year

THREE airlines officially went into liquidation this year with many passengers having their flights affected.

Here’s everything you need to know.

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Spirit Airlines

Just days ago, US airline Spirit Airlines announced it was shutting down and would be cancelling all of its flights.

The budget carrier had been in talks with the US government about securing a rescue deal to save it from collapse, but in early May announced its liquidation.

The airline said on its website it had “started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately”.

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Spirit had filed for its second bankruptcy in recent years – but experts said rising fuel costs caused by the war in Iran had pushed it over the edge.

According to The Independent, the airline had over 4,000 domestic flights scheduled through mid-May and has refunded most of its customers.

Ascend Airways

Ascend Airways went into liquidation in late April.

The airline provided aircraft for other carriers, with previous ones including Oman Air, Air Sierra Leone and Tui Airways.

A company email suggested a combination of economic pressure, soaring UK costs and a lack of contracts was the cause of the collapse.

An insider told Sun Travel: “It’s to do with the economy, we couldn’t get contracts, the UK is a lot more expensive than Europe.

“The fuel situation had a massive effect on it as well.“

EcoJet 

Earlier this year, Edinburgh’s EcoJet went bust – without ever actually launching a flight.

It was founded in 2023 by entrepreneur Dale Vince and with the aim of being the world’s first electric airline.

In early May, The Herald reported that Opus Restructuring were appointed the formal liquidators for the firm. 

A spokesperson said: “EcoJet was a start-up business and has no material assets.

“The members have elected to fund the liquidation process to ensure that the company’s employees receive their full statutory entitlements.”

EcoJet had planned flights from Edinburgh to Southampton and wanted to launch other journeys across Europe – but the flights never took off.

TWO holiday destinations are losing their Virgin flights until next year.

The major airline has confirmed that flights to both Dubai and Seattle will no longer go ahead this year.

Flights to Dubai are off the cards for most airlines right now, with the Iran war putting the winter sun destination on the no-travel list.

Virgin Atlantic had already suspended flights from London Heathrow to Dubai, but has now confirmed they would not go ahead until winter 2027.

It comes as its London Heathrow flights to Riyadh were cancelled entirely after just a year.

The airline is also suspending flights to Seattle until March 27, 2027.

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A Virgin spokesperson said: “Unfortunately, we have taken the difficult decision to temporarily suspend our seasonal service to Dubai for the winter 2026 season, while services to Seattle will also be temporarily suspended for the winter 2026 season only, before resuming in March 2027.

“Customers can continue to travel to Seattle with our partner Delta Air Lines who will offer daily services from London Heathrow.”

“We’d like to apologise to any affected customers and will be contacting them with their options which include rebooking or a refund.”

The airline is instead adding more flights to two of its destination in Africa.

From October 25, there will be 11 weekly flights to Cape Town, as well as 10 a week to Johannesburg.

They added: “The updated flight schedule enhances convenience for travellers, with earlier morning arrivals into South Africa allowing passengers to maximise their time on the ground, and later evening departures offering a more seamless overnight journey to London.”

Ticket buyer: Alec Mackie of Los Angeles

Events: Men’s baseball gold medal finals, women’s basketball gold medal finals, men’s soccer gold medal finals, swimming preliminary and tennis quarter final mixed doubles

Thoughts: ”My uncle made a spreadsheet. The tickets are for me, my uncle, friends and I’m hoping to take my nephew as well. I was 10 years old at the 1984 Olympics and got to go to gymnastics, swimming and closing ceremonies, and my nephew will be 10 in 2028. I know L.A. is going to have an amazing Olympics, we are Los Angeles! Ten million creative, beautiful people, always dreaming and we know how to wow people. I can’t wait and hopefully traffic is smooth, a glamorous sequel to ’84.”

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. Supreme Court sharply curtailed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last week, Democrats in Washington had a message: The rules of redistricting have changed, and California — the nation’s biggest blue bastion — may have a further role to play.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Democrats should “play by the same set of rules” as Republicans. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) vowed to fight in “the Deep South and all over the country.” And Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, was blunt: “I’ll take 52 seats from California, I sure would. And 17 seats from Illinois.”

The calls for action came as Republican governors in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississipppi and Tennessee called special legislative sessions to redraw congressional maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Florida has also approved new maps that could give the GOP four more seats in the House, and President Trump urged other Republican states to follow suit.

The Republican response has intensified the pressure on Democrats to act, including those in California — where the ruling could upend not just congressional maps, but also legislative and local races.

“We can’t allow this national gerrymandering effort of Republicans to go unanswered,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach). “If Republicans go for it, I think we have to leave all options on the table.”

For now, California’s response is far from settled.

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) cautioned against “accelerating a race to the bottom.”

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The chair of the California Democratic Party said there are no current plans to redraw maps — just months after voters approved a constitutional amendment authorizing a mid-decade redistricting backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The Democratic consultant who drew the state’s current congressional district boundaries says an all-blue map, while possible to create, would probably hurt Democrats more than help them in the long run. And some of the state’s congressional Democrats are worried the impulse to match Republican partisan efforts would be bad for the American electorate.

“Rather than accelerating a race to the bottom, the next step is to dial it down because you can reach a point of no return,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), one of the state’s most prominent Black lawmakers. “And that’s where we’re headed.”

What California decides — and when — will matter at the national level. With 52 congressional seats, no state has more to offer Democrats in a redistricting war. But experts, lawmakers and party officials say the path forward is more complicated than the calls from Washington suggest.

California could see 48 blue seats, out of 52

That’s in part because California already acted. In 2025, voters approved Proposition 50, which drew new congressional district lines designed to favor Democrats for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections. The new maps, which could yield as many as 48 Democratic seats out of 52, are already in effect, and voters have begun receiving their mail-in ballots.

Going farther is not currently on the table — at least not yet.

“We have yet to fully win the seats in the map that was drawn in 2025. It seems a step too far to say we’re going to go back to the drawing board and redraw the map,” said Rusty Hicks, the chair of the California Democratic Party.

Hicks said it doesn’t mean the issue could not become part of a future discussion, but he said Democrats in other states should not look past what California has already done.

“We’re trying to pick up 48 of them. How much more do you want us to pick up? You want us to make it 52 blue? Well, you all should get into the fight,” Hicks said. “You all should pick up some seats. Let’s all do this together, because California cannot do it alone, it will take the rest of the country.”

Others are not convinced the most aggressive option makes the strategic sense in California.

Paul Mitchell, the Democratic redistricting consultant who drew California’s Proposition 50 congressional maps, said the push for a 52-0 delegation reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how a partisan map would perform in the state over time.

“A 52-to-zero map would have the potential of backfiring,” Mitchell said. “In 2026, we could pick up 52 seats. But then in 2028 or 2030 — a bad year for Democrats, let’s say — Democrats lose 11 of those seats. You’ve drawn these districts so demonically to a Democratic advantage in a good year that in a bad Democratic year, they don’t have the ability to withstand the challenge.”

Ruling could jeopardize state’s voting rights law

The political debate over congressional maps has so far dominated the conversation in Washington. But legal scholars and redistricting experts say the ruling could also have consequences in California’s city hall, school board and county supervisor races.

The justices’ ruling, decided by the court’s conservative majority, says states cannot consider race to create majority-minority electoral districts while allowing them take partisan interests into account.

“A purely partisan map is actually more defensible now than one drawn with racial considerations,” said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA. “It turns the world on its head.”

The ruling now puts at risk any district drawn at any level of government that relied on the Voting Rights Act to justify its boundaries, Hasen said.

And in California, that uncertainty extends to districts drawn under the state Voting Rights Act, which extends protections for minority voters beyond the federal law, he said. The state law was not directly at issue in the Supreme Court ruling, but Hasen argues the court’s reasoning could provide new legal grounds to challenge the state law as potentially unconstitutional.

Cities including Santa Monica and Palmdale have faced lawsuits alleging their at-large City Council elections diluted the Latino vote. Palmdale settled its case and agreed to switch to district-based elections; Santa Monica’s case is ongoing. Hasen argued that the cities, as well as other bodies, such as school boards, could now return to court to challenge whether district maps drawn as a result of the California Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional.

“That has not been tested yet,” he said, but he fears the same arguments made to challenge the federal Voting Rights Act could be made against the state law.

At the state level, Republican strategist Matt Rexroad sees the ruling affecting the California Legislature as well. He argues the boundaries drawn for the state Assembly and Senate districts are racial gerrymanders.

“Those legislative lines, I would argue, are unconstitutional,” Rexroad said. “And those lines are probably going to change by 2028.”

But Rexroad’s biggest concern goes beyond any single set of maps: It is the future of California’s independent redistricting commission, the nonpartisan body he has spent years defending.

A threat to independent redistricting

Rexroad sees a scenario in which the national political environment gives California Democrats little incentive to return the map-making power to the commission. If Republican states continue to aggressively redraw maps, Democrats will have another justification to keep power in the Legislature’s hands, the same argument made to pass Proposition 50, he said.

“I don’t think the California redistricting commission has ever been in greater jeopardy than it is right now,” he said.

J. Morgan Kousser, a historian who has testified as an expert witness in voting rights cases for 47 years, said California’s commitment to the commission may depend on how aggressive Republican states act in redistricting.

“If we go back to an all-white South in Congress, California may not go back to a fairness standard,” Kousser said. “It may not disarm. It may rearm.”

Mitchell, the redistricting consultant, said that he hopes California and other states choose the path of disarmament and that there is a national push for independent commissions in every state.

“This isn’t good for anybody,” he said. “This was all basically a nerd war over lines that didn’t actually improve any districts anywhere.”

On one of her previous visits to Los Angeles, Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel found herself having a smoke on Hollywood Boulevard.

There, while she stepped over the famous concrete-embedded stars, an unhoused man struck up a conversation with her.

“He kept explaining to me that he was poorly dressed because he was currently living on the street after someone robbed him, but he had written a screenplay,” Martel, 59, recalls in Spanish over coffee on a morning in April at a West Hollywood hotel.

“He told me they had stolen a watch from him — not a Rolex but a known brand,” she continues. “The whole time he was trying to convince me he was a millionaire who just so happened to be on the street because of random circumstances.”

One of Latin America’s most indispensable storytellers, Martel is fascinated by how prevalent that dream still is in L.A. — that movies can change your life overnight.

“That particular fantasy is par for the course in this city,” she says, though she’s not above it. It’s the reason she’s back to promote her first documentary, “Our Land,” out Friday.

Unhurried when it comes to her output, Martel has only made four fiction features, among them 2001’s “La Cienaga” and 2008’s “The Headless Woman” (returning to theaters this month in a new 4K restoration). Her biting and formally audacious narratives examine class, politics and — a speciality — the interiority of women through enigmatic portraits of psychologically complex individuals.

“Our Land,” a piercing indictment of the enduring wounds of colonialism, chronicles the murder of Indigenous Argentine activist Javier Chocobar in 2009 and the prolonged trial of the perpetrators in 2018.

Chocobar was shot during a confrontation with armed men over land in the Tucumán province of Argentina where the Chuschagasta Indigenous community has lived for many generations. Martel explores the killing not as an isolated event in her country’s recent past but as part of a long history of dispossession.

“Racism is a foundational element,” she says of her homeland. “The only consistent thing in Argentina, from the country’s birth to the present day, is the rejection of Indigenous people.”

In Argentina, Martel explains, public education has indoctrinated the population into believing Indigenous people no longer exist. Yet many Argentines proudly claim a connection to the Europeans, Italians in particular, who arrived in the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“When giving speeches, our presidents always say, ‘We are a country of immigrants,’ or ‘We came from the boats,’” says Martel. “They use metaphors like these because deep down Argentines feel much more indebted to European immigration than to our Indigenous population. But more than half of the people in Argentina have Indigenous ancestors.”

In 2020, Chocobar’s three convicted murderers appealed their guilty verdicts and were set free. “Our Land” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025, which brought renewed attention to the case. A month later, the sentence was upheld and two of the men returned to prison (one died in the interim).

Martel believes that outcome was a response to her film. “Communities wage the fight but cinema helps,” she says.

“I believe that we must use cinema for its enormous power to alter perception and not soothe the rich,” Martel says. “It’s not about delivering a message but rather about showing how an idea functions.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

For over 14 years, Martel worked on “Our Land” on and off. This time included periods when she focused on 2017’s “Zama,” her masterful period piece following a Spanish official in 18th century Argentina “who doesn’t want to be American,” she says, referring to the continent. In her mind, both “Zama” and “Our Land” come from the same impulse to dissect colonialism.

