Before our appointment at Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary, a peaceful retreat off the Bodega Highway in West Sonoma county, a friend and I popped into a nearby gift shop. We told the owner that we were destined to try Osmosis’ storied treatment — a so-called “cedar enzyme bath” — and her eyes widened with excitement.
“You’ll feel like you’re a plant being composted,” she said, adding that the spa’s recycled bath materials lined the path of a neighboring garden.
When we were eventually led into Osmosis’ tidy changing rooms to disrobe, I smelled what she meant before I saw it. A dank, earthy odor hung in the air, as if mounds of fresh pencil shavings had been scattered over a newly excavated farm plot.
FREESTONE, CA — MARCH 29, 2025: A Koi pond at Kyoto-style Meditation Garden. Wellness Editor Alyssa Bereznak in an enzyme cedar bath at the Osmosis Day Spa in Freestone, California on Saturday, March 29, 2025. (Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
It’s the signature scent of a spa whose marquee treatment involves being blanketed up to your neck in a box of steaming compost. Known in Japan as an ion bath, it combines many spa treatments in one: a heated, weighted feeling to relax and soothe the body and a calming aromatherapy to pique the senses. Much like the mud baths of Calistoga, the experience is just as much about a novel brush with natural elements as it is an opportunity for release.
“I like to say that what’s going on in there is a fundamental impulse in biology,” Osmosis owner Michael Stusser said. “All these microorganisms get a chance to talk to each other. They all have infinite wisdom. They all communicate. So there’s this energy going on. There’s a whole flow.”
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Stusser estimates that Osmosis has slung compost onto half a million guests in its 40 years of business. For much of that time, it was the only place in North America where you could consistently book a cedar enzyme bath, currently priced at $155 a person or $127.50 per person for a shared two-person vat. (In May 2023, Tahoe Forest Baths opened in Lake Tahoe and began offering them in partnership with the Japanese company Ohtaka Enzyme Co. Though Santa Monica’s Willow Spa once gave cedar enzyme baths, it has discontinued that service.) Now the creekside 5-acre spa is expanding its offerings, which include sound therapy sessions in zero-gravity loungers, meditation workshops and all-day retreats.
Healdsburg resident Simone Wilson and Wellness Editor Alyssa Bereznak in an enzyme cedar bath at Osmosis Day Spa. The warm, fragrant treatment originated in Japan.
(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
The smell that permeates Osmosis’ halls is the byproduct of a very intentional process, said Stusser. The enzyme bath concoction is a mix of fragrant Douglas fir and Port Orford cedar (a tree that the native Karok people of northwest California once used to construct sweat lodges) and rice bran, which activates the composting process.
“There’s literally billions of organisms in there feeding on nitrogen and generating heat with their bodies, breaking down carbon,” Stusser said. “That’s what they do.”
The spa’s staff is responsible for keeping the mixture from becoming hygienically dubious both by replacing it and churning it multiple times a day, thus ensuring there’s enough oxygen to keep that activity moving. We observed the process before our personal meeting with the mulch. Our spa attendant for the day, Samundra Sutcliffe, lodged a large pitchfork into the vat shavings and turned it over on top of itself as steam emanated from the pile.
Attendant Samundra Sutcliffe churns the cedar enzyme shavings at Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary.
(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
“If it doesn’t get fluffed enough, the material starts to compact and it starts to break down, what’s called anaerobically, which is without oxygen,” said the spa’s general manager, Heather Bishop. “Sometimes we’ll end up with less appealing smells.”
Stusser, 78, has a deep education in biodynamic gardening. He studied Agroecology at University of Santa Cruz under organic gardening and farming pioneer Alan Chadwick, who founded the school’s “French-intensive” garden in 1967. (Stusser went on to film a 1971 documentary, “The Garden,” about the project.) As Stusser got more into the bio-intensive gardening scene, he became enamored with compost.
“I saw the alchemical power of compost to transform not only the soil, but everything that was put into it,” he said. “And I had a secret wish that I never was willing to admit to anyone, which was to be buried in a compost pile.”
Osmosis serves a special enzyme-infused tea before guiding guests to its signature cedar enzyme bath.
(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
After living on and tending to the land at the Farallones Institute Rural Center (now the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Sonoma County), Stusser traveled to Japan in 1981 to become a landscape gardening apprentice. The program, a seven-days-a-week dawn-til-dusk grind, proved to be far too intense, so he quit and went to live in a Zen temple in Obama-shi. There Stusser developed a serious case of sciatica and went on a quest to heal himself. He ended up on the island of Kyushu, where he stumbled upon an enzyme bath center where people of different ages and ailments had come to heal.
“As soon as I saw what was happening, I realized this is actually the same dynamic that exists in compost,” Stusser said. “I said, I’m going to finally get my wish.”
A farmer in southwestern Hokkaido named Noboru Ohtaka came up with the idea for a so-called “ion bath” after stepping on a sawdust enzyme fertilizer he’d developed and noticing it felt pleasant. His company, Ohtaka Enzyme Co. opened its first ion house in Sapporo City in 1964, said company President Seiichi Imai. Seven years later, when the city hosted the Winter Olympics, organizers built enzyme baths for athletes to use in the Olympic village.
“As the facility was continuously featured in newspapers and on television, the concept of the enzyme bath spread across Japan,” Imai shared in an email.
The enzyme bath Stusser tried was consistent with the original practice. It involved undergoing the treatment two times a day for a week, during which he fasted save for an enzyme drink, and received ashiatsu massages (in which a practitioner walks on your back). He said the treatment resolved his sciatica. He also had a spiritual experience.
“I was in the enzyme bath and as part of that experience, like in a millisecond of this vast experience, I saw the whole creation of Osmosis unfold before my mind’s eye in an instant, crystal clear, undeniable, and I knew it was my calling to do this,” he said.
He returned to the U.S. and got to work. On May 21, 1985, he opened Osmosis. At first, he said, it was hard to persuade people to live out the same wish of being composted that he’d held for so many years.
“I could barely give it away in the beginning,” he said. “But once they did it and discovered how much better it made them feel, we have had a lot of people coming for decades.”
As my friend and I sat robe-clad in a tea room staring out at a glass door that opened to a private Zen garden and sipping a hot enzyme herbal tonic with yarrow, red clover and peppermint, I contemplated my imminent encounter with the compost. I’m an avid gardener who has dusted my plants with compost and brewed her own kombucha. But even I felt a trickle of hesitation at being smothered in a bacteria-laden mulch.
Before I could give it a second thought, our attendant, Samundra, led us into a separate room with what looked like an adult sandbox. Two human-sized seats had been carved into the enzyme cedar mix to ensure we had sufficient support as we gazed out onto another private zen garden. We were left alone briefly to settle in and cover ourselves in the mix. When she reentered, she began shoveling it on to both of us until only our heads were visible.
“If you do get too hot, you can always pull out your arms, and I’ll just be coming out to check on you,” she said.
Up close and personal, the musk of the odor dissipated, and I breathed in the grounding spice of the cedar and the energizing citrus notes of the Douglas fir. It felt as though my body was wrapped in a hot compress. I tend to overheat easily in jacuzzis and hot springs but the enzyme bath felt breathable. (I later learned that this is because wood has a lower thermal conductivity than water, and the cedar enzyme mix allows for more aeration.)
As my friend and I began to sweat, Samundra arrived with cold compresses and draped them across our necks. With our arms still buried under the compost, she brought ice-cold waters with straws up to our mouths so we could hydrate — a truly luxurious part of the service.
The allotted 20 minutes went quickly. And when our time was up, she dug us out enough for us to break free. We used special grated mittens to wipe the mixture off of our bodies in the private zen garden, then rinsed off in the shower. My body was warmed from within, my typically tight-and-achy lower back and shoulders, slack and painless. After a trip to a spa I can sometimes feel like I’m on the verge of a nap, but in this case I felt invigorated and present, ready to tour the gardens that awaited outside.
When I later relayed my journey of skepticism to convert to Stusser, he said it was a common one.
“You can’t really explain it to somebody until you’ve done it,” Stusser said. “A lot of people will be very inquisitive on the phone. They go, ‘Well, can you tell me something more about what is it really doing?’ Then they get here and they look at it, and they’re not even sure they want to go in. And then they get in and get a big smile. ‘Oh, this is what it is like.’”
It was true. I had been composted like a plant — and I liked it.
Teahouses built for spending extended time in, open until the wee hours of the night, are popping up all over the city. Some are elusive, hidden in plain sight or only accessible via a mysterious membership. Others have gone viral on TikTok and have cover charges and waitlists to attend. Some reference East Asian tea ceremony culture, others lean California cool and bohemian.
Jai Tea Loft owner Salanya Angel Inm prepares tea at her recently opened social gathering space in Koreatown.
(Dante Velasquez Jr. / For The Times)
Why the surge in places to drink tea? It might be because young people are consuming less alcohol (a 2023 study from Gallup found the number of people under 35 who drink has dropped 10% over the last two decades). Or maybe it’s due to the fact that the city has lost a sizable chunk of restaurants open past 10 p.m. — LAist reports nearly 100 since 2019 — leaving fewer places to sit and chat that aren’t bars or clubs. At the same time, activities centered on wellness and reflection, like gratitude groups, journaling or even reading silently in public, are being embraced by people of all ages looking for third spaces and activities outside of the standard dinner-and-a-movie.
Salanya Angel Inm was inspired to open Jai in Koreatown after years of feeling that Los Angeles lacked late-night spaces not oriented around alcohol. She wanted to create an alternative for her community of creatives, a place they could spend long hours loosening up outside of a bar environment. Lydia Lin, co-founder of Steep in Chinatown, which does serve alcohol along with plenty of tea, wanted a place that was open late but was peaceful enough that she could hear her friends while having a conversation.
Enter the rise of the teahouse. Despite their design and menu differences — some have a dozen herbal blends, others opt for dealer’s choice with a rotating set of three bespoke infusions; some are places to debut a trendy outfit, a few ask visitors to remove their shoes — they each come from a desire to challenge a typical consumer experience. These are spaces meant for lingering long after tea has been purchased, or even finished.
Below are four teahouses in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Jai
Scenes from a Saturday night in May at Jai Tea Loft.(Dante Velasquez Jr. / For The Times)
Located above Thai Angel, known for its DJ sets and late-night noodles, newly minted teahouse Jai offers a quieter, more intimate space to spend weekend nights. The spot is owned and operated by Thai Chinese American model and breathwork and reiki practitioner Salanya Angel Inm, who co-owns Thai Angel with her mom and brother. She began tinkering with the idea of opening a teahouse in May 2022. In January 2024, construction began, with a soft opening following in March 2025.
Jai is housed in a one-room attic on top of Thai Angel. It’s cozy, with space for two dozen people at most. The room glows in yellow-orange light from a neon art piece fixed to the ceiling and is lined with brightly colored custom floor cushions made of fabric from Thailand. On a Saturday night in March, seven guests removed their shoes and sat for a storytelling event, ticketed at $10. This was the second installment of the event; Inm had selected the theme “Lucky to be alive.” Some guests recited poetry, while others freestyled between sips of tea. The group exchanged stories and lounged until 3 a.m.
Guests socialize on a Saturday night at Jai Tea Loft in Koreatown.
(Dante Velasquez Jr. / For The Times)
Jordan Collins bought a ticket for storytelling at Jai after hearing about it on Inm’s social media. Upon arrival, he ordered a herbal elixir featuring Asian botanicals from the brand Melati. It’s one of three premade nonalcoholic tonics (the other two are “Awake” and “Calm” by California-based brand Dromme) that Jai serves room temperature for $9. A fan of art shows and experimental music performances, Collins described himself as always on the lookout for new community spaces. “I think that was the first time I pulled up to anything completely solo with no expectations, with the full intention to yap for however long to a room with complete strangers,” he said, likening his experience to a night spent chatting with friends into the morning.
The tea selection at Jai Tea Loft.
(Dante Velasquez Jr. / For The Times)
The current menu at Jai consists of hot tea, sold by the glass or pot, along with the herbal elixirs — one invigorating, one calming and one berry. Tea drinkers can choose between more than a dozen herbs, from butterfly pea to white chrysanthemum, to create a custom blend prepared by Inm, starting at $15 per 25-ounce pot or $6 for a single serving. Behind the tea bar, she offers customers guidance based on their mood and needs.
She may expand the menu going forward but plans to keep costs low. “I really don’t like the idea that people can only access things that are good for them if they have a large amount of money to invest in themselves. I want people to feel like, ‘Yeah, I can swing that for this experience’ and it not be this obstacle,” said Inm.
Koreatown 149 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles, CA (upstairs) Soft opening, see Instagram for hours
Tea at Shiloh
Patrons at Tea at Shiloh on a recent Saturday.(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Only 45 customers can enter Tea at Shiloh per evening, and those hoping to visit should plan ahead: Reservations, which are required, can be made through the website, and Tea at Shiloh fully books nearly every night.
As each attendee enters and takes off their shoes and adds them to the disorganized pile near the front of the door, a host asks them their intention for the evening. Patrons of the Arts District teahouse know what they’re getting into and answer the question with ease. The space attracts a metaphysically minded, wellness-oriented community. Some are there to journal, others to spend time with old friends. A few want to get out of their comfort zone; they come on dates, join with friends and arrive alone.
