The UK Football Policing Unit will send only three officers to this summer’s World Cup after a failure to secure extra funding from authorities in the United States.
With as many as 15,000 England fans expected at each group fixture, police said their role would be to act as “cultural interpreters” for local law enforcement and they had no concerns over the safety of supporters in the US.
“The number of officers we send is generally dependent on the request of the host and [US] states aren’t funding mobile delegations this time,” said the head of the UKFPU, chief constable Mark Roberts. He added that the unit cannot fund more officers themselves, citing a 10% cut in its funding from the Home Office.
“This isn’t a criticism, it’s a statement of fact. There will be [lead officer] Supt Gareth Parkin supported by two football officers, which is a significant change to what we would normally employ. But we’re having to fund that, so that’s limited the number of officers we can get out there.” Roberts said the UKFPU had given online presentations to each of the 16 World Cup host cities on how to engage with supporters, with England’s group-stage matches taking place in Dallas, Boston and East Rutherford, New Jersey.
“We have to work hard to make the point that our fans behave really well,” he said. “They may have a drink or two, but we will be often trying to calm people down and say this is not a problem. It’s not going to lead to disorder. They are just having a good time and enjoying themselves. Equally, it’s important to get the message to supporters that while certain things might be acceptable in the UK they might not be elsewhere. “We are not anticipating problems,” Roberts continued. “We can expect the supporters will behave very well. We’ve got the message out about our fans and everyone we’ve had meetings with seem fine and receptive. Nothing is leaping out as cause for concern.”
Roberts said Police Scotland would be one of the few other European forces to send officers to the US, thanks to funding from the Scottish government. Scottish policing efforts are expected to focus on the Boston area with the Tartan Army’s opening two fixtures scheduled for the Foxborough Stadium. Some 40 officers were sent by the UKFPU to the Euro 2024 championship in Germany after a request from the organising committee was backed by government funding. A similar arrangement is also understood to have been in place during the World Cup in Qatar. The UKFPU said it has been working to deepen the relationship between police and fans groups before the World Cup, with the Football Supporters’ Association to play a key role in delivering messages about safety and local laws. The Foreign Office has also advised all those expecting to travel to monitor their online travel advice and take out travel insurance. Around 3,500 tickets have been sold for each group-stage match to England fans registered with the FA’s travel club. On top of that there will be another 10,000-11,000 ticket holders who have bought through the Fifa portal and declared themselves England supporters.
Finally there will be around 1,000 friends and family of the England team travelling to the games. FSA sources suggested that demand for a potential last-16 tie in Mexico City will exceed these numbers.
A spectre is haunting British politics: the bond markets.
Defending Keir Starmer after the disastrous local election results earlier this month, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, warned that a leadership contest would trigger the wrath of those investors who lend the state money by buying and selling UK government bonds (also known as gilts). The prospect of Andy Burnham winning that contest prompted shriller warnings: the left-leaning contender, after all, had dared to suggest governments should stop “being in hock” to the bond markets.
The bond vigilantes, sober voices tell us, would punish him in the same way they punished Liz Truss’s mini-budget: detecting fiscal irresponsibility, they would sell gilts, thereby increasing government borrowing costs, until he dropped any plans for transformative public investment.
This seems plausible: if you want to borrow, you have to do it on the terms of the creditors who lend it to you. But wholeheartedly accepting this logic turns us into “choiceless democracies”, as the economist Thandika Mkandawire warned , where democratic mandates for change are vetoed by bond investors. Burnham has already this week reasserted his commitment to fiscal rules – a sign of the bond markets’ continued grip on our politics. But there is another way: here is a plan for progressive politicians to stop worrying (too much) about bond vigilantes.
They should start by holding their nerve. Tremors in the bond markets are often driven by global factors. They should also have a clear-eyed understanding of what the bond vigilantes want – and communicate this with the public. The bond vigilantes cheer austerity because their profits are highest when the economy slumps. In this scenario, interest rates are expected to fall and gilt prices increase, pumping returns for investors. Conversely, a mild selloff of gilts often signals that investors expect fiscal plans – that is, government spending – to deliver growth. In other words, good news for the economy is bad news for shifty bond holders.
Since the interests of the public and bond investors are not always aligned, governments have to explore other ways to finance big, transformative ambitions: that means scrutinising the Bank of England , getting rid of inflation-linked bonds, and repurposing Britain’s pension funds.
