A TEENAGE boy was banned from boarding his flight because of a sticker on his passport.
Thirteen-year-old Alix Dawson was due to fly to Thailand with his family last month for two weeks.
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A teenage boy was banned from his flight because of his passportCredit: Kennedy NewsA luggage sticker mark meant the airline didn’t accept the passportCredit: Kennedy News
However, after arriving at Edinburgh Airport, his mum Meghan Law was told that he wouldn’t be allowed to board the flight with his passport at the check in desk.
Meghan, who lives in Aberdeen said: “We got to the airport and were checking in my bags when the [check-in staff member] looked at my passport then just walked away from the desk. She didn’t say anything.
“We were standing there for 20 minutes before I asked what’s going on. She came back and said that my passport was damaged.
“I said I’ve used this umpteen times. No one’s ever mentioned any damage on it before.
“There were no rips or stains, I don’t know what she was trying to imply. I was really shocked.
“What they were trying to say was that the luggage check-in stickers that had been stuck on one of the pages [and] had damaged the page. But it wasn’t even on the photo page.
“There were no rips, it was just where the sticker marks had been. They said we couldn’t travel with it.
“I knew there were no issues with their passports. We’d probably travelled over a dozen times with them.”
She was then told that they would need to go to Glasgow Airport to get a new emergency passport.
Fearing for their £3,000 holiday, she contacted TUI, who they booked the trip with.
After sending photos of the reported ‘damage’, Meghan said the tour operator found no issues with the passport and put them on the next available flight to Thailand which was with Emirates rather than Qatar Airways.
The family were able to head on holiday with no further obstacles, albeit the next day, from a different airport.
Meghan said: “If I hadn’t booked through TUI and booked it myself, we just wouldn’t have been able to go on holiday.
“One way from Glasgow on the same day of travel would’ve been £2,800.
The family had to fly from Glasgow instead of Edinburgh, with TUI getting them on the next flightCredit: Kennedy NewsMum Meghan has slammed the rules as she said they have never had problems flying with it beforeCredit: Kennedy News
“We used it six times over the two-week holiday and no one said anything which confirms there were no issues with the passports.”
She said that it “ruined the start of the trip” for being so stressful and is calling for compensation.
Other passengers have been banned from their flights due to them being too damaged.
When Friedia Niimura moved to the U.S. from Japan in her mid-20s, she shared a dream with many Angelenos: acting, or maybe fashion. A TV and media personality in Japan, it seemed a natural fit, only she didn’t take to the competitive pace of Los Angeles.
So she dove into one of her other passions: paper.
“When I came to L.A., I noticed there weren’t a lot of specialty stationery boutiques,” Niimura says. “When you’re in Japan, they’re everywhere and you take them for granted. That’s how I would spend my days off. I would go to the stationery and browse and take my notebook and draw.”
Friedia Niimura outside her shop Paper Plant Co., which occupies two Chinatown storefronts and shares a space with Thank You Coffee. Niimura spent her teen years in Japan before changing her career.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Niimura created a place where one can do just that. Chinatown’s Paper Plant Co. is her stationery outpost, made of two small storefronts that share a space with Thank You Coffee and boast outdoor seating. A communal destination since 2020, the shop has earned a reputation for specializing in notebooks, stickers and pens from Japan. Or, as Niimura describes Paper Plant’s aesthetic: “cute.”
“When we pick something and we all go, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so cute,’ then we know it’s going to do really well,” Niimura, 45, says. “I don’t know how in Japan they always come up with cute scenarios and cute scenes and cute gestures. It’s almost like there’s a school on how to draw dogs doing cute things, cats doing cute things.”
Paper Plant will on Oct. 11-12 play host to Bungu LA, believed to be the first proper stationery festival in the city. Niimura has handpicked Bungu’s 60 or so exhibitors, with the vast majority of them traveling here from Japan. Bungu is inspired by similar events Niimura has gone to in Tokyo or New York. Paper Plant, for instance, exhibited last year at a festival hosted by Brooklyn’s Yoseka Stationery.
“There was a line every day,” Niimura says, describing the New York fest. “It was just my store manager and I, and we were like, ‘How come L.A. doesn’t have one?’ And then who would do it? It always came back to us, since we have that relationship with Japanese creators.”