Guests socialize at Tea at Shiloh: A Teahouse.
(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
The concept for Tea at Shiloh came to owner Shiloh Enoki (who goes by the mononym Shiloh) in 2019. Shiloh, who was born in Utah and is of South American descent, found herself unfulfilled working for a record label in Hollywood. She underwent a personal transformation that led to her quitting her job and legally changing her name. After a visit to a teahouse in San Francisco that closed in the afternoon, she couldn’t stop thinking how nice the experience would have been at night. She found herself looking for late-night teahouses back home in Los Angeles on Google Maps. To her surprise, she couldn’t find any. “I couldn’t believe that something that was in my brain didn’t exist on Google. I was like, ‘It has to be somewhere. It has to be somewhere in L.A.’ I live in one of the biggest cities in the world and nothing … I became obsessed,” she said. Shiloh began exploring herbalism and hosting friends and strangers at her home for tea, then decided to create a business that would provide what she’d been searching for. She opened the space in 2022.
Faith Bakar, Alexsys Hornsby and Rachel Angelica painting at Tea at Shiloh.
(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Tea at Shiloh is inside an industrial loft. Brick walls and exposed piping contrast with wooden furniture, white couches and floor cushions and the warm glow of Noguchi lampshades. Surfaces are covered in books, tarot cards, clay and other art supplies to make use of. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., laptops are welcome. For the evening shift, which goes from 7 to 10 or 11 p.m., the lights go down and laptops are banned (with an exception for Monday’s piano lounge events). Both time slots require prepaid reservations, which, day or night, start at $37 and include unlimited access to the only thing on the menu, a rotating selection of three custom tea blends by Shiloh’s herbalists.
On some nights, there’s live music; others feature workshops in journaling, ceramics and other mind-body activities and performances. “It’s not a singular experience. There’s something for everyone,” Enoki said. After discovering the space on TikTok, Cooper Andrews took his partner to “cosmic jazz” (an eclectic mix of saxophone, keys, and abstract vocal looping) night at Shiloh to celebrate her birthday. He was looking for something other than just another fancy dinner, and for him, the $47-per-person cover charge was well worth it. “I see the fee as a cover charge. It’s like going to a museum,” he said.
Arts District 2035 Bay St., Los Angeles, CA 90021 Reservation only
Steep LA
Steep LA in Chinatown.
(Solomon O. Smith / For The Times)
Friends Samuel Wang and Lydia Lin come from cultures that take tea seriously. Wang, an industrial designer, is Taiwanese, while Lin, a marketing MBA working in the legal field, is Cantonese. In 2019, they separately went on trips to Asia to visit their families and discovered how modernized traditional teahouses had become. “[In China] people our age were going to teahouses instead of bars or clubs. It was somewhere that wasn’t home to just hang out and be able to have a conversation,” said Lin. “Why didn’t this exist in L.A.?” the friends asked themselves.
Within six months, thanks to the help of their Chinatown community, Lin and Wang — who didn’t quit their day jobs — opened Steep in the fall of 2019. Opening night was the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, Lin remembers, an important and auspicious day.
The minimalist tea lounge hides in the back of a plaza in Chinatown. There’s space inside for a few dozen guests and a handful of outdoor tables for when weather permits. Inside, there’s a beautiful marble bar, wood tables, a cozy couch and long tables with tea leaves in jars to smell and discover.
By day, Steep serves 10 rotating teas, all sourced from China and Taiwan. Customers can order a glass of cold-brewed tea or fresh-brewed tea, but Lin encourages a tea ceremony, which comes with a pot and up to four cups. Baristas walk guests through the steps of brewing and pouring the tea, providing a timer for the perfect steep.
By night, Steep is the only business open in its plaza. Inside, soothing R&B plays. And, unlike the other teahouses that have popped up recently in Los Angeles, Steep serves alcohol. After 5 p.m., the space shifts from cozy teahouse to experimental mixology bar, serving boozy concoctions that all feature tea as an ingredient. Take the Yuanyang Martini, an espresso martini with black sesame and black tea or Red Robe, featuring cognac, bourbon, oolong tea and white miso. At 9 p.m. on a Thursday in March, nearly every seat was filled. Half of the guests enjoyed cocktails, while the rest shared pots of tea.
Chinatown 970 N. Broadway #112, Los Angeles, CA 90012 11 a.m.-11 p.m. daily; closed Tuesday
NEHIMA
There’s no information about NEHIMA online except for an email address. The invite-only, membership-based Japanese teahouse opened in Los Feliz in 2022. It’s more exclusive than any Soho House, San Vicente Bungalows or Bird Streets Club. So much so that its founders, Miho Ikeda and Richard Brewer, also co-owners of New High Mart, an equally exclusive Japanese home goods boutique, agreed only to speak about their latest venture via email.
“Serving tea to-go is to miss the entire point of tea. Tea is time. An excuse to enjoy a moment, a pause, a rest — either with oneself or the company of others,” said Brewer. The space has a strict no-technology policy. Even smartwatches are required to be checked in lockers along with phones.
At NEHIMA, all tea is served made-to-order, tableside, in pieces from the owner’s collection of Japanese ceramics. There are no matcha, lattes or novelty drinks on the menu, only loose-leaf tea sourced from Japan. NEHIMA is careful to distinguish that while the space and experience recall Japanese tradition, the club does not offer an official tea ceremony. “That term is thrown around too easily these days and should be reserved for describing the very specific event, ‘Cha-No-Yu,’” said Brewer.
The founders said the average visit is between three and six hours. Where most members clubs try to offer a luxurious experience for the wealthy through elevated design, upscale food and posh clientele, taking time to relax and enjoy a pot of tea is what NEHIMA sees as the ultimate luxury. “In this busy demanding world, time is the new flex, and real wealth is taking time to stare into a bowl of tea,” said Brewer.
Los Feliz 4650 Kingswell Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027 Members only
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Democratic senators sparred Tuesday over the Trump administration’s foreign policies, including on Ukraine and Russia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the slashing of the U.S. foreign assistance budget and refugee admissions.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, his first since being confirmed on the first day of President Trump’s inauguration, former Florida Sen. Rubio defended the administration’s decisions to his onetime colleagues.
He said “America is back” and claimed four months of foreign policy achievements, even as many of them remain frustratingly inconclusive. Among them are the resumption of nuclear talks with Iran, efforts to bring Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and efforts to end the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
He praised agreements with El Salvador and other Latin American countries to accept migrant deportees, saying “secure borders, safe communities and zero tolerance for criminal cartels are once again the guiding principles of our foreign policy.” He also rejected assertions that massive cuts to his department’s budget would hurt America’s standing abroad. Instead, he said the cuts would actually improve American status and the United States’ reputation internationally.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the committee’s chair, opened the hearing with praise for Trump’s changes and spending cuts and welcomed what he called the administration’s promising nuclear talks with Iran. Risch also noted what he jokingly called “modest disagreement” with Democratic lawmakers, who used Tuesday’s hearing to confront Rubio about Trump administration moves that they say are weakening the United States’ influence globally.
Yet Democrats on the Senate committee, including ranking member Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, took sharp issue with Rubio’s presentation.
Shaheen argued that the Trump administration has “eviscerated six decades of foreign policy investments” and given China openings around the world.
“I urge you to stand up to the extremists of the administration,” Shaheen said. Other Democrats excoriated the administration for its suspension of the refugee admissions program, particularly while allowing white Afrikaners from South Africa to enter the country.
In two particularly contentious exchanges, Kaine and Van Hollen demanded answers on the decision to suspend overall refugee admissions but to exempt Afrikaners based on what they called “specious” claims that they have been subjected to massive discrimination by the South African government. Rubio gave no ground.
“The United States has a right to pick and choose who we allow into the United States,” he said. “If there is a subset of people that are easier to vet, who we have a better understanding of who they are and what they’re going to do when they come here, they’re going to receive preference.”
He added: “There are a lot of sad stories around the world, millions and millions of people around the world. It’s heartbreaking, but we cannot assume millions and millions of people around the world. No country can.”
On the Middle East, Rubio said the administration has continued to push ahead with attempts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and to promote stability in Syria.
He stressed the importance of U.S. engagement with Syria, saying that otherwise, he fears the interim government there could be weeks or months away from a “potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions.”
Rubio’s comments addressed Trump’s pledge to lift sanctions on Syria’s new transitional government, which is led by a former militant chief who led the overthrow of the country’s longtime oppressive leader, Bashar Assad, late last year.
Lee and Knickmeyer write for the Associated Press.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a 2026 candidate for California governor, criticized former Vice President Kamala Harris and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra on Tuesday as complicit in covering up former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in office.
Villaraigosa said those actions, in part, lead to President Trump winning the November election. Becerra, who previously served as California Attorney General, is also in the running for governor and Harris is considering jumping into the race. All three are Democrats.
“At the highest levels of our government, those in power were intentionally complicit or told outright lies in a systematic cover up to keep Joe Biden’s mental decline from the public,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “Now, we have come to learn this cover up includes two prominent California politicians who served as California Attorney General – one who is running for Governor and another who is thinking about running for Governor. Voters deserve to know the truth, what did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?”
President Joe Biden walks out to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Nov. 26, 2024.
(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)
Attempts to reach representatives for Harris and Beccera were unsuccessful Tuesday afternoon.
Villaraigosa based his remarks on excerpts from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson and publicly released Tuesday.
“Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra took an oath of office and were entrusted to protect the American people, but instead Kamala Harris repeatedly said there was nothing wrong with Biden and Becerra turned a blind eye,” Villaraigosa said.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Ashli Babbitt’s family filed over her shooting by an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss with the Associated Press terms of a settlement that have not been made public.
The settlement would resolve the $30-million federal lawsuit that Babbitt’s estate filed last year in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol police officer shot Babbitt as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.
The officer who shot her was cleared of wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which concluded that he acted in self-defense and in the defense of members of Congress. The Capitol Police also cleared the officer.
Settlement terms haven’t been disclosed in public court filings. On May 2, lawyers for Babbitt’s estate and the Justice Department told a federal judge that they had reached a settlement in principle but were still working out the details before a final agreement could be signed.
Justice Department spokespeople and two attorneys for the Babbitt family didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was unarmed when she was shot by the officer. The lawsuit alleges that the plainclothes officer failed to de-escalate the situation and did not give her any warnings or commands before opening fire.
The suit also accused the Capitol Police of negligence, claiming the department should have known that the officer was “prone to behave in a dangerous or otherwise incompetent manner.”
“Ashli posed no threat to the safety of anyone,” the lawsuit said.
The officer said in a televised interview that he fired as a “last resort.” He said he didn’t know if the person jumping through the window was armed when he pulled the trigger.
Thousands of people stormed the Capitol after President Trump spoke to a crowd of supporters at his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. More than 100 police officers were injured in the attack.
In January, on his first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of charges for all of the more than 1,500 people charged with crimes in the riot.
Tucker and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Penguin Press: 352 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Eleven minutes into the June 27 presidential debate, CNN anchor Dana Bash slipped a note to her colleague Jake Tapper after President Biden gave a rambling, incoherent answer.
Negative reaction to Biden’s alarmingly disastrous performance led him to abandon his campaign three weeks later and Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place on the 2024 Democratic ticket. The election against President Trump was less than four months away.
Biden’s mental and physical decline had long been the subject of speculation at that point. The unraveling of the then-81-year-old incumbent president in front of an audience of 51 million TV viewers made his diminished capacity undeniable.
“It was just the painful realization that the White House had been lying to everyone, including likely, in many ways, to themselves,” Tapper said in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in Washington, D.C. “As bad as it was on TV, it was worse in person.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the first 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.
(Austin Steele / CNN)
The debate meltdown and its aftermath prompted Tapper to join forces with Thompson for an investigative deep dive into Biden’s deteriorating condition and how family and staff protected him from scrutiny until it was no longer possible to hide.
“Original Sin” is rife with examples of Biden forgetting the names of friends and associates he’s known for years, most notably actor George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser. At the same event, former President Obama led a dazed-looking Biden offstage.
Tapper and Thompson give a detailed account of Biden’s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated whether the former president was in illegal possession of classified material.
Biden frequently wandered off topic during his testimony and failed to recall dates of key moments of his life, such as the year his son Beau died. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, calling him a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” in his report. Hur was hammered by Democratic critics who called him cruel and ageist.
There were private discussions among aides about Biden using a wheelchair if he were elected to a second term. The staff went through machinations to minimize the appearance of Biden’s physical challenges, even enlisting director Steven Spielberg to coach Biden for his 2024 State of the Union address.
Tapper and Thompson tie the stories together in a way that reads like a horror movie script — you know what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“We were just lied to over and over again,” Tapper said.
Their book has already generated a national debate about whether the White House deceived the public about the president’s condition and how Biden’s late exit from the race undermined the Democratic Party’s chances of stopping a second term for President Trump.
The immediate response of right-wing commentators to the book’s revelations has been “we told you so,” along with accusations that the mainstream media was complicit in a White House cover-up of the president’s health issues.
Tapper anticipated the reaction. He said 99% of what is reported in the book was discovered after the election.