Let’s start with the Bank of England, which has contributed to Britain’s high borrowing costs and the fear of bond markets. The bank is independent but not neutral: it is run by conservative technocrats protective of the status quo. Following the 2008 crisis, the Bank, like its peers, acknowledged that UK gilts had become the bedrock of our financial system, and announced that it would act as gilt “market maker of last resort” : it would buy them when nobody else would to preserve financial stability. It also embarked on massive “unconventional” gilt purchases – ie, quantitative easing, or QE – during the crisis as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic.
By September 2022, having become the biggest gilt owner, the Bank announced active quantitative tightening , or QT, to deal with inflationary pressure from the war in Ukraine, a policy of selling gilts. But when bond investors repeatedly warned that active QT would increase government borrowing costs, the Bank stopped consulting them. It also ignored other large central banks, which didn’t opt for such an aggressive approach, instead keeping government bonds until they matured.
Since 2022, the Bank has sold £134bn in gilts , with its share of UK gilt holdings nearly halved in three years. This year alone it sold £7.6bn , with another £12bn planned . Investors calculate that active QT has added up to 0.7 percentage points to UK borrowing costs. Think of this as the “Bailey premium”, to recognise the role that the Bank and its governor, Andrew Bailey, have played in the gilt market. Without this premium, the UK government would borrow at cheaper rates than the US.
In many ways the current impasse between central bank and government is the result of the aftermath of Trussgate. Her mini-budget amplified an existing problem in UK pension funds that had made gilt bets with borrowed money. When this dangerous combination threatened financial stability, the Bank offered only two weeks of capped support. But it knew from the eurozone sovereign debt crisis that such half-hearted interventions do not calm markets; in that pivotal moment, the Bank of England walked away from its commitment to backstop gilts.
When Liz Truss resigned a few protesting voices charged the Bank with ousting her government . But the Bank appears to have calculated, correctly, that a British commentariat unfamiliar with the intricate life of gilts would be likely to point to bond vigilantes disciplining the then prime minister, rather than its own decisions. This has had the effect of inflating the bond vigilantes’ power in the eyes of the public. Separately, the Bank also presides over another budgetary timebomb, hidden in the design of its QE programme. Since 2022, it has passed more than £100bn in losses on its gilt holdings to the UK Treasury, with more to come. Again, this is not the policy of other large central banks , which keep losses on their books.
Further increasing costs for the national purse are inflation-linked gilts. Also known as “linkers”, they force the UK government to compensate bond investors for higher inflation. Consider the irony: when the Bank misses inflation targets, the government pays. Britain is uniquely vulnerable , with about a quarter of its bonds inflation-pegged, more than twice as many as Italy or France. Since the 2022 Russia price shocks, the British government has had to pay a staggering £153bn in additional debt service. A progressive government must enlist the Bank of England in an orderly exit from linkers, under a new framework for monetary-fiscal coordination.
Finally, there is the role of pension funds. Back in 2012, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition imposed automatic enrolment in defined contribution pension schemes, in which workers bear the investment risks. These kinds of pension funds prefer to invest in high-yielding stocks and private equity funds rather than less lucrative government bonds. .
As a result, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that pension funds will halve their gilt holdings over the next decade, which would eventually result in an increase in annual debt interest costs of about £22bn. This is a political choice that can be reversed. A progressive government could use the recent Pension Schemes Act 2026, which gives governments power to mandate pension fund investments in the UK economy, to channel our savings towards financing public ownership of essential services such as housing, water and transport.
It is clear that if the UK wants transformative change, it needs a new and democratic model of central banking that weakens the power of bond vigilantes. Making the Bank of England serve the common good again, undoing the borrowing mistakes of the past, channelling workers’ capital into public essentials – these are hard political choices, but they exist. Changing the status quo of managed British decline was never going to be easy.
Daniela Gabor is professor of economics at Soas, University of London
Tennessee officials will pay $835,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who was jailed for more than a month over a Facebook post he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk .
While many people across the US lost their jobs over social media comments about Kirk’s death, Larry Bushart’s case stood out as a rare instance in which such online speech led to criminal prosecution. The 61-year-old retired police officer spent 37 days behind bars before authorities dropped the felony charge against him in October.
During his time in jail, Bushart lost his post-retirement job and missed his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter, according to a federal lawsuit Bushart filed in December against Tennessee’s Perry county, its sheriff and the investigator who obtained the arrest warrant.
