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As Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy moved fluidly through a chopper at the edge of Camelback Ranch’s infield grass and made a running throw to first, his offseason work started to snap into place.

He wasn’t thinking about the angle he took to the ball, or how to get into the right position to throw — or anything, really. He was just moving instinctively.

“That’s how I like to field it in my work, is not necessarily traditionally,” Muncy told The Times on Thursday. “I like to field it one-handed, sometimes off the wrong foot, sometimes off balance, and that’s what works for me really, really well. I just couldn’t get that into the game. And finally getting those first couple of balls [this spring] to go that way just made everything click in my head and gave me the freedom to know that I can do it when it matters.”

Muncy has put together an impressive all-around first half. His .871 OPS through Thursday leads NL third basemen. He’s on pace for his highest slugging percentage (.513) in five years. But he’s most proud of the work he’s put in on the defensive side.

“I felt like I would show flashes of this, but never the consistency,” Muncy said. “And so to be able to just do it on the consistent daily basis that I’ve been doing this year, that’s easily what I’m most proud of.”

Now, with that well-rounded body of work, he’s in position to claim the third All-Star selection of his career and first since 2021.

Muncy entered Stage 2 of All-Star fan voting this week as the favorite to claim the starting nod at third base, up against fellow finalist Alec Bohm. But voting totals reset, adding some unpredictability to the process. The All-Star starters are set to be revealed Saturday at 4:30 p.m. on Fox.

“In total, the player, the defense, the hitting, the slugging, I think this is the best version of Max,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I’m so happy that he’s leading the All-Star voting.”

Not only is this shaping up to be Muncy’s best offensive season since 2021, it’s the best defensive season of his career, regardless of position.

Entering this weekend’s series against the Padres, he had a fielding run value of plus-five runs, tied with the Giants’ Matt Chapman for the highest mark among third basemen, according to Statcast.

“He’s always been a hitter,” first-base/infield coach Chris Woodward told The Times. “And I think he took it upon himself to say, ‘I’m going to prove to everybody that I’m a really good defensive player,’ which he has been in his time here, but he’s just never had the opportunity to play one position.”

Though Muncy is in his 11th major-league season, and has played all around the infield for most of it, 2022 marked his first season making the majority of his appearances at third base. And 2023 was his first season moving there full time.

He was also limited by injuries in that span. For years, he still felt the effects of the elbow injury he suffered toward the end of 2021. And he strained his right oblique in each of the last two seasons.

“Third base was just a new position for me, and it just took time to learn it,” Muncy said. “And so just trying to get my work to translate into the game is a tough thing to do, and that’s kind of the secret to every aspect of baseball.”

Each infield position is unique, with its own quirks in footwork, angles and timing. Each has plays — like a slow-roller up the third baseline that requires a quick throw across the diamond — that no other position will encounter.

“When a righty gets around the ball, it comes off the bat a lot different than when a lefty gets around the ball,” Muncy said. “And it’s weird how that works, and it’s hard to explain, but that’s just the way it is.”

For much of Muncy’s baseball life he played on the right side of the infield, fielding pull-side contact from left-handed hitters and opposite-field contact from right-handed hitters. That was second nature.

“You have to completely flip that,” Muncy said of playing third base, “and understand which way it’s going to bounce, how it’s going to bounce, how it’s going to get to you. It just took years of experience to finally get to that point.”

Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts, left, and third baseman Max Muncy congratulate each other coming off the field after a defensive play against the Baltimore Orioles on June 19.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Woodward has always been impressed by Muncy’s agility, surprised when the Dodgers first promoted him in 2018 (as he returned to the big-leagues for the first time since being released by the A’s the previous spring) and by how he moved at second base, despite an atypical build for a middle infielder.

Now, after an offseason with a new diet and training program, he may have leveled up that part of his game — even at 35 years old.

“In the past it was a good first step, and he couldn’t sustain his speed,” Woodward said. “And this year I think he can sustain the speed through the ball.”

Said Muncy: “I’m still beating the age curve for now.”

Woodward also noted how good Muncy is at staying on top of the mental side of the game, knowing how specific pitches to different types of hitters should change his positioning. That, along with regular communication, are some of the details that make the Dodgers infield look like it’s moving as a unit — or, as Woodward put it, an “NFL defense” because of the way they swarm to the ball.

The Dodgers’ infield defense as a whole has improved even from last season (No. 6 in fielding run value) to sit in the No. 3 spot in the majors (plus-17 runs) a little past the halfway point of the season.

Muncy unlocking even more potential in the hot corner is a big part of the Dodgers raising their defensive ceiling. That’s helped the Dodgers, who own the best record in the majors, create separation in the standings. But it’ll be even more vital in the postseason, when the margin for error is at its thinnest.

In All-Star voting, defense won’t be the determining factor. Muncy’s increased power at the plate is the far flashier aspect of his case to start the Midsummer Classic. But a well-rounded resume doesn’t hurt.

Muncy can picture it: his three children — Sophie Kate, who turns 5 this month, Wyatt James, 3, and Macie Grace, who was born in January — taking in All-Star weekend in Philadelphia, watching their dad represent the National League.

“Being able to have my kids experience the whole ordeal with me would mean everything to me,” Muncy said. “My oldest is kind of old enough now to remember these types of things, and so I think it’d be really special to just share that moment with them.”

WASHINGTON — Small towns across America had big plans to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial this weekend. Local historical societies scheduled town square readings of the Declaration of Independence, hired bands to play patriotic tunes, organized parades and set up themed baking contests.

But many of their most ambitious plans were scrapped after the Trump administration cut $100 million in federal funding for humanities nonprofits and state councils at the start of its term. The decision severely hampered local planning for America’s 250th anniversary, disrupting history projects, museums and educational programs nationwide.

Instead, the Trump administration funneled tens of millions in federal dollars to Event Strategies, the firm behind Trump’s infamous rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, to organize anniversary events throughout the nation’s capital centered on President Trump.

The result, historians say, has become a centralized, more politicized spectacle, marking the national milestone as a celebration of an imperial presidency rather than a revolution from kingly rule.

The spectacular show that Americans will see features Trump at its center, culminating a year of concerted efforts by the president to put his face on passports and currency, national park passes and government buildings.

Members of the Dance4Life studio in Claymont, Del., prepares to march ahead of the Red, White, & Blue To-Do Pomp & Parade on July 2, 2026, in Philadelphia.

(Al Drago / Getty Images)

Yet, beyond the noise of the nation’s capital, historians and teachers, docents and curators, archivists, tour guides and reenactors have sustained the messy, organic discourse of the American story, less funded but no less vocal in their patriotism.

“The way history has been argued since Trump returned to office has been a reminder that governments and political figures have remarkable power to shape a society’s historical memory,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”

Trump’s effort to control the anniversary narrative has reminded Ekbladh of one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“The administration’s clear signals that it can and will restrict funding to institutions seems to have muted the way many institutions, like museums and universities, have approached the anniversary,” Ekbladh added. “With this said, Trump’s own direct, personal use of the 250th has been less about articulating a clear view of the nation’s history than using the moment itself to keep attention on him.”

The White House has taken a more active role in the festivities than initially planned, setting up its own Freedom 250 project to supplement America250, a bipartisan congressional effort to celebrate the occasion.

Fencing is seen around the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on Thursday.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

The Trump administration has directed funding to events centered on the president’s attendance, primarily around Washington, and partnered with conservative organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College to present the country’s founding story through a conservative Christian lens.

Historians are in broad agreement that this year’s celebration has garnered far less attention than the bicentennial, marked in 1976, which generated blanket media coverage and widespread national excitement.

Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency,” attributed the lack of enthusiasm this time in part due to a more fragmented media landscape than existed 50 years ago, denying the country a “core curriculum” and a shared story.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of patriotism, so much as a determination that no presidential administration should be able to center itself as the focus of that patriotism,” Rudalevige said.

“There’s a lot to celebrate in the text of the declaration. But that’s not where the focus of the Freedom 250 efforts has been,” Rudalevige said. “It would have been interesting to see what the bipartisan America250 initiative could have come up with if its funding and energies had not been diverted.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is fenced off in preparation for Fourth of July fireworks.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

Trump has scheduled little national travel around the anniversary, visiting North Dakota this week for an event that allowed him to debut a new version of Air Force One, donated by Qatar and outfitted to the president’s tastes. Trump intends to keep the plane after leaving office for his personal use.

The jet will fly over the National Mall alongside the Defense Department’s most impressive equipment on Saturday, before the president delivers a speech in what is forecast to be a blistering heat wave. The evening will end, according to administration officials, with the largest fireworks display in U.S. history.

“The fundamental challenge that we face now is the fight between the historians — people who have been studying the past and who have been thinking about how to tell that story to the public — and government leaders over who gets to control that story,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The people who are really on the front lines are museum professionals, the operators of historic sites and schoolteachers,” he said. “They face the responsibility for explaining the past to a general audience on a day-to-day basis, and they are the ones who most often face the backlash from people who want the story to be told differently.”

Herb Alpert walks up a long driveway at his rambling Malibu estate, wincing slightly after having woken up around 3 a.m. with a cramp in his left calf.

“It’s still kind of seizing,” the trumpeter says as he leads me past a garden lush with moist-looking tropical plants.

This, Alpert accepts, is the reality of life at 91. Yet the only reason he’s out here racking up steps by the hundreds on a recent morning is because he was tooling around in his sculpture studio before I arrived. And the only reason the sculpture studio is so far from his music studio — there’s also a studio devoted to his painting — is because of his huge success over the last 60 or so years.

“So I can’t really complain,” he says.

A Los Angeles native who got his start writing songs like Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World,” Alpert has lived here in Malibu since 1972, a decade after he released “The Lonely Bull,” his debut album with the Tijuana Brass. The LP’s title track, inspired by a bullfight Alpert caught in Mexico, went to No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100; more than a dozen finger-snapping Top 40 hits followed, including “A Taste of Honey,” “Spanish Flea” (also heard as a theme song on TV’s “The Dating Game”) and “This Guy’s in Love With You,” which took a rare Alpert vocal turn all the way to No. 1.

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What’s more, these inescapable tunes came out on Alpert’s own label, A&M Records, which he “formed on a handshake,” as he puts it, in 1962 with his business partner Jerry Moss. The label quickly became one of the biggest independent record companies in music, with acts such as Carole King, the Carpenters, the Police, Peter Frampton and Janet Jackson, as well as a beloved recording studio complex on La Brea Avenue. (Moss, who with Alpert sold A&M in 1989 for a reported $500 million, died in 2023.)

After years working on his own and with his wife, the singer Lani Hall, Alpert revived the Tijuana Brass name in 2024 and launched a tour that will stop Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. We sat down in his gear-stuffed music studio to talk about it and much more.

I’m sure you heard that John Mayer and McG bought the former A&M Studios last year. I wondered what your emotional investment is in the place at this point.
I don’t have an emotional investment. Once I left the lot, I was out of there — I didn’t look back. I wanted to paint, I wanted to sculpt, I wanted to make music. I wasn’t thinking about the business.

What’s an A&M success story you took particular pride in?
Cat Stevens. I heard this kid — he was a kid at the time — at the Troubadour, just him and a guitar, and I got goosebumps. It was so beautiful and so honest.

What was Karen Carpenter like?
She was a doll. She didn’t know how great she was — didn’t think she was a great singer. One hell of a drummer too. Go onto YouTube and search Karen Carpenter’s solo on drums — it’ll knock your socks off. But she was innocent. She was lucky to have [her brother] Richard because Richard knew what to do with her in a very gentle way.

Even at the Carpenters’ smoothest, I hear deep sadness in Karen’s singing.
I think that’s a standard ingredient to great artists. Listen closely to Miles Davis and you’ll hear the same thing.

Karen struggled with her mental health, which her fame didn’t help. Did you ever feel responsible for what she went through?
I’ve gone over that question so many times in my head: If I hadn’t picked them out and signed them, would the same result have happened?

Where have you landed?
I don’t have an answer.

In a recent documentary about you, you’re talking about “Wonderful World” and you say that nobody knows what a hit record sounds like. That’s your feeling now based on years of experience. But did you think you knew when you were young?
I didn’t know then either. “Wonderful World” was a demo that Keen Records put on a shelf. When Sam started selling records on RCA Victor, they pulled it out as a lark, and it ended up one of the biggest-selling singles Sam ever had. I’ve told this story before, but at A&M a guy played a record for me — I said, “Man, this record stinks.” Well, I was turning down “Louie Louie.”

