Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court broke new ground this month when it ruled the Constitution forbids school policies in California that prevent parents from being told about their child’s gender transition at school.

But the reach of this new parental right remains unclear.

Does it mean all parents have a right to be informed if their child is using a new name and pronouns at school?

Or is the right limited to parents who inquire and object to being “shut out of participation in decisions involving their children’s mental health,” as the high court said in Mirabelli vs. Bonta.

Both sides in this legal battle accuse the other of creating confusion and uncertainty. And that dispute has not subsided.

UC Davis law professor Aaron Tang says understanding the Supreme Court’s order calls for a close reading of the statewide injunction handed down by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in San Diego.

That order prohibits school employees from “misleading” or “lying” to parents. It did not say school officials and teachers had a duty to contact parents whenever they saw that a student changed their appearance or used a new name, he said.

By clearing this order to take effect, the Supreme Court’s decision “means that schools must tell parents the truth about their child’s gender presentation at school if the parents request that information,” Tang said.

“But the initial burden is on the parents. This is not a rule that schools have an affirmative obligation to inform any and all parents if their child is presenting as a different gender,” he said.

The high court’s 6-3 order also indicated the reach of the judge’s injunction was limited.

It “does not provide relief for all the parents of California public school students, but only those parents who object to the challenged policies or seek religious injunctions.”

Religious conservatives who sued say they seek to end “secret transition” policies that encourage students to adopt a new gender identity without their parents knowing about the change.

The lawsuit challenging California’s “parental exclusion” policies was first filed by two teachers in Escondido.

Peter Breen, an attorney for the Thomas More Society, said many of the parents in Escondido “had no clue” their children were undergoing a gender transition at school.

“We need to activate parents,” he said.

Ruling for them, Benitez said the state’s “parental exclusion policies are designed to create a zone of secrecy around a school student who expresses gender incongruity.”

His injunction also said schools must notify their employees that “parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school child expresses gender incongruence.”

The Supreme Court’s order cited a dramatic example of nondisclosure.

Two parents who joined the suit had gone to parent-teacher meetings and learned only after their eighth-grade daughter attempted suicide that she had been presenting as a boy at school and suffered from gender dysphoria.

John Bursch, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, argues the Supreme Court’s opinion goes further to empower parents.

“Fairly read, the Mirabelli opinion creates an affirmative obligation on school officials to disclose,” he said. “It’s consistent with the way [the court] describes the parental right: ‘the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.’ School officials’ silence (rather than lying) is not notice to and is shutting out parents.”

“All that said, the California attorney general is obviously not getting that message,” Bursch said.

He said the Supreme Court needs to go beyond an emergency order and fully decide a case that squarely presents the issue of parents rights.

“School officials should not be socially transitioning children without parental notice and consent. Period,” he said.

He filed an appeal petition with the Supreme Court in a case from Massachusetts that dissenting Justice Elena Kagan described as a “carbon copy” of the California dispute.

It takes only four votes to grant review of a case, but since November, the justices have repeatedly considered the case of Foote vs. Ludlow and taken no action.

The case is set to be considered again on Friday in the court’s private conference.

Meanwhile, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta went back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking a clarification to limit the potential sweep of Benitez’s order.

He objected to the part of the judge’s order that said schools must post a notice that “parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence.”

Bonta said that goes beyond what the Supreme Court approved.

This “could be understood to suggest that public school officials have an affirmative constitutional duty to inform parents whenever they observe a student’s expression of ‘gender incongruence,’ effectively imposing a mandatory ‘see something, say something’ obligation in all circumstances,” he said.

But the 9th Circuit said it would not act until he first presented this request to Benitez.

Meanwhile, transgender rights advocates say the voices and the views of students have been ignored.

“This case has been about states’ and parents’ rights but students have been left out of the conversation. Their voices have not been heard at all,” said Andrew Ortiz, an attorney for the Transgender Law Center. “School should be a place where young people can feel safe and confident they can confide in a teacher.”

“We’re hearing about fear and anxiety,” said Jorge Reyes Salinas, communications director for Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization.

“There are students who are unable to speak with their parents. Teachers can encourage them to have a conversation with their parents. But this will weaken the trust they have in their teachers,” he said.

In the past, the court had been wary of reaching into the public schools to decide on education policies and the curriculum, but it took a significant step in that direction last year.

In a Maryland case, the court said religious parents had a right to “opt out” their young children from classes that read “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks.

The 1st Amendment protects the “free exercise of religion” and “government schools … may not place unconstitutional burdens on religious exercise,” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito, the lone conservative who attended public schools.

The same 6-3 majority cited that precedent to block California school policies that protect the privacy of students and “conceal” information from inquiring parents if the student does not consent.

But the California case went beyond the religious-rights issue in the Maryland “opt out” case because it included a “subclass of parents” who objected without citing religion as the reason.

The justices ruled for them as a matter of parents’ rights.

“Parents — not the state — have primary authority with respect to the upbringing and education of children,” the court said.

That simple assertion touches on a sensitive issue for both the conservative and liberal wings of the court. It rests on the 14th Amendment’s clause that says no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

In the past, a liberal majority held that the protection for “liberty” included rights to contraceptives, abortion and same-sex marriages.

Conservatives fiercely objected to what was dubbed “substantive due process.”

In the California case, Kagan, speaking for the liberals in dissent, tweaked the conservatives for recognizing a new constitutional right without saying where it came from.

“Anyone remotely familiar with recent debates in constitutional law will understand why: Substantive due process has not been of late in the good graces of this Court — and especially of the Members of today’s majority,” she wrote.

She noted that when the court struck down the right to abortion in the Dobbs case, Justice Clarence Thomas said he would go further and strike down all the rights that rest on “substantive due process.”

In response to Kagan, Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed a concurring opinion that staked out a moderate conservative position.

Since 1997, the court has said it would stand behind rights that were “deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition,” she wrote. That includes “a parent’s right to raise her child … and the right to participate in significant decisions about her child’s mental health.”

She said California’s “non-disclosure policy” is unconstitutional and violates the rights of parent because it applies “even if parents expressly ask for information about their child’s gender identification,” she wrote.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh signed on to her opinion.

While Kagan dissented on procedural grounds, she did not disagree with bottom-line outcome.

“California’s policy, in depriving all parents of information critical to their children’s health and well-being, could have crossed the constitutional line,” she said. “And that would entitle the parents, at the end of the day, to relief.”

SACRAMENTO — During the Los Angeles writers’ strike in 2023, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell wanted to reach out to his donors in Hollywood and ask what he could do to help them. But he didn’t have an easy way to find the screenwriters who backed his many campaigns.

So Swalwell and his congressional chief of staff launched an AI technology company that sifts and analyzes campaign fundraising data.

The company has since been used by dozens of political campaigns, including by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles). Even Swalwell’s current campaign for California governor hired the artificial intelligence company, called Findraiser.

But some details of Swalwell’s private venture remain unclear, including the company’s investors.

Craig Holman, a governmental ethics expert with the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, said it’s common and legal for candidates to use their own businesses to promote their campaigns or the campaigns of others, as long as all business interactions are charged at market value.

He said Swalwell can talk about his business privately but cannot do so in relation to his role in Congress, to avoid running afoul of ethics rules barring using one’s position for personal monetary gain.

Holman called it “odd and politically unwise” that Swalwell’s business will not publicly disclose all of its investors.

Swalwell, who has represented Northern California in Congress since 2013, is among the top Democrats in the governor’s race, according to a recent poll, but thus far none of the candidates has a breakaway lead.

Findraiser is close to profitability, his onetime chief of staff, current campaign manager and Findraiser CEO Yardena Wolf said in a podcast interview that aired in October.

The company received more than $67,400 from congressional campaigns in the 2025-26 cycle, according to filings with the federal government.

Members of Congress are not barred from owning outside companies or accepting a small outside salary, with exceptions. Swalwell makes no income from the company, according to filings he has made with the state of California, though he could benefit if the company was ever sold.

“Findraiser is a platform like hundreds of other tools in the market that helps Democratic campaigns communicate more efficiently,” a Swalwell spokesperson said. “Congressman Swalwell and the Findraiser team consulted the House Committee on Ethics on the conception and implementation of the tool every step of the way.”

Still, it highlights how mixing public service and private business can raise ethics questions.

Wolf told The Times that none of Findraiser’s investors have business before Congress, but she declined to reveal the names of the backers.

The fair market value of Findraiser is between $100,001 and $1 million, according to campaign finance documents filed with the state this month.

Swalwell stated on the documents that he is a part owner. Besides the Congress member and Wolf, the other member of the company listed with the state is Paul Mandell, who runs an event business.

The company’s website boasts that it provides a “straightforward AI-powered chatbot that supercharges your fundraising database searches. This first-of-its-kind tool sits on top of your political fundraising database, allowing you to ask simple, intuitive questions and receive the results you need instantly.”

The website also contains testimonials, including from former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, who says Findraiser provides the AI technology that makes it “easier than ever for campaigns to connect with the right donors and raise what they need to win.”

The amount of money campaigns are paying to use Findraiser is nominal, federal campaign finance records show. During the 2025-26 cycle, Swalwell’s campaign for Congress reported paying Findraiser $6,630. His campaign for governor paid the company $975.

Wolf, in an interview with The Times, declined to provide details about the company’s staff or how much it charges customers.

In her interview with the political podcast “The Great Battlefield,” she recounted that the writers’ strike was the impetus for Findraiser and said Swalwell came up with the name.

She conceded that it is “pretty unusual” for a member of Congress to start a company with his chief of staff. She also said there was “a lot of ethics back and forth — of lawyers and all of that, to make sure that we were aboveboard and that everything is kosher.”

Among other things, Findraiser has helped Swalwell’s campaigns pull in more money, she said. For example, the campaign could identify donors who gave small amounts to Swalwell but larger checks to other politicians, Wolf said.

“We’ve been able to set up meetings with people like that, and they’ve increased their contributions.”

Aside from Wolf, one other staff member who works for both Swalwell’s campaign and his government office is also being paid via a contract to do digital work for Findraiser, Wolf confirmed.

Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform at Issue One, a bipartisan advocacy group, said that although there is no prohibition on a member of Congress hiring his own company, voters may perceive an issue.

“Voters may see self-dealing as evidence that a candidate is prioritizing personal enrichment over public service, which damages confidence in elections and governmental institutions,” he said.

“If donors give money knowing it will personally benefit the candidate, that undermines the integrity of the political system.”

Swalwell’s campaign declined to respond to Beckel’s statements.

Wolf in her podcast interview last year said the business was “going really well.”

“We have PACs that use it. We have first-time candidates, as well as 20-year incumbents who are using it. We have congressional races and Senate races,” Wolf said.

Around 2024, the company began offering beta testing, she said.

“Obviously, both Eric’s and my network are people who are in the political space and just in our day to day, as we were talking to people, we had people say, ‘Well, I want to use it,’” Wolf said. “And so we had a group of people who ended up beta testing.”

A spokesperson for Swalwell’s campaign said that “Findraiser spread through word of mouth among campaigns across the country. Any decision by a campaign or candidate to utilize the tool is based on their choice and their organization’s strategic prioritization.”

The Times contacted 16 congressional campaigns that reported using Findraiser in recent federal filings. None would tell The Times how they came to hire the company.

Both Schiff and Gomez have endorsed Swalwell in his campaign for governor.

Schiff’s paid about $2,000 for two months of Findraiser services last year. However, Wolf, in her podcast interview, said Findraiser works with Schiff “a lot.”

Ian Mariani, a spokesperson for Schiff’s campaign, said the company “is one of many campaign vendors used by our team, and it helped us engage with several people.”

SACRAMENTO — A new poll shows California voters are sharply divided over two brewing statewide ballot measures stirring up the nation’s partisan and economic divides: a one-time tax on billionaires to pay for mostly healthcare and a voter ID mandate that includes citizenship verification.

