According to Abs Mechial, there is a specific minute every day in which holidays can be booked for cheaper on average – but you may need to set your alarm to take advantage of it

If you are yet to book a getaway this year and are wondering when the ideal moment might be to do so, a financial expert has identified precisely when you should – and shouldn’t – make your move. Abs Mechial turned to TikTok to reveal that not only are certain days preferable for booking, but specific times of day matter too.

“When is the worst time to book a holiday and when is it actually cheapest? he asked his followers in a video. Surprisingly, according to research, Abs claimed there is a one-hour window in each day when holidays can cost you significantly more money to book.” he asked his followers.

“According to the data, the most expensive time to book is between 9am and 10am,” he explained. “Bookings in that window came in around 30 per cent more than the cheapest time of the day – so no more booking holidays as soon as you log in for the day.”

As for the most economical time of day, Abs warned that you might need to set your alarm. “Early… and I mean really early,” he said. “Between 4am and 5am – and the logic does make sense.”

Abs highlighted that overnight, demand “drops off” and consequently prices “reset” to their baseline.

He elaborated: “Then as the day goes on, the more searches and more clicks result in prices starting to creep back up again.”

For those reluctant to wake up before sunrise, however, Abs provided guidance for anyone wanting to book during “more realistic hours”.

“Late evening, around 8pm to 10pm tends to be noticeably cheaper than the morning rush,” he enthused. “But if you want to go even further and want the exact moment – not just the hour, but the minute – according to the data, the single cheapest minute to book a holiday is 2:48am.”

Surprisingly, bookings made at that precise time worked out up to 60 per cent cheaper on average, according to Abs.

He concluded with a word of caution, however: “Now, definitely take that with a pinch of salt – booking at 2:48am isn’t going to make every holiday 60 per cent cheaper, but the pattern is clear – if you want to save money, avoid peak booking hours because timing, just like everything else with money, makes a massive difference.”

Responding in the comments, one TikTok user offered their own unverified tip: “Best to search in private browser so prices do not increase if you are searching for same destinations. Prices increase with demand so private searching will prevent this.”

A second person added: “I usually book mine within 72 hours of departure… like 50% cheaper! I find the hotels I want and then I wait for them to deal them off.”

A third exclaimed: “Wow that’s crazy how the time of day can cost you!”

While a fourth TikTok user pointed out: “Doesn’t change if you want a certain resort at a certain time of year.”

The Times’ results pages reveal how Californians voted for governor, U.S. House seats and in local city, school board and ballot measure races.

Every registered voter in the state receives a ballot by mail. Polls close at 8 p.m. on June 2, and mailed ballots need to be postmarked on or before that day. Winners may not be known on election night due to the high volume of mail-in ballots arriving after election day.

The vote counts on these pages update periodically as results are reported by the Associated Press and the L.A. County registrar. On election day, those results include in-person voting as well as any mail-in ballots already received. In the days and weeks following, votes will be reported approximately once a day, as they are processed by county registrars. Voters can track their own cast ballot here.

The Associated Press surveys the numbers posted by local election officials. The AP projects the winner for all statewide and federal races using vote returns and other data. A race may be called before all expected votes are in. Results can change as more ballots are counted.

These pages will update until the secretary of state certifies results on July 10.

Reaching the summit is a dream. But staying there? That’s an altogether different challenge.

Maja Stark has a special appreciation for that now, a year after winning the U.S. Women’s Open at Erin Hills and feeling the hefty weight of expectation that came along with it.

For her, the aftermath of that victory brought heightened anxiety, and searing criticism from outsiders when the Swedish professional’s play took a dip.

“You get comments and stuff saying, ‘What happened? You just won a major; why do you suck all of a sudden?‘” Stark said at the Chevron Championship in April. “That does take some energy and just makes you focus on the wrong things. Then I got even more stressed and anxious.”

Maja Stark plays a shot from a bunker on the 17th hole during the third round of the Chevron Championship on April 25.

(Alex Slitz / Getty Images)

Stark said she sought professional help in the form of a mental coach, sports psychologist and therapist and now believes she’s better able to withstand the scrutiny that comes with winning at the highest tier.

That career-shaping pressure will be on display again this week when the USGA brings the U.S. Women’s Open to Riviera Country Club for the first time, merging the game’s most prestigious women’s championship with a historic venue celebrating its centennial year. The tournament takes place Thursday through Sunday.

Riviera is a theater, sitting low beneath high hillsides that almost serve as balconies. Players have described the course as a stage because it can feel as if you’re being watched even when you’re alone.

“I think there’s something very nostalgic about the facility,” said Jim Richerson, Riviera’s general manager. “The golf course has never had any major renovations or changes. The clubhouse is the exact same footprint today as it was when it was built in the 1920s.”

The U.S. Women’s Open is the oldest of the LPGA Tour’s five majors, and has long served as the standard by which women’s golf measures itself. It’s open to professionals and elite amateurs through a qualifying process, and the tournament is known for identifying the player who can withstand the most pressure under the most demanding conditions.

NBC will televise the championship and although Mike Tirico will not call the event, he knows the significance of holding it at Riviera.

“Without there being a Masters for women’s golf, that tournament really is the crown jewel of the sport,” Tirico said. “It has become the event people dream of winning. … It’s just appropriate that it’s contested at a place like Riviera that for so many generations has come to define a great championship test of golf.”

A look at some of the players to watch:

Nelly Korda

Nelly Korda celebrates after winning the Chevron Championship on April 26.

(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

The world’s No. 1 player is a major needle mover for women’s golf and is a significant source of ratings when she’s in contention. She had a record five consecutive victories last season and seven overall. Her missing major is the U.S. Women’s Open. She finished in a runner-up spot last year and left Erin Hills firmly believing a win was within reach.

Jeeno Thitikul

Jeeno Thitikul plays a shot from the fairway during the first round of the Queen City Championship on May 14.

(Jeff Dean / Associated Press)

The former World No. 1 is still in pursuit of her first major championship. She’s a big question mark in the field.

Lydia Ko

Lydia Ko hits from the fairway during the second round of the LPGA Honda Thailand on Feb. 22.

(Kittinun Rodsupan / Associated Press)

This Hall of Fame player is the only golfer in modern Olympic history to win a complete set of medals — gold, silver and bronze — across three different Olympic Games. She’s still looking for her first U.S. Women’s Open win.

Charley Hull

Charley Hull hits off the 16th tee during the first round of the Mizuho Americas Open on May 7.

(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)

A colorful character who went viral during the 2024 Open for smoking a cigarette while signing autographs and playing. She was among a cluster who finished second in that tournament. She has three victories on the LPGA Tour but has yet to win a major.

Rose Zhang

Rose Zhang hits from the ninth tee during the final round of the Queen City Championship on May 17.

(Dylan Buell / Getty Images)

Zhang, who has been splitting time between Stanford and the LPGA, amassed a remarkable collection of victories as an amateur and three years ago, became the first player in 72 years to win an LPGA Tour event in her professional debut.

Minjee Lee

Minjee Lee prepares to putt during the third round of the Chevron Championship on April 25.

(Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Lee, an Australian star, has won three majors including the U.S. Women’s Open in 2022. Her younger brother, Min Woo, won the 2016 U.S. Junior Amateur, making them the first brother-sister tandem to win the USGA’s junior championships.

Yuka Saso

Yuka Saso lines up a putt during the first round of the Mizuho Americas Open on May 7.

(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)

She is the anomaly of anomalies, with zero wins on the LPGA Tour with the exception of two U.S. Women’s Open victories. She won the first of those at 19 years, 11 months and seven days — astoundingly tying her for the youngest player to win the Open with Inbee Park, who was precisely that old when she won in 2008.

Lilia Vu

Lilia Vu watches her shot from the seventh tee during the third round of the Queen City Championship on May 16.

(Dylan Buell / Getty Images)

Vu grew up in Fountain Valley and was a standout at UCLA. She won two majors in 2023 but lately has been battling back problems.

Michelle Wie West

Michelle Wie West of the United States hits from the third tee during the first round of the Mizuho Americas Open on May 7.

(Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Wie West retired three years ago after the Open at Pebble Beach, but is coming out of retirement to use her last year of exemption to play at Riviera. Her husband, Jonnie West, son of late NBA icon Jerry West, will be caddying for her.

Teachers in north-eastern Nigeria held protests, demanding stronger protection for learning institutions.
The outcry comes after the abduction of dozens of school children in Borno State last month. Al Jazeera’s Felix Niwara explains.

Let us begin with what has been forgotten. 

There is a field, roughly 22 kilometres southwest of Sokoto, between the Dange Shuni and Bodinga local government areas in North West Nigeria, that carries no particular weight to the eye. Grass grows there. Wind moves through trees at predictable intervals. The surrounding bush is in full silence, neither mourning nor celebrating. Nothing marks what happened here, and that, of course, is precisely the point.

The place is called Satiru. Or was called Satiru. The grammar is slippery, because the British, when they finished with it in the spring of 1906, did not simply defeat it. They made sure to erase it – razing buildings, enslaving survivors, most of whom were women and children, and stripping the site with the cleansing method of an administration that understood that a crushed rebellion, left with a location, becomes a shrine. And shrines become consciousness and arguments. Better to leave nothing. Better to leave nowhere.

And then the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Attahiru II, the Muslim ruler (Sarkin Musulmi) whose fighters helped carry out the slaughter, reportedly pronounced a curse on anyone who would rebuild or farm on the ground. As the British Resident Burdon telegraphed proudly to High Commissioner Frederick Lugard: “All Sokoto went out yesterday to inspect [the] battlefield and raze Satiru to the ground. No wall or tree left standing.” The scholars Paul Lovejoy and J.S. Hogendorn, writing in the Journal of African History, note that “the deserted site of Satiru is on the edge of a forest reserve. It has not been inhabited since its destruction and the official curse.” More than a century later, that is still true.

This is what erasure looks like when it succeeds. For 120 years, the ruins of Satiru have remained untouched, a vanished town erased by British colonial forces after a 1906 uprising led by poor clerics, fugitive slaves, and peasants challenging both imperial taxation and the aristocratic order of the Sokoto Caliphate. 

But this story is not only about a massacre buried in colonial archives. It is about how modern Nigeria inherited the use of overwhelming force to suppress communities marked as threats. 

The thing Satiru was

Before it became a problem requiring artillery, Satiru was an answer to a different problem. To understand it, you need to understand the particular moral atmosphere of the Sokoto Caliphate in its late decline – the spiritual hangover, you might call it, of a revolution that had once been genuine.

