From just outside the burn zone in Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Jes Claydon can see the ruins of the rental home where she lived for 13 years and raised three children. Little remains recognizable beyond the jars of sea glass that stood outside the front door. 

On Monday, officials will begin lifting restrictions on entry to the area, and Claydon hopes to collect those jars and any other mementos she might find. 

“I want the freedom to just be there and absorb what happened,” Claydon said. “Whatever I might find, even if it’s just those jars of sea glass, I’m looking forward to taking it….It’s a piece of home.” 

Authorities will begin allowing the first residents and property owners to return to their properties in the burn zone, many for the first time since it was demolished nearly seven weeks ago, on Aug. 8, by the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. 

The prospect of returning has stirred strong emotions in residents who fled in vehicles or on foot as the wind-whipped flames raced across Lahaina, the historic capital of the former Hawaiian kingdom, and overcame people stuck in traffic trying to escape. Some survivors jumped over a sea wall and sheltered in the waves as hot black smoke blotted out the sun. The wildfire killed at least 97 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, most of them homes. 

Claydon’s home was a single-story cinderblock house painted a reddish-tan, similar to the red dirt in Lahaina. She can see the property from a National Guard blockade that has kept unauthorized people out of the burn zone. A few of the walls are still standing, and some green lawn remains, she said. 

Authorities have divided the burned area into 17 zones and dozens of sub-zones. Residents or property owners of the first zone to be cleared for reentry — known as Zone 1C, along Kaniau Road in the north part of Lahaina — will be allowed to return on supervised visits Monday and Tuesday between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Those eligible could pick up passes from Friday to Sunday in advance. 

Darryl Oliveira, interim administrator of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, said officials also want to ensure that they have the space and privacy to reflect or grieve as they see fit. 

“They anticipate some people will only want to go for a very short period of time, a few minutes to say goodbye in a way to their property,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said last week. “Others may want to stay several hours. They’re going to be very accommodating.” 

Those returning will be provided with water, shade, washing stations, portable toilets, medical and mental health care, and transportation assistance if needed.

Nonprofit groups are also offering personal protective equipment, including masks and coveralls. Officials have warned that ash could contain asbestos, lead, arsenic or other toxins. 

While some residents, like Claydon, might be eager to find jewelry, photographs or other tokens of their life before the fire, officials are urging them not to sift through the ashes for fear of raising toxic dust that could endanger them or their neighbors downwind. 
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The North American box office hit a 2023 low this weekend, with top film “The Nun II” estimated to take in a paltry $8.4 million, industry watchers said Sunday. 

“The numbers are not good,” said David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research, describing an entire month of poor results. 

He said the months-long strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors — reportedly at a key point Sunday — “cannot end soon enough.”  

The strikes have prevented stars from promoting upcoming films. 

This weekend’s top five films had a combined take of roughly $31 million — less than “Barbie” alone earned in its fourth weekend out. 

Warner Bros.’ “The Nun II,” starring Taissa Farmiga in a tale of Gothic horror and possession, has led the box office for the past few weeks, despite posting tepid numbers. 

Nearly tying it this weekend was new action film “Expend4bles,” at an estimated $8.3 million for the Friday-through-Sunday period, Exhibitor Relations reported. 

The Lionsgate movie, the fourth in a series, has a veteran team of Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren — joined by franchise newcomers including Megan Fox, 50 Cent and Andy Garcia — heading to Libya to try to prevent a mercenary from stealing nuclear warheads. 

In third place, down one spot from last weekend, was 20th Century’s “A Haunting in Venice,” Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie-inspired film, at $6.3 million. Branagh again plays legendary Belgian detective Hercules Poirot. 

Fourth spot went to Sony’s “The Equalizer 3,” at $4.7 million. Denzel Washington plays a retired U.S. Marine and drug-enforcement agent taking on beaucoup bad guys. 

And holding on in fifth — in its 10th weekend out — was Warner Bros. blockbuster “Barbie,” at $3.2 million. The Greta Gerwig paean to pinkness has now taken in $630.5 million domestically and an additional $797 million internationally. 

Rounding out the top 10 were: 

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” ($3 million) 

“It Lives Inside” ($2.6 million) 

“Dumb Money” ($2.5 million) 

“Blue Beetle” ($1.8 million) 

“Oppenheimer” ($1.6 million) 
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President Joe Biden is set to announce the opening of new U.S. embassies on Cook Islands and Niue on Monday as the Democratic administration aims to demonstrate to Pacific Island leaders that it remains committed to increasing American presence in the region.