The survey conducted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed 52% of registered voters supported the billionaire’s tax, while 33% said they opposed it. Fifteen percent were undecided.

Support for the voter ID measure was more evenly split, with 44% of voters in support, 45% opposed and the remainder undecided.

The pair of statewide proposals, which have yet to qualify for California’s November ballot, emanated from opposite sides of California’s political spectrum. Organized labor and progressives are pushing hard for a new wealth tax in response to Republican cuts to federal healthcare programs, and the GOP-led call for additional voter restrictions comes in the wake of President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Poll director Mark DiCamillo said he “was a little surprised” by the results given how much attention each measure has already received.

“Just from reading the press accounts of these initiatives, I thought they would both be well ahead. There’s been a lot of discussion about them and advocates seem to be very confident in their chances of passage, but the polls seem to indicate otherwise,” he said.

The divisions over each measure fell largely along partisan and ideological lines.

On the billionaire’s tax initiative, 72% of Democratic voters said they would support the measure if the election were held today — and the same percentage of Republicans oppose it. A slim majority — 51% — of voters who are unaffiliated or registered with another party support the wealth tax, while 30% said they oppose it, with the remainder undecided.

Republican voters overwhelmingly support the voter ID initiative, with 91% saying they would vote for it. More than two-thirds of Democratic voters, 68%, said they would oppose the measure. No party preference voters appeared evenly split.

Neither ballot measure has officially qualified for the November ballot thus far, though proponents of the voter ID measure said this month that they turned in 1.3 million voter signatures to elections officials, well above the 875,000 required to qualify. Proponents of the new tax on billionaires have until June 24 to submit signatures to elections officials.

The billionaire tax has generated national news coverage and widespread debate over whether it would benefit low-income Californians or end up hurting the state’s tax base as billionaires move out of the state to avoid paying it.

The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, which represents 120,000 workers in California. Union leaders say that the tax would raise $100 billion to backfill steep cuts to federal healthcare programs under a sweeping tax and spending bill approved by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed in the summer by Trump.

The measure would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California residents who are worth $1 billion or more, with options to pay it over multiple years.

According to SEIU-UHW, the new tax would apply to around 200 people in the state, though several wealthy tech leaders have made moves to change their residences and avoid paying the tax should it pass. In recent months, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and others have bought up lavish beachfront estates and new commercial office spaces in South Florida.

Some of those billionaires are also ponying up to defeat the measure. Brin, who according to Forbes is the world’s third-richest person, has contributed $45 million to a new ballot measure committee called Building a Better California, which is pushing an alternative statewide ballot measure that could scrap the billionaire’s tax.

Brandon Castillo, a veteran ballot measure campaign strategist who is not working on either of the two measures, said even though it’s currently polling above 50%, the billionaire’s tax is starting out “in a really shaky position.”

“This is not a very strong place to start,” he said. “That’s not to say they can’t keep this thing over 50%, but when you’re starting just barely above 50% and you have a tsunami of money and a huge campaign against you, it’s really hard to keep yourself at that level.”

Though previous public opinion polls at the state and national levels have shown broad support for requiring proof of citizenship to vote in elections, even among Democrats, the new Berkeley poll showed liberal voters are skeptical of the measure.

Proponents of voter ID contend that such laws prevent election fraud and, along with proof of citizenship mandates, prevent noncitizens from voting. Opponents say ID requirements threaten the fundamental constitutional rights of Americans who do not have the documentation readily available, and that the restrictions are unnecessary given that voting by noncitizens is rare and already outlawed in the U.S.

Under current law, Californians are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. They are required to provide identification when registering to vote, and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and a U.S. citizen.

The poll showed that slim majorities of predominantly Spanish-speaking voters, voters who were born in another country and first-generation immigrants support the voter ID measure. A plurality of Latino voters also favor it, with 44% in support and 41% opposed.

But DiCamillo cautioned against reading too much into those numbers, noting that awareness of the measure is still relatively low.

“I’ve always seen in my history of measuring Latino voters’ support that they are relatively late deciders on most ballot measures,” he said. “How they break will be critical. I would say we’ll have to look at how they feel when we do our final preelection poll.”

Voter ID laws are also a top priority of Trump, who has pressured the Senate into taking up the SAVE Act, which would impose nationwide requirements for proof of citizenship to vote and already has passed the House of Representatives.

Castillo said Trump’s support could sway Democratic and liberal-leaning independents to vote against the measure.

Both DiCamillo and Castillo noted that with the November election still seven months away, voters are not paying much attention and those on either side of each ballot measure have not launched major campaigns yet.

“I suspect by the time election day comes around, these awareness numbers on the billionaire’s tax certainly are going to be much higher,” Castillo said. “You’re going to see 80-90% of voters familiar with it, just because they’re going to be inundated with advertising and earned media between now and November.”

The Berkeley IGS/Times poll surveyed 5,019 registered California voters online in English and Spanish from March 9 to 14. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.

WASHINGTON — U.S. companies will be allowed to do business with Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company after the Treasury Department eased sanctions, with some limitations, on Wednesday as the Trump administration looks for ways to boost world oil supplies during the Iran war.

The Treasury issued a broad authorization allowing Petróleos de Venezuela S.A, or PDVSA, to directly sell Venezuelan oil to U.S. companies and on global markets, a massive shift after Washington for years had largely blocked dealings with Venezuela’s government and its oil sector.

Separately, the White House said President Trump would waive, for 60 days, Jones Act requirements for goods shipped between U.S. ports to be moved on U.S.-flagged vessels. The 1920s law, designed to protect the American shipbuilding sector, is often blamed for making gas more expensive.

The moves highlight the increased pressure that the Republican administration is under to ease soaring oil prices as the United States, along with Israel, wages a war with Iran without a foreseeable end date. Global oil prices have since spiked as Iran halted traffic through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s oil typically passes through from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide.

The Treasury’s license is designed to incentivize new investment in Venezuela’s energy sector and is intended to benefit both the U.S and Venezuela, while increasing the global oil supply, a Treasury official told the Associated Press. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Since the ouster and arrest of Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president during a U.S. military operation in January, Trump has said the U.S. would effectively “run” Venezuela and sell its oil.

The U.S. license provides targeted relief from sanctions, but does not lift the penalties altogether. The license allows companies that existed before Jan. 29, 2025, to buy Venezuelan oil and engage in transactions that would normally be banned under American sanctions, reopening trade for a major oil producer to global markets.

There are some limits.

Payments cannot go directly to sanctioned Venezuelan entities such as PDVSA, but must be sent instead to a special U.S.-controlled account. In other words, the U.S. will allow the oil trade but will control the cash flow.

Additionally, deals involving Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and some Chinese entities will not be allowed. Transactions involving Venezuelan debt or bonds will not be allowed.

The license is expected to give a massive boost to Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy and help encourage companies that have been apprehensive to invest. The decision is part of the Trump administration’s phased-in plan to turn around Venezuela. But critics of the acting Venezuelan government argue that the move rewards Venezuela’s leadership — all loyal to Maduro and the ruling party — while repression, corruption and human rights abuses continue.

Many public sector workers survive on roughly $160 per month, while the average private sector employee earned about $237 last year, when the annual inflation rate soared to 475%, according to Venezuela’s central bank, and sent the cost of food beyond what many can afford.

Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves and used them to power what was once Latin America’s strongest economy. But corruption, mismanagement and U.S. economic sanctions saw production steadily decline from the 3.5 million barrels per day pumped in 1999, when Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chávez, took power, to less than 400,000 barrels per day in 2020.

A year earlier, the Treasury Department under the first Trump administration locked Venezuela out of world oil markets when it sanctioned PDVSA as part of a policy punishing Maduro’s government for corrupt, anti-democratic and criminal activities. That forced the government to sell its remaining oil output at a discount — about 40% below market prices — to buyers such as China and in other Asian markets. Venezuela even started accepting payments in Russian rubles, bartered goods or cryptocurrency.

The new license does not allow payments in gold or cryptocurrency, including the petro, which was a crypto token issued by the Venezuelan government in 2018.

Meantime, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Jones Act waiver would help “mitigate the short-term disruptions to the oil market” during the Iran war and would “allow vital resources like oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and coal to flow freely to U.S. ports.”

Hussein and Cano write for the Associated Press. Cano reported from Caracas, Venezuela. AP writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

A deaf 6-year-old boy snatched by immigration agents from Northern California and deported to Colombia this month needs to be returned to the U.S. immediately or he could die, a lawyer representing the child said Wednesday.

Attorney Nikolas De Bremaeker said the boy, Joseph Lodano Rodriguez, was “at risk every day that he is not getting his treatments.” The child has a cochlear implant that requires the same routine maintenance and cleaning he was receiving stateside but may not get in Colombia.

“Joseph is at immense risk for his life if he does not continue the treatment that he was receiving in the United States,” De Bremaeker said at a virtual news conference hosted by California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

“He is at risk of infection, he is at risk of meningitis, he is at risk of death if he is not given the proper care for his surgical implants.”

Joseph, his 28-year-old mother, Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, and another son, 5, were detained by federal agents on March 3 while attending an immigration meeting and deported shortly after.

Rodriguez Gutierrez traveled to the United States in 2022 seeking asylum from domestic violence and lived in Hayward. She was told in the run up to the March 3 meeting that she needed to bring her two children for a routine check-in to update the photos Immigration and Customs Enforcement had of them.

Shortly after arriving, ICE agents “tried to force her to sign a document without explanation, and then pushed the family into a vehicle to be put on a flight to a faraway detention facility, “ De Bremaeker told The Times earlier.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions sent Wednesday after office hours but has consistently said that Rodriguez Gutierrez was “an illegal alien from Colombia” who “illegally entered the United States in 2022.”

She was issued a removal order on Nov. 25, 2024, according to DHS.

Thurmond, the superintendent, called on the public to lobby Congress and the Trump administration “to return Joseph so he can continue his studies.”

Thurmond showed a 40-second clip of Joseph and his family at a Colombian facility for the deaf.

The child appeared to struggle communicating with his sibling and mother, while his brother repeatedly tried to give directions to him in Spanish with little avail.

Joseph’s only language is American Sign Language, Thurmond said. Joseph was studying at the state-funded Fremont’s California School for the Deaf.

“Joseph is struggling,” Thurmond said. “He does not have the ability to communicate with anyone and in many ways, he can barely communicate with his mom. Like Joseph’s mom, Lesly was just beginning to learn American Sign Language.”

Both California senators — Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — along with state Democratic congressional members Eric Swalwell, Nanette Barragán, Zoe Lofgren, Kevin Mullin and Lateefah Simon called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to investigate the deportation.

The group is also calling on both government agencies to return the family to the U.S. through the process of humanitarian parole. That move would allow Joseph to re-enroll in school and receive specialized care.

Celena Ponce, founder of Hands United, a nonprofit organization dedicated to aiding deaf immigrant children and families, said her group was trying to connect the family with the deaf community and services, like interpreters, in Colombia.

She said, however, that Joseph and his family face several challenges. The first hurdle if he ends up staying in Colombia, is that he and his mother will have to learn Colombian sign language, which differs from American sign language.

Ponce added that Joseph also suffered language deprivation, meaning he is delayed in comparison to other 6-year-olds who are hearing.

“Because Colombia does not have residential schools similar to what California has, the ability to be fully immersed in language is not present,” she said.

Whatever gains he made at the California School for the Deaf would likely end, she said.

Times staff writers Clara Harter and Christopher Buchanan contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The State Department says it is adding 12 countries to an expanding list of nations whose citizens must post bonds of up to $15,000 to apply for U.S. visas.

