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June 26 (UPI) — Authorities in Paris implemented restrictions on drinking in public and takeout alcohol sales on Friday for the second time in five days, amid one of the most severe June heat waves on record.

In an effort to reduce stress on the capital’s hospitals, public consumption of alcohol will be banned from noon through 7 a.m. Saturday, local time, and from noon on Saturday through 7 a.m. on Sunday, and can only be sold in bars and restaurants between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m on both days.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said the health alert level was being raised to its highest, to boost hospital staffing and protect the vulnerable while Paris police chief Patrice Faure said the the capacity of hospitals to cope was “reaching a saturation point.”

“As you know, drinking alcohol with the sun beating down can have a devastating effect,” said Faure.

The bans coincided with a France-Norway game at the FIFA World Cup in Boston, due to kick off in the early hours of Saturday, local time.

Paris Pride, which was due to run Thursday through Sunday, was moved to September, and the Solidays music festival, scheduled to be held over the same period, was canceled because police felt going ahead with either amid the searing temperatures posed a major public health risk.

On Thursday, a three-year-old child died in a hot car in Saint-Gratien in the northern Paris suburbs.

As Paris baked in record temperatures that peaked at 40.9 degrees Celsius earlier in the week, Health Minister Stephanie Rist warned the health impacts of the heat were not restricted to the elderly, infants and other vulnerable groups.

“Even if you are young and in good health with no underlying medical issues, this heat will affect you too. Young people are also suffering from cardiac arrests,” she said, explaining that the Paris ambulance responded to a four-fold jump in cardiac arrests, compared with normal, during a 24-hour period.

Paris mayor Emmanuel Gregoire said the mortality rate was on the increase and urged people, especially the young, to suspend normal physical activity such as jogging.

“We must not believe we are invulnerable. It’s fine to take a couple of days off from exercising,” he said.

WASHINGTON  — Licensed gun owners have a right to carry a concealed firearm into stores and other private places unless the owner objects, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The 6-3 decision extends gun rights and strikes down laws in Hawaii, California, New York, New Jersey and Maryland.

Those measures would prohibit carrying guns onto private property that is open to the public unless the owner has expressly authorized them.

“This regime hobbles what the 2nd Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said for the court.

The new laws, if upheld, would “impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the state’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit. When these permit holders leave home in the morning, … they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”

The three liberals dissented, saying the law would protect property owners who don’t want guns in their stores.

“There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Trump administration lawyers had joined a coalition of Hawaii gun owners in urging the court to strike down these blue state laws in the case of Wolford vs. Lopez.

They said the laws, if enforced, would mean “a person carrying a handgun for self-defense commits a crime by entering a mall, a gas station, a convenience store, a supermarket, a restaurant or a coffee shop.”

This litigation is part of much broader debate over where guns may be permitted or prohibited.

Four years ago, the justices ruled that law-abiding persons had a right to obtain a permit to carry a concealed gun when they left home. They also agreed there are “sensitive places” where guns may be prohibited, such as schools, courts and other government buildings.

In response, lawmakers in California and Hawaii adopted their own lists of “sensitive places.” They imposed restrictions on concealed weapons at parks, beaches, playgrounds, places of worship and public transit as well as bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Gun owners sued but the 9th Circuit Court refused to block most of those restrictions in a single 83-page opinion covering Hawaii and California. Both states would prohibit carrying guns onto private property open to the public without the owner’s consent.

The 9th Circuit upheld that measure in principle but said California went too far by requiring the owner to post a prominent sign expressly authorizing guns.

“While today’s ruling in Wolford is disappointing, owners still have every right to decide whether firearms are allowed in their stores and businesses,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment Litigation at Everytown Law. “The Supreme Court may have changed the default rule, but it cannot take away a private property owner’s authority over their own land.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition said the court had properly protected gun rights and barred states from carving out their “own regional version of the 2nd Amendment.”

“The historical record does not support forcing peaceable people to obtain advance permission before carrying for self-defense in places held open to them,” the group said.

Last week, the court upheld gun rights in a Texas case and said the government may not make it a crime for an “unlawful user” of a drug such as marijuana to own a gun.

For as long as I’ve been a journalist, which is a really long time, public entities have hated public records requests, even while claiming they don’t.

Ask your typical elected or hired official, from the governor to the animal control folks, and they’ll tell you transparency is vital and sunshine in government a key value.

Then turn in the most benign of public records requests — access to a calendar, for example — and prepare for weeks of delays and excuses. Want emails or financial records or, heaven forbid, anything from the police? Months or even years may pass before a single page is delivered, no joke.

That’s why I am deeply concerned about a bill winding its way through the California Legislature that would definitely slow down public records requests and likely make them more difficult and expensive. At its worst, it could push people into costly court battles just for having the audacity to ask for information.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 1821, is authored by Democratic Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, whose district includes Norwalk, Downey and Bell, where legendary scandals are Example 1 of why public records matter.

Pacheco’s office told me Wednesday that the troubles with the bill are far from what Pacheco set out to do.

“It was never the author’s intention to take away people’s rights to a [Public Records Act] request,” said her chief of staff, Nikki Johnson.

Johnson said the bill was meant to curtail malicious records requests, which do happen, where a citizen goes after copious amounts of records just to be a jerk and cost the government time and money.

It was also meant to address the growing problem of artificial intelligence and other for-profit businesses requesting thousands of records with the intent of using the information to create money-making products — think of sites that already sell publicly available personal information as “background checks.”

I believe Johnson on the good intentions of the bill in addressing those real if nebulous difficulties, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans.

The bill passed through the Assembly recently with ease, largely because most of its problematic portions (I’ll get to those in a minute) were removed — though not all. Even in a watered-down form, which basically gave government more time to answer requests, I found myself in the unlikely position of agreeing with conservative Republican Assemblymember and Trump supporter Carl DeMaio of San Diego, who offered some of the only opposition from elected leaders during the Assembly vote.

