We Must Unlock Greater Access to Climate Finance at COP29 to Deliver on the UAE Consensus

The Southern California Independent Bookstore Bestsellers list for Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024, including hardcover and paperback fiction and nonfiction.

Super Bowl champion Heath Evans offered advice to ESPN NFL analyst Ryan Clark after the former player said he would not and does not respect President-elect Donald Trump.

At least two people have died and several others are injured after a massive explosion at a Louisville food coloring factory Tuesday. The cause of the blast is still under investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump's national security picks have so far sent relief to several U.S. allies, one such ally being Taiwan where recent announcements have been met with delight.

The Consumer Price Index rose 2.6% versus a year ago in October -- falling in line with expectations, the Labor Department said on Wednesday.

We are recapping “The Real Housewives of New York City” season 15 episode 7. The women gather for a “friendly” game of dodgeball, while a scandalous pregnancy rumor is spread around the group. Check out the full recap now! Subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a thing!

Strange laws in Vermont have been around for ages. Some of its strangest laws are no more, like dying imitation butter pink, but others are still enforced, like billboard bans.

After reaching stardom, many actors returned to a more traditional work life by taking jobs in nursing, becoming CEOs, veterinarians and more.

"This has been an extraordinary journey, and I’m OK if this is the end of the journey," the actor told "Today" show viewers of his "incredible life."

A 51-year-old son of a federal judge pleaded guilty on Tuesday to secretly filming sexual encounters he had with multiple women, but might end up avoiding jail time.

A CIA official has been charged with leaking highly classified documents about Israel's potential plan to strike back against Iran over a missile attack.

Inflation accelerated in October, snapping a streak of six consecutive months of cooling inflation.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders she will not join the incoming Trump administration after previously serving as White House press secretary.

The Federal Reserve began cutting its benchmark rate in September amid cooling inflation.

U.S. government employee Asif William Rahman was indicted for allegedly leaking classified documents about Israeli plans for retaliatory strikes on Iran.

Kemsley believes Stracke "likes the attention."

Dave Coulier revealed the early symptoms he had before learning of his diagnosis.

In Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, Cyrus Shams is sleepwalking through life. He’s a poet, newly sober, obsessed with death, and deeply depressed. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother boarded a plane in Tehran to visit her brother in Dubai. A U.S. missile mistakenly shot it down, and she was…

Tommy Orange’s family saga, Wandering Stars, picks up where his 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, left off. In the wake of a 2018 shooting, high-school freshman Orvil Red Feather struggles to make sense of the violence he has endured. To better understand what Orvil is up against, Orange takes us back to 1864 to…

Juli Min’s debut, Shanghailanders, is an ambitious family drama told entirely in reverse. The novel begins in 2040 with Leo Yang, an aging Chinese real-estate investor who finds himself drifting apart from his elegant Japanese French wife Eko, their precocious eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko, and the baby of the family, aspiring actress Kiko. To…

Dave Coulier, best known for his role as Uncle Joey in “Full House," has announced he has stage 3 Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

What does utopia look like for Black Americans? It’s the question at the heart of essayist, editor, and translator Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, which explores the history and meaning of Black freedom movements in the U.S. The topic is a personal one for the author,…

Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, a captivating multigenerational tale set amid the 2008 financial crisis, begins with a frenzied proposal. Gary Geist, a wealthy and preternaturally lucky football player, asks Kismet Poe, his rebellious Ojibwe classmate, to marry him. This is much to the chagrin of Kismet’s superstitious truck-driver mom…

In her debut memoir, best-selling cookbook author and food TV icon Ina Garten admits she has a “low threshold for boredom.” This, she writes, has made her more than willing to take wild risks “just to get out of that miserable state.” In Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Garten lays out her journey to…

With his new book, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides reckons with the ambitions and intentions of Captain James Cook. In recent years, Sides writes, the enigmatic British explorer and gifted cartographer has become, in some respects, the…

New Yorker staffer Emily Witt’s debut memoir Health and Safety offers a sardonic look at her journey to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible. In 2013, after spending a few years on a prescribed antidepressant that “confirmed my love of stimulants,” Witt decided to try ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive beverage, for the first…

John Edgar Wideman’s genre-bending autobiography chronicles not only his life, but also those of African men and women who made their way to the U.S. through the trans–Atlantic slave trade. A poignant mix of memoir, autofiction, history, and poetry, Slaveroad begins by tracing the journeys of people like William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved…

Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar’s third novel, My Friends, begins with a tender yet tense goodbye between two middle-aged friends, one of whom is compelled to search their past in order to understand how they got there. Decades earlier, Khaled, the book’s somber protagonist, found kinship with Hosam, an enigmatic writer and fellow Libyan dissident…

The reality star teamed up with Erin Lichy to pull the curtain over Jessel Taank, Brynn Whitfield, Jenna Lyons, Ubah Hassan and Sai De Silva.

