troubled

Lockheed Martin has received a new full-rate production contract, valued at $233 million, for Block II IRST21 infrared search and track sensors to go into pods for U.S. Navy and U.S. Air National Guard fighters. For the Navy, in particular, this is a notable move forward given the reliability and quality control issues the service has faced with its podded configuration of the IRST21 for years now.

The Navy officially declared initial operational capability (IOC) with its version of the IRST21, also known by the designation AN/ASG-34A(V)1, back in November 2024. Limited operational evaluations, including as part combat operations in the Middle East, had been ongoing since at least 2020.

The Navy’s pod, developed for use on the service’s the F/A-18E/F Super Hornets consists of a modified FPU-13/A drop tank with the IRST sensor in a redesigned front section, as you can learn about more in this past TWZ feature. Air Force F-15C/D Eagles, which are now in the process of being retired, and F-16C/D Vipers, have been flying for years with IRST21s integrated into modular, multi-purpose Legion Pods from Lockheed Martin. Legion Pods with IRST21s are part of the sensor suite for the Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle IIs, as well. Though they have the same IRST sensor at their core, which allows for shared contracts like the one announced today, the Navy and Air Force efforts are distinct, with major differences in the respective pod designs.

The Navy’s pod, developed for use on the service’s the F/A-18E/F Super Hornets consists of a modified FPU-13/A drop tank with the IRST sensor in a redesigned front section, as you can learn about more in this past TWZ feature. Air Force F-15C/D Eagles, which are now in the process of being retired, and F-16C/D Vipers, have been flying for years with IRST21s integrated into modular, multi-purpose Legion Pods from Lockheed Martin. Legion Pods with IRST21s are part of the sensor suite for the Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle IIs, as well.

As designed, the ASG-34A(V)1 has long been set to offer a valuable new way for Navy Super Hornets to spot and track airborne threats. IRST systems offer particular advantages when it comes to detecting stealthy crewed and uncrewed aircraft, as well as missiles, designed to evade traditional radars. IRSTs also scan passively, so they do not send out signals that can alert an opponent to the fact that they are being tracked, and are also immune to expanding adversary electronic warfare capabilities. The information from IRSTs can also be fuzed with that from radars, datalinks, and other passive sensors to provide major synergistic capabilities.

When carried by a Super Hornet, “the IRST acts as a complementary sensor to the aircraft’s AN/APG-79 fire control radar in a heavy electronic attack or radar-denied environment,” according to the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Test and Evaluation. “It operates autonomously, or in combination with other sensors, to support the guidance of beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles.”

IRST systems, in general, have experienced a renaissance within the U.S. military amid a steadily growing ecosystem of stealthy aerial threats, especially emanating from China. IRST technologies are also evolving, including with the emergence of systems that can be distributed around an aircraft using smaller individual sensors, which are also sometimes less complex and costly.

The Navy’s particular efforts to field this capability for its Super Hornets, which trace all the way back to 2007, have faced hurdles. The service only formally initiated work on the improved Block II IRST21 in 2018, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional Watchdog. A Block II prototype pod first flew on a Super Hornet the following year.

Quality control and reliability issues continued to dog the program afterward, as you can read more about here. Following the IOC declaration, a full-rate production decision was expected to come in January 2025, but was delayed.

“The program reported that it would not reach a full-rate production decision by its baseline schedule threshold in January 2025 due to delays incurred during flight testing,” according to a GAO report published in June 2025. “IRST officials told us that operational tests were delayed by 2 months due to software defects that caused IRST pods to falsely report overheating.”

“Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) officials told us that the defect was relatively easy to fix and would likely have been addressed during developmental testing had the program allocated more time for that testing,” the GAO report added. “The program now expects a full-rate decision in June 2025. This is the second time the program breached its baseline schedule in the past 3 years.”

GAO’s June 2025 report also said that DOT&E remained of the view that “the pods were extremely unreliable.”

“These officials said that the program improved pod reliability as it made software updates but only managed to achieve 14 hours mean time between operational mission failures – short of the 40 hours required,” the report said. “As such, DOT&E officials said that deploying the IRST pods without improving their reliability would transfer risk to the Navy’s fleet. Program officials noted that IRST initial capability was achieved without any noted limitations.”

“IRST Block II operational flight test events demonstrated tactically relevant detection ranges against operationally relevant targets and the ability to translate these long-range target detections into stable system tracks to facilitate weapons employment,” DO&TE had said in its own most recent annual report, covering work done during the 2024 Fiscal Year. “The Navy must continue to improve the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet’s operating software and address existing deficiencies to effectively integrate IRST into aircraft fire control solutions.”

“IRST Block II demonstrated significant reliability problems during operational testing. Throughout the test period, IRST Block II suffered from hardware and software deficiencies, which required the aircrew to restart the pod multiple times,” that report added. “Troubleshooting and repair often exceeded the abilities of Navy maintenance crews and required assistance from Lockheed Martin. Many of these problems were discovered during integrated and operational test after the Navy completed a minimal developmental test program with the representative hardware.”

It is curious to note that there has been no commensurate reporting of reliability or other issues with the IRST21/Legion Pod combination that has been seen flying on Air National Guard F-15s and F-16s for years now. At the same time, whether or not the Air Force has experienced any troubles with those IRST pods is not entirely clear.

To what degree remaining issues on the Navy side have been addressed and/or mitigated is also unclear, and TWZ has reached out the service, as well as Lockheed Martin, for more information.

The decision now to move ahead with full-rate production of the IRST21 is certainly a new vote confidence, especially when it comes to the Navy program.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Brad Ingelsby knew after the breakout success of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” — a crime drama about a police detective (Kate Winslet) investigating the murder of a teenage girl in a fictional working-class town — he didn’t want his next series to be another whodunit.