As part of her research process, Martel and her team created a detailed archive of documents related to the case that the Chuschagasta community now has at its disposal. Over the years, Delfín Cata, one of the Indigenous men present during the attack, would call Martel. He never asked about how her film was going, but the director sensed he was tacitly checking in on her progress, hoping that she was not losing faith.

“That was a confirmation that, beyond my own interest, there were people who needed this film,” she says. “I felt the immense satisfaction of knowing I was doing something that would be concretely useful.”

For Martel, the question of whether she was the right person to make this film (one she got in Venice) seems unfair. “It’s wrong to prevent a human being from speaking about their own history because they are not a woman, because they are not Black, or because they are not Indigenous,” she says. “It’s better to make mistakes trying to understand something than not to try at all. The chances of making a mistake are enormous in a film, no matter how good your intentions are.”

A key piece of evidence in the Chocobar case, prominent in the film, is a video that one of the attackers filmed, presumably expecting the Indigenous community to react violently, to justify firing his gun at them. The Chuschagasta men that faced them weren’t armed. As used by their aggressors, the camera functioned as a weapon.

Hollywood feels incompatible with Martel’s sophisticated, confrontational movies rooted in her country’s troubles. By Martel’s own admission, it doesn’t feel like a fit for her.

“I would have to force myself to create something outside my own country, outside my own language,” she says. “And that doesn’t really appeal to me.”

Still, Marvel Studios famously asked to meet with her when seeking a director for 2021’s “Black Widow.” Martel says she was among many directors they contacted, but she was curious to take the meeting even if she knew nothing would come of it.

“They wanted to do it over Zoom and I happened to be here in Los Angeles,” she remembers. “I told them I could come in, because I wanted to see what the whole process was like.”

Martel describes the month she spent in L.A. — an eye injury prevented her from flying home sooner — as a “lot of fun in the end,” even if no blockbuster emerged from it. More recently, another Hollywood offer did tempt her, but she ultimately passed.

“It was a good book suggested to me by an actress of undoubted talent,” Martel shares, careful to avoid names. “I considered it, but you very quickly have to picture yourself spending three years or at least a year and a half living in the United States making a movie. I have a thousand things in Argentina to worry about.”

Still, Hollywood, and its significance to moviemaking, has a singular, unnerving allure on her. Two of Martel’s favorite movies set in L.A. are David Lynch’s nightmarish “Mulholland Drive” and Robert Aldrich’s psychodrama “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

“There is something ruthless and utterly devoid of sanity at the heart of this film industry, and I’ve never felt that darkness as clear as in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” she says. “How can an industry that handles so many millions [of dollars] and such impeccably dressed famous people be so full of lunatics? That film captures that perfectly.”

And occasionally, she thinks, a big production breaks the mold, such as Todd Phillips’ “Joker,” which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 when Martel served as jury president — a controversial choice.

“It certainly had an impact on me,” says Martel. “I didn’t vote for it, though. I had another favorite, a Chinese film that stood no chance of winning.”

Phillips, she thinks, created a premonition for what was to come. “For me, the real killer clowns are Trump, Milei or Orbán,” Martel says, referring to polarizing leaders. “They expose themselves to ridicule and spout all sorts of nonsense. Those are clowns. And I think that movie captured that.”

Not one to mince words, Martel elaborates on the relation of Joaquin Phoenix’s social outcast turned supervillain and President Trump.

“The origin of the Joker is social resentment,” she says. “Trump holds no resentment toward society because the system gave him everything. But he has exploited the people who do harbor resentment. That is where you see the kind of clown he is, one who knows how to use people.”

Artificial intelligence, far-right ideologies, voracious capitalism — all of it makes Martel alarmed, seeing it as pushing us collectively to the brink of collapse. But there is hope, she thinks.

“What we have invented is very dangerous but we can dismantle it,” she says. “That is the only thing I’m betting on, that, at some point, a consensus will emerge and we’ll go, ‘Let’s not do this.’”

“I believe that we must use cinema for its enormous power to alter perception and not soothe the rich,” she says. “It’s not about delivering a message but rather about showing how an idea functions.”

She points to one of her subjects in “Our Land,” an Indigenous man who told her he loves the 1959 Charlton Heston epic “Ben-Hur,” a passion she does not share but understands.

“That’s a blow for all of us who make auteur cinema,” Martel says with a laugh. “That feeling that ‘Ben-Hur’ evoked gave him the strength to continue fighting for his community’s territory.”

The night before our interview, Martel rode around L.A. on a scooter holding onto a friend. These days she uses a cane to help her with mobility. “The city has great light,” she says, still open to being surprised by it.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in New York unsealed a suicide note Wednesday purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein in July, 2019, before a failed suicide attempt soon after he had been taken into federal custody on sex trafficking charges.

The disgraced financier would ultimately die weeks later in the same New York facility in what was ruled a suicide.

While the note’s authenticity has not been established, it contains an apparent reference to a line from a 1931 Little Rascals film that Epstein had used in at least two email messages, according to the trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice this year in response to the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act.

In the short handwritten note released Wednesday, Epstein allegedly wrote, “They investigated me for month — Found nuthing!!!”

The note concludes, “Whatcha want me to do — Burst out cryin!! No Fun – Not Worth It!!”

It was a phrase Epstein had used before.

In a September, 2016, email to his brother, Mark, he wrote, “whtchoo want me toodo — bust out crying” in response to news that their cousin had become a grandfather.

And in another message the following year to his childhood friend Terry Kafka, Epstein wrote, “Whatcha want me todo/bust out cryin,” in response to a message from Kafka about being nostalgic

Epstein’s brother and Kafka did not immediately responded to requests for comment.

The line is an apparent reference to a 1931 Little Rascals short film “Little Daddy,” in which the character Stymie says, “Well, what do you want me to do, bust out crying?” when another character says that it will be their last breakfast together.

The note emerged from the court records of Epstein’s onetime cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer who is serving four consecutive life sentences for a 2016 quadruple murder.

It was released in response to a request by the New York Times.

The note itself was not included in the millions of pages released by the Justice Department.

In 2020, “60 Minutes” disclosed a note Epstein reportedly wrote days before his August, 2019, death that included complaints about his conditions and similarly concluded with the phrase “No fun!!!”

Journalist Katie Phang sued acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche for allegedly failing to comply with the requirements of the Epstein files law passed last year, which required that the documents be released in their entirety within 30 days, with reasoning provided for any documents not released.

The department released the files after the deadline passed and has faced criticism for removing or not releasing some documents and simultaneously failing to redact the names of numerous Epstein victims while redacting the names of some of Epstein’s friends and associates.

There will be no Triple Crown winner in horse racing this year. There won’t even be an attempt.

Trainer Cherie DeVaux on Wednesday announced Golden Tempo, the horse that made her the first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby, would skip the Preakness Stakes next week at its temporary home, Laurel Park in Laurel, Md.

Just hours after Golden Tempo returned to the racetrack at Keeneland for the first time since his victory Saturday at Churchill Downs, DeVaux posted a statement on X.

“After much thoughtful discussion as a team, we have decided that Golden Tempo will bypass the Preakness Stakes,” the statement read.

“We are incredibly appreciative of the excitement and support surrounding the possibility of a Triple Crown run. The enthusiasm from racing fans, our owners, and our entire team has meant more to us than we can properly express. Golden gave us the race of a lifetime in the Kentucky Derby, and we believe the best decision for him moving forward is to give him a little more time following such a tremendous effort. His health, happiness, and long-term future will always remain our top priority.”

The Preakness, set for May 16, is the second leg of the Triple Crown, followed June 6 by the Belmont Stakes, which for the third straight year will be contested in Saratoga, N.Y. Since 1978, the only horses to sweep all three races are American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018.

Golden Tempo is the second straight horse and third in the last five years not to run in the Preakness. Sovereignty, who did not participate last year, won the Belmont and later the Travers and was voted Horse of the Year.

Unlike in the past, trainers almost never run horses with just two or even three weeks’ rest. That has prompted talk that the Preakness — which has been run 14 days after the Derby since 1950 — and Belmont could be moved back to allow horses more time between races. Sports Business Journal reported last month that the Preakness was “set to make a historic shift to one week later,” though many trainers have said that won’t make a difference.

DeVaux was asked the day after the Derby if having the Preakness four weeks after the Derby would make her decision easier.

“I mean, it would make anyone’s decision easier, but that’s not the Triple Crown,” she said. “So, the Triple Crown is hard to win for a reason. And I appreciate the history of it.

“You know, the horses are definitely different. They’re not built the same. They’re not trained the same as back then, but current times have shown that it can be done with the right horse.”

There is no shortage of horses aiming for the Preakness, which is limited to 14 starters. One of those — and the likely favorite if he runs — is Crude Velocity, who won the Pat Day Mile on Saturday at Churchill Downs in just his third career start. But trainer Bob Baffert, who has won the Preakness a record eight times, has yet to decide whether he wants to run the horse in two weeks.

“I’m still on fence,” Baffert said Wednesday via text. “Tempted but I’m not leaning yet.”

The Daily Racing Form reported Ocelli, the maiden who finished third in the Derby, is now expected to run in the Preakness. Trainer Whit Beckman told the Form he had Ocelli jog Wednesday and “he looked better than great.”

Added Beckman: “You wouldn’t know this horse ran Saturday. He’s made of something different. Every indication he’s given me is to point to this race. … We’re having fun, the horse is having fun. If everybody’s having fun, why stop the fun?”

According to a news release from the Preakness, other horses under consideration who didn’t run in the Derby are Chip Honcho, Corona de Oro, Crupper, Express Kid, Great White, Iron Honor, Napoleon Solo, Pretty Boy Miah, Silent Tactic, Taj Mahal, Talkin, Talk to Me Jimmy and The Hell We Did.

The Racing Form reported jockey Jose Ortiz, who rode Golden Tempo to his Derby win, will ride Chip Honcho in the Preakness.

WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is appearing Wednesday before a House committee investigating sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as lawmakers seek answers for Lutnick’s contact with him in the years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

Lutnick, a member of President Trump’s Cabinet, is the latest powerful political figure to appear before the House Oversight Committee. He has previously given contradictory statements about his relationship with Epstein, but he says he has done nothing wrong and welcomes the closed-door interview with lawmakers.

Still, the transcribed interview presented a test of how much scrutiny lawmakers will apply to powerful men who kept company with Epstein even after it was known that he had solicited prostitution from an underage girl. Trump’s Republican administration has tried unsuccessfully for more than a year to move past the issue.

Lutnick is the highest-ranked official in the Trump administration, besides Trump himself, to be named in the case files on Epstein. Trump has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.

Several Democrats have called for Lutnick to resign, and a few Republicans, including Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, have said he should at least testify before the Oversight panel.

Lutnick has downplayed his ties to Epstein, who was once his neighbor in New York City. Under questioning from Democrats during an unrelated hearing earlier this year, he described their contact as a handful of emails and a pair of meetings in 2011 and 2012.

But that admission came after he had previously claimed on a podcast last year that he had decided to “never be in the room” with Epstein following a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife.

In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state sex offense charges in Florida, including soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with him,” Lutnick told senators in February when he was asked about Epstein during a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

But Lutnick, who was previously the head of brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, actually had an hourlong engagement at Epstein’s home in 2011. His family then visited Epstein’s infamous private island in 2012 for lunch.

The federal release of case files on Epstein also showed that the two had kept in contact through email. Lutnick in 2018 emailed Epstein about a proposed expansion of a museum in their neighborhood that would have blocked the view from their homes. Epstein also gave $50,000 to a 2017 dinner honoring Lutnick, while Lutnick invited Epstein to a 2015 fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. In 2013, they both invested in the same business venture.

The White House has continued to express support for Lutnick, who was one of the biggest boosters of Trump’s sweeping tariffs strategy. He has been close to Trump for years and helped fundraise for his 2020 and 2024 campaigns.

The House Oversight Committee is also scheduled to hear testimony on May 29 from Pam Bondi, who was pushed out from her job as attorney general last month.

Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Groves writes for the Associated Press.

In June 2017, with President Trump newly installed in office for the first time, one of the biggest battles with the administration was about oil. He’d just named the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, as his secretary of State, even though great reporting — in this newspaper among others — had recently shown that the company knew all about, and lied all about, climate change as far back as the 1980s.

