Mythical’s studio president, said it’s an easy sell for shows like “Last Meals” when guests are already a few minutes away.

Filmmakers rehearse a scene in the restaurant set at Dhar Mann Studios.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Traditional media have taken note. Mythical Entertainment and Alan Chikin Chow both struck deals with Netflix in July. “Good Mythical Morning,” “Mythical Kitchen,” “Last Meals” and “Alan’s Universe” are all set to stream there alongside their YouTube releases starting later this year.

Dhar Mann Studios, one of Burbank’s biggest creator-run operations, added a deal with Disney last week for 20 episodes of family-oriented programming — its second major-studio partnership after a 40-title vertical-video deal with Fox Entertainment earlier this year.

Mann, 42, started making YouTube content in 2018 under the Dhar Mann Studios banner, centered around morality and motivational videos. The company now runs a 125,000-square-foot, three-soundstage facility with roughly 220 employees producing rotating sets — restaurants, school hallways, a courtroom, jail visitation rooms — designed to mimic a small town.

But Dhar Mann Studios doesn’t own its Burbank building — it leases the space — and this month the company bought a 108,000-square-foot production campus in Chatsworth for $23 million, with plans to relocate there by 2027, the Real Deal reported.

It’s the same pattern playing out across L.A.’s creator economy.

“The scale that creators have gotten to is ginormous,” said Sean Atkins, Dhar Mann Studios’ chief executive. “Media companies are always looking at what the next thing is. The answer isn’t that they become us or we become them. It’s somewhere in the messy middle, of which nobody knows right now.”

Most internet content work is mostly non-union and typically pays less than traditional film and TV jobs. SAG-AFTRA and the Motion Picture Editors Guild have started drafting new-media-specific contracts in response.

Even so, some workers welcome the opportunity.

Austin Scott, an editor who built a career cutting reality shows like “MasterChef” and “Dancing With the Stars,” recently landed his first big gig after three years of being unable to find post-production work, editing a YouTube series for Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat. Over eight weeks, he’ll work 12-hour days for $3,500 a week — below the $5,000 to $6,000 a typical TV editing job pays.

“My expectations are that it’s going to be harder work, longer hours, more notes, less money,” Scott said. “But there’s no work, so people are kind of forced to take what they can get.”

By the time I reached the top, my shoulders were burning, my calves were screaming and I could no longer say exactly how many steps I’d climbed.

On the way down, I had counted 223. On the way back up, balancing a sack across my back, I arrived at 225. I chalked the discrepancy up to exhaustion.

The route at Thousand Steps Beach in South Laguna gains roughly 250 feet in elevation within a quarter mile from the sand to the highest point of the Ninth Avenue hill. And I was one of around 60 people making the climb again and again with sandbags weighing anywhere from 5 to 50-plus pounds.

Co-creator Joey Finiguerra sets out some gear before the workout begins.

A participant fills a bag with sand.

This was Sandbag Saturday, a free training session founded by brothers Dante and Joey Finiguerra. There’s no registration required — attendees just show up and grab one of the heavy-duty, polypropylene sacks the brothers provide and fill it with as much beach sand as they want. A portable luggage scale allows the more serious athletes to keep track of their progress week after week.

My quads and I were intimidated. But it turned out to be one of the friendliest workouts I’ve ever done.

The workout got its start in December 2023, when Dante, a former Navy SEAL and fitness coach, posted an invitation on Instagram for what was originally supposed to be “Water Jug Saturday.” He encouraged his followers to fill 5-gallon jugs and join him and Joey, a triathlete, for military-style drills on the sand, in the water and up the stairs and adjacent hill.

When a friend pointed out some weighted bags lining the path at the bottom of the staircase one day, the siblings quickly abandoned the water jug idea. Sandbags were easier to sling over shoulders and balance on heads. And perhaps just as importantly, “Sandbag Saturday” rolled off the tongue a lot better.

Long before Dante joined the military and Joey started running marathons, Thousand Steps Beach was always where they got their best workouts. As teenagers growing up in the area, they climbed the staircase barefoot, sprinted the hill overlooking the Pacific and stretched their limbs on the shoreline. They spent nights camping on the sand after long days of surfing. Joey later proposed to his now-wife there.

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1. Participants prepare to walk down a hill. 2. A close-up of a sandbag. 3. The workout consists of hundreds of steps.

“The beach really has meaning to us,” Dante told me when asked about the workout’s origins. “From 18 to 22, I trained for the Navy here almost every day. I always wanted to come back and give this to the community and to anyone who I felt would appreciate it.”