“If I learned about any of these stories in 2022, 2023 or 2024, I would have reported them in a second,” he said. “But I don’t have subpoena power.”
Tapper believes conservatives were proven correct in their harsh and at times tactless assessments of Biden’s condition, which clearly worsened in 2023 after his son Hunter faced the possibility of a prison sentence when a plea deal on tax and gun charges fell apart.
“They were right and that should be acknowledged,” Tapper said. “At the same time, saying that the president’s brain has turned to applesauce is not journalism. It’s punditry.”
Although there is plenty of footage showing Biden’s memory lapses and senior moments, Tapper noted there were few deeply reported stories on the extent of the president’s condition. Biden was surrounded by family members and longtime loyalists who were effective at deflecting and dismissing the inquiries as partisan attacks.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy was persistent in raising the issue of Biden’s health in the White House briefing room and former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was persistent in shutting him down, suggesting he was spreading disinformation.
“They weren’t only lying to journalists, they were lying to everybody,” Tapper said. “People would do reporting and all the great Democratic sources that you could rely on for candor would say, ‘No, we’re told that he’s fine.’ And I think that they all either believed it or had no other facts.”
Along with Thompson’s work for Axios, the most detailed report on Biden’s frailty and memory lapses came in June 2024 from Wall Street Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey. The highly respected Washington journalists were roundly criticized by progressive commentators for depending on unnamed sources in the report, titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” CNN’s own Reliable Sources newsletter dismissed the piece, saying, “The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better.”
Tapper said Hughes and Linskey “should be heralded as heroes” and agreed that the Washington press corps failed to aggressively pursue the Biden health story. But it didn’t help that loyalty to Biden kept potential whistleblowers in line.
“I do primarily think that the people who were lying, or the people who knew the truth but were fearful, are the ones that could’ve prevented this disaster much more so than those of us in the news media,” Tapper said. “We’re only as good as our sources.”
Tapper and Thompson rely largely on unnamed sources in “Original Sin.” Among the 200 people they talked to are Democratic Party insiders and four cabinet secretaries. While many Democrats are still reluctant to go on the record about what they knew about Biden and when they knew it, the floodgate of anecdotes opened after the election.
“I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,” Tapper said. “I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.”
Many of the sources expressed regret that they did not speak up sooner. Tapper said he and his co-author maintained a high bar for what they used.
“If there was stuff that we were not 100% sure about, we didn’t put it in the book,” he said. “There are stories, really good ones, that had one source and we said, ‘It’s not good enough.’”
In its only response to the book thus far, the Biden camp has asserted that the former president’s condition did not impair his ability to execute his duties in the White House.
“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”
Tapper and Thompson say in the book that they found no instances where Biden was unable to discharge his duties as president. They write that even most of his critics interviewed for the book “attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule.”
Tapper believes that the effort of family and his longtime staff members to hide Biden’s condition deprived the Democratic Party of the chance to determine if its chances were better with another candidate, who would have benefited from more time to mount a campaign against Trump.
“President Biden knows what he was going through,” Tapper said. “Jill Biden knows what he’s going through. They hid this. It’s still amazing to me that they were actually arguing that he could do this job for four more years.
“I’m proud of the book that Alex and I wrote,” Tapper added. “I’m proud of the reporting. But I’d rather that this hadn’t happened.”
Asked if the Biden’s actions amounted to a medical Watergate, Tapper said it did “in the fact that there was a horrible cover-up of something that wasn’t technically a crime, but you could argue morally it was.”
The Baltic nation is seeking damages, including compensation for border reinforcement costs.
Lithuania has initiated legal proceedings against Belarus at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing its neighbour of orchestrating a refugee and migrant crisis by facilitating the smuggling of people across their border.
“The Belarusian regime must be held legally accountable for orchestrating the wave of illegal migration and the resulting human rights violations,” Lithuanian Justice Minister Rimantas Mockus said in a statement on Monday.
“We are taking this case to the International Court of Justice to send a clear message: no state can use vulnerable people as political pawns without facing consequences under international law.”
The case, submitted to the ICJ in The Hague, centres on alleged violations by Belarus of the United Nations Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said attempts to resolve the issue through bilateral talks failed and it has evidence showing direct involvement by the Belarusian state in organising refugee and migrant flows, including a surge in flights from the Middle East operated by Belarusian state-owned airlines.
After landing in Belarus, many of the passengers were escorted to the Lithuanian border by Belarusian security forces and forced to cross illegally, Lithuanian officials said.
Lithuania also accused Belarus of refusing to cooperate with its border services in preventing irregular crossings and said it is seeking compensation through the ICJ for alleged damages caused, including costs related to border reinforcement.
Tensions between the two countries have simmered since 2021 when thousands of people – mostly from the Middle East and Africa – began arriving at the borders of Lithuania, Poland and Latvia from Belarus.
Belarus had previously deported Middle Eastern refugees and migrants with more than 400 Iraqis repatriated to Baghdad on a charter flight from Minsk in November 2021.
That same year, a Human Rights Watch report accused Belarus of manufacturing the crisis, finding that “accounts of violence, inhuman and degrading treatment and coercion by Belarusian border guards were commonplace”.
European Union officials have also accused Minsk of “weaponising” migration in an effort to destabilise the bloc. The claims are strongly denied by Belarus.
In December, the EU approved emergency measures allowing member states bordering Belarus and Russia to temporarily suspend asylum rights in cases in which migration is being manipulated for political ends.
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Kat Renfroe was at Mass when she saw a volunteer opportunity in the bulletin. Her Catholic parish was looking for tutors for Afghan youth, newly arrived in the United States.
There was a personal connection for Renfroe. Her husband, now retired from the Marine Corps, had deployed to Afghanistan four times. “He just never talked about any other region the way he did about the people there,” she said.
She signed up to volunteer. “It changed my life,” she said.
That was seven years ago. She and her husband are still close to the young man she tutored, along with his family. And Renfroe has made a career of working with refugees. She now supervises the Fredericksburg migration and refugee services office, part of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington.
That faith-based work is now in peril. As part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, his administration banned most incoming refugees in January and froze federal funds for the programs. Across the country, local resettlement agencies like hers have been forced to lay off staff or close their doors. Refugees and other legal migrants have been left in limbo, including Afghans who supported the U.S. in their native country.
The upheaval is particularly poignant in this part of Virginia, which boasts both strong ties to the military and to resettled Afghans, along with faith communities that support both groups.
Situated south of Washington and wedged among military bases, Fredericksburg and its surrounding counties are home to tens of thousands of veterans and active-duty personnel.
Virginia has resettled more Afghan refugees per capita than any other state. The Fredericksburg area now has halal markets, Afghan restaurants and school outreach programs for families who speak Dari and Pashto.
Many of these U.S.-based Afghans are still waiting for family members to join them — hopes that appear on indefinite hold. Families fear a new travel ban will emerge with Afghanistan on the list. A subset of Afghans already in the U.S. may soon face deportation as the Trump administration ends their temporary protected status.
“I think it’s tough for military families, especially those who have served, to look back on 20 years and not feel as though there’s some confusion and maybe even some anger about the situation,” Renfroe said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced in April that it was ending its decades-old partnership with the federal government to resettle refugees. The move came after the Trump administration halted the program’s federal funding, which the bishops’ conference channels to local Catholic Charities.
The Fredericksburg Catholic Charities office has continued aiding current clients and operating with minimal layoffs thanks to its diocese’s support and state funds. But it’s unclear what the local agency’s future will be without federal funding or arriving refugees.
“I’ll just keep praying,” Renfroe said. “It’s all I can do from my end.”
A legacy of faith-based service
Religious groups have long been at the heart of U.S. refugee resettlement work. Until the recent policy changes, seven out of the 10 national organizations that partnered with the U.S. government to resettle refugees were faith-based. They were aided by hundreds of local affiliates and religious congregations.
Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington has been working with refugees for 50 years, starting with Vietnamese people after the fall of Saigon. For the last 10 years, most of its clients have been Afghans, with an influx arriving in 2021 after the Taliban returned to power.
Area faith groups like Renfroe’s large church — St. Mary’s in Fredericksburg — have been key to helping Afghan newcomers get on their feet. Volunteers from local congregations furnish homes, provide meals and drive families to appointments.
“As a church, we care deeply. As Christians, we care deeply,” said Joi Rogers, who led the Afghan ministry at her Southern Baptist church. “As military, we also just have an obligation to them as people that committed to helping the U.S. in our mission over there.”
Rogers’ husband, Jake, a former Marine, is one of the pastors at Pillar, a network of 16 Southern Baptist churches that minister to military members. Their flagship location is near Quantico, the Marine base in northern Virginia, where nearly 5,000 Afghans were evacuated to after the fall of Kabul.
With Southern Baptist relief funds, Pillar Church hired Joi Rogers to work part time as a volunteer coordinator in the base’s makeshift refugee camp in 2021. She helped organize programming, including children’s activities. Her position was under the auspices of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which the government contracted to help run the camp.
For Pillar’s founding pastor, Colby Garman, the effort was an easy decision. “It was affecting so many of the lives of our families here who had served in Afghanistan.”
“We’ve been told to love God and love our neighbor,” Garman said. “I said to our people, this is an opportunity, a unique opportunity, for us to demonstrate love for our neighbor.”
Christians called to care for refugees, politics aside
Within five months, as the Afghans left the base for locations around the country, the support at the camp transitioned to the broader community. Pillar started hosting an English class. Church members visited locally resettled families and tried to keep track of their needs.
For one Pillar Church couple in nearby Stafford, Va., that meant opening their home to a teenager who had arrived alone in the U.S. after being separated from her family at the Kabul airport — a situation they heard about through the church.
Katlyn Williams and her husband Phil Williams, then an active-duty Marine, served as foster parents for Mahsa Zarabi, now 20, during her junior and senior years of high school. They introduced her to many American firsts: the beach, homecoming, learning to drive.
“The community was great,” Zarabi said. “They welcomed me very well.”
She attends college nearby; the Williamses visit her monthly. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this spring, they broke fast with her and her family, now safely in Virginia.
“She has and will always be part of our family,” Katlyn Williams said.
Her friend Joi Rogers, while careful not to speak for Pillar, said watching the recent dismantling of the federal refugee program has “been very hard for me personally.”
Veterans and members of the military tend to vote Republican. Most Southern Baptists are among Trump’s staunch white evangelical supporters. For those reasons, Pillar pastor Garman knows it may be surprising to some that his church network has been steadfast in supporting refugees.
“I totally understand that is the case, but I think that is a bias of just not knowing who we are and what we do,” Garman said after a recent Sunday service.
Later, sitting in the church office with his wife, Jake Rogers said, “We recognize that there are really faithful Christians that could lie on either side of the issue of refugee policy.”
“Regardless of your view on what our national stance should be on this,” he said, “we as Christ followers should have a heart for these people that reflects God’s heart for these people.”
Unity through faith and refugee work
Later that week, nearly two dozen Afghan women gathered around a table at the Fredericksburg refugee office, while children played with toys in the corner. The class topic was self-care, led by an Afghan staff member. Along the back wall waited dishes of rice and chicken, part of a celebratory potluck to mark the end of Ramadan.
Sitting at the front was Suraya Qaderi, the last client to arrive at the resettlement agency before the U.S. government suspended new arrivals.
She was in Qatar waiting to be cleared for a flight to the United States when the Trump administration started canceling approved travel plans for refugees. “I was one of the lucky last few,” said Qaderi, who was allowed to proceed.
She arrived in Virginia on Jan. 24, the day the administration sent stop-work orders to resettlement agencies.
Qaderi worked for the election commission in Afghanistan, and she received a special immigrant visa for her close ties to the U.S. government. She was a child when her father disappeared under the previous Taliban regime.
The return of the Taliban government was like “the end of the world,” she said. As a woman, she lost many of her rights, including her ability to work and leave home unaccompanied.
She studied Islamic law during her university years. She believes the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam is wrong on the rights of women. “Islam is not only for them,” she said.
The resettlement office includes not only Catholic staffers, but many Muslim employees and clients. “We find so much commonality between our faiths,” Renfroe said.
Her Catholic faith guides her work, and it’s sustaining her through the uncertainty of what the funding and policy changes will mean for her organization, which remains committed to helping refugees.
“I’m happy to go back to being a volunteer again if that’s what it takes,” Renfroe said.
Regardless of government contracts, she wants local refugee families to know “that we’re still here, that we care about them and that we want to make sure that they have what they need.”
I was always told as a child that breakfast is the most important meal. It gives you the energy to keep going the whole day. And so, in my family, we would regularly eat a scrumptious breakfast.
That was in the past, of course. For weeks now, we have had hardly anything to eat. I myself have been dreaming of having a slice of cheese and a warm loaf of bread dipped in thyme and oil.
Instead, I start yet another day of genocide with a cup of tea and a tasteless, nearly expired “not-for-sale WFP fortified biscuit”, which I bought for $1.50.
I have been following the news recently and have started to feel that my wish for something other than a World Food Programme (WFP) biscuit may soon be fulfilled.
Apparently, the United States has grown tired of hearing Palestinians in Gaza say they are starving. So now, it has decided to end the hunger, or at least the annoying complaints about it.
