Nobody does rock star like Lenny Kravitz. He pads into the recording studio like a tranquillised tiger. It’s dark in here, but he is wearing shades. He’s got on a leather jacket, skinny black jeans, a T-shirt made from metallic shards. His dreadlocks reach way down his back and are as black as his designer stubble. Kravitz, who has spent much of his adult life topless, has a 28in waist and an eight-pack that could double as a xylophone. Last Sunday, he celebrated his 60th birthday and he’s every bit as gorgeous as he was when he made his name in the late 80s; possibly more so. The consensus seems to be that he’s the hottest 60-year-old man on the planet.

I can’t believe you’re 60, I say. “I can barely believe it myself. But it’s beautiful,” he says. Is it in the genes? “It’s a combination of genes, self-care, hard work and discipline.”

Kravitz is instantly recognisable, his songs less so. Take away the few big hits (American Woman, It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, Are You Gonna Go My Way, Fly Away) and many of us would struggle to name a song of his. It’s 26 years since he last had a Top 10 hit in the UK and 24 years in the US. And he’s hardly prolific. Blue Electric Light, released this month, is only his 12th studio album in 35 years. Yet Kravitz remains huge, worth an estimated $90m (£70m). He writes and produces for other musicians (notably Madonna’s Justify My Love, although this takes us back 34 years), acts (The Hunger Games, Precious, The Butler) and works as a successful interior designer.

Blue Electric Light is a classic Kravitz mix of funk, soul, pop and heavy rock. His voice is honeyed, he is a gifted multi-instrumentalist and he has a fine ear for writing songs that sound as if they’ve already been written by someone else. The album is sunny and sexy, at various points echoing Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Prince, Elvis Costello and Miguel.

Then there is the outrageous song TK421. Named after the Star Wars character, it also seems to be a euphemism for Kravitz’s you-know-what. (“Come on, baby, get on the one / Can you feel it, oh, my TK421!”) The accompanying video is every bit as raunchy as the lyrics. It’s his first nude scene and he pulls it off with aplomb.

Kravitz, who lives in France, the Bahamas and Brazil, grew up in New York. His mother was the actor Roxie Roker, who starred in the sitcom The Jeffersons; his father, Sy Kravitz, was an NBC television news producer. Roxie was black with Bahamian ancestry, while Sy was white and Jewish.

By the time he was in his teens, his mother was a household name – and wealthy with it. But she was adamant she wouldn’t spoil Kravitz, who showed promise in music – choral, classical and pop. Despite that, he ended up at the brattish Beverly Hills High in Los Angeles, which inspired the TV series Beverly Hills 90210. “On their 16th birthday, you’d see the kids driving in their BMWs. The teachers’ parking lot was full of Chevys and Fords and the student parking lots were Porsches and Ferraris. It was pretty funny,” he says.

Did you have a car? “Hell no!” So how did you get to school? “Bus or a carpool with friends.” But your parents could have afforded to buy you one? “Of course. My mother was on a No 1 TV show for 11 fucking years. But that would not be raising her boy to become a man. We had no maid – on Saturday morning, she’s scrubbing toilets. She was the most amazing human being.”

His relationship with his father was fraught. When Kravitz was 15, he was desperate to go to a jazz concert, to see the drummer Buddy Rich. Although his father had introduced him to jazz, he told his son he’d been out enough that week and couldn’t go. Kravitz said he was going – and that he was also leaving home.

Today, he says he must have put his mother through so much pain. There was no internet, no mobile phones. If he didn’t have change or there was no working phone box, he couldn’t get in touch with her. And often he didn’t. He was homeless; sometimes living in a car, sometimes depending on the kindness of strangers. “It’s a miracle I survived, that I wasn’t abused,” he says.

Hold on, I say – I thought you said in your memoir that you were abused by a woman in her 20s when you were 13? Ah, he says, that was different. “Yes, she did do that, but that wasn’t …” He comes to a stop. “In today’s world, yes, that was abuse and assault. It was this chick who saw this young teenager and thought I was cute and I’m going to give him some. Any young boy would have taken that opportunity and enjoyed the hell out of it.”

Did you have sex with her? “No. She began and I stopped her.” Why? “I had a girlfriend.” What did she think when you stopped her? “She thought it was comical – ‘You have a girlfriend?!’” Were you a virgin? He nods. I ask if he’s talked about it to his daughter, the actor Zoë Kravitz, and whether she regards it as abuse. He doesn’t answer directly. “I mean, she stopped, and I can’t speak for everyone, but that would have been a fantasy for so many kids. But, for me, it’s not what I wanted.”

Kravitz initially struggled to secure a record deal. He was told he was too black to play rock’n’roll, despite the fact that Little Richard and Chuck Berry had helped invent it 40 years earlier. He straightened his hair, wore blue contact lenses and became Romeo Blue. Where did that come from? “I had a lot of girlfriends, so they nicknamed me Romeo.” Blue was a tribute to the guitarist Adrian Belew.

He was Romeo Blue in 1985 when he met the Cosby Show actor Lisa Bonet, four years his junior. When she turned 20, they eloped. A year later, they had Zoë and the dynasty was extended (Zoë is a star in her own right). Bonet and Kravitz split up when Zoë was four and are often cited as role models for bringing up a child harmoniously post-divorce.

In his memoir, he writes of the time he overheard his father on the phone talking to a woman and realised he was having an affair – one of many. Kravitz was devastated and told him so. His father replied that he’d end up doing the same thing – as though it was some kind of curse.

Was his father right? “He became right,” he says. “After the marriage, I became more like him. I was becoming a player.” How did you feel about it? “I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be that guy. So I had to tackle that and it took years.” How did you tackle it? “By taking responsibility. Discipline. Not letting my own desires take over.”

Kravitz tells me he’s not been in a serious relationship for nine years. Were you serious when you said a while ago that you wanted to be celibate until you found the right woman? “Yes. It’s a spiritual thing.” He says he’d love to be in a relationship now, but he thinks he might struggle. “I have become very set in my ways, in the way I live.”

By 1989, Kravitz had embraced his real name and released his first album. What was wrong with it in the first place? He looks embarrassed. “I thought ‘Lenny Kravitz’ sounded ridiculous. I’ve got nothing against my Jewish heritage, but it sounded like a Jewish lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t think it was very rock’n’roll. How wrong I was.”

It didn’t take long for him to come to his senses. “I cut the processed hair, grew dreadlocks and became myself. It was a wonderful exercise in finding my way home.”