The announcement about the new diplomatic missions in the South Pacific comes as Biden prepares to welcome leaders to Washington for the two-day U.S.-Pacific Island Forum Summit. Talks are expected to heavily focus on the impact of climate change in the region.

Biden has put a premium on improving relations in the Pacific amid rising U.S. concern about China’s growing military and economic influence. Plans about the embassies were confirmed by two senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would use the summit to strengthen “ties with the Pacific Islands and discuss how we address complex global challenges, like tackling the existential threat of climate change, advancing economic growth, and promoting sustainable development.”

The leaders were scheduled to be feted on Sunday at a Baltimore Ravens football game and to visit a Coast Guard cutter in Baltimore Harbor for a briefing by the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard on combatting illegal fishing and other maritime issues.

Pacific Island leaders have been critical of rich countries for not doing enough to control climate change despite being responsible for much of the problem, and for profiting from loans provided to vulnerable nations to mitigate the effects.

At last year’s summit, the White House unveiled its Pacific strategy, an outline of its plan to assist the region’s leaders on pressing issues like climate change, maritime security and protecting the region from overfishing. The administration pledged the U.S. would add $810 million in new aid for Pacific Island nations over the next decade, including $130 million on efforts to stymie the impacts of climate change.

The forum includes Australia, Cook Islands, Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Biden will welcome the leaders to the White House on Monday morning for talks and a working lunch. They also will meet on Monday with Biden’s special envoy on climate, John Kerry, for talks focused on climate change. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield will host the leaders at the State Department for a dinner.

Kerry and USAID administrator Samantha Power will host the leaders on Tuesday for climate talks with members of the philanthropic community. The leaders also are slated to meet with members of Congress and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is to host a roundtable with the leaders and members of the business community.

Power last month travelled to Fiji to open a new USAID mission that will manage agency programs in nine Pacific Island countries: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. The U.S. this year has opened embassies in Solomon Islands and Tonga, and is on track to open an embassy in Vanuatu early next year.

The White House said most members of the 18-member forum were dispatching their top elected official or foreign minister to the summit.

But the administration was “very disappointed” that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, who was in New York last week for the U.N. General Assembly, opted not to stick around for the White House summit, according to an administration official. The Solomon Islands last year signed a security pact with China.

Prime Minister Meltek Sato Kilman Livtuvanu of Vanuatu also is expected to miss the summit. He was elected by lawmakers earlier this month to replace Ishmael Kalsakau, who lost a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Biden earlier this year had to cut short a planned visit to the Indo-Pacific, scrapping what was to be a historic stop in Papua New Guinea, as well as a visit to Australia for a gathering with fellow leaders of the so-called Quad partnership so he could focus on debt limit talks in Washington. He would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit Papua new Guinea.

The U.S. president is set to honor Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with a state visit next month.
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In an ultra-sterile room at a secure factory in Kansas City, U.S. government technicians refurbish the nation’s nuclear warheads. The job is exacting: Each warhead has thousands of springs, gears and copper contacts that must work in conjunction to set off a nuclear explosion.

About 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away in New Mexico, workers in a steel-walled vault have an equally delicate task. Wearing radiation monitors, safety goggles and seven layers of gloves, they practice shaping new warhead plutonium cores — by hand.

And at nuclear weapons bases across the country, troops as young as 17 keep 50-year-old warheads working until replacements are ready. A hairline scratch on a warhead’s polished black cone could send the bomb off course.

The Associated Press was granted rare access to key parts of the highly classified nuclear supply chain and got to watch technicians and engineers tackle the difficult job of maintaining an aging nuclear arsenal. Those workers are about to get a lot busier. The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project.

It’s been almost eight decades since a nuclear weapon has been fired in war. But military leaders warn that such peace may not last. They say the U.S. has entered an uneasy era of global threats that includes a nuclear weapons buildup by China and Russia’s repeat threats to use a nuclear bomb in Ukraine. They say that America’s aged weapons need to be replaced to ensure they work.

“What we want to do is preserve our way of life without fighting major wars,” said Marvin Adams, director of weapons programs for the Department of Energy. “Nothing in our toolbox really works to deter aggressors unless we have that foundation of the nuclear deterrent.”

