World News
Monterey Park teen missing after taking her bike to visit a relative
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Police are searching for a 15-year-old Monterey Park girl who disappeared Tuesday after leaving home on her bicycle.
Alison Jillian Chao left her residence in the 200 block of North Ynez Avenue in Monterey Park around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to visit a relative’s house in the nearby city of San Gabriel, but never arrived, according to the Monterey Park Police Department. A search was initiated within hours, police said.
Signs affixed to street lights and utility poles in her neighborhood and in nearby Alhambra say Alison was wearing a blue T-shirt and black shorts and carrying a black backpack when she departed on a blue mountain bike. The posters include an image of Alison peddling away from home with her hair in a ponytail.
Police described the teen as Asian with black hair and brown eyes. She is about 5 feet 2 and weighs around 96 pounds.
According to a website dedicated to finding her, the last confirmed sighting of Alison was on Main Street in Alhambra soon after she left home Tuesday.
“The more time that goes on, the scarier it gets,” the teen’s mother, Annie Chao, told KTLA on Friday. “I haven’t slept in days, and it’s just every parent’s worst nightmare.”
Those with information should call the Monterey Park Police Department at 626-573-1311.
Times staff writer Karen Kaplan contributed to this report.
World News
Moral imperative to stop small boat gangs, says Yvette Cooper
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There is a “moral imperative” to stop the gangs helping people get to the UK in small boats, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said ahead of a meeting with ministers, intelligence agencies and law enforcement bodies.
The summit takes place three days after 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman, died trying to make the dangerous journey across the English Channel.
The disaster is the deadliest loss of life in the waterway this year.
Earlier this week, Conservative shadow home secretary James Cleverly said it was “not enough to talk about ‘smashing the gangs’ when the real-life consequences are so serious”.
Ms Cooper said people had been “packed into an unsafe boat which literally collapsed in the water” adding: “We will not rest until these networks have been dismantled and brought to justice.”
This year so far, more than 21,000 people have made the crossing – slightly higher than at the same time last year but 20% lower than in 2022.
Having scrapped the previous Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, aimed at curbing the number of crossings, Labour will come under pressure to demonstrate that its own approach is working.
The government has pledged to focus on stopping smuggling gangs.
Mr Cleverly said Labour should re-establish the Rwanda policy “to stop vulnerable people being exploited and secure our border”.
Friday’s meeting to discuss small boat crossings will be attended by Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Attorney General Lord Hermer and representatives from the National Crime Agency (NCA), Border Forces and Crown Prosecution Service.
Graeme Biggar, head of the NCA, is expected to tell the attendees that in recent weeks, co-operation with Bulgaria has led to more than 40 small boats and engines being seized, which could have been used to transport 2,400 people across the Channel.
The NCA says more than 410 small boats and engines have been seized since last spring.
Mr Biggar will also set out the details of 70 other ongoing investigations including raids of warehouses in Libya, where migrants were being held.
The summit will look at analysis of the operational capabilities of the criminal smuggling gangs.
The Home Office had promised a “rapid” recruitment of a border security command chief to target the gangs, however no appointment has yet been announced. Downing Street says it will be confirmed “in the next few weeks”.
Ms Cooper said the last two months had seen “encouraging progress, with significant seizures of boats and equipment in Europe”.
“But there is work to do,” she added, “and the Border Security Command will bring all the relevant bodies together to investigate, arrest and prosecute these networks, as well as deepen our ties with key international partners.
“At the same time, we are swiftly removing those with no right to be in the UK, which will ensure we have a fair, firm and functioning asylum system where the rules are respected and enforced.”
![Graph showing numbers of people crossing the English Channel in boats](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/0c1f/live/e8d6a2f0-6bc3-11ef-b970-9f202720b57a.png.webp)
The Home Office says a “reset in the relationship with Europe” has led to a 50% increase in the number of NCA officers based with Europol and that officers are being sent to Romania and those South East Asian countries where gangs advertise Channel crossings.
The department argues that this week’s deaths in the Channel demonstrate the “increasingly extreme measures the gangs are willing to contemplate as more people are crammed into less seaworthy vessels”.
