As 2025 began, the stars were aligning for a housing market rebound.

Inflation was easing, the economy looked strong, and mortgage rates were drifting downward. By April, there were more available homes to buy than at any time since January 2020, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. The conditions were ripe for buyers to reemerge, checkbooks in hands, and sellers to negotiate.

Then April 2, President Donald Trump rolled out his expansive global trade tariffs, shocking the stock and bond markets and sparking fears of a recession. Mortgage rates jumped again, hitting 6.89% for a 30-year fixed-rate loan May 29, their highest level since early February. The extreme volatility threw cold water on a fragile market. Buyers bailed out.

“There isn’t any urgency to buying right now — if anything it feels more risky to put a down payment into a home when you might not have a job six months from now,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of Redfin.

Real estate agents across the country report a chilled environment, with sellers unwilling to lower their prices and buyers reluctant to make a big purchase as the economy flounders and the costs for a mortgage, insurance and property taxes rise. Even in markets where prices have fallen and inventory is piling up, like Austin, Texas, homes are sitting on the market for months. In fiercely competitive areas, like the New York City suburbs, where prices are still rising and homes sell fast, properties that would have gotten a dozen offers a year ago now get two or three.

“Yes, there is more inventory, but it’s almost like too little too late,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist for Cotality, a real estate data provider.

In 2024, there were fewer home sales than in any year since 1995. This year is looking worse. In April, the number of sales of existing homes dropped 2% from April 2024, while the median sale price rose 1.8%, marking 22 straight months of year-over-year price growth, according to the National Association of Realtors. The trade group also reported that pending sales are down from a year ago in every region of the country except the Midwest.

The number of canceled sales (one sign of a skittish market) also rose year over year, according to Redfin, which also found that there were nearly 500,000 more people trying to sell homes in April than there were people trying the buy them — the biggest such gap since Redfin began tracking the data in 2013.

La’Keshia White, a real estate agent in Douglasville, Georgia, said that some of her prospective buyers dropped out of the market after losing federal jobs. Others are nervous and scaling back their budgets to leave more cushion should their financial situation change.

“They used to be content, thinking their jobs are going to be there, but it’s not the same anymore,” White said.

In Lewisburg, West Virginia, Leah and Jesse Jones, who were in the market for a three-bedroom home, lost out on two bids: one to a cash buyer who waived contingencies and the other because the seller wouldn’t lower the price enough. After six months, they’ve paused their search, hoping a downturn might bring home prices down, too.

“I feel like buying a home, owning a home, is becoming a privilege that only the truly wealthy can enjoy,” said Leah Jones, 45, a clinical dietitian.

Yet despite a market full of reluctant buyers, sellers are not under pressure to drop their prices. Almost 60% of households have an interest rate below 4%, according to a study published in the Journal of Finance; selling would mean trading that low rate for a much higher one on a new purchase. Not since the 1980s, when borrowing rates soared into the double digits, have so many Americans been locked into their mortgages, said Lu Liu, an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the study, describing the conditions as “unprecedented.”

Added to that, the country hasn’t built enough homes since the foreclosure crisis, creating a chronic lack of new housing supply that drags down the market and keeps prices high. “There is no panacea in sight,” Liu said.

Even Austin is stuck, despite starting construction on 102,000 single-family homes between 2020 and 2024, according to Zonda, a data provider. The median sale price there has fallen by 18% since the peak in April 2022, according to Unlock MLS, the multiple listing service for the Austin Board of Realtors.

But buyers still see an overheated market — the median home price jumped 69% from April 2020 to April 2022 — and an uncertain future. Many sellers, in turn, would rather pull a listing from the market than meaningfully lower the price. “It’s a bit of a frozen market,” said Eric Bramlett, an Austin real estate agent.

Christopher Damien is reporting about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

Alicia Upton paced the concrete floor of her jail cell. She looked around the cramped quarters. Then she pressed the alert button on an intercom attached to the wall.

“What is your emergency?” responded a voice, captured on video footage from a camera in the cell. It was a deputy about 50 feet away, in the control room of the women’s mental health unit where Upton, 21, was being held.

“It’s not an emergency, but —” she began, then the deputy cut off the call before she could finish. Charged with a misdemeanor, Upton was awaiting a court-ordered evaluation to determine whether she was competent to stand trial.

She took a few more listless steps, the video shows. She paused beneath a buzzing fluorescent light, then picked up a white bedsheet and said, “It’s time to hang myself.”

She was found, limp, 20 minutes later. In the interim, the camera recorded the young woman preparing to end her life. But no guards, who were tasked with monitoring the video feed, noticed until it was too late.

Upton was the first of 19 detainees at Riverside County jails to die in 2022. That total, the highest the department had reported in at least three decades, ranked the jail system among the most lethal in the nation that year.

The deaths, attributed to homicide, overdose, natural causes or suicide, reflected troubling patterns: neglect by jail employees, access to illicit drugs, and cell assignments that put detainees at increased risk of violence or did not allow for close oversight.

The suicides — at least three of the deaths, but most likely four — offer particular insight into some of those institutional problems and lapses, an investigation by The New York Times and The Desert Sun found.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department failed at times to adequately monitor detainees and intervene when they attempted suicide. Guards did not always enforce rules prohibiting detainees with mental illnesses from blocking cell windows and cameras, which hinders the required safety monitoring. The department has often isolated detainees with severe mental illness, which can exacerbate suicidal intentions.

And, the investigation found, the department has omitted pertinent facts about the deaths in communications to the families of the dead and to the public.

The department has assumed no responsibility for these deaths. California’s attorney general last year opened an ongoing civil rights investigation into the increase in deaths in custody, and Riverside County agreed to pay more than $12 million to settle lawsuits linked to detainee deaths going back to 2020. At least a dozen cases are still pending.