Like most everything Paper Plant-related, Niimura has been figuring it out on the fly. Paper Plant, for instance, was initially funded almost entirely by credit cards, a business plan Niimura wouldn’t recommend to others. Bungu will take over part of a concourse at downtown’s Union Station, and the hope is to make it an annual event. The goal for the first year is to simply break even, as Niimura jokes that she doesn’t yet know the final cost of staging a festival.
“We had to also rent out a front sidewalk, which was another $10,000 that I hadn’t added to the budget,” Niimura says.
The response, however, has been overwhelmingly positive. Popular Japanese firms such as Hobonichi will be in attendance, but Niimura says she made an effort to secure vendors that have never before sold in the U.S. Advance tickets of $25, for which about 1,500 were made available per day, have sold out. There will, however, be walk-up tickets sold each day of the show. Niimura is hoping to attract 2,500 people per day.
Stickers, says Paper Plant Co. owner Friedia Niimura, are hugely popular at the moment. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Paper Plant Co. makes and sells original greeting cards. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Niimura herself is still discovering new joys in the stationery world. She notes that only recently has she become smitten with fountain pens.
“In Japan, fountain pens are geared toward older gentlemen,” she says. “And they’re expensive. The really nice ones can be thousands of dollars. We have ones that are a couple hundred, but also beginner ones for about $20. I started off with those, but I recently got a couple hundred dollar ones, and it’s life changing — the way the ink comes out is so smooth. Once you have one, it’s hard to go back to a regular pen.”
As part of Bungu, Niimura is encouraging attendees to explore L.A.’s public transit and the walkability of Chinatown. Maps will be given out at Bungu for which guests can collect three stamps, one at the event, one at the Chinatown Metro Rail station and one at Paper Plant. Those who complete the mini scavenger hunt will be given a free gift at Paper Plant, which Niimura is keeping a secret.
With the rise of collage and zine-making workshops, younger generations are connecting with paper and Niimura notes that one-day planners and scrapbooking today have become especially popular.
“I feel like anything work-wise, people have on their phones,” Niimura says. “But there’s this trend of scrapbooking everything — receipts for the day, the coffee cup holder, stickers. They call it ‘junk journaling.’”
Junk journaling, says Niimura, is fueling in part the sticker trend of the moment. Paper Plant sells a wide array of stickers and also makes its own — a dog, for instance, wearing a Dodgers hat, or a man wearing a dog as a hat. “The mini stickers are for the journalers and the planners,” Niimura says. “They have really teeny-tiny ones. It’s for the calendar. You use a sandwich sticker for lunch with a friend.”
The charm of Paper Plant’s two storefronts, where one can find lamps shaped like bread, diaries with adorable cats on the cover and those fancy fountain pens, belies the fact that 2025 is a stressful time for the stationery business. Niimura sighs as she notes that she’s had to raise prices this year due to tariffs imposed by President Trump.
“Everything has kind of gone up,” Niimura says when asked how the tariffs have affected her business. “If its coming from China, it’s a lot. If it’s coming from Japan, it’s a little bit.”
And yet that doesn’t deter her optimism. Niimura notes that in a way, she’s living out one of her childhood dreams, as she once envisioned her retirement life including a gig at a stationery shop.
“I always thought I would do this later in life,” she says. “I thought I would be the old lady putting out a sign and being behind the register.”
And now, Niimura speaks of Paper Plant and Bungu as something of a mission.
Chinatown’s Paper Plant Co. occupies two Chinatown storefronts, and sells everything from stickers and stationary to lamps shaped like bread.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“This analog style of things shouldn’t die just yet,” she says. “I think it’s important. Creativity starts with a pencil and a paper. Now my son, too, doesn’t have a cursive class. That hurts. You can recognize someone by their handwriting. My son calls cursive ‘fancy writing,’ and I don’t want that to die.”
Think of Paper Plant and Bungu, then, as a way to keep a lost art alive.
It was billed as a bargain-basement deal: L.A. County would buy the Gas Company Tower for $200 million — a third of what the downtown skyscraper cost before the pandemic sent office prices plummeting.
Nine months after the sale closed, some of the supervisors say they have sticker shock.
The sore point: a looming $230-million contract for “voluntary seismic upgrades” to the newly purchased tower, soon to become the county’s new headquarters.
