NEW YORK – World-famous chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa has been tantalizing foodies for decades as he built his empire to include more than 50 upscale restaurants and several luxury hotels. The new documentary, “Nobu,” reveals the man behind the cuisine in an intimate look at how he found success, despite several major setbacks.

The film traces Matsuhisa’s journey to creating his unique fusion cuisine, blending traditional Japanese dishes with ingredients discovered while living in Peru. Matsuhisa, now 76, was driven to run his own restaurant but faced obstacles, including financial woes, doubters and a devastating fire at one of his first spots.

Candid and sometimes emotional interviews with Matsuhisa are interspersed with mouthwatering shots of his “Nobu-style” culinary treats, made with a precision and standard of excellence his diners have come to expect. “Nobu” releases widely July 1.

Director Matt Tyrnauer and the chef himself sat down with The Associated Press to discuss his perseverance, creativity and influence on the culture. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: One of the most dynamic things about the film is the gorgeous food. How did you approach it, Matt?

TYRNAUER: Nobu started as a graphic designer, and you can really see it in the plates. The totality of his vision for creating a new type of cuisine, which he calls “Nobu style,” or the signature dishes, was really interesting, but also the beauty of the presentation, which is so important. We had cameras everywhere — on the ceiling, we had them over the shoulder, and anything to kind of get the precision and the detail. At a certain point in the film, you see him correcting some of the chefs who work for him and it’s a pretty tough process because he’s a perfectionist. I wanted to show that.

AP: There are many difficult moments in the film and you have to relive some pain from your past. How was that process for you Chef Nobu?

MATSUHISA: Even though my life was pain, but I learned from this pain. Also I learned lots and lots of love from people who supported me. So nothing is losing, in my experience. I’d like to say, at my age, I can say, I did my life.

AP: Matt, were there any surprises when you were shooting the film?

TYRNAUER: When he broke down on camera and couldn’t stop crying, it was a big surprise. I didn’t understand the true wound of the loss of Nobu’s best friend, Sakai. I’ve interviewed a lot of people. I’ve never had anyone really be so emotional. I thought it was extraordinary and very beautiful, actually, and very honest. Nobu invited me to go see the grave of his dear friend who had taken his own life and the pain and the suffering that we see on camera is unexpected in a movie that you think is just going to be about great food and the artistry of being a chef. There’s a soulfulness to it.

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If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org

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AP: Your world travel helped you develop your Nobu style. You’re still traveling and visiting restaurants. Can you talk about that?

MATSUHISA: I made the Nobu corporate teams. These teams that are traveling with me … they stand by at all the locations, and they set up, then they’re training for the next generations. The Nobu teams keep growing like a family, and they (are) working there long times so they understand Nobu’s quality, philosophy, the passions, how to do service. We have good teams.

AP: From “The Bear” to reality TV, there is high interest in what goes on in restaurant kitchens in pop culture now. Did that play into the film?

TYRNAUER: What I wanted to do was show the process and put that on display. Part of the secret to his success is that he’s actually created a very civilized culture, and it comes from the top down. I think that’s why he goes around the world like he does and visits all these restaurants and trains the chefs personally in his own style. But his own temperament is exemplary.

AP: What do you want people to take away from the film?

MATSUHISA: I’m very glad because I didn’t give up on my life. That’s the message. Even (when) the young people has a problem, I like to say, “Don’t give up. Just don’t forget about the ambitions, passions and go step by step.”

NEW YORK – If you’re going to let dinosaurs run amok, it’s good to have some ground rules.

That’s how screenwriter David Koepp saw it, anyway, in penning the script for “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which opens in theaters July 2. Koepp wrote the original “Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel, “The Lost World. But “Rebirth,” the seventh film in the franchise, marks his return to the franchise he helped birth.

And Koepp, the veteran screenwriter of “Carlito’s Way” and “Mission: Impossible,” saw it as a chance to get a few things in order for a movie series that had perhaps strayed too far from its foundational character. Inspired by the animator Chuck Jones, Koepp decided to put down a list of nine commandments to guide “Jurassic World Rebirth” and future installments.

Jones had done something similar for the Roadrunner cartoons. His “commandments” included things like: the Roadrunner never speaks except to say “meep meep”; the coyote must never catch him; gravity is the coyote’s worst enemy; all products come from the ACME Corporation.

“I always thought those were brilliant as a set of organizing principles,” Koepp says. “Things become easier to write when you have that, when you have a box, when you have rules, when you agree going in: ‘These we will heed by.’ So I wrote my own, nine of them.”

Koepp shared some — though not all of them — in a recent interview.

1. The events of the first six movies cannot be contradicted

“I hate a retcon. I hate when they change a bunch of things: ‘Oh, that didn’t actually happen. It was actually his twin.’ I don’t like other timelines. So I thought: Let’s not pretend any of the last 32 years didn’t happen or happened differently than you thought. But we can say things have changed.”

2. The dinosaurs are animals, not monsters

“On the first movie, anyone working on the movie would get fined for referring to them as monsters. They’re not monsters, they’re animals. Therefore, because they’re animals, their motives can only be because they’re hungry or defending their territory. They don’t attack because they’re scary. They don’t sneak up and roar because they want to scare you.”

