Category: Business Wires

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — People in Iran’s capital shouted from their homes and raIran’s government cut off the country from the internet and international telephone calls Thursday night as a nighttime demonstration called by the country’s exiled crown prince drew a mass of protesters to shout from their windows and storm the streets.

The protest represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father fled Iran just before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Demonstrations have included cries in support of the shah, something that could bring a death sentence in the past but now underlines the anger fueling the protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy.

The demonstrations that have popped up in cities and rural towns across Iran continued Thursday. More markets and bazaars shut down in support of the protesters. So far, violence around the demonstrations has killed at least 42 people while more than 2,270 others have been detained, said the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected. Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.

Meanwhile, the protests themselves have remained broadly leaderless. It remains unclear how Pahlavi’s call will affect the demonstrations moving forward.

“The lack of a viable alternative has undermined past protests in Iran,” wrote Nate Swanson of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, who studies Iran.

“There may be a thousand Iranian dissident activists who, given a chance, could emerge as respected statesmen, as labor leader Lech Wałęsa did in Poland at the end of the Cold War. But so far, the Iranian security apparatus has arrested, persecuted and exiled all of the country’s potential transformational leaders.”

Thursday’s demonstration rallies at home and in street

Pahlavi had called for demonstrations at 8 p.m. local (1630 GMT) on Thursday and Friday. When the clock struck, neighborhoods across Tehran erupted in chanting, witnesses said. The chants included “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Others praised the shah, shouting: “This is the last battle! Pahlavi will return!” Thousands could be seen on the streets before all communication to Iran cut out.

“Iranians demanded their freedom tonight. In response, the regime in Iran has cut all lines of communication,” Pahlavi said. “It has shut down the Internet. It has cut landlines. It may even attempt to jam satellite signals.”

He went on to call for European leaders to join U.S. President Donald Trump in promising to “hold the regime to account.”

“I call on them to use all technical, financial, and diplomatic resources available to restore communication to the Iranian people so that their voice and their will can be heard and seen,” he added. ”Do not let the voices of my courageous compatriots be silenced.”

Pahlavi had said he would offer further plans depending on the response to his call. His support of and from Israel has drawn criticism in the past — particularly after the 12-day war Israel waged on Iran in June. Demonstrators have shouted in support of the shah in some demonstrations, but it isn’t clear whether that’s support for Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iranian officials appeared to be taking the planned protests seriously. The hard-line Kayhan newspaper published a video online claiming security forces would use drones to identify those taking part.

Iranian officials have not acknowledged the scale of the overall protests, which raged across many locations Thursday even before the 8 p.m. demonstration. However, there has been reporting regarding security officials being hurt or killed.

The judiciary’s Mizan news agency report a police colonel suffered fatal stab wounds in a town outside of Tehran, while the semiofficial Fars news agency said gunmen killed two security force members and wounded 30 others in a shooting in the city of Lordegan in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province.

A deputy governor in Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province told Iranian state television that an attack at a police station killed five people Wednesday night in Chenaran, some 700 kilometers (430 miles) northeast of Tehran. Late Thursday, the Revolutionary Guard said two members of its forces were killed in Kermanshah.

Iran weighs Trump threat

Iran has faced rounds of nationwide protests in recent years. As sanctions tightened and Iran struggled after the 12-day war, its rial currency collapsed in December, reaching 1.4 million to $1. Protests began soon after, with demonstrators chanting against Iran’s theocracy.

It remains unclear why Iranian officials have yet to crack down harder on the demonstrators. Trump warned last week that if Tehran “violently kills peaceful protesters,” America “will come to their rescue.”

Speaking to talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Trump reiterated his pledge.

Iran has “been told very strongly, even more strongly than I’m speaking to you right now, that if they do that, they’re going to have to pay hell,” Trump said.

Trump demurred when asked if he’d meet with Pahlavi.

“I’m not sure that it would be appropriate at this point to do that as president,” Trump said. “I think that we should let everybody go out there, and we see who emerges.”

