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SOME like to jet off when the weather gets chilly here in the UK – but what about those who like to feel Christmassy in November?

Sun Travel has revealed our favourite destinations across both Britain and the world that make us feel the most festive, with cosy fireside pubs, snowy scenes, Christmas markets and Santa’s actual home.

Cotswolds, UK

Sometimes you just can’t beat a festive staycation – Deputy Travel Editor, Kara Godfrey said: “One of my favourite things to do at Christmas is drive through pretty country villages and go on a free light show.

“And having grown up in the Cotswolds, I wasn’t short of huge beautiful manor houses and pubs wanting to show off their Christmas lights.

“I recommend driving from Burford to Broadway, with stops in Bourton-on-the-Water and Moreton-in-Marsh where you will see them a mile away because of the sheer volume of lights.

“Then if you need a cosy pub to warm up in, head over to the town of Witney where you have a huge amount of choice on the high street.

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“My favourites are the Holly Bush, with low ceiling and delicious mulled cider, or The Plough, the town’s oldest pub dating back to the 17th century.”

Copenhagen, Denmark

After a recent trip to the Danish capital of Copenhagen, Travel Reporter Alice Penwill recommends heading there to embrace the cold.

She said: “Copenhagen thrives during autumn and winter – and another plus point is that the city is dressed up for Christmas from early November.

“Festive markets pop up with new stalls – they sell everything from Christmas decorations to tasty treats and my favourite, hot chocolate or spiced Gløgg.

“Make sure to grab a Danish pastry from one of the many bakeries in the city and then take a mooch around Strøget – the famous shopping street. Or head down to the famous colourful Nyhavn with plenty of outside bars underneath outdoor heaters so you won’t feel too chilly.

“For a bit of peace and quiet, head to the Botanical Gardens where the trees have bright yellow and orange leaves.”

Lapland, Finland

Head of Sun Travel (Digital), Caroline McGuire suggests heading to Finland: “This is an obvious one, but I took my child to Lapland with TUI last
year and nothing can compare to being in Santa’s ACTUAL homeland at
Christmas.

“Yes, it’s exhausting getting up before the crack of dawn to catch a
flight, but the airline staff were a joy from check-in onwards, where
they greeted travellers with festive headgear.

“On the plane, we enjoyed a cooked breakfast and sang Xmas songs,
before landing and being immediately sized up for our Arctic snow
gear.

“A coach transfer complete with its own elf guide takes you to the snow
village, for a day of gingerbread decorating, snowmobiling, husky
sleigh riding, ice hotel exploration and a visit to the big man
himself.

“Then you’re flying home with a plane Christmas dinner.
it’s a full-on itinerary, but having done 4 nights in Lapland before,
the one-day trip makes sure to tick off all the big hitters every
family dreams of.”

Edinburgh, Scotland

Travel Reporter Cyann Fielding said: “Harry Potter fans and festive fanatics must head to Edinburgh around the Christmas period.

“The Scottish capital is special all-year round, but at Christmas it comes alive with decorated shop fronts, dazzling lights and a vast market.

“For a refreshing hike with the wind in your hair and spectacular views, head up Arthur‘s Seat. If you prefer to wander, then head to W Bow – a 17th century cobbled street with endless independent businesses set behind the colourful facades of buildings.

“If you do like Harry Potter, make sure to nip into Museum Context, which sells wizardy merch. And for a hot drink make sure to head into Black Medicine Coffee Co, which is super cosy – so much so I didn’t want to leave.

“The Christmas Market transforms the city centre into a festive village and has a great mix of everything including traditional markets, rides and food and drink stalls.”

Scottish Sun’s Travel Editor Heather Lowrie also recommends Edinburgh for a festive visit.

She said: “The city’s historic Princes Street Gardens are awash with festive lights which brighten any gloomy night sky and you’ll find there are merry-go-rounds, a big wheel and other funfair rides for youngsters.

“There’s also the ‘try if you dare’ Around the World Starflyer – an 80m tall tower with swings that spin you around for views of the city  which probably rival those Santa gets from his sleigh as he flies through the sky.

“In George Street (just behind iconic Princess Street) you’ll find an ice-rink,  so grab some skates and go gliding  and dancing (and falling if you’re anything  like me!).

“And new for this year is glittering frozen world of The Ice Queen’s Castle, complete with ice carvings and intricate wall etchings – the perfect winter wonderland.”

New York, USA

Assistant Travel Editor Sophie Swietochowski suggests heading to the Big Apple for festive cheer.

She said: “This may sound cliché, but there really is no better time to visit New York City than during the festive period. Perhaps I’ve attached some sentimental value to the city at Christmas as it was around this time of year that I visited for the first time ever.

“Woozy from jet-lag, I gazed in awe at neon lights beaming from the mighty skyscrapers of Times Square, while city-goers dashed past, wrapped in their woollen scarves, shielding from the bitter chill.

“The Rockefeller Tree, one of the city’s most prized festive traditions, dazzled in a blur of tiny, multi-coloured lights, while a queue formed outside Macy’s department store, whose windows were drenched in holly and splashes of red and white paint.

“It was everything I’d expected, my very own Big Apple rom-com.
I’ve returned to the city around Christmas three times since – and it gets no less magical.

“My routine rarely changes: a visit to Bryant Park’s markets, laden with wooden stalls – grab a hot choccie while you’re here and watch the skaters twirl on an ice rink.

“I’ll always visit Bloomingdale’s, too, on Fifth Avenue to buy a tacky tree decoration, making sure to stroll past Saks, which puts on a Christmas light show every year.

“The bars of Manhattan often feel packed, but the atmosphere is electric as people pass back mulled wine through the crowd, full of festive enthusiasm.”

Reykjavik, Iceland

As its name suggests Iceland is a great spot for anyone seeking cooler weather, which is rare for Deputy Travel Editor, Kara Godfrey: “As someone who hates the cold, you will normally find me in warmer climates during Christmas, having spent Decembers in Morocco, St Kitts and Dubai.

“But one place I didn’t mind braving the cold for was Iceland – after all, the point is to feel the chill!

“There’s nothing better than wrapping up in all the layers before heading out to see stunning geysers, dramatic waterfalls and icy landscapes, ending by warming up in the famous Blue Lagoon.

“I highly recommend staying at the Grandi by Center Hotel in Reykjavik. I spent the evenings with glasses of wine and board games in the lobby, overlooked by twinkling Christmas tree lights and a roaring fire.”

Pitlochry, Scotland

Lynn Kernan, Features Editor at The Scottish Sun said: “To me there is nothing more festive than being curled up in front of a roaring fire with a twinkling tree and a warming dram.

“And that’s exactly what you get in Pitlochry’s Port-Na-Craig inn.

“The little guest house, right on the River Tummel and in the shadow of Perthshire’s snow-capped mountains, dates back to the 1600s and knows how to do an old school Christmas in style.

“Its dining room is transformed into a winter wonderland at this time of year, with glittering baubles hanging from the ceiling and festive trinkets adorning every surface.

“Inside, it’s breathtaking for a festive fan – while outside, the beer garden is an illuminated sanctuary.

“The inn is in Pitlochry, one of Scotland’s prettiest towns with cute cafes, independent shops and top notch restaurants which all make an effort at this time of year.

“It’s also where the Enchanted Forest is held in the run up to the festive season. The nearby Faskally Wood is brought to life with stunning light shows in October and November.

“If you’re looking for me in December I’ll be at the inn, with a single malt, marvelling at the decadent decorations and singing Jingle Bells.”

Luxembourg

Head of Sun Travel (Digital), Caroline McGuire added: “Luxembourg isn’t exactly must-visit destination among European
capitals, but the city comes into its own at Christmas time.

“Best explored on foot (which allows for extra mulled wine), the old
town of Luxembourg city is both grand and quaint – and perfect for
exploring in chilly weather, when you can nip into the bars and
bakeries for a warming drink.

“There are also Christmas markets spread throughout the city as part of
the annual Winterlights festival, which also features festive
concerts, exhibitions, performances and crafts for kids.

“Given how quick the flight is to Luxembourg (1 hour and 15 minutes)
and the time it takes to get from the airport to the city centre (20
minutes by tram), this is a really easy trip to do in just 24 hours.”

Lisbon, Portugal

Travel Reporter Alice Penwill suggests a short trip over the one popular European spot. She said: “Yes, Portugal is beautiful in the summer, but the city of Lisbon is easy to explore at any time of year.

“I went to the city two years ago and weather-wise it was actually fairly mild but still very festive, especially as the shops had the lights on display.

“Major attractions include Wonderland Lisboa and Rossio Christmas Market plus you still have to take a ride on the tram and of course, take a walk on the famous Pink Street.“

Cairngorms, Scotland

Scottish Sun’s Travel Editor Heather Lowrie said: “Situated in historic Royal Deeside – just a few miles from the Royal family’s private Balmoral Castle  – the beautiful Cairngorms destination almost guarantees snow, transforming it into a  true winter wonderland.

“The village celebrates Christmas with a traditional Christmas lights switch on, with carols and mulled wine and there’s even a reindeer parade on Christmas Eve.

“The Cranford Guesthouse is famed for its delicious home baking and will be adorned with decorations and lights to turn up that festive feeling.

“If money is no object then book into the award-winning Fife Arms Hotel, where they even put on a Fondue Hut from November where you can indulge in all things melted cheese or if you’d rather get back to nature then go glamping at the dog friendly Braemar Glamping Pods and go star-gazing.

“Skiers will be in Christmas heaven too, as the Glenshee & Lecht Ski Centres are nearby where Christmas on the slopes is a real thing.

“Head out at night with Mountain Skies Braemar where, if you’re lucky, you  might catch a glimpse of the Northern lights!”

Tallinn, Estonia

Travel Reporter Cyann Fielding has got some pending Christmas plans to Eastern Europe. She said: “Next week, I will be heading off to Tallinn – the capital of Estonia – which is often dubbed a fairytale city.

“I’m super excited to head to the Christmas market in the medieval Old Town’s Town Hall Square, with a huge decorated tree – the first tree to ever be displayed in Europe – and carol performances.

“The market has also previously been named one of the best in Europe so I am keen to see whether it lives up to the title. For food and drink, the gingerbread cookies are meant to be a hit, as well as the hot mulled wine, known as glogi.

“Temperatures in November sit around zero degrees, so I am hoping there will be snow to make it feel even more Christmassy.”

St Albans, UK

Some like to head to the city for Christmas, but Assistant Travel Editor Sophie Swietochowski said she prefers to stick to the countryside.

She said: “What can beat a proper British pub at Christmas time? Several worn armchairs scattered around a crackling fire, a pile of board games on the shelf in the corner, and a heated vat of mulled wine propped on the bar.

“The city of St Albans is home to the kind of stereotypical cottage-style boozers you see in festive rom-coms like The Holiday. It’s also the pub capital of the UK, claiming to have more pubs per square mile than any other region in the country.

“Many of these drinking holes are listed properties, so they have that higgledy-piggledy feel to them with timber beams and low ceilings that enhance the cosy factor.

“Talking of cosy, the recently opened Cosy Club restaurant-cum-bar is a great spot for those looking to amp up the party, The menu features jam-packed burgers and pasta dishes, alongside heady cocktails, all of which are cracking value.

“During the festive season The Odyssey, a restored Art Deco cinema, shows classic Christmas movies, like It’s A Wonderful Life – book one of the table seats in the downstairs section and order yourself a glass of wine and cheese platter from the bar.

“Pop into one of the many local bakeries for a festive treat – Brad and Dills, a coffee and bagel joint founded by a local duo, does a cracking brew and often has fun spins on classic festive flavours crammed into their moreish bagels.”

