Editor’s note: This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org . A missed flight. Cryptic text messages. Sightings around Los Angeles. A family tragedy. Each new update in the monthlong search for a missing Hawaii woman captivated the nation. And after family members announced Wednesday that Hannah Kobayashi, 30, had been found safe , questions are still swirling about what could have caused the photographer to abruptly stop communicating with her loved ones and leave the country. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said Kobayashi walked through the U.S.-Mexico border in California voluntarily on Nov. 12, days after she missed her connecting flight to New York. She was not the victim of an abduction, foul play, or human trafficking as had been speculated on social media, McDonnell said. "We are happy to learn that Hannah has been found safe," the department said in a statement to USA TODAY. "Now that we have this new information, this has become a private matter and we will wrap up our investigation." But it's unlikely the public will ever see the results of that investigation or learn exactly what happened to Kobayashi after she was reported missing last month, said Michelle Jeanis, an assistant professor in the criminal justice department of The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "If it's a voluntary departure, then there is no crime and there's nothing to investigate," said Jeanis, who researches missing persons phenomenon. "And they have no obligation to tell the public anything or the family anything." What happened to Hannah Kobayashi? According to accounts from family and police , on Nov. 8, Kobayashi missed a connecting flight from Maui to New York City at Los Angeles International Airport and was later spotted at different locations around the city. She sent a series of unusual text messages to her family, including mentions of not feeling safe and of someone attempting to steal her identity and money. Kobayashi stopped contacting them days later, prompting her family to file a missing person report and launch a sweeping, in-person search effort. During the search Kobayashi's father, Ryan Kobayashi , 58, died by suicide near LAX. Police later said Kobayashi intentionally missed her flight to New York - a claim the family disputes - and reclassified her as a voluntary missing person after reviewing footage that showed her crossing the southern border. On Wednesday, lawyers for the family said she had been found in Mexico . “This past month has been an unimaginable ordeal for our family, and we kindly ask for privacy as we take the time to heal and process everything we have been through,” the statement, attributed to her mother Brandi Yee and sister Sydni Kobayashi, said. “We want to express our heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported us during this difficult time. Your kindness and concern have meant the world to us.” Kobayashi 'is not obligated' to explain disappearance to police It's not clear what led Kobayashi to cut off communication with her family and travel to Mexico. McDonnell told reporters that before she departed Maui, Kobayashi "expressed a desire to step away from modern connectivity," which may explain why she did not have her phone after departing LAX. Typically, voluntary departures are prompted by a high stress situation like a divorce, financial crisis, or potential criminal charges, said Jeanis. "We rarely see a case reach this level of exposure or attention for what seems like just family dysfunction or perhaps poor communication," she said. Jeanis said Kobayashi and her family are unlikely to share more details about what prompted her disappearance after experiencing such an "incredibly, profoundly traumatic" ordeal. And unlike in cases where people have misled law enforcement about their disappearance, police likely won't investigate Kobayashi further, Jeanis said. "We have not seen her and at this point we have no reason to compel her to see us," Lt. Doug Oldfield, a member of the LAPD missing persons unit, told PEOPLE . "It’s a big news story so she may decide to come with a lawyer, but she is not obligated to speak to us." Oldfield told PEOPLE that if Kobayashi crosses the border back into the United States, she will still "show as a missing person." He said the department is waiting for Customs and Border Protection or other law enforcement agents to make contact and determine she's okay. "Then we take her out of the system," he told the outlet, "unless something else happens." (This story has been updated to add new information.) Contributing: James Powel , Christopher Cann and Eduardo Cuevas , USA TODAYChina’s AIMA brand electric motorbike is now in Bangladesh
Dismiss Trump taunts, expert says after 'churlish' social media posts about Canada
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USC freshman guard Kennedy Smith is out indefinitely after having a surgical procedure, the program announced on Saturday. Smith was not available against Notre Dame on Saturday, but the Trojans expect her to return at some point this season. No additional details have been released regarding what kind of procedure Smith underwent. The Trojans are currently ranked No. 3 in the nation, and having the top recruiting class in the nation has been a key part of that. Smith, a California native, arrived to USC as the No. 6 recruit in the class of 2024. She earned a spot in the starting lineup right away and was averaging 10.3 points, 4.0 rebounds and 2.0 assists in her first four games. With Smith unavailable against the No. 6 team in the country, freshman Kayleigh Heckel made her debut as a starter. Heckel played for Long Island Lutheran High School in New York and was the No. 13 player in the class of 2024. She has been averaging 9.8 points, 1.8 rebounds, and 1.7 steals. While Smith has been a valuable piece for the team, there is still plenty of talent in Lindsay Gottlieb's roster. JuJu Watkins is fresh of a historic year in which she broke the all-time scoring record by a freshman. She carried over that momentum into her sophomore season and is leading the USC offense with 21.5 points per game, along with 6.3 rebounds. The team also got stronger during the summer with the addition of Stanford transfer Kiki Iriafen, who gives USC 17.3 points per contest and a team-high 7.5 rebounds.