Sheriff Chad Bianco did not respond to interview requests or comment on detailed questions about the news organizations’ findings. But on an episode of his podcast this summer devoted to inmate deaths, he said that it can be extremely difficult at times to prevent suicides, and falsely claimed that there had never been any allegation that the department had “somehow done something wrong, or mishandled inmates, or mistreated inmates, or caused their death.”

The president of the deputies’ union declined to comment.

To understand how the suicides occurred, The Times and The Desert Sun interviewed dozens of people including current and former jail employees, relatives of the dead, independent medical examiners and civil rights lawyers. The news organizations also reviewed court documents, including arrest records, detainee medical and mental health records, and department notes on jail housing decisions.

Many of the details in this article have never been publicly reported, including the jail security camera footage reviewed by a reporter — material that is rarely seen by outsiders. The department has not released that footage or a dozen other videos requested by the news organizations under the California Public Records Act.

The suicides strongly suggest that, despite a federal class-action suit a decade ago that exposed deficiencies in mental health treatment in Riverside County jails and resulted in new court-ordered requirements, problems persist.

One detainee in 2022, who told guards that he was suicidal, was cleared after a medical check to return to his cell without any suicide-watch protocol. He was found dead about an hour later. He had been in custody for one day.

Another man, who suffered from schizoaffective disorder, had been mostly segregated from other detainees for two years when he was found hanging, and later died. To conceal his actions, he had covered his cell window and camera without any intervention from guards.

No suicides have been reported for 2023, but earlier this year, a man hanged himself while another detainee tried to alert jail guards but couldn’t get their attention.

That suicide and a separate drug overdose prompted Capt. Alyssa Vernal, then the head of the jail, to warn staff members that they were failing to maintain basic jail operating standards — including some of the same lapses identified years ago by the federal court.

Vernal, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, wrote in an internal email reviewed by the news organizations, “It has become obvious we are not keeping house or following the rules we should be.”

‘Kept saying she was fine’

When she was 19, Alicia Upton hit the road and left everything behind. She piled into a friend’s car in West Virginia and embarked on what would become a cross-country trip.

In an interview, her mother, Nichole Thompson, recalled believing that she was going on a fleeting adventure before settling back home. “She was resolute when she fixed her mind on something,” said Thompson, a librarian who raised Upton and her older sister in the Appalachian town of Lost Creek.

From a young age, Upton was an animal lover who would bring home rabbits and raccoons she hoped to keep as pets. At 14, she sold the Xbox she had gotten for Christmas to buy a horse, which she trained herself. To raise money for the road trip, she sold her four-wheeler and some goats, but not the horse, which she left in the care of a friend.

Upton had shown no signs of mental health problems when she left home, her mother said. She had gone to counseling years earlier after the suicide of a close friend, and her mother felt that she was resilient.

The road trip took Upton to Florida, Texas, and across the country through New Mexico and Arizona. Finally, she called home from Hemet.

She sounded happy, her mother recalled. She said California was beautiful. As the weeks wore on, though, she mentioned the car needed costly repairs and that she was often looking for places to sleep.

“I walked a fine line, trying to coax her to come back, but also let her have her freedom,” Thompson said. While some companions left for new destinations, Upton stayed put.

As the months turned into a year, it became clear to Thompson that her daughter was living on the streets. “She always knew coming home was an option,” Thompson said. “If I pushed her, I felt she would disconnect. She just kept saying she was fine.”

Soon, Thompson became concerned that her daughter might be struggling with drugs. She recalled Upton saying irrational things on the phone, like describing seeing relatives who were thousands of miles away.

Eventually, Upton was arrested twice for minor offenses — shoplifting and trespassing. Both times, she was released. But a third arrest was different.

On April 19, 2022, a woman found Upton on her land in San Jacinto. She later told deputies the young woman appeared to be looking for something. When the landowner found a knife on the ground, the two had a confrontation. Upton left and no one was injured. But she was arrested nearby and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and making criminal threats, both misdemeanors.

The paper trail of Upton’s incarceration describes her as distraught and combative on arrival at the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside. Of the five jails in the county, it is the facility where detainees who need mental health care are most often sent. Reports from the booking note that she did not sign several required documents. One jailer wrote on the signature line that she could not be trusted with a pen.

She was given a mental health rating of “severe” and placed in the women’s mental health housing unit, where each cell was monitored by camera. She was not prescribed any medication. When asked if she had ever attempted suicide, she would not answer.

But, deputies wrote in her file, she said she had “multiple personality disorder” and “stated that she ‘always kinda wanted to die.’”

A surge in jail deaths

Long before Upton was sent to the jail, the sheriff’s department had struggled to treat mental illnesses among the nearly 3,700 detainees it housed on any given day.

In jail and prison systems across the country, the population of people with mental health needs has surged in recent decades. More than half the detainees in California’s jails have such problems, a 2023 study found. As Riverside County’s jails began to operate as de facto mental health facilities, some detainees who claimed mistreatment took action.

Four sued the county in federal court in 2013, in what would become a class action, claiming the department was not providing adequate care.

When a judge ordered experts to inspect the claims, Dr. Bruce Gage, then chief of psychiatry for the Washington State Department of Corrections, found multiple problems. Some detainees were not receiving prescribed medications. Others were being medicated indefinitely on mere suppositions of mental illness. It was unclear whether the call buttons in the cells even worked.

Gage reported that the jails didn’t monitor suicidal detainees who were awaiting transfer to psychiatric facilities. The jails had no protocol in place to transition someone who was no longer considered suicidal into less-restrictive living conditions. Detainees either were in a general population and could be outside their cells for hours a day, or confined for all but 15 to 45 minutes.

“Riverside County jail system is amongst the most restrictive correctional settings I have visited,” Gage wrote. Those struggling with mental illness, he added, are “placed at greater risk of harming themselves under these conditions.”