London, UK

Of course, how could you leave the country’s capital off the list? Head of Sun Travel (Digital), Caroline McGuire said: “Brits spend a fortune travelling to festive destinations abroad when we have one of the best places for celebrating Christmas on our doorstep – London.

“In my opinion, there are few places in the world that are more
festive, starting with the traditional London pub.

“Paper hat on your head, pint in hand, everyone packed in like sardines as with condensation mists the drafty Victorian window panes and they sing
along to Fairytale of New York – there’s nothing that signals December
has arrived more.

“But of course, there is plenty to do other than pubs too. It has
plenty of haters, but Winter Wonderland is one of the biggest
Christmas attractions in the world and you can choose everything from
market shopping to fancy grub, beer halls, fair grounds, Santa’s
grotto and ice bars.

“Don’t fancy that one? How about the ice skating at Somerset House with
the fancy Virgin Clubhouse for a drink afterwards, or Glide at
Battersea – or even the new rink in Leicester Square.

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“And then there’s all the Christmas theatre shows – The Snowman, Elf,
The Nutcracker, Santa Needs a Wee, Jack And The Beanstalk… there are
enough shows on and off London’s West End to see one every day now
until December 25.

“The restaurants are all decked out in their festive best, the shops
are the best in the country… so unless you’re looking for some peace
and quiet, there’s no better place get in the festive mood.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Adam Gray was one of only six House Democrats — and the only one from California — who voted with Republicans in favor of a deal to end the government shutdown, and there was a calculated reason behind that decision.

Gray, a first-term Democrat from the Central Valley, is running for reelection in a majority Latino district that national Republicans are expected to heavily target as they defend their narrow House majority in next fall’s midterm elections. Last year, Gray won his seat by 187 votes, and although redistricting has since made the 13th District more favorable to Democrats, it remains highly competitive.

The Merced Democrat’s vote reflects the political reality of representing one of the nation’s few battleground districts. Gray is positioning himself as an independent-minded Democrat willing to buck leadership on politically divisive issues. The shutdown deal gave him a rare opportunity to put that in practice, even at the risk of frustrating members of his own party.

“I know it is not comfortable, and I know there’s people that are going to be mad at me,” Gray told The Times. “But I am not here to win an argument. I am here to actually help fix problems with people in my community, and I know I did the right thing.”

Democratic representatives and senators for weeks were steadfast in opposing a shutdown deal that did not include language to extend Obamacare tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year, and as a result, leave millions of Americans with higher healthcare costs.

In Gray’s district, more than half of residents rely on Medi-Cal or have coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, making them vulnerable to rising healthcare costs — a pocketbook issue that is likely to factor into an already competitive congressional race.

Beyond healthcare, nearly 48,000 families in his largely rural district rely on food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, according to the latest data provided by the Department of Agriculture. Those benefits were put at risk during the shutdown as funding for the federal program commonly called food stamps was caught up in legal disputes.

As the shutdown dragged on without meaningful negotiations on healthcare, Gray said, he grew concerned that Republicans were too comfortable “using vulnerable Americans as political leverage.”

Ultimately, Gray was among just 13 Democrats — six in the House, seven in the Senate — who went against their party to end the shutdown that had dragged on an historic 43 days.

“The government is reopening because Democrats were willing to compromise,” Gray said.

The deal, which was signed by President Trump last week, will fund the government through January 2026 and reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown. It will also fund SNAP through September 2026, a provision that Gray says he wanted to secure because he worries that partisanship could lead to another shutdown in January.

Republicans attack his position

Although Gray voted with Republicans over the shutdown, national Republican operatives still see his seat as a main target ahead of next year’s election — and there is good reason for that.

The seat has a history of party flipping.

In 2024, Gray won his seat by 187 votes, the slimmest margin of any race in the country. His opponent, Republican John Duarte, who cast himself a centrist in the race, had only held the seat for one term before being beat. (And he defeated Gray two years earlier by just 564 votes.)

President Trump carried the 13th last year by five points, underscoring the competitiveness of the Central Valley district which backed Joe Biden in the first Biden-Trump matchup of 2020.

The passage of Proposition 50 has made the district safer for Democrats as the new congressional map shifts parts of Stockton, Modesto and northern Stanislaus County into the district, while removing more conservative, rural territory west of Fresno. Still, it remains a highly competitive district.

Like Duarte, Gray has positioned himself as a centrist, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from portraying him as being from the party’s far-left flank.

Christian Martinez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, is now focusing on Gray’s voting history on the shutdown as a reason to criticize the incumbent. Specifically, how Gray in September abstained from voting on a bill that would have prevented the shutdown.

“Instead of delivering results for Californians, out-of-touch Democrat Adam Gray is too busy appeasing his radical socialist base, and now he’s fully responsible for holding Americans hostage with the longest government shutdown in history,” Martinez said.

Martinez added that “hardworking Californians paid the price for his refusal to vote to keep the government open, and next November, they’ll send him packing.”

Gray is now facing a Republican challenge from former Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln. When Lincoln announced his bid on Nov. 6, before the shutdown deal vote, he criticized Gray for not doing enough to prevent the shutdown in the first place.

“Washington politicians like Adam Gray have fallen in line with a failed liberal agenda that’s made life less affordable and less safe,” Lincoln said in a statement.

Moving forward, Gray sees the vote as an opportunity to reset negotiations and find a bipartisan solution before funding runs out again on Jan. 30, 2026.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Gray said. “I hope my colleagues have the courage to do the right thing over the next days.”

Back in his district, Democrats have had a mixed reaction to his vote. As for his congressional colleagues, they have not offered up much criticism, choosing to let Gray explain his vote to the ever-changeable 13th District.

At a White House event on Nov. 6 announcing price cuts for those blockbuster weight-loss drugs, Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz made an astonishing claim.

Because the price cuts would vastly improve access to the prescription drugs, Oz said, by next year’s midterm elections in November, “Americans will lose 135 billion pounds.”

As though to make sure nobody missed the magnitude of the achievement, Oz hit the word “billion” with all its plosive force: “135 BILLION pounds.”

Well, that would be some achievement. The U.S. population is just over 340 million. Do the math, and Oz’s figure works out to an average weight loss of 347 pounds for every man, woman and child in America.

Oz called the calculation “our estimate based on company numbers,” referring to Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the makers of the most popular drugs in the category. His figure was a vast improvement over what he said was his agency’s original estimate of 125 million pounds.

Perhaps Oz just misspoke; it’s certainly not uncommon for people to substitute “billions” for “millions” in quotidian speech. (More on that shortly.) But his casual retailing of obviously bogus arithmetic points to a broader issue with the numbers the Trump White House routinely injects into its policy statements.

The administration’s suspect arithmetic is in many respects deliberately aimed at portraying some condition as better than the real numbers show.

It’s also reliant, however, on people’s proverbial dislike, even fear, of math — whether we’re talking about calculating the tip at a restaurant or the statistical risk of dying from a lightning strike or in a terrorist attack. The mathematician John Allen Poulos described this phenomenon as “innumeracy,” the title of his classic 1989 book on the topic.

As is the case in all hierarchical organizations, the problem starts at the top. President Trump loves to define his ostensible political achievements and goals with big numbers. For example, he claimed in August to have cut prescription drug prices “by 1,200, 1,300 and 1,400, 1,500%.”

To an unwary listener, that sounds like another major achievement. In mathematical terms, though, it’s impossible: A 1,500% reduction would mean reducing a $100 drug bill to negative $1,400, meaning that the drug company would be paying you to use its product.

In recent weeks, Trumpian innumeracy has cropped up in official dispatches not only in relation to healthcare, but also home mortgages and (especially) inflation. The partisan value of mathematical deception is manifest. But it’s also dangerous.

“One rarely discussed consequence of innumeracy is its link with pseudoscience,” Poulos wrote. That’s at the core of the anti-vaccine movement and the doubts sown by partisan actors in the science of COVID-19‘s origins — specifically, the evidence-free assertions that the virus was concocted in a Chinese laboratory.

Let’s examine the most recent displays of bogus math from the Trump administration.

Healthcare math: Oz employed his weight-loss conjecture to dress up the effect of Trump’s price negotiations with Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The figure he offered as the administration’s initial estimate of 125 million pounds lost by next November’s election was not especially impressive, as it implied an average loss of about one-third of a pound per capita.

If we adjust these stats to cover the 12% of American adults who have taken the drugs — about 3.12 million users — that’s a loss of 40 pounds per user, which is at the very high end of per-user weight loss experiences. A 2023 study found that about one-third of users lost more than 5% of their body weight after about 18 months; for a 250-pound user, that’s a loss of about 12.5 pounds in a year and a half.

I asked the Department of Health and Human Services, Oz’s parent agency, to clarify his statement but didn’t receive a reply. I also asked Novo Nordisk and Lilly what “company numbers” he might have been referring to. Lilly didn’t reply, and Novo Nordisk emailed me to say it had nothing to say on the matter.

Mortgage math: As an ostensible solution to the diminishing affordability of home ownership, the administration advanced the idea of giving homebuyers the option of 50-year mortgages. That’s a big departure from the standard 30-year, fixed-rate home loan, the most popular option.

Trump endorsed this fundamentally unserviceable idea with a Truth Social post in which he depicted himself as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s equal as a “great American President” — indeed, as going one better than FDR, to whom he attributed the introduction of the 30-year mortgage.

(Actually, under FDR the standard mortgage, a three-to-five-year loan with interest-only payments ending in a balloon payment and required refinancing, gave way to fully amortized loans that would be paid off in 15 years; the 30-year mortgage didn’t become the standard until the 1950s.)

What makes the 50-year mortgage such a chuckleheaded product? Let’s do the math.

Here’s a nugget of truth about it: The monthly payment on the same size mortgage at the same rate would be lower on a 50-year term than on a 30-year term. On a $400,000 loan at 6%, the interest and principal payment would be $2,106 for the former versus $2,398 on the latter, an apparent savings of $292 a month. For borrowers living on the edge, that’s a sizable difference.

Here are the catches, however. First, over the life of the loan, borrowers will pay much more in interest for the longer loan — in our examples, the total in interest on the 50-year loan comes to about $650,000, versus $461,000 over 30 years.

Moreover, it’s almost certain that lenders will charge a higher rate for the longer-term loan. No one is quite sure how much higher, but Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law conjectures that it might be higher by a percentage point or more. The monthly payment on a 50-year, $400,000 loan at 7% would be $2,407 — higher than the payment on the shorter loan at the lower rate — and the total interest paid over the term rises to about $774,500.

It’s true that very few borrowers pay off their entire mortgage; Americans stay in their homes an average of 12 years, real estate experts say. That brings the issue of home equity into play.

This is important because a home is the largest single investment for most Americans, with the growth of home equity the financial holy grail of home ownership. Yet equity grows much more slowly under the longer-term loan. At the beginning, most of the monthly payment goes to pay down interest, not principal.

After 12 years of payments, the holder of a 30-year, $400,000 loan at 6% would have accumulated nearly $84,000 in home equity. The holder of a 50-year loan would have accumulated only about $22,000 in equity. (If that loan were at 7%, the gain would be even less — only about $16,500.)

“Homeowners are not building much wealth with a 50-year mortgage,” economist Dean Baker observes.

The 50-year mortgage idea reportedly was sold to Trump by Bill Pulte, the real estate scion serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who’s best known as the instigator of the mortgage fraud accusations against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, and other Trump critics.

