The Brief

JERUSALEM — Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land on Monday in the occupied West Bank before he was detained by the Israeli military, according to two of his fellow directors and other witnesses.

The filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was one of three Palestinians detained in the village of Susiya, according to attorney Lea Tsemel. Police told her they're being held at a military base for medical treatment, and she said she hasn't been able to speak with them.

Basel Adra, another co-director, witnessed the detention and said around two dozen settlers — some masked, some carrying guns, some in Israeli uniform — attacked the village. Soldiers who arrived pointed their guns at the Palestinians, while settlers continued throwing stones.

"We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us," Adra told The Associated Press. "This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment."

The Israeli military said it detained three Palestinians suspected of hurling rocks at forces and one Israeli civilian involved in a "violent confrontation" between Israelis and Palestinians — a claim witnesses interviewed by the AP disputed. The military said it had transferred them to Israeli police for questioning and had evacuated an Israeli citizen from the area to receive medical treatment.

No Other Land, which won the Oscar this year for best documentary, chronicles the struggle by residents of the Masafer Yatta area to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages. Ballal and Adra, both from Masafar Yatta, made the joint Palestinian-Israeli production with Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

Basel Adra (from left), Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham, winners of the award for best documentary feature film for "No Other Land", pose in the press room at the Oscars on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

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The film has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. It has also drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened the documentary.

Adra said that settlers entered the village Monday evening shortly after residents broke the daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. A settler — who according to Adra frequently attacks the village — walked over to Ballal's home with the military, and soldiers shot in the air. Ballal's wife heard her husband being beaten outside and scream "I'm dying," according to Adra.

Adra then saw the soldiers lead Ballal, handcuffed and blindfolded, from his home into a military vehicle. Speaking to the AP by phone, he said Ballal's blood was still splattered on the ground outside his own front door.

Some of the details of Adra's account were backed up by another eyewitness, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

A group of 10 to 20 masked settlers with stones and sticks also assaulted activists with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, smashing their car windows and slashing tires to make them flee the area, one of the activists at the scene, Josh Kimelman, told the AP.

Video provided by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence showed a masked settler shoving and swinging his fists at two activists in a dusty field at night. The activists rush back to their car as rocks can be heard thudding against the vehicle.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want all three for their future state and view settlement growth as a major obstacle to a two-state solution.

Israel has built well over 100 settlements, home to over 500,000 settlers who have Israeli citizenship. The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centers.

The Israeli military designated Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered residents, mostly Arab Bedouin, to be expelled. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly move in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards — and Palestinians fear outright expulsion could come at any time.

During the war in Gaza, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank during wide-scale military operations, and there has also been a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians. There has been a surge in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Copyright 2025 NPR

The L.A. County Medical Examiner has released the cause of death for Emily Beutner, the daughter of former LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner.

The 22-year-old died from the effects of a combination of drugs, including two linked to the opioid known as kratom — mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine — according to the statement released by the medical examiner on Friday.

A county health official told our partner CBS L.A. that kratom products are sometimes sold as natural remedies but are illegal and unsafe.

The other two substances cited as causes of death were quetiapine and mirtazapine — the former is an antipsychotic medication, and the latter is used to treat depression, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The former Loyola Marymount University student was found alone and suffering from medical distress by L.A. County Fire Department personnel shortly after midnight in a field by a highway in Palmdale on January 6. She was transported to a hospital and pronounced dead soon after.

After his daughter's death, Beutner dropped out of the L.A. mayoral race to unseat incumbent Karen Bass.

The Medical Examiner said the manner of death was ruled as suicide.

If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, you can dial the mental health lifeline at 988.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

There’s a familiar shorthand history of the L.A. band Los Lobos: four working-class Chicano musicians in their early twenties — David Hidalgo, Conrad Lozano, Louie Pérez and Cesar Rosas — got together in 1973 and began playing traditional Mexican music. That’s the music they recorded for their first album, 1978’s “Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles (Just Another Band From East L.A.).” 