3. Humor is oxygen.

“You can’t forget it.”

4. Science must be real

“The tone that Steven (Spielberg) found and I helped find in that first movie is really distinctive. I haven’t gotten to work on a movie with that tone since then. So to go back to that sense of high adventure, real science and humor, it was just kind of joyful.”

5. The tone must never been ponderous or self-serious

“And then there were a number of other rules that I would define as trade secrets. So I’ll keep them to myself.”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California lawmakers on Friday are scheduled to vote on a budget that pares back a number of progressive priorities, including a landmark health care expansion for low-income adult immigrants without legal status, to close a $12 billion deficit.

It’s the third year in a row the nation’s most populous state has been forced to slash funding or stop some of the programs championed by Democratic leaders. This year’s $321 billion spending plan was negotiated by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders.

He’s expected to sign the budget Friday. But Newsom and lawmakers are still negotiating another deal to make it easier to build housing, and the budget will be void if that agreement isn’t reached by Monday.

The budget avoids some of the most devastating cuts to essential safety net programs, state leaders said. They mostly relied on using state savings, borrowing from special funds and delaying payments to plug the budget hole.

California also faces potential federal cuts to health care programs and broad economic uncertainty that could force even deeper cuts. Newsom in May estimated that federal policies — including on tariffs and immigration enforcement — could reduce state tax revenue by $16 billion.

“It is never easy to balance a budget with the deficit that we faced, which was made worse by the actions of our federal administration,” Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, who chairs the Senate budget committee, said at a hearing this week.

Republican lawmakers said they were left out of budget negotiations. They also criticized Democrats for not doing enough to address future deficits, which could range between $17 billion to $24 billion annually.

“We’re presenting this to this public as a balanced budget, and it’s only balanced because we’re borrowing money and we’re using reserves that are supposed to be for dire emergencies,” said Republican Sen. Kelly Seyarto.

Here’s a look at spending in key areas:

Health care

Under the budget deal, California will stop enrolling new adult patients without legal status in its state-funded health care program for low-income people starting 2026. The state will also implement a $30 monthly premium July 2027 for immigrants remaining on the program, including some with legal status. The premiums would apply to adults under 60 years old.

The changes to the program, known as Medi-Cal, are a scaled-back version of Newsom’s proposal in May. Still, it’s a major blow to an ambitious program started last year to help the state inch closer to a goal of universal health care.

The deal also removes $78 million in funding for mental health phone lines, including a program that served 100,000 people annually. It will eliminate funding that helps pay for dental services for low-income people in 2026 and delay implementation of legislation requiring health insurance to cover fertility services by six months to 2026.

But lawmakers also successfully pushed back on several proposed cuts from Newsom that they called “draconian.”

The deal secures funding for a program providing in-home domestic and personal care services for some low-income residents and Californians with disabilities. It also avoids cuts to Planned Parenthood.

Environment

Lawmakers agreed to let the state tap $1 billion from its cap-and-trade program to fund state firefighting efforts. The cap-and-trade program is a market-based system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Companies have to buy credits to pollute, and that money goes into a fund lawmakers are supposed to tap for climate-related spending.

Newsom wanted to reauthorize the program through 2045, with a guarantee that $1 billion would annually go to the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project. The budget doesn’t make that commitment, as lawmakers wanted to hash out spending plans outside of the budget process. The rail project currently receives 25% of the cap-and-trade proceeds, which is roughly $1 billion annually depending on the year.

Legislative leaders also approved funding to help transition some 3,000 part-time firefighters into full-time positions. Many state firefighters only work nine months each year, which lawmakers said harms the state’s ability to prevent and fight wildfires. The deal includes $10 million to increase the daily wage for incarcerated firefighters, who earn $5.80 to $10.24 a day currently.

Public safety

The budget agreement will provide $80 million to help implement a tough-on-crime initiative voters overwhelmingly approved last year. The measure makes shoplifting a felony for repeat offenders, increases penalties for some drug charges and gives judges the authority to order people with multiple drug charges into treatment.

Most of the fund, $50 million, will help counties build more behavioral health beds. Probation officers will get $15 million for pre-trial services and courts will receive $20 million to support increased caseloads.

Advocates of the measure — including sheriffs, district attorneys and probation officers — said that’s not enough money. They have estimated it would take around $400 million for the first year of the program.

Other priorities

Newsom and lawmakers agreed to raise the state’s film tax credit from $330 million to $750 million annually to boost Hollywood. The program, a priority for Newsom, will start this year and expire in 2030.

The budget provides $10 million to help support immigration legal services, including deportation defense.

But cities and counties won’t see new funding to help them address homelessness next year, which local leaders said could lead to the loss of thousands of shelter beds.

The budget also doesn’t act on Newsom’s proposal to streamline a project to create a massive underground tunnel to reroute a big part of the state’s water supply.

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Police Department arrested a second suspect in connection with the murder of a 19-year-old on the East Side.

Veronica Montoya, 33, was arrested Tuesday after police said she tampered with evidence in the shooting of Jordan Bocanegra on East Commerce Street on Sunday.

According to an arrest affidavit, police allege Montoya sold the bike that murder suspect Mark Criollo left the scene on.