By CHRIS MEGERIAN and COLLEEN LONG WASHINGTON (AP) — In the two weeks since Donald Trump won the presidency, he’s tried to demonstrate his dominance by naming loyalists for top administration positions, even though many lack expertise and some face sexual misconduct accusations. It often seems like he’s daring Congress to oppose his decisions. But on Thursday, Trump’s attempt to act with impunity showed a crack as Matt Gaetz , his choice for attorney general, withdrew from consideration. Trump had named Gaetz, a Florida congressman, to be the country’s top law enforcement official even though he was widely disliked by his colleagues, has little legal experience and was accused of having sex with an underage girl, an allegation he denied. After being plagued by investigations during his first presidency, Trump wanted a devoted ally in charge of the Justice Department during his second. However, it was never obvious that Gaetz could win enough support from lawmakers to get confirmed as attorney general. Trump chose for a replacement Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who defended him during his first impeachment trial and supported his false claims of voter fraud. Now the question is whether Gaetz was uniquely unpalatable, or if Trump’s other picks might exceed his party’s willingness to overlook concerns that would have sunk nominees in a prior political era. The next test will likely be Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to lead the Pentagon despite an allegation of sexual assault that he’s denied. So far, Republicans are rallying around Hegseth , an Army veteran and former Fox News host. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the controversy over Gaetz would have little bearing on Trump’s other choices. He said they would be considered “one at a time.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, suggested otherwise, claiming “the dominoes are falling.” “The drip drip of evidence and truth is going to eventually doom some others,” he said. Trump’s election victory was a sign that there may not be many red lines left in American politics. He won the presidential race despite authoritarian, racist and misogynist rhetoric, not to mention years of lies about election fraud and his role in sparking the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was also criminally convicted of falsifying business records to pay hush money, and he was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case. Empowered by voters who looked past his misconduct and saw him as a powerful agent of change, Trump has shown no deference to Washington norms while working to fill his second administration . The transition team hasn’t pursued federal background checks for Trump’s personnel choices. While some of his selections have extensive experience in the areas they’ve been chosen to lead, others are personal friends and Fox News personalities who have impressed and flattered Trump over the years. Several have faced allegations involving sexual misconduct . Hegseth is facing the most scrutiny after Gaetz. Once Trump announced Hegseth as his nominee for Pentagon chief, allegations emerged that he sexually assaulted a woman in California in 2017. The woman said he took her phone, blocked the door to the hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a police report made public this week. Hegseth told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said. However, he paid the woman a confidential settlement in 2023. Hegseth’s lawyer said the payment was made to head off the threat of a baseless lawsuit. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has faced allegations of misconduct too. A woman who babysat for him and his second wife told Vanity Fair magazine that Kennedy groped her in the late 1990s, when she was 23. Kennedy did not deny the allegation and texted an apology to the woman after the article was published. That isn’t the only hurdle for Kennedy; he’s spent years spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines, raising fears about making him a top health official in the new administration. Linda McMahon, chosen by Trump to be education secretary, is fighting a lawsuit connected to her former company, World Wrestling Entertainment. She’s accused of knowingly enabling sexual exploitation of children by an employee as early as the 1980s, and she denies the allegations. Tulsi Gabbard is another person who could face a difficult confirmation battle, but for very different reasons. The former Democratic representative from Hawaii has been a vocal Trump ally, and he chose her to be national intelligence director. But there’s grave concern by lawmakers and national security officials over Gabbard’s history of echoing Russian propaganda. Critics said she would endanger relationships with U.S. allies. Gaetz was investigated by federal law enforcement for sex trafficking, but the case was closed without charges and Republicans have blocked the release of a related report from the House Ethics Committee. However, some allegations leaked out, including that Gaetz paid women for sex. One of the women testified to the committee that she saw Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl, according to a lawyer for the woman. As Gaetz met with senators this week, it became clear that he would face stubborn resistance from lawmakers who were concerned about his behavior and believed he was unqualified to run the Justice Department. “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction,” Gaetz wrote on social media when announcing his withdrawal. Sen. Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican, said he believed there were four to six members of the caucus who would have voted against Gaetz, likely dooming his nomination, and “the math got too hard.” He said some of the issues and allegations around Gaetz were “maybe beyond the pale.” “I think there were just too many things, it was like a leaky dike, and you know, it broke,” Braun said. Trump thanked Gaetz in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, without addressing the substance of the allegations against him. “He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect,” Trump wrote. Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Stephen Groves and Lisa Macaro contributed from Washington. Jill Colvin in New York and Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, also contributed.Supporters of suspected CEO killer Luigi Mangione establish defense fundNEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump’s recent dinner with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his visit to Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral were not just exercises in policy and diplomacy. They were also prime trolling opportunities for Trump. Throughout his first term in the White House and during his campaign to return, Trump has spun out countless provocative, antagonizing and mocking statements. There were his belittling nicknames for political opponents, his impressions of other political figures and the plentiful memes he shared on social media. Now that's he's preparing to return to the Oval Office, Trump is back at it, and his trolling is attracting more attention — and eyerolls. On Sunday, Trump turned a photo of himself seated near a smiling first lady Jill Biden at the Notre Dame ceremony into a social media promo for his new perfume and cologne line, with the tag line, “A fragrance your enemies can’t resist!” The first lady’s office declined to comment. When Trudeau hastily flew to Florida to meet with Trump last month over the president-elect's threat to impose a 25% tax on all Canadian products entering the U.S., the Republican tossed out the idea that Canada become the 51st U.S. state. The Canadians passed off the comment as a joke, but Trump has continued to play up the dig, including in a post Tuesday morning on his social media network referring to the prime minister as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.” After decades as an entertainer and tabloid fixture, Trump has a flair for the provocative that is aimed at attracting attention and, in his most recent incarnation as a politician, mobilizing fans. He has long relished poking at his opponents, both to demean and minimize them and to delight supporters who share his irreverent comments and posts widely online and cheer for them in person. Trump, to the joy of his fans, first publicly needled Canada on his social media network a week ago when he posted an AI-generated image that showed him standing on a mountain with a Canadian flag next to him and the caption “Oh Canada!” After his latest post, Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Tuesday: “It sounds like we’re living in a episode of South Park." Trudeau said earlier this week that when it comes to Trump, “his approach will often be to challenge people, to destabilize a negotiating partner, to offer uncertainty and even sometimes a bit of chaos into the well established hallways of democracies and institutions and one of the most important things for us to do is not to freak out, not to panic.” Even Thanksgiving dinner isn't a trolling-free zone for Trump's adversaries. On Thanksgiving Day, Trump posted a movie clip from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” with President Joe Biden and other Democrats’ faces superimposed on the characters in a spoof of the turkey-carving scene. The video shows Trump appearing to explode out of the turkey in a swirl of purple sparks, with the former president stiffly dancing to one of his favorite songs, Village People’s “Y.M.C.A." In his most recent presidential campaign, Trump mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, refusing to call his GOP primary opponent by