Usman Dan Fodio launched his jihad in 1804 with an argument that was partly political and partly theological, but entirely serious: that the Hausa rulers of the time had corrupted Islam, that the ordinary people – the talakawa, the poor commoners – were being ground down by a system that dressed itself in religious language while behaving in wholly irreligious ways. Dan Fodio and his followers built the caliphate on the promise that this would change. That Islamic governance would be just. That scholars who held power would be answerable to something beyond their own appetites.

By the end of the nineteenth century, that promise had curdled into something its founders would not have recognised. The Fulani aristocracy that administered the caliphate had made a comfortable accommodation with power. Tribute collectors arrived in the villages. The talakawa paid. Palace scholars – the senior ulama (religious scholars), with their elaborate networks of family and commerce – found, in the more elastic corners of Islamic jurisprudence, reasons why this was all acceptable. The poor continued to be poor. The aristocracy continued to wear piety as a garment while extracting what they could.

The scholars of Satiru – humble men, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn describe them, “poor Muslim scholars engaged in farming and teaching,” with origins far outside the Fulani elite – found different reasons. Malam Siba, who founded the Satiru settlement in approximately 1894, was of Nupe origin. A second key figure, Maikaho, came from Gobir, the country that Uthman Dan Fodio himself had subjugated. A third, Malam Bawa, was from Zamfara, which had revolted against Sokoto on several occasions across the nineteenth century. What distinguished these men from the mainstream was not their learning – they were, by caliphate standards, minor figures – but their refusal to make the peace that more successful scholars had made with power. As Lovejoy and Hogendorn paraphrase the alleged statement of Malam Siba himself: he “was fed up with the exactions of the ruling class and was not going to obey the instructions of anyone anymore… [but instead] was going to set up a new great regime.”

What grew at Satiru, on the frontier of four fiefdoms – Danchadi, Dange, Shuni, and Bodinga – was something the caliphate’s administration regarded as an irritant and then, gradually, as something worse. The community refused to pay taxes. It refused to provide unpaid labour. It attracted, in growing numbers, fugitive slaves fleeing from the plantations and estates of the aristocracy. This last detail matters enormously. By 1906, British Resident Burdon would report that the adherents of the Satiru cause were “nearly all run away slaves.” Local tradition in Satiru itself held, as recorded by A.S. Mohammad in his foundational social history of the revolt, that “the leaders of Satiru abolished slavery and as a consequence… slaves flocked to them. The freedom of these fugitives was effectively and strenuously guarded.”

This was, in other words, not an uprising of the godless. It was an uprising of the structurally abandoned — poor clerics, dispossessed peasants, and fugitive slaves –   against the two interlocking systems that were destroying them simultaneously: the late-caliphate aristocracy that extracted their labour, and the British colonial administration that had, since 1903, added new demands of jizya (poll tax) and jangali (livestock tax) to communities that had never before paid such taxes to Sokoto. As a Sokoto citizen wrote bitterly at the time, and as quoted in Lovejoy and Hogendorn’s account: “We have been conquered. We have been asked to pay poll tax and cattle tax. We have been made to do various things, and now they want us to fight their wars for them.”

The movement Satiru had built was, in the framework laid out by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, a form of revolutionary Mahdism – distinct from all the other currents of Mahdist thought that ran through the caliphate at the time. It drew its support from peasants, fugitive slaves, and subject populations. It had no aristocratic supporters, no wealthy merchants, and no members of the established ulama. It was ethnically diverse in a way that the aristocracy was not: Hausa from various origins, Zamfarawa, Gobirawa, Gimbanawa, Kabawa, and Azbinawa – but, strikingly, no Fulani. The battle lines, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn note, mapped onto class so precisely that “the ethnic dimension… reflected the class division.” On the day of the final battle, “all the faces on the battlefield had Gobir, Kebbi, Zanfara, Katsina and other such tribal marks. Not a single Fulani talaka [commoner] joined them.”

What Satiru wanted, ultimately, was the recovery of the original promise – the caliphate that Dan Fodio had said was coming, and that had not arrived. You can call this politics, or you can call it theology. At Satiru, they did not distinguish between the two.

The spark and the suppression

The movement had been building for years, connected by threads of correspondence and travelling clerics to similar currents of dissatisfaction across both the British and French colonial zones in are now Nigeria and Niger Republic. On the French side of the boundary, a blind Zarma cleric named Saybu Dan Makafo had been the central animating figure – charismatic, mystically inclined, and reportedly possessing gifts of ventriloquism that contributed to his reputation as a waliyyi, a saint. 

In December 1905, violence broke out at Kobkitanda, 150 kilometres south of Niamey, in French territory in today’s Niger Republic. Saybu and his followers killed two gardes-cercles (colonial police) from Dosso. The French responded, the Mahdists absorbed losses, and Saybu fled east – eventually arriving at Satiru, where the local community had already been living in a state of armed readiness and messianic expectation.

The revolt was supposed to begin on the Eid El-Kabir (Babbar Sallah), February 5, 1906. It was postponed – there was an internal dispute about the recognition of Isa, the village head of Satiru, as the messianic successor figure who would accompany the Mahdi. The Satirawa (people of Satiru) resolved the question on February 13, when they attacked the neighbouring village of Tsomau. Fourteen people died.

The British response was swift and catastrophically misjudged. Acting Resident H.R. Preston-Hillary moved immediately with a column of about seventy mounted infantry under Major Francis Blackwood, armed with a single Maxim gun. He appears to have been entirely unaware that the rising at Satiru was connected to the weeks of violence that had already convulsed French territory. He rode toward the village with the assumption of a man who believed the gap between his weapons and his opponents’ was so vast that the details of the situation hardly mattered.

He was wrong. 

The Mahdists attacked the British column. Hillary and Blackwood were killed, along with three other white officers and 25 African soldiers. The West African Frontier Force (WAFF) suffered such heavy losses that it was “forced to retreat in disarray.” It was, as Lugard would later acknowledge, “the first serious reverse suffered by the West African Frontier Force since it was raised in 1898.”

The Satiru Mahdists were also severely wounded — their leader, Malam Isa, was struck during the initial encounter and would die two days later, on the morning he was supposed to unfurl the green flag and declare the jihad formally. He did not live to see what his movement had achieved: a genuine military victory over the empire. For a brief, burning moment, the talakawa had won.

The British did not pause to understand what had happened. They regrouped.

The reckoning

On March 10, 1906, a combined force of the British-run West African Frontier Force (WAFF) troops and Sokoto fighters approached Satiru. The Satirawa had dug trenches. But they did not stay behind them. They charged, repeatedly, in massed formation, against troops equipped with Maxim guns firing destructive volleys. Historian Richard Dusgate would later call what followed “the most bloodthirsty expedition in the history of British military operations in Northern Nigeria.” Margery Perham, in her biography of Lugard, noted that subsequent reports – kept secret at the time – found that the “killing was very free, not to say slaughter,” that the soldiers “killed every living thing before them,” and that “the fields were running with blood.”

At least 2,000 Satirawa were killed. An estimated 3,000 women and children were herded to Sokoto, many distributed among the aristocracy as effective slaves – a thinly disguised reassertion of the master-slave relationship that the very people of Satiru had staked their lives on dismantling.

Saybu Dan Makafo, blind and wounded, survived. He was captured and brought to Sokoto, where he was tried. His boy guide, according to a story collected by H.A.F. Johnston, reportedly shouted at the trial that if Saybu was given water, he would vanish into thin air – an indication of the extraordinary tension surrounding the proceedings. The public executioner decapitated him on March 22. His head was mounted on a stake in the market. Four subordinates suffered the same fate.

The political accounting that followed the massacre revealed what the British understood the suppression to mean and to communicate. The Colonial Office initially received dispatches that accurately attributed the uprising partly to the fugitive slave crisis –  Lugard’s own initial cable described the rebels as “outlaw fugitive slaves.” A marginal note in the Colonial Office files, as documented by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, captures the official response with bracing economy: “Better say nothing of slaves.” By May 9, Lugard had incorporated a sanitised version of events into his official reports. The slave dimension was quietly removed from the record. The most dangerous thing about Satiru – that it had articulated a class argument, that it had offered sanctuary to the enslaved, that it had made the connection between colonial taxation and pre-colonial extraction explicit – was the thing the British were most determined to forget.

The Sokoto aristocracy was rewarded for its loyalty. Marafa Muhammadu Maiturare, the Sokoto official who had commanded the local levies and whose authority was partly credited with preventing a general rising, eventually became Sarkin Musulmi in 1915. Hassan, the sarki of Dange, the fief nearest to Satiru, who had greeted Burdon warmly in the hours after the Mahdist victory, would become Sarkin Musulmi in 1931. The collaboration was not forgotten. It was promoted.

What the grammar inherited

Nearly a century and two decades later, an eight-year-old boy named Sa’id watched through a crack in the wall of his grandmother’s hut as the men of his family were dragged outside and shot.

His village, Kajen Shuwa, sat in Marte Local Government Area of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, a Shuwa Arab community of cattle herders and storytellers, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the dominant groups of the region. Between 2014 and 2015, at the height of the military’s campaign against Boko Haram, soldiers arrived looking for a Boko Haram cell in a village called Kajen Kanuri. The names were similar enough. No interpreter had been brought. No local guide accompanied the unit.

More than 40 men died.

“They had the wrong village,” Imam Abdulkarim, now living with displaced survivors at the Garin Shuwa IDP camp in Bauchi, told HumAngle. “It was later we realised they were sent to Kajen Kanuri.”

One of the survivors told HumAngle in 2026 how the events unfolded as he watched from where he had hidden himself in a tree. He said he was watching when the men were gathered and ordered to produce Boko Haram members. The people apparently did not even understand what was being said to them, so the soldiers simply lined all the men up in a place resembling a ditch and shot every single one of them. Just like that. No trial. No evidence. Nothing. Everyone was killed.

Sa’id is nineteen now. He teaches Quran to children at the displacement camp — children who have their own mornings they cannot stop replaying. He speaks slowly. He flinches at loud sounds. When he told his story to HumAngle, tears came before words, and other residents of the camp stepped in to complete the parts his voice could not carry. They knew the story. They had assembled it over the years, in the way that displaced communities assemble the things they are not allowed to say publicly – from fragments, from the accounts of those who were in different parts of the village when it happened, from the silence of those who were not there to tell anything.

