The Los Angeles Zoo welcomed a newborn Masai giraffe, a subspecies native to Kenya and Tanzania that was recently deemed to be one of the most endangered animals in the wild. The new calf is on display now at the zoo with the herd of four females and one male.

The unnamed baby giraffe born Oct. 5 weighed 138 pounds and stood 6½ feet tall, according to an L.A. Zoo news release. Giraffa camelopardalis subspecies tippelskirchii can grow up to 17 feet tall, weigh up to 2,700 pounds and have what are called “irregular” shaped patches all over their bodies.

The calf is the fifth born to her mother, named Hasina, and seventh from her father, Phillip. All giraffes at the zoo belong to the Masai subspecies, and are part of a special breeding program that aims to maintain genetic diversity.

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“The giraffe calf won’t be returned to the wild, but that doesn’t mean she will live her whole life here at the L.A. Zoo,” spokeswoman April Spurlock wrote in an email. “She will probably be here for the next two to three years, and then she could go to another [American Zoo Assn.]-accredited zoo if there is a breeding recommendation from the Species Survival Plan program.”

There are about 500 such zoo-based conservation programs under way for different species.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature in July put the subspecies on its endangered Red List after populations in the giraffes’ native habitat dwindled by 50% in the past three decades, largely because of poaching and habitat loss. About 35,000 Masai giraffes still exist in the wild.

Terry Ann McIntosh’s financial nightmare began four years ago, soon after she hired a caregiver through a family services website.

McIntosh, then 75 and in a wheelchair, had assumed that the young woman who eventually showed up at her San Mateo, Calif., home wouldn’t steal from her. She was wrong. In October 2015, Meletofetofe Uhila began logging into McIntosh’s Bank of America account, using the older woman’s credentials. The first time, Uhila attempted to transfer $10,000 into her own account. The bank blocked it, requesting that McIntosh call in to verify her identity. Uhila called instead, pretending to be McIntosh.

Though Uhila failed the bank’s security questions, and McIntosh had never made a similar transfer in all the years she held the account, the bank allowed it to go through. Unaware, McIntosh continued to visit her branch every week, as she had done for the past 15 years. No bank employee ever mentioned the transaction.

Over the next nine months, Uhila made 44 additional transfers, ultimately stealing about $245,000 from McIntosh. Though Uhila was eventually caught and convicted, she had only $8,000 left to return to McIntosh. So McIntosh asked Bank of America for her money back. Despite all the seemingly bright red flags raised by Uhila’s conduct, the bank said no.

Tales such as McIntosh’s — of being hoodwinked by a criminal only to face an uphill battle to be made whole — are on the rise, consumer and legal experts warn. Already targeted by phone scammers and greedy relatives, elderly Americans face another threat. Increasingly, it’s the professionals — the lawyers, insurers and financial advisors that the elderly trust — who are the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

In 2017, financial institutions filed 63,500 suspicious activity reports tied to the exploitation of older adults, quadruple the amount reported four years earlier, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for a total of $1.7 billion in attempted thefts and losses. That estimate, however, is a tiny fraction of the real total. The reports “may account for less than 2%” of actual incidents, the CFPB says. Estimates of total losses ranged as high as $36.5 billion, according to one financial services firm.

One in 5 older Americans is a victim of financial exploitation, said Jilenne Gunther, who heads the BankSafe initiative at the AARP’s Public Policy Institute, costing U.S. financial institutions $1 billion in deposits annually. The vast majority of such attempts to separate the elderly from their money, both legal and illegal, go unreported.

Shawna Reeves, director of elder abuse prevention at the Institute on Aging in San Francisco, says few understand that such activity can involve professional firms and companies, including banks, financial advisors, insurers and law firms.

“This is big business, perpetrated by actors people think are legitimate,” Reeves said. According to social workers, prosecutors and other officials across the country, common stratagems involve attempts to sell the elderly ill-advised annuities and reverse mortgages, as well as solar panel installations and access to veterans’ benefits.

At the Iowa attorney general’s consumer protection division, complaints about professionals manipulating elderly clients pour in “nonstop,” said Chantelle Smith, an assistant attorney general in Des Moines. They involve “any type of business you can imagine.”

When InvestmentNews surveyed 591 financial advisors about elder fraud in 2017, it found that 62% said they have seen or suspected financial abuse of an older client at least once. Some 39% of them said the perpetrator was another financial professional — but more than half admitted they didn’t bother to report it.

It’s not just financial professionals doing the fleecing. Doug Chalgian, an attorney with the Michigan-based elder law firm Chalgian & Tripp, said some lawyers build a business model helping adult children take control of their parents’ assets. Others encourage older clients to make financial decisions that aren’t in their best interest.

“There’s a sleazy underbelly to elder law,” Chalgian said.

The consequences of such unethical behavior aren’t just financial. Elderly people who fall victim to financial wrongdoing are more likely to die prematurely, research shows. Losing one’s life savings, worrying about maintaining control over assets that remain or simply being embarrassed at having been taken advantage of all play a part, Smith said.

“Where do you go after you’ve been exploited by a professional you thought you could trust, and you are now at perhaps your most vulnerable state? Another ‘trusted’ professional?” Smith asked. “They die. It kills them.”