A few years later, they moved on to the other music they grew up listening to — rock, R&B and blues. After adding saxophonist Steve Berlin and releasing two critically acclaimed albums in the mid-1980s, they were tapped to perform Ritchie Valens’ songs for the hit 1987 film, “La Bamba.” The soundtrack album topped the Billboard charts and catapulted the band to rock star status. 

But instead of continuing along that gilded path, they reverted to the traditional sounds — both in Spanish and English — that meant so much to them. Fifty-plus years after starting out, Los Lobos are still at it, and now a new documentary is digging deep into their ups and downs — and how they always stayed true to their East L.A. roots.

“Los Lobos: Native Sons” — co-directed by Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti — had its world premiere on Sunday at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas. The band was in attendance, proudly walking the red carpet in front of the historic Paramount Theatre. The film, which took 4 ½ years to complete, combines archival photos and film/video footage (17 boxes of material from Pérez alone), alongside contemporary interviews with the band members, their families and a host of admirers, including Linda Ronstadt, Rubén Blades, Dolores Huerta, Cheech Marin, Edward James Olmos, George Lopez and others.

“I thought the film was great,” said Pérez, speaking from his home a few days after the premiere. “There were tears, cheers … I was moved.”

The new documentary “Los Lobos: Native Sons” was 4 1/2 years in the making.

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Pérez said he was particularly touched by a part in the film when his wife talks about the song, “A Matter of Time,” off the band’s album, “How Will the Wolf Survive?” from 1984. Pérez noted that he and Hidalgo wrote the song about a Mexican migrant worker who has to part ways with his family:

In the film, Mary Pérez becomes emotional as she describes how the song was just as much about the band members leaving their families behind when they went on tour, the kids waking up to find their fathers gone.

“That song became our narrative,” Louie Pérez said in our interview. In the film, he bluntly states that the band “wouldn’t exist without the women in our lives.” Those women were the den mothers of the wolfpack, holding down the fort at home, accompanying the band on tour when possible, with some of the kids eventually jamming with their dads onstage.

Personal stories aside, the documentary also poetically frames the band’s — and the country’s — evolution over a half-century. “I saw the face of America change,” Pérez says in the film. “And that face is brown.”

Days after the premiere, Pérez reflected on the band’s journey. “All our success, all our hard work — we’re fortunate to be where we are considering where we came from.”

Los Lobos continue to perform after 53 years as a band.

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From Garfield High School to playing at weddings and quinceañeras to performing in the Obama White House and winning four Grammy Awards, Los Lobos has exemplified — indeed, helped define — what it means to be Mexican American.

“We set out to de-mystify what a Mexican was, what a Chicano was,” Pérez said. “We needed to let people know who we were.”

And that they did, and continue to do — for 53 years and counting. 

“At this point in my life,” said the 73-year-old Pérez, “I’ve never been more proud to be who I am.”

On Friday, K-pop's biggest group, BTS, released its highly anticipated new album, Arirang. It's the first project featuring all seven members of the boy band in nearly four years, following a hiatus for mandatory military service in South Korea.

Individual members — particularly Jimin and Jung Kook — have achieved significant solo success since then, but the return of BTS in full force signals a massive moment for the genre the group helped turn into a global powerhouse. In 2018, BTS' album Love Yourself: Tear became the first K-pop album to ever top the Billboard 200 chart. The band would go on to reach that milestone five more times in four years.

Since BTS' hiatus, K-pop has reached unprecedented heights in mainstream culture, largely thanks to groups like Blackpink, NewJeans, and of course, the artists behind Netflix's animated film KPop Demon Hunters (which led to the first-ever Grammy win for a K-pop song). But even during their time out of the spotlight, BTS' impact — and the promise of its return — has lingered over the genre.

"It's interesting to me because a lot of people are crediting 'Golden' and KPop Demon Hunters with bringing people into K-pop," Billboard journalist Tetris Kelly told NPR's Morning Edition. "But I don't think that the success of even 'Golden' would've happened if BTS didn't already push that door open for this kind of moment."