Back east, the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts were trying to take the oil giant on, initiating investigations of the company to try to hold it accountable. Environmental advocates and consumer groups were pressing hard for California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to join in, and she seemed to be considering it. Then she left the office to assume her new U.S. Senate seat, and the decision fell to her replacement, Xavier Becerra — now a leading candidate for California governor.

As I wrote in these pages at the time, it was a great test for him, and a great curiosity that he was staying silent, “since the rest of Sacramento is hard at work dealing with climate change.” I was not the only one who noticed. Seventy thousand Californians signed petitions demanding action. Eight California representatives in Congress — including Jared Huffman and Ted Lieu — sent him a letter demanding a “vigorous” inquiry and pointing out that it was particularly important because the newly elected Trump administration was clearly favoring the oil industry. “California has led the world in responding to the dangers of climate change, and we know that it will continue to do so,” they wrote. “You now have a leading role in that effort.” But ultimately Becerra did not have a leading role, or indeed any role at all: He punted, as this editorial page pointed out. What Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is now trying to do by statute — immunize the big oil companies from prosecution for climate liability — Becerra accomplished by sheer silence.

In the years since, of course, California has paid a huge price for our inaction on climate. Just looking at wildfire, there were of course the great blazes that Los Angeles County will never forget in 2025, but also the 2020 August Complex fire in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, the 2021 Dixie fire up north, the 2017 conflagration across Napa and Sonoma counties, the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the 2018 Camp fire that devastated Paradise — the list goes sadly on and on and on.

Meanwhile, Big Oil and its friends at Big Utility have racked up huge profits, and Californians have faced ever higher bills. An unhobbled oil industry played a huge role in reelecting Trump in 2024 and in taking us to war with Iran.

And through it all, during his years as attorney general, Becerra did little or nothing to help. As I said all those years ago, it’s a mystery why, though I fear the mystery gets clearer with each campaign funding filing over his long career. As California’s top prosecutor, he took big donations from oil industry giants such as Chevron, and also from energy companies Sempra and Southern California Edison. As a member of Congress, he took larger checks from Pacific Gas and Electric and Edison International.

This time around, as he seeks the governor’s office, Chevron has maxed out its contributions to his campaign, the first time they’ve found a gubernatorial candidate to back in a decade. Meanwhile, across the country, leading progressives have signed a pledge refusing fossil fuel donations. Another gubernatorial contender, Katie Porter, is among them. Needless to say, Becerra is not.

The California chapters of Third Act — a group of Americans over 60 that I helped found — canvassed their members last month and issued an endorsement of Tom Steyer, on the grounds that he had worked hard over the years to address energy and climate issues. Instead of taking money from Big Oil, he’s given money, time and counsel to those of us volunteering in the fight against the industry. In fact, I think that whether one is most concerned about lowering utility bills with clean energy or protecting California’s forests, beaches and insurance rates from the global warming threat, he’d be the most climate-conscious elected official in America.

But Third Act was also founded to help protect our democracy. And that means disconnecting public policy from campaign donations. We need leaders who will do the right thing for us, not for their donors. Steyer has called on Becerra to return his donations from Big Oil. That would be a start, but it doesn’t really make up for the wasted decade we’ll never get back.

Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act and the author, most recently, of “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate, a Fresh Chance for Our Civilization.”

Tom Steyer is trying to sell himself to voters as an agent of change.

He has vowed to take on entrenched political and economic forces to create affordable housing, make the wealthy pay more in taxes, lower energy bills and protect the environment.

But perhaps the biggest change he is selling is his own.

The hedge-fund billionaire turned climate activist has faced criticism throughout his campaign for past investments in coal plants and private prisons, to name a few, that helped build his fortune and gave him the means to spend more than $150 million of his own money in his quest for the governor’s mansion.

Steyer’s prolific spending has blanketed the airwaves with television ads and helped propel him near the top of an unsettled gubernatorial field in the polls.

The 68-year-old San Franciscan has helped put many Democratic candidates in office as one of the party’s biggest political donors in the past two decades, but has never held public office himself.

He spent more than $340 million in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but dropped out after placing third in the primary in South Carolina, where he had invested heavily.

There is a long tradition of wealthy, self-funding candidates, and the results are mixed at best. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent more than $260 million to win three terms as New York City mayor. But he spent more than $1 billion on a 2020 presidential bid and lasted only four days longer in the race than Steyer. Two years later, real estate developer Rick Caruso spent more than $100 million in an effort to become Los Angeles mayor but lost handily to Karen Bass.

Hoping for a better result in his current race, Steyer has staked out a position as the most progressive candidate in the field — touting an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution. He’s picked up other key endorsements, too, from the California Teachers Assn., California Nurses Assn. and numerous environmental groups.

But he faces the challenge of convincing enough liberal voters to support a billionaire with controversial past investments the same year a tax on billionaires, currently enjoying strong support, is poised to be on the November ballot.

“This election is about who you can trust to fight for you,” former Rep. Katie Porter said during an April 22 gubernatorial debate in San Francisco. “One candidate is a billionaire who got rich off polluters and ICE prisons and is now using that money to fund his election.”

Steyer said he understands the broad concerns about his wealth and is willing to vote for the billionaires’ tax in November.

“I know that people are skeptical of billionaires, and I’m skeptical of billionaires,” Steyer said Tuesday in an interview with The Times. “But if you look at this race, I’m the only progressive in the race. I’m the person who’s taking on the corporate special interests.”

He pointed to the millions spent by a super PAC supported by the real estate industry and Pacific Gas & Electric — which Steyer has pledged to break up to bring down utility costs — as evidence that he is the candidate most feared by moneyed interests in the state.

“The companies that are running up the costs are fighting like hell, because that’s how they make their money,” he said. “But somebody’s got to stand up to them.”

The departure of former Rep. Eric Swalwell from the race last month after sexual assault allegations doesn’t appear to have resulted in a major surge of support for Steyer. Rather, it is Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary, who seems to have gained momentum.

But veteran California pollster Mark Baldassare said that he hasn’t counted out Steyer yet.

Tom Steyer, in 2013, as he was campaigning against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

(David Paul Morris / Bloomberg)

“It would be easy to say that he’s reached his peak, except for the fact that there are so many undecideds and Steyer has so many resources at his disposal,” said Baldassare, the statewide survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California.

Steyer has poured at least $875 million into federal and state political committees since 2010, according to an analysis conducted for The Times by OpenSecrets, and federal and state campaign finance records. That total includes the nearly half a billion dollars he has spent on his two races.

In 2013, Steyer left his investment firm and launched NextGen Climate, a progressive political action group geared toward addressing climate change. He has given nearly $270 million to a super PAC affiliated with the group, which was later renamed NextGen America.

The committee has spent tens of millions of dollars on campaigns opposing fossil fuel interests and supporting progressive candidates, though Steyer’s financial support for the group has decreased as he has run for office.

The billionaire also established his climate bona fides by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline during the Obama administration, which became a national proxy fight over climate policy, and by backing environmental ballot measures in California.

Among them was a $5-million investment in 2010’s “No on Prop. 23” campaign, which defeated a conservative effort to overturn California’s greenhouse gas emission reduction law.

Two years later, Steyer invested about $29.5 million in Proposition 39, a winning measure to recoup money from corporate tax breaks to help pay for clean energy projects.

Privileged upbringing and a ‘desire to compete’

Steyer’s unconventional path to politics began with a privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He studied at the elite Buckley School and Philips Exeter Academy before attending college at Yale University, where he captained the men’s soccer team and graduated in 1979.

After a brief stint on Wall Street, he got a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Kat Taylor. They wed on the Stanford campus in 1986.

Steyer worked hard — very hard — at making money.

He was one of several “Wall Street Prodigies” featured in a Wall Street Journal profile from the same year he was married.

Steyer’s work began at 5 a.m. in the office and he seldom took days off — he fretted he wouldn’t have time for a honeymoon.

He eschewed the trappings of wealth — driving an eight-year-old Honda — motivated instead by a “desire to compete, excel and keep struggling to do better.”

Steyer began cutting political checks soon after, but his real emergence as a major political donor came during the 2004 presidential campaign, when he pledged to raise more than $100,000 for John Kerry’s campaign and was talked about as a potential political appointee at the U.S. Treasury Department in a Kerry administration.

Steyer hired Kerry to join his sustainable investment company Galvanize in 2024. Steyer stepped down from the company before entering the governor’s race.

The year 2004 was pivotal for another reason.

A group of students at his two alma maters, Yale and Stanford, along with those at a handful of other elite universities, began a campaign to pressure the endowments at their institutions to stop investing with Steyer’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management.

They cited concerns about some of the firm’s investments, including a coal burning plant in Indonesia and a joint venture between Farallon and Yale to pump out water from an aquifer in Colorado adjacent to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

“Stated simply, we do not want our universities to profit from investments that harm other communities,” the students wrote in an open letter to Steyer. “We are concerned about the impact some of Farallon’s recent investments have had.”

Steyer told the students he appreciated “the importance of the issues that you raise,” but defended his firm’s work, saying that it acted “responsibly and ethically.”

Looking back on that time now, Steyer said it was a turning point.

“I think that experience really was a wake-up call to me,” he said. “It’s when I started to very seriously consider leaving Farallon. I really felt like if I was going to be the person with my values, I was going to have to leave and be independent and do what was right.”

Three years later, Steyer and his wife began their initial pivot to public service, opening a bank in Oakland that would cater to low-income customers

Tom Steyer, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, greets people at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2019.

(Scott Olson / Getty Images)

But this initial venture highlighted the inevitable collision course between Steyer’s burgeoning activism and his firm’s investments.

At an event that year with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Steyer and Taylor pledged $1 million in loans to support vulnerable people in Oakland facing foreclosure in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Left unsaid was the fact that Steyer’s firm had extensive financial ties to San Diego’s Accredited Home Lenders, one of the biggest subprime mortgage lenders in the country.

The transformation to climate activist

Steyer and his wife began writing bigger philanthropic checks and in 2010 took the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of their wealth before they died.

In 2009, they gave $40 million to endow the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, the first of several multimillion-dollar gifts to Stanford and Yale to support climate-focused ventures. They pledged $7 million to create the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, also at Stanford, in 2010. It closed last year after its endowment came to an end.

And in 2011, the couple donated $25 million to Yale to help establish an Energy Sciences Institute focused on developing sustainable energy solutions.

But even as Steyer undertook his public transformation from investor to climate activist, his firm continued to make decisions out of step with his newfound commitment.

In 2011, for example, the firm purchased 1.8 million shares of BP, a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP-operated project dumped nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Steyer resigned from the firm at the end of 2012, though he still has millions of dollars invested in the firm .

Environmentalists have largely been willing to forgive Steyer’s past investments.

“There’s no question he’d be the most knowledgeable and committed climate advocate that’s ever held really high office in America,” climate activist and author Bill McKibben recently told Politico.

While the nonprofit California Environmental Voters has endorsed both Katie Porter and Tom Steyer in the race, Steyer, in particular, has “taken on Big Oil dollar for dollar, toe to toe, and beaten them,” said Mary Creasman, the group’s chief executive.

“He has made this his career and his investment and his passion, so it’s authentic, and voters see that,” she said.

Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, said she’s impressed by Steyer’s climate track record and progressive campaign platform, noting that he’s been an active presence in California’s climate movement for more than 15 years.

That includes not only his work on ballot initiatives and clean energy technology, but also his focus on biodiversity loss and carbon sequestration at his 1,800-acre TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, where researchers are studying regenerative agriculture.

But Steyer has also played a role in elevating climate into a national political issue — including in the early 2010s when it wasn’t a “politically hot topic,” Stokes said.

“He has been willing to spend an enormous amount of his personal money on elections on climate — whether it’s propositions, whether it’s himself running for president on basically a climate platform, whether it’s the Next Gen giant voter turnout campaign,” she said. “I think he has recognized … that politics is where we have to invest our time if we want to make a difference on the climate crisis.”

Despite concerns raised about Steyer’s early investments into fossil fuels through Farallon, Stokes said she’s more apt to criticize candidates who are taking money from oil companies today, such as Becerra, who accepted a $39,200 donation from Chevron for his gubernatorial campaign.

She was also heartened by the fact that Pacific Gas & Electric has funded a $10-million PAC opposing Steyer, because she said it indicates that he aims to hold utility companies accountable for skyrocketing electricity prices amid soaring profits.