“The families of the killed couldn’t even raise their voices,” Abdulkarim said. “Everyone was afraid that he might be targeted too.”

No soldier was prosecuted. No investigation was publicly announced. No family received notification, compensation, or the minimum of official acknowledgement that their men had been killed by mistake.

What happened to Kajen Shuwa is not exceptional in the region’s chronicle of the last decade. Amnesty International’s 2015 report documented execution-style killings, torture in detention, and mass graves of individuals who had never been charged, tried, or formally arrested — people killed not for what they did, but for who they resembled, where they lived, what language they spoke when soldiers arrived. The Nigerian military’s response to that report was not to open investigations. It was to call Amnesty International a liar.

And then the world moved on, as it always does – to the next atrocity, the next set of statistics that briefly animated international concern before fading into the background noise of a continent the world has learned to observe without fully attending to.

Zaria massacre 

If Kajen Shuwa happened in the shadows – a remote village, an Arabic-speaking minority, a story reaching the press years after the fact — then what occurred in Zaria, Kaduna State, in the country’s North West, in December 2015 happened in full view, and still went unanswered.

The Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), led by Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, was a Shia organisation with roots deep in Zaria’s social fabric. It ran schools and clinics. It was also an organisation that had long attracted the suspicion of the Nigerian state – not because it was violent, but because it was organised, independent, and loyal to a leadership structure that fell outside the state’s system of control.

On Dec. 12, 2015, an IMN procession blocked a road, delaying a military convoy carrying the then Chief of Army Staff. What followed, as documented in meticulous detail by both Amnesty International and the Kaduna State Government’s own commission of inquiry, was a massacre. Soldiers attacked IMN members across multiple locations. The Hussainiyya Islamic Centre was demolished. El-Zakzaky’s residence was destroyed. Three of his sons were killed. El-Zakzaky himself, elderly and partially blind – the parallel to the blind Saybu Dan Makafo feels almost too pointed – was arrested. He and his wife would remain in detention for years, their release ordered repeatedly by courts and resisted repeatedly by the government.

The Kaduna State commission produced a report of unusual honesty. It confirmed that at least 347 IMN members had been buried in a mass grave at Mando. It found the military’s response disproportionate. It recommended the prosecution of specific officers, and it named the mass grave by location. But not one recommendation was implemented.

The IMN was formally proscribed in 2019, an organisation that had existed for four decades and operated schools and hospitals, banned by the government that had killed hundreds of its members, as though the banning were the logical conclusion of the killing rather than an additional punishment for surviving it.

The grammar of impunity

There is a grammar to this. Lovejoy and Hogendorn identified it in the colonial records of 1906 in three steps: a community marked as dangerous, the deployment of force that is “excessive by design,” and the systematic management of the record. 

At Satiru, the British made the decision consciously – the marginal note that said “better say nothing of slaves” was an administrative instruction to suppress an inconvenient truth. The communities targeted after them have had to live inside the silence that administrative instruction created.

But this never worked permanently. What the scholars Godwin Odeh and Williams Efe argue, in their analysis of the Satiru uprising’s historiography, is that the episode was not merely a military or religious event but a demonstration of “the impossibility of subjugating a group permanently without facing a crisis of cultural relevance.” They invoke Amilcar Cabral’s formulation: that culture “is a means by which people assert their opposition to domination… one of the fundamental tools of struggle for emancipation.” The argument is that Satiru never fully ended – that its logic persisted, became available, got taken up again in different forms by different communities facing different versions of the same problem.

The circumstances were different, the enemies differently named, and the legal justifications modernised, but the underlying grammar remained recognisable.

This is not a metaphor. What the British established in 1906 and what successive Nigerian governments have absorbed so completely is a particular relationship between the state and the communities it finds inconvenient. The relationship has a fixed sequence: a community is marked; disproportionate force arrives; the record is managed; and then, reliably, comes the silence. The silence is not passive. It is constructed and maintained by the same institutions that produced the violence –  maintained through the denial of accountability, the obstruction of independent investigation, and the prosecution of those who speak too loudly about what they witnessed.

The families of Kajen Shuwa could not grieve publicly because grief, in that context, was dangerous. The IMN, after Zaria, could not even gather to mourn without risk of further confrontation with the same security forces that had killed their members.

But the cycle continues. 

In the debut episode of “The De Los Podcast,” hosts Fidel Martinez and Suzy Exposito spoke with the Latin Grammy-nominated singer and actor Leslie Grace about her long-awaited new music — plus some of the highlights and pain points throughout her film career.

Released in May, Grace’s bilingual record “Amor, ¿Quién Eres?” is the first album she’s released in over a decade. Suffused with what Exposito described as “tropical eleganza,” the album is a far cry from the Christian music Grace recorded in her teen years — and a marked shift from the Latin Grammy-nominated self-titled project she released in 2013. She touched on some of the personal developments required to reach the more sensual sonic landscape she explored in her latest release.

“The biggest learning has been how to protect my creative space, while I grow it and discover at the same time,” she told De Los.

The 31-year-old also discussed her work in the 2021 movie musical “In the Heights” — and the online backlash the film received due to the lack of other Afro-Latinos in the cast.

“The lack of representation within film [and] diversity within the Latin community is a conversation we haven’t touched on as much,” she said. “Only so many films [are] given a shot. There [are] certain ways that Latinos are portrayed that are very narrowed down in film. I think it’s a worthwhile conversation at any time. I’m glad that people started to talk about that, so [we] can get more stories.”

Reflecting further on her filmography, Grace talked about the canceled release of “Batgirl,” in which she played the titular role. The film, which was originally for a late 2022 debut on the HBO Max streaming service, was axed by its studio Warner Bros. for financial reasons.

“It was disappointing because we knew the film that we were making,” Grace said of the movie, which was in postproduction when it was scrapped. “I knew that it wasn’t a reflection of our work, because this is something that happens. But I think because of the context of the conversation around representation, and the way that films can be discarded, after a lot of work and time and money has gone into something … the creative community really felt for me.”

During that period, Grace said the support from other creatives helped her move forward. She has since starred in more independent films in recent years — including “In the Summers,” which won a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 — and the 2026 features “Stages” and “Campeón Gabacho,” which premiered at this year’s edition of South By Southwest.

“I really am grateful for every person that reached out to me and was like: ‘Hey, I’ve got you, whatever you need,’ or ‘This is wrong,’” Grace said. “When something happens to me, I focus on my experience and what I gained from it, that no one could really take away.”

Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth. It has lithium. It has agriculture, a coastline three hours away from Miami, and—for the first time in a generation a political window. The reconstruction investment case is real. So is the obstacle for every actor, across every ideology, that wants Venezuelan assets to perform.

The obstacle is not the oil price. It is not the OFAC sanctions framework, which has been substantially liberalized since January 2026. It is not even the absence of functioning institutions, though that is the proximate problem every investor will encounter. The obstacle has a nucleus with name, a title, and an active intelligence apparatus. And his continued presence in power is not merely a moral affront. 

This is not a story about mismanagement. Mismanagement leaves a paper trail.

What happened across Venezuela’s infrastructure ministries between 2002 and 2012 lest almost none, deliberately. Over $150 billion in documented railway, housing, and infrastructure contracts were disbursed across that decade. The projects largely do not exist. The documentation largely does not exist. The Tinaco-Anaco railway, a $7.5 billion contract signed with China Railway Engineering Corporation, produced looted campsites and empty concrete columns. The National Railway Plan, budgeted at $150 billion, produced less than one percent of its projected track. 

One of the ministers who oversaw that disbursement period of the infrastructure that is so dire, and who preserved an influence only surpassed by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, today is the Interior Minister of Venezuela. He controls the national intelligence apparatus, the police, and the armed colectivos. He is Diosdado Cabello, your competing General Partner that has acted without impunity. He carries a live indictment from a New York court on narco-trafficking charges. He is sanctioned by the US Treasury. He hosts a television program that airs every Wednesday evening.

By 2011, the beneficial ownership architecture built by Venezuela’s ruling network spanned more than forty trustees across multiple jurisdictions: a parallel private equity structure embedded inside a sovereign state.

The distinction that every institutional investor must internalize is this: a mismanaged State is recoverable. A State whose productive apparatus was deliberately extracted (not ruined by incompetence but hollowed out because extraction was more profitable than production) presents a categorically different investment problem. The destruction was not the side effect of the governance model. It was the point of it. Cabello remains an icon of that governance model.

The counterparty problem

Conventional private equity rests on a foundational assumption: your counterparty has an interest in the underlying asset performing. Returns depend on it. Exit depends on it. The entire structure of an LP agreement, a term sheet, a co-investment right, all of it assumes a counterparty whose incentive is aligned with asset value.

In Venezuela, the sophisticated actor on the other side of the table for two decades was running a competing structure. One with no limited partners, no fiduciary duty, no quarterly reporting, and a sovereign intelligence apparatus for compliance. That structure had a single mandate: maximum extraction, minimum documentation, zero accountability. It executed that mandate with precision.

By 2011, the beneficial ownership architecture built by Venezuela’s ruling network spanned more than forty trustees across multiple jurisdictions. This is not a warlord’s operation. This is a parallel private equity structure embedded inside a sovereign state.

That sophistication is precisely what makes the residual presence of these networks so consequential for reconstruction capital. They did not disappear with the January 2026 transition. They repositioned. The structures that governed Venezuela’s extraction apparatus are experts at corporate layering: shell companies, nominee directors, off-channel financial instruments designed to distance beneficial owners from the assets they control.

This is the counterparty environment that reconstruction capital is walking into. Not a post-conflict landscape with residual corruption. An active, sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional extraction network that has spent 25 years perfecting its operational security

These are not improvised operations, they are multi-jurisdictional corporate architectures spanning Switzerland, Brazil, Spain, the Caribbean, and more recently Turkey and the Middle East. Each node chosen for its specific regulatory gap or enforcement lag. The $5.2 billion in gold shipped to Switzerland between 2013 and 2016, the Alex Saab procurement network running through Turkey and Cape Verde, the Zapatero indictment revealing consulting structures designed to siphon money from China, Venezuela, and Spain simultaneously these are documented examples of the same operational capability.

These networks retain the best advisors money can pay. Former heads of state, international law firms, financial intermediaries operating across jurisdictions. The Zapatero case is not the exception, it is the template. And they operate with the enforcement discipline of a cartel: strategic asset moves backed by the implicit and sometimes explicit willingness to use coercion when commercial pressure is insufficient. The SDNY indictments against senior regime figures on narco-trafficking charges are not separate from the financial architecture. They are evidence that the same command structure manages both.