Based on the reports, in 2016 a judge ordered a remedial plan that included ongoing inspections of the facilities and the threat of court intervention. Gage noted that the department had faced a staffing shortage since the 2009 recession, but emphasized that basic standards of care were required by law.

Sara Norman, one of the plaintiffs lawyers in the case, said the jail had made progress in improving medical care, but less so with mental health care. “We have been concerned for years about the dearth of programming and group and individual therapy for people struggling with mental illness in the jails,” she said.

Meanwhile, the county system experienced an increase in jail deaths over the past decade. Among them was a man in 2020 who had been arrested for drug possession and was to be released with a citation for a later court appearance. Instead, he died after being violently extracted from his jail cell by guards while experiencing symptoms of psychosis. His relatives received $7.5 million this year to settle a lawsuit.

The surge of 19 deaths in 2022 made Riverside County’s rate the second-highest in the state, behind Kern County, which had a much smaller jail population. Among the nation’s 15 largest jail systems, Riverside’s was the second-most deadly, with a rate more than twice that of Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas.

While some people at the jails were serving criminal sentences, most — including those who died by suicide — were detainees awaiting trial or other resolution of their cases.

Robert Robinson, 41, was arrested in September 2022 for trying to cash a fraudulent check at a casino. Because he was a gang dropout, he was considered a likely target of violence and was housed alone.

He told jailers while being booked that he was having suicidal thoughts, according to a lawsuit filed by his relatives. He was placed in a cell without a camera and was not put on suicide watch, records show.

The next day, he told deputies he was suicidal, and he met with a medical provider and a mental health nurse, according to court documents. Both cleared him to return to his cell alone. About an hour later, a deputy discovered he had hanged himself.

Riverside County settled the civil suit with his relatives in August for $1.8 million, with no admission of wrongdoing. His family did not respond to requests for comment.

Aaron Aubrey, 28, had an extensive history of mental illness and violence. During his three-year incarceration awaiting trial on a murder charge, he was housed in a mental health unit. He spent significant time in isolation after he was charged with killing another detainee in 2020.

In December 2022 a guard saw that Aubrey had blocked his window and covered his camera, but took no action, according to the coroner’s report. During another security check 40 minutes later, the detainee was found hanging. He died six days later at a hospital.

And this year, Reynaldo Ramos, 55, hanged himself even as a cell neighbor twice tried to alert guards over the intercom, according to a complaint filed with the county by the man’s relatives. The guards didn’t respond, the complaint said.

The claim attributed that account to an anonymous letter sent to the family’s lawyer and separately to a reporter for The Times and The Desert Sun, containing those closely guarded details. A person who had reviewed jail surveillance video of the unit also described the failed alert efforts.

Ramos, who had been given a mental health rating of severe when admitted to the jail on drug charges, was discovered unresponsive during a routine safety check, according to an internal incident report provided to the Times.

‘Man down!’

In the days after Upton’s arrest, her mind continued to fray.

On April 28, 2022, a judge ordered her to undergo a mental competency evaluation. Her criminal case was suspended, and with it the possibility of bail, until the findings were reported. When she was admitted to the jail, she had briefly been placed in a safety cell, without access to items that could be used for self-harm. Soon after, she was placed in the mental health unit.

That evening, the surveillance video showed, she was restless. Her cellmate was asleep on the top bunk as Upton paced and looked out of the cell door’s window. Meal trays were stacked at the foot of the bed and clothes were scattered nearby.

At 8:13 p.m., she pressed the intercom button, but got only a few words out before the deputy hung up. Moments later, Upton can be heard in the video saying she intends to hang herself.

She looped the bedsheet around her neck and, for a few minutes, tried anchoring it. She smacked her head three times. She looked toward the camera. At one point, it sounded as if she was weeping.

Sitting on the bottom bunk, she tied the sheet above her and tightened it around her neck.

At 8:18 p.m., Upton raised a middle finger to the cell camera. Over the next few minutes, the video captured her final movements. By 8:22, she was still.

It all unfolded in view of the deputies who were supposed to monitor the feed from her cell. A guard at a workstation near the control room was responsible for constantly tracking the video footage of the unit, according to three former jail employees speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the department.

Meanwhile, a deputy in the control room reminded a trainee to occasionally scan the images. They looked up at the feeds from the roughly 40 cameras, two of the former employees said. Spotting Upton, the deputy shouted over the radio, “Man down!”

She had been hanging by the bedsheet for 16 minutes before guards flashed lights signaling an emergency, video footage shows. Two deputies and a jail nurse entered her cell and began resuscitation efforts, but it was futile.

The next morning, back in West Virginia, Upton’s mother woke to pounding on her door, she recalled in an interview. It was a local deputy, who told her to call the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

She remembers asking, “Does this mean she’s dead?”

Yes.

“I thought my heart would stop,” she said.

The sheriff is the coroner

In Riverside County, the final accounting of how people die depends to a large extent on Sheriff Bianco.

A veteran of the department, Bianco was first elected sheriff in 2018. He has cast himself as a right-wing firebrand at odds with the state’s left-leaning legislature and governor. He has also criticized Attorney General Rob Bonta’s investigation of jail deaths as a “political stunt.”

California is one of just three states that allow elected law enforcement officials to oversee coroners’ offices. Until recently in Riverside County, that meant the sheriff’s department typically investigated deaths at its jails while also supervising the pathologists conducting the autopsies. (This year, the department began outsourcing those autopsies.) The final report about the cause of death is signed by the sheriff, who also serves as the coroner.

The state legislature has considered bills to separate the offices but none have passed. The California Medical Association has long advocated a separation, saying that the consolidation of the responsibilities of sheriff and coroner is an “immense conflict of interest.”

The Times and The Desert Sun found discrepancies when comparing the department’s public death summaries of the 2022 suicides against jail records turned over in civil suits, the video of Upton’s death and information provided by current and former employees.