Effective April 2, passport holders from Cambodia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Grenada, Lesotho, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles and Tunisia will be required to pay the bond, which is refunded if the visa application is denied or, if granted, the person adheres to the terms of the visa.

That’s according to a notice posted to the State Department website on Wednesday.

After April 2, there will be 50 countries whose citizens are subject to the requirement, which was rolled out by the Trump administration last year as it cracked down on visa overstays and more broadly moved to curtail illegal migration.

Under the program, visa applicants from designated countries, many of which are in Africa, that have high overstay rates, have to post bonds of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 depending on their circumstances and the discretion of the consular officer processing the application.

“The visa bond program has already proven effective at drastically reducing the number of visa recipients who overstay their visas and illegally remain in the United States,” the department said, adding that almost 97% of the nearly 1,000 people to have posted the bond had not overstayed their visa.

The full list of countries is here.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

An eerie silence had settled.

As word evidently reached activists in the last few weeks that disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against Chicano civil rights icon Cesar Chavez were forthcoming, things started to happen without much explanation.

Groups began to cancel long-planned parades, dinners, lectures and fundraisers scheduled for Chavez’s birthday on March 31. People who I’ve known for years suddenly weren’t returning calls or texts about what was going on. Longtime defenders of Chavez — who stood by their hero even as revelations in this paper and in biographies over the past generation showed there was a dark side to the man — suddenly became hard to reach.

When the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation put out statements Tuesday morning that “troubling allegations” against their patriarch were considered credible enough for them to offer help to his victims, the silence transformed into dread. There was a discomfort similar to waiting for a tsunami — that whatever was coming would change lives, shake institutions and make people question values and principles that they had long held dear.

And like a natural disaster, what emerged about Chavez was far worse than anyone could’ve expected.

Wednesday morning, the New York Times published a story where two women whose families marched alongside Chavez in the fields of California during the 1960s and 1970s disclosed that he sexually abused them for years when they were girls. Just as shocking was the revelation by Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s longtime compatriot and a civil rights legend, that he had once raped her at a time when their leadership in the fight to bring dignity to grape pickers earned national acclaim and amounted to a modern-day Via Dolorosa.

The silence has transformed into screams. Politicians and organizations that long commemorated Chavez and urged others to follow his ways are releasing statements by the minute. My social media feed is now a torrent of friends and strangers expressing empathy for Chavez’s victims and outrage, disgust and — above all — disappointment that someone considered a secular saint by many for decades turned out to be a human more terrible than anyone could’ve imagined.

There will be questions and soul-searching about these horrifying disclosures in the weeks, months and years to come. We will see a push for the renaming of the dozens of schools, parks and streets that bear Chavez’s name across the country and even the rebranding of Cesar Chavez Day, a California state holiday since 2000 devoted to urging people to give back to their communities and the least among us.

The reckoning is only right. Much of the Latino civil rights, political and educational ecosystem will have to grapple with why they held up Chavez as a paragon of virtue for too long above others just as deserving and, as it turns out, nowhere near as compromised.

In any event, the myth has been punctured.

A portrait of Cesar Chavez on a mural on Farmacia Ramirez, 2403 Cesar E Chavez Ave. in East Los Angeles.

(James Carbone / Los Angeles Times)

Chavez’s biography always reads like an entry in the “Lives of the Saints” genre of books that Catholics used to read about the holy men of their faith. The son of farmworkers who became a Mexican American Moses trying to lead his people to the promised land of equity and political power. An internationally famous leader who lived a mendicant’s life. Who devoted decades to some of the most exploited people in the American economy. Honored with awards, plays, posters. Murals, movies and monuments. President Biden even kept a bust of Chavez at his Oval Office desk.

It was a beatific reputation that largely persisted even as the union he helped to create lost its influence in the fields of California and a new generation of activists looked down on Chavez for his long-standing opposition to immigrants who came to this country to work without legal status. Admirers kept him on a pedestal even as former UFW members alleged over the last two decades that the boss they once idolized purged too many good people in the name of absolute control. The hagiography continued even as a new generation of Latinos came of age not knowing anything about him other than an occasional school lesson or television segment.

I was one of those neophytes. I first heard his name at Anaheim High School in the mid-1990s and thought my teacher was talking about Julio Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican boxer. I was thrilled to discover that someone had bravely fought for the rights of campesinos like my mom and her sisters, who toiled in the garlic fields of Gilroy and strawberry patches of Orange County as teenage girls in the 1960s, the same time that Chavez and the UFW were enjoying their historic wins.

“Who’s Cesar Chavez?” my Mami responded when I asked if his efforts ever made her work easier.

My admiration for Chavez continued even as I learned about some of his faults. I was able to separate Chavez the man from the movement for which he was a figurehead. Long-maligned communities seek heroes to emulate, to draw hope from, to hang on their walls and share their quotes on social media. We create them even as we ignore that they’re flesh and blood just like us.

Chavez seemed like the right man at the right moment as Mexican Americans rose up like never before to battle discrimination and segregation. Now, Latinos and others who admired Chavez have to grapple with his moral failings of the worst possible magnitude at the worst possible time: when there’s an administration doing everything possible to crush Latinos and we’re looking for people to look up to like never before.

He remains one of the few Latino civil rights leaders known nationwide — and Chavez is nowhere near as known as acolytes make him out to be. Some people will argue that it’s unfair he will likely get wiped away from the public sphere while other predatory men from the past and present largely maintain their riches and reputations.

But that’s looking at the abuse revelations the wrong way. For now, I will follow what those most directly affected by Chavez’s actions are telling us to do.

The UFW and Cesar Chavez Foundation were wise to not try to defend the indefensible in their statements and instead consider any victims first before deciding how to decide what’s next for them.

The Chavez family put out a news release that states “we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual abuse.”

Huerta wrote in an online essay: “Cesar’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement. The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”

Another of his victims told the New York Times of Chavez’s legacy: “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes. The movement — that’s the hero.”

The fountain in the Memorial Garden surrounds the gravesite of Cesar Chavez and his wife Helen Chavez at Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene, Calif.

(Francine Orr)

The face of that movimiento brought inspiration to millions and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands. That’s why we shouldn’t cancel the good that Chavez fought for alongside so many; we should direct the adulation he once attracted and the anger he’ll now rightfully receive toward the work that still needs to be done.

To quote an old UFW slogan that Chavez transformed into a mantra, la lucha sigue — the fight continues. It’s a statement that’s more pertinent than ever, damn its imperfect messenger.

At 95, labor icon Dolores Huerta made a shocking and heartbreaking revelation Wednesday, in the wake of a New York Times investigation into sexual abuse allegations against her fellow icon, Cesar Chavez.

She was raped by Chavez, she said. Twice — both times resulting in pregnancies.

“I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control,” Huerta wrote in a statement Wednesday. “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.”

Like so many women who have carried the burden of their own attacks behind an iron curtain of guilt and shame, Huerta now finds herself in the difficult, painful position of having not only to relive this trauma as it becomes public, but explain it to the rest of us.

Like the brave women of the Epstein files; like our First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the courageous women who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein; like Cassie Ventura; like E. Jean Carroll; like Christine Blasey Ford, Huerta joins the ranks of women forced to justify their response to abuse by powerful men.

Huerta shouldn’t have to engage in this rite of self-flagellation, of course, but she and Chavez are linked by their legacies as two of the greatest civil rights fighters in our history. Now, this hidden truth rewrites not just his story, not just hers — but the entire legend of a workers’ movement that grew from the grape fields of California into a defining story of Golden State fortitude and hope.

If Chavez was a predator, where do we even go from here? What do we believe in when even our heroes are ghosts, as Pink Floyd long ago warned?

“It’s just a very heavy day,” said Huerta’s spokesperson, Erik Olvera. “It is incredibly overwhelming for her.”

And for all of us, really.

Reports of abuse

The New York Times investigation detailed the molestation and abuse by Chavez of two women who were teens at the time the events took place. Huerta, the sharpest 95-year-old I’ve even seen, also told the reporters that Chavez had forced sex on her when she was in her 30s, once by manipulation and once by force.

“The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to,” she wrote in her statement. “The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”

Huerta had two daughters from these encounters and gave them to other families to be raised, though she is close to both of them, Olvera, the spokesman, said.

Olvera said that Huerta was unaware of the allegations of the two other women interviewed by the New York Times until the reporters contacted her several weeks ago.

“She literally thought she was the only one,” Olvera said. “The guilt is really heavy for her.”

As the news broke this week, shock — but not disbelief — rippled through the political and union worlds where Chavez remains revered (he died in 1993) and Huerta remains active. Despite her age, she speaks at multiple events each week and is a fixture at the state Capitol advocating for workers’ rights.

While Huerta has never spoken before about Chavez’s attacks on her, his infidelities and autocratic leadership style — and rumors of misconduct — have been documented for years. In her 2014 biography, journalist Miriam Pawel detailed some of these complaints as well as Chavez’s troubled relationship with his wife.

In a statement, the United Farm Workers union called the allegations “profoundly shocking.”

It canceled all events celebrating the upcoming Cesar Chavez Day — a state holiday — and is working on a survivor-centered response with outside experts to help ensure a fair and inclusive pathway for other people to tell their stories.

Sen. Alex Padilla, who has worked for years with Huerta but who was a child when Chavez was organizing, called for “zero tolerance for abuse, exploitation, and the silencing of victims, no matter who is involved.”

“Confronting painful truths and ensuring accountability is essential to honoring the very values the greater farmworker movement stands for — values rooted in dignity and justice for all,” Padilla said.

Changing times

If there is the slightest bit of solace to be found in this tragedy, it is in the response. So far, we have been spared the usual attacks on victims — though almost certainly they are happening outside the public eye.

Though Huerta may carry guilt, as all survivors so unfairly do, coming forward now has quickly and forcefully changed the narrative. I suspect there are few people who would dare call Huerta a liar, or challenge her motives. I suspect without her revelations, the other women coming forward would be treated differently.

I imagine that had she spoken out back then, as a young mother in the 1970s, a Latina woman in the male-dominated culture of the Central Valley, she would likely have found little relief.

What must it have been like for her all these years to know the man we idolized had this monstrous side?

But after 60 years of hard work, Huerta is now powerful in her own right. And after 60 years of silence, Huerta wanted to use that power to support the other women speaking out. Olvera said Huerta came to that decision reading the New York Times piece, and for the first time understanding that these other survivors were children when their abuse happened.

“When she learned that, that’s when she was like, I need to come out and tell my story,” he said. “She didn’t want them to stand alone.”

In the end, every survivor stands alone because what needs to heal is a soul shattered by the trivial evil of carnal greed, a pain so personal and unique even another survivor can’t fully understand it. It is daring and noble in the crucible of that personal destruction, which lasts years if not decades, to demand accountability. Not all of our heroes are ghosts.

“Your courage and your voices matter,” Siebel Newsom said. “They open the door for so many others to follow suit and tell their stories so that one day soon, we will break this horrific cycle of repetitive abuse by powerful men.”

These women have now made it clear: Chavez was a predator — a powerful man who used his authority to manipulate and force women and girls into sexual encounters.

In the end, all the good Chavez did, the strength and dignity he brought not just to farmworkers but to immigrants across the country, will forever be bound up with this ugly truth — though the movement is far more than one man.

Chavez earned this ending. Hopefully, for Huerta and the other survivors, speaking out is the beginning of healing.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years
The deep dive: ‘Profoundly shocking’ allegations against Cesar Chavez spark soul-searching in movement
The L.A. Times Special: Democrats face the possibility of a historic upset in California governor’s race, poll finds

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria
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In another timeline, in that parallel universe where Venezuela is a normal Latin American country and not a case study of self destruction and democratic retreat, Vladimir Padrino López might have been a good military officer. A native from Caracas, he graduated with honors in the Military Academy in 1984, and as was normal for promising Venezuelan Army officers like him, he was sent to study in the infamous School of the Americas where the United States managed to train the armies of their allied countries. Padrino Lopez was sent later to command an Army post in the border with Colombia, and then came Hugo Chávez.

