The hugely popular star of ABC’s lineup was known as an outspoken critic of the president of the United States. But when one comment sparked an outrage, the network moved swiftly to yank the entertainer off the air.
It was May 2018, and the star was Roseanne Barr.
Hollywood reacted in shock when ABC abruptly pulled the plug on “Roseanne,” the top-rated reboot of the sitcom about the Conner family and their struggles with harsh economic difficulties. Barr’s reunion with her television family was an instant hit, becoming the most successful TV series on the network in years.
The cancellation came just hours after Barr posted a response to a tweet about a WikiLeaks report claiming that the CIA spied on French presidential candidates during the Obama administration. The comedian made a reference to Valerie Jarrett, a former aide of former President Obama, as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes” film franchise.
Although Barr, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump in his first presidential term, had long been a fiery presence on social media, the racism of the barb was undeniable. Executives at the Walt Disney Co.-owned broadcaster said that the post crossed a line, rejecting Barr’s apology and pleas for forgiveness.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” announced then-ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey. Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger later tweeted about the cancellation, “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.”
The incident had echoes of Wednesday’s announcement that ABC was pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely in the wake of sharp backlash over Kimmel’s comments about slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The late-night host said during the monologue on his show Monday that Tyler Robinson, the Utah man accused in the shooting death of Kirk, might have been a pro-Trump Republican.
The network’s decision to suspend the show came after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr suggested on a right-wing podcast Wednesday that the FCC could take action against ABC for Kimmel’s comments. Within hours of Carr’s comments, Nexstar Media Group said it would pull the show from its ABC affiliate stations, and Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, followed suit, saying it was pulling Kimmel from the network.
Barr on Thursday jumped into the fray over the pulling of Kimmel’s show, firing off a response to Obama’s post on X, formerly Twitter, saying that the Trump administration was taking “cancel culture” to “a new and dangerous level.”
“Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?” Barr wrote in a repost of his message.
There were no reports or indications that the Obamas had any involvement with the cancellation of “Roseanne.”
Less than six months later, “The Conners,” a spinoff of “Roseanne,” premiered to high ratings. The series picked up the story of the working class family, who were grieving over the death of matriarch Roseanne Conner, who had overdosed on opioids. The comedy became a staple of ABC’s primetime, concluding its seven-season run in April.
In a 2023 Times interview promoting her stand-up special on Fox Nation, Barr called the cancellation “a witch-burning,” lashing out at the network and her former co-stars.
“I felt like the devil himself was coming against me to try to tear me apart, to punish me for believing in God,” she said. “And they denied me the right to apologize. Oh my God, they just hated me so badly. I had never known that they hated me like that. They hate me because I have talent, because I have an opinion. Even though ‘Roseanne’ became their No. 1 show, they’d rather not have a No. 1 show.”
She added, “It didn’t faze them to murder my character, either. They s— on my contribution to television and the show itself. But I forgive everybody. I started thinking that God took me out of there to save me. And once I started thinking that way, I was, like, a lot better off.”
As a major storm rushed toward Florida last October, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time faced a different kind of threat. Police had shown up in force to a rental property she owned as a result of a prank call, in a potentially dangerous attack known as “swatting.”
Back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton had sparked a torrent of online conspiracies, with FEMA officials facing harassment and death threats, according to hundreds of pages of agency emails and other documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. The records shed new light on how disaster-related misinformation affects the government’s emergency response, sucks up internal resources, and puts staff at risk.
Deanne Criswell, who ran FEMA under President Joe Biden, learned about the swatting situation as she was about to brief TV viewers on Milton, one of the most powerful storms on record to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. “It was a very unsettling feeling,” she said in a recent interview, thinking back on how she juggled her concern for her renters along with preparing Floridians for the storm.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, November 20, 2024.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Many of the attacks outlined in the documents have not previously been reported, including the doxxing of at least seven senior FEMA staffers. In those incidents sensitive personal information, such as home addresses, was published online for the purpose of harassment. The records also reveal challenges the agency faced as it tried to control the situation.
The incidents followed an online wave of disinformation suggesting FEMA was mishandling the response to the hurricanes that pummeled Florida and North Carolina in the lead up to the presidential election. Among the debunked claims swirling at the time were reports that agency workers had seized property from survivors and confiscated donations.
The offensive diverted agency time and resources to set the record straight and protect personnel. “It made my staff nervous,” said Criswell. “It made people in the community nervous. They didn’t know who to believe. They didn’t know who to trust.”The threat of misinformation continues to loom over the agency at a time when President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have made steep cuts to its staffing and funding, including pulling back on some of the resources FEMA used last fall to combat threats. In the aftermath of deadly Texas floods in July, for example, conspiracy theories online blamed cloud seeding.
“The profit-driven platform model, where sensational falsehoods outperform factual updates in emergencies, ensures this problem persists across political cycles and it can put lives at risk,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
A FEMA spokesperson said in an email the agency “uses internal DHS resources to identify and mitigate any personal threats to employees.”
A trail of disinformation
Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina, Sept. 30, 2024.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the middle of the night on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing historic flooding far inland and killing at least 250 people. Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit. Flood waters swept away small towns and cut off others, while Asheville lost water for more than a month. Almost immediately, FEMA staff had to confront false rumors circulating online, including that it had stopped accepting housing assistance applications from survivors and didn’t have enough funds to help them.
FEMA officials and experts attribute the quick spread of disinformation to historic government mistrust in the area, as well as social media platforms ratcheting back moderation. High-profile figures including X owner Elon Musk and Trump, then in the late stages of his bid to retake the White House, repeated some of the false claims. Trump, for example, said multiple times during his campaign rallies FEMA was directing disaster funds to immigrants.
For example, the agency shared a screenshot taken from a TruthSocial post from Oct. 5 that stated: “Deanne Criswell needs to be executed for crimes against humanity and treason!” An Oct. 6 post on Gab, a social media site favored by the far right, called for the “Mussolini treatment” of various officials. “The only question: Is there enough rope?” read one of the responses.
Jacyln Rothenberg, the agency’s spokesperson at the time, was among the most heavily targeted, leading Homeland Security to loan Customs and Border Protection agents to provide security at her home. “Because the doxxing was so severe and my safety was at risk, I had to stop tweeting,” she said. “I had to stop doing interviews. I had to stop putting myself on the record.”
FEMA staff also found what it called “far-right” users posting possible personal information for numerous officials, including Criswell, Coen and Rothenberg, internal documents show.
Attacks on FEMA Offline
As a second powerful hurricane — Milton — developed off the coast of Florida, the attacks on staffers’ started migrating from the internet to their homes. After Criswell’s rental property was swatted, among other “serious threats,” then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed off on a government vehicle and extra security to protect the embattled FEMA chief.
Then it happened to someone else. “My deputy Jenna Peters’ home was swatted,” Coen told FEMA’s security team in an email on Oct. 11. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.
The most high-profile incident involved a man allegedly “hunting” FEMA staff in North Carolina’s disaster zone. On Criswell’s orders, she said in an email to other top Biden officials: “All FEMA staff and contractors working to interact with survivors and conducting housing inspections, as well as search and rescue teams stood down following the initial reports.”
Elena Gonzalez, 37, looks at their burned-out home after Hurricane Milton’s landfall on October 14, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure.
After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
Supporters of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attend a boat parade near a house damaged in Hurricane Milton, Siesta Key, Florida, October 26, 2024.
(Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
Arab and Islamic foreign ministers are gathering in Doha after Israel’s unprecedented missile strikes on Qatar that killed five Hamas members and a Qatari officer. The summit aims to formulate a collective regional response, with leaders warning Israel’s attack crossed ‘all red lines’, as Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar explains.
Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani has said that there must be a “collective response” to Israel’s attack on the Qatari capital Doha, as Arab leaders rushed to the tiny Gulf nation to express solidarity.
“There is a response that will happen from the region. This response is currently under consultation and discussion with other partners in the region,” he told US media outlet CNN on Wednesday, adding that “the entire Gulf region is at risk”.
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“We are hoping for something meaningful that deters Israel from continuing this bullying,” Sheikh Mohammed added, accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of leading the region into “chaos”.
“We understand some sort of regional meeting will be held here in Qatar. We know that the countries have pulled together their own legal team. They are looking at all legal avenues to have Netanyahu tried for breaking international law,” Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said.
“So yeah, the pressure is definitely mounting on Israel, not only from Qatar, but obviously on a regional and a wider international level. And that’s what I think he’s obviously trying to do in giving these very forceful statements to the US network, CNN.”
Smoke rises from an explosion caused by an Israeli strike in Doha on September 9, 2025 [UGC via AP Photo]
The Israeli military targeted Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday as they were meeting to discuss the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal put forth by US President Donald Trump. At least seven people were killed in the attack, but Hamas said its leadership survived the assassination bid. Qatar says two of its security officers were killed in the attack that has drawn global condemnation.
On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned Israel’s attack in a phone call with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “These strikes are unacceptable. I condemn them. I reaffirmed France’s commitment to the sovereignty and security of Qatar,” he posted on X.
The attack was part of a wider wave of Israeli strikes extending beyond its immediate borders, and marked the sixth country attacked in just 72 hours and the seventh since the start of this year. On Wednesday, Israel killed 35 people in an attack on Yemen.
The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on Wednesday that Israel’s strike on Qatar is a warning to oil-rich Gulf countries that they would not be spared in the future if armed groups in the region are defeated.
“We are on the side of Qatar that was subjected to an aggression and we also stand with the Palestinian resistance,” Naim Kassem said. He added that the Israeli strike is part of its attempts to create a “Greater Israel” in large parts of the Middle East.
The “Greater Israel” concept supported by ultranationalist Israelis is understood to refer to an expansionist vision that lays claim to the occupied West Bank, Gaza, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza by numerous rights groups, but that has not stopped it from its brutal campaign of bombardment. On Wednesday, Israeli attacks across Gaza killed at least 72 people, taking the total number of Palestinians killed since October 2023 to more than 64,656. Israel has intensified its assault to capture Gaza City – home to more than one million Palestinians.
Sheikh Mohammed, the Qatari prime minister, also said that the Israeli strike was aimed at undermining “any chance of peace” in Gaza.
“Everything about the meeting is very well known to the Israelis and the Americans. It’s not something that we are hiding,” he said of the presence of Hamas officials in Qatar.
“I think that what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu did yesterday – he just killed any hope for those [Israeli] hostages,” Sheikh Mohammed said about the 20 captives believed to be still alive in Gaza.
Netanyahu appears unfazed
However, Netanyahu appears unfazed by the criticism from global leaders, including the UN secretary-general.
On Wednesday, the Israeli prime minister threatened further attacks on Qatar. “I say to Qatar and all nations who harbour terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will,” Netanyahu said.
Qatar has condemned Netanyahu’s “reckless” comments regarding Qatar’s hosting of the Hamas office. “Netanyahu is fully aware that the hosting of the Hamas office took place within the framework of Qatar’s mediation efforts requested by the United States and Israel,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
It also called out “the shameful attempt therein to justify the cowardly attack that targeted Qatari territory, as well as the explicit threats of future violations of state sovereignty”.
Netanyahu’s threats came despite the US President Donald Trump on Tuesday saying no further attacks would happen on Qatari soil.
The attack on Tuesday was the first such attack by Israel on Qatar, which has been a key mediator in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas and hosts the region’s largest United States military base, Al Udeid airbase, which hosts US troops.
The Qatari prime minister, who is also the foreign minister of the Gulf nation, has dubbed Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday “state terrorism”.
“I have no words to express how enraged we are from such an action … we are betrayed,” he said in the interview with the cable network.
Netanyahu “needs to be brought to justice. He’s the one who’s wanted at the International Criminal Court. He broke every international law,” Sheikh Mohammed said, referring to the arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister for war crimes.
A damaged building, following an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders, according to an Israeli official, in Doha, Qatar, September 9, 2025 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]
Arab states express solidarity with Qatar
Meanwhile, Gulf leaders have visited Doha to rally around Qatar, with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan calling the Israeli action “criminal” and a threat to regional stability.
In a meeting on Wednesday with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha, Sheikh Al Nahyan reaffirmed his country’s “resolute solidarity with Qatar and its steadfast support for all measures taken to safeguard its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the safety of its people”, according to the UAE state media outlet WAM.
“He [Sheikh Al Nahyan] stressed that the criminal attack constituted a violation of Qatar’s sovereignty and of all international laws and norms, warning that such actions threaten the region’s security, stability, and prospects for peace,” WAM added.
The crown princes of Kuwait and Jordan also travelled to Doha on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, will arrive in Doha on Thursday.
Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, is received by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar, as he arrives at Doha International Airport, in Doha, Qatar [Abdulla Al Bedwawi/Handout via Reuters]
“We will stand with the State of Qatar in all measures it takes, without limits, and we will harness all our capabilities for that,” Prince Mohammed said in an address to the Shura Council on Wednesday.
“We reject and condemn the attacks of the Israeli occupation in the region, the latest of which was the brutal aggression against the State of Qatar,” the crown prince added.
