NEW YORK CITY: About 4,100 Palestinians have been displaced across the West Bank so far this year as a result of demolitions and settler violence, UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Thursday.
He warned of a sharp rise in demolitions in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern West Bank in recent days. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Israeli authorities demolished 20 homes and other structures, including a water cistern and solar panels, in two Palestinian herding communities there on Tuesday.
This activity, and demolitions in a nearby third community on Wednesday, displaced nearly 60 people, half of them children, and affected a further 30 seasonal residents. Many of the destroyed properties were built with donor support, Haq said.
Masafer Yatta is home to about 1,200 Palestinians in 13 communities, all of whom have been under pressure to leave after Israeli authorities designated the area a “firing zone.”
Haq said humanitarian officials have reported increased violence by Israeli settlers targeting those communities following the establishment in recent years of settlement outposts nearby.
Representatives of the UN and its humanitarian partners visited Masafer Yatta on Tuesday to speak with displaced residents who are receiving emergency shelter, food, hygiene items, baby products and psychosocial support, Haq said.
Across the West Bank, he added, about 1,500 Palestinians have been displaced so far this year as a result of demolitions, and more than 2,600 have been displaced by settler violence and related access restrictions.
ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico won’t air on broadcast television amid the network’s high-stakes skirmish with the Federal Communications Commission.
Kimmel, during his Wednesday night monologue, said his talk with the 37-year-old Texas Democrat would instead stream on his show’s YouTube channel — depriving ABC viewers and TV stations of a potentially newsworthy interview with Talarico, who has been surging in the polls.
The Texas race is shaping up as a key contest in what could help decide control of the U.S. Senate in the mid-term elections.
Kimmel alluded to the Walt Disney Co. network’s ongoing dispute with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr as the reason for the switch. This spring, Carr’s Media Bureau ordered ABC to submit to an early review of its TV station licenses for Disney’s eight owned stations. The FCC launched the review a day after President Trump demanded Kimmel be fired after First Lady Melania Trump became upset over a joke the comedian told on his program, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
ABC has since sued the FCC, alleging Trump’s disdain for Kimmel and other ABC programs has fueled the FCC’s heavy-handed approach to the network, in violation of its 1st Amendment rights.
Kimmel pointed to the “unusual circumstances” in his monologue.
“For the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like [David] Letterman did, [Jay] Leno did, Arsenio [Hall], etc. etc.,” Kimmel said. “I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates — from Hilary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump.”
But, Kimmel said that in the current climate, airing the Talarico interview on the public airwaves carried too much risk.
“Out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense,” the ABC interview, which was scheduled for Thursday, would instead play on YouTube, he said.
ABC declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The issue surfaced nearly one year after a major dust-up when ABC temporarily benched Kimmel after comments he made on his show over the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. During that episode, Carr seemed to threaten Disney by saying that Kimmel should be punished.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways … to take action … on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC.”
Two station groups removed Kimmel’s show, but ABC eventually stood by the comedian returning him to his perch the following week.
The Disney-owned station licenses were not set to expire for several years when the FCC demanded that Disney defend its stewardship of the outlets. The license for Disney’s KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles extends to 2030 but it is now being challenged.
The Burbank giant has asked a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order and injunction to halt the FCC’s early station review.
ABC also is defending against an FCC probe into whether its daytime talk show, “The View,” should be entitled to an exemption from the so-called equal-time rule for political candidates who appear as guests.
Carr has challenged the status of “The View,” arguing that the topical chat show is not a bona fide news program and, thus, should not be entitled to the exemption.
The same issue tripped up former CBS late night comedian Stephen Colbert who interviewed Talarico in February — before his program, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, was canceled.
At the time, Colbert told viewers CBS lawyers forbid him from airing a Talarico interview on his program due to the FCC’s increased scrutiny of exemptions to the equal-time rule, an allegation that CBS disputed.
But Colbert’s interview played on the program’s YouTube channel — not the CBS network.
The FCC has said it was investigating ABC stations over whether the company’s diversity and inclusion policies are in violation of the Communications Act of 1934 and the agency’s rules, including its “prohibition on unlawful discrimination.”
Last week, the FCC asked a federal judge in Washington to dismiss ABC’s 1st Amendment lawsuit, calling Disney’s challenge to the early review “meritless” because the commission hasn’t made a decision on whether to escalate the matter or rescind Disney’s station licenses.
Kimmel ended his monologue, saying he was grateful for the YouTube channel “because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do until November.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, there were no smartphones and no social media. What the country watched that morning — a jet airliner colliding with the south tower of the World Trade Center, the ash rolling through the streets, the paper still falling in the afternoon — was through a television set and the journalists who had to deliver the unfathomable details.
The jarring images shattered the peacefulness of a sunshine-filled late summer morning in New York.
“Everything seemed so perfect,” said MS NOW’s Chris Jansing, reflecting on the moments before anchoring her network’s continuous coverage. “It was another day of doing a job I loved, living in a city I loved.”
By nightfall, nearly 3,000 people were dead in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The experience of covering the terrorist attacks and their grim aftermath transformed Jansing and other journalists who were there. Twenty-five years later, it’s never far from their minds.
“It’s with me in ways large and small,” said NJ Burkett, a correspondent who covered the tragedy for New York station WABC. “When I look at my phone and it says 9:11, it takes me back.”
The Times asked five of the on-air personalities who are still working today to look back on the day they were called to cover the tragedy and its lasting impact.
Bret Baier: “I just said yes to everything.”
Fox News anchor Bret Baier at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 25, 2026.
(Jared Soares/For The Times)
On every anniversary of Sept. 11, Fox News anchor Bret Baier uses the hashtag #NeverForget. He can recall every moment of that day.
Baier, 56, was driving to the Fox News bureau in Atlanta when he first heard on his car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was a 31-year-old correspondent for the network, covering stories throughout the southeast U.S. and Latin America. When he arrived at the office, a call came from New York headquarters telling him to book a flight to the city so he could file reports from the World Trade Center site for Fox TV affiliates around the United States.
After a second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center 17 minutes later, all flights in the U.S. were halted. Baier and his producer were told to get a car and start driving.
“I just remember going really fast when I was driving,” Baier said. “I remember thinking what is happening with the world, and how big this story is. How big this moment is.”
By the time the duo reached northern Georgia, their plans changed again. A jetliner struck the Pentagon while a San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight crashed in Shanksville, Pa. Fox News executives told Baier and his producer to reroute to Arlington, Va.
After the 10-hour drive, Baier started the first of 10 straight days of reporting on the recovery efforts at the site. While the World Trade Center provided the most dramatic and enduring pictures of the stunning attack, the loss of life at the Pentagon was staggering as well, as 125 people died along with the 64 passengers and crew members on American Airlines Flight 77.
Baier was eventually pulled into the larger military story that followed 9/11. Fox News, just 5 years old, did not have a full-time Pentagon correspondent. Baier was offered the job while traveling overseas with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was making the case for war against Afghanistan.
“I called a buddy on a satellite phone to get me an apartment in Washington,” he said. “Fox packed up my stuff in Atlanta.”
But the unplanned move changed Baier’s life. In six years on the Pentagon beat, he traveled to 74 countries. He was embedded with the military in war zones. “I just said yes to everything,” said Baier, who has anchored Fox News’ Washington newscast “Special Report” since 2009.
Baier recalled it was in the weeks after Sept. 11 that he first wore an American flag pin on his lapel. He never felt conflicted about it, even though such displays were prohibited at other network news divisions. “I thought I could report on America, ask tough questions and still be an American, pulling for us to win,” he said. “I wanted to be tough but fair, but also show that as a country we were standing together against this horrible attack.”
Byron Pitts covering the terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan for CBS News on Sept. 11, 2001.
(CBS)
Byron Pitts: “It’s the only story I think about every day.”
A newcomer to New York 25 years ago, Byron Pitts, then a CBS News correspondent, admitted it took him a few moments to understand the massive scope of what happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He arrived early at the network’s headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan to screen an interview he did with entertainer and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte. Shortly after he started, a producer knocked on his door and told him there was a plane crash at the World Trade Center.
Pitts, 65, acknowledged the producer but kept working. “I thought it was a novice pilot bumping into a building,” he recalled. “I thought it would be three hours out of my day and it won’t make television.”
The producer came back shortly and said, “You need to go down there.”
An irritated Pitts hailed a cab and headed down the West Side Highway. While in the car, he learned a second plane had hit the south tower. Traffic was stopped and he had to head downtown by foot.
As Pitts got closer to the site, he tried to use his past experiences covering fires and other disasters during his career to judge the severity of the situation.
But the horrible scenes that unfolded before him were incomparable. One was a lifeless body near the lobby of the north tower. He thought it was a homeless man until he saw a uniform. He later learned it was Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department killed by fallen debris. Judge’s body was later carried away by a group of first responders. Pitts saw a woman and a man standing at a window of one of the towers holding hands, and then jumping.
“Gravity takes over and their hands split, and he moves a little faster than she does,” Pitts said. “And we see them on the ground. That was the moment I realized something significant was going on.”
Pitts crossed paths with Mika Brzezinski, then a CBS News correspondent, now the cohost of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” As debris came down and smoke filled the air, they headed into an elementary school that Pitts believes was a command post for the fire and police departments. They took turns calling into CBS News on a hard-line phone, one delivering accounts of the unfolding catastrophe while the other looked outside to gather details amid the blinding smoke and dust.
Pitts said from that day forward, he never went to a story assignment without a handkerchief.
Pitts was awed not just by the enormity of the event, but also by how despite the rigid hierarchy of CBS News, he was “the new kid on the block” who had to present the story on Dan Rather’s evening newscast that night.
“My approach became almost childlike, so I would not become overwhelmed,” he said. “I tried to make it as simple as possible. I said, ‘Dan, I’ve never heard New York City this quiet.’ I was thinking — what simple thing can I say that you would understand if you’ve never been in New York.”
A few weeks later, Pitts headed off to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. military action. His evening news report on Sept. 11 won an Emmy Award and his star rose at CBS News, leading to “60 Minutes” and then ABC News in 2014, where he is currently a co-anchor of “Nightline.”
Pitts knows the good fortune he’s had in TV journalism is linked to the tragedy that started with a producer’s knock on his door 25 years ago. “I feel some measure of guilt but mostly gratitude,” he said. “It’s the only story I think about every day.”
Pitts said he uses his 9/11 experience to provide perspective. “When we’re discussing politics, a mass shooting, or the latest awful day in Iran, I know for a fact there is one guy in the room who has seen worse and who can say, ‘we’ll be OK,’ ” he said.
Chris Jansing: “You had to balance the news response with the human response.”
Chris Jansing paid her dues as a local reporter in upstate New York before she joined MSNBC (now called MS NOW) as a daytime anchor in 1998. She loved living in Manhattan, and took friends from out of town to the World Trade Center observation decks and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower.
“It was so iconically New York,” she said. “And I was proud to live in the city.”
Jansing, 69, had little time to process her emotions when she was told to “get in the chair” before 9 a.m. that morning at MSNBC’s Secaucus, N.J., studios after the first plane hit.
“You had to balance the news response with the human response,” she recalled.
For several hours, Jansing co-anchored the network’s coverage alongside Gregg Jarrett. The look of 24-hour cable news evolved that day, as the tsunami of information led to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all adding running tickers at the bottom of the screen.
