PEREZ Hilton has been rushed to hospital after worrying reports he was seen self-harming during a TikTok livestream.

Police raced to the celebrity blogger and TV star’s home in Miami after concerned fans made “multiple” 911 calls reporting Hilton’s worrying behaviour and saying he was covered in blood.

Distressing footage from Hilton’s TikTok account appeared to show the media personality covered in blood with with several marks on his body.

Fans of Hilton, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr, reported the video and managed to get it taken down by TikTok.

The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office confirmed they received several 911 calls about an individual livestreaming acts of self-harm on social media.

Deputies found Hilton, 48, inside the house alone and quickly assessed he wasn’t a risk to others but needed medical help.

A police spokesperson said: “Deputies tactically disengaged while continuing to monitor the situation.”

He was “safely recovered” and taken to a local hospital to receive treatment.

Hilton’s family have been in contact with the cops and helped provide statements.

Hilton’s representatives, Golden Artists Entertainment Co-CEOs Dante Rusciolelli and Rebekah Kochan told TMZ they “are aware of the concerning content circulating online”.

Their statement added: “At this time, we have not been able to make direct contact with him, despite our ongoing efforts to reach him.

“Our primary concern is Perez’s health and well-being, as well as the well-being of his family.

“Until we have confirmed information, we will not speculate or comment further.”

If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.

That reality has created a new one.

Rashford is contracted to Manchester United until 2028. His salary of £325,000 a week makes him the club’s top earner at a time when minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe is trying to stay on top of wage costs, which is, by some distance, the club’s highest expenditure.

United’s transfer activity has slowed since Belgium midfielder Youri Tielemans joined them for £35m on 14 July.

While uncertainty over Rashford’s future is not the entire reason for this, it is a basic truth that Manchester United‘s search for a left-sided attacking player, or another striker, will be impacted if he stays at the club because he can play in both positions.

Equally, the amount United can pay in wages will differ depending on whether Rashford’s salary is part of the overall bill.

Many fans are conflicted.

Plenty feel Rashford’s fallout with Amorim over his performances in training was reflective of someone who no longer felt the joy of playing for his boyhood club.

Comparisons were made with his performances prior to his exit from United and those at Aston Villa, with England and then Barcelona.

Others think Rashford is too good to be discarded; a local lad who would benefit from an arm around the shoulder and is capable of making a significant impact in Carrick’s team.

The secondary point to that is could United sign a player of similar standing for £26m, given that is the fee sources close to Rashford feel would not be exceeded given it had been agreed with Barcelona?

Stellio Lestienne, chef at La Matelote in Boulogne’s harbour, shows me his shopping list as we browse the city’s daily morning fish market. He wants to pick up some crab and sole, which are in season, but his usual lobster fisher is still out on his boat, so he’ll have to wait a bit for that. Although I’ve been a regular visitor to both Boulogne and the surrounding Hauts-de-France region for about 30 years, this is my first time in the fish market. Now I’m kicking myself for all that lost time.

It’s not very big, nor is it remotely picturesque, stretching along a nondescript car park in the port. But it does have a fantastic selection of fish and seafood, both from fishers (pêcheurs artisans in light-blue stalls) and retailers (commerçants in dark blue). And it’s considerably cheaper than other fish markets I’ve seen. “People come here from the UK with cool bags to do their shopping,” Stellio says, pointing to a man doing that very thing. I spot filleted roussettes (dogfish) going for €2 each. At another stall, a man deftly slices through a grotesque-looking monkfish, cutting out the prized cheeks.

Boulogne-sur-Mer is France’s largest fishing port and all of this bounty is just a short jaunt across the Channel. This makes the idea of a seafood safari along the Côte d’Opale – whose chalky cliffs, sand dunes and forests stretch south from Calais to Le Touquet and beyond – impossible for me to resist.

I start in the fishing village of Audresselles, a pleasant 45-minute pootle along the coast road from LeShuttle’s terminal. La Marie Galante, run by cheerful and talented sisters Béatrice and Godeleine Cuvellier, has a cosy interior and razor clams on the menu. Accustomed to seeing empty razor-clam shells on my favourite Norfolk beach but not on restaurant menus (too much of a faff to collect, a local fishmonger told me), I pounce on these shellfish smothered in garlic and parsley. This is followed by a typical plate of fruits de mer – oysters, whelks, giant juicy prawns and half a crab. Around me echoes the sound of people studiously pounding their crab claws open, soon joined by my own. The sound of a happy restaurant.

One of my favourite French towns awaits a little further along the coast – Wimereux, with its wonderfully whimsical 19th-century architecture and long expanse of beach. Its art deco grande dame, Hotel l’Atlantic, has had a major makeover since I last stayed. Chef Benjamin Delpierre, co-owner with his wife Aurélie, has also since handed back the restaurant’s Michelin star, throwing off the constraints that came with it. In a relaxed yet sophisticated atmosphere, I dip prawn croquettes into a curried beetroot puree before revelling in a fillet of roast cod with an addictive celery cream and rich chicken jus. All the while, I watch mesmerised as the sun dips across the Channel.

Le Touquet, with its long sandy beaches, pine forests and golf courses loved by Channel-hopping Brits, is my next stop. But first I make a detour to its neighbour across the River Canche, Étaples-sur-Mer. This is another first for me: a visit to Maréis, an exhibition centre and aquarium telling the story of French sea fishing in the North Sea and Channel. And what an utterly fascinating story it turns out to be. What is caught in the sea and how it’s caught are vividly brought to life thanks to clever immersive and interactive exhibits (in French and English). Fish swim in an aquarium above my head, while another large tank holds enormous rays gliding through the water.

That evening in Le Touquet, the shouts of England fans from the Globe Trotter pub keep me abreast of the World Cup score while, across the lane at Pérard, I dine on a whole grilled sea bream. I can’t remember the last time I could fillet a fish so effortlessly, such was the perfection of the grilling and freshness of the fish. On the way back to my hotel, Novotel Thalassa Le Touquet, I’m treated to the same sunset spectacle as in Wimereux, the sands and the sea glowing in the warm light.

I spend an agreeable morning wandering through Le Touquet’s sprawling market, most of whose food stalls are under soaring wooden vaulted ceilings within the semicircular covered market. Not surprisingly, the fishmongers have their own section, where they’ve set up a bar à huitres so you can sit at high tables and order fruits de mer and a glass of wine. It’s tempting, but I go for a bowl of mussels covered in oozing maroilles cheese in nearby La Chope. The restaurant’s soundtrack of death metal isn’t exactly conducive to a relaxing lunch, but the food just about makes up for it.

I still have an evening in Boulogne to look forward to, but first a stroll around the Old Town near the imposing basilica. My B&B is here too, the Stay Well Hôtel de Fiennes, an elegant 1732 townhouse with a courtyard made for unwinding. But the prospect of dinner at La Matelote drags me out of the comfy chairs and down to the port. Delicious flavours follow: langoustine with cauliflower cream; white asparagus with smoked salmon, caviar, basil cream and hummus; hake with pea puree and thyme-roasted carrots. And it’s all crowned by a quite stupendous lemon souffle. I’m not a dessert person, but this makes me want to applaud whoever made this divine creation.

I have a final stop before the end of my little seafood safari – back to Audresselles, but this time to my regular haunt, Chez Mimi. Trying to be sensible after days of indulgence, I opt for a small plate of crustaceans instead of my usual calorific “crabe mimi” (stuffed crab with fries). My husband orders it instead, making me wish I were less sensible. In the village square, everything is being set up for that weekend’s annual crab festival, now in its 50th year and an event I enjoyed years ago. I might be missing the party, but I have my own seafood celebration to savour.

The trip was provided by Hauts-de-France tourism and Pas-de-Calais tourism. Hotel l’Atlantic has doubles from €129 room only, Novotel Le Touquet from €128 room only and The Stay Well Hôtel de Fiennes from €160 B&B

Bangladeshi journalist and fact-checker Qadaruddin Shishir investigates extrajudicial killings and disinformation following the student-led protests that ousted former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2024.