“This requires Arab, Islamic, and international action to confront this aggression and to take international measures to stop the occupation authority and deter it from its criminal practices aimed at destabilising the region’s security and stability.”
In a brief interview with reporters on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump said he was “not thrilled” about Israel’s strike.
“This was a decision made by [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu, it was not a decision made by me,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Still, it remains unclear whether the Trump administration had been caught off guard, whether the US had indicated even tacit approval for such a strike, or if the attack could represent a rupture in Washington’s “ironclad” support for Israel.
Independent Middle East Analyst Adam Shapiro said if the US was not made aware of the attack, it was not “something new”.
“I think this is just simply the way Israel continually acts as the tail wagging the US dog, doing what it wishes, when it wishes, and getting what it wants, according to a double standard,” he told Al Jazeera.
Two Senate Republicans have opened yet another investigation into the deadly Palisades fire, adding to a long list of ongoing probes aimed at determining whether local officials prepared sufficiently for the emergency.
The investigation will look at whether emergency preparations were sufficient, including an examination of whether there was enough reservoir water to respond to the deadly wildfire.
Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin announced Monday that they were leading the congressional investigation, which they said is necessary to “uncover and expose the truth” about how the state and local governments responded to the major blaze, which broke out amid hurricane-force winds and quickly overwhelmed firefighting resources.
“Families in this community deserve answers and accountability,” Scott and Johnson wrote in a joint statement.
The new probe is the latest in a string of ongoing investigations into the start of the fire and how officials responded. It comes almost nine months since the fire broke out on Jan. 7, killing 12 and largely destroying Pacific Palisades. That same day, the Eaton fire erupted in Altadena, killing 19 people and devastating the foothill community.
The congressional investigation appears to focus only on the Palisades fire, and will look specifically at what water resources were — or weren’t — available, and why.
The Times first reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, located in the heart of Pacific Palisades, was empty when the fire broke out, and remained that way as firefighters experienced dry hydrants and water pressure issues. The 117-million-gallon water storage complex had been closed for repairs to its cover for nearly a year, officials said.
After The Times’ reporting on the reservoir, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the city’s water system and how it may have hampered firefighting efforts.
Times reporting also exposed poor preparation and deployment by the Los Angeles Fire Department, even as city officials were repeatedly warned about life-threatening winds and red flag conditions. Top brass at the agency decided not to deploy roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the Palisades fire.
The announcement of this federal investigation comes a few weeks after Scott — the former governor of hurricane-prone Florida — met with former reality star Spencer Pratt to tour some of the areas destroyed by the Palisades fire. At the time of their meeting, Pratt, who lost a home in the fire, was demanding a congressional investigation — an action that Scott said he would do his “best to make sure it happens.”
Pratt has also sued the city, alleging it failed to maintain an adequate water supply and other infrastructure.
In recent weeks, Scott has sent letters to several agencies seeking answers about how California used federal funds for wildfire management and response. In an August letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Scott said it appeared that the state and the city of Los Angeles had not used the agency’s funds “wisely or appropriately.”
The response to the January firestorm, particularly in the Palisades, has become a polarizing topic — and rife with misinformation —among national and local political leaders, from President Trump to developer Rick Caruso, a former mayoral contender against L.A.’s current mayor, Karen Bass. Caruso, who owns Palisades Village mall, became an immediate critic of the city’s response, blasting officials for struggling to meet water demands during the fire fight.
But fire and water experts have repeatedly said that the conditions during the fire were unprecedented, and one that no urban water system could have been properly prepared.
Still, understanding what, if anything, went wrong during the Palisades fire appears to have struck somewhat of a bipartisan note. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said his team will “absolutely welcome” this additional review.
“It complements the thorough investigations already taking place — including by the federal government, the state, and an independent review by the nation’s leading fire experts,” Newsom said in a statement. “From day one, we’ve embraced transparency because Californians deserve nothing less.”
Los Angeles officials last month delayed releasing one of those reports, so as not to interfere with a federal investigation into the cause of the Palisades fire.
The new congressional investigation, which will be led by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, will give senators the power to issue subpoenas and seek documents for the committee’s review.
WASHINGTON — The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet on the planet, capable of waging electronic warfare, of dropping nuclear weapons, of evading the surveillance and missile defenses of America’s most fearsome enemies at supersonic speeds.
It is the latest example of the Trump administration using disproportionate military force to supplement, or substitute for, traditional law enforcement operations — first at home on the streets of U.S. cities and now overseas, where the president has labeled multiple drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has vowed a “tough” response.
On Tuesday, that response began with an inaugural “kinetic strike” targeting a small vessel in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics and 11 members of Tren de Aragua, one of the Venezuelan gangs President Trump has designated a terrorist group. Legally designating a gang or cartel as a terrorist entity ostensibly gives the president greater legal cover to conduct lethal strikes on targets.
The operation follows Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for operations with dubious justifications, as well as threats of similar actions in San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, moves that a federal judge said last week amount to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Trump has referred to both problems — urban crime and drug trafficking — as interlinked and out of control. But U.S. service members have no training in local law or drug enforcement. And experts question a strategy that has been tried before, both by the United States and regional governments, of launching a war against drugs only to drive leaders in the trade to militarize themselves.
U.S. drug policy “has always been semi-militarized,” said Jeremy Adelman, director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. Trump’s latest actions simply make more explicit the erasure of a line “that separates law enforcement from warfare.”
“One side effect of all this is that other countries are watching,” Adelman said. “By turning law enforcement over to the military — as the White House is also doing domestically — what’s to stop other countries from doing the same in international waters?
“Fishermen in the South China Sea should be worried,” he added.
The Trump administration has not provided further details on the 11 people killed in the boat strike. But officials said the departure of a drug vessel from Venezuela makes Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictatorial president labeled by the White House as a top drug kingpin, indirectly responsible.
“Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he’s a fugitive of American justice,” Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and national security advisor, said on a tour of the region Thursday, citing a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City.
(Hector Vivas / Getty Images)
The president’s war on drug cartels will continue, Rubio said, adding that regional governments “will help us find these people and blow them up.”
Maduro has warned the strike indicates that Washington seeks regime change in Caracas. The Venezuelan military flew two aircraft near a U.S. vessel in international waters Thursday night, prompting an angry response from Pentagon officials and Trump to direct his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “do what you want to do” in response.
“Despite how dangerous this performance could be, because of its political consequences, it can’t be taken seriously as a drug policy,” said Lina Britto, an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean at Northwestern University with a focus on the history of the drug trade. “It lacks rigorousness in the analysis of how drug trafficking operates in the hemisphere.”
Most drugs entering the U.S. homeland from South America arrive in shipping containers, submarines and more efficient modes of transportation than speedboats — and primarily come through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, Britto said.
Trump has flirted with military strikes on drug cartels since the start of his second term, working with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to coordinate drone strikes over Mexican territory for surveillance of cartel activity.
But Sheinbaum has ruled out the use of force against cartels, or the deployment of U.S. forces within Mexico to combat them, warning that U.S. military action would violate Mexican sovereignty and upend collaboration between the two close-knit trade and security partners.
In comparison, Venezuela offers Trump a cleaner opportunity to test the use of force against drug cartels, with diplomatic ties between the two governments at a nadir. But a war with Maduro over drugs could create unexpected problems for the Trump administration, setting off a rare military conflict in a placid region and fueling further instability in a country that, over the last decade, already set off the world’s largest refugee crisis.
Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump’s use of foreign terrorist designations changes the rules of engagement in ways that allow for action “where law enforcement solutions failed in the past.”
“What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in real time,” Berg said. “Many of Latin America’s most significant criminal organizations are now designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration is demonstrating that this is not only rhetorical.”
But Paul Gootenberg, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug,” characterized Trump’s military operation as a “simplistic” approach to complex social problems.
“This is more a performative attack on the Venezuelan regime than a serious attempt at drug policy,” Gootenberg said.
“Militarized drug policy is nothing new — it was tried and intensified in various ways from the mid-1980s through 2000s, oftentimes under U.S. Southern Command,” he added. “The whole range and levels of ‘war on drugs’ was a long, unmitigated policy failure, according to the vast, vast majority of drug experts.”
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
After Los Angeles police officers shot at people on three consecutive days late last month, the LAPD’s civilian bosses turned to Chief Jim McDonnell for an explanation.
The Police Commission wanted to know: What more could the department be doing to keep officers from opening fire?
But in his response at the panel’s meeting last week, McDonnell seemed to bristle at the notion his officers were too trigger-happy.
“I think what we’re seeing is an uptick in the willingness of criminals within the community to assault officers head-on,” he said at the Aug. 26 meeting. “And then officers respond with what they have to do in order to control it.”
The commission has heaped praise on McDonnell for his performance since taking over the department in November. But the exchange over the recent cluster of police shootings — part of anoverall increase that has seen officers open fire in 31 incidents this year, up from 20 at the same point in 2024 — marked a rare point of contention.
Commission Vice President Rasha Gerges Shields told the chief that she and her colleagues remained “troubled by the dealings of people both with edged weapons — knives, other things like that — and also those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis.”
During a radio appearance earlier this year, the chief brushed aside questions about shootings, saying officers are often put into dangerous situations where they have no choice but to open fire in order to protect themselves or the public.
“That is something that’s part of the job unfortunately,” he said. “It’s largely out of the control of the officer and the department as far as exposure to those types of threats.”
Such remarks have left some longtime observers worried that the department is backsliding to the days when department leaders tolerated pervasive and excessive use of force. McDonnell’s defense of aggressive tactics during this summer’s pro-immigration protests, critics argue, sends a dangerous message to the rank-and-file.
The LAPD sits at a “pivotal” crossroads, according to Jorja Leap, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
The federal consent decree that followed the Rampart gang scandal of the late 1990s pushed the LAPD into becoming a more transparent and accountable agency, whose leaders accepted community buy-in as essential to their mission, said Leap.
Out of the reforms that followed came its signature outreach program, the Community Safety Partnership, which eschews arrests in favor of bringing officers together with residents to solve problems at some of the city’s most troubled housing projects.
Leap said support for the program has in recent years started to wane, despite research showing the approach has helped drive down crime. “The LAPD has now evolved into an inward-facing organization,” she said.
McDonnell was not available for an interview this week, an LAPD spokeswoman said.
Others faulted the chief for his response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Southern California, taking issue with the local police presence at federal operations and the aggressive actions of LAPD officers toward protesters and journalists during demonstrations in June.
Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said McDonnell seems unwilling to acknowledge how the sight of riot-gear-clad officers holding off protesters created the impression that police were “protecting the feds and the buildings more than the residents of L.A. who pay for LAPD.”
McDonnell has repeatedly defended his department’s response, telling reporters earlier this year that officers were forced to step in to quell “direct response to immediate, credible threats.”
He also issued an internal memo voicing his support to officers in the Latino-majority department and acknowledging the mixed feelings that some may have about the immigration raids.
After his public swearing-in in November, McDonnell acknowledged how much had changed with the department since he left in 2010, while saying that “my perspective is much broader and wider, realizing that we are not going to be successful unless we work very closely with the community.”
At the time, his appointment was viewed with surprise in local political circles, where some questioned why a progressive mayor with a community organizing background like Karen Bass would hitch her fortunes to a law-and-order chief. Others argued that McDonnell was an appealing choice: A respected LAPD veteran who also served as the chief in Long Beach and later as Los Angeles County sheriff.
Afternumerous scandals in recent years, McDonnell’s selection for the job was widely seen as offering stability while the city prepared for the massive security challenges of the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games.
With an earnest, restrained manner, McDonnell has won over some inside the department who were put off by his predecessor Michel Moore’s micromanaging leadership style. After his much-publicized union battles during his tenure as sheriff, McDonnell has courted the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League by putting new focus on police hiring and promising to overhaul the department’s controversial disciplinary system.
By some measures, McDonnell has also delivered results for Bass. Violent crime numbers continue to drop, with homicides on pace for 50-year lows.
But the two leaders have taken starkly different positions on the White House’s indiscriminate raids and deployment of National Guard troops.
McDonnell took heat during a City Council hearing in June when he described federal law enforcement officers participating in immigration operations as “our partners.”
Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, policy counsel and senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that McDonnell’s record on immigration was one of the reasons the ACLU opposed his selection as chief. Since then, Kwon said, the chief seems out of touch with the message of Bass and other local leaders rallying around the city’s immigrants.
“Given that we’re three months into this Trump regime siege of Los Angeles you’d think that the leader of this police department” would be more responsive to the community’s needs, Kwon said.
In a statement, Clara Karger, a spokeswoman for Bass, said that “each leader has a different role to play in protecting Angelenos and all agree that these indiscriminate raids are having devastating consequences for our city,” she said.
McDonnell’s relationship with the Police Commission has been cordial, but several department insiders — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose private discussions — said that behind the scenes some commissioners have started to second-guess the chief’s handling of disciplinary cases.
The tensions were evident at the recent meeting when the issue of officer shootings led to a public dressing-down of the chief.
Echoing the frustrations of LAPD critics who flood the commission’s meetings on a weekly basis, board members questioned how it was possible that officers needed to fire their weapons on back-to-back-to-back days last month.