The night before Barbara Williams died in August 2015, she and her husband Tom decided to leave the bulk of their assets to a nonprofit serving the homeless near their Oroville, Calif., home.

Tom Williams had relied on his wife, a former bookkeeper, to handle their finances. Williams, then 78, called American Family Legal Services, the firm he thought had helped them with estate planning in the past, to update their trust.

Not long after, Victor Pantaleoni arrived at his home. An independent insurance agent, Pantaleoni quickly went about selling Williams on purchasing an annuity — one that, unlike the updated trust Williams sought, would earn Pantaleoni a $9,500 commission, according to a lawsuit Williams later filed in the Superior Court of California in Butte County.

The agent had Williams sign a blank check and blank documents, ostensibly needed to modify the trust, Williams said. Instead, Pantaleoni used them to move $100,000 of Williams’ money into a National Western Life Insurance Co. annuity, according to court filings.

Williams, who intended to use those savings for healthcare expenses and emergencies, was left with only about $14,000 in his account. When he tried to cancel the annuity and get his money back, National Western didn’t respond. The company instead told Pantaleoni he had five days to “conserve” the annuity or he would lose his commission, according to court filings.

Williams alleged that, as a result, Pantaleoni tricked him into signing a second annuity application. National Western subsequently reissued the annuity. Williams tried a second time to get his money back. He called and wrote National Western, complaining about Pantaleoni.

But instead of investigating, National Western slapped Williams with a surrender penalty of almost $15,000 and allowed Pantaleoni to hold onto his original commission, keeping him as an agent, according to the lawsuit. Though the insurer refunded the rest of his money, Williams had spent thousands of dollars on legal fees and other expenses related to his dealings with Pantaleoni.

He sued both Pantaleoni and National Western in late 2017 for elder financial abuse, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.

In April, a jury found National Western and Pantaleoni liable of elder financial abuse and negligence, and found Pantaleoni liable for fraud. It awarded Williams $3.1 million, declaring the insurer primarily responsible. The company appealed in September. Pantaleoni did not.

“Pantaleoni couldn’t have done what he did without the complicity of a company willing to turn a blind eye,” said Williams’ attorney Frank Fox.

This wasn’t the first time Pantaleoni was accused of improper behavior when working with seniors. In 2015, the California Department of Insurance filed a formal accusation against him, detailing his violation of insurance statutes in his dealings with a 74-year-old widow. The agency fined Pantaleoni and restricted his insurance license.

“I never did elder financial abuse and I never would,” said Pantaleoni, 62. However, in the case of Williams, he admitted he was negligent, in part because he didn’t have errors and omissions insurance, a type of liability policy, at the time. But he nevertheless disputed most of the other allegations in the lawsuit. “I did what the client wanted,” he said.

As for National Western, in 2010 the insurer settled a class action claiming it had misled seniors about penalties for withdrawing money from their annuities. National Western’s settlement included an accord with the California insurance commissioner requiring the company to make reforms in its sales, marketing and complaint procedures. The insurer denied any wrongdoing.

National Western, which uses thousands of independent agents to sell its insurance, had just two employees in its compliance department responsible for handling complaints at the time Williams tried to return the annuity, according to court documents. “Our independent agents are careful to ensure policyholders thoroughly understand the agreements they enter into when they purchase our annuity or life insurance products,” National Western’s chief legal officer, Rey Perez, said in an emailed statement.

When it comes to luring the elderly into a trap, some strategies are more aggressive than others. Earlier this year, a federal law enforcement officer outside Washington started to get glossy flyers at his home, inviting him to a free meal and a “retirement strategies workshop” at a local restaurant. “Expect to have a little fun and obtain some meaningful information with none of the usual financial double-talk,” one read.

By chance, the officer, who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly, noticed that the retirement planner’s address matched that of an attorney he suspected was targeting the elderly. So on a sticky night in July, he dropped by the dinner.

At an Italian restaurant in Virginia, more than a dozen elderly couples picked at their salads as the presenter asked them to fill out forms describing their assets and then complete worksheets while he extolled the virtues of annuities. “We can get you two to three times as much as a bank and keep you just as safe,” he said.

To the officer, the workshop shared the same traits as so-called trust mills, a term he used to describe schemes in which unscrupulous individuals try to sell seniors questionable investments under the guise of estate or retirement planning. He echoed a warning on the Minnesota attorney general’s website about such con artists: “Once he obtains your financial information, he will usually try to get you to buy an annuity or other insurance product. He may have several meetings with you before he reveals his true intentions: to sell you insurance.”

Kathryn Stebner, the lawyer for Terry Ann McIntosh, is a national expert on elder law. Given how her client’s account was methodically emptied, she said she can’t fathom how the bank missed what happened. “I don’t know how much plainer it could be,” she said.

After discovering what happened, McIntosh became deeply distressed, and not just for her own circumstances; she also needed her savings to support her disabled adult daughter. Last year, she sued Bank of America. As the trial approached this fall, the bank settled. Bank of America spokesman Andy Aldridge said the institution is “working with Ms. McIntosh to help her recover from the criminal actions of her caregiver.”