After serving for nine years, Dante’s military background is evident in the fitness sessions he designs for Sandbag Saturdays. Participants perform duck walks, suitcase carries, bear crawls and overhead holds reminiscent of the log and boat carries in Marine boot camps. But despite its inspiration, the atmosphere couldn’t be further from the “Full Metal Jacket”-esque training days that might come to mind.

“We don’t do the typical hardcore yelling at you,” Joey told me before leading the group on a recent Saturday. “Everyone can go as slow or fast as they want.”

Participants run while carrying sandbags on their heads.

Among the regular participants are active-duty firefighters, lifeguards, professional boxers, National Guard personnel, yoga teachers and locals just looking for a fun way to get their cardio in. For some, the gatherings are family affairs. When I was there, Dante and Joey’s mother and sister joined in, and a handful of young children carried tiny sacks too.

“I think people see us and it looks like there’s a barrier of entry with the sandbags and all,” said Anthony Gudenau, who joins Sandbag Saturdays regularly. “But I’m amazed at the different types of people that show up regardless.”

The group’s growth might be due to the sense of inclusiveness that becomes especially noticeable on the staircase. While doing the steps myself, I noticed participants regularly inviting curious, inquiring beachgoers to join in the following weekend.

Running in sand adds to the challenge.

Everyone is encouraged to move at their own pace.

“I love how we all pump each other up when we pass one another going up and down,” said Carmen Benedick, a local who has attended every Saturday for the past six weeks. “It’s not unusual for strangers who aren’t even part of it to also encourage you. The sense of community is amazing.”

Perhaps that’s why so many people keep coming back. Sandbag Saturday has evolved into a kind of outdoor third place, where the endorphin-releasing workout is only part of the draw. For all the sore glutes and calves, what lingers most is the appeal of turning this into a weekend ritual.

“I just want to keep doing it for free every Saturday,” Dante told me. “As long as it’s bringing a positive force to people’s lives and making them feel proud for doing something extremely hard.”

When the morning finally wrapped up and the temperature started to climb, participants stacked their sandbags into a towering formation. A few climbed onto the pile to practice gymnastics-style balances while others headed into the water.

The workout includes bear crawls after running into the water.

Then, one by one, the bags were sliced open, and the sand spilled back onto the beach where it had come from. I grabbed my belongings and headed up those 223 — or maybe 225 — stairs one last time.

EMPORIA, Kan. — Adam Hamilton has spent decades trying to bring people to Jesus as founder of the nation’s largest United Methodist church. Now he wants to bring Kansas voters to the polls as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

A first-time candidate, Hamilton faces an unusual balancing act between political ambition and spiritual obligation. His pastoral role has given him rare prominence for a Democrat in a state where Republicans have won every Senate race for nearly a century, and some in his party are hoping for an upset victory over incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall.

But conservatives are also trying to use Hamilton’s religious leadership against him. They suggest that his sermons prove he’s too liberal for Kansas or even that he’s a heretic for suggesting that non-Christians have a path to salvation after death.

Marshall said in an interview that Hamilton is “too woke for Kansas.”

Hamilton isn’t turning the other cheek. If Jesus were standing before them now, he said, “Roger Marshall would call him ‘woke.’”

Only a few ordained ministers have served as senators over the past 100 years and just one — current Democrat Raphael Warnock of Georgia — remained an active pastor. If elected, Hamilton plans to continue as senior pastor at his Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, preaching 12 to 18 times a year.

As Hamilton tries to win over center-right churchgoers as well as secular liberals, he’s promising that he wouldn’t use his perch in Washington to evangelize. He’s on unpaid leave, going 11 weeks without giving a sermon this summer, although he peppers his remarks with biblical references, discusses Jesus’ teachings with voters and spends several hours weekly on pastoral duties such as hospital visits.

“I need that interaction with people and the caring for people,” he said after a meet-and-greet at a coffee shop in Emporia, a university town of 24,000 that’s smaller than his congregation 110 miles to the northwest.

Hamilton brings skills that built a huge church to a tough race

Hamilton, 61, built his church from a few members meeting in a funeral home chapel in 1990 into a 25,000-member congregation with nine locations across the Kansas City area. He’s demonstrated an ability to raise money and has gained national attention by writing more than 30 books, mostly on Christian theology.

