problem

WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials announced that they had invoked executive authority to shut down 110 commercial driving schools that they said are connected to more than 5,000 truck drivers who failed English language proficiency tests.

During a news conference Monday in Detroit, leaders of the departments of Transportation and Homeland Security singled out California as the biggest problem state.

The federal officials were joined by Marcus Coleman and his 7-year-old daughter Dalilah, who in 2024 was critically injured when the driver of an 18-wheeler — an immigrant from India — crashed into their vehicle in the Mojave Desert.

“By far, the worst abusers are in California under [Gov.] Gavin Newsom’s leadership,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

“A lot of the licenses unlawfully issued come from California, New York, a lot from Illinois,” added Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. “We see a lot of the violations when trucks are pulled over in the Midwest because they travel through the Midwest, and so though a license might be issued unlawfully in California, that driver doesn’t stay in California.”

The emergency school closures were part of a federal partnership to crack down on fraud and illegal practices in the commercial trucking industry. Mullin and Duffy did not say how many of the closures are in California.

Federal officials are also launching a nationwide audit of third-party testers who are authorized by states to verify commercial driver’s license applicants’ skills.

Homeland Security investigators, meanwhile, were conducting a coordinated sweep Monday of more than 200 training schools in 23 states.

Investigators with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration have also issued notices seeking to shut down another 160 training schools where they said they found unlicensed instructors, missing documentation and inadequate space for drivers to learn necessary maneuvers.

Federal officials said that drivers certified by those schools were linked to 239 commercial motor vehicle-related deaths.

The Trump administration has revoked the commercial licenses of more than 28,000 drivers over English language proficiency failures since June 2025.

On Monday, Derek Barrs, administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, cited Platinum Plus Truck Driving School in Fresno, which certified 36 drivers who were later cited for English language proficiency violations.

“One of these trainees killed someone in Oklahoma that should have never been on the roadway,” he said.

At another school in California, Barrs said, operators said their classroom was the back end of an open semi-trailer, and their primary instructor was out of the country.

The Transportation Department didn’t respond to a request from The Times asking how many of the 110 trucker schools were in California. But the agency told Fox News that 11 are in California, 10 in Florida, 13 in Pennsylvania and 13 in Texas, with smaller numbers in other states.

The announcements follow a longstanding effort by the Trump administration to target immigrant commercial truck drivers — especially those from California.

Soon after returning to the White House, President Trump signed an executive order requiring commercial truck drivers to prove they are proficient in English. In early August, the Motor Carrier Safety Administration moved to codify those language requirements through the federal rulemaking process.

Deadly accidents in Florida and San Bernardino County last year brought scrutiny to Sikh Punjabi truck drivers, who make up an estimated 20% of the U.S. trucking workforce.

New federal guidelines this year began limiting commercial driver’s licenses to certain visa holders and requiring states to verify an applicant’s immigration status through a federal portal. Federal officials also ordered California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to cancel about 13,000 licenses due to a clerical error that allowed them to remain valid past a work permit’s expiration date.

The federal government withheld $160 million in transportation funding after California delayed revoking the licenses.

Most states have allowed immigrants who have legal work authorization — including visa holders, asylum seekers and recipients of Temporary Protected Status — to drive commercial vehicles.

Critics of the rule say the Trump administration hasn’t provided data to back up its claims that foreign commercial drivers pose a particular safety threat.

In 2024, about 5,200 large trucks were involved in fatal crashes, a 3% decrease from 2023 but a 30% increase in the last 10 years, according to the National Safety Council.

Immigrant rights groups say the new rules exacerbate a truck driver shortage and inflame anti-immigrant bias by perpetuating the myth that all such drivers are unqualified. They say many affected drivers are legally authorized to work and have strong safety records.

The Asian Law Caucus and Sikh Coalition sued California’s DMV on behalf of drivers who faced cancellation of their licenses.

In March, an Alameda County judge declined to halt the cancellations but required the DMV to establish a process so they could reapply. The DMV also found that some 7,000 cancellations had been issued in error.

Also Monday, U.S. Border Patrol announced that it had arrested 95 truck drivers who are in the country illegally and possessed state-issued commercial driver’s licenses, including 76 with California licenses.

So the appeal is clear for those who manage the financial spreadsheets, but what about everybody else?

US Open organisers have not yet commented in the wake of the Williams-Kenin match, but they have previously argued late scheduling is a benefit to fans.

“Without question late-night matches were heavily discussed and reviewed after the 2022 US Open,” tournament director Stacey Allaster said in 2023, after opting to maintain the late schedule.

“We looked at starting the evening session earlier, instead of 7pm start at 6pm, but it’s not really a possibility because it’s hard for New Yorkers to get here even at 7pm.

“We talked about [changing to] one match at night, but we felt that’s not fair to our fans. One of the realities we have in tennis is that we are not defined by a start and an end time. We can have a short match or we can have a five-hour match.”

And that lack of certainty is where the problems arise. Organisers might not think all matches will run long, but they definitely know it’s a possibility.

A five-set men’s match can easily run for over four or even five hours and a women’s match that goes the distance can comfortably pass the three-hour mark. Put those two matches back-to-back on Arthur Ashe with a short break in-between and suddenly whoever is playing second isn’t finishing until about 3am.

The reason Williams and Kenin started their match so late is that Novak Djokovic’s defeat by Mariano Navone took five sets and over four hours to complete.

By the time Williams and Kenin were finished, the crowd in the 23,933-capacity stadium was sparse.

After more than three years behind bars, José Ignacio Moreno Suárez said he walked out of El Rodeo I prison last Friday with nothing to his name. “I have no house. These are my clothes; this is what I have left after three years. They took everything from me, everything I have,” he told reporter Maryorin Méndez at the prison gates, gesturing at what he was wearing. Moreno Suárez, the legal representative in Venezuela for Canadian miner Gold Reserve, was arrested in June 2023 for defending the company’s international arbitration claim for over $1 billion in expropriated assets. He was freed in the first round of political prisoner releases since the beginning of the US-brokered talks between the Rodríguez government and the opposition. 

Although we know no further details about Moreno Suárez’s case, we do know that it is one of many cases of this kind of systematic punishment against political prisoners and dissident figures. While the Rodríguez-Figuera table gets to boast about the releases, the regime has yet to answer for the houses and personal property it raided or seized from dozens of political figures and their relatives. Among them is Dinorah Figuera herself, president of the Delegate Commission in the ongoing negotiations with chavismo. As they begin releasing prisoners and readmitting exiles to take part in the talks, the question remains about whether these negotiations will give any of the houses back.

Charity in a stolen home

In May, chavista officials gathered in Los Palos Grandes to inaugurate the Casa de los Abuelos y Abuelas Indio Chacao, a new branch of the Gran Misión Abuelas y Abuelos de la Patria program for the elderly. Footage of the opening (and backlash against it) spread quickly, as the building they chose was once the family home of Lilian Tintori and Leopoldo López, the exiled founder of Voluntad Popular and once-popular opposition leader.

Back in March, Tintori had reported that authorities took over the house, emptied it of their belongings and started demolishing parts of it. The raid happened after López said in an interview that he supported the US military operation that captured Maduro and Cilia Flores.

“They took my house from me for assuming the presidency of the 2015 National Assembly,” Dinorah Figuera said recently.

The day after the inauguration, López answered with a video walking through what was done to his house. “This is the house where my children grew up, where we hold the memory of our family, the photos, the sheets, the furniture, the toys. This is the house where I spent a year and a half under arrest,” he said. The video, originally posted on May 30 to Leopoldo López’s account in collaboration with Voluntad Popular, was deleted this week. Tintori had already reported, in March, that the home was looted and structurally damaged, with personal objects removed, interior walls knocked down, and even the family’s pets disappeared. 

López clarified that he was not against this kind of assistance program, as he inaugurated similar centers during his time as mayor of Chacao. He condemned, however, that Rodríguez’s administration is now presenting this action as an ‘act of justice’ when, in his view, it represents a message of intimidation. “Recovering democracy also means recovering every citizen’s right to live, work, and return home in freedom and safety”, López wrote in his post.

House by house

Magalli Meda, campaign chief for María Corina Machado, had her family home raided in May 2025, days after she escaped from the Argentine embassy where she sheltered for over a year. Agents returned in February 2026, tagging the property “secured” and “seized.” GNB agents had raided Meda’s mother’s apartment in May 2025, stealing her car in the process. Machado’s personal assistant, Laura Acosta, also saw her main residence taken by force in March 2025, and formally confiscated a year later.

Those close to Antonio Ledezma— the former Caracas metropolitan mayor— lost multiple properties. In 2023, the National Anti-Corruption Police of Venezuela (PNCC) raided the Santa Rosa de Lima apartment he shared with his wife Mitzy Capriles, where Ledezma had lived under house arrest from 2015 until 2017, when he escaped the country. Neighbors told Ledezma that hooded men with long guns forced the lock, entered, and carried off boxes of his belongings. They left a sign on the door that read clausurado, sealed. Ledezma’s father-in-law’s vacation home in Naiguatá had already been seized before then. His stepdaughter Isabel González Capriles and her husband, former Chávez minister Andrés Izarra, were forcibly removed from their Quinta Los Gnomos in Caraballeda in 2020 and given a 15-day notice to remove their belongings. Three years later, the head of the DGCIM, Iván Hernández Dala, celebrated his wedding at the confiscated property. 

Diego Arria, the former governor, minister and UN ambassador during the Carlos Andrés Pérez administrations, faced two expropriations back in 2010 under Chávez’s guerra al latifundio policies: his Hacienda La Carolina in Yaracuy and Finca Los Azahares in Carabobo. Julio Borges’s home was raided in 2018 over his alleged link to the drone attack on Maduro, which stripped him of parliamentary immunity. Bony Pertiñez, wife of the jailed police commissioner Iván Simonovis, lost her home in 2019 through a precautionary seizure issued by a terrorism court and executed by the SEBIN.

But confiscations and raids are not confined to the country’s household-name dissidents. 