Jansing went to the roof of the network’s building after Brian Williams took over the anchor chair. Trauma centers in the area had been alerted, and she was told to watch for ambulances. “There was still a hope and a prayer that there would be injured folks who would overwhelm the hospitals in New York and would need to be brought to New Jersey,” Jansing recalled. She saw none.
Jansing has never watched the coverage of that day, which is now on YouTube. She had real-life reminders every day in her Manhattan neighborhood when she walked by the Rescue Company 1 firehouse that lost half its battalion at the crash site. She adopted a dog left behind by a 9/11 victim, a Dachshund named Baron. She remains friends with every producer she worked with on the story. The experience also reinforced her purpose in a career approaching its 50th year.
“I will always think that those moments are what keep you going,” said Jansing, currently chief political reporter for MS NOW. “They were an affirmation that’s kept me in the job,”
NJ Burkett, a correspondent for WABC, on the 13th floor of the Walt Disney Co. offices in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 2026.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
NJ Burkett: “I put myself in increasingly dangerous situations.”
Burkett, 64, recalls how pedestrians were gathered around WABC’s windowed street level studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when he arrived for work on 9/11. He presumed the crowd was there for a big name guest on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” They were actually watching monitors showing news reports of the first plane that hit the north tower.
As Burkett and his cameraman Marty Glembotzky headed downtown in a truck, he already knew it was a terror attack. He recalled covering the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center and regretted not getting footage of the firefighters’ rescue efforts. This time around he wanted to go inside the buildings and document their heroism.
A police officer stopped Burkett and Glembotzky before they could get in, likely saving their lives. A short time later, they would escape death again.
Burkett was doing a second take for a taped report that would set the scene for viewers when he heard the rumbling that “sounded like Niagara Falls.” It was the south tower of the World Trade Center coming down behind him. “A huge explosion now raining debris on us — we better get out of the way,” he said in what may be the most terrifying video clip from that morning.
Burkett and Glembotzky took cover in an adjacent building. “We open up the door and in a weird way it’s sort of providential, right?” he said. “The door is a metaphor. It’s like the door into the rest of your life. If we had to run for half a block, we’d be dead.”
Glembotzky was so shaken by the experience, he stepped away from his career as a cameraman and became a wine seller before eventually returning. But Burkett took on more dangerous assignments in the Middle East, heading to Israel to cover the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. He later headed to Iraq to cover the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Burkett won a George Foster Peabody Award for his work on 9/11. In retrospect, he believes he took on assignments in war zones to avoid dealing with the trauma of the day.
“I would put myself into increasingly dangerous situations,” he said. “Looking back, I was running from 9/11. That was my way of coping. Sometimes I wonder did I allow myself feel it enough. Or did I just run too far and too hard and it will all come down and crash on me one day?”
Occasionally he worries about 9/11-related illnesses. “If I start to cough — the slightest little cough — I’ll think ‘is this it?’” he said.
But as a New York TV fixture since 1989, Burkett still feels the appreciation from viewers for his efforts. “To this day, almost 25 years later, people will come up to me on the street and ask to hug me and say ‘NJ Burkett I’m glad you’re alive,’ ” he said.
Carson Daly at NBC’s “Today” show studio at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 3, 2026.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
Carson Daly: “I remember how motionless the room was.”
As continuous news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks saturated television for days, the makers of entertainment shows had to decide when it would be appropriate to go back to work. Carson Daly and the MTV executives mulled over the situation as their wildly popular program “Total Request Live” remained off the air for three days since the attacks.
“We had such a massive audience that the question was raised, ‘do we have a responsibility to simply show up?’ ” Daly, 53, recalled in a recent interview.
Daly, now a feature anchor on NBC’s “Today,” was not a journalist by trade. But he understood the trust that young viewers had in him and “TRL,” a live show that counted down the most popular music videos of the moment. The show had dealt with tragedy a few years before after the high school shooting in Columbine, Colo.
But 9/11 happened on the home turf of “TRL,” which aired from New York City’s Times Square. With the bridges and tunnels closed, getting a crew to the studio was a challenge.
“Everybody wore multiple hats,” said Daly, who also served as an executive producer.
By Sept. 14 of that week, the MTV studio on Broadway was filled with young “TRL” fans, but lacked the energy viewers were used to seeing on the screen. “They were frozen,” Daly recalled. “That was in such stark contrast to what the show was every day. I remember how motionless the room was and feeling like, ‘What am I doing on television?’ ”
Carson Daly shows a tattoo he got after the 9/11 attacks in New York.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
Daly leaned on the MTV News team to update the audience on the 9/11 story developments. Music stars including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Kid Rock called into the program to share their thoughts with Daly. Instead of music videos, the screen showed email messages from viewers expressing their feelings about the tragedy.
MTV News personality Sway delivered a music news report that noted how two new CD releases — “Party Music” by the American hip-hop group The Coup and Dream Theater’s “Live Scenes from New York” — were delayed because both used cover artwork that depicted the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Daly has a permanent remembrance of the week. When he arrived at the MTV offices the day before “TRL” returned, the building was evacuated after it received a bomb threat.
“I remember walking around Hell’s Kitchen,” he said. “I ended up getting a tattoo. A red, white and blue NYC on my right wrist.”
A sweeping bipartisan bill that seeks to prevent catastrophic wildfires and restore fire-ravaged forests has revealed a schism in the nation’s environmental movement as some conservation advocates find themselves allied with a longtime foe: loggers.
The Fix Our Forests Act, which Congress is close to passing, aims to speed up forest management projects on public and tribal lands by reducing regulatory and legal hurdles.
The proposed legislation comes at a time of increasingly devastating wildfires and has garnered wide support among Republicans and the timber industry.
However, the traditional Democratic coalition of environmental groups is split over the role humanity has to play in forest management. Some argue ecosystems are best protected when humans leave them alone — a view that dominated during the timber wars of the ’80s and ’90s. Others argue that humans have a responsibility to intervene — an increasingly popular idea as climate change threatens ecosystems around the world.
Among the major environmental groups that oppose the legislation are the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity. They worry that limiting environmental review and litigation will allow timber companies to heavily log these areas instead of gently thinning them. Meanwhile, some Southern California groups worry the bill would allow well-meaning land managers to approve misguided projects that ultimately harm local shrublands, which have a very different relationship with fire than the bill’s namesake, forests.
“It’s really handing the keys to the Trump administration to be able to push forward a lot of their timber agenda,” said Anna Medema, deputy legislative director for forests and public lands at the Sierra Club.
But the Nature Conservancy and other groups have voiced support for the bill, citing the constant and imminent threat that increasingly severe wildfires pose to communities and ecosystems.
“We do advocacy at a twofold level. We are doing defensive work to fight back against bad things, and we’re also trying to promote the good things that are happening on the ground,” said Morgan Cashwell, North America director of legislative affairs for the Nature Conservancy. Right now, that good work needs to “meet the moment in the current wildfire crisis.”
That sentiment appears to have motivated Western lawmakers in particular.
In the House of Representatives, roughly half of the Democrats from Western states voted for the bill, compared to about a quarter of Democrats from elsewhere in the country. Republicans voted overwhelmingly in favor. The legislation is now awaiting a final vote in the Senate. Congress has until Jan. 3, 2027, to pass it.
“Wildfires today are very different than wildfires from a generation ago,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who co-introduced the Senate version of the bill. “Oftentimes, they’re irreversibly devastating ecosystems and watersheds.”
“So,” he said, “ the status quo is clearly not working.”
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), center, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, delivers remarks at the Capitol in March 2023.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)
The act was born when Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), a former forester, stole a seat on a plane next to Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego). He used the opportunity to talk Peters’ ear off about a beloved species of tree that is under threat from worsening wildfires: the giant sequoia.
The two introduced a bill to protect them, called the Save Our Sequoias Act, and quickly saw an opportunity for something bigger.
“I knew right away that this could be a gateway to talking about permit reform,” Peters said. So, “we started working on a bigger, nationwide reform of forestry practices which have been really, really clogged up.”
While California grasslands, shrublands and woodlands are adapted to different frequencies and intensities of wildfire, research has found that high-severity fires — which kill the vast majority of trees in their path — are scorching 30 times more land area than in the 1980s.
The result: California is losing, on average, more than 200,000 acres of forest every year — or roughly 2.5% of all woodlands in the state every decade. U.S. Forest Service efforts to resuscitate these ecosystems have failed to keep pace. In recent years, the agency has reforested only about 1% of woodlands that are unlikely to recover on their own.
Californian supporters of the Fix Our Forests Act argue the problem has more to do with permitting delays than finances.
Marin County firefighters train during a prescribed burn in June in San Rafael.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
Rep. George Whitesides (D-Santa Clarita), who co-sponsored the Fix Our Forests Act, pointed to nonpartisan research that found it takes the Forest Service more than five years on average to complete a full environmental review and begin work on forest thinning projects that use mechanical equipment like bulldozers and wood chippers. For prescribed burns, it takes more than seven years on average.
“That’s insane,” he said, that it “takes as long as a kid growing up to be a first grader to be able to move on this.”
The Fix Our Forests Act would exempt projects from the full permitting process if they were in areas with the most extreme fire risk and would expand existing exemptions for projects under 3,000 acres to cover projects up to 10,000 acres. It also would limit the window during which environmental groups can sue over project approvals.
These projects tend to employ a combination of harvesting timber and thinning smaller trees and plants with heavy machinery (often the favored tools of Republicans and the timber industry) and using prescribed fire to clear out the forest floor (often favored by environmental groups).
The “environmental left” has “made it endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive to maintain our forests, all with the promise that this would improve the forest environment,” said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove), a co-sponsor who authored some of the permitting exclusions. “Well, after 50 years, I think we’re entitled to ask, how’s the forest environment doing?”
In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that blamed “our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply” as a contributor to disastrous wildfires. In response, the U.S. Forest Service set a goal to increase the amount of timber open to logging by 25% nationwide over five years.
Scott Dane, executive director of the American Loggers Council, argued the nightmare scenarios of expansive clear-cutting from the timber wars are not on the table for America’s public lands.
“It’s a boogeyman position that they love to take from 100 years ago,” he said. “It’s not, in reality, in modern forest management at all.”
Watchdogs in Southern California have a different concern: While research shows forest thinning is an effective tool in overgrown Sierra Nevada woodlands, the state’s coastal shrublands are not denser than they historically have been. Consequently, the type of projects the Fix Our Forests Act would expedite are far more controversial and contested in shrublands. Local advocates fear the act would undermine their ability to push back on proposals with questionable scientific backing.
Goats and sheep graze on top of Kite Hill in May 2025 in Los Angeles for wildfire prevention.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In contrast to projects in conifer forests that aim to decrease the density of trees and vegetation across the landscape, shrubland projects are typically centered on creating a network of corridors hundreds of feet wide with no vegetation throughout the wildlands and clearing plants away from existing buildings.
While firefighters rely on these networks of fuel breaks to access the wildlands during fires and build containment lines, research has found that when firefighters cannot reach the fuel breaks — which is often the case during extreme winds — the lines only stop fires about 13% of the time. If they are not routinely maintained, they also risk supporting the growth of flammable invasive grasses.
In Los Padres National Forest, near Santa Barbara, officials proposed in 2022 creating roughly 187,000 acres of fuel breaks and structure defense zones. After organizations like Los Padres ForestWatch pushed back on the plan through the environmental review process, the national forest ultimately scaled the proposal down to about 22,000 acres this July.