“That’s Mare’s thing,” he says on a recent late afternoon. “So, you start to go, if you’re going to write another story in the crime genre, what would get the audience to keep clicking to the next episode? I just thought, ‘Well, maybe a collision course show, where [in] every episode, we get a little closer, a little closer, a little closer, until things collide.’ ”

In “Task,” which concluded Sunday on HBO, Mark Ruffalo stars as Tom Brandis, a priest-turned-FBI agent leading a task force investigating a series of robberies in Delaware County, Pa., an area commonly referred to as Delco that was also the setting for “Mare of Easttown.” (And with references to Wawa and Scrapple, along with visits to Rita’s Water Ice, it slips into its role of expanding the universe.) It leads Tom to Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a sanitation worker who robs drug houses at night to provide for his family. Both men are emotionally tortured by life events — Tom’s wife was murdered by their adopted son, who is incarcerated; Robbie’s brother was killed by a member of a motorcycle gang — that have set them each on different, but destructive paths.

In “Task,” Mark Ruffalo, left, Alison Oliver, Thuso Mbedu and Fabein Frankel portray law enforcement officers who are part of an FBI task force investigating a string of robberies.

(Peter Kramer / HBO)

“ ‘Mare’ was about the moms — the damage that all the guys have caused and the women are kind of having to pick up the pieces of that,” Ingelsby says. “This [show] is all about the fathers and being left behind, seeing the damage they’ve done to their kids, how they’re going to fix that in their lives — or not be able to fix it. The guys who are actually doing the damage without knowing.”

Ingelsby says his uncle, who was an Augustinian priest, helped inspire the throughline of the series.

“I’ve always been very intrigued by his idea of faith in God over the years, and how it’s changed over time, and what he believed once and what he believes now,” he says. “I was intrigued by the idea of a guy who, everything he held as truth, all the pillars of his life, have come crumbling down. And Robbie has a much different faith. And it’s through the gauntlet of the story, how their lives intersect, that they both get to navigate their own journeys of faith.”

Over dinner at a West Hollywood hotel, The Times sat down with Ingelsby, Ruffalo and Pelphrey to discuss their faith journeys, economic inequality, fatherhood — and Wawa, too. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation, which contains spoilers about the finale.

After the success of “Mare of Easttown,” creator Brad Ingelsby wanted his follow-up, “Task,” to feel connected, but not repetitive: “ ‘Mare’ was about the moms,” he says. “This [show] is all about the fathers and being left behind, seeing the damage they’ve done to their kids, how they’re going to fix that in their lives — or not be able to fix it.”

(Bexx Francois/For The Times)

The themes of the show involve forgiveness and faith. Every person has experienced something in life that has tested those ideas. How has your own relationship to faith and forgiveness evolved as you’ve lived more life or taken on roles that ask you to live different experiences?

Pelphrey: My faith, to me, is when I got sober. God willing, Oct. 1, which is three days from now, it’ll be 12 years. That’s truly by the grace of God — you hear that phrase, but I genuinely, I mean that. That’s how I’ve experienced faith, through my sobriety. I was raised Catholic, but the experience I had at 31 was like in a different dimension to what I thought of religion or ideas. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another thing to have your heart opened. It’s definitely an important part of my life. And I think Brad did such a beautiful job conveying that. My grandma used to have one of these things when I was a kid — not a real gem, but like a glass cut thing so if you put it in the window, the sun shines through a million different ways, and the color goes everywhere. I feel like you [Brad] did that with some themes in the show where you’re like, “Let me just hold it up, and we’ll just look at it a few different ways.”

Ruffalo: My journey with faith is probably very similar to Tom’s. When you get a job or something, it can take you on a journey that you’re ripe to take. It touches your life at a very moment where you need it. I’d say, after my brother died, the whole notion of faith just went out the window for me. But oddly enough, I have a lot of addiction, alcoholism in my family. I say, either you are one or you love one. When you love somebody who’s struggling with that, it takes a lot of faith to let them go and to trust it will be OK. My friend says to me, “They got a God and you ain’t it.”

My faith has been renewed, actually, through Tom [the character] — he is an alcoholic. It’s touched my life in so many ways, even with my brother, that it’s like where I lost my faith and where I gained my faith again has been through this journey with alcoholism and drug addiction. And I waver. You look at the world and you’re like, “Where is God in this? Please show yourself. ” But the thing about faith is it requires you to believe without any evidence of its existence. I’d rather believe in that than nothing. Although, I fought him [Brad] all the time. I was like, “He’s [Tom] not really praying here. He’s trying to pray. He’s going through the actions of praying, but he can’t quite get to the opening sentence, which is “ … God …” He does pray, eventually, but it’s a journey.

There’s the powerful moment in that car when Tom and Robbie finally meet in Episode 5. Robbie says, “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced God in my life.” This is a man that hasn’t felt hope, and he has this glimmer of it with this goal of escaping to Canada. Tom, how was it getting into the mindset of this guy just trying to get out of this life?

Pelphrey: It’s heartbreaking. We’re articulating an American dream that far too many people don’t get to experience, and maybe are starting to lose the hope of ever experiencing it. That’s a very real thing — unfortunately, way too real and increasingly way too common. It was just constantly reminding myself: What does this character want? And at the end of the day, regardless of how extreme some of the things Robbie’s doing, he just wants a decent life for his kids. And the fact that he’s having a hard time getting it is heartbreaking.

That scene and in the car, the first time I read it, I was like, “Oh, he’s [Brad] got some balls.” You have so much s— boiling over — the plot lines, the violence, the stakes are through the roof for everyone now in the show, and we are going to sit in a car for half an episode? And two dudes are gonna talk?