“We could actually have a shot here at having somebody who cares about climate change, who wants to hold utilities accountable, who wants to hold big polluters accountable,” Stokes said. “That would just be transformative.”

Energy costs weigh heavily on voters

Steyer’s focus on climate issues and energy affordability could also be a strategic boon in the governor’s race.

Sixty percent of voters in the state see climate change as a major threat to the country and believe that the government is not doing enough to address it, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California.

“Californians connect the dots between what’s going on with extreme climate and wildfires and climate,” said Baldassare, the institute’s survey director.

Recent polling has also shown that voters are very concerned about energy affordability and rising utility costs, with 13% of Americans naming it as the most important financial problem facing their family — a 10-point increase from last year, according to an April Gallup poll.

Overall, energy costs tied housing costs as the second-biggest concern following the high cost of living, the poll found.

In November, Democrats who campaigned heavily around energy affordability swept the field in key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Residential electric prices increased nearly 11% between January 2025 and this February, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Voters are supporting candidates who are leaning into these issues,” Creasman said.

Wieder reported from Washington and Smith from Los Angeles.

¿Qué en la fregada?

What the hell?

That’s what I muttered after learning that Los Angeles Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez wants to allow noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections.

Talk about a solution in search of a problem, considering everything Angelenos are facing right now.

While the specter of la migra continues to haunt the city, far more crushing are problems that affect everyone — affordability, housing, traffic, pollution. Maybe Soto-Martínez and his colleagues should double down on fixing those things first and sell their message better to voters instead of picking up a new issue?

I know the first-term council member comes from a good place. His parents were formerly undocumented, just like my dad, and he has been a fierce advocate for immigrants going back to his labor organizing days. I have friends without legal status and others in the DACA program for people who came to the U.S. illegally as children. I think giving them, as well as green card holders and others with papers, a chance to participate in elections is a righteous idea.

But to paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a time and a place for everything. In 2026, Angelenos should be focused on electing people and approving initiatives that will improve the city for everyone, not a narrow plank benefiting a slice of the population.

So I called up Soto-Martínez and challenged him to convince this doubting Tomás.

He hopes his proposal will reach the City Council later this month for a vote on whether to place it on the November ballot. If voters pass the measure, it goes back to the council to decide when — if ever — to enfranchise the immigrants.

The proposal, already vilified in conservative media, isn’t as radical as it seems. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, but there’s a well-established history of their participation in local ones, including in Vermont and Maryland. They can already vote in L.A. neighborhood council elections, and in San Francisco school board elections if they have a child in the district.

Besides, L.A. has long led the way in weaving undocumented immigrants into the fabric of civic life.

This is a sanctuary city where Mayor Karen Bass has stood up to President Trump’s xenophobia. Where eight of the 15 council members are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Where LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho — himself formerly undocumented — has striven to make local schools as welcoming as possible (Carvalho is on paid leave after the FBI raided his home and office earlier this year). Even the LAPD learned decades ago that it’s better to embrace undocumented immigrants than castigate them for their lack of legal status.

“If you’re contributing to this economy, you should have the right to decide who represents you,” Soto-Martínez told me.

Fair point. But isn’t thumbing our noses at Trump asking for more of what he has already inflicted on L.A., making life even more miserable for undocumented immigrants? Could he use the noncitizen voter rolls as a list of whom to deport? Besides, doesn’t extending the franchise to noncitizens give fuel to his crazy conspiracies about stolen elections?

“You always hear, ‘Don’t poke the bear, don’t instigate them,’ but that’s not how you deal with a bully,” Soto-Martínez replied. “They’re coming at us already. While they’re removing people’s right to vote in the Supreme Court, we’re expanding it. … And it has nothing to do with Trump. It’s about fairness.”

Tell that to Trump.

I mentioned that Santa Ana — a city far more Latino than Los Angeles, though not as liberal — decisively rejected a similar measure in 2024. Soto-Martínez’s fellow Democratic Socialist council members, Ysabel Jurado and Eunisses Hernández, have voiced their support for his measure. But I wonder whether the full council will move it along to voters in a year when some members, including Soto-Martínez, are running for reelection.

I couldn’t get a comment from Bass. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who’s running against her, said in a statement that Soto-Martínez’s push “is worth taking seriously” but that it’s “critical to getting this right, and we must not make decisions lightly or quickly.”

“We’re going to have to organize,” Soto-Martínez acknowledged. “But we live in a political moment where it’s the right conversation to have about what this city stands for.”

Avance Democratic Club President Nilza Serrano at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights in 2022.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He’s going to have to convince people like Nilza Serrano. She’s president of Avance, L.A. County’s largest Latino Democratic club, and heads the California Democratic Party’s Latino caucus. Serrano is no wokosa — she supported Rick Caruso in the last mayoral election and is now siding with Bass.

While Serrano thinks Soto-Martínez is on to something, she said that voting rights for noncitizens are a nonissue for the people she’s trying to get to the polls for the June primary and November general elections. The economy and Trump’s deportation deluge are more on their minds.

I asked if Soto-Martínez’s proposal would cheapen citizenship for people like her. Serrano and her family came here legally from Guatemala in the 1980s before becoming U.S. citizens, a process that took years.

“Not for me,” she replied. “But it’s hard to say for others. I’d have to do a little bit more research.”

So I continued with my own research, calling someone I was sure would have a fit about the idea: Los Angeles County Hispanic Republican Club President David Hernandez.

“Isn’t San Francisco already doing it?” the Navy veteran cracked.

I thought Hernandez would go on an anti-liberal rant, but.…

“I believe there’s a strong argument,” he said, “that if someone has established residency and is a member of the community and suffered the consequences of whatever local policies will be enacted, they should have a say in who gets elected.”

Did the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta, California’s original avenging Latino, suddenly possess Hernandez? To make sure I was hearing right, I asked again if noncitizens voting in L.A. elections is a good thing.

How could he support that, as a Trump-voting Republican?!

“We have to be pragmatic,” he replied. He approves of noncitizens voting in L.A. neighborhood council elections, because that’s true local control.

He understands that allowing them to vote in municipal elections might come off as an insult to the memory of civil rights activists who lost their lives fighting for that right for Black Americans. But U.S. citizens are already taking it for granted, he noted — turnout in the November 2022 L.A. mayoral election was a pitiful 44%.

“Maybe noncitizens will appreciate voting more than citizens,” he said.

I’m still not fully convinced that Soto-Martínez’s push is wise right now, but I like that he’s being careful.

“We need to get in the weeds of this,” he said of the City Council’s deliberations, which he characterized as attempting to ensure maximum benefit and minimum fallout.

Let’s see what they come up with in a few weeks.

People heading to Yosemite to escape urban congestion fumed this weekend as they waited in a seemingly endless line of cars at the park entrance.

Inside, they circled aimlessly around full parking lots, scanning for empty spots instead of majestic views.

Near the summit of Half Dome, on the infamous steel cables hikers use to ascend the final stretch of bare granite, another traffic jam formed, trapping people hundreds of feet in the air, according to social media posts.

Even before the summer rush, California’s most visited national park is seeing big crowds — the most people in a decade, according to National Park System data.

Critics of the free-for-all are blaming the influx on the Trump administration for abandoning a reservation requirement that, for the last few years, has helped control the number of visitors and preserve a sense of natural tranquility.

California’s nine national parks drew a record 12 million visitors in 2025, up more than 800,000 from the previous record set in 2019. Yosemite accounted for more than a quarter of those visits.

This year, the pace continues, with more than half a million visits to Yosemite so far. In March, the park recorded 236,000 visits, up more than 45% from the same month a year earlier.

Yosemite National Park is enormous, covering more than 1,100 square miles on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Even at the height of summer, an adventurous soul willing to hike a bit can spend weeks in the park and rarely see another person.

But Yosemite’s most famous and Instagrammable vistas — the towering, 3,000-foot granite wall of El Capitan, the thundering spectacles of Yosemite and Bridalveil falls — can be enjoyed from parking lots and picnic benches in the relatively cramped confines of Yosemite Valley.

Visitors don’t even have to get out of their cars to gaze in wide-eyed wonder at sights they will probably remember for the rest of their lives.

And that’s the problem.

Traffic in the valley, especially on summer weekends, had become legendary by the end of the 2010s, inspiring think pieces with headlines such as “Inside Yosemite’s Traffic Meltdown” and “The Siege of Yosemite Valley.”

In June 2020, to limit crowds in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the park introduced a controversial system requiring a reservation before entering.

That left a lot of would-be visitors frustrated, but those lucky enough to snag a reservation were treated to the most peaceful, serene Yosemite Valley experience in years.

Since then, the reservation system has been tweaked repeatedly as administrators searched for a sweet spot between welcoming more visitors and retaining the peace of the great outdoors.

In February, the Trump administration, which had already slashed the national park system’s staff by about 25%, scrapped the reservation system and replaced it with “targeted management” of crowds.

“We are committed to visitor access, safety, and resource protection, and will continue active traffic management strategies to ensure a great visitor experience,” Yosemite Supt. Ray McPadden said at the time. “While reservation systems are one valuable management tool, our data demonstrates that a season-wide reservation requirement is not the most effective approach for the coming season.”

A crowd of tourists gather to take pictures of the Yosemite Valley on March 23, 2025, in Yosemite National Park.

(George Rose / Getty Images)

But the new approach is already getting harsh reviews, and the busy season hasn’t even begun.

During “Firefall” in February — an annual phenomenon when sunlight lands on the water cascading from Horsetail Fall, making it glow orange and red, like molten lava — the crowds were reportedly nightmarish.

“I spent over an hour stuck in traffic leaving the park, and exiting felt more like leaving a major sporting event than it did visiting a national park,” Mark Rose, a senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit devoted to protecting the park system, wrote in a blog post.

“I saw an ambulance stuck in standstill traffic announcing over a megaphone for pedestrians and vehicles to move out of the way,” Rose wrote. “The views were incredible, but I don’t think I’d ever go back without a reservation system in place.”

It left Rose worried about a return to the bad old days of Yosemite traffic, when visitors would wait forever just to get to the gate, pay the $35 entrance fee and then run into road blocks, with signs turning them away because the valley was too crowded.

“That was not an unusual situation,” Rose said. “To wait in line for close to two hours to get into the park and then just be stuck driving around for hours trying to find any parking at any location within the park.”

Over the weekend, the wait in traffic to simply get through the park entrance was an hour and a half, according to Lorena Calvillo from Fresno, who posted pictures and video of the traffic on Yosemite National Park’s official Facebook page.

And once she got in?

“Gridlock. Cars everywhere. People everywhere. No parking. No space,” Calvillo wrote.

“This all comes right after the reservation system was lifted … and honestly, it showed,” she added. “Officials were literally telling people to avoid the Valley.”

Another visitor, Richard Smekal, posted about the conga line of climbers who packed onto the cables leading to the Half Dome summit. He shared a photo of the cables empty when he arrived at 9 a.m., and another taken two hours later.

“After I got down, I turned around and took the second photo,” he wrote. “The line was a continuous stream of people, barely moving — basically at a standstill.”

The cables can be deadly, especially in thunderstorms, when they become a slippery lightning rod. Being stuck there in a human traffic jam is a nightmare many experienced hikers and climbers would do anything to avoid.

A spokesperson for Yosemite did not respond to requests for comment.

Traffic is at a standstill on the Yosemite Valley floor in the summer of 2017 while a bus lane is empty and off-limits to visitors at Yosemite National Park.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Chris Clarke had gone the traditional route, pitching for three years at USC after starring at Newbury Park High, then toiling for six more seasons in the Chicago Cubs’ minor league system after being a fourth-round draft pick in 2019.

But his big-league dream abruptly became a wake-up call last August when the Cubs released him a week before his wife gave birth to their first child. No more paychecks. No more health insurance.

So imagine how jarring it was for Clarke to take the mound in front of a record 102,000 fans in the Texas A&M football stadium Saturday, which had been converted to accommodate (sorry Dodgers) the most popular team in baseball: the Savannah Bananas.

“It was surreal,” Clarke said. “In fact, it was so incredible, I didn’t feel anything. My body went numb. There was a moment in the third inning when everybody was screaming. I couldn’t hear myself talk.”

It was the most people ever crammed into Kyle Field, the nation’s fourth-largest college stadium, trailing only Michigan (107,601), Oregon (106,572) and Ohio State (102,780).

Clarke pitched for the opposing team, the Texas Tailgaters, one of five squads created by Bananas founders Jesse and Emily Cole that serve as touring partners to face the yellow-clad star attraction. All six teams practice at a complex in Savannah, Ga.