He was back in Caracas when the crisis of April 2002 allowed Chávez to purge the armed forces and control them as a whole, after promoting the politicization—to his favor, of course—of the military caste. Padrino read the room and focused on rising as a hardcore chavista. By the end of the Chávez years, he was leading the chief of staff of the Army, in the pole position to jump into the highest job an active military officer can get in Venezuela: minister of defense. Nicolás Maduro appointed him as such in October 2014, as well as chief of the FANB’s Strategic Operations Command. 

By then, he was a general-in-chief with four stars on his uniform, but the most important thing is what he did, and what he didn’t. 

Padrino López didn’t stop Colombian guerrillas from controlling villages, rivers, mines and illegal businesses in Venezuela. On the contrary, he helped him to use our territory as a sanctuary that protected them from Colombian soldiers and as a hunting ground for kidnapping and drug trafficking. He didn’t purge military intelligence from Cuban advisors and spies, but let them impose terror in the ranks and prevent the rise of conspirators against Maduro with extreme prejudice. What Padrino López focused on was on lucrative arms trade and cooperation with the Russian and Iranian industrial-military complexes. His most important function for Maduro was to help him to keep FANB in line, to lead the different military tribes around the chavista regime, and to ensure support from the women and men in uniform to an autocratic consolidation—through the illegal Constituent Assembly, and the two illegitimate inaugurations of Maduro in 2019 and 2025.

He was the minister of defense when FANB was tasked with overseeing the Mining Arc, when the protest wave of 2017 was drowned in blood, when FANB deployed with the police the killing squads of the Operación de Liberacion del Pueblo, and when DGCIM became the spearhead of the worst place Venezuela has been in terms of human rights since the military dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez. This is why you can find the name of Padrino López in several reports on repression and crimes against humanity in Venezuela: he was at the top of the military chain of command responsible for kidnapping, torturing and killing people.

Now he has completed his comeback, with the mission of helping Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez keep stability, to deter potential spoilers from trying to change the post-Maduro order.

The demise of Padrino López has been a rumor for years, as his ascendancy among troops decayed. Thousands of members of the armed forces have been victims of witchhunts or abandoned FANB, by quitting or even deserting, fed up with abuse, low wages, corruption and miserable operational arrest. In January 3, years of preaching about asymmetric war and millions spent on Russian toys did nothing to avoid the capture of Maduro and the bombing of Fuerte Tiuna. Delcy Rodriguez found a pretext to send Padrino to retirement, which was way past due. Naturally, she didn’t do it to punish him for being useless as an army leader, incapable of defending the country and his commander in chief, but because she needed someone she trusts more.

The successor might not be as visible or as well known as Padrino Lopez, but he is not very different. General Gustavo González López is also an alumni of the School of the Americas, a loyal chavista and a longtime member of the Maduro regime’s military elite. Twenty years ago he was already serving in civilian positions, like director of the Caracas Metro, that had nothing to do with his training, and everything to do with his loyalty to Chávez and the chavista (but not only chavista) myth that military officers are good managers because they know how to boss people around and impose order. González López’s organizational abilities, though, were more in the realm of building an efficient repressive apparatus than in running a decades-old public transport system.

He was appointed head of SEBIN, the civilian political police in charge of the dungeons in El Helicoide, during the 2014 repression wave. That meant González López was one of the men who dragged the country down the ladder of poor human rights indicators. Just like Padrino López, he quickly entered the list of Venezuelan high-level officials targeted by international sanctions and investigations. One year later, he became interior minister. Just when an assassination attempt with drones surprised Maduro and his security ring during a military parade in Caracas, and a scandal followed the murder of opposition councilman Fernando Albán in the SEBIN headquarters, González López was dismissed and put aside. 

Now he has completed his comeback, with the mission of helping Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez keep stability, to deter potential spoilers from trying to change the post-Maduro order. González López was appointed chief of the DGCIM and commander of the Presidential Guard just after January 3, and now is at the top of the pyramid. 

This is about loyalty, not about any political transition. We can’t expect justice, reconciliation or any movement towards the restoration of the rule of law with a man like González López heading the Venezuelan military. No one in the barracks or the streets is safer because one symbol of the Maduro regime, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, has been replaced by another.

WASHINGTON — The Iranian government remains “intact but largely degraded,” National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress on Wednesday, as Israel continued to hunt down the Islamic Republic’s leadership with an overnight airstrike that killed the nation’s spy chief.

The death of Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib, announced Wednesday by Israel, was the third high-level assassination in roughly 24 hours in a series of strikes that have hollowed out Tehran’s leadership ranks.

Israel ordered strikes Tuesday that killed Iranian security chief Ali Larijani and Basij paramilitary commander Gholamreza Soleimani.

Additional senior Iranian figures could be targeted, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday. “Israel’s policy is clear and unequivocal: No one in Iran has immunity — everyone is a target,” Katz said.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, issued a rare statement Wednesday addressing Larijani’s assassination.

“Undoubtedly, the assassination of such a person shows the extent of his importance and the hatred of the enemies of Islam towards him,” he wrote, according to the Associated Press. “All blood has its price that the criminal murderers of the martyrs must pay soon.”

Tehran responded with renewed missile and drone attacks on Israel and U.S.-aligned countries across the Persian Gulf, further disrupting strained energy infrastructure and shipping lanes. Fighting has halted oil and gas production throughout the region, as shipping was stalled through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global oil supplies.

The war has triggered a severe global oil shortage that has destabilized electronics, agriculture, pharmaceutical and energy supply chains.

Exacerbating those disruptions, the U.S. and Israel carried out a coordinated attack on the South Pars natural gas field on Wednesday. The strikes drew swift condemnation from Qatar, a U.S. ally that shares the reservoir with Iran. The Qatari Foreign Ministry called the attack “dangerous and irresponsible” and “a threat to global energy security.”

The attack is a major blow to Iran’s supply of electricity too, as most of the country’s energy grid relies on gas, analysts said. The field accounts for about 75% of Iran’s natural gas production.

Tehran promised to respond with more attacks on its Mideast neighbors, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, near-constant Israeli strikes in Beirut and southern Lebanon have displaced over 1 million people, and killed 968 civilians, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

With the war in its third week, deaths now number in the thousands across Iran, Israel and neighboring countries.

International reaction has sharpened as the fighting showed no sign of relenting. Russia condemned the “murder and liquidation” of sovereign leadership and called for an immediate ceasefire, while European leaders voiced growing alarm about the war’s trajectory and the risks of broader destabilization.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifies Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Intelligence.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

All allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have refused to heed President Trump’s call to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz, signaling a deepening rift in the world’s most powerful military alliance. Trump has sought to sever the U.S. from the alliance.

“We no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! “ he wrote on social media Tuesday.

Trump on Wednesday signaled little appetite for de-escalation, floating the prospect of a decisive military endgame.

“I wonder what would happen if we ‘finished off’ what’s left of the Iranian Terror State,” he wrote on his social media website.

The president visited Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Wednesday, where the remains of six U.S. service members killed in the crash of a refueling aircraft were returned to their families. The visit marks the second time since the Feb. 28 launch of the war with Iran that Trump has attended the solemn military ritual known as a dignified transfer, the Associated Press reported.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “worldwide threats” Wednesday, Democrats grilled Gabbard and other intelligence leaders over their preparation for Iranian retaliation against Mideast energy infrastructure, civilian areas and American military sites and personnel.

Trump has maintained that the U.S. was caught off guard by Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

“Nobody expected that. We were shocked,” he said at a Kennedy Center board meeting Monday. Later in the day, when asked at an Oval Office news briefing whether he had been warned about the possibility of Iranian retaliation, Trump reiterated his surprise.

“Nobody, nobody, no, no, no. The greatest experts — nobody thought they were going to hit,” he said.

Last year, intelligence agencies testified to Congress that Iran was capable of inflicting substantial damage on an attacker, executing regional strikes and disrupting shipping, “particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of Hormuz,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at the hearing, reading from last year’s worldwide threats report.

“In other words, every problem we’re seeing now was not only foreseeable, but was actually predicted by the intelligence agencies,” Wyden told Gabbard. “It’s hard to see how you can sit here and say that the intelligence agencies couldn’t provide a clear warning that if attacked, the Iranians would respond by attacking our people.”

Gabbard refused to confirm whether intelligence agencies briefed the president on the subject, saying she “won’t divulge internal conversations.”

She also testified that U.S. strikes on Iran had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear enrichment program, including underground facilities, and said officials are now watching to see whether Tehran attempts to rebuild. So far, she said, Iran has not restarted the program.

But Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) challenged that assessment, noting that Trump had used the same word — “obliterated” — to describe strikes just months before. He pressed Gabbard on how serious the nuclear threat was leading up to the February operation, given that timeline.

The intelligence community assessed that Iran “maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment,” Gabbard said adding that the “only person” who can determine what constitutes an imminent threat is the president.

“False,” Ossoff shot back. “It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States.”

On Monday came the latest evidence of dysfunction within the Trump administration’s counterterrorism apparatus, when Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned, citing his opposition to the war in Iran. But the disarray is not new.

In July 2025, Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism on President Trump’s National Security Council, announced that he was “on the cusp of releasing the unclassified new presidential U.S. counterterrorism policy.” Yet eight months later, while America wages war on a notorious state sponsor of terrorism, the strategy has yet to be released.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has not published a National Terrorism Advisory since September and has failed to issue the annual Homeland Threat Assessment report since Trump returned to office. This remains the case, even as counterterrorism experts have warned about the possibility of Iranian-backed sleeper cells being activated because of the current conflict with Iran.

Without a strategy that clearly lays out American priorities and responses, America’s counterterrorism defenses are divided, disorganized and under-resourced. It is this malfunction that left Trump answering a question about whether Americans should expect more violence in the homeland with an effective shoulder shrug: “I guess.”

The homegrown backlash to the Iran conflict began on March 1, when a naturalized U.S. citizen opened fire at a bar in Austin, Texas. The gunman, who was wearing clothing pointing to his support of Iran, killed three before being killed by police gunfire. On March 7, two Islamic State-inspired teens hurled improvised explosive devices at a group of far-right protesters outside the New York City mayor’s mansion. March 12 then saw two attacks. First, a shooting erupted at Old Dominion University, as a former U.S. National Guardsman who had been prosecuted for Islamic State-related plotting killed an ROTC instructor. Then, a U.S. citizen with family ties to Lebanon drove his vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., before dying in an exchange of gunfire with synagogue security officers.

In three of the four attacks, further violence was stopped by heroic takedowns on scene. Perhaps most notably, the Old Dominion attacker was neutralized by students, who stabbed the gunman to death. The heroic stories, while worth uplifting, underscore a bleaker truth: amid war abroad, Americans have been forced to take counterterrorism into their own hands in their own communities, left to fend for themselves against AR-15s, improvised explosive devices and weaponized vehicles.

The diversity of the attacks and the perpetrators makes matters worse. The attackers include a U.S. National Guard veteran who served several years in prison on terrorism charges, two teenagers who traveled to a different state with violent intentions, a man with an apparently long history of mental illness, and a U.S. citizen who lost family members in the latest Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities. Their targets also point to a complex and unpredictable terrorism environment.

Absent more predictable trends, law enforcement will be spread thin, asked to protect an impossible array of locations across the country against an impossible diversity of threats. In this environment, an effective national counterterrorism strategy would likely point to stopping terrorism further upstream, interrupting radicalization and violent mobilization at an earlier stage. Yet the Trump administration has effectively eviscerated its prevention infrastructure, largely dismantling the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships.