Former presidential candidate Enrique Márquez described the same process: “The police arrested me leaving my house, took my keys, and went in. They took my computer and personal effects… They stole money, kitchen appliances, clothes, paintings. They left us bankrupt.” When approached for an update on the state of the stolen goods, Márquez told Caracas Chronicles those belongings were never returned. 

And then there’s Dinorah Figuera, the opposition’s co-chair at the current negotiating table. In January 2023, the DGCIM raided her home and that of Auristela Vásquez, second vice president of the 2015 National Assembly. “At this moment my home in Los Rosales, Caracas, is being raided. Regime security agents, continuing their strategy of State terrorism, are adding one more act to their long list of human rights violations”, she tweeted. In June, Figuera confirmed she returned to Venezuela “having been stripped of a home” in an interview with Luis Olavarrieta: “They took my house from me for assuming the presidency of the 2015 National Assembly,” she recalled when asked about those who consider her a divisive figure within the opposition.

But confiscations and raids are not confined to the country’s household-name dissidents. 

José Breijo was a Uruguayan-Venezuelan former hotel manager held in Tocuyito Prison for two years on a terrorism charge. His alleged crime was taking a picture of a flag in an office where he believed Islamist groups met. The detention drew little attention until this May: after being granted house arrest, a photo of Breijo lying on a mattress at the entrance of his home started circulating on social media. One of the officers who arrested him had moved a family in. “It’s a very common police practice,” Breijo said. “They pick you up on the street, ask you a lot of questions, and if they realize you live alone, they send you to prison and take your house.” Unable to occupy the house the court ordered him to remain in, he risked being sent back to prison for failing to comply. He slept in the hallway for three days until, after several human rights organizations and activists denounced the situation, State authorities opened the doors to his house and handed José the keys. He passed away this month in that same apartment, at 71.

Even some chavistas were stripped of their property once their loyalties faded. Raúl Baduel was the general behind Chávez’s return to power after the 2002 coup, and then became his Minister of Defence in 2006. After breaking with Chávez the following year over proposed constitutional reforms, he was arrested in 2009, convicted on corruption charges and stripped of all his material goods. Baduel insisted the charges were pushed as a tool for political persecution. More recently, Tareck El Aissami, Simón Zerpa, and Samark López were deprived of their property because of their involvement in the PDVSA-crypto case of 2023.

The laws laundering the theft

Article 116 of the Venezuelan Constitution forbids confiscation, permitting it only by final judicial sentence and against those convicted of crimes against public property or enrichment through illicit trafficking. Still, the State built itself loopholes by declaring statutes to route around that protection.

Officers invoked one of three laws for the seizures (at least, whenever a legal basis was provided at all). The Organized Crime and Terrorism Financing Law, passed under Chávez in 2012, is used to target exiles: Article 58 allows a court to move from “preventive seizure” to permanent forfeiture after a year if the owner is deemed to have “abandoned” the property. On the other hand, the 2024 Libertator Law “against the imperial blockade” explicitly authorizes the confiscation of assets as a criminal penalty against anyone who supports or requests international sanctions against Venezuela.

The 2023 Asset Forfeiture Law (Ley de Extinción de Dominio) was born out of Maduro’s anti-corruption purge of El Aissami. The chavista National Assembly issued it to “establish mechanisms to identify, locate, and recover assets tied to illicit activity.” The law was first applied in February 2025 against an alleged corruption network within PDVSA, when a single court gave roughly 400 assets belonging to more than 100 people over to the State. The 462-page ruling never established when the alleged crimes took place, and inverted the presumption of innocence by forcing the accused to prove their assets were clean.

The US-sponsored negotiations are advanced by an opposition cohort of mostly exiles who have been permitted to return to take part in the talks, premised on “reconciliation” and on “verifiable” steps toward a restored democracy. While Figuera can now re-enter the country whose legitimate Assembly she once led, the properties seized from her circle have not been restored.

Restitution is a direct measure of whether “reconciliation” means anything concrete or is simply another buzzword to back transactions that leave the regime’s loot intact. A transition pushed by the US to partially restore investor confidence cannot leave the confiscations unaddressed. Doing so would ratify the theft and reward those behind the seizures with fresh capital. If the Trump administration intends to sell this process as a genuine opening, it must be prepared to say whether the property the regime took will be given back.

On July 23, Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians that Raytheon wanted to help produce Patriot interceptors on Ukrainian-linked lines. Five days later, Lockheed Martin signed a second license, this one for the PAC-3 MSE — the hit-to-kill missile that has spent three years picking Russian ballistic warheads out of the sky over Kyiv. For a moment it looked like a watershed: the United States handing a country still absorbing nightly missile and drone barrages the blueprint to build its own air defense. Then, within days, the story came apart in public. US Ambassador Matthew Whitaker said Washington would not allow Ukraine to build PAC-3s at all. Donald Trump called the technology transfer “a hard thing to give away.” NATO’s own envoy said no agreement would close before winter. Something had clearly been decided. Nobody could agree on what.

The Patriot system is the closest thing the West has to a proven shield against ballistic missiles, and it is scarce almost everywhere it is needed. Roughly twenty countries now compete for a production line that turns out about 650 PAC-3 MSE interceptors a year worldwide — Lockheed Martin’s entire global output, shared among Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Gulf states and the US Army’s own depleted stocks. Russia, meanwhile, has been firing 55 to 60 Iskander ballistic missiles a month at Ukraine alone, before counting the nightly Shahed drone waves that push crews to expend scarce interceptors on cheaper threats out of necessity. The Pentagon has spent much of the past two years quietly rationing Patriot allocations across allies, reportedly diverting orders meant for Taiwan and Ukraine to replenish American stockpiles. Against that backdrop, “Ukraine will build its own Patriots” is not primarily a sovereignty story. It is a story about whether the system that makes Patriots for everyone else can keep up at all.

What the deal actually requires

Start with what was actually signed, because the headlines overstate it. Raytheon’s license covers the PAC-2 GEM-T, an older blast-fragmentation interceptor effective against aircraft and cruise missiles. Lockheed Martin’s covers the PAC-3 MSE, the missile that actually stops Iskanders and Kinzhals. Neither license includes the radar, the fire-control system or the launchers; those still come from existing Patriot batteries. And neither company has committed to building these missiles on Ukrainian soil in the near term. Reporting from Reuters and Ukrainian officials both point to Germany, which already runs its own PAC-2 line, as the likely first production site, with capacity shifting to Ukraine only “after the war ends.” What was announced in July, in other words, is not a factory. It is paperwork that keeps a door open.

Even so, the paperwork matters, because of what it concedes. Every PAC-3 MSE round carries a 24-month production lead time for the missile itself and 30 months for its solid rocket motor. Boeing manufactures every active radar seeker that guides it from a single facility in Alabama, capped at 650 to 700 units a year — a bottleneck no amount of Ukrainian factory floor changes. Aerojet Rocketdyne is the sole source for the motor. These are not obstacles a co-production agreement dissolves; they are structural limits on how fast the United States can arm anyone, Ukraine included. A government does not open its most tightly export-controlled missile program to a country still under nightly bombardment unless it has concluded that the existing pipeline, working alone, cannot meet demand. That is the admission buried in the announcement: not that Ukraine’s industrial base is ready, but that Lockheed’s and Raytheon’s are strained, and Washington needs help from a country it would ordinarily be supplying, not licensing.

The contradictions among American officials sharpen the point rather than undermine it. Whitaker’s flat denial that Ukraine would ever build PAC-3s, arriving days after Zelensky announced the license, is not really about Ukraine’s trustworthiness. A Republican congressional official close to the process gave the more candid version: the manufacturers are less worried about Ukraine leaking American technology to Moscow than about Ukraine improving on it and producing it “at scale, faster and for much less money.” That fear has a track record behind it. Fire Point’s Flamingo cruise missile, built in Ukraine during the war, reportedly costs around $600,000 — roughly a sixth of a Tomahawk and a fraction of a $2 million PAC-3 ACE round — while Ukraine’s home-grown Freyja interceptor is priced at roughly a fifth of the Patriot missile it is meant to substitute for. A country that has spent three years learning to manufacture air defense under fire, at a fraction of Western unit costs, is not the industrial partner a legacy prime wants loose inside its own supply chain. The reluctance is commercial before it is strategic.

The strongest objection to this reading is that Kyiv already produces a large share of its own weapons, so extending that into Patriots is a natural next step rather than a crisis signal. Zelensky puts the domestically produced share of Ukraine’s frontline weapons at close to 60 percent, up from roughly 40 percent a year earlier — drones, the Bohdana howitzer, the Neptune and Flamingo missiles. That is true, and it matters. But those are systems Ukraine designed and built from scratch under wartime pressure, with no legacy export-control regime standing in the way. Patriot is different: it is Washington’s most sensitive interceptor program, run by companies that have spent decades keeping production onshore for precisely the security reasons Whitaker cited. Handing over any piece of it, even nominally, to a country under active bombardment breaks with everything the export-control system was built to prevent. That the United States is doing it anyway — however slowly, however contested internally — says less about confidence in Ukraine than about how thin the interceptor pipeline has become.

Three ways this goes

What happens next depends on which of the deal’s obstacles proves harder to move: engineering or politics.

Base case (our estimate: roughly 55 percent probability). The license survives, but production stays offshore. Germany’s existing PAC-2 line absorbs the first Ukrainian-linked output sometime in 2027; Lockheed and Raytheon leave the seeker and motor bottlenecks unresolved; and Zelensky’s own target of “production capability by the end of 2026” slips the way most Patriot-related deadlines have slipped since 2022. The deal functions mainly as a signal — to Moscow, to Congress, to the manufacturers themselves — that the West is willing to widen its supplier base, without actually widening it before the war’s most dangerous phase has passed.

Downside case. Export-control friction, not battlefield risk, kills momentum outright. Boeing declines to license seeker technology, Congress balks at formally notifying an ITAR transfer into an active conflict zone, and the agreement quietly becomes what several earlier Patriot-adjacent announcements already have: a signed memorandum with no factory behind it. Unable to close its ballistic-missile gap through licensed production, Ukraine leans harder into Flamingo and Freyja — cheap and available, but not full substitutes for hit-to-kill interception. Iskander and Kinzhal strikes on Ukrainian cities continue at close to current tempo through 2027.