Financial institutions may have gotten the hint when it comes to making it harder to scam the elderly. According to Marti DeLiema, an assistant professor of research at the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, more banks are investing in detection software and training. Executives, she said, “have really strong incentives, because the problem is only going to get worse.”

DeLiema, a consultant for major banks and broker-dealers, said financial institutions “need better communication across lines of business. For example, the brokerage side needs to talk to the banking side if they suspect a customer is at risk.”

She added that banks also could benefit from a rule similar to what the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority put in place last year, allowing broker-dealers to pause a disbursement and investigate without worrying about clients suing them.

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DeLiema said banks also lack the trusted contact form that broker-dealers are supposed to have clients fill out. “Banks need to do that,” she said. “Banks need another tool in their toolbox to protect us from ourselves.”

Smith, the Iowa assistant attorney general, started pursuing financial advisors, securities brokers and insurance agents for exploiting older people about two decades ago. She said that elder financial abuse is more than a legal issue. It’s societal.

Financial predators aren’t being prosecuted “in any significant number, relative to how many cases there are,” she said. And when it comes to lawsuits, “most of them don’t go to court.” Meanwhile, perpetrators seek out and spend time with older people who are isolated and lonely. They know many of their targets won’t report what’s happening for fear of embarrassment or of having their children take control of their finances.

“They target, they stalk,” Smith said. “I tell all the older people I talk to: ‘You have a bull’s-eye on your back.’”

Ford Motor Co.’s Jim Hackett and Wall Street analysts started this year frustrated with one another. Sure, the automaker had been underperforming, but the chief executive appealed for time to show he was fixing things. He assured them the redesigned Explorer SUV that would be rolling out months later would be a proof point.

But rather than help the earnings results Ford delivers this week, the Explorer will be a hindrance. Sales have plunged as a factory plagued by personnel problems has struggled to get the new sport utility vehicle out the door. Thousands have been shipped 270 miles away to another Ford plant for rework.

The botched Explorer launch puts Hackett back in the position he was early this year — testing the patience of investors. A downbeat assessment of how long it will take to turn the automaker around already cost the company an investment-grade credit rating. By pointing to the SUV as one of the first products he influenced, the CEO staked his reputation on it.

“From a design, styling and content standpoint, it hit the marks,” Jeff Schuster, a forecasting analyst for LMC Automotive, said of the Explorer. “But if you can’t get out of the gate, that certainly is going to put some question marks not only on his credibility, but from a consumer standpoint, on the vehicle itself.”

The transformation of Ford’s Chicago assembly plant was one of the most complex in the company’s history, a spokeswoman said. The company is shipping the new Explorer — the all-time best-selling SUV nameplate in the U.S. — to dealers now and performing additional quality inspections as needed, she said.

Ford is expected to report Wednesday that third-quarter profit slipped to 26 cents a share, according to analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg, down from 29 cents a year ago. Automotive revenue is expected to slip to $34.3 billion, from $34.7 billion.

“This Explorer issue is going to be a big negative for the quarter,” said David Whiston, an analyst for Morningstar who rates Ford the equivalent of a buy. “It’s a viciously competitive market and you don’t want to be missing one of your big hitters.”

Ford shares have fallen 15% since Hackett, 64, took over in May 2017. The stock slumped 37% during the tenure of his predecessor, Mark Fields.

When Ford reported early this month that Explorer deliveries collapsed by almost half during the quarter, Mark LaNeve, the automaker’s U.S. sales chief, said dealers had adequate inventory to sell.

“Availability has improved dramatically over the last 30 to 45 days,” he said in an interview. “We’ll be able to hit our stride with Explorer starting now.”

Supply in showrooms may indeed be building up, but a batch of about 2,500 Explorers in need of repairs arrived recently at the company’s factory in Flat Rock, Mich., which for weeks has been fixing and finishing vehicles shipped from the Chicago plant where the SUV is built, according to people familiar with the matter.

LaNeve told analysts Oct. 2 that the Chicago plant had started shipping Explorers directly to dealers. But most of those models also have required repairs before they can be sold, said the people, who asked not to be identified describing internal issues the company is having.

And not all problems with Chicago-built SUVs are being fixed before they reach customers’ driveways. Consumer Reports had problems with the Lincoln Aviator — a mechanically similar model built alongside the Explorer — that the magazine’s testers purchased last month for $63,400. The digital gauges that display speed, fuel consumption and other important information shake and flip, making them difficult to read.

“Ford does tend to struggle with the new introductions, especially if they’re a larger departure from the previous design,” said Jake Fisher, the magazine’s director of auto testing. “It could take a few years to get the bugs worked out.”

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Ford is not experiencing similar setbacks as it begins building a redesigned version of its Escape compact SUV at its factory in Louisville, Ky. LaNeve told analysts the Escape “is a much more normal launch.”

Days after the January debut of the new Explorer — which hadn’t been redesigned in almost a decade — Hackett described Ford’s product development as “constipated,” and said his executive team was fixing what ailed the company.

“The new Explorer and Ranger, which our administration kind of intercepted in process, are good examples of where we started to have influence,” said Hackett, who played football for Bo Schembechler in the 1970s at the University of Michigan.