Commissioner Fabian Garcia called the three shootings “a lot.”
He and his colleagues told McDonnell they expected the LAPD to present a report on the shootings at a future meeting.
McDonnell responded, “Great, thank you,” before launching into his regular crime and staffing updates.
Jack Osbourne fired back this week at the insults that Roger Waters hurled last month at his late father Ozzy Osbourne, who died in July at the age of 76.
During an interview with the Independent Ink, Waters had expressed his feelings about the “Prince of Darkness” and his music.
“Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever that state that he was in his whole life,” the 81-year-old rocker told host Dwayne Booth. “We’ll never know. The music, I have no idea, I couldn’t give a f—.”
He added: “I don’t care about Black Sabbath, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn’t care less, you know.”
Osbourne’s son, Jack, caught wind of Waters’ words and turned on the war machine. He took to his Instagram on Tuesday to defend his dad.
“Hey Roger Waters F— You,” Jack posted on his page, using white lettering on a red background. “How pathetic and out of touch you’ve become.”
Waters, who co-founded the band Pink Floyd in 1965 and has toured as a solo act since 1999, typically posts politically driven messages in a similar style on his account.
“The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out b— in the press. My father always thought you were a c— thanks for proving him right,” he added. He ended the post with a clown emoji.
The youngest of the Osbourne clan appeared alongside his father in the MTV reality series “The Osbournes” from 2002 through 2005 and the History Channel’s “Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour” from 2016 through 2018.
The Black Sabbath frontman revealed to David Letterman in an episode of “Late Night” in 1982 that he had beheaded a bat onstage by accident, a feat that had added to the considerable lore built around the heavy metal legend.
Ozzy Osbourne made his last public appearance during the band’s farewell concert, “Back to the Beginning,” on July 5 at their hometown of Birmingham, England. He died on July 22 of a heart attack.
Destination X came to an end on Thursday night as one lucky contestant managed to win £100,000 and BBC viewers were quick to take to social media to share their opinions
Saskia, Josh and Judith made it to the final but viewers were thrilled with the champion(Image: BBC)
Destination X fans were left ‘in tears’ after the grand finale aired on Thursday night. The last episode in the hit series saw the last remaining contestants, Saskia, Josh and Judith, compete in one last round of challenges for the chance to win the £100,000 jackpot.
The series followed a group of travellers sent around to various locations in a bus with blacked-out windows, with only clues and challenges to try to guess where they are. Each round, the player who guessed furthest away than where they actually were was booted off the bus and therefore out of the competition.
But it was Judith, a 28-year-old nuclear engineer from Bristol, who emerged victorious from the programme and walked away with the huge amount of cash, and fans flooded social media to declare that the moment was so emotional by the whole thing that they had been moved to tears of joy.
Rob Brydon was at the helm of the series (Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC/TwoFour)
One fan wrote on X: “I’m so pleased I’m in tears the underdog always wins!” and a second said: “Crying my EYES out at destination x oh my god.”
In replying to that tweet, a third viewer said: “Honestly so happy she won (wanted Nick from the begging, but with the players left it had to be her), the others were to smug she needed to humble them”(sic), and the initial user replied: “100% they isolated her and were so confident she had no chance, it was so satisfying that she got to win.”
The sentiment was echoed across social media, with another writing: “Yes!!! The nice person triumphed Well done Judith.” Another fan of the programme wrote: “Congratulations Judith!!!! Well deserved love,” and another said: “Yes Judith! So, so, so pleased for her!”
For much of the series, Judith appeared to have been left to navigate the ups and the downs of the competition alone whilst the others worked as a team, and fans were thrilled to see that it all worked in her favour in the end, especially after her fellow finalists left her on her own as well.
One viewer said: “They isolated Judith from week 3, and Josh spent the last days undermining Judith’s ability to win. So, for her to make it 30 seconds ahead of Josh to win the cash prize without any advantages was extremely satisfying to watch.
Another, very taken with how Judith had remained ‘true to herself’ throughout the show despite the pitfalls, she said: “She had no advantages. No alliances. Was even ridiculed. Yet she still won. Why? Character. She was steady, kind and true to herself. And that was enough.”
After a month on the Destination X bus, the 13 contestants were whittled down to justthree finalists by tonight’s last episode. The remaining stars’ memories were put to the test as old clues resurfaced for the first challenge.
The programme has been a ratings winner for the BBC having attracted around four million viewers an episode (Image: Destination X / BBC)
Josh had the advantage after the first task, with the 26-year-old pilot receiving three golden tickets while Saskia had one and Judith won none. They were revealed to be in Rome – and challenged with finding host Rob Brydon in one final location within the Italian city. It comes afterRob Brydon’s catastrophic Destination X blunder almost ruined whole competition.
While the golden tickets could be used to unlock more clues, after a nail-biting race to the final destination it was ultimately Judith who was first to find Rob Brydon at the Spanish Steps.
“Oh my God,” she said, bursting into tears. “I feel like it’s been so hard. Oh my God, this is a lot. I literally can’t believe it. I literally won Destination X.
“Going from having zero golden tickets to winning – I think Josh and Saskia’s faces definitely showed. They were so shocked.”
Unfortunately for Josh, he was just 30 seconds behind Judith while Saskia was two minutes and 25 seconds later.
“I was shocked to be honest,” Josh said. But in the end, it seems as he shared the same view as the fans of the programme as he added: “I should have done much better in this so I was punching myself. Fair play to Judith – she’s a deserving winner. We’ve all been through this experience together and I’ve got a lot of respect for her.”
The Southern Section has declared five football transfers to Bishop Montgomery ineligible for violating CIF rule 202, which is a bylaw about providing false information and comes with a penalty of up to two years of ineligibility.
Bishop Montgomery has been under scrutiny for months because of numerous transfer students, coaching changes and a decision to try to upgrade the program by scheduling powerhouses Mater Dei and Honolulu (Hawaii) Saint Louis.
The Southern Section could offer no response until paperwork was submitted by the school. Now those five players, plus potentially others, are facing the possibility of missing the 2025 and 2026 seasons.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles replaced the president and principal of Bishop Montgomery last school year. New president Patrick Lee is a former St. John Bosco administrator.
Nevertheless, the couple confirmed their separation last August following five years as a pair, with booze being disclosed as the reason behind their relationship’s collapse.
Lately, they’ve reignited their romance with Tommy providing an update during Tuesday’s edition of BBC Breakfast, reports OK!.
Tommy appeared on BBC Breakfast on August 19 to promote his new show(Image: BBC)
The 26 year old chatted to Jon Kay and Sarah Campbell regarding the current state of his relationship with Molly-Mae.
He revealed: “Me and Molly are in the best place that we’ve ever been in in our entire lives, even before all this. We’re do good now and it’s so nice to be in a healthy and loving relationship again.
“We’re keeping everything to ourselves and just enjoying what we’ve got and what we’ve created in Bambi.”
Yet the BBC presenter delved deeper into their present relationship circumstances, after Tommy’s proposal back in 2023.
She enquired whether they remained engaged as Tommy playfully responded: “Who knows?”.
Molly-Mae and Tommy are parents to Bambi(Image: Instagram)
Throughout their conversation, Tommy revealed the devastating moment involving Molly-Mae and their daughter Bambi, which made him realise he required assistance with his alcohol consumption.
Jon asked: “You say in the documentary that you don’t really remember the moment when Molly Mae said that she and Bambi were leaving because you’d been drinking.”
Tommy responded: “100 per cent, I was drunk that night and then it wasn’t until I realised I woke up in the morning and the house was empty.
“I thought, ‘right, this is no way to live, this is a serious problem, and if I don’t fix it, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse’.”
However, Tommy admitted that he would’ve done the same thing and doesn’t blame what happened as he pointed out that nobody would want to be around that situation.
Tommy and Molly-Mae shocked fans when they announced their split last year(Image: Instagram)
He added: “That’s not who I am anymore. I don’t have that relationship with alcohol where I want to be like that. It seems like I’m talking about a different person.”
Speaking about his daughter, Tommy told the two presenters that everything he does is for her. He remarked: “The fights that you take, the money that you earn, I’m over that.
“It’s not for me, it’s building the best life I can for that baby and hopefully other children, that’s my motivation now.”
All episodes of Tommy: The Good. The Bad. The Fury is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now and BBC Breakfast continues weekdays on BBC One from 6am
Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a request Sunday seeking records from the Trump administration to explain why a phalanx of Border Patrol agents showed up outside a news conference held by leading California Democrats last week.
Newsom filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security asking for “all documents and records” related to the Aug. 14 Border Patrol operation in downtown Los Angeles, which took place outside the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. At the news conference, Newsom announced a campaign to seek voter approval to redraw California’s congressional maps to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House and stymieing Trump’s agenda in the 2026 midterm elections.
“Trump’s use of the military and federal law enforcement to try to intimidate his political opponents is yet another dangerous step towards authoritarianism,” Newsom posted Sunday on X. “This is an attempt to advance a playbook from the despots he admires in Russia and North Korea.”
Newsom announced at the press event the “Election Rigging Response Act” — which would scrap independently drawn congressional maps in favor of those sketched by Democratic strategists in an attempt to counter moves by Republicans in Texas and other GOP-led states to gerrymander their own districts to favor Republicans in the 2026 midterms. Meanwhile, dozens of armed federal agents massed in the adjacent streets wearing masks, helmets and camouflage.
Newsom and other leading Democrats, including L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, dismissed the Border Patrol action as an intimidation tactic. In response to questions from The Times on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the agents were “focused on enforcing the law, not on [Newsom].”
McLaughlin said two people were arrested during the Little Tokyo operation. One was a drug trafficker, according to McLaughlin, who said the other was a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that has been a focus of the Trump administration’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportation efforts.
She did not respond to questions about how many agents were deployed or what specific agencies were involved in the Aug. 14 operation. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operations in California, was at the scene and briefly spoke to reporters.
McLaughlin did not name either person arrested or respond to a request for further information or evidence of links between the arrests and the Venezuelan gang.
“Under President Trump and [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,” she wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, witnesses at the scene identified one of the men arrested as Angel, a delivery worker who was carrying strawberries when he was captured.
“He was just doing his normal delivery to the courthouse,” said the man’s colleague, Carlos Franco. “It’s pretty sad, because I’ve got to go to work tomorrow, and Angel isn’t going to be there.”
In the FOIA request, Newsom’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, called the Border Patrol deployment an “attempt to intimidate the people of California from defending a fair electoral process.”
In addition to documents related to the planning of the raid, the FOIA request also seeks “any records referencing Governor Newsom or the rally that was scheduled to occur” and communications between federal law enforcement officials and Fox News, which allowed the Trump-friendly media outlet to embed a reporter with Border Patrol that day.
Trump’s increased use of the military and federal law enforcement against his political rivals has drawn growing concern in recent months. The president deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to quell protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles earlier this year. Just last week, Trump sent swarms of federal law enforcement officials to Washington, D.C., to combat what he sees as out-of-control crime, despite the fact that most crime statistics show violence in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.
Although Newsom demanded an answer by early September, the federal government is notoriously slow in responding to FOIA requests and will often delay responses for years. A spokesman for Newsom did not immediately respond to questions on Sunday about what, if any, other legal steps the governor was prepared to take.
Voters would have to approve Newsom’s plan to redraw the congressional maps in a special election in November. The new maps, drawn by Democratic strategists and lawmakers behind closed doors instead of the independent commission that voters previously chose, would concentrate Republican voters in a few deep-red pockets of the state and eliminate an Inland Empire district long held by the GOP.
In total, Democrats would likely pick up five seats in California in the midterms under the redrawn maps, possibly countering or outpacing Republican efforts to tilt their map red in Texas. Other states have already begun to consider redrawing their maps along more partisan lines in response to growing anxieties over the fight to control the House of Representatives in 2026.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
Residents accuse officials of not warning them to evacuate as torrential rain, cloudbursts trigger deadly flooding.
Climate change-induced flash floods have killed at least 337 people in northwestern Pakistan, according to the National Disaster Management Authority, while dozens remain missing after the area was hit by flash floods in recent days.
In Kishtwar district, emergency teams continued rescue efforts on Sunday in the remote village of Chositi. At least 60 were killed and some 150 injured, about 50 of them critically.
Mohammad Suhail, a spokesman for the emergency service, said 54 bodies were found after hours-long efforts in Buner, a mountainous district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where torrential rains and cloudbursts triggered massive flooding on Friday.
Suhail said several villagers remained missing. Search efforts focused on areas where homes were flattened by torrents of water that swept down from the mountains, carrying massive boulders that smashed into houses like explosions.
Cloudbursts also caused devastation in Indian-administered Kashmir. Flash floods were reported in two villages in the Kathua district, killing at least seven people and injuring five others overnight, officials said.
Authorities have warned of more deluges and possible landslides between now and Tuesday, urging local administrations to remain on alert. Higher-than-normal monsoon rains have lashed the country since June 26 and killed more than 600.