By treaty the U.S. maintains 1,550 active nuclear warheads, and the government plans to modernize them all. At the same time, technicians, scientists and military missile crews must ensure the older weapons keep running until the new ones are installed.

The project is so ambitious that watchdogs warn that the government may not meet its goals. The program has also drawn criticism from non-proliferation advocates and experts who say the current arsenal, though timeworn, is sufficient to meet U.S. needs. Upgrading it will also be expensive, they say.

“They are going to have extreme difficulty meeting these deadlines,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a non-partisan group focused on nuclear and conventional weapons control. “And the costs are going to go up.”

He cautioned that the sweeping upgrades could also have the undesired effect of pushing Russia and China to improve and expand their arsenals.

Where it begins

The core of every nuclear warhead is a hollow, globe-shaped plutonium pit made by engineers at the Energy Department’s lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atom bomb. Many of the current pits in use come from the 1970s and 80s. That can be problematic, because there’s a lot about plutonium’s aging process that scientists still don’t understand.

The key radioactive atom in the plutonium pit has a half life of 24,000 years, which is the amount of time it would take roughly half of the radioactive atoms present to decay. That would suggest the weapons should be viable for years to come. But the plutonium decay is still enough to cause concern that it could affect how a pit explodes.

President George H.W. Bush signed an order in the 1990s banning underground nuclear tests, and the U.S. has not detonated pits to update data on their degradation since. When the last tests were performed, they provided data on pits that were at most about two decades old. That generation of pits is now pushing past 50.

Bob Webster, deputy director of weapons at Los Alamos, said scientists have relied on computer models to determine how well such old pits might work, but “everything we’re doing is extrapolating,” he said.

That uncertainty has pushed the department to restart pit production. The U.S. no longer produces man-made plutonium. Instead, old plutonium is essentially refurbished into new pits.

This task takes place inside PF-4, a highly classified building at Los Alamos that’s surrounded by layers of armed guards, heavy steel doors and radiation monitors. Inside, workers handle the plutonium inside steel glove boxes, which allow them to clean and process the plutonium without being exposed to deadly radiation.

In the final production steps, a lone employee in the vault takes the almost-completed pit into both of her gloved hands and shapes it into its final form.

“Things have to fit a certain way, and everything is by touch, by feel,” said the Los Alamos employee, who the AP has agreed not to name because she is one of only a handful of people in the U.S., and the only female, who performs this sensitive task.

For about the last 10 years technicians have been practicing on “test” pits that aren’t ready for the stockpile. The U.S. is planning to fully recycle its first weapon-ready pit next year — and quickly increase annual production to as many as 80 new pits.

The painstaking and hazardous work has led a government watchdog to express doubts about whether the U.S. government can meet that goal.

“The United States has not regularly manufactured plutonium pits since 1989,” the Government Accountability Office noted in a January 2023 report, adding that the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration has provided “limited assurance that it would be able to produce sufficient numbers of pits.”

Webster has been at Los Alamos since Ronald Reagan was president. He could have retired years ago, but has remained to shepherd the first new plutonium pits through to production. The lab is starting to feel a bit like it did in the 1980s, during the Cold War, he said. Los Alamos scientists are having intense discussions about weapon design — how much each can weigh, its explosive punch, how far it must travel.

“We need our nation to be back making pits,” Webster said. “We just have to be able to do that.”

The warhead and the wristwatch

Completed pits are protected and detonated by an outer warhead layer that is built at the Energy Department’s Kansas City National Security Campus. Inside that three-story windowless factory, workers restore and test those warhead parts, work that a government watchdog said required “a great deal of precision manufacturing to exacting specifications.”

There are thousands of tiny parts inside each warhead, so steady hands are key. That’s why technicians go through a skills assessment that includes disassembling and assembling a mechanical wristwatch.

“Everything is done under a microscope with tweezers,” said Molly Hadfield, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City plant. “And it’s pass (or) fail. Either the watch works or it doesn’t work.”

This factory would be busy even if an overhaul wasn’t underway. All warheads have regular maintenance requirements. Their plastics age, and metal gears and wiring are weakened by the years and by exposure to radiation.

The factory is also working on warheads for the B-21 Raider, a futuristic stealth bomber, while also supporting the Sentinel, a new intercontinental ballistic missile and on warheads for a new class of submarines.

“There’s a huge modernization effort going on,” said Eric Wollerman, who manages the Kansas City complex for the Department of Energy through its federal contract with Honeywell. “If you’re going to update the delivery systems, you would also then update the warheads in the missiles and the bombs that are with them.”