“We cannot police the public’s right to know, and we want to err on the side of transparency in how government agencies operate,” DeMaio said.

Amen, brother.

But the Democratic-controlled Assembly erred on the side of secrecy and slowdown instead, and the measure sailed to the Senate, where seemingly out of the blue, a bunch of new provisions were added that fill it with loopholes, vague language and tons of room for abuse.

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said the bill as written now was “comprehensively bad for transparency and therefore for government accountability.”

Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics and accountability program manager for the advocacy organization California Common Cause, put it even more forcefully. He pointed out that “public records are the public’s records.”

“They’re not owned by the government,” he said. But this bill would shift that paradigm and make the public “prove why you need them.”

“It’s going to chill people who want to make requests, and it’s going to complicate the process, and it’s just wrong,” McMorris said.

In its new form, the bill basically allows government entities to decide if they feel a public records request is malicious or for commercial gain. If they do, they can petition a court to intervene — potentially sparking both legal costs and new fees associated with fulfilling the request.

It would also, Snyder said, force a requester to explain why they wanted the records — something California law has repeatedly avoided because it gives power to government to treat those it perceives as enemies differently.

In this age of fairness and reason, it’s hard to imagine a government official misusing power to keep secrets, but I’m told it happens. That makes it all the more crucial that people not be forced to explain why they want information, or if they will use it to, say, expose corruption — be it wrongdoing by a single individual or the entire system.

Faced with unintended consequences, Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey), shown in 2023, will seek to scale back the bill to its original form, according to her chief of staff.

(Rich Polk / Getty Images for Equality California)

“I have little doubt that some agencies will use that provision to overburden requesters that they view as political opponents, requesters that they view as just a hassle, requesters that ask for things the government doesn’t want to disclose,” Snyder said. “They can bring the requester into court, and at a minimum, slow down the process, and probably more likely get the requester to simply withdraw.”

As written, the bill also gives a shoddy carve-out meant to protect journalists, but which in reality could be used to curtail requests from freelancers, student journalists and more.

McMorris said access to public records is a “moral issue,” and fixing any problems with the current law requires “a scalpel, not a meat ax.”

This bill, he warned, is a meat ax.

“I don’t discount that there are abusive requests, and that there are requests that really are a burden on government agencies, but the law right now has ways for government agencies to address that,” he pointed out. “Once these laws go into place, they’re going to be hard to roll back.”

It could “fundamentally change” our access to public records, he said.

Johnson, Pacheco’s chief of staff, told me that faced with all these unintended consequences, the Assembly member is going to ask for the amendments to be removed, and for the bill to progress as it was written when it passed the Assembly. That could happen as early as next week, when the bill with the new provisions is scheduled to come up again in a Senate committee for debate.

Reverting to the bill the Assembly voted on would be better, but slowing down public records is in government’s best interests, not the people’s. The bill does nothing to address the problems it seeks to fix, but stretches out the time officials have to simply tell a requester if any records do exist — never mind delivering them.

So even back to its watered-down form, the bill remains a meat ax for a scalpel problem, chopping up transparency with good intentions.

WASHINGTON — Bobby Ray Inman’s bizarre withdrawal as the defense secretary nominee provides a glimpse into a peculiar Washington phenomenon–the insider who has spent so long behind the scenes that he is unprepared for the glare of the public limelight.

For more than 20 years, first as a Navy admiral and later as director of the National Security Agency and then deputy CIA director, Inman was part of a cadre of people who exercise great power in government but are insulated from the give-and-take of daily political life.

Inman’s remarks in announcing his withdrawal Tuesday and interviews with some of his friends suggest that the retired admiral was unequipped to step into the public arena. Despite his stated reasons, that lack of exposure to public life has emerged as the most plausible explanation for Inman’s abrupt turnabout.

“We thought: ‘He’s an insider–he probably knows the rules of the game.’ But he didn’t,” said Stephen H. Hess, a Brookings Institution political analyst. “We were all caught off guard by that.”

William Safire, the New York Times columnist accused by Inman of mounting unfair attacks, said Wednesday that he suspects Inman withdrew because he and other journalists were working on stories that might have damaged Inman’s chances for winning confirmation.

In his column appearing today, Safire wrote that Inman might have been worried by probes into reports that Inman had used a source on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff to help “manipulate” unsuspecting senators during Inman’s time at the CIA.

Inman had blamed a “new McCarthyism” in the press and the threat of a “partisan attack” by Republicans for his decision, but the media coverage and the GOP were overwhelmingly favorable toward him.

There were other ingredients as well: By Inman’s own admission, he did not thirst for the post. “I did not want a job in Washington,” he said in an interview.

He said he accepted Clinton’s offer because, as a career military officer, he found it difficult to refuse a presidential request.

Friends suggest that Inman’s longtime insecurities, apparently stemming from his days as a clumsy, bespectacled youngster, may have played a part by prompting him to overreact to fears that his reputation was being besmirched.

Inman’s experience is not unique in Washington politics. Others who have made the transition–notably Dwight D. Eisenhower, who went from five-star general to President, have had similar adjustments to make, although Eisenhower managed it more deftly.

Being an admiral or general provides a degree of insulation that often is a handicap for a would-be politician. Few are willing to criticize a senior military officer, especially in public.

And someone who has spent the bulk of his career as an intelligence officer is even more protected. By nature, the chiefs of the nation’s intelligence agencies stay in the background, even while advising presidents, briefing congressional leaders and influencing policies.

Especially during the Cold War, the bulk of their contact with the outside was behind closed doors–with lawmakers or reporters respectfully grateful for any morsel of information they were given.

Inman’s circumstances, and his own talents, accustomed him to receiving nothing but plaudits. Presidents, lawmakers and even the press praised him lavishly, extolling his brilliance and wisdom. Hardly an unkind word was to be found.