What the CEO wasn’t counting on was for a problematic plant to cause trouble again. The Chicago factory, fined twice in the last two decades by federal workplace-harassment regulators, is riven with dissension that’s hampering productivity and quality, according to people familiar with the situation.

Roving groups of workers are intimidating other employees, creating a hostile environment, the people said. That’s driving up turnover and leaving some vehicle assembly unfinished, contributing to the company having to complete the work at the Michigan factory or at dealerships, the people said.

Ford is unaware of any recent issues in which employees are intimidating one another, the spokeswoman said. The automaker is waiting its turn to negotiate a new labor contract with the United Auto Workers union, which has been on strike against General Motors Co. since mid-September.

Ford spent a combined $1 billion upgrading its 95-year-old assembly plant and 63-year-old stamping factory in Chicago, outfitting them with advanced manufacturing technology to produce the Explorer, Aviator and Police Interceptor Utility.

Those investments included $40 million to upgrade lighting and add security at the plants, where some employees have experienced sexual and racial harassment. In August 2017, the company agreed to pay as much as $10.1 million to settle claims following an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ford faced similar charges at the Chicago factories in 1999 that led to a $17.5-million settlement.

When Hackett’s executive team discusses quarterly results with analysts this week, they’re likely to have to address how much further the plant has to go to overcome its troubled past.

“You can’t afford to have these kinds of issues in this market environment. It shouldn’t have become the problem that it is,” LMC’s Schuster said. “They have some explaining to do.”

When the economist Uwe Reinhardt died unexpectedly in November 2017, his colleagues and followers lamented the silencing of one of the most penetrating, objective and effective voices in the healthcare debate.

They didn’t know the half of it. With the posthumous publication this month of his final work, a book entitled “Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care,” Reinhardt’s reputation for cutting to the quick of the issues in U.S. healthcare reform is only enhanced. The book should be required reading for anyone who professes to have an interest in the debate — economists, journalists, legislators, doctors and patients.

Reinhardt, who spent his academic career on the Princeton faculty, may be best known for his seminal article on the reason for America’s outlandish spending on healthcare compared to every other developed country. Published in the journal Health Affairs in 2003, it was headlined, “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

The late economist Uwe Reinhardt

In the article, Reinhardt and his co-authors explained that although Americans had fewer hospital admissions per capita and shorter stays per admission than residents of other countries, they paid more per admission and per day. The U.S. also paid the highest prices, by far, for drugs.

The culprit was the private insurance sector, which played a much larger role in America than in other countries; the public sector, represented here mostly by Medicare and Medicaid, was roughly as cost-effective as public health programs elsewhere. (An updated version published this year by Reinhardt’s co-authors —“It’s Still the Prices, Stupid” — came to the same conclusion.)

Yet “Priced Out” raises an even more important point — that a chief obstacle to enacting sensible healthcare reform in the U.S. is our refusal to state the political issue squarely. As Reinhardt writes, it’s this: “To what extent should the better-off members of society be their poorer and sick brothers’ and sisters’ keepers in health care?”

To Reinhardt, this question is “the elephant in the room no one likes to mention.” Although it’s the fundamental ethical question underlying the healthcare debate, “we have never been able to reach a politically dominant consensus on the distributive social ethic that should guide our health system, because we dare not confront that question at all.”

Every other developed country has long since pondered this fundamental question and concluded that healthcare is a social good that should be “available to all on roughly equal terms,” Reinhardt writes, though the method of delivery varies from country to country.

Instead, we’re distracted into addressing the question in what Reinhardt calls “camouflaged form”— whether to “repeal and replace Obamacare,” for example or whether to allow premiums for seniors to be five times higher than for young adults, or three times higher.

My own favorite among these largely diversionary arguments is the one about whether the tax increase Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would institute to pay for Medicare for All will hit the middle class or not. Here’s a pro tip: The American healthcare system imposes an enormous tax burden on the middle class today; getting to a system that provides universal healthcare is the point.

As Reinhardt documents, the American system as it exists essentially rations healthcare by income class. This isn’t always easily discernible because the system is “exceedingly complex and almost beyond human comprehension.”

Its fragmentation into untold private and public payers and public and profit-seeking providers makes it impossible even to determine what a specific procedure costs. Reinhardt shows this by referencing a study by the Health Care Pricing Project that found the average hospital list price for a hip replacement — one of several procedures tracked by the study — at $51,458, the average insurance-negotiated price at $24,565, and the price paid by Medicare at $13,419.

Variations like this make a mockery of the conservative mantra that the key to lowering healthcare spending is to give patients more “skin in the game” via higher deductibles and co-pays. The idea that this will prompt patients to shop around for the best deals “has been a cruel hoax,” Reinhardt writes. In truth, they enter the healthcare market “like blindfolded shoppers pushed into a department store … to shop around smartly.”

This “consumer-driven healthcare” idea is just another diversion to keep Americans from seeing the fundamental issues of the system clearly.

The cost of specific procedures may be opaque to the average patient, but there is no question that on average, Americans are vastly overpaying for their services. No country approaches the more than 18% of gross domestic product the U.S. spends on healthcare. Switzerland, which may come closest, spent only 12.3% in 2017. But Americans actually spend less time with physicians and have fewer and shorter stays in the hospital than Europeans; they just spend more per visit.