“I never heard that it would double the cost of the purchase,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn, who cast a ‘hell no’ vote against buying the building. “I’m holding out hope that smarter minds will prevail, and we can stop any more investment in this building.”
On Tuesday, Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsey Horvath will introduce a motion to “immediately suspend” all seismic work.
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“Given that we are in the budget constraints that we are in, I was surprised to know that that work was still being contemplated,” said Horvath.
The county’s financial future has never looked so grim. Federal cuts will force the county to slash health services and potentially shutter a hospital, Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport warned the board this week. The county soon will start making payments for its historically large $4-billion sex abuse settlement. Newly negotiated raises for county employees could cost the county $2 billion.
Before the purchase, the supervisors were given ballpark figures as to just how much it would cost to bring the Gas Company Tower into tiptop shape vs. rehabbing the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, the county’s current headquarters, which is widely viewed by county employees as a death trap during the next major earthquake.
To earthquake-proof the hall — by far the riskiest of the two buildings — it could cost $700 million, according to estimates provided to the board last fall. To do the same for the newer Gas Company Tower, the county Chief Executive Office estimated it could potentially cost about $400 million. (As of now, the county is planning to spend less than that with a bid amount of $234.5 million.)
The Gas Company Tower came out looking the better deal by about a billion dollars, according to the Chief Executive Office, once it took into account other costs needed to upgrade the Hall of Administration — including more than a billion dollars in deferred maintenance and improvements.
Hahn’s not swayed.
“I think the bureaucrats had a plan and they made their numbers fit to sell this ill-conceived project,” she continued, adding she believed similar doubt was starting to creep in among her colleagues.
“I’ve heard some of them have some buyer’s remorse,” she said.
Horvath says she doesn’t regret buying the building — but she is skeptical that the county needs to pour millions more into the tower.
“I still maintain that the purchase of the building was the right thing to do,” she said. “If retrofitting is not needed, then I want to understand why we would [retrofit] at a time such as this, when we are making a very clear case about the difficult financial position we’re in.”
Lennie LaGuire, a spokesperson for the Chief Executive Office, previously told The Times that the tower is already safe and the upgrades are “proactive.”
“The County is choosing to perform this work proactively with an eye to the future, to ensure that the building performs optimally in the decades ahead,” LaGuire said.
During brutal labor negotiations over the last year, the purchase of the skyscraper became a touchy subject. Labor condemned it as an unnecessary splurge. The county insisted it was an obvious money saver.
The hard feelings haven’t gone away, with some unions saying they were kept in the dark about the tower’s true cost.
“The priority should be those facilities the public relies upon for emergencies and daily needs, like sheriff’s stations, fire stations, medical facilities, etc.” said Richard Pippin, president of the sheriff‘s deputies union. “Look, we get it — with the near doubling of the Board of Supervisors and an elected County Executive Officer, everyone wants an office with a better view, but is that what’s best for the public we serve?”
The motion Tuesday also requests a report on where the money to finance the retrofit is coming from and which departments will be moving into the tower.
“The purpose of this acquisition was to realize substantial savings for the County of Los Angeles by consolidating operations and avoiding leased spaces,” the motion states. “However, there has been little to no transparency into what progress, if any, the County has made in occupying spaces in the Gas Company Tower after eight months of ownership.”
According to the Chief Executive Office, some employees have started to move into the building, but the entire move is expected to take three years.
State of play
— OLYMPIC JITTERS: Councilmember Imelda Padilla, a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on the 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games, called President Trump’s announcement that he would head a federal Olympic task force a “real curveball” for the city and raised concerns about what a mercurial president would mean for the Olympics. “We are a little nervous to see what they’re going to ask for,” Padilla said during the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon on Thursday referring to the Trump administration’s involvement in the Olympics. She also called Trump’s assertion that Bass was not very competent “completely false.”
—TUNNEL TROUBLE: The city spent $25,800, using 10 contracted workers, to paint over graffiti in the 2nd Street Tunnel — only for taggers to immediately paint the walls again within 24 hours. “It’s infuriating that these selfish vandals are wasting tax dollars aimed at improving the city for all Angelenos,” said Steve King, president of the Board of Public Works.