Notably, too, none of the attacks to date seem to be coordinated or directed by the Iranian regime, with the war instead inspiring Western lone actors to attack their own communities. Yet Iran has long engaged in assassination plots in the United States, often by enlisting third-party criminal groups, and may yet seek to activate such a program. As journalists Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes warn: “Iran’s past calculus was low-grade operations in the United States, enough to keep the FBI busy but not large enough to trigger serious military consequences. With the latter now already a reality, the Islamic Republic has less to lose by orchestrating bolder attacks.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly invoked Iran’s history of support for terrorist proxies to justify the conflict: On March 2, for instance, Trump explained that one of the operation’s objectives was “ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Indeed, should it follow its historical model, Iran will likely continue to make external operations and inspired violence a significant part of its response, adding sleeper cell activation and sponsored individuals to the ranks of homegrown violent extremists who have so far plagued America’s homeland since hostilities broke out. But without a more defined strategy, America will likely struggle to mount an effective response.

If, as the old saying goes, “all politics is local,” then the modern-day corollary in an era of smartphones is, “all conflict is global.” Whenever there is a war in the Middle East, as kicked off in Gaza following the Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it exacerbates the terrorism threat landscape around the world, including in the West. When images and videos of the errant U.S. missile attack on a girls’ school flood the internet, it raises the temperature, making attacks by lone actors and other violent extremists with only tangential connections to the conflict more likely.

The breadth of the violence, however, was not guaranteed or pre-ordained. As a Shiite-majority nation, Iran has long held fractious and even hostile relationships with Sunni jihadist actors. The extent of the violence indicates a broader anti-American sentiment prevailing across diaspora communities, likely precipitated by the decades-long war on terror, greatly aggravated by Israeli abuses in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and punctuated by the killings of schoolchildren. The Iran war, in other words, seems to be superseding earlier grievances and instead uniting disparate extremist forces against the United States.

In this environment, the Trump administration needs to stop being so cavalier about counterterrorism. Devoid of an actual strategy and without a director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the United States is even more vulnerable to an attack on the homeland than it would be with those in place. Writing on X, Robert A. Pape, a longtime scholar of terrorism, posted: “After tracking terrorism for 25 years, this is a flashing red light — as bright as I’ve seen prior to a serious attack.”

Only a serious approach to countering terrorism will keep the United States safe, and this is the moment for the Trump administration to demonstrate that it recognizes the stakes. In counterterrorism, inattention can be deadly.

Jacob Ware is a terrorism researcher and the co-author of “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.” Colin P. Clarke is the executive director of the Soufan Center. His research focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism and armed conflict.

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — President Trump is set to pay his respects on Wednesday at a Delaware military base when the remains of six U.S. service members killed in the crash of a refueling aircraft are returned to their families.

It will be the second time since launching the war with Iran on Feb. 28 that the Republican president will attend the solemn military ritual known as a dignified transfer, which he once described as the “toughest thing” he has had to do as commander in chief.

All six crew members of a KC-135 Air Force refueling aircraft were killed last week in a plane crash over friendly territory in western Iraq while supporting operations against Iran. They were from Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Washington state.

“Every person on that aircraft carried a weight most Americans will never see, and they carried it with professionalism, courage, and a level of quiet excellence that deserves to be recognized,” retired Lt. Col Ernesto Nisperos, a friend of one of those killed, said in a text message Wednesday.

The crash brought the U.S. death toll in Operation Epic Fury to at least 13 service members. About 200 U.S. service members have been injured, including 10 severely, the Pentagon has said.

Trump last traveled to Dover Air Force Base on March 7 for the dignified transfer of six U.S. service members who were killed by a drone strike at a command center in Kuwait. He saluted as flag-draped transfer cases containing the remains of the fallen service members were carried from military aircraft to vehicles waiting to take them to the base’s mortuary facility to prepare them for their final resting place.

“It’s the bad part of war,” he told reporters afterward. Asked then if he worried about having to make multiple trips to the base for additional dignified transfers as the war continued, he said, “I’m sure. I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war, isn’t it?”

U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said that the crash followed an unspecified incident involving two aircraft in “friendly airspace” over Iraq but that the loss of the aircraft during a combat mission was “not due to hostile or friendly fire.” The circumstances were under investigation. The other plane landed safely.

The crash killed three people assigned to the 6th Air Refueling Wing at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida: Maj. John A. “Alex” Klinner, 33, who served in Birmingham, Ala.; Capt. Ariana Linse Savino, 31, of Covington, Wash.; and Tech. Sgt. Ashley Pruitt, 34, of Bardstown, Ky.

Klinner, who left behind a wife, a 2-year-old son and 7-month-old twins, was known for his steady command and goofy nature, as well as a willingness to help others. Pruitt’s husband described her as a “radiant” woman who lit up the room. Savino was a friend, mentee and “source of positive energy” who was proud of her Puerto Rican heritage and inspired young Latinas, said Nisperos, who is serving as spokesman for her family.

“She had had this warmth that made you feel seen, a strength that showed up in everything she touched, and a spark — that spice — that made her unforgettable,” Nisperos said. “If you knew her, even for a moment, you knew you were in the presence of someone who was going to change the world.”

The three others were assigned to the 121st Air Refueling Wing at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base in Columbus, Ohio: Capt. Seth Koval, 38, a resident of Stoutsville, Ohio, who was from Mooresville, Ind.; Capt. Curtis Angst, 30, who lived in Columbus; and Master Sgt. Tyler Simmons, 28, of Columbus.

Koval grew up dreaming of becoming a pilot, according to his wife, who described him as a loving, generous “fixer of all things.” Angst’s family said his life was defined by service, generosity and “a genuine love for people.” Simmons loved confiding in his 85-year-old grandmother and working out with her, Sen. Jon Husted said Tuesday, when he and Sen. Bernie Moreno honored the Ohio airmen on the Senate floor.

“To the mom and dad of these three young soldiers, I can’t even process what you’re going through. I can’t even imagine the emotions that you’re feeling,” Moreno said. “Just know that America is grateful beyond words for the sacrifice that your heroic young sons made.”

Superville writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H., and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — At a Senate hearing Wednesday to consider the confirmation of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) as Homeland Security secretary, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opened by asking whether “a man with anger issues” can set the right example for federal immigration agents.

Mullin, President Trump’s pick to replace Secretary Kristi Noem, faced tough questions before the Senate Homeland Security Committee about how he would carry out the administration’s mass deportation effort and how he would steer the agency in the wake of controversies that led to Noem’s firing earlier this month.

For his part, Mullin said he will work to ensure a secure homeland as well as to “bring peace of mind and confidence to the agency.”

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said.

Throughout the hearing, Democrats made digs at Noem while examining Mullin’s character and ability to lead the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Most Republicans painted Mullin as a good man and a hard worker while chastising Democrats for punishing federal workers with the continued Homeland Security funding shutdown.

The leadership shake-up comes amid intense scrutiny over increasingly violent immigration enforcement tactics since last year that intensified after the shooting deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis by immigration agents, which Noem — without evidence — called domestic terrorism.

She was fired days after testifying before congressional oversight committees, during which she faced criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

“It’s not the role of the secretary to be a cable news commentator in the wake of a crisis” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). “This is a role where temperament matters, where judgment matters and where experience matters.

“We have seen under Secretary Noem’s leadership how shortcomings in these traits can compound the challenges that already come with leading a large and complex department, and now more than ever, we need a DHS secretary who is a steady hand, who will provide thoughtful leadership, follow the facts, tell the truth, and hold agency officials accountable when they need to be.”

Paul brought up incidents to illustrate why Mullin is not fit for the job, including a time in 2023 when he nearly got into a fight in a Senate hearing room and more recently when Mullin called Paul “a freaking snake.”

Paul also confronted Mullin for saying he “completely understood” why Paul was assaulted by a neighbor in 2017, which left him with six broken ribs and a damaged lung.

Mullin did not apologize for his remarks and instead accused Paul of smearing his character.

“I’ve worked with many people in this room,” Mullin told Paul. “It seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.”

But Mullin added that their personal differences wouldn’t keep him from doing his job — “it’s bigger than partisan bickering” — and asked Paul to let him earn his respect.

Paul appeared unmoved. Referencing the 2023 near fight with Sean O’Brien, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Paul asked Mullin to “explain to the American public how a man who has no regrets about brawling in a Senate committee can set a proper example.”

Mullin was prepared for the moment: O’Brien was sitting behind him. The union president, he said, has become a close friend.

“Both of us agreed we could have done things different,” Mullin said.

For months, the senior U.S. senator from Montana pondered his political future.

Or so he said.

Wrapping up his second term and facing a glide path to a third, Steve Daines unexpectedly opted this month against seeking reelection, saying in an aw-shucksy video he planned to spend more time back home in Montana and enjoy more cherished moments with his seven grandkids.

Notably, after long “wrestling with this decision,” Daines announced his intent a scant two minutes after the deadline passed for candidates to put their names on the ballot. March 4 at 5:02 p.m local time, to be precise.

More notable still, Daines’ preferred successor, Republican former U.S. Atty. Kurt Alme, jumped into the race at 4:52 p.m. that very same day.

There are relay runners who might learn a thing or two from their timing and coordination.

As part of the seamless handoff, Alme was swiftly endorsed by President Trump, Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, and its other Republican senator, Tim Sheehy, for all intents settling the GOP contest and, quite likely, choosing the state’s next member of the U.S. Senate.

Never mind what voters might have wished, or other prospective candidates might have had in mind.

“There are a lot of Republicans in the state, folks with political ambitions, who are extremely peeved right now,” said Kal Munis, a Montana native and political science professor at Auburn University, who closely tracks politics in his home state.

Moreover, Munis said, with enough notice a heavy-hitting Democrat might have entered the contest, instead of the lowly bunch now running hopeless campaigns.

Montana, which has a rich Democratic history, has become a solidly Republican state, though the makeover took some time to complete.

As recently as 2008, Barack Obama made a serious run there, losing to John McCain by less than 3 percentage points. Montana had a Democratic governor until Gianforte was elected in 2020 and a Democratic U.S. senator until Jon Tester was defeated in 2024.

Still, while Daines’ seat hardly appeared at great risk for the GOP, a fight for the party’s nomination might have been a costly distraction, diverting money and attention that could go elsewhere as Republican prospects for the midterm election grow increasingly dim. (An unpopular war and shaky economy that’s been knee-capped by a sudden spike in oil prices will do that.)

Of all people, Daines certainly appreciates the bigger political picture, having led Republicans’ Senate campaign committee during the 2024 cycle. So he and his allies short-circuited the election process by laying hands on Alme, who stepped down as U.S. attorney to sidle into the Senate.

Seth Bodnar was among those who quite rightly criticized Daines for, as Bodnar put it, having “so little respect for Montana Republicans that he withdrew at the last minute to coronate his handpicked successor instead of giving them a voice at the ballot box.”

It just goes to show, Bodnar suggested, “the disgusting arrogance of Washington politicians and their party bosses who trade power back and forth like candy.”

Bodnar, the former president of the University of Montana, is running for Senate as an independent, conspicuously steering clear of the toxic Democratic brand. There is speculation the high-handed behavior of Daines, Trump and other Republicans might be enough to give Bodnar’s steep-odds candidacy a decent shot in November.

Munis, for one, is doubtful.

“There are a number of activist types who are deeply angered by this,” he said. “But when it comes to tallying votes in an election, that’s just a drop in the bucket.”

Unfortunately, Daines’ scheming, stick-it-to-the-voters approach isn’t just a Montana Republican thing.

Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois announced in the fall that he would not seek a fifth term this year. The last-second move — which came after Garcia had earlier filed paperwork to run for reelection — made it so his chief of staff and preferred successor, Patty Garcia (no relation), was the only major Democrat to appear on the ballot, virtually guaranteeing her election in November.