What Inman actually had to face during his few short weeks as defense secretary-designate was mild:

* A potential flap over his failure to pay Social Security taxes for a housekeeper peaked a few hours after it was announced, leaked by the White House to head off any serious brouhaha. The issue had been a major element in toppling two candidates for top Justice Department posts.

* News stories, backed up by bankruptcy records, noted his mixed performance in various business ventures. The articles were brought on mainly by Inman’s statements that he planned to bring more business techniques to government.

As Inman eventually admitted, the only real criticism came from a handful of columnists. News coverage and most editorials were heavy with praise; Inman said Tuesday that the working press had treated him fairly.

Inman did “more to besmirch his own reputation in his press conference than the press or the Republicans ever did,” Hess said. “Most people think his response bordered on the bizarre.”

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), whom Inman accused–apparently without foundation–of spearheading a GOP attack against him, offered perhaps the unkindest cut of all:

“I think it’s probably a break for President Clinton that he didn’t get the job, the way he carried on yesterday,” the senator said Wednesday on CBS-TV’s “This Morning” program, in a view shared by some White House aides.

Times staff writer James Risen contributed to this story.

June 21 (UPI) — The Russian government on Sunday halted fuel sales to civilians and businesses not considered vital to functioning and security in Crimea.

Sergey Aksyonov, the governor of Crimea, announced people would be turned away from gas stations amid a fuel shortage and logistical difficulties related to the war with Ukraine, the BBC reported.

“Further decisions regarding the current situation in the republic’s fuel market will be announced at a later date,” he said in a post on Telegram.

The announcement came amid new attacks by Ukraine on energy and transportation infrastructure on the Crimean Peninsula, Politico reported. Russia illegally annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, and it has been at the center of fighting between the two countries ever since.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russia’s energy supply in an effort to hobble its defenses and ability to transport troops and machinery. Fuel facilities in the Kerch Strait in Russia’s Krasnodar region have also been attacked.

Aksyonov said a Ukrainian drone attack on an oil depot in Kerch killed four people and injured 28.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack was a “just response to Russia’s brutal attacks.”

“Russia understands only strength, and our long-range strength is certainly working for peace,” he wrote in a post on X.

June 21 (UPI) — French police issued a ban on certain alcoholic drinks Sunday amid unusually high temperatures coinciding with one Paris’ largest street parties.

The order banned people from consuming certain high-alcohol content drinks after 8 a.m. Sunday along areas of Canal Saint-Martin and along riverside zones along the Seine.

Businesses were also banned from selling takeaway drinks after 1 p.m., with exemptions for restaurants and bars, Politico reported.

Paris hosts the Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) one of its largest street festivals, Sunday. Free concerts are held throughout the city, and residents are encouraged to play music outside in public spaces and neighborhoods.

This year’s festival is taking place during a heatwave that could see temperatures break 100 degree Fahrenheit in the coming week. The country issued Level 1 and Level 2 heat alerts Sunday for an area encompassing about 75% of its population.

“Very high temperatures are setting in for the long term,” the national meteorological service, Météo-France said, as cited by The Guardian. The agency said the heat would be of “exceptional severity and duration” and will likely break records.

Officials also put wildfire crews on alert in case of fire, and canceled some outdoor events. Some locations in France canceled concerts scheduled to take place before 7 p.m.

A new commission made up of legislators, public defenders, academics and advocates seeks to push California — one of just two states that don’t pay for basic public defense — to begin providing resources and enforcing minimum standards for county public defender systems.

The California Independent Commission on Public Defense includes three assemblymembers and two senators — among them Jesse Arreguín and Nick Schultz, chairs of the Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committees — as well as chief public defenders from several counties, retired judges, the directors of criminal justice nonprofits, and the heads of organizations representing thousands of defense attorneys in the state.

“We have discussed the problem of our public defense system for years,” said Schultz, a Democrat from Burbank and former prosecutor who has sponsored legislation to improve public defense.

The goal is to “move past discussion and study, and come up with an actionable road map of what we need to do to really build out the robust public defense infrastructure that Californians are rightfully entitled to,” he said.

The commissioners plan to develop a five-year plan to phase in state funding, along with enforceable standards like caseload limits and access to defense investigators.

A CalMatters investigation last year found that criminal defendants across the state are routinely convicted without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions. Many California counties do not employ a single defense investigator who can interview witnesses, review police reports, visit crime scenes and retrieve video surveillance footage. CalMatters also found that lawyers in some rural counties are handling caseloads that far exceed even the most permissive standards, making them less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge the prosecution’s evidence in legal motions and take their cases to trial.

But the state has resisted stepping in. After a proposed bill that would have created an official state commission to address the issue was abandoned, two advocacy groups, the Wren Collective and UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, decided to form an independent commission and began assembling participants who could develop and act on reforms. These types of commissions, which have facilitated significant improvements in other states’ public defender systems, are usually established by the governor.

“It became clear that this was an issue that was not a high priority for Sacramento, especially during a budget crisis,” said Chesa Boudin, the Berkeley center’s founding director and a former San Francisco district attorney. It also became clear, Boudin said, that “there was a tremendous gap between what experts understood to be the crisis and the public perception of California government as a kind of progressive leader in the country.”

In the decades since the U.S. Supreme Court established the right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings, California has saddled its counties with the responsibility of providing lawyers to poor people accused of crimes. Many of those counties have opted for the cheapest path: paying private lawyers and firms a flat fee to represent indigent defendants, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case.

“You’ve got some offices that have an incredibly high caliber of representation that they can provide, and you have other offices that are doing these flat-fee contracts where the quality has been documented to be pretty bad,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Primus is the only member of the new commission from outside of California. She was asked to join because of her extensive research and writing about the structure of indigent defense.

An indigent defense commission in Michigan, which was formed by the legislature in 2013, has led to significant reforms and a substantial influx in state funding.