After his idea was pilloried by sources including the Wall Street Journal, Pulte stated in a tweet that it was one of “a wide arsenal of solutions” to housing costs. The only solutions he mentioned were assumable mortgages and portable mortgages. The first are loans that can be assumed by new buyers of existing homes, the second are loans that borrowers can apply to their own new homes.

These are pigs in a poke. Mortgage lenders generally are averse to carrying existing loans over to new borrowers or new properties, at least without new appraisals, credit checks and other paperwork. No one in the administration can wave a wand and make them happen. I asked Pulte’s agency to explain his thinking but received no reply.

That brings us to the White House’s inflation math.

On Nov. 10, after the government shutdown rendered the monthly inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics missing in action (perhaps permanently), the White House issued a statement asserting, “President Trump has tamed inflation.”

The statement drew heavily from a report on the consumer economy issued last week by the gig delivery company DoorDash, principally its Breakfast Basics Index, which showed a decline in breakfast prices of 14% from March through September. The index measures price movements for three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel and an avocado.

A couple of points about this: First, the company acknowledges that the driver of the index decline was the price of eggs; those for the other commodities were stable. Second, Trump has had nothing to do with the price of eggs. They’ve come down sharply since March because of the passing of the avian flu epidemic, which devastated flocks and accordingly the supply of fresh eggs. Finally, the price of eggs bottomed out in early October .

The White House tried to take credit for ending bird flu. “Egg prices are down because the Trump administration implemented a robust plan to tackle bird flu and increase egg production,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told me by email. “The bird flu crisis did not magically disappear.”

Nope, it didn’t: After a lull in cases this summer, bird flu is again on the rise, after a marked increase in infections in October. And — surprise! — that’s when egg prices started heading higher too. Anyway, Desai insisted that “the Trump administration’s policies have cooled inflation.”

DoorDash told me that although its report was published this month, its data collection ended in September. But the company’s full report shows price increases over the last year in baked, canned and jarred goods, and automotive supplies and clothing. The average price of a cheeseburger, soda and fries, it says, rose by 3.8% in the year through September.

The White House still is trying to hide the effects of its economic policies on inflation — especially its tariffs. Just last week, Trump moved to roll back tariffs on coffee, beef, bananas and other foodstuffs to bring prices down.

Despite Trump’s insistence that foreign exports pay the tariffs, his move is an implicit admission that U.S. consumers are paying the price. Desai explained Trump’s tariff climb down as demonstrating Trump’s “nimble, nuanced, and multi-faceted strategy on trade and tariffs.”

The bottom line is that one shouldn’t trust the math coming from this White House. If you do the calculations for yourself, you’ll see why.

England flanker Henry Pollock has been nominated for World Rugby’s Breakthrough Player of the Year.

The 20-year-old’s sensational rise includes two tries on his England debut against Wales in March, before selection for the British and Irish Lions’ tour of Australia.

Although he did not feature in a Lions Test, he has continued to shine for England, scoring a vital try against Australia at the start of November.

Northampton’s Pollock is known for his high energy, speed and immense work-rate, which has been used to good affect off the bench this autumn.

New Zealand’s Dutch-born lock Fabian Holland, South Africa wing Ethan Hooker and Australia’s cross-code star Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii are the other nominees.

France winger Louis Bielle-Biarrey, who was named the 2025 Six Nations Player of the Tournament, is nominated for World Rugby Player of the Year.

The 22-year-old scored eight tries – a record in a single championship – as France lifted the title for a 19th time.

Last year’s winner Pieter-Steph du Toit, who won the award in 2019 as well, is again nominated after helping South Africa win back-to-back Rugby Championships.

Fellow Springboks Malcolm Marx and Ox Nche are also up for the award, with Rassie Erasmus’ side topping the world rankings after an impressive year.

The winners of both awards, and the men’s international try of the year, will be announced on Saturday.

Canada lock Sophie de Goede was named Women’s Player of the Year in September, with England’s World Cup-winning head coach John Mitchell named World Rugby’s Coach of the Year.

Sabrina Carpenter brought her latest world tour in for a landing Sunday night at Crypto.com Arena, where the pop star will play half a dozen sold-out dates through Nov. 23 to wrap up her year-long road show behind 2024’s “Short n’ Sweet.”

I was at Crypto when Carpenter played the arena last November, just after “Short n’ Sweet” was nominated for six Grammys. (It went on to win prizes for pop vocal album and pop solo performance.) But since then she’s released a speedy follow-up LP, “Man’s Best Friend,” which itself earned another six Grammy nods this month, including album, record and song of the year.

So it seemed worth checking in on the tour again as Carpenter, 26, gets close to stepping offstage. At least for a moment, that is: Come April, she’ll be back in the spotlight to headline Coachella along with Karol G and Justin Bieber. Here are the seven best moments from Sunday’s concert:

1. Turns out that earlier visit to the Lakers’ home wasn’t quite as cheery as it seemed then. “This time last year, when I played this show, I was going through it,” Carpenter told the crowd Sunday night. “I was not in a good headspace, and thankfully because of that I was able to write a whole new album for you guys this year.”

“Man’s Best Friend” follows Carpenter’s breakup with the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, whom she seems to refer to in her song “Go Go Juice” when she threatens to drunk-dial an ex named Larry. “So thank you for Crypto last year,” she added, “’cause you really inspired ‘Man’s Best Friend’ and what was to come after that.”

2. Carpenter didn’t sing “Go Go Juice” on Sunday, though she did throw a few tunes from “Man’s Best Friend” into a set list still dominated by material from “Short n’ Sweet.” (“Short n’ Sweet” is the better of the two albums, so this was fine.)

For the lightly country-fied “Manchild,” the singer and her dancers did a cute little line dance, and Carpenter’s live band powered “Tears” with some appealingly skanky disco-funk energy. The evening’s surprise song — the product of a regular bit in which Carpenter selects a tune via spin the bottle — was the new album’s “Nobody’s Son,” which emulates Ace of Base’s Nordic reggae more precisely than anyone else has in the past 30 years.

3. In one of the show’s other recurring bits, Carpenter pretended to arrest one of her opening acts, Amber Mark, with a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs before singing the very horny “Juno.” That song features Carpenter simulating a different sexual position every night; here, well, you can look it up on TikTok.

4. Shout out to Carpenter’s guitar player, Caleb Nelson, whose ripping solo in “Juno” made the tune sound just like the theme from “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

5. “I’m gonna give you a little bit of history that you didn’t ask for,” Carpenter said about halfway through the concert, which ended up being a selective rundown of gigs she’s played in L.A. since she was a teenager on the Disney Channel.

“I played the Roxy when I was 16, and then I think played the Wiltern,” she said. “Then I played the Fonda and then the Wiltern again. And then I went to the … the Greek! Went to the Greek, of course — that was the best night ever.”

6. It says something about Carpenter’s commitment to the concept of her show, which takes place in the various rooms of a late-’60s/early-’70s-style bachelorette pad, that after dozens of tour dates she’s still performing one of her most emotionally cutting songs, “Sharpest Tool,” while sitting on a toilet.

7. Carpenter closed, as she always does, with “Espresso,” and if you’d assumed that by now this breezy electro-pop bop would inevitably have lost some of its fizz, think again. “I’m working late ’cause I’m a singer,” she sang as she strutted down a runway jutting onto the arena floor. It’s a task she’s still up to.

Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is serving four years in federal prison for using prostitutes in “freak-offs,” is under investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in connection with new allegations of sexual assault. A record producer alleges Combs assaulted him on two occasions.

The sheriff’s Special Victims Unit initiated the probe because one of the incidents occurred in East Los Angeles, according to Nicole Nishida, a department spokeswoman. The producer reported the incidents to police in Largo, Fla.

Florida-based music producer John Hay revealed in media interviews that he was the “John Doe” plaintiff from a civil lawsuit filed in July alleging assault.

The producer, who was not named by law enforcement investigating the allegations, alleged he was subjected to sex acts in 2020 and 2021 while working on a remix project of music by Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Christopher Wallace, which put him into contact with Bad Boy Records and company executive Combs.

A spokesman for Combs did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment on the investigation.

The lawsuit states that, in December 2020, the producer was at a warehouse in Los Angeles that housed some of Notorious B.I.G.’s clothing. The items were being donated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame later that year, when Biggie would eventually be inducted.

Combs “provided drugs to everyone present. Everyone there was running around the warehouse and tripping on the drugs,” the lawsuit alleges. Combs “started watching porn on his cell phone, grabbed one of Biggie’s shirts off a rack, and began to masturbate with it in front of the plaintiff,” the suit states.

Combs subsequently threw the shirt over the producer’s lap and arm, laughed and said “Rest in peace, Biggie” before leaving the room.

In an incident in March 2021, the plaintiff claims that he was set up. He states in the lawsuit he was lured to a meeting by Biggie’s son, Christopher “CJ” Wallace Jr., and music producer Willie Mack.

But upon his arrival, his head was covered, and Combs appeared and began yelling and ordered everyone to leave, the lawsuit alleges. Combs then allegedly attempted “to force plaintiff to perform oral copulation on Combs, while plaintiff’s head was still covered.”

“I’m pushing for criminal charges to be filed against Combs at a state and federal level,” Hay told ShockYa earlier this month in an interview where he stated he was the civil suit plaintiff.

According to a police report first obtained last month by People magazine, Hay reported the allegations on Sept. 20 of this year to Largo, Fla., police.

Gary Dordick, the producer’s lawyer, said “we intend to present out client’s case to a jury in California and we are confident that the truth will prevail.” Dordick said in a message to The Times that he would not comment further given that a defamation lawsuit was filed last week by Wallace.

Wallace, the son of Biggie Smalls and singer Faith Evans, sued Hay for defamation in a Florida federal court last week, calling Hay’s recent interviews “a calculated smear campaign” that included false statements that he attended Combs’ so-called freak-off parties and “conspired to lure Hay to a location where Combs purportedly assaulted him.”

An attorney for Mack could not immediately be reached for comment.

Wallace says in his defamation action that Hay worked on the remix project, titled “Ready to Dance,” with Wallace and Mack in 2020. A single was released, but the remaining songs were not, due to a lack of interest.

According to the suit, Hay was upset over the decision not to release the music he worked on and began accusing Mack of “inappropriate and abusive behavior” in 2021. But Hay never made an assault allegation, the suit claims.

Combs is currently incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dixon, a New Jersey low-security federal penitentiary.

Equal access to sport and exercise could help tackle an estimated £20bn shortfall in the public finances, according to Sport England.

Before next week’s Budget, the funding agency says new research highlights “the critical role” physical activity plays in supporting public finances and economic growth.

But it also warns inactivity is costing a “staggering” £20bn a year and has called for more investment in sport.

It claims that is the amount in healthcare savings, productivity gains and improved wellbeing that could be unlocked if the least active groups in society – such as those with disabilities, on lower incomes and black people – were supported.

Earlier this year, Sport England found 67% of the adult population were meeting the chief medical officers’ recommended guidelines, external for weekly physical activity – a record high. But it warned more needed to be done to tackle inequalities.

At the time, the government said tackling inactivity was “at the heart of our preventative health agenda”.

Sport England also says its research found grassroots sport and exercise boost the economy by £36bn every year through employment opportunities, volunteering, facilities and equipment.

And it calculates that for every £1 invested in the sector, £4.38 is generated for people and the public purse, via savings to the NHS, chronic illness prevention, improved workforce productivity, and enhanced health and happiness.

In addition, £14bn in tax revenue is generated by grassroots sport and exercise every year: a return of approximately six to seven times the public investment in sport and exercise.

“It’s shocking that inequalities in activity levels cost the public purse nearly £20bn every year,” said the chair of Sport England, Chris Boardman.