As Bangladesh continues a political transition under new governance, he turns his focus towards debunking fake news and misleading narratives spreading online. Determined to safeguard his nation’s democratic integrity, he launches an independent organisation to expand his work and mentor a new generation of fact-checkers.

As Bangladesh struggles to rebuild trust after political turmoil, Shishir pins his hopes on a new generation willing to defend the truth.

Egypt has moved from rhetorical backing of Sudan’s army to active enabler of its war effort, with a covert drone hub on Egyptian soil symbolising how Cairo has tied its regional strategy to the survival of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Since fighting erupted between the SAF and RSF in April 2023, Egypt has framed its stance as defence of Sudan’s “unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity” and of its “national institutions, particularly the Sudanese Armed Forces.” Officially, President Abdel Fattah al‑Sisi repeats pledges of “non‑interference,” presenting Egypt’s role as limited to mediation, humanitarian aid and hosting Sudanese refugees.

In practice, that line has steadily eroded. Years of joint drills, intelligence sharing and arms ties since 2019 created deep interoperability between the two militaries, well before the civil war began. Egyptian troops captured by the RSF at Merowe airbase in April 2023 were explained away as being on pre‑scheduled exercises, a narrative few regional observers accepted.

The New York Times investigation into East Oweinat in Egypt’s Western Desert crystallises this shift from backstage support to direct operational involvement. Satellite imagery, flight records and videos show a once‑civil agricultural airstrip expanded since 2018 with a second runway, new hangars and satellite links, and by 2025 hosting Turkish Akinci combat drones.

According to U.S. and European officials cited in that reporting, those drones have for at least six months flown strike missions into Sudan, hitting RSF targets up to hundreds of miles inside the country, including convoys on supply routes from Libya and Chad. The drones and their munitions match Turkish systems, but are based on Egyptian territory and shield Sudan’s military assets from RSF retaliation, blurring whether Cairo is merely hosting or also directing the campaign.

For Cairo, East Oweinat offers plausible deniability: operations are embedded in a desert reclamation project far from public scrutiny, yet close enough to Sudan’s border to project sustained air power. For Sudan’s army, it is a lifeline in a war where the RSF has excelled at capturing bases and shooting down drones; at least several Akinci units have reportedly been lost to RSF fire in recent months.

RSF statements and battlefield evidence further illuminate the depth of Egyptian support. In January 2026 the RSF published what it called “irrefutable” proof of Egypt’s direct role, citing captured Egyptian‑made ammunition, armoured vehicles and testimonies from detained SAF‑aligned commanders who described arms, training and medical support routed from Egypt.

Egypt’s wager on the SAF is rooted in hard security and regime‑survival logic. Egyptian strategists see Sudan’s collapse as an existential threat, evoking fears of refugee flows and arms smuggling on a porous southern frontier. Control of the Nile is still more fundamental: since the 2019 fall of Omar al‑Bashir, Cairo has tightened security and military coordination with Khartoum to present a united front against Ethiopia’s GERD and protect its historic water share.

There is also an ideological affinity. General Abdel Fattah al‑Burhan is a career officer with long‑standing ties to Egyptian commanders, and his military rule mirrors Sisi’s own path from barracks to presidency. Backing the SAF fits a long‑standing Egyptian instinct to side with Sudan’s regular army “whoever is in charge of it,” and more broadly to prefer strong central militaries over unruly civilian transitions in the Arab world. The SAF’s reliance upon Muslim Brotherhood–aligned militias and ideologues, including the glorification of early militant figures such as Bara Bin Malik, against the backdrop of Washington’s formal designation of key Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organisations, should be unsettling to Cairo.

Yet by 2026, Egypt’s bet looks increasingly brittle. The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 14 million and pushed parts of Sudan close to famine, while neither side has secured decisive control. Burhan’s legitimacy is deeply disputed: he led the 2021 coup that derailed a fragile civilian‑military transition, and many of the forces that drove the 2018–19 uprising see him as the continuation of military dominance, not a route to elections.

Cairo’s categorical rejection of “parallel entities” and alternative governments in exile is presented as a defence of Sudanese unity, but in effect delegitimises broad civilian coalitions trying to organise outside the SAF–RSF binary. By equating Sudan’s “national institutions” with the current military leadership, Egypt narrows the field of acceptable interlocutors to a junta whose territorial control and popular backing are both eroding.

At the same time, Egypt seeks recognition as a mediator, through formats like the Quad and by hosting conferences of Sudanese civil and political actors in Cairo. That posture sits uneasily with explicit promises not to be “lax or late in supporting the legitimate Sudanese government” under Burhan, and with mounting evidence of Egyptian‑based air operations in the conflict. The covert base in the desert, and the drones that rise from its runways toward Sudanese skies, have become emblematic of a policy that claims non‑interference while in practice helping to lock Sudan into a devastating, externalised war.

Jelly Roll is taking a break from performing after a highly publicized split from Bunnie XO.

Last week, the “Save Me” singer paused his Salt Lake City concert to announce the hiatus. “This has truly been a lifetime experience for me,” Jelly Roll told the crowd at the Rice-Eccles Stadium, per Country Now. “And in a couple of nights, I go to Colorado Springs and do my last show for a year or two. I’m fixing to take some time off and heal. Thank you for the opportunity.”

The Grammy Award-winning country star (born Jason DeFord) and “Dumb Blonde” podcaster (Alisa DeFord) finalized their divorce last month after nearly 10 years of marriage.

The country music star filed for divorce from his wife in Tennessee’s Williamson County on May 18, citing irreconcilable differences. The announcement shocked country fans who had followed the couple through podcast appearances and acceptance speeches that painted a rosy picture of the pair’s relationship.

Jelly Roll’s the Little Ass Shed Tour concluded last week in Colorado after two months of shows; he also co-headlined several stadium concerts with Post Malone. The musician released his latest single, “Hands Up,” on June 24, followed by the music video on July 17, which was filmed at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and incorporated inmates from the facility. Details on a forthcoming album have yet to be released.

Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO were regulars on the podcast circuit and spoke candidly about the ups and downs of their relationship. In Bunnie’s 2026 memoir, “Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic,” she wrote about Jelly Roll’s 10-month affair in 2018 and her subsequent emotional unraveling.

The couple also has been open about their struggle with IVF in recent years. In a since-deleted podcast episode, Bunnie XO said the pair still planned to get pregnant post-split.

As a wave of cheap Chinese imports has flooded the EU in recent years, Brussels is now facing a new challenge: new import routes passing through Morocco and Turkey, the EU’s neighbouring countries, where Beijing can leverage tariff-free trade agreements with the bloc.

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By investing heavily in those countries, China is seeking to circumvent the EU’s trade barriers, including the extra duties imposed by the EU on products such as electric vehicles, and channel its industrial overcapacity into the European market.

European policymakers are now bracing for a surge in low-cost Chinese goods entering duty-free through these gateway countries, thanks to an association agreement that liberalises trade with Morocco and a customs union linking Turkey to the EU.

The European Commission launched negotiations with Beijing in June in a bid to rebalance a trade relationship that has left the EU with a €1 billion deficit. However, it is not guaranteed to reach concrete results by October — the deadline set by Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.

Brussels has already made clear it is prepared to deploy new unilateral trade defence measures. But Beijing is becoming increasingly adept at getting around the EU’s traditional trade tools, particularly trade defence tariffs.

Its circumvention strategy is now to go through Morocco and Turkey, which are becoming the new front line in the EU’s trade battle with China.

Billions in investments

Over the last four years, these investments have reached a record $6 billion in Morocco and $2 billion in Turkey, according to Rhodium Group, an independent research provider.

Cairo is also attracting Chinese money, with $6 billion invested in 2025 alone. But Chinese products made in Egypt are mainly exported to the US and Gulf countries.