“I am pleased my first amendment rights [to free speech] have been vindicated,” Bushart said in a statement announcing the settlement on Wednesday. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”
The Perry county mayor, John Carroll, did not immediately respond to a message left on Wednesday with his office seeking an interview.
Bushart was arrested in September after he refused to take down Facebook memes that joked about Kirk’s killing, which had prompted an outpouring of grief among conservatives, including in Perry county. The county, near Bushart’s home, held a candlelight vigil.
The meme Bushart posted that prompted his arrest read “This seems relevant today … ” and featured Donald Trump and the words: “We have to get over it.” That quote, the meme explained, came from the president, who said it in 2024 after a shooting at a high school in Perry, Iowa.
The Perry county sheriff, Nick Weems, told news outlets that most of Bushart’s “hate memes” were lawful free speech. But residents were alarmed by the school shooting post, fearing Bushart was threatening a local school called Perry county high school, even though Weems said he knew the meme referred to a school in Iowa.
“Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems said in a statement to the Tennessean newspaper.
Bushart’s bail was set at $2m before he was released as the case drew national attention.
“It’s in times of turmoil and heightened tensions that our national commitment to free speech is tested the most,” said Cary Davis, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which helped represent Bushart. “When government officials fail that test, the constitution exists to hold them accountable.
“Our hope is that Larry’s settlement sends a message to law enforcement across the country: respect the first amendment today, or be prepared to pay the price tomorrow.”
New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani , on Thursday will announce that a new tranche of 2026 World Cup tickets will be made available to residents of the five boroughs at $50 per ticket. The tickets, which will be distributed via random draw, will be for every game at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium other than the final. They will also include bus transportation to and from the event.
It is expected that a total of 1,000 tickets will be available as part of the program, with a block of about 150 tickets for each of the seven games. The tickets will be located in the upper bowl of the 82,000-capacity MetLife Stadium.
The games eligible for the program include five group games (Brazil v Morocco on 13 June, France v Senegal on 16 June, Norway v Senegal on 22 June, Ecuador v Germany on 25 June and Panama v England on 27 June), plus a Round of 32 game on 30 June and a Round of 16 game on 5 July.
The plan marks the first and to date only time an individual 2026 World Cup host city will provide special access to tickets for residents of that particular city. In that way, it marks a return to the status quo: residents of Qatar receiving discounted tickets to the 2022 edition of the tournament in the country.
Mamdani is set to unveil the plan on Thursday in the Little Senegal neighborhood of Harlem in upper Manhattan, where he is expected to be accompanied by community leaders.
The lottery system for the tickets will open on 25 May at 10am Eastern Time and close on 30 May at 5pm ET, with a maximum of 50,000 allowed daily entries into the lottery. Winners will be allowed to buy up to two tickets each. The initiative will be positioned as a collaboration between the mayor’s office and the NY/NJ World Cup host committee – not with Fifa , who have control over ticket operations and have utilized dynamic pricing amid much criticism.
Ticket pricing has been a major issue throughout the buildup to this World Cup, with games in the New York/New Jersey area garnering significant attention for both the price of admission and the cost of transportation. New Jersey Transit, the authority that operates most of the bus and train routes to MetLife Stadium from New York City proper, initially announced that a round-trip train ticket between New York’s Penn Station and MetLife Stadium would cost $150, when the usual fare is $13. That price has since dropped to $105 for a round-trip ticket. Buses between New York City and the stadium are expected to run at $80 per ticket.
Fifa had previously responded to criticism around ticket prices by releasing a limited amount of tickets at $60 , comprising approximately 1.6% of those available for sale. The federation had initially set $60 as the cheapest possible tickets for any World Cup games, but dynamic pricing has rocketed the prices up into the hundreds for every game of the tournament.
Mamdani, an avowed soccer fan who made affordability a central pillar of his successful mayoral campaign, took aim at Fifa over the prices of admission, saying last year that the federation was putting revenues over accessibility for what should be an inclusive celebration of soccer.
“There’s just no chance for so many who love this game so much to actually be able to go and see this,” Mamdani said at a campaign stop in September. “This also has a real impact on the potential for the atmosphere of the World Cup and just how many fans will actually be there. Because so often the people who get the tickets quickest are not the ones who are actually the most eager to be there. They’re the ones who are the most excited at the prospect of a profit.”
