The word on Rohl is wholly positive, though. Players talk at length about his many strengths. Barry Bannan says he’s the best manager he’s ever played for.
It’s not the same, but he has operated successfully in a demanding regime before. In Sheffield, before he was appointed, the team was in the grip of the worst league start in more than 150 years.
He had an owner, Chansiri, who was, to put it kindly, eccentric. He had fans in uproar over all manner of things. He had players who were not only demoralised but also unpaid at times.
So, though Rohl is only 36, he’s had experience of football’s turbulence. He’s young, but he may not be wet behind the ears. You’d hope not, for his sake. Once a defender, he was invalided out of the game with an ACL injury at 21. It takes talent and drive to do the things he has done since then.
Every Rangers fan will know the outline of his story, the assistant manager positions he held at RB Leipzig, Southampton, Bayern Munich and Germany.
He has said before that he doesn’t do dogma and is not a slave to any one system. He’s flexible, be it 4-2-3-1, 3-4-3, 4-4-1-1 or any other formation. It would appear that he’s tried them all at one time or another depending on the challenge staring him in the face.
There’s enough testimony out there about the endless hours he put in at Sheffield Wednesday and the improvement he made to the players he had – Djeidi Gassama, now at Rangers, being one of many.
The fans liked and admired him. He kept Wednesday up when most people had abandoned all hope. He got them to 12th the following season with a side high on energy and togetherness despite Chansiri-inspired mayhem behind the scenes.
The supporters didn’t want him to leave at the end of his second season in July this year, but thought he was better off out of the basket case.
He cited financial issues and a total breakdown in communication with Chansiri as the reason for a mutually agreed contract termination.
Rohl says the scale of the challenge at Rangers is part of the appeal, which is what you would expect him to say, but fans have heard too much chat from too many managers to be comforted by fighting talk.
Win games and he can be as quiet as a Trappist monk. Don’t win games and the eloquence of the greatest orator will not save him. It was ever thus.
British number three Katie Boulter’s poor run of form continued with a straight-sets loss to world number 44 Eva Lys in the first round of the Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo.
Boulter, 29, was beaten 6-2 6-1 in just one hour and 14 minutes by the 23-year-old German.
After coming through two rounds of qualifying, she was the only British player in the main draw after Emma Raducanu withdrew, ending her season early through illness.
The Briton was only able to win 50% of the points on her first serve and was broken five times by Lys.
This latest defeat caps a disappointing run of form, which has seen the former world number 29 unable to progress beyond the second round of a tournament since the Nottingham Open in June.
It also comes five days after the Briton lost in straight sets in the second round of the Japan Open by world number 51 Sorana Cirstea.
Elsewhere, British number four Fran Jones was beaten in straight sets by China’s Wang Xiyu in the first round of the Guangzhou Open.
Seventh seed Jones was broken four times in the match as she lost 6-4 6-4 to the world number 163.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday vetoed legislation that would have phased out a range of popular consumer products, including nonstick pots and pans, that contain synthetic chemicals with potential links to cancer.
“I appreciate the efforts to protect the health and safety of consumers, and while this bill is well-intentioned, I am deeply concerned about the impact this bill would have on the availability of affordable options in cooking products,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “I believe we must carefully consider the consequences that may result from a dramatic shift of products on our shelves.”
The legislation would have prohibited the selling or distributing of cookware with intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, by 2030. It phased out PFAS in products for infants and children, ski wax, dental floss, food packaging and cleaning products starting in 2028. Previously used items would have been exempt.
Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who introduced the legislation, Senate Bill 682, said he will continue to work on the issue moving forward.
“We are obviously disappointed,” he said. “We know there are safer alternatives — [but] I understand there were strong voices on both sides on this topic.”
Allen previously explained he introduced the bill to help protect the state’s water supply from contamination.
A study released in 2023 by the U.S. Geological Survey found tap water in urban areas of Southern and Central California is more likely to contain PFAS than the drinking water in most of the nation’s other regions.
“The water agencies, sanitation agencies and local governments are faced with increasingly impossible-to-meet standards just to keep the water supply for our constituents clean,” Allen said during a Senate committee meeting in April. “They’re facing the costs while the producers who keep pushing these products out on the market are not being held accountable.”
PFAS are commonly dubbed “forever chemicals” because of their well-established longevity. They are linked to adverse health effects, including liver enzyme changes and kidney and testicular cancer, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The chemicals have been used for decades to prevent food from sticking to pans or packaging, or to make materials more resistant to stains. California has taken steps in recent years to ban their use in certain items, like cosmetics and menstrual products.