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi remains imprisoned by authorities after her arrest in December.

“Since Dec. 28, 2025, the people of Iran have taken to the streets, just as they did in 2009, 2019,” her son Ali Rahmani said. “Each time, the same demands came up: an end to the Islamic Republic, an end to this patriarchal, dictatorial and religious regime, the end of the clerics, the end of the mullahs’ regime.”

NEW YORK — New York City parents would have access to free childcare for their 2-year-olds under a plan unveiled Thursday by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the first step for the mayor in delivering on a signature campaign promise.

The two Democrats announced the proposal at a celebratory event in Brooklyn a week after Mamdani was sworn in — marking an early political victory for Mamdani, who has faced questions over whether he will have the state support needed to enact his ambitious affordability-focused agenda.

“To those who think that the promises of a campaign cannot survive once confronted with the realities of government, today is your answer,” he said.

Hochul, a moderate who is up for reelection this year, has been aligned with the city’s new progressive mayor on his free childcare plan, though questions remain on precisely how the program will take shape and what it might cost over the long term.

The proposed program will begin slowly, focusing first on “high-need areas” selected by the city, then expanding gradually over years until it becomes available across the city. The mayor expects it to cover around 2,000 children this fall, though he said it was not yet clear where the first seats would open up.

The governor said she is committing to funding the first two years of the city’s free childcare program for 2-year-olds, describing it as an expansion of the city’s existing pre-K and 3-K programs.

She said the initial round of funding would come from the state’s existing revenues, rather than having to raise taxes, a step the governor has opposed. Still, Hochul said it was difficult to forecast costs in future years when the program would be more widely available.

Additionally, Hochul rolled out a sweeping, longer-term proposal to expand access to universal pre-K statewide, with the goal of having the program available throughout New York by the start of the 2028-2029 school year.

The governor said she anticipates investing $1.7 billion in the near term for the programs she announced Thursday, bringing her proposed childcare and pre-K spending to $4.5 billion for the coming fiscal year.

She will include the plans in her annual state of the state address next week and in her executive budget proposal, which will be subject to debate and negotiations with the state’s legislative leaders over the next few months.

While Hochul has supported the mayor’s childcare plan, she hasn’t publicly backed his entire agenda. After the event, as Hochul and Mamdani spoke to reporters about the proposal, the governor sidestepped a question about Mamdani’s proposal to eliminate fares for city buses, saying “Well, we’re focused on this today.”

Rebecca Bailin, executive director for the advocacy group New Yorkers United for childcare, called the announcement a “historic moment,” adding: “By bringing together the Governor and Mayor around a shared commitment to childcare, tens of thousands of families could finally get the relief they desperately need.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. population is projected to grow by 15 million in 30 years, a smaller estimate than in previous years, due to President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies and an expected lower fertility rate, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The nonpartisan budget office projected that the U.S. population will grow from 349 million people this year to 364 million people in 30 years, a 2.2% smaller gain than it had predicted in 2025. In September, the office issued a revised demographics report that showed Trump’s plans for mass deportations and other strict immigration measures would result in roughly 320,000 people removed from the United States over the next 10 years.

The country’s total population is projected to stop growing in 2056 and remain roughly the same size as in the previous year, the CBO said. But without immigration, the population would begin to shrink in 2030 as deaths start to exceed births, making immigrants an increasingly important source of population growth, according to the report.

Even if the limits on immigration and increased deportations end with the Trump administration in three years, “it’s still a demographic shock,” said William Frey, a demographer at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Social Security and Medicare, which are already buckling under an aging population, will be under increasing pressure with even fewer than expected people in the labor force paying taxes. By the end of the decade, all of the nation’s baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, will be over age 65.

With fewer immigrants in the labor force and projections for U.S. fertility rates showing a long-term decline below replacement levels, “that reduces the number of kids who are going to be born in that four-year period” of the second Trump administration, Frey said.