In Morocco, Beijing has been investing in an entire electric vehicles (EV) manufacturing ecosystem. “There is a genuine long-term trend that began after COVID-19. We are seeing Chinese companies setting up operations in the country to manufacture high-value-added goods,” Armand Meyer, an expert at Rhodium Group, told Euronews.

Chinese battery producer Gotion is settling in the country, along with BTR, Tinci and Huayou, which produce battery materials, APG, an automotive brake manufacturer, and Sentury Tire, a tyre maker. All will soon have factories in Morocco.

The EU, which hit Chinese EVs with anti-subsidy duties in 2024, is concerned about China’s move into neighbouring countries.

In Turkey, part of the investment targets the local market, while Chinese export plans also threaten European producers. China’s EV giant BYD was granted preferential access to the Turkish market to build a factory, although the project has been suspended for now.

“The idea was to build a mega-factory in exchange for an exemption from Turkish import duties, as Turkey imposes tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles,” Meyer said. Chinese home appliance maker Haier is also investing in the country, as is Astronergy, which manufactures solar panels.

China’s manufacturing push in those countries spans multiple sectors, exploiting trade agreements with the EU that cover a wide range of products.

“The free trade agreements with Morocco and Turkey cover almost all goods. So it’s complicated to counter the Chinese export strategy,” Thomas Grjebine, an economist at the French Centre for Research and Expertise on the World Economy, told Euronews.

Grjebine added that China has understood these countries can serve as “a staging ground”, with investments rising year after year.

“Investments in these gateway countries account for about a quarter of China’s total investment in Europe and the Maghreb,” he said.

Reducing Morocco and Turkey’s access to the EU market

However, in March, the Commission proposed a landmark bill called the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) which aims to protect the EU market from foreign competitors — provoking anger from China.

The IAA creates a European preference for access to public procurement and EU public funding schemes, ruling out non-EU countries under certain conditions. China was targeted in particular, leading to threats of retaliation from Beijing.

All foreign countries are now lobbying EU lawmakers, who are discussing the bill, to be considered trusted partners, allowing their products to qualify as “Made in Europe”.

Industries with parts of their value chains outside the EU are also urging MEPs to include those countries. Euronews has learnt that ACEA, for instance, which represents European carmakers in Brussels, has been lobbying EU lawmakers to include Morocco, where many European manufacturers have production plants.

Paradoxically, if Morocco and Turkey — where European carmakers are also established — were considered trusted partners whose products could be labelled “Made in Europe”, it would also serve Beijing’s interests — despite fierce competition with the EU in the automotive sector — as China is building factories there.

“The Chinese know full well that a number of companies have located part of their value chain in those countries and are lobbying hard to ensure that Morocco and Turkey are not excluded from what is considered ‘Made in Europe’,” French socialist MEP Pierre Jouvet told Euronews.

“This is part of Beijing’s investment and tariff circumvention strategy,” he said.

The MEP is campaigning to exclude Morocco and Turkey from the scope of the IAA unless both countries open their public procurement markets to EU companies.

That position is backed by French liberal MEP Christophe Grudler and German Green MEP Anna Cavazzini, who, along with Jouvet, are expected to present a report on the issue to fellow MEPs in September.

EU trade defence instruments lack effectiveness

Without such a bill, the EU’s trade defence instruments remain modest compared with the scale of the coming wave of cheap Chinese products manufactured in those neighbouring countries.

The EU can only tackle Chinese dumping — where a product is sold below its normal value — on a product-by-product basis, as well as tariff circumvention when parts of the goods come from China and have only been assembled in Morocco or Turkey. The Commission usually assesses the value added generated in those countries before deciding whether to sanction Chinese companies with duties.

“For years, it was mostly a matter of transhipment through these countries, with Chinese exporters simply changing the certificate of origin, but defending the EU market has now become far more challenging,” Laurent Ruessmann, partner at law firm RB Legal, told Euronews.

Ruessmann has represented European glass fibre producers — whose products are used as reinforcement materials — in their fight against cheap Chinese imports. Eventually, glass fibre from China and from Chinese companies located in Egypt was hit with EU anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties in 2020.

But the Commission then had to open new cases involving glass fibre fabrics — used in wind turbine blades — imported from Morocco and Turkey. In 2022, it found that they were made using Chinese glass fibre already subject to EU anti-dumping duties imposed in 2020, a textbook case of tariff circumvention.

More recently, in 2025, the Commission also slapped countervailing duties on aluminium road wheels made in Morocco after concluding China had unfairly subsidised them.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Chinese companies receive up to eight times more subsidies than Western firms.

With recent investments in Morocco and Turkey, the EU executive is facing a new challenge: Chinese companies are setting up factories abroad, generating more added value in those countries than in China.

“In those cases, the Commission can no longer rely on anti-circumvention rules and has to launch a fresh investigation. The challenge is that it is much more difficult to prove dumping or unfair subsidies, making it far harder to impose duties high enough to protect the European market,” Victor Crochet of law firm Nishimura & Asahi told Euronews.

Looking at recent judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union, however, the lawyer believes EU judges will progressively allow the Commission to be “more aggressive” towards Chinese operations located in the EU’s neighbouring countries.

“The Commission will have to come up with new instruments. It will try to push the boundaries of the concept of circumvention to keep pace with the times, even when the raw materials no longer come from China,” Crochet said.

Turkish club Trabzonspor say they have begun negotiations to sign Mohamed Salah.

The 34-year-old Egypt forward left Liverpool at the end of last season and is in talks to join as a free agent.

In a statement, Trabzonspor said Salah will arrive in Istanbul on Wednesday.

“The player is planned to reach Trabzon in the evening of the same day,” it said.

“The time and other details regarding the welcome program in Trabzon will be shared with the public through our club’s official communication channels during the day.”

Nicknamed the Black Sea Storm, Trabzonspor have won seven league titles, six of which came between 1976 and 1984.

In 2022, they claimed their most recent league success, ending a 38-year wait.

Based in the north-eastern city of Trabzon, they are one of only six teams to have won the Turkish Super Lig.

Salah joined Liverpool from Roma in June 2017 and won numerous honours with the club during a nine-year spell.

He helped the Reds to win two Premier League titles, the Champions League, the Club World Cup, Uefa Super Cup, FA Cup and two EFL Cups, as well as the Community Shield.

During his time in England, the Egyptian won the Premier League Golden Boot on four occasions and was named the Professional Footballers’ Association player of the year three times – in 2018, 2022 and 2025.

In the process, he scored 257 goals and provided 120 assists from 442 appearances for Liverpool.

Salah was part of the Egypt side that reached the 2026 World Cup last 16 before losing 3-2 to eventual finalists Argentina.

Footage shows some of the more than 200 Bolivian police and military officers patrolling its border with Brazil. A wave of violence linked to clashes between Brazilian criminal groups fighting to control drug routes has left at least nine dead.

Miami authorities on Tuesday night responded to a residence after a disturbing video was posted on social media that appeared to involve celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

The Times has not confirmed the authenticity of the video. But the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office said in an emailed statement that authorities had received an influx of calls on Tuesday reporting that an individual was livestreaming acts of self-harm on social media.

After surrounding the Miami residence of a man who was not named, the Sheriff’s Office said around 9 p.m. that he had been “safely recovered and transported by Miami-Dade Fire Rescue to a local hospital, where he is receiving medical attention.”

Deputies had arrived earlier and said they spoke with family members at the scene and confirmed that the man was alone inside the home.

“In many incidents involving a person experiencing a mental health crisis or actively harming themselves, deputies prioritize de-escalation by creating time, distance and opportunities for communication,” the statement read. “Unless there is an immediate threat to others, slowing the situation and utilizing crisis intervention techniques can reduce the likelihood of a suicide-by-cop encounter and minimize the risk of injury to the individual, deputies and the public.”

Authorities said they had “tactically disengaged while continuing to monitor the situation.” In their later update, the Sheriff’s Office said that after the man had been transported to a hospital, mental health professionals were at the scene “providing support and resources to the individual’s family.”