Mario Solis, who had a history of mental illness, was jailed after a scuffle with a grocery store security guard over a stolen bag of Skittles, according to court records. In September 2022, his mother, Sara Solis, was told that he had died alone in a cell — but not much else. About six months later, she received the department’s summary report.

It included findings from an autopsy conducted days after Solis, 31, died in the mental health unit of the jail in Murrieta. Inside his mouth and throat were two pencils, a toothbrush, a plastic cap and bars of soap, the report said. It also noted cut marks on his arms.

A deputy coroner wrote that Solis had “an unspecified mental health history” and had been prescribed two psychiatric medications.

Bianco attributed Solis’s death to suffocation and blood loss after his jugular vein was punctured. He certified the death as an accident.

More than a year later, a lawyer representing the Solis family in a suit against the county received a trove of information the sheriff’s department had not previously disclosed. Jail medical staff had treated Solis for schizophrenia, including with antipsychotic medication. On three occasions, he said he was suicidal and talked about stabbing himself with a pencil.

During a chaotic five-month incarceration, he was transferred 10 times among four county jails and did two stints in intensive psychiatric treatment.

From the start, Solis had pleaded for help and medication, his scribbled notes show: “I am not well. Please help me before things worsen,” one read. In another, he requested a psychiatric visit, which was arranged but later canceled.

On Sept. 2, 2022, Solis was ruled incompetent to stand trial and ordered to a hospital for treatment. The next day, he was found unconscious in his cell. He had lacerations on his wrist and neck, a nurse wrote. His neck was red and bruised. His mouth and nose were bloody.

Photos of the cell show flooding from the toilet that soaked books and trash. One wall was filled with erratic writing.

The department’s reports do not explain why Bianco determined the death was accidental.

Bianco has accused media outlets and advocacy groups of misrepresenting the jail deaths to the public, including on his podcast episode on the topic, which was promoted on the department’s social media channels. Without naming names, the sheriff said that a detainee who had died after swallowing objects, including a pencil, had a “propensity to eat things.”

“They suffocated themselves, basically,” Bianco said. “But we don’t believe it was a suicide.”

In 1,600 pages of jail medical notes, there is no mention of Solis habitually swallowing harmful objects, as the sheriff claimed.

“This is not someone who accidentally died,” Hugo Solis, one of Solis’s brothers, said in an interview. “He killed himself in despair. And the sheriff knows that.”

A forensic pathologist and a medical anthropologist reviewed the coroner’s report for this article. Both said that, aside from the mention of Solis’s psychiatric history and prescriptions, it was unclear whether the coroner staff had reviewed his extensive mental health records or knew about his suicide threats. Both said that information was crucial for determining whether the death was a suicide.

Judy Melinek, a board-certified forensic pathologist, asked, “Why was he left alone and unsupervised after showing severe signs of mental health deterioration?”

‘It was their job’

Thompson, Alicia Upton’s mother, said she was stunned at how little information the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department would share about her daughter’s death.

For weeks, she said, she struggled to learn even basic details about the events leading up to the suicide. She asked to see any reports and obtain any surveillance video, though she wasn’t sure if she could bear to watch it. But the department declined to provide much of the material she requested.

Thompson sued the sheriff’s department last year, saying it had failed to monitor and protect her daughter. In its response, the county denied that deputies had failed to monitor Upton at the time of her suicide. However, according to two former employees, two jail workers faced discipline for lapses.

When a reporter described to  Thompson the footage from the jail cell, she said she had long suspected that her daughter had been desperate for help — but had been ignored.

“It was their job to keep her safe,” Thompson said. “It was their job to monitor her. They didn’t care to do it.”

Justin Mayo and  Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting.  Julie Tate contributed research.

This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Christopher Damien is a reporter focusing on law enforcement and incarceration in California as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship at The Times. More about Christopher Damien

Mickey Mouse wants to change his narrative.

The Walt Disney Co. rarely provides guidance about what investors can expect in future earnings. On Thursday, however, the entertainment giant shared growth expectations with investors — not just for 2025, but also for 2026 and 2027.

Entertainment streaming, for instance, will generate roughly $700 million in operating profit in 2025, up from $253 million this year, Disney said. Total per-share earnings will increase by “double digit” percentages in 2026 and 2027, compared with the previous years, in part because of new cruise ships and theme park expansions.

“We’ve got visibility,” Hugh F. Johnston, Disney’s chief financial officer, said.

Disney has desperately needed a new storyline on Wall Street: Shares have languished, even amid a broader market upturn, in large part because of uncertainty, something investors loathe, about the company’s future.

“There were some people who wanted to say that Iger brought the magic back,” said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen & Co., referring to Bob Iger’s return as Disney’s CEO in late 2022. “Well, let’s hold on for a minute. There has actually not been a whole lot to get people excited.”

Disney continues to have big problems, the largest being the traditional television business. Operating profit at Disney’s entertainment networks, including ABC, FX, National Geographic and the Disney Channel, plunged 38% in the most recent quarter compared with a year earlier, the company said in its earnings report Thursday. Operating profit at ESPN fell 6%, with Disney citing lower viewership and higher costs for college football rights.

But the company’s earnings report also revealed significant progress in two other areas that have worried investors: movies and streaming.

“Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” helped Disney’s film division — the company’s creative heart — roar back to life, as it swung to a $316 million profit from a loss of $149 million a year earlier. “Moana 2,” set for release on Nov. 26, and “Mufasa: The Lion King,” a prequel scheduled to arrive on Dec. 20, are both expected to be major box-office hits.

Disney’s streaming business (Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+) delivered $321 million in profit, a nearly sevenfold increase from the three months that ended in June, which was the first time Disney’s direct-to-consumer unit as a whole had any profit. Not long ago, the company’s streaming unit was hemorrhaging $1 billion a quarter.

