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Tuesday is election day, and, as usual, the pundits are breathless, the predictions are dubious and the consultants are already counting their retainers. But make no mistake: Off-year elections matter. Tuesday’s results will shape the political landscape for 2026 and beyond.

Let’s start in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided to fight Texas Republican gerrymandering with a little creative cartography of his own.

Proposition 50, which began as the “Election Rigging Response Act,” wouldn’t just help level the playing field by handing Democrats five House seats; it would also boost Newsom’s presidential ambitions. Polls suggest it’ll pass.

When it comes to elections involving actual candidates, the main attractions are in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

In the New York City mayoral contest, Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old democratic socialist who seems like the kind of guy who probably buys albums on vinyl — is leading both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (running as an independent) and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

National Republicans are already making Mamdani the avatar of everything Fox News viewers fear.

President Trump went so far as calling Mamdani a “communist” and threatening to send in the troops if he wins.

One thing is for certain: Mamdani is already a symbol. If he wins, he’ll be evidence for progressives that politics can still be interesting, exciting and revolutionary. To conservatives, he’ll be evidence that Democrats have gone insane.

If you’re paying attention, these arguments are not mutually exclusive.

Across the Hudson, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill (whose resume includes having been a naval officer and a federal prosecutor) is a very different kind of politician — the “I’m a competent adult, please clap” variety.

Her gubernatorial opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, is an ex-state legislator who radiates the kind of energy usually found at bowling alleys and diners. He’s the grandson of Italian immigrants, the son of blue-collar workers and the spiritual heir of every guy in a tracksuit yelling at a Jets game.

Ciattarelli came dangerously close to winning the governorship in 2021, which should be cause for concern for Sherrill, who’s sitting on a slim lead.

The main problem for Ciattarelli is Trump, who, despite his bridge-and-tunnel aesthetic, does more harm than good in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1988.

Trump’s termination of the Gateway Tunnel project didn’t help either. It’s one thing to be loud and populist; it’s another to cancel something that would make voters’ commutes slightly less horrible.

Speaking of commutes, a few hours south, down I-95, Virginia will also elect a new governor. Here, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — former CIA officer, former U.S. representative, professional moderate — is coasting toward victory against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, the lieutenant governor.

Earle-Sears, a Marine, trailblazer and gadfly, is about to add “failed gubernatorial candidate” to her resume.

Her biggest headline was firing her campaign manager (a pastor who had never run a campaign before), which sounds like a metaphor for today’s GOP. Her best attack on Spanberger involved attempting to tie her to something someone else (the Democratic attorney general nominee) did (sending a violent text about a Republican politician).

Virginia has a history of electing governors from the party that opposes the sitting president, and Trump’s DOGE cuts (not to mention the current government shutdown) have outsize importance in the commonwealth.

Depending on how things shake out in these states, narratives will be set — storylines that (rightly or not) will tell experts and voters which kinds of candidates they should nominate in 2026.

For example, if Mamdani, who represents the progressive wing, wins, but Sherrill and/or Spanberger lose, the narrative will be that cautious centrism is the problem.

If the opposite occurs, the opposite narrative (radicalism is a loser!) will take root.

The postmortems write themselves: “Progressive Resurgence,” “Year of the Woman” and/or “The Return of the Center.” The problem? It’s unwise to draw too many conclusions based on Tuesday’s election results.

First, it’s misguided to assume that what works in New York City could serve as a national model.

Second, even if Sherrill and Spanberger both win, it’s impossible to know if they simply benefited from 2025 being a good year for Democrats.

Still, what happens on Tuesday will have major repercussions. Within a day of the election, everyone with a stake in the midterms and future elections will claim the outcome means what they want it to mean. Within a week, narratives will have congealed, while heroes and scapegoats will have been assigned.

And the rest of us will be right here where we started — anxious, exhausted — and dreading the fact that the 2026 midterm jockeying starts on Wednesday.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

The U.S. Army is in the very early stages of formulating a vision for fleets of advanced and highly autonomous drones in a similar vein to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) that the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Navy are now developing. The Army’s CCA endeavor may ultimately be linked, at least in some way, with work already being done on so-called “launched effects,” a term generally applied to smaller uncrewed aerial systems designed to be fired from other platforms in the air, as well as on the ground and at sea.

Army aviation officials talked about the current state of the service’s CCA plans during a roundtable on the sidelines of the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual conference this week, at which TWZ was in attendance. The topic had also come up elsewhere during the three-day event, which ended yesterday. Army CCAs would be primarily expected to operate in close cooperation with the service’s existing crewed helicopters, as well as its future MV-75A tiltrotors.

“So, one, we’re following the other services very closely as they’re looking at this, this [CCA] concept,” Brig. Gen. Phillip C. Baker, the Army’s Aviation Future Capabilities Director, said. at the roundtable. “I think for the Army, especially launched effects, it comes down to a discussion of mass. … A platform, a loyal wingman, a CCA concept, allows you to increase mass while also reducing the amount of aviators you’ve got to have in the air.”

Baker noted that the Army is working in particular with U.S. military commands in the Pacific and European regions as it begins to explore potential CCA requirements, which might lead to an operational capability in the next few years. For the past year or so, the Army has been working to figure out “the capabilities that they need in order to deliver that mass, and really survivability,” he added.

At present, a key aspect of the ongoing discussions within the Army seems to be focused on where the service’s existing work on launch effects ends and where a CCA-like effort might begin.

“Launched effects, if you think about it, is a CCA, right?” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, also said at the round table. “These are things that we’re going to launch off of aircraft and are going to operate in a collaborative fashion, potentially autonomously, but we’re going to give them instructions, and they’re going to operate based off of guidance, either off of something on the ground or maybe they’re being quarterbacked in the air.”

“Manned-unmanned teaming is the future. We’ve talked about the potential of launched effects off the aircraft, or a potential loyal wingman,” Col. Stephen Smith, head of the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, better known as the Night Stalkers, had also said during a separate panel at this year’s AUSA conference. Smith had talked about increased use of drones as part of larger efforts to help his unit operate more effectively and just survive in higher-threat environments during future high conflicts, which you can read more about here.