The game in College Station attracted the largest crowd in the Bananas’ six-year history, and Clarke shined, striking out five in four innings. He also entertained, as all players in the Banana Ball Championship League are cheerfully required to do.

“The amount of joy it brings to fans and even people online, it’s really something,” Clarke said. “There definitely is a winner and a loser — which holds some weight — but for the most part, fans are there because it’s a really good show.”

Clarke, a 6-foot-7 right-hander, was the third overall pick in the inaugural Banana Ball draft held in November. Tailgater coaches contacted him beforehand to gauge his interest and he told them, “Pick me.”

March 2019 photo of former USC pitcher Chris Clarke during the 2019 Dodger Stadium Classic.

(John McGillen/USC Athletics)

That level of bold fits right in. Banana Ball is fast-paced, hilarious and maximizes fan engagement. It features innovative rules: Fouls caught by fans count as outs, for example, and batters who walk get to run the bases until all nine defensive players have touched the ball. Choreographed dances, acrobatic tricks, a pitcher on stilts and other antics keep the entertainment flowing.

“I like to think of every game as a stepping stone to the next show,” Clarke said. “Whether it goes well or is terrible, we will make it better for next time. Banana Ball is a relaxed culture, so when it comes to the entertainment stuff, there is no fear of failure. We are seeing what works and what doesn’t.”

Guest stars are frequent and on Saturday, the Bananas sent Texas-grown YouTube sensation Tyler Toney, a member of the sports comedy troupe Dude Perfect, to the plate as a pinch-hitter. Clarke struck him out on four pitches: a called strike, a swinging strike, a ball Clarke purposely launched high into the stands for laughs, then strike three swinging on a cut fastball.

It was a rare humbling moment for Toney, who, with fellow Dude Perfect members Cody Jones, Garrett Hilbert, and twins Cory and Coby Cotton, generates more than $20 million annually from YouTube, merchandise and tours.

Clarke had watched Dude Perfect videos religiously when he was at USC and was starstruck to meet them in person.

“Dude Perfect is the reason I failed econ twice,” he said. “I watched every single Dude Perfect video. To meet them and shake their hands was fun. It was the only moment in my life where I was a fanboy.”

He’s also a breadwinner again for his family. The burgeoning popularity of Banana Ball has made the gig more lucrative than playing in the minor leagues.

“I’m making five times as much and playing half the time,” Clarke said. “My contract is also for 12 months of the year. In affiliated baseball, it’s only six months. So, there’s that. I’ve never met anyone in baseball who has had the luxury to spend time with a newborn child. To come to Banana Ball and actually feel like there is respect, a culture and guidelines, that was something I hadn’t experienced.”

It is also giving him notoriety. Twenty-five Banana Ball games this year are being streamed on the ESPN app and Disney+, with select games airing across ESPN networks and ABC. The first Bananas broadcast on ABC will take place at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Ore., June 27 and 28. The games have been sold out since October.

Highlights from Saturday’s game flooded social media and traditional outlets alike. Family friends and former teammates reached out to Clarke. What was it like pitching in front of 100,000 people? Are you improving your dance moves?

“The entertainment side of it takes pressure off performance,” he said. “Performing well is still very much there, but there is a level of relaxation that makes it easier.”

Clarke admits he thinks back to USC and the 2019 season, when he posted a stellar earned-run average of 1.03. He also occasionally misses the heightened competition and quest to make the major leagues of affiliated baseball.

He pitched two seasons in triple A and is only 27. Would he leave Banana Ball next year if an MLB team offered him an invite to spring training?

“I’m not in a situation to close any doors,” he said. “That’s the mindset that got me here. I wanted to investigate Banana Ball and I told them I’d give them a full year for us both to evaluate it. Either way, I think it’s a win. Just comes down to what’s best for my family.”

Meanwhile, more games in packed stadiums await. In addition to a handful in football stadiums against the Bananas, the Tailgaters will play three games a week against other Banana Ball League teams throughout the summer, mostly in minor league baseball stadiums from Tulsa, Okla., to El Paso, Texas, to Nashville, Tenn., to Charlotte, N.C.

Exponentially larger crowds than those venues are accustomed to are a given.

WASHINGTON — White House economists estimate that President Trump’s deals with pharmaceutical companies to drop some of their U.S. prescription drug prices to what they charge in other countries could save $529 billion over the next 10 years.

The analysis obtained by the Associated Press includes the first economy-wide projections behind a policy at the core of Trump’s pitch to voters going into November’s midterm elections for control of the House and Senate. Democratic lawmakers have been doubtful about the savings claimed by Trump and these new numbers are likely to trigger additional questions about the data.

Cost-of-living issues are at the forefront of voters’ concerns and higher energy prices tied to the Iran war have deepened the public’s anxiety. Trump has tried in part to address affordability concerns by focusing on his efforts to cut deals with companies so that the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. would no longer be dramatically higher than in other affluent nations.

“Now you have the lowest drug prices anywhere in the world,” Trump said at a Friday rally before a crowd of seniors in Florida. “And that alone should win us the midterms.”

The analysis was done by administration officials for the White House Council of Economic Advisers. They also estimated that federal and state governments could save a combined $64.3 billion on Medicaid during the next decade because of what Trump calls his “most favored nation” policy on drug prices.

Few of the details of the deals struck by the Trump administration and 17 leading pharmaceutical companies have been made public, making it hard to independently verify the projected savings. The White House analysis sought to estimate the prospective savings as more medications come onto the market and fall under Trump’s framework — with one model in the report tallying the possible savings at $733 billion over a decade.

Trump and his Department of Health and Human Services have touted his drug-pricing deals as transformative and urged Congress to codify their principles into law. Democratic lawmakers have challenged the administration’s claims of savings. Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and 17 Senate Democrats in April proposed a measure requiring the administration to disclose the terms of the agreements signed by pharmaceutical companies.

“If these deals are so great, why is the Trump administration afraid of showing them to the public?” Wyden said when announcing the measure. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his team would share details that didn’t include proprietary information or trade secrets.

The White House said it has not shared the text of the agreements because they include highly sensitive data that could move financial markets.

The potential savings estimated by the Trump administration would be substantial as Americans spent $467 billion on prescription drugs in 2024, according to the most recent government data available. The analysis is premised on the idea that foreign countries would also pay more for their prescription drugs, which would diversify drugmakers’ sources of revenue and preserve their ability to innovate with new treatments.

Outside economists have caveated that any savings might not flow directly to patients, many of whom already pay discounted prices for their drugs through their insurance coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office in October 2024 estimated that a plan similar to what Trump ended up adopting could reduce prescription drug prices by more than 5%, though the decrease “would probably diminish over time as manufacturers adjusted to the new policy by altering prices or distribution of drugs in other countries.”

The scope of the savings claimed by the Trump administration are likely to intensify the scrutiny by Democrats, who counter that any price reductions would be offset by higher costs for prescription drugs not covered by the “most favored nation” framework. One of their main critiques is that pharmaceutical companies have increased their profit margins while working with the administration.

In April, staff working for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released an analysis that looked at 15 of the companies that have agreed to this drug-pricing plan and found that their combined profits jumped 66% over the past year to $177 billion. The report noted that the tax cuts Trump signed into law last year “exempted or delayed many of the most expensive drugs” from price negotiations with Medicare.

The Trump administration has countered that they consider Sanders’ critique to be flawed, saying that it’s based on the list prices for pharmaceutical drugs instead of the actual price that patients pay.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

AFTER five years of being shut-off, one small island off the coast of Montenegro is set to reopen, as is its luxury resort.

Called Sveti Stefan, the pretty spot has been closed for half a decade due to backlash from locals.

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A few miles away from Montenegro‘s town of Budva is the small and beautiful island of Sveti Stefan which is home to a luxury resort, Aman Sveti Stefan.

The hotel is accessible only to its guests who have to walk across a small strip of land which connects it to the mainland.

Historically, the island has been popular with celebrity clientele like Marilyn Monroe, Princess Margaret and Brad Pitt.

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But the hotel closed back in 2021 due to a dispute between the property operator and locals over access to its public beaches.

When the hotel first opened in 2009, it made its surrounding beaches including Miločer Beach (King’s Beach) and Queen’s Beach accessible to its guests only.

Access for locals was made difficult with the luxury resort charging high fees around €200 (£172.63) for sunbeds and umbrellas.

However, these had historically been free for all to enjoy with space for locals to lay down a towel.

Restriction of the beaches caused a lot of backlash and there were even protests back in 2021.

The dispute between locals and the hotel ended up with the temporary closure of the resort which stretched on for five years.

In 2023, Europa Nostra, the European Voice of Civil Society committed to Cultural Heritage, said: “The Montenegro State has almost half privatised this national treasure and disenfranchised its own citizens from their own public domain.

“Public access to Sveti Stefan old town and other parts of the site has been forbidden, even during winter months when the hotel is closed, making it impossible for locals and non-hotel guest tourists to enjoy this cultural landscape.”

Five years on and the hotel operator, Aman, has confirmed the island retreat in Montenegro will be reopen on July 1, 2026.

The luxury resort still looks like a small village, and is made up of hand-restored stone cottages and suites all updated with modern furnishings.

Some of the more luxurious suites even have private swimming pools, courtyards and terraces.

Stays include a daily breakfast, in-room refreshments and access to snorkelling equipment and paddle boards.

A stay in the Deluxe Cottage which is based on an original island home starts from €2,973 (£2,566.12) per night.

The resort has a mainland retreat called Villa Miločer, that and its Aman Spa will welcome guests back on May 22, 2026.

As for its surrounding beaches, these are open to the public once more with free access – but there are no shower, changing cabins or toilets.

For anyone who wants a glimpse of Sveti Stefan, the nearest airport is Tivat which is a three-hour direct flights from the UK and as little as £38 each way with easyJet.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has shown an ability to make a lot of noise at the government agency known in recent years to be a little sleepy.

But his April 28 announcement that the Walt Disney Co.’s eight ABC TV stations will undergo an early review of their broadcast licenses is his loudest action yet taken on behalf of President Trump, who repeatedly threatened media outlets that he believes are critical of him.

Carr is calling for the review two years before any of the station licenses are up, citing the agency’s inquiry into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies and whether they violated federal anti-discrimination rules.

The timing of Carr’s move is raising eyebrows as it comes after First Lady Melania Trump’s call for the firing of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over his April 23 comedy bit on the White House correspondents’ dinner. A tuxedo-clad Kimmel called Melania Trump “beautiful,” saying she had “the glow of an expectant widow.”

The first lady’s remarks came after a man armed with a shotgun, handgun and several knives breached security at the Washington black-tie event on April 25. The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, was arrested and faces three criminal charges, including attempting to assassinate the president.

Kimmel’s gag became ammunition for right-wing commentators, who claim the left is stoking political violence.

The host said the joke was about the age difference between the 79-year-old president and his wife. Kimmel denied it was a call for violence and has continued to mock the president on his show.

Carr insisted at a Washington news conference last week that his demand for a review is not related to Kimmel’s remarks.

Although many are skeptical, Carr, who was at the April 25 dinner, told The Times there would be an action related to ABC coming soon. The conversation occurred hours before the shots were fired.

The investigation into Disney’s practices began in March 2025, part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reverse DEI initiatives across private companies, federal agencies, universities and other organizations.

After the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which spurred the Black Lives Matter movement, companies such as Disney and NBC-owned Comcast aggressively promoted their diversity efforts.

But experts believe Carr is acting on ABC at the behest of Trump, as the chairman has often expressed support on social media whenever the president criticizes one of the broadcast TV news outlets.

“It might be the case that Disney can get some early relief by saying this should be dismissed because this is really a 1st Amendment issue,” said James Speta, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law. “We all know what’s going on here — the administration doesn’t like the speech that’s coming out of the talent on the broadcasting airwaves.”

Disney is not commenting on Carr’s DEI investigation, but it earlier defended the record of its TV stations, which are ratings leaders in most markets. “We are confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels,” the company said.

Here’s a primer on what to know and the challenges Disney may face.

Why are TV stations licensed by the government?

Government licensing regulates the spectrum allocated to broadcast channels, largely to prevent interference between TV signals. When renewals come up, the license holder must demonstrate that the station is serving the public interest by providing local news, program diversity and educational and informational shows for children. The procedure once occurred every three years, but deregulation efforts have extended that period to the current span of eight years.