Criollo was arrested Monday after nearly a 12-hour-long standoff with police that ended around 1:30 a.m. Monday.

Bocanegra’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head by the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. The ME’s office ruled his manner of death is being investigated as a homicide.

Bocanegra was getting gas near North Gevers Street and East Commerce Street around 11 a.m. Sunday, when he was shot inside his car.

His family told KSAT that he drove about a block before crashing near South Polaris Street and East Commerce Street.

Officers identified 29-year-old Mark Criollo was the shooter, and an arrest warrant for murder was issued, according to a preliminary report.

SAPD said Criollo left the scene on a bicycle and fled to a residence in the 800 block of Potomac. Officers later found Criollo in the home’s backyard around 2 p.m.

While in jail, police said Criollo told his family members over the phone to pawn his bike “before the cops get it,” according to the affidavit.

Montoya then told Criollo in a subsequent call that she sold the bike to someone on OfferUp for $200, the affidavit stated.

The charge against Montoya is a third-degree felony.

Both Criollo and Montoya remain in custody at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center.

More coverage on KSAT:

LUND – After nine years scurrying in the shadows, the two-person Swedish street art collective known as “Anonymouse” — dubbed “Banksy Mouse” by Swedish media — has finally stepped out of the dark and into a museum exhibition.

The mystery began in late 2016 when miniature homes and businesses, all measuring well below knee height, began appearing on the streets of southern Sweden.

It looked like a bunch of mice had opened a tiny restaurant named “Il Topolino” and a neighboring nut delicatessen “Noix de Vie.” There was no clue as to who created them besides a signature from anonymous artist group “Anonymouse.”

The following years saw more mouse homes and businesses appear in unexpected places: First in Sweden, then all over the world from the U.K. to Canada.

The original creation on Bergsgatan, a busy street in Malmö, quickly attracted attention and went viral, drawing crowds. The project was even featured on the popular U.S. TV show “The Late Late Show with James Corden.”

The two artists behind the whiskery art project stepped out of their anonymity earlier this year. Swedes Elin Westerholm and Lupus Nensén both work in show business, making props and sets for film and television.

“The sweet part is that we’re building something for children. Most of us have some kind of relationship to a world where mice live parallel to ours,” said Nensén, citing numerous child-focused fairy tales.

On Friday, a selection of the duo’s creations went on display at the Skissernas Museum in Lund, a short trip from Malmö, to celebrate nine years of “mouse pranks and creativity.”

Far-ranging mouse builders

The duo say the idea for “Anonymouse” came during a trip to Paris in 2016. Sitting in the French capital’s Montmartre district, they soaked up Art Nouveau influences. Their first creation took six months to build, before they secretively installed it on Bergsgatan one cold, dark night.

“It’s amazing to see a 70-year-old come over with crutches, and people help them down and have a look,” said Nensén. “It really does bring out the child in everyone.”

The artists have since created a mini pharmacy in the Swedish city of Lund, a pastry shop near Stockholm, a castle on the Isle of Man, and a radio studio in Quebec, Canada. The duo created between two and three projects a year.

Record store “Ricotta Records,” which the pair installed in Lund in 2020, features tiny, mouse-sized record covers, such as “Back to Brie” by Amy Winemouse and “Goodbye Yellow Cheese Roll” by Stilton John.

Westerholm said “part of the game is taking something that’s a bit dumb really seriously.”

“We spent a lot of time coming up with mice and cheese puns over the years,” Nensén said.

A sense of adventure

The museum’s exhibit rooms host six miniature worlds, once secretly installed on nearby Swedish streets, as well as sketches and preparatory works from the archives. The exhibit will run until late August.

“They are hidden, they are not in common areas where you would expect an artwork. There’s one in the basement, one on a balcony, and so on,” exhibit curator Emil Nilsson said.

“I hope (visitors) take away a sense of adventure when they enter the museum looking for these hidden miniature worlds.”

After revealing their identities earlier this year, Westerholm and Nensén announced their mouse building adventures were over, bringing an end to the viral street art project.

“It’s been nine years,” said Westerholm. “It’s time to end it, I think.”

Anonymouse won’t return. But will the duo never build anything small in a public place again?

“We never know, we can’t promise anything,” Westerholm said.

The 12-day war between Iran and Israel may not have transformed the opaque rule of the Islamic Republic, but it did make some things newly visible in Tehran. However briefly, a city within a city, long governed through layers of concealment and spectacle, lay exposed.

I still recall returning to Tehran in 1998, after more than two decades spent in London and New York. As the plane descended, I pressed my forehead to the window and saw the city of my birth splayed beneath me, vast and unfamiliar. It had multiplied since I had last seen it, not only in size but in identity. Tehran was no longer just the capital of Iran. It was now the beating heart of the Islamic Republic—the world’s first fully realized theocracy, the product of a revolution that had yielded not more freedom or material prosperity, but less.