Upside case. Ukraine’s wartime manufacturing culture forces the restructuring the primes have been resisting. Facing a credible cheaper competitor, Lockheed and Raytheon accelerate second-sourcing of seekers and motors — the actual chokepoints — to defend market share rather than out of goodwill toward Kyiv. Patriot output rises for every operator, not only Ukraine, and Kyiv becomes the proving ground for a lower-cost interceptor variant that outlives the war. This is the scenario in which an admission of scarcity turns into a fix for it — plausible, but it requires the manufacturers to treat competition, not politics, as the threat that finally moves them.

The takeaway

So: is licensing Patriot production to a country under bombardment an admission? Yes — but not the one the announcements were built to convey. It does not say Ukraine’s industrial base has arrived. It says the American one has not kept pace with a war of attrition it did not plan for, and that Washington is now willing to test its most sensitive export controls against the same scarcity that has Israel, Taiwan and its own Army competing for the same missiles.

Watch for: whether groundbreaking on a German or Polish production line actually begins before the end of 2026 — Zelensky’s own deadline for “technical capability.” If it hasn’t started by then, treat every subsequent announcement as the political theatre this one increasingly resembles: a scarcity confession dressed up as an industrial handshake.

Countryfile’s Adam Henson has highlighted a worrying issue facing Britain’s farming industry after a set of figures left him deeply concerned

BBC Countryfile presenter Adam Henson has highlighted a serious concern facing the farming industry after new figures revealed a sharp rise in the number of people dying at work.

The farmer, who runs Cotswold Farm Park, said the statistics had prompted him to think carefully about the risks faced by those working on farms and whether more could be done to prevent fatal accidents.

Writing in BBC Countryfile Magazine, Adam said: “There’s so much bad news around that it’s easy to be numbed by the torrent of negative stories in the media. But occasionally something hits the headlines that stops me in my tracks – and that’s what happened when the latest figures for deaths in the workplace were released.”

Figures showed 33 people died while working in agriculture during the 2025/26 financial year, compared with 23 the previous year and 27 in 2023/24.

Adam pointed out the disproportionate number of deaths in the sector, noting that agriculture employs only around 1% of the British workforce but accounts for approximately one in five workplace fatalities.

The figures also prompted him to reflect on safety procedures at his own farm, where both employees and contractors carry out a wide variety of work.

He explained that risk assessments and training were already part of everyday operations, but said the figures were a reminder that it was worth looking again at how hazards were identified and managed.

Adam stressed that there was no single reason behind the number of deaths and that every incident had its own circumstances. However, he highlighted the nature of agricultural work as one possible factor.

Long days, physically demanding jobs and working alone can all create additional risks, particularly when there is nobody nearby to spot a problem or intervene.

“If there are no colleagues around and no chance of a second opinion (or a crucial second pair of eyes), it’s easy to imagine how something potentially dangerous could go unnoticed,” he wrote.

Farming also involves a huge variety of potentially hazardous tasks, with workers dealing with livestock, machinery, chemicals and other equipment.

Adam said the rural setting could sometimes make it easy to forget that a farm is still a workplace, and compared it with more conventional working environments such as factories and workshops.

He also recalled Apaches, the notorious public information film from the 1970s which highlighted the dangers children could face on farms. Adam described the film as “terrifying to watch”.

Research by the Farm Safety Foundation found that 88% of farmers surveyed believed complacency, including overconfidence and a false sense of security, was a major contributor to accidents on farms.

Several initiatives are attempting to improve safety, including the Foundation’s Yellow Wellies campaign, which provides advice and training. Meanwhile, charity RABI has developed FarmersAid, a free app intended to support people who are alone after a serious accident while they wait for emergency assistance.

Adam’s comments come after he recently raised another concern affecting the farming industry during a Q&A with fellow farmer Olly Harrison at Cotswold Farm Park.

Asked what they wanted from the Government, Harrison argued that farming needed to receive greater attention.

Adam subsequently discussed food fraud, saying he had been told by someone at the Food Standards Agency that the problem was worth £9 billion in the UK.

He said: “I was with someone from the Food Standards Agency and food fraud in the UK has a value of nine billion pounds. So stuff that is on a glass or a packet or says it’s something that it’s actually not.”

He went on to claim: “Huge amount of food coming into the country that is, you know, meats that is unlabelled or out of date or not fit for human consumption. Honey, olive oil and dairy products are the three biggest fraudulent foods.”

But it was the farm safety figures that left Adam with a simple hope for the future.

“Like everyone, I’m hoping and praying for zero avoidable deaths on our farms in the future.”

Someday, you might be able to ride a bike from the western San Fernando Valley to Long Beach along the Los Angeles River. But not yet.

The longest unfinished stretch is the eight miles from Elysian Park through downtown to Maywood. For decades, advocates of the path have tried to complete those eight miles along the concretized river.

Yet a decade later, the unrideable gap remains. The ambitious project remains mired in planning and bureaucratic complications, with groundbreaking still two years off and the cost nearly tripling to more than $1 billion — almost $24,000 per foot — documents reviewed by The Times show.

It looked like the prospects for the bike route to the sea were getting serious after Angelenos enthusiastically passed a half-cent tax for transit projects in 2016 that earmarked $365 million for the L.A. River Path.

At the time, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the lead on the project, priced out a simple path on one side of the river.

An aerial view of bicyclists where the Los Angeles River Path ends near Golden Shore and Shoreline Drive in Long Beach.

But by last year, the proposed designs were much wider and added seven pedestrian bridges. They also included sections where the path would be elevated above the ground, supported by beams. The changes responded to community input and comments from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and L.A. Department of Water and Power, among others. Estimated completion of the initial phase is not until 2031.

Navigating the web of nearby structures, like active rail lines and historic bridges, is part of what makes the construction so complex, Metro says. An original $75 million set aside for unforeseen expenses in 2016 swelled to $309 million last year, and the rising cost of construction also added to the high price tag.

Advocates for the path say this grander plan would be great, if there were a way to pay for it.

Yuval Bar-Zemer is a board member with Streets for All, a group that advocates for safer streets in L.A. He also is a downtown loft developer and commissioned studies that helped inform a far less expensive option that would run down near the flowing river, rather than up above. The path would be unusable during heavy rains, but Bar-Zemer and others say that would be less than 20 days each year.

This option was included in Metro’s initial scoping of the path in 2016 but has since been dropped, with the agency citing safety concerns. Bar-Zemer contends that safety features could be installed to make sure pedestrians have enough time to exit the pathway if water rises swiftly. He says he’s spent $350,000 of his own funds in engineering studies and advocacy to advance the path.

A pedestrian walks with an umbrella on the L.A. River Path near Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park.

“The benefits are so obvious, it’s such a home run and such a low-hanging fruit that for me, it’s like criminal not to make it happen,” he said.

Currently, bikers headed southbound run out of path where Riverside Drive crosses the L.A. River at Egret Park. From there, they’re forced to weave through high-traffic streets in neighborhoods including Lincoln Heights, Chinatown, Downtown L.A. and Boyle Heights before they find the path again in Vernon.

“It’s a huge chasm,” said Michael Schneider, founder and chief executive of Streets for All. He called the gap in the L.A. River path “a shame because it’s an otherwise amazing resource.”

Some 76,000 residents live within walking distance of the proposed path, and a million within three miles of the L.A. River, according to Metro estimates from 2022. Around 17% of working-age people who live within a bikeable distance already walk, bike or take transit in their regular commute.

An aerial view of downtown Los Angeles and the Sixth Street Bridge amid an unfinished eight-mile gap in the L.A. River Path.

More recent numbers could be higher since high fuel prices have motivated many to use transit, bikes, e-bikes and scooters. The path also could provide recreational benefits to an area that has some of the most limited access to green space in Los Angeles.

Metro had the eight-mile gap on its list of 28 projects it wanted ready for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. As costs soared, it quietly was taken off the list.

Yet there are recent signs of progress for the L.A. River Path.

In late May, the Metro board voted to create a committee that brings together all the players needed to push it to toward completion.

The Los Angeles River runs under the Sixth Street Bridge amid an unfinished eight-mile gap in the L.A. River Path in downtown Los Angeles.

Mayor Karen Bass chairs the Metro board. Despite the project’s stagnation, she continues to convey optimism.

“Angelenos voted in 2016 to make the L.A. River Path path a reality, and Mayor Bass is marshaling the resources necessary to eliminate further distraction that have threatened the project’s pace and cost,” her office said in statement.

Metro staffers are reviewing comments on the draft environmental impact statement, the agency said. They intend to recommend a path forward in the fall.

Sudan’s prolonged war is creating risks that extend well beyond its borders. The growing role of Islamist armed groups, including the Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, could further complicate the country’s political and security landscape while creating new challenges for China’s economic and strategic interests in the Red Sea, East Africa and the Horn of Africa.

The Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, an Islamist militia associated with the Sudanese Islamic Movement, has been one of the armed formations supporting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) during the conflict. In September 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the brigade over its involvement in Sudan’s civil war and alleged connections to Iran. In March 2026, Washington designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, also known as the Sudanese Islamic Movement, as a terrorist organization and updated the brigade’s designation accordingly.

These measures have increased the international pressure on Sudanese Islamist networks and could complicate their future role within the country’s political and security institutions. For China, however, the issue is less about the ideological orientation of these groups than about the possibility that their growing influence could contribute to a broader fragmentation of Sudan’s security environment.

A security vacuum with regional consequences

The continuing conflict has already weakened Sudanese state institutions and created space for armed groups to expand their influence. The danger for Beijing is that prolonged fragmentation could transform Sudan into an environment in which local, regional and external actors compete through armed proxies.

Such a development would have consequences beyond Sudan itself. The country occupies a strategically important position on the Red Sea, while its internal conflict is increasingly interconnected with developments in neighboring states and wider regional security dynamics.

China has consistently called for a ceasefire, protection of civilians and a political settlement in Sudan. Following attacks on Port Sudan in May 2025, Beijing called for the protection of civilian facilities and civilians and urged all parties to work toward an early ceasefire and the restoration of peace and stability.