This is the counterparty environment that reconstruction capital is walking into. Not a post-conflict landscape with residual corruption. An active, sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional extraction network that has spent 25 years perfecting its operational security, asset acquisitions by “patriotic”expropriations to serve their drug-logistic hubs and is now repositioning for the reconstruction window. 

Why China doesn’t actually want this

China’s position in Venezuela is widely misread as unconditional support. The reality is more commercially specific. China has over $60 billion in loan-for-oil exposure through CNPC and the China Development Bank. Those loans require one thing: barrels flowing. Barrels require functional production infrastructure. Functional production infrastructure requires institutional stability, contract enforcement, and (critically) a counterparty with an interest in assets performing.

Beijing understands this better than any outside observer because its own institutions have investigated the damage. Xi Jinping’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection placed a CITIC Group vice president under investigation for serious disciplinary violations, the same CITIC that embedded confidentiality clauses in Venezuelan housing contracts barring the Venezuelan government from accessing financial information about its own projects. An Andorran court documented $100 million in bribes paid by CAMC Engineering to Venezuelan officials. China did not need backchannel meetings to understand the corruption. Its own companies were defendants in it.

China also enforces its own code of conduct internally. The CCP’s anti-corruption apparatus, operating through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has a long reach, including over state enterprise executives who participated in overseas schemes that damaged China’s institutional reputation. Chinese firms implicated in Venezuelan bribery networks in Andorra for payments to PDVSA lobbyists related to Venezuela’s electricity system did not operate without consequence within their own system. Beijing does not publicize these accountability mechanisms, but they exist. The party does not tolerate reputational exposure that undermines its economic diplomacy, regardless of the geography.

Every dollar that disappears into the extraction apparatus is a dollar that does not produce the barrel that services the Chinese loans.

The Trump-Xi summit concluded in Beijing on May 15, 2026, the same day Lamargas exploded on Lake Maracaibo, a facility operated by China Concord Resources Corp under a PDVSA joint venture contract. At the moment, the US and Chinese governments are navigating toward economic stabilization and a framework for managed competition, building on their South Korea thaw. That G2 stabilization has direct implications for Venezuela: a China that is repositioning toward US capital markets, Boeing purchases, and agricultural commitments is a China with diminishing strategic incentive to backstop a Venezuelan network that embarrasses it commercially.

The Chevron model—US-anchored, internationally governed, with Chinese off-take embedded through structured contracts—is precisely the kind of framework that serves Beijing’s debt recovery needs without requiring it to defend the indefensible.

A ministry based in a kleptocracy whose financial architecture is premised on assets not performing for the state is structurally incompatible with Chinese debt recovery. Beijing is not sentimental about this. It is calculating.

China’s $50-60 billion in loan-for-oil exposure to Venezuela requires one thing above all else: barrels flowing. Barrels require functional production infrastructure. Functional production infrastructure requires institutional stability, contract enforcement, and a counterparty whose economic interest is aligned with assets performing. When the ministry overseeing oil production is the same apparatus that systematically extracted value from every sector it touched, railways that produced concrete columns and nothing else, housing programs with $76 billion in unaccounted deficits, power plants that were paid for and never built, you can see that the problem for Beijing is not political. Every dollar that disappears into the extraction apparatus is a dollar that does not produce the barrel that services the loans.

China tried to correct this internally before abandoning the effort. In 2018, Margaret Myers at the Inter-American Dialogue pointed out that Beijing “tried over the past couple of years to guide decision-making in Caracas by providing advice or by tying loans to production capacity projects in the oil sector, in order to try to help Venezuela right itself economically. That has not proven successful.”

By 2016, China stopped issuing new loans entirely. That is not a diplomatic signal. That is a credit committee decision. The same kind of decision any institutional lender makes when the counterparty’s governance structure has made repayment structurally unlikely.

The Brazilian vector

Brazil’s relationship to Venezuela’s reconstruction is complicated by a paper trail that runs through the largest corruption scandal in Latin American history. Odebrecht paid the highest figure of any country outside Brazil itself. Venezuela’s own former prosecutor general, Luisa Ortega Díaz, formally linked those payments to senior Socialist Party figures including Diosdado Cabello after being removed from office and forced to flee the country. The investigation was halted by Venezuela’s highest court. The Swiss banking system was asked to provide a list of Venezuelan recipients. Neither process was allowed to reach its conclusion.

In Brazil, the Odebrecht network reached the highest levels of political life. Federal prosecutors investigated Lula for allegedly lobbying foreign governments on Odebrecht’s behalf after leaving the presidency, and for his role in directing state development bank BNDES financing toward Odebrecht projects abroad. The contracts that linked Odebrecht to Venezuela were not arm’s-length commercial transactions. They were, by Odebrecht’s own admission in its US Department of Justice plea agreement, instruments of a coordinated bribery architecture that spanned twelve countries and operated through a dedicated internal division (the Division of Structured Operations) whose sole purpose was managing political payments.

What does not yet exist is the decision—by US institutional capital—to arrive with a governance structure that the extraction network cannot penetrate.

Brazil has significant commercial interests in Venezuela’s reconstruction, across energy, agriculture, and infrastructure. Those interests are legitimate and Brazilian private capital is a natural reconstruction partner. The complication is not Brazil. It is the specific political-commercial network that governed Brazil’s prior engagement with Venezuela. Odebrecht did not select its Venezuelan counterparties through competitive markets. Contracts were directed through political relationships — between heads of state, with BNDES as the financing instrument, and with the Odebrecht Division of Structured Operations managing the payments in between.

Political networks have institutional memory. The preferred partners that flow through certain diplomatic channels into Venezuela’s reconstruction window carry relationships forged in that prior architecture. A governance framework serious about reconstruction cannot simply exclude Odebrecht, the legal entity. It must screen for the network that Odebrecht served. That screening is structural, not political. It is the difference between Brazilian capital that competes on merit and Brazilian capital that arrives pre-selected by the same diplomatic infrastructure that enabled the extraction.

The structure that worked and the decision that remains

One Venezuelan asset survived twenty-six years of chavismo with its value intact. One. CITGO Petroleum, incorporated in Delaware, governed under US fiduciary law, with its governance architecture anchored entirely outside Venezuelan legal jurisdiction. It survived not because of political protection but because of structural protection. US law held when every Venezuelan institution around it failed. That is not a coincidence. It is the blueprint.

Venezuela sits very close to Miami. Capital will flow in. The question is whether it arrives with a governance structure equal to the threat, or whether it arrives the way it always has in captured states: trusting counterparties who already demonstrated, at extraordinary scale, that trust was the wrong instrument.

The SDNY indicted the man who sits in the Interior Ministry. The US Treasury sanctioned him. He is still in the building. Turkish construction conglomerates, Asian commodity traders, and European energy juniors are already positioning—without FCPA compliance costs, without fiduciary obligations, without LP reporting requirements. They will move faster. They will price lower. This is what happened in Iraq after 2003. It is what happened in Libya.

The architecture to do this differently exists. Human capital exists in the diaspora: eight million Venezuelans left and within them there are over a million that hold verifiable credentials embedded in US and European institutions, carrying the technical and legal knowledge to rebuild what was taken. The OFAC licensing framework exists. The proof of concept exists in CITGO’s survival. What does not yet exist is the decision—by US institutional capital—to arrive with a governance structure that the extraction network cannot penetrate. That decision is the only thing standing between reconstruction and a second extraction with better letterhead.

A new LGBTQ+ travel risk map has assessed safety for LGBTQ+ travellers across 233 countries and territories worldwide, with conditions worsening in several nations including the US, India and Japan

Major travel hotspots including the US, Japan and India have faced travel warnings as a new map highlights the risk for LGBTQ+ travellers. Fresh criminal legislation, curbs on established rights, and political reversals mean that LGBTQ travellers could encounter heightened legal and societal dangers when journeying overseas.

The LGBTQ Risk Map 2026, published by Safeture, evaluates the circumstances for LGBTQ travellers across 233 countries and territories around the world. Worldwide, the assessment categorises 91 countries as high risk for LGBTQ travellers. A further 62 countries are rated medium risk, while 80 are deemed low risk.

In comparison with last year, circumstances have deteriorated in multiple countries, including Belarus, Burkina Faso, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Senegal, Slovakia, and the United States. The factors differ but encompass restrictions on established rights, legal setbacks, stricter penalties, and fresh constraints on the recognition of gender identity and on travel documentation.

Where is safest for LGBTQ travellers?

Western Europe remains the safest region for LGBTQ travellers, with every country in the region classified as low risk in the most recent assessment.

According to the LGBTQ Risk Map 2026, the UK remains in the ‘Normal’ zone as somewhere LGBTQ+ travellers are “unlikely to face difficulties”. Local attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community for countries in the normal zone, including the UK, Brazil, Spain, France and Italy have “are overall open and progressive”.

Botswana and St. Lucia have scrapped legislation criminalising same-sex relations between men, leading to better ratings on this year’s map.

Where is risky for LGBTQ travellers?

By comparison, the Middle East and North Africa remain home to some of the globe’s most perilous destinations for LGBTQ travellers. The majority of nations in the region are categorised as high risk, with Israel given a low risk rating and Lebanon designated medium risk.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, conditions remain extremely difficult. Roughly 80 per cent of evaluated countries in the area fall within the highest risk bracket. The decline is especially noticeable in Burkina Faso and Senegal. Following the 2022 military coup, Burkina Faso introduced its first legislation criminalising same-sex relations. In Senegal, prison terms for same-sex relations have been doubled.

Throughout Europe and Eurasia, fresh legal restrictions have resulted in lower ratings for certain countries. Kazakhstan has introduced constraints on information concerning so-called “non-traditional sexual orientations,” while Slovakia has further curtailed the rights of same-sex couples. Belarus has passed legislation against so-called “LGBT propaganda,” which could lead to fines or even detention.

Backward steps have also been documented in Asia. In India, new laws aim to restrict transgender individuals’ ability to self-identify. In Japan, a court maintained the constitutionality of the nation’s prohibition on same-sex marriage.

In North America, the United States has strengthened requirements for travel documents. Passports will display only the sex assigned at birth, and the “X” gender marker will no longer be accepted.

The most important thing political junkies might need this week is patience.

With so many key races expected to be tight, officials are warning it could takes days — perhaps even more than a week — to know the outcome of Tuesday’s primary election.