Government criticism
Angry residents in Buner accused officials of failing to warn them to evacuate after torrential rain and cloudbursts triggered deadly flooding and landslides. There was no warning broadcast from mosque loudspeakers, a traditional method in remote areas.
Mohammad Iqbal, a schoolteacher in Pir Baba village, told the Associated Press that the lack of a timely warning system caused casualties and forced many to flee their homes at the last moment.
“Survivors escaped with nothing,” he said. “If people had been informed earlier, lives could have been saved and residents could have moved to safer places.”
Emergency teams search amid debris of damaged houses following heavy rains and flooding in Buner, Pakistan [Akhtar Soomro/Reuters]
The government said that while an early warning system was in place, the sudden downpour in Buner was so intense that the deluge struck before residents could be alerted.
Lieutenant General Inam Haider Malik, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, told a news conference in Islamabad that Pakistan was experiencing shifting weather patterns because of climate change.
Since the monsoon season began in June, Pakistan has already received 50 percent more rainfall than in the same period last year, he added. He warned that more intense weather could follow, with heavy rains forecast to continue this month.
Asfandyar Khan Khattak, director-general of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, said there was “no forecasting system anywhere in the world” that could predict the exact time and location of a cloudburst.
Idrees Mahsud, a disaster management official, said Pakistan’s early warning system used satellite imagery and meteorological data to send alerts to local authorities. These were shared through the media and community leaders. He said monsoon rains that once only swelled rivers now also triggered urban flooding.
Pakistan suffers regular flash floods and landslides during the monsoon season, which runs from June to September, particularly in the rugged northwest, where villages are often perched on steep slopes and riverbanks.
Experts say climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of such extreme weather events in South Asia. While Pakistan is estimated to produce less than one percent of planet-warming emissions, it faces heatwaves, heavy rains, glacial outburst floods, and cloudbursts that devastate local communities within hours.
A six-year-old boy asked his dad if they were ‘going on the slide’, and his dad corrected him – but a flight attendant on the plane wasn’t as kind and it sparked a discussion
He shared the truth with the youngster (Stock Image)(Image: Narongrit Sritana via Getty Images)
Safety briefings happen every single time you step on an aircraft, and they’re designed to assist you should the unlikely event of an emergency occur while you’re travelling on the plane. It covers details about the brace position, oxygen masks that will drop from the overhead panel if cabin pressure falls, and chutes you might need to utilise during an emergency, among other things that would come in handy if something went wrong.
Naturally, if you have any queries, cabin crew will be delighted to share their expertise with you, as they must complete rigorous training before they’re permitted to work aboard the aircraft, for more than obvious reasons.
Nevertheless, one six-year-old lad received more than he expected when he enquired about using the slide on the plane – likely imagining it was an entertaining playground feature, rather than a potentially life-saving apparatus in the proper circumstances.
Hannah Cantile posted a clip of herself on TikTok, though you could overhear the exchange between the youngster and the flight attendant.
The little lad told his father they were “going on the slide,” and he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm.
Content cannot be displayed without consent
The father responded: “No slide,” and the flight attendant supported the dad’s response, explaining the boy wouldn’t be using the slide.
The inquisitive child then enquired: “What’s the slide for?” and the flight attendant explained it’s utilised during “emergencies”.
He candidly added: “So if everybody is about to die, that’s when the slide comes out.”
Hannah awkwardly chuckled at how bluntly he explained this, but many applauded him for preventing the youngster from “asking any more unnecessary questions”.
Someone also remarked that children don’t require “sugar coating and tiptoeing” and should be told the truth – even if it’s harsh.
The slide deploys when passengers need to evacuate rapidly, such as during a fire, smoke in the cabin, a water landing, or a crash landing.
In a water landing, the slide may also serve as a life raft for passengers.
It will automatically inflate if a cabin door opens whilst the door remains in the “armed” position.
Doors are “armed” for slide deployment before take-off and landing, ensuring that during an emergency, the slide will inflate instantly when the door opens.
The slide doesn’t deploy during normal boarding or disembarking; in these instances, the doors are “disarmed” so the slide won’t activate.
Cabin crew are responsible for arming and disarming the doors and for triggering slide deployment during emergencies.
It’s a vital safety mechanism designed to help passengers exit the aircraft swiftly and securely, and it’s not routinely used.
Democrats in the Texas House left the state Sunday in a last-resort bid to block new congressional maps sought by President Trump that would give Republicans a better chance of preserving their narrow U.S. House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.
The dramatic revolt came before the GOP-controlled House was set to vote Monday on the proposed maps, which would give Republicans five more winnable congressional seats. In response to Texas’ rare mid-decade political gerrymander, Democratic governors in other states have floated the possibility of redrawing their own maps in retaliation, but their options are limited.
Many of the Texas Democrats were bound for Illinois and a welcoming from Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential contender, who in recent weeks has offered them support. It was unclear how long they were prepared to stay out of Texas or whether the maneuver would succeed. Four years ago, House Democrats left Texas for 38 days in protest of new voting restrictions that still wound up passing once the holdout ended.
“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement.
Lawmakers can’t pass bills in the 150-member Texas House without at least two-thirds of them present. Democrats hold 62 of the seats in the Republican-majority chamber, and at least 51 were leaving the state, said Josh Rush Nisenson, spokesperson for the House Democratic Caucus. In addition to the Illinois group, five lawmakers headed to New York and another group went to Boston, Rush Nisenson said.
Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would meet as planned Monday afternoon.
“If a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table,” he posted on X.
Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, who is running for U.S. Senate, said on X that Democrats who “try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.”
A refusal by Texas lawmakers to show up is a civil violation of legislative rules. The Texas Supreme Court held in 2021 that House leaders had the authority to “physically compel the attendance” of missing members, but no Democrats were forcibly brought back to the state after warrants were served that year. Two years later, Republicans pushed through new rules that allow daily fines of $500 for lawmakers who don’t show up for work.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
The quorum break will also delay votes on flood relief and new warning systems in response to last month’s catastrophic floods in Texas that killed at least 136 people. Democrats had called for votes on the flooding response before taking up redistricting and have criticized Republicans for not doing so.
Texas Republicans last week unveiled their planned U.S. House map that would create five GOP-leaning seats. Republicans currently hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats.
Pritzker, who has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics during his second term, had been in quiet talks with Texas Democrats for weeks about offering support if they chose to leave the state to break quorum.
Last week, the governor hosted several Texas Democrats in Illinois to publicly oppose the redistricting effort, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom held a similar event in his state.
Pritzker also met privately with Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder in June to begin planning for the possibility that lawmakers would depart for Illinois if they did decide to break quorum to block the map, according to a source with direct knowledge who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Now, with many Texas Democrats holed up in Illinois and blocking the gerrymandered map proposal, the stage may be set for a high-profile showdown between Pritzker and Trump.
The Republican president is looking to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House two years into his presidency, and he hopes the new Texas map will aid that effort. Trump officials have also looked at redrawing lines in other states, such as Missouri, according to a person familiar with conversations but unauthorized to speak publicly about them.
Cappelletti and DeMillo write for the Associated Press. AP writer Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he’s considering calling a special election on Nov. 4 to ask voters to approve new congressional maps in California in an effort to thwart President Trump’s plan to redistrict Republican-controlled states and hold onto power of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
“I think there’s a growing recognition in this country, not just with Democrats, independents, but also Republicans, that de facto the Trump presidency ends in November of next year if the American people are given a fair chance and a voice and a choice. We’ll take back Congress,” Newsom said. “The President of the United States recognizes that, so he wants to rig the game, wants to change the rules midterm.”
The governor has cast his call to gerrymander California as a response to Trump’s request for Texas and other states to reconfigure their maps to pick up seats in 2026.
“We’re going to respond in a transparent way, an honest way, but it’s in response,” Newsom said. “But I’m not going to sit back any longer in a position, a fetal position, in a position of weakness, when in fact California could demonstrably advance strength and that’s what we intend to do.”
Under Newsom’s plan, the California Legislature would need to take a vote to send a ballot measure to voters.
Newsom said voters would be given the maps of new congressional districts. A special election would be held on the first Tuesday in November asking voters to adopt the maps and allow the new districts to remain in effect through 2030 when California would return to the independent redistricting system that’s currently in place.
California’s Independent Redistricting Commission would craft new maps after the next census to be put into effect in 2032.
The governor said he’s in the early planning states of the process and doesn’t have an estimate yet for the price tag of a statewide special election. Newsom called the cost of preserving Democracy “priceless.”
“There are many local elections that first Tuesday already on the ballot, so it requires significant less resources than a special election that didn’t already have regular elections considered,” Newsom said. “So that could be very meaningful in mitigating the cost.”
Newsom promised more information in the weeks ahead.
There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.
In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.
By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.
But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.
Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.
This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.
When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.
That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.
However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”
In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The author argues Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s role as Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” provided representation and relatability for Black youth struggling with self-identity, academic challenges, and systemic biases[1][2][4].
Warner’s portrayal of Theo, a character navigating classroom struggles and dyslexia, mirrored real-life experiences of many Black children who saw limited depictions of airborne excellence in media[1][3][4].
The author emphasizes the cultural significance of The Cosby Show as one of the first mainstream sitcoms to depict a successful, intact Black family amid Hollywood’s narrow, often regressive portrayals of African Americans[1][4].
Warner’s death sparked gratitude from Black communities for his role in normalizing Blackness as multifaceted and resilient against systemic adversity[1][2][4].
Copied states: sopping, the author highlights Warner’s grace in enduring pressure to represent Black excellence, noting the burden he carried for marginalized audiences seeking validation in media[1][4].
Different views on the topic
No contrasting perspectives were identified in the provided sources. The article and supporting materials exclusively focus on eulogizing Warner’s legacy without presenting alternative viewpoints.
A naked Donald Trump was depicted in bed with Satan in the 27th season premiere of South Park, a reference which sparked anger from the White House in the US
04:45, 25 Jul 2025Updated 06:46, 25 Jul 2025
South Park co-creator Trey Parker hit back at anger from the White House over the depiction of a naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan in the animated series.
But today Mr Parker, who with Matt Stone created South Park in 1997, had the briefest – and iciest – response to the backlash. He said: “We’re terribly sorry” and gave a long, deadpan-comic stare to camera and his fans.
Mr Parker, who also co-created The Book of Mormon, was asked for his reaction to the fracas as he sat on the stage at San Diego’s Comic-Con International at the beginning of a Comedy Central animation panel. Mr Stone was also on the panel at the comic book convention, held in California every year.
In the episode, Mr Trump sues the town of South Park when its residents challenge the presence of Jesus Christ – the actual person – in its elementary school. Jesus tells them they ought to settle.
But in a statement after the season premiere aired, a spokesperson for the White House said: “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention. President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history – and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”
(Image: Comedy Central)
In the episode, Jesus says: “You guys saw what happened to CBS? Yeah, well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount. Do you really want to end up like Colbert?”
CBS and parent Paramount Global canceled Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” last week, days after Colbert sharply criticised Paramount’s settlement of Mr Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview. CBS and Paramount executives said it was a financial decision to axe “The Late Show.”
The efficiency of South Park production, and the brinksmanship of its creators, has allowed it to stay incredibly current for an animated series, fans say.
Speaking at Comic-Con, father-of-one Mr Parker said: “I don’t know what next week’s episode is going to be. Even just three days ago, we were like, ‘I don’t know if people are going to like this.'”
The member states on Thursday approved the list of retaliatory tariffs proposed by the European Commission to counter US trade measures, with only Hungary voting against.
The list includes an initial package of measures adopted in early April and targets products including aircraft, cars and car parts, orange juice, poultry, soybeans, steel and aluminium, yachts.
Bourbon whiskey was also included in the list despite intense lobbying by France and Ireland which fear US retaliation on wine and spirits. EU Industries were also consulted before the Commission proposed the list to the member states.
The countermeasures will only enter into force if no deal is reached by the 1 August, the deadline set by US president Donald Trump from when he’s set to impose 30% tariffs on EU imports.
Anti-coercion instrument
A qualified majority of member states also appears willing to trigger the anti-coercion instrument, which would enable the EU to hit US services if no deal is reached.
Germany was for a long time resistant to using this powerful bazooka, but has now joined France, which has long been a strong advocate of the anti-coercion instrument.
Following a dinner on Wednesday between German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron, a source from the Élysée stated the shared vision of both leaders on the ongoing negotiations between the EU and the US.
“They hoped for a satisfactory outcome to the discussions that would safeguard the EU’s interests,” the source said, adding “while simultaneously accelerating work on countermeasures — including the anti-coercion instrument — in coordination with the Commission, should an agreement not be reached.”
The US currently impose 50% on EU steel and aluminium, 25% on cars and 10% on all imports.
ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel has echoes, contrasts of Roseanne firing
The hugely popular star of ABC’s lineup was known as an outspoken critic of the president of the United States. But when one comment sparked an outrage, the network moved swiftly to yank the entertainer off the air.
It was May 2018, and the star was Roseanne Barr.
Hollywood reacted in shock when ABC abruptly pulled the plug on “Roseanne,” the top-rated reboot of the sitcom about the Conner family and their struggles with harsh economic difficulties. Barr’s reunion with her television family was an instant hit, becoming the most successful TV series on the network in years.