For several months in the late 1990s, I returned for both work and personal reasons. As I wandered the city, I felt a sense of both wonder and cautious belonging. I moved into a quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood in the north—unflashy, orderly, lived-in. My neighbors were professionals: engineers, doctors, artists, middle-tier bureaucrats. Most were secular, or observed religion privately and with restraint. They loathed the regime’s imposed piety. Inside their homes, they drank wine, hosted mixed-gender gatherings (these were illegal in the Islamic Republic), and listened to banned music. Private spaces were sanctuaries, zones of quiet resistance. But for Iranians they were part, I came to understand, of the visible city—the Tehran most people saw, most of the time.

From the October 1906 issue: New York after Paris

That visible city was more modern, more vibrant than I had expected. Parks and flower gardens, legacies of Persian landscaping genius, were scattered across the city—especially in the north. Unlike in New York, where I would never have entered Central Park after dark, Tehran’s parks were well populated late into the night: families picnicking, children playing, couples strolling in the warm summer air. The streets were clean, well lit, and—traffic aside—surprisingly orderly. Tehran pulsed with activity.

At first, it was easy to believe that this was the whole of the city’s life. I soon learned otherwise.

In the summer of 1999, during my second return visit to Tehran, I had my first encounter with what I now think of as the invisible city: a hidden infrastructure of control, secret spaces layered beneath the visible ones like the traces of ink on a palimpsest.

That July, students protested the closure of a reformist newspaper—one of a few outlets that dared to openly criticize the hard-line clerical establishment. Students from Tehran University poured into the streets, demanding greater openness and accountability. This was the first serious political challenge to the regime since the revolution, and the response was swift and brutal. Riot police, plainclothes agents, and members of the Basij, a paramilitary militia, stormed the dormitories. Protesters were beaten, arrested, disappeared. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly threatened to depose the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. The city vibrated with anxiety.

One afternoon, I was standing with a recent acquaintance at a major downtown square, sipping fresh pomegranate juice, watching events unfold. Around us, people milled about—nervous, curious, suspended between ordinary life and political rupture. A minibus pulled up nearby, already half filled with arrested demonstrators. I made the mistake of looking too long. Within moments, I was yanked by the arm, shoved inside, blindfolded, and driven off.

That night, those of us who had been in that minibus were held in a military compound—unmarked, unnamed—somewhere in the capital. My acquaintance who had witnessed the abduction, it turned out, worked for a marginalized reformist faction within the Ministry of Intelligence. Even with his connections, it took him several days and the intervention of senior military officers to locate us. We were eventually released into the custody of his superiors, who brought us to his office, on the third floor of a building I had passed dozens of times. It had always appeared to be a quiet academic institute. I now learned that this was a front: an office run by the Ministry of Intelligence, disguised as a historical-research center.

That was my first initiation into the invisible city—the Tehran that doesn’t show up on maps or official registries. It runs parallel to the ordinary one, yet wholly apart: embedded in unmarked buildings, accessed through back doors and side alleys, staffed by men with fake names, unsmiling and polite. It was the regime’s city, hidden in plain sight.

Every city has its secrets. But in Tehran, the secrets are not incidental—they are structural. After that first arrest, and in the years that followed, I began to understand just how extensive the invisible city really was.

Some parts of it were what you might call “visibly invisible”: Everyone in Tehran knows about Evin Prison, perched on the edge of the Alborz foothills, its name spoken with dread and resignation. But almost no one knows what happens inside.

Read: Iran has become a prison

I spent long months there as a political prisoner, detained for my work on democracy and civil society. I was held in solitary confinement—23 hours a day in a small white cell, alone but for my jailer and my interrogator. Once a week, I was permitted a family visit. My wife, Bahar, and our 2-year-old daughter, Hasti, would meet me in a room arranged like a reception lounge—carpeted, with sofas, a potted plant or two, and cameras discreetly embedded in the walls. A performance of normalcy, under surveillance. Evin was the regime’s theater of control, which it carefully lit and dimmed.

Only after my release in 2010 did the full topology of the invisible city begin to reveal itself to me—slowly, then all at once. Like Alice through the looking glass, I was ushered ever deeper into its passageways. I was no longer in Evin, but I was never quite free; I remained under watch, summoned to meetings, moved from place to place. The architecture of control was mundane on the surface. I would be told, with feigned casualness, “Come on, pack up, let’s go,” and soon find myself in an unmarked car, or on the back of a battered motorbike, taken to what they called a “safe house”—not safe for me, of course, but shielded from view.

These places were embedded in perfectly ordinary buildings: apartment complexes, office towers, mid-range hotels. Their doors bore no signs, or else misleading ones: for a travel agency, a translation bureau, a small think tank. Once, I was flown to another city, checked into a standard business hotel, and led to a room that had been converted into a studio—lights, cameras, a backdrop—where political detainees were brought to record “confessions.” Another time, I was taken to a back alley in northern Tehran, up a narrow flight of stairs, and into an unremarkable flat where an intelligence officer waited behind a desk, ready to resume our conversations.

The invisible city extended underground, metaphorically if not always literally. After the discovery of Hamas’s extensive network of reinforced tunnels beneath Gaza—more than 350 miles long, nearly half the length of the New York City subway system, and built with extensive support from Iran—I couldn’t help but imagine Tehran with its own network. Not of tunnels perhaps, but of whispered channels: mosques that doubled as surveillance nodes, schools and ministries laced with informants, entire office blocks that served the security state. A hidden circulatory system beneath the city’s surface.