In Episode 5, Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), left, and Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) finally meet.

(HBO)

Ruffalo: There’s no chase! And when they finally face each other, they’re not even [actually] facing each other! They’re both pushed to the edge and you don’t know where it could go. Tom certainly doesn’t know where it will go. Tom’s kind of at that point, like, “F— it. Go ahead.” We talked about it a lot, I was like, “I think Tom should die.”

[They break into laughter]

Ingelsby: Every single day he was pitching it.

Ruffalo: I was pitching Tom should have a heart attack at the end and he literally sees God and he says to God, “I’m ready.” He finally finds his faith. It’s finally paid off and he says [gasping], “I’m … reaaady.”

Ingelsby: Enough people die here. But that particular episode has always been very special to me. That’s when the show is operating at the peak of its powers. It just felt like, how do we subvert the expectations of the audience and do that in a way that still feels true to who these characters are? I remember talking to you [Tom] about this. You were like, “As soon as I know Cliff’s done, I’m on a one-way street. I have a plan.” But with you [Mark], once they get out of the car and you feel like you’re going to die, you’re like, “I want to call my family.” That’s when you get activated in a way. You’ve been going through the motions in life, but that’s when it gets very real.

Ruffalo: It’s like being reborn. It opens his heart. He sees how life can be taken away.

We’re in a political and cultural moment where the mood of the country is simmering — there’s anger and rage on all sides, and a lot of it stems from class and systemic issues that are in place that put people in certain positions. There’s that layer, but there’s also the grief element both these men are facing.

Ingelsby: With Robbie in particular, I was interested in a guy that felt really stuck. What I liked about Robbie was, if he didn’t take action, what would happen to Robbie? He’d be a trash man in too deep his whole life. Who cares about Robbie and his family? Nobody. He was left behind. In early versions of the script, I very explicitly said, “He wants his bite of the apple.” There are lots of people like that now. I loved writing Robbie because it felt like he was raging against being left behind and and I felt, in many cases, in the script, why wouldn’t you do something? Whether you agree with the actions or not —

Pelphrey: He had his f— life stolen from him. What he’s going after is a very specific thing. He’s not lashing out blindly against anybody to get any money at any cost. He’s like: “I’m gonna take it from these mother f—, who are bad dudes.” Even within that, he has principles. No one’s gonna die — obviously, the rules all go out the window Episode 2, but we’re not going to take the drugs, we’re not going to sell the drug. We’re going to destroy the drugs. We’re going to take the cash. Even within his brand of lashing out, he actually has a set of principles that he’s operating by.

Mark Ruffalo, left, and Tom Pelphrey star as two troubled men on a collision course in “Task.” Ruffalo portrays an FBI agent recovering from a family tragedy, while Pelphrey plays a garbage collector and criminal involved in a series of robberies. (Bexx Francois/For The Times)

Mark and Tom, as sons and fathers, how did you think about the father-child relationships of these two men and the collateral damage of their choices?

Ruffalo: It’s so hard to be a father, especially now because this generation is like, “We’re not going to do it the way our parents, our fathers did. We see that there’s another way to do it. We’re actually talking about it.” At the same time, we don’t exactly know what it is that we should do differently, plus we have the responsibility of, financially, keeping it together. It’s obviously hard to be a mom too. These guys are doing the best they can.

Pelphrey: Becoming a dad two and a half years ago now, it’s just the most f— awesome, wild, intense, crazy s— I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s like getting struck by lightning. I’m so in love and I feel so vulnerable and I feel so happy — it’s all the feelings. Then suddenly, when you’re thinking about how you feel, you go, “How do I balance this? How do I protect her, but make sure that she’s brave and experiencing things? And you quickly realize there is so much to this that I will have no power over and the realization of that, in the deepest sense — and I’ve already had moments of that and we’re just getting started here. You imagine what it’s like, when you don’t have kids, but you have no f— clue. One of the things I could say without blinking, ever, is, “I totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing.”

Was there a version where Robbie lived?

Ingelsby: No, I felt like structurally what needed to happen was Tom had to witness Robbie’s kindness, then his sacrifice. It felt very necessary to be like, “Oh, wait. Robbie — he went up to the woods…” Because he’s always like, “What’s the plan?” Tom realizes, “Oh, I know what the plan was. He went there to die.” Part of Tom’s journey to getting rid of the anger and to believing in something at the end, was to have witnessed the goodness in Robbie. He [Robbie] also gets in so deep eventually, he has pushed himself into such a corner and there’s no good way out of this. What’s an audience gonna think if he gets out of this unscathed? Even if he were to survive, he’s gonna be in jail for the rest of his life. The idea of sacrifice would speak to Tom as a character and get him to his ultimate decision to give the boy [Sam] up, but also forgive his own son and, quite literally, get the house ready for him.

Mark, how did you feel about the statement that Tom winds up giving at the hearing in the finale?

Ruffalo: He had to sit down and write that. I don’t think he really knew what he was going to be writing. He’s taking stock of his life and his son’s life and the story of the life. It’s connecting him to the whole story. It’s not just the loss of my wife, but also we raised that boy. We made this life together and, even in the hard part of it all, that’s where we learned what love is. Then when he gets in there, he doesn’t even know that he’s gonna say it. He doesn’t know he’s going to confront him with it and say [to his son], “Look at me.” But the whole journey, leads us there.

There’s something, too, about his composure in that moment.

Ingelsby: That’s the genius of Mark. That was the first or second take, what we used.

How many versions of it did you write? Was there an overly emotional or dramatic version?