The cancellation came just hours after Barr posted a response to a tweet about a WikiLeaks report claiming that the CIA spied on French presidential candidates during the Obama administration. The comedian made a reference to Valerie Jarrett, a former aide of former President Obama, as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes” film franchise.
Although Barr, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump in his first presidential term, had long been a fiery presence on social media, the racism of the barb was undeniable. Executives at the Walt Disney Co.-owned broadcaster said that the post crossed a line, rejecting Barr’s apology and pleas for forgiveness.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” announced then-ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey. Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger later tweeted about the cancellation, “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.”
The incident had echoes of Wednesday’s announcement that ABC was pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely in the wake of sharp backlash over Kimmel’s comments about slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The late-night host said during the monologue on his show Monday that Tyler Robinson, the Utah man accused in the shooting death of Kirk, might have been a pro-Trump Republican.
The network’s decision to suspend the show came after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr suggested on a right-wing podcast Wednesday that the FCC could take action against ABC for Kimmel’s comments. Within hours of Carr’s comments, Nexstar Media Group said it would pull the show from its ABC affiliate stations, and Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, followed suit, saying it was pulling Kimmel from the network.
Barr on Thursday jumped into the fray over the pulling of Kimmel’s show, firing off a response to Obama’s post on X, formerly Twitter, saying that the Trump administration was taking “cancel culture” to “a new and dangerous level.”
“Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?” Barr wrote in a repost of his message.
There were no reports or indications that the Obamas had any involvement with the cancellation of “Roseanne.”
Less than six months later, “The Conners,” a spinoff of “Roseanne,” premiered to high ratings. The series picked up the story of the working class family, who were grieving over the death of matriarch Roseanne Conner, who had overdosed on opioids. The comedy became a staple of ABC’s primetime, concluding its seven-season run in April.
In a 2023 Times interview promoting her stand-up special on Fox Nation, Barr called the cancellation “a witch-burning,” lashing out at the network and her former co-stars.
“I felt like the devil himself was coming against me to try to tear me apart, to punish me for believing in God,” she said. “And they denied me the right to apologize. Oh my God, they just hated me so badly. I had never known that they hated me like that. They hate me because I have talent, because I have an opinion. Even though ‘Roseanne’ became their No. 1 show, they’d rather not have a No. 1 show.”
She added, “It didn’t faze them to murder my character, either. They s— on my contribution to television and the show itself. But I forgive everybody. I started thinking that God took me out of there to save me. And once I started thinking that way, I was, like, a lot better off.”
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Chaos inside FEMA as death threats distract from hurricane response
As a major storm rushed toward Florida last October, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time faced a different kind of threat. Police had shown up in force to a rental property she owned as a result of a prank call, in a potentially dangerous attack known as “swatting.”
Back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton had sparked a torrent of online conspiracies, with FEMA officials facing harassment and death threats, according to hundreds of pages of agency emails and other documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. The records shed new light on how disaster-related misinformation affects the government’s emergency response, sucks up internal resources, and puts staff at risk.
Deanne Criswell, who ran FEMA under President Joe Biden, learned about the swatting situation as she was about to brief TV viewers on Milton, one of the most powerful storms on record to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. “It was a very unsettling feeling,” she said in a recent interview, thinking back on how she juggled her concern for her renters along with preparing Floridians for the storm.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, November 20, 2024.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Many of the attacks outlined in the documents have not previously been reported, including the doxxing of at least seven senior FEMA staffers. In those incidents sensitive personal information, such as home addresses, was published online for the purpose of harassment. The records also reveal challenges the agency faced as it tried to control the situation.
The incidents followed an online wave of disinformation suggesting FEMA was mishandling the response to the hurricanes that pummeled Florida and North Carolina in the lead up to the presidential election. Among the debunked claims swirling at the time were reports that agency workers had seized property from survivors and confiscated donations.
The offensive diverted agency time and resources to set the record straight and protect personnel. “It made my staff nervous,” said Criswell. “It made people in the community nervous. They didn’t know who to believe. They didn’t know who to trust.”The threat of misinformation continues to loom over the agency at a time when President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have made steep cuts to its staffing and funding, including pulling back on some of the resources FEMA used last fall to combat threats. In the aftermath of deadly Texas floods in July, for example, conspiracy theories online blamed cloud seeding.
“The profit-driven platform model, where sensational falsehoods outperform factual updates in emergencies, ensures this problem persists across political cycles and it can put lives at risk,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
A FEMA spokesperson said in an email the agency “uses internal DHS resources to identify and mitigate any personal threats to employees.”
A trail of disinformation
Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina, Sept. 30, 2024.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the middle of the night on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing historic flooding far inland and killing at least 250 people. Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit. Flood waters swept away small towns and cut off others, while Asheville lost water for more than a month. Almost immediately, FEMA staff had to confront false rumors circulating online, including that it had stopped accepting housing assistance applications from survivors and didn’t have enough funds to help them.
FEMA officials and experts attribute the quick spread of disinformation to historic government mistrust in the area, as well as social media platforms ratcheting back moderation. High-profile figures including X owner Elon Musk and Trump, then in the late stages of his bid to retake the White House, repeated some of the false claims. Trump, for example, said multiple times during his campaign rallies FEMA was directing disaster funds to immigrants.
For example, the agency shared a screenshot taken from a TruthSocial post from Oct. 5 that stated: “Deanne Criswell needs to be executed for crimes against humanity and treason!” An Oct. 6 post on Gab, a social media site favored by the far right, called for the “Mussolini treatment” of various officials. “The only question: Is there enough rope?” read one of the responses.
Jacyln Rothenberg, the agency’s spokesperson at the time, was among the most heavily targeted, leading Homeland Security to loan Customs and Border Protection agents to provide security at her home. “Because the doxxing was so severe and my safety was at risk, I had to stop tweeting,” she said. “I had to stop doing interviews. I had to stop putting myself on the record.”
FEMA staff also found what it called “far-right” users posting possible personal information for numerous officials, including Criswell, Coen and Rothenberg, internal documents show.
Attacks on FEMA Offline
As a second powerful hurricane — Milton — developed off the coast of Florida, the attacks on staffers’ started migrating from the internet to their homes. After Criswell’s rental property was swatted, among other “serious threats,” then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed off on a government vehicle and extra security to protect the embattled FEMA chief.
Then it happened to someone else. “My deputy Jenna Peters’ home was swatted,” Coen told FEMA’s security team in an email on Oct. 11. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.
The most high-profile incident involved a man allegedly “hunting” FEMA staff in North Carolina’s disaster zone. On Criswell’s orders, she said in an email to other top Biden officials: “All FEMA staff and contractors working to interact with survivors and conducting housing inspections, as well as search and rescue teams stood down following the initial reports.”
Elena Gonzalez, 37, looks at their burned-out home after Hurricane Milton’s landfall on October 14, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure.
After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
Supporters of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attend a boat parade near a house damaged in Hurricane Milton, Siesta Key, Florida, October 26, 2024.
(Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
Hirji, Alba and Leopold write for Bloomberg.
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Qatar holds Arab-Islamic summit in Doha to agree response to Israeli strike | Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani
Arab and Islamic foreign ministers are gathering in Doha after Israel’s unprecedented missile strikes on Qatar that killed five Hamas members and a Qatari officer. The summit aims to formulate a collective regional response, with leaders warning Israel’s attack crossed ‘all red lines’, as Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar explains.
Published On 14 Sep 202514 Sep 2025
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‘Gulf region at risk’: Qatar seeks ‘collective response’ to Israeli attack | Israel-Palestine conflict News
Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani has said that there must be a “collective response” to Israel’s attack on the Qatari capital Doha, as Arab leaders rushed to the tiny Gulf nation to express solidarity.
“There is a response that will happen from the region. This response is currently under consultation and discussion with other partners in the region,” he told US media outlet CNN on Wednesday, adding that “the entire Gulf region is at risk”.
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“We are hoping for something meaningful that deters Israel from continuing this bullying,” Sheikh Mohammed added, accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of leading the region into “chaos”.
“We understand some sort of regional meeting will be held here in Qatar. We know that the countries have pulled together their own legal team. They are looking at all legal avenues to have Netanyahu tried for breaking international law,” Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said.
“So yeah, the pressure is definitely mounting on Israel, not only from Qatar, but obviously on a regional and a wider international level. And that’s what I think he’s obviously trying to do in giving these very forceful statements to the US network, CNN.”
The Israeli military targeted Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday as they were meeting to discuss the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal put forth by US President Donald Trump. At least seven people were killed in the attack, but Hamas said its leadership survived the assassination bid. Qatar says two of its security officers were killed in the attack that has drawn global condemnation.
On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned Israel’s attack in a phone call with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “These strikes are unacceptable. I condemn them. I reaffirmed France’s commitment to the sovereignty and security of Qatar,” he posted on X.
The attack was part of a wider wave of Israeli strikes extending beyond its immediate borders, and marked the sixth country attacked in just 72 hours and the seventh since the start of this year. On Wednesday, Israel killed 35 people in an attack on Yemen.
The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on Wednesday that Israel’s strike on Qatar is a warning to oil-rich Gulf countries that they would not be spared in the future if armed groups in the region are defeated.
“We are on the side of Qatar that was subjected to an aggression and we also stand with the Palestinian resistance,” Naim Kassem said. He added that the Israeli strike is part of its attempts to create a “Greater Israel” in large parts of the Middle East.
The “Greater Israel” concept supported by ultranationalist Israelis is understood to refer to an expansionist vision that lays claim to the occupied West Bank, Gaza, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza by numerous rights groups, but that has not stopped it from its brutal campaign of bombardment. On Wednesday, Israeli attacks across Gaza killed at least 72 people, taking the total number of Palestinians killed since October 2023 to more than 64,656. Israel has intensified its assault to capture Gaza City – home to more than one million Palestinians.
Sheikh Mohammed, the Qatari prime minister, also said that the Israeli strike was aimed at undermining “any chance of peace” in Gaza.
“Everything about the meeting is very well known to the Israelis and the Americans. It’s not something that we are hiding,” he said of the presence of Hamas officials in Qatar.
“I think that what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu did yesterday – he just killed any hope for those [Israeli] hostages,” Sheikh Mohammed said about the 20 captives believed to be still alive in Gaza.
Netanyahu appears unfazed
However, Netanyahu appears unfazed by the criticism from global leaders, including the UN secretary-general.
On Wednesday, the Israeli prime minister threatened further attacks on Qatar. “I say to Qatar and all nations who harbour terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will,” Netanyahu said.
Qatar has condemned Netanyahu’s “reckless” comments regarding Qatar’s hosting of the Hamas office. “Netanyahu is fully aware that the hosting of the Hamas office took place within the framework of Qatar’s mediation efforts requested by the United States and Israel,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
It also called out “the shameful attempt therein to justify the cowardly attack that targeted Qatari territory, as well as the explicit threats of future violations of state sovereignty”.
Netanyahu’s threats came despite the US President Donald Trump on Tuesday saying no further attacks would happen on Qatari soil.
The attack on Tuesday was the first such attack by Israel on Qatar, which has been a key mediator in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas and hosts the region’s largest United States military base, Al Udeid airbase, which hosts US troops.
The Qatari prime minister, who is also the foreign minister of the Gulf nation, has dubbed Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday “state terrorism”.
“I have no words to express how enraged we are from such an action … we are betrayed,” he said in the interview with the cable network.
Netanyahu “needs to be brought to justice. He’s the one who’s wanted at the International Criminal Court. He broke every international law,” Sheikh Mohammed said, referring to the arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister for war crimes.
Arab states express solidarity with Qatar
Meanwhile, Gulf leaders have visited Doha to rally around Qatar, with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan calling the Israeli action “criminal” and a threat to regional stability.
In a meeting on Wednesday with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha, Sheikh Al Nahyan reaffirmed his country’s “resolute solidarity with Qatar and its steadfast support for all measures taken to safeguard its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the safety of its people”, according to the UAE state media outlet WAM.
“He [Sheikh Al Nahyan] stressed that the criminal attack constituted a violation of Qatar’s sovereignty and of all international laws and norms, warning that such actions threaten the region’s security, stability, and prospects for peace,” WAM added.
The crown princes of Kuwait and Jordan also travelled to Doha on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, will arrive in Doha on Thursday.
“We will stand with the State of Qatar in all measures it takes, without limits, and we will harness all our capabilities for that,” Prince Mohammed said in an address to the Shura Council on Wednesday.
“We reject and condemn the attacks of the Israeli occupation in the region, the latest of which was the brutal aggression against the State of Qatar,” the crown prince added.
“This requires Arab, Islamic, and international action to confront this aggression and to take international measures to stop the occupation authority and deter it from its criminal practices aimed at destabilising the region’s security and stability.”
In a brief interview with reporters on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump said he was “not thrilled” about Israel’s strike.
“This was a decision made by [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu, it was not a decision made by me,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Still, it remains unclear whether the Trump administration had been caught off guard, whether the US had indicated even tacit approval for such a strike, or if the attack could represent a rupture in Washington’s “ironclad” support for Israel.