A representative for Hilton did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

In the TikTok live video, a person who seems to be in distress harms himself. The video has since been removed from the platform.

Police and fire personnel converged on the Miami home Tuesday night. NBC6 News reported that some neighbors said Hilton lived at the home, but police would not confirm that.

Hilton, born Mario Lavandeira Jr., has been a pop culture personality since the early aughts when he launched his eponymous celebrity gossip rag. The venture garnered the columnist social status but also made him persona non grata among many celebrities who weren’t fans of his controversial coverage, which was often deemed disparaging, especially toward women.

ON A COLD February morning in San Diego, a slim blond man wearing a suit as gray as the weather stands behind a podium outside City Hall. Around him bustle younger men carrying folders and boxes stuffed with papers. Blue and white balloons rise from the podium and quiver in the stiff breeze. Reporters stand on the edge of the square with notebooks poised.

For Republican Sen. Pete Wilson, the man behind the microphone, this is in many respects a triumphant homecoming. On the third official day of his campaign for the governorship of California–a job he has coveted for more than a decade–he has returned to the city that he led as mayor from 1971 through 1982. All around him are reminders of his achievements over that long reign. New office buildings spike into the skyline. Local officials mill behind him deferentially.

All that is missing this morning is an audience.

Not more than a dozen people, including reporters, are listening as Wilson begins his speech. There are more police officers than spectators present. Trolleys run by; people step off, look for a moment at the podium, slow their step and then pass on. One man in a wheelchair looks quizzically at the balloons, the amplifier and the police and asks, “Is that Pete Wilson?” Then he rolls away without waiting for an answer.

If Wilson notices that he is speaking to an empty courtyard, he betrays no sign of it. He does not vary his delivery. No disappointment colors his voice. The subject for the morning is transportation, and Wilson sticks to it as stubbornly as if he were before a room of rapt highway engineers.

His remarks are reasonable, well-informed and entirely unarresting. Here in this empty courtyard a continent away from the capital, Wilson sounds as though he is still on the Senate floor. His is the cool and insular language of government, of official declarations and distant decisions.

This is Pete Wilson’s natural vernacular, for he is, above all, a creature of government. Except for a brief period as a young lawyer 25 years ago, Wilson has spent his entire adult life in politics–as a local Republican operative in San Diego, state assemblyman, mayor of San Diego and, since 1982, as a U.S. Senator.

That resume marks Pete Wilson as a pioneer among the new generation of career politicians who have come to dominate American public life during the era of the permanent campaign–the unflappable, technocratic young men so common in Congress and state houses today. In Wilson are evident all of this generation’s characteristic strengths. He is efficient at moving the levers of government, comfortable before the television camera, conversant with campaign media strategy, prodigiously successful at raising money. Extremely sensitive to the political center of gravity, he is difficult to box into an ideological corner and disciplined enough to avoid the mistakes that in this day of 30-second negative advertisements can end a political career overnight. With a loyal and efficient staff around him, he is the skilled and savvy manager of a diversified bicoastal enterprise: the political career of Peter Barton Wilson.

But if Wilson possesses all the skills of the modern politician, he shares the breed’s great weaknesses. Like so many of his contemporaries, Wilson has enormous difficulty capturing the voters’ imagination with bold initiatives or forging emotional bonds with his constituents, a point painfully dramatized in his adopted home town by the steady flow of people who push by him indifferently on this winter morning.

THERE IN MICROCOSM is the dilemma Pete Wilson faces as he begins his campaign for the state’s highest political office. After two decades in elected office, Wilson remains for many Californians an indistinct figure, a name on a ballot but little more, a blond blur. “People have intellectual knowledge of him,” says one California Republican political consultant, “but they don’t have emotional knowledge. You can’t win the governor’s race without both.”

Pete Wilson begins this campaign with formidable assets. While Attorney General John K. Van de Kamp and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein flay each other with negative advertisements, Wilson has no opposition for the Republican nomination. Though some conservatives carp about his support for a woman’s right to abortion and his tolerant views toward homosexuality, Wilson has behind him an enthusiastic party desperate to maintain control of the governor’s mansion during the redrawing of state legislative and congressional districts that will follow this year’s census. He is stockpiling one of the largest campaign treasuries ever accumulated in California.

But one rule in modern campaigns is that the higher politicians ascend, the more voters expect to know about them–not only about what they have done, but why they have done it; not only about their program, but their values and the experiences that shaped them. These are not mysteries that Pete Wilson, a man who prizes discipline over passion, spends much time pondering, even with close friends, even alone. But they may be the most important questions he faces on the road to Sacramento.

AT 56, WILSON offers himself as evidence that the unexamined life may be worth living after all. “This is not a man,” says his wife, Gayle, “who wakes up in the morning and says ‘How do I feel?’ He wakes up and says, ‘What do I have to do today?’ ” From boyhood, he has been brisk, efficient, directed, reluctant to inspect his own motivations and feelings, as though fearing that would slow him down. “I tried introspection once,” he says, “and I didn’t like it.”

Amid the chaos of the campaign trail, Wilson is smooth and cool and opaque, like a stone in a river. In speeches and during interviews, he is friendly and approachable, often witty in a dry way, but still fundamentally reserved. He always seems to choose his words carefully, even the profanity with which he occasionally underlines a point. Whether remembering his boyhood or analyzing economic policy, his voice is invariably level, his phrasing clipped and precise; even discussing his own life, at times he can sound like a neutral observer.

Wilson’s face reveals little about his thoughts. He has the bland good looks of a talk-show host. Behind a microphone, with his suit jacket typically buttoned and a deadpan delivery for one-liners, he is vaguely reminiscent of another Midwesterner, Johnny Carson. Wilson gives the impression of a man who never sweats. Emotionally, he is the rarest of men: a serene Type A.

Even as a young man, Wilson was serious, stolid, studious. He was born in Illinois and grew up in St. Louis, the son of James and Margaret Wilson. His mother, in her younger years, had been a model; his father, after selling fraternity jewelry, became an advertising account executive.

By the time he was in his teens, the family was prosperous enough to send him to the exclusive Saint Louis Country Day School, in whose intimate surroundings he excelled. In his senior year, Wilson served as president of the student council and literary editor of the yearbook, played on the varsity soccer and football teams (as an undersized offensive lineman nicknamed “Trapper”), acted and sang in class performances and won the school’s top prize for overall achievement. He was “just kind of an all-American Midwestern private-school type,” says classmate Richard Burgheim, now an editor at People magazine. “There was a certain student council type you’d resent, but that wasn’t Pete. He was gritty and popular, bright, but I can’t think of escapades. There was a sense of decorum about him.”

At the dinner table, Wilson, who has one older brother, learned lessons of engagement and service. From his father, who voted for FDR during the Depression but had since moored himself in the Republican Party, Wilson heard the local political debates and absorbed a conservative outlook without ever passing through a stage of rebellion against the older man’s ideals. “By and large,” Wilson says, sitting in the quiet of the bar at the Westgate Hotel in San Diego on a recent evening, “I thought he made pretty good sense.”

As a young man, Wilson cut the grooves that guide him to this day. His father often told him–perhaps a bit too pointedly, for the son remembers the words vividly decades later–that he had been endowed “with a reasonably good mind,” and through his career Wilson has worked with the special intensity of someone unsure he would measure up. (“My father was very gentle, but he was also pretty damn clear,” Wilson says now. “If he thought I had done something, whether it was at school or elsewhere, that really probably was not as good as it could have been, he would say, ‘Why didn’t you do better?’ ”)

Early on, Wilson put his faith in perseverance and effort, not flash or guile. As a junior high school student, he read condensed biographies of famous men and women night after night, “intrigued by people who had amounted to something,” looking for the secret of their success–and when he had finished his reading, what he concluded was that success came not from ephemeral sparks of brilliance or creativity but from the unglamorous work of setting goals and working to meet them.