The Army is already envisioning at least three categories of launched effects, broken down into short, medium, and long-range types. They could be configured for a variety of missions, including reconnaissance, electronic warfare, communications relays, and as acting as loitering munitions or decoys. The service has long said that it sees these systems, which could also be networked together in highly autonomous swarms, operating forward of friendly forces, extending the reach of their capabilities, while also reducing their vulnerability.

In some broad strokes, the benefits that launched effects and CCA-types drones offer do align, on top of the “affordable mass” they both promise to provide. However, as the Army currently describes them, even the largest launched effects are substantially smaller and less capable than something in the generally accepted CCA, or ‘loyal wingman,’ category. Most, if not all launched effects are also expected to be fully expendable, unlike a CCA. Any Army CCAs would likely carry launched effects themselves, further extending the reach of the latter drones into higher-risk environments, as well as the overall area they can cover quickly. This, in turn, would allow for a crewed-uncrewed team capable of executing a complex and flexible array of tactics.

When asked then to clarify whether a future Army CCA effort would be distinct from the service’s current launched effects efforts, Maj. Gen. Gill said that “it could be, yes.”

“So, last fall, we actually asked industry what they can provide for a Group 4 VTOL/STOL [vertical takeoff and landing/short takeoff and landing] perspective,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips, head of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation (PEO-Aviation). “So we use that as a great set of information on what the state of the art of technology is from a range, speed, payload, and really effects perspective. What can we bring to bear, given modern technology versus some of our older UAS [uncrewed aerial systems].”

The U.S. military groups uncrewed aircraft into five categories. Group 4 covers designs with maximum takeoff weights over 1,320 pounds, but typical operating altitudes of 18,000 feet Mean Sea Level (MSL) or below. As mentioned already, this is far heavier and higher-flying than any of the UASs the Army is currently considering to meet its launched effects needs.

“I think we’re informing Gen. Gill and Gen. Baker’s teams on what industry has told us on what requirement that shapes out to be,” Phillips added. “It might not look like some of the things we’ve seen on the [AUSA show] floor today. But I can tell you, we received a very robust response from industry, and it’s a combination of maybe some of the things you’d seen on the floor, but we’re excited to start thinking about that space.”

Boeing announced plans for a family of new tiltrotor drones, collectively called Collaborative Transformational Rotorcraft, or CxRs, at this year’s AUSA conference, which you can read more about here. The company said the designs will fall into the Group 4 and Group 5 categories. Per the U.S. military’s definitions, the only difference between Group 4 and Group 5 is that the nominal operating altitude for the latter extends above 18,000 feet MSL.

Last week, Sikorsky, now a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, announced its own plans to expand existing work on a VTOL drone with a so-called rotor-blown wing configuration into a full family of designs dubbed Nomad, which is set to include a Group 4 type. You can learn more about Nomad, which was also showcased at AUSA, here.

Nearly a decade ago now, Bell also announced it was working on a design for a Group 5 tiltrotor drone called the V-247 Vigilant, aimed originally at a Marine Corps requirement. The V-247, or a scaled-down derivative, could be another starting place for a future Army CCA. Bell has notably shown renderings, like the one below, depicting V-247s operating together with versions of its crewed V-280 Valor tiltrotor design, which the Army’s MV-75A is based on.

Brig. Gen. Baker said that experimentation with CCA concepts, to varying degrees, is already underway, and that more is planned for the near future. He also pointed out that the Army is presented with unique questions to answer compared to the Air Force, Marines, and Navy, given that those services primarily expect CCA-type drones to operate collaboratively with higher and faster-flying fixed-wing tactical jets. The Army, in contrast, as noted, sees any such uncrewed aircraft partnered with its existing helicopters, as well as its future MV-75A tiltrotors, with much lower and slower operational flight profiles. It is worth noting here that the other services still have many questions to answer when it comes to their future CCA fleets, including how they will be deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated, let alone employed tactically.

The video below from Collins Aerospace offers a relevant depiction of what the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy expect future air combat operations involving their CCAs to look like.

“So, our experimentation really lies in two areas. One, our modeling that we do constantly. We do that with the feedback that [Brig.] Gen. Phillips talked about from industry. How do you put that [notional system] into a threat environment, and how does that play out, and really render the specifications that we’re looking at,” Baker explained. “The second piece is, we do an annual experimentation out west. That will be the second quarter this year. And, so, we are looking at vendors, potentially, to come out and partner with us to build off the study that [Brig.] Gen. Phillips did, of what’s truly [the] capability out there.”

“When you look at a CCA role for – really linked to rotary wing, that is a different dynamic than you have at 20-to-30,000 feet,” he added. “So it’s a whole set of different behaviors, a whole set of different capability you need to marry that up with an aircraft that’s flying at 100 feet, at 150-plus knots, at night. So that is what we’re really looking at, is what is the state of technology right now to develop a requirement that we can deliver.”

Altogether, the Army still clearly has many questions of its own to answer as it begins to explore concepts for future CCA-drones in earnest, including how such a program would fit in with work it is already doing in the uncrewed aerial systems space.

Contact the author: [email protected]

If you’re looking to change your body shape, we’ve got you covered.

Here, Laura Hoggins, a personal trainer and author, takes you through your new workout plan.

Your New Workout 

Include a few compound movements in each workout, which work multiple muscles and joints at once. Do eight to 12 reps in each set.

“Women should lift heavy enough that the last two to three reps of a set are challenging but doable with good form,” says Laura.

You can use dumbbells or a barbell for these exercises:

SQUATS 

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• Hold a dumbbell in each hand, letting them hang at your sides. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, chest up, and core tight.
• Initiate the squat by pushing your hips back, as if you are reaching for a chair behind you.
• Bend your knees and lower your body until your thighs are parallel to the floor (or as low as you can comfortably go while keeping your back straight and chest up). Keep the dumbbells close to your sides.
• Push through your heels and the middle of your feet to powerfully drive back up to the starting position.
• At the top, fully straighten your legs and squeeze your glutes for a complete repetition.

Try a goblet squat with one, heavier dumbbell held at the chest, or with a barbell on your upper back/neck.