Disney+ and Hulu delivered 14% ad revenue growth in the quarter. Disney+ ended the quarter with 122.7 million subscribers (excluding India), an increase of 4.4 million since June. Hulu had 52 million subscribers, roughly flat.

Disney said the two services would achieve an operating margin of about 10% in 2026, not including Hulu Live, a type of cable TV hookup.

As expected, the company’s theme park division had a subpar quarter. In August, Johnston had warned that some Americans, battered by years of high inflation, were pulling back on vacation spending. He also said Disney’s overseas theme parks, like Disneyland Paris, would struggle, including from competition by the Olympic Games.

Overseas, operating profit fell 32%, to $299 million. Despite flat attendance, Disney’s domestic properties squeezed out 5% growth, to $847 million, through higher prices.

Disney predicted a theme park recovery in the next fiscal year, saying that operating income for the division as a whole would increase as much as 8%, compared with 4% in 2024, despite launch costs for a new cruise ship and the impact of two hurricanes in Florida.

“As we look out to early bookings, they are consistent with growth year over year,” Johnston said.

Companywide, adjusted per-share income increased 39% from a year earlier, to $1.14, on par with analyst expectations. Revenue totaled $22.6 billion, up 6%, slightly ahead of expectations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

According to the website Downdetector, which tracks user reports of internet disruptions, more than 104,000 cases of Verizon outages were reported across the country as of 11:20 a.m. Eastern, more than an hour after the first issues were reported.

Also see: Verizon in talks to buy Frontier Communications

A map posted on the site showed cities with the most reports.

On the site, many users said their cellphones were intermittently displaying “SOS” mode and that they could not place calls or send or receive text messages.

“We’re aware of the issue affecting service for some customers,” a spokesperson for Verizon, Ilya Hemlin, said in a telephone interview at 11:30 a.m.

“Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to solve the issue,” he added.

Hemlin said he had no information on the cause of the problem or whether it was linked to localized power failures in certain parts of the country.

He said the company would provide more information as soon as it was available.

On social media, where Verizon customers went to check if outages were widespread, Verizon technical support was only responding individually to scores of users reporting the “SOS” problem on Monday morning.

Many people on the social media platform X complained of how the outage would affect their ability to do jobs, such as deliver Instacart orders.

Verizon, one of the largest cellphone carriers in the world, has 114.2 million wireless subscribers in the United States.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator for Shohei Ohtani who was fired late last month amid allegations he stole millions of dollars from the Dodgers star’s bank account to cover debts that Mizuhara owed to an illegal bookmaker, is in negotiations to plead guilty to federal crimes in connection with the purported theft, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The investigation, which began about three weeks ago after news of the alleged theft broke while Ohtani and the Dodgers were opening their season with two games in South Korea, is rapidly nearing a conclusion, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is continuing.

A guilty plea from Mizuhara before a federal judge likely to include an admission of a range of facts related to any illegal conduct could confirm the account that Ohtani gave to reporters two weeks ago, in which he said he had no knowledge of what happened to the money.

Those briefed on the matter claim that prosecutors have uncovered evidence that Mizuhara might have stolen more money from Ohtani than the $4.5 million he was initially accused of pilfering, the people said. In particular, authorities think they have evidence that Mizuhara was able to change the settings on Ohtani’s bank account so Ohtani would not receive alerts and confirmations about transactions, the three people said.

Ohtani’s lawyers initially alerted federal authorities about the alleged theft, and Ohtani pledged publicly to cooperate with the federal investigation and one being conducted by Major League Baseball. According to one of the people briefed on the investigation, federal authorities interviewed Ohtani in recent weeks to learn more about his relationship with Mizuhara.

By quickly pleading guilty, Mizuhara would increase his chances of receiving a more lenient sentence, as federal prosecutors and judges often look more favorably upon defendants who make the government’s job easier by expeditiously admitting their guilt.

Little is known about where Mizuhara has been since the Dodgers fired him. Upon returning to California from South Korea, Mizuhara was stopped by law enforcement officials after getting off the plane, the three people said. It’s unclear what Mizuhara told authorities in their interaction, but he was not arrested.

Mizuhara has hired Michael Freedman, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who specializes in white-collar criminal defense. Freedman declined to comment.

The investigation has been jointly led by the Los Angeles offices of the IRS’ criminal division and the Department of Homeland Security, along with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesperson for Ohtani, referred to the player’s detailed explanation he gave to the media two weeks ago, when Ohtani said Mizuhara had stolen from him and he promised to cooperate fully with the federal and MLB investigations.

“I never bet on baseball or any other sports or never have asked somebody to do that on my behalf,” Ohtani said. “And I have never went through a bookmaker to bet on sports. Up until a couple days ago, I didn’t know this was happening.”

The allegations about the theft surfaced when the Dodgers were in Seoul to open the season with games against the San Diego Padres. Interest in the team has intensified since it signed Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract in December. But as he and his new teammates were preparing for their opening games, reporters began asking about suspicious wire transfers from Ohtani’s account that had surfaced in a federal investigation of an alleged bookmaker. Rather than inform Ohtani personally, the superstar’s agent and Mizuhara tried to manage the crisis themselves.

Mizuhara, communicating with the agent, Nez Balelo, offered different versions of what had happened. First, Mizuhara said Ohtani had paid the debts of an unnamed teammate, then he said that he himself had racked up debts with the bookie and that Ohtani had bailed him out. The shifting stories alarmed executives in MLB, who worried that Ohtani might be tarnished by a connection to gambling.

Once executives with the Dodgers and MLB learned of the wire transfers but with Ohtani still in the dark the Dodgers asked Mizuhara to address the team in the clubhouse after the first game in Seoul. He told the team that he had a gambling addiction and was deep in debt, and that Ohtani, his close friend for years, had paid the debts.