“You had community input, and you had the federal government incorporating that input into a plan that is grossly improved,” said Benjamin Pitterle, director of advocacy and field operations at Los Padres ForestWatch. “It’s arguably a perfect example of how the process should work.”
Companies and special interest groups with some of the diciest issues expected to land on California’s next governor’s desk are among the top financial backers of Democrat Xavier Becerra, the gubernatorial front runner.
Money from Big Tech, the healthcare industry, labor unions and tribes helped propel Becerra’s bid for governor, which languished at the outset then took off just months before the June primary. All are major players in national and state politics and have a major financial stake on the policies of California’s next governor.
Meta, which has contributed nearly $1.2 million to groups backing Becerra’s campagin, has faced mounting scrutiny by lawmakers and the courts. The Menlo Park-based company, which operates social media and communication platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, just agreed to a landmark $17.1 billion settlement to resolve multi-state claims that its apps endanger children.
The state Legislature in August also passed a measure to bar social media platforms from providing an “addictive feature” to lure children, as well as bills to shield Californians from threats posed by the boom in artificial intelligence and data centers. The fate of these measures is now in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the next governor likely will have to decide whether approve even stricter controls on Big Tech.
Meta is among eight donors that wrote seven-figure checks supporting Becerra’s gubernatrial campaign, with most of he money funneled to independent committees backing the Democrat that are not allowed to legally coordinate with the candidate. Campaigns often find back doors to do so.
Former state Sen. Steve Glazer, a Democrat who ran Jerry Brown’s successful 2010 gubernatorial campaign, said such spending is not surprising.
“Look, millions and billions of dollars are at stake, and the governor is the central point for all of that in California,” Glazer said. “It’s not a gamble anymore. You’re not picking a winner or a loser, right? So the floodgates open up for a runaway winner like Xavier Becerra.”
Becerra, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a longtime congressman, won one of the top two spots in the chaotic June primary. Republican Steve Hilton, a conservative media commentator and strategist who was endorsed by President Trump, won the other slot to advance to the Nov. 3 election. Becerra is considered a heavy favorite to win, given that Democratic voters in California outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.
Becerra has the financial edge in the race, raising at least $30 million while also receiving significant support from the independent committees. Donors have contributed $48.8 million to Becerra’s campaign committee as well as outside efforts supporting his bid, according to a Times analysis of contributions through Sept. 3.
A Becerra spokesman said that although the campaign welcomed support from any donor, he would not weigh their contributions as he makes policy decisions if elected
“Xavier Becerra is laser-focused on making California work for working people — lowering costs, building housing, and making this state affordable again,” said Jonathan Underland, a spokesman for the Democrat. “Anyone willing to stand with us in that fight is welcome to join it, and we won’t hesitate to challenge anyone who gets in the way of that goal.”
His GOP rival raked in $18.8 million, including a $90,100 contribution from the candidate himself. Hilton’s top donors are billionaires and business executives including manufacturer Donald Friese and his wife Andrea, Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, former Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Los Angeles real estate magnate Geoffrey Palmer and the founder of defense contractor Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey.
Executives and employees at Lighthouse Worldwide Solutions Inc., a company that makes contamination monitoring systems, contributed more than $474,000 to Hilton’s campaign.
A small handful of donors gave to both candidates. Uber and its employees gave nearly $42,000 to Hilton, while the company and an affiliated political action committee spent $1,039,200 supporting Becerra. Vlad Tenev, founder of the financial trading platform Robinhood, gave $289,000 to Becerra and $15,000 to Hilton.
A committee ostensibly established to oppose Hilton, an effort that effectively propped him up among Republican voters before the June primary, raised $2.5 million through large donations from the California Nurses Assn., the Service Employees International Union, the Democratic Governors Assn. and wealthy businessman Bill Bloomfield, an unsuccessful congressional candidate and Republican-turned-Democrat.
Hilton said Becerra’s financial backers are unsurprising and illustrate the “corruption” created by one-party rule in Sacramento.
“All these businesses and organizations assume he’s going to be the next governor, so they’re trying to bribe him,” Hilton said in an interview. “You can call it donations if you want, but it’s actually legalized bribery. … Big business and special interests are shoveling cash into his mouth in the hope that they can bribe him to do their bidding.”
Becerra, who served in public office for nearly 35 years, has a long history of support from powerful industries, labor unions and others with business before the government. During his 24 years in Congress, donors spent roughly $11 million supporting Becerra, according to the Times analysis and Open Secrets, a nonprofit, nonpartisan tracker of campaign fundraising. While he served as California attorney general for four years, contributors spent nearly $9.4 million backing him.
Among the former Biden Cabinet secretary’s top financial backers in the governor’s race are labor unions, healthcare groups, tech companies and Native American tribes that own some of the state’s splashiest casinos. All will probably be affected by decisions made by the next governor.
The Laborers’ International Union of North America and local affiliates and political arms, focused on infrastructure projects and the creation of union jobs, has contributed nearly $3.2 million. A committee associated with the California Assn. of Realtors that is focused on housing, real estate policy and property rights has spent nearly $2.8 million backing Becerra.
The Pechanga Band of Indians chipped in more than $2.3 million to efforts supporting Becerra at a time that gaming issues continue to be scrutinized.
A Pechanga representative said the tribe’s leader was unavailable due to travel but pointed to a statement he made before the primary.
“Secretary Becerra has stood with Indian Country for decades and understands Tribal sovereignty. When tribal healthcare was on the line, he was there,” said Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro. “This experience comes from a lifetime of public service, not a checkbook.”
The California Medical Assn. has spent nearly $1.5 million backing Becerra at a time of deep impending federal healthcare funding cuts and efforts by the state to backfill that lost financial support.
Dr. René Bravo, president of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 50,000 physicians, said their spending was spurred by the their belief that Becerra is the best candidate to take on impending federal healthcare funding cuts that will harm millions of Californians access to care.
“Xavier Becerra understands healthcare and the challenges facing patients and physicians. The next governor will make critical decisions on MediCal, the physician workforce, affordability and access to care,” Bravo said. “We’re investing in this race because those decisions will directly affect California patients and physicians.”
Meta declined to comment on its contributions, and the Realtors and the Laborers did not respond to requests for comment.
Becerra, asked about the Realtors’ large donations supporting his campaign, noted that most of the money was contributed to committees outside his control. But he argued that his policy priorities have long been clear, including when he was an afterthought in the gubernatorial race.
“I was pretty clear in the primary, where I wasn’t getting as much support from a lot of different folks,” Becerra said Fridayat a news conference in north Long Beach supporting Proposition 1, a proposed $11.25-billion bond measure on the November ballot to boost affordable housing construction around the state.
“What I will tell you is this: Take a look at my record. Take a look at what I’ve said, and rather than look to inflated promises, look at what I’ve done in my record,” Becerra said, standing in front of Laborers’ International Union of North America members clad in orange safety vests. “And I will tell you, I have built, not just as a public servant, but when I was wearing myself that orange vest as a construction worker, as a laborer for Local 185, in my younger years, I was out there helping build. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to do what we need to do, regardless what the voices say. We’re doing it because the people demand it.”
Fossil fuel and renewable energy firms have also supported Becerra, notably Chevron and affiliated groups and employees, spent more than $1.1 million boosting his bid — money that his Democratic rivals in the governor’s race and other critics, including climate activist Jane Fonda, pounced upon before the primary.
Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer deployed mobile billboards touting Becerra saying “You need Chevron, I need Chevron,” a clip from a longer comment about how every Californian doesn’t drive an electric car.
Chevron did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, Becerra was a single-digit polling afterthought in the crowded race to replace Newsom, who is termed-out. But after a dizzying primary that included a potential front-runner, then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), dropping out amid allegations of rape and sexual assault, Becerra took the lead in the Democratic field and placed first in the June election.
Becerra, 68, has a long career in elected office, serving two years in the state Assembly, 24 years in Congress, four years as California’s attorney general, and four years in the Biden administration.
While he was in Congress, donations to his federal campaign committee grew dramatically, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission documents provided by Open Secrets.
In the early 1990s, Becerra was receiving donations in the low six figures, but by the end of his time in Congress, he was receiving well over $1 million during each two-year electoral cycle.
Finance, insurance and real estate firms and trade groups, such as Charles Schwab, the National Assn. of Insurance and Financial Advisors, the New York Life Insurance Co., Merrill Lynch and Pacific Life Insurance, were major supporters of Becerra, who served on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which regulates taxation. Such donors contributed more than $2.6 million to his congressional bids, according to Open Secrets.
Healthcare interests came in a close second, contributing more than $2.4 million to his congressional campaigns in the years before he was nominated and confirmed as Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services, according to Open Secrets. Among the groups that supported Becerra’s federal campaigns included organizations representing physical therapists, anesthesiologists, podiatrists, assisted living and long term care facilities, and dietitians. While in Congress, Becerra was a strong advocate and supporter of the Affordable Care Act, a landmark healthcare overhaul championed by former President Obama.
Labor donated more than $1.7 million to Becerra’s congressional bids, a trend that continued when he ran for attorney general. Unions representing laborers, electrical workers, pipe fitters and firefighters donated $1 million, according to the Times analysis. The number has spiked to $6.3 million for Becerra’s gubernatorial bid.
Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the powerful California Labor Federation, said Becerra’s personal and political resume are significant at a time when the next governor will need to tackle artificial intelligence and the potential resulting job losses, the state’s volatile budget and federal funding cuts to MediCal and Medicare.
“He comes from a union family,” she said. “He has a long history of being on the right side of working people in a lot of different roles — in Congress, as attorney general and as secretary of Health and Human Services.”
Question about the Clippers’ attempt to evade the NBA salary cap: Did they really think they could get away with it?
One rule I’ve developed in years of writing about financial scandals is that, as bad as a scheme appears at first, it’s more likely than not that the facts will turn out to be nastier than they appeared at first.
Case in point: The scandal swirling around the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Assn. and their billionaire owner, former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.
The story was initially broken one year ago by sports podcaster Pablo Torre, who reported on a suspect endorsement deal between a sustainability company named Aspiration and All-Star forward Kawhi Leonard that smelled like an attempt to circumvent the NBA’s strict salary cap. (Torre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.)
I have no idea why we’d do this.
— Aspiration executive questioning its “endorsement” deal with Kawhi Leonard
By Sept. 2, when the NBA issued a series of nuclear sanctions against the team and Ballmer, it had become much bigger. The team, according to an investigative report the league released, actually orchestrated endorsement deals for Leonard with four companies that had been angling for business arrangements with the team, not just one, and took steps to hide the deals from public view.
Because of the extent to which these deals violated league rules and perhaps because the Clippers are repeat offenders (they were fined $250,000 in 2015 for a similar endorsement scheme involving then-free agent DeAndre Jordan), the league hit the team with its maximum penalties.
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It fined the team $30 million and took away its first-round draft picks for five years, 2029-2033 (the team already had ceded its first-round picks for the next two years in trade deals). It suspended Ballmer from any league or team activities for one year and imposed a one-year suspension on Gillian Zucker, the team’s president of business operations, and a six-month ban on Lawrence Frank, its president of basketball operations.
The Clippers said they “vehemently reject” the accusations and called them the product of a “heavily biased investigation.” They said they would appeal the sanctions, though it’s unclear how they could do that.
Leonard, who appears to be on his way back to the Toronto Raptors, from whence he came to the Clippers in 2019, issued a statement accepting “full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle.” That’s an apparent reference to Dennis Robertson, his business manager and uncle, who the investigators said was a key figure pushing the Clippers to find “off-court income” for Leonard.