Not everything in the invisible city was overtly sinister. Some moments blurred the line between menace and civility. Once, one of my interrogators, a man with an incongruously gentle demeanor, stopped to buy a cold drink on the way to a meeting. At a small café, he chose a table out of view of the surveillance camera. “Pull your cap down,” he murmured. A gesture of protocol? Paranoia? Or some strange performance of care? I still don’t know.

The invisible city was not merely a place. It was a psychological condition, a way of moving through space in uncertainty and coded awareness. It was an alternate world with its own logic, rules, and rituals, always one breath beneath the surface of the city of ordinary life.

In January 2016, a few days after Iran and the United States signed the nuclear deal that would become known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, I stood in Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, passport in hand, waiting to board my flight. It felt like the end of something: almost six years of surveillance, arrest, confinement, and conditional release. I was finally leaving.

My phone rang.

“Look to your left.”

There he was: one of the more polite and composed of the intelligence officers who had overseen my case. He had always struck me as thoughtful, almost sympathetic. I never learned his real name. That day, in plain clothes, he was unmistakable, his neat, collarless teal shirt peeking above his dark wool coat. He nodded and gestured for me to follow.

Read: Iran is not a ‘normal’ country

We walked back past the passport-control barrier, through a narrow side corridor, into a long, low-lit room where uniformed airport police sat at terminals. As we passed, one officer half-rose to stop us—then hesitated, recognizing my escort. He sat back down.

We returned to the terminal’s public spaces, on the other side of the security barriers, which passengers aren’t normally allowed to cross back through. There, another man waited on a bench: the most senior security officer I had encountered during my months under semi-carceral control. He told me he had come to personally supervise my departure. “I hope,” he said evenly, “you won’t betray your country again.”

Then he smiled.

And just like that, I was back in the visible city, rolling down the runway, lifting off, seeing Tehran with my own eyes for what was likely the last time.

In some sense, the past 30 years of Iran’s history—its repressions and rebellions, its suffocations and flickers of hope—can be understood as the continuous conflict between these two realms: the visible one of ordinary life, and the invisible one of revolutionary power.

One Tehran is filled with apartments and parks, evening picnics and bus rides, laughter and prayer and disappointment—the “city of man,” in Augustine’s sense, full of contradictions and grace. The other is cloaked in surveillance and menace, shaped by ideological certainty and fear, a city not of citizens but of instruments, organized for the will of their God.

When the brave young women of the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement rose up in 2022, joined by young men willing to risk everything to stand beside them, they were demanding to live fully in a visible city: a city where women and girls could be present, not hidden, and where public space belonged to the living, not to the ghosts of revolution. The regime’s response was immediate and categorical. It reasserted the dominance of its invisible, omnipresent apparatus with snipers, beatings, disappearances, and night raids.

Read: A cease-fire without a conclusion

The invisible city, by definition, was designed to remain unseen. But over the past few weeks, the Israeli air strikes in and around Tehran have made it impossible to ignore. Whatever one thinks of their legality or strategy, the strikes illuminated something long denied: a lattice of military, intelligence, and weapons infrastructure embedded in the civilian fabric of the city and the country. The bombs were flares briefly lighting up the hidden architecture of power.

In those flashes one could glimpse a parallel Tehran: IRGC commanders asleep in residential apartments; nuclear engineers moving discreetly across the city; weapons depots nested inside nondescript office blocks. Many of these men, knowing they might be hunted, rarely slept in the same apartment twice. They were shuttled from building to building, neighborhood to neighborhood, passing silently among unsuspecting neighbors, shadows in borrowed homes.

For a few seconds, the invisible city was visible: not metaphorically, but with terrible literalness. Then the fireballs receded and the shadows reabsorbed the light. The palimpsest was back.

SAN ANTONIO – Crime Stoppers is seeking the public’s help in identifying potential suspects connected to a shooting underneath a bridge near downtown San Antonio.

San Antonio police officers found Curtis Davis, 38, dead underneath Interstate 10 near North Frio Street on Wednesday, June 11.

Davis’ body was found around 1:30 p.m. The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office determined he died from a gunshot wound connected to a homicide.

The Crime Stoppers posting stated that Davis was last seen leaving Haven for Hope the night before, around 9:30 p.m., with a black backpack and cellphone.

None of the personal items were found with Davis under the bridge, according to the posting.

Crime Stoppers said people in the area near the scene reported seeing Davis dead as early as 9 a.m. on June 11.

The San Antonio Police Department’s investigation is ongoing.

Crime Stoppers may pay up to $5,000 for information that leads to the arrest of the suspect in this crime. To be eligible for a reward, tips must be submitted directly to Crime Stoppers.

Anyone with information on this case is urged to call Crime Stoppers at 210-224-7867 (STOP). To text a tip, text “Tip 127 plus your tip” to CRIMES (274637).

Tips can also be left on the P3 Tips app, which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. Tips can also be submitted on the Crime Stoppers website.

Related coverage from KSAT:

For 49 straight days, everyone in Seeley Lake was breathing smoke. A wildfire had ignited outside the small rural community in Montana, and the plume of smoke had parked itself over the houses. Air quality plummeted. At several moments, the concentration of particulate matter in the air exceeded the upper limit of what monitors could measure.