Reinhardt attributes much of the difference to the insane administrative complexity of the American system, especially in the private sector. The costs are manifest. U.S. physician practices spent an average of more than $80,000 per doctor interacting with health insurers, according to a 2011 study. That was four times the cost incurred by practices in Canada, which has a single-payer system. As Reinhardt reports, the Duke University hospital system, which had 957 beds in 2017, employed 1,600 billing clerks.

That suggests that the vaunted joint venture by Warren Buffett, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon looking for a magic bullet to solve the healthcare conundrum with a technocratic fix may be barking up the wrong tree.

The Affordable Care Act reduced the segmentation of American healthcare by income class by eliminating it from the individual insurance market, as it had been eliminated from the senior healthcare market by Medicare. But the political compromises embedded in the law to get it passed made it only a partial victory.

Through federal subsidies, the ACA protects most of its enrollees, those earning less than 400% of the federal poverty line ($103,000 for a family of four this year), from the impact of rising premiums. But individual buyers earning more than that threshold are fully exposed to rising premiums.

Republicans and other Obamacare critics “have successfully made the plight of this group” — about 10% of the Obamacare exchange customer base — “the focus of their criticism,” Reinhardt observes. “It is why they, and President Trump, argue that Obamacare is imploding.” But that’s simply untrue of the larger market segment receiving subsidies. “That market is not imploding.”

Reinhardt is withering about Republican ventures to erode the Affordable Care Act. The replacement bill passed by the GOP-controlled House under then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2017 plainly “favored the rationing of health care … by income class.”

Although the elimination of the penalty for breaching the ACA’s individual insurance mandate was enacted by the GOP and signed by Trump after Reinhardt’s death, this book makes clear that his opinion would have been equally dismissive, for he argues that one Obamacare “fix” that would have been technically simple albeit “politically difficult” would have been to increase the penalty to ensure that more young and healthier Americans had an incentive to sign up for coverage.

In 2012, Reinhardt proposed a reform to the ACA that, mischievously enough, purported to give conservative critics of the law just what they said they wanted — the “freedom” to choose whether to join the Obamacare pool or scorn it. Aware that the ACA gave the critics an escape valve that allowed them to join the pool if they got sick (though they might have to wait as long as a year until the annual open enrollment window), the catch was that their decision to refuse it would be in effect for the rest of their lives.

Every American would have to decide by the age of 26 whether to accept the ACA’s community-rated premiums — that is, premiums set without regard to their health condition — or “take a chance on being uninsured” or entering a market with premiums based on their illness. If they chose to be rugged individualists, they could never change their minds.

If they did fall ill or get injured, Medicaid would cover them (“rugged individualists live in a society that does not like to see people dying in the street,” he observed) but any expenses they incurred would give the government a claim on their lifelong income and assets until the bill was paid off.

“Libertarians should like this arrangement,” Reinhardt smirked, figuratively. His insight was profound: The prospect of actually being at risk for all your uninsured medical expenses was likely to concentrate their minds and remind them that, when it comes to health coverage, we all really are in the same pool.

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SoftBank Group Corp. is taking control of WeWork, part of a rescue financing plan that will see founder Adam Neumann depart from the company’s board, according to people familiar with the matter.

Neumann is expected to sell about $1 billion of stock to the Japanese investment firm as part of the deal, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the deal hasn’t been announced. He can also assign two board seats and will get a roughly $185-million consulting fee.

WeWork had been considering two separate rescue packages from SoftBank and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to keep it from running out of money as soon as next month.

JPMorgan had been putting together a $5-billion debt package for WeWork, which would have been one of the riskiest junk-debt offerings in recent years.

SoftBank, WeWork and JPMorgan either declined to comment or couldn’t immediately be reached. Dow Jones earlier reported details of the deal.

The bailout underscores the rapid unraveling of the startup. Just this summer, WeWork appeared to be headed toward a rich initial public offering. But public investors spurned the company, which lost $900 million in the first half of this year. As its estimated valuation cratered, WeWork last month ousted Neumann as chief executive officer and, eventually, pulled its IPO paperwork.

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Standing poolside at the home of Zoë and Olivier de Givenchy in Beverly Hills, Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Iger addressed an intimate gathering of Angelenos on Friday about the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, slated to open in 2020.

“When you think about the world today, when you think about the pessimism, the cynicism and the uncertainty … the entertainment business has never been as important as it is today,” said Iger, chair of the Campaign for the Academy Museum, speaking of “the ability to give people a chance to escape, to enlighten them, to make them happy.”

He then added, “There is no better time, not only for the business, but to celebrate the business, which is one of the reasons the museum is being built.”

The event

On the occasion of Renzo Piano’s visit to Los Angeles, Iger invited a select group of Academy Museum enthusiasts to the cocktail party with the Pritzker Prize-winning architect of the 300,000-square-foot showcase for the past, present and future of film.

The scene

Just inside the living room, director and producer Ava DuVernay caught up with the museum’s newly appointed director, Bill Kramer. “I’m wildly excited about the museum,” the Oscar-nominated director stopped to tell us. “I’m excited about there being a permanent home for cinematic expression that is inclusive of all kinds and all cultures of people.”