The report released by the NBA’s investigators at the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz portrays Ballmer and the team as treating the league’s salary cap rules not as strict mandates, but as obstacles to be evaded, like traffic cones. And it describes efforts at subterfuge that seemed to reach a Gilbert & Sullivan-esque level of absurdity.
Ballmer is called out to an extent that one almost never sees when applied to the millionaires and billionaires who own most professional sports teams. That’s even more remarkable given his status in the NBA: With a reported net worth of more than $150 billion, he is the richest team owner by an enormous margin, outranking the next-place owners, the Adelson family, owners of the Dallas Mavericks, by about $115 billion.
The other NBA owners were reportedly stunned by the sheer arrogance of the Clippers’ behavior. That’s saying something, since one would expect that those in the billionaire class have had plenty of rannygazoo paraded past their eyes in the course of their business careers. Ballmer, who can often be seen bouncing around like a hyper-caffeinated party animal in the Clippers’ home arena, Intuit Dome, is no shrinking violet — he was known as a ferociously hard-charging, hands-on leader at Microsoft. The NBA faults him for being “knowingly” engaged in the team’s dealings with Leonard and creating its anything-goes culture.
The NBA values its salary cap as a key to a competitive balance, enabling even mid-market teams to reach the Finals — over the last 10 seasons, eight teams have reigned as champs. Its rules bar teams from initiating endorsement deals or other such arrangements for players by interpreting them as an underhanded breach of the cap; if teams are approached by a potential endorsement partner for a player, they can refer the partner to a player’s representatives but can’t participate in the dealmaking. They’re also required to report any such overtures to the league. The Clippers violated those rules, the investigators say.
The investigators say the team tried to circumvent the initiation clause via emails Zucker sent to three companies in 2020, implying that she was responding to their requests for introductions to Leonard.
The investigators found “no documentary evidence” that the companies genuinely initiated the requests. They viewed the emails merely as efforts to “create the appearance” that the Clippers were complying with the rules. The companies were Boingo, a wi-fi company at which Zucker’s husband was then chairman; Daktronics, a maker of scoreboards and video displays; and Lockton, an insurance brokerage.
All three were seeking to launch business relationships with the Clippers. The investigators asserted that the team implied to them that participating in its scheme to make illicit payments to Leonard by signing him to endorsement deals would help them win the contracts. They also found that the Clippers essentially assured the companies that it would cover their payments for the endorsement deals via their other contracts.
The investigators called these multi-year, multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, totaling $18 million, “peculiar.” None of the companies had ever signed an endorsement deal “of remotely the same financial magnitude” as these, nor have they done so since.
None of the deals was publicly announced, even though the whole point of signing a pro player to represent your company is to shout it from the rooftops. In any case, Leonard was nothing like a big, popular star—the investigators charitably referred to his “relatively insubstantial endorsement profile.” That hardly mattered, since the deals didn’t require Leonard to actually do anything for the money.
The key deal was with Aspiration, which was guided by the Clippers into paying Leonard $48 million over four years. When Joseph Sanberg, Aspiration’s co-founder and a board member, presented the deal to top executives, they were dumbfounded. “I have no idea why we’d do this,” one wrote in an email, according to the investigators.
But Sanberg assured them that the Clippers would adjust their contract with Aspire to cover the expense. Seeing that the deal was “cashflow neutral,” as an executive observed, they agreed.
Inside the Clippers’ front office, the contract for Aspiration to provide environmental services was seen as “super shady,” according to a text from one executive to another cited in the report.
Ballmer maintained in at least one interview that the endorsement deal was initiated by Aspiration: “They were off to the races on their own,” he told a television interviewer. “We weren’t involved.”
In fact, the investigators say, the Clippers initiated the contact with Aspiration, put the firm in touch with a business agent who was already a team contractor, and provided the agent with proposed deal terms. The investigators found that the endorsement deal was such a departure for Aspiration that Sanberg needed to be educated about what it should require from Leonard in return for his fees. Sanberg “doesn’t really know what to ask for,” the agent told his associates.
Ballmer maintains that he was the victim in this arrangement. He points the finger at Sanberg, who he says enticed him into investing $60 million in his failing firm, thereby causing him “reputational harm.” But Sanberg might be viewed as a target of convenience, given that he pleaded guilty last year to federal fraud charges associated with the collapse of Aspiration and has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. (The NBA investigators told the court in a pre-sentence letter that Sanberg “substantially assisted our investigation”—though in the investigative report they said they “remained cautious in relying on Mr. Sanberg’s information” unless it was “corroborated by other evidence.”)
Where does this leave the Clippers? Nowhere good. Ballmer’s acquisition of the team in 2014 was seen as a major step toward ending its years-long record of futility, dating to its origin as the Buffalo Braves in 1970. The team still has never played in the NBA Finals. Leonard hasn’t lived up to expectations — injuries have kept him off the court for nearly half of his games as a Clipper, as my colleague Mirjam Swanson notes.
Basketball mavens see the NBA sanctions as condemning the Clippers to as long as 10 more years in John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond. For a brief moment, Ballmer got Southern California fans excited about the team. Ten years from now, will anyone even remember they exist?
WASHINGTON — President Trump gave sizable holiday gifts to four White House aides, according to new financial disclosures released by the administration.
The gifts of $45,000 each to executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications advisor Margo Martin, and deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris as well as a $20,000 gift for director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta were noted in the staffers’ annual financial disclosure forms that were published by the administration last week. Harp, Martin and Harris make $150,000 annually and Nauta is paid $175,000 a year, according to the White House’s salary disclosure report to Congress.
A White House official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Trump “has a long-standing practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector.”
The official did not say if any other staffers were given similar gifts from the president but added that the cash gifts were not related to the “individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”
The disclosures of the gifts were first reported earlier on Tuesday by the Washington Post.
Harp is a constant presence by Trump’s side and is known for carrying a portable printer with her so she can print out favorable media coverage and social media posts for the president, who prefers reading important information on paper rather than on a screen.
Martin has been working for Trump since his first go-around in the White House. She started in the first term as a White House press assistant and followed the president to Palm Beach, Fla., to help run his media operations after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. She returned to the White House with Trump after his 2024 victory.
Earlier this year, Trump appointed Harris to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which has oversight over the president’s White House ballroom project.
Nauta, who previously served as a valet to Trump, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira were charged in 2023 with conspiring with Trump to obstruct an FBI investigation into classified documents that the Republican took with him when he left the White House after his first term.
Workers at “World of Warcraft” video game developer Blizzard Entertainment have ratified union contracts after two years of bargaining.
The ratification vote means all union-represented Blizzard employees — nearly 1,900 people across all units in the company’s games teams and shared services — will have the same contract language in their respective departments, the union said Wednesday.
Blizzard quality assurance workers in Albany and Austin were the first to unionize in 2022, followed by “World of Warcraft” employees in 2024. Last year, workers on the “Overwatch,” “Diablo,” “Hearthstone” and Warcraft Rumble” games teams, as well as the story and franchise development and platform technology units unionized.
“This contract marks the beginning of a new era at Blizzard Entertainment, but it doesn’t stop with us,” “Overwatch” bargaining committee member and quality analyst Simon Hedrick said in a statement. “I believe that the positive change we have won will ripple out and help make the games industry as a whole a better place for workers and players alike.”
The Blizzard contracts include wage increases and a hybrid work week of three days in the office, among other provisions, the union said. The contracts also require Blizzard to discuss and bargain over the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace.
“We appreciate the dedication and engagement of our represented employees and the bargaining committees throughout this process, as well as every Blizzard employee whose work continued alongside it,” Johanna Faries, Blizzard’s president, said in a statement. “The ratification of these agreements marks a significant milestone and reflects our shared commitment to continuing to work together in support of our teams and our players.”
Blizzard is a subsidiary of Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard. The company was acquired by tech giant Microsoft Corp. in 2023.
In July, Microsoft said it would cut 3,200 jobs in its video game division, or about 20% of that staff, over the next year as the gaming industry continues to face a flagging landscape. The layoffs were part of a larger cost-cutting effort at Microsoft, which is laying off about 2% of its workforce in total.
Blizzard’s union said the planned layoffs, as well as job cuts throughout the video game industry, were a major issue during contract negotiations.
One of the provisions in the Blizzard contracts gives laid-off workers the right to be “recalled” into open jobs across Blizzard’s bargaining units for 14 months after the announcement of their layoff.
“This contract secures a lot of what people already love about working here while adding strong protections around layoffs, job security and remote work,” Daniel Weltz, platform and technology bargaining committee member and principal software engineer, said in a statement. “Blizzard helped shape the gaming industry, and I’m proud that this contract allows us to continue setting new standards for this work.”
Sure, the U.S. tennis star advanced to his second U.S. Open semifinal in epic fashion, knocking off defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in a five-set marathon that did not end until 3:33 a.m. ET Wednesday.
It was during his on-court interview afterward, however, that Shelton committed a bit of a faux pas while discussing the match that ended later than any other in tournament history.
“I’m just hoping that my best friend and my sister over there don’t have to be at work at 6 a.m. in three hours,” Shelton said following the 6-7 (5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (10-7) victory. “It’d be huge from their employers to let them have the day off today.”
Shelton certainly didn’t have to give a shout out to two of his loved ones for hanging in there for the entire 4 hours 28 minutes … but since he did, there’s one other person Shelton probably should have mentioned as well: soccer star Trinity Rodman, who also was sitting courtside throughout the match. TV cameras showed her laughing and apparently saying, “What about me?”
Shelton and Rodman have been dating for more than a year, after going Instagram official in May 2025. They are seen in the stands at each other’s sporting events when their schedules allow.
For the record, Rodman apparently did have to work hours later. The U.S. national team and Washington Spirit player posted a video later Wednesday morning on TikTok that showed her inside a gym with the caption, “Yes, I’m at training now.”
She doesn’t seem to hold a grudge over her boyfriend’s omission, though. Rodman posted a video on her Instagram Story of the match’s aftermath, with the caption, “The moment belongs to Shelton!”
And Shelton actually did include Rodman in that moment, with the two of them making eye contact and flashing his signature “dialed-in” hand motion to each other as he celebrated.
Rodman’s schedule with the Spirit hasn’t allowed her to attend all of Shelton’s matches at Flushing Meadows, but she has been to at least three. For his Round 2 victory against Hubert Hurkacz, Rodman wore a black crop top that read, “I ❤️ my boyfriend.”
For the quarterfinal, Rodman carried a Shelton figurine, possibly as a good luck charm.
Shelton will face fellow U.S. player Frances Tiafoe in Friday’s semifinals.
Bruce Davis spent more than two decades as the motion picture academy’s chief executive. Even when he retired in 2011, it was not because he didn’t still love the work. In fact, he kept at it in retirement, retaining an office at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study where he focused on writing a definitive history of the early days of the Oscars.
“I don’t think I’ve been bored for a minute in 30 years here,” Davis told the Associated Press upon leaving the academy. “I feel like such a rube sometimes. To this day, when I get out of the car on Oscar night and step up there onto that carpet, you get that rush of energy. The lights are popping — not that anybody’s aiming at me — but still I think it’s one of the great rushes, emotionally speaking, that a person can have.”
Following a battle with leukemia, Davis died Saturday. He was 83.
Davis’ career at the academy was, according to wife Joann, partly a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
“Not that he wasn’t really good at what he did,” she says by phone. “But he was also a lucky man.”