Independent Middle East Analyst Adam Shapiro said if the US was not made aware of the attack, it was not “something new”.
“I think this is just simply the way Israel continually acts as the tail wagging the US dog, doing what it wishes, when it wishes, and getting what it wants, according to a double standard,” he told Al Jazeera.
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Senate Republicans investigate Palisades fire response
Two Senate Republicans have opened yet another investigation into the deadly Palisades fire, adding to a long list of ongoing probes aimed at determining whether local officials prepared sufficiently for the emergency.
The investigation will look at whether emergency preparations were sufficient, including an examination of whether there was enough reservoir water to respond to the deadly wildfire.
Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin announced Monday that they were leading the congressional investigation, which they said is necessary to “uncover and expose the truth” about how the state and local governments responded to the major blaze, which broke out amid hurricane-force winds and quickly overwhelmed firefighting resources.
“Families in this community deserve answers and accountability,” Scott and Johnson wrote in a joint statement.
The new probe is the latest in a string of ongoing investigations into the start of the fire and how officials responded. It comes almost nine months since the fire broke out on Jan. 7, killing 12 and largely destroying Pacific Palisades. That same day, the Eaton fire erupted in Altadena, killing 19 people and devastating the foothill community.
The congressional investigation appears to focus only on the Palisades fire, and will look specifically at what water resources were — or weren’t — available, and why.
The Times first reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, located in the heart of Pacific Palisades, was empty when the fire broke out, and remained that way as firefighters experienced dry hydrants and water pressure issues. The 117-million-gallon water storage complex had been closed for repairs to its cover for nearly a year, officials said.
After The Times’ reporting on the reservoir, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the city’s water system and how it may have hampered firefighting efforts.
Times reporting also exposed poor preparation and deployment by the Los Angeles Fire Department, even as city officials were repeatedly warned about life-threatening winds and red flag conditions. Top brass at the agency decided not to deploy roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the Palisades fire.
The announcement of this federal investigation comes a few weeks after Scott — the former governor of hurricane-prone Florida — met with former reality star Spencer Pratt to tour some of the areas destroyed by the Palisades fire. At the time of their meeting, Pratt, who lost a home in the fire, was demanding a congressional investigation — an action that Scott said he would do his “best to make sure it happens.”
Pratt has also sued the city, alleging it failed to maintain an adequate water supply and other infrastructure.
In recent weeks, Scott has sent letters to several agencies seeking answers about how California used federal funds for wildfire management and response. In an August letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Scott said it appeared that the state and the city of Los Angeles had not used the agency’s funds “wisely or appropriately.”
The response to the January firestorm, particularly in the Palisades, has become a polarizing topic — and rife with misinformation —among national and local political leaders, from President Trump to developer Rick Caruso, a former mayoral contender against L.A.’s current mayor, Karen Bass. Caruso, who owns Palisades Village mall, became an immediate critic of the city’s response, blasting officials for struggling to meet water demands during the fire fight.
But fire and water experts have repeatedly said that the conditions during the fire were unprecedented, and one that no urban water system could have been properly prepared.
Still, understanding what, if anything, went wrong during the Palisades fire appears to have struck somewhat of a bipartisan note. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said his team will “absolutely welcome” this additional review.
“It complements the thorough investigations already taking place — including by the federal government, the state, and an independent review by the nation’s leading fire experts,” Newsom said in a statement. “From day one, we’ve embraced transparency because Californians deserve nothing less.”
Los Angeles officials last month delayed releasing one of those reports, so as not to interfere with a federal investigation into the cause of the Palisades fire.
The new congressional investigation, which will be led by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, will give senators the power to issue subpoenas and seek documents for the committee’s review.
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After militarizing U.S. streets, Trump turns guns on the drug trade
WASHINGTON — The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet on the planet, capable of waging electronic warfare, of dropping nuclear weapons, of evading the surveillance and missile defenses of America’s most fearsome enemies at supersonic speeds.
Ten of them are being deployed by a newly branded War Department to Puerto Rico to combat drug traffickers in dinghies.
It is the latest example of the Trump administration using disproportionate military force to supplement, or substitute for, traditional law enforcement operations — first at home on the streets of U.S. cities and now overseas, where the president has labeled multiple drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has vowed a “tough” response.
On Tuesday, that response began with an inaugural “kinetic strike” targeting a small vessel in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics and 11 members of Tren de Aragua, one of the Venezuelan gangs President Trump has designated a terrorist group. Legally designating a gang or cartel as a terrorist entity ostensibly gives the president greater legal cover to conduct lethal strikes on targets.
The operation follows Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for operations with dubious justifications, as well as threats of similar actions in San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, moves that a federal judge said last week amount to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Trump has referred to both problems — urban crime and drug trafficking — as interlinked and out of control. But U.S. service members have no training in local law or drug enforcement. And experts question a strategy that has been tried before, both by the United States and regional governments, of launching a war against drugs only to drive leaders in the trade to militarize themselves.
U.S. drug policy “has always been semi-militarized,” said Jeremy Adelman, director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. Trump’s latest actions simply make more explicit the erasure of a line “that separates law enforcement from warfare.”
“One side effect of all this is that other countries are watching,” Adelman said. “By turning law enforcement over to the military — as the White House is also doing domestically — what’s to stop other countries from doing the same in international waters?
“Fishermen in the South China Sea should be worried,” he added.
The Trump administration has not provided further details on the 11 people killed in the boat strike. But officials said the departure of a drug vessel from Venezuela makes Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictatorial president labeled by the White House as a top drug kingpin, indirectly responsible.
“Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he’s a fugitive of American justice,” Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and national security advisor, said on a tour of the region Thursday, citing a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City.
(Hector Vivas / Getty Images)
The president’s war on drug cartels will continue, Rubio said, adding that regional governments “will help us find these people and blow them up.”
Maduro has warned the strike indicates that Washington seeks regime change in Caracas. The Venezuelan military flew two aircraft near a U.S. vessel in international waters Thursday night, prompting an angry response from Pentagon officials and Trump to direct his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “do what you want to do” in response.
“Despite how dangerous this performance could be, because of its political consequences, it can’t be taken seriously as a drug policy,” said Lina Britto, an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean at Northwestern University with a focus on the history of the drug trade. “It lacks rigorousness in the analysis of how drug trafficking operates in the hemisphere.”
Most drugs entering the U.S. homeland from South America arrive in shipping containers, submarines and more efficient modes of transportation than speedboats — and primarily come through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, Britto said.
Trump has flirted with military strikes on drug cartels since the start of his second term, working with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to coordinate drone strikes over Mexican territory for surveillance of cartel activity.
But Sheinbaum has ruled out the use of force against cartels, or the deployment of U.S. forces within Mexico to combat them, warning that U.S. military action would violate Mexican sovereignty and upend collaboration between the two close-knit trade and security partners.
In comparison, Venezuela offers Trump a cleaner opportunity to test the use of force against drug cartels, with diplomatic ties between the two governments at a nadir. But a war with Maduro over drugs could create unexpected problems for the Trump administration, setting off a rare military conflict in a placid region and fueling further instability in a country that, over the last decade, already set off the world’s largest refugee crisis.
Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump’s use of foreign terrorist designations changes the rules of engagement in ways that allow for action “where law enforcement solutions failed in the past.”
“What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in real time,” Berg said. “Many of Latin America’s most significant criminal organizations are now designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration is demonstrating that this is not only rhetorical.”
But Paul Gootenberg, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug,” characterized Trump’s military operation as a “simplistic” approach to complex social problems.
“This is more a performative attack on the Venezuelan regime than a serious attempt at drug policy,” Gootenberg said.
“Militarized drug policy is nothing new — it was tried and intensified in various ways from the mid-1980s through 2000s, oftentimes under U.S. Southern Command,” he added. “The whole range and levels of ‘war on drugs’ was a long, unmitigated policy failure, according to the vast, vast majority of drug experts.”
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
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3 LAPD shootings in three days: Chief grilled on officers opening fire
After Los Angeles police officers shot at people on three consecutive days late last month, the LAPD’s civilian bosses turned to Chief Jim McDonnell for an explanation.
The Police Commission wanted to know: What more could the department be doing to keep officers from opening fire?
But in his response at the panel’s meeting last week, McDonnell seemed to bristle at the notion his officers were too trigger-happy.
“I think what we’re seeing is an uptick in the willingness of criminals within the community to assault officers head-on,” he said at the Aug. 26 meeting. “And then officers respond with what they have to do in order to control it.”
The commission has heaped praise on McDonnell for his performance since taking over the department in November. But the exchange over the recent cluster of police shootings — part of an overall increase that has seen officers open fire in 31 incidents this year, up from 20 at the same point in 2024 — marked a rare point of contention.
Commission Vice President Rasha Gerges Shields told the chief that she and her colleagues remained “troubled by the dealings of people both with edged weapons — knives, other things like that — and also those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis.”
During a radio appearance earlier this year, the chief brushed aside questions about shootings, saying officers are often put into dangerous situations where they have no choice but to open fire in order to protect themselves or the public.
“That is something that’s part of the job unfortunately,” he said. “It’s largely out of the control of the officer and the department as far as exposure to those types of threats.”
Such remarks have left some longtime observers worried that the department is backsliding to the days when department leaders tolerated pervasive and excessive use of force. McDonnell’s defense of aggressive tactics during this summer’s pro-immigration protests, critics argue, sends a dangerous message to the rank-and-file.
The LAPD sits at a “pivotal” crossroads, according to Jorja Leap, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
The federal consent decree that followed the Rampart gang scandal of the late 1990s pushed the LAPD into becoming a more transparent and accountable agency, whose leaders accepted community buy-in as essential to their mission, said Leap.
Out of the reforms that followed came its signature outreach program, the Community Safety Partnership, which eschews arrests in favor of bringing officers together with residents to solve problems at some of the city’s most troubled housing projects.
Leap said support for the program has in recent years started to wane, despite research showing the approach has helped drive down crime. “The LAPD has now evolved into an inward-facing organization,” she said.
McDonnell was not available for an interview this week, an LAPD spokeswoman said.
Others faulted the chief for his response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Southern California, taking issue with the local police presence at federal operations and the aggressive actions of LAPD officers toward protesters and journalists during demonstrations in June.
Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said McDonnell seems unwilling to acknowledge how the sight of riot-gear-clad officers holding off protesters created the impression that police were “protecting the feds and the buildings more than the residents of L.A. who pay for LAPD.”
McDonnell has repeatedly defended his department’s response, telling reporters earlier this year that officers were forced to step in to quell “direct response to immediate, credible threats.”
He also issued an internal memo voicing his support to officers in the Latino-majority department and acknowledging the mixed feelings that some may have about the immigration raids.
After his public swearing-in in November, McDonnell acknowledged how much had changed with the department since he left in 2010, while saying that “my perspective is much broader and wider, realizing that we are not going to be successful unless we work very closely with the community.”
At the time, his appointment was viewed with surprise in local political circles, where some questioned why a progressive mayor with a community organizing background like Karen Bass would hitch her fortunes to a law-and-order chief. Others argued that McDonnell was an appealing choice: A respected LAPD veteran who also served as the chief in Long Beach and later as Los Angeles County sheriff.
After numerous scandals in recent years, McDonnell’s selection for the job was widely seen as offering stability while the city prepared for the massive security challenges of the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games.
With an earnest, restrained manner, McDonnell has won over some inside the department who were put off by his predecessor Michel Moore’s micromanaging leadership style. After his much-publicized union battles during his tenure as sheriff, McDonnell has courted the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League by putting new focus on police hiring and promising to overhaul the department’s controversial disciplinary system.
By some measures, McDonnell has also delivered results for Bass. Violent crime numbers continue to drop, with homicides on pace for 50-year lows.
But the two leaders have taken starkly different positions on the White House’s indiscriminate raids and deployment of National Guard troops.
McDonnell took heat during a City Council hearing in June when he described federal law enforcement officers participating in immigration operations as “our partners.”
Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, policy counsel and senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that McDonnell’s record on immigration was one of the reasons the ACLU opposed his selection as chief. Since then, Kwon said, the chief seems out of touch with the message of Bass and other local leaders rallying around the city’s immigrants.
“Given that we’re three months into this Trump regime siege of Los Angeles you’d think that the leader of this police department” would be more responsive to the community’s needs, Kwon said.
In a statement, Clara Karger, a spokeswoman for Bass, said that “each leader has a different role to play in protecting Angelenos and all agree that these indiscriminate raids are having devastating consequences for our city,” she said.
McDonnell’s relationship with the Police Commission has been cordial, but several department insiders — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose private discussions — said that behind the scenes some commissioners have started to second-guess the chief’s handling of disciplinary cases.
The tensions were evident at the recent meeting when the issue of officer shootings led to a public dressing-down of the chief.
Echoing the frustrations of LAPD critics who flood the commission’s meetings on a weekly basis, board members questioned how it was possible that officers needed to fire their weapons on back-to-back-to-back days last month.
Commissioner Fabian Garcia called the three shootings “a lot.”