Mariah Carey may be the Queen of Christmas Music but Lacey Chabert is the Queen of Christmas Movies. Known for playing the violin virtuoso on “Party of Five” as a kid, and later “trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” as Gretchen Wieners in the classic “Mean Girls,” this holiday season the Mississippi-born, LA-based actress is starring...

Special Counsel Jack Smith, the leader of two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, will wrap up his work and resign before the president-elect takes office in January, according to new reporting from the New York Times.

Lenore Lindsey said her longtime customer’s laugh had always reminded her of her brother’s. Now she knows why.

This budding star's first marquee game ended in disaster.

President-elect Donald Trump managed to surprise some Republicans on Capitol Hill with his choice for secretary of defense, going with Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth. CBS News political director Fin Gómez has more on who Hegseth is and the new White House roles Trump has selected Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for.

Measure G didn’t grab as much attention as others, but the wonky reform package could help Los Angeles County make progress on its jail, homelessness and more.

A Glendale man owed a couple $80,000, so he shot the husband, kidnapped and killed the wife, and burned the bodies in different deserts, prosecutors allege.

Ex-CNN honcho Chris Licht sounded off on the media's "hyperbole" about Donald Trump leading up to Election Day, specifically about warning of "the end of democracy."

Buying New | Two units available in renovated 1909 building

The co-creator unpacked his Season 2 guest role.

TikTok sensation the Astrology Bro has taken to the platform to reveal his picks for the zodiac's top problem children, rascals, woeful whippersnappers, and enfant terrible.