And so, with unshakeable confidence and pride in its own ingenuity, the US government has announced a new mechanism for delivering food to Gaza. The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, an extraordinary name now added to our genocide vocabulary of NGOs and charities, is supposedly set to restart food distribution by the end of May and hand out “300 million meals”. Israel, for its part, has volunteered to secure the “humanitarian” process, while maintaining its killing activities.
While this new feeding “mechanism” is being set up, the Israeli government, “under US pressure”, announced that it will let in “a basic quantity of food” in order to prevent “the development of a hunger crisis”, international media reported. The resumption will reportedly last only a week.
Here in Gaza, where the hunger crisis is already “well-developed”, we are hardly surprised by these announcements. We are well used to Israel – with foreign backing – turning on and off the “food button” as it pleases.
For years, we have been kept in a 365-square-kilometre prison, where our Israeli jailers control our food, rationing it so that we can never go too far beyond the level of survival. Long before this genocide, they openly declared to the world that they were keeping us on a diet, our calories carefully counted to ensure we did not die but just suffer. This was not a fleeting penalty; it was an official government policy.
Anyone driven by basic humanity who dared challenge the blockade from the outside was attacked, even killed.
Some say we should have been grateful that trucks were being allowed to enter at all. True, they were. But just as often, they weren’t, especially when we, the prisoners, were deemed to have misbehaved.
Countless times, I would find my neighbourhood bakery shut down because there was no cooking gas, or I would fail to find my favourite cheese because our jailers had decided it was a “dual-use” item and could not enter Gaza.
We were good at growing our own food, but we could not do much of that either because much of our fertile soil was near the prison fence, and hence out of reach. We loved fishing, but that too was closely monitored and restricted. Venture beyond the shore and you would get shot.
All of this humiliating, calculated blockade was taking place well before October 7, 2023.
After that day, the amount of food allowed into Gaza was drastically reduced. In the days that followed, I felt the shackles of the Israeli blockade on Gaza more tangible than ever, even though I had lived under it since I was born. For the first time, I found myself struggling to secure something as basic as bread. I remember thinking: surely the world will not allow this to last.
And yet here we are, 19 months later, 590 days in, the struggle has only gotten worse.
On March 2, Israel banned all food and other aid from entering Gaza. The situation since then has grown from bad to worse, leaving us nostalgic for previous phases of the crisis, when the suffering felt slightly more bearable.
A few weeks ago, for example, we could still have some tomatoes alongside our canned beans that rotted our stomachs. But now, vegetable vendors are nowhere to be found.
Bakeries have also closed, and flour has all but disappeared, leaving me wishing to re-experience the slight disgust at the sight of worms squirming through infested flour because it would mean my mother could make bread again. Now, finding non-expired fava beans is all I could realistically wish for.
I recognise that others still have it much worse than I do. For parents of young children, the struggle to find food is an agony.
Take my barber, for example. When I last went to him for a haircut two weeks ago, he looked exhausted.
“Can you imagine? I haven’t eaten bread in weeks. Whatever flour I manage to buy every few days, I save for my children. I eat just enough to survive, not to feel full. I just don’t understand why the world treats them like this. If we are not worthy of life in their eyes, then at least have mercy on our hungry children. It’s OK if they want to starve us — but not our children,” he told me.
This may seem like a cruel sacrifice, but it is what parenting has become here after 19 months of nonstop Israeli killing. Parents are consumed by fear, not just for their children’s safety, but for the possibility that their children might be bombed while hungry. This is the nightmare of every household and every tent-hold in Gaza.
In the few barely functioning hospitals, the landscape of famine is even more harrowing. Babies and children looking like skeletons lie on hospital beds; malnourished mothers sit by them.
It has become normal to see daily images of emaciated Palestinian children. We may ourselves be struggling to find food, but seeing them leaves our hearts shattered. We want to help. We think maybe a can of peas might make a difference. But what can peas do for an infant suffering from marasmus, for a child who looks like a fragile shell of skin and bones?
Meanwhile, the world sits in silence, watching Israel block aid and deliver bombs and asking questions in disbelief.
On May 7, the Israeli army bombed al-Wehda Street, one of the busiest in Gaza City. One missile hit an intersection full of street vendors, another – a functioning restaurant. At least 33 Palestinians were killed.
Images of a table with slices of pizza soaked in the blood of one of the victims appeared online. The scene of pizza in Gaza captivated world attention; the bloodbath did not. The world demanded answers: how can you be in a famine when you can order pizza?
Yes, there are vendors and restaurants amid genocidal famine. Vendors that sell a kilogramme of flour for $25 and a can of beans for $3. A restaurant where the smallest and most expensive pizza slice in the world is served — a piece of bad-quality dough, cheese, and the blood of those who craved it.
To this world, we are required to explain the presence of pizza in order to convince we are worthy of food. To this world, the outline of an abstract US plan to feed us sounds reasonable, all while tonnes of life-saving aid wait at the border crossings to be allowed in and distributed by already fully functional aid agencies.
We in Gaza have seen PR exercises masked as “humanitarian action” before. We remember the airdrops that were killing more people than they were feeding. We remember the $230m pier that barely got 500 truckfuls of aid into Gaza from the sea: a feat that could have been accomplished in half a day via an open land crossing.
We in Gaza are hungry, but we are no fools. We know that Israel can only starve and genocide us because the US allows it to. We know that stopping the genocide is not among Washington’s concerns. We know that we are hostages not just of Israel, but also of the US.
What haunts us isn’t just famine; it is also the fear of outsiders arriving under the guise of aid, only to start laying the foundations of colonisation. Even if the US plan is enforced and even if we are allowed to eat before Israel’s next bombing, I know my people will not be broken by the weaponisation of food.
Israel, the US, and the world should understand that we will not trade land for calories. We will liberate our homeland, even on an empty stomach.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
PALM SPRINGS — Along the main thoroughfare of this desert city, just a block from a vibey, adults-only hotel and a gastropub serving boozy brunches, a new apartment building with a butterfly-wing roof inspired by Midcentury Modern design is nearing completion.
The property, called Aloe Palm Canyon, features 71 one-bedroom units with tall windows offering natural light and sweeping views of Mt. San Jacinto, plus a fitness room and laundry facilities. When it opens this summer, serving lower-income seniors over age 55, the complex will become the latest addition to the Coachella Valley’s growing stock of affordable housing.
A decade ago, this desert region known for its winter resorts, lush golf courses and annual music festivals produced just 38 units of affordable housing a year, while the low-wage workers powering the valley’s lavish service industry faced soaring housing costs and food insecurity. Fast-forward to this year, and affordable housing units are planned or under construction in all nine Coachella Valley cities, including the most exclusive, and in many unincorporated areas.
Aloe Palm Canyon, geared toward low-income seniors, will feature affordable one-bedroom units with sweeping views of Mt. San Jacinto and an airy communal room.
At least some of that momentum can be credited to a Palm Desert-based nonprofit organization that in 2018 set an ambitious 10-year goal to reduce rent burden — or the number of people spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs — by nearly a third. Lift to Rise aimed to do this by adding nearly 10,000 units of affordable housing in the Coachella Valley by 2028.
Some seven years into its decade-long push, Lift to Rise appears well on its way to that goal. It counts 9,300 affordable housing units in the pipeline as of April. That figure includes those in the early planning stages, as well as 940 units starting construction soon, 990 under construction and 1,405 affordable housing units completed.
It is notable progress in a state where the dire shortage of low-income housing can seem an intractable problem. Now, some officials and elected leaders say Lift to Rise may offer a path forward that could be replicated in other regions.
The Coachella Valley, in Riverside County, stretches from the San Gorgonio Pass to the north shores of the Salton Sea. Its major employment sectors — leisure and hospitality, retail and agriculture — generally produce the area’s lowest-paid jobs, putting the cost of renting or buying a home out of reach for many.
Coastal areas have a reputation for being unaffordable, but the desert region has a higher share of rent-burdened households than Riverside County as a whole, the state or nation, according to American Community Survey data compiled by Lift to Rise.
Addressing the situation comes with its own complications.
Lift to Rise helped create a loan program to smooth the flow of funding for affordable housing, including the Vista Sunrise II complex in Palm Springs.
Many California housing and climate policies tend to support the development of affordable housing in dense, pedestrian-friendly communities with easy access to public transportation, said Ian Gabriel, Lift to Rise’s director of collective impact. Such adaptations are difficult in the Coachella Valley, where suburban-style neighborhoods, limited public transportation and months of triple-digit heat have lent themselves to a car-centric lifestyle, he said.
And although state policy — and funding priorities — often focus on alleviating chronic homelessness in major urban areas, he said, the Coachella Valley also needs housing for low-wage farmworkers who aren’t homeless but are living in dilapidated, financially untenable conditions.
All of that makes it harder for the region to compete for state affordable housing dollars, he said.
“We’re not saying other folks in coastal areas shouldn’t be getting money,” Gabriel said. “We’re saying we need more equitable distribution and a path forward that isn’t just a one-size-fits-all, because it’s not fitting for our region.”
Lift to Rise has built a network of more than 70 people and organizations — among them residents, county officials, funders and developers — with a shared goal of increasing affordable housing in the region.
One of the group’s early steps was to create an affordable housing portal to track developments in the pipeline and, maybe more important, determine what factors are holding projects back.
In assessing those bottlenecks, Lift to Rise identified a need for stronger advocacy, both at the local level and in the policy sphere. So it has launched an effort, Committees by Cities, to help residents develop leadership skills and advocate for affordable housing at public meetings.
The Vista Sunrise II complex, located on a DAP Health campus, offers affordable housing for low-income people who are HIV-positive or living with AIDS.
Modesta Rodriguez is a member of the Indio chapter, attending city council hearings and passing along information to her neighbors. Although she and her family have lived in a development specifically for farmworkers for a decade, she wants to ensure her four children — the oldest of whom graduated from San Diego State University this month — can find housing in the eastern Coachella Valley.
“It’s not as if they are going to begin their careers making a lot of money,” Rodriguez said, seated in the kitchen of her tidy three-bedroom apartment. “For us, these projects are very good, because I know at least they will help my daughter.”
Mike Walsh, assistant director of Riverside County’s Department of Housing and Workforce Solutions, said Lift to Rise and its army of advocates should get credit for helping to change the narrative around affordable housing in the Coachella Valley.
“When affordable housing projects pop up, they have a built-in network to turn folks out and support those projects, where in the rest of the county, there’s not that same sort of ease of turning people out,” Walsh said.
Walsh recalled that a teacher, a farmworker and a social worker — essentially a cross-section of local residents — spoke up at a recent county meeting. “It drowns out NIMBYism,” said Heidi Marshall, director of the county’s housing and workforce solutions department.
Lift to Rise aims to spark wider conversations about the need for affordable housing in the Coachella Valley with billboards along the 10 Freeway.
The organization aims to spark wider conversation about the fight for affordable housing and living wages through eye-catching billboards that the nonprofit buys along the 10 Freeway during spring music festival season in the Coachella Valley. “Born too late to afford a home, and too early to colonize Mars” is among their slogans.
And when an analysis revealed low-income housing developers were having trouble getting predevelopment financing, Lift to Rise set out to create a funding mechanism to help get projects off the ground.
The result is a revolving loan fund known as We Lift: The Coachella Valley’s Housing Catalyst Fund. The $44-million fund, supported by public and philanthropic dollars, is intended to bridge financing gaps and accelerate development.
Solar panels rise above a parking lot at the Aloe Palm Canyon complex in Palm Springs.
The developer behind the Aloe Palm Canyon complex in Palm Springs, the West Hollywood Community Housing Corp., benefited from three loans from the fund totaling more than $11 million. It has already paid back two of those loans.
“I don’t know any other regions in California that are doing this at this level of support,” Anup Nitin Patel, the corporation’s director of real estate development, said during a toasty morning tour of the construction site.
Another Palm Springs project — a partnership between the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition and DAP Health, a local healthcare provider — received a $750,000 predevelopment loan that was repaid at the start of construction.
“It’s going to be something I can sustain, a game-changer for me,” Sean Johnson said of his new home in DAP Health’s Vista Sunrise II development in Palm Springs.
Last June, Sean Johnson moved into that development, which is for low-income people who are HIV-positive or living with AIDS. After struggling to find stable housing, he said it’s a relief to pay a monthly rent of $718 for a studio apartment.
“It’s going to be something I can sustain, a game-changer for me,” he said.
Lift to Rise is seeking a $20-million allocation in the next state budget to scale up its work. As part of that request, it is asking for a one-time $10-million investment into the Catalyst Fund to expand lending capacity across Riverside County.
Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) and Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh (R-Yucaipa) submitted a budget request on the organization’s behalf. Padilla said it’s a worthy expenditure, especially as California faces a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall.
In lean budget situations, Padilla said, the state should focus its investments on programs that are having meaningful impact and have the data to prove it.
“In tough budget times, you have to be very strategic,” he said. “And this is a good example of [an effort] that’s proven some pretty impressive results.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative,funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to addressCalifornia’s economic divide.
WILL today go down in history as the day Sir Keir Starmer betrayed Brexit and the British people?