Why didn’t you understand “Louie Louie”?
It was out of tune. It was too long. I didn’t know what the hell they were saying.

That’s why it’s great.
Probably so. But did they have another hit record? Sam used to say, “Close your eyes when you listen to a new artist — don’t get swayed by whether they’re beautiful or they’re handsome or they can dance their ass off.”

OK, but you were like a heartthrob in the ’60s.
What am I now — chopped liver?

I don’t think you can say your success had nothing to do with your looks.
I don’t think it did. You know that sadness you were talking about? It’s in my horn.

I agree. But it didn’t hurt that you looked great.
It didn’t hurt once I had a hit record. It wouldn’t have given me a hit record.

Jerry Moss, left, and Herb Alpert in 1974.

(Michael Putland / Getty Images)

Let’s talk about your song “Rise.”
Got lucky with that.

In what way?
My nephew Randy, who’s one of my managers, he wanted me to take some of the Tijuana Brass records and do a little disco number with them. So we go into the studio with a bunch of great musicians, start playing “Taste of Honey” at 120 beats per minute. I got nauseous — I said, “Man, I ain’t doing this.”

Nauseous?
The record was big, and I didn’t want to tamper with it. But Randy had written this song called “Rise” with a friend of his. He wanted me to play that at 120 beats per minute too. I said, “Lookit, man — let’s slow this thing down and let people dance closer together.” We recorded it live in the studio. Julius Wechter was playing marimba — dear friend of mine. I said, “What do you think of this thing? Pretty cool, isn’t it?” He turns around and says, “I hate it. That beat — the four-on-the-floor is killing me.” I expected a different answer from him. But it didn’t matter.

What’d you make of the Notorious B.I.G.’s sampling “Rise” for his “Hypnotize”?
How could you not like that record? These guys that take your bass line and make a record by pressing a button — I think that’s cheating a bit. But there’s 70 zillion streams on that song. Can’t deny it.

“Rise” was also sampled by the rapper Nas for his song “Power, Paper & P—.”
I don’t know how to comment on that one.

A lot of musicians from your generation have been selling their catalogs lately. Have you considered it?
There’s no reason to — I don’t need the money.

I wrote about Frankie Valli a few years ago, and he and Bob Gaudio seemed eager to have this company Primary Wave out there finding ways to —
Monetize the catalog. I get it. But they don’t have to do that with us. I don’t know if you know what’s happening, but I’m in the heyday of my career right now.

Right now?
It wasn’t my idea to get the Tijuana Brass back together again. My nephew, he’s a social media guy, and he went around the world to see what songs of mine were selling the most. Turned out there were about 18 songs. I started listening to the 18, and at the end, I felt happy, I felt joyous, I felt a smile was on my face. I thought, Man, let’s try this — this might be interesting. We started doing it, and we’ve been sold out 50 concerts in a row.

It strikes me that without the Tijuana Brass, you weren’t playing the Hollywood Bowl.
Hell no, I wasn’t.

What’s that say to you?
That the music is touching people. The times we’re living in, there’s a lot of doubt with what’s going on, and I think people are getting some positive energy from it.

You’re a lifelong Angeleno. Lots of well-to-do folks say that L.A. has gone to hell in a handbasket. What’s your take?
I think it’s pretty much the same all over the country.

Which is?
Gone to hell in a handbasket. People are confused about where they’re going, whether they’re gonna be able to have enough food on the table, whether they can afford gasoline. I’m not saying it’s all bad — it’s just hard to make sense of a lot of it for a lot of people, including the guy you’re talking to.

Your music has pulled from any number of cultures. Do you think it speaks of your Jewish identity?
Most definitely. My father was born in a shtetl outside Kyiv — didn’t speak Russian, spoke Yiddish. He brought his mandolin with him when he was 16 years old on a boat by himself and landed at Ellis Island. He used to play songs for me on the mandolin. When his nostrils flared, I knew he was into it. That kind of got me.

Jewish meets Mexican feels very L.A. to me.
I think we’re all a product of our surroundings. In high school I used to go see Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and I was touched by them. Of course, they were loaded.

What kind of guy was Chet Baker?
A troubled guy who was a brilliant musician. I gave him one of my horns, and he pawned it the next day. He was sweet but he didn’t have a hold on his emotions.

Not great for living, obviously. But good for music?
Well, you’re opening up a whole can of worms. I mean, why did so many great jazz musicians get hooked on drugs? Maybe guys that were hung up on being a human being, they found that getting stoned helped them through the struggle. I recorded Stan Getz the first time he ever recorded without drugs. It was at A&M — he was wearing this red silk shirt that had sweat stains under both arms. He had like 75 reeds on the ground because he couldn’t pick out the right one. He finally found the right reed, got over the anxiety and started playing — same Stan Getz you heard throughout his career. These guys were under the assumption that being stoned would change what they played. I don’t think that holds any water.

Was there a time you thought it might be true?
I did experiment with grass once. Turned on a recorder, took a puff, started playing some jazz. Took another puff, started playing some more jazz. I listened to that recording the next morning — it was terrible.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Can we do a little Herb Alpert trivia to finish?
Do I have a choice?

“A Taste of Honey” won record of the year at the Grammys in 1966.
You’re gonna ask why.

You beat the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
No kidding?

The year after “Taste of Honey,” you were nominated for record of the year again with “What Now My Love.” That one you lost. Remember what you lost to?
Not “Louie, Louie.”

“Strangers in the Night.”
That’s a real pop song. Love the guy, but not my favorite by him.

What’s your favorite Sinatra song?
“Only the Lonely.”

“This Guy’s in Love With You” — great vocal performance. Why didn’t you do more?
I’m not a singer.

Sure you are.
I know it’s a great performance. But it was one take, man — I did that in one take.

This is what I’m saying.
Look, I had an interesting guy in the sound booth who did the arrangements named Burt Bacharach.

I read that you talked with Burt a few times a week until he died.
I did, and not about music. We talked about football, basketball, politics, you name it.

What’s your basketball team?
Lakers.

Hard to be a Lakers fan these days.
Easy to be a critic.

In an era hallmarked by what experts call a “sex recession,” Six Sex is a symbol of liberation.

The Argentine baddie fashions herself as a baby-voiced, bikini-clad fembot, beamed in from the clubs of Buenos Aires — and has become known for cheeky, instructive celebrations of desire. Her songs are designed to galvanize like-minded club rats into Dionysian revelry, or, in the case of the song “How to Make Your Ass Bigger,” squats.

To a certain subset of the Latine underground, she represents a pure-hearted hypersexuality. Yet, for the artist behind the persona, Francisca Agustina Cuello, this wasn’t always the intention.

“I don’t know if it was because I still had to keep my innocence or what, but I didn’t envision the project that way,” she said, calling from a hotel room in Barcelona. “That response sort of came about from the people, towards me. So, I said OK, I’m making it my own.”

In doing so, Cuello has churned out six thumping EPs as Six Sex, a campy character that she describes as a “fable” — a mix of “fantasía y hedonismo.”

That dynamic is taken to extremes on her debut album, “Ultra”, released June 6. It’s a dark and propulsive journey through decades of electronic dance music, best described by its own opening words portending “ultra terrorific fantasy.” (The phrase conjures up images of grandeur, but really, it evokes that “Blades of Glory” quote: “no one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.”)

“I feel like nothing I say is all that serious,” she said about her lyrics. “It’s a thing about my personality to be silly and goof around.”

“Ultra” centers Cuello’s winking, suggestive sense of humor. “Not Your Mom” features a conversation with a garbled, omnipotent voice akin to the parents in Charlie Brown; “FUchi!” features schoolyard taunts about “low dickie energy;” the album ends with “No More Porn,” a playful yet powerful subversion of sexual expectations.

“At the same time, for me, that acts as a filter,” she added with a laugh. “Weeding out the people who get scandalized by it, and identifying the people who get it and say: ‘Yas, yo también quiero tener cuatro novios.’”

Earlier this year, Cuello took the stage at Don Quixote, performing in front of a sold-out crowd for her Los Angeles debut. The smell of sweat permeated the air as she ripped through several of her hits — including collaborations with Reysha Rami and German producer MCR-T. Every single one of her signature ponytail flips sent the room into hysterics. The audience screamed every word at the top of their lungs; it was the loudest, most raucous show I’d been to in years.

Cuello took a breather in the middle of her world tour to chat with De Los over Zoom about all things Six Sex: her new record, her writing style and how it feels to connect with fans spun into febrile intensity.

This interview has been condensed for clarity and was translated from Spanish to English.

“[I’m] weeding out the people who get scandalized,” says Six Sex of her provocative music.

(Catalina Jacobo)

I was really taken by the “Ultra” album cover. You’re wearing a white bikini and in this “come to Jesus” pose. What was the goal?
[laughs] It was hard, because I wanted the cover to represent what the entire journey of the album meant to me. I was looking for something strong and heavy in visual terms, because with “Ultra”, this is the first time I’ve finished a long, heavy project and I see the start of something. It’s like something new was unlocked. I found a new way to convey feelings, and a new way to create as well. It’s not like I just finished, and it is what it is. Rather, it is the beginning of something bigger.

Is there an element of separation at all between the artistry and you as a person?
I think they’re pretty close. It’s as if Six Sex was sort of a fable, or like a hentai or comic [version of] my life. It’s also happened that things I wrote as a joke later became reality. But generally, I draw inspiration from things that actually happened to me.

Is it weird to put those intimate experiences on an album?
No, not for me. Because I’m not speaking so seriously, I don’t feel exposed. Even though my persona and my character are very close to one another, I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. I’m not trying to make you believe in something. The songs stop being about me as soon as someone else listens to them. There are certain things we can all see ourselves represented in, and I think my music aims for that, too.

I want to ask about your performance style. I saw you live in Los Angeles and was really taken by the energy exchange between yourself and the crowd. How do you approach live performance?
Nowadays, I’m in a balance between performance and being a human being that connects with people and can pause to look in the eyes of the audience to register how they feel. I like being in a showgirl role, and at the same time, knowing when to step out of it.

Sometimes I go up there after having a crappy day, thinking that I’m gonna screw it up. And when I get up there and connect with the people, everything flows in a perfect way.

Does the music transform when it’s performed live, versus on a record? A lot of your music seems designed to be played in the club.
I think it’s very personal. For me, I’m a bit autistic; sometimes when I’m at a show, I get different sensations. It really depends on the person. I like seeing people’s reactions live when I start playing these songs for the first time. People were super hyped. They were enjoying them and jumping around a lot. It feels really fresh.

You reference ‘90s club classics all over “Ultra,” including by U.K. band the Prodigy on “Bitch Up.” How did these sounds come into your life?
These sounds evoke a special kind of nostalgia for me. Even though I hadn’t been listening to them lately, they sounded like something I wanted to bring back to the table — songs my uncle used to listen to when I was really young. Like a CD [of] pirated songs that somehow ended up at my house, and at the time I was like, “Wow, what is this music?”

There’s an element of Six Sex that gives “fembot,” like a female, sexy robot. I’m curious if you feel that playing out in your work.
[laughs] I didn’t know about the fembot thing. I don’t use Twitter. I [keep] a bubble… against some things that I don’t know. But I’ve always liked the idea that people have that perception of me, to some extent.

How do you feel about the rise of AI as a musician, especially considering your persona adopts that perception?
I mean… I don’t have a formed opinion on the matter. I do think that, I don’t know, it’s all very relative. For one thing, I obviously feel like it strips away the human value, but at the same time, it’s also a tool for humans. So it’s kind of contradictory. I feel weird about it…. I don’t know.

Zooming out, I’ve noticed Argentina has been having a musical moment over the last few years between yourself, Ca7riel y Paco Amoroso, Juana Rozas… How do you feel Argentina being represented or even challenged in your music?
I feel that culturally, Argentina is a very rich country. However, I do feel like, over generations, a paradigm was broken, and new sounds have been created that don’t necessarily abandon the roots of our music, but were created out of counterculture.

That same kind of counterculture is what makes Argentina be in such turmoil. It’s also the context of our country. Economic, political, social. The key Argentinian figures we refer to nowadays are constantly changing. And that allows you to listen to a variety of genres from Argentina, from people doing different things, and at the same time raising the flag and saying: “Yo soy argentino.” And we love that.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his fellow Republicans are reviving a line of attack against Democrats heading into the midterm elections: They’re communists.

In just the past week, Trump has issued dark warnings that members of the Democratic Party’s ascendant left are communists who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life” and even engage in assassinations. Vice President JD Vance has similarly called out communism as a political shift that is “something we haven’t seen in the U.S.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has decried “radical candidates” who are “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.”