“Intelligence reveals smugglers have also increased the price they charge for migrants to cross the Channel, including charging for children to get into boats, as the business model comes under pressure from UK and partner law enforcement.”
Steve Smith, head of Care4Calais, has argued that the “only way to stop the crossings is to create safe routes for people to claim asylum in the UK”.
“That’s what the new government should be focusing on,” the refugee charity head said.
Christa Rottensteiner, the UN’s migration agency chief, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the provision of more safe and legal routes would take away the demand for smugglers.
“Good international cooperation is also at the heart of it – so tackling smuggling along the whole migration route,” she said.
But the former head of the UK border force, Tony Smith, told the programme he hoped the government would reconsider scrapping the Rwanda scheme – the former Conservative government’s plan to send some asylum seekers to the east African country – to act as a deterrent to crossing the Channel.
“We have to make it clear to migrants in France who are already in a safe country that actually it won’t work – getting in a small boat, you won’t get to stay in the UK and that you’re likely to be relocated elsewhere,” he said.
World News
Trump returning to California for big-dollar fundraisers next week
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Former President Trump is scheduled to return to California next week for a pair of high-dollar fundraisers, one notably hosted by relatives of the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to invitations obtained by The Times.
On Sept. 13, donors are being asked to pony up as much as $500,000 per couple for an afternoon fundraiser in Woodside hosted by Tom and Stacey Siebel. Tom Siebel, a billionaire software developer and businessman who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign, is a second cousin once removed of Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the Democratic governor’s wife.
Newsom’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Siebel Newsom’s family has a well-reported history of Republican activism, including by her father, Ken Siebel. But after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose presidential bid Ken Siebel supported financially, misstated the motivation for Siebel and his wife moving to Florida during a debate with the governor, the first partner’s father described DeSantis as a “lying slimeball,” according to the Daily Mail.
Trump will also headline an evening fundraiser in Los Angeles on Sept. 12, with top tickets going for $250,000 per person. The location and hosts have not been revealed.
The gatherings take place at a critical moment in the campaign, in the window between the first debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, on Tuesday, and Sept. 18, when Trump is scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that could have affected his 2016 bid.
Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Ohio‘s Sen. JD Vance, will raise money in Los Angeles on Sunday, as Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff did on Thursday. Several Italian Americans, including Hollywood stars, will host a virtual dinner fundraiser for Harris on Sunday. Among the participants of “Paisans for Kamala” are actors Steve Buscemi, Alyssa Milano, Lorraine Bracco, Marisa Tomei and John Turturro, as well as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The amount of attention being showered on Californians in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign is due to its outsized role in fueling campaigns of both parties. Despite the state’s cobalt-blue tilt, it is home to an enormous number of Republican as well as Democratic donors and is typically among the largest sources of donations to candidates of both parties.
As of Aug. 8, Harris had raised $65.5 million for her presidential campaign from Californians, more than any other state’s residents had donated, according to Federal Election Commission fundraising disclosures of donors who contributed more than $200 to a candidate committee.
Trump had raised $24.8 million from California donors, the second-most from any state. (These figures reflect donations to the candidates’ committees, not to outside groups or independent expenditure committees.)
World News
JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security
PHOENIX (AP) — Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Thursday that he lamented that school shootings are a “fact of life” and argued the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia.
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”
The Ohio senator was asked by a journalist what can be done to stop school shootings. He said further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, won’t end them, noting they happen in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He touted efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”
Vance said he doesn’t like the idea of his own kids going to a school with hardened security, “but that’s increasingly the reality that we live in.”
He called the shooting in Georgia an “awful tragedy,” and said the families in Winder, Georgia, need prayers and sympathy.
Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, toured the bloodstained Florida classroom building where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre happened. She then announced a program to assist states that have laws allowing police to temporarily seize guns from people judges have found to be dangerous.
Harris, who leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, has supported both stronger gun controls, such as banning sales of AR-15 and similar rifles, and better school security, like making sure classroom doors don’t lock from the outside as they did in Parkland.
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