This approach reflects a broader Chinese preference for protecting its economic and diplomatic interests without becoming directly involved in Sudan’s internal conflict.

For Beijing, therefore, the emergence of increasingly autonomous armed formations represents a potential strategic problem. The greater the fragmentation of Sudan’s security institutions, the more difficult it becomes to protect infrastructure, commercial interests and Chinese nationals while maintaining a policy of non-interference.

Why the Red Sea matters to Beijing

Sudan’s Red Sea coastline gives the conflict a significance that extends far beyond the country itself.

The Red Sea is a critical maritime corridor linking Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Any deterioration in security along Sudan’s coast could add to the risks already affecting commercial navigation in the wider Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb area.

For China, the issue is particularly important because the country is heavily dependent on secure maritime trade routes. Instability along the Red Sea can increase shipping costs, disrupt supply chains and complicate the movement of Chinese goods between Asia, Europe and Africa.

The risks are therefore not limited to projects formally identified with the Belt and Road Initiative. They extend to China’s wider commercial, energy and logistical interests across the region.

Sudan’s instability could also affect Chinese companies operating in infrastructure, energy, mining and other sectors. The safety of Chinese workers and businesses becomes increasingly difficult to guarantee when state authority is fragmented and armed groups operate with greater autonomy.

The South Sudan connection

One of the most important dimensions of Sudan’s instability for China is its potential impact on South Sudan.

South Sudan’s economy remains heavily dependent on oil exports, while much of the country’s oil reaches international markets through infrastructure crossing Sudan. Any prolonged disruption to Sudanese territory, oil infrastructure or export facilities could therefore have consequences for South Sudan’s production and revenues.

This matters to China because Beijing has significant economic and diplomatic interests in South Sudan. China and South Sudan established a strategic partnership in 2024, and China remains one of South Sudan’s major trading partners, with crude oil constituting a major component of bilateral trade.

Consequently, instability in Sudan could create an indirect risk to China’s interests in South Sudan even without any direct Chinese involvement in the Sudanese conflict.

The relationship between the two countries also demonstrates why Beijing is unlikely to view Sudan solely through the lens of the Sudanese civil war. Developments in Sudan can affect neighboring states, energy flows, infrastructure networks and regional trade routes in which China has invested for decades.

China’s limited but expanding security footprint

China has sought to protect its interests in the region while avoiding direct military involvement in Sudan’s war.

Its military presence in Djibouti provides Beijing with an established logistical and security position around the western Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. At the same time, China’s broader commercial presence in Djibouti has continued to expand, reinforcing the country’s importance as a regional trade and logistics hub.

This does not mean that China is preparing to intervene militarily in Sudan. Rather, the existence of a Chinese military and commercial presence in the wider region gives Beijing additional capabilities for protecting its nationals, supporting maritime security and responding to emergencies if regional instability intensifies.

China’s activities in South Sudan also demonstrate a gradual expansion from purely economic engagement toward broader cooperation in areas such as security and public-sector capacity. In June 2026, for example, China handed over a Chinese-aided digital forensic laboratory to South Sudanese authorities, describing improved public-security management as important to national stability.

Beijing is therefore building relationships and capabilities that can help it protect its interests without becoming a direct party to regional conflicts.

The Islamist factor

The future role of Sudanese Islamist organizations remains an important variable.

The international designation of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade could make it more difficult for these networks to operate openly through political or institutional channels. At the same time, pressure on an armed or ideological movement does not necessarily eliminate its influence. It can instead encourage the movement to adapt, fragment or seek alternative forms of political and social organization.

For China, this creates an additional layer of uncertainty.

Beijing has little incentive to become involved in Sudan’s ideological disputes. Its primary concern is whether political fragmentation and the proliferation of armed groups will threaten the stability required for trade, investment, energy flows and the safety of Chinese citizens.

The more Sudan’s conflict develops into a competition involving multiple armed and externally supported actors, the more difficult it becomes for China to maintain its preferred strategy of pragmatic engagement with all sides.

What China is likely to do

China’s response is likely to remain cautious and pragmatic.

Beijing is unlikely to seek a direct military role in Sudan unless its citizens, facilities or broader maritime interests face a severe and immediate threat. Instead, China is likely to continue supporting diplomatic efforts, calling for dialogue and a political settlement while maintaining relations with Sudanese institutions and neighboring countries.

China’s recent diplomatic position toward Sudan and South Sudan reinforces this approach. At the United Nations, Beijing has continued to emphasize political solutions and stability in the region, while maintaining engagement with both Sudan and South Sudan. In May 2026, China’s permanent representative to the UN warned that the continuing conflict in Sudan and instability in South Sudan were delaying the Abyei political process and called for greater attention to the security situation.

This suggests that Beijing sees the Sudanese conflict increasingly as part of a wider regional security problem rather than an isolated domestic crisis.

The central challenge for China is therefore not simply the rise of one Islamist militia. It is the possibility that Sudan’s institutional fragmentation will produce a durable security vacuum connecting the country’s internal conflict with instability in South Sudan, threats to Red Sea navigation and competition among regional and international powers.

If that happens, Sudan could become a much more serious strategic problem for Beijing.

China’s interests in the region depend on stability without requiring China itself to become responsible for providing it. The longer Sudan’s war continues, the harder that balance becomes to maintain.

The Great British Sewing Bee is currently delighting BBC viewers – but what do we know about judge Esme Young’s life?

The Great British Sewing Bee judge Esme Young has faced her fair share of struggles.

In 2016, Esme replaced May Martin as a judge on the hit BBC competition. She has since delighted BBC viewers alongside Patrick Grant and a number of hosts, including Joe Lycett, Sara Pascoe and Sophie Willan.

Over the years, Esme has established herself as an esteemed British fashion designer. In 1972, she founded a shop in Camden Town called Swanky Modes, alongside fellow designers Judy Dewsbury, Melanie Herberfield and Willie Walters.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Swanky Mode’s clothing appeared in Vogue, Honey and The Face, and was photographed by David Bailey, Nick Knight, and John Swannell.

Since then, Esme has made costumes for many films, including The Beach, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Romeo and Juliet, and Trainspotting. She notably designed the bunny costume worn by Renée Zellweger in the first Bridget Jones movie.

That’s not all, as one of Esme’s most famous designs was the Amorphous Dress worn by Linda Kozlowski in the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee – a dress that is now in the V&A Collection.

But away from her successful career, Esme has also been through a number of challenges.

Personal struggles

Esme grew up in Bedford with her stay-at-home mum and her dad, who was an RAF pilot. He was a fighter pilot in World War Two.

Speaking with The Telegraph in 2022, Esme opened up about her life in north London, after moving into a one-bedroom flat in 1983.

“I’ve never been able to afford my own home. I’ve lived in social housing since 1983 – in a one-bedroom flat in Islington, north London, rented from the charitable housing trust Peabody,” she explained.

Reflecting on her previous money struggles, Esme told This is Money: “I could not afford to pay rent so I lived in a squat with my brother and friends… We had to pay for our electricity via a meter but otherwise we lived rent-free.”

The designer has previously shared her support for the Macmillan cancer charity, after her mum died of cancer.

“Even though I do not have much money, I give as much as I can to Macmillan Cancer Support. My mother died of cancer and it gave her and all the family lots of support,” she shared.

Hidden condition

In an interview with SheerLuxe, Esme revealed that she was “partially deaf” and therefore only learned to read when she was seven years old.

“My teachers thought I was thick and my father used to describe me as ‘dreamy’ – but, really, I was in my own little world because I couldn’t hear anyone,” she explained.

“I also didn’t learn to read until I was seven because I didn’t know how to make the right sounds. It’s still a bit of a problem today because I have to look at everything visually.”

The Great British Sewing Bee is available to stream on BBC iPlayer

Hi, and welcome to another edition of Dodgers Dugout. My name is Houston Mitchell. Will the person in charge please stop turning up Earth’s thermostat. It’s warm enough now.

There’s a problem in the Dodgers’ offense. Yes, they are near the top in most offensive categories, but, well, let’s see if you can spot it.

Batting average/OB%/SLG% by lineup position

Batting first: .275/.378/.522
Second: .229/.305/.348
Third: .273/.364/.457
Fourth: .262/.340/.445
Fifth: .247/.333/.406
Sixth: .273/.339/.464
Seventh: .264/.344/.447
Eighth: .269/.341/.410
Ninth: .265/.326/.402

One of those lines is not like the other. The No. 2 spot in the lineup has been horrible. And it’s not just one person, it’s anyone they try there. A look at each player who has batted in the No. 2 spot this season:

Santiago Espinal, 1 for 1
Tommy Edman, 2 for 4
Andy Pages, .254/.336/.431, 238 plate appearances
Kyle Tucker, .238/.330/.333, 97
Freddie Freeman, .213/.276/.263, 87
Alex Call, 1 for 5
Miguel Rojas, 1 for 6
Mookie Betts, .149/.196/.234, 51
Dalton Rushing, 0 for 1
Will Smith, 0 for 8

Wow. Everyone who has spent any time in the No. 2 spot is hitting worse than their overall numbers.

Last season, the No. 2 position hit .259/.324/.418, which was mainly Betts.

Let’s break out the four players who have the most appearances in the No. 2 spot this season and see how well they hit in other positions:

Andy Pages
Batting second: .254/.336/.431, 238 plate appearances
Third: .167/.200/.167, 25
Fourth: .200/.292/.350, 24
Fifth: .222/.300/.500, 40
Sixth: .375/.394/.781, 33
Seventh: .271/.329/.414, 79
Eighth: .476/.500/.810, 22

Kyle Tucker
Batting second: .238/.330/.333, 97
First: .222/300/.556. 10
Third: .000/.111/.000, 9
Fourth: .263/.391/.395, 92
Fifth: .226/.329/.387, 73
Sixth: .225/.297/.326, 101
Seventh: .333/.412/.633, 34
Ninth: 0 for 1

So hit Pages sixth and Tucker seventh?

Freddie Freeman

Batting second: .213/.276/.263, 87
Third: .328/.421/.572, 273
Fourth: .288/.342/.452, 79
Fifth: .417/.417/.583, 12

So Freeman should bat third.