The GOP’s ideological focus conflates democratic socialism, which often centers on securing universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter corporate regulation, with communism, under which private ownership is largely eliminated. It has been building since Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor last year.

But it’s kicked into a higher gear recently after democratic socialists won several New York City congressional primaries last week. The primary victory on Tuesday by another democratic socialist, Melat Kiros, for a Denver congressional seat suggested the trend may extend beyond Manhattan liberalism.

“The Democrats are making this easy for us,” Rep. Richard Hudson, the North Carolina Republican who leads the House GOP’s strategy and fundraising arm, said in an interview. “They’re nominating extreme liberals, leftists who are out of touch even with mainstream Democrats.”

Republicans are holding onto slim majorities

The messaging effort comes as Republicans scramble to hold onto threadbare congressional majorities in the November midterms. It risks overlooking public frustration, particularly among younger voters, with unfettered capitalism at a time of growing income inequality and rising costs.

But it also gives Republicans a much-needed opportunity to shift the conversation back to territory that is more comfortable for them after their party has spent much of the year on defense over the fallout from Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, which contributed to widespread price spikes.

Ralph Reed, the longtime conservative activist who hosted Trump last week at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, acknowledged that Republicans are facing steep headwinds this year. But the recent string of wins by democratic socialists, he said, allows Republicans to present a contrast between “common sense and crazy.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) rally at Kings Theater on June 18, 2026 in New York City. Sanders joined Mayor Zohran Mamdani ahead of next week’s primary, and the start of early voting on Saturday, as the pair campaigned for Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are challenging incumbents in Democratic primary contests.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Democrats are uncertain over the party’s direction

The renewed push could tug at tensions among Democrats who are largely united in their loathing of Trump but are divided over the party’s direction. This year’s primaries are shaping up as a referendum between centrists who are eager to course correct from what they see as progressive overreach earlier in the decade and a left-wing pushing for even more sweeping change.

“A lot of this anger has been boiling under the surface,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, which was founded by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats. “It’s coming to the fore in this moment in a very powerful way.”

But Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a centrist New Jersey Democrat, called the victories in Colorado and New York “aberrations.”

“We’ve got to fight like hell to keep our party from being hijacked by socialists,” he said. “Most of them are bomb throwers, not problem solvers.”

Nevada Atty. Gen. Aaron Ford easily dispatched a more progressive rival earlier this year in his Democratic bid for governor in a state Trump carried in 2024. As he eyes a general election challenge to Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, he insisted candidates like those who won in New York don’t represent all Democrats.

He said the Democratic Socialists of America “is not the face of our party.”

Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Washington Democrat who chairs the House Democratic campaign committee, said in a statement that Republicans were “resorting to desperate attacks that aren’t actually about the pocketbook issues.”

Trump risks overreaching with communism argument

Trump and fellow Republicans risk missing the mark when the public’s embrace of capitalism might not be as strong as it was decades ago.

About half of U.S. adults, 54%, have a positive view of capitalism, according to an August poll from Gallup, a slight decline from 61% in 2010. Democrats have driven some of the shift, but favorable opinions of capitalism have fallen among independents as well.

Only 42% of Democrats viewed capitalism favorably, while 66% had a positive view of socialism. The poll found that both younger and older Democrats have warmed slightly on socialism since 2010, but Democrats under age 50 are much less likely to view capitalism favorably. Democrats age 50 or older didn’t shift meaningfully.

“Young voters, who I would argue are driving a lot of the electoral energy that we’re seeing, came of age politically in a post-Soviet world,” Geevarghese said. “The attacks don’t land in the same way when Donald Trump was politically of age.”

Hudson, who is running the House GOP campaign committee, acknowledged the communism line might not resonate in the same way with all voters, particularly younger people. That’s why, he said, it’s important for Republicans to tailor their message to the needs of individual districts.

“I’ve never run cookie-cutter campaigns where we just say one thing over and over everywhere,” he said.

Still, the argument was high on Trump’s mind again on Wednesday as he visited the newly built Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota. He called the former president a “ferocious opponent of a thing called communism.”

“It’s the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11,” he said. “It’s a bigger threat, potentially a bigger threat than that, because it’s like a cancer that spreads, and you better stop it fast.”

Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University who has written on the rise and fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy, said earlier eras of anti-communism politics took hold because there was a large and active Communist Party in the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the country’s primary foe. But she said Trump’s focus on the issue is notable given his ties to Roy Cohn, a onetime confidant of Trump who earlier worked for McCarthy.

“It’s not very many steps to get from McCarthy to Roy Cohn to Donald Trump,” she said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, shrugged off Trump’s communism focus as “bunk.” In an interview, he said the direction of the party isn’t all that different from the dynamics he’s navigated for decades in California politics.

“I governed in an environment where the DSA was otherwise known as progressives,” he said. “This dialectic is so deeply familiar to me, and I don’t over read any of it.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

OLYMPIC VALLEY, Calif. — In the pre-dawn chill of the Sierra Nevada, Christina Klayko bounced on the balls of her feet, trying to keep warm and calm before one of the planet’s most punishing competitions.

Surrounding her at the starting line for the Western States Endurance Run — a lung-busting 100-mile race over towering mountain ridges and through deep, sun-scorched canyons — were some of the most elite athletes in the world, including former champions, record holders and an Olympic marathon medalist.

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Klayko, a 48-year-old mother of three, had no illusions about winning — she was just relieved to be there. She is a two-time cancer survivor, and a year earlier, she was lying on an operating table enduring a full hysterectomy, followed by months of radiation treatment. She was terrified she might die.

Spectators trekked to Emigrant Pass before dawn to cheer at the first significant milestone the Western States Endurance Run.

“I was in a very dark place,” she said. “I would have given anything just to be able to walk my dog around the block.”

But Klayko, a former software engineer from Los Altos, has never been a quitter. In her twenties, following a breast cancer diagnosis and a full mastectomy, she finished an Ironman triathlon. Last Saturday, she was hoping to complete an even more miraculous comeback.

To do so, she would have to run almost half the width of California, from the shores of Lake Tahoe to Auburn, a former mining town in the foothills above Sacramento, along remote, rock-strewn paths that rise and fall like a roller coaster.

In all, she would have to propel herself up more than 18,000 vertical feet, or three times the elevation hikers climb to the summit of Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous U.S. And she’d have to endure relentless jack-hammering from nearly 23,000 feet of descent.

Hard things are nothing new to her, Klayko said. And unlike cancer, running is a choice. You can walk away when you’ve had enough.

There’s no prize money for doing well in the Western States 100, but finishers get a commemorative belt buckle and, more importantly, membership in one of the most exclusive clubs in all of sports. More than 11,000 runners entered a lottery for fewer than 400 spots this year. Many had waited for more than a decade for their chance.

But there’s a cruel twist — not everyone who crosses the finish line wins the bragging rights.

There’s a strict 30-hour time limit. Which means, most years, dozens of competitors struggle over snow-capped mountains, push themselves to the brink of heat stroke in the sweltering canyons and endure a long, dark night in the wilderness, only to show up at the finish line a few minutes late.

Eric Strand, 65, of Wildwood, MO, center, runs in front of the Granite Chief Wilderness at the start of the Western States Endurance Run.

They’re not acknowledged as finishers. As far as the official record is concerned, they didn’t make it.

So as Klayko waited for the ceremonial shotgun blast that signals the start, she wasn’t worrying about cancer, or mortality, or even the hours of torture that lay ahead — she was dreading the cutoff.

“I knew I could just push and push as long as I had to,” Klayko said. But she couldn’t escape the looming fear of “running out of time.”

The first major obstacle was Emigrant Pass, a high ridge that is four miles, almost straight uphill, from the start at the Palisades Tahoe ski resort.

Half an hour after the start, the sun peeked over distant summits, turning the horizon orange, and the first runners approached the top.

In the lead pack was Jim Walmsley, a four-time Western States champion and holder of the course record — an astonishing 14 hours, 9 minutes and 28 seconds. Spaniard Kilian Jornet, arguably the greatest ultra runner of all time, was right there with him. That was no surprise. In addition to having won Western States and almost every other notable ultramarathon, Jornet famously summited Mt. Everest twice in one week — without supplemental oxygen.

Among the women was Molly Seidel, perhaps the most recognizable name after Jornet. Seidel had been a 27-year-old barista and babysitter before the COVID-delayed Olympics in 2021, when she shocked the running world by winning the bronze medal in the marathon. It was only the third marathon she had ever run.

These battle-hardened pros barely flinched when they crested the ridge and ran headfirst into bitter, gale-force winds gusting to 65 mph. Their bare, muscled legs kept pumping steadily and carried them down the other side, where the gusts quickly subsided.

The rest of the pack didn’t make it look so easy.

Spectators watch the sunrise before the start of the Western States Endurance Run.

Many were hunched and gasping as they struggled toward the crest. One woman bent over and started retching violently. Locking eyes with a reporter, she shouted, “I’M OK!” — apparently unaware that she was screaming over the wind and whatever was playing in her headphones. “I JUST SWALLOWED TOO MUCH SPIT!”

Then she straightened and staggered into the howling gale: only 96 more miles to go.

Seven hours later, at mile 56, the lead runners climbed out of the course’s deepest and hottest canyon, onto a dusty promontory called Michigan Bluff.

The first few looked almost as fresh and fast as they had at the ridge. But the punishment was starting to show on everyone else.

Jornet, who had been nursing a knee injury before the race, was concerned about the canyons. He didn’t make it through them, dropping out at mile 38.

Walmsley, who had been among the leaders for the first 30 miles, was fading by Michigan Bluff. Persistent hip pain would force him from the race at the next aid station. At this point, most of the other runners, including Klayko, were hours behind.

Justin Grunewald, a 40-year-old Colorado doctor, who some picked as a dark horse contender to finish in the top ten, looked exasperated as he emerged from the canyon. He went straight to his support team, who started dumping water down the back of his shirt and tying an ice bag around his neck.

“I’m totally fine,” he told them, “but my knee is killing me because I keep eating s—.” That’s runner shorthand for falling.

His knee was bleeding, but the real problem was his vision. He pulled off his sunglasses, and his eyes were a scary shade of red. He leaned his head back while a friend squeezed drops into them and reminded him to keep wearing his glasses. Obvious advice — but what else do you say to someone hellbent on running another 44 miles?

“Ultra runners are a strange breed,” said Amanda Basham, Grunewald’s wife. She was on his support team this year, but she has twice finished the race in fourth place.

Jacob Banta, of Mill Valley, pushes up the trail near Michigan Bluff during the Western States Endurance Run.

As Grunewald composed himself and trotted off into the distance, it seemed like a good time to ask the obvious: why does anyone put themselves through such an ordeal?

Basham laughed and said most people would probably brush the question aside with something safe and trite, like, “I just love running!” But the truth, she said, is that “almost everyone here has an intense story.”

Grunewald’s first wife and running partner, Gabe, died after fighting a rare cancer for 10 years, Basham said. Other competitors have lost a child, struggled with mental health or battled addiction. Running long distances on secluded trails can be a coping mechanism. For some, showing up at big races to commune with their tribe is like group therapy.

“We all come together for this common thing, and it doesn’t really matter if you went to rehab 10 times,” Basham said. “You’re here trying to get better, and it’s cool.”

Minutes later, Seidel hobbled out of the canyon clutching her thighs. When her crew offered her a chair, she tried to settle but started panting in pain, apologizing that she was in too much agony to sit.

This was her first attempt at 100 miles. She would explain later that she hadn’t eaten enough during the race and had developed excruciating skin lesions from chafing. It looked like her day was done, but she refused to quit.

The women’s winner, Jennifer Lichter, might have the most intense story of them all. Born in Bogota, Colombia, she was a nine-year old orphaned by cartel violence when a couple from Wisconsin adopted her.

In her first 100-mile race, she shaved a minute off the women’s course record, finishing in 15 hours, 28 minutes and five seconds.

The men’s winner, Vincent Bouillard, smashed the overall course record by more than 20 minutes, sprinting across the line in 13 hours, 46 minutes and 15 seconds.

Klayko, who never imagined herself involved in the chase for records, emerged from the canyon eight hours behind the leaders.

For most of the race, she hovered between hiking fast and running slow. She subsisted mostly on energy chews and gels, indulging in a baked potato sprinkled with salt at one point, and luxuriating in a cup of broth with rice at another.