Outside on the patio, four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe, along with his wife, filmmaker Giada Colagrande, listened to the project update. Acknowledging his interest, he said, “I’ve been following the museum’s progress.”

“We’re finally going to have a place in Los Angeles, in the place where movies are made, where people can actually touch Dorothy’s shoes [from ‘The Wizard of Oz’] and see something from ‘Star Wars,’” said Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nia Vardalos. She then joked that if asked, she’d gladly contribute something from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the original or the sequel, “because I steal something from every movie I write.”

The program

In introducing Iger to guests, Olivier de Givenchy said after moving to Los Angeles five years ago, he was surprised to hear there was no museum of motion pictures. “If you come to Los Angeles from anywhere in the world, you want to see something about this industry that has shaped and continues to shape how we see the world,” he said.

Addressing the group, Iger then said the museum has now raised more than 80% of the $388-million goal, “which is no easy task, but we’re getting there.” He called the former Wilshire Boulevard May Co. space, rechristened the Saban Building, “a work of art.” Of the theater in the adjacent sphere, he said, “I think it is going to blow people away. It is a true work of architecture art, and it will become, I believe, a landmark in the years to come.”

The crowd

The 50 by-invitation guests included Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President David Rubin and the academy’s Chief Executive Dawn Hudson; museum trustees Dominic Ng and Jim Gianopulos; California Film Commission Executive Director Colleen Bell; and filmmakers Bob Simonds, Joshua Grode, Jeremy Zag, Yariv Milchan, Beau Flynn, Mike Medavoy and Miky Lee.

The quotes

“This is completely different from other museums,” said Piano, whose critically acclaimed portfolio includes the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Beyeler Foundation outside Basel in Switzerland, the Menil Collection in Houston and more. “Cinema is changing all the time. Cinema is a young art — so young, it’s only 100 years old. So, we don’t know what can happen in the next 100 years. This is more than a museum. It’s a laboratory.”

Said Rubin, “If the Oscars broadcast represents our one forward-facing, outward-facing time to focus on films, the museum will take care of the other 364 days.”

Iger dismissed any concerns that the museum’s completion had originally been slated for 2019.

“I’m in the business of opening things,” Iger said in a private conversation. “I find that if you delay something to make something better, and it opens and everybody loves it, no one is ever going to remember that it opened late. But if you rush something to market, and it isn’t quite ready, and it disappoints people, that will stick forever.”

“This is my favorite place,” says Daniel DeSure, gesturing to the stretch of Exposition Boulevard in Crenshaw that he’s lived in and worked on for the last 12 years. Behind an olive-and-black graphic facade, the 42-year-old creative director and entrepreneur runs Commonwealth Projects, a creative agency called on by the likes of Nike, Saint Laurent, MoCA and USC to develop genre-bending installations, design books and re-imagine entire brands.

More recently this spot has also become host to a skate shop and store for DeSure’s 5-year-old side project, the zine-turned-clothing-line Total Luxury Spa that is on the cusp of becoming streetwear’s newest household name.

After years of executing visions for others, DeSure and his partner, Hassan Rahim, launched Total Luxury Spa in 2014 as a means of more direct creative output. “There just felt like a little bit of a disconnect. Why can’t the work that I’m doing during the day speak one-on-one to what I care about?” DeSure remembered thinking. The name “Spa” was chosen to conjure visions of replenishment. “I always think of books and culture and things that we’re working on as the things that I feel filled by,” DeSure said.

The two started by creating zines for local artists who were outside the purview of gallery and museum representation. Those zines made for cheap and easy distribution — but T-shirts, they found, were even better forms of communication. “They’re a quick way to get a design out in the world and onto people who move around the world,” DeSure said.

Against black, white and tie-dye fabrics, Spa T-shirts advertise fake shows for artists including jazz musician Sun Ra and the cellist and singer-songwriter Kelsey Lu. Others feature the phrase “Crenshaw Wellness,” an umbrella term for the earnest messages of Afrofuturism, meditation and mindfulness delivered in ironic clip art fonts. “Healing plants for hurt landscapes,” reads one T-shirt. “Your worries washed away,” reads another.

DeSure and Rahim utilized Spa as a means of rejuvenating their neighborhood. The clothes are made in L.A. and designed, modeled and photographed by members of the Crenshaw community. And, to reverse the sins of capitalism, Spa gives more than it takes, infusing the neighborhood with resources, guidance, opportunity and careers. “I always think about culture as this thing that a lot of times is taken from, meaning people take the aesthetic of other people, but it’s all about how you ante into a system,” DeSure said. “There’s a way to give back to a system to actually make it better.”

He added: “When we make a Crenshaw Wellness shirt, we mean it. Wellness should be here. How do we make it here?”

Using funds from Commonwealth Projects, he opened his studio to the neighborhood for free weekly meditation classes, which are now held every Monday at the Underground Museum. He helped kick off a children’s meditation program at Hillcrest Elementary School and hopes to open another this year. In search of additional ways to be helpful, he looked to the skate park across the street for guidance: “Everyone takes care of each other there. [Kids are] being taken care of by their peers. I’ve always respected that.”

DeSure asked some of the young local skaters to share their opinions. “We would sit down and talk and just kind of chop it up,” he remembered. Conversations would cover their personal, professional and entrepreneurial aspirations, and always pose the question: What does the neighborhood need?