Ingelsby: There was a longer version. But I think what was important about it was — and Mark does such a beautiful job — was that he had to be honest about how hard it was. I was always worried it would be a bit maudlin, if he just went in and said straight away, “I love you.” It was almost like he had to be really honest with everybody, like, “Hey, this was f— horrible.” And the shame of changing your name —

Ruffalo: Yes. To be that honest and to say that I pretended like I wasn’t his father. It’s so shameful. It’s so honest.

Ingelsby: I think because he’s so honest, it makes the forgiveness even more impactful. When he says, “I forgive you,” you believe because he’s earned the trust in the speech by admitting the things that were so shameful .

Ruffalo: It doesn’t just go one way — forgiveness. There’s a lot of shame on it on the other side, that’s where the anger comes from. There’s always this question: What could I have done? The backstory was I left, knowing that he was in an episode, but I had to go. I left her with him, thinking it would blow over. And it didn’t. He has to also be honest about his part in it. What dad says, “That’s not my kid. You’re in retreat already.”

Ingelsby: That’s what we want the ending to be. It’s not that everything’s going to be easy. I think the same for Mare — it wasn’t like Mare’s life was so great at the end of the show. There was a lot of going on.

Ruffalo: She’s going to an AA meeting. Tom and Mare can meet at an AA meeting.

Tom Pelphrey as Robbie Prendergrast, a garbage collector trying to avenge his brother’s death by hitting trap houses belonging to a local gang before getting caught in a deadly standoff. (HBO)

Mark Ruffalo, Silvia Dionicio and Phoebe Fox in “Task.” Ruffalo plays a priest-turned-FBI agent who hasn’t confronted his feelings about the murder of his wife at the hands of their adopted son. (HBO)

To that point, was there thought about whether to incorporate “Mare” characters in this show, if they’re in the same universe?

Ingelsby: It’s funny you say that. [In] one of the early scripts, we had a scene where Emily (Silvia Dionicio), at the end of the show, went to a concert with her boyfriend, Leo, the guy that’s a magician. And Mare’s daughter, Siobhan (Angourie Rice), was playing. And there was another connective piece I’m missing. I think Leo’s brother was in the band. And they had a moment together, because I felt like Emily and Siobhan were very, very similar. That they had the weight of the world on their shoulders in some way, Emily especially —

Ruffalo: They’re well suited for each other. They could just sink to the bottom of the lake together.

He’s got a crossover season mapped out for you.

Pelphrey: If we hold hands, we can sink faster.

Ingelsby: But we did have something connecting them. But I’m glad HBO read it and were like, “Is it a bit much?” It felt like maybe we were reaching to do something that the story didn’t require. And when we took it out, I felt like this story exists on its own, and we didn’t need that. If we had threaded it through the story in a more interesting way, maybe it would have worked, but it would have felt really tacked on and kind of just fan service for the sake of fan service, which I didn’t want.

Can we talk about the Phillies cup? It’s seems like such an obscure detail, but that cup triggered me. I know it well. A father trying to hide his vice.

Ingelsby: That’s another detail of my own life that I can repurpose, steal. That’s my dad. He drinks out of that. He watches every Phillies game. There’s 162 games. And if he can’t watch, he’s listening to it in a radio in the car. I feel like we always talk about in the specific, is the universal. And Mark did the swirly thing.

Ruffalo: That’s what made me want to do the show. That he was drinking out of that. And then he swirled his hand. I said, “This guy is writing character like nobody is doing that I’ve seen in television.” I only read the first episode and I was like, “I want to go. I trust this journey with him.” And it was from that nuance thing. I know that guy. He’s a priest who swirls his vodka and tonic with his finger. In a Phillies cup. And he thinks he’s pulling it over. That’s my family. It’s so honest.

The accent was such a feature of “Mare of Easttown.” I imagine that had its own expectations or pressure for this show.

Ingelsby: “Mare” was more a community — very, very specific community. I felt like, in that show, we had to go all in and Kate did. A lot of Mark’s character was driven by my uncle, who has no accent at all. Because he went to the seminary, then he went to Merrimack College, he was a teacher — he bounced around. And even me, there’s a couple words I’ll say that you can’t pick up a heavy accent. There’s a couple words, where maybe you could pick it up.

Ruffalo: We tried. I tried it. I kept kicking it out, it just didn’t feel right. He does hit some of those words. He does say wooder — cheery wooder ice. We kept some of it in, but we didn’t go as hard at it because he goes another way. I feel like he might have ended up in South America at some point. I was thinking he traveled the world.

Did you pay many visits to Wawa? I remember Kate telling me about her Wawa experiences.

Pelphrey: I grew up going to Wawa. I was Wawa all the time because I was living out in the suburbs.

Ingelsby: I think Kate ate hoagies or something.

Pelphrey: They make a good sandwich.

Ruffalo: Oh, bro. I started with a fat suit and then I had to take it off. I just kept getting fatter. My wife saw me and she’s like [to the kids], “huh, your father’s eating his way through Philly.” But, man, I’d be like, “How about a sandwich for the scene?” [Mimics scarfing down a sandwich.] Like a troll.

Ingelsby: He is an amazing sandwich eater. We were talking about it.

Pelphrey: We were.

Ruffalo: Oh, I knew I was going to be eating a sandwich that day [in a scene], so I starved myself so I could just plow that thing.

Are you interested in a Season 2, Brad?

Ruffalo: No one wants a Season 2. [the trio laughs] No, I’m kidding. That would be amazing.

Ingelsby: It would be amazing. If people respond and we get a chance to do it.

Could we get that “Task”-”Mare” crossover?

Ingelsby: A lot could happen.

Ruffalo: Some “Mare” people could show up. There could be a love affair.

Sept. 16 (UPI) — Officials at U.S.-based website LimeWire have acquired the Fyre Festival brand after emerging as the winning bidder for the fraud-plagued music festival.