“Inactivity is quietly draining our economy, health system and our communities – but we can change that.

“Excitingly, the solution is right in front of us: movement. With a return on investment of more than four to one, billions can be saved in healthcare, our workforce will be more productive and quality of life improved for millions.”

Earlier this month, the chancellor Rachel Reeves warned she would make “necessary choices” in the Budget after the “world has thrown more challenges our way”, and did not rule out a U-turn on Labour’s general election manifesto pledge not to hike income tax, VAT or National Insurance.

In June, leaders across the sport and physical activity sector jointly wrote to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, warning that if they were not prioritised in government spending plans it would “risk the decline or closure of more facilities and clubs”.

The letter was signed by organisations including the Youth Sport Trust, the Sport and Recreation Alliance, gym and leisure-centre body Ukactive and the Sport for Development Coalition.

Thirty years after Selena Quintanilla’s death, a recently released autopsy report revealed new details about her murder.

In March 1995, the 23-year-old Tejano singer was gunned down inside a motel room in Corpus Christi, Texas, by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar, who had been accused of embezzling money from Quintanilla.

The autopsy report, obtained by Us Weekly, was carried out three hours after Quintanilla’s death. Her death, which had been ruled a homicide by the coroner’s report, was caused by a bullet wound that had entered through her shoulder.

The bullet’s path continued through her ribs until it eventually punctured her chest and exited her body from her upper chest. The autopsy report shows that the gunshot wound hit the subclavian artery — a major blood vessel that brings blood to the arms, neck and head.

Coroner Lloyd White wrote in the report that her death was “a result of an exsanguinating internal and external hemorrhage, in other words massive bleeding, due to a perforating gunshot wound of the [chest].” It also noted that her clothing was covered in blood.

After Saldívar shot Quintanilla, she engaged in a 10-hour standoff with law enforcement, sitting in her vehicle in the motel’s parking lot and threatening to take her own life. She was later charged with first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty. During the trial, Saldívar claimed that the shooting was accidental, but she was eventually found guilty in October 1995.

Saldívar was sentenced to life in prison, with the potential of parole. The 65-year-old applied for parole last December and was denied in March. Her case will be eligible for review again in 2030.

In the 30 years since Quintanilla’s death, she’s become a mainstay in pop culture. From the posthumous success of “Dreaming of You,” her first album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200, to being played on-screen by Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 biopic “Selena,” the singer, dubbed the Queen of Tejano music, continues to leave her mark on the rising generation of Latino artists.

Recently, “Selena Y Los Dinos” a new documentary, was released on Netflix. It features never-before-seen footage filmed by her sister Suzette Quintanilla and closely documents her rise to fame.

“I want to leave a nugget of love for the future generation coming up, that’s embracing Selena and our music,” said Suzette Quintanilla, earlier this year at the documentary’s Sundance premiere. “We are 30 years without Selena, but her legacy is stronger than ever.”

Nahshon Wright had just made a huge play for the Chicago Bears, and in spectacular fashion.

The fifth-year cornerback leapt high in full sprint with his hand stretched over his head to intercept a pass by Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy in the end zone to preserve a 10-3 Bears lead late in the second quarter.

No wild celebration followed. Instead, Wright jogged to the back of the end zone and took a knee in memory of Oakland football legend John Beam, the former football coach at Laney College who died Friday after being shot on campus a day earlier.

“He was watching over me,” Wright, who played for Beam at Laney in 2018, said after the Bears’ 19-17 victory on Sunday . “It’s crazy. He called me the night before he passed and he told me that every game he watched, I just seemed to get a pick. So I just know he was behind me today.”

Just before noon Thursday, the Oakland Police Department responded to reports of gunshots at Laney and found Beam suffering from gunshot wounds. He was transported to an area hospital, where he was listed in critical condition. At approximately 10 a.m. the next day, Beam was pronounced dead.

Oakland police arrested 27-year-old Oakland resident Cedric Irving Jr. as a suspect in the case early Friday morning at the San Leandro BART station. Irving is a former football player at Skyline High School where Beam once coached, but police said he did not play under Beam.

Former Laney Collegefootball coach John Beam holds the trophy after the Eagles won the California Community College Athletic Assn. championship in 2018.

(Peralta Community College District via Associated Press)

Irving and Beam knew each other but were not close, acting Oakland Police Chief James Beere said Friday at a news conference. Beere added that Irving isn’t a student at Laney but “was on campus for a specific reason” on Thursday.

“This was a very targeted incident,” Beere said.

On Monday, Irving was charged with murder and 10 other felonies related to Beam’s death. Alameda County District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson said during an afternoon news conference that Irving faces 50 years to life in prison if convicted.

Irving is scheduled for arraignment on Tuesday, Jones Dickson said.

Beam coached football in Oakland for more than 40 years. He came to Laney as running backs coach in 2004, was promoted to offensive coordinator in 2005 and was head coach from 2012-2024. Upon retirement from coaching, Beam continued to serve as Laney’s athletic director, a post he had held since 2006.

For many of his players and members of the community, Beam was much more than a coach, as seen by viewers of Season 5 of the Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U,” which focused on Beam and the Eagles during the 2019 football season.

“Filming with him at Laney College gave us a firsthand look at his passion, his integrity, and his unwavering commitment to the young men he coached — and to the city of Oakland,” the show’s creator, Greg Whiteley, wrote Friday on X.

Wright told reporters that Beam was “someone I could confide in, someone that I love dearly.” He added that the coach filled a huge void for him and his brother — New Orleans Saints cornerback Rejzohn Wright, who played at Laney in 2018 and 2019 — after the death of their father in 2017.

“Beam stepped in, stepped in as a father figure, a father role,” Nahshon Wright said. “He did a lot for me and my brother, my family. He’s been there. He’s been there every step of the way, and it won’t stop. I gained an angel, for sure.”

In a scene from “Last Chance U,” Laney coach John Beam talks to player Rejzohn Wright.

(Netflix)

Rejzohn Wright reposted a video clip of his brother’s interception and its aftermath on X and wrote: “Long live Coach beam forever with us!”

In an Oct. 19 Instagram post, Beam wrote that he was “in Chicago to watch the brothers battle” as the Bears hosted the Saints. The pride and love Beam felt toward his former players was more than evident in the photos he posted and the words he wrote.

“The Wright Way — always believe and keep grinding, never give up and believe the path will open up,” Beam wrote.

JACKASS star Johnny Knoxville has married his fiancée Emily Ting – 15 months after divorcing ex-wife Naomi Nelson.

The MTV stuntman, 54, and his bride were the picture of happiness as the posed on their big day beside their famous pal John Waters Jr, 79, with the actor landing a starring role as officiant.

Johnny shared two pictures on Instagram and wrote, “It seems I have had a lot of news lately but there is no news bigger than this…..Today Emily and I got married and I’m the luckiest and happiest fella in the universe.

“Bucket is pretty happy too as you can see from the pictures. It was a small ceremony with family, friends, and THE best minister ever.

“Thank you John Waters we love you so. Ok I’m getting off Instagram now because it’s our wedding night, but I wanted everyone to know. Love to everybody, wahoooo!!!”

Friends and fans were delighted for the couple.

Former Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese wrote, “Congrats! You guys look great! AND John Waters??”

Walking Dead star Norman Reedus said, “congrats u guys.”

Josh Brolin commented, “Yes!!!! [love heart emojis‘”

Ex Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg said, “Congratulations!!”

Johnny looked smart in velvet navy suit and held his beloved dog Bucket on a pink lead.

Standing underneath a floral arch, Emily wore a pretty mini dress with a gold bow at the midriff.

While Pink Flamingos star Waters rocked a loud pair of monochrome patterned trousers and a suave black jacket.

Johnny split from second wife Naomi on their 11th wedding anniversary in 2021.

He cited irreconcilable differences in divorce papers submitted the following year and applied for joint custody of the couple’s two children: Rocko, 15, and Arlo, 14.

His first marriage to Melanie Cates lasted from 1995 until 2009, and they have a daughter called Madison, 29.

The TV star is best known for his body-breaking stunts on Jackass, which has produced four big screen spin-offs since it launched in 2000.

The daring stunts came at a price, with one particularly risky skit leaving him with brain damage.

He suffered a nasty concussion from a bull when it tossed him up into the air and he landed on his head in the dirt.

Speaking to Howard Stern in 2022, he said, “I had to go under all these type of treatments, this transcranial magnetic stimulation, which they buzz your head with these magnets for about 30 minutes at a time for like, oh God, I would say 10 to 12 treatments over a series of two months and it’s supposed to help with depression and help with my cognitive skills.

“It was a tough one to come back from.

“I was trying to edit the movie at the time but I couldn’t sit still.”

While dad-of-three Johnny is now entering a new period of domestic bliss, after two previous marriages, he also has legal issues to contend with.

Daniel Curry, 49, alleges Johnny tasered him on the set of The Prank Panel in September 2022 – an incident caught on video that left him with a broken fibula and torn ankle ligament, according to court records.

Curry, a veteran writer and producer, was serving as a consulting producer on the short-lived ABC series when the tasering happened, he claims.

The writer launched a negligence and battery lawsuit in 2024 against Knoxville, ABC Signature Studios, Kimmel’s Kimmelot banner, ITV America and others connected to the series.

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Now, Curry’s lawsuit is heading to arbitration, a private process where a neutral third party decides the dispute outside of court, he said.

He claimed the incident permanently damaged his leg and is seeking $3 million in damages.

Belém, Brazil — Two stark-white cruise ships loomed over a muddy Amazonian estuary, an odd sight from a beach where two children waded in the water.

The diesel-powered vessels towered over the impoverished riverfront neighborhood where trash littered the ground and a rainbow sheen from household and street runoff glistened on top of rain puddles.

The cruise liners — with their advertised swimming pools, seafront promenades and an array of restaurants and bars — were brought in to house thousands of delegates attending the 12-day United Nations COP30 climate summit in Belém, which ends Friday. The ships helped address a housing crunch created by an influx of roughly 50,000 people into the capital of Pará in northern Brazil.

Along with being a global economic powerhouse, Brazil is also one of the planet’s most important climate actors. The South American nation is home to tropical rainforests that absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide but are increasingly threatened by deforestation and a drying Amazon.

A navy soldier patrols the Port of Outeiro, where cruise ships are docked to host delegations attending the COP30 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Belem, Brazil, on Nov. 8. Two cruise ships tower imposingly over a sleepy port in the Brazilian Amazon where some 50,000 people are gathering for a U.N. climate conference. With capacity for 6,000 people, the behemoths came from Europe to the riverine city of Belem on Brazil’s north coast to serve as floating hotels.

(Pablo Porciuncula / AFP via Getty Images)

The contrast — a climate conference relying on emissions-heavy cruise ships — has become the defining image of this year’s COP30, where wealth and scarcity sit side by side.

Belém residents said they felt a mix of curiosity and excitement watching the influx of foreigners, eager to show a culture that is often overshadowed by the country’s larger southern cities.

Many described COP30 as the first time the world had paused long enough to take notice of the people living at the mouth of the Amazon River, where locally grown açaí is sold on nearly every block. The region supplies the vast majority of Brazil’s açaí crop and much of what’s exported worldwide.

As humidity hung thick in the hot air, locals across the city of 1.3 million people pointed to expanded docks meant to attract future tourism, freshly painted walkways, restored colonial buildings with late-19th-century European touches and new cultural centers rushed to completion. But the sudden infusion of money layered atop long-standing inequality sharpened questions from residents about what will remain after the summit’s global spotlight fades.

