The United States, South Korea, and Japan held their first ever combined aerial exercise Sunday in an effort to send a tough message to North Korea.

It’s not new for the United States to hold aerial drills with Japan or with South Korea. But the three countries had never held such an exercise together until Sunday.

That’s when a U.S. B-52 bomber flew alongside Japanese and South Korean fighter jets just south of the Korean Peninsula.

Philip Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, called it a “new era” in defense ties.

Though Japan and South Korea are both close U.S. allies, their bilateral ties are strained by historical disputes.

But in August, the three countries agreed to hold more defense drills to counter North Korea.

It is particularly significant that a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber participated in this week’s drill, says Seoul-based scholar Park Won-gon.

Park says Pyongyang particularly fears strategic aircraft like the B-52, because it was bombers like this that devastated the North during the Korean War.

North Korea has also blasted U.S.-Japan-South Korea military cooperation.

In an editorial Friday, North Korean state media called the air drill an “intentional nuclear war” provocation.

North Korea has rapidly expanded its number of nuclear weapons in recent years, and now regularly threatens to conduct preemptive strikes if necessary.
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Charles Nahale spent a restless night trying to sleep in the back seat of his pickup truck after a wildfire destroyed his home and the town of Lahaina. The next two nights weren’t much better: The singer and guitarist put his feet on one chair and sat in another as he took refuge on the grounds of an evacuated hotel where he once performed for guests.

Nahale eventually found a timeshare condo with a bed, shower and kitchen — lodging he was able to keep until Friday, when, yet again, he had to move, this time with officials setting him up in a different hotel condo.

He is one of many whose lives have become transient since the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century left at least 99 people dead. The blaze destroyed thousands of buildings and unmoored residents who now face myriad challenges posed by Maui’s location and status as a vacation hub.

“It’s hard to begin the healing process when you’re worried about the essentials,” Nahale said.

Some are bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, in some cases to make way for the return of tourists who are crucial to the local economy. Many are struggling to find places to rent amid a housing shortage — and steep prices — that plagued the island even before the fire wiped out an estimated 3,000 homes and apartments in Lahaina.

And it’s not feasible for authorities to bring in the mobile homes used to shelter people after natural disasters elsewhere, given Hawaii’s humidity and the difficulty of shipping them from the U.S. mainland.

The government, via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, paid for Nahale and some 8,000 other displaced residents to move into hotels, vacation rentals and other short-term housing after the Aug. 8 fire. There are still about 6,900 people in short-term lodging more than two months later.

It’s unusual for FEMA to put so many people in hotels after a disaster, particularly for months, but Maui had plenty of empty hotel rooms after tourists left in the wake of the fire.

In other states, people unable to move home after a disaster might move in with friends and family members who live within a few hours’ drive. That’s trickier on Maui, an island of about 150,000 people that’s a 30-minute plane ride from the nearest major city, Honolulu.

Bob Fenton, administrator of the FEMA region including Hawaii, is leading the government’s response. His agency has the authority to house people in hotels for six months, and in some cases that can be extended, he said. Still, he wants to see people get into stable housing — “a place they could be for the next two Christmases,” Fenton said in an interview.

The Red Cross, whose case workers are administering FEMA’s hotel stay program, is sending Nahale to another condo unit with a kitchen, but it will only be available for 12 days. Finding a long-term rental is hard when thousands of others are also looking, he said.

Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern said at a news conference Wednesday that no one is being cut off from short-term housing before there is a long-term solution. Gov. Josh Green urged anyone who feels they are being pushed out to talk to a Red Cross worker.

Tiffany Teruya is among the lucky ones who found a two-bedroom rental to stay in with her 13-year-old son. The monthly cost for the “tiny, tiny cottage” was $3,000, more than double what she paid for their subsidized apartment in a building that burned in Lahaina.

She signed a lease on Wednesday, paying the first month’s rent and a deposit using aid money and $2,000 from a cousin. Catholic Charities is arranging to pay for the next three months.

The cottage belongs to a member of her extended family. She said about 30 others saw the house before her, including families of three, four and even six people.