LimeWire officials said the purchase enables the digital music provider and the Fyre Festival to combine their brand identities and attract millions of new users.

“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” said LimeWire Chief Executive Officer Julian Zehetmayr in a news release.

“We’re not bringing the festival back,” he said. “We’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life.”

The purchase will enable LimeWire and Fyre to start a new chapter that is “grounded in technology, transparency and a sense of humor,” according to the news release.

LimeWire was an early pioneer of online file sharing, which a federal judge ended in October 2010 by ordering it to stop illegally sharing files in a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

LimeWire’s new owners resurrected the brand in 2022 and seek to do the same with Fyre Festival.

“LimeWire’s acquisition is not about repeating past mistakes,” the news release said. “It’s about saving one of the Internet’s most infamous cultural memes from extinction and turning it into something new.”

The Fyre Festival was a subsidiary of Fyre Media, whose owner was charged and convicted of wire fraud in 2018 for lying to at least two investors.

The Fyre Festival formerly sponsored a live music event and booked musical artists at venues across the nation.

Filmmaker Taika Waititi and his wife, singer-songwriter Rita Ora, last week announced they are producing a stage musical about the failure and eventual cancellation of the 2017 Fyre Music Festival.

Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar on the run-up to the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised her hand.

“Can I ask about the Charlie Kirk situation?” she said in Waite’s classroom at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The student, he said, wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the stuff of doomsday prepper threads on Reddit, but this week’s shooting made it a mainstream topic of conversation.

While cautioning that the country is nowhere near as fractured as it was when the Civil War erupted, Waite and other scholars of the period say they do increasingly see parallels.

“Our current political moment is really resonating with the 1850s,” the historian said.

He and other scholars note similarities between the deployment of troops to American cities, widespread disillusionment with the Supreme Court, and spasms of political violence — especially from disaffected young men.

“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s there was a growing sense that the sections of the country were pulling apart,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson University.

Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old who left antifascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.”

Conservative influencers amplified the rhetoric, with Trump ally Laura Loomer posting on X, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

Violence was far more organized and widespread in the late 1850s, historians caution. Congressmen regularly pulled knives and pistols on one another. Mobs brawled in the streets over the Fugitive Slave Law. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.

But some aspects of modern politics are worryingly similar, scholars said.

“What almost scares me more than the violence itself is the reaction to it,” Waite said. “It was paranoia, the perception that this violence was unstoppable, that really sent the nation spiraling toward Civil War in 1860 and ’61.”

Top of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as the Wide Awakes, hundreds of thousands of of torch-toting, black-capped abolitionist youths who took to the street out of frustration with their Republican representatives.

“There was this perception that antislavery Republicans hadn’t been sufficiently aggressive,” Waite said. Wide Awakes, he said, believed “that it was the slaveholders that were really pushing their agenda much more forcefully, much more violently, and antislavery [politicians] couldn’t just sit down and take it anymore.”

Most Democratic politicians of the era were fighting to expand slavery to the Western territories, extend federal power to claw back people who’d escaped it, and enshrine slaveholders rights to travel freely with those they held in bondage.

The Wide Awakes struck terror in their hearts.

“For their political opponents, it was a really scary spectacle,” Waite said. “Any time a cotton gin burned down in the South, they pointed to the Wide Awakes and other more radical antislavery Northerners and said, ‘This is arson.’”

For Waite, the Wide Awakes can be compared to an antebellum antifa, while the paramilitaries of the South were more like modern Proud Boys.

“The South was highly militarized,” he said. “Every adult white man was part of a local militia. It was like a social club, so it was easy to take these local militias and turn them into anti-abolitionist defense units.”

Still, incursions by abolitionists into the South were rare. Incursions by slave powers into the North were common, and routinely enforced by armed soldiers.

Legal scholars have already noted striking similarities between Trump’s use of the military to aid his mass deportation effort. The Trump administration has leaned on constitutional maneuvers used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — a divisive law that empowered slave catchers from the South to make arrests in Northern states — in legal arguments to justify the use of troops in immigration enforcement.

“I argue it was the fugitive crisis, more than the territorial crisis, that drove the coming of the Civil War,” Pinsker said. “The resistance in the North essentially made the Fugitive Slave Law dead-letter. They broke the enforcement of that law through legal, political and sometimes protest resistance.”

Many Northern states had passed “personal liberty laws” to prevent Black people from being snatched off the streets and returned to slavery in the South — a move Waite and others compare to sanctuary laws across the country today.

“The attempt to uphold these personal liberty laws and simultaneously the government’s attempts to take these Black fugitives led to violence, and to perceptions that the so-called slave-power was the aggressor,” Waite said.

By the late 1850s, Northerners were equally fed up with the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was seen as a rubber stamp for slaveholders’ goals.

“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by Southerners, mostly Southern Democrats, and they were pro-slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think the Dred Scott case and the court being on one side is absolutely a parallel with today.”

The Dred Scott decision, which ruled Black people ineligible for American citizenship, is widely taught in schools.

But far fewer Americans know about the Lemmon case, a New York legal battle that could have effectively legalized slavery in all 50 states had the Taney court heard it before the war broke out in 1861.

“Slaveholders were eager to get that case before Taney, because that would have nationalized slavery,” Waite said.

Despite the similarities, scholars say that there is nothing inevitable about armed conflict, and that the imperative now is to bring the political temperature down.

“Donald Trump has not been offering that message with the clarity it needs,” Pinsker said. “He says he’s a big fan of Lincoln, but now is the moment for him to remember what Lincoln stood for.”

When it comes to parallels with America’s deadliest conflict, “there’s only one lesson,” the historian said.