The cynical maneuver so disgusted Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a maverick Democrat from rural Washington state, that she defied party leaders and introduced a resolution rebuking Garcia.

His actions were “beneath the dignity of his office and incompatible with the spirit of the Constitution,” said Gluesenkamp Perez, who was jeered and booed by fellow Democrats during the floor debate for having the temerity — heavens to Betsy! — to put principle above knee-jerk partisanship. The measure passed the House, 236 to 183, with only 22 Democrats joining Gluesenkamp Perez in support.

In California, the law prevents incumbents from pulling off the kind of underhanded stunt that Garcia and Daines managed. That’s because the filing deadline is automatically extended for an extra five days whenever a sitting lawmaker opts against seeking another term.

So, for instance, when Rep. Darrell Issa suddenly announced this month he would not run for reelection, he endorsed his favored replacement, San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, but couldn’t grease the process to see to it that Desmond takes his place.

Legislators in other states should pass a law like the one in California to prevent the undemocratic shenanigans that in effect neutered voters in Montana and the Chicago area.

That is, if they truly believe elections matter and voters should have a choice and not stand by powerless as their government representatives are anointed from on high.

PARIS — We’ve long had your back, now it’s our turn. That is how the famously transactional President Trump is framing his demands that allies help him with the Iran war. He wants to call in IOUs for decades of U.S. security guarantees.

The string of refusals indicates his stock of European goodwill is low. He has put allies through the wringer since returning to the White House, bullying them over tariffs, Greenland and other issues, and disparaging the sacrifices their soldiers made alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Now he’s demanding — not just requesting — that they send warships to help the U.S. unblock the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes — essentially mop up behind the conflagration that he and Israel ignited in the Middle East.

The reply has been a “global raspberry.”

That’s how a veteran French defense analyst, François Heisbourg, described allied responses.

No close ally has come forward with immediate help. Britain is flat-out refusing to be drawn into the war. France says the fighting would have to die down first. Others are non-committal. China, which is not an ally but was also asked to help, is ignoring Trump’s call.

“This is not Europe’s war. We didn’t start the war. We were not consulted,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Tuesday.

Trump’s frustration with the ‘Rolls-Royce of allies’

Trump has singled out the refusal from the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer cultivated ties with Trump and reached an early trade deal with the administration, but is now among allies who refuse to join a regional war with no clear endgame.

The U.K. “was sort of considered the Rolls-Royce of allies,” Trump said Monday, adding that he’d asked for British minesweeping ships.

“I was not happy with the U.K,” Trump said. “They should be involved enthusiastically. We’ve been protecting these countries for years.”

Starmer said Britain “will not be drawn into the wider war” and that British troops require the backing of international law and “a proper thought-through plan” — suggesting those were not in place.

He initially refused to let U.S. bombers attack Iran from British bases before accepting their use for strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, said allies are “looking at the United States in a way that they never have before. And this is bad for the United States.”

Having previously appeased Trump, some European leaders are “starting to realize that there’s no benefit or value in using flattery,” he said.

European leaders say it’s not their war

Going to war without consulting allies was in keeping with Trump’s America-first outlook.

“My attitude is: We don’t need anybody. We’re the strongest nation in the world,” he said Monday.

But failing to get an international mandate, as the U.S. did before intervening in the 1990 Gulf War, is boomeranging.

“It is not our war; we did not start it,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said. “We want diplomatic solutions and a swift end to the conflict. Sending more warships to the region will certainly not contribute to that.”

French President Emmanuel Macron envisions possible naval escorts in the Strait of Hormuz — but only once fighting has died down.

“France didn’t choose this war. We’re not taking part,” he said.

After bruising tariff battles with Trump last year, the first months of 2026 have further strained alliances. Trump’s renewed pressure for U.S. control of Greenland, including a tariff threat against eight European nations, and his false assertion that allied troops avoided front-line fighting in the Afghanistan War, upset partners in the NATO military alliance.

“Allies, or at least the Europeans, aren’t willing to be at the beck and call of a demand from Donald Trump,” said Sylvie Bermann, a French former ambassador to China, the U.K. and Russia.

“And even in asking for a helping hand, he is doing so in a brutal manner, saying: ‘You’re useless, we’re the strongest, we don’t need you, but come,’” she said.

A dangerous mission

Retired naval officers say that unblocking the Strait of Hormuz with military escorts while the war rages and without Iran’s consent would be dangerous.

France, which has rushed its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, is working with other countries to prepare such a mission once the air war has subsided. French military spokesman Col. Guillaume Vernet said any escorting would be conditional on talks with Iran, and Macron has publicized two calls in eight days with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

That has won points with Trump.

“On a scale of zero to 10, I’d say he’s been an eight,” Trump said Monday. “Not perfect, but it’s France. We don’t expect perfect.”

But he’s fuming at other allies.

“We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” Trump said Tuesday.

Trump has leverage, including in Ukraine

Allies in Europe and Asia need oil, gas and other products from the Middle East to flow again. That gives Trump some leverage.

Allies also know from experience that resisting Trump carries risks of retaliation.

“It really could be anything. Are the Europeans prepared for that?” asked Ed Arnold, a former British army officer and now a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.

European allies need Trump’s continued blessing for U.S. weaponry, intelligence, and other support for Ukraine, as well as financial pressure on Russia. The U.S. has started to chip away at some sanctions on Moscow by temporarily allowing shipments of Russian oil to ease shortages stemming from the Iran war. Allies also want him to reengage in talks to end the war.

“That was what kept European leaders quiet for a lot of last year in the face of the rhetoric and actions,” said Amanda Sloat, a former U.S. national security adviser who now teaches at Spain’s IE University.

“It is also the thing that is making them a little bit nervous now.”

Leicester and Burrows write for the Associated Press. Burrows reported from London. AP journalists Jill Lawless in London, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Suman Naishadham in Madrid, Geir Moulson and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is traveling Wednesday to the United States for what she expects to be a “very difficult” meeting with President Trump after he called on Japan and other allies to send warships to secure the Strait of Hormuz.

The three-day visit to Washington was originally expected to focus on trade and strengthening the U.S.-Japanese alliance as China’s influence grows in Asia. It is now expected to be overshadowed by the war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on Feb. 28.

”I think the U.S. visit will be a very difficult one, but I will do everything to maximize our national interest and to protect the daily lives of the people when the situation changes daily,” Takaichi told parliament on Wednesday, hours before her departure.

Takaichi held her first meeting with Trump in October in Tokyo, days after becoming Japan’s first female prime minister. A hard-line conservative, Takaichi is a protege of former leader Shinzo Abe, who developed a close friendship with Trump.

Her initial plan was to focus largely on China and strengthen the Japan-U.S. alliance ahead of Trump ‘s highly anticipated diplomatic trip to China that had been planned for months. The White House announced Tuesday that it is being delayed due to the war in the Middle East.

Takaichi will be in the hot seat figuring out what best to offer to Trump. Experts say showing commitment and progress in investment deals is key to a successful summit.

Japanese officials say the two sides will work to deepen cooperation in regional security, critical minerals, energy and dealing with China.

No plan to send warship to the Strait of Hormuz

A key U.S. ally in Asia, Japan has carefully avoided clear support for the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran or a decision over a warship deployment. That’s mainly because of Japan’s constitutional constraints but also due to a legal question over the U.S. action and strong public opinion against it.

She told parliament that Japan hopes to see a de-escalation of the war, which has disrupted deliveries of oil and gas that Japan is highly dependent on.

“Without early de-escalation of the situation, our economy will be in trouble,” she said. “Early de-escalation is important for both the U.S. and global economy.”

Japan also hopes to secure its traditional ties with Iran, where most of Japanese oil imports come from.

Takaichi and her ministers have denied that Washington officially requested Japanese warships sent to the Strait of Hormuz. Trump on X asked a number of countries, including Japan, to volunteer. He then said he no longer needs them, complaining about a lack of enthusiasm.

That takes some pressure off Takaichi.

“We have no plans to send warships right now,” Takaichi told the parliamentary session Wednesday. A dispatch for survey and intelligence missions are possible but only after a ceasefire, she said. Some Japanese experts have commented that minesweeping would be a mission that the country could carry out when hostilities end.

“I will clearly explain what we can do and cannot do based on the Japanese law,” Takaichi said. “I’m sure (Trump) is fully aware of the Japanese law.”

China and security

Takaichi wants to discuss China’s security and economic coercion and ensure the U.S. commitment in the Indo-Pacific region, especially as some U.S. troops stationed in Japan are being shifted to the Middle East — a change seen by Japan as a potential risk for Asia as China’s clout grows.

Takaichi plans to reassure Trump of Japan’s military buildup, emphasizing the acceleration of long-range missile deployment to enhance offensive capabilities. This breaks from Japan’s postwar self-defense-only principle and reflects closer alignment with the U.S.

At the summit, Takaichi is expected to convey Japan’s interest in joining America’s “ Golden Dome “ multi-billion dollar, multi-layered missile defense system.

Japan considers China a growing security threat and has pushed a military buildup on southwestern islands near the East China Sea.

Takaichi has pledged to revise Japan’s security and defense policy by December and seeks to further bolster Japan’s military with unmanned combative weapons and long-range missiles.

Her government is to scrap a lethal arms exports ban in the coming weeks to promote Japan’s defense industry and cooperation with the United States and other friendly nations.

Oil in Alaska, rare earths in Japan

A resource-poor nation, Japan is seeking to diversify oil suppliers and is finalizing a Japanese investment for increased oil production in Alaska and stockpiles in Japan, according to media reports. A Japanese investment in small modular reactors and natural gas in the U.S. is also a possibility.

If agreed, the projects would be part of a $550 billion investment package that Japan pledged in October. In February, the two sides announced Japan’s commitment to the $36 billion first batch of projects — a natural gas plant in Ohio, a U.S. Gulf Coast crude oil export facility and a synthetic diamond manufacturing site — whose progress is also to be disccused with Trump.

Japan reportedly plans to propose a joint development of rare earths discovered in undersea soil around the remote Japanese island of Minamitorishima as part of the investment package.

Diplomatic and trade disputes have escalated further since Takaichi’s comment that any Chinese military action against Taiwan could be grounds for a Japanese military response.

Yamaguchi writes for the Associated Press.

Despite a long, entrenched Democratic reign over California politics, a new poll shows two Republicans leading by slim margins in the state’s 2026 race for governor as the June primary election fast approaches.

The confounding results appear to be mostly due to the state’s left-leaning electorate feeling uninspired by any single candidate in the crowded field of eight top Democrats. Because of California’s top-two primary rule, that lethargy could lead to Democrats being shut out of a November election that will determine the next leader of the largest state in the union, though that is still considered unlikely.

Conservative commentator Steve Hilton had the support of 17% of likely voters and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had the backing of 16%, according to a poll released Wednesday by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times.

Following closely behind were Democrats Rep. Eric Swalwell of Northern California and former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, both of whom had support from 13% of the likely voters surveyed. Aside from billionaire hedge fund founder and environmental activist Tom Steyer, who registered at 10% support after plowing tens of millions of dollars into his campaign, no other Democrat had won support from more than 5% of likely voters, the poll showed.

Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll, said he was stunned by how fractured voters are and how little knowledge they have about the candidates less than 60 days before ballots start arriving in Californians’ mailboxes.

“This is historic for me, and especially given that none of the candidates have really a positive image rating with voters, also startling. I mean, perhaps one of the reasons why voters are disengaged, they’re just not enthusiastic about any of the candidates,” he said. “They’re kind of sleepwalking to this election.”

Swalwell and Porter both hew toward the progressive wing of the party and rose to national prominence as frequent guests on cable news shows and as combative, at times theatrical, committee members during congressional oversight hearings. That notoriety prompted attacks from Republicans and the far right and increased their popularity among the Democratic base — both pivotal for voters seeking a strong candidate to challenge President Trump.