DEADLIFTS

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• Stand with your feet hip-width apart. Bend over and grip the bar with your hands just outside your shins.
• With the bar still on the floor, bend your knees until your shins touch the bar. The bar should be going across the mid-foot. Keep your hips low, chest up, and back straight. Take a big breath and brace your core.
• Drive through your heels, pushing the floor away. Stand up by extending your knees and hips simultaneously. Keep the bar in contact with your body (dragging it up your shins).
• Finish the lift by standing tall. Squeeze your glutes together and lock your hips and knees.
• To lower the bar again, hinge at your hips first, keeping your back straight, and allow the bar to descend down your thighs. Once the bar passes your knees, bend your knees to lower it to the floor with control.

BENCH PRESS

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• In the gym, set up a barbell on a rack with a flat bench underneath it. Lie on the bench and, planting your feet firmly on the floor, grab the bar with an overhand grip slightly wider than shoulder-width.
• Squeeze your shoulder blades back and down (like you’re pinching a pencil between them). Arch your upper back slightly and drive your feet into the floor to lock in your entire body.
• Take a deep breath and push the bar straight up and off the rack. Move it forward until it is balanced directly over your shoulders. This is your starting position (see illustration above).
• Slowly lower the bar to your mid-chest, just below your collarbone. Keep your elbows tucked to a 45-to-70-degree angle from your body (avoid flaring them out wide).
• When the bar lightly touches your chest, press it forcefully up and slightly back (not straight up) until your arms are fully extended over your shoulders. Exhale, and then repeat the movement for the next rep.

Try with dumbbells if you are at home or are new to the exercise and want more flexibility or range of motion, for example.

BENT OVER ROWS

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• Stand with a dumbbell in each hand, palms facing each other (neutral grip). Bend your knees slightly, then hinge at your hips so your torso is close to a 45-degree angle to the floor.
• Keep your back straight, chest up, and core tight. Let the dumbbells hang straight down, just below your knees.
• Lead the movement by pulling your elbows up and back towards the ceiling, drawing the dumbbells toward the sides of your chest/lower rib cage.
• At the top of the movement, squeeze your back muscles together (imagine pinching a pencil between your shoulder blades).
• Slowly lower the dumbbells back to the starting position with your arms fully extended, maintaining the bent-over posture for all repetitions.

Try with a barbell too.

OVERHEAD PRESS WITH SQUAT

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• Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, holding a dumbbell in each hand by your sides (palms facing inward). Keep your chest up and core tight.
• Initiate the squat by pushing your hips back, as if you are sitting down into a chair.
• Bend your knees, keeping your back straight and the dumbbells hanging close to your body. Go down until your thighs are parallel to the floor, or as low as comfortable.
• Push through your heels and the middle of your feet to drive your body back up to the starting position. Fully straighten your legs and squeeze your glutes at the top of the movement.

Add on a couple of accessory lifts, which target specific areas and work only one side of the body at a time.

Think biceps curls or single-leg glute bridges.

Short on time?

“I suggest pairing exercises together from opposite muscle groups (such as quads and hamstrings), or an upper and a lower exercise to get the biggest bang for your time spent in the gym,” says Laura. 

COLUMBUS, Ohio — U.S. veterans of the war in Afghanistan are telling a commission reviewing decisions on the 20-year conflict that their experience was not only hell, but also confounding, demoralizing and at times humiliating.

The bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission aims to reflect such veterans’ experiences in a report due to Congress next year, which will analyze key strategic, diplomatic, military and operational decisions made between June 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal in August 2021.

The group released its second interim report on Tuesday, drawing no conclusions yet but identifying themes emerging from thousands of pages of government documents; some 160 interviews with cabinet-level officials, military commanders, diplomats, Afghan and Pakistani leaders and others; and forums with veterans like one recently held at a national Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Columbus, Ohio.

“What can we learn from the Afghanistan War?” asked an Aug. 12 discussion session with four of the commission’s 16 members. What they got was two straight hours of dozens of veterans’ personal stories — not one glowingly positive, and most saturated in frustration and disappointment.

“I think the best way to describe that experience was awful,” said Marine veteran Brittany Dymond, who served in Afghanistan in 2012.

Navy veteran Florence Welch said the 2021 withdrawal made her ashamed she ever served there.

“It turned us into a Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us worked for,” she said.

Members of Congress, some driven by having served in the war, created the independent commission several months after the withdrawal, after an assessment by the Democratic administration of then-President Biden faulted the actions of President Trump’s first administration for constraining U.S. options. A Republican review, in turn, blamed Biden. Views of the events remain divided, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered yet another review this spring.

The commission wants to understand the bigger picture of a conflict that spanned four presidential administrations and cost more than 2,400 American lives, said Co-Chair Dr. Colin Jackson.

“So we’re interested in looking hard at the end of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, but we’re equally interested in understanding the beginning, the middle and the end,” he said in an interview in Columbus.

Co-chair Shamila Chaudhary said the panel is also exploring more sweeping questions.

“So our work is not just about what the U.S. did in Afghanistan but what the U.S. should be doing in any country where it deems it has a national security interest,” she said. “And not just should it be there, but how it should behave, what values does it guide itself by, and how does it engage with individuals who are very different from themselves.”

Jackson said one of the commission’s priorities is making sure the final report, due in August 2026, isn’t “unrecognizable to any veteran of the Afghanistan conflict.”

“The nature of the report should be representative of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine experience,” he said.

Dymond told commissioners a big problem was the mission.

“You cannot exert a democratic agenda, which is our foreign policy, you cannot do that on a culture of people who are not bought into your ideology,” she said. “What else do we expect the outcome to be? And so we had two decades of service members lost and maimed because we’re trying to change an ideology that they didn’t ask for.”

The experience left eight-year Army veteran Steve Orf demoralized. He said he didn’t go there “to beat a bad guy.”

“Those of us who served generally wanted to believe that we were helping to improve the world, and we carried with us the hopes, values, and principles of the United States — values and principles that also seem to have been casualties of this war,” he told commissioners. “For many of us, faith with our leaders is broken and trust in our country is broken.”

Tuesday’s report identifies emerging themes of the review to include strategic drift, interagency incoherence, and whether the war inside Afghanistan and the counterterrorism war beyond were pursuing the same aims or at cross purposes.