Was attempting the race wise, given her health? Had she told her doctors she was planning to do this?

“That’s, um, a good question,” she said with a chuckle. “They know I’m a serious runner but … I don’t think I actually told them I was running the Western States.”

Probably for the best.

Like a lot of the runners, Klayko said she got a jolt of much needed energy at mile 78, on the bank of the American River, where the run suddenly turns into an obstacle course.

Racers grab a thin nylon rope and gingerly wade into the freezing water. Volunteers offer life vests and stay close to prevent drownings, but offer no assistance.

A racer crosses the American River during the Western States Endurance Run.

Near the middle of the crossing, the water got so deep that many runners submerged completely, pulling on the rope to haul themselves to the far bank.

“It definitely woke me up,” Klayko said of her crossing in the dark at 3 a.m. “It was a lot colder than I expected.”

On the other side — soaked to the bone, with wet clothes and shoes — she crawled back onto the dusty trail and started running again. Soon after, the trouble set in.

It began with a burning sensation on the bottom of her left foot. As the pain intensified, she started hobbling, leaning on the trekking pole in her right hand to take pressure off the blister that was growing bigger than a golf ball.

With just miles to go, her husband, Chris, who ran beside her — after the halfway point, competitors are allowed to have a companion for safety — kept checking the time. They were falling behind.

What do you say to someone you love in such a situation? You don’t want them to suffer, but you don’t want them to fail.

“We need to hustle,” he told her.

In the last few hundred yards, the race enters the football stadium at Placer High School. Seidel had finished hours earlier, at 5:29 a.m., when the stadium was relatively empty.

But the last 60 minutes before the notorious cutoff — known as Golden Hour — attracts a huge crowd.

Cameras film from every angle as one battered body after another circles the track. Some jog, some hobble, some openly sob. Whatever they do, it’s fully public and likely to go viral on social media.

Christina Klayko pushes for the finish at Placer High School with just minutes to spare in the Western States Endurance Run..

Klayko said she was coached to visualize her finish during training. In her head, it looked nothing like this.

When she came around the final bend with the clock ticking down, gasps arose from the media gaggle behind the finish line.

Desperate to compensate for the enormous blisters on both feet now, she leaned forward and to the right at almost 90 degrees — wobbling and weaving on her heels, relying on trekking poles to stay upright and claw forward.

It was hard to watch but impossible to look away.

When she was finally in stumbling distance of the line, Chris bounced up and down and thrust his arms in the air. The crowd roared.

She finished with 18 minutes to spare.

Christina Klayko nearly collapsed after crossing the finish with minutes to spare in Western States Endurance Run.

WASHINGTON  — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led a fractured Supreme Court this year that both expanded a president’s power to run the government and dealt major defeats to President Trump.

In Trump’s second year back in the White House, Roberts and the court punctured his claim to have power with no limits.

The justices struck down his worldwide tariffs, ruling these import taxes are a matter for Congress, not the president.

They also threw out his executive order that would end the principle of birthright citizenship. The Constitution wrote this promise into law, Roberts said, and the president may not change it.

The court also ruled in December that the president did not have the power to put National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago.

The three decisions came over fierce dissents from conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and with Neil M. Gorsuch in two of them.

The three liberal justices dissented angrily when the court ruled the administration may end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians.

They did the same when the court ruled the president may replace the top appointees of semi-independent agencies.

But they joined Roberts in a 5-4 ruling that affirmed the independence of the Federal Reserve and blocked Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

Trump has won on most immigration fronts because Roberts and the conservatives believe Congress put the enforcement power in the hands of the administration. They point to the law authorizing temporary protection which says there shall be “no judicial review” of the decision to end the protection.

Roberts is a solid conservative who also tries to keep the court on a middle course. It’s an approach that rarely wins plaudits from the right and almost never from the left.

This year the chief justice prevailed with different coalitions.

This week, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote against the Republican National Committee and upheld state laws that allow for counting late-arriving mail ballots. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Barrett also joined the chief justice in the rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. speaks to the Georgetown Law School graduating class in 2025.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

This week, the court also limited the power of police to use cellphone data to look for crime suspects. This too came on a 5-4 vote when Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the three liberals.

Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, who has been a friend of Roberts’ since their time in law school, said the chief justice “is clearly working very hard” to put together majorities.

“It is not easy to formally preside over a court in which five of its members (Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch on the right and Justices Sotomayor and Jackson on the left) deride the kind of efforts at moderation that is the chief’s preferred signature and harshly condemn him when he strays from their own views.”

Washington attorney Roman Martinez, a former clerk for Roberts, said the court is “clearly right of center” but the decision on tariffs was the most important of the year.

“It is a huge deal for the court to say ‘no’ to the president on his major policy initiative,” he said.

Stanford law professor Michael McConnell agreed. “It’s hard to claim the court is in Trump’s pocket when he lost the major cases,” he said.

Trump responded to the tariff defeat by calling the justices in the majority a “disgrace to our nation” and “disloyal to the Constitution.”

They “sicken me,” he said of Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, his two appointees who joined Roberts in the 6-3 majority.

Trump went to the court in April to hear his top attorney defend his executive order on birthright citizenship. He left after an hour of mostly skeptical questions.

On the term’s last day, Roberts issued a clear and eloquent 26-page opinion setting out America’s history of according citizenship to children who were born in this country, without regard to their parents.

This view came from England “and crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” he wrote. “Nothing is better settled,” Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1830.

But it was unsettled by the fight over slavery.

“In the odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford, this Court imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation” and decreed Blacks could not become citizens, Roberts wrote.

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were among the many who condemned the court’s decision, he said.

“It took more than a decade — and the addition of names such as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville to our national canon — but Douglass’s vision of ‘our common humanity’ would be fulfilled,” he wrote.

The Reconstruction Congress wrote this rule into the 14th Amendment and said “All persons born” here are citizens by birth.

The principle of birthright citizenship had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, the chief justice wrote, and it had gone unchallenged until Trump returned to the White House last year.

But Thomas filed a 91-page dissent arguing that immigrants must be “domiciled” here before their children may become citizens.

Alito filed a separate 39-page opinion branding the Roberts opinion a “serious mistake.”

On that note, the court adjourned for its summer recess.

¿Y si sí?

As Mexico moves to the Round of 16 in the 2026 World Cup following its Tuesday night 2-0 win over Ecuador — advancing in the knockout stage of the tournament for the first time in 40 years — El Tri fans have rallied behind a unifying phrase: “¿Y si sí?”

The simple three-word expression — which roughly translates to “What if… yes?” — has given Mexico supporters all over the world renewed hope: What if Mexico wins the World Cup?

The now ubiquitous phrase has been featured in memes and compilation videos. Even Mexican goalkeeper Memo Ochoa has gotten in on the action, posting a selfie on Instagram wearing a straw cowboy hat with “¿Y si sí?” etched on it.

Origins of the phrase can be traced back to a May interview with Efraín Juárez, who led Pumas UNAM to the Liga MX Clausura final. During the media appearance, journalist Rodrigo Celorio asked the head coach, “Y si sí?” (“What if yes?”), to which Juárez responded, “Y si sí? Y si los Pumas sí son campeones?” (“What if yes? What if Pumas are be champions?”).

Although Pumas would lose to Cruz Azul 2-1, the optimistic sentiment resonated with TikTok users, especially with the World Cup just weeks away. Some hopeful fans took to social media to post their own interpretation of the phrase, often coupled with clips of past Mexican men’s national teams. Others included a mariachi soundbite of Juan Gabriel’s “Hasta Que Te Conocí” from his 1990 performance at the Palacio de Bellas Artes — an appearance that was seen as a milestone for Mexico’s working-class communities given that the iconic Mexico City venue was best known to cater to the elite class. Because if someone who grew up in extreme poverty like Juan Gabriel could bring a mariachi band to the illustrious Palacio de Bellas Artes, why couldn’t the Mexican national team win its first ever World Cup?

The phrase “¿Y si sí?” is also a callback to a 2018 interview Javier “Chicharito” Hernández gave to journalist David Faitelson, who asked the former striker if he was serious about Mexico’s chances of winning that year’s tournament.

“Why can’t we be Greece in the [2004] EuroCup? Why can’t we be Leicester in the Premier League? Why not?” said Hernández, referring to underdog teams that defeated the odds against more favorable clubs.

As the two discussed Mexico’s probability of advancing in the knockout stages of World Cup, Hernández balked back with his now famous phrase: “Imaginémonos cosas chingonas!” (“Let’s imagine badass things!”), followed by “Porque no?” (“Why not?”)

Now both “¿Y si sí?” and “Porque no?” have taken on new meaning in 2026. After Fox Deportes reporter Rodolfo Landeros asked attacking midfielder Gilberto Mora why Mexico could win the World Cup ahead of the June 11 kickoff, the 17-year-old responded with “Es qué, porque no?” (“Because, why not?”).

After Mexico won all three of its group stage matches, TUDN reporter Julio Ibáñez asked the wunderkind Mora, “¿Y si sí?” to which the young soccer player replied “Y Porque no?” When Ibáñez asked if people should get their hopes up, Mora said yes. “Si, que se ilusione” (“Yes, they should dream big”), playing up the running gag.

With Mexico set to face England, one of the teams favored at the start of the tournament, on July 5, would it be so wrong if fans allow themselves to dream? ¿Y si sí? ¿Porque no?

LONDON — Claire Liu packed her bags and checked out of her London hotel room on Wednesday morning before heading to the All England Club.

It was more pragmatism than pessimism — a reality of a qualifier navigating her Wimbledon journey one day at a time.

But as her boyfriend reminded her while organizing her luggage: “Just because you’re packing doesn’t mean you’re leaving,” Liu recalled with a laugh.

He was right.

The Thousand Oaks native went on to win her second-round match against 51st-ranked Zeynep Sonmez of Turkey 7-5, 6-3, advancing to the third round of a Grand Slam for the first time in her professional career. She had tried 29 previous times at majors, including qualifying rounds, since 2015.

“I was just super relieved to get through that,” said Liu, noting she had blown a set and a break lead in the French Open’s second round last month.

For Liu, who turned 26 in May, returning to the manicured lawns of SW19 brings her tennis journey full circle. Nine years ago, she captured the 2017 Wimbledon girls’ singles title — the first American to do so since Chanda Rubin in 1992 — and was the No. 1 junior in the world. She still holds fond memories of that heady achievement, including chatting with her idol, Roger Federer, at the Wimbledon Champions Ball.

Yet, the transition from teenage phenom to professional mainstay has been anything but a linear ascent. When asked if she expected to be in the third round of a major this late in her career given her junior success, Liu was candid.

“Younger me would have believed it more than now,” she said.

That shift in perspective comes after weathering some brutal setbacks.

Liu climbed as high as No. 52 in early 2023 but then endured a wrist injury and took a months-long mental health hiatus in 2024 that eventually saw her ranking plummet outside the top 400 last year.

Currently sitting at No. 146, she’s been rebuilding her standing by playing a mix of WTA 125 events and ITF tournaments before returning to the main WTA Tour, with 2026 stops in far-flung places from Bahrain to Boca Raton and plenty of places in between.

“My goals haven’t changed, but I think the stress of how I got there really took a toll on me,” said Liu.

To navigate the darkness, Liu leaned heavily into both sports psychology and traditional therapy, including EMDR, a technique that helps people process traumatic experiences. She also started a Substack newsletter called “Finding Claire-ity,” where she openly chronicles her life and struggles on the tour.

The Southern California native, who has trained at the USTA facility in Carson since she was 9 years old and resides in Redondo Beach, also split with her longtime coach last season, a difficult decision, and hired Clemens Wagner.

The switch following the U.S. Open last year is clicking.

“I saw in her someone who fought a lot of battles inside herself,” says Austrian-born Wagner, who has a background in tennis analytics.

Together, they have focused on keeping an “aggressive undertone” on the grass, emphasizing coming to the net and squeezing the most out of her game.

Wagner notes that the 5-foot-7 player’s game isn’t the flashiest, but describes her as a “silent killer” who excels at “redirecting pace, standing close to the baseline, constantly putting pressure on her opponents.”

The reboot is starting to pay significant dividends.

Liu put together her best stretch in years this spring, winning a lower-tier title in Trnava, Slovakia, her first professional title since 2024, and then qualifying for the French Open.

Having again successfully navigated three rounds of qualifying to reach the main draw here, Liu has now won five consecutive matches at Wimbledon. Not surprisingly, she currently has no sponsors, just equipment support from Head Sport and Asics Corp., making her Wimbledon run particularly lucrative. By reaching the third round, Liu achieved her highest career payday: around $250,000. A victory Friday would boost that to nearly $400,000.