At that point, Ohtani, who is not fluent in English but can understand the gist of some conversations, became suspicious. After Mizuhara’s clubhouse address, Ohtani told reporters, he confronted Mizuhara back at the team hotel. It was then, Ohtani said, that Mizuhara told him that he had stolen the money from his account. The Dodgers promptly fired him.

ATLANTA — For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis.

Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.

Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is using a RICO indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside of her Atlanta-area jurisdiction into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute. Her investigation also reached into rural parts of Georgia — notably Coffee County, where Trump allies got access to voting machines in January 2021 in search of evidence that the election had been rigged.

Signaling its breadth, the indictment brought Monday night laid out a number of ways the defendants obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia Legislature and state officials, recruiting fake pro-Trump electors, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.

“RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement to tell the whole story,” Willis said at a news conference last year.

Her challenge will be to convince jurors that the disparate group of 19 conspirators charged in the indictment — including a former president and a local bail bondsman, a White House chief of staff and a former publicist for Ye, who changed his name from Kanye West — were all working together in a sprawling but organized criminal effort to keep Trump in power.

• Trump employee faces judge: With racketeering charges against Trump, Georgia prosecutor aims to ‘tell the whole story’

State and federal prosecutors have found that they can use RICO laws to effectively make such arguments, and Willis has done it before. So has Rudy Giuliani, one of the defendants, who made his name trying racketeering cases against mafia families decades ago as a federal prosecutor in New York.

Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, said the indictment “shows the incredible power brought to bear against Trump by using Georgia’s racketeering law,” noting that in addition to the 19 people charged, it encompassed “as many as 30 unindicted co-conspirators — over 160 separate acts in all.”

But RICO laws have their detractors. Some critics say that the laws have granted too much power to prosecutors, allowing them to indict dubious members of “organizations” that are in some cases barely organized.

“Because RICO is so expansive, and so open, as a tool, it allows people to be caught in its dragnet that are nothing like the people who were originally intended” when the laws were first developed more than 50 years ago, said Martin Sabelli, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Another potential pitfall for a big RICO case is that it may become too complex for jurors to follow. As Michael J. Moore, the former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, put it Monday night: “When you fish with too big a net, you risk getting tangled up yourself.”

Some of the defendants were already accusing Willis of overreaching. A spokesperson for Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was charged in the case, said Willis was “exceeding her powers by inserting herself into the operations of the federal government to go after Jeff.”

Trump’s legal team said, “We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”

Trump and his allies have argued that their efforts to challenge his 2020 election loss in Georgia were well within the bounds of the law. Indeed, Trump has been laying the groundwork for his defense for months, arguing repeatedly that there was nothing illegal about his now-famous call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021.

In that call, Trump told Raffensperger he hoped to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win Georgia.

But the RICO indictment forces Trump to push back against a broader allegation — that he was part of a multipronged criminal scheme that involved not only calls to state officials, but the convening of bogus pro-Trump electors, the harassment of Fulton County elections workers, and false statements made by Trump allies, including Giuliani, before state legislative bodies.

In Georgia, RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: a potential prison term of five to 20 years, a fine or both.

Racketeering statutes are an outgrowth of New York City’s long history of combating corruption and organized crime. The word “racketeer” itself is derived from the “racket” at boisterous Tammany Hall fundraising dinners where it was an expectation, among crooked politicians, that anyone who hoped to get a piece of city business would buy tickets.

Under Giuliani’s leadership in the 1980s, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York used RICO to prosecute powerful mobsters such as Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese family. But Giuliani also used the federal statute to prosecute white-collar business cases.

Willis may rival Giuliani in her deep well of experience with RICO charges. She made her name as an assistant district attorney by bringing a sprawling RICO case against educators in the Atlanta public school system in 2013 in the wake of a cheating scandal, and has used Georgia’s version of the law repeatedly since then.

In the 2013 case, a group of Atlanta educators were accused of inflating standardized test scores and giving a false sense of academic progress. At the time, there was concern that the state was applying a law known for targeting the mob to a group of modestly paid public schoolteachers, most of whom were Black.

“I think it’s overkill,” Atlanta lawyer Bruce Morris told the Los Angeles Times. “RICO was originally designed for organized crime.”

Willis has said defending the integrity of the education system — and children’s right to an education — was paramount. The trial ended with 11 defendants being found guilty of racketeering, with some convicted of other crimes.

After being elected Fulton County’s top prosecutor in 2020, she has continued to be aggressive in using RICO to prosecute other cases, particularly in her fight against street gangs. The best known is the ongoing RICO conspiracy case against the group Young Slime Life, headed by Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.

The indictment charges that members of the group, known as YSL, committed the crime of conspiracy to violate the RICO act, and that certain members are responsible for crimes such as murder, aggravated assault and armed robbery. Defense attorneys maintain that the group is merely a musical collective.

In an analysis of the case for the pop culture website Complex, Andre Gee, a music and culture writer, blasted Willis for wielding RICO as an overly broad dragnet.

“It’s an ugly, precedent-setting maneuver in the war on rap that can only happen because the law allows her to be creatively predatory with their definition of a ‘corrupt organization,’” Gee wrote.

Some experts have argued that applying RICO charges in a criminal case allows prosecutors to use the laws’ often stiff penalties to pressure defendants marginally connected to criminal groups to take plea bargains. In the YSL case, Willis’ office obtained pleas from a number of defendants, securing admissions along the way that the group was indeed a criminal street gang.

The Young Thug case, taking place in the same courthouse that may eventually host Trump, has shown how unwieldy a large racketeering case with multiple defendants can be: Jury selection, which began in January, has yet to be completed, and has been rife with hiccups and scandals.

Noting that Willis is hoping for a trial within the next six months, Christopher Timmons, an Atlanta trial lawyer and former prosecutor experienced in RICO cases, said the timetable seemed to be “ambitious.”