Porter slightly rebounded after a dip in polling in the fall after videos emerged of her berating an aide and a reporter. She also has the highest favorable rating of any candidate in the field at 34%.

According to the survey, Steyer’s support from likely voters increased to 10% from just 1% in Berkeley’s October poll. The momentum comes after Steyer spent about $50 million airing television ads since December, according to an analysis by data expert Paul Mitchell for Capitol Weekly.

Among the other top Democrats in the race: former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra was backed by 5% of likely voters; former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San José Mayor Matt Mahan by 4%, and former state Controller Betty Yee and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond by 1%.

The poll found that 16% of likely voters were either undecided or backed other, lesser-known candidates.

The splintered support for the Democrats hoping to become the state’s next governor has surfaced in other ways as well. On Monday, the powerful California Federation of Labor voted to endorse four gubernatorial candidates — half the Democratic field.

DiCamillo said he believes the poll’s inclusion of the candidates’ titles that voters will see on their ballots is crucial in a low-information contest.

“That really matters in a race where voters don’t have much information, or they say they don’t know much about the candidates,” he said, adding that it could particularly help Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff. “His job title is kind of impressive, and that voters think, well, that’s credible, so let me consider him.”

The fear of two Republicans winning the top two spots in the June 2 primary prompted California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks to urge low-polling candidates to consider their viability and drop out if they didn’t see a path forward earlier this month.

Some candidates bristled, arguing that party leaders were in effect telling every candidate of color to leave the race. Aside from one candidate, all of the top Democrats in the race responded by quickly filing their campaign documents with the secretary of state’s office, meaning that their names will appear on the ballot.

The two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary are the only ones who advance to the November general election — regardless of their political party.

The odds that a Republican will become California’s next governor appear slim. No Republican has won a statewide election in California since 2006, the year Hollywood movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to a second term as governor. Democratic registered voters in the state outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1.

Compared with prior gubernatorial races that had well-known Democratic front-runners, none of the candidates of either party are particularly well known by voters. Large numbers of voters have no opinion about any of the candidates — including roughly two-thirds of those asked about Mahan, Yee and Thurmond.

Voters were far more tuned in to the issues that they believe are most important for the state’s next governor to tackle.

Affordability was dominant among all voters, regardless of political ideology, the poll found. Four out of 10 voters said reducing the cost of living in California is among the top issues the next governor should prioritize, and smaller numbers also highlighted building affordable housing and lowering gas prices and utility rates.

Affordability “is the top issue for voters, both here in California and across the country. There’s no question,” DiCamillo said. “Perhaps it’s even of greater urgency here in California, just given our cost of living is higher than in most other places.”

Building new housing, paring back regulations to allow such construction quickly and to reduce the cost of buy a home, disincentivizing private firms from buying homes and reducing gas prices are among topics candidates frequently speak about on the campaign trail and in debates.

A notable split was evident among voters when asked about cutting waste, fraud and political corruption in state government, the poll found. Nearly 50% of Republicans said this was a top priority, compared with 10% of Democrats and a little over a quarter of voters who do not state a party preference.

DiCamillo said this sentiment aligns with President Trump’s messaging and what his administration has been pursuing in the federal government. Trump has repeatedly painted California as teeming with waste, fraud and abuse. On Monday, when he launched a task force to fight fraud that will be led by Vice President JD Vance, California was among the states he singled out as having insufficient oversight of federal funds.

GOP voters in California share similar sentiments, DiCamillo said.

In Washington, D.C., “they’re cutting back, trying to make government smaller, and … just cut the waste as well,” he said. California “Republicans, given the fact that Democrats have been controlling things for so long, they think … more of that is needed now here in California as well.”

The Berkeley IGS/Times poll surveyed 5,019 California registered voters online in English and Spanish from March 9 to 14. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.

Edison International boosted the pay of its top executives last year despite their responsibility for the safety of the company’s power lines before the devastating Eaton fire, which destroyed a wide swath of Altadena and killed 19 people.

Although the company cut cash bonuses for its senior executives, citing the wildfires, their overall compensation went up substantially as the utility’s profit soared in 2025.

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of the parent company of Southern California Edison, received $16.6 million in cash, stock and other compensation last year, up 20% from 2024, according to a new company filing.

Steven Powell, president of Southern California Edison, received compensation totaling $6.5 million last year, up from $3.9 million in 2024 — a jump of more than 65%.

The utility’s transmission equipment is suspected of igniting two wildfires on Jan. 7, 2025, including the Eaton fire, which left thousands of families homeless.

The Times earlier detailed how Edison fell behind in performing maintenance on its aging transmission lines — work that it had told state utility regulators was needed. County prosecutors are investigating whether Edison should be criminally charged for its actions before the fire.

The government investigation into the cause of the fire has not been released and Edison has denied that it acted negligently. Pizarro has said a leading theory is that a century-old transmission line, which the company had not used for 50 years, may have briefly reenergized, igniting the fire.

A state law championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 protects utilities from paying for the damage due to fires sparked by their equipment. When it passed, Newsom touted the law’s requirement that utilities must tie executive compensation to their safety record, saying it would keep them accountable.

The law said that a utility “may” consider tying 100% of executive bonuses to safety performance and “denying all incentive compensation in the event the electrical corporation causes a catastrophic wildfire that results in one or more fatalities.”

Edison said in the new filing that the company’s board members who determine executive compensation decided to decrease the cash bonuses of Pizarro, Powell and Jill Anderson, the utility’s chief operating officer, because of the 2025 wildfires.

Pizarro’s cash bonus was cut by more than $1 million while Powell’s was trimmed by $442,000, according to the filing. Anderson lost out on $244,000.

The company, based in Rosemead, said its decision to cut the three executives’ cash bonuses “was not a reflection of the performance of the company or these executives.”

Despite those cuts, the executives’ total pay of salary, bonuses, stock and other compensation rose, according to the filing. That’s because Edison ties most executive compensation not to safety, but to the company’s financial performance.

And last year, Edison’s profit jumped more than 200% — from $1.3 billion in 2024 to $4.5 billion — despite the Eaton disaster.

The profit increase resulted from the protections from wildfire damage provided to Edison by the 2019 law, as well as a 13% hike in customer electricity rates in October.

The utility attributed the higher electric bills to several increases that it successfully lobbied the California Public Utilities Commission to approve. All five members of the commission were appointed by Newsom.

Scott Johnson, an Edison spokesman, said Tuesday that Pizarro and other company executives holding stock took a financial hit after the fires when the price plummeted.

Before the January fires, Edison International’s stock price was about $80. It fell to $50 the next month. It has recovered much of its value, closing on Tuesday at $72.92.

Edison is facing hundreds of lawsuits by victims of the fire. The suits claim it acted negligently, including by failing to remove the old, dormant transmission line in Eaton Canyon.

The lawsuits also blame Edison for not preventatively shutting down its transmission lines Jan. 7, 2025, despite the dangerous Santa Ana winds.

Pizarro has said the winds didn’t meet the company’s threshold in place at the time for turning off those high-voltage wires.

“Our deepest sympathies remain with all those affected, and this loss reinforces our commitment to public safety and wildfire risk mitigation,” Pizarro and Peter Taylor, chairman of the parent company’s board, wrote in a letter to shareholders that was released with the details on executive compensation.

The two executives added that the company’s “long-term objective remains unchanged: to significantly reduce wildfire risk while improving safety, reliability and affordability of electric service.”

Edison is now offering to compensate Eaton fire victims, including those who lost their homes, family members, businesses and apartments. The offer requires the victims to give up their right to sue the utility. Many survivors say the utility’s offer falls short of what they lost.

Pizarro and Taylor wrote that as of March 4, more than 2,500 claims had been submitted through the program. So far, Edison has extended offers to roughly 600 victims submitting claims and made payments totaling $31 million to 212 of those people, they wrote.

The utility also has begun settling claims of property insurers that covered Altadena homes that were destroyed or damaged, paying out hundreds of millions of dollars. The settlements will help cover the insurance companies’ losses.

Edison has told its shareholders that it expects most or all of those payments to victims and insurers to be covered by a $21-billion state wildfire fund that Newsom and lawmakers created as part of Assembly Bill 1054, which became law in 2019.

Critics say the law went too far, allowing a utility to allegedly spark a deadly wildfire without financial consequences to the company or its executives.

“The predictable outcome of continuing to protect shareholders and executives from the consequences of their own negligence is not theoretical. It is observable. More catastrophic fires,” Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, wrote in an email to state wildfire fund administrators this year.

Johnson responded, saying,”Our motivation to prevent fires and any incidents is to be good neighbors and provide affordable and resilient energy. There is nothing more important than safety.”

Taylor was on the board committee that approved the compensation package for Pizarro and other top executives. For his work chairing the board, Taylor received cash and stock compensation of more than $500,000.

Johnson said Taylor’s compensation was based on “typical board chair pay” at other utilities.

The new filing said Pizarro’s total compensation of $16.6 million was 75 times the median Edison employee’s total compensation of $220,000.

The present value of Pizarro’s pension is more than $19 million, the report said.

The company is facing a challenge from one of its shareholders — John Chevedden of Redondo Beach, according to the filing.

Chevedden is asking the company’s shareholders to vote to approve his proposal that would require Pizarro and other Edison executives to hold at least 25% of the stock they had received as compensation until they reach retirement age.

He said that requiring utility executives to hold a significant portion of their stock until retirement would focus their efforts on the company’s long-term success.

Chevedden pointed to “unfavorable news reports,” including the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuits against Edison for the Eaton fire and 2022 Fairview blaze, which killed two people in Riverside County.

Edison’s board urged shareholders to vote against Chevedden’s proposal before the company’s annual meeting April 23.

The board said the company already had guidelines that “closely align the interests of officers with the long-term interests of our shareholders.”

Four of the five members of the Board of Fire Commissioners, which oversees the Los Angeles Fire Department, are stepping down at a time when the department is under intense scrutiny because of its missteps in handling the devastating Palisades fire.

The departures, which include board President Genethia Hudley Hayes, come after the agency’s top watchdog, Independent Assessor Tyler Izen, retired this month.

The fire commissioners are appointed by the mayor and are supposed to provide civilian oversight for the Fire Department. But during critical discussions about the Palisades fire, the commissioners have largely been quiet.

Addressing the LAFD’s failure to fully extinguish the Lachman fire, which later reignited into the Palisades fire, Chief Jaime Moore conceded at a January board meeting that mop-up procedures needed to be strengthened. Moore also admitted that the LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades fire was softened to shield top brass from scrutiny.

The commissioners did not ask any questions about Moore’s remarks and only praised him.

In an interview at the time, Hudley Hayes said she did not know who ordered the changes to the after-action report — and despite her oversight role, was “not particularly” interested in finding out.

“Our job is to take the report that we have in front of us. Our job is to make sure those recommendations that came to us from a public report are taken care of,” said Hudley Hayes, a former school board member who said she was first appointed to the commission by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, served eight years and then was appointed again by Mayor Karen Bass.

On Monday, Corinne Tapia Babcock, one of the four commissioners stepping down, said that by the time items come to the board, they often have already been negotiated by the fire chief, the mayor and the City Council.

“It’s more of an approval, ceremonial role,” she said.

After Babcock said she wasn’t planning to stay on past the end of her term in June, Bass’ office asked her to serve instead on the Board of Fire and Police Pension Commissioners, and she accepted.

On her way out, Babcock said she suggested that the fire commission be expanded to seven seats, instead of five, to include an active and a retired LAFD member.

“I think there could be more opportunity for the commission to have more of a say if there was some lived experience,” said Babcock, whose father is a retired fire chief.

Jimmie Woods-Gray, whose term was set to expire in 2028, is also stepping down. She said family commitments have left her with less time to devote to the board.