Did you not realise you were gorgeous back then? “Not. At. All. I never thought that and still don’t think that.” Really? “I’m telling you the truth. I have grown to accept myself and be comfortable with myself, but I have never been one to look in a mirror and go: ‘Ooh yeah, look at that! You’re so beautiful.’ And especially not back then, as a teen. Absolutely not.”

The video for TK421, which features plenty of mirrors, would suggest otherwise. “I can’t take credit for that,” he says. “I hired this young Ukrainian woman director, Tanu. She had this idea: we’re going to come to your house, you’re going to wake up and open the curtains, get ready for your day … I thought that sounds like the most boring thing ever. Then, when she gets there, she says: ‘So you sleep in the nude, yeah?”

Kravitz says it could have backfired, but tells me why it worked. “We’re having fun, I’m singing into a toothbrush, dancing around the bathroom. It wasn’t the energy of: ‘Ooh, let’s be sexy.’”

I hate to disappoint you, I say, but it is a sexy video. Someone has written a comment below it: “OMG, 60 is the new 30, Lenny just proved it.” He nods. “OK. Well, that’s OK. I’m not going to say there were no sexy elements.”

And another comment: “Great! Now I’m pregnant!”

“Oh God! It was fun and it was cool and it was sexy,” he concedes.

A big spliff features prominently in the video, too. I’d heard that he used to be a heavy smoker. Is it true that he hired somebody to roll his joints? “Erm, yes. A junior high school friend. He had other jobs, too, but one of them was to roll joints.” What other jobs? “Just assisting me. I wanted my buddy with me.” Were you rubbish at rolling or too busy? “No, I was actually very good at it. But if I’m in the studio, playing all the instruments, running around …” Were you a mega spliffhead? “Oh yeah!” I ask if he could compete with George Michael, who told me he smoked about 25 spliffs a day. “Erm, I’d say even more. I was Bob Marley level.” Did it worry you? “No. I’d been smoking weed since I was 11. I stopped years ago. Maybe I’ll have a hit every now and then – as you saw in the video – but I’m talking about every now and again.”

He swapped grass for the gym and took his new hobby every bit as seriously. Could all 60-year-olds look like you? What about somebody like me, who’s got a zero-pack? He looks me up and down. “Right …” he says in a way that doesn’t inspire confidence. “Well, there’s a lot of hard work and discipline in being healthy for me. That means when I want to eat junk, I don’t do it.”

How do you resist? “Take last night. I worked all day, interviews, rehearsing into the night, get home at 11pm. I need to eat something. Now it’s 1am. I didn’t get my workout. So I went to the gym and I did a 90-minute workout at 2am. I don’t want to be in the gym at 2am, but I know that I must.” Why? “Because it’s part of my discipline – it’s about body, mind and spirit. I want all of those three elements aligned. If my body’s in shape and my spirit and mind are not, then it’s just something nice to look at or to boast about. Who cares? For me, all of it has to be aligned. And I have to do the work it takes to have all of those in alignment so my being can be at its maximum.”

The thing is, I explain to Kravitz, I love eating KitKats, about four of them, followed by a bag of crisps with salted peanuts poured into it. He laughs, sympathetically. “I love a KitKat, especially when it’s been kept in the refrigerator.”

I’m a year older than Kravitz. Does he think there’s hope for me? He gives me another once-over. Now I’m convinced all he can see is a human KitKat. “Absolutely. Ab-so-lute-ly. But it takes discipline. You have to change your thinking and do the work. I do it completely naturally. I’m on no hormones, no testosterone. I do this 100% by food and action.”

Have you ever been a slob? “A slob?” he repeats, as if it’s a foreign language. You know, a little bit lazy? “There are a couple of times I stayed in Paris for six months in between tours and I got a little poochy. I drank wine, I ate croissants. I just enjoyed myself and then I was like: oh shit! But that’s only happened once or twice.”

Today, Kravitz is almost as famous for an incident that happened nine years ago as he is for his music. He was rocking so hard on stage that his leather trousers split open at the crotch. He wasn’t wearing underpants. Do you think that boosted your career? “Nooooooah. Absolutely not.” Were you embarrassed? “You just have to go with it. What can you do?” Did you consider wearing underpants after that? “No, I just made sure the pants I had were working.”

Photos recently emerged of Kravitz working out in the gym in leather trousers. Was that for real? “Yep. If I’m coming from somewhere and my trainer says we can get it in now, then I’ll come as I am. A lot of the time I’m in street clothes, which people think is funny.” Kravitz doesn’t. It’s just what you do when you’re dedicated to getting body, spirit and mind in alignment.

My time is up. Kravitz stands up and his mobile rings. It’s on speakerphone. “Hey, what’s up, Rock Star?” says a voice at the other end.

Kravitz is chatting enthusiastically in a side room as I leave. I put my head in the door to say goodbye. He waves. I ask who calls him Rock Star. He grins. “It’s my cousin. He’s being facetious.”

Israel is in effective control of Gaza’s entire land border after taking control of a buffer zone along the border with Egypt, Israel’s military has said, a move that risks complicating its relationship with Egypt.

In a televised briefing on Wednesday, chief military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said Israeli forces had gained “operational” control over the Philadelphi Corridor, using the Israeli military’s code name for the 14km-long corridor along the Gaza Strip’s only border with Egypt.

Hagari did not spell out what “operational” control referred to, but an Israeli military official earlier said there were Israeli “boots on the ground” along parts of the corridor. The border with Egypt along the southern edge was Gaza’s only land border that Israel had not controlled directly.

“The Philadelphi Corridor served as an oxygen line for Hamas, which it regularly used to smuggle weapons into the area of the Gaza Strip,” Hagari said, claiming that troops had “discovered around 20 tunnels” in the area.

Egypt’s state-linked Al-Qahera News reported a “high-level Egyptian source” as saying that Israel was using claims of tunnels under Egypt’s border with Gaza as cover for its Rafah offensive.

“There is no truth to Israeli media reports of the existence of tunnels on the Egyptian border with Gaza,” the source told Al-Qahera, which is linked to state intelligence. “Israel is using these allegations to justify continuing the operation on the Palestinian city of Rafah and prolonging the war for political purposes.”

Egypt has previously said it has destroyed hundreds of cross-border tunnels with Gaza since 2013.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said seizure of the Philadelphi Corridor would be consistent with the “limited” ground operation Israeli officials briefed President Joe Biden’s team on for the city of Rafah.