G ustav Mahler hated it . Its publisher was convinced it would be a commercial disaster. Critics complained it was mostly just “noise” and predicted that it would quickly be forgotten. But more than 125 years since Tosca’s premiere in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini’s fifth opera remains one of the most bankable in the business.
We love a hard-won success story in classical music. Think of the tales of woe that still swirl around Beethoven’s life and works , with their implied happy ending in our own Beethoven centrism. Or there’s Wagner’s Tannhäuser being booed off the stage in 1861, before finding its way into the operatic pantheon. Or the riot supposedly provoked by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its 1913 premiere , before everyone calmed down and the score was acclaimed a masterpiece.
in the case of Tosca , it’s hard to imagine today how a work so packed with tuneful hits – some of the best-known numbers in opera, no less – could have left one early critic grumbling that “song is lacking”. But Mahler’s own catty dismissal of the new opera as “papal pageantry with continual chiming of bells” is revealing. The problem in 1900 was precisely that Puccini wove the “real-world” sounds of bells and screams, cannonfire and religious chant straight into his score. It was a groundbreaking example of an immersive soundscape. But for some of Puccini’s contemporaries, those soundeffects were radically out of place in an operatic work of art.
This is where Tosca parts ways with classical music’s other initially reviled treasures: the opera is still treated with suspicion. In the 1950s, leading US musicologist Joseph Kerman dismissed Tosca as a “shabby little shocker”. More recently, in 2010 the eminent opera critic Rupert Christiansen described it as a “tawdry but irresistible melodrama”. Put bluntly, Tosca’s most intractable problem in certain quarters is its popularity: that overwhelming melodic appeal, combined with a sexanddeath nail-biter of a plot.
“It’s also a study of evil,” US director Ted Huffman suggests, “which we find really entertaining in a horrible way.” Huffman is speaking to me between rehearsals for his new production of Tosca at Glyndebourne in East Sussex. The summer festival has been running since 1934 , but this will be the first time it stages the opera. “I associate this piece only with the largest theatres,” says Huffman. “It’s interesting to do Tosca on this scale, which is much more intimate than opera houses like the Royal Opera House [in London] or the Met [New York], where Tosca is a staple.” Glyndebourne’s smaller stage and auditorium mean that “people will experience it as a slightly different piece,” he says – one full of “little conversations and asides and minuscule plot points that are very important, actually”. Crucially, the size of Glyndebourne’s theatre means “you don’t have to telegraph those details to the audience in a big way”.
Yet for well over a century, productions have reproduced the same details on the grandest possible scale. As specified by Puccini and his librettists, Tosca is set in three real places in Rome in 1800: the Sant’Andrea della Valle church, the Palazzo Farnese and the Castel Sant’Angelo . Productions these days rarely follow historical stage directions literally – who in the Netflix age wants a return to painted flats, slow-mo processions and hyper-stylised gestures? Yet the vast majority of Toscas are still set in a monumentally realistic Rome populated by priests in cassocks, a hero working on an oil painting, and a heroine who wears red, places candelabras on either side of the villain’s corpse and leaps at the end (as per the gags about sopranos and trampolines) from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo.
As Huffman stresses, Tosca is “a piece about state violence and resistance and heroism”. Such themes could hardly be more relevant today. So where are the bold reimaginings of Tosca – the equivalents of Jonathan Miller’s iconic 1950s, Little Italy-set Rigoletto or Claus Guth’s radical displacement of La Bohème into space ? Huffman has risen to prominence as an intrepid director specialising in new opera. On Tosca, however, he is cautious, agreeing that the work seems “more rooted in its setting than most”. You can change the time and place, he says, but Puccini’s “little narrative details” remain vital.
Opera critic Tim Ashley observes that “Rome, Catholicism and the queasy symbiosis between church and state are so embedded in Tosca that most directors shy away from rethinking it”. The Te Deum that closes act one (an authentic religious chant accompanying the villain’s erotic fantasy about the heroine) or the volley of bells in the prelude to act three – all tuned according to Puccini’s location research – are certainly symptoms of the composer’s commitment to a new, realist aesthetic. No wonder directors have filmed on-location productions of a work that so directly pre-empts the values of modern cinema and TV.