Davis was working as chair of the theater department at Juniata College in Pennsylvania when he and Joann loaded all of their belongings atop their Mazda GLC and headed to Los Angles in pursuit of Hollywood dreams. Davis had been working on a few screenplays while teaching, and his agent told him needed to move closer to the action to network and take meetings.
“Neither of us had jobs when we left Pennsylvania,” Joann says. “We just bit the bullet and drove out. It was a leap of faith.”
Shortly after arriving, Davis met someone at a party whose wife worked at the motion picture academy. That soon led to Davis taking a job arranging lectures and seminars and, later, overseeing the organization’s public programming.
Davis became the academy’s seventh executive director in 1989, leading it through a sizable expansion of staff, relocating the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library to the Beverly Hills Waterworks building in 1991 and setting up its film archive at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in 2002.
“Bruce would drive back and forth to work and see that Waterworks building at the time that they were looking for places for the library to expand,” Joann says. “And one day, it just occurred to him that maybe that would be a building, and so initiated conversation with Beverly Hills. It was kismet.”
Davis had hoped to build an academy museum next to the Pickford, convincing the group’s board of governors to purchase a nearby 3.5-acre site in 2006 for a reported $50 million, but the 2008 recession derailed those plans. His successor, Dawn Hudson, led the push to partner with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, eventually building the museum at the former May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax. It opened in 2021.
“That way, best picture reflects the choice of the greatest number of people,” Davis told The Times.
Davis’ Oscar book, “The Academy and the Award,” was first published in 2022, long after he originally anticipated it would hit stores.
“He thought a couple months of research, a couple more months to write it, and voila, in two years, he’d have it done,” Joann says. “But he kept finding new things he wanted to explore.”
Shortly before it published, Davis told The Times that he hoped the book would dispel myths surrounding the Oscars, including Susan Orlean’s assertion in her Rin Tin Tin biography that the dog received more votes than any male actor at the first Academy Awards and that Bette Davis gave the golden statue its nickname because its backside mirrored that of her then-husband Harmon Oscar Nelson.
“There’s a lot of nonsense out there,” Davis said, “and the real story is almost always more interesting.”
“He was deeply committed to preserving the academy’s history, establishing dedicated homes for our library and film archive, and relaunching the concept of creating a museum,” current academy CEO Bill Kramer and President Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement. “He had a profound love for the academy.”
Davis loved to read and collect books, devouring anything from John Updike and Margaret Atwood, among other authors, a passion that necessitated having bookshelves in every room of his home. Language itself was an obsession, with many family dinners ending with Davis pulling out his unabridged Oxford English Dictionary to share the derivation of a word.
“He was a really fascinating guy,” Joann says.
Perhaps the only thing Davis didn’t like about the Oscars was the ceremony’s annual in memoriam segment, which pays tribute to those who died in the previous year.
“It is the single most troubling element of the Oscar show every year,” Davis told the Associated Press, “because more people die each year than can possibly be included in that segment.”
Next year’s ceremony now has one certain addition.
In addition to Joann, Davis is survived by four daughters: Brangien Davis, Alexandra Davis, Archer Davis and Roxanne Davis.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Around this time two years ago, Sen. John Fetterman was in high demand on the campaign trail, going county-to-county in Pennsylvania to help Democrats up and down the ballot.
Now, after two years of crossing swords with Democrats and backing some of President Trump’s priorities, he’s nowhere on the stump.
No Democrat in the state wants to be seen with him. His approval ratings are better with Republicans — far better — than they are with Democrats. And a shadow primary of sorts is taking shape for Fetterman’s Senate seat in 2028, even if he runs again.
Fetterman has acknowledged his isolation in the party as he maintains staunch support of Israel’s war in Gaza and criticizes left-wing candidates who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s often gone his own way in the Senate, voting repeatedly with Republicans to end the shutdown last year while supporting multiple Trump nominations and opposing efforts to end the war in Iran.
Still, Fetterman has repeatedly said that he wouldn’t switch parties because of his support for labor unions, LGBT rights and other issues held dear by the left.
“I’m not going to be a Republican, but I’m going to be a Democrat that’s going to have a conversation with whoever is playing it straight,” Fetterman told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Fetterman’s office and political adviser did not return messages seeking comment.
Fetterman has fallen out of favor with Pennsylvania Democrats
Fetterman has been silent about any plans to campaign in Pennsylvania this year, and Democrats say they aren’t asking him for help.
“I absolutely think that Fetterman would bring us more harm than good,” said Lori McFarland, the Democratic Party chair in Lehigh County, which is home to a congressional seat and a state Senate seat that Democrats are trying to flip. “Nobody’s asked to see him, nobody’s requested his presence, and people, quite honestly, they’re mad at him and they don’t want anything to do with him. The local feel here is they feel betrayed by him.”
Polling captures the shift. Only about 2 in 10 registered Democrats in Pennsylvania have a favorable view of Fetterman, according to a New York Times poll from August. That’s a sharp reversal from 2024, when 74% had a positive view. He’s now seen more favorably by Republican voters in the state, with 73% giving him a positive rating. That’s up from 25% a couple years ago.
A Quinnipiac poll from July similarly found most Republicans approve of how Fetterman is handling his job, while most Democrats do not.
Cindy Durian, a Democrat voting in May’s primary in suburban Harrisburg, said she would never vote for Fetterman again.
“I think he might as well change parties, he might as well change from a D to an R,” she said.
Frustration with Fetterman has been building
Fetterman had a stroke on the campaign trail before winning his Senate seat in 2022 and then was hospitalized for clinical depression in the first months of his term.
Progressive frustration with Fetterman began to emerge in late 2023 with his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. But it’s moved beyond that since Trump took office. Democrats have watched him belittle their attempts to push back on Trump while emerging as a conservative media darling.
“He is antagonizing Democrats, seemingly for pleasure,” said J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist.
Fetterman’s dedication to the job has also been called into question. Last year, he began racking up missed votes and missed hearings in the Senate. A meeting in Washington with representatives from a teachers union broke up after he began repeating himself, shouting and slamming his hands on a desk. And he has avoided other meetings and public events, including the funeral for three police officers killed in the line of duty.
Public officials around Pennsylvania say they haven’t seen him in several years. Some can’t remember when they last saw him.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said state Rep. Peter Schweyer of Allentown. “We assumed that when we got him there that we were going to get somebody who’s going to fight for us. And what we got instead was somebody who just disappeared.”
Pennsylvania Democrats have a lot on the line in November
The state has several marquee races this year. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, seen as a likely presidential candidate in 2028, is running for reelection and leading the party’s efforts to hold a narrow state House majority, capture a state Senate majority for the first time in decades and flip four U.S. House seats.
In one of those competitive U.S. House races, Democrat Bob Harvie is trying to unseat Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. A campaign spokesperson said Harvie hasn’t asked Fetterman for help.
It’s unclear whether Fetterman will ever return to the campaign trail, or whether he even wants another term in 2028, given that he spends much of his time criticizing his party and the dysfunction of Congress. He often sits alone in the hallway during Senate votes, eschewing conversations with colleagues inside the chamber.
Talk of 2028 among Democrats often turns to several others — Reps. Chris Deluzio and Brendan Boyle and former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb — who have become outspoken critics of Fetterman.
“I don’t think that Democrats want John Fetterman campaigning for them, and I say that as a guy who’s campaigning with Democrats in the most competitive and toughest districts across Pennsylvania,” Deluzio told The Associated Press.
Deluzio said he’ll decide after the November election whether to run for Senate in 2028. But, he said, “Pennsylvanians elected John Fetterman as a Democrat to the United States Senate. They expect him to be a Democrat in these two years he has left in this term.”
Fetterman says he has a ‘red line’ with his party
While Fetterman has insisted he won’t change parties, he hasn’t ruled it out, saying the Democratic Party becoming anti-Israel would be a “red line” that would force him out.
He’s also become close with Pennsylvania’s other senator, Republican David McCormick, appearing at events alongside him and launching a joint political fundraising committee, an unusual arrangement for senators from opposing parties.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., in July said he and other Republicans had spoken with Fetterman about the “challenges” he has in the Democratic caucus. “If he ever comes to the conclusion that he’s ready to move, we’d certainly welcome him.”
Democrats hold 47 seats in the Senate. If they were to pick up four seats in the election, a Fetterman party-switch could reset the Senate back to a 50-50 split, giving Republicans the majority and putting Vice President JD Vance in a position to break ties.
Levy writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.
It’s pronounced “human.” Yet writer-director Siân Heder acknowledges that the unusual spelling of the title of her new movie, “Being Heumann,” is something people might give a puzzled second look, unsure of how to say it and possibly dismissing it altogether.
Which, the more she sat with it, made it perfect as the title for a portrait of real-life disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who, while being in a wheelchair, made herself undismissable.
More specifically, the film looks at the pivotal 1977 protest in which Heumann led a group in a 26-day sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco until the government began enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the first federal law that recognized disability as a civil rights category.
“The fact that her last name was ‘human’ has so many beautiful layers of meaning,” says Heder, 49, during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “I think Judy was asking for the world to see disabled people as human beings who were worthy of rights and being looked at and being included.”
A world premiere and the opening-night selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, “Being Heumann” will hit theaters Nov. 6 and begin streaming on Apple TV Nov. 13. It is also, crucially, Heder’s first film since 2021’s “CODA,” the bittersweet drama about a young woman in a Deaf family (the title is an acronym for “child of Deaf adults”) that won three Academy Awards including adapted screenplay for Heder and best picture.
Actor Ruth Madeley and filmmaker Siân Heder during production on “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
In Heumann, a wheelchair user after contracting polio as a child, Heder found a subject who was in the process of discovering herself as a leader: learning when to hold firm and when to cede ground and empower other people. And for someone who was grappling with the aftermath of unexpected success, that felt familiar.
“I think I was making a movie about myself, honestly,” Heder says. “When you’re moving forward on a massive project or a movement or anything, there’s a necessary drive and ambition and focus that is needed. And if you look at any major change that’s happened in human history, it takes a certain kind of person to push that through. I’m not identifying myself with great leaders of the civil rights movement, but directing a movie is a similar thing.”
Heder is tucked into a quiet corner of a busy coffee shop in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, where she has long lived. She is in the process of moving from one historic house to an even older one a few blocks away. Heder didn’t want to disrupt the schooling of her two young children, ages 10 and 12, and has become too enmeshed in the area to want to leave it.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says of “CODA,” her Oscar-winning best picture. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Community is a word that comes up often over the course of a conversation with Heder, who has a warm manner and a quiet self-possession. Though “CODA” may have brought her wider attention, she was far from a novice by the time she made that film. She won a Peabody Award as a writer on the series “Men of a Certain Age” and was a writer, director and producer on the acclaimed “Orange Is the New Black.” She expanded her 2006 short film “Mother” into her first feature “Tallulah,” about a young woman who takes a baby from a reckless mother and tries to pass it off as her own. It premiered at Sundance in 2016.
Winning the Oscar created changes in her life both big and small. Heder at first kept it on her desk at home, but had to move it because she began to feel the statuette’s crossed arms quietly judging her as she worked. When she drove herself to the Spirit Awards the year after “CODA’s” triumph and spontaneously gave a ride to an afterparty to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Heder suddenly realized her 10-year-old Subaru wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
“I have a nicer car now,” she says, laughing at the memory. “It’s baby steps.”