First, she faces her biggest test yet: a third-round contest against two-time major champion Coco Gauff on No. 1 Court, which perhaps fittingly is the same show court where Liu won the girls’ title almost a decade ago.

Gauff, 22, noted that she and Liu haven’t crossed paths much since Liu is older, but expects a serious battle. Gauff won both of their previous meetings on hard courts.

“I feel like anytime you’re playing a qualifier, it’s always tough because they have three matches already,” the seventh-seeded American said.

Liu, who didn’t even know she was playing Gauff until a reporter told her after her match, is purposefully keeping her focus narrow.

“I will just take today to be happy for winning, and then tomorrow I’ll think about it,” Liu said. “Obviously she’s one of the best players in the world right now, so that’ll be a good experience.”

Veteran Jessica Pegula, 32, the top-ranked American who also toiled away on the sport’s lower tier before becoming a top-10 mainstay, appreciates Liu’s resolve.

“It’s always nice to see girls that are figuring it out slowly but surely,” the No. 4 seed said. “I think I can relate to that.”

Liu’s accommodations? Fortunately, her mother was able to rebook the same hotel after the match, which eased some of the logistical issues for her unexpectedly extended stay in London.

“It definitely makes me stay in the moment, like, day by day,” Liu smiled of her lodging limbo.

On Wednesday morning, Liu packed her bags expecting she might leave Wimbledon. Instead, she emptied them one more time, with the biggest match of her career still waiting.

A century and a half ago, Richard Wagner was running out of cash as he was preparing to stage his four momentous nights of opera known as the “Ring Cycle” when he got a message from the Women’s Centennial Executive Committee in Philadelphia. It offered him a princely $5,000 (around $150,000 today) to write a triumphant 12-minute orchestral score to open the Centennial Exposition in Fairmont Park celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

On May 10, 1876, Theodore Thomas, perhaps America’s most famous conductor at the time (he would go on to head the New York Philharmonic and help found the Chicago Symphony), led the premiere of Wagner’s “Grosse Festmarsch” with a 150-member orchestra, its brass and percussion so impressive that the addition of cannon fire Wagner suggested was not needed. The crowd was said to number well over 100,000. President Ulysses S. Grant attended and invited Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil to join him along with members of Congress and Supreme Court justices for what remains a unique Declaration of Independence spectacle and debacle.

The “Centennial March,” as it came to be known, turned out to be dreck. Even Wagner, who carelessly tossed it off in a couple of weeks, said the best thing about the score was the fee, which he had demanded to be paid in gold. But what sounds like something AI might come up with if asked to write a pompous march in the style of Wagner began the American obsession with celebrating the Declaration of Independence, the words and deeds of our presidents, our very democracy with the assist of the symphony orchestra and opera.

One hundred years later, the country was awash with federal, state, city and philanthropic funding for a music-happy bicentennial of exceptional ambition. “With millions available in hand and more money to come,” Time Magazine wrote in 1975, “the Bicentennial is the biggest bonanza for the American composer since Hollywood discovered the musical.”

And so it was. The centerpiece was the National Endowment for the Arts Bicentennial Orchestra Commissioning Project. That funded America’s six top orchestras to each commission a major work that all six would play. In addition, the NEA offered further support to 34 American orchestras for dozens more new scores.

Everyone got into the act. The New York State Council of the Arts alone sponsored 68 commissions. Orchestras everywhere came up with striking projects. The Pittsburgh Symphony, for instance, premiered L.A. composer John LaMontaine’s opera/oratorio “Be Glad Then America” that featured the folk singer Odetta as the Muse of Liberty and enlisted ROTC students to reenact the Battle of Lexington overhead the orchestra.

The National Symphony commissioned symphonies from Roy Harris and William Schuman as well as Alan Hovhaness’ “Ode to Freedom,” a lovely short violin concerto written for Yehudi Menuhin. The list goes on.

We are obviously not seeing or hearing much like that in a semiquincentennial year when our government’s green gets the most attention for promoting algae. Even so, the NEA does indeed have an “America250” project (though it does little to publicize it, let alone fund it on the scale of 50 years ago) that is promoting more than 50 artworks. In music, they range from the Montgomery Symphony’s premiere in February of Nkeiru Okoye’s oratorio “A Time for Jubilee,” commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches, to a New West Symphony premiere last weekend of Michael Christie’s “A Ronald Reagan Portrait” at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

The major East Coast orchestras are paying some attention. The New York Philharmonic premiered David Lang’s luminous “the wealth of nations.” The National Symphony got the most attention in its attempt to commission Philip Glass’ “Lincoln” Symphony, which the composer pulled in opposition to an un-Lincoln-like presidential takeover of the Kennedy Center. Glass then gave the rights to the Boston Symphony for a July 5 first performance.

The National Symphony did pull off the premiere of Peter Boyer’s “American Mosaic,” and it was to the Altadena composer that Philadelphia, this time around, entrusted its Declaration of Independence commemoration. Boyer’s multimedia oratorio, “A Hundred Years On,” was given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra last month at the orchestra’s outdoor summer home, the Mann Center.

Upcoming will be a few repeat performances. Next month, “the wealth of nations” lands at the Aspen Festival, as does the “Lincoln” Symphony at the Cabrillo festival (with an L.A. Phil performance next season). “American Mosaic,” of which the Pacific Symphony was a co-commissioner, had its West Coast premiere in Costa Mesa last month and was scheduled to be performed at the Hollywood Bowl by the National Symphony in August, but that has now been replaced by Dvorak’s commonplace “New World Symphony.”

None of this comes close to comparing with the attempted civic zest of 1976. The NEA made it a matter of admirable policy that commissioned new works get multiple performances. Yet despite several of these being substantial works by some of our most noted and venturesome composers, few bicentennial commissions have survived. Even odder is that many of the composers did not necessarily feel compelled to explore nationalist themes. For them, American liberty implied freedom to simply write the kind of music they cared about.

The six works for the six orchestras were David del Tredici’s irresistibly over-the-top “Final Alice” (Chicago Symphony), Elliott Carter’s arrestingly impenetrable-on-first-hearing “Symphony for Three Orchestras” (New York Philharmonic), John Cage’s irrepressibly come-what-may “Renga” (Boston Symphony), Morton Subotnick’s brilliant electronic-landscaped “Before the Butterfly” (Los Angeles Philharmonic), Leslie Bassett’s introspective “Echoes From an Invisible World” and Jacob Druckman’s abstract-modernist “Chiaroscuro” (Cleveland Orchestra).

No orchestra has brought back its commission over the last half century, and only Chicago and New York recorded their commissions. No recording at all exists of L.A.’s, although Subotnick’s inventive uses of electronic music with a standard symphony orchestra went on to have considerable influence. None of these works, it appears, are likely to be heard anywhere in America this year, with one sort-of exception.

An explanation for that may be that, while 1976 was a fraught time for America — the country was recovering from the Vietnam War, we had a president and vice president who were not elected, there was runaway inflation, etc. — the music of the time represented optimism. Many works around the country explored new electronic music technology. It was the year Glass wrote “Einstein on the Beach” and Steve Reich created “Music for 18 Musicians” — the composers’ first masterpieces — demonstrating that Minimalism mattered.

That sense of liberation is clearly behind Del Tredici’s “Final Alice,” an hourlong romp around the ending of “Alice in Wonderland” for superhuman soprano and orchestra. It is so obsessively and addictively wild that its tamest moments sound like Richard Strauss on LSD. It does have a cult following although performances are few and far between.

Cage’s score is an abstract work based on the Japanese form of collective poetry known as renga, in which each poet attempts to write a line that is as distant as possible in meaning from the preceding line. Cage translates that to an independence of instrumental parts. While “Renga” can be performed alone Cage further suggests it be played along with an actual bicentennial work he wrote separately, “Apartment House 1776.” That is what Boston and the other orchestras did.

Indeed, “Apartment House” got the lion’s share of bicentennial attention and ridicule. When Zubin Mehta conducted it at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the L.A. Philharmonic did not take it seriously and many walked out on it.

The work features four vocal soloists who represent Native American, Sephardic, African American and Protestant religious traditions, along with instrumental music based on early American hymn tunes. Everything is cut up and put together through chance operations into what Cage called a Musicircus. Under the circumstances “Renga” was hardly noticed, although two decades later, “Renga” came into its own when Michael Tilson Thomas famously conducted it with the San Francisco Symphony and the surviving members of the Grateful Dead.

Still the idea that “Apartment House” need not stand alone, that our traditions and those of long-ago Japan belong together, represented for Cage a future for America. We need not act like a superpower, he noted, but merely be one nation, no more and no less, among many.

We are obviously not that nation. A half-century later, “Apartment House” tends to exist mainly in its own right. An excellent London new music ensemble calls itself Apartment House. Detroit Opera recently staged it with a 2026 need to give the singers the opportunity to select their own music rather than reflect on our heritage. If American music in 1976 represented a collective, inquisitive, inventive American spirit of discovery, the semiquincentennial in the age of social media has become more about the individual identity.

As a sign of how we think about ourselves, the Los Angeles Philharmonic begins its Hollywood Bowl season five days after the 4^th with a program of American music conducted by Thomas Wilkins that opens with Valery Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” which was written five years ago.

But for now, the work that stands out is Lang’s “the wealth of nations.” It balances harsh thoughts of how the promise of capitalism has failed society and how racism remains with music of stunning beauty and glory, to gently but forcefully show us, in our age of American dissatisfaction, the direction in which we might go to make us proud again. It needs many performances.

While veterans jockey for new contracts during free agency, young players are getting their tryout opportunities with NBA summer league games beginning this week.

First-round draft pick Cameron Carr and second-year forward Adou Thiero highlight the Lakers summer league roster that was announced Wednesday. The 16-man team will be coached by Lakers assistant coach Ty Abbott and begin summer league play Friday against the Golden State Warriors at Chase Center.

The Lakers also face the Miami Heat (July 5, 1:30 p.m.) and San Antonio Spurs (July 6, 4:30 p.m.) in the California Classic before playing in the Las Vegas summer league from July 9-19. The Lakers play Oklahoma City (July 10), Dallas (July 11), the Clippers (July 14) and Chicago (July 16) in Las Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center.

The Lakers traded up in the draft to get Carr, a 6-foot-5 guard out of Baylor, with the 24th overall pick. He will make his unofficial NBA debut, along with former Indiana State and Saint Louis star Robbie Avila. The 6-10 center became a bespectacled college basketball cult hero known affectionately as “Cream Abdul Jabbar” while leading Indiana State to the NIT championship game in 2024. He transferred to Saint Louis, where he was named Atlantic-10 player of the year as a senior when the Billikens won a school-record 29 wins.

Although he is entering his second season with the Lakers, Thiero will be playing his first summer league games. Persistent knee injuries hampered his rookie season. The athletic 6-7 forward averaged 1.9 points and 1.1 rebounds in 25 appearances last season. He said after the Lakers were eliminated from the playoffs that he wanted to improve on his three-point shooting during his second year. He attempted only five three-pointers during his rookie season, regular season and playoffs, making one.

Lakers summer league roster

Robbie Avila, C, 6-10, 240
Cameron Carr, G, 6-5, 190
Jon Elmore, G, 6-3, 190
Luke Goode, F, 6-7, 210
William Hickey, G, 6-4, 203
Arthur Kaluma, F, 6-7, 225
William Kyle III, C, 6-9, 230
Chris Mañon, G, 6-4, 212
Robert McCray V, G, 6-4, 188
AK Okereke, F, 6-7, 245
Chase Ross, G, 6-5, 210
Zhaire Smith, G, 6-4, 205
Peter Suder, G, 6-5, 215
Adou Thiero, F, 6-7, 234
Anton Watson, F, 6-8, 225
Jacari White, G, 6-3, 180

July 1 (Asia Today) — South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back urged senior commanders Wednesday to complete a key military capability review and work toward proposing a target year for the transfer of wartime operational control by the end of 2026.

“A military that cannot make its own decisions cannot become a strong military,” Ahn said while presiding over a meeting of senior commanders from across the armed forces at the Defense Ministry in Seoul.

Ahn called on the military to make every effort to present what officials have described as an “X-year” for the command transfer at this year’s South Korea-U.S. Security Consultative Meeting.

“Regaining wartime operational control is a path toward building a stronger Republic of Korea and advancing the South Korea-U.S. alliance to a new level,” Ahn said.