“When they briefed us on their plans for Rafah it did include moving along that corridor and out of the city proper to put pressure on Hamas in the city,” Kirby told reporters on Wednesday.

The Philadelphi corridor is part of a larger demilitarised zone along both sides of the entire Israel-Egypt border. Under a peace accord, each is allowed to deploy only a tiny number of troops or border guards in the zone. At the time of the accord, Israeli troops controlled Gaza.

Earlier this month, Israel and Egypt became embroiled in a diplomatic row after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seized control of the Rafah crossing. The capture of the corridor signals that Israel has deepened its offensive in southern Gaza and further threatens relations with Egypt.

Elsewhere on Wednesday, Israel sent tanks on raids into Rafah, after moving into the heart of the city for the first time on Tuesday despite an order from the top United Nations court to immediately halt the assault on the city.

As Israel expanded its offensive in Rafah, a top Israeli official said that Israel’s war with Hamas is likely to last through to the end of the year.

National security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told Kan public radio he was “expecting another seven months of fighting” to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group.

“The army is achieving its objectives but [it] said from the first days it was presenting its plan to the cabinet that the war will be long,” he said. “They have designated 2024 as a year of war.”

Reuters, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press contributed to this report

It took nearly half an hour for the first ambulances and firefighters to reach the stretch of blazing tents in the Kuwait peace camp in Rafah on Sunday night. The crowding and rubble that slowed the passage of emergency vehicles fuelled the spread of flames through the temporary homes of the displaced.

Zuhair, a 36-year-old lawyer, had been sitting on a road near his own tent, watching the news with friends as the last glimmers of twilight faded from the sky, when an explosion shook the area at about 8.45pm.

He raced towards the sound, terrified for his wife, children and friends. A vision of hell lay ahead, so gruesome he started shaking from shock. “I saw bodies everywhere. Children burning. I saw heads without bodies, the injured running around in pain, some alive but trapped inside burning tents.”

There had been no warning, and for many long minutes, there was no help.

He said people tried at first to drag the injured from tents with their bare hands, loading them on to donkey carts or cramming them into ordinary cars to seek help.

Sharif Warsh Agha, a driver, was among the crowds trying to help. He too shook as he stepped around bodies burned and mutilated by the initial explosion, and the fires that followed, trying to help the people he could.

“I heard a woman screaming for help for her sister. When I went into the tent, I found her seriously injured in the foot and her mother lying dead next to her,” he said. He did basic first aid, got her to the car, then someone called to say his young nephew – who has special needs – had lost his feet.

“I turned the car around to get my injured nephew but when we started moving someone was brought to me with an open chest wound. We put him in too,” he said.

Eventually nine people were loaded into the small car, which would normally take two people to hospital, with some in the boot.

He had been with his family in their tent, resting after the Maghrib twilight prayer, when a red flash and an explosion ripped the night apart. Black smoke and a deadly hail of shrapnel followed, then the sound of screaming.

He raced out to help the injured, not realising that his sister-in-law had been killed and nephew injured in their tent, which was just 70 metres from where the missiles hit. A sliver of shrapnel pierced her lungs and heart, killing her instantly. “She never did anyone harm,” he said.

Busy with his nephew, he didn’t count the dead, but believes he saw nearly 20 bodies, many of them women and children. “The Israeli army claims they were targeting militants, but it is not an excuse to strike an area full of tents and the displaced.”

The target was at the edge of rows of tents, set up by Kuwait earlier this year to shelter displaced people. The camp was outside a “humanitarian zone” along the coast that Israel had announced in early May, as it launched the operation into Rafah.

But it was not in an area of Rafah covered by specific evacuation orders that the Israeli military issued through social media, phone calls and leaflets as troops moved in, so the people living there thought it was safe.

Agha said: “The missile hit near a medical point surrounded by a lot of tents, in an area with more than 4,000 people.” It seemed unusual because there were no large impact craters on the ground and it sparked the large fire, he added.

The attacks were likely caused by US-manufactured GBU-39 missiles, which carry an explosive payload of 17kg, CNN and the New York Times found in investigations that looked at missile remnants photographed on site. This matched Israeli military claims about the amount of explosives that had been used. Overall the GBU bombs weigh 110kg, including the metal casing that can turn in part to shrapnel. They can penetrate 3 metres of concrete.

The Israeli military spokesperson, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, said the strike narrowly targeted senior Hamas commanders and said the fire might have been caused by a secondary explosion. He suggested there may have been Hamas weapons stored in the area and said the military is investigating without providing further evidence.

Refugee camps are full of flammable objects that could explode and cause a fire, including cooking gas cylinders.

A large number of Sunday’s victims were originally from Beit Lahia, because many communities stayed together as they fled across Gaza. They included Zuhair’s close friend Ahmed Zayed, who left behind one cherished young child, born after a 10-year struggle with infertility.

He wants his cheerful, ambitious friend to be remembered. “I love mentioning his name so we can assure the world that our dead were not just numbers. They had lives and goals.”

Intense bombardment continued through the night, even after the flames died down, and so the next morning they packed and left again. “I remembered the first exodus from my city [in the north],” he said.

A million people have already left Rafah, and many more are likely to take to the road again in coming weeks as Israeli troops press forward.

Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said on Wednesday that fighting would last at least through the rest of 2024, signalling the country would defy fierce international criticism to continue with its operation.

“The fighting in Rafah is not a pointless war,” he said, adding that it aimed to dismantle Hamas to prevent future attacks on Israel.

Palestinians who survived attacks on Rafah this weekend, after months of flight and hunger, disagree. “They robbed us of everything. What do they want from us any more?” said Fida Al-Din Abu Jarad, a 40-year-old barber who was sheltering with his wife and children just a few hundred metres from the site of Sunday’s blaze.

On Monday evening they had been kept awake by hunger, so he heard the explosion of a missile landing nearby around 3am, and then watched shrapnel from the blast tear his family apart. In a few seconds, he saw his 18-year-old daughter, Nouira, collapse dead into her mother’s lap and heard his son scream with pain after shrapnel severed his foot.

“I felt that time had stopped,” he said, but the family’s ledger of pain was not complete. The bomb had landed even closer to the nearby tent housing his father and siblings and their families.

“Fear, pain and loss – these words can’t describe my feelings,” he said. “I tried to control my nerves and control my feelings, and I came out to see what happened.”

At his father’s tent, he saw one brother, Abu Ismail, collapsed on the floor beside his wife, who cried out “your brother is dead” as Abu Jarad arrived. Another brother, Emad, had been killed with his wife, Anwar. Their bodies were so badly damaged by the blast that he couldn’t tell one from the other.