Dozens of organizations weighed-in on Allen’s bill, with the Sierra Club, California Health Coalition Advocacy and the League of California Cities supporting the legislation.
The Chemical Industry Council of California and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance were among those opposed.
Steve Burns, president of the sustainability alliance, was especially concerned by the provision barring the distribution of the banned products.
“California is the entry point for nonstick cookware and other products that come into the Port of Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Oakland, and then get distributed throughout the country,” he told The Times. “They go to warehouses, distribution centers and get loaded up on rail or usually trucks — so there’s a lot of jobs in the California economy that depend on products that have Teflon.”
Burns said science hasn’t shown that all PFAS are harmful and argued California should have studied the issue further. He pointed to Illinois, which recently passed similar legislation but ultimately nixed the line banning nonstick cookware. An amendment instead directs the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to assess scientific data on fluoropolymers, the type of PFAS used in nonstick pots and pans.
Several states have recently moved toward restricting items with PFAS. Last January, Minnesota became the first state to ban PFAS in cookware. The Cookware Sustainability Alliance filed a lawsuit arguing the law discriminated against out-of-state commerce. A judge dismissed the suit in August.
The sustainability alliance has shared letters of opposition on its website from several prominent chefs and culinary personalities, including cook and television host Rachael Ray and Mark Dommen, the chef at Hestan, a new restaurant in Napa slated to open later this year.
Dommen explained the legislation would have placed an unfair burden on restaurants and food service providers.
“Non-stick cookware is essential to our daily operations and eliminating these products without a viable alternative would drive up costs, disrupt our supply chain, and put California restaurants at a competitive disadvantage,” Dommen wrote.
Ray, who has a cookware line, argued easy-clean cookware helps families eat healthier by making it easier to prepare meals without extra oils or fats.
Her letter drew a gentle rebuke from actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo, who implored Ray on social media to reconsider her stance and said her advocacy on behalf of the cookware industry was putting the bill in jeopardy.
“Some of us have so much PFAS in our blood that we face a far greater risk of developing cancer,” he wrote in a recent letter shared on X. “Let’s work together to get PFAS out of the everyday products we bring into our home.”
Scientific studies about the health effects of PFAS will continue, according to the CDC.
“Ongoing research has identified associations between PFAS exposure and several health impacts,” the agency’s website states. “There are many factors that can influence the risk of these effects, such as exposure, individual factors and other health determinants. Research is ongoing to understand the mechanisms of PFAS toxicity.”
Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.
A series of federal actions aimed at pressuring states to allow parents to opt out of school vaccine mandates for religious or personal reasons threatens to undermine California’s ironclad ban on such exemptions.
California is one of just five states that bans any non-medical exemptions, the result of a landmark 2015 law passed in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. Connecticut, New York, Maine, and West Virginia have similar statutes.
The law is credited with bringing California’s rate of kindergartners vaccinated against the measles to 96.1% in the 2024-25 school year, up from 92.6% in 2014-15, even as the national rate declined. California is one of just 10 states with a kindergarten measles vaccination rate that exceeds the 95% threshold experts say is needed to achieve herd immunity.
If vaccine mandates are weakened, “we’re going to have more outbreaks, and schools are going to be less safe for the families who have children who are vulnerable,” said Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics California.
Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.
Key actions to allow for vaccine exemptions include:
Legislation introduced in Congress last month would withhold federal education funding from states without religious exemptions.
A letter from the Department of Health and Human Services threatened to withhold federal vaccine funding from states that have any form of religious freedom or personal conscience laws but do not allow exemptions to vaccines. The move is “part of a larger effort by HHS to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise.”
Several lawsuits winding their way through the courts from parents — including in California — seek the right to a religious exemption, which may eventually come before the Supreme Court.
Legal experts say that taken together, these moves reveal a concerted effort to chip away at limits states like California have placed on parents’ ability to send their unvaccinated children to school.
“We should assume that every aspect of the administration, at least three justices of the Supreme Court, and a significant contingent in Congress are actively trying to implement changes to the law that would invalidate California’s … approach to not allowing non-medical exemptions,” said Lindsay Wiley, a law professor at UCLA.
In West Virginia, the approach is already proving successful. Despite the state legislature recently rejecting a bill that would have permitted religious exemptions for the first time, Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed an executive order allowing them, bolstered by a letter of support from HHS.