Among the gazillions of productions that keep Tosca on stage across the world, Ashley can name only two major ones that have deviated from the norm: Barrie Kosky’s “opéra noir” treatment for Dutch National Opera (think minimalist chic and a sushi-making villain – though Tosca still wears red) and Martin Kušej’s staging for Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. Forget Rome – this is a post-apocalyptic wasteland of grimy caravans, limbless torsos and industrial quantities of snow.
Back at Glyndebourne , Huffman’s production is inspired, he tells me, by 1940s neorealist Italian film. “Not in a literal way,” he’s quick to add, but as an exploration of realism, which “comes back at certain times when we need to assess what has gone wrong politically in our world”. In the meantime, he giggles, “People keep asking me whether there are two candelabras at the end of act two. Spoiler: there aren’t. I’m sorry.”
Tosca is at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, from 21 May to 22 June and 4 to 30 August
Elon Musk’s social media network X has been fined A$650,000 (US$463,063) after admitting it failed to provide information about how it was tackling online child abuse material.
The federal court penalty, handed down on Thursday, brings to an end a legal battle that lasted more than three years, after the eSafety commissioner first issued the notice to the US-based company in 2023 .
The February 2023 notice asked the company – then known as Twitter – to prepare a report on its compliance with basic online safety expectations around child sexual exploitation and abuse material.
Twitter merged into X Corp on 15 March and the company then provided its report to the commissioner on 29 March.
But the commissioner identified unanswered questions in the report and wrote back to X Corp on 6 April to seek further information, which was ultimately provided on 5 May.
The commissioner took X Corp to the federal court, arguing it had contravened the Online Safety Act between 29 March and 5 May by not properly responding to the safety notice.
The company initially challenged the accusations in court, claiming it did not have to comply with the notice because Twitter stopped being a company after the merger.
But Justice Michael Wheelahan rejected that claim and found in the commissioner’s favour in October 2024, ordering X Corp to comply with the notice.
The decision was upheld by the full federal court in July 2025 after X Corp tried to appeal against the ruling.
The US-based company on Thursday admitted the contraventions but noted they had happened at a time when there were significant corporate changes due to the merger.
The parties agreed to a A$650,000 penalty, which Justice Wheelahan imposed.
The judge found it was appropriate to impose a penalty close to the maximum available fine of A$687,500.
“A penalty near the maximum is appropriate in the case of the respondent, which is a substantial corporation so that it operates as a real deterrent and is not simply a cost of doing business,” he said in his written reasons.
X Corp has also agreed to pay A$100,000 to the commissioner for its legal fees.
The commissioner welcomed Thursday’s ruling, saying it was important international companies complied with Australian regulations.
“Meaningful transparency is critical to holding technology companies to account,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.
X Corp will have 45 days to pay the penalties.
In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood ( Napac ) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
London is to host a star-studded all-female Athlos athletics meeting on 18 September as founder Alexis Ohanian builds towards his dream of it becoming “F1 for track and field”.
Ohanian, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams, has added a London date prior to the meeting in New York, which is in its third year and takes place a fortnight later.
The London event will take place at StoneX Stadium, the 10,500-capacity ground used by Saracens rugby union side in Barnet. It is also the home stadium of Shaftesbury Barnet Harriers, whose athletes over the years have included Olympians Dave Bedford, Daryll Neita, Zharnel Hughes, Ashia Hansen, Natasha Danvers and Yamilé Aldama.
Athlos is owned entirely by Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which has assets of $900m (£670m) – but competing athletes will receive equity in the league if the competition succeeds.
The athletes on board, who include the 2023 100m world champion and 2024 Olympic silver medallist Sha’Carri Richardson and Paris Games 200m winner Gabby Thomas, will compete for a prize pot of $2.1m (£1.5m).
Athletes can earn up to $65,000 in each individual event, while overall champions will receive an additional $25,000, meaning an athlete winning in both cities could pocket $155,000.
“I’ve long been very obsessed with this ‘F1 for track and field’ analogy,” Ohanian told the BBC. “We come to expect the fastest cars in the world to tour the greatest global cities, and for people to come out and watch and celebrate this excellence.
“I envision Athlos to be a version of that and, as we grow this league, I’d love to add more cities and make Athlos truly global.
“We know we’re entering into something really ambitious. Ultimately we want to build a league around athletics, which historically has not had commercial success. This is a big moment for us.”