“We do not want another civil war,” Pinsker said. “That’s the only message that matters.”

Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand that their government reach a deal to release two Israeli captives held in Gaza who have been shown as starving in Hamas footage.

The video showed that captives have been as badly affected by the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza in March as the rest of the population trapped there.

So far, at least 197 people have starved to death in Gaza, 96 of them children and global outrage about the famine Israel is imposing on Gaza has mounted.

However, a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) found more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents were “not at all troubled” by the reports of Palestinians starving and suffering in Gaza.

Front pages of international newspapers previously accused of backing Israel’s war on Gaza have carried images showing the massive human cost of Israel’s actions.

Yet, in the past 24 hours, gangs of far-right Israeli agitators have blocked aid trucks from reaching a starving Gaza, in apparent defiance of global anger.

Formerly stalwart allies, such as Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have condemned Israel and its actions in Gaza, committing to recognising Palestinian statehood if some kind of resolution is not reached.

I guess Israeli settlers are stopping and destroying aid meant for starving Palestinians, so that Israel-first politicians in the West can accuse Hamas of stealing the aid… pic.twitter.com/6ECMP23g8r

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) August 6, 2025

Domestically, two of Israel’s leading NGOs – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel – have labelled Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide, and protests against the war have grown.

A week earlier, hundreds of demonstrators led by wounded soldiers and the families of some of the captives marched on the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, demanding that the war on Gaza be continued.

Widespread awareness of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and their government’s role in inflicting it, has yet to dawn upon the bulk of Israeli society, Orly Noy, journalist and editor of the Israeli Hebrew-language magazine Local Call, told Al Jazeera.

This is particularly the case because Gaza’s suffering has not been featured in mainstream media.

“I avoid Israeli TV,” Noy told Al Jazeera. “However, I was round at my mother’s yesterday, and they were covering the story of the video of the two captives.

“So, for once, starvation and famine in Gaza was finally on Israeli news,” she said, adding that, instead of denying that starvation existed in Gaza, the wider Israeli public was being told that the only two people starving there were the captives in the Hamas film.

For months now, the mainstream media narrative in Israel has been that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is “a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign”.

This perception runs deeper than the framing by Israel’s nationalistic television channels, political analyst and former government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera.

“It comes from decades of self-justification and dehumanisation,” Levy said.

“Most Israelis would be uncomfortable setting out some kind of moral critique of the country, but still have the feeling that something has gone very seriously wrong. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance at play that helps them make sense of it.”

Then there is the language used by politicians, the media and, ultimately, the public to discuss the war, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

“They’ve corrupted language. Instead of ‘concentration camps‘, they say ‘humanitarian city’. Instead of talking about ‘killing’, they say ‘elimination’. Every military operation has a biblical name, which we now use to measure time.

“We don’t say ‘such and such a thing’ happened in June. We say, ‘during Operation Whatever’. It helps people make sense of everything. The jargon’s become a new type of speech. It’s become Orwell’s 1984,” he said, referring to the dystopian novel in which language is dictated by the state.

Changing tides

However, while most Israelis have continued to see Gaza’s starvation through the lens of its media and politicians, there are signs that, at its fringes, the mood is beginning to shift, observers say.

“This isn’t going to hold up,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al party, said.

“More and more, people are beginning to understand that there is real hunger in Gaza, and if Israel is making such a big deal of sending food now, then how can it not have been responsible for the hunger before?”

Meanwhile, activists such as Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian group Standing Together say resistance to the war is growing across all parts of Israeli society – albeit for often widely differing reasons.

“We don’t care why people are protesting the war. We don’t care if it’s because you don’t want to do another tour with the army, or you don’t want your children to go to Gaza and kill people. If you’re against the war, you’re welcome,” he said.

However, despite the killing of more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – and thousands more lost under the rubble and presumed dead – much of Israeli society has yet to accept that the suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza is real. 

“From my perspective, we’ve reached the point where the Israeli state and society has lost whatever moral claims they had as a result of the Holocaust,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

“They’ve spent whatever symbolic capital that was associated with it.”

BBC show Pebble Mill at One was an iconic magazine programme that ran throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s – and here’s what happened to the original faces of the daytime series

They were the familiar faces that lit up Britain’s afternoons – the hosts, producers and personalities behind Pebble Mill at One, the BBC’s beloved daytime magazine programme that ran from 1972 to 1986. Whether they were interviewing celebrities, dispensing gardening advice or covering human interest stories from the famous foyer of the Birmingham studio, the Pebble Mill team became a fixture of the nation’s lunchtime telly.

But what happened to the show’s stars when the cameras stopped rolling?

From telly legends who went on to headline primetime shows, to behind-the-scenes figures who subtly influenced British broadcasting, many continued to leave their mark across radio, film and theatre. Others quietly stepped out of the spotlight – while some faced scandals that shook their public persona.

Here, we reminisce about the highs, lows and unexpected twists in the lives of Pebble Mill’s most recognisable faces. From gardening guru Marian Foster and broadcasting legend Alan Titchmarsh to the late Donny MacLeod and troubled DJ Dave Lee Travis, here’s what unfolded for the faces who once dominated daytime TV.

Dave Lee Travis

Dave Lee Travis was best known as the host of The Golden Oldie Picture Show and a DJ on BBC Radio 1. However, his career was later marred by legal issues.

In 2014, he was found guilty of indecently assaulting a woman working on The Mrs Merton Show in 1995 and was handed a three-month suspended sentence.

Though acquitted of several other accusations, the conviction resulted in the presenter’s episodes of Top of the Pops being no longer repeated by the BBC. Travis expressed being “mortified” and “really disappointed” by the verdict.

