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He lost his first LA Marathon medal in the fires — this weekend he got his second

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He lost his first LA Marathon medal in the fires — this weekend he got his second

Abel Rivera wears his medals after finishing the LA Marathon on Sunday in Century City.

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Elise Hu

FIRE SURVIVOR COMPETES IN L.A. MARATHON

Burn zones from the most catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles history have yet to be fully cleaned up, and thousands of Angelenos remain displaced. But on Sunday, people turned out in droves along the 26.2 mile route of the Los Angeles Marathon, to cheer on more than 21,000 runners who took part. It marked a reaffirmation of vitality in a community that endured disaster just a few months ago.

Among those who finished the race was 15-year-old fire evacuee Abel Rivera, whose home in Altadena burned down in January. Rivera is on his high school running team, and competed in the LA Marathon for the first time last year. For both Rivera and the Los Angeles community, the event was a show of resilience in the aftermath of tragedy.

‘Fifteen years of my life is basically gone’

Rivera lost almost everything when the Eaton fire leveled his home on January 7th.

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“I lost a house and not really the way I wanted to. I didn’t want to leave it behind that way,” Rivera tells NPR.

NPR listeners may remember Rivera from a piece on the radio in mid-January, just days after the fires tore through LA.

“Fifteen years of my life is basically gone,” he said at the time. “Everything that I’ve accomplished, every single medal I have, every single collection – everything I had is gone.”

Abel Rivera and his mother, Lupe Melchor, pin on their race bibs at Dodger Stadium, the starting point of the 26.2 mile LA Marathon.

Abel Rivera and his mother, Lupe Melchor, pin on their race bibs at Dodger Stadium, the starting point of the 26.2 mile LA Marathon.

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Everything, including his prized medal for finishing last year’s marathon, and his running shoes. When listeners learned this detail, some reached out to offer him their own 2024 medals. The McCourt Foundation, which puts on the marathon, provided a replacement upon learning of Rivera’s story.

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In the aftermath of the tragedy, Rivera relied on running as a way to keep calm and centered. Except for a month-long pause due to concerns about air quality, he and more than a dozen other teammates from Pasadena’s Blair High School continued training and participating in shorter road races to prepare for Sunday’s big event.

Rivera expected the run – starting from LA’s Dodger Stadium, and winding through downtown, past City Hall, Hollywood landmarks, and down Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive – to be painful.

“I think for the first 10 miles, I’ll probably be alright, then mile 11-12 I’ll probably be struggling. I’d say 20-24 I’ll probably be hurting a lot,” Rivera said shortly before the race.

But unlike the emotional pain he’s endured as a result of the fires – this is a kind of pain he gets to choose.

‘Doing it for our city’

Rivera isn’t the only student from his running team who was personally affected by the blazes earlier this year. Two other students from Blair High School running club also lost their homes, according to their teacher and coach Eric Glenn, and half the team had to be evacuated from their homes for weeks. Their school district, Pasadena Unified, closed its campuses – also for weeks – since several schools in the district burned.

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Participants prepare for the start of the Los Angeles Marathon Sunday, in Los Angeles.

Participants prepare for the start of the Los Angeles Marathon Sunday, in Los Angeles.

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Glenn said it was rewarding to hit the streets of Los Angeles as a team: “It just feels like we’re doing it for our city, you know?”

Rivera and his teammates started the marathon just past seven in the morning. He ran side-by-side with his mother, Lupe Melchor, for the first half. And in the early afternoon on Sunday, after about six hours of running, Rivera crossed the finish line to earn his second LA Marathon finisher medal in a row.

“It feels like a milestone,” he said at the finish line. “And running the marathon is nostalgic. It reminds me of times before I had the fire.”

His mom finished about 50 minutes later.

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“We didn’t finish together, but we did it,” she said, after giving her son a hug and walking through the finisher’s area arm-in-arm with him.

Marathon runners wind down Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday, in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, a popular tourist landmark and the site of many film premieres.

Marathon runners wind down Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday, in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a popular tourist landmark and the site of many film premieres.

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Every runner on Blair High School’s marathon team finished, including Coach Glenn. In all, about 3,000 Los Angeles area middle and high school students ran the LA Marathon, as part of a non-profit program called Students Run LA.

“They just did a hard thing while going through a hard thing. And it’s really a testament to their resilience and it’s super inspirational,” Glenn said.

Cleanup and rebuilding is only getting started in Los Angeles. Rivera and his family are still without a permanent home. But they aren’t without hope.

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“I feel really good about myself, that no matter what, I can always push through,” Rivera said.

It’s a reminder of resilience, and the capacity to keep going, even when it really hurts.

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.

One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.

The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said.

All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.

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Several “partnering law enforcement agencies assigned to the Reflecting Pool” working with US Park Police were involved in detaining the two men and one woman — including officers from Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and California.

One of the officers said in court documents that Thiers “admitted to removing a piece of blue sealant from the Reflecting Pool and still had it in his hand when I made contact with him.”

The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.

Lawyers for Thiers and Dennison-Gibby declined to comment. CNN has reached out to Carreno’s attorney.

If found guilty of destruction of property, the defendants could be fined up to $1,000 and face a maximum of 180 days behind bars.

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The New York Times first reported that three additional people had been charged with damaging the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals caused major damage to the pool by gashing the lining after his administration spent more than $14 million on renovations, though he has not provided evidence to support that claim. The officers who charged Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby did not accuse them of gashing the lining.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, DC, last week for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn — unlike Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby – was charged with destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000 which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Crews began draining the Reflecting Pool over the weekend to make repairs, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for the second time in three months.

The move comes after weeks of problems – algae blooms, green-hued water, a chipping bottom and the administration’s allegations of vandalism – that have plagued the iconic landmark, making its woes the subject of national interest.

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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