One Tuesday he moved what is left of the family to Khan Younis, but is still in shock. Abu Jarad said: “So far I have not been able to comprehend what happened to me. When I took down the tent, I thought of the start of the operation in Rafah. At the time I suggested to my brothers that we move, but they rejected the idea and asked me what I was afraid of.

“I told them I am not afraid for myself, but I am afraid of losing someone from my family. And now it has happened, I have lost them.”

Detectives from France’s cold case unit have ordered DNA analysis of evidence in the unsolved killing of a British family and a French cyclist in a remote Alpine village 12 years ago.

Clothes belonging to one of the victims, cigarette butts found at the scene and pieces of the gun used in the killings are to be tested in the hopes of solving the mystery of the murders, described by the local prosecutor as “an act of gross savagery”.

The bodies of four people – Saad al-Hilli, 50, a British-Iraqi engineer; his wife, Iqbal, 47; her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, 74; and a French cyclist, Sylvain Mollier, 45 – were found in an isolated layby at Chevaline near Annecy in September 2012. Each had several gunshot wounds to the head.

The al-Hillis’ two daughters, then aged four and seven, both survived the attack. The younger child hid under the legs of her dead mother in the rear footwell of the car for eight hours before she was discovered by the gendarmes examining the scene. Her sister was shot and suffered a shoulder and head wound.

The family was visiting the region in a British-registered BMW estate car whose engine was still running when the bodies were found. Examination of the vehicle suggested al-Hilli, who was driving, had attempted to reverse away. Mollier, a local man and father of three who was cycling in the area at the time, was shot five times. Detectives believed he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Pieces from the butt of the weapon used in the killings, a vintage Luger P06-29 pistol, were found on the ground near the vehicle. The weapon was identified as a model used by the Swiss army in the 1930s, but its owner has never been traced. Detectives ruled out the possibility of a contract killing, saying a professional killer would not have used such a vintage weapon.

Police examined a number of leads, including interviewing members of the al-Hilli family in the UK, but the crime has never been solved.

On Wednesday, the French radio station RTL reported that prosecutors at the national cold case unit headquarters in the Paris suburb of Nanterre had been working on the case since September 2022 and ordered “new technical assessments” earlier this year.

This included DNA tests on the gun fragments, two cigarette butts found near the layby, Mollier’s clothing, including his cycle helmet and shoes, and clothing worn by one of al-Hilli’s daughters.

A person has died after falling into the spinning turbine blades of a departing passenger jet at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

The death occurred on the apron outside the busy hub’s terminal as a KLM flight was preparing to depart for Billund in Denmark.

“A fatal incident took place at Schiphol today during which a person ended up in a running aircraft engine,” the Dutch flag carrier, KLM, said in a statement. “Sadly the person has died.” The victim has not yet been named.

Dutch border police, who are responsible for security at the Netherlands’ largest airport, said passengers had been removed from the plane and an investigation opened.

The aircraft involved is a short-haul Embraer jet used by KLM’s Cityhopper service, which operates flights to nearby destinations such as London, Dutch news reports said.

A picture posted by the Dutch public broadcaster, NOS, showed the plane surrounded by fire trucks and ambulances next to the departure terminals.

Safety and security measures are strict at Schiphol and accidents are rare at the airport, which handled about 5.5 million passengers last month alone, according to airport figures.

Rachel Keenan’s account of the rapid and ongoing destruction of her home town of Inverbervie, Aberdeenshire, is stark, but sadly she is not alone (‘The fear has properly set in’: how it feels to watch my home town disappear into the sea, 21 May).

Here in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the tidal surge resulting from December 2013’s Storm Xaver left 158 homes and 233 commercial properties flooded, with many people made homeless. In response, improved floodwalls were completed in 2023, but in January 2024 the plug was pulled on the construction of a tidal barrier due to the emergence of a £124m funding gap. Instead of a flood defence system, Lowestoft has therefore been left with what worryingly looks a lot like a funnel.

Coastal communities have always been exposed to the forces of nature. However, more recently climate change has intensified risks along the UK’s North Sea coast, leaving low-lying communities and infrastructure with inadequate and outdated sea defences more vulnerable than ever.

We in the Use Your Voice Lowestoft group are convinced that the metric the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) uses to make its capital investment decisions perversely disadvantages smaller communities and ignores the economic benefits of improved flood protection. The metric should be reviewed and changed. Some 500 protection schemes have fallen foul of the metric. But only one of those has been revealed by Defra: Lowestoft.

It is true that government funds are available for flooding and coastal erosion projects. For example, on the north Norfolk coast, the villages of Bacton and Walcott, due to their proximity to the Bacton gas terminal, benefited from a sandscaping scheme, with £5m from central government. Elsewhere, many places such as Inverbervie, and Hemsby and Happisburgh in Norfolk, have been left to fend for themselves.

We who live in coastal areas need to promote a united front and demand that governments north and south of the border take action to protect our precious east coast.
Kate Stott
Use Your Voice Lowestoft, Suffolk

By increasing its use of renewable energy, the US has not only slashed its planet-warming emissions but also improved its air quality, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits, a new report has found.

The study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability on Wednesday and based on publicly available data, focuses on uptick of renewable energy in the US from 2019 to 2022.

“From 2019 through 2022, wind and solar generation increased by about 55%,” said Dev Millenstein, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By 2022, wind and solar provided roughly 14% of total electricity needs for the US.”

During that time period, by reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants, the nation’s use of wind and solar power cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 900m metric tons, the authors found. That’s the equivalent of taking 71m cars off the road every year.

Those major climate benefits can obscure the air quality benefits renewable power yielded, wrote the authors, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and renewable consulting firm Clean Kilowatts. To illuminate those co-benefits, the researchers quantified how much the use of wind and solar reduced toxic air emissions, focusing specifically on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxides (NOx), which are both produced during fossil fuel combustion.

They found emissions of SO2 and NOx – both linked to increased asthma risk and a variety of other health issues – decreased by a total of 1m metric tons over that three-year period.

To determine the impact of that reduction on public health, the authors “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from power plants”, Millstein said. They also employed epidemiological research to examine the effects of those emissions, and quantified the benefits by using an Environmental Protection Agency dollar value establishing the value of reducing the risk of early death across the population, he said.

All told, the emission reductions from SO2 and NOx provided $249bn of climate and health benefits to the US, the authors found – a figure Millstein said he found was “noteworthy”.