When was the last time a TV station faced a significant license renewal challenge?

The most notable recent example was Fox Corp.’s Philadelphia station WTXF, which was up for a license renewal in October 2023. Activist groups filing the challenge said Fox was unfit to own the outlet after a judge ruled earlier that year that the company’s Fox News Channel had spread falsehoods about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Fox paid $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems that alleged the cable news channel damaged the company’s reputation.

Fox News, which operates on cable and satellite and is therefore not subject to FCC control, has a different management team than the parent company’s local TV stations, which mostly cover their communities and do not typically present political commentary. The FCC rejected the renewal challenge in January 2025, noting that none of the false information on Fox News was heard on the Philadelphia station. WTXF was not cited in Dominion’s lawsuit.

Are there any other examples?

Yes. Other White House administrations have threatened to pull TV station licenses in response to negative news coverage. At the height of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s allies unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the TV licenses of three stations then owned by the Washington Post.

Has a company ever lost its broadcast license?

RKO General, a unit of the General Tire and Rubber Co., was the last company to lose broadcast TV station licenses in 1987, including Los Angeles outlet KHJ. The case was related to corporate malfeasance and not broadcast content on the stations.

The process to revoke the RKO licenses took seven years from the moment the FCC voted in favor of the move.

But isn’t this case different?

Yes. Although the rule Carr mentioned is legitimate, the FCC has rarely if ever acted on it, according to one veteran TV executive who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. If Disney or any other company was found to violate the nondiscrimination rule, they would in previous eras probably be subjected to a just a fine, not the denial of a license, which would be viewed by many as government censorship.

What happens in the event that ABC licenses are not renewed?

Nothing immediately, as the licenses are in effect through 2028 to 2032, depending on the outlet. If Disney had to sell the stations, the price would probably be depressed due to pressure to unload the properties.

But public communications attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman told The Times last month that the bar for denying a renewal is high and any effort would be tied up in court on constitutional grounds.

“The law intentionally sets out a very steep burden for the FCC to deny a license renewal; the process takes many years, during which time the licensee continues to operate normally under ‘continuing operating authority,’” Schwartzman said.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court often resembles a feuding family where the same heated arguments go on for years.

The justices disagree over race, religion, abortion, guns and the environment, and more recently, presidential power and LGBTQ+ rights. And while they try to maintain a cordial working relationship, they don’t claim to be good friends.

“We are stuck with one another whether we like it or not,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote last year in her book, “Listening to the Law.”

And like it or not, the testy exchanges and simmering anger have been increasing, driven by the sharp ideological divide.

The three liberals had known since October the conservative majority was preparing to elevate partisan power over racial fairness.

By retreating from part of the Voting Rights Act, the court’s opinion last week by Justice Samuel A. Alito will allow Republicans across the South to dismantle voting districts that favor Black Democrats.

Justice Elena Kagan, who first came to the court as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, denounced the “demolition” of a historic civil rights law.

In dissent, she quoted Marshall’s warning that if all the voting districts in the South have white majorities, Black citizens will be left with a “right to cast meaningless ballots.”

But Alito and Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the court 20 years ago believing the government may not make decisions based on race.

Their first major ruling was a 5-4 decision that struck down voluntary school integration policies in Seattle and Louisville. It was illegal to encourage some students to transfer based on their race, Roberts said.

When faced with a redistricting case from Texas, Roberts described it as the “sordid business … [of] divvying us up by race.”

With President Trump’s three appointees on the court, the conservatives had a solid majority to change the law on race. Three years ago, they struck down college affirmative action policies.

Watching closely were states such as Alabama and Louisiana.

They had been sued by voting rights advocates, and both had been required to draw a second congressional district with a Black majority.

Their state attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing these race-based districts were unconstitutional.

In a decision that surprised both sides, Alabama lost by a 5-4 vote in 2023.

Roberts said the Voting Rights Act as interpreted by past decisions suggests Alabama must draw a second congressional district that may well elect a Black candidate. The three liberals agreed entirely and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh cast a tentative fifth vote.

Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas filed strong dissents, joined by Barrett and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Last year, the justices agreed to decide a nearly identical appeal from Louisiana, and this time Roberts joined the conservative majority and assigned the opinion to Alito.

He argued the Voting Rights Act gave “minority voters” an equal right to vote but not a right to “elect a preferred candidate.”

The decision dealt a double blow to Black Democrats because an earlier 5-4 opinion by Roberts freed state lawmakers to draw voting districts for partisan advantage.

That ruling, combined with Wednesday’s decision, will bolster Republicans trying to maintain their narrow hold on Congress.

As if to highlight that point, the court’s six Republican appointees were guests of President Trump at Tuesday’s White House dinner for King Charles.

Just a few days before, Trump had slammed the court in another social media post.

“The Radical Left Democrats don’t need to ‘Pack the Court’. It’s already Packed,” he wrote. “Certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad.” They had struck down his sweeping tariffs, he said, “they probably will … rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship.”

That didn’t stop him from inviting them to the White House, nor did the partisan appearances dissuade them from attending.

Alito is enjoying his moment of acclaim as the voice of the conservative legal movement.

In March, the Federalist Society held a day-long conference in Philadelphia to celebrate the “Jurisprudence of Justice Alito.”

He is the subject of two new books. One, by journalist Mollie Hemingway, calls him “the justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution.”

The other, by author Peter S. Canellos, is “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.”

Alito attended Princeton during the Vietnam War and was put off “by very privileged people behaving irresponsibly,” as he later described his classmates.

He then went to the Yale Law School and, like Thomas, left with a lasting disdain for the left-leaning faculty and students.

Alito has a book of his own scheduled to be released in October. It is called “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country.”

Last month, rumors and speculation had it that Alito and perhaps Thomas planned to retire this year so Trump and the Senate Republicans could quickly fill their seats.

At age 76, Alito is at the peak of his influence and has no interest in stepping down, and he and Thomas confirmed to news organizations they had no plans to retire this year.

For 20 years, Alito has cast reliably conservative votes at the Supreme Court and regularly argued for moving the law farther to the right.

Most famously, he wrote the court’s 5-4 opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe vs. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.

Roberts issued a partial dissent, arguing the court should uphold Mississippi’s 16-week limit on abortions and stop there.

Alito has called religion a “disfavored right,” and there too a change is underway.

In the decades before his arrival, the court had handed down steady rulings barring taxpayer funds for religious schools or religious ceremonies or symbols in public schools or city parks.

Then, the court viewed these official “endorsements” of religion as violations of the 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment” of religion or the principle of church-state separation.

Those decisions have faded into the background, however.

Instead, Alito, Roberts and the four other conservatives see today’s threat as one of discrimination against religion, not official favoritism for religion.

They ruled church schools and their students may not be denied state aid because of religion. Similarly, Catholic charities and other religious groups may not be excluded from publicly funded programs because they refuse to accept same-sex parents, the justices said.

They upheld a football coach’s right to pray on the field. And they ruled for a wedding cake maker in Colorado and other business owners who refused to serve same-sex couples in violation of a state civil rights law.

Religious liberty has now replaced separation of church and state as the winning formula at the Supreme Court.

The next test on that front may come from Louisiana, which calls for the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classes.

In the past, the court had ruled such religious displays violated the 1st Amendment, but it is not clear that the current majority will agree.

The court’s oral arguments for this term ended last week. Many of them were dominated by questions from liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

A statistical tally by Adam Feldman for Scotusblog found that Jackson, the newest justice, had spoken twice as many words as the most talkative of the conservative justices.

Her arrival shifted the “center of verbal energy” to the liberal side, Feldman wrote. While Jackson “sits in a class of her own,” Sotomayor also presses the argument on the liberal side.

The court now has about eight weeks to hand down the decisions in 35 remaining cases. Usually, May and June can be a trying time because of intense disagreements over the opinions in close cases.

But for the liberal justices, it also may be a time mostly for writing dissents.

The ninth in an occasional series of profiles on Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.

When the Dodgers drafted David Lesch in January 1980, they had visions of his fastball lighting up radar guns at Dodger Stadium.

He never made it that far.

Lesch never climbed above the lowest rung on the minor league ladder, where he pitched just 10 innings and gave up more runs, hits and walks than he got outs. Less than 18 months after he was drafted, Lesch, wracked by a rotator cuff injury, was released, his major league dream over before he was old enough to legally buy a beer.

“I went to Disney World after that,” he said.

But that wasn’t the only decision the Dodgers made that changed Lesch’s life. When he was drafted, the team gave him just a small bonus, but sweetened the deal by offering to pay for college if he ever went back to school. For the team, it seemed a safe bet.

“They probably have this algorithm saying ‘this is the No. 1 draft pick. If he doesn’t make it, he’s not going back to college. He’ll be assistant baseball coach of his high school or something,’” Lesch said.

Oops.

Lesch not only went back to college, but he also wound up getting three degrees, including a master’s and a PhD from Harvard. It was arguably the most important investment in humanity the Dodgers made since signing Jackie Robinson, because Lesch went on to become one of the world’s top experts on the Middle East, writing 18 books and more than 140 other publications while advising four presidents and a cadre of United Nations diplomats.

David Lesch interacts with students in his history class at Trinity University in San Antonio.

(Lucero Salinas / Trinity University)

“That was the best deal,” Lesch, 65, said by phone from San Antonio, where he is the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity University.

“Without that I probably could not have said yes to Harvard because of the price. The Dodgers committed to paying.”

And by doing so, the Dodgers may have altered history just a bit.

Lesch’s regular meetings with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which ended with Lesch facilitating an important if temporary breakthrough in U.S.-Syrian relations? The diplomatic and conflict-resolution work in Syria and the wider U.N. initiatives on regional issues throughout the Middle East? The thousands of students Lesch inspired to go on to perform important diplomatic and public-service roles of their own?

None of that happens if Lesch’s shoulder had held on or if the Dodgers had reneged on their deal.

“It was very fortunate that he hurt his rotator cuff. Baseball’s loss is academia’s gain,” said Robert Freedman, a scholar and expert on Russian and Middle Eastern politics who taught Lesch at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“I’ve been teaching for, I guess, 60 years now and I can tell when a student can see a complex problem and can penetrate right to the heart of the problem very quickly. He was one of those students.”

Still, it took a slightly offhand comment from Freedman, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, to launch Lesch on his post-baseball career.

“We were having lunch and he was looking for a project and I mentioned to him ‘you know, there hasn’t been a good American scholar doing work on Syria for many, many years,’” he said.

“That struck his interest.”

Playing a child’s game and managing life-and-death Middle East politics share very little in common. But Lesch made the transition seamlessly.

“It is like he’s several different people, or has been,” said journalist and author Catherine Nixon Cooke, whose book “Dodgers to Damascus: David Lesch’s Journey from Baseball to the Middle East” traces those parallel lives.

“I’m wondering if, in a sense, it all worked out the way it was supposed to,” Cooke continued. “Even though his dream was to be a major leaguer, David certainly has reinvented himself to this really remarkable man following a completely different path.

“It was the Dodgers who paid for him to go to Harvard and so it’s kind of a weird thing. Baseball took away his dream because he got hurt, but baseball also gave him his backup plan.”

Lesch was still a teenager when, 20 minutes into his first spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda plucked him off a minor league practice field to pitch batting practice in the main stadium.

Waiting for him were Ron Cey, Bill Russell, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes and Reggie Smith, the heart of a lineup that would win a World Series a season later.

It was the first time — and nearly the last — that Lesch faced big-league hitters. And it didn’t start well.

Batting practice pitchers throw from behind an L-shaped screen that protects them from comebackers and Lesch had never used one. That, combined with his understandable nervousness, caused him to short-arm his first fastball, which sailed at Cey’s head, sending him sprawling into the dirt.

“He got up and gave me this mean look,” Lesch said. “I remember it so vividly right now. I really thought I was going to be released that day.”

Instead, he gathered himself and finished the session, earning pats on the back from both Garvey and Lasorda. The incident, he said, has colored the rest of his life.

“I’ve met with presidents, prime ministers, been in war zones, all sorts of things,” Lesch said. “Anytime I say ‘well, you know, this should make me nervous,’ I think about that episode and the fact that I made it through and did OK.”

In high school, Lesch had focused on basketball and baseball. Academics? Not so much. So after spending his freshman year of college at Western Maryland College, he transferred to Central Arizona, a junior college, so he would be eligible for the January 1980 draft, allowing him to trade his books in for a baseball.