That boy has grown into a man whose preferred form of exercise is the treadmill, who meticulously lays out his clothes every night for the next day, who pursues his agenda with a bruising single-mindedness and whose capacity for work is apparently bottomless. Other politicians may be smarter or more dynamic, but no one will outwork Pete Wilson.

ALMOST ANY MEAL with Wilson begins late–with him rushing in from the office–and if the dinner begins with talk about art or theater, it invariably winds back to politics and policy, the air he breathes. He mainlines paper and briefings. “Nothing will make him more unhappy,” says his former legislative director Ken Carpi, “than not to be prepared intellectually.”

Work does not entirely encompass Wilson’s interests: He likes to watch movies, browse in men’s stores (he is fastidious about his clothes), attend theater, perform on stage himself. In San Diego he sang creditably at charity events; in Washington, he and Gayle organize parties where friends gather behind a rented piano to belt out their favorite show tunes. The Wilsons live in a small townhouse on a quiet street a few blocks from the Capitol. In California, he lives in hotels; he maintains a condominium in San Diego but rents it out. At home, he stubbornly barbecues chicken for guests year-round, even if he has to stoke the coals in a ski jacket. His drink is gin with a twist, though he also has a taste for good wines. The bookshelves in his living room are filled with volumes of history and biography. On his refrigerator, someone has taped (and slightly misquoted) the Spinoza aphorism: “All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”

Wilson’s pleasures are urban: Friends say it is difficult to imagine him spending a week somewhere watching the sun set over the mountains. His idea of high life is a movie with friends such as U. S. Court of AppealsJudge Laurence H. Silberman and his wife or a small dinner party with Dan Quayle (a friend from his Senate days) and former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director Kenneth Adelman and their wives. His perfect vacation would probably be a week in London. (“He’s an Anglophile,” says one old friend.)

Not that he has much time for these pursuits. For Wilson, his work–the making of public policy, the political jostling– has always had an overpowering allure. “He’s been a workaholic ever since I’ve known him,” says San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, who served on the city council near the end of Wilson’s tenure as mayor. “He lives his job. I don’t know when he isn’t working.”

Wilson’s private life has had to fit in the margins of his public life. In 1968, he married the former Betty Robertson, a woman 12 years older than he, with two children from a previous marriage. In 1981, they were divorced, and Wilson later told an interviewer that “the most important thing I learned (from my first marriage) is that I had a tendency toward spending too much time on the job.”

But rather than change priorities, Wilson found someone who would more willingly share them. In 1983, in a chapel in the Capitol building, he married the former Gayle Graham, an activist in civic and charitable affairs in San Diego, who also had two children from a previous marriage. (Wilson has no children of his own.) Friends say that Gayle Wilson enjoys the campaign grind as much as Betty Wilson disliked it; Gayle calculates that 90% of the couple’s time revolves around Wilson’s work.

If there is a touch of obsession in this punishing schedule, it springs from the restlessness of the perfectionist, not the zealotry of the ideologue. Unlike, say, Ronald Reagan, who entered politics fired by a sweeping ideological agenda, Wilson has never been powered by such combustible fuel. A desire to serve and be part of his times put him on the track, and a hunger for solving problems has kept him on it.

As a young man, politics did not seem like an obvious career to Wilson. When he graduated from Country Day, he choose Yale on the recommendation of his father and a teacher. He took a heavy course load in English literature and worked himself to exhaustion (his roommates would occasionally find him asleep in the library in the middle of the night), but he was an unremarkable student, although his performance picked up enough for him to make the dean’s list as a junior and senior.

Trapped in the library with his poets and novelists, Wilson took no interest in student government and seemed to want of his time at Yale mostly to be through with it. “I was eager to get out,” Wilson says. “I wanted to get out and do things. I wasn’t quite sure what, but I wanted to do them.”

Advertising, the law or even literature appeared the most likely choices. When he graduated, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel–a love story involving a young Marine–imagining that he might make his living with his typewriter. At least, “That was my thought at the beginning,” he remembers. “I was less inclined to think that by the time I neared the end.” He decided the book was “thin on plot” and shelved it without sending it to publishers.

His father had always stressed to Wilson the importance of giving something back to the community. But it was not until after he served as an infantry officer in the Marines to fulfill his ROTC scholarship to Yale and enrolled, without much enthusiasm, in law school at the University of California at Berkeley that he began to feel confined by the course he’d set for himself.

“It could be very exciting to be a good trial lawyer,” Wilson says, recalling his deliberations. “What was missing, it seemed to me, was a sense of doing something for other people and a sense of doing something important. Not for the history books. I had no illusions on that score. Anybody who chooses public life does so without the illusion that in most cases he is going to make any lasting difference. You do it for yourself. . . . It is just a sense of satisfaction.”

The vague sense that the law alone could not fill his life led Wilson to join in Young Republican activities at Berkeley. After graduating in 1962, he went to work for the gubernatorial campaign of recently defeated Presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon. After Nixon lost to Pat Brown, the father of the man Wilson humbled two decades later, the young advance man moved to San Diego, where several of his best friends from law school had settled.

Almost effortlessly, Wilson was absorbed into the local Republican hierarchy. In his early 30s, Wilson was the sort of diligent young man–witty but not disrespectful, hard-working but not cutthroat–who reminded older men of themselves at that age, or at least what they imagined themselves to have been.

When Gordon Luce, the chairman and chief executive of Great American Bank, interviewed Wilson for a job as assistant director of Republican Associates of San Diego, an organization that recruited young professional men and women into the GOP, he found the fledgling lawyer “a studious young man, but a very interesting one. You knew that he had knowledge and was studying the issues and was a measured person in terms of the approaches he would take. You could see this was a person who did not shoot from the hip. There was substance to him.”

Wilson’s path opened before him. He ran the county Republican committee during the 1964 campaign. Finally passing the bar exam on his fourth try, he joined a law firm headed by the father of John G. Davies, a friend from law school, and began the grinding work of building a practice.

In 1966, when State Assemblyman Clair W. Burgener decided to run for a new state Senate seat created by redistricting, it seemed to him logical to encourage the “serious-minded” young attorney to seek the seat he was vacating. Wilson campaigned tirelessly and won.

Wilson swiftly learned his new business in the State Assembly, quickly moving into the Republican leadership; when the mayor’s job opened in San Diego in 1971, he saw opportunity in what had been an ineffectual and ceremonial post. He debated his opponent in the general election 46 times (by the end, Wilson says, “he was almost starting to give my lines, and I was starting to give him signals that would have been inappropriate in a crowd or on television”), won the job going away and skillfully built alliances on the City Council that gave him more influence over the city than any mayor in memory.

In 1978, after winning a convincing reelection as mayor, Wilson ran for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. But he was hampered by his opposition to the tax-cutting Proposition 13 as well as bitter feelings left by his support of President Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in the struggle for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976. He finished a distant fourth. He recovered quickly enough to win a third term in San Diego in 1979, but by then he was aching for center court. Three years later, after taking a hard look at another race for the state house, he overcame a crowded primary field and then faced outgoing Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. for a seat in the U.S. Senate. As a candidate, Brown was the hare to Wilson’s tortoise: bold, controversial, unpredictable and inveterately interesting. But by then, Brown was for most Californians interesting in the way a car wreck is. Wilson brushed past him.

THE SENATE has long styled itself as the world’s most exclusive club. But the label is an anachronism. Senators now are far too busy to spend much time together strategizing or thinking, much less socializing. Today the Senate is less a club than a switching yard with 100 separate tracks.

Even in that atomized environment, Wilson is more of a loner than most. Personality explains part of that. In the Senate, Wilson has been “somewhat distant,” says Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., a former Senate Republican leadership aide and now president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative policy research company in Indianapolis. “He is controlled, and he is not into, oh, gratuitous affability.” One high-ranking White House official describes Wilson more succinctly as “a cold fish.”