Much of the summit footprint, they said, sits in areas where new structures were built fast, unevenly or only partly completed. Brazil’s government highlighted upgrades to Belém’s airports, ports, drainage systems, sanitation networks, parks and tourist areas, saying the work would leave a lasting legacy beyond COP30.

The BBC reported that a new four-lane highway built for COP30 resulted in tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest being leveled, including trees locals relied on to harvest açaí berries to sell. One roadway to ease traffic to the climate summit remains unfinished and blocked by plastic orange netting.

“They cut all this forest to make that road and didn’t even finish it,” said Lucas Lina, 19, who works as an administrator at a Belém fire station, as he pointed to the unfinished road. “I don’t think they ever will. They will delay and delay.”

Lina said climate change is something locals feel acutely. The region has seen unpredictable rainfall, and in some years, receives little at all in an area used to its showers.

“The climate is going crazy,” Ana Paula, a government food safety inspector, said in Portuguese as Lina translated. “We can’t predict anything anymore.”

Even environmentalists acknowledge the optics are fraught, particularly as attendees flew more than 1,800 miles from events in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for satellite gatherings. That included members of California’s delegation and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“It’s not well conceived because there’s not enough housing,” said Terry Tamminen, former California environmental secretary. “If we really cared about the climate, we’d have these events every year and they’d be 100% virtual.”

Such contradictions have often fueled demonstrations at climate summits, including on Friday when roughly 100 Indigenous protesters blocked the conference’s main entrance for more than 90 minutes. They formed a human chain as they denounced development plans they say would accelerate deforestation.

Indigenous activists participate in a climate protest during the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit on Saturday in Belém, Brazil.

(Andre Penner / Associated Press)

“Our forest is not for sale,” they wrote in a statement.

It was the second protest during the first week of COP30 after a brief clash inside the massive newly constructed facility resulted in two security guards suffering minor injuries.

“There are a lot of promises that the government made that are yet to be delivered,” said Lina, who taught himself English by watching YouTube and through online gaming. “We don’t know if these promises will actually be kept up after COP30.”

That tension — between symbolism and the city’s strained reality — defines this climate conference in a way that delegates say feels impossible to ignore.

Brazil remains one of the world’s top oil producers and recently approved new drilling near the rainforest. Many delegates argued that no setting better captures the stakes of the climate crisis than the Amazon, where Indigenous stewardship, extraordinary biodiversity and the consequences of deforestation are felt globally.

“I don’t know there’s a more important location than the rainforest,” Newsom told The Times. “The one area that consistently gets overlooked in the climate discussion is biodiversity.”

This aerial view shows a deforested area of the Amazon rainforest in the municipality of Moju, Brazil, on Wednesday during the COP30 U.N. Climate Change Conference.

(Mauro Pimentel / AFP via Getty Images)

With the summit came new investments that residents say they welcomed, including new bus routes, expansions at ports meant to increase future tourism and increased police presence to make streets safer.

“It’s very good for us,” said Maria Fátima in Portuguese while standing under an awning of a shuttered bar overlooking the cruise ships. She smiled and gave a thumbs up after saying she had never seen an American in Belém before.

“Everyone is very happy,” she said of the possibility that the newly expanded port will bring future tourism.

That port, which experienced an oil spill in April, is now being marketed as the Amazon’s next cruise-tourism hub. Its expansion cost $44 million and relied on nonstop work from construction crews in rotating shifts. The rush project doubled the pier’s capacity.

Room prices aboard the cruise ships soared to more than $1,400 a night for a balcony cabin, according to Times inquiries. On land, Belém’s modest supply of hotels and even seedy love motels that typically rent by the hour surged in price, pushing residents to rent their apartments and homes at rates many said they had never imagined.

People on a beach along the Guama River watch cruise ships docked at the Port of Outeiro, which will host delegations attending the COP30 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, on Nov. 6.

(Carlos Fabal/AFP via Getty Images)

One attendee said her hotel room typically goes for $85 a night. Her room cost $1,000 instead.

Newsom even joked about the costs. When a Brazilian journalist asked whether California would make climate investments in the country, Newsom said the price of his room at the Holiday Inn in Belém already felt like an “economic contribution.”

But those prices didn’t benefit everyone. Local media reported that some renters were evicted ahead of the conference in order to open up rooms to foreigners.

Inside the summit, Newsom operated as a proxy for the United States while attending COP30 for two days after President Trump, an outspoken climate skeptic, declined to send any high-level federal officials.

Long Beach resident Dominic Bednar, attending his fifth climate summit, said the contradictions of this year’s summit don’t diminish the importance of being there.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Bednar, an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UC Irvine. “On one hand, it brings understanding to the city and is driving a lot of economic investment. But I’m also curious: What is the carbon footprint of everybody coming into COP and the construction of this place? We are using energy, and we’re contributing to climate pollution.”

People riding in boats participate in a People’s Summit event on Guajara Bay during the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit on Wednesday in Belém, Brazil.

(Andre Penner / Associated Press)

Graduate students from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography echoed that discomfort, but said not attending would only cede more ground to powerful energy interests that already dominate climate talks.

“We can empathize with not having our voices heard,” said graduate student Danielle McHaskell as she waited to take a photo with Newsom. “And that’s an important part of the climate movement — empathy for other people.”

Newsom, too, said he was aware of the contradiction of using fossil fuels to reach a climate summit.

Still, he defended the decision to hold COP30 in the Amazon. He said it offered a chance to “see what I’ve only seen on TV or could see disappear in my lifetime.” He added that he was particularly excited about venturing into the Amazon rainforest with a small delegation to learn in person about conservation efforts and connect with something beyond policy and negotiations.

“I think that spiritual element really matters in a world that can use a little bit more of that,” he said before returning to California on Sunday. “That’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to getting deeper into the Amazon.”

We’re dreaming of a white Christmas… and there’s a UK city with one of the best seasonal markets, which is expected to get snow this year, for the enchanting backdrop we envision each year

With the festive season approaching, many of us will be longing for a classic white Christmas, for the ultimate Hallmark movie backdrop. Fortunately, there’s one city with the top-rated Christmas market in the UK that is forecast to welcome snow during the holiday season.

Edinburgh has been highlighted as the only UK destination on a list of European Christmas markets most likely to be dusted with snow this season. The renowned Christmas market, which adorns East Princes Street Gardens, has joined a list of more than 30 European countries expected to offer visitors that authentic and sought-after white Christmas.

To compile the results, Omio, a leading multi-modal travel booking platform, gathered weather data for 51 European Christmas market locations in November and December, and calculated the average lowest temperature from this data. Omio identified which markets are most likely to be chilled by temperatures of 2°C or below, resulting in a higher likelihood of snowfall during the last two months of the year, and, ultimately, when the Christmas markets are open. The data was sourced from NOAA.

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However, a cold snap expected in the UK this week could prove the study wrong. Snow is forecast in parts of the North East and North West, meaning highly ranked Christmas market cities such as Chester, Liverpool, York and Durham could get a dusting.

Already one of the UK’s most picturesque cities, Edinburgh is famed for its Christmas market, which runs from 15 November to 4 January this year. Among the quaint huts packed with festive gifts and snug stocking fillers, you’ll find international foods such as German sausages and crepes, as well as a warming cup of hot chocolate or mulled wine.

The market also boasts a mini-funfair with a helter-skelter, swing carousel that almost brushes the Gothic Scott Monument, and a big wheel providing a view of Edinburgh’s imposing medieval castle and ancient hill, Arthur’s Seat. So, the thought of wandering around the Edinburgh Christmas market, adorned with charming wooden chalets, in a flurry of snow, is enough to entice anyone to the Scottish capital.

But if you needed another excuse to visit, Edinburgh was also ranked among the top nine UK Christmas markets to visit this year, following extensive research from Which? in its annual tradition. In addition to its hugely popular Christmas market, Edinburgh is also famous for hosting one of the UK’s most famous New Year’s Eve (Hogmanay) celebrations.

So with hundreds of Christmas markets dotted across the UK and Europe, this just might be the best spot in the UK to visit during the festive season. Plus, visitors can take in the city’s allure even further with a leisurely walk around the winter gardens, a glide around the ice rink, or by exploring the New Town for more retail therapy in the city.

However, if you’re looking to venture a little further afield, there are more than 30 other European Christmas markets predicted to welcome snow this year, according to Omio.

European Christmas markets expecting snow

• Christmas Village, Rovaniemi, Finland
• Christmas Market at Senate Square, Helsinki, Finland
• Christmas Markets at Market Square, Turku, Finland
• Christmas Market at Main Market Square, Kraków, Poland
• Old Town Christmas Market, Innsbruck, Austria
• Advent Market at Hauptplatz, Graz, Austria
• Christmas Markets at Náměstí Svobody, Brno, Czech Republic
• Christkindlmarkt at Domplatz, Salzburg, Austria
• Advent Feast at the Great Forest, Debrecen, Hungary
• Christmas Market at Rynek, Wrocław, Poland
• Christmas Markets at Hlavná ulica, Košice, Slovakia
• Christkindlesmarkt at Hauptmarkt, Nuremberg, Germany
• Christkindlmarkt at Marienplatz, Munich, Germany
• Skansen Christmas Market, Stockholm, Sweden
• Christmas Markets in Old Town, Colmar, France
• Christmas Market at Targ Węglowy, Gdańsk, Poland
• Marché de Noël at Parc des Bastions, Geneva, Switzerland
• Christmas Market at Den Gamle By, Aarhus, Denmark
• H.C. Andersen Christmas Market, Odense, Denmark
• Christkindelsmärik at Place Kléber, Strasbourg, France
• Marché de Noël at Place Saint-Louis, Metz, France
• Striezelmarkt at Altmarkt, Dresden, Germany
• Gendarmenmarkt Christmas Market, Berlin, Germany
• Liseberg Christmas Market, Gothenburg, Sweden
• Christmas Market at Gustav Adolfs Torg, Malmö, Sweden
• Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic
• Christmas Market at Vörösmarty Square, Budapest, Hungary
• Christmas Markets in Caves, Valkenburg, Netherlands
• Christmas Markets at Hlavné námestie, Bratislava, Slovakia
• Christkindlmarkt at Main Train Station, Zurich, Switzerland
• Weihnachtsmarkt at Barfüsserplatz, Basel, Switzerland
• Christmas Market at East Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, UK

Do you have a travel story to share? Email [email protected]

Inside an office in Hollywood, not far from the Walk of Fame and the Sunset Bronson Studios, Netflix executive Alain Tascan revealed new content coming soon to the platform — but it’s not a TV show or a movie. It’s a new game where U.S. viewers compete to win thousands of dollars.

The game show, called “Best Guess Live,” will run on weekdays at 5 p.m. PT, where hosts Howie Mandel and Hunter March will unveil a set of five clues. Mobile game players tune in to make their best guesses. The earlier they can guess correctly with fewer clues, the higher the chances they can win more of the prize money. The show, filmed in Van Nuys, is Netflix’s attempt at appointment gaming for its audience of more than 700 million viewers.

“Can you imagine where you not only can go and play a game, but you could win a life-changing amount of money each and every day, and it takes no time, it’s easy, and you just have your phone?” said Mandel, widely known for his hosting turns on NBC’s “Deal or No Deal” and “America’s Got Talent.”

The goal is to make playing games on Netflix “as simple as streaming a movie on a Friday, using the same innovative mindset that led Netflix to transform itself from a company shipping DVDs to streaming movies, shows and now games,” Tascan said.