“These people are desperate too, you know what I’m saying?” said Teruya, who was a restaurant waitress on Lahaina’s famed Front Street before the fire.

A Maui-based software developer, Matt Jachowski, built a website aimed at matching fire evacuees with landlords. More than 600 families have sought housing on the site, but he said very few have actually found lodging because landlords want more in rent than the evacuees can afford to pay.

His analysis showed that the median rent that evacuees are requesting — $1,500 for a one-bedroom, $2,400 for a two-bedroom — is about two-thirds of market rate. Some landlords wanted as much as $8,000 to $10,000 a month, saying they could get that from tourists, Jachowski said.

To help, FEMA has raised the rental assistance it’s offering to evacuees by 75%. Displaced Lahaina residents will be eligible for up to nearly $3,000 for a one bedroom. This could help plug the gap between what renters can pay and what landlords are asking — at least in the short term, Fenton said.

Longer term, Maui will need to build more affordable housing, Fenton said, noting some developments are awaiting zoning approval or need to be evaluated for sufficient sources of water.

If other temporary solutions fall short, FEMA is preparing to build up to 500 modular units using prefabricated materials or 3D printing. The agency has identified four sites — three in Lahaina and one in central Maui — near power, water and sewer infrastructure. Utility lines would have to be extended to individual lots but could then be repurposed for permanent housing after the modular homes are removed.

Nahale called the experience of rotating hotels on the island a “second wave of humanitarian disaster.” He said the compassionate thing would be to let people stay where they are through the holidays.

But tourists are returning and beginning to fill some of the rooms. Green and Maui Mayor Richard Bissen say the island needs to welcome travelers back to support the economy and give people jobs. Maui’s unemployment rate hit 8.4% in September compared to 3.4% the same month last year.

Playing music helps Nahale cope with the ordeal. Before moving to his new condo, he showed two visiting journalists the only guitar he was able to grab before his home burned. Then he began strumming a song written by his late friend, the famous Hawaiian musician Roland Cazimero.

“Please be careful/ Of the dangers of the world/ Careful not to be afraid/ Of the roads we’ve yet to go,” Nahale sang, first in English and then in Hawaiian.

“That song just came to mind,” he said. “That song can help heal.”
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While screenwriters are busy back at work, film and TV actors remain on picket lines, with the longest strike in their history hitting the 100-day mark Saturday after talks broke off with studios. On the same day, the actors’ union and an alliance representing major studios announced in a joint statement that negotiations will resume next week on Tuesday, with several studio executives expected to join. Here’s a look at where things stand, how their stretched-out standoff compares to past strikes, and what happens next.

Inside the talks that failed

Hopes were high and leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists were cautiously optimistic when they resumed negotiations Oct. 2 for the first time since the strike began 2 1/2 months earlier.

The same group of chief executives from the biggest studios had made a major deal just over a week earlier with striking writers, whose leaders celebrated their gains on many issues actors are also fighting for: long-term pay, consistency of employment and control over the use of artificial intelligence.

But the actors’ talks were tepid, with days off between sessions and no reports of progress. Then studios abruptly ended discussions Oct. 11, saying the actors’ demands were exorbitantly expensive and the two sides were too far apart to continue.

“We only met with them a couple of times, Monday, half a day Wednesday, half a day Friday. That was what they were available for,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher told The Associated Press soon after the talks broke off. “Then this past week, it was Monday and a half a day on Wednesday. And then, ‘Bye-bye.’ I’ve never really met people that actually don’t understand what negotiations mean. Why are you walking away from the table?”

The reasons, according to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, included a union demand for a fee for each subscriber to streaming services.

“SAG-AFTRA gave the member companies an ultimatum: either agree to a proposal for a tax on subscribers as well as all other open items, or else the strike would continue,” the AMPTP said in a statement to the AP. “The member companies responded to SAG-AFTRA’s ultimatum that unfortunately, the tax on subscribers poses an untenable economic burden.”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, one of the executives in on the bargaining sessions, told investors on an earnings call Wednesday, “This really broke our momentum unfortunately.”

SAG-AFTRA leaders said it was ridiculous to frame this demand as though it were a tax on customers, and said it was the executives themselves who wanted to shift from a model based on a show’s popularity to one based on the number of subscribers.