It also details difficulties the commission has encountered getting key documents. According to the report, the Biden administration initially denied the commission’s requests for White House materials on the implementation of the February 2020 peace agreement Trump signed with the Taliban, called the Doha Agreement, and on the handling of the withdrawal, citing executive confidentiality concerns.

The transition to Trump’s second term brought further delays and complications, but since the commission has pressed the urgency of its mission with the new administration, critical intelligence and documents have now begun to flow, the report says.

Smyth and Aftoora-Orsagos write for the Associated Press.

The redistricting plan taking shape in Sacramento and likely headed toward voters in November could shift the Golden State’s political landscape for at least six years and determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.

Maps made public Friday afternoon show how California Democrats hope to reconfigure the state’s 52 congressional districts. The plan targets five of California’s nine Republican members of Congress, and is designed to counteract the redistricting efforts in Texas that would favor Republicans.

The state Legislature is expected to place the new map and a constitutional amendment to override the state’s independent redistricting process on a Nov. 4 special election ballot.

Enter your address below or select somewhere on the current map to see how the districts could change.

Sean Greene and Hailey Wang contributed to this report.

DONALD Trump and Vladimir Putin are just hours away from holding a historic one-on-one meeting which could shape global politics.

The world’s eyes are poised on Alaska today as leaders of both superpowers prepare to sit down in a peace summit that could decide the fate of Ukraine.

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On Thursday afternoon, Trump likened the high-stakes talks to a game of chess as he warned there is a 25 per cent chance it could end in failure.

He also vowed that Putin “is not going to mess around with me”, insisting the Russian leader “wants a deal” but would face consequences if he becomes greedy.

Trump and Putin are set to meet one-on-one at Elmendorf-Richardson base near Anchorage at 11.30am local time (8.30pm UK) — under extraordinary security.

Putin, who rarely travels abroad since launching his full-scale invasion, will arrive with his feared “Musketeers” bodyguards.

They are notorious for coming armed with everything from armour-piercing pistols to the infamous nuclear briefcase — and even a “poo suitcase” to stop any analysis of Vlad’s health.

The Cold War-era military base has been locked down by US and Russian forces since the meeting was announced last week.

Over 32,000 troops, air defences, and electronic jamming systems are all in place waiting for today’s link up.

The crunch talks will be followed by a joint press conference by both leaders.

The main topic of the meeting will be crisis in Ukraine with Trump pushing to strike a deal with the Kremlin to end the bloodshed.

Also on the agenda will be trade and economic cooperation, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov added.

Trump and Putin will also have a wider meeting with delegations from Washington and Moscow.

They will then attend a working lunch with their security entourage.

For Trump, the meeting stands as a chance to bring peace to war-torn Ukraine and end a conflict which he said would never have started if he were the president back in 2022.

And for Putin, the meeting will decide how much territory he can grab before ending his bloody assault.

The Russian leader, who has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire, said that he wants peace but that his demands for ending his invasion were “unchanged”.

One major sticking point for Moscow is the annexation of more Ukrainian territory – one of Putin’s long-term demands.

It is understood that Trump will try to convince Putin to make peace by offering him deals and concessions.

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Though Washington has said that it will not engage in any agreement on a final peace deal without Ukraine’s formal involvement in the negotiations.

Trump has insisted a deal won’t be made without Ukraine’s blessing with a second meeting set to be arranged soon.

He hinted at a more “important” second round of talks taking place “very quickly” — this time with Volodymyr Zelensky and “maybe some European leaders” in the room.

Putin has tried to sweeten the mood, praising Trump’s “sincere efforts” for peace, even as Zelensky warns he is “bluffing”.

If Putin agrees to a possible ceasefire, both leaders will reach the next stage of peace-making, where they are expected to hold a trilateral meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump has vowed “very severe consequences” if this turns out to be the case.

Zelensky, fresh from meetings with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK PM Sir Keir Starmer, has warned that any talks without Ukraine risk disaster.

Don, who hails himself as a great dealmaker, is said to be planning to present a money-making deal to lure sanctions-hit Putin into peace-making.

The deal will include opening up Alaska’s natural resources to Moscow and lifting some of the American sanctions on Russia’s aviation industry, The Telegraph revealed.

Proposals also include giving Putin access to the rare earth minerals in the Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Russia.

Trump is seemingly betting on Russia‘s current economy, which has been hit hard by global sanctions since he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine.

There is also a chance that the meeting could go south as Trump warned that the Russians risk facing “very severe consequences” if they continue to bomb Ukraine and kill innocent civilians.

More than anyone else, the meeting will be key to European leaders who have long supported Ukraine and warned against future Russian aggression.

Zelensky and European leaders are likely to reject any settlement proposals by the US that demand Ukraine give up further land.

They want to freeze the current frontline as it is – giving away the territory already being held by the Russians.

Zelensky has reiterated that Ukraine will not cede any further territory to Russia.

But it may not be up to the embattled leader if he is presented with a take it or leave it offer in the latter stages of the peace process.

Trump announced on Friday that the only way to resolve the issues is for both sides to accept losses of land.

He said: “It’s complicated, actually. Nothing is easy. It’s very complicated.

“We’re going to get some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

The MAGA president said he would try to return territory to Ukraine.

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Don added: “Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They’ve occupied some very prime territory.

“We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”

After Trump held a call with the European leaders on Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed that Trump reaffirmed that Trump would not negotiate territorial issues with Putin.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron will not be engaging in any “schemes for territory swaps” during the summit.

The summit is set to take place at Elmendorf-Richardson base, one of the most strategic locations in the Arctic.

Bristling with troops from the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps, as well as National Guardsmen and Reserves, it is a symbolic location for both the US and Russia.

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BBC Sport’s Qasa Alom looks at the piece of advice Novak Djokovic gave world number one Jannik Sinner in 2022 and how it’s helped shape his game.

WATCH MORE: Is this the secret to Djokovic’s best ever serving performance at Wimbledon?

Watch live coverage from every court on BBC iPlayer.

Available to UK users only.

Welcome back to another edition of the Times of Troy newsletter, fresh off a pretty consequential week at USC, one you might have missed while eating ungodly amounts of potato salad or sipping margaritas by the pool. But I’m here to catch you up.