The first conclusion: “It’s not the easiest place to find healthy, inexpensive food.” Spa responded in a shirt dedicated to the local vegan restaurant Mr. Wisdom, which was closing. The T-shirt featured the owner’s face and borrowed language from a sign hand-painted in the restaurant: “You are entering the spiritual zone. Please turn off all radios and negative thoughts.” The shirt was bought by skaters around the globe, Vogue editors, the Kardashian coterie. Whether or not they understood what the shirt represented, 50% of the profits went to the restaurateur.

The kids, now 20-somethings, developed their own response: a streetwear, skate and juice brand called Tropics. Named for the once-tree-covered neighborhood dividing Baldwin Hills from Crenshaw, the juice company enables the young men to not only nourish their community, but also to learn and teach one another how to build a brand and run a business.

Since launching in 2015 with the help of DeSure’s mentorship, funding and office space, Tropics has partnered with Sambazon, staged pop-ups at the Felix Art Fair and the Santa Monica Airport Barker Hangar, and held public conversations with Alice Waters and the late Jonathan Gold about food inequality.

They design their own skate decks and T-shirts featuring their company’s name written in a font made out of pieces of fruit hand-drawn by Tropics co-founder Preston Summers. Next, they hope to open a permanent juice shop on Jefferson and are in talks to bring a farmers’ market to the neighborhood by the end of the year.

DeSure is creating strategies to address gentrification, economic inequality, and headline anxiety. Perhaps a T-shirt could change them. Streetwear’s power has always laid with its community, but, to date, no streetwear brand has empowered its community so directly.

“It’s our way of trying to create more balance and fairness,” DeSure said. It’s enough that Spa shirts look good and have been worn by style-setters, but, said DeSure, “our approach gets people to engage with bigger issues that we’re all reading about every day in the paper. The bigger we can make that push, the more effect it will have.”

ANCHORAGE — 

The digital memory card in a torture killing in Alaska’s biggest city ended up leading police right to a suspect, first when the killer lost the memory card labeled “Homicide at midtown Marriott” that contained video of the dying woman.

Then came an even more innocuous blunder: The killer spoke on the tape in a distinctive, very un-Alaskan accent.

When a woman found the memory card on the street and turned it over to police, what detectives saw was horrific. At one point, the killer complained to the victim, whose face was swollen and bloodied: “My hand’s getting tired.” Then he stomped on her throat with his right foot.

Amid the footage, a clue: The man spoke in an “English sounding accent,” and detectives recalled Brian Steven Smith, a 48-year-old South African, from another investigation, the details of which they have not disclosed.

They arrested Smith, who has pleaded not guilty in the September killing of 30-year-old Kathleen Henry, an Alaska Native woman. During his interrogation, police say, he confessed to shooting another Alaska Native woman. Police won’t say whether there may be other victims.

Anchorage has a diverse population — more than 200 languages are spoken in the school system — and it’s not uncommon to hear Russian, Yupik or Hmong accents.

But South African accents aren’t common, certainly not after the summer tourist season. Just a fraction of the city’s foreign-born population comes from Africa, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Authorities identified the second victim as Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February. The family last saw her in July 2018, police said.

Smith told police where he left Abouchuk’s body. It was in an area near where state troopers recovered a skull with a bullet wound earlier this year.

He pleaded not guilty to a second set of charges in court Monday, and bail was set at $2 million.

Several family members of the slain woman were sobbing and had to leave the courtroom when Smith was brought in.

After the hearing, Abouchuk’s niece, Tatauq Ruma, said she has questions for Smith.

“Why did he do it?” she said.

Her “Auntie Veronica,” a Yupik, grew up in the small community of Saint Michael, on the state’s western Bering Sea coast. She eventually moved to Anchorage, where she taught her niece how to make breaded chicken by using crumbled cornflakes.

Veronica Abouchuk had four children before she became homeless, a lifestyle she embraced.

The last time they spoke, Abouchuk told her niece she liked being homeless.

“She didn’t say why. She was just happy that she was homeless and that she was OK with that,” Ruma said.

She was full of life, Ruma said. “She’s just a very sweet lady. She loved her kids. She loved everyone. I really miss her.”

After the women were killed, their bodies were dumped along roads outside of Anchorage “like unwanted trash,” the state says in a memorandum seeking $2-million bail on the more than a dozen counts Smith faces, including first-degree murder, second-degree murder and evidence tampering. If convicted and found to have committed substantial torture in the Henry case, he will be sentenced to a mandatory 99 years. Alaska doesn’t have the death penalty.

“These were two Alaska Native women,” Anchorage Deputy District Attorney Brittany Dunlop told a recent news conference. “And I know that hits home here in Alaska, and we’re cognizant of that. We treat them with dignity and respect.”

Joanne Sakar and Natasha Gamache held a silent protest to highlight what Gamache called Alaska’s history of not properly investigating, prosecuting or sentencing perpetrators of crimes against Alaska Native woman.

They had red hands painted on their faces, to represent the silencing of indigenous women.

“There’s a movement called Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women that seeks to highlight the level of violence that’s perpetrated against indigenous women and how nationally our criminal justice system isn’t taking it seriously. So I’m here today to showcase that,” Gamache said.