Netflix has been investing in its games vertical for the last four years, with mixed results. Last month, the streamer’s co-CEO Greg Peters gave the company’s gaming efforts a B- grade. Under Tascan’s leadership, the division has focused on some key areas, including narratives based on Netflix programs, games for children, social party games and mainstream titles like “Grand Theft Auto.”

The changes appear to be working. The number of downloads for Netflix games has increased 17% to 74.8 million from January to October of this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to data from app analytics firm Appfigures. The company is also releasing fewer games, adding 16 titles this year compared to 35 last year, Appfigures said.

Netflix declined to comment on the Appfigures data.

The company has also removed games in part due to low customer engagement. Netflix has released 142 games, with 78 of them still active as of October, according to Appfigures.

Its two most popular mobile games were released on Netflix in the last two years, including “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” which came on the platform in December 2023 and achieved 44 million downloads. The streamer released an original, the multiplayer party royale title “Squid Game: Unleashed,” last year with 21 million downloads. The game had tie-ins to the popular series’ second season where players could earn cash or wild tokens in the game if they watched a certain number of episodes.

Some analysts say there is still room for improvement.

Journalists participate in a games demo at a Netflix office on Wednesday.

(Netflix)

“It still seems pretty experimental,” said Ross Benes, senior analyst at research firm Emarketer. “I don’t get the impression that they are on gamers’ list of their go-to sources of entertainment.”

On Thursday, Netflix said its first slate of five games for the TV, including Tetris Time Warp, Boggle Party, Pictionary: Game Night and LEGO Party! are now available. Prior to the new slate, subscribers could only play Netflix games on their mobile devices.

When consumers load up the TV games, they will see a QR code they can scan on their devices and use them as controllers in the game. For example in Netflix’s version of Pictionary, users draw on their phones.

“A big switch in the strategy is really to make sure that we are eliminating any friction that somebody can encounter when they want to play,” Tascan said in an interview. “We believe that on TV, in particular, where people enjoy their different shows, is the best place to offer something very easily approachable.”

The TV games are the latest iteration in Netflix’s effort that began four years ago. The company had beefed up its staff after acquiring four gaming businesses — Glendale-based Night School, Boss Fight Entertainment out of Allen, Texas, Finland-based Next Games and Spry Fox based in Seattle.

Netflix shut down Boss Fight Entertainment last month.

The gaming division efforts were first led by Mike Verdu, a former Facebook and Electronic Arts executive. He later transitioned to a role focusing on transforming game development and player experiences with generative AI in November 2024 and left Netflix earlier this year. Tascan, a former executive at Epic Games, was named Netflix’s president of games in July 2024.

Games has been an attractive area of investment for some companies, as younger audiences spend a lot of time playing titles like Roblox, Fortnite and Call of Duty. Tascan estimates there are 3 billion gamers in the world and with Netflix having an audience of more than 700 million people, “the Venn diagram is pretty large.”

The streamer on Thursday also announced new mobile games for kids, including digital coloring book “Barbie Color Creations” and a hairstyling game, “Toca Boca Hair Salon 4.”

It can be challenging for companies to get into the space. For example, in 2023, Google shut down its gaming service Stadia after it failed to gain traction with users.

Tascan said Netflix is not competing against traditional gaming consoles but is looking to innovate and find new ways to reach its customers.

Tascan said he is encouraged by the reactions he has seen.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” he said. “But at the end, how many people are going to have the same reaction? We are a company driven by data, and our main data is, how many people are going to engage?”

Tascan said he thinks it will be a few short years before Netflix becomes the Netflix of games. He hopes the division can improve from Peters’ grade of a B- to a higher level.

“What I hope is, by the end of the year, we’ll upgrade to an A, hopefully A+,” Tascan said.

Times editorial library director Cary Schneider contributed to this report.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump on Sunday brushed aside concerns about conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with a far-right activist known for his antisemitic views, which has caused a schism within the GOP.

Trump defended Carlson, citing “good interviews” he’d had over the years with the former Fox News host. He said if Carlson wants to interview Nick Fuentes, whose followers see themselves as working to preserve a white, Christian American identity, then “people have to decide.” Trump did not criticize Carlson or Fuentes.

Fuentes appeared to appreciate Trump’s sentiment, posting Sunday, “Thank you Mr. President!” along with video of his interaction with reporters.

Carlson had an amiable sit-down on his podcast last month with Fuentes that touched off a controversy among some conservatives. It roiled the Heritage Foundation, where the president of the right-wing think tank defended Carlson for his interview, drawing outrage from staffers. Heritage President Kevin Roberts later denounced Fuentes’ views.

Trump told reporters as he prepared to fly back to Washington from a weekend at his Florida estate that when it comes to Carlson, “you can’t tell him who to interview.”

“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said. “People have to decide.”

A few minutes later, Trump added, “Meeting people, talking to people for somebody like Tucker — that’s what they do. You know, people are controversial.”

The president then said: “I’m not controversial, so I like it that way.”

It’s not the first time Trump has been asked about Fuentes. Three years ago, he hosted Fuentes at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort, along with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. Ye, like Fuentes, has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks in recent years.

Trump at the time said he had not previously met Fuentes and “knew nothing about” him.

Fuentes’ visit to Trump’s estate was condemned by numerous Republicans at the time, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who said it was wrong for Trump “to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table.”

Trump said Sunday that he didn’t know Fuentes at the time and that he didn’t know he was coming with Ye.

Trump’s defense of Carlson’s interview comes as he has used his second term to crack down on colleges and universities over what his administration claims is a tolerance of antisemitic views during protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Carlson has been critical of U.S. support for Israel in the war in Gaza and has come under fire for his own far-right views, including the white supremacist theory that says white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color.

Price and Megerian write for the Associated Press and reported from Washington and West Palm Beach, respectively.

Annie Leibovitz strides onto the Wiltern stage to the thunderous cheers of 1,500 mostly female fans. She takes her place at the podium, a small, casually dressed figure on a big stage. On the screen behind her are images of the matching covers of her new two-book set, “Annie Leibovitz: Women.” Volume 1 is her 1999 collection. Volume 2 has 100 new photos captured in the 25 years since. Taken together, the slipcased set zooms in on the past quarter century of American womankind, rendered in 250 images of dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, soldiers, musicians, athletes, socialites and scientists.

“The book was Susan’s idea,” Leibovitz says on Tuesday, referring to writer Susan Sontag, her partner until Sontag’s death in 2004. “I thought doing a photo book about women was a bad idea, like going out and photographing the ocean. But then I heard what Hillary Clinton said at the U.N. Conference on Women in 1995 — ‘Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights’ — and I reconsidered.” Applause shakes the Wiltern rafters.

An image from Volume 2 appears, featuring a somber-looking Sontag. “This is the last formal portrait of Susan,” Leibovitz says. “You could think she’s projecting a sense of strength, but really, she was mad at me for making her go outside to take the picture.” The crowd roars with laughter.

Think of Leibovitz, and some legendary photographs spring to mind. Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a milk-filled bathtub on the cover of Vanity Fair, July 1984. Also on VF covers: Michael Jackson, fittingly clothed and shot in black-and-white, in 1989. Demi Moore, fully pregnant and fully naked, two years later. But the photo that remains Leibovitz’s most iconic to date is the January 1981 cover of Rolling Stone featuring a nude, fetal John Lennon wrapped around Yoko Ono. “John showed up naked,” Leibovitz tells the audience. “Yoko wanted to wear clothes, so she’s fully dressed.” Leibovitz took the Polaroid on Dec. 8, 1980 — a few steps away from, and a few hours before, Lennon was shot and killed by former fan Mark David Chapman.

Joan Baez in Woodside, Calif., in 2007, from “Annie Leibovitz: Women.”

(Annie Leibovitz)

In Volume 2, we find a barefoot Joan Baez sitting in a tree strumming her guitar; a pregnant Rihanna draped in jewels and fur; Billie Eilish dreaming over a journal with pencil in hand; Shonda Rhimes with her feet up on a desk as massive as her oeuvre; and an uninhibited Michelle Obama as we’ve never seen her before: chin raised, eyes closed, hair tossed back, T-shirt and jeans parted to reveal her midriff. “I was in shock,” Leibovitz says. “But the first lady’s assistant was standing next to me, shouting, ‘That’s my first lady!’”

Familiar faces dominate, but woven between them are portraits of “regular” American women. A botanist precedes Oprah Winfrey, a philanthropist and a rabbi surround the founder of a Skid Row nonprofit, the reproductive rights activists of Moms Demand Action share space with a nude Lady Gaga. “I told her to bring a slip,” Leibovitz comments. “I’d rather people keep their clothes on at this point in my life.”

Volume 2 includes one essay each from activist Gloria Steinem, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Leibovitz herself. Steinem writes, “This book will help us to discover our adventurous true selves. … We are atoms whirling in place, affected by and affecting those near and far from where we are.”

Adichie agrees. “Taken as a whole,” she writes, “these photographs create a deeply moving experience, they refute the singular lens, they revel in plurality’s power, and because of — or perhaps in spite of — their wide range, they are infused with a spirit that is communal, collective, even unifying — and ultimately hopeful.”

Leibovitz concludes the second book. “For this volume I thought about issues that are important today,” she writes. In 2016, when she was beginning work on Volume 2, the notoriously cloistered Leibovitz told a New York Times reporter about the nationwide “talking circles” she and Steinem had organized, in which women shared their experiences with issues including sexual violence, technology and human rights. “Talking in groups like that, it brings me to tears,” Leibovitz told the reporter, adding that the new work she was making for Volume 2 was more “democratic.” Volume 2 is indeed more diverse, possibly in response to a widely discussed critique of Leibovitz’s photographs of Black women.

No celebrity survives fame without acquiring a layer or two of tarnish. In the decades between Volumes 1 and 2, Leibovitz’s representations of Black women painted Leibovitz with hers. A 2022 Guardian story was headlined, “Annie Leibovitz proves yet again: she can’t photograph Black women.”

“Leibovitz’s photographs are what happens when Blackness is seen through a white gaze incapable of capturing its true beauty,” contributor Tayo Bero wrote, referring to a list of Leibovitz subjects including Simone Biles, Viola Davis, Serena Williams and Rihanna. Bero wrote, “In all cases, she manages to make her subjects look dull, ashy, pained and sad, a far cry from the lively and graceful people that they usually are.”

Bero and others particularly criticized an image Leibovitz made for Vogue, depicting Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Lincoln Memorial. In the photo, the snow-white marble statue takes center stage, overlooking Brown Jackson on the lower left. At the Wiltern, when that image appears, Leibovitz speaks of her own experience shooting it, not the controversy surrounding its publication. “I was skeptical about that idea,” Leibovitz says. “But she walked into the rotunda and she started reading Lincoln’s words that are engraved into the wall. It was such a moving moment.”

Two years later, the controversy was reawakened by Leibovitz’s depictions of Zendaya, also in Vogue. An April 2024 piece on the website Screenshot Media reiterated the photos’ failure to accurately reflect “the beauty of melanated skin tones, with poor lighting that often results in lackluster portrayals.”

In her introductory essay to Volume 2, Adichie, on the other hand, praises Leibovitz’s sensitivity. “The first time Annie photographed me, more than ten years ago at my home, she sensed my discomfort right away and knew it was not merely about my general awkwardness with being photographed. It was specifically about my belly, which was newly postpartum, although I would probably still have worried even if it wasn’t. … Annie’s sanguine reaction was a relief. There was no divisiveness, no judgment.”

Rihanna at the Ritz Hotel, Paris, in 2022, from “Annie Leibovitz: Women.”