He and his colleagues told McDonnell they expected the LAPD to present a report on the shootings at a future meeting.
McDonnell responded, “Great, thank you,” before launching into his regular crime and staffing updates.
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Jack Osbourne has a fiery response to Roger Waters’ diss of Ozzy
Jack Osbourne fired back this week at the insults that Roger Waters hurled last month at his late father Ozzy Osbourne, who died in July at the age of 76.
During an interview with the Independent Ink, Waters had expressed his feelings about the “Prince of Darkness” and his music.
“Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever that state that he was in his whole life,” the 81-year-old rocker told host Dwayne Booth. “We’ll never know. The music, I have no idea, I couldn’t give a f—.”
He added: “I don’t care about Black Sabbath, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn’t care less, you know.”
Osbourne’s son, Jack, caught wind of Waters’ words and turned on the war machine. He took to his Instagram on Tuesday to defend his dad.
“Hey Roger Waters F— You,” Jack posted on his page, using white lettering on a red background. “How pathetic and out of touch you’ve become.”
Waters, who co-founded the band Pink Floyd in 1965 and has toured as a solo act since 1999, typically posts politically driven messages in a similar style on his account.
“The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out b— in the press. My father always thought you were a c— thanks for proving him right,” he added. He ended the post with a clown emoji.
The youngest of the Osbourne clan appeared alongside his father in the MTV reality series “The Osbournes” from 2002 through 2005 and the History Channel’s “Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour” from 2016 through 2018.
The Black Sabbath frontman revealed to David Letterman in an episode of “Late Night” in 1982 that he had beheaded a bat onstage by accident, a feat that had added to the considerable lore built around the heavy metal legend.
Ozzy Osbourne made his last public appearance during the band’s farewell concert, “Back to the Beginning,” on July 5 at their hometown of Birmingham, England. He died on July 22 of a heart attack.
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Destination X fans left ‘crying their eyes out’ in same response to final
Destination X came to an end on Thursday night as one lucky contestant managed to win £100,000 and BBC viewers were quick to take to social media to share their opinions
Destination X fans were left ‘in tears’ after the grand finale aired on Thursday night. The last episode in the hit series saw the last remaining contestants, Saskia, Josh and Judith, compete in one last round of challenges for the chance to win the £100,000 jackpot.
The series followed a group of travellers sent around to various locations in a bus with blacked-out windows, with only clues and challenges to try to guess where they are. Each round, the player who guessed furthest away than where they actually were was booted off the bus and therefore out of the competition.
But it was Judith, a 28-year-old nuclear engineer from Bristol, who emerged victorious from the programme and walked away with the huge amount of cash, and fans flooded social media to declare that the moment was so emotional by the whole thing that they had been moved to tears of joy.
READ MORE: Destination X’s Saskia admits rival Nick stopped her quitting show early in unaired sceneREAD MORE: Destination X winner revealed as Judith after nail-biting BBC finale
One fan wrote on X: “I’m so pleased I’m in tears the underdog always wins!” and a second said: “Crying my EYES out at destination x oh my god.”
In replying to that tweet, a third viewer said: “Honestly so happy she won (wanted Nick from the begging, but with the players left it had to be her), the others were to smug she needed to humble them”(sic), and the initial user replied: “100% they isolated her and were so confident she had no chance, it was so satisfying that she got to win.”
The sentiment was echoed across social media, with another writing: “Yes!!! The nice person triumphed Well done Judith.” Another fan of the programme wrote: “Congratulations Judith!!!! Well deserved love,” and another said: “Yes Judith! So, so, so pleased for her!”
For much of the series, Judith appeared to have been left to navigate the ups and the downs of the competition alone whilst the others worked as a team, and fans were thrilled to see that it all worked in her favour in the end, especially after her fellow finalists left her on her own as well.
One viewer said: “They isolated Judith from week 3, and Josh spent the last days undermining Judith’s ability to win. So, for her to make it 30 seconds ahead of Josh to win the cash prize without any advantages was extremely satisfying to watch.
Another, very taken with how Judith had remained ‘true to herself’ throughout the show despite the pitfalls, she said: “She had no advantages. No alliances. Was even ridiculed. Yet she still won. Why? Character. She was steady, kind and true to herself. And that was enough.”
After a month on the Destination X bus, the 13 contestants were whittled down to just three finalists by tonight’s last episode. The remaining stars’ memories were put to the test as old clues resurfaced for the first challenge.
Josh had the advantage after the first task, with the 26-year-old pilot receiving three golden tickets while Saskia had one and Judith won none. They were revealed to be in Rome – and challenged with finding host Rob Brydon in one final location within the Italian city. It comes after Rob Brydon’s catastrophic Destination X blunder almost ruined whole competition.
While the golden tickets could be used to unlock more clues, after a nail-biting race to the final destination it was ultimately Judith who was first to find Rob Brydon at the Spanish Steps.
“Oh my God,” she said, bursting into tears. “I feel like it’s been so hard. Oh my God, this is a lot. I literally can’t believe it. I literally won Destination X.
“Going from having zero golden tickets to winning – I think Josh and Saskia’s faces definitely showed. They were so shocked.”
Unfortunately for Josh, he was just 30 seconds behind Judith while Saskia was two minutes and 25 seconds later.
“I was shocked to be honest,” Josh said. But in the end, it seems as he shared the same view as the fans of the programme as he added: “I should have done much better in this so I was punching myself. Fair play to Judith – she’s a deserving winner. We’ve all been through this experience together and I’ve got a lot of respect for her.”
Join The Mirror’s WhatsApp Community or follow us on Google News , Flipboard , Apple News, TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads – or visit The Mirror homepage.
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Southern Section declares five Bishop Montgomery transfers ineligible
The Southern Section has declared five football transfers to Bishop Montgomery ineligible for violating CIF rule 202, which is a bylaw about providing false information and comes with a penalty of up to two years of ineligibility.
Bishop Montgomery has been under scrutiny for months because of numerous transfer students, coaching changes and a decision to try to upgrade the program by scheduling powerhouses Mater Dei and Honolulu (Hawaii) Saint Louis.
The Southern Section could offer no response until paperwork was submitted by the school. Now those five players, plus potentially others, are facing the possibility of missing the 2025 and 2026 seasons.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles replaced the president and principal of Bishop Montgomery last school year. New president Patrick Lee is a former St. John Bosco administrator.
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Qatar: Hamas gives ‘positive response’ to Gaza ceasefire plan
Hamas has accepted a new Gaza ceasefire proposal, Qatar confirmed. Israel’s response is still pending.
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Tommy Fury’s two-word response as he addresses Molly-Mae Hague engagement
Love Island star Tommy Fury has addressed his relationship status with Molly Mae
Tommy Fury has provided a fresh update on his romance with Molly-Mae Hague.
The pair initially crossed paths during the ITV reality programme back in 2019 and have soared to massive fame since departing the villa.
In 2023, they welcomed a daughter named Bambi, who Tommy recently revealed one firm rule he’s established for her, and became engaged during the same year.
Nevertheless, the couple confirmed their separation last August following five years as a pair, with booze being disclosed as the reason behind their relationship’s collapse.
Lately, they’ve reignited their romance with Tommy providing an update during Tuesday’s edition of BBC Breakfast, reports OK!.
The 26 year old chatted to Jon Kay and Sarah Campbell regarding the current state of his relationship with Molly-Mae.
He revealed: “Me and Molly are in the best place that we’ve ever been in in our entire lives, even before all this. We’re do good now and it’s so nice to be in a healthy and loving relationship again.
“We’re keeping everything to ourselves and just enjoying what we’ve got and what we’ve created in Bambi.”
Yet the BBC presenter delved deeper into their present relationship circumstances, after Tommy’s proposal back in 2023.
She enquired whether they remained engaged as Tommy playfully responded: “Who knows?”.
Throughout their conversation, Tommy revealed the devastating moment involving Molly-Mae and their daughter Bambi, which made him realise he required assistance with his alcohol consumption.
Jon asked: “You say in the documentary that you don’t really remember the moment when Molly Mae said that she and Bambi were leaving because you’d been drinking.”
Tommy responded: “100 per cent, I was drunk that night and then it wasn’t until I realised I woke up in the morning and the house was empty.
“I thought, ‘right, this is no way to live, this is a serious problem, and if I don’t fix it, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse’.”
However, Tommy admitted that he would’ve done the same thing and doesn’t blame what happened as he pointed out that nobody would want to be around that situation.
He added: “That’s not who I am anymore. I don’t have that relationship with alcohol where I want to be like that. It seems like I’m talking about a different person.”
Speaking about his daughter, Tommy told the two presenters that everything he does is for her. He remarked: “The fights that you take, the money that you earn, I’m over that.
“It’s not for me, it’s building the best life I can for that baby and hopefully other children, that’s my motivation now.”
All episodes of Tommy: The Good. The Bad. The Fury is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now and BBC Breakfast continues weekdays on BBC One from 6am
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Border Patrol show of force at Newsom event spurs demand for info
Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a request Sunday seeking records from the Trump administration to explain why a phalanx of Border Patrol agents showed up outside a news conference held by leading California Democrats last week.
Newsom filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security asking for “all documents and records” related to the Aug. 14 Border Patrol operation in downtown Los Angeles, which took place outside the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. At the news conference, Newsom announced a campaign to seek voter approval to redraw California’s congressional maps to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House and stymieing Trump’s agenda in the 2026 midterm elections.
“Trump’s use of the military and federal law enforcement to try to intimidate his political opponents is yet another dangerous step towards authoritarianism,” Newsom posted Sunday on X. “This is an attempt to advance a playbook from the despots he admires in Russia and North Korea.”
Newsom announced at the press event the “Election Rigging Response Act” — which would scrap independently drawn congressional maps in favor of those sketched by Democratic strategists in an attempt to counter moves by Republicans in Texas and other GOP-led states to gerrymander their own districts to favor Republicans in the 2026 midterms. Meanwhile, dozens of armed federal agents massed in the adjacent streets wearing masks, helmets and camouflage.
Newsom and other leading Democrats, including L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, dismissed the Border Patrol action as an intimidation tactic. In response to questions from The Times on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the agents were “focused on enforcing the law, not on [Newsom].”
McLaughlin said two people were arrested during the Little Tokyo operation. One was a drug trafficker, according to McLaughlin, who said the other was a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that has been a focus of the Trump administration’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportation efforts.
She did not respond to questions about how many agents were deployed or what specific agencies were involved in the Aug. 14 operation. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operations in California, was at the scene and briefly spoke to reporters.
McLaughlin did not name either person arrested or respond to a request for further information or evidence of links between the arrests and the Venezuelan gang.
“Under President Trump and [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,” she wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, witnesses at the scene identified one of the men arrested as Angel, a delivery worker who was carrying strawberries when he was captured.
“He was just doing his normal delivery to the courthouse,” said the man’s colleague, Carlos Franco. “It’s pretty sad, because I’ve got to go to work tomorrow, and Angel isn’t going to be there.”
In the FOIA request, Newsom’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, called the Border Patrol deployment an “attempt to intimidate the people of California from defending a fair electoral process.”
In addition to documents related to the planning of the raid, the FOIA request also seeks “any records referencing Governor Newsom or the rally that was scheduled to occur” and communications between federal law enforcement officials and Fox News, which allowed the Trump-friendly media outlet to embed a reporter with Border Patrol that day.
Trump’s increased use of the military and federal law enforcement against his political rivals has drawn growing concern in recent months. The president deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to quell protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles earlier this year. Just last week, Trump sent swarms of federal law enforcement officials to Washington, D.C., to combat what he sees as out-of-control crime, despite the fact that most crime statistics show violence in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.
Although Newsom demanded an answer by early September, the federal government is notoriously slow in responding to FOIA requests and will often delay responses for years. A spokesman for Newsom did not immediately respond to questions on Sunday about what, if any, other legal steps the governor was prepared to take.
Voters would have to approve Newsom’s plan to redraw the congressional maps in a special election in November. The new maps, drawn by Democratic strategists and lawmakers behind closed doors instead of the independent commission that voters previously chose, would concentrate Republican voters in a few deep-red pockets of the state and eliminate an Inland Empire district long held by the GOP.
In total, Democrats would likely pick up five seats in California in the midterms under the redrawn maps, possibly countering or outpacing Republican efforts to tilt their map red in Texas. Other states have already begun to consider redrawing their maps along more partisan lines in response to growing anxieties over the fight to control the House of Representatives in 2026.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
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At least 337 killed in Pakistan floods, gov’t defends emergency response | Floods News
Residents accuse officials of not warning them to evacuate as torrential rain, cloudbursts trigger deadly flooding.
Climate change-induced flash floods have killed at least 337 people in northwestern Pakistan, according to the National Disaster Management Authority, while dozens remain missing after the area was hit by flash floods in recent days.
In Kishtwar district, emergency teams continued rescue efforts on Sunday in the remote village of Chositi. At least 60 were killed and some 150 injured, about 50 of them critically.
Mohammad Suhail, a spokesman for the emergency service, said 54 bodies were found after hours-long efforts in Buner, a mountainous district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where torrential rains and cloudbursts triggered massive flooding on Friday.