The so-called secondary draft, which was discontinued six years later, was specifically targeted toward winter high school graduates, junior college players, college dropouts and amateurs who had been previously drafted but did not sign. As a result, the bonuses teams offered winter draft picks were just a fraction of what players taken in the June draft received.

Lesch’s was so low, he can’t even remember what it was.

“I want to say $10,000 to $15,000,” he said. “No more than $20,000.”

When it became clear the Dodgers weren’t going to budge on the money, Lesch’s father, Warren, a family physician in suburban Baltimore, pulled out the Harford County phone book and looked up the number for Baltimore Orioles coach Cal Ripken Sr. Lesch played high school ball against Ripken’s son Cal Jr., who had been a second-round draft pick of the Orioles two years earlier. So his father thought the Ripkens might have some advice on what to ask of the Dodgers.

David Lesch, a former Dodgers draft pick, stands on the baseball diamond at Trinity University in San Antonio.

(Lucero Salinas / Trinity University)

“Ripken goes ‘does your son like school and is he smart?’” Lesch’s older brother Bob remembers. “So Ripken suggested if they offer you XYZ bonus money, take less and say ‘I’ll take this amount, but you have to cover education if he doesn’t make it.’”

Neither side thought that clause would ever be triggered; Lesch, a big, intimidating right-hander who threw bullets from behind Coke-bottle eyeglasses, wasn’t headed to a classroom, he was going to Dodger Stadium.

Until he wasn’t.

Lesch missed a couple of weeks with a back injury. By overcompensating for the sore back, he developed paralysis in the ulnar nerve in his right arm, limiting him to five appearances in his first minor league season.

He arrived healthy for his second spring in Vero Beach and threw three no-hit innings in his first outing against double-A and triple-A players, creating such a buzz that Ron Perranoski, the Dodgers’ major league pitching coach, showed up to watch his second game. By then the shoulder and back stiffness that shortened his first season had returned, and Lesch was rocked. Perranoski left early and unimpressed.

Lesch’s delivery had one major flaw: He threw directly overhand, as opposed to three-quarters or even sidearm, which can increase velocity but also places additional strain on the shoulder and elbow. As a result, his fastball could top out in the mid-90s one day, but when the stiffness and pain returned, it left him throwing in the low 80s.

The inconsistency continued to plague Lesch, and eventually the Dodgers decided they’d seen enough and released him. When he got back to Maryland, Lesch’s father sent him to see an orthopedic surgeon, who found the problem wasn’t in his back or elbow but rather the rotator cuff.

“We didn’t live in the era of pitch counts. So he just pitched,” said David Souter, a high school and college teammate who went on to develop big-league pitchers.

“He had the ability if he was developed and stayed healthy. I think he probably overthrew and tore his rotator cuff and nobody knew it.”

If Lesch had come along 10 years later, when rotator cuff surgeries were common, he might have returned to the mound. But in 1981, a rotator cuff injury was a death sentence for a pitcher.

“It’s just a crapshoot based on physiology,” Lesch said. “I probably was destined. Something would have happened.”

If he could do it over again, Lesch said he would change one thing.

“I’d throw sidearm,” he said. “It’s much less stress.”

He threw to big league hitters just one more time. Following the strike that interrupted the 1981 season, Ripken Sr. phoned Lesch back and asked him to throw batting practice at Memorial Stadium to help the Orioles prepare for the resumption of play. As a reward, the Orioles let Lesch hit — he never had batted in the minors — and he drove a pitch over the left-field wall, then dropped the bat and walked away.

He never stepped on a major league field again.

The Dodgers’ investment in Lesch’s education appeared manageable when he enrolled at a satellite campus of the University of Maryland, in part because his brother Bob was the school’s sports information director.

But it was 1981 and the Middle East was at the forefront of geopolitics. Lesch became convinced the Middle East would be central to world affairs for decades to come. Inspired and encouraged by Freedman and another professor, Lou Cantori, he applied to graduate school at Harvard, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago, knowing he couldn’t afford any of those schools on his own.

“I probably could not have said yes to Harvard when they accepted me because of the price,” Lesch said. “The Dodgers had committed to paying and whatever it was, it was a lot more collectively — my undergraduate MA and PhD — than I had gotten in the bonus.”

That wasn’t the only time his baseball background worked in his favor. Years after starting at Harvard, Lesch stumbled upon written evaluations of his application and learned that his grade-point average and other factors were similar to those of other applicants, but it was his athletic career that had swung enough votes in his favor to get him accepted.

“Failure is at the core of sports. And so you have to have this resiliency,” Lesch said. “What a lot of the top colleges have found is that these young kids out of high school who somehow get a 4.6 GPA, they come in — and I’ve seen this as a professor — they get their first C and they’re distraught.

“Athletes stick with it. They say ‘how can I turn this around? How can I get better?’ Admissions departments across the board have looked at athletes much differently.”

The struggles Lesch experienced on the diamond did not follow him into academia. Yet becoming an expert on the Middle East definitely was a backup plan.

“His first passion was clearly baseball and basketball,” said Souter, the former teammate. “Every kid dreamed … that.”

If the shoulder injury wasn’t a strong enough sign that that dream was over, the fire that destroyed Lesch’s childhood home a few years later was. The flames, which severely burned both his parents, also erased his baseball career, consuming all the photos and memorabilia he had collected, save for the championship ring from his one minor league season, which he found buried in the embers. It was the only thing to survive the blaze intact.

David Lesch’s championship ring from his one minor league season, the only surviving keepsake of his professional career after a his family’s home was destroyed in a fire.

(Courtesy of David Lesch)

A post-graduate trip to Syria, the first of more than 30 visits he has made to the country, sealed the deal a few years later. The love he once had for baseball he now felt for a strange and mysterious place that was as old as history itself yet as secretive as the classical ciphers.

Soon Lesch was helping arrange high-level meetings between Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and President George H.W. Bush, a baseball fan who seemed as interested in Lesch’s Dodgers days as his Middle Eastern expertise. But his big break came during the first presidential term of Bush’s son George W. Bush, when Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father as Syria’s president, welcomed Lesch for the first of many interviews that informed his book, “The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Assad and Modern Syria.”

“His forte is listening,” Cooke, the biographer, said of Lesch, whose polite, unassuming manner reflects an adult life spent mostly in San Antonio. “When he goes in to try to mediate something, he is a big listener. There is a side of David that doesn’t talk much. But he’s listening.”

The book humanized al-Assad and opened, for a time, the possibility of normalized relations between Syria and the West, with Lesch serving as an unofficial liaison between Damascus and Washington, as well as other Western capitals.

“He’s absolutely a critical player in what we would call two-track diplomacy,” Freedman said. “If the government wants to reach out but doesn’t want to take the political consequences, they send somebody to sound out the situation.

“It’s absolutely critical that we have people like that who can speak the language and understand the overall context, which sadly is lacking in the current administration.”

David Lesch teaches students in his history class at Trinity University in San Antonio.

(Lucero Salinas / Trinity University)

But that opening closed as quickly as it opened. Lesch’s close contacts with al-Assad raised suspicions among some in Syria, and Lesch was poisoned twice. His relationship with al-Assad was severed completely shortly afterward when he criticized al-Assad for failing to implement promised reforms and becoming a “bloodthirsty tyrant.” The Syrian civil war took nearly 700,000 lives and displace another 6.7 million people before al-Assad and his family fled into exile in Russia in 2024.

“Many governments think that they can reduce war to a calculation,” Lesch said. “What we cannot measure accurately or fully appreciate is the human element. We cannot assess a people’s sense of grievance, passion, revenge, ideological commitment and historical circumstances that shaped the nature of their response and staying power.

“This is where academics can make a contribution to policy, giving it the depth and insight gleaned from years of study and learning the culture and the people.”

Baseball’s loss wasn’t just academia’s gain. It may prove to be humanity’s as well.

“I don’t really have any regrets,” Lesch said. “My career turned out great. I could not think of doing anything else at this point and, in fact, in a way I’m glad [baseball] didn’t work out.”

Paramount Skydance Chairman David Ellison defended his commitment to release 30 movies a year once his media company swallows Warner Bros. Discovery — a goal that some industry observers view as overly ambitious.

During a Monday call with analysts to discuss Paramount’s first-quarter earnings, the tech scion said the target was achievable because his management team would maintain current levels of production. Paramount has doubled its film release capacity to 15 films this year, matching the number of theatrical releases planned by competing Warner Bros.

“The two companies are actually making 30 films to date,” Ellison said. “We really view our pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery as a powerful accelerant to our strategy.”

The company said it was on track to finalize its Warner takeover by the end of September. The $111-billion deal would transform the smaller Paramount into an industry titan with prestigious programming, including Harry Potter, “Game of Thrones,” “Euphoria,” as well as its current slate of Taylor Sheridan-produced franchises, including “Yellowstone” and “Landman.” The combined company also would own dozens of popular TV networks, including CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Food Network and HGTV.

But the proposed merger would saddle the combined company with $79 billion in debt, stoking fears that Paramount would need to make steep cost cuts to balance such a large debt load. During the quarter, Paramount lined up banks and other institutional investors to provide bridge financing to help pull off the transaction, the company said.

“We’re pleased with the momentum and will continue to take the necessary steps to bring this deal to completion,” Ellison told analysts.

Late last month, Warner Bros. Discovery stockholders overwhelmingly voted in favor of the deal, which will pay $31 a share to Warner investors. The company now must secure regulatory approvals in the U.S. and abroad, and that process is well underway, Paramount said.

Paramount has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to exceed a cap on foreign ownership for U.S. media companies. Ellison’s company is expecting $24 billion from three Middle Eastern royal families, who would become part owners of the combined entity. Those total funds will represent about 49% of equity in that new company, exceeding the current foreign ownership cap of 25%.

More than 4,000 filmmakers, actors and industry workers, including Bryan Cranston, Connie Britton, Kristen Stewart, Jonathan Glazer and Jane Fonda, have signed an open letter asking California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and other regulators to block the deal, saying it “would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four.”

Late last week, a small group of consumers sued to block Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and unwind Ellison’s Skydance Media’s takeover of Paramount, alleging that both deals reduce marketplace competition.

For the January-March quarter, Paramount’s earnings beat Wall Street’s expectations. Revenue grew 2% to $7.3 billion compared with the first quarter of 2025.

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) reached $1.1 billion, helped in part by growth in its streaming services unit. Paramount+ increased its revenue by 17% to nearly $2 billion, compared with the year earlier period when it generated $1.7 billion. The service added 700,000 subscribers, bringing the total to nearly 80 million.

With Warner’s HBO Max streaming platform, the combined service would boast more than 200 million subscribers.

Paramount reported first-quarter net earnings of $168 million, or 15 cents per share, compared with $152 million in 2025, which occurred before Skydance acquired the media company in August.

Executives pointed to “Scream 7,” a late February release that has topped $200 million in global ticket sales, as a success story. Studio revenue grew 11% to $1.28 billion for the quarter.

Television networks revenue declined 6% to $3.7 billion as Paramount’s cable channels continue to contend with the loss of cable cord-cutters, which reduces the company’s collections from pay-TV providers. Nonetheless, Paramount pointed to the strength of Sheridan’s “Landman,” starring Billy Bob Thornton, Ali Larter, Sam Elliott and Demi Moore, and the strength of the CBS television network, which currently has 13 of the broadcast industry’s top 20 prime-time shows, including “60 Minutes,” “Marshals,” and “Tracker.”

The company told analysts it would achieve $30 billion in revenue for the full year and $3.8 billion in adjusted EBITDA. Paramount said it would also make $2.5 billion in cost-cuts by the end of this year and reduce expenses by $3 billion in 2027.

Paramount said it ended the quarter with $1.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents. It also was carrying $15.5 billion in debt. The company had to draw $2.15 billion from its revolving credit facility to pay Netflix a $2.8-billion termination fee that Warner Bros. Discovery had agreed to pay under a previous deal to sell the company to Netflix.

Paramount released its earnings after Monday’s trading day. Its shares closed at $11.13, basically unchanged.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court took a first step on Monday to consider anti-abortion challenges to medication that has been commonly used to end early pregnancies for 25 years.

The justices moved quickly to put on hold an appeals court ruling that would block the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. Justice Samuel A. Alito issued a temporary “administrative stay” until May 11.

Three years ago, the court blocked a similar challenge to abortion pills, ruling that anti-abortion doctors had no grounds to sue over medication they did not use or prescribe.