Despite the scandal, the now 80-year-old made a comeback to broadcasting. Throughout the years, Travis has presented programmes on various UK radio stations, including periods at Classic Gold, BBC Three Counties Radio, and United DJs Radio.

In 2025, he hosts a Sunday morning programme on Heritage Chart Radio.

Currently residing in Buckinghamshire with his Swedish wife Marianne, whom he wed in 1971, Travis enjoys photography and vintage automobiles.

Jock Gallagher

Gallagher began his BBC career in 1966 as a news producer and swiftly climbed the ladder, ultimately leading the Pebble Mill at One.

His influence extended beyond the programme’s triumph to nurturing celebrated BBC radio productions including The Archers, alongside programmes such as From the Grassroots and Offshore Britons.

Following decades of broadcasting service, Gallagher stepped down from the BBC in 2014.

He died in May 2025 aged 87 at Worcester Hospital. Former colleagues and admirers paid tribute, with one remembering: “I remember having a conversation with Jock in the late 1980s when I was trying to become a researcher, and fancied working on Radio 4 series.”

Donny MacLeod

Donny was a beloved figure on television, known for his warmth, professionalism, and innovative approach, becoming a staple in homes as the leading presenter of his show and shaping daytime TV for countless viewers.

He was one of the original faces of Pebble Mill at One, hosting the show from its beginnings in 1972 until his sudden death in 1984.

His career was studded with standout moments, including major BBC specials like MacLeod’s Soviet Union and MacLeod’s America, and memorable interviews with prominent figures such as Edward Heath, Les Dawson, Terry Wogan, Dame Edna Everage, and Morecambe and Wise.

Touching tributes have continued to honour Donny’s legacy, with one colleague fondly remembering: “He was kind and ever prepared to lend this novice a helping hand… For 11 years Donny was Pebble Mill at One.”

Passing away at the young age of 52 from a heart attack, Donny is still deeply missed as a trailblazer in British daytime broadcasting.

David Attwood

Starting his career as an assistant floor manager, David Attwood climbed the ladder, contributing to series like Out of Town Boys (1978), Keep Smiling (1979), and the BAFTA-winning Boys from the Black Stuff (1982).

After completing the BBC Directors course in 1984, he quickly made a name for himself as a director.

Attwood’s portfolio includes directing All Together Now, Airbase, and the intense thriller Killing Time.

He later pursued a freelance career, directing critically acclaimed projects such as Wild West, Fidel, and Stuart: A Life Backwards, which starred Tom Hardy.

David sadly died on 21 March 2024 after battling illness.

Remembered by peers as a talented and considerate director, David left an indelible mark on British television drama over three decades.

Marian Foster

A multifaceted broadcaster, Marian Foster was celebrated for her engaging on-screen personality and a deep-rooted passion for horticulture, which became her signature.

She broke new ground as one of the original presenters on Top Gear and went on to host gardening segments for BBC Look North after her time at Pebble Mill.

Foster boasts an extensive career in radio, having presented shows on BBC Radio 2, Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, and currently hosts Garden Mania every Sunday on BBC Radio Newcastle and Radio Tees.

A familiar face at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, she has imparted her horticultural wisdom to audiences for more than three decades.

Her diverse work includes documenting the impact of Live Aid in Ethiopia and even sharing the stage with The Who for a rendition of Tommy.

In recent times, she has continued her role as a judge for Northumbria in Bloom, been featured by Radio Times, and remains an endearing presence in the North East.

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh rose to fame as the beloved presenter of Ground Force and later captivated viewers on ITV’s Love Your Garden, affirming his status as one of the nation’s favourite gardeners.

His natural charm extended beyond the garden, leading him to host various programmes including The Alan Titchmarsh Show, Popstar to Operastar, and Secrets of the National Trust.

In 2024, he made waves when North Korean TV censored his jeans, prompting Titchmarsh to quip that it gave him “a bit of street cred”.

The 76 year old father of two is a prolific author, having penned over 70 books, including best-selling novels, gardening guides, and memoirs.

He currently presents a Saturday afternoon programme on Classic FM and continues to write regularly for the press. Now in his mid-70s, he divides his time between his farmhouse in Hampshire and his residence on the Isle of Wight.

Titchmarsh was awarded an MBE in the 2000 New Year Honours for his contributions to horticulture and broadcasting, and was later promoted to CBE in the 2025 New Year Honours for his services to horticulture and charity.

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June 26 (UPI) — President Donald Trump held a “One Big, Beautiful Event” rally on Thursday afternoon to garner support for the federal budget bill that he wants passed before Independence Day.

Trump was backed by dozens of supporters who represented many occupations while addressing attendees at the event held in the East Room of the White House.

“We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” Trump told media and other event attendees.

“Your Medicaid is left alone. It’s the same,” Trump said. “Your Medicare and your Social Security are strengthened.”

He said Democrats would cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits in half and asked people to contact their senators and representatives to support the budget bill.

“Almost every major promise made in the 2024 campaign already will have become a promise kept,” Trump said. “That’s very important.”

He said the budget bill would eliminate federal income taxes on tips, overtime pay or Social Security.

A reconciliation bill before the Senate would limit the income tax deduction on tips to the first $25,000, though.

The president also said a trade deal has been reached with China and another might be coming with India, but he did not elaborate on them.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and several members of Trump’s Cabinet attended the event, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Trump held the rally after the Senate parliamentarian earlier ruled several provisions in the Senate reconciliation bill violate Senate rules.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough nixed provisions that would have limited the use of healthcare provider taxes by states that recently expanded Medicaid coverage but did not increase Medicaid under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

Those proposed changes would cost states more to provide Medicaid coverage.

MacDonough is still reviewing the Senate reconciliation bill and might issue more objections to proposed measures.