The latest numbers come as Trump has pushed for the largest mass deportation campaign in history. The CBO’s numbers account for the success of those efforts in the first year of his second term in office.

The administration has used a variety of methods to remove people from the country, including through a visa ban on applications for immigrants from some countries and deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in U.S. cities to track down immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Trump’s tax and spending law, passed by Congress and signed in July, included roughly $150 billion to ramp up his deportation agenda over the next four years. This includes money for extending the U.S.-Mexico border wall, building detention centers and adding thousands of law enforcement staff.

When it comes to estimating the nation’s population and future growth, immigration is always the wild card because it varies much more year to year than the number of births and deaths. Immigration has fueled U.S. population growth this decade because of an aging population and fertility lower than the replacement rate. For a generation to replace itself in the absence of immigration, the fertility rate needs to be 2.1 births per woman. But it was expected to be 1.58 in 2026 and is projected to drop to 1.53 in 2036 where it will remain over the next two decades.

The U.S. Census Bureau said that immigration increased by 2.8 million people in 2024 over the previous year.

Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, though, demographers and economists have struggled to decipher the impact of his policies on immigrant growth in the United States.

The bureau’s population estimates for last year have not been released yet, but the Current Population Survey estimated that the number of adult immigrants fell by 1.8 million people from January to November 2025. But those numbers have come under scrutiny, with some experts claiming they may reflect a decline in participation by immigrants in the survey rather than a dramatic drop in immigrant numbers.

Last September, the CBO reduced its immigration estimate for 2025 by 1.6 million people, and it said Wednesday that the U.S. added 410,000 immigrants last year. Immigration is projected to gradually increase through 2030, and then grow more slowly through 2036 because of fewer international students and temporary workers, before jumping up to an average of 1.2 million people a year from 2037 to 2056, the CBO said.

“These immigrants bring both themselves and the potential for children in the near term,” Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email. “They contribute both to the labor force through their arrival but also to the potential future growth of the US population through their potential to have children in the near term.”

LOS ANGELES — On the first anniversary of the most destructive wildfires in the LA area, the scant home construction projects stand out among the still mostly flattened landscapes.

Fewer than a dozen homes have been rebuilt in Los Angeles County since the Jan. 7, 2025, Palisades and Eaton fires erupted, killing 31 people and destroying about 13,000 homes and other residential properties. The fires burned for more than three weeks and clean-up efforts took about seven months.

For those who had insurance, it’s often not enough to cover the costs of construction. Relief organizations are stepping in to help, but progress is slow.

Among the exceptions is Ted Koerner, whose Altadena home was reduced to ash and two chimneys. With his insurance payout tied up, the 67-year-old liquidated about 80% of his retirement holdings, secured contractors quickly, and moved decisively through the rebuilding process.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Koerner was among the first to finish a rebuild in the aftermath of the fires, which were fueled by drought and hurricane-force winds.

But most do not have options like Koerner.

The streets of the coastal community of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, a community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, remain lined with dirt lots. In the seaside city of Malibu, foundations and concrete piles rising out of the sand are all that’s left of beachfront homes that once butted against crashing ocean waves.

Neighborhoods are pitch black at night, with few streetlamps replaced. Even many homes that survived are not inhabited as families struggle to clear them of the fire’s toxic contaminants.

Koerner was driven in part by fear that his beloved golden retriever, Daisy Mae, now 13 years old, might not live long enough to move into a new home, given the many months it can take to build even under the best circumstances.

He also did not have to wait for his insurance payout to start construction.

“That’s the only way we were going to get it done before all of a sudden my dog starts having labored breathing or something else happens,” Koerner said.

Once construction began, his home was completed in just over four months.

Daisy Mae is back lying in her favorite spot in the yard under a 175-year-old Heritage Oak. Koerner said he enjoys his morning coffee while watching her and it brings tears to his eyes.

“We made it,” he said.

Many fear they can’t afford to rebuild

About 900 homes are under construction, potentially on pace to be completed later this year.

Still, many homeowners are stuck as they figure out whether they can pay for the rebuilding process.