Christopher Migliaccio, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Montana, saw an opportunity to do what few have ever done: study what happens after people get exposed to wildfire smoke. He and his team quickly cobbled together funding and drove out to Seeley Lake to get data.

That was in 2017. The researchers followed up with residents for two years after the fires, checking on their lung function. To their surprise, the worst effects didn’t show up immediately, despite the heavy dose of smoke. Instead, people’s lung function seemed to deteriorate later. Right after the fires, about 10 percent of the cohort had lung function that fell below the lower limit of normal. By the one-year mark, about 46 percent did. At the two-year mark, most of those people still had abnormally poor lung function. “We were very surprised,” Migliaccio told me. He and his colleagues had intended to follow the residents for a third year, but then COVID hit. Instead, they tried exposing mice to wildfire smoke in a controlled lab environment. Their results pointed to a similar outcome: The worst effects took time to present.

Migliaccio’s work can speak to only a single smoke event. But it is the type of event that more people in the United States are dealing with, over and over again. Until recently, wildfires that exposed large populations to smoke were a relatively rare occurrence. But that’s changing: More frequent and intense wildfires are erasing or even reversing decades of gains made in American air quality in the majority of U.S. states. Across the country, from 2012 to 2022, the number of people exposed to unhealthy air from wildfire smoke increased 27-fold; one out of every four unhealthy air days in parts of the country is now a smoke day. “It is the exposure that is impacting air quality across the U.S. now more than any other pollution source,” Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington whose work helped show a link between wildfire-smoke exposure and increased risk of dementia, told me.

Yet science—to say nothing of policy—has hardly caught up with what that means for human health. “We’re in the preschool stage of development,” Casey said. What cumulative smoke exposure can do to a body and mind remains largely a mystery, but the few studies that do exist point to nothing good.

Plenty of research shows that respiratory distress and heart attacks spike in the event of smoke exposure; acute impacts of breathing smoke send people to the hospital and make them miss work and school. Those risks can linger for months afterward, or, in the case of the Seeley Lake cohort, for years.

Now that more people are regularly breathing smoky air over their lifetime, though, the relevant concern may no longer be what happens when a person gets one big dose of smoke; rather, it may be what happens when they are exposed many times. How much does anyone know about the long-term consequences of exposure to smoke or, worse, the long-term consequences of long-term exposure to smoke? “Very little,” Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an environmental engineer and epidemiologist at—as of next week—Brown University, told me.

The best model for assessing wildfire-smoke exposure was developed only recently, Kioumourtzoglou and Casey told me, and, because of satellite imagery and monitoring limitations, goes back to only 2006. That means researchers have at most 20 years of data to look at in determining whether smoke could have contributed to a population’s incidence of a particular illness. Latency periods for plenty of diseases, including some cancers, can be longer. Plus, every fire is its own unique nightmare, chemically speaking. The Seeley Lake fire burned mostly trees. Add to that whole neighborhoods of cars and houses and parking lots, and the toxicity profile of the smoke changes significantly. During the Los Angeles fires in January, which burned down entire neighborhoods, noxious compounds from burning plastics and other man-made materials swirled through the air.

Scientists know a lot about the harms of regular ambient air pollution (such as the particulate matter that spews from tailpipes and factories), but wildfire smoke is chemically different—and likely worse, from a health standpoint. Its complexity is also daunting from a research perspective: Even the types of trees burned appear to affect the smoke’s toxicity. In a lab study, for instance, researchers burned peat, pine needles, and several types of wood to simulate different regional forests. They found that pinewood smoke was the most mutagenic, suggesting that it might be more likely to cause cancer than other woods, and that eucalyptus smoke was the most toxic to lungs. How long the smoke stays in the air may matter too. Some research suggests that smoke becomes more toxic as it ages, which is bad news for people living downwind from smoke—in parts of the U.S. during Canadian wildfires, for instance.

And unlike our relatively steady exposure to ambient air pollution, exposure to wildfire smoke is spiky, coming in bursts, with pauses in between. That makes it hard to model, Kioumourtzoglou told me, and also introduces many questions, each of which needs research attention: Is the health impact worse if a person breathes a very high level of smoke for three days, or if they breathe a lower level for three weeks? How does the point in life at which they are exposed—as an adult with asthma, a child whose lungs were still developing, a fetus in utero—change how the smoke affects them?

Many of the attempts to even start to answer these questions depend on chance and the swift action of researchers like Migliaccio, who seize on the chance to study a fire close at hand. In the summer of 2008, for instance, Lisa Miller, who studies pulmonary immunology and toxicology at UC Davis, was in her office as wildfires sent smoke settling over the region. The air outside her office looked like thick winter fog. She  suddenly thought about the rhesus monkeys she studied at the primate research center; they had been outside in their habitat the whole time. These primates were great models for human health, so they became a case study for what happens to a smoke-exposed body.