The California commission’s work, Primus said, can serve “as a catalyst for political actors to do the right thing and start to fund and improve indigent defense delivery, or as fodder for lawsuits that then can try to get the judiciary to push the political actors to do what is necessary to provide for effective representation.”

The commission is scheduled to hold its first in-person meeting, which will be open to the public, in Berkeley in October, with additional meetings planned for Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Northern California over the next 12 months. Commissioners say they will work in subcommittees in between these quarterly sessions to develop a concrete fiscal plan for the state, draft legislative language, and establish minimum standards for how counties should structure their public defender offices, compensate their attorneys, provide access to experts, and report on their work.

Anat Rubin writes for CalMatters.

Published on
12/06/2026 – 17:57 GMT+2

The moment that Wall Street had anticipated all year arrived on Friday as SpaceX, the AI and aerospace company controlled by Elon Musk, began trading publicly on the Nasdaq in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of financial markets.

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In a speech before the New York session opened for trading, Musk stated that SpaceX’s goal is to “take the fiction out of science fiction.”

SPCX opened at $150, over 10% above its $135 IPO price, and it was already at more than $160 after the first few minutes of live trading.

The company confirmed on Thursday that it had priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, valuing the firm at roughly $1.78 trillion (€1.54trn) and targeting a raise of $75 billion (€64.5bn) that instantly eclipsed Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion (€25.4bn) listing, which had stood as the global record for almost seven years.

Only around 3% to 4% of SpaceX shares are currently available for public trading.

The company earmarked as much as 30% of its offering for retail investors, including 10% dedicated to European buyers, but the final amount was set at 20%. As for options contracts on SPCX, they are scheduled to begin trading next week.

The IPO has also brought Elon Musk closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

Forbes valued his pre-IPO SpaceX stake, estimated at around 42% of the company, at about $500bn (€435bn). At the IPO valuation, those holdings are worth roughly $690bn (€600bn), adding nearly $190bn (€165bn) to his fortune and pushing his net worth closer to the $1tn (€870bn) milestone.

Along with Musk, thousands of SpaceX employees are benefitting from the IPO and becoming millionaires.

The listing will give millions of savers indirect exposure to SpaceX as the company is expected to qualify for major stock market indexes shortly after its debut, meaning its shares could be automatically purchased by index-tracking funds.

SpaceX is estimated to be fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100 in less than a month, as opposed to a typical wait of as much as a year.

Nasdaq’s new fast-entry rule, introduced in May, now sees it evaluating newly listed stocks for potential entry ‌by ranking ⁠their market capitalisation on the seventh trading day and assessing whether they would rank within the top 40 index members.

SpaceX is already in the top 10.

Among other changes announced, the rule that requires companies to float a minimum of 10% of their shares was also scrapped.

Analysts estimate that funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 will be required to purchase at least $7bn (€6bn) worth of SpaceX shares around the inclusion date, creating a wave of mechanical demand.

SpaceX has also already become eligible for inclusion in both the Russell US Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series under the newly announced fast-entry rules from the index provider FTSE Russell.

The S&P 500, however, will not adopt a similar fast-track approach.

S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed in early June that it would maintain its 12-month seasoning requirement and GAAP profitability test, meaning SpaceX will not join the index before mid-2027.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

This article does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research and invest according to your specific circumstances.

June 8 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company OpenAI confidentially filed for an initial public offering Monday, becoming the third in a well-known trio of U.S. AI companies to do so in the past few weeks.

Rival AI company Anthropic filed for an IPO on June 1, and SpaceX (which merged with xAI, also owned by Elon Musk) filed in late May. SpaceX’s debut is set for Friday. All three are expected to be very lucrative for early investors, as they have valuations around $1 trillion, Axios reported.

OpenAI said in a post that there has been no decision on the IPO’s timing yet.

“It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the post said.

The company has had both successes and trials in recent months, CNN reported. Musk lost a lawsuit against it in mid-May because of the statute of limitations, and the company has expanded ChatGPT options and other AI tools and programs.

However, the company and founder/CEO Sam Altman are also facing lawsuits because of ChatGPT’s role in recent shootings and other issues. Florida announced last week that it is suing the company and Altman, claiming the company chose “profits over public safety” in creating a dangerous product in the form of ChatGPT. The state also has an ongoing criminal investigation into the company.

Individuals including the family members of those killed or injured in a recent school shooting have also sued, saying that the company should have warned authorities about the shooter’s interactions with ChatGPT.

The pontiff praises Madrid as a beacon of inclusion as about 1.2 million people gather for Sunday mass.

An oceanic crowd has filled the streets of the Spanish capital Madrid with chants, cheers and applause to greet Pope Leo XIV on the second day of a weeklong apostolic journey to mainland Spain and the Canary Islands.

The Vatican and local organisers said about 1.2 million people braved the heat to be present in the landmark Cibeles Square on Sunday in what is expected to be the largest event during his visit to the country.

Throngs of people pressed along barriers near the square – best known as the rallying point for Real Madrid football fans celebrating the club’s titles – waving flags and shouting “Long live the pope”, as Leo arrived in his white popemobile for the event. Some tossed flower petals marking his arrival.

“May Madrid continue to be a welcoming and inclusive city, where social life is inspired by true human values,” the pontiff wrote in the guestbook as he was handed the key to the city by its mayor.

Leo began his trip on Saturday, ⁠meeting migrants and the homeless and attending a vigil with about 600,000 young people in Madrid. His June 6-12 visit also includes stops in Barcelona and the Canary Islands, where he will meet migrants and refugees who ⁠risked their lives crossing there from West Africa.

He said he hoped the visit, his first to a European Union country outside Italy, ⁠⁠would set an example to the world about respecting “every ⁠⁠human being” and urged leaders to stop dividing electorates.