Mookie Betts

Batting second: .149/.196/.234, 51
First: .125/.125/.500, 8
Third: .179/.281/.429, 32
Fourth: .261/.326/.436, 181
Fifth: .250/.276/.464, 29

Betts at cleanup? Should the Dodgers lineup be:

Shohei Ohtani
Tommy Edman
Freddie Freeman
Mookie Betts
Max Muncy
Andy Pages
Kyle Tucker
Teoscar Hernández
Dalton Rushing

Of course, here we are talking about making changes to the team that is fourth in the majors in runs scored per game (5.15).

But why does everyone fall apart in the No. 2 spot? Do the pitchers relax a bit after facing Ohtani and pitch better because of it? Do they concentrate more? Is it just the randomness of baseball? We’ll never know. But right now, the No. 2 spot is a weakness.

Editor’s note: Of course, right after I write this, Pages goes five for eight with a double and a homer in the No. 2 spot. The randomness of baseball!

Where doesn’t it hurt?

We knew that Shohei Ohtani‘s left knee was still bothering him, but it turns out his right biceps is bothering him, too.

“My biceps is not 100%,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton while speaking to reporters. “Just [a] similar issue with the knee. Do we consider pushing this? It is still July. So, I think the conversation would be a little different if we’re in August or September.”

And the longer Ohtani sits, the more likely he will have to be built back up as a starter. Don’t expect him to come back and pitch seven innings right away.

“You know, he’s a starting pitcher, and then, when you start missing three, four, five weeks of that build-up,” Dave Roberts said, “then you’ve got to kind of start up again.”

Phil ‘The Vulture’ Regan dies

Phil Regan, who had one great and one good season as a relief pitcher with the Dodgers, died earlier this month at 89.

In 1966 with the Dodgers, Regan pitched in 65 games and went 14-1, with a 1.62 ERA and a league-leading 21 saves. It was that season where he earned his nickname, “The Vulture.”

On Aug. 1, 1966, Sandy Koufax was facing the Pittsburgh Pirates and left after seven innings with the score tied, 1-1. Regan relieved him, and the Dodgers scored four runs to win the game. Afterward, Koufax said to Regan, “You’re getting to be a real scavenger. A vulture, that’s what you are.”

Regan went 6-9 with a 2.99 ERA and six saves with the Dodgers in 1967. He pitched in five games for them in 1968, going 2-0 with 3.52 ERA, before he was traded to the Chicago Cubs along with Jim Hickman for Jim Ellis and Ted Savage.

Regan last pitched in the majors in 1972 with the Chicago White Sox, who released him in July. His career record was 96-81 with a 3.84 ERA and 92 saves.

He went on to become a longtime pitching coach for several teams and managed the Baltimore Orioles during the 1995 season.

He came out of retirement at 82 in 2019 to become interim pitching coach for the New York Mets, saying, “Well, I love the game and I love what I’m doing. I know I’m 82 years old now, but I still enjoy it. I feel good. I’m going to retire one of these days, or die, I dont know. One or the other.”

Scheduling note

The next newsletter will be delayed until after the trade deadline so we can discuss what happened, or what didn’t happen, and see what moves other postseason contenders made.

Up next

Friday: Boston (*Ranger Suarez, 4-3, 3.02 ERA) at Dodgers (TBD), 7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

Saturday: Boston (*Payton Tolle, 6-6, 3.32 ERA) at Dodgers (Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 11-6, 2.72 ERA), 6:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

Sunday: Boston (*Jake Bennett, 6-4, 2.74 ERA) at Dodgers (Emmet Sheehan, 4-7, 4.95 ERA), 4:20 p.m., NBC, Peacock, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

All times Pacific

*-left-handed

In case you missed it

Dodgers’ Andrew Friedman addresses Shohei Ohtani’s knee injury and trade deadline approach

Dodgers Debate: Trade deadline madness

‘Do we consider pushing this?’ Shohei Ohtani’s return to the mound remains unclear

Shaikin: The Dodgers’ three-peat chance may never come again. Trade accordingly

Dusty Baker’s peers expect him to become the first Black manager in the Hall of Fame

And finally

Vin Scully calls Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. Watch and listen here.

Until next time …

Have a comment or something you’d like to see in a future Dodgers newsletter? Email me at houston.mitchell@latimes.com. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

In the latest twist in Shohei Ohtani’s battle with left knee discomfort, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts held him out of the lineup Thursday against the Seattle Mariners.

Ohtani reported soreness Wednesday night in his left knee, which he treated over the All-Star break with a lubricating orthovisc injection and rest. So the Dodgers’ athletic training staff recommended a day off.

“I expected him to play,” Roberts said. “I appreciate him saying that there’s some soreness to then allow me to make a decision of what is in his best interest, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Roberts said he’s “very confident” that Ohtani will be in the lineup Friday when the Dodgers open a three-game series against the Boston Red Sox.

But the Dodgers previously believed only pitching aggravated the injury. Ohtani hasn’t pitched in a game since July 3, and he hasn’t thrown off a mound in a little over a week. He’s been running through weighted plyo ball drills to keep his arm in shape without putting pressure on his knee.

It raises questions about how to best manage Ohtani for the rest of the season.

“I’m trying to restrain from a forecast of what’s going to happen, as opposed to just reading and reacting,” Roberts said. “Three days ago, we just had an off day, and to say there’s some soreness certainly is different than what we’ve done the last two weeks. Is it a trend? I hope not. But if it is, then we just got to manage it.”

Roberts said he didn’t believe any specific incident Wednesday aggravated Ohtani’s knee.

“The last couple days he’s been on base a lot more,” Roberts said. “So I think that’s been a good thing in one sense, whereas the last part of the road trip he wasn’t, so there might have been a little something to that.”

Ohtani also mentioned earlier this week that his biceps problem, which flared for the second time this season on July 3 during his last at-bat, has not completely subsided. But the Dodgers have downplayed the severity of that ailment and are under the impression that throwing doesn’t hurt it.

When asked if the team would consider shutting down Ohtani for 10 days to help him fully recover, Roberts said: “That’s a hard question and I understand the thought behind it. But it’s gotten better over the last few weeks, markedly. He’s been a very productive player. … You trust him. He feels like he can go.

“He’s not 100%; very few players are 100%. Then what is it? Is it 70%, is it 80%, is it 90%? For me, there’s still that conversation, where he understands the most important part of the season is to come, and he understands his value with our team.”

It doesn’t seem like the Dodgers are ready to put Ohtani on the injured list just yet. Roberts said he hopes Ohtani will start playing catch this weekend or next week.

The Dodgers, however, had expressed hope that the injection and time off over the break would prevent Ohtani from having to manage the problem. That no longer seems to be in play.

“We’re talking about this constantly, we are,” Roberts said. “And nothing should be off the table and nothing is set in stone. So I think it’s more of how he feels. This surprised me. So now with this new information we’ve got to have new conversations.”

Graffiti has marked the walls of Rome for millennia. Now, as one content creator builds a following cleaning spray-painted walls, his videos are fuelling a wider debate over heritage, street art and where the line between the two should be drawn.

Coronation Street’s Sarah Platt confessed to police that she killed Theo Silverton – but has claimed that it was in self-defence and viewers have spotted a “problem” ahead of a potential twist

Coronation Street’s Sarah Platt confessed to police that she killed Theo Silverton – but has claimed that it was in self-defence. The legendary soap character, who has been played by Tina O’Brien since 1999, beat the scaffolder over the head and sent him tumbling from the builder’s yard roof earlier this year.

It all came just moments after Theo whole load of derogatory remarks towards her but the pair were already enemies because she knew that he had subjected her best friend Todd Grimshaw to horrific abuse during their relationship.

Viewers will know that, on that fateful night, Sarah, who is currently dating DC Kit Green, called her ex-boyfriend Gary for help before heading home and being hit on the head and knocked out cold by the mysterious Jodie Ramsey .

In the weeks after Sarah confessed to Kit, he has been doing everything he can to try to get her off the hook and pin the blame on Gary, but she is currently in prison and has been charged with murder.

On Friday night’s episode of the world’s longest-running TV soap, Sarah was interviewed by DS Lisa Swain, who usually locks innocent people up, and she didn’t quite believe her story.

Sarah told her: “I barely remember calling Gary. He answered the phone. And I realised how crazy I was being. OK, fine, I did – I wanted to tell him what I’d done. And then the second… that I heard his voice. I realised that I couldn’t let him get involved and ask for his help!” Sarah then tried to explain the phone call, to no avail, and Lisa was very interested to know what she did with the murder weapon – which Gary disposed of – and the factory supervisor simply claimed she couldn’t remember.

Over in the Rovers, Lisa and Kit sat having a casual chat about the murder investigation and she told him that Sarah clearly didn’t think much of him if she called her ex-boyfriend rather than him. Whilst on the phone in her cell, Sarah told Kit that she couldn’t possibly bring Gary into it – much to her partner’s frustration.

It was then that Sarah attempted to split up with Kit on the phone, for his sake, but he was having none of it. She said to him: “Just look after Harry and Bethany for me,” but when Kit mentioned Jodie, Sarah was quick to warn him that she is a “dangerous” woman and he needs to keep away from her.

The scenes certainly sparked a reaction amongst fans, with some theorising that Sarah didn’t actually kill Theo after all.

One fan wrote on X: “Sarah’s finally told someone about Jodie being the person who hit her on the head that night. So, now Kit knows, I’m wondering if he will frame Jodie as Theo’s real killer? But, Sarah having the nerve to call Jodie dangerous, while on remand for murder, is peak irony”

Another said: “I think Sarah didn’t kill Theo. I think he was battered whey he lay unconscious… possibly by his son? I also feel the story of the life insurance is going somewhere.”

In response, a third said: “It would mean overturning the autopsy report, which stated Theo was dead before he fell. Corrie have hade a problem there, if they wanted a second killer. Otherwise, I would also go with Millie or Miles. And, I would like Todd to get the life insurance back. He’s earned it!”

Coronation Street airs weeknights at 8:30pm on ITV1 and ITV X.