The study went on to examine the benefits wind and solar offer to particular regions of the United States. Wind power, for instance, is particularly beneficial to the across the Central states due to the displaced emissions on the local power grids; the same is true of solar power in the Carolinas. It’s an aspect of the research that Jeremiah Johnson, a climate and energy professor at North Carolina State University, who did not work on the study, applauded.

“These findings can help us target future wind and solar development to provide the greatest climate and health benefits,” said Johnson, whose work is cited in the study.

He said he hopes the paper helps the public focus on the benefits wind and solar are already creating.

The public “is often focused on the challenges we face” when it comes to ecological damage, he said. “But it is also important to recognize when something is working.”

Shortly after turning 18 in February, Daniil Yermolenko fulfilled a long-held wish and signed a contract with Russia’s armed forces. A month later, he voted for the first time, casting a ballot in the presidential election for Vladimir Putin, who had already been in power for six years when Yermolenko was born in 2006.

By late March Yermolenko had completed a basic two-week military training, and he was sent to Berdychi in eastern Ukraine where Russian forces were engaged in a devastating assault as part of its spring offensive.

There, on 4 April, during a storming of a Ukrainian position, Yermolenko found himself separated from his unit, surrounded by intense enemy fire. Before losing contact, Yermolenko reportedly radioed his base: “This is it guys. I am doomed.”

Last week his family and friends gathered in a small town in central Russia to receive Yermolenko’s casket, which was draped in the Russian flag. A military orchestra presided over the ceremony where the casket was lowered into the ground.

Yermolenko is the only recorded Russian casualty so far to have been born in 2006, making him the youngest known soldier to have died since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine more than two years ago.

“He couldn’t wait to join the fighting, so when he came of age he took his chance,” said his brother Maksim, 25, in a telephone interview from the small town of Krasnoufimsk, near the Ural mountains, to where he returned from the frontlines to attend the funeral.

Maksim had signed up for the army first, in 2022, shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. “He wanted to follow my example and enlist. I warned him that war isn’t pretty … but mentally he was ready,” he said of his brother.

“I am proud of Daniil,” Maksim said. “He always said he wanted to fight Nazis and fascists there,” he added, repeating some of the false narratives popularised at home by the Kremlin to try to justify its war on Ukraine.

Thousands of young Russians, often referred to as “Generation P” for having lived only under Putin’s presidency, have died fighting in Ukraine. Mediazona, a Russian outlet that tracks war casualties using open sources, has identified nearly 5,000 soldiers under the age of 24 who have died in the war, including 1,400 under the age of 20. The real toll is likely to be much higher, the outlet says.

Russia portrays these fallen men, many of whom hail from the hinterlands, as heroes. And the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to make sure many more young people join the fighting as Putin seeks to re-engineer the country into a militarised society.

Shortly after the war began, Russian authorities amended its laws to allow 18-year-olds like Yermolenko to enter contract service immediately after finishing school. More ambitiously, the Kremlin has embarked on an unprecedented campaign to mould a new generation of Russians eager to enlist in the military.

Ever since Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian government has attempted to impose a state ideology on its youth, investing heavily in pro-government youth organisations. But for years these efforts seemed to be failing, with young Russians often at the forefront of pro-democracy protests and topping polls expressing anti-government sentiments.

The war in Ukraine, however, gave the Kremlin a renewed momentum to indoctrinate teenagers with Putin’s highly aggressive and anti-western version of patriotism.

“We are waging at least three wars,” said Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, in July 2023. “There is the war on the frontlines. There is the economic war. And the third war is an ideological war … a war for the minds of the youth.”

Russia has dramatically increased its spending on patriotic education and state-run militarised groups for children and teens, from £25m in 2021 to more than £382m in 2024. Since the onset of the conflict, public school textbooks have been rewritten to align with the Kremlin’s foreign policy, reflecting Russia’s interpretation of history that emphasises the need to reclaim “historical territories” lost to Ukraine.

Moscow has placed special importance on war veterans, including former convicts from the Wagner group, who have returned home from Ukraine. In a recent speech Putin said more than 1,000 Russian veterans were already employed in schools. Starting in September, many of them will lead compulsory military lessons, which will include training in operating drones and handling Kalashnikovs.

Young Russians are also confronted with more conspicuous, physical reminders of the war. Across schools in Russia, thousands of memorial plaques have been set up to honour former students who died in what is framed as the ultimate sacrifice for the homeland.

In one school in the Siberian city of Bratsk, members of Russia’s youth army, Yunarmiya, gathered in February to inaugurate a memorial dedicated to six graduates. A video report of the event published by a local news outlet showed grieving mothers sitting on a school bench as Yunarmia youth read out poems that glorified war. The video then cuts to a young Yunarmia member introduced as Denis who says he “would like to become a hero like these men”.

The long-term effectiveness of the state’s militarised messaging is still up for debate. “Ideological indoctrination of teens is one of the areas where the Russian state comes closest to being totalitarian,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist.

But she pointed to recent polling that showed younger Russians still preferred individualist success over state ideologies. “It is still too early to say how successful the Kremlin has been,” she said.

Schulmann said the massive financial incentives to sign military contracts were likely to play the biggest role in persuading young men to join the army.

In Krasnoufimsk, Maksim Yermolenko stressed he was eager to return to fight. “After my brother’s death, I feel extra motivated to finish the job,” he said.

More than anything, Maksim said he wanted young Russians to follow his sibling’s example. “I hope Daniil’s story will serve as an inspiration for others to enlist.”

This article is reported by AfroLA and co-published by AfroLA, Guardian US and the Mammoth Sheet. It’s the first of several stories examining the impact of Los Angeles’s extensive landownership in the Owens Valley.

A red horse statue perched on a 12ft pole greets drivers coming to the town of Bishop from the south. It’s one of the first landmarks here, part of Mike Allen’s corrugated metal feed store – a local institution that sells camping gear, livestock feed and moving equipment in this expansive region of inland California.

But Allen desperately wants to sell it so he can retire.

“I own the building, the inventory, and the asphalt for the parking lot,” Allen said. “But I don’t own the land under it.”

And so Allen can’t get rid of it.

The land under Allen’s store belongs to an owner 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles, specifically its department of water and power (DWP).

LA has owned large swathes of the Owens valley, where Bishop is located, for more than a century. The city first swooped in in the early 1900s, at the dawn of California’s water wars. As the metropolis grew at breakneck speed, its leaders searched for ways to sustain that population, and when they entered the Owens valley, they found what LA lacked: plenty of water.