Miller and her team studied the monkeys for the next 15 years. They found that those that were exposed to wildfire smoke as infants became adolescents with smaller, stiffer lungs than their peers born the following year, which resulted in poorer lung function and worse immune regulation. When the researchers exposed blood samples from both populations of adolescent monkeys to bacterial infection, the samples from the smoke-exposed animals responded more weakly, indicating that their immune system wasn’t working as well. The smoke-exposed monkeys also slept far less, she told me: “It was absolutely stunning.” Some research suggests that smoke can affect humans the same way: In 2022, a large study in China concluded that human children who had been exposed to air pollution early in life also had poorer-quality sleep. High-quality sleep is important to neurodevelopment in children, and poor sleep is associated with a range of negative health consequences across a lifetime.

What we can learn from Miller’s monkeys is limited; they spend 24 hours a day outdoors, unlike humans, and they get constant medical care and perfectly tailored diets, also unlike humans. Still, rhesus monkeys are some of the closest animals to us, physiologically, and on a basic level, smoke exposure in infancy seems to have affected these monkeys’ health for their entire life, Miller said.

Standard air pollution is known to have a negative impact on virtually all aspects of fertility, and for people who wish to conceive children, smoke may pose a hazard too. After wildfires in Oregon prompted an air-quality emergency in Portland in 2020, researchers looked at the sperm quality of 30 people who had their semen analyzed at a fertility clinic before and after the fires. The study was small, but the trend was clear: Motility—how well the sperm swims—went down for most of the participants. A nearly identical study in Seattle, which is still awaiting peer review, yielded a similar result. And Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University, told me that he’s seen similar results in bull sperm: He and his colleagues got records from a cattle-breeding facility in Colorado that tests bull sperm with many of the same metrics used for human sperm at a fertility clinic. Sperm that isn’t up to shape gets discarded by the facility; after a wildfire in the area, more of the cattle sperm got thrown out, Montrose found. Quality must have gone down.

The results on the bull sperm are preliminary and are awaiting peer review. But in the meantime, Montrose is enrolling male firefighters in a study to learn whether their fertility is affected by their job (which forces them to breathe much higher doses of smoke than the general population). When Montrose and his colleagues exposed mice to a very high dose of wood smoke in a lab—simulating what they estimate would be the equivalent of 15 years on the job for a wildland firefighter—the mouse sperm was significantly altered at the epigenomic level, where gene expression is altered without changing the underlying DNA sequence. “Normally, in a study like this, you see a handful of sites being changed,” Montrose told me; he and his colleagues found changes at more than 3,000 different sites, reflecting about 2,000 different genes. Montrose wonders what this far higher level means for the mice’s fertility and for their offspring. Whether these changes are positive or negative, it appears that smoke can alter, on a deep level, the very cells involved in reproduction. “It’s intriguing, but we still don’t quite know what it means,” Montrose said.

If smoke can affect health early in life, it also can affect life’s end. Breathing smoke can cause inflammation, which is a key pathway for many neurological disorders, and research is now turning up associations between smoke and conditions that strike older people, such as Parkinson’s, Casey told me. Smoke also causes premature death: more than 50,000 people in California died prematurely from wildfire smoke between 2008 and 2018, according to one estimate, and more than 11,000 people in the U.S. do so each year, according to another. Climate change is only accelerating those dynamics. As I’ve written before, the National Bureau of Economic Research found last year that in a worst-case warming scenario, deaths from wildfire-smoke exposure in the U.S. could top 27,000 a year by the middle of the century. That is, smoke could kill 700,000 people from now until 2055.

Burning fossil fuels has locked us into a downward spiral: Warmer temperatures mean more fires. Already, summer 2025 is poised to be a fiery one in California, only half a year after fires devastated Los Angeles. Canada has already been burning for weeks, sending smoke billowing down through the U.S. The smoke is coming for us all—each of us is now more likely to encounter it in the coming years.

That terrible reality means that researchers will have more opportunities to understand what smoke does to us. Susan Cheng, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, is now part of a major multi-institutional study of people exposed to the L.A. fires. As a cardiologist, she’s well aware of the extreme heart risks associated with smoke inhalation. Breathing regular pollution over a long period can accelerate heart disease by prematurely aging blood vessels and accelerating plaque buildup in the coronary artery; at least one recent study found that people’s risk of heart failure and other serious cardiac problems can persist for months after smoke exposure. If that’s any indication, fire smoke is a major heart hazard.

“We really need to be closely tracking and following this,” Cheng told me. “Otherwise, we will be facing a major information gap, and trying to, in hindsight, put the pieces together.” She pictures asking, years down the line, “How did people get this way? How did our patients end up with these accelerated aging processes, accelerated development of these different chronic conditions?” Studies like hers—which began in January and will follow a cohort of more than 13,000 Angelenos for the next 10 years—aim to answer those questions now, before even more of the country starts having to ask them.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Texas – Capital One Research found that thrifting generated $53 billion in revenue for the US market in 2023.

In an era when everyone is seeking ways to save, thrift stores are gaining popularity.

Melissa and Nathan Weir opened Thrifty Hippie Community Thrift Store a year and a half ago in Universal City, right outside Randolph Air Force Base. It’s a nonprofit focused on keeping prices low for those in need.

Melissa describes it as a boutique-style chic thrift store.