“I am delighted that he is praying for us migrants and for our safety,” said Andrea Margarita, a 72-year-old Peruvian who arrived in Spain six months ago, as she ‌‌waited in the crowd in a wheelchair with her daughter.

After mass, Leo was scheduled to hold a private meeting with fellow members of his Augustinian religious order in ‌‌the afternoon ‌‌before meeting figures from the world of entertainment, sport and culture at a concert venue in central Madrid.

WASHINGTON — It was perhaps a surprising private overture from OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The meeting between the two had come just after the Vermont senator announced a plan for the public to take a 50% ownership stake in artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, using their stock to create a public wealth fund that would spread the fortune generated by AI behemoths.

Altman told Sanders that he, too, wants the public to have equity in AI companies. Though the CEO said he couldn’t support Sanders’ threshold of 50%, he nonetheless wanted to work with him to advocate for the general idea, according to people with knowledge of the conversation.

The nearly hourlong meeting in Sanders’ Senate office this week, held at Altman’s request, highlighted the inherent tension between AI powerhouses and policymakers as Americans are increasingly asked to accept the costs of the AI boom even as many remain unconvinced of its direct benefits. Yet it’s also creating odd political bedfellows fueled by populism as politicians from Sanders to President Trump embrace giving the public a stake in AI’s growth.

Speaking to reporters Friday on Air Force One, Trump described a potential partnership “where the American people can benefit from the success of AI” and said executives from leading AI companies will visit the White House, perhaps in the coming week, to discuss the idea.

“There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” Trump said.

When reporters noted to the Republican president that Sanders, a democratic socialist and political independent, had proposed public ownership in AI companies, he pointed to similarities in their coalitions. The economic views of Trump voters and those who have supported Sanders for president, Trump said, “aren’t that far apart.”

Trump has embraced government investment in private companies in his second term, scrambling his party’s politics. His administration last year secured a 10% stake in the struggling Silicon Valley company Intel, and it considered a government takeover of Spirit Airlines earlier this year, although the airline couldn’t reach a deal and ultimately closed.

Public backlash

The positioning of leading figures such as Trump and Sanders comes as concerns about AI are emerging far beyond Washington.

In Michigan, Democrats recently clashed over Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s appearance with Altman at the site of a major data center. Candidates such as New York Democratic House candidate Alex Bores have also made AI regulation a campaign issue by tapping into voters’ unease about the technology.

“This is a real change to society,” Altman told reporters this week. “I think it’s possible both that people can use AI a lot and like using it and also have anxiety about what it’s going to do for the future.”

Data center projects across the country have drawn opposition from residents concerned about electricity demand, water consumption and environmental impacts. Some states once eager to attract the facilities, including Ohio and Virginia, have moved to reconsider tax incentives.

“We need to pass legislation right now that says there’s not going to be any further data center development until they agree to pay for their own electricity, build their own grids and pay for their own water supply,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a leading Republican skeptic of Big Tech, told the Associated Press.

Before arriving in Washington, Altman stopped in Michigan on Monday to appear alongside Whitmer, a Democrat, at the site of a 1.65 million-square-foot data center project. Whitmer’s team said the project will create more than 2,500 union construction jobs.

But it also drew criticism from local activists and some fellow Democrats, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who called the project “disgusting.” She said she was “so disappointed” in Whitmer.

“It’s a very controversial topic right now and it’s coming from the ground up,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, another Michigan Democrat, said about the grassroots resistance. “People feel very strongly about it.”

Whitmer defended her appearance, telling reporters afterward that “one thing’s very clear: Everyone has a cellphone in our pocket.”

“We are all, more and more, consuming technology and data, and these data centers are going to get built. So, my thought is if we can hold them to a high standard and do it in Michigan, that’s the best way to do it,” she said.

The tensions extend beyond data centers. On college campuses, commencement speakers have been interrupted by boos when discussing artificial intelligence. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Altman acknowledged those concerns. He said that while “the impact on jobs has been less than many people in our field expected,” he understands “that college students have a lot of anxiety about the future.”

Washington seeks an AI bargain

The idea that AI’s expansion is inevitable is increasingly shared by leaders across the political spectrum, even as they disagree sharply about how to manage it.

That reality was at the center of Altman’s conversations in Washington. In addition to Sanders, Altman met with Trump administration officials such as Michael Kratsios, the White House’s chief science and technology advisor, and congressional leaders from both parties.

Sanders’ team emphasized that the two did not reach an agreement on the main points that the senator made to Altman, including the 50% figure to ensure that the public has decision-making power. The senator also expressed opposition to the growing spending on elections by the AI industry.

“Unfortunately, Sam Altman did not commit to any of those,” Sanders spokesperson Jeremy Slevin said.

Altman, emerging from the conversation, described it as “great,” though noting that the two “obviously don’t agree on everything.”

How AI should be governed

Congress this week released a bipartisan framework that would establish the first broad federal approach to AI regulation while temporarily preempting many state laws.

Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s top competitors, has proposed mechanisms for coordinating pauses on advanced AI development if systems become too powerful.

The Trump administration has also begun constructing its own oversight structure, signing an executive order to establish a process for reviewing national security risks posed by advanced AI systems before their public release.

Sanders said he found the administration’s move notable after years of warnings that regulation could slow American innovation.

“Even these guys are beginning to catch on that there are legitimate concerns that have to be dealt with,” Sanders said.

Cappelletti and Kim write for the Associated Press.

Former Cuban president Raul Castro made his first public appearance in Havana since being indicted by the United States on murder charges linked to the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft. He was cheered at an event commemorating the Interior Ministry, attended by military officials and Cuba’s Olympic wrestling champion.

June 1 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic confidentially filed Monday for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining SpaceX and OpenAI in plans to go public this year.

“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” Anthropic said in a statement, CNBC reported. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

That makes three prominent companies with IPO plans in 2026. SpaceX plans to debut next week, while OpenAI is preparing to file. Anthropic’s filing did not give any further information on timing, but it could go public as soon as this fall, The New York Times reported.