Unlike American track legend Michael Johnson’s failed Grand Slam Track series , Ohanian is treading more cautiously. After adding its London event in 2026, Ohanian’s ultimate aim is to create a worldwide, season-long league and says he has been in discussions with the sport’s governing body and “great partners” World Athletics.
Seven disciplines will be contested in both London and New York – the 100m hurdles, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, mile and long jump – with an athlete’s combined points determining the overall event winner.
Ohanian – who sold Reddit for $10m in 2006 and has since made a fortune in other investments – invested $27m in buying 10% of Women’s Super League football team Chelsea last year.
New Orleans state prosecutors on Thursday filed formal misdemeanor battery charges against Shia LaBeouf , four months after police officers there arrested him on allegations that he struck three men at a bar.
That move from the office of local district attorney Jason Williams means prosecutors opted to not pursue hate-crime charges against LaBeouf, the star of the Transformers film franchise, despite claims evidently supported by video that LaBeouf aimed anti-gay slurs at the alleged victims.
Police arrested LaBeouf after he purportedly punched two men and headbutted a third at the R Bar in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans at about 12.45am on 17 February – which was the city’s Mardi Gras holiday.
Bar staff had asked him to leave after becoming increasingly aggressive and insulting the men he battered with homophobic slurs, police said in sworn statements filed in court. LaBeouf was briefly jailed after being discharged from a hospital where he was taken at the time of his arrest. But he was soon released, made to put up a $105,000 bond and told by a judge to enroll in substance abuse treatment.
One of the alleged victims, Nathan Thomas Reed, identifies as queer and another dresses in drag, the Guardian has previously reported. The latter of those men, named Jeffrey Damnit, captured a cellphone video of LaBeouf directing the homophobic insult “faggot” at him outside the bar. And Damnit had previously spoken openly about his hope that prosecutors would charge LaBeouf under a state law which allows for enhanced penalties against those who victimize others based on the “actual or perceived” basis of sex or gender, among other categories.
The Guardian has contacted Reed as well as attorneys for Damnit and LaBeouf for comment. The third alleged victim has said he is not commenting on the case.
An arraignment date for LaBeouf, at which he would enter a plea, was not immediately available.
In an interview published 11 days after his arrest, LaBeouf told the YouTube outlet Channel 5 that “big gay people are scary” to him given his “traditional Catholic” faith.
He also alleged to Channel 5 that “three gay dudes [were] next to me, touching my leg”, before the violence preceding his arrest.
“I [got] scared,” LaBeouf added. “I’m sorry – if that’s homophobic, then I’m that.”
LaBeouf’s remarks were notable to some in New Orleans’s legal community in light of a state law which enables people to use a reasonable amount of violence to prevent certain offenses against them.
The charges pending against LaBeouf in New Orleans are not his first experience with the US’s criminal court system. While being arrested in 2014 over allegations that he disrupted a Broadway show in New York City, LaBeouf faced accusations of insulting a police officer with the homophobic slur “fag”.
He was separately recorded saying police were racist – and that a Black officer on the scene would go to hell – during a 2017 disorderly conduct arrest in Savannah, Georgia. That resulted in an earlier court-mandated stint in rehab.
T he fight for the future of Los Angeles , America’s second-largest city, usually plays out in the grand art deco offices and committee rooms of city hall. But in an election year full of surprises, the most consequential battle may in fact have begun on a beach.
And not just any beach: we’re talking about the fantasy sandbox inhabited by buff gym rats and sun-kissed bikini babes on Baywatch and its multiple spin-offs. In February, Los Angeles welcomed the latest incarnation of the hit TV show back to southern California after a long hiatus, including detours to Hawaii and Georgia. City officials heralded its return as a sign of better times for local film and television production following years of decline and tens of thousands of job losses in the heart of Hollywood.
But trouble soon beckoned. The producers, who had built a new lifeguard station on Venice Beach in preparation for what they anticipated to be a multi-season reboot, learned they were not allowed to use the camera drones they were counting on, or to shoot at night.
They had a $21m tax credit from the state and what they thought was the full blessing of the local authorities. But a handful of regulatory agencies, notably the county beaches and harbors department, had other ideas, and within four days shooting ground to a halt under a barrage of unexpected restrictions involving everything from the sand they could shoot on to the parking arrangements.
“Suddenly, everything was ‘no’,” one member of the production wrote in a widely read anonymous Instagram post that quickly morphed into a political flashpoint. “Los Angeles is not film friendly.”