Hamilton describes himself as a centrist, running partly on “bringing people together.” His congregation, he notes, is nearly evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and independents.

Republican-leaning Kansas has a sizable bloc of moderate voters, protects abortion rights and regularly elects Democratic governors. But Democrats haven’t come within 10 points of winning a Senate race in more than 50 years, and they haven’t won one since 1932.

Marshall, 66, is focused on rallying rural conservatives, a strategy that perennially works for Republicans. A fifth-generation farm kid who became an obstetrician, the senator is fluent in agriculture policy. He jibed that suburbanite Hamilton “doesn’t know a heifer from a steer.”

Marshall also warned that the Senate could fall under Democratic control if Hamilton wins the race.

“His party is too crazy for Kansas,” Marshall said.

The campaign has included an allegation of heresy

This year’s race is unusual because of attacks from the Christian right branding Hamilton a heretic.

At issue is a 2022 sermon, reposted on X after Hamilton won the Democratic primary in August. Hamilton cited New Testament passages to argue that non-Christians can receive “the saving grace of Jesus” after death, avoiding eternal torment in Hell.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared that Hamilton had rejected “the central tenets of Christianity,” quoting a verse in the Gospel of John where Jesus declares, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Marshall thanked Cruz for raising the issue, suggesting the sermon was “one of hundreds” of examples of Hamilton being out of step with Kansans.

Hamilton acknowledged that some Christians agree with Cruz — but cited other prominent Christians who might share his own view, including Methodist founder John Wesley and “Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis.

“If he’s going to call me a heretic, he’s not the first,” Hamilton said. “He won’t be the last.”

Hamilton seeks to reassure voters wary of church-state mix

Hamilton also has faced skepticism from Democrats wary of mixing government with religion.

Republican conservatives routinely highlight their faith, suggesting that God wanted them to seek office and profusely thank God after winning.

This year during Lent — the 40 days of self-reflection and repentance before Easter — Hamilton said he skipped a meal each day and prayed about entering the Senate race.

“I’m never 100% sure about the will of God, so I tell people I am 87.2% sure I am supposed to be doing this,” he said. “The Kansas voters will decide whether I’m supposed to win, but I feel like I was being called to step into the arena.”

In Emporia, Hamilton said that as a senator, he’d “fight for the rights of all people, whether they have any faith or not.”

“I’m not running for the Senate to make everybody in this country Christian or United Methodist,” he said.

Nolan Guyer, a 72-year-old Navy veteran and retired nuclear plant operator, said he initially worried about voting for a minister, but Hamilton won him over enough that he donated to the pastor’s campaign.

“I don’t think it’s the government’s business to teach morals, and that is a preacher’s job,” Guyer said.

Some familiar issues are prominent

Republican political action committees have attacked Hamilton as so radical on climate change that he urged his congregation to repent for eating beef. They base that allegation on a misleading stitching together of two parts of a 2020 sermon, with one clip showing Hamilton calling Christians “to repentance” for not protecting God’s creation and a second, earlier clip of him saying that “maybe changing your diet” is among personal actions that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another ad claimed that Hamilton’s church helped pay for a drag queen story hour for children — a claim his campaign denies.

Marshall blamed Hamilton for a split in the United Methodist Church over allowing LGBTQ+ clergy, something it did in 2024. While Hamilton did support that change — at least since 2019 — he also had worked to prevent a split by backing a plan for a local option on whether to ordain or marry LGBTQ+ people.

Hamilton said his views on human sexuality and same-sex marriage evolved gradually, as he came to know gay and lesbian people in his congregation. His church now has a Queer Inclusive Collective ministry and participates in Pride events.

“One small part of my ministry has been trying to make sure that people who felt alienated from the church and pushed away knew that Christ welcomed them and they were loved by our congregation,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s watchwords include ‘decency’ and ‘affordability’

One of Hamilton’s assertions, that he is “running on decency,” resonated with Jann Briggs. She’s a retired teacher from Reading, a small town where the Methodist church is across the street from the Miracle Cafe.

Briggs and several friends came to Hamilton’s event in Emporia with a copy of his latest book, “Holy Spirit: God’s Presence and Power at Work in Us.” He signed it for them.

“Finally, somebody who’s speaking the right words,” Briggs said.

Hamilton is also focusing on affordability, a key issue for Democrats this year. He has criticized Republican cuts to federal programs for the poor, such as food assistance and Medicaid coverage.

“I just want to know, when did it become ‘woke’ to care for your neighbor?” he asked.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.