Last week, Anthropic passed OpenAI in valuation, reporting $965 billion as opposed to OpenAI’s $852 billion reported in March, CNBC reported. The company, based in San Francisco, is the creator of the Claude chatbot and the Claude Mythos Preview AI model. It has a focus on software coding.

Anthropic’s founders left OpenAI in 2021 to found the new company after concerns about OpenAI’s direction. Anthropic leaders have stressed safety in the use of AI, which caused issues with the U.S. Department of Defense after the company wanted limits on military and intelligence usage of its products.

President Donald Trump then called it a “radical left, woke company” and ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products, while Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, called the company a supply chain risk to national security. Anthropic has sued the Trump administration to reverse the blacklisting, and that lawsuit is ongoing. Meanwhile, the company’s growth in the private sector has accelerated, CNBC reported.

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.

The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”

“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”

The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.

The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.

Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”

In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”

“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”

“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

Stephen Colbert’s viral public access spot had former bosses CBS and its parent company Paramount in a brief tizzy over the weekend, mere hours after his buzzy late-night sign-off.

The longtime TV personality, 62, returned to the air on Friday evening on “Only in Monroe,” a public access program in Monroe, Mich., with an hour-long late-night parody episode that featured several guests and took shots at Paramount’s monopolistic aspirations in media. Colbert, previously a one-time host of “Only in Monroe,” began his episode: “It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV, so I am grateful to be able to be here on Monroe Community before they also get acquired by Paramount.”

The “Only in Monroe” episode was broadcast in southeast Michigan, the Associated Press reported, and also published to Colbert’s official YouTube page. News of Colbert’s surprise late-night spot spread online, with social media users reposting the episode in its entirety or sharing clips. Journalist and the Desk founder Matthew Keys shared the episode to his X (formerly Twitter) page, tweeting on Sunday that he received a “frivolous” copyright notice from Paramount Global.

CBS said in a statement shared over the holiday weekend to multiple outlets that the “Only in Monroe” episode was “financed and produced by CBS Studios” and was posted on Colbert’s YouTube page through a collaboration with Monroe Community Media and Colbert’s “The Late Show” YouTube channels. The network, which was home to “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” for more than a decade, said in its statement that it is “regular practice” to copyright-strike “unauthorized websites” that repost its “copyrighted content,” but later added that it’s walking back its actions.

“For this episode, we have decided to waive further enforcement of this standard industry practice until additional review,” the statement said.

A representative for CBS did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment on Tuesday. A representative for Colbert also did not immediately respond.

Colbert’s guests on Friday included regular “Only in Monroe” hosts Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson, Emmy winners Jeff Daniels and Steve Buscemi, rapper Eminem (via video call) and White Stripes rocker Jack White. Friday’s broadcast ended with a literal bang, with Colbert, Daniels and White taking hammers to the talk show set and setting it ablaze.

“Since they are no longer using this set, it would actually be helpful for me to destroy it,” Colbert said, “which is pretty great news because right now — for no particular reason — I would very much like to break something.”

“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” ended its run at CBS after 11 seasons and more than 1,800 episodes. Colbert began his late-night talk series in 2015, succeeding David Letterman. CBS announced it was canceling “The Late Show” in July 2025, with chief executive George Cheeks claiming “this is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”

“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” Cheeks added at the time.

CBS announced it was parting ways with Colbert, a relentless critic of President Trump, after Paramount settled a lawsuit filed by Trump for $16 million. At the time, media mogul David Ellison’s Skydance Media was also awaiting federal approval to acquire Paramount for $8 billion. Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder, tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison.

Colbert ended his CBS tenure at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Thursday evening, joined by an impressive roster of celebrity guests including Paul Rudd, Bryan Cranston, Tim Meadows, Ryan Reynolds and Paul McCartney. The “Late Show” time slot now hosts media mogul Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” syndicated show.

After late night, Colbert revealed in March that his next project is co-writing a new “Lord of the Rings” movie with his screenwriter son Peter McGee. Even as Colbert begins a new chapter away from late night, work may bring him right back under the Paramount umbrella.

The new “Lord of the Rings” films, including Colbert’s project, will be produced by New Line and its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. David Ellison‘s Paramount Skydance is seeking a $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and its properties.

Times staff writers Greg Braxton and Meg James contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump had another medical exam Tuesday, putting his health under renewed public scrutiny as he has worked to dismiss concerns over his age and stamina.

The 79-year-old president spent more than three hours at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House described as preventive medical and dental checkups. It was Trump’s fourth publicly disclosed medical exam since he returned to office for a second term, and it comes as he tries to project strength ahead of midterm elections that will test his sway with voters.

In a social media post after the visit, Trump said he just finished his “6 month physical” and “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”

For decades, administrations have released selected results from presidential physicals, offering the public a glimpse at the commander in chief’s health. But the results are filtered through the White House and must be approved by the president, raising questions about what the public does and doesn’t get to see.

Trump turns 80 next month and was the oldest person elected president. His immediate predecessor, President Biden, was 82 when he left office, dropping out of the 2024 race because of widespread concerns he was too old for the job.

A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in April found that less than half of U.S. adults think Trump has the mental sharpness or physical health to serve effectively as president.

“I think concern for the president’s physical health is probably at an all-time high, and I think advanced physical age is the No. 1 concern,” said Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served as a White House physician for more than a decade under Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton.

For a president of Trump’s age, a complete physical would be expected to include advanced heart testing, screening for common cancers and a cognitive assessment, along with basics like height, weight and blood pressure, Kuhlman said.

The White House has not disclosed what the visit entailed but expressed confidence in what it will show.

“President Trump is the sharpest and most accessible President in American history who is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises, and he remains in excellent health,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.