He said the transfer would allow the South Korean military to take the lead in wartime planning, operational preparations and the execution of military operations.

Ahn made similar remarks earlier Wednesday while chairing a quarterly meeting reviewing progress on the command transfer.

“This year, we face the critical task of completing the Full Operational Capability verification and determining the timing of the OPCON transition,” Ahn said. “Let us fulfill the historic mission of regaining wartime operational control.”

The Defense Ministry aims to complete verification of the future Combined Forces Command’s Full Operational Capability at the annual Security Consultative Meeting, or SCM, scheduled for November in Washington.

The ministry then plans to recommend a target year for the transfer to the presidents of South Korea and the United States.

South Korea regained peacetime operational control of its armed forces in 1994. During wartime, designated South Korean and U.S. forces remain under the operational control of the South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command, which is led by a U.S. general.

The allies have agreed that wartime command will be transferred after mutually established conditions are met rather than on a predetermined timetable.

The assessment of South Korea’s ability to lead the combined defense is divided into three stages: Initial Operational Capability, Full Operational Capability and Full Mission Capability.

The ministry said the Full Operational Capability assessment has been completed and that finishing its verification would allow the allies to begin specifying a transfer timetable.

U.S. and South Korean defense officials have repeatedly said the transition must be carried out in a stable and systematic manner under their jointly approved conditions-based plan.

Ahn also emphasized cooperation among the Army, Navy and Air Force.

He said each service must maintain its professional expertise but warned that service-specific interests should not create barriers to joint operations.

“Each service should ask itself how much time it allocates to joint training during the year,” Ahn said.

“Jointness must become part of military culture through the process of learning, training and thinking together beginning at the service academies and then be refined and developed in the field.”

The remarks came amid concern that the ministry’s plans to reform and potentially integrate elements of the military academy system could weaken the specialized education provided by each service.

Senior commanders also discussed developing a military based on artificial intelligence and advanced technology and restructuring South Korea’s armed forces by 2040.

They reviewed lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine and recent fighting in the Middle East, including the growing battlefield use of artificial intelligence, drones and robots as relatively inexpensive and efficient weapons.

The ministry said it would begin pilot programs using newly developed artificial intelligence models during the second half of the year.

It also plans to provide private companies with a catalog of military data that could support defense technology development.

The military will expand the number of units assigned to test commercially developed drones from one to nine to support South Korea’s domestic drone industry, the ministry said.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260701010000411

Eddie Huang has never felt lighter. Last month, after his debut novel, “Come Undone,” finally released, something shifted.

“I have a family. I feel healed,” he said over coffee and short ribs in Santa Monica hours ahead of a live talk with Ottessa Moshfegh, the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of Huang’s favorite book, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.”

“People always write me off as a personality or a multi-hyphenate,” he said. “It’s a nice way of saying I’m not really good at anything. But I didn’t have any of that this time.” He leaned forward, serious. “I have to be honest. I do think the Knicks are a big, big part of it.”

His beloved Knicks winning the championship, he said, kept him from spiraling over the book. In person, Huang subdues his ironic braggadocio with polite eye contact and rolling belly laughs at his own jokes. For years, audiences have watched Huang resist whatever box you put him in. His particular brand of cultural fluency — a rapid-fire mix of food, fashion, basketball, politics and pop culture — is what made the “Gua Bao Bad Boy” impossible to categorize.

For most of his career, Huang has seemed constitutionally incapable of standing still. Chef. Memoirist. TV host. Filmmaker. Lawyer. Comic. Podcaster. His first book, “Fresh Off the Boat,” became the longest-running network sitcom centered on an Asian American family, even as Huang publicly distanced himself from the show. Since leaving post-fires L.A. for New York, he’s reopened Baohaus — returning to the kitchen that built his career. Waiting for him at home after the book tour is his wife, Natashia Perrotti, and their 2-year-old son.

Now there’s “Come Undone,” fiction that Huang called his most honest — and vulnerable — work to date.

“It’s sort of this next-gen auto fiction type thing that is creating its own rules,” Moshfegh said ahead of their Q-and-A. “It made me think about my own appreciation for the experience of male heterosexuality and how much it’s been commodified.”

The book follows Hubie, a globe-trotting food-show host drifting through Chateau Marmont, Madeo, Nobu and other “dirtbag L.A” (as Huang coins) spots. He meets Janine, his equal in appetite and id, sending him into a tailspin of yearning and loops of Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” on sadboi walks. The “two walking red flags” decide to try to make it work.

Huang called the novel an “autofictional riddle.” The puzzle isn’t especially difficult if you’ve followed his relationship with Perrotti, who co-hosts their podcast, “Canal Street Dreams.” Marrying a writer, she’s learned, often means finding out what he feels by reading it. “We’ll get into a fight,” she said, “and I’ll wake up to a Substack article about it.”

It’s also part of the private life she’s since conceded. “It’s annoying,” she added. “But now I can read it, and maybe understand him a little bit better. He’s trying to communicate through the writing, like sending somebody a song and saying, ‘I want you to listen to these lyrics.’”

The novel goes further, drawing from experiences the couple has never discussed publicly. In the novel, Hubie and Janine’s relationship pivots after an ectopic pregnancy ends in loss. Perrotti said the scene is fictionalized but mirrors a similar experience they had early in their own relationship.

“It brought us closer together,” she said. “It was the catalyst for us realizing we were serious.”

Before Huang could finish the book, the life he was writing about had to fall apart. “This book was very much about breaking up with your family to start your own,” he said. “There was a lot of anger in the book that had not been resolved.”

By the end of 2024, Huang had stopped speaking to his mother. The break followed what he described as a blowup at a Cheesecake Factory. It also unlocked the ending he’d been chasing.

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Looking back, Huang thinks the earlier versions failed because he was still arguing with her. He’s still trying, in some way, to communicate with her through his writing. “If there’s one person I wish would read the book,” he said, “it would be my mom.”

There were other chapters he had to close the book on, mainly Hollywood. His foray into fiction coincided with the writers’ strike, drying up all his income and future projects. That same year, he became a father. “I had to accept and realize that my value was not in making money,” he said. “Because for three years, I couldn’t.”

He recalled a particular low point researching life insurance policies. “I had to rebuild my whole self. Really love myself despite not being able to offer anybody anything.”

That new certainty didn’t make Huang any less willing to pick fights. Last year, as his documentary “Vice Is Broke” — an autopsy of the media company behind “Huang’s World” and its eventual bankruptcy — awaited release, Huang said distributor Mubi shelved the film after he boycotted the company over Sequoia Capital’s investment in an Israeli defense technology startup. (Mubi denied this and said it still planned to distribute the film.)

The ghost of Vice still lingers in today’s media ecosystem in what he called our “era of cartel journalism:” creators navigating a world of blurred incentives and corporate interests. He traced this instinct to challenge those systems back to Socrates’ “gadfly” — the person whose job was to annoy power. “As a writer, you should be challenging people,” he said. “If your memoir can be turned into a sitcom, it probably wasn’t challenging.”

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

After the 2025 L.A. fires drove his new family back to New York, Huang went back to cooking. He worked pop-ups, reopened Baohaus and found himself alongside line cooks half his age. In March 2025, he rewrote the novel in five days. That same month “was the first month I didn’t overdraft my credit card,” he said, with the majority of his income today coming from the restaurant. It’s allowed him to make films, write books and walk away from deals he doesn’t believe in. “Being a chef is the anchor that allows me to maintain my artistic integrity.”

For years, comparisons to Anthony Bourdain followed Huang everywhere. The two eventually became friends.

“He was one of the few people who was as advertised,” Huang said. “Nicer and more generous in person. And wounded.”

Bourdain is the only real person who appears in “Come Undone” under his own name.

When Huang mentions him, he stops talking. He covers his face. Tears come.

“I don’t believe in God,” he said, “but I asked the universe why for many, many years.”

Bourdain’s suicide, he said, was one of the reasons he walked away from “Huang’s World” in 2018. At the time, few people understood why. “It was Tony. It was family. It was everything.”

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Now, looking back, Huang thinks he was writing “Come Undone” toward a different ending than the one he’d imagined.

“This book is a guy saying, ‘I don’t want to be like my biological father,’” he said. “And, in the most respectful, loving way, I don’t want to go out like Tony.”

He paused. “I needed to name the sadness in me. I needed to allow myself to be loved.”

Huang is already writing another memoir about getting back into the kitchen. Still, he said, these days, he’d rather write fiction.

Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.

The White House submitted a 927-page financial disclosure to the US Office of Government Ethics on Tuesday, offering the fullest picture yet of how US President Donald Trump’s fortune has grown since he returned to office in January 2025.

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Barely established when he was sworn in, Trump’s crypto businesses now generate more revenue than large parts of the property empire he spent decades assembling with his family, earning the US president more than $1.2 billion (€1.05bn) last year.

Two ventures account for the bulk of the crypto windfall.

World Liberty Financial, the firm launched in 2024 by Trump’s sons and business partners, brought in more than $500 million (€438mn) from selling new crypto products, among them so-called governance tokens, which grant holders voting rights in certain company decisions but no ownership stake.

A separate business tied to the $TRUMP “meme” coin, a cryptocurrency bearing the US president’s face and name, generated a further $635 million (€557mn) from token sales.

Trump’s crypto activities appear to be a major driver of the near tripling of his personal fortune, which Forbes estimates rose from $2.3 billion (€2bn) to $6.5 billion (€5.7bn) between 2024 and 2026.

For many buyers, the story has been far less lucrative.

The $TRUMP coin, which briefly traded above $74 in the days after its launch, has since collapsed to under $2, while World Liberty’s tokens have shed around 80% of their value since they began trading last September.

Since the disclosure lists only revenue and not profit, the true scale of Trump’s personal gains cannot be known. However, the filing shows that the US president and his family collected fees and royalties up front, while many investors have seen the value of their holdings fall sharply.

Among those investors was Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who poured $75 million (€65.7mn) into the governance tokens and $200 million (€175.3mn) into both $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins.

A US fraud case against him was later paused before being resolved with a $10 million (€8.7mn) settlement. Sun has denied any connection between his spending and the outcome of his legal troubles.

After the release of the filing, the White House also rejected suggestions of any ethical concerns.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” Principal Deputy US Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to AFP.

Kelly said US President Donald Trump had “proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world.”

“All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people, and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade,” Kelly added.

Beyond crypto: Trump’s wider business empire

The filing also details an aggressive international expansion, with new hotel, resort and condominium agreements generating millions of dollars in countries that were negotiating with Washington over trade and security at the same time.

A development in the United Arab Emirates earned the Trump business around $10.4 million (€9.1mn) last year, one in Saudi Arabia roughly $9 million (€7.9mn), and projects in Qatar, Romania and Vietnam were $5 million (€4.3mn) apiece.

Closer to home, the US president’s established businesses boomed alongside all the new ventures.

Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, generated around $77 million (€67.5mn), a jump of roughly 50% on the previous year, as heads of state and executives flocked to the property during his new term.

The disclosure also reveals the wide range of ways the Trump brand is now monetised.

The US president earned millions from a sprawling range of branded goods, from sneakers and watches to bumper stickers, with Trump-branded watches alone bringing in $4.7 million (€4.1mn), and more than $200,000 (€175,300) coming from the “God Bless the USA” Bible, a branded edition promoted with country singer Lee Greenwood.

Branded merchandise of this kind, sold by a sitting US president, has no precedent.

A 1978 law requires the president and vice president of the United States to declare their income as well as their assets.

First Lady Melania Trump’s income is also set out in her husband’s financial disclosure, including more than $10 million (€8.7mn) tied to a biographical Amazon documentary and over $500,000 (€438,250) from her memoir.

For comparison, US Vice President JD Vance reported between $1 million (€876,500) and $5 million (€4.4mn) in royalties from his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy”.

Critics have long argued that such arrangements blur the line between public office and private profit. The White House rejects the charge outright.

America 250” is no “Spirit of ‘76.”

For those of us who remember the bicentennial, the semiquincentennial is a complete and utter dud. Many fine festivities will take place on and around July 4, but compared with the years-long nationwide celebration that marked this country’s 200th anniversary, 250 feels like a nonevent.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Semiquincentennial (meaning half of a 500-year anniversary) certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as bicentennial and our current president isn’t making it any catchier. Mostly because he seems to think 250 is the new 80 (the birthday President Trump recently marked with his UFC Freedom 250 cage match on the White House lawn).