The day after the Oscars, Heder recalls that she couldn’t stop crying, all the pressure built up from months of campaigning events and Q&As finally letting itself out.
She says two things changed almost immediately after winning the Oscar. One was a sense of expectation, wanting to make the most of whatever the moment might allow.
“This was not a part of my plans,” she says. “I didn’t ever intend to have so many eyeballs turn to me and go, ’What are you doing now?’”
The second was simply the volume of material and opportunities incoming. Heder says she met with Marvel “so many times” about different projects but none of them felt right. As an independent filmmaker “you’re always pushing against the no,” she puts it, moving projects forward against all odds. But now she felt she had to be the resistance, the one to ask whether something was worthwhile.
“Suddenly there are a lot of voices chiming in too because your reps have an idea of what you should do next and the industry has an idea of what you should do next,” Heder says. “And it was really important for me to center myself back in a feeling of: I’ve always been drawn to stories because they move me. And that hasn’t changed.”
Her Oscars triumph was also the night of the notorious Will Smith-Chris Rock on-stage slap, which overshadowed coverage. Heder is online enough that she knows that some film fans would want an asterisk next to the Oscar wins for “CODA,” as if to note some sort of COVID-era exception for the first film from a streaming service to win Hollywood’s top award.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says with a edge of defiance. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story. And then audiences embraced that story and that story took off in a way that was unexpected and surprising even for me.”
Siân Heder holds her Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “CODA” backstage during the Oscars in 2022.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Heder had been developing “Being Heumann” before “CODA” was released. A friend encouraged Heder to see the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” which includes Heumann as a subject, and the filmmaker was so struck by that story, she followed up by reading Heumann’s 2020 memoir.
She sent Heumann a cold email expressing interest in the book. As it turned out, Heumann was deciding that very day who should direct a movie of her life. Heumann gave the filmmaker a last-minute chance to pitch herself. After saying she’d cast authentically disabled performers as she did on “CODA,” Heder got the job.
Heder would work for two years on researching and developing the project with Heumann, interviewing dozens of people involved in the actual Carter-era protest. When Heumann died unexpectedly in 2023, Heder did not think she could continue, but it was “Crip Camp” co-director James Lebrecht who convinced her otherwise.
“I think Judy’s death, which was sudden — it made me feel like she had left her legacy in my hands,” remembers Heder.
After developing other scripts post-Oscars that never quite became her next film, Heder eventually found herself in the enviable position of having two projects greenlit at once: “Being Heumann” at Apple and an adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” at Paramount.
As she was trying to make a decision, she went to a meeting with several other directors about the relaunching of the Village Theater in Westwood. She found herself having coffee with Guillermo del Toro and asked him how he decided between potential projects.
“And he said, ‘Make the movie that can’t get made without you,’” she recalls. “And that was very clarifying for me. When you are the element that gets that story told, it takes on an importance and urgency.”
As can often be the case, Del Toro’s advice confirmed what she already felt and she began to move forward with “Being Heumann.” (She is currently prepping “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” so there will not be another five-year gap between releasing films.)
“I was having a rare moment of power in the industry to push something forward,” Heder says, “and it felt like there was a path to go make a big paycheck and have that kind of jump up, or I could use that moment of power and success to try to push through the hardest project I could think of. It was in that moment, after ‘CODA,’ where I really realized: I could make this incredibly difficult movie that no one might make.”
Andrew Pilkington, from left, Siena Rafter, Charlie Rush-Reese, Dylan O’Brien, Roberta Colindrez, Ruth Madeley and Madeline Delp in the movie “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
Following what Heder describes as “the casting Olympics,’ she arrived at BAFTA-nominated actor Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair user, to play the lead role. “Being Heumann” was shot in Toronto, largely on a soundstage built to stand in for the San Francisco federal office building where the sit-in took place.
“Hollywood might be the least accessible industry out there,” Heder notes while beginning to explain the accommodations that needed to be made for a cast that included performers with a wide range of disabilities. Custom-built trailers were created and the set had to be made accessible in ways that a filming location typically is not. An accessibility team oversaw everything, from large-scale logistics to the personal needs of individual background actors.
Rather than a more conventional biopic, Heder wanted to tell the more specific story of the 504 sit-in, building out an ensemble of characters around Heumann.
“I said, “It’s almost like ‘Bad News Bears’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ together,” says Heder. “There’s an underdog-sports-team feeling and bank-heist-gone-wrong.”
But a filmmaker friend asked her: Is making movies about disability now her “thing”? It is a question Heder had already considered.
“Of course it was on my mind if it starts to feel like: Oh, is Siân Heder a social justice warrior who’s just out to try to make these movies that have some kind of message behind them,” she says preemptively. “But I think this is just a great story. Outside of disability, outside of anything else, it is a great story.”
Heder remains interested in stories about outsiders, about class and people generally ignored by or on the fringes of society. And it remains important that she herself feel a part of a larger community in her life and her work.
“My daughter said to me the other day, ‘Mom, I think you’re the right kind of famous because you are important to people who know who you are, but you can still just be in the world and be anonymous.” And I think there’s something true about that.”
Her daughter has obviously inherited Heder’s deep well of empathy, one that is more concerned with bringing new, unseen stories to the screen than with the pursuit of cool points or pure fame.
“‘Earnest’ has become a dirty word,” says Heder. “And what earnest actually means is direct and truthful.”
If elected governor in November, Republican Steve Hilton said Tuesday he would eliminate the state Department of Motor Vehicles and slash registration fees for car owners — expressing confidence that the Democratic-controlled Legislature would embrace the plan.
“My starting expectation would be, they would be with me on things to reduce the cost of living, so let’s work together,” he told The Times on Tuesday.
Hilton said that once state lawmakers met with him and realized he was not the “caricature” his critics portray, they would realize that he is “not a particularly tribal person. I’m just looking to solve problems, and we all agree about the cost of living.”
Eliminating a state agency would require approval from the state Legislature, where Democrats hold super majorities in both chambers. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) have both endorsed Hilton’s Democratic rival in the governor’s race, former Biden cabinet member Xavier Becerra.
The Becerra campaign scoffed at Hilton’s confidence.
“You can’t spend a year calling Democrats a failure and then expect two-thirds of both chambers to take your calls,” said Becerra spokesperson Jonathan Underland. “Steve is in for a very rude awakening, and the fact that he can’t see it coming just shows how little he understands the job he’s asking for.“
Hilton announced his plan at a news conference outside of a DMV office in West Hollywood, where he touted proposals to eliminate the state agency, which has a $1.6-billion budget, and reduce the annual vehicle registration fee to $73 per year.
“We are going to shut down this bloated, nanny-state bureaucratic agency that treats Californians with complete contempt,” he said to cheers at the event. “We are done with it. Enough is enough with the DMV. Enough is enough with sky-high registration rates. We are done.”
Hilton said he could issue an executive order to reduce the vehicle licensing fees, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did less than an hour after being sworn into office upon winning the 2003 recall election. While the fee is set by state tax code, governors can waive it in specific circumstances, as Schwarzenegger did.
Californians currently register more than 36 million vehicles with the DMV each year, and the average annual fee paid for each is $329, according to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office. The registration fees, along with driver’s license costs and other fees related to the California Highway Patrol and identification cards collected by the DMV, are the primary funding sources of the CHP and DMV.
Hilton said the state currently reaps $11 billion to $12 billion per year from vehicle registration fees, and that his proposal would reduce the revenue to roughly $2.7 billion. He said he would make up for the revenue shortfall created by the proposal — and other plans, including eliminating state taxes on the first $150,000 of income — by reducing the state’s workforce by 10% and agency budgets by 5%.
To eliminate a state agency, Hilton would need legislative approval, although he says that if Sacramento lawmakers were to rebuff his efforts, he could use the budget to slash the DMV’s operations.
Hilton cited a discussion he had with Schwarzenegger at an August dinner at the movie star’s Brentwood estate.
“Arnold said the Democrats who led the Legislature when he was there much preferred” having a Republican governor to a Democratic one, Hilton said.
Hilton lacks Schwarzenegger’s worldwide fame, and the nation and Sacramento are far more polarized than when the Austrian bodybuilder turned action movie star took office. Still, Hilton’s vehicle registration proposal is reminiscent of a major plank of Schwarzenegger’s successful 2003 campaign to recall and replace Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
Davis had tripled the state’s annual vehicle license fee shortly after being reelected in 2002 to help address a state budget shortfall. Schwarzenegger seized upon the issue during the recall campaign, at one point dropping a wrecking ball from a five-story crane onto a car spray-painted with the words “Davis Car Tax” in front of a cheering crowd in Costa Mesa.
“We had the biggest action star in the world. He’s going to show action,” said Rob Stutzman, who worked as one of Schwarzenegger’s top advisors. “Arnold demanded it. It was always a production to tell a story. He was genius at it.”
“Californians got a huge increase in their vehicle license fee and it was being done to backfill a deficit arguably revealed to them by surprise after the [2002] election,” Stutzman said.
Stutzman said the fee created a backlash that fueled the recall campaign against Davis, along with rolling blackouts during the energy crisis of 2000 to 2001.
Schwarzenegger’s executive order reducing the license fee to its former rate resulted in billions of dollars of losses to the state’s general fund. The Republican had to respond with spending cuts as well as issuing bonds to make up for the shortfall.
If Matthew Fine, a 5-foot-8, 165-pound senior running back and lacrosse star for Loyola High, needs a walk-up song, he can go back to 1969 when Frank Sinatra’s hit “My Way” came on the radio with the lyrics, “I did it my way.”
Fine, who lives in Manhattan Beach, declined to be interviewed last week before the Cubs’ game against the public school he lives five minutes from, Mira Costa. He didn’t want to give friends he grew up with any bulletin board material. Then he went out and rushed for 105 yards in a 14-7 Loyola victory.
It was fun for him to catch up with neighborhood kids he used to play with starting at age 5.
“I traded jerseys and traded photos,” he said. “It was nice talking to them.”
Asked if he walked home from the game, Fine said, “I actually considered it.”
Fine, with his speed and strength from lacrosse training, could be the comeback player of the year in football. He quit football after his sophomore year to focus on lacrosse. Loyola has one of the best lacrosse programs in the state, winning last season’s Southern Section championship. He’s earned a lacrosse scholarship to Utah.
Football coach Drew Casani had lobbied Fine to return to football before his junior year with no success. Last school year, after the lacrosse season ended, Casani sent him a text inviting him to return.
“I’m in,” Fine responded.
“I love football,” Fine said. “There was a lot of uncertainty. My junior year is where you get recruited for lacrosse. After sitting out a year and watching all the guys playing football, I got really jealous and wanted to jump back in.”
He rejoined the team this year starting at the bottom of the depth chart. Now he’s had back-to-back games rushing for more than 100 yards. This will be his first and only year playing on varsity.
“I’m doing this for fun,” he said. “I love football. I’ve been doing it longer than any other sport.”
Whenever the season ends, it will be Fine’s final football game.
“I don’t think I’ll have any regrets,” he said. “I’ll just be sad. I don’t want to think about that.”
Incredibly, as much as people believe football gets players in the best shape of their life, Fine once flunked his conditioning test for lacrosse after playing football.
“It’s a different type of conditioning,” he explained.
Casani is thrilled that Fine’s one year off from football has had little effect.
“He picked up seemingly where he left off,” Casani said. “ He’s fast, has vision and is hard to tackle.“
Don’t ask his father, Mickey, what Fine might do next or any day.
“My son does things his own way,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t understand it.”