But Wilson is set apart, too, by his solitary commitment to his own political agenda–even to the discomfort of his colleagues, his party or the White House, as demonstrated by his recent spat with presidential Chief of Staff John Sununu over Wilson’s breaks from the Administration on votes concerning trade policy and relations with China. Friends describe that doggedness as principled independence; critics see in it a pattern of calculated opportunism.

To the dismay of his colleagues, for example, Wilson perennially introduces legislation that would eliminate funding for the mass mailings senators send to their constituents and transfer the funds to an unimpeachably worthy purpose, such as the treatment of babies born addicted to cocaine. Most senators want to keep their newsletters but hate voting against crack babies; many of his colleagues consider it the worst form of grandstanding for Wilson to try to compel them to choose between the two.

In his defense of specific California interests, Wilson has been no less tenacious. That became apparent one gray morning in April as the senator careened through his crowded schedule. His day had a strong California bent–from his 8:25 a.m. appearance before a delegation of officials from California waterways and ports to his late-afternoon meeting with a group of visiting California farmers. In between, Wilson testified on behalf of California water projects before the Senate Appropriations Committee, introduced legislation to provide federal funding for trauma-care centers burdened by the cost of caring for illegal immigrants and carried the flag for California growers in the opening markup session for the 1990 farm bill at the Agriculture Committee.

Wilson went to the committee’s hot and crowded meeting room for a specific purpose–one that symbolizes the political strategy that has governed his time in the Senate. Wilson was there to defend something called the Targeted Export Assistance program. In the overall picture of the multibillion-dollar farm bill, the $200-million program merits barely a footnote. Its purpose is to help American farmers who have been injured by unfair foreign-trade barriers to market their products abroad. But that narrow purpose is of wide interest to California growers of everything from wine grapes to almonds.

Wilson’s major committee assignments–Armed Services and Agriculture–provide him with many opportunities to protect influential California constituencies. He lets few pass. His staunch support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and high defense budgets reflects his conservatism on national security matters–but it is also good politics in a state that receives more than 18% of all defense expenditures.

On the Agriculture Committee, where Wilson’s ideological compass is less clear, his parochial purpose has been even more distinct. Soon after Wilson attended his first meeting and sat at the end of the long table, years in seniority away from the seats close to power, he went to see then-committee chairman, North Carolina Republican Jesse A. Helms.

“He came to us and said, ‘It’s very important to me that California agricultural interests are well attended to. What can I do to get to the top of the table?’ ” says George S. Dunlop, the committee’s chief of staff at the time. And Helms, Dunlop recalls, gave Wilson the facts of committee life: If he supported the leadership agenda on the key votes, “the trade-off was that the chairman would deliver for California agriculture.” Wilson never became a major player in agricultural policy, but he supported Helms on the key votes–and for his loyalty won approval of the export-assistance program.

At the same time, Wilson reached out shrewdly to traditionally Democratic constituencies. In his successful 1988 reelection campaign against Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, Wilson received extraordinary financial help from normally Democratic executives in Hollywood, whose cause he carried against the three major networks in a legislative battle over control of lucrative syndication rights for television programs. Likewise, liberal Jews gave him an unusual degree of financial support–for Israel has few stauncher allies in the Senate. By the time the 1988 race began, Wilson’s skillful positioning during his six years in Washington had put him in a virtually impregnable electoral position.

FOR MCCARTHY’S advisers, the defections of Jewish and Hollywood donors were maddening. So was the campaign’s inability to persuade voters that Wilson’s hard-line views on national defense and support for the Reagan Administration’s budget cuts put him to the right of the state.

Wilson’s success in avoiding any ideological label has been frustrating his opponents for 20 years. Two decades ago, in the state Legislature, Wilson was usually considered a reliable conservative vote. But he saw the environmental wave cresting and broke with most conservatives by introducing legislation to create a commission to regulate development of the California coastline. Though environmentalists, according to contemporary accounts, considered his bill “the weaker” one under consideration because it left too much authority with local officials, Wilson eventually compromised with Democrats on a stronger measure that paved the way for the 1972 ballot initiative that created the California Coastal Commission.

When he ran for mayor in San Diego, Wilson displayed the same sense for emerging issues. Though he was the clear choice of the Republican establishment, which included the most powerful pro-development forces in the city, he accepted no contributions larger than $300 from developers and based his first mayoral campaign largely on a platform of controlling growth.

Wilson held to that policy against protests from construction unions and a spirited reelection challenge in 1975 largely financed by development interests. But his instincts gradually pulled him back from sustained confrontation with such a powerful constituency–just as, critics noted, he began courting support for the leap to statewide office. “He was with us (on the growth issue) in the beginning,” says U. S. Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego), who served on the San Diego City Council while Wilson was mayor, “but then when he began running for governor (in 1978), he moved the other way.” By the end of Wilson’s second term, the San Diego League of Conservation Voters accused him of “desert(ing) the environmentalists and managed-growth supporters who elected him last election.”

In Washington, Wilson has presented an equally complex profile. With surprising ideological fervor, Wilson quickly emerged as one of the Senate’s leading hawks. His skepticism of social spending was dramatically underlined when he was wheeled in on a hospital gurney while recovering from an appendectomy to cast the deciding vote on a 1986 budget bill mandating large cuts in domestic programs, including Social Security–a vote that inspired negative ads from McCarthy during Wilson’s reelection campaign in 1988.

But on other votes, Wilson resumed his characteristic search for the center. His hard line on defense, taxes and crime has been balanced by moderate positions on some social issues, and those dissents from Republican dogma have been balanced, in turn, by support of the White House on many of the toughest partisan votes. While supporting abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, Wilson also voted to confirm former U. S. Court of Appeals Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court when partisans of those causes bitterly opposed him.

On environmental issues, Wilson receives only mediocre overall ratings from national conservation groups. But he has resisted all efforts from the Reagan and Bush administrations to open the California coastline to offshore oil drilling. In March, he co-sponsored an amendment to the Clean Air bill that would have tightened auto-emission standards and encouraged greater use of clean-burning alternative fuels. The amendment, which some conservation groups considered the key environmental vote of the year, narrowly failed. But Wilson’s performance won high marks from green lobbyists.

Likewise, Wilson was the only one of the three gubernatorial candidates to support the 1989 Los Angeles ballot initiative to stop Occidental Petroleum Corp. from drilling for oil under the Pacific Palisades. “If it hadn’t been for Pete Wilson,” says Democratic Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, one of the initiative’s principal sponsors, “we wouldn’t have won. It’s just as simple as that.”

And yet Wilson failed to endorse the Clean Water ballot initiative in 1986, has angered environmentalists by resisting legislation to declare millions of acres of California desert as protected wilderness and opposes the “Big Green” environmental measure on the ballot this year.

So far in the gubernatorial race, Wilson has held to the same eclectic pattern. He has reinforced his conservative credentials by backing a criminal-justice ballot initiative that would speed trials, increase sentences for murder and create a new crime of “torture” that would be punished with life imprisonment. Typically, Wilson balances that with support for drug education, a new proposal welcomed by educators to deliver medical and mental health services to young people through the schools, a promise of expanded prenatal care and a call for the state to organize a volunteer effort to provide adult mentors to inner-city children.

But Wilson has been unclear on how he would pay for these initiatives other than to say that if voters approve the ballot measure loosening the Gann limit on state spending, economic growth would produce enough revenue to meet the needs.

Revenue is not the only subject on which Wilson has been tight-lipped. In these opening stages of the campaign, Wilson has given little attention to the issues just beyond the headlines: He has offered no thoughts on the challenges of integrating a state where minorities are growing into a majority of the population, for example, or on how the end of the Cold War may reshape California.

These broad questions about the state’s future, and others like them, have been overshadowed in Wilson’s campaign by the immediate–primarily the hammering sound bites on crime that have dominated all three of the candidates’ early dialogue with the voters. For all Wilson’s fascination with the details of public policy, many of his early appearances have given less a sense of a creative intelligence grappling with problems than of a politician reaching for applause lines.