As many have noted, Trump’s method of honoring this country’s birthday involves making it all about him by demolishing parts of the White House (to install a new bunker-like ballroom), attempting to set up a $1.8-billion slush fund for pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, seeking to build a triumphal arch that a majority of Americans oppose and trying to slap his name and/or image on any surface he can think of (including a proposed $250 bill). No wonder so many artists have dropped out of the concert series planned for the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C.

To be fair, the federal government’s involvement in bicentennial planning also got bogged down with political and personal hubris. The national commission, originally created by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was reformed under President Richard Nixon. Plagued by criticism and scandal, it was eventually dissolved by Congress and replaced by a new commission that decided to mostly fund community celebrations.

There was much hand-wringing over missed opportunities at the time, but for more than a year, state and local governments staged reenactments, parades and patriotic events all over the country while the commercial sector star-spangled the crap out of everything: T-shirts, bell-bottoms and bathing suits; curtains, bedspreads and throw rugs; dishware, glassware and Tupperware.

The Declaration of Independence appeared on highball glasses, tea towels and collectible plates. Beginning in 1974, CBS ran mini-history lessons called “Bicentennial Minutes,” which were then sent up on shows as diverse as “Hee Haw” and “Maude.” George Washington and other Founding Fathers graced Pez dispensers, coasters and the cover of Mad Magazine. There was a bicentennial Barbie and a colonial Campbell’s Soup doll. McDonald’s sold red, white and blue milkshakes, Burger King offered a flag-bedecked series of glass tumblers, Disney characters wore tricorn hats for a line of park merchandise.

Some called it the “buy-centennial” but for a kid who daily rocked Stars and Stripes sneakers, and, thanks to a year’s worth of American-history-themed “Schoolhouse Rock!,” could, and would, sing the preamble to the Constitution or the anthem “No More Kings” at the drop of a hat, it was great fun.

Now, of course, “No More Kings” is an anti-Trump protest theme, and the right has so co-opted patriotism that wearing a flag-emblazoned T-shirt can feel somehow partisan. American history itself has become a bone of contention, with the left accusing the right of whitewashing this country’s inarguable sins — Native American displacement, slavery, gender inequality and racist policies — while the right insists that the left is obsessed with undermining our nation’s power and legacy by “woke”-shaming it.

The only thing each end of our divided political spectrum can agree on is that democracy is under mortal threat from the other.

That’s one good reason to feel less than festive, and there are plenty of others, including increased political violence, the war in Iran, tariffs, surging gas prices, civil rights rollbacks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics, artificial intelligence’s threat to jobs, the resurgence of measles, the rising cost of just about everything and the fact that some critics are claiming that Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is less full of wonder than “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

But things weren’t so great heading into the bicentennial either. I was 12 at the time, born nine months after Alabama Gov. George Wallace gave his infamous “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech and less than two months before President Kennedy was assassinated. I hadn’t been alive a year when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan and hadn’t turned 5 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were also assassinated.

Sure, it was that now-wistfully remembered time when kids went out in the morning and played, mostly unmonitored, until nightfall (with the inevitable trips to the doctor for stitches and tetanus shots for those wounds too obvious to hide from parents). But by the time the bicentennial rolled around, my life had played out against the backdrop of civil unrest and the Vietnam War, both spilling from our black-and-white television almost nightly.

I was 9 when Wallace, then a presidential candidate, was shot and 10 when I learned what OPEC and gas siphoning meant as my family spent hours in an un-air-conditioned car, inching toward the gas pump after the 1973 “Yom Kippur” Arab-Israeli War resulted in oil shortages.

That same year, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned from office, pleading “no contest” to charges of tax evasion but avoiding prosecution for charges of bribery and criminal conspiracy, and Nixon appointed House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-Mich.) to Agnew’s place. In 1974, Nixon, faced with impeachment for his part in the Watergate scandal, became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The bicentennial’s tall ships festivals, fife and drum parades and Old Glory consumer fest occurred in a country reeling from more than a decade of history-changing assassinations, civil unrest, economic anxiety and high-level political corruption (not to mention a collective fear of the ocean brought on by the 1975 release of Spielberg’s “Jaws”). Democracy was celebrated under Ford, the first, and thus far only, president to come to office through the provisions of the 25th Amendment rather than a national election.

A president who, after being regularly and ruthlessly lampooned by comedian Chevy Chase on the nascent “Saturday Night Live,” reacted by becoming friends with Chase instead of, you know, forcing the network to fire him.

If the bicentennial roiled with some of the same tensions Americans feel today, it did benefit from a cultural cohesion that no longer exists. The year 1976 saw the founding of Apple and the introduction of VHS tapes, but the national audience was still very much a reality. Back then, you couldn’t escape the songs of the summer — “Silly Love Songs” (Wings), “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (Elton John and Kiki Dee) and “Afternoon Delight” (Starland Vocal Band) — any more than you could miss those “Bicentennial Minutes.” We all listened to the radio, watched TV, went to the movies and bought books, and our preferences revealed the country’s desire for both comfort and change.

On the bestseller lists, Agatha Christie’s final Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple books marked the end of an era, toggling in the No. 1 spot with the political turbulence of Gore Vidal’s “1876” and Leon Uris’ “Trinity.” “Rocky” beat “All the President’s Men,” “Taxi Driver,” “Network,” “Marathon Man” and “The Omen” at the box office and, later, in the best picture Oscar race.

On television, Americans sought the nostalgic comfort food of “Happy Days,” “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie” amid the more pointed social comedies of “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons” and “MASH,” all of which had nightly averages of 20 million or more viewers.

In today’s cultural landscape, defined by social media bubbles, streaming services and Spotify libraries, the gap between mass audience and cultural significance is much wider than it was 50 years ago (“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” may be the highest-grossing movie of the year, but it’s hard to imagine it winning best picture) and mass audience has become a relative term for pretty much everything that is not the Super Bowl.

Even so, we too find ourselves rooting for the little guy (“Project Hail Mary”) and reaching into the past for inspiration (a new “Little House on the Prairie” debuts next week on Netflix) even as we contemplate the future of tech (“The Six Billion Dollar Man” has become every computer genius who can leap a firewall).

I don’t know what it was like to be an adult in 1976, but I remember my parents fretting over the grocery budget, nixing travel plans because of the price of gas and worrying about the future of a country that seemed so irreparably divided. To paraphrase the Diana Ross hit of the time, did we know where we were going to? Not at all. The bicentennial occurred during an election year, with all the partisan denunciations that entails (though when Jimmy Carter narrowly beat Ford, no one thought of contesting the results).

Even so, most Americans were still ready to party, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of a long-shot revolution that resulted in the United States of America.

So does it stink that the semiquincentennial has been such a flop? Yes, it does. But, as is written in its very singable preamble, the Constitution was written “in order to form a more perfect union.” Not “perfect,” but “more perfect.” As in better.

Even in the most troubled times, the cornerstone of our democracy is the understanding that we will always need to do better and there is a living document that allows us to do so.

And 250 years’ worth of that is definitely worth celebrating.

Just 16 miles north of the California border, enchanting Ashland, Ore., has drawn theater fans for more than 90 years. The city owes its modern tourism economy in large part to William Shakespeare.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs from spring to fall annually, attracting many of the 350,000 annual visitors to the city of 21,000 residents. Locals and travelers gather to watch live productions in venues like the Allen Elizabethan Theatre — modeled after a 1599 London playhouse, with a three-story Tudor facade — where for one magical evening, they’re transported to Shakespeare’s heyday.

While it’s hard to escape the Bard’s reach in the downtown core, Ashland and environs offer much more than theater. Its outdoor wonderland especially is well worth exploring. Or as Shakespeare once put it: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Within a short drive await wineries, hiking, cycling and white-water rafting on the magnificent Rogue River. Crater Lake National Park is about a two-hour drive, and the destruction of dams on the Klamath River reopened scenic rafting there last year for the first time in more than a century. As a designated Tree City USA community, Ashland is steeped in greenery. Parks abound. Lovely Ashland Creek meanders through the town.

Founded as a farm town in the 1850s, Ashland incorporated as a city in 1885 after rapid growth fueled by the railroad’s arrival. Many buildings in the downtown historic district date to the turn of the 20th century. Today, Ashland is home to a variety of shops — a couple of favorites include Bloomsbury Books with its ecology rack right out front and Mountain Provisions for high-quality outdoor gear. And with more than 100 restaurants, Ashland’s food and beverage scene runs the gamut from casual (try the porkstrami at Sammich) to inventive (check out the unique Alsatian menu at Nous).

These days, a cautious optimism prevails throughout Ashland, which had been hit hard by the pandemic and simultaneous wildfires. At downtown’s Village Baker, the scent of baking bread hints at the 1,400 loaves produced daily. They start at 4 a.m. and deliver for miles around. That broad reach, co-owner Gerardo Gutierrez says, has helped them weather challenging times.

“We’re coming back from the ashes,” he said.

Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda celebrates after the Dodgers beat the Montreal Expos to win the NL pennant in 1981.

(Associated Press)

Years as manager: 1976-1996

Record: 1,599-1,439, .526 win pct

After serving as the team’s third base coach for four seasons, Lasorda took over as manager late in the 1976 season when Alston announced his retirement. He led the Dodgers to the National League pennant in his first two full seasons, losing both times to the Yankees in the World Series. He won his first World Series in 1981, knocking off the Yankees, and rallied his team to a surprise title in 1988 in which the Dodgers beat the heavily favored Athletics. Lasorda was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997, his first year of eligibility.

A fiery and vibrant presence who spent 71 years with the Dodgers, Lasorda managed nine players who won the NL rookie of the year award. The Dodgers also opened the Japanese player pipeline on his watch. Hideo Nomo, the first Japanese big leaguer to permanently relocate to the U.S., joined the Dodgers in 1995. Three decades later, the team features Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto on its star-studded roster.

WASHINGTON — New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. revealed Tuesday that he spent months away from Congress being treated for depression.

“It is physical, it is emotional, and until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be,” he said on the House floor.

Kean’s reappearance comes after he won an uncontested primary on June 2 and months since he last voted in the House.

“Today I stand before you healthier, stronger and excited to return to the work that I love,” Kean said.

A second-term lawmaker and scion of a New Jersey political family, Kean represents a battleground district that includes President Trump’s Bedminster golf club. He’s missed more than 100 votes in Congress this year and hadn’t been seen publicly in Washington or his district despite winning the Republican nomination to serve another term.

The mystery over Kean’s absence carries potential political implications, given the competitive district he represents and the Republican Party’s narrow control of the House. His office has said he is still running for reelection and is set to face Democratic nominee Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, in New Jersey’s most high-profile contest in November.

Democrats have targeted the district as a prime pick-up opportunity, given that the seat has changed hands in the last two midterm elections. Kean won in 2022 by defeating Democrat Tom Malinowski, who had defeated Republican Leonard Lance in 2018.

Kean’s last vote was months ago

Kean last voted in the House on March 5, but his absence wasn’t explained.

In April, his social media account said he had been dealing with a personal medical issue and his doctors expected him to recover.

Kean’s absence has also complicated matters for House Republican leaders, who are struggling every day to pass bills with their razor-thin majority, 218-212. Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders repeatedly told reporters they were in touch with Kean, but said he would have to address the circumstances himself.

Trump has endorsed Kean’s reelection, without mentioning his absence.

Kean comes from a long line of public servants, stretching 250 years to the country’s founding when one of his ancestors became New Jersey’s first leader since independence.

His great-grandfather was a senator, his grandfather was a congressman and his father is the former two-term governor, Tom Kean Sr.

Catalini and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will hear a 2nd Amendment challenge to the gun laws in Connecticut and Cook County, Ill., that ban most semiautomatic assault weapons.

Before leaving for the summer recess, the justices issued orders on new cases that will be heard in the fall. The new 2nd Amendment case figures to be a major test of what kinds of firearms and ammunition are off-limits to state or federal regulation.

The outcome will affect California and all the states led by Democrats that strictly regulate or prohibit semiautomatic rifles, such as the AR-15.

Gun-rights advocates say these are among the most common and popular weapons in the country, and they should not banned in some states.

In response, Connecticut state attorneys said only about 2% of Americans own assault weapons, and they rarely use them for self-defense.

Since 1989, California has prohibited the sale and possession of most semiautomatic rifles and pistols that can fire more than 10 shots before reloading. Nine other states led by Democrats have similar laws.