No law requiring presidents to disclose medical records

In the weeks leading up to his visit, Trump has been saying he feels as good as he did five decades ago — even as he jokes about his fondness for fast food and his minimal exercise regimen. Yet he’s also sensitive to perceptions about his age, noting that he takes extra caution descending the steps from Air Force One to avoid headlines about a stumble.

There is no law requiring presidents to publicize their health records, and the degree of transparency has varied by administration. Trump’s past reports have been criticized for offering scant detail and providing statistics that some medical experts eyed with skepticism.

At public appearances, Trump often is seen wearing makeup to conceal bruising on his hands, which the White House attributes to handshaking and regular aspirin use. He sometimes has appeared drowsy during meetings and closed his eyes for long stretches, though he denies having fallen asleep.

Trump often boasts of having “aced” cognitive tests while frequently deriding Biden, who faced questions about his mental acuity. Biden and his aides pushed back aggressively against doubts raised about his fitness for office.

Some of Trump’s previous physicals have included the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, used to screen for dementia and cognitive impairment. His physicians reported a score of 30 out of 30 for him at 2018 and 2025 checkups.

Yet critics have pointed to Trump’s meandering speeches and sometimes bellicose rhetoric as evidence of cognitive decline.

Last month, a statement from more than 30 neurologists, psychiatrists and other medical experts — who acknowledged they’ve never examined him — said Trump was mentally unfit to serve and warned of an “increasingly dangerous decline” in his behavior based on what they called “objectively observable signs of serious medical concern.″

“Any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to,” Ingle said.

Just like any other patient, presidents get to choose what’s disclosed about their health, said Sara Rosenthal, a bioethicist at the University of Kentucky who studies presidential health. Questions about transparency have become more acute as America elects aging presidents like Trump and Biden, she said.

“We can expect very little disclosure about the true health status of any president unless they’re in perfect health,” said Rosenthal, who has suggested an independent medical organization to review and report on the health of the president and those in the line of succession.

‘Nothing should be hidden’

Trump’s first medical report in his second term was released in April 2025. In July, he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition in older adults that causes blood to pool in his veins. Photographs have shown the president with swollen feet, ankles and calves, described by the White House as a symptom of chronic venous insufficiency leading to “mild swelling” in his lower legs.

Following his last publicly disclosed exam, described as a routine follow-up in October, Trump’s physician issued a one-page summary saying the president was in “exceptional health” without divulging many specific results.

The frequency of Trump’s medical checkups is not uncommon for someone his age, according to S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois-Chicago, who has studied the health of past presidents. It’s part of a strategy to catch problems while they’re still treatable, Olshansky said.

Olshansky says the public deserves to see more than White House medical summaries that “may be subject to editorial discretion.” Full, unredacted medical records should be made public, he said. “Nothing should be hidden.”

Binkley writes for the Associated Press.

Homicides in Los Angeles are down to levels not seen since the 1960s. Neighborhoods once awash in gang violence now sometimes go weeks, even months, without a shooting. And the follow-home robberies and street takeovers that captured the public’s attention in recent years have largely subsided.

By many measures, the city is safer than it has been in generations — and yet voters following L.A.’s hotly contested mayoral race might think the opposite.

The challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have zeroed in on homelessness and public drug use to argue she hasn’t delivered on public safety, while also criticizing how the Police Department has operated and been funded during her tenure.

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member, said the fact that Spencer Pratt — the former reality TV star who has been attacking Bass from the right — has gained so much traction in the race is proof of how Bass and other candidates to the left have failed to change “prevailing narratives that the city is unsafe.”

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign block party on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20, 2026.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Pratt has been particularly active on social media, where he has shared artificial-intelligence videos created by fans depicting him as various superheroes coming to the rescue of a city that, under Democratic rule, has turned into a dystopian hellscape.

In a March 26 post on Substack, Pratt railed against the thousands of drug-related calls that emergency officials respond to every month. He has said that if elected mayor, he would order the police and fire chiefs and the county health director to “treat every encampment as a grave-disability zone.”

“No new laws needed,” he wrote. “No endless task forces.”

Flanking Bass on the left is Nithya Raman, a progressive City Council member who was once the mayor’s political ally.

Raman has argued that Bass has thrown too much money at the LAPD, with raises for police officers coming at the expense of other basic services such as park maintenance and street paving. Raman said the LAPD pay increases have “bankrupted” the city, depriving other services of much-needed funding. In campaign ads, Raman has cast herself as a more sensible alternative to Bass. Raman has said she would work to reduce traffic deaths and prioritize safety on the city’s buses and trains.

When she first ran for office in 2020, Raman called for defunding the police, saying the Los Angeles Police Department should be a “much smaller, specialized armed force.” Since then, however, she has voted for some budgets that increased spending on law enforcement.

In response to questions from The Times, Raman said she would work to find ways to overhaul public safety.

“I’ll propose budgets that expand unarmed response, work with LAPD to improve 911 response to more quickly answer calls for help that don’t require armed officers, and will appoint leadership at the Police Commission who will actively partner with the City Council to work on reform,” she said.

Representatives for Pratt and Bass didn’t respond to requests for interviews with the candidates.

Bonin said Bass — who supported various police reform measures while Congress — has shocked some of her supporters with how “aggressively pro-police she has been.”

When she ran for mayor in 2022, Bass vowed to retool the recruitment and hiring process in order to restore LAPD staffing to 9,500 officers. That hasn’t happened. The number of sworn officers recently fell below 8,600, despite Bass striking a deal with the police union to offer higher starting salaries and new retention bonuses.

Mayor Karen Bass takes part in a candidate forum on May 5, 2026, in Sherman Oaks.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

On Thursday, the City Council approved a $15-billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which included funds to hire 510 new officers — just enough to offset turnover and maintain current staffing levels.

Raman has said the LAPD should not shrink any further because there aren’t enough officers to respond to 911 calls “in a timely fashion.”

