Young

British singer-songwriter Lola Young is opening up about the “breaking point” that steered her toward recovery.

The “Messy” hitmaker told Rolling Stone in a recent interview that she was grateful that she fainted onstage late last year, and framed the scary ordeal as a wake-up call. “What do you call that? Like, a breaking point which allowed me to then be able to be here today, allowed me to be better for my fans, better for the future, and better for myself,” she told the outlet.

In September, the Grammy winner collapsed onstage during a performance at the All Things Go Music Festival in New York City. Following the health scare — which drew speculation and worry from fans who’d watched the viral video of Young stumbling and dropping her microphone before falling backward — Young canceled the remainder of her tour, which included a 21-stop North American run.

The tour, in support of her third album, “I’m Only F— Myself,” was expected to conclude with two dates at the Hollywood Palladium in December. Instead, she spent two months seeking holistic addiction treatment in a facility that prioritizes psychotherapy. She’s now attending 12-step meetings and working with a sponsor.

When announcing that she would have to nix forthcoming performances to prioritize her health, Young told fans on social media that she was “going away for a while” and apologized, writing, “I love this job and I never take my commitments and audience for granted so I’m sorry to those who will be disappointed by this. … I really hope you’ll give me a second chance … once I’ve had some time to work on myself and come back stronger.”

Young told Rolling Stone that, naturally, some folks were really angry that she’d canceled her tour. “[I]t was a decision that I had to make, and it was sad that I had to do that. What else was I going to do, die? That was the reality of where my addiction was heading.”

This wasn’t the first health incident for Young, who is known for her chart-topping breakout hit, “Messy.” The budding megastar performed at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in 2025, and during her Weekend 1 performance, she struggled to get through. The heat lingered around 100 degrees, and while Young danced and sang, she began to visibly gag and retch before running off the stage and asking for a bucket.

The acclaimed artist has been candid about her struggles with cocaine and alcohol addiction and often explores those struggles in her lyrics. In the song “d£aler,” a bouncy goodbye letter to her drug dealer, she sings about spending the day trying to be sober but feeling miserable nonetheless: “I wanna get away, far from here / Pack my bags, my drugs, and disappear.” … “Pack my bags and tell my dealer I’ll miss him.”

Young also sat down with the Times UK and said that she didn’t want to say too much but confirmed that she was in recovery for drug addiction. “But what I would say is that recovery is an ongoing process. I’m not the finished article, but I’m doing a hell of a lot better.”

Shohei Ohtani’s three straight strikeouts in the fourth inning of his final spring start Tuesday featured a different putaway pitch for each.

He got Angels slugger Jorge Soler to whiff on a sweeper. Jeimer Candelario went down on a curveball. And Jo Adell struck out on a fastball.

“Just shows the confidence he has and different ways he had to attack guys, to get ahead and also put guys away,” manager Dave Roberts said after the Dodgers’ 3-0 loss to the Angels in the Freeway Series finale. “And today the feel was really good, even better than the first outing.”

Pretty much everything was clicking for Ohtani heading into the regular season, even though it was only his second spring training start on the mound. Ohtani recorded 11 strikeouts in four-plus innings. He held the Angels to four hits, three of which were consecutive singles in the fifth, and was charged with three runs, all scored in the fifth.

For the first time in three years, Ohtani is set to begin the season as a fully healthy pitcher. And it will be the Dodgers’ first time managing his two-way schedule all year. Limited the last two seasons by his recovery and build-up from elbow surgery, Ohtani last made 20-plus starts in 2023 with the Angels.

“The desire is high,” Roberts said when asked about Ohtani’s aim to pitch wall to wall. “I think it’s realistic. Then the bigger question is, how are we going to manage that and navigate it?”

Thinking through the plan going into the season, Roberts floated the idea of giving Ohtani a little extra rest between starts. Dodgers starters are already on a six- to seven-day rotation. But a six-man starting pitching group gives the team flexibility as they map out their pitching plan.

“My intent is to be in the rotation under normal rest, normal circumstances,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton last week in Arizona. “Now if management thinks that I need extra rest, I’ll take it. But I’ll let management handle that. Just looking at our roster, we have a lot of pitchers. It doesn’t hurt to rest more.”

Ohtani’s in-game limits, after a build-up slowed by his participation in the World Baseball Classic as a position player, will be adjusted before each start. But his Freeway Series outing Tuesday set him up well. He stretched out to 86 pitches.

“When you’re talking about the first game of the season, could he get through six innings? Could he touch the seventh? Yes,” Roberts said Tuesday afternoon. “But he won’t touch the eighth inning. So there’s got to be some responsibility as far as how we manage him.”

When it comes to awards, Ohtani is going after a third World Series title. But his trophy case is well stocked with individual accolades too. He’s won four MVPs, five All-Star selections, four Silver Sluggers and a Rookie of the Year award.

The Cy Young, however, has remained elusive. He came close in 2022, when a 2.33 ERA and league-leading 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings earned him a fourth-place finish in the American League. It was the only time in his career that he crossed the 25-start threshold, with 28.