Vaccinations and syringes at Larchmont Pediatrics in Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“Vaccination is considered one of public health’s greatest achievements, preventing the spread of serious illnesses, reducing hospitalizations and saving lives,” the statement said. “CDPH remains committed to ensuring that all Californians continue to have access to safe and effective vaccines that are based on credible, transparent and science-based evidence.”
The federal actions are occurring in a moment of growing anti-vaccine fervor within the Trump administration. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has long been an outspoken critic of vaccines, including the vaccine to prevent measles. As secretary of HHS, he has defunded mRNA research, limited COVID-19 shots to the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions, and pledged to reveal a link between vaccines and autism.
California’s evolution on vaccine mandates
In 1961, California became one of the first states to permit residents to opt out of vaccines for a broad range of personal beliefs, as part of a law mandating the polio vaccine for school attendance.
For decades, few parents claimed the exemption, and the rate of children opting out of vaccines for non-medical reasons stayed around 0.5%, said Dr. Richard Pan, the former state senator who authored the 2015 law eliminating non-medical exemptions.
Pan said the rate of exemptions began to climb in the mid-2000s, when actress Jenny McCarthy appeared on Oprah and claimed that vaccines had caused her son’s autism. “But what really gave fuel” was the advent of Facebook and Twitter, said Pan. “Social media really connected people who are anti-vax and created an echo chamber.”
By the 2013-14 school year, 3.1% of California kindergartners were receiving a non-medical exemption to at least one required vaccine. The rate of kindergarteners fully vaccinated against the measles slipped to 92.3% — well below the 95% required for herd immunity.
In 2014, a single measles case at Disneyland spread to more than 140 people across the country, an outbreak that epidemiologists said was fueled by vaccine refusals. In this moment of crisis, Pan introduced SB277, making California the first state in nearly 35 years to eliminate non-medical vaccine exemptions.
The legislation received the support of many parents, especially those whose children could not be vaccinated for medical reasons and relied on the immunity of people around them. “The whole purpose of 277 was actually to protect the rights and the freedoms of families and their children to get an education who could not get vaccinated,” said Pan.
Despite bitter debate, no major religious denominations opposed the bill, Pan said.
“This really isn’t about religion,” Pan said. “This is about trying to find a loophole or an excuse for someone who doesn’t want to vaccinate their child.”
Parents say California’s mandate violates religious beliefs
A contingent of parents say their sincere religious beliefs prevent them from getting their children vaccinated.
In 2023, Amy and Steve Doescher of Placerville brought a federal lawsuit, along with two other families, against California claiming that SB277 had violated their right to freely exercise their religion by preventing them from sending their 16-year-old daughter to public school.
The Doeschers, who attend a church near their home, “prayed extensively and consulted the Bible when deciding whether to vaccinate their children, and they arrived at the firm religious conviction that vaccinations violate their creed,” according to a complaint filed as part of the lawsuit.
Their daughter, who is enrolled in a charter school independent study program, is unable to have “the typical interactions with children that ‘normal’ children get. This has caused much stigma.”
The lawsuit alleges that her parents have had to enroll her in gymnastics classes and spend $10,000 per year on independent study costs, “to make up for the socialization shortcomings caused by SB277.”
While the lawsuit was dismissed in June, it is now on appeal at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Lawyers in a similar New York lawsuit brought by Amish parents have requested review from the Supreme Court.
“I do think it’s a cumulative moment of change,” said Christina Hildebrand, president and founder of A Voice for Choice, an advocacy group that sponsored the California lawsuit.
“If vaccines are so effective and they don’t have risk involved, then people should want to get them,” she said. “How good really is the product if you’re having to put a mandate on them?”
UCLA Law’s Wiley said she is sympathetic to sincere religious objectors, and herd immunity can still be reached even if a small number of people opt out. The problem, she said, is that they’re difficult for states to police for validity and “can really open the floodgates to vastly diminished vaccination rates.”
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California at San Francisco who studies vaccines, said religious exemptions are often “used as a fig leaf for people who have safety concerns. The way the system works is that it privileges the good liars.”
As part of her research, she has found “a whole industry of people trying to help each other get exemptions” online, including those who offer sample requests to parents and workshops on how to claim a religious exemption for non-religious reasons.
Reiss points to numerous studies finding that making exemptions broader and easier to get tends to lead to lower vaccination rates and more outbreaks.
The volatile landscape for vaccine mandates
Since the COVID pandemic, states across the country have experienced a decline in the rate of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated, and an increase in parents seeking exemptions, according to a recent report from KFF, a nonprofit health research group.