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Freelance writer and editor Lucy Schiller bumped up against the issues of aging, eldercare and loneliness through her grandmothers. When the family pulled her maternal grandmother, Mary Ann, from assisted living during the pandemic, Schiller became her primary caregiver. Her paternal grandmother, Anita, was less fortunate; she contracted COVID-19 from a home healthcare aide and died in a hospital.

As she relates in “Aging Out,” the shock of Anita’s death was a factor in Schiller’s abrupt relocation from a central New York college town to Pittsburgh, where she knew no one. Schiller calls the move “a half-desperate plan to simply change the background scenery of my life for the millionth time.”

While grieving, scrambling to make a living, taking long walks with her dog and wrestling with her chosen solitude, Schiller embarks on a quest to understand the institutions and attitudes that shape old age in America. “What was the relationship between personal fear of oldness and the ways in which oldness was structured in society?” she asks.

The resulting book, a deliberately meandering account of her Steel City sojourn, weds memoir, travelogue, philosophical rumination and journalistic investigation. Schiller, an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa and now an assistant professor of nonfiction at Texas Tech University, is a fluid writer. But most of what she covers is well-trod ground.

It’s worth asking whom she envisions as her audience. Most older readers know this territory; younger ones have other, more pressing concerns, including how to afford life in the here-and-now.

Perhaps Schiller, a millennial in her 30s, hopes they will identify with her personal struggles. But her loneliness seems largely self-imposed, perhaps compounded by what she describes as “a severe strain” of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It turns out, laughably, that an interest in privacy, and staying quiet about internal feelings, are hallmarks of this condition,” she writes, offering a partial explanation for her wariness of company.

Pondering the American way of aging, Schiller initially adopts a posture of ignorance and naivete so extreme that it seems like a pose. She puzzles out the distinctions among nursing homes, assisted living facilities and continuing care retirement communities, as well as home healthcare. And she underlines the fact that, when it comes to long-term care in the United States, only the relatively well-off have good choices. This isn’t exactly news.

Another Schiller inquiry involves the familiar complexities of Medicare. She notes that, as a public program for seniors, it is so inadequate that it requires private options, such as Medigap and Medicare Advantage, to paper over coverage gaps. Picking the best plan for one’s needs can be a daunting option, requiring trained help or careful study. Schiller attends an informational seminar by a broker for Medicare Advantage plans and decides, unhelpfully, that they are neither “a solution or a problem.”

Schiller’s reporting methods rely, to some extent, on serendipity. “I tended toward … a kind of diffuse sallying through the world, staying open to the coincidence, digression, and movement,” she writes. She calls the method “antinarrative.”

All that sallying takes her down some unexpected byways. She returns to a western Pennsylvania town called Harmony, where she once had “a horrible, endless date over crepes,” to investigate a strike over pay and working conditions at a troubled nursing home. That leads to a long discussion of the use of restraints on the elderly.

At one point, Schiller finds a company called Papa that employs younger “Pals” to assist older adults. With the backing of health insurance companies, the Pals provide companionship, transportation, housecleaning services and more. Schiller tries something similar as a volunteer for a health insurance company, reaching out to an elderly Black woman by phone. They stumble over time into an unlikely friendship.

One problem with all these efforts to mitigate old-age loneliness, Schiller notes, is that the loneliest generation is actually Gen Z. And the loneliness surveys themselves, she suggests, may be suspect.

Schiller delves, inevitably, into the history of AARP, an organization that even in its earliest days was entangled with the health insurance industry. And consumer advocate Ralph Nader, for whom she does some editing work, tips her to the story of activist Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers.

Kuhn, Schiller writes, understood “the tension between the social so-called nothingness of old age and its vibrant realities.” Which brings Schiller to the intersection of aging and disability, and to Programs for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), which provide community-based care as an alternative to nursing homes.

In the end, Schiller has a go at parsing her own motivations. “I had descended into the strange subterranean structures of aging, almost as a way to avoid the contemporary world … ,” she writes. “Age … was a helpful distancing tool: older people’s vulnerabilities, including those of my own grandparents, helped to distract me from my own present and future. … I still did not know how to seal over the gaping wound of the pandemic, how to move forward.”

For all her verbiage, she can find no easy fix, nor even a complicated one. “It was not possible for me to imagine a solution to the level of fragmentation, pain, and dysfunction I saw,” she writes, leaving readers without much justification for having followed her rambling, idiosyncratic quest.

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Trips to waterfalls, gardens, galleries, medieval forests and prehistoric caves will make the long school holidays a lot more fun. To help families explore affordably, throughout August buses in England will be free for kids and adult fares will be capped at £3 single. Or, if you arrive somewhere by train, you could buy a PlusBus ticket, which include unlimited local bus travel. Here are six ideas for family outings by bus around England.

Great North Museum, Newcastle

Painted mummy cases, fossilised dino teeth, a stuffed wombat, a fake merman … Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock is full of things kids might love – and entrance is free. Some of the impressive Roman altars are lit with colourful projections and there’s a planetarium with shows (from £2.95). This summer’s exhibition Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found (free, until 20 Sept) involves thoughtfully curated shiny stuff, from Roman coins to Viking silver unearthed across northern England. Lots of buses stop nearby, and a bus ticket gets you 10% off in the cafe.

This summer, there’s also a Tales on the Tyne trail across Newcastle of giant Peter Rabbit sculptures and other, smaller “fluffles” to raise funds for St Oswald’s hospice. The waterfront hotel INNSiDE Newcastle, near the station, hosts a Tynetastic Peter sculpture, plus art and reading events. Its riverside restaurant has a bambino menu and under-11s get free meals until 6 September. The hotel offers family-friendly rooms (from £119 for four in August, room-only), activity hampers and a free soft-drink minibar.

In stylish Ouseburn, a short bus ride away, the Biscuit Factory gallery hosts three further fluffles, free kids’ activities, rabbit-themed food and a roof terrace. Bus 306 runs regularly all the way out to Tynemouth for an afternoon on the beach under castle-topped cliffs. Back in the city, the art deco Tyneside cinema has selected films at £5 each week and kids’ classics over the summer.

Forest fun near Hatfield, Essex

Open every day and free to enter, the National Trust’s Hatfield Forest has 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of Frisbee-ready flowering fields and shady woodland. Incongruously close to Stansted airport, the forest was once a royal hunting ground and is still home to hundreds of deer, some descended from Henry I’s original 12th-century herds. You can follow a boardwalk through twisting hornbeams, ramble across buttercup-carpeted meadows, build a den and hear yaffling woodpeckers.

Bus 509 from Bishop’s Stortford stops outside The Green Man, a short walk from the forest’s edge. Briefly follow the road signed Hatfield Forest and turn right up the path just after the bridge to find a map and gateway.

The lakeside picnic tables and alfresco cafe are a delightful mile away, past cattle-grazed pastures busy with butterflies, and 1,000-year-old trees. With no car to get back to (parking costs £9), make this a linear walk. Loop through woods to Thremhall Priory or follow the Three Forests way for 4½ miles to the village of Hatfield Broad Oak and catch bus 305 (not Sundays).

In Bishop’s Stortford itself, there’s a riverside splash pool and playgrounds near the recently revamped castle mound. South Mill arts centre has kids’ crafts for £2 and Much Hadham Forge museum has a free event on 27 August, featuring a Tudor storyteller, to celebrate 450 years since their Elizabethan murals were painted. Half-timbered Much Hadham is 20 minutes from Stortford on hourly bus 35 (not Sundays).

Cave art in Nottinghamshire

The Welbeck Estate’s walking map includes an easy-going, sculpture-dotted trail to Creswell Crags, where a bus ticket gets you free entry to the museum and 10% off in the cafe. A stroll through the limestone gorge is spectacular, past ponds and caves where prehistoric humans lived and left rock art on the walls. Bus 209 from Worksop stops every couple of hours (not Sundays) near the Dukeries garden centre and Welbeck courtyard at the start of the trail.

Welbeck has a free museum and gallery in converted outbuildings. Highlights include the pearl earring Charles I was wearing when he was beheaded and a red chalk Madonna by Michelangelo. The award-winning Harley cafe next door serves local food (kids’ soup £5, cheese on toast £6).

Half-price Harewood, West Yorkshire

Like many big country houses, Harewood usually charges adults well over £20 for a day’s worth of paintings, porcelain and landscaped gardens. But arrive on the frequent bus 36 from Leeds or Harrogate, and you get 50% off walk-up ticket prices. This gives you access to the art-filled house, the Capability Brown parkland and gardens with scented borders, waterfalls and bridges in thickets of bamboo.

For kids, there’s a wooded adventure playground with zipwire and slides, a treehouse and a willow maze. They can also borrow a nature safari bag, complete with map and compass, torch, binoculars and magnifying glass. And the summer holidays are packed with extra offers, all free with a ticket: den-building, gardening, statue-cleaning, dressing up, circus skills, and mid-August workshops by Tibetan monks.

Inside, there’s an exhibition of glamorous photos by Cecil Beaton (until 4 October). Alternatively, a 5-mile circular walk from the bus stop takes in deer, buzzards, rolling parkland and the Muddy Boots cafe. Half an hour away on the 36 bus, Leeds has the free five-storey Royal Armouries museum overlooking the dock.

Word-class art indoors and out in Norwich

Elisabeth Frink’s ostrich-like structures stalk through waterside woods. Antony Gormley’s cast iron figures stand poised on rooftops and walkways across the brutalist University of East Anglia (UEA) campus. Henry Moore’s bronze forms recline on the lawns, and angular steel beasts by Lynn Chadwick crouch under a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s tower. The free sculpture park at the Sainsbury Centre is packed with iconic names from 20th-century art and architecture and set in 140 hectares of parkland that are yours to explore, with centuries-old oaks, wild rabbits, and free family-friendly tours and trails.

Inside the Norman Foster-designed gallery (pay what you can), relaunched in 2023, the works are eclectic. You can wander from ancient Chinese tomb figures to a dynamic new installation via a work by Picasso. Kids might like the glass box you can stand in to “become a work of art” near John Davies’ hyper-realistic Bucket Man. The ambitious summer exhibitions look at the meaning of life and aspects of play. Show your bus ticket in the cafe for a 10% discount.