Over the next decades, LA agents secretly, and aggressively, worked to buy up Owens valley land and take ownership of the water rights that came with those parcels. By 1933, DWP had gobbled up the large majority of all properties in the towns of Bishop, Big Pine, Independence and Lone Pine.

Today, DWP owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, which encompasses the Owens valley, and 30% of all the land in neighboring Mono county. Aqueducts transporting water from both counties provided 395,000 acre-feet of water to LA last year – about 73% of the city’s water supply.

Stories of LA’s brazen land grab in the Owens valley have been told for decades – it was loosely depicted in the 1974 film Chinatown. And the fierce legal battles that have ensued, including over the environmental impact, have made regional headlines for years.

But residents, business owners, and some municipal leaders in this rural region say LA’s landownership in the valley has taken on a new, and crippling, dimension in recent years.

DWP has taken steps to exert even greater control over its land holdings in the valley. An AfroLA review of hundreds of documents obtained through records requests, as well as interviews with municipal officials, residents, legal experts and business owners, reveals DWP started changing the terms of leases in 2015, and formally added restrictions on the transfer of leases from one owner to the next in 2016.

DWP’s moves have meant that hundreds of families who have built lives in the Eastern Sierra region have seen their plans upended, often being left with the stark choice of abandoning their livelihoods or fighting DWP.

For Allen, the owner of the feed store, the 2016 changes mean that he can’t retire to Montana, where his wife moved seven years ago.

Selling the store had always been Allen’s retirement plan. But since the new owner will not be able to transfer their lease or sell the business to recoup their investment, he hasn’t found a buyer. Meanwhile, his own lease has gone into holdover status: he continues to pay his rent and abides by the terms of his lease, but he can be evicted at will with 30 days’ notice.

Leases lapsing into holdover status have long been an issue, but between 2015 and 2023, more leases have gone into holdover than did before.

Allen now faces a brutal choice: continue to make month-to-month payments on an inactive lease, or surrender the building to DWP and abandon his business. If he lets the lease go back to DWP, he has to liquidate all of his inventory and demolish all of the improvements he has invested in over the years – including the asphalt in the parking lot and the building itself. That’s just a standard clause in DWP leases.

Since DWP implemented the changes, at least 13% of leases in Inyo county have reverted back to DWP control, an analysis of property tax records reveals.

Los Angeles is not alone in importing water from hundreds of miles away. San Francisco obtains most of its water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and water system in Yosemite, and the California state water project gets most of its water from rural areas in northern California. LA’s also not the only city that secures its water supply through land holdings – New York City has similar landlord-tenant relationships. But DWP in the Owens valley is the “poster child” for negatively impacting the broader local economy, according to Greg James, special counsel for Inyo county.

As water becomes increasingly scarce in a more extreme climate, urban communities like Los Angeles will increasingly need to rely on imported water, obtained at the expense of the environment and economies of rural and Indigenous communities. Los Angeles claims to be working toward diversifying its water portfolio through stormwater capture, recycled water and conservation as well as importing water from the Colorado River basin and northern California. But even after conservation efforts, LA projects it will still need to get about 30% of its water from the Owens valley by 2045, meaning the city and the valley are locked in a relationship for the foreseeable future.

Los Angeles DWP did not respond to a detailed request for comment from AfroLA. DWP’s Eastern Sierra division also did not respond to a request for comment.

The Land of Flowing Water

Inyo county is a land of extremes. The region is larger than the state of Vermont but fewer than 20,000 people call it home. In its west, the peaks of the Eastern Sierra tower 10,000ft above the Owens valley. In its south lie the desert landscapes of Death valley. Brave hikers can trek from Mt Whitney, the highest point in the continental US, to Badwater Basin in Death valley, the lowest point.

During winter, the Owens valley ground is parched. But come spring, when snowmelt runs from the Sierra and White Mountains down to the Owens River, the valley turns lush green. The Paiute, who have lived in the valley for thousands of years, named it Payahuunadü, the Land of Flowing Water.

William Mulholland, LA’s famed water and infrastructure czar, realized the valley’s potential when he camped in the area in 1904. LA agents soon went on a buying spree, locking in land and water holdings.

In the late 30s, the city briefly authorized the sale of about half of Bishop’s properties back into private ownership, but by the mid-40s, DWP had stopped that practice. Between 1967 and today, DWP added 10,000 more acres in the valley to its holdings.

Today, LA owns 252,000 of the county’s 6.5m acres. The federal government, which owns the land in Death Valley national park and Inyo national forest, holds much of the rest.

DWP’s extensive holdings make it the de facto landlord for many of Inyo county’s residents. DWP leases the majority of the region back to those living there – to the county government, to ranchers, to veterinarians and retailers, to families who have lived here for generations and people compelled to move in because of its stunning outdoors.

Living here had long been affordable, too. LA’s leases were inexpensive, and for decades, the lease process was simple and straightforward, valley residents said. Much like the way many mobile home parks operate, property owners own the structures of their homes and businesses, but not the land underneath. DWP leases them that land through agreements with fixed terms, at fixed rates. Lease holders pay either month-to-month or yearly. When a lessee previously sold their home or business, the lease for the property transferred to the new owner after a credit score check, lease holders recalled. Lease transfers were hardly ever rejected, they said.

That changed in 2016. That year, DWP ruled the way it had been treating leases conflicted with the 1924 Los Angeles city charter, which outlaws the sale or lease of city property except at public auction. From then on, DWP has only allowed leases to be transferred once. That meant an existing tenant could pass on their lease, but the new tenant could not, and instead would have to let the land revert back to LA control.

If leases go out to bid, DWP auctions the lease off to the highest bidder. Under the old system, the lessee was able to profit directly from the sale of their business. Now, DWP reaps the financial benefits of the auction.

DWP retroactively applied this policy to leases established before 2016. For lessees like Mike Allen, who have leased for decades, it has devalued their businesses and made them difficult to sell, because a new owner has no guarantee of recouping their costs.

The department carved out an exemption for families, allowing leases to transfer within a family an unlimited number of times.

“For 100 years they’ve never cared,” said Mark Lacey, a Lone Pine resident and rancher who sits on the Owens Valley Committee, a non-profit that helped negotiate environmental mitigations in a water agreement between LA and the county. “Now all of a sudden, you know, somebody decided, ‘Well, we’re going to actually follow the letter of the law based on the LA city charter that says, you know, we can’t do this. We have to put [leases] out to bid.’”