To meet the demand for both maintenance and modernization, the facilities have gone on a hiring spree. The Kansas City plant has 6,700 employees, a 40% jump since 2018, with plans to add several hundred more. The Los Alamos lab has added more than 4,000 employees in that same time frame.

Old missiles, young troops

The U.S. nuclear arsenal reveals its age each time troops fix a missile. That can occur as often as twice a week, but only if the equally old tools, or the truck carrying the tools, or the truck needed to transport the missile itself isn’t also broken down, which is often.

That is why Airman 1st Class Jonathan Marrs was dragging a second 102-kilogram (225-pound) aluminum tow behind him toward a concrete silo in the midst of vast Montana farmland on a recent hot afternoon.

Marrs, 21, and other airmen used a tow and wrenches the size of human femurs to dislodge silo Bravo-9’s 110-ton blast door. Underneath its cement and steel cover was a 31,750-kilogram (70,000-pound) nuclear missile; the missile’s warhead tip needed to be lifted out and trucked to base for work.

Except the blast door wouldn’t budge. The first 102-kilogram (225-pound) tow, or mule, as the troops call it, couldn’t generate the power needed to pull back the door.

After attaching a second mule, Marrs and the other airman succeeded in pulling the door free, releasing scores of mice.

The maintainers next unfastened the warhead from the missile and placed it in a specialized truck. It’s then escorted by Air Force security forces back to a heavily guarded hangar at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base.

Marrs and the other young airmen — known as maintainers — are closely monitored as they handle nuclear weapons, U.S. Air Force officials said.

“If I under-inflate a basketball at the gym, no one will care,” said Chief Master Sgt. Andrew Zahm, the maintenance group senior enlisted leader at F.E. Warren Air Force Base. “If I did something with one of these weapons, the president would know about it in 45 minutes.”

The workload is already a challenge for these troops, and there aren’t many easy ways to relieve it.

While the private-sector managed Los Alamos and Kansas City plants have hired personnel to meet the rising workload, the military has struggled to fill jobs and retain experienced technicians. Instead, the military must do more with fewer maintainers, and for much less money than those troops could make as government contractors.

“Once you start showing a staff sergeant the $80,000” they could make in the private sector, they are going to take it, Zahm said.

Zahm is a rarity. While many have retired or left for private industry, he’s remained to keep serving the military’s nuclear mission. With the U.S. so close to its first new weapon, he’s driven by a desire to see it through. “In 21 years I’ve never seen a new thing,” Zahm said. “I want to see the new stuff.”
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The surge of migrants crossing the U.S. border from Mexico has pushed the city of El Paso, Texas, to “a breaking point,” with more than 2,000 people per day seeking asylum, exceeding shelter capacity and straining resources, its mayor said Saturday.

“The city of El Paso only has so many resources and we have come to … a breaking point right now,” Mayor Oscar Leeser said.

The crush of largely Venezuelan asylum-seekers is part of a larger swell of immigrants who traveled dangerous routes on buses and cargo trains to Mexican border towns near San Diego, California, and the Texas cities of El Paso and Eagle Pass.

Migrant numbers had plummeted in recent months, and the recent dramatic increase has generated a new wave of political attacks on U.S. President Joe Biden heading into the 2024 election.

Lesser told a news conference that El Paso plans to open a new shelter, and on Saturday chartered five buses to take migrants to New York, Chicago and Denver.

Republican governors in Texas and Florida have been criticized for sending migrants to cities perceived as liberal such as New York and Sacramento. But Leeser, a Democrat, said all of the migrants on the El Paso buses were going voluntarily to the cities of their choice.

Leeser said the Biden had been a good partner. But he said the overall U.S. immigration system was broken.

Many migrants from Venezuela, he said, lacked transportation to their desired destinations, while El Paso’s current shelter houses only 400 people, and must also be available to help the homeless.

As recently as six weeks ago, about 350-400 people were crossing into El Paso per day, but the past few days have brought 2,000 or more.

Over the past 10 days, the city has worked with the U.S. Border Patrol to provide shelter for 6,500 people, he said.

About two-thirds of those crossing into El Paso recently are single men, he said. About 32% are families and 2% are unaccompanied children.

“I think it’s really important to note that we have a broken immigration system,” he said. “It’s the same thing over and over again.”
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