“It’s (got) a happy vibe,” she said. “It’s a boutique vibe, we like people to be, come in and it be nice for them. Just because it’s the thrift store, it doesn’t have to be not appealing.”

The couple is hoping to meet a need.

“Just so many people that couldn’t afford to shop at regular stores, and even some thrift stores. And so we wanted this to be a place that anybody could afford,” Nathan said.

They even did some research on where to locate the store and opened it in a lower-income community. They have over 150 people visit the store daily, not just to make purchases, but also to donate and utilize their food pantry.

Melissa has a heart for helping those who need a meal. The money generated from sales is donated to food pantries at local churches and other nonprofit organizations. They put some of their own savings into a project they strongly have a calling for.

“It makes my heart big knowing that if somebody is in need of something that, I can give it to them,” Melissa said. “I don’t have any shame or nobody has any guilt, they ask for it and I give it.”

Items are sold at a very low price as an effort to truly help those who are in need, Nathan said. They ask that people not take advantage of their kindness by reselling the items at a higher cost.

They would like to partner with community members who can donate quality items and even food for their pantries. The thrift store is located at 118 E Wright Blvd, Universal City, TX 78148.

Call or check their Facebook page for hours of operation before you drive over, 210-386-9934.

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Our security is dependent on those who are willing to fight our foreign enemies and die for their country. We honor them and their families because their bravery and courage protect our democracy. We respect our military precisely because its role in defending the nation means that the military does not get involved in politics. If we allow the president to politicize the military, that will undermine the trust of the American people in our national security. The mobilization of the National Guard in California has raised concerns about whether the reason for its deployment was based on real threats to law and order, or on political differences between the governor of California and the president of the United States.

To protect the role of the military, the U.S. has historically made clear in its laws that federal troops should not be used for civilian law enforcement. In 1878, President Rutherford Hayes signed the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from doing the work of law-enforcement officers. Even the statutes that authorize the president to activate the National Guard make clear that troops are to be limited to responding to “invasions” or “rebellions.” The U.S. is not facing either an invasion or a rebellion.

Respect for the military’s role is crucial for our democracy. That is why the law is designed to ensure that our armed forces are not politicized or misused. This rule-of-law tenet is the fundamental difference between a free society and an autocracy. Tyrants use the military as a pawn to solidify power, put down protests, and arrest opponents. Russian President Vladimir Putin has incurred as many as a million casualties among the soldiers he sent into Ukraine for his dictatorial goal of restoring the supposed greatness of the Soviet Union. Putin has found an ally in another ruthless autocrat, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, who has sent forces to help Russia’s fight in Ukraine. In China, the primary purpose of the military is to protect those in power. In each case, the tyrant demands—for his own survival—that the loyalty of the military is solely to him, not to the nation, let alone the people.

Tom Nichols: Trump is using the National Guard as bait

Doing a dictator’s bidding is not how the military works in America. Our service members swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, not to the president. They follow the orders of the president as their commander in chief, but may do so only if those orders are legal and pursuant to the Constitution. Their job demands training, skill, and courage, certainly. The job also requires the capacity to make decisions based solely on the goal of accomplishing a national-security mission, not appeasing political leaders. As secretary of defense, I was a party to the kinds of tough decisions our military has to make. That judgment must not be damaged by those who seek to use it for political purposes.

At the Pentagon, I bore the vital responsibility of deciding on the deployment of our men and women in uniform, and whether to put them in harm’s way. The concern that some of those deployed would not return from a mission was always uppermost in my mind. Whenever we lost a serving soldier, I would receive a report and see their name. On those occasions, I personally wrote a condolence note to their family. The list of fallen warriors was also sent to the White House so that the president could do the same and convey the nation’s gratitude to the family for the sacrifice that their loved one had made.

Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of Special Operations Command at the time, made clear to me that every military judgment must be based on doing what’s right to accomplish the mission. As the director of the CIA, I was in charge of the covert operation to hunt down the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. McRaven was the Afghanistan-based operational commander of the raid, in which two teams of Navy SEALs flew 150 miles at night. As they were about to land, residual heat from the day caused one of their helicopters to stall out and make a hard landing that left its tail stuck on one of the compound’s walls. I called McRaven to ask what was going on. He was decisive in his response. “I have called in a backup helicopter, and we will proceed with the mission breaching through the walls,” he said. “The mission will go on.” I gave my approval. The mission was successful: The man who had masterminded the 9/11 attacks was finally eliminated. The kind of split-second judgment that McRaven showed is what our military is trained to do.

In the recent success of the U.S. forces that were deployed to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, the military did a great job of planning and execution. America has the strongest military force on Earth, but all of the technologically advanced weapons, planes, ships, and equipment would not be worth much without the skill and training of our service men and women. At outposts throughout the world, they are our front line of defense. They are our national security.

To maintain that security demands that we protect and respect the constitutional purpose they serve. If a president deliberately misuses the military for partisan reasons, he is weakening America’s safety. Leadership of a military devoted to defending our nation is an honored role that goes back to George Washington and the creation of the Continental Army 250 years ago. During that long history, Americans have learned that presidential parades do not define their military; what does is their respect for the military’s mission of protecting national security. Trust in the military is indivisible from trust in the Constitution. Both must remain inviolable.