The House already passed the bill, but the Senate is trying to hammer out a reconciliation package that would pass both chambers and be ready for signing by the Fourth of July.

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., already has said she intends to vote against the reconciliation bill, The Hill reported.

New York Republican Rep. Nick LaLota also is skeptical of the package and a potential limit on state and local tax deductions for taxpayers.

He said changes being made in the Senate reconciliation package make it impossible for a reconciliation bill to win approval in the House.

A judge approved a plan Friday to move more than 100 youths out of a troubled Los Angeles juvenile hall that has been the site of riots, drug overdoses and so-called “gladiator fights” in recent years.

Los Angeles County Superior Judge Miguel Espinoza signed off on the L.A. County Probation Department’s plan to relocate dozens of detainees from Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, months after a state oversight body ordered the hall to be shut down.

The Downey facility, home to approximately 270 youths, most of whom are between the ages of 15 and 18, has been under fire since last December, when the Board of State and Community Corrections ordered it closed because of repeated failures to meet minimum staffing requirements. The probation department has faced a years-long struggle to get officers to show up to work in the chaotic halls.

But the probation department ignored the state board’s order to shut down. Since the body has no power to enforce its own orders and the California Attorney General’s Office declined to step in, Los Padrinos continued to operate in defiance for months. In that time frame, several youths suffered drug overdoses, a teen was stabbed in the eye and 30 probation officers were indicted for allegedly organizing or allowing brawls between youths.

Acting on a legal challenge brought by the L.A. County Public Defender’s Office, Espinoza last month ordered probation officials to begin shrinking the number of youths held at Los Padrinos so it could comply with state regulations.

Roughly three-quarters of the youths at Los Padrinos are awaiting court hearings connected to violent offenses including murder, attempted murder, assault, robbery, kidnapping and gang crimes, according to the probation department.

The probation department made its plan to de-populate Los Padrinos public earlier this month, promising to remove 103 detainees from the facility by June.

Under the department’s plan, youth who are awaiting trial on cases that could land them in the county’s Secure Youth Treatment Facility will be moved to Barry J. Nidorf Hall in Sylmar. Others will be moved out of Los Padrinos and into the lower-security camps, where some juvenile justice advocates say teens perform much better and are far less likely to act violent.

“This plan reflects our continued commitment to balancing public safety, legal compliance, and the rehabilitative needs of the young people in our care,” the department said in a statement. “It is key to note that the court denied an indiscriminate mass release of youth, and that Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall will not be fully depopulated or closed.”

Espinoza originally weighed shutting down the facility last year when the public defender’s office questioned the legality of its continued operation in defiance of the BSCC. On Friday, he declined to adopt a plan from the Probation Oversight Commission that could have resulted in the release of some youths through a review process.

Some members of the oversight body expressed frustration that Espinoza’s order won’t solve the larger issues that have plagued the probation department for years. Milinda Kakani, a POC board member and the director of youth justice for the Children’s Defense Fund, also noted the moves might cause some youths to backslide by returning them to Nidorf Hall after they had already graduated from the prison-like SYTF, which some derisively refer to as “The Compound.”

“I imagine it’s deeply damaging to a young person to go back to the facility they had worked so hard to get out of,” Kakani said.

Espinoza warned he could take further action if the department’s plan does not bring it into compliance with state regulations. It was not clear when the next BSCC inspection of Los Padrinos would take place and a spokeswoman for the oversight body did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The probation department must provide Espinoza with an update on conditions at Los Padrinos by July.

In an interview with the Observer, Wiggins said of his post-career cocaine addiction: “There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning.

“I was a functioning addict. People wouldn’t realise – I was high most of the time for many years.”

Wiggins – a gangly north Londoner, from a broken home, brought up in poverty – made it to the very top of a sport that requires clinical preparation and a calm head under pressure.

In interviews during his career, Wiggins exuded calm and charm. He seemed to have everything under control.

And perhaps it was, with the hyper-organised, big-budget Team Sky around him between 2010 and 2015, run by Dave Brailsford and Rod Ellingworth – with whom he would win the 2012 Tour, the 2014 world time trial championship and much more.

Wiggins’ talent and presence inspired the team to a period of domination in road cycling never before seen.

But post-career, his troubles spiralled.

In 2020, his marriage to Cath came to an end. They have two children: Ben – now a rider himself with Hamens Berman Jayco – and Isabella.

Then came the collapse of Team Wiggins, which he had founded in 2015. The team lacked enough blue chip sponsors, despite having so many talented British riders. There was an awful more of Wiggins’ own money invested in the team than most realised.

That, and a cocaine addiction, would spell trouble for anybody’s wallet – even a sporting icon. And Wiggins was declared bankrupt.

“I already had a lot of self-hatred,” said Wiggins of his post-career addiction. “But I was amplifying it. It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realised I was hurting a lot of people around me.

“There’s no middle ground for me. I can’t just have a glass of wine – if I have a glass of wine, then I’m buying drugs. My proclivity to addiction was easing the pain that I lived with.”

Wiggins’ former team boss Jonathan Vaughters – who now heads the EF Education-EasyPost World Tour team – understands why Wiggins has come across the problems he has. But that it’s not through a lack of self-awareness.

“I mean, ultimately pro cyclists are always going to search for that dopamine hit they got while racing,” Vaughters said. “[It] makes them an easy target for addiction.

“I mean… I’d say Wiggo is far more gifted, from an IQ standpoint, than most people. He’s very sensitive to social interactions too. So, you have a guy that’s hyper intelligent, hyper aware of social interactions, and has led an extremely disciplined, but dopamine-soaked lifestyle as a professional racer… It’s a perfect storm.

“He’s very clever. No formal education at all. But he reads people like a book.”