Such a verdict appeared potentially devastating to a city that has struggled mightily for years to stop productions fleeing to cheaper locations – Atlanta, Toronto, London, Budapest – and has seen businesses around the industry from catering to costume rental flounder and fail. In an election year, the prospect of losing Baywatch so soon after luring it back brought the knives out for LA’s mayor, Karen Bass , who leads in the polls but has had a bumpy time defending her record in a city ravaged by housing shortages, soaring living costs, tent cities on the streets and last year’s devastating wildfires.
Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star challenging Bass from the right, blamed the Baywatch mess on what he called “ political fecklessness ” and “a perfect storm of self-inflicted wounds”. “This is not an isolated production snafu. It is the new normal in a city once synonymous with the dream factory,” he thundered in a Substack post.
Nithya Raman, a city council member challenging Bass from the left, also mucked in with a campaign video highlighting the near-50% loss in shooting days in Los Angeles since 2018. She has also denounced “ ridiculous conditions ” that, she said, made it difficult to attract productions. “For too long, Los Angeles has treated Hollywood as an inconvenience rather than an asset,” she wrote in X.
Bass, for her part, jumped on the Baywatch calamity like a five-alarm fire and worked with other members of the city council, the state coastal commission and FilmLA, a non-profit permitting office that acts as a liaison between film producers and the many jurisdictions and agencies across Los Angeles county, to fix it as fast as possible.
By mid-April she was able to announce that Baywatch was staying in Venice after all and promised that the city of Los Angeles would “always clear bureaucratic barriers, making it easier and more affordable to film in the entertainment capital of the world”.
She and her city council colleagues did not stop there, taking measures to coordinate permit regulations better between agencies, speeding up certification of new soundstages so they can be available faster and waiving all fees for what are known as “microshoots”, small independent productions involving just a few people. FilmLA, meanwhile, announced a six-month pilot program to cover the cost of permits for what it calls “ low-impact ” productions that are small enough not to cause disruption to traffic or street access.
By the end of April, Bass was further buoyed up by new data showing the first significant uptick in shooting days in the Los Angeles area since the Covid pandemic – a 10.7% increase in all productions from the last quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, with a particularly pronounced boom in feature films, which saw a 45% increase in shooting days over the same period.
“We have a long way to go, but after years of decline, Hollywood is finally turning a corner with more productions and more jobs,” Bass proclaimed. “We have worked hand in hand with industry partners to make filming in Los Angeles easier and more affordable.”
The criticisms, though, have not let up, as Bass’s rivals accuse her of moving too slowly and only in response to a crisis. “The people saying ‘we’re going to act’ have been insiders for four to six years in city government. Why are they only doing things now?” said Adam Miller, an education technology entrepreneur and urban policy advocate making his own long-shot run for mayor.
At the same time, the problems besetting the entertainment industry are bigger than one TV show, industry experts and political analysts say, and bigger than anything even the most efficient city government can control, let alone turn around.
Dramatic advances in technology have made producers less reliant on location shooting and require smaller crews and fewer days now than they did 10 or 20 years ago – and have opened the door to artificial intelligence starting to replace actors and writers.
The number of credible production centers around the world has grown, and so have the incentive structures that city and national governments offer to bring in more business. Since California has a particularly high cost of living, affecting everything from meals to the price of filling up production vehicles with gas, the temptation to take production elsewhere has been substantial and keeps increasing.
It was exactly this concern that prompted California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to wrest $750m in entertainment-industry tax breaks and other incentives out of the state legislature last year – and data from FilmLA shows it has been these incentives, more than expedited city permitting or reduced fees, that have spurred much of the new production.
“That’s what’s driving it right now,” FilmLA’s chief executive, Denise Gutches, said in an interview. “It’s great news, and we anticipate, with the 147 projects that were given the [state] incentive, that we’ll see more increases.”
And so critics of the current mayor have accused Bass of taking credit for a turnaround she did not initiate. With at least one eye on the 2 June mayoral primary, her rivals have also warned that LA needs an entirely new approach and a much greater sense of urgency.
“If we have another four years of this,” Miller charged, “we’ll never be able to get Hollywood back because the talent won’t be here any more.”
Bass’s office did in fact highlight the issue before the Baywatch crisis: her administration unrolled a package of measures a year ago that it called Reel Change to lift some restrictions on filming at city-owned locations and cut fees. And, her administration says, she was directly involved in negotiations to bring Baywatch to LA and in the state tax incentive package that made it possible.