From the moment he entered No10, or Remainiac Prime Minister — who spent years in Opposition trying to reverse the historic 2016 vote — has been hellbent on securing a so-called “reset” with the EU.
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Keir Starmer with EU boss Ursula Von der Leyen ahead of their crunch meetingCredit: AFP
His approach to the negotiations with Brussels has been naive at best, and craven at worst.
Indeed, the message his public desperation sent to the hard-nosed Eurocrats was “I want a deal at any price, so shaft me”.
The vengeful EU — which will never get over Brexit, and cannot stand the idea of us being a sovereign nation again — duly obliged.
Its list of demands, in return for a defence partnership, a sop on passport queues and the simple lifting of some spiteful checks on British food exports, would put a mafia extortionist to shame.
Through a series of snide anonymous briefings (the EU’s tactic of choice for decades), we know it expects to agree the following at today’s Lancaster House talks:
Britain to slavishly adhere to every pettifogging Brussels edict on standards, a straitjacket known as “dynamic alignment” which would make trade deals with the rest of world far harder.
Generous access to our fishing waters for mostly French vessels for ever more, undermining a core reason why millions voted Leave.
Bundles of cash to once again be paid into the EU’s coffers for participation in its various programmes and schemes.
Most unbelievably, a “youth mobility scheme” for anyone under 35 – yes, 35! – which would restore free movement by the back door, and give 80 MILLION EU citizens the chance to live and work here.
Think the Tories were split over Europe? If Starmer’s EU trip goes wrong he’ll be on menu when he gets home
So much for getting a grip on runaway immigration.
And what has Sir Keir’s response been to all of this?
He and his Chancellor have effectively said bring it on, and that this is just the start of a much deeper future partnership with the EU.
We remind them both of two things, before they sit down to formally ink this seemingly wretched surrender deal.
First, the best economic days of the EU are long behind it — look at the state of the German and French economies.
Britain should be looking to do ambitious trade deals beyond Europe — indeed the new partnership with India, and the recent easing of US tariffs were only possible because of Brexit.
Not tying our hands and alienating allies like Donald Trump.
And, second, the British people voted nine years ago to take back control of our money, borders and laws.
If the PM hands all of this back over to Brussels today, he will not be forgiven.
CANNES, France — “The sun is my mortal enemy,” Ari Aster says, squinting as he sits on the sixth-floor rooftop terrace of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, where most of the screenings happen. It’s an especially bright afternoon and we take refuge in the shade.
Aster, the 38-year-old filmmaker of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” wears a olive-colored suit and baseball cap. He’s already a household name among horror fans and A24’s discerning audiences, but the director is competing at Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a paranoid thriller set in a New Mexican town riven by pandemic anxieties. Like a modern-day western, the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) spars with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in tense showdowns while protests over the murder of George Floyd flare on street corners. Too many people cough without their masks on. Conspiracy nuts, mysterious drones and jurisdictional tensions shift the film into something more Pynchonesque and surreal.
In advance of the movie’s July 18 release, “Eddington” has become a proper flash point at Cannes, dividing opinion starkly. Like Aster’s prior feature, 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid,” it continues his expansion into wider psychological territory, signaling a heretofore unexpressed political dimension spurred by recent events, as well as an impulse to explore a different kind of American fear. We sat down with him on Sunday to discuss the movie and its reception.
I remember what it was like in 2018 at Sundance with “Hereditary” and being a part of that first midnight audience where it felt like something special was happening. How does this time feel compared to that?
It feels the same. It’s just nerve-wracking and you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. But it’s exciting. It’s always been a dream to premiere a film in Cannes.
Have you ever been to Cannes before?
No.
So this must feel like living out that dream. How do you think it went on Friday?
I don’t know. How do you feel it went? [Laughs]
I knew you were going to turn it around.
That’s what everybody asks me. Everybody comes up saying [makes a pity face], “How are you feeling? How do you think it went?” And it’s like, I am the least objective person here. I made the film.
I know you’ve heard about those legendary Cannes premieres where audiences have extreme reactions and it feels like the debut of “The Rite of Spring.” Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Those are the best ones, aren’t they?
Oh, yeah. But again, I don’t really have a picture of what the response is.
Do you read your reviews?
I’ve been staying away while I do press and talk to people. So I can speak to the film.
Makes sense. I felt great love in the room for Joaquin Phoenix, who was rubbing your shoulder during the ovation. Have you talked to the cast and how they think it went, or were they just having a good time?
I think that they’re all really proud of the film. That’s what I know and it’s been nice to be here with them.
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
In the context of your four features, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and now “Eddington,” how easy was “Eddington” to make?
They’re all hard. We’re always trying to stretch our resources as far as they can go, and so they’ve all been just about equally difficult, in different ways.
Is it fair to say that your films have changed since “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and now they’re more accommodating of a larger swath of sociopolitical material?
I am just following my impulses so I’m not thinking in that way. There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.
This was circa what, 2020?
It was in June 2020 that I started writing it. I wanted to make a film about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening.
You mean no one agrees what is happening in the sense that we can’t even agree on the facts?
Yes. There’s this social force that has been at the center of mass liberal democracies for a very long time, which is this agreed-upon version of what is real. And of course, we could all argue and have our own opinions, but we all fundamentally agreed about what we were arguing about. And that is something that has been going away. It’s been happening for the last 20 something years. But COVID, for me, felt like when the last link was cut, this old idea of democracy, that it could be sort of a countervailing force against power, tech, finance. That’s gone now completely.
And at that moment it felt like I was kind of in a panic about it. I’m sure that I am probably not alone. And so I wanted to make a film about the environment, not about me. The film is very much about the gulf between politics and policy. Politics is public relations. Policy is things that are actually happening. Real things are happening very quickly, moving very quickly.
I think of “Eddington” as very much a horror film. It’s the horror of free-floating political anxiety. That’s what’s scaring you right now. And we don’t have any kind of control over it.
We have no control and we feel totally powerless and we’re being led by people who do not believe in the future. So we’re living in an atmosphere of total despair.
During the lockdown, I was just sitting on my phone doom-scrolling. Is that what you were doing?
Of course. There was a lot of great energy behind the internet, this idea of: It’s going to bring people together, it’s going to connect them. But of course then finance got involved, as it always does, and whatever that was curdled and was put on another track. It used to be something we went to. You went to your computer at home, you would maybe go to your email. Everything took forever to load. And then with these phones, we began living in cyberspace, so we are living in the internet.
It’s owned us, it’s consumed us and we don’t see it. The really insidious thing about our culture and about this moment is that it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s catastrophic and it’s absurd and ridiculous and stupid and impossible to take seriously.
Did that “ridiculous and stupid” part lead you aesthetically to make something that was an extremely dark comedy? I think “Eddington” sometimes plays like a comedy.
Well, I mean there’s something farcical going on. I wanted to make a good western too, and westerns are about the country and the mythology of America and the romance of America. They’re very sentimental. I’m interested in the tension between the idealism of America and the reality of it.
You have your western elements in there, your Gunther’s Pistol Palace and a heavily armed endgame that often recalls “No Country for Old Men.”
You’ve got Joe, who’s a sheriff, who loves his wife and cares about his community. And he’s 50 years old, so he grew up with those ’90s action movies and, at the end, he gets to live through one.
Let’s step backward for a second about where you were and what you were doing around the time you started writing this. You were finishing up “Beau Is Afraid,” right? What was your life like then? You were freaking out and watching the news and starting to write a script. What was that process like for you?
I was New Mexico at the time. I was living in New York in a tiny apartment, but then I had to come back to New Mexico. There was a COVID scare in my family and I wanted to be near family. I was there for a couple months and just wanted to make a film about what the world felt like, what the country felt like.
Were you worried about your own health and safety during that time?
Of course. I’m a hyper-neurotic Jew. I’m always worried about my health.
And also the breakdown of truth. What were the reactions when you first started sharing your script with the people who ended up in your cast? What was Joaquin’s reaction like?
I just remember that he really took to the character and loved Joe and wanted to play him, and that was exciting to me. I loved working with him on “Beau” and I gave him the script hoping that he would want to do it. They all responded really quickly and jumped on. There was just a general excitement and a feeling for the project. I had a friendship with Emily [Emma Stone, whom Aster calls by her birth name] already and now we’re all friends. I really love them as actors and as people. It was a pretty fluid, nice process.
I haven’t seen many significant movies expressly about the pandemic yet. Did it feel like you were breaking new ground?
I don’t think that way, but I was wanting to see some reflection on what was happening.
Even in the seven years since “Hereditary,” do you feel like the business has changed?
Yeah, it is changing. I mean, everything feels like it’s changing. I think about [Marshall] McLuhan and how we’re in a stage right now where we’re moving from one medium to another. The internet has been the prominent, prevailing, dominant medium, and that’s changed the landscape of everything, and we’re moving towards something new. We don’t know what’s coming with AI. It’s also why we’re so nostalgic now about film and 70mm presentations.
Do you ever feel like you got into this business at the last-possible minute?
Definitely. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make the films I want to make and I feel lucky to have been able to make this film.
There’s a lot of room in “Eddington” for any kind of a viewer to find a mirror of themselves and also be challenged. It doesn’t preach to the converted. Was that an intent of yours?
[Long pause] Sorry, I’m just thinking. I’m just starting to talk about the film. I guess I’m trying to make a film about how we’re all actually in the same situation and how similar we are. Which may be hard to see and I’m not a sociologist. But it was important to me to make a film about the environment.
I was asked recently, Do you have any hope? And I think the answer to that is that I do have hope, but I don’t have confidence.
It’s easy to be cynical.
But I do see that if there is any hope, we have to reengage with each other. And for me, it was important to not judge any of these characters. I’m not judging them. I’m not trying to judge them.
Ari Aster, left, and Pedro Pascal on the set of “Eddington.”
(Richard Foreman)
I love that you have a partner in A24 that is basically letting you go where you need to go as an artist.
They’ve been very supportive. It’s great because I’ve been able to make these films without compromise.
Do you have an idea for your next one?
I’ve got a few ideas. I’m deciding between three.
You can’t give me a taste of anything?
Not yet, no. They’re all different genres and I’m trying to decide what’s right.
Let’s hope we survive to that point. How are you personally, apart from movies?
I’m very worried. I’m very worried and I am really sad about where things are. And otherwise there needs to be another idea. Something new has to happen.
You mean like a new political paradigm or something?
Yeah. The system we’re in is a response to the last system that failed. And the only answer, the only alternative I’m hearing is to go back to that old system. I’ll just say even just the idea of a collective is just a harder thing to imagine. How can that happen? How do we ever come together? Can there be any sort of countervailing force to power? I feel increasingly powerless and impotent. And despairing.
Ari, it’s a beautiful day. It’s hard to be completely cynical about the world when you’re at Cannes and it’s sunny. Even in just 24 hours, “Eddington” has become a conversation film, debated and discussed. Doesn’t it thrill you that you have one of those kind of movies?
That’s what this is supposed to be. And you want people to be talking about it and arguing about it. And I hope it is something that you have to wrestle with and think about.
In 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, as a record 1.3 million people, mostly Syrians fleeing civil war, sought asylum, Pau Aleikum Garcia was in Athens, helping those arriving in the Greek capital after a perilous sea journey.
The then 25-year-old Spanish volunteer arranged housing for refugees in abandoned facilities like schools and libraries, and set up community kitchens, language classes and art activities.
“It was kind of a massive cascade of people,” Garcia recalls.
“My own memory of that time is oddly patchy,” he admits. Though there was one encounter that stood out.
In one of those schools in Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood, where refugees painted the external wall to illustrate their memories of their journeys, Garcia met a Syrian woman in her late 70s.
“I’m not afraid of being a refugee. I have lived all my life. I’m happy with what I have lived,” he recalls her telling him. “I’m afraid that my grandkids will be refugees for all their life.”
When he tried to reassure her that they would find a place to start anew, she protested: “No, no, I’m worried, because when my grandkids grow [up] and they ask themselves, ‘Where do I come from?’ they won’t be able to answer that question.”
The woman told him how, during the family’s journey to Greece, all but one of their photo albums were lost.
Now, she said, all the memories of their lives in Syria existed only in her and her husband’s minds, unrecorded and unrecoverable for the next generation.
A screening of the Synthetic Memories project’s reconstructed memories in Barcelona in May 2024 [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
Connecting generations
The woman’s story stayed with Garcia after he returned to Barcelona and his work as cofounder of the design studio, Domestic Data Streamers (DDS).
Over the years, the studio has grown into a 30-person team of experts in varied disciplines such as psychology, architecture, cognitive science, journalism and design. The studio has collaborated with diverse institutions such as museums, prisons and churches, as well as the likes of the United Nations, and uses technology to bring “emotions and humanity” to data visualisation.
Then, in around 2019, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence – a model of machine learning that uses algorithms to create new content from data scraped from the internet – the team began to explore image-generating technology, following the release of ChatGPT.
As they did, Garcia thought of the grandmother from Syria and how this technology might help someone like her by constructing images based on memories.
He believes that memories – captured through records like photographs – play an integral role in connecting generations.
“Memories are the architects of who we are. … It’s a big part of how social identities are built,” he says.