K-pop may have grown (and Westernized) during BTS' time away — but if the preliminary numbers for their comeback are any indication, pop culture (and their fervent fanbase, known as the "ARMY") has been eagerly awaiting the band's return. Here are just a few ways to measure how enormous the impact is expected to be:

ARIRANG album presales

In January, South Korean news outlets reported that presales for Arirang — advance orders ahead of the album's release — had likely surpassed 4 million copies within one week of the album being announced. In the U.S., BTS' last release, the 2022 compilation Proof, sold 314,000 copies in its first week. Arirang seems likely to eclipse that mark.

Concert in Seoul

On Saturday, BTS will perform a free concert in Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square. Although about 22,000 fans secured tickets to the show, authorities expect closer to a quarter of a million people to show up to the event. Billboard journalist Tetris Kelly told NPR's Morning Edition that the anticipated crowds have activated security concerns, leading authorities to seal off around 30 buildings in the surrounding areas. According to the BBC, ARMY members had already started gathering on Friday afternoon, and the city of Seoul had deployed thousands of police officers to monitor the area.

Luckily for fans around the world, Netflix will also be live-streaming the performance in 190 countries at 4 a.m. on Saturday. It will be the streaming giant's first time globally broadcasting a concert, and tens of millions of viewers are expected to watch. In interviews with the press, Brandon Riegg, Netflix's vice president of nonfiction series and sports, suggested the show could be part of a longer-term investment in South Korean culture.

"We have high expectations with this inaugural concert, but it certainly should signal a greater appetite that we have to work with other artists and labels throughout Korea and Asia in general," Riegg told Reuters.

On March 27, Netflix will also release a documentary about the making of Arirang and the band's blockbuster return.

Sold out tour

After Saturday's concert, BTS will keep the momentum going — first at an intimate performance hosted by Spotify in New York City, and then on a sold out global tour that kicks off in South Korea on April 9.

The Arirang tour, or at least this initial leg, which spans across multiple continents and more than 70 shows, will extend into the spring of 2027. Within just a few days of tickets going on sale, all of the North America, Europe and U.K. stadium dates sold out. The total number of tickets sold, according to Live Nation: close to 2.4 million. The first two dates of the tour will also be screened in movie theaters around the world. Bloomberg projects that BTS' tour could rival Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, which is the most successful tour of all time.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Curious gardeners have been noticing more grasshoppers — a lot more. And inquiring minds want to know why — and what can be done about these insects with a reputation for destruction.

" So what happens is the standard grasshopper that we think of can become a locust if the weather conditions are right," said Lynn Kimsey, a distinguished professor emerita at UC Davis who specializes in bugs.  "In a true outbreak, they would be, you know, crossing roads by the thousands."

We are nowhere approaching outbreak proportions in Southern California.

But Eric Middleton, an entomologist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources who works in pest management, can answer the why.

Big shocker: It's the weather

"For a grasshopper population to grow, you need a wet winter or spring so there's a lot of vegetation growing," said Middleton, who is based in San Diego. "Then you need warm conditions, which allow the young grasshoppers to emerge."

Think back to the intense bouts of rain Los Angeles received over the last months, the green hillsides and recent heatwave — these are the exact conditions for a grasshopper explosion.

"It's the same thing that triggers locust outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa, or North Dakota, places like this," Kimsey said. "It's pretty common."

Many species of grasshopper skip and scatter around Southern California. Probably the most common, Middleton said, is the gray bird grasshopper. They're 2 to 3 inches long, with larger wings, and  their populations start peaking around now.

Another common species is  the valley grasshopper, which is about an inch long.

What you should do? Less is more

Depending on the species' life cycle, both Middleton and Kimsey said they expect this overpopulation to taper off by summer.

"It's not going to be a permanent thing," Kimsey said. " Usually they become bird food or mammal food because everything likes to eat them."

If they pose a threat to your garden, don't go reaching for insecticides, the experts said.

 "Usually, they don't do a ton of damage to your garden," Middleton said.

So try catching them by hand or using temporary netting.

" This too shall pass," he added.

Alternatively, Kimsey said, they make a killer snack.

"They really are quite tasty. I highly recommend it," she said. "Like French fries, especially if you fry them."