July 1, in particular, marked a major turning point for the University of Southern California. Not only was it Carol Folt’s final day as university president, but it was also the first day of a new era for all of college sports, as USC and other schools are now officially permitted to make direct payments to their athletes.

Both changes will have a profound impact on USC’s athletic department and how it operates going forward.

But let’s focus on Folt’s exit. I wrote in November about the imprint her six years as president would leave on USC athletics. She made investing in athletics one of her “moonshot” goals and, by most accounts, followed through on that promise. She signed off on the hire of Lincoln Riley, which cost the university over $20 million in the first year and more than $10 million per year since, and ushered forth the school’s move to the Big Ten, which will help its bottom line. Then last November, Folt was there with ceremonial shovel in hand to break ground on the Bloom Football Performance Center, the gleaming centerpiece of a $225-million fundraising initiative that will forever be part of her legacy. She announced her exit soon after.

Say what you will about Folt — and I have said plenty in this space — but she saw the value in investing in athletics. She understood that the football program was the front porch of the university.

There’s no guarantee that USC’s next president will have the same approach.

Whoever that is will have plenty more pressing problems to deal with first. He or she will inherit a university that reported a staggering $158-million budget deficit for 2023-24 and could now face even more dire financial straits courtesy of the Trump administration, with the potential for major cuts to federal research funding, among other things, in near the future.

No matter what happens, USC’s next president will have a serious financial crisis to solve, a furious faculty to calm and a tense political climate to navigate. Athletics, in the grand scheme, probably shouldn’t be front-of-mind. But the new president’s perspective on college athletics — and their plans for the university as a whole — will have wide-reaching implications for USC’s athletic department going forward.

Take the last two presidents at USC. Folt arrived in 2019 in the aftermath of the Varsity Blues scandal — as well as several other scandals — with an edict to clean up the university. Right away, she set out to reshape athletics, forcing out athletic director Lynn Swann two months after taking the job. She fired three other senior officials a few months after that.

Before her, Max Nikias took the helm in 2010 and immediately announced a $6-billion fundraising initiative, the largest in the history of higher education at the time. In six years, the university raised as much as it had in the previous six decades combined, $760 million of which came from athletics. That directive would shape how every department functioned. In athletics, I’d argue that it set the tone for Varsity Blues.

The new president now takes over at a time when college athletics have never been more expensive. Not only will USC use the full allotted revenue-sharing cap of $20.5 million — $2.5 of which will likely be counted for scholarships — but the expectation is it will spend much more in additional scholarships beyond that. That’s no small expenditure.

Already, no one else was reaching as deeply into their pockets for athletics as USC. According to the most recent Department of Education data, USC reported over $242 million in total athletics expenses between July 2023 and July 2024, more than every other Big Ten or Southeastern Conference school by a considerable margin. (USC also reported $242 million in revenue.)

That number is almost certainly higher this year, too. And from 2025 to 2026, we know at least $20.5 million — and likely much more — will be added to the total.

But the bigger question, in this time of great uncertainty and unexplored gray area, may be what the new president’s tolerance for pushing the envelope will be. At the advent of NIL, when third-party collectives were first coming to the forefront, multiple officials within the department told me that Folt had no interest in wading into the gray area of boosters directly paying football players. She was, after all, the president hired to clean up the school’s image. It wasn’t until a federal judge opened the floodgates on NIL that USC even stepped in with both feet.

It’s going to take more innovative thinking than that to “win the new era” of college athletics. Will the new president have the stomach for working outside the rev-share cap? What about collective bargaining with college football players? Or a Big Ten-SEC super league?

USC has the right leaders in place at the top of its athletic department, and I’ve only heard positive feedback around the department about interim university president Beong-Soo Kim.

But whomever is hired for the permanent job will take the reins at an especially critical time for college athletics. And wherever they stand could change everything about the direction in which USC is headed.

USC and Texas A&M track and field athletes and coaches pose with NCAA trophies after being crowned co-champions. USC has already sent at least one track athlete through the NIL clearinghouse to get their compensation approved.

(C. Morgan Engel / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

— USC has already had deals approved by the NIL clearinghouse. All third-party NIL deals over $600 must now be approved by NIL Go, the clearinghouse run by Deloitte that’s set up to determine whether deals have a legitimate business purpose and fall within a reasonable range of compensation. There will be ways to get around that, of course. For one, schools all over the country front-loaded as many NIL deals as they could before the July 1 deadline, so as to not have to use the clearinghouse. But USC has successfully used the clearinghouse already, and it wasn’t for football like you might assume. The first of those deals, an official said, came from USC’s track and water polo programs.

— USC continues to be an unstoppable force on the recruiting trail. The latest addition to the Trojans’ No. 1 class comes at receiver, as Ethan “Boobie” Feaster committed last week, giving USC three four-star wideouts and eight top-100 prospects in 2026. Feaster, who reclassified from the 2027 class, looks like he could be the best of the bunch. USC now has the No. 1 tight end, the No. 2 offensive tackle, the 7th- and 10th-ranked receivers and the 5th- and 9th-ranked running backs committed — and its class on defense might still be better!

—USC’s women’s basketball program has a new general manager. Selena Castillo spent the last two years as director of external affairs for Duke’s women’s basketball team. She replaces Amy Broadhead, whose hire last September was hailed at the time as a groundbreaking move for the program. Broadhead ultimately chose to leave college athletics of her own accord just nine months later, for a job at the streaming service Crunchyroll. Now Castillo steps into a key role, at a key time. It’ll be up to her to maximize the rare window that USC has now with young, marketable stars like JuJu Watkins and Jazzy Davidson in the fold.

—What’s up with the transfer exodus out of USC baseball? When I spoke with Andy Stankiewicz ahead of our last edition of this newsletter, he singled out outfielder Brayden Dowd as a player he was excited about heading into next season. Well, Dowd has since entered the transfer portal, along with 16 of his teammates. That’s a significant portion of last year’s NCAA tournament roster. Dowd, who hit .324 with 52 runs, 10 home runs and 36 RBI last season, is the only major loss in the batting order. But the Trojans will have a ton of talent to replace on the mound, with its two top starters out (Caden Aoki, via transfer, Caden Hunter, via the draft) and its two top relievers, by ERA, transferring (Brodie Purcell and Jude Favela).