Samantha Stevens, a Los Angeles political consultant and former legislative staffer, said people seem willing to back Pratt because he acknowledges that their sense of safety has been shaken — even if he has offered few concrete details about how to tackle crime beyond cracking down on homelessness.

Pratt’s critics say that his plan relies on funneling homeless people into a shelter system that doesn’t have the capacity to handle them all. Others have noted that the aggressive tactics he has proposed would probably face legal challenges.

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, makes a campaign stop at the site of a home burned in the Palisades fire.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

“He’s kind of a case study in somebody who has a lot of opinions but has no idea of how the city is run,” Stevens said.

Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said Pratt seems to have tapped into a deep well of discontent among Angelenos who believe that crime and homeless have spiraled out of control. The challenge for Bass, he added, is that although the numbers suggest that crime has decreased, many people associate the sight of encampments spilling onto public sidewalks as “a breakdown” that indicates the city is becoming less safe.

“You want to go back to the days of Daryl Gates, you’ve got Pratt,” he said, referencing the former LAPD chief whose controversial police sweeps in the late 1980s yielded thousands of arrests while alienating large segments of South L.A.

“If you want more of the same from the past 20 years, you’ve got Bass,” Guerra added. “And if you want something new, then you’ve got Raman, but she has to explain what exactly she wants to do.”

Although Pratt and Raman appear to be the strongest challengers to Bass, several long-shot candidates have also made public safety a key issue in their campaigns. Some have gone after Bass for her support of LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. Hired by Bass in 2024, McDonnell has touted the impressive drop in crime under his leadership, but also faced criticism over an uptick in shootings by police and aggressive crowd control tactics during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Police Chief Jim McDonnell attends a news conference at LAPD headquarters on May 21, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Rae Huang, a minister and housing rights advocate, said if elected mayor she would immediately replace McDonnell with someone who has the “ability to really reimagine what public safety really looks like.”

“I’m the only one with the guts to say that out loud,” Huang told The Times during a recent campaign stop at a bookstore in the West Adams neighborhood.

In social media posts and interviews, Huang has frequently referred to the LAPD as “one of the biggest legal gangs in the world,” and said she would work on diverting money from the police budget to scale up programs that have shown promise in sending unarmed specialists to deal with emergencies that involve people experiencing mental health crises.

The city is already running two such pilot programs, but under Bass they have remained underfunded, Huang said. Last week, the City Council signed off on expanding one of the programs.

Huang said she would also invest more heavily in addressing the city’s lack of affordable housing, which she said is an underlying cause of crime and homelessness.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads against Huang and Raman.

Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur, has tried to strike a balance in his mayoral campaign, advocating for changes while acknowledging that many people still feel unsafe despite the historic drop in violent crime.

He criticized a recent vote by the L.A. City Council to limit so-called pretextual stops, in which officers pull people over for minor traffic infractions in order to investigate more serious offenses. The stops have been blamed for enabling racial discrimination.

Miller said that “constraining the Police Department is the opposite of what we should be doing.” He called for “leveraging” AI and modernizing the department’s archaic computer systems, which he said could allow the LAPD to catch up to other agencies that have embraced new technology.

Miller told The Times that he recently went on a ride-along with officers from the Rampart Division, which he said was eye-opening.

“At the highest level I think Angelenos don’t feel safe anymore,” he said. “They don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods, but more recently they don’t feel safe even in their own homes.”

Statistically speaking, the city might be safer than it’s been in decades, he said — but that doesn’t necessarily matter to voters.

“I don’t think it’s just perception,” he said. “I think it’s reality that crime has spread.”

Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe have made their first public appearance together as the new hosts of Strictly Come Dancing but have already left fans divided

The new Strictly Come Dancing presenters were all smiles during their first public outing as a trio at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe visited the London garden show on Friday, in their first appearance together since being announced as the new faces for the hit BBC dancing competition earlier this week.

Willis, wearing a white waistcoat and matching trousers, was seen smiling and posing for photos alongside co-hosts comedian Widdicombe and professional dancer Radebe.

Widdicombe wore a long-sleeve shirt and black trousers, despite the hot weather, while Radebe sported a see-through black top adorned with red flowers and green flared trousers.

In one image, Johannes lifts up Josh as Emma gestures beside them. The new line-up will take over from Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, who announced their departure from the programme in October 2025.

Emma has hosted shows including Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother and Love Is Blind UK, while Josh has previously competed on the show in a festive special and currently hosts podcast Parenting Hell alongside fellow comedian Rob Beckett.

Johannes joined the programme as a professional dancer in 2018 and is currently starring in West End musical Kinky Boots. The trio were also seen expressing their excitement for their new roles at a photoshoot for the BBC dancing competition, in a behind-the-scenes video posted to Strictly Come Dancing’s Instagram on Friday.

The announcement was a long time to come, and fans have waited almost a year to find out just who will step into the roles once held by Tess and Claudia. But following the first public appearance of the trio, several fans were left divided about what is to come, with some predicting that the lineup will change again after just one series.

One fan wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “I’m so sorry but even this photo backs up my theory that it’ll just be Emma + Johannes after 1 series. This is just so odd and you can’t keeeeep dancing like this!”

Another said: “I would have put Emma with Rylan, not sure about Josh or Johannes,” and a third, writing on Reddit, said: “producers were thoroughly surprised and impressed with Johannes during the screentest.

“I wouldn’t be surprised they added the 3rd host role specifically for him. If Josh doesn’t work out for them, they can slot Johannes right in that spot upstairs, with a year of experience under his belt. If it does all work out, they have 3 amazing hosts!”

Others had an optimistic outlook, with one viewer writing: “Good luck Josh, Emma and JoJo, looking forward to the new line-up!” and another said: “Love Emma! Don’t know too much about Josh so will stay open minded before making judgements. I’m sort of gutted we won’t see Jojo with a partner, but I will love to watch him on my screen every week!!”