Here are some important things to watch as the results roll in:

From left; Steve Hilton at the California Republican Convention in San Diego; Tom Steyer campaigning in downtown Santa Ana; and Xavier Becerra in San Diego.

(Los Angeles Times)

1. The fight for the second top spot

Most polls and pundits say Democrat Xavier Becerra is likely to be the top voter-getter in the primary to replace Gavin Newsom as California governor.

Until recently, it was assumed that Republican Fox News host Steve Hilton would also advance, especially after he was endorsed by President Trump.

But a new poll suggested Hilton was in a tight race for second place with Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, who is spending heavily from his own fortune. If he is successful, California could see a competitive Democrat-versus-Democrat general election come November.

Under California’s election rules, the top two vote-getters move on to the general election regardless of party preference.

Hilton is urging Republicans to unite around him to avoid being shut out. His main GOP opponent is Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

A few months ago, Hilton and Bianco led some polls amid a crowded Democratic field, prompting fears that Democrats might be locked out of November’s general election. But those concerns have subsided somewhat with Becerra’s rise in the polls.

More to read:

Left to right: Karen Bass on Friday, April 8, 2022; Spencer Pratt on April 16, 2025; Nithya Raman on March 3, 2026.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times; Jordan Strauss / Invision/AP; Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

2. Is the mayor’s race really a tossup?

It’s rare for the Los Angeles mayor’s race to become a national story. But that has happened this year thanks to a showdown few would have predicted.

Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt is a big reason for all the attention, running from the right in a very liberal city. Embattled Mayor Karen Bass is the incumbent, with City Councilwoman Nithya Raman running from the left.

A UC Berkeley-L.A. Times poll released last week found a close race with Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22% among likely voters. Other polls have shown Pratt doing better.

Pratt had overshadowed his opponents when it came to social media (and old media) attention. But is that enough to get him into the runoff? Bass has big labor on her side, and we’ll see whether that helps her get out the vote. But Bass is also unpopular, according to polls. Does that give Raman an opening among Democrats who are looking for an alternative?

More to read:

Dan Egelhoff plays with his dog at a “Barbecue, Beer and Ballots” event at Rep. Ken Calvert’s office.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

3. The fallout from California redistricting

When it comes to congressional elections, this should be a good night for Democrats, by design. That’s because California voters last year approved Proposition 50, which redrew congressional districts to favor Democrats.

It was part of a national battle by both red and blue states designed to help their respective parties secure control of Congress. The new California maps give Democrats an advantage in some areas, but it’s still unclear how sweeping the victories will be. There are some notable intra-party battles in “safe” districts as well.

The Times’ data and graphics team has identified a few races to watch:

• Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) lost his seat in redistricting and is now challenging incumbent Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) in the 40th District.
• In San Francisco, several factions of the Democratic Party are vying to replace former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 11th District.
• California’s 48th Congressional District in San Diego and Riverside counties has traditionally been red. But the sudden retirement of longtime Republican incumbent Darrell Issa and redistricting puts it in play.
• Veteran Rep. Brad Sherman is facing a strong challenge from fellow Democrat Jake Levine in the 32nd District.

More reading:

Want more information about the ballot-counting process? Times reporter Grace Toohey breaks it down, including how to track your mail-in ballot, how races get called and why it takes so long.

Williams was a key player for Forest last term, playing in 53 games as they maintained their Premier League status and reached the Europa League semi-finals.

He was named Forest’s player of the season and the City Ground club have opened talks with the Wrexham-born player over a contract extension.

“It’s physically and mentally tough, but we’re professional enough to deal with what gets put in front of us,” Williams added.

“If that’s games every other few days or the travelling, we’re prepared for that and I’ve enjoyed it.

“I’ll be going straight on holiday, having a few cocktails and putting my feet up on the beach.

“We’ll get a couple of weeks off and then straight back into it.”

June 3 (UPI) — Kuwait closed its main airport in Kuwait City on Wednesday after Iranian missile and drone strikes injured several people and caused “significant damage” to its main terminal building as renewed hostilities between the Iran and the United States escalated.

The airport activated its emergency plan, suspending all flights indefinitely after its Terminal 1 building was the target of “Iranian aggression, resulting in significant damage to several airport facilities, in addition to recording human injuries,” the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said in an update on X.

DGCA spokesman Abdullah Al-Rajhi said it has been decided to suspend air traffic and divert flights to alternative airports until further notice pending the completion of repair work to enable the airport to resume operations, saying that inspection and comprehensive assessment by technical and specialized teams was already underway.

Kuwait International Airport only fully reopened on Monday after being closed on and off since the start of the war on Feb. 28.

The attack came hours after Iran and the United States and Iran exchanged fire across the region Tuesday with Iranian forces attacking its Gulf neighbors and the American military striking a vessel attempting to evade its naval blockade and launching “self-defense” strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island.

The airport was hit in the early hours, shortly after U.S. Central Command said a series of Iranian missiles and drones directed at its regional neighbors had either failed to reach their targets or been repelled by U.S. forces, including two Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait that “fell short or broke apart enroute,” and three others launched at Bahrain that were intercepted by U.S. and Bahrain air defense forces.

CENTCOM said later that an additional wave of Iranian drones targeting U.S. forces in Kuwait was downed by air defenses with no American personnel or assets harmed and dismissed as fake Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims they struck U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and a U.S. air base in the region with missiles and drones.

No U.S. personnel were harmed. CENTCOM forces remain vigilant and ready to defend against unwarranted Iranian aggression during the ongoing ceasefire.

Moments earlier, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces shot down three one-way attack drones launched by Iran toward civilian mariners that were rightfully transiting regional waters. American forces also conducted self-defense strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island.

The American military also downed three attack drones launched by Iran toward civilian mariners that CENTCOM said were sailing legitimately in regional waters and struck on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island.

“No U.S. personnel were harmed. CENTCOM forces remain vigilant and ready to defend against unwarranted Iranian aggression during the ongoing cease-fire,” it said.

CENTCOM also released footage of a U.S. warplane firing a Hellcat missile at an empty Iran-bound oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz that it said ignored warnings to stop.

“U.S. Central Command enforced blockade measures against Botswana-flagged M/T Lexie as it transited international waters toward Kharg Island. The ship’s crew ignored repeated warnings, failing to comply with directions from U.S. forces multiple times over a 24-hour period. A U.S. aircraft ultimately disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room, preventing the tanker from reaching Iran,” CENTCOM said.

Previous World Cup appearances: 6
Best performance: Fourth place (2022)
First appearance: 1970 (Mexico)
Top goal scorer: Youssef En-Nesyri (3)
Most appearances: Achraf Hakimi, Hakim Ziyech (10)
Player to watch: Brahim Diaz
FIFA world ranking: 8

The FIFA World Cup begins on June 11. You can follow the action on Al Jazeera’s dedicated World Cup 2026 page with all the latest news, match build-up and live text commentary, and keep up to date with group standings, real-time match results and schedules.

Four years ago, the Morocco made history by becoming the first African and Arab team to reach the World Cup semifinals in Qatar, eliminating Spain and Portugal along the way, before narrowly losing to France.

They come into the 2026 edition again boasting a strong squad and hoping to replicate – or go even further – than their sensational 2022 run.

However, the Atlas Lions also find themselves in rather more chaotic circumstances this time around with a managerial departure less than three months out from the tournament, and bruised by a wild Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) final that provoked a diplomatic row with Senegal.

AFCON hangover

The squad is still dealing with the fallout from one of the most incendiary episodes in African football history.

January’s final in Rabat descended into chaos when Senegal’s players walked off the pitch in protest after Morocco were awarded a contentious stoppage-time penalty following a VAR review with the game at 0-0.

The decision to award the spot kick sparked trouble among the Senegal fans in the crowd. Eighteen spectators were were later jailed following the disruption.

After Senegal finally returned to the pitch after a lengthy delay, Real Madrid and Morocco star Brahim Diaz missed the penalty with a poor attempt at a panenka. Senegal went on to win the game 1-0 with a goal in extra-time.

However, the saga did not end there. In March, CAF stripped Senegal of the title and awarded it to Morocco, ruling that Senegal had forfeited the game by leaving the pitch.

Senegal have appealed at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and have made allegations against CAF and Morocco.

For the Atlas Lions, being belatedly crowned champions by officials has done little to ease the pain as well as a sense of injustice, and the ongoing saga continues to leave a toxic fallout for the team.

The Regragui saga

Walid Regragui, the coach who masterminded the 2022 run, parted ways with the team in March.

It is likely that he ultimately paid the price after the manner of Morocco’s narrow defeat to Senegal in the AFCON final on home soil, as well as reported arguments between him and the country’s football federation over the direction of the team.

His replacement, Mohamed Ouahbi, led Morocco’s Under-20 side to the 2025 Youth World Cup title as the federation said a “strategic decision” was behind the appointment.

“It’s a desire not to waste time and to take a different direction,” a source close to the federation told the AFP news agency.

But for Ouahbi, 49, stepping up to a first senior World Cup under such acrimonious circumstances is an extremely challenging task – especially as he has only ever managed youth teams in his career.

“I’m not here to build, because the foundations are already in place. I’m here to keep performing,” Ouahbi said after his appointment.

Whether the new coach has the authority and tactical acuity to thrive at the highest level remains to be seen, and it will be a bit of a baptism of fire.

Brahim Diaz hopes to shake off panenka nightmare

Up until that penalty miss, talented forward Brahim Diaz had been the best player at the tournament, driving Morocco to the final as he won the Golden Boot with five goals.

The Real Madrid playmaker is quick, clever and capable of producing something out of nothing – giving Morocco a touch of genuine magic between the lines.

He may be carrying a psychological weight into this tournament after the AFCON final fracas, but Morocco will hope he will channel that frustration into having an outstanding World Cup.

Teenage star Bouaddi makes the cut

While much of the squad is fairly well established, the exciting 18-year-old Lille midfielder Ayyoub Bouaddi, who has switched allegiances after representing France at junior level, made the squad.

“A dream come true, but above all the start of a new chapter, with even more work, rigour and responsibilities,” Bouaddi said on X.

“I am aware of the privilege I have to defend ‌these colours, and I will give everything to represent my country in the best possible way.

“A thought also for France. My choice in no way diminishes the pride and gratitude for having been able to wear that jersey in my youth.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Youssef En-Nesyri, who scored the winning goal against Portugal in the 2022 quarterfinal, did not make the cut.