—There’s a new one-time transfer window from July 7-Aug. 5, but don’t expect the usual chaos. The only athletes permitted to transfer in that window will be those listed as “Designated Student-Athletes” by their respective schools, and the only athletes listed as DSAs are those who would have been removed from a roster in 2025-26 because of new roster limits from the House settlement. In other words, this would only really affect athletes on the back-end of rosters, many of which would have previously been viewed as walk-ons. So, for now, no need for any more transfer panic.

—Should college athletes and staff be allowed to bet on other sports? That’s a question that was recently asked by the NCAA Division 1 Council to its membership. Whether you agree morally or not, the reality is the NCAA simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to police all forms of sports betting on campus. Betting on college sports will obviously still be against the rules — and punishable by a lifetime ban — and the Council was clear that it doesn’t “endorse” gambling. But betting on other sports could be an option moving forward.

Food for thought

Joey Chestnut wins the Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4 in New York City.

(Adam Gray / Getty Images)

Growing up in the Kartje household, it was tradition that every July 4 we would watch the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. This year, after a few years off, I got to share those 10 gloriously gluttonous minutes with my son.

We’re still working on his hot-dog eating fundamentals. (According to my wife, toddlers are not supposed to competitively eat. Ugh. Lame.) But the whole experience got me ruminating on a question I’d seen asked before on social media: How many hot dogs have I actually eaten in my lifetime?

I’ll spare you the methodology here, but let’s just say I’m looking at between 600-700 hot dogs, conservatively, in my lifetime. Gulp.

In case you missed it

USC commit Andrew Williams proves the City Section still has football talent

‘I’m panicking.’ USC’s Alijah Arenas recounts harrowing escape from Cybertruck crash

Judge rules Reggie Bush must pay Lloyd Lake $1.4 million in defamation case

Three years after USC and UCLA led mass defections, Pac-12 adds Texas State as 8th member

Times of Troy: How will USC allocate the $20.5 million it can pay its athletes?

What I’m watching this week

Matthew Goode, right, stars in the Netflix series “Dept. Q.”

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

I’m a sucker for a British crime drama, so it’s no surprise that I’ve enjoyed Netflix’s “Dept. Q.” Set in Scotland, the show follows an ornery police detective begrudgingly leading a misfit cold-case unit. It reminds me of Sherlock, another fantastic entry in the genre featuring a prickly lead. Matthew Goode, the star of Dept. Q, is particularly good at playing prickly.

Until next time….

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected], and follow me on Twitter at @Ryan_Kartje. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

Warner Bros. Discovery is in poor shape — so much so that Chief Executive David Zaslav has decided to unwind the 2022 merger he orchestrated by splitting the company in two.

But Zaslav himself is doing just fine, to the chagrin of shareholders.

In a rare searing rebuke, investors recently cast a symbolic vote disapproving of Zaslav’s 2024 compensation package, which rose 4% to $51.9 million compared with the year before.

The package, approved by the company’s board of directors, ensured that Zaslav remained one of the nation’s highest-paid corporate leaders. Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services, known as ISS, described the company’s executive compensation packages as “an unmitigated pay-for-performance misalignment.”

The situation renewed scrutiny of the compensation levels for leaders of the top entertainment companies, which remain high compared with peers in other industries.

Although 2024 was a bad year for Hollywood, it was a very good year for some of the industry’s top executives, according to a survey of data by Equilar, which studies executive pay, for The Times.

The median compensation for those executives for 2024 was $33.9 million, up 7% from 2023, Equilar said. That’s about double the median compensation of CEOs at S&P 500 companies, which was $17.1 million last year.

The compensation data include stock options, base salaries, bonuses and other perks for CEOs from Netflix, Fox Corp., Roku, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., AMC Networks, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery and the Walt Disney Co.

Paramount was excluded from the median data because of a change from one CEO to three in April 2024.

“The compensation packages remain somewhat out of whack based on the good old days where the margins were substantially higher,” said Evan Shapiro, a former NBCUniversal executive who now runs his own company. “The Hollywood era got used to very specific — some would argue irrational — pay packages and never readjusted itself when the business went haywire.”

Pay packages increased for Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, reflecting the streaming giant’s strong performance. The value of Sarandos’ pay package went up 24% to $61.9 million, while Peters’ went up 50% to $60.3 million.

Other executives whose compensation increased included Bob Bakish, who was ousted as CEO of Paramount in April 2024. He had a package worth $86.96 million in 2024 (which included his roughly $69 million severance), up 178% from $31.3 million a year earlier.

Disney chief Bob Iger, who spent 2024 mounting a turnaround for the Burbank-based company, earned $41.1 million, up 30% from the previous year. During the year, Disney had renewed strength at the box office and achieved streaming profitability after years of losses.

Fox Corp.’s CEO Lachlan Murdoch’s total pay rose 9% to $23.8 million, while Roku CEO Anthony Wood got a bump of 37% to $27.7 million.

Others got a pay cut. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts’ 2024 compensation declined 5% to $33.9 million, primarily due to a lower cash bonus. AMC Networks CEO Kristin Dolan had a 40% drop to $8.7 million last year related to a $6.8-million equity award she received in 2023 tied to her promotion to CEO.

Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer earned $18.2 million in the company’s fiscal 2024 year, down 15% compared with $21.5 million from fiscal 2023.

For 2024, the highest-paid chief executives among publicly traded media and entertainment companies compiled by Equilar for The Times were Bakish, Zaslav, Sarandos, Peters and Iger.

Most of the companies declined to comment or referred The Times to proxy statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fox Corp. did not return a request for comment.

The increase in pay reflects a broader trend at publicly traded companies. Compensation is increasing as companies try to align pay with performance by handing out large stock awards, said Amit Batish, senior director of content for Equilar. Certain awards such as stock options typically benefit executives only if the stock goes up.

Some executives are also adding security perks after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, he said.

Several Hollywood executives had pay packages last year that were worth substantially more than the median, Equilar said. With so much change and disruption happening in the entertainment business and plenty of competition for skilled leadership, companies believe they need to pay up to hold on to executive talent.

“Especially in the entertainment industry that’s constantly evolving, with streaming services taking over, there’s constant fluctuations in the market, so companies are looking to find ways to keep their executives on board and motivated,” Batish said.