“Six months to start a RICO trial is lightning fast,” Timmons said in an email early Tuesday. “They usually take a year to put together. That suggests the DA’s office walked into the grand jury room knowing what their case will look like at trial.”

Even though RICO laws now go far beyond mob-busting, their origins in fighting the New York mafia can still work against defendants in the court of public opinion.

But a good defense lawyer can sometimes use the laws’ association with the mob to their client’s advantage. That was the case in 2013, when one of Trump’s current lawyers in Georgia, Drew Findling, was defending a sheriff in the suburbs of Atlanta who had been accused of corruption and was facing state RICO charges.

In his closing argument at trial, Findling, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ridiculed state prosecutors for not reaching out to federal authorities if they truly believed they were dealing with a criminal on a par with the nation’s most infamous gangsters.

His client was acquitted.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The company’s network of fast chargers has been a key element in the company’s success by giving drivers confidence that they will be able to charge cars during longer trips.

Tesla’s network also has a reputation for being faster and more reliable than the networks available to owners of electric vehicles made by other manufacturers. Those chargers require drivers to download special apps.

Tesla accounts for more than half the fast chargers in the United States, and its network could provide a significant boost to the Biden administration’s plans to encourage electric vehicle ownership and fight climate change.

The Biden administration said 7,500 Tesla chargers will be open to other vehicles by the end of 2024. Of those, 3,500 are fast chargers capable of recharging a vehicle in about half an hour to an hour. The rest are slower chargers at hotels, restaurants and other destinations that are already available to owners of other car brands if they buy an adapter.

Tesla has about 17,700 fast chargers in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, meaning that most of the network will remain closed to electric vehicles made by General Motors, Ford Motor, Volkswagen and others.

Tesla said the opening of its network would be part of a major expansion.

“Our U.S. network will more than double by the end of 2024 to support our growing Tesla fleet and new EV customers,” the company said on Twitter without providing further details.

Tesla’s decision to open its network means the company will become eligible for some of the $7.5 billion in grant money that Congress authorized as part of a bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021. The money is meant to help create a nationwide charging infrastructure.

Chargers will be required to accept a standard form of payment, such as credit cards.

Companies that offer charging must also ensure that the network works 97% of the time, the administration said in a fact sheet, and charging systems must be standardized.

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the IRS as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the IRS to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that the group engages in more tax evasion than others.

Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit, according to the study by economists from Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and the Treasury Department.

Some of that discrimination appears to be rooted in decisions that IRS officials made over the past decade as they sought to maintain tax enforcement in the face of budget cuts, by relying on automated systems to select returns for audit.

Those decisions have produced an approach that disproportionately flags tax returns with potential errors in the claiming of certain tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit, which supplements low-income workers’ incomes in an effort to alleviate poverty. Those tax returns are more often selected for audits, regardless of how much in owed taxes the agency might recover.

The result is audit rates of Black Americans that are between three and five times the rate of other taxpayers, even when comparing that group with other taxpayers who also claim the EITC.

The IRS does not detail how it selects returns for audit. But the researchers were able to isolate several apparent explanations for why Black taxpayers are targeted so much more frequently. One is complexity: It is much harder for the agency to audit returns that include business income, because that process requires expertise from individual auditors.

Black taxpayers are far less likely than others to report business income. And Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for IRS systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

In effect, the researchers suggest that the IRS has focused on audits that are easier to conduct and as a result, finds itself disproportionately auditing a historically disadvantaged group.

Karina Franco’s ornate Art Deco building in the historic center of Mexico City has long been the heart of a downtown lifestyle, housing families of artists and activists and supporting an ecosystem of street vendors.

But as the pandemic upended office norms, a wave of remote workers from around the world descended on Mexico City, the country’s capital. The flow of foreigners has yet to slow down, causing housing costs to rise, displacing residents and upending the fabric of neighborhoods.

In August, Franco and the other tenants in her building were told by their landlord that their leases would not be renewed. Some units soon appeared on Airbnb — at rates more than four times the monthly rent — and new neighbors, mostly speaking English, now fill the hallways.

“It was very shocking at first,’ said Franco, 47, a migrant rights worker who found a new apartment in a different part of the city. “Then I felt angry.’

Since the pandemic, Mexico City has become a leading global hub for foreigners unshackled from their offices by work-from-home policies and drawn to the kind of comfort a salary paid in dollars or euros can afford.

Between January and October, more than 9,500 permits were issued to Americans allowing them to temporarily reside in Mexico City, according to federal immigration statistics, nearly double the 5,400 issued in the same period in 2019. Many more entered on tourist visas, which allow them to work from Mexico for up to six months as long as they are paid abroad.

The influx has been a boon for business owners in areas popular with foreigners and landlords taking advantage of record demand for long-term stays on platforms like Airbnb. It has also helped Mexicans with spare rooms to earn extra income amid soaring inflation.

But the surge has jolted the already tightening housing market, threatening to make large swaths of the city, where the average monthly salary is $220, unaffordable to many locals.

Mexico City’s leftist mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, has sought to navigate the changing market by embracing the transplants and partnering with Airbnb on a campaign that promotes the city as a “capital for creative tourism” that encourages foreigners to spend money in less well-off neighborhoods.

But as the jump in American and European visitors fuels a rapid expansion of Airbnb, the mayor’s alliance with the rental giant has ignited an argument that’s enveloped the platform in other major cities, from London to New York to San Francisco, where critics have accused it of driving up housing costs.

Housing activists, wary of gentrification and a shortage of rental housing in the sprawling capital, have accused city leaders of spurring a modern day “colonization” that is pricing out many Mexicans.

Sergio González, a housing activist, said there would be a “big problem” if the city government did not regulate the housing market at a time when remote workers are leading to the “forced displacement of families.”

Amid the backlash, the mayor has acknowledged that American and European remote workers may be putting pressure on housing prices and has directed the city’s housing authority to study the effect of Airbnb.