Elsewhere, Bilal El Khannouss is a highly technical and creative attacking midfielder, while Sofyan Amrabat gives the side combative energy in defence.

Marseille defender Nayef Aguerd has been selected, despite not playing since March due to injury.

Hakimi: The world’s best right back?

Last season, the PSG right back scored 11 goals and provided 14 assists en route to helping his club win a historic treble of the Champions League, Ligue 1 and the French Cup – he was subsequently named CAF African Player of the Year.

This season has been less productive so far in terms of goals and assists. Hakimi increasingly attracts intense attention from opponents keen to neutralise his threat. His season has also been overshadowed by issues off the pitch as it was announced earlier this year that he will stand trial for rape in France – allegations which Hakimi denies.

Despite the off-field issues and reduced returns this season, his overlapping runs, delivery and goalscoring threat – on top of his defensive prowess – arguably means he remains the best right back in the world.

How does Morocco’s group look?

Group C certainly has its challenges for Morocco, not least in their opening game against Brazil. While the Brazilians no longer quite hold the fear factor of previous tournaments, they are still packed with quality.

Nevertheless, Morocco will fancy their chances of getting something from that game and sending a statement to their rivals.

Easier ties await after that, and although an improving Scotland are no pushovers and Haiti could provide an unknown quantity, Morocco should be winning both of those games if they are to mount a serious push for the title.

Morocco also faced Brazil and Scotland in the France 1998 World Cup. The Atlas Lions put in a respectable performance then – recording a 3-0 win over Scotland while losing by the same score to Brazil and drawing with Norway – but finished third in the group and failed to progress to the round of 16.

Morocco’s group matches at the World Cup

⚽ June 13: Brazil vs Morocco (New Jersey, US), 6pm ET (22:00 GMT).
⚽ June 19: Scotland vs Morocco (Boston, US), 6pm ET (22:00 GMT).
⚽ June 24: Morocco vs Haiti (Atlanta, Georgia), 6pm ET (22:00 GMT).

Al Jazeera’s prediction

Last 16.

An inexperienced coach and turmoil around the squad will probably lead them to fall short of matching their 2022 exploits.

Morocco’s World Cup squad

Goalkeepers: Yassine Bounou (Al Hilal), Munir Mohamedi (RS Berkane), Ahmed Tagnaouti (Royal Armed Forces).

Defenders: Noussair Mazraoui (Manchester United), Anass Salah-Eddine (PSV Eindhoven), Youssef Belammari (Al Ahly), ‌Nayef Aguerd (Marseille), Chadi Riad (Crystal Palace), Issa Diop (West Ham United), Redouane Halhal (KV Mechelen), Achraf Hakimi (Paris St-Germain), Zakaria El Ouahdi (Genk).

Midfielders: Samir El Mourabet (Strasbourg), Ayyoub Bouaddi (Lille), Neil El Aynaoui (Roma), Sofyan Amrabat (Real Betis), Azzedine Ounahi (Girona), Bilal El Khannouss (Stuttgart), Ismael ‌Saibari (PSV ‌Eindhoven).

Forwards: Abdessamad Ezzalzouli (Real Betis), Chemsdine Talbi (Sunderland), Soufiane Rahimi (Al Ain), Ayoub El Kaabi (Olympiacos), Brahim Diaz (Real Madrid), Yassine Gessime (Strasbourg), Ayoub Amaimouni-Echghouyabe (Eintracht Frankfurt).

Brooke McCree, a 22-year-old recent UCLA graduate, is the first to admit she’s been going to the movies a lot less.

Back when Regency operated the local Village and Bruin theaters in Westwood Village, she would often take advantage of the student discount and see as many movies as possible. But in the two years since the theaters closed, she said moviegoing for many UCLA students has become inaccessible.

“At UCLA, it’s been rough because I’ll have to walk really far or take the bus [to the movies]. There’s nothing really nearby,” said McCree, who recalled fond memories of seeing movies like “Madame Web” and a “Hunger Games” prequel in a dense crowd of excited college students. “I was pretty devastated when it initially closed.”

There is still hope for the Village Theatre, which recently received a breath of new life thanks to some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

For the first time since 2024, the theater opened its doors early last month for the Los Angeles debut of Billie Eilish and James Cameron’s co-directed concert film, “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour. ” Hundreds of fans filled the college town’s sidewalks, and streets were closed for the black SUVs that dropped off A-listers and executives on the bright blue carpet.

The event was reportedly the first of a limited number of premieres and screenings planned for this summer to support a 12-month renovation set to begin this fall.

The revival is being led by Village Directors Circle, a group of 35 filmmakers who purchased the theater in 2024. They include prominent directors Jason Reitman, who is leading the effort, and Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, Guillermo del Toro, Judd Apatow, Steven Spielberg and Chloé Zhao.

A representative for Reitman declined to comment on the plans.

Nissan GT-R NISMO sports cars are seen outside the Fox Westwood Village Theatre, promoting the “Gran Turismo” movie in 2023.

(AaronP / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images )

The $25-million restoration, which organizers previously told The Times would be completed next year, includes plans for a restaurant, bar, gallery and a multipurpose space in the lobby for filmmakers and hosting premiere-related events.

Last year, the coalition of directors announced that American Cinematheque would operate the theater, hosting special screenings of new releases and repertory titles and conversations with filmmakers. The film non-profit already runs Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre and co-programs both the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Los Feliz 3.

Historically, the neighborhood has been a tricky market for businesses, said Jonathan Kuntz, a former lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He worked in the area for nearly 40 years and saw much turnover among local businesses due to high rents and inadequate parking.

“We’ve had some great things, like bookstores and eateries that have flourished sometimes for a decade or two, but it faded out,” Kuntz said. “[The theater] will certainly help Westwood if it is a success.”

For that to happen, Kuntz said, 1400-seat theater will need to screen a regular supply of films to a diverse customer base, including nearby students that have long been among its most frequent customers.

Many current UCLA students are already eagerly anticipating the theater’s reopening, said Ingrid Fan, a senior at the university majoring in public affairs.

“It’s been a bummer to have it closed for so long,” said Fan. “My friends and I always talk about how we just wish it opened sooner.”

While the theater’s renovation timeline won’t be complete before she graduates, she’s certain that other students will make good use of it when it reopens.

“Westwood is a college town, and we are always looking for a new source of community. It’s a space a lot of students would definitely flock to,” Fan said.

Broxton Avenue in Westwood Village during one of UCLA’s First Thursdays community events.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A historic movie hub

The university and its surrounding village, including the theater, were developed simultaneously throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Designed by Percy P. Lewis, the Westwood Village Theatre originally opened as a part of the Fox Theatres chain in 1931.

Despite launching during the Great Depression, the Westwood Village Theatre had a prime location working in its favor.

Westwood was imagined as a satellite town in West L.A. that would eventually support the growing UCLA campus. The neighborhood became known as the third major movie theater hub, behind downtown and Hollywood. In the 1920s, when the Chinese and the Egyptian theaters opened on Hollywood Boulevard, Westwood was next in line as a booming premiere destination.

“It was much more convenient to those folks than going to downtown Los Angeles, or even to Hollywood,” Kuntz said.

This was an era of moviegoing when premieres were essential to a movie’s box office success, drawing substantial marketing opportunities. The volume of films being produced at the time made it necessary to have multiple premiere-ready theaters around L.A., Kuntz said.

A “Terminator” poster is unveiled at the world premiere of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” in 2003.

(Robert Mora / Getty Images)

Over its 95-year history, the venue has been remodeled a handful of times, including in the 1950s when television became a mainstream medium. Soon, multiplexes emerged, which put the Westwood Village location at a disadvantage. To this day, the theater can only show one film at a time.

In the 1970s, the venue joined the Mann Theatres chain, and in 1988, it was designated a historic cultural monument.

Regency Theatres took over the Village Theatre and its neighboring film venue, the Bruin, in 2010. Notably, in 2018, Quentin Tarantino used the Bruin during the filming of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” which is set in late-1960s Los Angeles.

The ticket booth at the Regency Bruin theater in Westwood Village all boarded up, as seen on the afternoon of Nov. 3, 2020.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

Regency continued to operate the two locations until its lease ended in 2024. Although the group of Hollywood directors was quick to bid on the Village (the Bruin was not included in the deal), the theater has remained closed since then, with the exception of the recent Billie Eilish premiere.

As theaters continue to navigate rough waters amid hopes of a durable post-pandemic recovery, celebrity buyers have become a driving force in the effort to preserve some of L.A.’s historic venues. Tarantino operates both the New Beverly Cinema and the Vista, and most recently, Kristen Stewart purchased the Highland Park theater.

“A lot of people in Hollywood want to preserve at least some of what made classic Hollywood successful, like the big screen experience,” Kuntz said. “These folks are the ones who could afford to buy a movie house or two, program it and keep that tradition alive.”

L.A. Times staff writers Josh Rottenberg and Meg James contributed to this report.

It’s the time of year where Brits flock to the continent to explore its cultural delights, but many will find that in addition to longer queues at passport control, they could paying more to visit top attractions

Exploring Europe has become a lot trickier, and more expensive, since Brexit. From 90-day restrictions to the new Entry/Exit System (EES) that non-EU residents need to go through, the days of carefree hopping across the continent are over.

In the latest blow to Brits, some of Europe’s top tourist attractions have also started two-tier pricing schemes for EU and non-EU residents, meaning not only are we relegated to the longer queues at airports, on arrival we’ll also pay more to experience the country when we arrive.

Here are some tourist spots where you’ll need to pay more if you don’t have an EU passport.

1. The Louvre

According to a report by Which?, visitors to the Louvre, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris, face a two-tier pricing system. The museum increased its prices last year, from €22 to €32 (around £19 to £27), for anyone from outside the European Economic Area (EEA). So, visitors from any of the 27 EU countries, or Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway, will pay €10 (about £8.64) less than British tourists.

Other Paris attractions such as the Palace of Versailles and Sainte-Chapelle have also introduced dual pricing depending on nationality. British visitors to the historic château in Versailles will pay €3 more for their tickets (about £2.50).

2. Teide National Park

Tourists visiting Teide National Park, the largest of its kind in the Canary Islands, will need to pay for a permit to walk its most popular trails. This recently introduced fee runs from €10 to €25 (approx. £8.64 to £21.50) depending on where you go and whether you take a guide. Tenerife residents don’t pay this charge, and people who live on other Canary Islands get heavy discount.