State lawmakers said these rapid-fire guns are not needed for self-defense but can be a weapon of mass murder. All of the blue-state bans could be struck down next year if the court’s conservatives rule in favor of the 2nd Amendment claim.

Gun-rights advocates say firearms in “common use” by law-abiding owners cannot be prohibited by the government.

Four of the court’s conservatives have said in past dissents they believe the state bans on assault weapons run afoul of the 2nd Amendment. They are Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

That suggests the fate of those state laws depends on Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Joining in support of the gun-rights challenge were the state attorneys for Montana, Idaho and 25 other Republican-led states.

They urged the court to prevent liberal judges and states led by Democrats from “rewriting the 2nd Amendment … to allow hostile jurisdictions to continue infringing on their citizens’ core constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

In 2016, California’s voters approved a ballot measure that makes possession of large-capacity magazines illegal. At least 10 states have similar laws, but they apply only to the manufacture and sale of large-capacity magazines.

Gun-rights advocates sued in San Diego, leading to nearly a decade of back-and-forth litigation. A federal judge struck down these restrictions under the 2nd Amendment, but the state appealed. They were eventually upheld by the 9th Circuit Court in an en banc ruling.

Meanwhile, the 7th Circuit Court in Chicago has upheld an Illinois law and the Cook County ordinance prohibiting semiautomatic rifles and pistols. Its opinion said rapid-fire guns do not differ significantly “from machine guns and military-grade weaponry,” which can be banned under the 2nd Amendment.

Before Tuesday, the justices had repeatedly refused to weigh in on whether the 2nd Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms” includes the right to semiautomatic “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines.

Since 2015, the court has turned down gun-rights appeals from blue states like Illinois and Maryland over their bans on “assault weapons,” despite dissents from Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch.

As an appeals court judge in Washington, D.C., Kavanaugh voted to strike down the city’s ban on assault weapons.

Three years after John Roberts became chief justice, the court ruled for the first time in 2008 that the 2nd Amendment protected individual gun rights, not just state militias. But the 5-4 decision simply struck down a city’s ban on having a hand gun at home for self-defense.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller said the Constitution gives law-abiding persons a right to have weapons in “common use” for self-defense, but not “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Ever since, advocates for gun rights and gun control have been arguing over whether semiautomatic guns with large-capacity magazines can be regulated because they are uniquely dangerous or are protected because they are very common.

In the past two years, the Supreme Court has a mixed record on gun regulation.

Last year, the justices in a 6-3 decision struck down a federal regulation that banned “bump stocks,” which allow rapid-fire shooting with a semiautomatic rifle.

That regulation was adopted in the first Trump administration in response to the mass shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas where a lone gunman fired as many as 1,000 shots from a hotel window.

The conservative majority ruled the bump stock devices did not fit the definition of a prohibited machine gun.

Earlier this year, however, the court in a 7-2 decision upheld a regulation prohibiting unregistered “ghost guns” that were made by parts kits.

Of all the calculated maneuvers by LeBron James during his eight years with the Lakers, he saved his smartest for last.

He left before the door could hit him in the butt.

He knew the Lakers didn’t want him back, so he skipped out before they had a chance to say goodbye.

He leaked the news alone, before the Lakers could publicly confirm, because he wanted to sell that this was his decision, when it absolutely was not.

This was not his idea. This was not his call. This was the Lakers saying, enough is enough. This was the Lakers saying, we want our team back.

This was arguably the greatest player in basketball getting the message and getting out before they threw him out.

Officially, on Tuesday, James informed the Lakers that he’s going to leave them as a free agent and finish his career elsewhere.

Unofficially, yay!

LeBron is gone, and he left without a fight, and the Lakers couldn’t be luckier.

LeBron is history, and it didn’t cost the Lakers a penny, and now they can breath again.

“LeBron James is one of the greatest athletes in history,” Lakers governor Jeanie Buss said on social media after the news dropped Tuesday morning. “We will always be thankful for his eight years with the Lakers — including the title he led us to in 2020 under the toughest imaginable circumstances and the countless records he broke in purple and gold. We wish him all the best in the future, both on the court and off. He will always be a cherished part of the Lakers family.”

Cherished, but gone, and thank goodness somebody over there had the conviction to let history walk.

Kudos to the new Lakers ownership for resisting every business impulse in their body to keep him while summoning the strength to stare down the most famous basketball player in the world and tell him to hit the road.

Lakers forward LeBron James looks to pass while being defended by Kings guard Daeqwon Plowden during a game in March.

(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)

They could have been suckered into signing him just to throw him a grand farewell tour. They weren’t.

They could have been fooled by the 15-2 success he enjoyed when playing with Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves during that glorious month this spring. They weren’t.

They could have, as with past Laker regimes, simply been bullied by Rich Paul and his cronies. They weren’t.

They didn’t even make him an offer!

In losing LeBron, the Lakers reclaimed a bit of their soul. In letting LeBron leave, they sent a clear message to everyone who stayed.

This team belongs to Luka. This team belongs to the future. This team again belongs to the Lakers.

“Truly a honor to wear the (purple and gold),” James posted on social media. “Hope I made a few proud during my stint.”

He made many proud. He made the Lakers proud. He led them to their only championship in the last 16 years, he became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and, in his 23rd season, he set all sorts of records for longevity.

Lakers forward LeBron James (23) and his son Bronny (9) on the court together during a playoff game against the Rockets in April.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In his final glorious act this spring, at age 41, he dragged a shorthanded Lakers team into the second round of the playoffs. His widely acclaimed effort against the Houston Rockets proved he could still play. He was still among the top 20 players in the league.

But, goodness, he drove the Lakers crazy.

His eight-year tenure was filled with quiet demands for roster changes amid veiled threats to leave. The Lakers were so afraid of losing him or displeasing Paul and all of his other star clients that they constantly, sometimes embarrassingly, bowed to the King.

In doing everything from acquiring Russell Westbrook to drafting James’ son, Bronny, the Lakers contorted themselves to please their leader.

And for what? Outside of that bubble title in 2020, James never led the Lakers to much of anything. Despite setting some of his records in front of them, he never connected with Lakers fans, perhaps because of the continuous passive-aggressive mind games he played with management.

Here’s guessing he wanted to stay in Los Angeles, and would have eventually accepted a massive pay cut from last year’s $52.6 million. Here’s guessing he would have chosen to remain in the town that contains one of his family homes and many of his businesses for a chance to end his career in a Laker uniform with a farewell celebration that matched the royal ones given the likes of Kobe Bryant and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

But the Lakers never gave him that choice. As it turns out, even 43,440 points were not enough to endear him to an organization that still prefers to call itself the Lakers and not the LeBrons. While he seemed invincible, LeBron was not indisposable, and now he can take his act to Golden State or Cleveland or somewhere else willing to kiss the ring.

Give him credit, though, for pulling one last move.

LeBron leaked his announcement one day after son Bronny’s $2.3 million contract became fully guaranteed.

Of course he did.

Carl Erik Rinsch, the director of the 2013 Keanu Reeves action film “47 Ronin,” will serve more than two years in federal prison for defrauding Netflix of $11 million.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff on Monday sentenced 48-year-old Rinsch to 30 months in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, announced. Federal prosecutors convicted Rinsch in December of wire fraud, money laundering and other counts. A legal representative for Rinsch did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors indicted Rinsch in March 2025, alleging the $11 million went into Rinsch’s personal accounts. The filmmaker “quickly transferred” the money from the Rinsch Co. account, where it had been deposited March 6, 2020, by Netflix, through additional accounts until about $10.5 million wound up weeks later in a personal brokerage account. He lost more than half of that money in less than two months via risky investments in the stock market, the indictment said.

Though Rinsch told the streamer that his sci-fi show “White Horse” was progressing nicely, the filmmaker allegedly moved the remaining money into cryptocurrency and profited from crypto speculation over the next couple of years. The streamer had invested around $44 million in the show. Rinsch was accused of spending around $10 million on five Rolls-Royces, a Ferrari, watches, clothing, luxury bedding and linens, credit card bills, attorneys to sue Netflix for more money, and lawyers to work on his divorce.

He was arrested in West Hollywood and released the same day after agreeing to post a $100,000 bond to guarantee his appearance in a New York federal court.

Rinsch never finished the Netflix show.

During his sentencing, Rinsch and his legal team told the court his behavior was a result of mental health struggles and medication problems and they are working to address those issues with a new care provider, the Associated Press reported.

“I failed to recognize the danger of the state I was in,” Rinsch said, though his mental issues were not described in court, and his attorneys declined to provide further detail.

Ahead of the sentencing, Reeves — the star of Rinsch’s most notable project to date — penned a letter in May requesting “leniency and mercy as well as justice” in the filmmaker’s sentencing.

In addition to prison time, Rinsch must serve three years of supervised release, forfeit the $11 million and pay $700 in mandatory special assessments, according to Monday’s announcement. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in the announcement: “Today’s sentence sends a deterrent message: fraud will not be tolerated.”

The Associated Press and former Times assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — The Trump administration on Tuesday said it would freeze federal funding for New York’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, a state agency responsible for investigating and prosecuting fraud in the safety-net government healthcare program.

In a letter sent to New York officials, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Thomas March Bell accused the state of not securing enough criminal indictments and said millions of dollars in funding would be suspended through at least Sept. 30.

The move is the second suspension of a state Medicaid fraud unit this year by the Republican Trump administration, and part of a barrage of anti-fraud actions it has aggressively promoted in the healthcare sector. They have included the creation of a new task force, targeted investigations, funding deferrals and demands for revalidation of healthcare providers that have touched all states but are focused largely on Democratic ones.

The pulled funding also comes after the administration admitted a glaring error in figures meant to help justify a fraud inquiry into New York’s Medicaid program this year, a mistake critics said revealed a Trumpian tendency to attack first and verify the facts later.

New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, a Democrat, immediately vowed to fight Tuesday’s funding freeze.

“During my time as Attorney General, my office has recovered over $627 million for Medicaid and was recognized by this very administration for leading the nation in anti-fraud efforts,” she wrote. “We are considering all legal options to stop this outrageous action.”

Letter accuses New York of low performance compared to other states

Bell’s letter to James and New York Medicare Fraud Control Unit Director Amy Held argues that the unit is moving too slowly on cases and amassing too few indictments and convictions for wrongdoing in the Medicaid system. It notes that compared with four similarly sized units in other states, it secured the lowest number of criminal fraud convictions between 2023 and 2025.

The letter acknowledges that one reason the state has fewer criminal convictions than others is that it made a deliberate choice to focus on “high impact, complex fraud cases” rather than smaller-scale individual cases, but says that trade-off didn’t produce sufficient results.

“Enough is enough,” Bell wrote. “The New York MFCU has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of its MFCU grant award.”

Bell said in the letter that the funding suspension could be lifted before Sept. 30 if New York takes corrective action, “showing it has remediated concerns that formed the basis for this suspension.” He said if the state doesn’t fix the problems, the freeze will continue.

New York officials dispute the Trump administration’s claims

New York’s attorney general’s office said in a statement that it has “long been recognized as a national leader in effectively investigating and prosecuting Medicaid fraud schemes,” including by the Health and Human Services inspector general’s office. A 2025 report from the office notes that New York is one of four states that made up half the total civil recoveries in that year.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said most of the unit’s criminal convictions focus on company owners, executives and corporations that would return large amounts to Medicaid.

“This administration’s unprecedented attack on New York is another political distraction,” James said in a statement.

The funding cutoff follows a similar move in Hawaii. In early June, Bell told Hawaii officials that Medicaid fraud funding would be cut off there, saying that it had a three-year stretch without a Medicaid fraud indictment or conviction.

Joan Alker, executive director and co-founder of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said there’s an irony in the federal government cutting off money intended for prosecuting fraud when its stated goal is to do just that.

“If you want to fight fraud, don’t take away money from states’ fraud control units,” she said. “I chalk this up to more political theater to distract voters from historic Medicaid cuts before the midterms.”

Move follows months of federal warnings and deferrals

For months, the Trump administration has contended that states — especially some Democratic-led ones — have been lax about fraud in social safety-net programs, including Medicaid.

It has demanded that at least five states, four of them governed by Democrats, share information about how they identify, prevent and address Medicaid fraud.

The federal government has also withheld some Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California over fraud concerns. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who was Kamala Harris’ 2024 running mate, accused President Trump of making cuts because of retribution.

The fraud-busting efforts have also targeted Medicare programs. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced a six-month moratorium on new enrollments for providers of hospice and home care nationally.

Swenson and Mulvihill write for the Associated Press. Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J. AP writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.