Scores of residents have left their communities for good. More than 600 properties where a single-family home was destroyed in the wildfires have been sold, according to real estate data tracker Cotality.

“We’re seeing huge gaps between the money insurance is paying out, to the extent we have insurance, and what it will actually cost to rebuild and/or remediate our homes,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, a group of 10,000 fire survivors mostly from Altadena.

By December, less than 20% of people who experienced total home loss had closed out their insurance claims, according to a survey by the Department of Angels, a nonprofit that formed after the disaster to advocate for recovery efforts.

About one-third of insured respondents had policies with State Farm, the state’s largest private insurer, or the California FAIR plan, the insurer of last resort. They reported high rates of dissatisfaction with both, citing burdensome requirements, lowball estimates, and dealing with multiple adjusters.

In November, Los Angeles County opened a civil investigation into State Farm’s practices and potential violations of the state’s Unfair Competition law. Chen said the group has seen a flurry of substantial payouts since then.

State Farm spokesperson Tom Hartman said in an email to the Associated Press on Wednesday that the company has addressed more than 13,500 claims and issued more than $5 billion in payments. He called the investigation a “distraction” and said the company is committed to helping.

Without answers from insurance, households can’t commit to rebuilding projects that can easily exceed $1 million.

“They’re worried about getting started and running out of money,” Chen said.

An uncertain future

Jessica Rogers discovered only after the Palisades fire destroyed her home that her coverage had been canceled.

The mother of two’s fallback was a low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration, but the application process was grueling. After losing her job because of the fire and then having her identity stolen, her approval for $550,000 came through last month.

She is still weighing how she’ll cover the remaining costs and says she wonders: “Do I empty out my 401(k) and start counting every penny in a penny jar around the apartment?”

Rogers — now executive director of the Pacific Palisades Long Term Recovery Group — estimates there are hundreds like her in Pacific Palisades who are “stuck dealing with FEMA and SBA and figuring out if we could piecemeal something together to build our homes.”

Also struggling to return home are the community’s renters, condo owners, and mobile homeowners. Meanwhile, many are also dealing with their trauma.

“It’s not what people talk about, but it is incredibly apparent and very real,” said Rogers, who still finds herself crying at unexpected moments.

A slow start

That so few homes have been rebuilt a year after the wildfires echoes the recovery pattern of a December 2021 blaze that erupted south of Boulder, Colo., destroying more than 1,000 homes.

“At the one-year mark, many lots had been cleared of debris and many residents had applied for building permits, said Andrew Rumbach, co-lead of the Climate and Communities Program at Urban Institute. “Around the 18-month mark is when you start to see really significant progress in terms of going from handfuls to hundreds” of homes rebuilt.

Time will bring the scope of problems into focus.

“You’re going to start to see some real inequality start to emerge where certain neighborhoods, certain types of people, certain types of properties are just lagging way far behind, and that becomes the really important question in the second year of a recovery: Who’s doing well and who is really struggling and why?” Rumbach said.

That’s a key concern in Altadena, which for decades drew aspiring Black homeowners who otherwise faced redlining and other forms of racial discrimination when they sought to buy a home in other LA-area communities. In 2024, 81% of Black households in Altadena owned their homes, nearly twice the national Black homeownership rate.

But recent research by UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute found that, as of August, 7 in 10 Altadena homeowners whose property was severely damaged in last year’s wildfire had not begun taking steps to rebuild or sell their home. Among these, Black homeowners were 73% more likely than others to have taken no action.

Determined to rebuild

Al and Charlotte Bailey have been living in an RV parked on the empty lot where their home once stood.

The Baileys are paying for their rebuild with funds from their insurance payout and a loan. They’re also hoping to receive money from Southern California Edison. Several lawsuits claim its equipmentsparked the wildfire in Altadena.

“We had been here for 41 years and raised our family here, and in one night it was all gone,” said Al Bailey, 77. “We decided that, whatever it’s going to cost, this is our community.”