It’s not the only Canary Islands attraction to offer deep discounts for those who live on the archipelago. For example, a visit to Siam Park, a sprawling waterpark in Tenerife is around €44 for a standard adult ticket, about £38, but half the price if you live on one of the local islands.

3. Acropolis of Athens

Hoping to take the kids to see the iconic Acropolis of Athens? if they’re British passport holders you’ll need to fork out more. While EU residents up to the age of 25 can visit the Acropolis for free, non-EU kids from the age of six to 25 will need to pay €10. Older adults also get fewer discounts if they’re from outside the EU. While seniors over 65 from the EU can pay a reduced €10 entry fee, Brits of the same age pay the full price of €20 (about £17.25).

4. The Royal Palace of Madrid

The Royal Palace of Madrid offers free hours between Monday to Thursday, from 4 pm to 6 pm from October to March, and from 5pm to 7pm from April to September, but these are only available to citizens of the European Union and Latin American citizens holding proof of nationality. Brits who want to visit the official residence of the Spanish royal family will need to pay nearly €25, although there are half-price tickets for younger people.

5. Pompeii and the Colosseum

Young people hoping to explore Italy’s state museums such as Pompeii and the Colosseum will pay more if they’re from non-EU countries. Many Italian attractions offer heavy discounts for young people up to the age of 25, bringing the cost of tickets down to under £2 in some cases. But these aren’t available to British passport holders.

Elsewhere in Italy, visitors to Rome will now need to pay for access the lower basin and steps of the iconic Trevi Fountain. As of February, visitors need to pay €2 to get close to the popular sightseeing spot, although locals can still enjoy it for free.

Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com

The outcome of the hotly contested race for California governor remained uncertain Tuesday night, but Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra held leads in the large field running to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Hilton, a former conservative commentator, and Becerra, a longtime elected official who served in the Biden administration, were roughly tied in early returns, with Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer in a distant third. Only two of the candidates will advance to the November general election.

In Tuesday night remarks, Becerra cited his upbringing as the child of hardworking immigrant parents. When it came to his run for governor, he said, he was counted out, was outspent by competitors and faced calls to drop out to clear a path for a Democrat to rise to the top of a crowded field.

In the end, Becerra appears to have been that Democrat.

“Like my parents, I never gave up … and thankfully neither did you,” he told supporters Tuesday evening at the Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown Los Angeles. “While I take nothing for granted [and] there are lots of ballots left to be counted, it appears that we are on track to advance to November.”

Hilton, a former Fox News commentator who was endorsed by President Trump, took the stage at his party in Huntington Beach just after 10 p.m. as results showed him leading the race. “This is the first stage, but the fight really starts tomorrow,” he told supporters.

Hilton spoke of himself and Spencer Pratt, who had a strong showing in the Los Angeles mayoral race, as “a couple of outsiders who’ve never run for office before” who had taken on a broken system.

Steyer remained hopeful Tuesday night, urging supporters to be patient as the statewide vote is counted. He called out corporations, including Chevron, PG&E and the insurance industry, for rigging the system and making the state unaffordable for working people.

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate,” he said.

Other candidates in the race included Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Democrats including former Rep. Katie Porter, San José Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

Villaraigosa, Mahan and Porter conceded the race Tuesday night.

Sonia Molina of Hancock Park said she came to Becerra’s election night party to support the Democrat, whom she has known since college. The local dentist described him as an honest, hardworking person who understands the importance of healthcare policy. Still, she was initially surprised at his rise in the polls.

“He’s very low-key and not very pompous — a lot of people [didn’t] really know him,” Molina said. “But I’m glad people are actually paying attention.”

Supporters of Hilton were gathered at the Waterfront Beach Resort in Huntington Beach, where cheers erupted in the ballroom with each wave of incoming results.

“He’s a true conservative,” said Hilton supporter John Merguerian, 52, of Glendale, who works as a security guard. “This is a chance for real change. We have the highest gas prices in the nation. We have the highest sales tax. One-party rule has done all this.”

California’s 2026 race for governor started slow but entered its next phase with a flourish, including the demise of a scandal-plagued Democratic favorite, the anointing of a Republican by Trump and Becerra’s unexpected rise from the depths of the crowded field of candidates.

Unlike gubernatorial elections in the last quarter century, this year’s race lacked a clear crowd-pleasing front-runner able to win over voters like Hollywood movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jerry Brown, a sage of the California electorate and scion of a storied political family. But it unfolded at a crucial time as the state’s residents are overwhelmed by high housing costs, steep gas prices and overall unaffordability that threatens the “California dream” that once drew millions of people to the state.

Many voters appeared exhausted by Trump’s policies that disproportionately affected California, such as immigration raids, and the costly special election in the fall to redraw the state’s congressional districts. They did not tune in to the gubernatorial contest until weeks before Tuesday’s primary.

A fundamental question in recent days was whether the state’s 23.2 million registered voters, who all received mail-in ballots, were waiting to vote or if they would skip the election because of malaise. Low early Democratic voter turnout alarmed party leaders, but it increased in the lead-up to the primary.

Tuesday’s initial results are the culmination of one of the most unpredictable and expensive gubernatorial primaries in decades and a race that was shaped just as much by who opted not to run as by the candidates who did.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris signaled interest in the seat shortly after her bruising 2024 loss to Trump. The race was in effect in limbo as Harris, one of the state’s most high-profile politicians, weighed whether to enter.

She ultimately decided against it, as did Sen. Alex Padilla. If they had run, political strategists said, either would have been favorites to win, with high name recognition and previous experience running for statewide offices.

Others bowed out too, including Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and billionaire developer Rick Caruso. Candidates who had initially declared for the seat — former state Senate leader Toni Atkins, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and billionaire Stephen Cloobeck among them — dropped out or pivoted to other races.

“I don’t ever recall a playing field that looks like this one. Usually there’s a clear front-runner,” said veteran Democratic strategist Darry Sragow. “It’s easy to say that it reflects a lack of talent [but] that’s absolutely not true. Almost any of the candidates running could make a good governor.”

Still, candidates struggled for months to break through to voters.

In February, polls showed the crowded field of Democrats splitting liberal voters and opening a statistical possibility that the party would be boxed out of November under California’s open, top-two primary, which places all candidates on the same ballot. Only the first- and second-place finishers in the primary advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.

Republicans Hilton and Bianco led many polls, prompting Democratic officials and allies to urge their party’s low-polling candidates to drop out of the race.

“Normal people are not living and breathing politics on a daily basis,” said Tim Rosales, a strategist who ran Republican John Cox’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. In today’s information-saturated environment, Rosales said, the race and its roster of “extremely milquetoast candidates” didn’t break through to voters until scandal erupted.

Just when former Rep. Eric Swalwell appeared on the cusp of becoming the Democratic front-runner — rising in polls and gaining support from influential labor unions — the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published allegations that he sexually assaulted a former staffer and acted inappropriately with other women.

Swalwell, a top Trump critic in Congress, vehemently denied the allegations as “flat false” and vowed to fight them, but the damage was done. His campaign staff and supporters abandoned him and some donors sought refunds. Two days after the allegations were published, Swalwell suspended his campaign.

In the vacuum created by Swalwell’s collapse, his Democratic rivals frenetically cast about for momentum. Porter saw a new bump in fundraising. Silicon Valley executives poured new millions behind Mahan. Former state Controller Betty Yee — who languished at the bottom of the polls — held on for a few more weeks before calling it quits.

It was Becerra who benefited most, though his critics and supporters alike have a hard time explaining exactly how or why. In less than two months, he vaulted from polling in the low single digits to the top of the field of candidates, according to surveys conducted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies that were co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

“Becerra caught lightning in a bottle,” Rosales said. “It could have easily gone to any of the other candidates,” but many had baggage. Videos of Porter losing her temper hurt her image, the source of Steyer’s wealth and his unbridled campaign spending weighed on voters’ minds, and Villaraigosa and Mahan were “more centrist than what most Democrats wanted, and so Xavier Becerra was really the safe choice,” Rosales said.

Before Democratic voters began to narrow down their choices, Trump endorsed Hilton in early April. It helped the former Fox News host break away from Bianco but diminished the chances of a Republican primary sweep.

In the days before the primary election, the race solidified into a three-way contest involving Becerra, Steyer and Hilton. Now fearing a scenario with two Democrats on the November ballot, Hilton called on Republicans to unite behind him and ramped up pressure on Bianco to drop out of the race, warning that having Becerra and Steyer on the November ballot would “be a disaster for California.”

“There’s one person who can stop this doomsday scenario, and that is my friend Chad Bianco,” Hilton said in an Instagram video Friday. “Chad, the best time to have dropped out would have been a couple of weeks ago, but the second best time is right now.”

Steyer stepped up his fight in the remaining days, seeking to squeeze into one of the top two spots by relentlessly battering Becerra in ads and at campaign rallies as a politician propped up by corporate special interests.

“We cannot afford to have a governor who’s been bought off by Big Oil. Period,” he said at a Sunday rally in Los Angeles.

Corporations, along with labor unions and interest groups including the California Assn. of Realtors, had spent more than $18.7 million to boost Becerra, according to the election spending tracker California Target Book. Many of the same groups also gave money to a committee intended to attack Steyer.

As the election neared, Becerra sharpened his own attacks against Steyer, calling the billionaire a “liar” and accusing him of trying to buy the election.

“We are not going to let a billionaire or Trump’s handpicked candidate take over this state,” he said during a Sunday rally in Long Beach.

Steyer’s wealth has been a central theme of the race. He has so far dropped more than $216 million into his campaign, shattering records set by other wealthy self-funded candidates before him and prompting attacks from critics who accuse him of trying to buy an election.

“Everybody assumes money is the most important thing, that you can quote-unquote ‘buy an election’ with all that money,” said Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “You still have to have a candidate who is able to be well-liked, and policy stances that are aligned with where voters are in general.”

Times staff writers Susanne Rust, Andrew Khouri and Christopher Goffard contributes to this report.