Last week, Florida’s surgeon general announced the state would no longer require children to be vaccinated in order to attend public school, something that all 50 states currently require.
Threats are also mounting from Washington, D.C. The GRACE Act, which was introduced in Congress last month by Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), would withhold federal education funding from any state that does not offer parents the right to opt out of vaccines for religious reasons.
The bill, if eventually approved and signed into law by President Trump, would also explicitly prevent states, including California, from requiring any documentation from parents to prove a sincere religious conviction against vaccines.
“Freedom of speech and religion is the most sacred right guaranteed under our Constitution,” Rep. Steube said in a statement to The Times. “No student or their family should ever be coerced into sacrificing their faith or jumping through loopholes to comply with a vaccine requirement.”
Last week, Kennedy weighed in on the issue. He said in a letter that if a state already has statutes on the books protecting religious freedom or personal conscience in any form, those laws must extend to vaccine opt-outs. If states with such laws do not comply with the directive, they could lose funding for the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which funds vaccines for low-income children.
California does not have religious freedom or personal conscience statues. But 29 other states have passed religious freedom laws, and 18 have parental rights laws, which legal experts said could be used by the federal government to compel states to offer vaccine opt-outs.
“States have the authority to balance public health goals with individual freedom, and honoring those decisions builds trust” Kennedy wrote. “Protecting both public health and personal liberty is how we restore faith in our institutions and Make America Healthy Again.”
Several legal experts said the approach was alarming.
“I’m very concerned that this is part of a playbook where they’re going on a state and federal level, to push on these laws,” said Richard Hughes, a lawyer with Epstein Becker Green in Washington, D.C., who has been working on vaccine law for two decades. “This is a massive federal overreach, and it’s incredibly inappropriate.”
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas – but tragically, they never made it
The disaster took place on December 21, 1988(Image: Daily Record)
The Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago. It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the houses below.
And it wasn’t just the passengers who lost their lives – the small Scottish town lost 11 residents, including a family of four, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who died when a section of the aircraft fell on their home in Sherwood Crescent.
In Lockerbie, residents opened their front doors to see 259 bodies dropping out of the sky, landing on the street in front of them. After the bomb exploded, everything went dark and eerily quiet in the town.
On 21 December 1988, flight N739PA was destroyed by a bomb killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew (Image: Mirrorpix)
The 243 passengers boarding their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany came from 21 countries and ranged in age from two months old to 82. Forty per cent of the 270 total victims were aged 25 or younger, many of them children, while two-thirds were American.
Of the 16 crew onboard the plane, called ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’, some were returning home to spend the festive season with their families, while others were set to enjoy some last-minute Christmas shopping in New York. They included senior purser Mary Murphy, who hailed from Twickenham and had been flying for over 25 years, and junior purser Milutin Velimirovitch, who had kindly rearranged his schedule to help a friend.
The ill-fated plane heading for New York had landed at noon at London Heathrow that day from Los Angeles, parking at Gate K-14 before pushing back for its flight at 6.04pm and taking off from runway 27R at 6.25pm. Just after 7pm, an air traffic controller at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre tried to make contact with the plane to no avail, before a loud noise was heard on its cockpit voice recorder.
Bunty Galloway told The Guardian she had been watching TV just like any other night when she heard a strange noise and opened her front door to see two young women fall in front of her house, with the body of a child already lying at the foot of her steps.
The damage caused by the explosion devastated a small Scottish town(Image: AFP/Getty Images)
The bomb had exploded at 7.03pm, when the plane was 31,000 ft above Lockerbie. Radar showed that eight minutes after the explosion, the plane’s wreckage had spread to one nautical mile, with a British Airways pilot flying from Glasgow to Carlisle contacting the Scottish authorities after seeing a huge fire on the ground.
Investigators later found signs of an explosion on one of the baggage containers from the forward hold. Scottish police and FBI agents would learn the bomb, containing 350 to 450 of Semtex, had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown Samsonite suitcase, which also contained various items of clothing purchased in Malta.
Records in Frankfurt suggested an unaccompanied bag had been routed from a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it had been loaded onto the feeder flight to London and onto the subsequent ill-fated flight to New York. After a painstaking investigation in 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died from prostrate cancer in 2011, always denying his involvement in the bombing.
In December 2020, the US Attorney General announced new charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence operative, for his role in the bombing, with a trial set to take place in Washington in May.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth premieres on Sky and NOW today