Bus 25 from the station or city centre runs frequently to UEA and stops close to the Sainsbury Centre. It passes the huge square keep of Norwich Castle, which reopened last year after a £27.5m renovation project. There are sound-and-light shows on the old stone walls of the Great Hall and a £2.50 twilight ticket if you visit an hour before closing time.

Wildlife watching in the Lakes

The mossy, fern-fringed waterfalls at Aira Force are 45 minutes on bus 508 from Penrith station. The route runs beside Ullswater with views across the lake to bracken-cloaked Hallin Fell. It’s one of the trips in a new book on Where to Watch Wildlife in Britain By Low-Carbon Transport, along with 100 other car-free trips to nature-rich sites across the UK.

Look out for dippers, dragonflies and red squirrels. The area offers varied and spectacular walks, such as a pushchair- and mobility scooter-friendly stroll through the woods at Pooley Bridge or a hike up Gowbarrow Fell.

A man claims an airline tried to pressure him into giving up his business class seat so a parent could sit with their child – but he refused to play along and the youngster ended up sitting alone

A man has sparked a debate after refusing to give up his business class plane seat so a child could sit next to their parent. He explained how he had specifically booked his seat in advance to ensure he was as comfortable as possible during the flight.

But after a flight attendant noticed a child sitting alone in economy while their parent was in business class, they reportedly made it their mission to reunite the pair. Taking to Reddit, he said: “I was asked to move from a row of two so a parent and child could sit together, and I don’t feel guilty for declining, no matter how much the flight attendant and the parent tried to guilt me.

“I wasn’t going to take a downgrade to economy. But even if I was asked to change to a seat in the same class, I would refuse. When I have to fly, I choose the seat that I want. Or, in rare cases when there are no assigned seats, I choose the best seat that’s available.”

He argued that parents should pay the extra cost to ensure they are seated with their children, rather than relying on strangers to swap seats at the last minute.

He added: “I’m not moving just because someone else is a parent. If someone is travelling with a small child, they need to plan better.”

The man also criticised the airline’s handling of the situation, claiming staff tried to pressure him into giving up his seat without offering any compensation.

He said: “While I did complain to the airline about 1) being asked to downgrade to economy without a refund or any compensation – I still wouldn’t have moved, but being told I should help without getting a refund was upsetting – and 2) being guilted by the flight attendants because I refused, I don’t expect a response.

“In Canada, the airline is legally required to give a refund if you are downgraded, so being told I wouldn’t be compensated at all if I changed seats was wrong.

“I don’t know what ended up happening, but the seat next to me was empty during the flight and I got to sit alone.

“Just because I’m not a parent doesn’t mean I should have to move. I don’t care if not moving makes me a bad person.”

Commenting on the post, one user said: “I’m surprised you weren’t offered booze by the flight attendant.”

Another added: “Why didn’t they ask the person next to the child to upgrade so the parent could move to economy instead?”

A third wrote: “So the parent booked business class for themselves and economy for the child, hoping they could guilt someone into upgrading the child for free at their own expense. You did the right thing.”

The University of California Board of Regents is being asked to consider whether to bring back the SAT and ACT for admissions, a debate so hot even New York is weighing in on this Golden State dilemma.

Despite dire warnings from our right-coast friends and thousands (yes, thousands) of professors who claim incoming students lack necessary skills, I’m here to present a somewhat contrarian position, based on reality, common sense and one key fact that keeps getting shuffled to the side: California parents pay taxes so their California kids can attend these excellent schools, even if they can’t do advanced calculus.

UC is not Harvard, and was never meant to embody that type of self-perpetuating exclusivity disguised as a meritocracy. As the parent of two (hopefully) college-bound teens, I understand the resentment toward both the UC admission process and the post-pandemic, artificial intelligence mess that plagues our K-12 schools.

But at its best, this push to immediately bring back these tests is a disservice to both the mission of our public universities and the remaining classes of kids who lost learning during the pandemic. At worst, it is jumping on the misguided and retrograde anti-diversity, anti-inclusion bandwagon being led by the Trump administration — and pretending we don’t see where this caravan is headed.

Here’s the common sense: This isn’t a problem of scamming students or lazy teachers, though of course both exist. This is a problem with high schools, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Bringing back a test solves neither.

“For sure, these are systemic structural problems and inequalities,” Michal Kurlaender, the chancellor’s leadership professor of education policy at UC Davis, told me.

Still, the argument is that we are letting in the “wrong” candidates — those who lack academic skills that would solve for the derivative of f(x) = 3x² + 2x − 5 but who are desirable for other, perhaps invalid, reasons that our current admissions are favoring.

This narrative was given a rocket-fuel boost when UC math professors released an open letter demanding standardized tests be reinstated to weed out the unprepared students cluttering their classes. That letter has now been signed by more than 3,000 UC faculty.

Shockingly, the letter seems to be pushing for a return to standardized tests by, in effect, arguing that a growing percentage of their students are simply too stupid to succeed, no matter what professors do.

“UC has finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach,” the letter reads.

These “wrong” candidates are supposedly sneaking through the grueling admissions process with inflated grades and AI cheating (never mind their numerous Advanced Placement test scores, which are largely being ignored in this debate), and what some apparently believe is the foolish decision of administrators to emphasize an admissions process that goes beyond rankings, scores and grades.

The result of the unwelcome presence of these “wrong” admits in our elite academic halls is world-class professors being forced to teach beneath-them basics, and a diminishing of the reputation of our top schools — despite the fact that Berkeley was just rated the No. 1 public university in the country (UCLA is No. 2) and received a record 133,000 first-year applications in 2026.

Here’s that reality I mentioned: When we talk about wrong candidates, we are actually largely talking about race and socioeconomics (including the ever-squeezed middle class).

In California, where the Latino population is more than 40% and growing, our universities have increasingly pushed to serve this demographic and other “first-generation” or underrepresented college applicants. We have also significantly increased the number of students our universities accept, from all demographics.

It is useful to know that standardized testing was eliminated by the regents in a controversial 2020 vote, largely based on the idea that it was discriminating against this broader pool of students — though the data didn’t actually back that up.

In fact, a 19-person task force that investigated the issue found the opposite: that the tests were useful predictors of college success and could pluck diamonds in the rough out of otherwise average applications — when used as one factor among broader admissions criteria.

Wait, what?

Then why am I against returning to these tests? Because the part of that report we are ignoring is that it also found that the University of California can do better than the SAT or the ACT. Saul Geiser, a UC Berkeley professor and a top expert on this issue, says the task force report was flawed because it failed to account for factors including family income and parent education. He calls the SAT “antithetical” to the mission of UCs and says that it is an “illusion” to think bringing them back would do anything but hurt diversity.

“Unlike private Ivy League colleges, public universities must strive to serve all sectors of the state and all segments of the population,” he told me. “The SAT, with its strong correlation with inherited privilege, is a major barrier to achieving that mission.”

The task force originally suggested that California create its own, alternative test by 2025 that would go beyond math and English to measure the persistence, resilience and determination that have always been the markers of success, in college and in life.

The pandemic and costs killed off that project, but our new era of AI has made it more possible than ever. Li Cai, a UCLA professor who was on the task force and who serves as the director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, told me that he supports bringing back standardized testing and that the test-blind decision process is a “failed” experiment — even though he voted for it six years ago.

But he also still supports a test designed by the UC system for the UC system — a test that could be free, available to take anytime at your school or local library as many times as you want, and that gives continuous feedback so students can better see their weaknesses and prepare.

“My vision has not really changed very much,” Cai told me. “A public university, a prominent one like the UC … has almost an obligation to not let the private sector take the charge in terms of intellectual leadership.”

On top of that hesitancy about the real effects of returning to the SAT is the fact that not all UC professors agree it is impossible for lacking students to catch up. Björn Birnir is the chair of the Mathematics department at UC Santa Barbara, and one of only two math chairs in the system who did not sign the open letter.

He told me that Santa Barbara sees the same deficiencies in math, especially in non-math majors, but it has found an effective way to deal with it that doesn’t involve slashing admissions based on test scores.

When students don’t have the basic skills, they are sent to the nearby community college, often over the summer, to catch up. They usually come back, he said, ready for the rigor he expects.

“These problems, they have to be addressed, but you don’t address them by reinstating the SAT,” Birnir said. “Just shutting the door is not really the best solution. We think the best way is to have a path for these students to make up deficiencies.”

Problem solved.

Bringing back the SAT may satisfy frustrated professors and parents, but it is a test that can never contend with the complicated reality of our state universities: We want them to be both world-class and a pathway for our imperfect, still-recovering kids to achieve their dreams, even if it involves summer school.

This village in the Cotswolds has been named the world’s most beautiful village in a Forbes-featured ranking, with its honey-slicked cottages and River Coln setting beating Mediterranean destinations

Travel lovers have awarded this charming village with cobbled streets a top spot as the most picturesque village on the planet.

Now a thriving tourist destination, Forbes crowned the Cotswolds settlement as the most beautiful village in the world, giving Mediterranean coastal hotspots a real run for their money.

While England has no shortage of stunning landscapes, from the rugged beauty of the Lake District to the sweeping coastlines of Cornwall, the Cotswolds continues to attract visitors from across the globe with its fairytale villages and quintessentially English charm.

Yet it’s one particular village that has truly made a name for itself. Forbes, in partnership with Unforgettable Travel Company, revealed the 50 most stunning villages in the world — and placed Bibury firmly at the top.

The publication wrote: “Bibury unfurls like a watercolour dream-where honey-slicked cottages line Arlington Row; their mossy roofs whispering tales of 14th-century weavers. The River Coln murmurs gently here-weaving through golden buttercups and forget-me-nots, while plump ducks paddle lazily beneath canopies of willow.”

Visitors travel from all corners of the globe to admire these honey-coloured cottages and sweeping willow trees, located just a 15-minute drive outside of Cirencester. However, locals are increasingly vocal about the issue of overtourism, as thousands descend upon the tiny village during peak season.

Residents are calling for greater action to preserve the peaceful and intimate atmosphere that makes the area so beloved in the first place. Nestled on the banks of the River Coln, Bibury is steeped in history and natural beauty, with the cottages on Arlington Row dating back as far as 1380.