IN MOST RESPECTS, Wilson presents a difficult political target. With his tough stance toward crime and taxes and more moderate positions on social issues and funding for education, even Democrats agree that Wilson is a good match for the state ideologically.

But in the exacting scrutiny of the governor’s race, Democrats believe Wilson may fall short on what George Bush calls “the vision thing.” As Bush did in succeeding Reagan, Wilson promises modest change but essential continuity with the administration of Gov. George Deukmejian. If voters want a sharper shift in course, and if the Democratic nominee appears to offer it, Wilson’s carefully crafted balance may seem inadequate.

As in the 1988 Senate race, whoever wins the Democratic primary will try to paint Wilson as a man who acts out of political expediency and is too close to the economic interests, such as agriculture, that have supported his campaigns. Wilson raised and spent almost $15 million to hold his Senate seat in 1988 and will probably raise a similar amount in the gubernatorial race. And though special-interest political action committees provided only one-sixth of Wilson’s overall campaign treasury in 1988, he received more money from PACs than all but one other Senator facing election that year.

Wilson, who bristled when McCarthy accused him of bending toward corporate contributors on environmental issues, insists that those donations have affected his votes “not at all.” But, he adds, “You can’t put yourself in a position where you are penalizing people because they supported you.” As scandals in Sacramento and Washington inspire more cynicism about elected officials, Democrats are certain to pointedly ask, “Who does Pete Wilson represent?” as Paul Maslin, a pollster for Attorney General Van de Kamp, puts it.

Wilson’s record in San Diego is also certain to receive more intense scrutiny than ever before. Most local observers agree that Wilson’s overall impact on the city was positive, but there were controversies, such as his shifting attitude toward growth.

More emotional was a tragedy in the suburban neighborhood of Tierrasanta, where a large private housing development was built in the early 1970s on the land previously used as an artillery range by both the Marines and the Navy.

In 1973, a resident of the area warned Wilson’s office that her children had found old bombs while playing in the canyons around the homes. A few weeks later, Wilson wrote the Army asking them to “sweep . . . the area.” Several months later, the Army informed Wilson by letter that it had recovered several dozen rounds of spent ammunition but urged “that due caution still be taken in the area, as earth movement (either by heavy equipment or natural erosion) may possibly bring further ordnance to the surface.”

Over the next decade, residents continued to find shells near their homes. But no additional cleanup was undertaken. Then in December, 1983, two young boys were killed when an old artillery shell they had found went off. The families of both boys brought suit against the developers and the city, which eventually settled for $2.5 million, the largest liability payment it had ever made.

In November, 1987, Wilson was called to give a deposition in one of the cases, testifying that he thought that because of the sweep, “the danger had been eliminated.” Mostly, though, Wilson testified that he could not recall almost all details about the case; 34 times he responded that he could not remember specific actions or decisions.

Today, Wilson says of the case, “I would have to say in hindsight, because a child died, not enough was done, I suppose. But at the time, I think that the mayor and the City Council, who had asked that the survey be undertaken, were probably entitled to rely on the assurance that was given.”

But Democrats may question that defense and use the case to challenge Wilson’s portrayal of his years in San Diego as an unblemished success.

EVEN THOUGH Pete Wilson is not a man who openly discusses his hopes and aspirations, he leaves no doubt that he very badly wants to be governor. After his drubbing in the 1978 GOP primary, he quickly began preparing for another run in 1982–only to switch to the Senate race when Deukmejian entered the gubernatorial field. And even on the morning after his election to the Senate, he wistfully told a group of reporters that if he had more than one life to live, he would want to spend one of them as governor of California.

Wilson has enjoyed many things about the Senate, and could probably stay there for many years if he does not become governor. But the demands of a collegial body–the unpredictable schedule, the chaotic barrage of disparate issues–constantly frustrate this orderly man. As governor, Wilson anticipates, he would have far more control over his personal schedule and political agenda. “Even in the much more limited circumstances of being mayor of San Diego, when I was presiding over the City Council–which was damn time-consuming–even then the rest of your time was yours to do with as you choose,” Wilson says. “If you wanted to have a daylong briefing on something, by God, you just did it.”

That freedom, friends say, provides one powerful incentive for Wilson to trade in Washington for Sacramento. Many political observers note also that almost any future Republican presidential nominee would welcome on the ticket the governor of a state that could have as many as 54 electoral votes after the next reapportionment. It is, in fact, not difficult to imagine that if Wilson wins the governorship, he could eventually envision himself playing more than a supporting role. “There are three jobs that are sort of parallel to him,” says Otto Bos, Wilson’s longtime aide; “mayor, governor and President.”

Those may be good reasons for Wilson to seek the governorship, but they are not necessarily reasons for the voters to reward him with it. No matter whom the Democrats nominate, they are bound to argue that only ambition is driving Wilson to seek this job just two years after the state returned him to Washington to perform another.

Wilson’s friends insist it is not personal ambition impelling him so much as the belief that he could shape the state more in Sacramento than in the Senate. Wilson recently told one interviewer that a senator may be just one of 100, but “as governor, you are one of one. The buck does stop with you.”

For this confident man who has always been drawn to solving problems, that is an enormously attractive prospect. “I have never seen any arrogance in him,” says his friend Judge Silberman, “but neither is there self-doubt.” Spending time with Pete Wilson, you get the sense that, issues aside, he wants to be governor because he believes he would be better at it than anyone else around. “Part of vision is being realistic,” he says. “Anyone can have sugarplums dancing in their head, but you’ve got to make it happen. And to make it happen, you’ve got to be tough-minded and realistic.”

That kind of steady, dependable competence–the faith in sweat over vision–has always been Wilson’s strength. But the experience in the 1988 presidential race of another quietly competent politician, Michael S. Dukakis, shows the risk of offering the public only competence without burning conviction. Some Republicans fear that Wilson could stumble on that same terrain–particularly if he faces Feinstein, who more easily displays emotion than either of the men in the race. “Pete is very smart,” says one Republican congressman nervous about the race, “but when you’ve been in politics this long, if you’re not passionate about anything, you come off as just rote.”

For any politician, that perception could be fatal. If Pete Wilson is to avoid it, he must persuade the voters that he has a vision of where California must go–that his campaign is propelled by a purpose more urgent than his personal advancement. In this race, Wilson will have to show endurance, fund-raising skill, political savvy, timing and cool; but all that may be less important than showing his passions.

Chad le Clos says his apartment in South Africa was destroyed by a fatal fire – the night after the swimmer became the most decorated athlete in Commonwealth Games history.

Le Clos picked up his 21st medal to overtake Australia’s Emma McKeon as the athlete with the most medals in Commonwealths history, when South Africa took bronze in the men’s 4x100m medley relay in Glasgow last week.

It was the 34-year-old’s third medal of the 2026 Games, having won silver in the mixed 4×100 ⁠medley and bronze in the men’s 4×100 freestyle relays.

Only days later, Le Clos has revealed that a fire destroyed his home of more than a decade in Sea Point, Cape Town and killed one of his neighbours.

“It has taken me a while to process this heartbreaking tragedy,” the 2012 Olympic gold medallist wrote on Instagram, external.

“On the evening of 30 July, amid breaking the all-time Commonwealth record, a fire started in my apartment block, which quickly spread to my home. Sadly my home, where I’ve lived for more than a decade, burnt down and there is nothing left to salvage.”

In the post, Le Clos also paid tribute to his “neighbour of many years” who died in the fire, offering his “deepest and most sincere condolences” to the victim’s family and friends.

“No words can truly ease a loss like this, but I hope the family knows that the thoughts of an entire community are with them,” the Durban-born swimmer said.

According to reports, external, a 93-year-old resident died in the incident.

Le Clos added: “To my fellow neighbours whose homes and lives have been severely affected by this fire, please know that you are not alone. This is a tight-knit community and it is in moments like these that we lean on one another.”

Le Clos, who famously beat Michael Phelps to win 200m butterfly gold at the London Olympics in 2012, said he has launched a fundraising campaign to help his neighbours affected by the blaze.