He also likes to cite Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author, who wrote that the biggest act of love is to remember something.
But in the past, people had fewer opportunities to document their lives than their mobile phone-wielding contemporaries, he says. Many experiences have been omitted or erased from collective memory due to lack of access, persecution, censorship or marginalisation.
So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memories project to use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.
“I don’t think there was an eureka moment,” Garcia says of the evolution of the idea. “I’ve always been intrigued by how documentaries reconstruct the past … our goal and approach were more focused on the subjective and personal side, trying to capture the emotional layers of memory.”
For Garcia, the chance to recover such memories is an important act in reclaiming one’s past. “The fact that you have an image that tells this happened to me, this is my memory, and this is shown and other people can see it, is also a way to say to you, ‘Yes, this happened’. It’s a way of saying, of having more dignity about the part of your history that has not been depicted.”
An interviewer and prompter with DDS create a memory during the project’s pilot phase in December 2022 [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
Building memories
To create a synthetic memory, DDS uses open-source image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Flux, while the team is developing its own tool.
The process starts with an interviewer asking a subject to recall their earliest memory. They explore various narratives as people recount their life stories before picking the one they think can be best encapsulated in an image.
The interviewer works with a prompter – someone trained in the syntax that the AI uses to create visuals – who inputs specific words to build the image from the details described by the interviewee.
Nearly everything, such as hairstyles, clothing, and furniture, is recreated as accurately as possible. However, figures themselves are usually depicted from behind or, if faces are shown, with a degree of blurriness.
This is intentional. “We want to be very clear that this is a synthetic memory and this is not real photography,” says Garcia. This is partly because they want to ensure their generated images don’t add to the proliferation of fake photos on the internet.
The resulting images – usually two or three from each session, which can last up to an hour – can appear dreamlike and undefined.
“As we know, memory is very, very, very fragile and full of imperfections,” Garcia explains. “That was the other reason why we wanted a model that could be full of imperfections and also a bit fragile, so it’s a good demonstration of how our memory works.”
An AI-generated image of a memory belonging to Carmen, now in her 90s, of visiting her father, who was a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
Garcia’s team found that people who took part in the project said they felt a stronger connection to less detailed images, their suggestive nature allowing for their imagination to fill in the blanks. The higher the resolution, the more someone focuses on the details, losing that emotional connection to the image, Airi Dordas, the project’s lead, explains.
The team first trialled this technology with their grandparents. The experience was moving, Garcia says, and one that grew into medical trials to determine whether synthetic memories can be used as an augmentation tool in reminiscence therapy for dementia sufferers.
From there, the team went on to work with Bolivian and Korean communities in Brazil to tell their stories of migration, before partnering with Barcelona’s city council to document local memories. The sessions were open to the public and held last summer at the Design Museum in Barcelona, generating more than 300 memories.
Some wanted to work through traumatic experiences, like one woman who was abused by a relative who avoided jail and wanted to recreate a memory of him in court to share with her family. Others recalled moments from their childhood, like 105-year-old Pepita, who recreated the day she saw a train for the first time. Couples came to relive shared experiences.
There was always a moment, Ainoa Pubill Unzeta, who carried out interviews in Barcelona, says, “when people actually saw a picture that they would relate to, you could feel it … you can see it”. For some, it was just a smile; others cried. For her, this was confirmation that the image was done well.
One of the first memories Garcia recorded during their pilot sessions was that of Carmen, now in her 90s. She remembers going up to a stranger’s balcony as a child, her mother having paid the owners to let them in, because it looked into the courtyard of the jail where her father, a doctor for the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War, was being held. This was the only way the family could see him from his cell window.
By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.
An AI-generated image of 105-year-old Pepita’s memory of seeing a locomotive for the first time in 1925. The smoke and noise scared her, and the memory has stayed etched in her mind [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
Clandestine assemblies
The team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.
One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.
Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression under General Francisco Franco, Vallejo came of age during one of Europe’s longest dictatorships, which lasted from 1939 to 1975. During the civil war of 1936-39, and following the defeat of the Republican forces by Franco’s Nationalists, enforced disappearances, forced labour, torture and extrajudicial killings claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.
Vallejo became involved in opposition to the fascist regime first at university, where he attempted to organise a democratic student union, and then as a young worker at Barcelona’s SEAT automobile factory.
He recalls an atmosphere of fear, with most people terrified of speaking out against the authoritarian government. “That fear sprang from the terrible defeat in the Spanish Civil War and from the many deaths that occurred during the war, but also from the harsh repression from the post-war period up to the end of the dictatorship,” he explains.
Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.
“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”
Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.
Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.
An AI-generated image of a clandestine meeting between workers of Barcelona’s SEAT automobile factory during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
He learned about synthetic memories through Iridia, a human rights organisation that collaborated with DDS to help visualise memories of police abuse victims during the regime in a central Barcelona police station.
Vallejo was drawn to the project, curious about how the technology might be applied to capturing resistance activities too dangerous to record during Franco’s rule.
In 1970, SEAT workers organised clandestine breakfasts in the woods of Vallvidrera. On Sunday mornings, disguised as hikers, they would make their way through the dense forests surrounding the Catalan capital to discuss the struggle against the dictatorship.
“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.
Vallejo’s synthetic memory of these meetings is in black and white. The image is vague, almost like someone has taken an eraser to it to blur the details. But it is still possible to make out the scene: a crowd of people gathered in a forest. Some sit, others stand beneath a canopy of trees.
Looking at the image, Vallejo says he felt transported to the clandestine assemblies in the Barcelona woods, where as many as 50 or 60 people would gather in a tense atmosphere.
“I found myself truly immersed in the image,” he says.
“It was like entering a kind of time tunnel,” he adds.
Vallejo suffered memory loss around the ordeal of his arrests, imprisonment and torture.
The process of creating the image provided “a feeling – not exactly of relief – but rather of reconciling memory with the past and perhaps also of filling that void created by selective amnesia, which results from complicated, traumatic, and above all, distant experiences”. He found the reconstruction a “valuable experience” that helped him process some of these events.
Garcia at a synthetic memory session in a nursing home in Barcelona in April 2023 [Courtesy of Domestic Data Streamers]
‘We are not reconstructing the past’
Emphasising that memory is subjective, Garcia says, “One of the things that we are kind of drawing a very big red line about is historical reconstruction.”
This is partly due to the drawbacks of AI, which reinforces cultural and other biases in the data it draws from.
David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom centre for data science and AI, cautions that using data that was initially biased against marginalised groups could create revisionist histories or false memories for those communities. Nor can “simply generating something from AI” help to remedy or reclaim historical narratives, he insists.
For DDS, “It is never about the bigger story. We are not reconstructing the past,” Garcia explains.
“When we talk about history, we talk about one truth that somehow we are committed to,” he elaborates. But while synthetic memories can depict a part of the human experience that history books cannot, these memories come from the individual, not necessarily what transpired, he underlines.
The team believes synthetic memories could not only help communities whose memories are at risk but also create dialogue between cultures and generations.
They plan to set up “emergency” memory clinics in places where cultural heritage is in danger of being eroded by natural disasters, such as in southern Brazil, which was last year hit by floods. There are also hopes to make their finished tool freely available to nursing homes.
But Garcia wonders what place the project could have in a future where there is an “over-registration” of everything that happens. “I have 10 images of my father when he was a kid,” he says. “I have over 200 when I was a kid. But my friend, of her daughter, [has] 25,000, and she’s five years old!”
“I think the problem of memory image will be another one, which will be that we are … [overwhelmed] and we cannot find the right image to tell us the story,” he muses.
Yet in the present moment, Vallejo believes the project has a role to play in helping younger generations understand past injustices. Forgetting serves no purpose for activists like himself, he believes, while memory is like “a weapon for the future”.
Instead of trying to numb the past, “I think it is more therapeutic – both collectively and individually – to remember rather than to forget.”
The beef is building between Bruce Springsteen and President Trump.
The Boss did not back down on his fiery rhetoric against Trump on the third night of his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, on Saturday — a day after Trump lashed out against the legendary singer on Truth Social, calling him an “obnoxious jerk,” a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker,” and writing that he should “keep his mouth shut.”
Springsteen didn’t oblige. In a resolute three-minute speech from the Co-op Live venue, Springsteen thanked his cheering audience for indulging him in a speech about the state of America: “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore.”
He then repeated many of the lines that he used during a previous Manchester show — the same words that upset Trump to begin with, including the administration defunding American universities, the rolling back of civil rights legislation and siding with dictators, “against those who are struggling for their freedoms.”
Trump’s Truth Social post contained what appeared to be a threat, writing of Springsteen, “We’ll see how it goes for him,” when he gets back to the country. This did not dissuade the “Born in the USA” singer.
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“In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now,” Springsteen said. “In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.”
In a steady voice, he listed the many concerns of those who oppose Trump, his enablers and his policies.
“They are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers as prisoners. That’s happening now. The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” Springsteen said as the crowd applauded and yelled its support. “They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
He finished on a positive note.
“The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its many faults, it’s a great country with a great people, and we will survive this moment. Well, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ ”
Springsteen has long been a vocal critic of Trump, and campaigned for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Trump is known for his angry diatribes against celebrities who criticize him, including Taylor Swift and Robert DeNiro.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Penguin Press: 352 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s superbly reported “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids. During his latter years as No. 46, Biden is portrayed as a lion in winter — shockingly frail and forgetful with a ferocious pride that blinds him to the fact that it’s time to exit the stage. He was assisted in that delusion, the authors claim, by the mythology his family erected around him — that he was indestructible — and by his zealously protective inner circle, dubbed “the Politburo.”
Though Tapper and Thompson’s mostly anonymous sources (it’s jarring that so few went on the record) suggest that the first disturbing signs of Biden’s diminished capacities emerged as early as 2015, many around him chalked them up to the “Bidenness” of it all: “He was known on the Hill for being congenitally prone to long stories, gaffes, and inappropriate comments,” the authors observe. “Even in tightly choreographed Zoom calls with friendly audiences, Biden could step on a rake.”
That propensity appeared to morph into something more worrisome even before Biden was elected president. An unnamed Democrat who witnessed candidate Biden being prepped for a taping prior to the 2020 convention in Milwaukee was startled by his incoherence, commenting that it “was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.” Once in office, the White House staff “treated him as very delicate,” and the pandemic gave aides an excuse to build “barriers” around him so few could gain access. The news media and public were kept at arm’s length, as were many members of the Cabinet and Congress, which led to a “uniquely small and loyal inner circle.” “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power,” said one unidentified top official.
That elite quintet consisted of domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed, chief strategist Mike Donilon, legislative affairs guru Steve Ricchetti and chief of staff Ron Klain, each of whom had deep ties to Biden. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” offered one person familiar with the dynamic. As time went on and more grew concerned about Biden’s behavior, those who inquired were routinely told that everything was okay. One staffer who didn’t have regular access to Biden during this period said that when they did see him in person, they were “shocked, but the other people around him didn’t seem to be, so I didn’t say anything.”
It wasn’t until around the time Biden broke his one-term pledge to be a “bridge” president and made clear he intended to run again that some began to feel a sense of alarm. For example, in 2023, Congressman Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) was with Biden when he visited Ireland. Biden seemed to gain strength from the crowds that greeted him, but then appeared “sapped and not quite there.” The authors write that Quigley “realized why this all felt so familiar to him … This was how his father, Bill, had been before he died.” Similarly, Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips was so disturbed by Biden’s reduced “speaking and walking skills” that he pressed Democratic officials as to whether the president was up to the job. Even those who admitted to having concerns offered the “yes, but,” as in, “Yes, Biden is in decline but can you imagine Trump winning?” Phillips could imagine such a scenario, “especially if Biden were the Democratic nominee.” Failing to get anyone to take his worries seriously, he declared his own candidacy. But “the whale who spouts gets harpooned,” Phillips later noted after the “Democratic machine” set out to quash his chances. He reluctantly pulled out of the race and “watched his party sleepwalk toward disaster.”
Alex Thompson, left, and Jake Tapper argue that there was a conspiracy to conceal President Biden’s “cognitive diminishment” from the press, public and top Democrats.
(Elliott O’Donovan)
Though some top Democratic supporters such as Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel refused to support Biden’s bid for reelection — even shouting at Klain during a “power-player retreat” that, “Joe Biden cannot run for reelection! He needs to drop out!” — most remained in the president’s corner until his disastrous debate performance in late June 2024. Following that, the slow drip of Biden allies calling for him to withdraw became a downpour, with even loyalists like George Clooney remarking publicly in an op-ed that while he “loved” Joe Biden, “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”
Was there a conspiracy to conceal Biden’s symptoms from the press, public and top Democrats? The authors conclude there was. “The original sin of Election 2024,” they write, “was Biden’s decision to run for reelection — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” The course Biden’s family and inner circle chose was tantamount to “gaslighting the American people.” Many other key Democratic officials and donors simply felt that even a weakened Biden was the best bet against the “existential threat” posed by Trump, until the debate shattered that rationalization. In any case, Biden allies “who voiced fears were flicked away like lint.”