Many lessees often only learned of the changes when they went to renew their leases, or tried to transfer them.

Tom Talbot was the valley’s veterinarian for more than 45 years. Talbot owned Bishop veterinary hospital, a yellow cottage on the north side of Bishop near the intersection of Route 395 and Route 6. It’s the only full-service vet practice for hundreds of miles in every direction.

In 2015, Talbot wanted to retire from medicine while still healthy enough to ranch full-time. But when he went to sell the hospital and transfer his lease, he said, he found completely rewritten rules.

Talbot had hoped his son-in-law Tyler Ludwick, and Nicole Milici, who had volunteered working at the clinic since she was a teenager, would jointly take over the business.

But the new transfer policy meant Milici could not be put on the lease. As a relative, Ludwick could. “We’re 50% partners in the business,” said Ludwick. “But it’s all me on the lease.”

The lease structure forced Ludwick to take on more risk, he said in an interview, leaving him at the mercy of changes to his lease terms. But it was just the start of the veterinarians’ problems.

“It’s just a giant handcuff that completely stymies any possibility of growth, equity, business advancement, because you don’t have anything real to sell,” Ludwick said.

Ludwick’s lease has been expired for years, and DWP hasn’t renewed it. Without a lease active for the long run, it’s been hard to secure funds for repairs and improvements, he said.

The yellow and brick building that houses the clinic is 60 years old and “rotting out from under us”, said Ludwick.

After Talbot transferred his lease to Ludwick, lease policies changed again. Starting in 2016, the family transfer policy was limited to transfers between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, and between spouses. As Talbot’s son-in-law, Ludwick would never have been able to take over the lease.

Ludwick and Milici recently purchased an out-of-business Ford dealership on some rare non-DWP-owned private land. They built a brand new veterinary hospital on the land and they plan to use their current lease to provide specialty care, such as physical therapy.

“The good news is we got something that is ours,” said Ludwick. “It gives us freedom.”

Reagan Slee, owner of a sporting goods store, went through a different set of disappointments.

In 2019, DWP changed its stance on selling properties to lessees. The new policy allows some business owners the chance to purchase the land they are leasing. Slee’s store, filled with hunting and fishing gear, was at the top of that list.

Appraisers appraised, surveyors surveyed, and more than a year later Slee had a purchase agreement with the city of LA. That’s where progress stopped.

“The price was fair,” Slee said. He put money in the bank, then waited. More than 18 months have passed since Slee signed his purchase agreement.

“There was some excitement a year or two ago where we thought, ‘OK, this is finally going to happen,’” Slee said. “But now, I would be surprised if they called and said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to move forward.’”

Slee’s lease expired in 2017, so he, too, is in holdover status. It would take more than a year to draft a new lease in order to sell his business, he said.

Meanwhile, Slee struggles to upgrade or perform maintenance on his store. “You’re invested in something that is unknown, that is not yours and then there is no date attached to it. The value of the business is worth almost nothing, because if I was to go sell, it can’t be transferred.”

According to Slee, DWP could keep the lease in holdover for 15 years, or it could pull the plug tomorrow. DWP did not respond to questions about Slee’s case.

Since the transfer policies went into effect nearly a decade ago, approximately 20 leases have changed hands, according to AfroLA’s review of tax assessor data.

Meanwhile, at least 49 of DWP’s 354 leases and use permits in Inyo county have been removed from circulation and not put back out to bid. Use permits, which function similarly to leases, are “agreements for private use”, according to the aqueduct operations plan. These include people’s backyards, pasture for horses and other uses.

Tamara Cohen, a former Inyo county public health officer who served for 23 years, saw the use permit for her backyard return to DWP control. For years, she lived on a multi-home lot with two business partners, Kenney Scruggs and Benett Kessler, and a shared 1.3-acre backyard. The homes and the land underneath them were in a trust, with Scruggs’s name on the use permit. When Scruggs died, the DWP agreement passed to Kessler. And when Kessler passed away, Cohen was ready to take it over in turn. Instead, a DWP real estate officer paid her a visit, and told her to vacate the yard within 60 days.

The rules had changed since 2013, when Kessler, an investigative reporter who spent her career monitoring DWP, took over the agreement, Cohen recalled the agent saying. Because the agreement was held in a trust, the agent said, it was taken out of circulation and would need to go to auction instead of being transferred.

The agent didn’t seem happy about the prospect of an auction either, Cohen recalled: “[He] was pretty clear with us that going for the bid process was just really a hassle for him to do,” said Cohen. “He said they are trying to get rid of these kinds of [backyard] leases.”

Cohen was later given until the end of the original agreement, an additional 18 months, to clear out and vacate the land. This included ripping out a patio and Scruggs’ garden. Now there is nothing but dirt and locust trees. Last spring, Cohen spent $7,000 to remove the dead vegetation on DWP’s property in order to prevent flooding and fires.

“It’s disconcerting. The trees have come down on what used to be leased land and it’s scary – it’s such a fuel for fires,” Cohen said, pointing to the dead locust trees that line the creek behind her home. “That used to be a lease that was maintained, and now it’s not. It’s a fire risk.”

The cost of drought

The circumstances LA found itself in when it applied the lease changes were similar to the ones it faced when it arrived in the Owens valley more than a century ago: it was desperate for water.

If LA’s 200,000 residents were thirsty in 1904, today, the city has a daunting task of servicing 3.8 million people living in an ever-warming climate. Much of the south-west US has faced crippling drought conditions at various points in past decades, with states and cities competing for few resources.

DWP has also seen its operations in the Eastern Sierra curtailed. The origins of a trio of lawsuits settled between the late 80s and the early aughts are long and complicated. But the outcome of the suits, initiated over rules on environmental protections, legally requires DWP to leave hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water in Inyo and Mono counties for the towns; people, including Indigenous nations; and wildlife of the region.

The drought lasting from 2011 to 2016 marked the driest years ever recorded in California. In 2014, internal DWP documents show, department staff recognized it needed to make changes to “prevent waste of water” in some of its most important leases: those of Inyo county’s ranchers.

The majority of acres leased by DWP in the Eastern Sierra are to ranchers, who graze their herds in the shadows of rugged Sierra Nevada mountains.

Ranchers and DWP have a “symbiotic relationship”, said Scott Kemp, whose family ranches more than 1,000 cattle on department land, one of the largest herds in the valley. “We take care of the land … People from Los Angeles can come up here and fish, and do what they do.”