(Annie Leibovitz)

Leibovitz, her representatives and her publisher, Phaidon Press, declined to comment on the critique. In an email interview with Phaidon Vice President Deborah Aaronson, who worked on four Leibovitz titles, Aaronson said, “‘Women’ reaffirms Annie Leibovitz’s place in the photographic canon. In the ‘Women’ series, she captures a breadth of experience and people who live and work in different spheres that’s unparallelled. I believe the series makes her the most important chronicler of women over the past 50 years.”

Annie Leibovitz entered the San Francisco Art Institute at 22, intending to be a painter. But a night photography class she took on a whim changed her medium, and her life. While still a student, manifesting the confidence that would characterize her career, Leibovitz pitched a Lennon shoot to Rolling Stone. Three years later, rendered immortal as the final photographer of Lennon and Ono, Leibovitz became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer.

In 1983, Leibovitz joined the staff of Vanity Fair, where her field of exploration, and her social sphere, expanded to include actors, athletes and politicians. In 1991, she became the first woman to have a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She was designated a Library of Congress Living Legend in 2000.

In 2001, at age 52, Leibovitz gave birth to her first daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz. Sontag was at her bedside. In May 2005, via surrogate, Leibovitz became the mother of twin daughters, Susan (named for her beloved painter sister) and Samuelle. In 2009, Leibovitz was commissioned to make the official portrait of the first family — President Barack Obama; his wife, Michelle; and their daughters, Sasha and Malia — continuing the relationship that began in 2004 when she photographed Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate.

“I want to photograph the White House,” Leibovitz says, “but I don’t think there will be much of it left when I get to it.” The evening ended as it began: with the enthusiastic applause of her audience.

Koreatown resident Scott Lyness was well aware that the city of Los Angeles was looking to tackle its food waste problem.

While bicycling to work, he saw the growing number of green trash bins popping up on curbs. He read the notice sent to his home instructing residents to expect green bins to be delivered at some point.

Still, Lyness was not prepared for what came next: 13 green bins deposited earlier this month outside the apartment building he manages on New Hampshire Avenue.

That’s on top of the three bins that the city delivered the previous week at a smaller building he also manages next door, and the two green bins that those properties were already using.

Lyness, 69, who works as a project manager at USC, said the two buildings don’t have anywhere near the room to store so many full-size cans — and don’t generate enough organic waste to fill them. He’s tried to have his tenants contact city offices to say they don’t need them. He said he’s even thought about throwing them into the street.

“Our neighborhoods are being inundated with green waste bins,” he said.

City officials are working furiously to get Angelenos to separate more of their food waste — eggshells, coffee grounds, meat bones, unfinished vegetables, orange peels, greasy napkins — to comply with SB 1383, a state composting law passed in 2016. They’ve even implemented Professor Green, an online chatbot that can help residents decide what can and can’t go in the green bin.

SB 1383 requires that 75% of organic waste be diverted away from landfills by the end of the year and instead turned into compost. Food and other organic waste sent to landfills is a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane has a global warming potential about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

To reach that goal, crews from L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation have deposited huge numbers of 90-gallon green bins in front of some apartment buildings, including duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and larger buildings that have been grandfathered into the city’s curbside trash collection program.

Scott Lyness, 69, stands near green waste bins outside the apartment building he manages in Koreatown.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Residents are already familiar with the green bins, which were long reserved for lawn clippings and other yard waste but now are the destination for food scraps as well.

Most large apartment buildings in L.A. have been spared from the recent round of green bin deliveries, since they participate in recycLA, the city trash franchise program that relies on private waste haulers.

Sanitation officials say that Angelenos who prefer smaller, more manageable containers should fill out a form to get a 30- or 60-gallon replacement. They point out that the bins are part of a much larger effort by the city to reach its zero-waste goals and “lead on sustainability.”

Most of the green bins’ contents are taken to a facility in Bakersfield, where the resulting compost can be used by farmers, said Heather Johnson, a sanitation spokesperson.

“While some may find [the bins] inconvenient at the moment, in the short term they will result in more diverted waste and cleaner air,” Johnson said in an email.

Despite those serious intentions, Angelenos have been poking fun at the “Great Green Bin Apocalypse of 2025,” as journalist and podcaster Alissa Walker framed the situation on Bluesky. Walker recently shared a photo showing what appeared to be 20 green bins in front of one property, right next to a discarded sofa.

“This one is probably my favorite,” she wrote. “I like how they lined them all up neatly in a row and then left the couch.”

Green organic waste bins outside an apartment building in Koreatown.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

After Walker urged others to send in pictures, Silver Lake resident Tommy Newman posted a photo on Bluesky showing eight bins outside an eight-unit building, just south of Sunset Boulevard.

“Unless they are running a juice bar in there, how could they possibly create this much organic waste on a weekly basis?” wrote Newman, who works at a county housing agency.

Over on X, another observer summed up the absurdity in a different way. “LA gave every multi family unit a green bin due to a bureaucratic fever dream about composting,” the person wrote. “I have 5 personally.”

In recent months, L.A.’s sanitation agency has sent teams of “ambassadors” into neighborhoods to educate residents about the need to throw food in the green bins.

That means keeping food out of the 60-gallon black bins where residents have been accustomed to dumping most of their garbage, which ultimately winds up in landfills. Recyclable items, including glass and aluminum, will continue to go into blue bins.

The changes were also spelled out on fliers sent out by the city last summer, with a clear warning in all capital letters: “Unless we hear from you immediately, we will deliver a 90-gallon green container to your residence.”

Lyness saw those alerts and knew about the change. But he contends that most people would have missed the news or thrown the fliers away. Depositing an inordinate amount of bins around town is just not the way to encourage people to properly dispose of their organic waste, he said.

The city’s new food-waste program, which is projected to cost $66 million a year, is one reason the City Council approved a huge increase in trash fees earlier this year, in some cases doubling them. Each 90-gallon green bin costs the city $58.61, tax included, though residents are not being directly charged for the recent deliveries.

Sanitation officials say they have delivered more than 65,000 green bins across the city, with 4,000 to go. For residents waiting for them to be removed or replaced with a smaller bin, only 1,000 orders can be carried out in a regular workday, those officials said.

Around the corner on North Berendo Street, Lyness’ neighbor Lucy Alvidrez agreed that the green bins were troublesome while dragging in her black bin Thursday afternoon.

“They sure got carried away with it,” she said, pointing across the street to an apartment building with about two dozen green bins on its front curb.

Alvidrez, 69, who has lived in the neighborhood for two decades, never had an issue with trash collection until the city dropped off four green bins, one for each unit in her building. She was more fortunate than Lyness: sanitation workers took two of the bins back, upon request.

Alvidrez said she would prefer that the city “spend our money feeding the homeless” instead of purchasing bins that no one needs, she said.

A dozen green organic waste bins occupy a street in Koreatown..

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Nearby, Lyness opened a neighbor’s green bin, which was filled to the brim with trash that wasn’t compostable and should have gone in a black bin. If no one knows what to put in the green bins, nothing is going to improve, he said.

“It’s trash,” he lamented. “It’s all trash.”

If you’ve watched the Screen Actors Guild Awards over the years, you’ve heard the name of the prize countless times, even if it hasn’t quite registered.

“And the Actor goes to … Timothée Chalamet.”

“And the Actor goes to … Demi Moore.”

“And the Actor goes to … ‘Conclave.’”

Now, in an effort to lean into the name of the statuette and streamline the show’s title, the Screen Actors Guild Awards announced Friday that it is renaming the ceremony to the Actor Awards. Or, if you want to get precise (and a bit verbose): the Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA.

“Now that our global audience is really growing, people don’t always understand what the union name is,” says awards committee chair JoBeth Williams. “But ‘the Actor Awards’ they recognize and they know they’re going to see their favorite actors when they tune in.”

The SAG Awards have long been a reliable precursor to the Oscars on the awards season calendar, with last year being an exception. (Chalamet, Moore and “Conclave,” winner of the guild’s best picture equivalent, the ensemble honor, did not repeat their SAG successes.)

Since the event moved to Netflix in 2024 from TNT and TBS, viewership numbers have increased, besting pre-pandemic levels. Last year, per Netflix, the ceremony received 4.3 million views on the platform.

That’s a far cry from just four years ago, when the pandemic forced ceremonies to postpone and shuffle dates, and the Grammys thought nothing of landing on the SAG Awards’ original date. (SAG-AFTRA voiced its “extreme disappointment,” then slunk off to Easter Sunday for a scheduled one-hour telecast.)

“[Netflix] saw the potential of the show to really grow an audience,” says Jon Brockett, longtime showrunner and executive producer. “We’re on 190-plus countries now on Netflix. So the simplification of the name, from a global perspective, should bring about even greater awareness to understand who we are and what we’re all about.”

Which is, in a word: actors. Like the Golden Globes, the Actor Awards (we’ll just start calling it that now, trying it out for size) reward lead and supporting performances in movies and television, and, in lieu of “best picture” or “best series,” prizes for acting ensembles. Unlike the Golden Globes, the ceremony has not been beset by scandal or raised questions about unethical self-dealing.

Nominations for the Actor Awards are chosen by two nominating committees, one for film and one for television, comprising 2,500 SAG-AFTRA members that are randomly selected each year. Winners are then selected by active SAG-AFTRA members, a massive voting body numbering more than 130,000.

“We are all doing what these folks up there on the screen do, so we have a strong sense of what it takes to do that and what it takes to make it really special,” Williams says of the awards’ voters. “The eyes of the voters are very tuned in to what actors do.”

The Actors Awards will stream live on Netflix on March 1. Nominations will be announced on Jan. 7.

On a flight to Houston to play in his first college football game, Kenny Easley was told that he would split time at free safety with a veteran UCLA teammate.

“That’s what happened,” Easley told The Times in 2017, recounting the story 40 years later. “Michael Coulter started the game and played the first two quarters, I played the second two and Michael never played again.”

Such was the dominance of a player who would be called The Enforcer for the way he inflicted his will on college and NFL opponents. Easley finished that first season with nine interceptions and 93 tackles, school records for a true freshman, and was just getting started on the way to becoming the first player in Pac-10 history to be selected for the conference’s first team all four seasons.

Easley, one of the most revered players in school history, died Friday from unspecified causes, the school announced. He was 66. Easley had long battled kidney issues that forced the five-time Pro Bowler to retire prematurely in 1987 after spending all seven of his NFL seasons with the Seattle Seahawks.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Seahawks legend Kenny Easley,” the team said in a statement. “Kenny embodied what it meant to be a Seahawk through his leadership, toughness, intensity and fearlessness. His intimidating nature and athletic grace made him one of the best players of all-time.”

Much of that resolve was forged thanks to a childhood game that Easley called dynamite pigskin. A pack of kids would gather on the athletic fields in Easley’s hometown of Chesapeake, Va., and a football would be tossed into the air.

Safety Kenny Easley also returned punts for UCLA.

(Courtesy UCLA Athletics)

Whoever caught it would take off running and everybody else would try to catch him until the ball carrier found himself hopelessly surrounded, forcing him to throw the ball back into the air, where the game earned its dynamite nickname. The game would go on for hours until everyone was bruised and exhausted.

One of the nation’s top prospects out of high school, Easley appeared bound for Michigan, telling everyone he was going to play for the Wolverines. But on the day of his college announcement, Easley blurted out that he was going to play for UCLA, his other finalist, during a ceremony at his high school auditorium.

“So just like that, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle and it’s on videotape that I’m going to UCLA,” Easley would recall many years later. He suspected he changed his mind because the Bruins had said from the start they were recruiting him to play free safety while Michigan wanted him as a quarterback, his other high school position.