The angst about southern California’s signature industry has continued to rise, however, and has triggered a similar debate among the state’s gubernatorial candidates.
Working in LA’s favor is the fact that many productions want to be here, since it’s where the business end of Hollywood is still based and where a lot of producers, directors, actors and writers live. Gutches, the FilmLA chief, said she’d heard this over and over in listening sessions she’d had with smaller independent producers over the past year.
But, she said, her organization was often vexed by the spaghetti bowl of rules and ordinances across the LA region, which has a county government and 88 separate city governments, all with their own semi-independent agencies responsible for fire prevention, traffic, public safety, utilities and other services that interact with film crews.
She spends much of her time trying to get everyone to follow the same framework so permits can be issued three days after a production applies for them. But, she said, it is not a fail-safe process.
Of the Baywatch impasse, she said: “It was a lesson in how we need to identify where film has to have some level of priority over ordinances that, for example, do not allow drones over the beach. The rule is understandable, but if a production is going to bring millions of dollars into the economy, we can also agree to make an exception.”
Miller, like Pratt, made a connection between LA’s struggles to attract Hollywood business and its struggles to attract business more generally. “It’s not just entertainment – it’s all the things that work with that industry: catering, stylists, makeup, transportation, manufacturers,” he said. “It’s the backbone of LA and we’re not treating it with the urgency that we need to.”
When it comes to solutions, Bass and her rivals tend to hit many of the same notes and sound strikingly similar in the remedies they propose: less bureaucracy, faster turnaround times and lower fees for lower-budget productions that can be crippled by the cost of fire checks, road closure fees, city staffing fees and other demands that studio productions absorb more easily.
Pratt, for example, has said he would put public money into FilmLA, cut location fees, eliminate the need for city officials on set for most productions, and introduce instant pre-approvals for standard street closures and safety plans. But that is not wildly different from what Bass and FilmLA are either doing already or pushing to do soon.
Raman says she would create an office dedicated exclusively to bringing in location shoots and smoothing out the bureaucracy around them. Bass gave exactly that responsibility last year to her public works chief, Steve Kang, but Raman and Miller say it needs to be someone with no other brief – a “deputy mayor of Hollywood”, in Miller’s words, “not somebody doing it on the side”.
In response, Bass’s spokesperson, Alex Stack, accused Raman of her own lack of energy in helping Hollywood, saying she had authored no industry-friendly legislation in her six years on the city council. “None of the other candidates in this race have any results they can point to except campaign talking points,” he added.
Gutches said her job precluded her from saying whom she would vote for. But she observed: “All the measures proposed by the candidates have merit. How they get executed is a different story.”
C oncert performances of opera can provide ideal conditions for live recordings. This ambitious release of Wagner’s Ring Cycle on 13 CDs, captured in 2024 with the Dallas Symphony under music director Fabio Luisi, is a fine example.
The Italian maestro has a strong record, having stepped in at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011 when James Levine had to withdraw from Siegfried due to illness. With his clearheaded approach, a keen sense of Wagner’s operatic architecture, and a supple way with phrasing, he is perhaps the most compelling reason for acquiring this frequently impressive set.
Of course, any Ring lives or dies on its singers, and no cast will ever be perfect. As Wotan, Mark Delavan’s voice carries the right authority, his characterisation intensifying as the work unfolds. Daniel Johansson is a lyrical Siegfried, never straining, even if he occasionally sounds uninvolved. As Brünnhilde, Lise Lindstrom’s soprano comes under rather too much pressure, though she’s never less than committed to text and drama.
Among the rest, Sara Jakubiak stands out as a radiant Sieglinde, though a tired-sounding Christopher Ventris disappoints as Siegmund. Stephen Milling, Štefan Margita and Michael Laurenz sing and act their socks off as Hagen, Loge and Mime respectively, with Tómas Tómasson characterful but occasionally wobbly as Alberich.
If Deniz Uzun is rather soft-edged as Fricka and Roman Trekel overly gravelly as Gunther, Kathryn Henry offers a glorious Gutrune and Tamara Mumford an imposing Erda. Giants and minor deities are good; Rhinemaidens, Valkyries, and especially Norns excellent. Sound is admirable, if slightly more congested than the finest studio sets.