CIF SOCAL SOFTBALL REGIONALS
TUESDAY’S RESULTS
First Round

DIVISION I
#1 Chula Vista Mater Dei, bye
#5 Point Loma 10, #4 Whittier Christian 1
#6 St. Paul def. #3 Murrieta Mesa, forfeit
#2 La Habra def. #7 Bonita, forfeit

DIVISION II
#2 Riverside Prep 1, #8 Del Norte 0
#5 Redwood at #4 Birmingham, Wednesday at 3 p.m.
#6 Garces Memorial 3, #3 Oxnard 0
#2 Great Oak 9, #7 El Capitan 4

DIVISION III
#8 Mission College Prep 4, #1 Venice 2
#4 Hanford West 19, #5 Eagle Rock 1
#3 Grace 9, #6 Brawley 3
#2 Helix 14, #7 Covina 7

DIVISION IV
#1 San Diego Madison 10, #9 Arleta 4
#5 Grossmont 7, #4 Arroyo 4
#3 Irvine 8, #6 Avenal 7
#2 Woodlake 8, #7 Edgewood 4

DIVISION V
#1 Arroyo Valley, bye
#5 La Jolla 16, #4 Franklin 3
#6 San Bernardino 9, #3 Monte Vista 6
#2 South East, bye

THURSDAY’S SCHEDULE
(Games at 4 p.m. unless noted)
Semifinals

DIVISION I
#5 Point Loma at #1 Chula Vista Mater Dei
#6 St. Paul at #2 La Habra

DIVISION II
#5 Redwood / #4 Birmingham at #1 Riverside Prep
#6 Garces Memorial at #2 Great Oak

DIVISION III
#8 Mission College Prep at #4 Hanford West
#3 Grace at #2 Helix

DIVISION IV
#5 Grossmont at #1 San Diego Madison
#3 Irvine at #2 Woodlake

DIVISION V
#5 La Jolla vs. #1 Arroyo Valley, Wednesday at San Gorgonio
#6 San Bernardino at #2 South East

Note: Finals in all divisions Saturday, June 6 at 4 p.m. at higher seeds.

Cape Verde’s national football team has arrived in the US ahead to take part in their first ever FIFA World Cup. Players filmed themselves dancing in the aisle of the plane and were cheered on the tarmac.

Hungary’s political landscape has undergone a major shift following the electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party after 16 years in power. The new governing Tisza party, led by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, is now reversing several institutions created under the previous administration, including the controversial Sovereignty Protection Office.

The office was established in 2023 under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to monitor what the government described as foreign political interference in domestic affairs.

What Happened

The Tisza party has submitted a bill to parliament proposing the abolition of the Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO), arguing that it has no genuine public function and was used for political purposes.

According to the bill, the agency was designed to pressure opposition figures, journalists, civil society organizations, and media outlets by labeling them as serving “foreign interests.”

The SPO did not immediately respond to requests for comment. During its operation, it published studies aligned with the former government’s positions on issues such as migration, Ukraine, and relations with the European Union.

Why the Office Is Controversial

Critics have long argued that the Sovereignty Protection Office functioned as a political tool rather than an independent watchdog. It was frequently accused of targeting government critics and reinforcing narratives favorable to the ruling party at the time.

The European Commission had also launched infringement proceedings against Hungary over the law that created the agency, raising concerns about its compatibility with EU standards on media freedom and democratic oversight.

Opponents compared the SPO to similar legislation in other countries that restrict foreign-funded organizations, warning that it risked undermining press freedom and civil society independence.

Political Shift After the Election

The proposed abolition comes after a major political transition in Hungary, where the Tisza party defeated Orbán’s Fidesz in parliamentary elections, ending more than a decade of uninterrupted rule.

The new government has signaled a broader effort to dismantle institutions seen as politically aligned with the previous administration and restore institutional neutrality in governance.

What Comes Next

The bill will now be debated in parliament, where the Tisza party holds a governing majority. If passed, it would formally dissolve the Sovereignty Protection Office and potentially roll back other measures introduced under Orbán’s leadership.

The move is likely to deepen political divisions in Hungary, where debates over media freedom, foreign influence, and relations with the European Union remain highly contentious.

With information from Reuters.

Nonfiction films and series are among some of the most-watched (and most-discussed) programming on TV. As Emmy season heats up, the directors of six notable contenders share thoughts about their projects.

‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ (HBO)

“It’s just a famous, famous story in Texas, but particularly Austin,” director Margaret Brown says of the bewilderingly complex case of four teenage girls slain at a yogurt shop in the state’s capital in 1991. “You heard about it all the time at parties. My best friend was like, ‘That story is rabbit hole upon rabbit hole upon rabbit hole — no one knows what really happened. It’s impossible to figure out.’ I liked the idea of something that was impossible to figure out. But when I started doing the interviews, I was like, ‘This is dark, this is deep trauma.’ I’d never watched or done true crime before. I didn’t realize what it would be like to sit with people who hadn’t known what happened to their siblings and children for over 30 years. I remember [thinking], ‘I’ve got to get this right. I can’t mess this up. There’s just too much pain here.’”

‘The American Revolution’ (PBS)

“Leading up to it, I said I just don’t want us drowning in fife-and-drum treacle,” director Ken Burns says of his expansive treatment of America’s origin story, which draws out the experiences of Native Americans and enslaved people as well as the era’s atmosphere of civic discord. “Clearly it’s not, because we’re so existentially challenged by the moment. But the revolution gives us a sense of perspective. Times were more challenging then. More division. More division in the Civil War. More division in Reconstruction. Yes, the threats are unprecedented, but they’re not totally unfamiliar. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn’t repeat itself, but he’s [also] supposed to have said it rhymes. I love that. So like Odysseus, I tie myself to the mast and resist the temptation to put a little neon sign in the film saying, ‘Isn’t this so much like today?’”

‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’ (Netflix)

“There was so much noise,” says director Alexandria Stapleton, who tracks hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ rise and shocking fall in this series, executive produced by 50 Cent. “I’m scared for my safety, I’m scared for my career. Then there was every journalist, every giant corporation, trying to chase the same story. Because there was a feeding frenzy, there were a lot of people that were not truthful. It was making sure that we were going after the right people to speak with, and then … making sure that they felt safe emotionally. No one knew who I was interviewing while I was making it. In making a project about a man who’s very connected in media and very good at whatever he wants his narrative to be, there was a very deliberate decision to not drop this project until we literally were a week out.”

‘Ocean With David Attenborough’ (National Geographic)

(Keith Scholey / Silverback Films and Open Planet / National Geographic)

“It’s been weird, because I’ve got older, and he sort of stayed the same, like the Dorian Gray picture,” says Keith Scholey, one of the film’s directors, of the 100-year-old broadcasting legend and naturalist. “He’s still got that huge power and presence and commitment. It comes from the heart. He’s got a huge depth to him, in terms of knowledge, experience, personality … but he’s also very self-effacing. The most boring thing in the world for David Attenborough is David Attenborough. He’s interested in every aspect of the truth, and he loves uncovering that and passing that on to the world. He knows how to present in a way that it’s a performance, but it’s not a performance.”

‘Neighbors’ (HBO)

“Neighbor disputes are a great leveler,” says Harrison Fishman, who co-directs this gonzo excursion into neighborhood feuds with Dylan Redford. “If you think about class and race and politics, all that stuff gets thrown out the window when people are dealing with such small, concrete problems. You quickly start learning why people care so much about the things that they’re fighting for. It becomes a bit like a Trojan horse into learning about aspects of America and things about people that have nothing to do with the dispute. Those tangents are so valuable to us, because it gives context to the dispute. But it also helps people understand who everybody is in our country.”

‘Mr. Scorsese’ (Apple TV)

“We would get together and have these very long conversations,” says director Rebecca Miller, who interviewed American cinema’s great poet of tortured masculinity over five years. “But then in terms of the other voices, I thought, ‘Who knows him best?’ There was this wonderful movie called ‘Crumb,’ by Terry Zwigoff. He interviewed [cartoonist R. Crumb’s] ex-girlfriend at a certain point, and I felt like I got a view into the person, not in a gossipy way, but … trying to get a rounded view. If you only get the front-facing part, you’re not going to get a full sense of who they are. It was very important to me that we hear from the daughters or his wife, that there’s a sense of a person in there.”

Published on 03/06/2026 – 11:31 GMT+2•Updated
11:36

The Spanish fashion giant behind Zara, Inditex, posted net income of €1.4 billion in the first quarter, up 5.4% year-on-year and ahead of market expectations.

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Sales rose 5.8% to €8.7bn, or 8.8% at constant exchange rates, ahead of the roughly 8% analysts had anticipated.

Gross profit rose 6.9% to €5.4bn, helped by an improvement in profit margins, meaning the company kept a larger share of revenue as profit. EBITDA, a measure of underlying earnings, increased 7.3% to €2.6bn.

Inditex shares rose more than 5% on Wednesday after the company reported a strong start to the second quarter, with sales increasing 11.5% between 1 May and 1 June, reassuring investors that the Zara owner remains resilient despite signs of weakening consumer spending.

“Inditex continued its strong momentum with its latest results beating first quarter expectations, and also seen a strong start to the second quarter too, as sales grew more or less in line with the rate the company exited with in the previous quarter,” said Mamta Valechha, consumer discretionary analyst at Quilter Cheviot.

The revenue jump from one of the world’s largest listed clothing retailers points to solid consumer appetite heading into the summer, despite concerns that a more uncertain economic and geopolitical backdrop could weigh on spending in the months ahead.

Navigating geopolitical risks

The results come as businesses around the world face growing uncertainty over the global economy and concerns that consumers may cut back on spending.

Inditex said its wide-ranging supply chain and flexible transport network had helped it keep products flowing to stores around the world despite recent disruptions.

“Ultimately, Inditex continues to have a resilient business model that can withstand significant economic pressures and currency headwinds,” said Mamta Valechha, consumer discretionary analyst at Quilter Cheviot.

Valechha said strong customer demand and the company’s ability to source products close to its key markets had helped it keep collections up to date while limiting the need for discounts. Productivity improvements had also helped protect profitability.

Inditex also said that the current “geopolitical challenges” had an impact on the sales in the Middle East, a region that Barclays estimates accounts for about 5% of its revenue.

The company also warned that ongoing instability in the region could affect its performance in the months ahead.

Inditex faces a number of other challenges, including higher shipping costs and rising prices for raw materials such as cotton and polyester. Currency movements are also expected to weigh on results this year.

Inditex ended the quarter with 5,456 stores and a net cash position of €10.8bn.

The board has proposed a dividend of €1.75 per share for the last fiscal year, comprising an ordinary component of €1.20 and a bonus of €0.55, payable in two instalments in May and November 2026.

Despite the strong start to the year, Inditex left its outlook unchanged. It said it expects sales growth to continue into the second quarter, supported by strong demand for its spring and summer collections and ongoing improvements to its stores and operations.

However, the company said currency fluctuations are likely to reduce sales growth by around 1% over the full year. It also expects to invest about €2.3bn in the business during the current financial year.