Sky-high executive compensation has resurfaced debate about a subject that has been simmering since even before the 2023 strikes led by writers and actors — the widening pay gap between executives and workers.

Many entertainment workers have left Southern California due to the lack of work, as more productions are moving out of the area due to increased costs. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and Paramount have continued to lay off employees. Some entertainment workers struggling to find jobs have adopted the saying “Persist to ’26,” replacing last year’s “Survive ‘til ’25.”

“Any survey of executive pay, generally there’s a disconnect between what people see in their own checking accounts and when they see what executives, particularly for top Fortune 500 companies, earned,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “There’s often discontent with the chasm between the rank and file and CEOs.”

Zaslav became a symbol of that ire in 2021 when his compensation package was valued at $246.6 million, which included stock options tied to the merger. The value of his 2024 compensation was much lower at $51.9 million, but still higher than other executives such as Disney’s Iger.

Following the nonbinding shareholder “say on pay” vote, Warner Bros. Discovery pledged to address shareholder concerns. Those changes are expected to lower Zaslav’s future payouts. Similarly, Disney and Netflix in recent years have been hit with negative shareholder votes on the pay, leading to adjustments.

Zaslav’s target annual cash bonus opportunity will shrink from $22 million to $6 million after splitting Warner Bros. Discovery in two, separating studios and streaming services from linear cable networks, the company said. Zaslav’s base salary would remain $3 million.

“We structured the new compensation packages to address shareholders’ feedback by fostering pay-for-performance alignment,” Warner Bros. Discovery board chair Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr. said in a statement.

While Warner Bros. Discovery worked on retiring $4.4 billion in debt through cost-cutting and launched its streaming service Max (which is being rebranded back to HBO Max) in 70 markets last year, the company also had some fumbles, including losing the NBA on its TV networks.

“It appears the board may have been out-negotiated,” said Lloyd Greif, chief executive of Los Angeles investment bank Greif & Co. “They created incentives that did not directly translate into a higher stock price, or higher revenue and EBITDA growth” — referring to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. “So,” he added, “you have to look at the results and say, the board blew the call.”

The company’s compensation committee said it took into account Zaslav’s performance across different goals including revenue, cash flow, enhancing the motion picture slate, cost controls, launching Max globally and securing talent.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s revenue in 2024 fell 5% to $39.3 billion, compared with 2023. Adjusted earnings excluding certain items fell 11% during that same time period. The stock price declined about 7% in 2024.

“It just sends a very bad message to your teams,” said Paul Verna, vice president of content at research firm Emarketer, adding that leaders should inspire their teams amid challenges facing the industry. “It’s very hard to do that when you’re firing thousands of people but not really absorbing any pain yourself in your own compensation.”

The committee saw the loss of the NBA U.S. TV rights as a positive, saying it resulted in a “more efficient long-term relationship with the league,” according to the company’s proxy filing.

When the compensation committee evaluated those figures, it took out costs related to a joint venture called Venu Sports that was meant to launch in 2024 but was scrapped, as well as new sports rights programming and packages.

That irked some groups, including ISS, though some executive compensation experts said it is not uncommon for companies to factor out some costs deemed to be out of the executive’s control.

The reverberations of the shareholder vote continue.

It could cause the board to put pressure on the compensation committee to improve its performance or activist shareholders to target the company for a proxy contest, Lawrence Cunningham, director of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, wrote in an email to The Times.

“Shareholder votes on pay, even when non-binding, send a signal that can be important,” Cunningham wrote. “A 60% no vote is huge.”

Thomas J. Barrack Jr. drew worldwide attention for bailing out Michael Jackson when the singer’s Neverland Ranch was on the brink of foreclosure.

A couple years later, Barrack’s purchase of Miramax studios with actor Rob Lowe and other partners vaulted him into the Hollywood elite. Barrack was chairman of Miramax for six years.

Now, Barrack’s close friendship with Donald Trump has made him one of the most influential Californians in the inner circle of the president-elect. Trump put Barrack in charge of planning his Jan. 20 inauguration.

Barrack is the founder and executive chairman of Colony Capital Inc., a Los Angeles investment giant that manages more than $60 billion in assets, much of it for Arab clients.

As Trump prepares to take power, Barrack’s long business history in the Mideast — and his deep knowledge of its politics and its cultures — makes him a significant player in shaping Trump’s thinking on the region.

“That he’s sitting at the table with Trump should make everybody very happy,” said Lowe, one of Barrack’s best friends. “I know it does me.”

Over coffee at his Santa Monica mansion, Barrack said he declined a top role in Trump’s administration, telling the president-elect he could serve him better as a friend with “no skin in the game.”

For now, that means overseeing preparations for next week’s inaugural celebrations, a task Barrack described as “drinking out of 10 fire hoses.”

“It’s like putting on the Olympics in 60 days,” he said.

Barrack (pronounced BEAR-ick) leads a group of wealthy Trump supporters who have raised more than $90 million, he said, for the galas and ceremonies in Washington. Among them are casino tycoons Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

Mark Burnett, producer of “The Apprentice,” is working for Barrack on the inauguration night festivities. Trump’s toxic image in liberal Hollywood has kept big stars off the program.

Barrack befriended Trump in the 1980s. They were haggling over the Plaza Hotel, a Manhattan trophy that Trump was buying from oil tycoon Robert Bass, then Barrack’s boss. Trump was already a famous developer, so Barrack felt obliged to treat him with deference.

“We didn’t have that intersection that two big dogs have when they get to a fire hydrant; I wasn’t equal,” Barrack recalled.

Barrack and Trump developed a close friendship through three decades of raising children, weathering divorces and maneuvering among the top echelons of global finance and real estate.

Barbara A. Res, who was Trump’s chief of construction in the 1980s, recalled that Barrack was one of Trump’s few genuine friends.

“I always felt sympathy for Donald, because it’s very hard for him to have a friend,” she said. “Everyone who surrounds him wants to have a piece of him.”

The friendship gave Barrack a prominent role at the Republican National Convention in July. On the night Trump accepted the presidential nomination, Barrack was the last speaker before the candidate’s daughter, Ivanka, took the stage.