— SILVER LININGS: L.A. County supervisors say they’re open to the idea of a receiver taking control of the beleaguered juvenile halls. But for it to happen, a majority on the board says the receiver will need to take on union agreements and civil service rules, which they say keep problem employees on the payroll.
—PLEA TO THE FEDS: A prominent law firm suing L.A. County over childhood sexual abuse is asking for a federal investigation into how so many children were harmed while in county custody. In a letter addressed to U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, attorney John Manly wrote that he wanted to see the U.S. attorney’s office conduct an “immediate investigation” into any federal crimes committed by staff within the county’s Probation Department.
—COOLING OFF: L.A. County will soon require landlords in unincorporated areas to provide a way for tenants to keep their rental units 82 degrees or below. The supervisors say the law is necessary to combat heat-related deaths fueled by climate change.
—A HIGH-PRICED HALF-MONTH: A law firm representing the city of Los Angeles in a high-profile homelessness case submitted a $1.8-million invoice for two weeks of work in May. The costs comes as the city faces significant financial burdens from rising legal payouts.
— VENUE VOTE: The hotel workers union turned in a ballot proposal to require that voters approve of “event centers” for the 2028 Olympics, including sports facilities and concert halls. Former City Councilmember Paul Krekorian, who heads Mayor Karen Bass’ Office of Special Events, said the measure “would make vital projects essential for our city and these Games potentially impossible to complete.”
—TEMPORARY LEAVE: As of next week, Deputy Mayor Randall Winston — who also serves as a judge advocate in the U.S. Army National Guard Reserve — will be on a leave of absence from the Mayor’s office for military training. Winston was originally supposed to go on leave in January but deferred to help support wildfire response and recovery efforts. Andrea Greene, Executive Officer of the Office of Infrastructure, will be filling his role until he returns in mid-December, according to the Mayor’s office.
QUICK HITS
On the docket for next week: The county supervisors are asking the sheriff’s department to report on their use-of-force policies as they relate to journalists covering the ongoing ICE raids.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
Chris Newman was carrying two bags when we recently sat down for breakfast at Homegirl Café in downtown Los Angeles.
One was a newish satchel holding his laptop and papers for the cases he’s working on, which happen to involve some of the most infamous moments in the Trump administration’s deportation deluge.
“If we can litigate the calamity [of Trump] at the local level to the widest degree, that can help democracy survive, dude,” Newman told me as he picked at black beans and two eggs over easy.
The other bag, a big straw tote, was filled with anti-Trump and anti-migra T-shirts, posters and stickers. Wherever Newman goes these days, he hands them out like a progressive Santa Claus.
“I want to keep the proper amount of anger to have the fuel to do all this,” he said. “The pendulum is sweeping so wide and so fast. We need to be ready.”
For the past 21 years, Newman has been a pivotal, omnipresent part of Southern California’s immigrant rights movement as legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, better known as NDLON. His work takes him from street corners advising jornaleros about their rights to my alma mater, UCLA, where he’s on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Newman’s influence extends far past Los Angeles, however. He’s a regular presence on national media outlets, quick and eloquent with insights and righteous anger. Politicians from Sacramento to Washington know he isn’t afraid to tear into them if he thinks they’re too timid to publicly call out xenophobia or support laws that protect the undocumented.
“He does not mind being the bad cop,” said Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney at the San Francisco public defender’s office. In her previous job last decade, she and Newman helped craft a trio of bills that made California a sanctuary state.
“It can make a meeting very uncomfortable, but Chris is cutting all the bulls— so you get much closer to having an honest conversation,” Chan said. “He does not expect or pursue pomp or circumstance.”
Chris Newman, legal council for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, outside Homegirl Cafe in Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Salvador Reza, a longtime organizer in Phoenix, first worked with Newman in the mid-2000s after asking NDLON to help pressure the city to let day laborers seek work. Newman participated in forums, organized rallies and ultimately convinced city officials to lay off by citing a 2006 lawsuit against Redondo Beach that he had worked on. In that case, an ordinance banning day laborers was ruled unconstitutional.
“He cares a lot about people, and he’ll go out of his way to help out anyone who needs it who’s being abused by the system,” said Reza, who saw Newman earlier this year when the two met with Home Depot managers over allegations that their stores in Phoenix were chasing off day laborers. “He’s super busy over there in California right now, isn’t he?”