In the end, I’m not convinced there was a coordinated campaign to hide the truth about Biden’s “condition,” but maybe that doesn’t matter. In the book’s final chapter, the authors quote former Watergate special prosecutor and law professor Archibald Cox on what lessons Americans should take away from the Watergate scandal. He observes that “we should be reminded of the corrupt influence of great power. … Perhaps it is inescapable that modern government vests extraordinary power in the President and puts around him a large circle of men and women whose personal status and satisfaction depends entirely on pleasing one man.”
But Biden isn’t Nixon. He is a man who generated intense love and loyalty, whose life has been filled with tragedy as well as opportunity; who adeptly and passionately served his country for decades. “Original Sin” is not a compassionate account of Biden’s last campaign — at times it’s even a painful, if necessary, piece of journalism. A great takeaway from 2024, according to political strategist David Plouffe, is that “never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true.” We don’t know if Trump could have been defeated had Biden opted not to run. But in the future, we can’t afford to be in denial.
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
NEW YORK — Christine Farro has cut back on the presents she sends her grandchildren on their birthdays, and she’s put off taking two cats and a dog for their shots. All her clothes come from thrift stores and most of her vegetables come from her garden. At 73, she has cut her costs as much as she can to live on a tight budget.
But it’s about to get far tighter.
As the Trump administration resumes collections on defaulted student loans, a surprising population has been caught in the crosshairs: hundreds of thousands of older Americans whose decades-old debts now put them at risk of having their Social Security checks garnished.
“I worked ridiculous hours. I worked weekends and nights. But I could never pay it off,” says Farro, a retired child welfare worker in Santa Ynez, Calif.
Like millions of debtors with federal student loans, Farro had her payments and interest paused by the government five years ago when the pandemic thrust many into financial hardship. That grace period ended in 2023 and, earlier this month, the Department of Education said it would restart “involuntary collections” by garnishing paychecks, tax refunds and Social Security retirement and disability benefits. Farro previously had her Social Security garnished and expects it to restart.
Farro’s loans date back 40 years. She was a single mother when she got a bachelor’s degree in developmental psychology and when she discovered she couldn’t earn enough to pay off her loans, she went back to school and got a master’s degree. Her salary never caught up. Things only got worse.
Around 2008, when she consolidated her loans, she was paying $1,000 a month, but years of missed payments and piled-on interest meant she was barely putting a dent in a bill that had ballooned to $250,000. When she sought help to resolve her debt, she says the loan company had just one suggestion.
“They said, ‘Move to a cheaper state,’” says Farro, who rents a 400-square-foot casita from a friend. “I realized I was living in a different reality than they were.”
Student loan debt among older people has grown at a staggering rate, in part due to rising tuitions that have forced more people to borrow greater sums. People 60 and older hold an estimated $125 billion in student loans, according to the National Consumer Law Center, a six-fold increase from 20 years ago.
That has led Social Security beneficiaries who have had their payments garnished to balloon by 3,000% — from approximately 6,200 beneficiaries to 192,300 — between 2001 and 2019, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
This year, an estimated 452,000 people aged 62 and older had student loans in default and are likely to experience the Department of Education’s renewed forced collections, according to the January report from CFPB.
Debbie McIntyre, a 62-year-old adult education teacher in Georgetown, Ky., is among them. She dreams of retiring and writing more historical fiction, and of boarding a plane for the first time since high school. But her husband has been out of work on disability for two decades and they’ve used credit cards to get by on his meager benefits and her paycheck. Their rent will be hiked $300 when their lease renews. McIntyre doesn’t know what to do if her paycheck is garnished.
She floats the idea of bankruptcy, but that won’t automatically clear her loans, which are held to a different standard than other debt. She figures if she picks up extra jobs babysitting or tutoring, she could put $50 toward her loans here and there. But she sees no real solution.
“I don’t know what more I can do,” says McIntyre, who is too afraid to check what her loan balance is. “I’ll never get out of this hole.”
Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective debtors union says it’s striking how many older people dial into the organization’s calls and attend its protests. Many of them, he says, should have had their debts canceled but fell victim to a system “riddled with flaws and illegalities and flukes.” Many whose educations have left them in late-life debt have, in fact, paid back the principal on their loans, sometimes several times over, but still owe more due to interest and fees.
For those who are subject to garnishment, Brewington says, the results can be devastating.
“We hear from people who skip meals. We know people who dilute their medication or cut their pills in half. People take drastic measures like pulling all their savings out or dissolving their 401ks,” he says. “We know folks that have been driven into homelessness.”
Collections on defaulted loans may have restarted no matter who was president, though the Biden administration had sought to limit the amount of income that could be garnished. Federal law protects just $750 of Social Security benefits from garnishment, an amount that would put a debtor far below the poverty line.
“We’re basically providing people with federal benefits with one hand and taking them away with another,” says Sarah Sattelmeyer of the New America think tank.
Linda Hilton, a 76-year-old retired office worker from Apache Junction, Ariz., went through garnishment before COVID and says she will survive it again. But flights to see her children, occasional meals at a restaurant and other pleasures of retired life may disappear.
“It’s going to mean restrictions,” says Hilton. “There won’t be any travel. There won’t be any frills.”
Some debtors have already received notice about collections. Many more are living in fear. President Trump has signed an executive order calling for the Department of Education’s dismantling and, for those seeking answers about their loans, mass layoffs have complicated getting calls answered.
While Education Secretary Linda McMahon says restarting collections is a necessary step for debtors “both for the sake of their own financial health and our nation’s economic outlook,” even some of Trump’s most fervent supporters are questioning a move that will make their lives harder.
Randall Countryman, 55, of Bonita, Calif., says a Biden administration proposal to forgive some student debt didn’t strike him as fair, but he’s not sure Trump’s approach is either. He supported Trump but wishes the government made case-by-case decisions on debtors. Countryman thinks Americans don’t realize how many older people are affected by policies on student loans, often thought to be the turf of the young, and how difficult it can be for them to repay.
“What’s a young person’s problem today,” he says, “is an old person’s problem tomorrow.”
Countryman started working on a degree while in prison, then continued it at the University of Phoenix when he was released. He started growing nervous as he racked up loan debt and never finished his degree. He’s worked a host of different jobs, but finding work has often been complicated by his criminal record.
He lives off his wife’s Social Security check and the kindness of his mother-in-law. He doesn’t know how they’d get by if the government demands repayment.
“I kind of wish I never went to school in the first place,” he says.
They arrive at the U.S. border from around the world: Eritrea, Guatemala, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ghana, Uzbekistan and so many other countries.
They come for asylum, insisting they face persecution for their religion, or sexuality or for supporting the wrong politicians.
For generations, they had been given the chance to make their case to U.S. authorities.
Not anymore.
“They didn’t give us an ICE officer to talk to. They didn’t give us an interview. No one asked me what happened,” said a Russian election worker who sought asylum in the U.S. after he said he was caught with video recordings he made of vote rigging. On Feb. 26, he was deported to Costa Rica with his wife and young son.
On Jan. 20, just after being sworn in for a second term, President Trump suspended the asylum system as part of his wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration, issuing a series of executive orders designed to stop what he called the “invasion” of the United States.
What asylum seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules, where people can be deported to countries they know nothing about after fleeting conversations with immigration officials while others languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Attorneys who work frequently with asylum seekers at the border say their phones have gone quiet since Trump took office. They suspect many who cross are immediately expelled without a chance at asylum or are detained to wait for screening under the U.N.’s convention against torture, which is harder to qualify for than asylum.
“I don’t think it’s completely clear to anyone what happens when people show up and ask for asylum,” said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council.
Restrictions face challenges in court
A thicket of lawsuits, appeals and countersuits have filled the courts as the Trump administration faces off against activists who argue the sweeping restrictions illegally put people fleeing persecution in harm’s way.
In a key legal battle, a federal judge is expected to rule on whether courts can review the administration’s use of invasion claims to justify suspending asylum. There is no date set for that ruling.
The government says its declaration of an invasion is not subject to judicial oversight, at one point calling it “an unreviewable political question.”
But rights groups fighting the asylum proclamation, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, called it “as unlawful as it is unprecedented” in the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court.
Illegal border crossings, which soared in the first years of President Biden’s administration, reaching nearly 10,000 arrests per day in late 2024, dropped significantly during his last year in office and plunged further after Trump returned to the White House.
Yet more than 200 people are still arrested daily for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border.
Some of those people are seeking asylum, though it’s unclear if anyone knows how many.
Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for the San Diego office of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her office sometimes received 10 to 15 calls a day about asylum after Biden implemented asylum restrictions in 2024.
That number has dropped to almost nothing, with only a handful of total calls since Jan. 20.
Plus, she added, lawyers are unsure how to handle asylum cases.
“It’s really difficult to consult and advise with individuals when we don’t know what the process is,” she said.
Doing ‘everything right’
None of this was expected by the Russian man, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution if he returns to Russia.
“We felt betrayed,” the 36-year-old told the Associated Press. “We did everything right.”
The family had scrupulously followed the rules. They traveled to Mexico in May 2024, found a cheap place to rent near the border with California and waited nearly nine months for the chance to schedule an asylum interview.
On Jan. 14, they got word that their interview would be on Feb 2. On Jan. 20, the interview was canceled.
Moments after Trump took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it had scrubbed the system used to schedule asylum interviews and canceled tens of thousands of existing appointments.
There was no way to appeal.
The Russian family went to a San Diego border crossing to ask for asylum, where they were taken into custody, he said.
A few weeks later, they were among the immigrants who were handcuffed, shackled and flown to Costa Rica. Only the children were left unchained.
Turning to other countries to hold deportees
The Trump administration has tried to accelerate deportations by turning countries like Costa Rica and Panama into “bridges,” temporarily detaining deportees while they await return to their countries of origin or third countries.
Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the U.S. to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama.
To supporters of tighter immigration controls, the asylum system has always been rife with exaggerated claims by people not facing real dangers. In recent years, roughly one-third to half of asylum applications were approved by judges.
Even some politicians who see themselves as pro-immigration say the system faces too much abuse.
“People around the world have learned they can claim asylum and remain in the U.S. indefinitely to pursue their claims,” retired U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a longtime Democratic stalwart in Congress, wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, defending Biden’s tightening of asylum policies amid a flood of illegal immigration.
An uncertain future
Many of the immigrants they arrived with have left the Costa Rican facility where they were first detained, but the Russian family has stayed. The man cannot imagine going back to Russia and has nowhere else to go.
He and his wife spend their days teaching Russian and a little English to their son. He organizes volleyball games to keep people busy.
He is not angry at the U.S. He understands the administration wanting to crack down on illegal immigration. But, he adds, he is in real danger. He followed the rules and can’t understand why he didn’t get a chance to plead his case.
He fights despair almost constantly, knowing that what he did in Russia brought his family to this place.
“I failed them,” he said. “I think that every day: I failed them.”
Holidaymakers should familiarise themselves with the three-digit number when travelling to Europe
The number is helpful for people travelling abroad (stock photo)(Image: Getty)
Holidays offer the chance to relax and unwind. For most tourists, it’s an opportunity to get away from it all and forget about any worries back home. However, there’s an important number anyone visiting the European Union ought to memorise before entering ‘holiday mode’.
The three-digit number could be life-saving if you or someone is in danger. It is 112, otherwise known as the European emergency phone number. It’s available everywhere in the EU free of charge.
The European Emergency Number Association explains: “112 is the European emergency number, available free of charge, 24/7, anywhere in the European Union. Citizens can dial 112 to reach the emergency services, including the police, emergency medical services and the fire brigade.
“EENA believes that having a common emergency number everywhere in Europe is directly benefiting citizens and visitors.” It adds: “But, unfortunately, this potentially life-saving number is largely unknown.”
You can also find information about the European emergency phone number on the European Commission’s website. The website says: “You can call 112 from fixed and mobile phones to contact any emergency service: an ambulance, the fire brigade or the police.”
112 is the free European emergency number (stock photo) (Image: Getty)
It continues: “A specially trained operator will answer any 112 call. The operator will either deal with the request directly or transfer the call to the most appropriate emergency service, depending on the national organisation of emergency services.”
Helpfully, the operators are often multilingual. The European Commission explains: “Operators in many countries can answer the calls not only in their national language, but also in English or French. If the caller does not know where he is, the operator will identify where the person making the call is physically located and will pass it to the emergency authorities so that these can help immediately.”
In many countries, you can dial 112 as well as national emergency numbers. However, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Sweden use 112 as their only national emergency number. 112 is also used in some countries outside the EU, such as Switzerland.
You can dial 112 anywhere in the European Union (stock photo)
People should treat 112 as they would any other national emergency number. They should not use it for general information queries, weather reports, or traffic updates, which waste time and money. Hoax calls to emergency lines are a criminal offence in most countries.
The EENA offers advice for people dialling 112. It recommends that you stay calm; wait until the operator answers your call; state your name, what happened, who is involved and your location; follow the operator’s advice; and ring 112 again if something changes.
The EENA website adds: “Sometimes several people call 112 reporting the same emergency. In those cases, do not be surprised if the operator only asks you for additional information and ends the call. This is normal procedure to avoid repeated information, to free the phone line faster and to ensure a prompt answer to the next emergency call.”