Phelps was a 14-time Olympic champion and had not lost in the event since 2001 when the United States icon was beaten by Le Clos.

The South African won his first Commonwealth medal in Delhi in 2010 at the age of 18 and now has seven gold, five silver and nine bronze medals across five editions of the Games.

Over his career, he has won four Olympic medals, 16 world titles, seven Commonwealth golds and 10 African titles.

Aug. 4 (UPI) — Sen. Susan Collins said Tuesday that she will vote against Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, further narrowing his path to confirmation.

“While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political. Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the department’s independence, and that is the basis for my vote to oppose his confirmation,” Collins, a Republican from Maine, said in a statement.

Collins cited Blanche’s handling of Trump’s anti-weaponization fund, his commitments to anti-abortion groups to restrict the mailing of abortion medication and the Justice Department’s failed attempt to indict six Democratic lawmakers over a video encouraging active-duty service members to reject unlawful orders.

“For these reasons, I will vote against this nomination,” she said.

Trump tapped Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, to lead the Justice Department in June. He has served as acting attorney general since Trump fired Pam Bondi in April.

But his confirmation as attorney general has been anything but smooth.

Collins’ announcemeent came hours after Blanche’s nomination was advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it had stalled after two Republican senators — John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — said they would not vote in his favor without written, binding proof that a so-called anti-weaponization fund had been rescinded. Blanche provided that proof late Sunday.

With his nomination advanced to the full Senate, he will require a majority vote to approve confirmation. However, all 45 Democrats and both independents are expected to vote against him. With Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., still absent and Collins stating she will not support his nomination, Blanche can afford to lose the support of only one additional Republican.

Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, who had indicated he might not support Blanche, said Tuesday that, following “robust discussions” with the the acting attorney general, he would vote for him, leaving the votes of Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska unknown, neither of whom has commented.

Blanche has been criticized by Democrats, democracy advocates and legal experts for allegedly further politicizing the Justice Department and using the department to further Trump’s aims, including targeting the president’s perceived political opponents.

He approved the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund to distribute taxpayer money to those who claim to be victims of the Biden administration’s Justice Department, including those convicted on crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection of the Capitol.

The fund was part of a settlement reached to resolve a case Trump brought against the federal government seeking $10 billion in damages stemming from an Internal Revenue Service contractor leaking his tax returns to the press.

Democrats and even Republicans balked at the fund.

Also part of the deal was language protecting Trump, his two adult sons and the Trump Organization from certain audits.

Last month, more than 1,200 former DOJ employees spanning 14 administrations issued a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to Blanche’s nomination, arguing that the consequences of his politicization of the department leave “communities less safe, Americans’ rights less protected and our national security more vulnerable.”

The administration of President Donald Trump has cancelled the visa for Brazil’s ambassador in the United States, the latest sign of a deepening diplomatic rift between the two countries.

An anonymous US State Department official briefed reporters on Tuesday that Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti’s visa had been temporarily revoked.

But Ribeiro Viotti was not being expelled from the country, the official added.

“The action was that the visa of a senior diplomat here was revoked or cancelled. That is not the same thing as kicking the person out of the country,” the official said.

The decision to revoke the visa was framed as backlash to Brazil’s decision to withhold approval for Trump’s ambassador to the South American country.

Should that approval be granted, the US official explained, Ribeiro Viotti’s visa would be returned. Until then, the official suggested she could remain in the US.

“It means that they are here but without a visa, and would have their visa restored if the balance is restored by giving agreement to our chosen ambassadorial nominee,” the official said.

The move comes after Washington expressed anger over Brazil’s failure to approve Trump’s choice for ambassador to Brazil, Danny Perez.

Perez is a Florida state representative and a Republican ally of Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. He was nominated to the ambassadorship in June, but has yet to be confirmed by the full US Senate.

Media reports indicate that Trump publicly nominated Perez before reaching out to Brazil.

Sources inside the Brazilian government said this was considered a breach of protocol, and they intend to probe Perez’s nomination before issuing formal approval.

Without such approval, though, Perez will be unable to take up his post in the capital, Brasilia.

The tit-for-tat over the ambassadors is likely to ratchet up long-simmering tensions between Washington and Brazil, the US’s largest South American trading partner.

Last month, Brazil denied visas to officials from the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, after voicing concerns that the delegation intended to undermine the country’s election system. Brazil is set to elect its president in October.

Trump is considered a close ally of the Bolsonaro family, a powerful political dynasty on Brazil’s far right.

The US president’s first term overlapped with the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, who was nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics”.

His son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, is on the ballot this election season.

Both Trump and the elder Bolsonaro have used false claims of election fraud to dispute unfavourable election results.

Trump has also sought to boost the prospects of right-wing candidates across Latin America since the start of his second term, even threatening to withhold US funds depending on election outcomes.

With Latin America experiencing a shift rightwards, Brazil remains the largest country to be governed by a left-wing leader: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He has emerged as a vocal critic of Trump’s attempts to increase US influence in Latin America.

Lula defeated the elder Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential elections, and he is seeking a fourth, non-consecutive term this October. Flavio Bolsonaro is his top rival.

Since being voted out of office, Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to overthrow the 2022 election results.

Trump vocally rejected Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution, which was recommended by Brazil’s Federal Police. Last year, the US president placed steep tariffs on Brazil, demanding that prosecutors end their case.

Though the tariffs were lifted, the US announced in July that it would impose 25 percent tariffs, this time accusing Brazil of unfair trade practices.

Brazilian authorities remain wary that the US might seek to influence the outcome of October’s presidential election in favour of Flavio Bolsonaro.

Lula formally launched his campaign bid on Sunday, framing the race as a question of national sovereignty – and the “future of Latin America”.

The BBC’s true crime hit Murder 24/7 has returned to screens with a brutal two-part instalment

Police officers were stunned by what they discovered after being called to a “horrific” scene as a chilling documentary returned.

Hit BBC true crime show Murder 24/7 has returned to screens for a brand new series, plunging viewers right into the heart of a murder investigation.

Following West Mercia Police, viewers witness detectives uncovering horrific truths on their search for justice as they see how a case is investigated from the moment a chilling 999 call is made.

An official synopsis teases: “In the pursuit of justice, every second counts. From the 999 call to conviction, via critical forensics and identifying suspects, follow the cases as they unfold – in real time.”

Tonight (August 4), a harrowing episode aired exploring the death of 54-year-old Jamie Gawler who was found dead in an armchair in a flat, with a towel draped over his face.

The episode sees police officers stunned by what they saw when they eventually located Jamie, as one could be heard saying: “That’s very strange if that’s how he was found.”

Viewers are then plunged into the chilling investigation that follows as forensics later examine blood splatters and evidence at the crime scene before detectives soon hear back initial post-mortem results.

Hearing the extent of Jamie’s injuries, which included lacerations to his chest as well as almost every rib being broken, a horrified DCI Gareth Lougher said: “That is just horrific.” Deputy senior investigating officer DS Emma Atherton added: “I wasn’t expecting that really.”

Saying the suspect was “really dangerous” DCI Gareth went on to say: “I was expecting it to be brutal but I don’t think I was expecting it to be quite as violent as you described.”

Delivering the results on the phone, DS Mat Crisp admitted: “I haven’t done one like that for a while.”

Later in the episode, the suspect of such violence was again dubbed “sadistic and dangerous” when detectives reviewed the brutal evidence in the case.

Viewers were also stunned by what they saw in tonight’s harrowing episode as one person wrote on X: “‘Evidence of torture’ J***s, poor bloke.”

The second part of the harrowing case will air in tomorrow evening’s episode at 9pm on BBC One. All episodes are also available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

The true crime series has previously been hailed “better than 24 Hours in Police Custody” as fans eagerly await brand new instalments.

Just this week, one person said on X: “Watching #Murder247 on @BBC I love this. It’s just as good as #24HoursInPoliceCustody on @Channel4.”