With a 4.0 grade-point average and terrific lacrosse talent as an attacker, Fine has a bright future. For those who play intramural flag football on Utah’s campus, Fine could be the ringer to deliver a championship next year.
Zendaya has become the big screen’s hottest heroine after her films raked in some £3billion this year alone at the global box officeCredit: PANewlyweds Zendaya and Tom, who also star in the Spider-Man moviesCredit: Getty
It puts her ahead of every other leading lady in cinema in 2026 — with her annual income from movies alone estimated at tens of millions of pounds.
The swords and sandals epic has itself become a massive summer hit and a box office phenomenon.
It easily grabbed the cinema top spot after its July 17 release, until the latest Spider-Man movie took the crown when it came out two weeks later.
Zendaya with Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s The OdysseyCredit: PAZendaya plays MJ in the Spider-Man movies, opposite husband Tom in the title roleCredit: Alamy
Spidey stayed at No1 on the global box office throughout August — until The Odyssey knocked it off again last weekend, proving the pulling power of newlyweds Zendaya and Tom.
She began the year with her other release, romantic dark comedy The Drama, in which she starred alongside Robert Pattinson.
It made £97million worldwide.
And Zendaya is showing no signs of slowing down, with Dune: Part Three set to debut on December 18 and looking to be another massive hit, possibly grossing another billion dollars (£740million).
Zendaya began the year with her other release, romantic dark comedy The Drama, in which she starred alongside Robert PattinsonCredit: AlamyZendaya is showing no signs of slowing down, with Dune: Part Three set to debut on December 18Credit: Alamy
Dune: Part Two made a global gross of over £526million in 2024, growing from part one’s £303million in 2021. It is now likely the third instalment will skyrocket way past its prequel.
It all comes as Hollywood’s leading lady just recently celebrated her 30th birthday after becoming one of the most influential young actresses of her time.
Dana Williamson, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s onetime chief of staff, is seeking to delay her criminal sentencing date for political corruption because of health issues, according to documents filed last week in federal court.
Williamson’s attorney McGregor Scott, asked the court to delay her Sept. 17 sentencing and seal documents related to her health condition.
Scott submitted documents that reference a Sept. 4 surgery that Williamson underwent, medical records, and a text message from Williamson’s mother about the surgery.
Williamson underwent a liver transplant earlier this year, prompting a judge to delay a February hearing in her case.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the requested sentencing delay.
Williamson, a veteran political consultant who also formerly worked for former Govs. Jerry Brown and Gray Davis, admitted she took part in a scheme from 2022 to 2024 to skim campaign funds from then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, now a leading candidate for governor, and divert the money to Becerra’s then-chief of staff.
She also admitted in her plea deal to filing a false tax form in 2024 and lying to FBI agents that same year.
Beyond lying to the FBI about the scheme involving Becerra, Williamson misled federal authorities on another topic, the plea agreement stated.
She lied to FBI agents when asked about the state’s lawsuit against video game company Activision Blizzard Inc., details contained in the November indictment against Williamson and other public records show.
One year ago, thousands of young people took to the streets in multiple Nepali cities to protest against corruption. Following the resulting curfews, arrests and the killing of protesters in a crackdown on the demonstrations, the Gen Z‑led movement forced the government from power, ushering in an interim administration and opening the way for new elections.
Now, as Nepal grapples with the aftermath of devastating floods along its border with Tibet, we examine what has changed over the past year – and whether the demands of the Gen Z protesters have been met.
What happened in Nepal last year?
On September 8, 2025, youth-led “Gen Z” protests began in Kathmandu and other cities of Nepal.
Demonstrators who took to the streets were protesting a series of corruption scandals in the country and were also angered by the rising trend of the children of Nepali government officials – dubbed “Nepo kids” – documenting their lavish lifestyles online.
The protests broke out just days after the country blocked 26 social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok for not complying with government rules about “harmful” content. This ban was lifted when the protests began.
Some young demonstrators defied curfews imposed by the authorities after demonstrations began, leading to arrests and the police firing live rounds at protesters, killing about 76 people. Hundreds of protesters were injured and hundreds more arrested. Protesters also set fire to several government buildings, including parliament, and the army was deployed.
Then, on September 9, Prime Minister KP Oli, 74, resigned from his position. Within a week, Nepal’s former Chief Justice Sushila Karki had been appointed as the country’s new interim prime minister.
Ultimately, the protests culminated in the current government being formed in March this year when 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah was sworn in as the country’s youngest-ever prime minister.
Shah leads the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), also known as the National Independent Party, a new anti‑establishment party which emerged after the youth-led protests and won more than two‑thirds of the 165 directly elected seats in parliament in March. Traditional parties such as the Nepali Congress and the CPN‑UML have a much smaller representation than ever before.
Although he was not a street organiser of the protests, Shah became one of the most prominent political figures, channelling Gen Z’s anger into his electoral campaign.
What were the key demands of the Gen Z protesters?
They included:
An end to corruption: Protesters demanded greater transparency and accountability from political elites they view as corrupt, as well as an end to nepotism, whereby the children of those elites live in luxury while many young Nepalis struggle financially.
Mass resignations and suspensions: Protesters called for the resignation of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and the mass resignation of parliamentarians. They also called for an immediate suspension of officials who issued the order to fire on protesters.
Political overhaul: The protesters called for the dissolution of parliament, establishment of an interim government and holding new general elections.
Have these demands been met?
The demands have been met to some extent.
For instance, Oli resigned in the wake of the Gen Z‑led protests, and several senior members of his government also stepped down. Parliament was dissolved, an interim government was established, and new general elections were held in March this year.
“Despite the loss of life and property during the movement, the interim government successfully conducted peaceful elections, leading to the emergence of a new political force in government,” Yog Raj Lamichhane, an assistant professor at Nepal’s Pokhara University, told Al Jazeera.
“The result reflected public disenchantment with the old political establishment.”
In March this year, Nepal police arrested Oli and former Home Affairs Minister Ramesh Lekhak for their alleged involvement in the deadly crackdown on the protesters last year.
However, both men were released in April after a Supreme Court order asked the police not to indefinitely extend the detention. They remain under investigation in connection with last year’s deadly Gen Z protests, but have not been formally charged.
Furthermore, the issue of corruption among political elites has barely been addressed, observers say.
Dinesh Paudel, professor at the Appalachain State University in the US, told Al Jazeera: “The fundamental concerns and issues raised by the young protestor last year are still the same, and there are no governance style changes even after the new elected government, other than some populist rhetorics on small and cosmetic topics.”
Has the leadership change made any difference?
Some of the young leaders have entered parliament and government, while others remain in activist groups. The divisions between these two groups of people are becoming more apparent as they often clash over how much to compromise with the old political establishment.
Those who were elected to parliament in March mostly belong to the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), or National Independent Party.
“One of the most exciting and progressive parts is the emergence of youth in politics as most of the parliamentarians are young, educated and have much aspiration to change,” Bishnu Raj Upreti, a public policy analyst and research director at Nepal Centre for Contemporary Research (NCCR), told Al Jazeera.
“The leadership change appears to have brought some positive differences, particularly in the working style of the current prime minister,” Lamichhane said.
However, experts say the younger generation of MPs – those elected under the NIP/RSP banner as well as those in older parties – remains constrained by party hierarchies and Nepal’s entrenched political system.
“They are inexperienced and are still heavily controlled by party structures,” Upreti said. He added that wider generational distrust between young politicians and the older establishment also complicated reform efforts.
“Leadership change has started. It is good, but not enough.”
This has resulted in an apparent divide between those in government positions and those in activist groups.
In May this year, the new government invited Gen Z activists – mostly civil society leaders and youth activists – to give their input for constitutional amendments. However, 25 of the 29 invited boycotted the meeting, saying deeper systemic problems and earlier agreements with the previous administration were being ignored, according to Gen Z activist Aayush Basyal.
Basyal, who was present at the protests last year, said it was “really tricky” for young activists to adjust to working inside the system alongside the new Gen‑Z politicians now in office. “They are trying to cooperate with the authorities they previously challenged, while still pushing for the radical changes they demanded on the streets,” she explained.
“Now the Gen Z protesters of that time are divided into different factions, and some of the factions are vehemently opposing some work of government,” Upreti explained.
“So those who oppose the government are not in positive booking of the government,” Upreti added.
Where are the protesters now?
On Tuesday, families of protesters who were killed in last year’s crackdown organised a formal commemoration at what used to be Nepal’s parliament building.
After functioning as the parliament building for almost two decades, it shut down last year when Gen Z protesters trespassed and set fire to it.
Basyal said the authorities provided tight security amid rumours that some groups might try to incite violence, noting that Nepal’s “media economy” often amplifies sensational incidents even when only a few people are involved.
In the meantime, however, the divide within the Gen Z movement is becoming more stark, particularly what some see as a failure by the new leaders to advocate for protesters.
“The injured protesters have generally received medical treatment and certain monetary compensation,” Lamicchane said.
“However, the concept of compensation remains broader than financial support alone. In my view, the true compensation would be the fulfilment of the promises and objectives that inspired the Gen Z movement and the subsequent formation of a new government.”
Basyal said that while some of the people involved in the movement are now MPs or cabinet ministers, others, from poor, minority backgrounds, who lack money and influence, are still in jail and cannot speak up for themselves.
“There are people still in jail, officially more than 900 and unofficially, maybe like 1,600 plus, who are in jail for arson,” Basyal said.
He said it was troubling that these protesters remain in jail, suggesting this risks becoming “institutionalised” and raising questions over whether the government is effectively celebrating impunity.
Activists, he added, hope the new administration will treat these detainees better, but “that is yet to be seen.”
What still needs to change?
Analysts say structural changes are necessary.
“Although the government has promised reforms, particularly through changes in laws and policies, these commitments have not yet been substantially realised,” Lamichhane said.
Upreti noted that the new government has not begun any structural changes at all.
“Structural changes have to start with changing existing laws and bringing in new laws and policies,” he said.
“From what we’ve seen so far, the new leaders don’t appear to be prioritising that. Massive reform of the bureaucracy is a precondition to achieving the aims of the Gen Z movement, but the government has not yet done meaningful work in this line.”
He added that another important element is to develop better relations and deeper trust with Nepal’s two giant neighbours, India and China, since Nepal’s economic progress and geopolitical balance depend on them.
Experts also say Nepal’s highly centralised system of government is a major obstacle to deeper structural reform.
“Strong collaboration of the federal movement with provincial and local government is the necessary condition for advancing economic progress, but they ignore provincial and local government as they have no provincial and local government. It is not a good approach,” Upreti said.
“Structural changes are necessary and they come from internal power dynamics such as urban-rural divide, inherent conflict between educated elites and peasant farmers and economic and bureaucratically institutionalised corruption,” Patel said. “It is hard to imagine that there will be any structural changes, aiming to making people’s lives better, at this stage and under current circumstances.
“In short, Nepal has missed yet another opportunity from a popular uprising that would fundamentally address Nepali peoples desire for change.”
What’s next?
“This new government seems to be deeply under its own weight of expectation,” Basyal said.
He explained that historically in Nepal, there’s been an “expectation gap”: people expect a lot, governments deliver little, and that gap fuels frustration.
He said that this government has “not been transparent”.
“The prime minister, he doesn’t speak a lot in the parliament. And when he did address the parliament a few times, that was pretty chaotic, as well,” Basyal added.
“If this issue remains unaddressed, it may lead to a second wave of public disenchantment.”