“We made big moves in their direction that have just been ignored and not responded to,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, told the AP. “We made changes to our AI proposal. We made dramatic changes to what used to be our streaming revenue share proposal,” Crabtree-Ireland said.

The studios said just after the talks broke off that the per-subscriber charge would cost them $800 million annually, a figure SAG-AFTRA said was a vast overestimate.

The AMPTP later responded that the number was based on a union request for $1 per customer per year, which was lowered to 57 cents after SAG-AFTRA changed its evaluation to cut out nonrelevant programming like news and sports.

What happens next in the actors strike?

The actors are in unscripted territory. Their union has never been on a strike this long, nor been on strike at all since before many of its members were born. Not even its veteran leaders, like Crabtree-Ireland, with the union for 20 years, have found themselves in quite these circumstances.

SAG-AFTRA says it is willing to resume at any time, but that it won’t change its demands.

“I think that they think that we’re going to cower,” Drescher said. “But that’s never going to happen because this is a crossroads and we must stay on course.”

The writers did have their own false start with studios that may give some reason for optimism. Their union attempted to restart negotiations with studios in mid-August, more than three months into their strike. Those talks went nowhere, breaking off after a few days. A month later, the studio alliance came calling again. Those talks took off, with most of their demands being met after five marathon days that resulted in a tentative deal that its members would vote to approve almost unanimously.

How did previous actors strikes play out?

Hollywood actors strikes have been less frequent and shorter than those by writers. The Screen Actors Guild (they added the “AFTRA” in a 2011 merger) has gone on strike against film and TV studios only three times in its history.

In each case, emerging technology fueled the dispute. In 1960 — the only previous time actors and writers struck simultaneously — the central issue was actors seeking pay for when their work in film was aired on television, compensation the industry calls residuals. The union, headed by future U.S. President Ronald Reagan, was a smaller and much less formal entity then. The vote to strike took place in the home of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, the parents of current SAG-AFTRA member and vocal striker Jamie Lee Curtis.

Mid-strike, the actors and studios called a truce so all could attend the Academy Awards — a move forbidden under today’s union rules. Host Bob Hope called the gathering “Hollywood’s most glamorous strike meeting.”

In the end, a compromise was reached where SAG dropped demands for residuals from past films in exchange for a donation to their pension fund, along with a formula for payment when future films aired on TV. Their 42-day work stoppage began and ended all within the span of the much longer writers strike.

A 1980 strike would be the actors’ longest for film and television until this year. That time, they were seeking payment for their work when it appeared on home video cassettes and cable TV, along with significant hikes in minimum compensation for roles. A tentative deal was reached with significant gains but major compromises in both areas. Union leadership declared the strike over after 67 days, but many members were unhappy and balked at returning to work. It was nearly a month before leaders could rally enough votes to ratify the deal.

This time, it was the Emmy Awards that fell in the middle of the strike. The Television Academy held a ceremony, but after a boycott was called, only one acting winner, Powers Boothe, was there to accept his trophy.

Other segments of the actors union have gone on strike, too, including several long standoffs over the TV commercials contract. A 2016-2017 strike by the union’s video game voice actors lasted a whopping 11 months. That segment of the union could strike again soon if a new contract deal isn’t reached.

What’s happening to movies and TV shows?

The return of writers has the Hollywood production machine churning again, with rooms full of scribes penning new seasons of shows that had been suspended and film writers finishing scripts. But the finished product will await the end of actors strike, and production will remain suspended on many TV shows and dozens of films, including “Wicked,” “Deadpool 3” and “Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 2.”

The Emmys, whose nominations were announced the day before the actors strike was called, opted to wait for the stars this time and move their ceremony from September to January — though that date could be threatened, too.

The Oscars are a long way off in March, but the campaigns to win them are usually well underway by now. With some exceptions — non-studio productions approved by the union — performers are prohibited from promoting their films at press junkets or on red carpets. Director Martin Scorsese has been giving interviews about his new Oscar contender ” Killers of the Flower Moon.” Stars and SAG-AFTRA members Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert DeNiro haven’t.
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