Suhail said several villagers remained missing. Search efforts focused on areas where homes were flattened by torrents of water that swept down from the mountains, carrying massive boulders that smashed into houses like explosions.
Cloudbursts also caused devastation in Indian-administered Kashmir. Flash floods were reported in two villages in the Kathua district, killing at least seven people and injuring five others overnight, officials said.
Authorities have warned of more deluges and possible landslides between now and Tuesday, urging local administrations to remain on alert. Higher-than-normal monsoon rains have lashed the country since June 26 and killed more than 600.
Government criticism
Angry residents in Buner accused officials of failing to warn them to evacuate after torrential rain and cloudbursts triggered deadly flooding and landslides. There was no warning broadcast from mosque loudspeakers, a traditional method in remote areas.
Mohammad Iqbal, a schoolteacher in Pir Baba village, told the Associated Press that the lack of a timely warning system caused casualties and forced many to flee their homes at the last moment.
“Survivors escaped with nothing,” he said. “If people had been informed earlier, lives could have been saved and residents could have moved to safer places.”
The government said that while an early warning system was in place, the sudden downpour in Buner was so intense that the deluge struck before residents could be alerted.
Lieutenant General Inam Haider Malik, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, told a news conference in Islamabad that Pakistan was experiencing shifting weather patterns because of climate change.
Since the monsoon season began in June, Pakistan has already received 50 percent more rainfall than in the same period last year, he added. He warned that more intense weather could follow, with heavy rains forecast to continue this month.
Asfandyar Khan Khattak, director-general of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, said there was “no forecasting system anywhere in the world” that could predict the exact time and location of a cloudburst.
Idrees Mahsud, a disaster management official, said Pakistan’s early warning system used satellite imagery and meteorological data to send alerts to local authorities. These were shared through the media and community leaders. He said monsoon rains that once only swelled rivers now also triggered urban flooding.
Pakistan suffers regular flash floods and landslides during the monsoon season, which runs from June to September, particularly in the rugged northwest, where villages are often perched on steep slopes and riverbanks.
Experts say climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of such extreme weather events in South Asia. While Pakistan is estimated to produce less than one percent of planet-warming emissions, it faces heatwaves, heavy rains, glacial outburst floods, and cloudbursts that devastate local communities within hours.
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Flight attendant’s blunt response to child who asked about vital safety procedure
A six-year-old boy asked his dad if they were ‘going on the slide’, and his dad corrected him – but a flight attendant on the plane wasn’t as kind and it sparked a discussion
Safety briefings happen every single time you step on an aircraft, and they’re designed to assist you should the unlikely event of an emergency occur while you’re travelling on the plane. It covers details about the brace position, oxygen masks that will drop from the overhead panel if cabin pressure falls, and chutes you might need to utilise during an emergency, among other things that would come in handy if something went wrong.
Naturally, if you have any queries, cabin crew will be delighted to share their expertise with you, as they must complete rigorous training before they’re permitted to work aboard the aircraft, for more than obvious reasons.
Nevertheless, one six-year-old lad received more than he expected when he enquired about using the slide on the plane – likely imagining it was an entertaining playground feature, rather than a potentially life-saving apparatus in the proper circumstances.
Hannah Cantile posted a clip of herself on TikTok, though you could overhear the exchange between the youngster and the flight attendant.
The little lad told his father they were “going on the slide,” and he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm.
The father responded: “No slide,” and the flight attendant supported the dad’s response, explaining the boy wouldn’t be using the slide.
The inquisitive child then enquired: “What’s the slide for?” and the flight attendant explained it’s utilised during “emergencies”.
He candidly added: “So if everybody is about to die, that’s when the slide comes out.”
Hannah awkwardly chuckled at how bluntly he explained this, but many applauded him for preventing the youngster from “asking any more unnecessary questions”.
Someone also remarked that children don’t require “sugar coating and tiptoeing” and should be told the truth – even if it’s harsh.
The slide deploys when passengers need to evacuate rapidly, such as during a fire, smoke in the cabin, a water landing, or a crash landing.
In a water landing, the slide may also serve as a life raft for passengers.
It will automatically inflate if a cabin door opens whilst the door remains in the “armed” position.
Doors are “armed” for slide deployment before take-off and landing, ensuring that during an emergency, the slide will inflate instantly when the door opens.
The slide doesn’t deploy during normal boarding or disembarking; in these instances, the doors are “disarmed” so the slide won’t activate.
Cabin crew are responsible for arming and disarming the doors and for triggering slide deployment during emergencies.
It’s a vital safety mechanism designed to help passengers exit the aircraft swiftly and securely, and it’s not routinely used.
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Texas Democrats leave state to block vote on gerrymandered map
Democrats in the Texas House left the state Sunday in a last-resort bid to block new congressional maps sought by President Trump that would give Republicans a better chance of preserving their narrow U.S. House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.
The dramatic revolt came before the GOP-controlled House was set to vote Monday on the proposed maps, which would give Republicans five more winnable congressional seats. In response to Texas’ rare mid-decade political gerrymander, Democratic governors in other states have floated the possibility of redrawing their own maps in retaliation, but their options are limited.
Many of the Texas Democrats were bound for Illinois and a welcoming from Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential contender, who in recent weeks has offered them support. It was unclear how long they were prepared to stay out of Texas or whether the maneuver would succeed. Four years ago, House Democrats left Texas for 38 days in protest of new voting restrictions that still wound up passing once the holdout ended.
“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement.
Lawmakers can’t pass bills in the 150-member Texas House without at least two-thirds of them present. Democrats hold 62 of the seats in the Republican-majority chamber, and at least 51 were leaving the state, said Josh Rush Nisenson, spokesperson for the House Democratic Caucus. In addition to the Illinois group, five lawmakers headed to New York and another group went to Boston, Rush Nisenson said.
Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would meet as planned Monday afternoon.
“If a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table,” he posted on X.
Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, who is running for U.S. Senate, said on X that Democrats who “try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.”
A refusal by Texas lawmakers to show up is a civil violation of legislative rules. The Texas Supreme Court held in 2021 that House leaders had the authority to “physically compel the attendance” of missing members, but no Democrats were forcibly brought back to the state after warrants were served that year. Two years later, Republicans pushed through new rules that allow daily fines of $500 for lawmakers who don’t show up for work.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
The quorum break will also delay votes on flood relief and new warning systems in response to last month’s catastrophic floods in Texas that killed at least 136 people. Democrats had called for votes on the flooding response before taking up redistricting and have criticized Republicans for not doing so.
Texas Republicans last week unveiled their planned U.S. House map that would create five GOP-leaning seats. Republicans currently hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats.
Pritzker, who has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics during his second term, had been in quiet talks with Texas Democrats for weeks about offering support if they chose to leave the state to break quorum.
Last week, the governor hosted several Texas Democrats in Illinois to publicly oppose the redistricting effort, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom held a similar event in his state.
Pritzker also met privately with Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder in June to begin planning for the possibility that lawmakers would depart for Illinois if they did decide to break quorum to block the map, according to a source with direct knowledge who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Now, with many Texas Democrats holed up in Illinois and blocking the gerrymandered map proposal, the stage may be set for a high-profile showdown between Pritzker and Trump.
The Republican president is looking to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House two years into his presidency, and he hopes the new Texas map will aid that effort. Trump officials have also looked at redrawing lines in other states, such as Missouri, according to a person familiar with conversations but unauthorized to speak publicly about them.
Cappelletti and DeMillo write for the Associated Press. AP writer Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
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Newsom provides new details about his plan for redistricting fight with Trump
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he’s considering calling a special election on Nov. 4 to ask voters to approve new congressional maps in California in an effort to thwart President Trump’s plan to redistrict Republican-controlled states and hold onto power of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
“I think there’s a growing recognition in this country, not just with Democrats, independents, but also Republicans, that de facto the Trump presidency ends in November of next year if the American people are given a fair chance and a voice and a choice. We’ll take back Congress,” Newsom said. “The President of the United States recognizes that, so he wants to rig the game, wants to change the rules midterm.”
The governor has cast his call to gerrymander California as a response to Trump’s request for Texas and other states to reconfigure their maps to pick up seats in 2026.
“We’re going to respond in a transparent way, an honest way, but it’s in response,” Newsom said. “But I’m not going to sit back any longer in a position, a fetal position, in a position of weakness, when in fact California could demonstrably advance strength and that’s what we intend to do.”
Under Newsom’s plan, the California Legislature would need to take a vote to send a ballot measure to voters.
Newsom said voters would be given the maps of new congressional districts. A special election would be held on the first Tuesday in November asking voters to adopt the maps and allow the new districts to remain in effect through 2030 when California would return to the independent redistricting system that’s currently in place.
California’s Independent Redistricting Commission would craft new maps after the next census to be put into effect in 2032.
The governor said he’s in the early planning states of the process and doesn’t have an estimate yet for the price tag of a statewide special election. Newsom called the cost of preserving Democracy “priceless.”
“There are many local elections that first Tuesday already on the ballot, so it requires significant less resources than a special election that didn’t already have regular elections considered,” Newsom said. “So that could be very meaningful in mitigating the cost.”
Newsom promised more information in the weeks ahead.
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Column: Malcolm-Jamal Warner carried a heavy load for Black America
There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.
In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.
By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.
But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.
Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.
This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.
When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.
That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.
However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”
In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
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South Park co-creator’s sarcastic three-word response after Donald Trump jibe
A naked Donald Trump was depicted in bed with Satan in the 27th season premiere of South Park, a reference which sparked anger from the White House in the US
04:45, 25 Jul 2025Updated 06:46, 25 Jul 2025
South Park co-creator Trey Parker hit back at anger from the White House over the depiction of a naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan in the animated series.
The reference featured in the first episode of the 27th series of the programme, which aired on Wednesday, following the team’s £1.19bn ($1.5 billion) deal with Paramount. The White House blasted the jibe, branding South Park a “fourth-rate show… with uninspired ideas.”
But today Mr Parker, who with Matt Stone created South Park in 1997, had the briefest – and iciest – response to the backlash. He said: “We’re terribly sorry” and gave a long, deadpan-comic stare to camera and his fans.
Mr Parker, who also co-created The Book of Mormon, was asked for his reaction to the fracas as he sat on the stage at San Diego’s Comic-Con International at the beginning of a Comedy Central animation panel. Mr Stone was also on the panel at the comic book convention, held in California every year.
READ MORE: Where you’ve seen the cast of Amazon Prime’s Cross before from Supernatural to 90210
In the episode, Mr Trump sues the town of South Park when its residents challenge the presence of Jesus Christ – the actual person – in its elementary school. Jesus tells them they ought to settle.
Although Mr Parker and Mr Stone recently signed a five-year deal with Paramount for 50 new episodes and streaming rights to previous seasons, they used the episode on Wednesday to take aim at the company’s its $16 million (£11.8 million) recent settlement with Mr Trump.
But in a statement after the season premiere aired, a spokesperson for the White House said: “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention. President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history – and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”
In the episode, Jesus says: “You guys saw what happened to CBS? Yeah, well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount. Do you really want to end up like Colbert?”
CBS and parent Paramount Global canceled Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” last week, days after Colbert sharply criticised Paramount’s settlement of Mr Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview. CBS and Paramount executives said it was a financial decision to axe “The Late Show.”
The efficiency of South Park production, and the brinksmanship of its creators, has allowed it to stay incredibly current for an animated series, fans say.
Speaking at Comic-Con, father-of-one Mr Parker said: “I don’t know what next week’s episode is going to be. Even just three days ago, we were like, ‘I don’t know if people are going to like this.'”
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EU adopts retaliatory hit list in response to US tariffs
Published on
24/07/2025 – 11:44 GMT+2
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The member states on Thursday approved the list of retaliatory tariffs proposed by the European Commission to counter US trade measures, with only Hungary voting against.
The list includes an initial package of measures adopted in early April and targets products including aircraft, cars and car parts, orange juice, poultry, soybeans, steel and aluminium, yachts.
Bourbon whiskey was also included in the list despite intense lobbying by France and Ireland which fear US retaliation on wine and spirits. EU Industries were also consulted before the Commission proposed the list to the member states.
The countermeasures will only enter into force if no deal is reached by the 1 August, the deadline set by US president Donald Trump from when he’s set to impose 30% tariffs on EU imports.
Anti-coercion instrument
A qualified majority of member states also appears willing to trigger the anti-coercion instrument, which would enable the EU to hit US services if no deal is reached.
Germany was for a long time resistant to using this powerful bazooka, but has now joined France, which has long been a strong advocate of the anti-coercion instrument.
Following a dinner on Wednesday between German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron, a source from the Élysée stated the shared vision of both leaders on the ongoing negotiations between the EU and the US.
“They hoped for a satisfactory outcome to the discussions that would safeguard the EU’s interests,” the source said, adding “while simultaneously accelerating work on countermeasures — including the anti-coercion instrument — in coordination with the Commission, should an agreement not be reached.”
The US currently impose 50% on EU steel and aluminium, 25% on cars and 10% on all imports.
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