Lamichhane said, however, it will take time to see if the government can address the challenges it faces.
“Let’s hope and wait for changes. Now, it’s not the appropriate time to criticise the government, as Nepal has faced an apocalypse in the form of a massive flood.”
Meanwhile, flags in Nepal flew at half-mast on Monday as the country mourned the more-than-1,300 people who are known to have died in catastrophic floods which ravaged the border region with Tibet late last month. Thousands more people are still missing.
Basyal noted that Nepal’s current constitution was finalised and promulgated in September 2015, only after the devastating April and May earthquakes created urgent political pressure to end nearly a decade of deadlock.
“It feels like the nation comes together only during national disasters. So we’re really hopeful that this sense of unity that is right now will help.”
Way back in the 1970s, the City Section ruled in top quarterbacks. In the city of Granada Hills alone, there were two future NFL quarterbacks competing: John Elway at Granada Hills and Tom Ramsey at Kennedy. Add another future NFL quarterback, Jay Schroeder, and the City Section could compare itself to anyone in the nation.
This season, City teams have been going to the air to take advantage of their experienced, athletic quarterbacks.
From Chris Fields III at Carson to super sophomore Thaddeus Breaux at Hamilton, these quarterbacks know what they are doing. Let’s look at others.
South East’s Bryce Johnson has 743 yards passing and five touchdowns in three games. Jered Smith of Verdugo Hills has 462 yards passing and six touchdowns in two games. Noa Tuvalu of Banning has thrown for 837 yards and seven touchdowns with only one interception.
Seth Solorio of San Pedro set a school record with seven touchdown passes last week against Westchester. Freshman Exavier Johnson of Birmingham came through with 171 yards passing and two touchdowns last week in a loss to Moorpark. Robert Holohan of Palisades has five touchdown throws. Danniel Flowers of Crenshaw has led his team to a 3-0 start with his versatility to run and pass.
Gerald Torres of King/Drew has 800 yards passing and seven touchdowns. Nathaniel Cadet of Marshall has passed for nine touchdowns.
It’s a good sign that teams are getting their offensive lines to provide enough protection to let quarterbacks shine.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
A MUCH-LOVED ride has closed at Disneyland Paris ahead of a huge makeover.
Crush’s Coaster at Disney Adventure World is now closed until summer 2027 as it undergoes its biggest upgrade in 20 years.
Crush’s Coaster is closed for the next 10 months at Disneyland ParisCredit: AlamyThe ride is one of Disneyland Paris’ most popular, with even celebs such as Will Mellor (pictured) on itCredit: Alamy
The coaster, which takes riders through the East Australian Current, will have technical elements replaced as well as sections of the track.
In the second phase of the refurbishment, the coaster will be tested to ensure it functions properly before reopening.
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Of course, the upgrade will refresh the ride’s show elements as well, such as repainting and repairs.
Crush’s Coaster was last closed in 2015 for six months but this project will be the biggest in the ride’s history.
Many people have taken to social media to express their excitement about the upgrade: “I’m happy about the refurb but I’ve booked for November. Massively underrated ride.”
Another person added: “Glad to see this happening.”
There are a number of other closures taking place at the theme park including Peter Pan’s flight, which is closed until September 19.
Pirate’s Beach is currently closed and will be until October 23 for a safety inspection as well as replacement of the ground padding.
The ride will be refurbished and reopen in summer 2027Credit: Alamy
Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups will be closed between September 21 and October 2 to repaint the floor.
La Tanière du Dragon will close on October 5 until the middle of the month for servicing.
TELLURIDE, Colo. — Standing ovations at film festivals are a rite: part appreciation, part obligation, part a need to stretch your legs after sitting for a couple of hours.
But for an audience to explode and roar their approval in the middle of a movie? That rarely, if ever, happens.
Except it did, midway through the Telluride Film Festival world premiere of Jesse Eisenberg‘s delightful comedy “The Debut.” The applause followed a scene between Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti that took its audience on such an exhilarating journey that there was almost no choice but to cheer in admiration, as if to say: What did we just see?
Sitting in the theater, Eisenberg, producer Emma Stone and Paul Giamatti looked at each other and asked themselves the same question but for a different reason.
“It was hard to process and, at the same time, just so affirming,” Eisenberg told me a couple of hours after the premiere.
The next day, sitting down to grab a quick bite with Moore and Giamatti, that giddy feeling had not dissipated, though, truth be told, they knew this scene was an all-timer from the moment they read it.
Let’s set the stage for you in a way that won’t spoil this constantly surprising film when it arrives in theaters in December and starts piling up acclaim and awards for all concerned.
Moore plays Mona, a meek, thoroughly unseen wife and mother who impulsively decides to audition for a community theater production of a musical titled “Nosy Neighbors,” despite having no experience apart from singing in the church choir when she was 13. The director Jerry (Giamatti) cuts her tryout short, sending her home, only to relent when the woman he’d already cast (Bernadette Peters!) drops out and he has nowhere else to turn.
Mona is, as Moore puts it, a “nice lady.” But she’s not a natural performer. She can’t get into character playing Miss Danielle, the show’s tough, toolbelt-wearing building super. So Jerry takes Mona aside because that’s what he does. As her cast mates note, “He’s going to drag you through the s— and the mud and you have to be ready for the s— and the mud.”
It turns out, though, that Jerry is the one who isn’t ready for what’s about to happen. Sitting in a chair on the theater stage, Jerry holds an envelope containing cash, telling Mona that it’s her job to make him hand over the rent. It’s an acting-class exercise designed to make you listen, react and dig into your character’s truth. Moore begins with a whisper and builds to a roar as Mona improvises a manic rant that involves rats and the plague.
Suffice to say, Jerry hands over the rent.
“When I read that scene, I stood up, put my iPad down and started doing laps around my dining room table,” Moore remembers. “I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I was just like, ‘Oh my God!Aaaaaaagh!‘”
“It was five pages long,” Giamatti marvels. “Jerry just needs Mona to be better. And then he sees that maybe she could actually be kind of great. He cracks her open and he’s like, ‘Oh wow, who is this lady? Who the hell is this?’ The funny thing about that scene is s— like that happens in classes.” He turns to Moore. “Did that ever happen to you?”
“I had an audition for a university, actually, where they threw chairs in front of me while I did the monologue and made me climb over the chairs,” Moore says, laughing. “I look back on that now. I was 18 years old and I was like, “What?’ Yeah. It was really strange. They’re trying to get you to react authentically and be alive.”
She smiles at Giamatti. “Hopefully when you get to be our age, you don’t need that.”
Though the scene has Mona improvising, it was performed as written, down to every last pause.
“Everyone keeps asking if we improvised and I’m like, ‘Hell, no,’” Moore says. “Jesse’s like the Coens. Everything’s there on the page.”
Adds Giamatti, “It’s incredibly specific. You follow his punctuation. The commas matter in his writing.”
“What’s so f—ing delightful about about working with Paul is that his sense of timing and rhythm is so tight,” Moore continues. “That scene is a set piece that requires you to work in tandem and you need somebody to hit it back with the same intensity and the same speed.”
When Eisenberg first met Moore, he told her flat-out, “I don’t want you to worry about this scene.” He knew it was a bear, with pages and pages of lines, so he told her he’d have a teleprompter on set.
“That section, all that crazy s— she goes off on, that would be really hard,” Giamatti says.
“And I was like, ‘Phew, that’s fantastic,’ because I knew all I would do would be to worry about all those lines and be so scared,” Moore says. “But because he said that to me, I never worried. And I didn’t need the teleprompter.”
They shot the scene in one morning, just Moore and Giamatti alone on the stage with the rest of the crew downstairs in the video village. There was an energy on set, spiked by an unusual number of visitors (“People knew,” Giamatti says) and then they went to work.
“I remember the first time you really hit that speech and they called cut, I just couldn’t stop grinning,” Giamatti tells Moore. “And I reached out and just kind of held you for a second because I was like, ‘That was amazing.’ I wanted to convey just how great it was, what you were doing.”
Moore beams. “I just love him. Just love him, love him, love him. I have so much gratitude for Paul.”
“To watch you be a bad actor was so hilarious and then you would you would modulate it and change it,” Giamatti continues. “Watching her was the experience that Jerry was having. It was such a joy.”
The scene is the beginning of a simpatico relationship between Jerry and Mona, mentor and protege, predicated on the power of imagination and how it can make outcasts feel seen and heard.
“Everyone wants to be known as who we are, even though it’s so scary for us to really reveal it,” Moore says. “There’s a real mind-altering power in just being yourself.”
Known for being ‘The GC’ on screen and larger than life, viewers will see a different side to Gemma Collins in her new Sky documentary series.
Gemma Collins has not had a lot to celebrate whilst making her Sky series.
Gemma Collins admits she has had “the worst year of her life” which corresponded with a time she had cameras following her every move.
The former TOWIE star, also known by her celebrity persona ‘GC’, and was due to get married to partner Rami and start a family during filming for Sky documentary series called ‘Gemma Collins: Everything. All At Once’. The series was originally called Four Weddings and a Baby, but as Gemma admits “things didn’t go to plan”.
Her relationship with Rami has had issues, the pair have also been sadly unable to conceive, and worst of all Gemma’s beloved mum Joan died at the end of July after several years of health issues. Admitting her life and TV series hasn’t been going to plan, 45-year-old Gemma said: “Mum’s been unwell for sixteen years and I’ve been dealing with that on the side, but her health started going downhill during filming and she passed away last month[actually July 2026].
“My fiancé Rami has also been struggling with his mental health and using alcohol to cope, and on top of that we had fertility issues. It was like drowning. It was the worst year of my life. I couldn’t keep hiding it.
“Being The GC was escapism. I could put the make-up on, get the hair big, and forget what was going on in the real world. But there’s been a real turn in media where people want to see the real me again. They’re sick of the bluff. I’m not afraid and I know I don’t need to deal with all this on my own.”
In the eight part series viewers will see Gemma embark on her fertility journey, and she questions whether she has left things too late, putting her career before having a family. On trying for a baby Gemma says: “Rami and I went to the Portland, and I started thinking maybe there could be a miracle. We could get an egg donor and make it work. But, as you’ll see on the show, it got increasingly difficult.
“I still have Tristan, and my nephews. I’ve known Tristan since he was three: I did his nappies, I gave him his bottles. I love that boy. With my mum gone, I’m going to be the mum of the family now, the matriarch, and I’m really happy and excited for that. If it’s meant to happen, my mum will send it to me, and a miracle will happen. If it doesn’t, I’m at peace with that.”
Gemma admitted she found filming on some days very hard but insisted she had to continue. The other deeply personal issue in the series is the loss of her mum Joan, and Gemma allows the cameras into moments like when she deals like this and when the bravado she usually uses on screen drops.
She said: “The camera crews are at your house and you’re thinking, ‘This is my life, it’s so s**t. How can I let people see it?’. But unless you go through hard times, I don’t think you grow as a person. This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also the thing I’m most proud of.”
On her mum Gemma added: “My mum passed away peacefully, and we were all in the room. She’s come back to me in so many ways already, which gives me great comfort. She comes back to me in spiritual ways and sends me signs. There was this butterfly in the house towards the last few days of my mum living, and it wouldn’t go away. When she passed, Tristan went to me, ‘There’s Nanny’. He went, ‘Nanny, if that’s you, flap your wings ten times,’ and it did.”
* Gemma Collins: Everything. All At Once launches 15 September on Sky and streaming service NOW.