A 2006 internal agency document describes the relationship as such: “The ranch lessees serve as stewards of the land and monitor and manage their leases consistent with LADWP’s goal of providing a reliable high quality water supply to Los Angeles. With the ranch leases providing this function, LADWP is able to concentrate its personnel on maintaining and operating water conveyances.”

In 2014, amid the drought, DWP proposed to the ranchers to change their lease terms to limit the amount of irrigation water they receive as part of their leases in years of normal water supplies. The department also proposed to allow DWP to provide water at its sole discretion in years with low snowmelt from the mountains, and place restrictions on water for cattle to drink.

Inyo county’s water department responded that those changes could violate the 1991 water agreement between the county and DWP.

The proposed lease changes led to conversations between DWP and the trade group representing the ranchers. Both parties agreed on restrictions for how water, particularly for cattle to drink, would be used. They also agreed that ranch lessees from then on could only transfer their lease once. They agreed that DWP would keep the proceeds from leases that would be auctioned off instead of transferred.

A year later, DWP attempted to cut water off from the ranch lessees a second time. In a 27 April 2015 letter, DWP informed ranch lessees it would cut off their water supply in three days. According to a letter dated two days later, “plainly stated, there is insufficient water to meet all water users’ needs”. Concerned community members and the county met with DWP. The solution? Diverting some water destined for Owens Lake, which helped keep toxic dust from the dry lakebed out of the air, to irrigation water for ranchers.

Even though the transfer limits originated with the ranchers, the department applied the policy broadly. On 15 November 2016, commercial lessees and Inyo county supervisors grilled the aqueduct manager about the lease changes during a board meeting.

The county supervisor Jeff Griffiths told the then DWP aqueduct manager he hoped he and the city understood the repercussions of imposing the lease-transfer restrictions the ranchers had agreed to on commercial lessees as well. “This could be the largest economic impact to the community since LA’s original acquiring of Owens valley land,” said Griffiths.

A DWP memo on the origin of the one-time assignment policy that was included in emails between DWP real estate staff and the then board president, Mel Levine, in 2016 only addresses ranch leases, and explains the changes were designed to bring the lease transfer process into compliance with the Los Angeles city charter and state law protecting DWP lessees in Inyo county.

But reporting by AfroLA shows the one-time assignment policy and the family transfer policy are being applied to commercial leases and use permits, such as Cohen’s backyard.

The restrictions that have been imposed on how much water LA can pull out of Inyo county, either through negotiations with the county or the courts, have been extremely costly for the city.

Internal DWP documents indicate that DWP has spent $30m-$40m annually buying water from southern California’s metropolitan water district to offset the water it now leaves in Inyo for the ranchers. The water DWP has been required to provide to Indigenous communities, for environmental mitigation and for agriculture since the water agreements costs the agency at least $124m annually, according to an internal briefing book.

A way of life

Though long constructive, the relationship between DWP and some ranchers has been strained by years of drought and lease changes.

“DWP is nice to us in the wet years,” said Talbot, the former veterinarian, whose ranch is located in the picturesque Round valley just north of Bishop.

In years water is plentiful, the department releases more water and provides flood control measures, Talbot said. But in dry years, DWP limits the ranchers’ water allocation to the minimum it is legally required to provide, he said.

Many Inyo county ranchers have been affected by severe cuts DWP has made to water allocations in Mono county, which doesn’t have the same legal protections as Inyo county.

Mark Lacey said he had to look for pasture land as far away as Oregon and Nebraska when DWP cut water to Mono county in 2015.

“I got transportation costs going up and then coming back. And then I had to pay for that pasture while I was there, as well as everything I have from DWP,” he recalled. “The transportation costs were horrendous.”

“After 2016, I couldn’t afford to do what I did. The price of cattle just didn’t allow me to make those moves,” he said. “Freight was too high. Pasture elsewhere either wasn’t available, or it was poor, [the price] was too high.”

Lacey has seen every drought in the Owens valley since the 70s. He said the 2011-16 drought was not as bad as the 1980s drought, but the impacts were more acute because of the water shutoffs.

For some in the county, the changes to the leases do not outweigh the benefits of LA’s land ownership. The county supervisor Jen Roeser said the agency’s presence in Inyo has been critical to maintaining the rural lifestyle residents enjoy.

Roeser lives in a mobile home on a DWP lease she’s had for decades. “It’s our whole lifestyle. And our purpose in life that we felt we were given was to operate a quality business in the mountains,” she said, one of her dogs napping in the shade of the black locust trees.

Roeser and her husband recently retired from running a mule packing business, which serves tourists hiking deep into the Sierra backcountry and also serves as one of the only ways to fight fires high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Bishop’s home to a week-long mule rodeo, and Roeser is a mule rodeo champion.

“[We’ve] introduced families and tourists to amazing experiences that impacted their lives and gave them memories that last generations, and we hear from hundreds of people every year that have memories that are still with them from pack trips. And these leases make that possible,” said Roeser.

On the other side of the Sierra, Roeser explained, the lease rates of winter pasture land have grown increasingly expensive. DWP land, she said, is higher quality than alternatives.

DWP, she added, also stimulates local economies as the county’s largest employer. It provides well-paying jobs – employing engineers and scientists and staff maintaining its infrastructure – with good benefits for local residents, including multigenerational families who live in the county but work for the city of Los Angeles, she said. DWP’s payroll in the Owens valley was approximately $60m.

As Los Angeles takes steps to diversify its water sources, the Eastern Sierra region will still make up a critical supply of the city’s water needs. For the Owens valley, that means a continuation of good jobs, but also the continued presence of a landlord 300 miles away making decisions about its residents’ livelihoods. While decisions, often behind closed doors, are made, lessees like Slee and Allen wait.

Credits

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

The stories are the result of more than two years of records requests, interviews and data analysis by AfroLA. Guardian US provided assistance as a co-publishing partner in the editing, production and promotion of this story. Collaboration and co-publication with the Mammoth Sheet helped ensure that Owens valley residents have ready access to news that directly affects their lives and communities. Thank you to the many people who made reporting and sharing this story possible.

For AfroLA

Justin Allen, technology manager

Dana Amihere, editor

Jennings Hanna, interaction designer

Alexandra Kanik, web developer

Katie Licari, reporter

Stu Patterson, copy editor

Alex Tatusian, visual designer

For Guardian US

Matthew Cantor, copy editor

Will Craft, data editor

Eline Gordts, editor

Thalia Juarez, photo editor

Andrew Witherspoon, data editor