The enormous fireball from the “Apache” device used in Operation Redwing, which was detonated in 1956 on a barge in the crater left by a previous explosion on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t take a political genius — whose ranks seem to have grown lately, based on the sheer number of very confident post-election takes over the past week — to see that many, many Americans have voted to blow up the system. Donald Trump has, if nothing else, incarnated a belief that the way America was being run was fundamentally broken and needed to be overhauled from top to bottom.  That, more than any policy specifics around taxes or immigration or foreign policy, was my takeaway from November 5. A (bare) majority of Americans wants to take a wrecking ball to everything. But those feelings and the anger that feeds them runs deeper than just Trump voters. One bit of news that caught my attention this week was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asking her Instagram followers why some of her constituents cast ballots both for her and for Trump. What I see in these answers is that frustration with the system isn’t something that can be attributed just to one party or another, even if it is currently concentrated in the GOP. An avowed leftist like AOC and President-elect Trump are about as far apart as two American politicians can be, but large segments of their supporters are united by anger at the way things are and by a thirst for radical change of some sort.  I can understand their point. In the nearly 25 years that I’ve been a professional journalist, I’ve seen a catastrophic overreaction to 9/11 lead to a two-decade war on terror; thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and a Middle East that remains chaotic. I’ve seen the 2008 Great Recession and the years of economic misery that followed.  I’ve seen the failure to prepare for a major pandemic that many people saw coming, and I’ve seen the failure to learn from it in a way that prepares us for the next one. I’ve seen political barriers harden to economic and technological progress that could meaningfully improve people’s lives. And I’ve seen very few people in power held accountable for those failures. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, you can undoubtedly add your own points to this list. I may believe, as I have written repeatedly, that the long run has seen human life improve immeasurably, and I retain confidence that better days ultimately lie before us. Yet I can still understand why voters on both the right and the left would look at the wreckage of the past 20 years and pull a lever for radical change, consequences be damned. Here’s the thing, however, about radical change. It is, as our more numerate readers might say, a “high-variance strategy,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is far wider than what we might expect from more incremental, within-the-system change.  Perhaps we nail the jackpot and manage to hit upon the political choices that really can create something meaningfully better out of a broken system. But just as likely — perhaps more likely if you know anything about political revolutions in recent history — is that radical change will leave us worse off, and it will turn out that the system so many had come to despise was, in fact, our last line of defense against something much, much worse. The night is dark and full of terrors If you, like much of the electorate, think things couldn’t possibly get worse, I have some reading for you. Less than a week before the election, the pointy-heads at the RAND Corporation published a 237-page report on Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. (I did not say it would be light reading.)  The report is a response to the 2022 Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act, which required the Secretary of Homeland Security and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess really big risks to human survival and develop and validate a strategy to safeguard the civilian population in the face of those risks. If the ultimate purpose of government is to keep us safe in a dangerous world, that law is meant to prompt the US government to anticipate and prepare for the most dangerous risks of all.The RAND report breaks down catastrophic risk into six main possibilities: asteroids and comet impacts; supervolcanoes; major pandemics (both natural and human-made); rapid and severe climate change; nuclear conflict; and, of course, artificial intelligence. (I’d call them the Sinister Six, but I suspect that might send Marvel’s trademark office calling.) What these six have in common, the report notes, is that they could “significantly harm or set back human civilization at the global scale … or even result in human extinction.” It’s important to pause for a moment on what that really means. We just finished an election in which a majority of Americans indicated that they were very unhappy with the way things are going. They’re mad about high prices, mad about immigration, mad about Joe Biden, or mad about Donald Trump.  Despite all the fury, however, these are fairly ordinary things to be mad about, ordinary political and economic problems to suffer through. Thinking about catastrophic risks helps put them in some perspective. A nuclear war — a possibility that is more likely now than it has been in decades — could kill hundreds of millions of people, and leave the planet so battered that the living would envy the dead.  We already know from Covid the damage a pandemic with a relatively low death rate could do; something more virulent, especially if it were engineered, could resemble something out of dystopian fiction — except the possibility is very real. The risk from out-of-control powerful artificial intelligence is almost entirely unknowable, but we would be fools to completely dismiss the dire warnings of those in the field. And with the exception of asteroids and comets — where actual, intelligent space policy has helped us better understand the threat and even begin to develop countermeasures — the RAND report judges that the threat of all of these risks is either static or increasing. (Supervolcanoes, the one risk that remains unchanged, is largely outside human prediction or control, but thankfully we know enough to judge that the probability is very, very low.) The system matters So why are the risks from nuclear conflict, major pandemics, extreme climate change, and artificial intelligence all increasing? Because of human decisions, otherwise known as policy. Will we act as though climate change is the catastrophic threat so many of us believe it to be and engineer our society and economy to mitigate and adapt to it? Will we reverse the collapse of global arms control treaties and edge back from the brink of nuclear conflict? Will we actually learn from Covid and empower the policies and unleash the science to stop the next pandemic, wherever it comes from? Will we do anything about AI — and can we?The answers aren’t easy, and no one political party or candidate has a monopoly on all the best ways to handle catastrophic risk. Reducing the risk of extreme climate change may mean getting serious about the consequences of what we eat and what we drive, in a way sure to anger Republicans — but it may also mean taking the brakes off rapid energy development and housing construction that have too often been defended by Democrats. Minimizing the danger of future pandemics may require defending the global health system, but it may also demand cutting the red tape that often strangles science.  Above all, it will demand dedication and professionalism in those we choose to lead us, here in a country where that’s still possible; men and women who have the skill and the understanding to know when caution is required and when action is inescapable. And from us, it will demand the wisdom to recognize what we need to be defended from. The system has failed us. But there are far worse things than the failure we’ve experienced. As we continue down a 21st century that is shaping up to be the most existentially dangerous one humanity has ever faced, we should temper the pull of radical change with an awareness of what can go wrong when we pull down all that we have built. 

Republicans need to win just two out of the 12 remaining undecided races to secure a majority in the House of Representatives.

Just over a week after his election victory, former and future President Trump returns to the White House on Wednesday to meet in the Oval Office with outgoing President Biden.

Blasts boomed across Kyiv on Wednesday morning after officials said Russia launched its first missile attack on the Ukrainian capital since August.

Questions have been raised about the Fox News host's experience.

Now that Aaron Rodgers has little to look forward to, how will we look back on his career?

A source said Hugh Jackman's ex-wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, "was the last to know" about his alleged relationship with Sutton Foster.

Ray J confessed he revealed "too much," noting, "I don't even know why I just said it, but I said it. ... They're gonna be mad. Come get me."