“The digital nomads are arriving,” Sheinbaum told reporters in November. “Obviously, we don’t want this to mean gentrification or price increases.”

According to Airbnb, between April and June of this year, the number of stays booked in Mexico City on the platform for longer than a month increased by 30% compared with the same period in 2019, making the city one of the more popular destinations worldwide among long-term renters.

In the Condesa and Roma neighborhoods, whose lush streetscapes and dynamic food scenes have long made them attractive to wealthier residents, co-working spaces offering free coffee and cubicles have proliferated.

English speakers pour out of cafes and, on Sundays, cantinas are packed with young people in sports jerseys, the televisions switched from soccer to American football.

The city’s campaign with Airbnb, which is scheduled to fully roll out on the platform’s website early next year, is meant to spread out the crowds. It will promote guided activities, designed with the help of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization, in neighborhoods that do not typically receive a high number of visitors, according to the company and city officials. Airbnb will also provide information on moving to Mexico, including visa requirements.

Miroslava Miyarath Lazcano Cruz, who has offered tours through Airbnb since 2019, started a new tour on Airbnb in October of Xochimilco, the working-class neighborhood where she lives, that is serving as a model for the program.

The tour includes preparing tamales from handpicked ingredients and floating along the neighborhood’s famous network of ancient canals.

The experience has seen high demand, introducing tourists to the markets and customs of a part of the capital that’s not widely explored by outsiders. Lazcano Cruz said the visitors who have come through Airbnb have “a vision and a thirst to get to know the space in a different way.”

Suvi Haering, a Finnish creative director who arrived in Mexico City in November after two months working remotely in France, said working and living in Mexico “pushes you to challenge your own thinking.”

“It’s the polar opposite of where I come from, hence it’s the most inspiring place I can go to,” said Haering, as she ate at a restaurant in the Roma neighborhood with a friend, a project manager from Denmark, who was staying with her in a nearby Airbnb.

The increase in the number of foreigners living in Mexico City has coincided with a rise in rents. Average monthly rents citywide have jumped from $880 in January 2020 to $1,080 in November, according to data from Propiedades.com, a real estate website.

The uptick has been higher in more upscale neighborhoods. In a slice of Condesa that borders Chapultepec Park, one of the city’s larger green spaces, monthly rents rose from $1,610 in January 2020 to $2,250 in November, driven mostly by the arrival of remote workers, said Leonardo González, an analyst at Propiedades.com.

Many are finding homes on a short-term basis on Airbnb, which is squeezing the available stock of long-term rentals, housing experts said.

Cities around the world, including Barcelona, London and New York, where housing costs have increased sharply, have targeted Airbnb by imposing stricter rules for short-term rentals.

In Mexico, a spokesperson for Airbnb said the company was working with government officials “to be part of the solution to the challenges faced by communities in Mexico City.”

The company also stressed the financial benefits for people who rent out rooms on the platform: More than half of Airbnb hosts recently surveyed by the company in Mexico City said the extra earnings helped cover an increase in food costs driven by inflation.

For Leonor González, the income from an Airbnb she began renting in 2020 in a state that borders Mexico City allowed her to keep paying her employees during the pandemic when her business setting up convention spaces ground to a halt.

Later that year, she also listed a new apartment, a stylish loft in Mexico City, for $71 a night on Airbnb. It’s been booked almost nonstop, González said, usually by Americans working remotely for longer than a week.

“The truth is that there aren’t any locals renting here now,” she said of her Condesa neighborhood. “It’s just foreigners.”

Mexico City officials argue that high housing costs in parts of the capital are the result of years of gentrification that started in the 1980s, when a wave of new construction following a devastating earthquake ushered in younger, deeper-pocketed residents.

Still, Diana Alarcón, a top mayoral adviser, acknowledged that remote workers are also contributing to rising housing rates.

“Certainly the fact that a large number of people with higher incomes are arriving in a single area can result in an increase in prices,” she said. “That’s precisely the reason it’s important to show visitors that there are many other areas to discover in Mexico.”

Ximena Gómez Gutiérrez, a 24-year-old who commutes an hour from her family home in a neighboring state to her job at a reproductive rights organization in Mexico City, took part in a recent protest over the new Airbnb program and the city’s lack of affordable housing.

Living near her job and being able to enjoy a vibrant urban lifestyle has long been a dream, Gutiérrez said.

“But my salary isn’t enough to be able to even think about living” in the capital, she said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The company, which claims it allows homeowners to sell their homes more quickly than through a broker, deceived customers into offering their properties to Opendoor for less than they would have made on the market, the FTC said Monday in a news release. The agency said Opendoor had presented home sellers with charts that showed they would make thousands of dollars more by selling their properties on the platform compared with the traditional marketplace.

Opendoor said in a statement Monday that it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations, which the company said were tied to its business activities from 2017 to 2019.

“While we strongly disagree with the FTC’s allegations, our decision to settle with the commission will allow us to resolve the matter and focus on helping consumers buy, sell and move with simplicity, certainty and speed,” the company said in the statement.

The turbulent housing market is under increasing pressure as consumers grapple with a jump in inflation, faltering home prices and soaring mortgage rates. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage climbed to 5.3% in July, according to Freddie Mac, a steep increase from 2.87% a year earlier.

Home prices rose more than 20% in May from a year earlier, according to Zillow, but the market has cooled since mortgage rates have begun climbing. In June, real estate brokerage firms Redfin and Compass announced that they were laying off employees because of sinking demand and signs of a “housing downturn.”

Opendoor is one of several services in the “iBuying” space, which includes companies that use algorithms to determine a home’s value and buy it for cash. In September, iBuying accounted for 1% of home sales in the United States.

“Opendoor promised to revolutionize the real estate market but built its business using old-fashioned deception about how much consumers could earn from selling their homes on the platform,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “There is nothing innovative about cheating consumers.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.