He told the audience that Trump “played me like a Steinway piano” in the Plaza Hotel deal. Left unmentioned was that Barrack’s boss got a good price, nearly $410 million, while Trump went so deep into debt — on that deal and others — that he soon lost the hotel in a bankruptcy settlement.

Barrack, a grandson of Lebanese Christian immigrants, grew up in Culver City. His father ran a grocery store; his mother was a secretary. In the family’s small stucco house, his parents spoke English with Barrack and his sister, Arabic and French with the grandparents.

Live coverage of the transition »

Barrack, impeccably fit at 69, has six children, ages 2 to 39. He works out daily and often surfs and plays polo around the world. He spends about a week a month at his neoclassical colonial home overlooking Santa Monica Canyon’s Riviera Country Club.

“When I get him on the phone, he’s as likely to be in Riyadh or Paris as he is to be in L.A.,” said Lowe, who joked that Barrack lives on his private jet. “He uses that plane the way my kids use an Uber.”

Barrack sees the jet as an essential tool for work.

“If somebody calls me on Sunday night and says I want to have breakfast with you in London at 8 o’clock in the morning, most of my competitors are too spoiled to do it — they’ll send somebody,” he said. “If I go, that’s my competitive advantage. And I don’t get jet lag.”

Last year, Barrack took Lowe to the Mideast. In Lebanon, they visited three Syrian refugee camps. One of them was in Zahle, Barrack’s ancestral village on his father’s side. It was heartbreaking, Barrack said, to see thousands of children left homeless by the wreckage of war.

Trump has vowed to block Syrian refugees from entering the United States, saying countries in the Mideast must set up “safe zones” where they can live peacefully in the region. Barrack recalled telling Trump how challenging that would be.

“The president-elect has a very good vision of what needs to be done, but it’s not that simple,” he said.

Trump’s critics, Barrack said, don’t realize how “tender and inclusive” he will be. “I go to my friends and say, ‘Get over it. He’s going to be so much better than you think.’”

Barrack served on Trump’s economic advisory council during the campaign. He also urged Trump to dial down the bombast, saying the volleys between him and Hillary Clinton were “disheartening.”

At the same time, Barrack started a super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, which spent more than $17 million slamming Clinton over donations that her family foundation got from what the ads called “Wall Street insiders” and “misogynistic regimes.” One of the spots accused her of looking the other way “on Saudi funding of terrorism.”

Some of Barrack’s friends and partners are dismayed by his embrace of Trump.

“I have absolutely no use for the president-elect, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like Tom,” said Richard Blum, a Barrack investment partner who is married to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. “He’s a very smart guy, and I hope Trump listens to him.”

Barrack’s big break came in the early 1970s, when he was an attorney at the firm of Herbert W. Kalmbach, President Nixon’s personal lawyer. The firm dispatched Barrack to work on a project in Saudi Arabia, where he played squash with a man who turned out to be a prince.

Barrack left the practice and spent the next four years in Saudi Arabia as an advisor to the royal family. At the time, Saudi rulers were using oil riches to transform the primitive Bedouin nation into a modern society with a mammoth construction program.

With few options for entertainment, Barrack spent nearly every night conversing in Arabic with men in their majlis, salons where he recalls learning patience and cultural adaptability.

“You’d sit sharia style and talk for six or seven hours,” he said.

Barrack’s time in the Mideast led to top executive jobs in real estate and finance, with a brief stint as deputy undersecretary at the Interior Department under President Reagan.

In 1991, Barrack opened Colony Capital. It specialized in bets on distressed assets, starting with bundles of bad loans that it picked up at low cost from federal regulators in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis.

Colony later capitalized on another U.S. lending debacle, the 2008 economic crash. Colony bought tens of thousands of single-family homes at foreclosure auctions in California, Nevada and other states, then made money by renting them out as housing markets recovered.

Barrack said Colony was careful to avoid tossing families from their homes, but critics fault the nature of the business, with tenants replacing homeowners.

“The only reason they’re able to acquire those properties is because of the misfortunes of homeowners that went into foreclosure,” said Charles Evans, a senior lawyer at Public Counsel, a Los Angeles nonprofit that provides free legal services to the poor.

Barrack, whose family spends summers at his medieval chateau on the French Riviera, has become a top corporate player in France, where Colony for a time owned the Paris-St. Germain soccer team. Colony has been a major investor in French hotel and retail chains.

In 2008, when Jackson was on the verge of losing his Neverland Ranch in Santa Ynez, near Barrack’s Happy Canyon winery and polo fields, a mutual friend asked him to meet with the singer and review his finances.

Barrack said he told Jackson he could no longer spend $35 million a year when his income was $12 million.

“You either go back to work, and you make enough money to support your lifestyle, or you wind your lifestyle down to a level that you can live on four or five million dollars a year,” he recalled saying to Jackson.

See the most-read stories this hour »

Colony restructured Jackson’s debt, keeping Neverland out of foreclosure as Jackson went back to work. Jackson started rehearsing for a comeback tour that would never occur; he died in 2009. Barrack also rescued other celebrities from financial ruin, but declined to name any, apart from the photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose lifeline from Barrack was widely known.

Barrack’s biggest Hollywood play was Miramax. He and Lowe were on holiday on a boat in Sardinia when Barrack called Ron Tutor, the construction magnate, and asked about joining forces to buy the studio from Disney.

They believed that they could make money by minimizing future filmmaking and maximizing sales from the studio’s film library to Netflix and other outlets. With partners from Qatar, the trio formed an investment group that bought Miramax for $610 million.

Barrack largely avoided the trappings of Hollywood. Others in his position, Lowe said, would have rushed to “make Leonardo DiCaprio’s passion project about sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Tom kept his eye on the ball,” Lowe said.

Barrack said the group made a solid return last year when it sold the studio for an undisclosed amount to investors in Qatar.

Now, as Trump’s administration takes shape, Barrack is content to watch from afar. He wants to stay near his youngest children in California and to see through Colony’s merger with two real estate companies.

If Trump needs him on the inside, Barrack said, the timing might be better once his advisors settle into their new roles and “everybody learns to play more nicely in the sandbox.”

“I would do anything he asks,” Barrack said.

[email protected]

@finneganLAT

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