Last year, Louisiana’s state lawyers sued and argued their state ban on abortions is thwarted if women can receive abortion pills through the mail after consulting a doctor online.

They questioned the federal regulation that permits doctors to prescribe the medication without seeing patients in person.

On Friday evening, the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans jolted abortion rights advocates, first by ruling this claim is likely to succeed and then by putting their order into effect immediately.

Judge Kyle Duncan, a President Trump appointee, said the Food and Drug Administration had “failed to adequately study whether remotely prescribing mifepristone is safe.”

Moreover, women may suffer “irreparable harm” if these mail-order prescriptions are allowed to continue, he said.

If upheld, the order would go far beyond Louisiana and make it illegal for women in California and other states to obtain the pills through a pharmacy or by mail if they did not see a doctor first.

The legal dispute may put the Trump administration in an uncomfortable spot. In response to the abortion critics, the FDA agreed to review the safety of prescribing these commonly used pills without a required trip to a doctor’s office.

Its review is not likely to be completed until after the November elections.

The 5th Circuit judges said they were not prepared to wait for the outcome of that review.

On Saturday, two makers of mifepristone — Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro — filed emergency appeals asking the justices to block the 5th Circuit’s order.

“Never before has a federal court” rejected a long-standing drug approval by the FDA, they said, and restricted its distribution based on claims the agency had rejected.

The justices asked for a response from Louisiana by Thursday.

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 as a safe and effective way to an early pregnancy. It is typically used in combination with a second drug — misoprostol — which is not affected by the court’s decision.

If mifepristone becomes unavailable, women may use misoprostol alone, abortion rights advocates say.

In recent years, the majority of abortions in this country result from the use of medication.

Alito is responsible for emergency appeals from the 5th Circuit, and Monday’s order does not signal what the court will decide.

“This ruling is not final — keep watching,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Getting abortion pills through telehealth has been a lifeline for women since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Louisiana’s attempt to restrict access is political and not based in science or medicine. Americans deserve access to this critical drug that has been FDA approved for 25 years.”

Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, agreed the court’s order did not resolve anything.

“It is a temporary procedural step that leaves unresolved the very real concerns about the safety of these drugs and the decision under the Biden administration’s FDA to recklessly remove longstanding safeguards,” she said.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta joined with 21 other state attorneys in urging the court to block the 5th Circuit’s decision.

“Telehealth has made it easier for women — especially in rural, low-income, and underserved communities — to access mifepristone and obtain reproductive health care,” he said. “We should be guided by science, not politics. The in-person dispensing requirement was eliminated because it was medically unnecessary, and there is still no basis for reinstating it.”

NEW YORK — John Sterling, the longtime New York Yankees radio broadcaster known for extravagant, individualized home run calls, died Monday. He was 87.

Sterling had undergone heart bypass surgery this winter and after the procedure was attended to by health care aides at his home in Edgewater, New Jersey. He died Monday at Englewood Hospital, according to his former wife, Jennifer.

“John Sterling breathed life and excitement into Yankees games for 36 years while wearing his passion for baseball and the Yankees on his sleeve,” the team said in a statement. “He informed and entertained generations of fans with a theatrical and unapologetic style that was uniquely his own. John treasured his role as the voice of the New York Yankees, and his enthusiasm for the art of broadcasting perfectly complemented our city and our fans. The symmetry between John and his audience was both undeniable and magical, and his signature calls will resonate for as long as we put on pinstripes — especially after every Yankees win.”

He had called 5,631 games — 5,420 regular season plus 211 postseason — when he retired in April 2024 just after the season’s start, citing fatigue. Sterling broadcast 5,060 consecutive games from September 1989 through July 2019 after beginning with the Yankees as a pregame host. He came out of retirement to broadcast Yankees games during the 2024 postseason.

Sterling’s call for a player’s home run became as treasured a part of a Yankees identity as an initial set of pinstripes or a championship ring. As rookies prepared for debuts and former opponents arrived in trades, fans speculated how he would label the newcomer’s first longball.

From “Bernie goes boom! Bern, baby, Bern!” for Bernie Williams, to “It’s a Jeter jolt!” for Derek to “It’s an A-bomb from A-Rod!” for Alex Rodriguez, “The Giambino!” for Jason Giambi and ”A thrilla from Godzilla!” for Hideki Matsui, Sterling created personal stamps resonating from the clubhouse to the bleachers.

“It wasn’t meant that way. I just happened to do something for Bernie Williams. He hit a home run and I said, `Bern, baby, Bern!′ And it kind of mushroomed from there,” Sterling said at the time of his retirement. “But it never was intended for every player, because, frankly, I’m not smart enough to do something for every player. But I did the best I could, and it’s amazing what started out as — became so big.”

“I did say `A-bomb from A-Rod!′ when he hit a home run and I did say: `Robbie Canó, don’t you know,′ and I think those were pretty good,” Sterling said of calls for Rodriguez and Robinson Canó.

Born Josh Sloss on July 4, 1938, Sterling grew up in Manhattan and left college to work for radio stations. He had wanted to be a broadcaster since hearing “The Eddie Bracken Show” in the 1940s.

“I didn’t want to be Eddie Bracken. I wanted to be the guy who says: `Live from Hollywood!’” Sterling said. “And I knew that maybe a year or two later, but before puberty I knew I was going to be on the air. And it really helped me because I didn’t worry about school, because I knew what I was going to do. And it was a good thing because I was a terrible student — terrible.”

He started his radio career in 1960 at a station in Wellsville, New York.

“I was preparing this all my life. It was easy,” he said. “I could always open my mouth and talk.”

Sterling cited Mel Allen, Russ Hodges and Jim Karvellas as influences. He wound up joining Allen in the history of memorable Yankees broadcasters along with Red Barber, Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer.

Sterling announced the NBA’s Washington Bullets and Morgan State football in his early years and gained notoriety for shrieking “Islanders goal! Islanders goal!” during the hockey team’s games from 1975-78. He broadcast for the NBA’s Nets from 1975-80.

Sterling’s first connection with the Yankees was during WMCA pregame radio talk shows from 1971-78. He moved to Atlanta and worked for the Braves from 1982-87 and Hawks from 1981-89 before switching to the Yankees, where he replaced Hank Greenwald.

Sterling was seldom in the clubhouse and dressed in Brooks Brothers suits even though he was on the radio.

He partnered with Jay Johnstone (1989-90), Joe Angel (1991), Michael Kay (1992-2001), Charley Steiner (2002-04) and Suzyn Waldman (since 2005). Sterling and Waldman were inducted into the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2016.

He was married to the former Jennifer Contreras from 1993 to 2004. In addition to her, he is survived by triplets Bradford, Derek and Veronica, and daughter Abigail.

Sterling was proud of his unique style.

“Harry Caray told me some years ago,” he recalled in 2024 of the famous Chicago Cubs and White Sox broadcaster, “and he says, ‘John, all the guys are great. We just have different styles.’ And no one has a more different style than I have.”

“Curly” Williams returned to his old high school campus last week for the first time in 76 years, but did so under his given name — the same name emblazoned on North Hollywood High’s newest attraction: the John Williams Performing Arts Center.

Williams, 94, attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony last Wednesday, which commenced with the composer’s rousing “Raiders March” played by the school’s marching band and accompanied by its blue-clad cheerleaders.

“I think you played that better than we could have,” Williams said, speaking from a wheelchair under the sign of his namesake venue in front of other accomplished alumni and friends, including producer Kathleen Kennedy. “That’s a hard piece.”

The ambitious construction project, initiated in 2015 and designed by CO Architects occupies 35,000 square feet and seats 800. Michael Stebbins, project manager for the BroadStage in Santa Monica, served as project manager. The center is equipped with state-of-the-art amenities to host student performances and school assemblies, but also to train the next generation of theater technicians. Besides an enormous stage, blue velvet curtains, a mixing console and safe catwalks, the building also features new classrooms and rehearsal spaces.

Students, faculty and guests stand for the national anthem before a concert inside the new John Williams Performing Arts Center, named for one of North Hollywood High’s most famous alumni.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A 75-foot hand-painted mural in the lobby, still in the works by artist Ian Robertson-Salt, is inspired by Williams’ formidable filmography, which serves “as a daily reminder to every student who walks these halls that greatness can begin right here,” remarked Andrés Chait, acting superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District.

Due to health complications, Williams has made few public appearances in the last two years. He last conducted a concert in February 2024 — and he has also consistently turned down requests to name buildings after him, including at his beloved Tanglewood in Massachusetts, although the Hollywood Bowl did recently name its stage for Williams. It’s a testament to his affection for his time at North Hollywood High, and his regard for the next generation of students, that he not only blessed this dedication but showed up and spoke to a gathered crowd of hundreds.

“I’m sort of silly happy to be here,” he said, calling the dedication “a singular honor in my life.”

Other showbiz alumni on hand included “Beauty and the Beast” producer Don Hahn (class of ’73), “Independence Day” writer-producer Dean Devlin (’80), and Rob Friedman (’81), CEO of Ascendant Entertainment. Partly due to its proximity to the entertainment industry, North Hollywood High has produced a host of famous artists over the decades, including the late Michael Tilson Thomas, who attended in the early 1960s.

John Williams smiles while applauding a performance by the North Hollywood High School band at the dedication ceremony of the John Williams Performing Arts Center on campus.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“At some point you have to stop calling that a coincidence,” said Kennedy, a longtime collaborator of Williams who gave brief remarks before handing him the microphone. “Something happened here, and something can happen again.”

Williams moved to North Hollywood with his family in 1947, having grown up in Queens. He transferred to North Hollywood High as a 15-year-old sophomore, and joined the band and orchestra as a jazz-loving trombonist. His classmates included Susan Sontag (“I remember her teaching a class in civics, when the teacher would sit down and listen to her,” he told me in 2023) and many future actors, including Barbara Ruick, who played Carrie Pipperidge in “Carousel.” But his best friends were all music-inclined guys whose dads, like his, were famous musicians.

A poster board featured yearbook photos of John Williams, left, performing with the North Hollywood High School Band, class of 1950, in the lobby of the new John Williams Performing Arts Center on the North Hollywood High School campus.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Williams embraced the nickname “Curly,” given to him by a fellow student in response to his curly red hair, and quickly created his own jazz band with classmates. Ruick sang with them at school events and dances, and they became the house band at a new teens-only venue in Van Nuys called the Dri-Nite Club. Broadcast on local radio, they caught the attention of Time magazine, which ran a story on “Curly’s” band in October 1949.

A newspaper story about John Williams’ high school band from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s archives.

(Los Angeles Unified School District)

Williams has said he fondly remembers his civics and French classes at North Hollywood High, but his time and passion were almost exclusively devoted to music. He rigorously practiced the piano at home, studying with a local concert pianist and MGM arranger named Robert Van Eps; on Wednesday nights he played in jam sessions with his father (Johnny Sr., a drummer) and the Columbia Pictures orchestra. He bopped around clubs in L.A. listening to jazz greats like Oscar Peterson (whose style influenced Williams’ recent piano concerto), and started making a name of his own as a wunderkind performer and arranger.

Long before he scored “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter,” Williams did his earliest arranging and orchestrating for theater productions at North Hollywood High. The impact of his time at North Hollywood High cannot be overstated.

John Williams featured with members of the class of 1950 in the North Hollywood High School Yearbook.

(Los Angeles Unified School District)

During his remarks about the performing arts center on Wednesday, Williams said he felt particularly overwhelmed because the school was “formative in my thinking and my professional work … This is a great, magical place, North Hollywood.”

Williams eventually married Ruick, his high school sweetheart and mother of his three children. Ruick was instrumental in making many of Williams’ earliest career connections. She died from a brain aneurysm in 1974, at the age of 41, just one year before Williams’ career catapulted with “Jaws.” The couple’s youngest son, Joseph, lead singer of Toto, stood proudly behind Williams during the theater’s dedication.

The John Williams Performing Arts Center (JWPAC) is the crescendo of a $319.5 million modernization project at North Hollywood High, which also includes modern classrooms and athletic facilities. It’s a reflection of the diverse public school’s commitment to the arts; students here can play in the orchestra, marching band or modern band, and study drama or modern dance.

“As I think about what else I might say to all of you younger people, students here,” Williams said at his homecoming Wednesday, “two words about this beautiful building: simply use it. Make sure you all use the place.”

Tim Greiving is the author of “John Williams: A Composer’s Life.”