Easley tallied 19 interceptions during four college seasons, which remains a school record. Having made 13 interceptions during his first two seasons, Easley developed a ready explanation for why he couldn’t sustain that pace.

“They didn’t throw the ball down the middle,” he said of opposing quarterbacks. “If I was playing against Kenny Easley, I wouldn’t throw the ball down the middle either.”

Easley also returned punts and was a punishing hitter, logging 105 tackles during his senior season in 1980. He would finish ninth in voting for the Heisman Trophy that year. His 374 career tackles remain the fifth most in UCLA history and he became the second player from the school to earn consensus All-American honors three times, joining linebacker Jerry Robinson.

“Kenny Easley was the most competitive person I’ve ever met in my life,” Robinson wrote in an email to The Times. “No matter what he was doing, whether it was sports or life, he was in it to win it! Whether it was football, basketball, pick-up softball games, playing cards, high diving into the swimming pool or golf, everything he did he wanted to be the best at it. And he was the best at it. He was the greatest all-around athlete that I have ever played with. RIP ‘Force 5’.”

The Seahawks selected Easley with the fourth pick in the 1981 draft, and he went on to make 32 interceptions in seven seasons. But his time with the franchise ended acrimoniously after he accused the team of providing medicine that led to his kidney problems. The sides would later resolve their differences. Easley was named one of the 50 greatest players in franchise history.

Elected into the college and pro football halls of fame, Easley had his No. 5 jersey retired by UCLA in 1991 and was also enshrined in the school’s athletics hall of fame.

Different team. Different time. But it’s back to the scene of the crime for the Chargers, who three years ago succumbed to a 27-point comeback in a playoff loss at Jacksonville.

This season’s Jaguars got off to a 4-1 start but have lost three of their last four to slip back into the pack. They don’t have star rookie Travis Hunter, who underwent surgery this week and will miss the remainder of the season.

The team plays hard for first-year coach Liam Coen, who said he wants quarterback Trevor Lawrence to “cut it loose and let it rip” when he sees opportunities down the field.

After opening the season 3-0, the Chargers lost three of four, but are now riding another three-game winning streak. Justin Herbert has been outstanding at times, despite being the most-hit quarterback in the NFL.

The Chargers defense is coming off a gem of a performance in a win over Pittsburgh. Aaron Rodgers looked every bit of 41 years old, and at one point the Steelers were 0 for 9 on third down.

How the Chargers can win: As usual, protect Herbert behind a patchwork offensive line. Jacksonville has struggled to pressure quarterbacks, especially with Travon Walker at less than full strength and a beat-up secondary. Get the ball to Ladd McConkey and Oronde Gadsden II, with some Keenan Allen mixed in. Don’t allow the Jaguars to control the game with the run.

How the Jaguars can win: Jacksonville can look like a playoff team when it wins at the line of scrimmage but tends to collapse when it gets pushed around. The Jaguars need to establish the run early and grind out some long drives because they do not get a lot of explosive plays. Get to Herbert quickly before he has a chance to attack that weakened secondary. Contain Herbert, too, because he can burn you with his feet.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, with an assist from David Zahniser and Doug Smith, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Could L.A.’s Zohran Mamdani moment be here?

It’s definitely a long shot. But Rae Huang, a 43-year-old community organizer, minister and dues-paying member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, is making her move, throwing her hat into the ring for mayor of Los Angeles.

The virtually unknown candidate is the deputy director of Housing Now California, a coalition that fights displacement of tenants at the state and local levels.

Huang, who is planning a campaign launch on Sunday, is shying away from comparisons to Mamdani, a democratic socialist who was elected mayor of New York City last week. She has not been endorsed by DSA-LA, though she hopes to be. Nevertheless, she sees next year’s election as a “moment for change.”

“We are in a place in our country and in our political environment where folks feel stuck and afraid,” Huang said in an interview. “They feel like nothing is going to change, and the things that are changing are making things even worse.”

Huang, a Sawtelle resident, has never run for elected office. She faces an extremely uphill battle against Mayor Karen Bass, a veteran politician with close ties to the Democratic Party who has spent much of the year denouncing President Trump’s immigration crackdown in L.A.

Still, Huang could complicate Bass’ reelection bid by playing a spoiler role, pulling away left-of-center voters in a year when the incumbent is facing criticism over her handling of the Palisades fire, a struggling city budget and less-than-optimal public services.

Bass already has a challenger in former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner, who has assailed her record in each of those areas. And it’s still not clear whether billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022, will jump in the race.

The larger the pool of candidates, the more work Bass will have to do in the June primary to secure an outright victory. If she falls below 50% of the vote, she would need to wage an expensive runoff campaign in the November 2026 election.

Doug Herman, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign, said that under her leadership, “there has been unprecedented progress on the issues that matter most to Angelenos.”

“Homelessness has declined for the first time in two consecutive years, neighborhoods are safer with significant drops in crime, and the Palisades fire recovery continues far ahead of pace with the fastest recovery and rebuilding in California history,” Herman said in a statement. “In addition, there was no better defender of Los Angeles than Mayor Karen Bass when Trump’s ICE raids started and we won a court ruling to help stop the illegal raids and unconstitutional arrests.”

Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College, said the upcoming mayoral election differs from recent L.A. contests that were won by DSA-aligned candidates. In many of those races, DSA-backed challengers ousted incumbents who were already struggling politically, she said.

The same goes for New York City, where former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Mamdani’s main opponent — was trying to emerge from scandal and stage a comeback, Sadhwani added.

The Democratic incumbent, Eric Adams, was so weakened by his own legal issues that he ended up running as an independent and then withdrawing from the race.

“Bass has her detractors,” Sadhwani said, “but is not in such an embattled position as Eric Adams or even Cuomo, who had stepped down from the governorship amid sexual harassment claims.”

Huang said she is in it to win — and hopes to highlight important issues for people on the left. She wants to expand public housing, make buses free for Angelenos and invest more in unarmed crisis responders.

Sound familiar? Those would pretty much be Mamdani’s talking points.

Huang said she was “hopeful” when Bass was elected. Now, she lobs plenty of criticism at Bass.

She thinks the mayor’s Inside Safe program is allowing too many people to slip back into homelessness. She believes Bass should explicitly support the Venice Dell affordable housing project. And she doesn’t feel the mayor did enough to curb police violence during the summer’s chaotic protests over federal immigration raids.

Huang is not the first to run from Bass’ left. In 2022, late-arriving mayoral hopeful Gina Viola won nearly 7% of the vote, scooping up more than 44,000 votes in the primary after positioning herself as the self-proclaimed “infamous defund-the-police candidate.”

Viola said she is glad to see Huang get into the race, and with much more time to campaign. Viola ran in 2022 with just three and a half months left before the primary. Huang has nearly seven months.

“What she needs to do is [win over] those voters that are so terribly disenfranchised that they don’t have anything to vote for,” Viola said.

Part of getting those potential voters out to the polls is having a strong ground game, knocking on doors and raising money. An endorsement from the local DSA chapter could help Huang get her name out to more Angelenos, Sadhwani said.

DSA members have petitioned to endorse Huang. She needs to receive 50 signatures, which would trigger a vote of chapter members, with 60% required to capture the endorsement.

“It’s certainly exciting to see a left challenger to a status-quo Democrat. That always pushes the conversation in a good direction,” said Claire Palmer, an organizer with DSA-LA.

There has been “enthusiasm” among members about Huang, Palmer said.

As for the DSA-backed members of the City Council?

“I haven’t sat down with them yet,” Huang said.

While four DSA-backed L.A. City Council members celebrated Mamdani’s win with a party at a Highland Park bar on election night, it’s not clear that they have any interest in getting behind a candidate other than Bass.

“Karen Bass is the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had in L.A.,” Councilmember Nithya Raman told The Times at the party.

Bass “has been doing a good job at least in handling this crisis,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in June, referring to Bass’ handling of the federal immigration raids.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez has already endorsed Bass.

State of play

— THE RENT IS TOO DAMN CAPPED: The City Council voted Wednesday to lower the annual cap on rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments to 4%. Many landlords and developers opposed the move, saying it would eat into their bottom line and drive away investment. Council members argued that the changes are needed to keep Angelenos from falling into homelessness.

— WILDFIRE PROBE: Los Angeles County has opened an investigation into State Farm General’s treatment of January wildfire victims following complaints that claims were delayed, denied and underpaid. The state’s largest home insurer received notice of the probe in a letter demanding records and data showing whether the company violated the state’s Unfair Competition Law.

— MISSING INFO: At least one official in the Los Angeles Fire Department was aware of concerns that its firefighters were ordered to stop mop-up operations for a Jan. 1 brush fire that later reignited into the massive Palisades fire. Yet the department’s 70-page after-action report on the Palisades fire didn’t include that information — or any detailed examination of the reignition, The Times reported this week.

— FAREWELL TO A WATCHDOG: One of L.A. County’s most prominent citizen watchdogs is dead at 62. Eric Preven, a resident of Studio City, advocated for increased public access to city and county meetings, filed countless public information requests and regularly offered his views on CityWatch. “It wasn’t just like [he was] shooting from the hip,” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger. “He would do his research.”

— MEMORIES OF MARQUEZ: Environmentalists are mourning the death of Wilmington clean air advocate Jesse Marquez, who battled the Port of Los Angeles for years over emissions from trucks, trains and ships. Marquez, 74, died Nov. 3 from health complications that developed after he was struck by a vehicle while in a crosswalk in January.

— A NEW ROADBLOCK: The proposal from Frank McCourt for a gondola between Union Station and Dodger Stadium faced yet another setback this week, with the City Council urging Metro to kill the project. “This resolution tells Metro that the city of Los Angeles refuses to be bought by shiny renderings and empty promises,” said Hernandez, who represents Chinatown and the stadium area.

— PROTEST POWERS: The council’s Public Safety Committee endorsed legislation this week that would bar the LAPD from using crowd control weapons against peaceful protesters and journalists. The proposal, which now heads to the full council, would prohibit the department from using “kinetic energy projectiles” or “chemical agents” unless officers are threatened with physical violence.

— POLICING THE POLICE: The LAPD took more than a year to begin fully disclosing domestic abuse allegations against its officers, as required by a state law passed in 2021. The revelation came out during a recent hearing regarding an officer who was fired after being accused of time card fraud and physically assaulting her former romantic partner, a fellow cop.

— CHIEF IN CHARGE: The council voted Friday to make Deputy Chief Jaime Moore the city’s newest fire chief. Moore, a 30-year department veteran, said one of his top priorities will be improving morale in a department that has faced heavy criticism for its handling of the Palisades fire. He also plans to seek an outside investigation into missteps by fire officials in the days leading up to that disaster.

— GRILLING GIBSON DUNN: U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter pressed attorneys from Gibson Dunn this week on the fees they’ve been charging the city in the landmark LA Alliance homelessness case. At one point, the firm had 15 lawyers billing the city $1,295 per hour, regardless of their titles or experience.

Carter also voiced his anger over reports that a South L.A. homeless facility had only 44 beds, not the 88 spelled out in a contract awarded to a nonprofit group. The judge set a hearing for Wednesday on whether to hold the city in contempt over what he described as delaying tactics in complying with an order he issued earlier this year.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature initiative to combat homelessness did not launch any new operations this week. The program did move about a dozen people indoors from Skid Row, according to Bass’ team.
• On the docket next week: The council heads out on recess next week, with members taking part in the National League of Cities conference in Salt Lake City. Meetings are also canceled the following week for the Thanksgiving holiday. They’ll be back Dec. 2.

Stay in touch

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