his real name and instead dubbing him “Ron DeSanctimonious.” He added, for good measure, in a post on his Truth Social network: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.” As he campaigned against Biden, Trump taunted him in online posts and with comments and impressions at his rallies, deriding the president over his intellect, his walk, his golf game and even his beach body. After Vice President Kamala Harris took over Biden's spot as the Democratic nominee, Trump repeatedly suggested she never worked at McDonalds while in college. Trump, true to form, turned his mocking into a spectacle by appearing at a Pennsylvania McDonalds in October, when he manned the fries station and held an impromptu news conference from the restaurant drive-thru. Trump’s team thinks people should get a sense of humor. “President Trump is a master at messaging and he’s always relatable to the average person, whereas many media members take themselves too seriously and have no concept of anything else other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director. “President Trump will Make America Great Again and we are getting back to a sense of optimism after a tumultuous four years.” Though both the Biden and Harris campaigns created and shared memes and launched other stunts to respond to Trump's taunts, so far America’s neighbors to the north are not taking the bait. “I don’t think we should necessarily look on Truth Social for public policy,” Miller said. Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to Trudeau and a close friend, said Trump brought up the 51st state line to Trudeau repeatedly during Trump’s first term in office. “Oh God,” Butts said Tuesday, “At least a half dozen times.” “This is who he is and what he does. He’s trying to destabilize everybody and make people anxious,” Butts said. “He’s trying to get people on the defensive and anxious and therefore willing to do things they wouldn’t otherwise entertain if they had their wits about them. I don’t know why anybody is surprised by it.” Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
American Airlines grounded all of its U.S. flights for about an hour Tuesday morning after a glitch of its flight operations system, leading to widespread flight delays. Flight-tracking website FlightAware showed at least a few dozen American Airlines flights delayed Tuesday morning, including five whose departures from the Washington area’s Reagan National Airport were pushed back more than 90 minutes, and nine delayed an hour or more at American’s hub, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. American reported a “technical issue” affecting all flights in a 6:37 a.m. social media post. Less than an hour later, a pilot on an American Airlines flight from Washington to Chicago told passengers around 7:35 a.m. that the issue had been resolved, and a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said around 8 a.m. that the ground stop had been lifted. The company later said the ground stop was caused by a technology issue with one of its vendors, which impacted the system it uses to release flights. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning,” the airline said in a statement. The airline told pilots that there had been a systemwide outage of its Flight Operations System, said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, a union representing American Airlines pilots. The system handles flight planning, dispatch, weight and balance data, he said. The system, which American has used for many years, “is at the heart of everything we do ... everything feeds out of it,” Tajer said, adding that one pilot was asked to take all passengers off the flight and reboard them because the system lost their information. When the ground stop was first implemented, more than a dozen American Airlines flights were waiting at National, even as planes from Southwest, United and other rival airlines took off. American Airlines passengers fretted about missing connecting flights and holiday gatherings. After the ground stop was lifted, airline staffers scrambled to load bags, deice planes and complete other tasks that pushed some flights’ estimated departure back more than two hours. Passengers complained about being rebooked for connecting flights, with some pushed to Christmas Day. “It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible,” American Airlines said in a statement. As of 11 a.m., less than 36 percent of American Airlines flights systemwide were departing on time, while about 59 percent were leaving within an hour of their scheduled departure, Tajer said. “[The outage] happened at the worst part of the day, but getting a resolution so early in the day is a real relief,” Tajer said. “These are all indications that the system is recovering and we are not seeing a major cascading failure.”
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