Police have released little information beyond what is in court documents. Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll said there’s no evidence of a public safety threat.

In seeking the high bail, prosecutors cited Smith’s ties to South Africa.

“He poses a significant public safety risk, especially to the vulnerable, homeless women currently living on the streets of Anchorage,” a bail memo said.

Authorities said Smith came to Alaska about five years ago and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September.

Five years ago, he married Stephanie Bissland of Anchorage. She was visiting family members in Virginia when Anchorage detectives approached her and told her of her husband’s arrest in the first homicide.

She told Anchorage television station KTUU that last month, Smith reported his vehicle had been vandalized and that his wallet, documents and a briefcase with phones and other electronics had been taken. She said it wasn’t unusual for Smith to have memory cards lying around from cameras and other gear he would work on and sell but said she never saw any of them labeled.

She didn’t return messages from the Associated Press seeking comment.

Smith’s attorney, Dan Lowery, an assistant public defender, said he does not comment on pending cases.

KABUL, Afghanistan — 

The Taliban stormed a checkpoint in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 15 policemen in the latest attack by insurgents, an Afghan provincial official said Tuesday.

The multipronged attack on the checkpoint in the Ali Abad district of northern Kunduz province began late Monday night and set off an hours-long gun battle, according to Ghulam Rabani Rabani, a provincial council member. Along with the 15 policemen killed, two other officers were wounded, he said.

The attack came as Afghan troops have been battling the Taliban for the last few weeks in Kunduz’s Dashti Archi and Imam Sahib districts, Rabani added. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the checkpoint attack.

The Taliban have a strong presence in Kunduz and are in control in several of the province’s districts.

The provincial capital, the city of Kunduz, briefly fell to the Taliban in 2015, before the insurgents withdrew in the face of a NATO-backed Afghan offensive. The city is a strategic crossroads with easy access to much of northern Afghanistan as well as the country’s capital, Kabul, about 200 miles away.

The Taliban pushed back into the city center again a year later, briefly raising their flag before gradually being driven out again. In August, the insurgents launched another attempt to overrun the city but were repelled.

The Taliban now control nearly half of Afghanistan and have been relentless in their near-daily attacks targeting Afghan security forces, attacks that inflict heavy casualties. The fighting has also killed scores of civilians.

President Trump, since his 2016 presidential campaign, has spoken of a need to withdraw U.S. troops from the “endless war” in Afghanistan. He has complained that the U.S. has been serving as policemen in Afghanistan and says that’s not the American military’s job.

The U.S. has about 14,000 American troops in Afghanistan as part of the American-led coalition. U.S. forces are training and advising Afghan forces and conducting counter-terrorism operations against extremists.

Trump had ordered a troop withdrawal in conjunction with the peace talks that would have left about 8,600 American forces in the country.

Last month, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had a preliminary peace deal with the Taliban, but a surge in Taliban violence and the death of an American soldier prompted Trump to cancel a secret Camp David meeting where the peace deal would have been finalized, and to declare the tentative agreement dead.

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LONDON — 

British lawmakers from across the political spectrum are expected to challenge Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s drive to push his European Union divorce bill through the House of Commons in three days, potentially scuttling plans to deliver Brexit by Oct. 31.

The bill faces two votes Tuesday, with lawmakers first being asked to approve it in principle, followed by a vote on the government’s schedule for debate and possible amendments.

“If this House backs this legislation, if we ratify this new deal … we can get Brexit done and move our country on,” Johnson said as he opened debate in the House of Commons.

“We can turn the page and allow this Parliament and this country to begin to heal and unite.”

While many analysts expect the bill to be approved, lawmakers may reject the three-day timetable because of concerns it doesn’t provide enough time for scrutiny.

“Unless you are prepared to contemplate more expansive debate, there is not the slightest possibility of considering the deal that has been obtained within the time available,” Ken Clarke, a senior lawmaker recently ousted from Johnson’s Conservative Party, told the Guardian newspaper.

The showdown comes just nine days before Britain’s scheduled departure date. Johnson’s government had sought a “straight up-and-down vote” Monday on the agreement he struck last week with the 27 other EU nations laying out the terms of Britain’s exit.

But the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, refused to allow it because lawmakers voted to delay approving the Brexit deal on Saturday, and parliamentary rules bar the same measure from being considered a second time during a session of Parliament unless something has changed.

Bercow’s ruling plunged the tortuous Brexit process back into grimly familiar territory. The government must now try to implement its Plan B — attempt to pass a Brexit-implementing bill through Britain’s fractious Parliament before the country’s scheduled Oct. 31 departure date.

Opposition lawmakers plan to seek amendments that could substantially alter the bill, for example by adding a requirement that the Brexit deal be put to voters in a new referendum. The government says such an amendment would wreck its legislation and it will withdraw the bill if the opposition plan succeeds.

European Council President Donald Tusk said EU leaders “will decide in coming days” whether to grant Britain another extension to the deadline for leaving the bloc, but said their decision depends on developments in London.

Tusk said Tuesday that the decision on prolonging Brexit for three months after Oct. 31. “will very much depend on what the British Parliament decides or doesn’t decide.”

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