Morgan and boyfriend Lou took to TikTok to reveal the unique name they’d chosen for their one-week-old sonCredit: tiktok/morganpresleyxo
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Unsurprisingly, the moniker divided opinion in the comments sectionCredit: tiktok/morganpresleyxo
In the clip, they admitted it was “really easy” for them to settle on a name for a little girl, and had chosen Birdie Lou for if they’d had a daughter.
“But it was really hard for us to find a boy name that was like equally as exciting,” Morgan admitted.
So, instead of going the traditional route of going through a baby name book, Morgan and Lou decided to go through their record collection, looking for one that “spoke to us the most” and “had sentimental meaning”.
“And that’s how we ended up landing on Pony Ramone Presley,” they said.
Read more Baby Name stories
They went on to explain where the inspiration for the name had come from, as they said that on their first date, they had danced to an Orville Peck song called Pony.
“So when we saw this record, it felt right,” Morgan added.
“Beautiful name!” Lou chimed in.
The tot’s middle name was inspired by the rock band Ramones.
“When we first found out she was pregnant, we were actually heavily, heavily listening to the Ramones,” Lou said.
“So it just felt right, and it just sounds nice.”
I’m trolled over my kids’ unique names – even the midwife questioned my choice
“Welcome to the world Pony Ramone,” they wrote over the top of the video as it came to an end, with Lou holding up a onesie that had the name ‘Pony’ emblazoned on the front.
The video quickly attracted comments, with the majority coming from people who insisted they’d assigned their son to a “lifetime of bullying” by giving him that name.
“That’s so terrible I’m sorry lol,” one wrote.
“You’re naming a future adult. You’re being selfish,” another raged.
“Pony???? Jesus Christ!”
“The bullying he’s going to get for his name though…” a third said.
Are Unique Baby Names Worth The Hassle?
YOU may think having a unique name helps you to stand out, but is it all it’s cracked up to be?
Fabulous’ Deputy Editor Josie Griffiths reveals the turmoil she faced with her own name while growing up.
When I was a child, all I wanted was one of those personalised keyrings with my name on it.
But no joy, the closest I could find was Rosie, Joseph (not great for a little girl) and Joanne.
Josie is short for Josephine, which is a French name, and I managed to reach my 20s without ever meeting anyone who shared it.
When I try to introduce myself to people, I get all sorts of random things – like Tracey and Stacey – which can be pretty annoying.
Although I have come into contact with a couple of Josies over the last year – there seems to be a few of us around my age – it’s still a much rarer name than most of my friends have.
On the whole I don’t mind it, at least it’s not rude or crazily spelt.
And it means I can get away with ‘doing a Cheryl’ and just referring to myself as Josie.
I’m getting married this year and some friends are shocked that I’m changing my surname, as it’s not seen as very cool or feminist to do so these days, but I explain to them that I’m not that attached to Griffiths as I’d always just say ‘hi it’s Josie’ when ringing a mate up.
I think it’s nice to be unique and I’ll definitely try and replicate this when naming my own kids.
It’s the rude names you’ve got to watch out for, so after nine years as a lifestyle journalist I’ll definitely be avoiding those.
“Parents caring more about appearing original and trendy than caring about how their name choice will affect the baby through their life is always wild to me,” someone else sighed.
“Feels selfish.”
“People choose names for their children as if they were choosing a name for a pet,” another commented.
“Oh my gosh that poor boy when he starts school,” someone else said, while another called him “that poor kid”.
“I swear some people just name their children anything these days,” someone else wrote.
“Might as well name mine Chair, Zebra, Door knob, and butter dish!”
“That’s a baby, not a puppy,” another said.
However, there were those in the comments section who approved of the baby’s unusual name.
“Stay true to your uniqueness guys, that little man is going to live a blessed life,” one wrote.
“I’m actually so obsessed with Pony as a first name!” another admitted.
“Oh I am absolutely in love with his beautiful name,” a third commented.
It’s a baby, not a puppy
TikTok commenter
“Having a unique name is really fun! Two of the coolest parents ever!”
“Pony has the most badass parents,” someone else agreed.
“Love his name!”
“I LOVE Pony because its a reflection of your love onto your sweet baby. Don’t listen to anyone else,” another urged.
“People act like we don’t already live in a world full of Forests, Diamonds, Bartholomews, and Cinnamons,” someone else wrote.
“Pony is actually so sweet and meaningful. They actually picked a cool name instead of a normal name spelled ENTIRELY WRONG in order to be ‘unique’.”
The Midcentury Modern home of Justin Edwards, one half of the couple whose love story informs the show — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel — is flooded with work from Black Angelenos.
“Local Los Angeles artists were important for me to put into the sets, and the Edwards family home, specifically, being collectors of Los Angeles art,” Akil, an L.A. native, told The Times.
Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev and set decorator Ron Franco are also Angelenos, which they said contributed to the cultural competency of their work on “Forever.” Although the writers’ strike made elements of their jobs difficult, both agreed that their experience on “Forever” was uniquely positive, in large part because of their curation of the art in the Edwards’ home.
“Sometimes art can really make a space and it makes a statement and it tells you who the character is,” said Ingerslev. “In this case, you really knew who the Edwards were — they curated art and they cared about where they live — and I thought that really made a big difference through the art and through the furnishings as well.”
Franco agreed, saying he had fun sourcing artwork from Black artists that matched Ingerslev’s color palette and also contained themes pertinent to the show.
“A lot of times the shows that you see now are just headshots and everything that we put up becomes a background piece that’s kind of blurred,” he said. “We are very lucky in that this camera really opened up, and you follow everybody through both of the [permanent] sets and you really feel a lot.”
Audiences noticed their effort, said Ingerslev, who’s been bombarded with questions about the artworks in “Forever,” which was just renewed for a second season.
Here are five local Black artists whose work are featured in the show.
Noah Humes, 31
Humes cites a book about artist and writer Romare Bearden that he received from Akil when he was 6 years old as the foundation for his worldview as an artist. (Humes’ mother was a casting director on “Girlfriends,” the 2000s TV series created by Akil, whom Humes calls “Auntie Mara.”)
“I look back [and] that’s what helped form and shape my energy with how I approach the canvas, wanting to tell the story of my community and different things that I see — social moments, political moments, historical remnants,” said the figurative painter.
Humes is drawn to bright colors that capture the vibrancy of his hometown of L.A. “Her” and “Mid City,” which feature prominently in the Edwards family’s media room in “Forever,” depict solitary figures against yellow backgrounds. The foliage in “Her” grows in Humes’ mother’s frontyard. “Mid City,” the neighborhood where Humes was raised, features the red-crowned parrots that wake him up every morning.
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1.“Her”(Noah Humes)2.“Mid City”(Noah Humes)
“I felt inclined to represent and show a certain subtlety of ‘We’re here, we’re centered, we’re always a focal point of unfortunate times, but also we can overcome things and become stronger than we have been,’” Humes said of the twin paintings, which he completed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the national racial reckoning that followed.
Humes also credits his neighbors in L.A., a “system of Black excellence,” for positively influencing his artistry. Animator Lyndon Barrois (“Happy Feet,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks”) is his mentor, and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, including siblings Syd and Travis “Taco” Bennett, as well as Thebe Kgositsile — who uses the stage name Earl Sweatshirt — are his childhood friends.
Francis ‘Tommy’ Mitchell, 41
(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)
Mitchell has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but it was a high school classmate pointing out the permanent nature of a ballpoint pen that led to his aha moment.
“You can erase graphite, you can paint over acrylic and oil,” said the Baltimore- and L.A.-based artist. “Ink is one of those things that I just think of, no pun intended here, it’s forever.”
Mitchell’s portraits feature individuals shaded with ink set against monochromatic acyrlic background. Because it is extremely time-consuming, most artists working in ink compose smaller, more intimate images, said Mitchell. In contrast, his portraits are huge. If the work were hung on the walls of a museum, the viewer may never notice the figure’s skin was drawn in ink and not paint.
“Going to museums or galleries as a kid, I would see these amazing European paintings, and I’m like, ‘Wow, these are amazing,’ but there’s no one that looks like me,” he said, of his desire to focus on portraiture.
“Francis R. of City College”
(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)
The subject of “Francis R. of City College,” Mitchell’s painting featured in the Edwards’ dining room in “Forever,” is modeled after his father. For Mitchell, the work represents a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Making the painting in his Baltimore studio less than a mile away from City College, where his father attended high school, felt like a full-circle moment.
Seeing the work on television only adds to the significance.
“One of my goals is to always promote those who work in ink because it’s not a traditional medium,” he said, pointing to tattoo artists Jun Cha and Mister Cartoon as inspirations. “So for it to be seen on television, it lends credence to, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special as well.’”
Edwin Marcelin, 50
Marcelin’s first job as a teenager was at Stüssy, a Laguna Beach streetwear brand founded in the early 1980s. Minimalist graphic design, a trademark of Stüssy as well as brands Supreme and Undefeated, has always informed his art.
“Everything usually is about engagement, confrontation or affection,” said Marcelin. “Those are things that I tend to generate towards by using very minimal strokes.”
During his time at the California College of the Arts — then called the California College of Arts and Crafts — Marcelin was drawn to Bauhaus, a German school of art that melds functionality and design. Marcelin applies those abstract Bauhaus fundamentals and adds the element of movement.
“If it ain’t moving, it ain’t me,” said the L.A.-born-and-raised artist.
Marcelin said his emphasis on motion lends itself well to the screen — his piece “Clarity,” a dynamic painting of Michael Jordan taking flight, hangs in basketball-loving Justin’s bedroom in “Forever.”
“I think Black folks in Los Angeles are dynamic, so I try to keep dynamic images, people doing things, not standing there, and I think that translates to film very well,” said Marcelin.
“Clarity” is part of a 23-painting series titled “Black Jesus.” Each image in the series, which took Marcelin about five months to complete in its entirety, references Jordan, who Marcelin said is disappearing visually from pop culture. Case in point: He said his 19- and 16-year-old sons may recognize the Jumpman logo, but they wouldn’t instantly recognize an image of Jordan himself.
“There’ll be more basketball players, but I wanted to do something that was completely abstract representing him because he has so many moments that are fantastically beautiful,” said Marcelin.
Corey Pemberton, 34
With a background in collage, glassblowing and painting, Pemberton’s large mixed-media works — of a man singing into his toothbrush in the bathroom, a naked woman smoking marijuana in bed, a man devouring a plate of his mother’s food — are both intimate and mundane.
“At a certain point, I turned an interest to those who had been marginalized by society in some way, whether it was because of the color of their skin or their gender expression or their socioeconomic status, and developed an interest in depicting those people in a way that both celebrated them but also gave them some space to just exist,” he said.
Such themes of ownership and viewership are etched into Pemberton’s work. For example, he depicts the space and objects around his figures in vivid detail. Objects are important, he said, because they carry memories of “the people who created them or gave them to us or lived with them before us.”
Similarly, his painting “The Collector” celebrates “a young black person who’s making a concerted effort to own and conserve our culture, which is so often falling into the hands of people who don’t care about us on a deeper level.” And in many of Pemberton’s pieces, miniature renderings of his previous works can be found on the walls of his subjects’ homes.
“I think when you see a work presented that way, it sort of brings a heightened level of importance,” said Pemberton.
“I Used to Cook More”
(Corey Pemberton)
So it’s doubly significant that Pemberton’s work is on display in the wealthy Edwards’ home in “Forever.” The art in question, “I Used to Cook More,” can be found in the family’s kitchen and depicts Pemberton’s friend and fellow collector Jared Culp eating out of a white takeout container.
“We were talking about all of the takeout that we now consume as busy young Black creatives in L.A. trying to claw our way to the top of something,” said Pemberton.
But success in the art world has been easier to come by in L.A., where he relocated to after six years in rural North Carolina, said Pemberton.
“When I moved to Los Angeles, not only was I selling work but I was selling work to people with shared experience,” he said. “I was getting feedback that not only were these works that people wanted to live with, but they were works that people saw themselves reflected in, and that I was doing something important or meaningful to more people than just myself.”
Charles A. Bibbs, 77
Bibbs worked in corporate America for 25 years before becoming an artist full time. For Bibbs, art — in a crosshatching style, in his case — is all about communicating universal ideas.
“I mix that crosshatching with different colors and paint, and it’s just one layer on top of another until you get your desired effect,” Bibbs said of his “spontaneous” way of creating that’s “almost like magic sometimes.”
Like many Black artists, Bibbs chose his subject matter out of necessity. As a young man, he encountered few Black artists, yet innately understood the power of positive images of the Black experience, especially in the home.
“It’s a very honorable occupation because you’re giving people a part of you that is changing their lives in an aesthetic way,” he said. “All of those things play into people proud to be who they are.”
“Daddy’s Love”
(Charles A. Bibbs)
In “Forever,” viewers may catch a glimpse of “Daddy’s Love,” a drawing of Bibbs’ father and Bibbs and his sister as children, on the wall outside Justin’s bedroom. But this isn’t the first time his work has made it to the screen. Bibbs is credited with the Black Madonna artwork on the honey jar central to the plot of the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” He said the experience underscored the importance of art, which he said touches the “subconscious mind.”
“[My work] was part of the presentation of the movie and in some way or another may have helped them understand what that movie was really all about.”
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