Today, the village’s character is safeguarded by the National Trust, who own most of the properties along the row, except for two that are now operated as holiday lets.

The historic row was subsequently transformed into weavers’ cottages during the 17th century and has remained unchanged ever since. Their characteristics appear to be straight from a storybook, and their location beside the meadow, which is inhabited by water-loving plants and birds, feels like something from a fantasy novel.

One visitor shared their thoughts on Tripadvisor, saying: “Quintessential English rural scene. Okay, we were one of the many tourists doing the same thing in admiring the buildings, but it didn’t spoil our time.

“We managed to park nearby for free, and the walk by the beautiful clear river is all part of the experience. Worth a visit.”

With nature forming the essence of this small village, many choose to visit England’s oldest trout farm, Bibury Trout Farm, where they can wander the grounds and observe vibrant wildlife. Tucked away within the village, this is a destination where you can catch a fish, hire a barbecue, enjoy a round of Crazy Golf, or simply relax in the welcoming onsite cafe.

One visitor who made the trip to the farm wrote: “We had such a fun trip at Bibury Trout Farm! The grounds were beautifully maintained, everything was clean, and the trout fishing and BBQ experience were fantastic.

“The staff were incredibly friendly, and we really appreciated the effort they made to make our visit enjoyable. Highly recommend it!”.

Should you be considering a day out to Bibury, it’s worth planning your parking arrangements ahead of time to avoid causing unnecessary disruption to the village. Where possible, experts advise visiting during the off-peak season and mid-week to ensure a more relaxed experience.

SACRAMENTO — When attorney Janice Rogers Brown left her job as Gov. Pete Wilson’s legal adviser last year to become a justice on the state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal, she cashed out the vacation, personal leave and holiday time accumulated in her years in state service.

Her unused 138 days off were converted into a lump sum payment of $52,359 when she moved to the judiciary, according to payroll records obtained from the state controller’s office.

“When I was in the governor’s office, I didn’t get much time off,” said Brown, who had earlier worked for the state attorney general.

The jurist was one of thousands of state employees who accumulate their vacations–and eventually cash them out–rather than use them.

While there is no question that they are entitled to the money–courts have ruled that the time is a vested right–the vast accumulation of vacation and leave time represents a sizable liability for state government.

As of June 30, California taxpayers owed their government employees more than $1.1 billion in accumulated vacation time, according to a controller’s office estimate.

And the amount is growing.

“We have given leave time as a benefit when we didn’t have cash,” said Patricia Pavone, chief of benefits and training for the state Department of Personnel Administration. “Now it’s coming back to haunt us. It’s borrowing in the future. Instead of a liability in 1991, we have it in 2001 in higher dollars when people retire.”

State policies that put a cap on the amount of leave time that can be accrued and eventually cashed out are not observed uniformly. A department computer survey of 72,000 state employee records found that 6,665 had accumulated vacation and leave time in excess of their limits.

More than 100 employees have accrued the equivalent of half a year’s pay or more, according to the study, and one unidentified individual has saved up more than 2,000 hours–the equivalent of a year’s pay.

As Pavone and others point out, unused leave time is cashed out at a worker’s final salary, which in most cases has risen with cost of living adjustments and promotions.

“The system is far too generous,” said one former high-level executive branch appointee, who cashed out a sizable amount of accumulated time when he left government. He asked not to be identified. “If you added the state holidays, the floating holidays, the annual leave hours, you can accumulate enormous amounts of time. You can take a reasonable or small amount of vacation and leave state service and have an enormous accumulation.”

Official state policy and negotiated employee contracts set the maximum at 50 days of vacation time, or 80 days for employees who decide to forgo sick days in exchange for a more generous “annual leave” system.

In contrast, federal government policy allows workers to carry only 30 days of accrued leave time into the next year. And several states also have a 30-day limit, including Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Washington, according to a survey conducted by Workplace Economics Inc. of Washington, D.C.

Many private businesses along with the federal government take a “use it or lose it” approach to vacation time, limiting their future liability by putting a cap on the amount that an employee can carry over into the next year.

However, California is legally unable to enforce its relatively generous limits, officials say. To take away excess time that has not been used at the end of the year would require a change in state law and would be subject to labor negotiations, said Pavone’s boss, personnel administration director David J. Tirapelle.

Instead, supervisors are supposed to sit down with their employees and set up vacation schedules that will ensure that vacation time is used.

“We want employees to take their vacations,” said Department of Personnel Administration spokeswoman Shirley McCall. “It’s there to use, not to accumulate for financial purposes.”

Generally, the higher the employees’ rank in the bureaucracy, the more likely that they will exceed the cap, department statistics show.

The highest ranking employees, people such as the governor’s former legal adviser, Justice Brown, say they find it almost impossible to get away for more than a few days at a time because of the demands of their jobs.

And career employees in certain departments–Emergency Services, Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol–find it difficult to use up their time as fast as they accumulate it.

When four ranking Highway Patrol officers left their jobs last year–to retire or because of disability–they took with them lump sum payments totaling $245,800 in vacation and compensatory time.

For example, former chief deputy Harry T. Adair cashed out 46 weeks of accumulated time worth $82,894.

Lynn Newquist, commander of personnel services for the CHP, said her agency tries to comply with state policy. “The commanders review vacation and annual leave balance usually around June 1 of each year and usually encourage employees to plan on time off,” she said.

But a broad exception to the state leave policy is made to allow for natural emergencies and public calamities, she said. And the unused time can accumulate quickly.

New state employees start earning as much as 16.5 days off a year–10.5 days of vacation plus six additional days if they decide to trade sick days, which cannot be cashed out, for added “annual leave” days.

After the third year, they begin to earn 22.5 days of leave time annually. The amount of annual leave time continues to climb in increments to a maximum of 30 days after 25 years.

Few private employers have been quite so magnanimous with benefits, according to a 1993 survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Only one in 10 companies surveyed offered their workers more than 20 vacation days off each year–even after 20 years of service.

And in an effort to balance the state budget during California’s lean recession years, state workers in 1991 were given one additional day off a month in exchange for a 5% pay cut. For most workers, the additional days were given for a year and a half, until the pay cut was restored. For many of the governor’s appointees, however, the pay cut remains in place, and they continue to accumulate the added time. (This added leave time does not count toward the state’s 80-day limit.)

“The theory is since we couldn’t give them a pay raise, we should give them a day off instead,” said Wilson press secretary Paul Kranhold.

But large numbers of state workers simply banked the time, waiting for the day when they would leave government service and cash it out.

There are a number of reasons why state workers find it easy to accumulate leave time rather than use it.

For one, the state is generous with paid holidays–13 per year. Only six other states observe that many, according to the Workplace Economics survey.

And many have been able to accumulate large amounts of compensated time off–or “comp time”–for working extra hours or on weekends. This is time that they can use in place of leave time for their vacations.

The top salaried state employees, including the governor’s top appointees and attorneys, are generally not eligible for comp time, although exceptions can be made in recognition of several days of unusually arduous work, said Edmund Brehl, labor relations counsel for the Department of Personnel Administration.

But this year the state auditor reported that a number of supervisors, managers and attorneys working for the Department of Fish and Game and the legal division at the Department of Transportation had been banking sizable amounts of comp time, in violation of state policy. The employees were using the time instead of vacation leave. One unnamed Caltrans attorney had banked almost a half a year’s worth of comp time–the equivalent of $43,891, the auditor’s report said.

Other Caltrans employees have been allowed to accumulate vacation time far in excess of state limits.

When former Caltrans district director Jerry B. Baxter left his $85,900-a-year post in Los Angeles last year for a top-paying job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he cashed out his vacation time.

The 161 days of leave time that he had accumulated in his 35 years with the department entitled him to a lump sum payment of $56,730.

Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said part of the problem has been downsizing the agency. “As we’ve been reducing the size of the department, the opportunity for other people to take vacation time gets reduced,” he said.

Top employees at other departments say they find they cannot break away for prolonged vacations. Charles S. Poochigian, the governor’s former appointments secretary, said he rarely was able to get away for a vacation for more than a few days at a time while working for Wilson or for Gov. George Deukmejian.

“I’m not claiming I was overworked and underpaid,” said Poochigian, who last year ran successfully for the Assembly from Fresno. “I think the compensation was quite good given the job opportunity and satisfaction. But there are few opportunities for time off when you work for the governor or the Speaker of the Assembly, people at that level.”

Last year, Poochigian said he used up leave time in his successful campaign for the Legislature. But he still had enough left over after seven years of government service to receive a lump sum of $26,770 for his unused time.

When James W. Robinson left his job as Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s communications director last year, he cashed out his remaining vacation time–118 days and six hours–for $45,384. He had accumulated the time over more than a decade in government, starting under Gov. Deukmejian.

In a recent interview, Robinson told a reporter: “If you’re suggesting that a person in a relatively high-level, high-pressure job can quickly accumulate a lot of time that can then be cashed out in what sounds like big amounts, that’s absolutely right. That’s the way the system is set up.”

Gray Atkins has made a return to EastEnders as Toby-Alexander Smith reprises his iconic villainous role. He was last seen in the Square back in 2022

Gray Atkins has made a return to EastEnders as Toby-Alexander Smith reprises his iconic villainous role.

The villain was last seen in Albert Square in 2022 when he was sent to prison for murdering Chantelle Atkins, Kush Kazemi and Tina Carter. The serial killer has not been seen since, with Toby-Alexander Smith now reprising his role for a short stint.

Speaking about his return, he said: “It’s been very surreal returning to EastEnders and stepping back into Gray’s shoes.

“He’s one of the most complex characters I’ve had the opportunity to play and revisiting him after several years has been an exciting challenge to get my teeth into. Exploring who Gray is now has been, fascinating, and I’m excited for the audience to see this version of him and watch the storyline play out.”

Gray is currently serving a life sentence in prison but needs the help of his grandmother Sheila (Sheila Ruskins) to get close to ex-wife Chelsea Fox after Jordan’s harrowing accident.

With motives still unclear, there’s trouble ahead but what does Gray want?