A fast talker who exudes confidence but isn’t a braggart, Newman looks far younger than 49. His full head of hair, round-framed glasses and freshly sprouted mustache gives the Chicagoland native the look of a Depression-era do-gooder.
“I’m trying to hold onto the anger stage so I don’t get into the sad stage,” he said. “And I don’t want to get there because that’ll lead to the acceptance stage, and too much of L.A. is already there.”
Newman never planned for a career like this, even though his mother was from Denmark, his father is a Hungarian Jew and his brother is of Salvadoran descent. He attended law school in Denver, set on becoming a death penalty lawyer, until realizing “it wasn’t like I thought it was in the movies.”
A mentor suggested that Newman recharge his bleeding heart by volunteering with Minsun Ji, founder of Denver’s first day laborers’ center. “I didn’t even know day laborers were a thing,” Newman admitted. But he immediately “loved everything — just hanging out there, chewing the fat and hearing the stories of the jornaleros.”
Ji assigned him to help clean the restrooms his first few weeks. Newman eventually graduated to handling wage theft cases and volunteered for whatever was needed, including driving a van full of day laborers to an NDLON conference in suburban Maryland in 2002. There, he heard Thomas Saenz, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who led a successful lawsuit against Prop. 187, the 1994 California anti-immigrant ballot initiative. Saenz told the crowd about MALDEF’s lawsuits against Southern California cities that were trying to ban day laborers.
“That’s when I realized I could use my law degree to do the exact same thing,” Newman said. “[It was] something that I loved in theory, but I didn’t realize it was happening in real life.”
“It was at eight at night, and I was still at the [NDLON] office,” Alvarado said in a phone interview. “And Chris said, ‘I want to do a fellowship with you. The fellowship deadline is at three in the afternoon the next day. Can I go right now so we can write it?’”
He began to laugh. “We didn’t sleep all night, but we did it — we finished his application. And Chris never left.”
(Newman remembers the moment differently. He said he applied for the fellowship, but Alvarado forgot about it until the day before it was due.)
Twenty-one years later, Alvarado says Newman’s energy and verisimilitude haven’t changed.
“Even though he’s a lawyer, his feet are on the ground — he’s not an elitist. By 8 in the morning, he will have read every article written that day about immigration. He’ll tell me what we need to do, and then he goes out and does it.”
Like the Abrego Garcia case.
Newman called Abrego Garcia’s lawyer to offer help, then connected with the family to organize a GoFundMe campaign through NDLON. Next was enlisting artists in a social media campaign to make Abrego Garcia’s predicament go viral. Soon, Newman was on a flight to El Salvador in an unsuccessful bid to visit the imprisoned Abrego Garcia, something he would try two more times.
“It felt like a Venn diagram of everything I’ve worked for over the past 20 years,” said Newman, who has yet to speak to Abrego Garcia. “At the time, we had no idea whether he was innocent or guilty. What mattered is that he deserved due process.”
“I’m a Cornel West disciple,” Newman responded. “And he said there’s a difference between hope and optimism.”
West defined optimism as based on a rational analysis of what’s out there, while hope is an act of courage against what seems like impossible odds.
“No one has ever accused me of being an optimist,” Newman said.
He kept thinking about it.
“I don’t know, but I think the tide will turn. I remember when Arpaio had an 85% approval rating. And he went down.”
He got more animated. “I know people can turn the tide, but they have to do their part.”
He reached into his straw tote and brought out his anti-migra swag — a T-shirt emblazoned with “Arrest Trump, Not Migrants,” bumper stickers reading “ICE Out of LA!” with the “LA” in Dodgers style, red-and-white signs declaring “I.C.E. Off My Property Get A Warrant!”
Our waitress came with the bill, then looked at the T-shirt. “That’s really cool!” she exclaimed.
“Want it?” Newman replied as he handed it to her. Other Homegirl staffers grabbed stickers and signs.
As we exited the cafe, Newman left a stack on a table next to the door.
“I’m going to go to Highland Park later to ask businesses if they want to post them on their windows,” he said as a customer eyed the signs.
“Go ahead and take it, man,” Newman urged. “Take a bunch!”