“I would never want to sacrifice our chance of winning and performing in the postseason,” Ohtani said. “So I think that’s really the No. 1 goal in my mind. Just because I want to try to win the Cy Young and throw more innings, that’s not necessarily the priority over winning a championship. So with that being said, if there’s a situation where there’s some injuries and I do have to pitch on shorter rest, I’m happy to do so.”

Would showing that he can make regular starts all year automatically put him in the Cy Young conversation?

“Oh yeah,” Roberts said. “Because of just talent, ability, will. If he does that, he’ll be in the conversation, absolutely. I have no doubt about that.”

Of course, besides reigning NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes, Ohtani would also be competing for the award with his own teammate, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who enters the season with the edge.

If Ohtani continues to pitch like he did on Tuesday, while building up the rest of the way, he and the Dodgers will be in good shape.

“It was another good one for him,” Roberts said, “and he’ll be ready to go.”

Nearly 600 immigrant children were held in a Texas family detention center in recent months without enough food, medical care or mental health services, as their time inside stretched beyond court-mandated limits, according to court documents.

Children and families held at the detention facility in Dilley, where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were sent this year, also faced virus outbreaks and lasting lockdowns in December and January, although the total number of children held there has fallen in recent weeks, according to the attorney reports and site visits.

The case of Liam, a preschooler who was wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack when he was picked up in Minnesota by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, stoked protests over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including among detainees who gathered and held up signs in the yard behind the Dilley facility’s chain-link fences.

Last week about 85 children remained detained at the Dilley facility, but concerning conditions continued, said Mishan Wroe, directing attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, who visited in mid-March. In early February, a legal advocate for the children observed about 280 children.

The filings Friday cited numerous poignant cases, including that of a 13-year-old girl held at Dilley who tried to take her own life after staff withheld prescribed antidepressants and denied her request to join her mother, as reported by the Associated Press. The government reported there had been “no placements on suicide watch,” according to the filing. The AP obtained Dilley facility discharge documents that described a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm.”

The filings were submitted in a lawsuit launched in 1985 that led to the creation in 1997 of court-ordered supervision of standards and eventually established a 20-day limit in custody. The Trump administration seeks to end the Flores settlement, as it is known.

“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Being in detention is a choice.”

Attorneys for detainees highlighted the government’s data showing longer custody times for immigrant children, and also cited worms in food and poor access to medical care or sufficient legal counsel as reported by families and monitors at federal facilities.

“Dilley remains a hellhole,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits the center regularly to ensure compliance. “Although the number of children has decreased, the suffering remains the same.”

The Homeland Security spokesperson said the Dilley facility is retrofitted for families, who receive basic necessities including adequate food and water while in detention, and the Trump administration is working to quickly deport detainees.

A report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed that about 595 immigrant children were held in custody for more than the 20-day limit in December and January, with some stretching into months, per the court filings.

“Approximately 265 of these children were detained for more than 50 days and a shocking 55 children were detained more than 100 days,” the filings state.

That is up from a previous government disclosure late last year that showed that from August to September, 400 children had been held at the Dilley facility beyond the 20-day limit. Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking comment on the data.

Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California is scheduled to hold a hearing on the case later this month.

Burke writes for the Associated Press.

Heavy social media use has contributed to ‘worrying decline’ in wellbeing in Western countries, World Happiness Report says.

Social media has played a large role in declining happiness among young people in Western countries, a United Nations-backed report has found.

Heavy social media use partly explains a “worrying decline” in the wellbeing of young people in the West, the latest edition of the annual World Happiness Report said on Wednesday.

In total, 15 Western countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, saw significant declines in youth wellbeing over the past two decades, according to the report.

The trend was not observed globally, with young people in regions covering 90 percent of the world’s population reporting higher life satisfaction than before.

“The trends are caused by many factors, which differ between continents. However, the evidence in this report does suggest that heavy social media use, especially in some countries, provides an important part of the explanation,” researchers John F Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara B Aknin, and Shun Wang said in an executive summary of the report.

“Outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe, the links between social media use and wellbeing are more positive, and they vary between platforms,” the researchers added.

The report, published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, cited data from sources including the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and research by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Despite the decline in youth wellbeing, Western countries, particularly in Scandinavia, dominated the overall happiness rankings across age groups.

Finland ranked as the world’s happiest nation for the ninth consecutive year, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Costa Rica, Sweden and Norway.

The Netherlands, Israel and Switzerland also made the top 10.

Middle Eastern and African countries had the lowest happiness scores.

Afghanistan reported the lowest life satisfaction, with Zimbabwe, Malawi, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon also ranking among the bottom 10 countries.

Social media use among young people has been a growing concern for governments amid reports linking platforms to bullying, sexual exploitation and worsening mental health.

Australia last year introduced the world’s first social media ban for under 16s, with plans for similar restrictions under way in Indonesia, France and Greece.

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