She said she is leaving with some frustrations about the management of the LAFD, including its reluctance to refer allegations of wrongdoing by its members to an independent investigation rather than an internal inquiry.

“One of the problems I’ve always had with the Fire Department is that they always investigate themselves,” she added.

Hudley Hayes, whose four-year term would have expired in June 2027, said the tumult within the LAFD had no bearing on her exit, which she had been planning since before the Palisades fire. After the fire, Bass and an aide asked her to stay on, Hudley Hayes said.

“For me, it’s time,” she told The Times on Tuesday, adding that her last day would be March 30. “At 81, it’s time for me to take care of Genethia.”

The one remaining commissioner is Elizabeth Garfield, a retired lawyer who represented the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the labor union for LAFD firefighters, in negotiating three collective bargaining agreements. She was appointed in September.

Bass has named four new commissioners to replace the departing ones: John Pérez, a former speaker of the California Assembly who will step down from the Board of Harbor Commissioners to join the fire commission; Jerry P. Abraham, a physician who is the director of public health, integration and street medicine at Kedren Health; Jose Campos Cornejo, a manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; and Yolanda Regalado, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy whose three brothers were firefighters and who now owns a cafe in San Pedro.

Yusef Robb, a Bass spokesperson, said in a statement that the mayor “is confident that her reform agenda for the Fire Department will not only continue, but will accelerate under the fresh perspective and leadership of her new appointees.”

LAFD spokesperson Stephanie Bishop said the agency “welcomes the new members of the Fire Commission and looks forward to working alongside them.”

Sharon Delugach, who was vice president of the fire commission and whose term was set to expire in 2029, bid farewell at a meeting this month.

“I still intend to help and fight and advocate,” she said. “I’m only leaving because I don’t feel like I’ve got the time at this point to be the kind of commissioner I want to be. I don’t want to just come to meetings.”

Delugach did not return a call Tuesday for comment.

Izen retired this month as the LAFD’s independent assessor, who reports to the commission and conducts audits of operations and the department’s handling of complaints. He could not be reached for comment.

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

BEIRUT —  Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, has been killed in an Israeli airstrike, a move that represents a palpable hit to an Iranian leadership that has shown little interest in compromise after almost three weeks of war with the U.S. and Israel.

Killing Larijani, who led Iran as de facto wartime leader after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died on the first day of the war, eliminates a veteran official seen as the consummate insider despite not having the religious credentials for the Islamic Republic’s highest offices. Israel, in an announcement Tuesday, said the attack occurred the night before.

For all his bellicose comments since the war began, Larijani was also seen as a pragmatist, and observers say his death might strengthen the resolve of what’s left of Iran’s leadership, rather than induce a willingness to compromise.

His post as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gave Larijani control of the country’s top security body, where he tasked government forces with subduing anti-regime protests in January. Thousands of Iranians were killed.

Also killed in the Israeli strikes was Gen. Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij, the volunteer auxiliary wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and an integral part of the state’s ability to keep order.

“Larijani and the Basij commander were eliminated overnight and joined the head of the annihilation program, Khamenei, and all the eliminated members of the axis of evil, in the depths of hell,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement Tuesday.

Israeli officials have employed “axis of evil” to refer to Iran and its allies, including the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Larijani had served as parliamentary speaker for 12 years and became the point man on nuclear negotiations as well as relations with allies such as China and Russia. He often acted as the government’s representative in the media.

Iranian officials confirmed that Larijani and Soleimani had been killed. They said Larijani’s son, the head of his office and several guards were also killed in the strikes.

Soon after Katz’s announcement, Iranian authorities released an undated note said to have been written by Larijani in which he honored Iranian sailors killed in a U.S. attack. The image of the note was also posted to Larijani’s account on X.

There was no explanation why the note was released and whether it is signified Larijani was still alive.

“We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and President Trump have repeatedly called on ordinary Iranians to topple the government.

Though assassinating Larijani counts as yet another intelligence coup for Israel and the U.S., both may come to regret the loss of a figure who, despite his defiant rhetoric since the war began Feb. 28, was considered by some analysts as a realist.

His killing adds to the evisceration of Iran’s upper echelons, raising the question of who is left to negotiate an end to the war, or have enough influence to make Iran’s deep state accept compromise.

Some observers say that’s the point.

“Why did the Israelis take out Larijani in this moment? Because Netanyahu is focused on blocking Trump’s pathways for a ceasefire and follow-up negotiations with Iran,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations, adding that “Larijani would have been the man to get that job done.”

Khamenei’s assassination, Geranmayeh said, had already empowered more hard-line figures in government, and Larijani’s death “could act as an accelerator to that path.”

“Israel seems to be turning its attention to targeting those that could push for a political solution to the current crisis,” she said.

Larijani’s death would add to the murkiness surrounding Iran’s leadership. After Khamenei was killed and it remained unclear who would replace him, Trump added to the uncertainty by saying that the country’s new leader would need his approval, but also that the U.S. had killed many of the leaders whom he would have deemed acceptable.

After Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was named the new supreme leader, Trump expressed his displeasure but repeatedly dodged questions about what the transition under the younger Khamenei would mean for the U.S. war effort.

After the elder Khamenei’s death, Larijani emerged as a high-profile voice for Iran, saying that Trump must “pay the price” for the U.S. strikes on the country.

In response, Trump acted as if he didn’t know who Larijani was.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about, who he is. I couldn’t care less,” Trump told CBS News.

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said Larijani was perceived to be “the last of the competent bunch” within the Iranian leadership — an intellectual who had a complex understanding of the geopolitical reality on the ground, who had negotiated with the U.S. in the past, and who was “adept at maneuvering” all the various parts of the Iranian power structure.

Radd said Larijani “lost that mantle of being the pragmatist” when he strongly backed the deadly January crackdown on protesters, for which he was “more responsible than anyone else.”

He “absolutely was responsible for a tremendous amount of carnage and death and destruction,” Radd said.

And yet, with his death, “all of that diplomatic, institutional experience” that he did have “is gone” from the Iranian leadership, Radd said.

Those left in power, he said, are “generally not the sharpest people, they’re not the people who understand the subtleties of diplomacy, of what negotiating with the U.S. is like.”

Bulos reported from Beirut and Rector from Colorado.

WASHINGTON — Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, abruptly resigned Tuesday, becoming the most senior national security official to break publicly with the Trump administration over its military campaign against Iran.

In a statement posted on social media, Kent said he “cannot in good conscience” continue serving in the administration, contending that Iran had “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and that the United States had been drawn into the conflict through “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

“I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” Kent wrote in a letter addressed to President Trump. “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for.”

Trump, speaking in the Oval Office, dismissed Kent’s concerns, telling reporters that he had long believed the counterterrorism director — whom he nominated to the post in February 2025 — was “very weak on security.” The president insisted that Iran has been a threat to the U.S. “for a long time,” and said that it was a “good thing” Kent is leaving.

The resignation came at an uncertain moment for the administration. The war, which has repeatedly been sold to Americans as “short term” and contained, is now in its third week, with fraying alliances, renewed missile and drone fire on gulf Arab nations from Iran, new Israeli strikes on Iran and Lebanon, mounting casualties and no clear exit strategy.

“If we left right now it would take 10 years for them to rebuild,” Trump told reporters. “We’re not ready to leave yet, but we’ll be leaving in the near future. We’ll be leaving pretty much in the very near future.”

The uncertainty was compounded Tuesday by Israel’s killing of Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as well as Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij, Iran’s militia force.

Trump made reference to the Iranian officials killed without naming them, saying one was “their actual top” and the other was responsible for the killing of 32,000 Iranian protesters in recent weeks.

“It’s an evil group,” he said.

Effect of Larijani’s killing

Iranian officials confirmed the deaths of Larijani and Soleimani via state media Tuesday. In addition to killing the Basij leader, Israel reported striking more than 10 Basij posts, part of an effort to destroy the Islamic Republic’s ability to contain internal unrest and protests.

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said Larijani’s killing would greatly diminish the Iranian diplomatic and institutional experience, as he was perceived to be “the last of the competent bunch” in power.

Those remaining in power are “generally not the sharpest people, they’re not the people who understand the subtleties of diplomacy, of what negotiating with the U.S. is like,” which clears a path for “a country run by a military junta” comprising Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders, Radd said.

“We’re really going to be moving more toward a military-style dictatorship — behind a clerical robe, if you will,” he said.

The battlefield developments have done little to reassure Washington’s closest allies, most of which have declined to join the fight despite Trump’s recent pleas to allied nations to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil route that has been threatened by Iran’s war efforts.

In a social media post Tuesday, Trump said the United States had been informed by most of its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that they “don’t want to get involved” in the expanding Middle East war — and he claimed the American military no longer needs or wants their help.

“In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!” Trump wrote.

Trump cannot unilaterally remove the U.S. from NATO. In 2023, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who is now Trump’s secretary of State — successfully pushed a measure barring any president from removing the U.S. from the treaty organization without approval from the Senate or an act of Congress.

“The Senate should maintain oversight on whether or not our nation withdraws from NATO. We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies,” Rubio said at the time.

Some experts viewed Trump’s latest remarks about not needing NATO allies as a result of him having misplayed his hand at the start of the conflict with Iran, which has attempted to widen the war by targeting Gulf Cooperation Council nations in the region.

When Trump started demanding that many other nations join the U.S. in the war effort, or at least in safeguarding the Strait of Hormuz, it was “an attempt on Trump’s side to widen the war the other way,” Radd said, based in part on the fact that other nations, including China and in Europe, are much more reliant on oil from the region than the U.S.

However, it was a “clumsy” move by Trump given his alienation of NATO allies in the past, including during a major speech in Davos, Switzerland, in January, in which the president was “basically shaming and criticizing NATO and European states,” Radd said.

Calling on allies to “step up” after ridiculing them was “ham-handed,” Radd said.

Intelligence official’s departure

In Washington, Kent’s resignation exposed new divisions over the administration’s handling of the war.

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters that he did not know where Kent was “getting his information” to conclude that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S. He said Trump administration officials in classified briefings have asserted that “they had exquisite intelligence and they understood that this was a serious moment for us.”

“The president felt that he had to strike first to prevent mass casualties,” Johnson said.

Several Democrats called on Kent to appear before Congress and tell the American people more about why the administration dragged the U.S. into war in Iran.

“If even officials like Joe Kent do not believe Iran posed an imminent threat, why are we sending more Americans to die in this war?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) wrote on X.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Kent’s letter contained “many false claims,” including that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S.

“This is the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over,” Leavitt wrote on X. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.”

She said that evidence, which has never been detailed publicly, “was compiled from many sources and factors,” and that Trump “would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum.”

Leavitt then repeated past justifications for the attack, including that Iran sponsors terrorism abroad and that it was building out its missile capabilities as “a shield” for protection as it continued to develop nuclear capabilities.

The press secretary previously said that Trump had a “feeling” that Iran was going to attack the U.S. or its assets. The president has alleged, without evidence, that Iran was within weeks of having a nuclear weapon.

Leavitt said the added assertion by Kent that Trump decided to attack Iran “based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable.”

Kent, a former political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed in July as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes and detects terrorist threats. Before joining the Trump administration, Kent ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Washington state. He also served in the military, serving 11 deployments as a Green Beret, followed by work at the CIA.

Democrats strongly opposed Kent’s confirmation in the Senate, in part because they were concerned about his ties to far-right figures and promotion of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kent refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, as well as false claims that Trump, a Republican, won the 2020 election over Democrat Joe Biden.

Democrats grilled Kent on his participation in a group chat on Signal where Trump’s national security team discussed sensitive military plans.

Republicans, meanwhile, were drawn to Kent’s experience in the military and intelligence.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the GOP chair of the Intelligence Committee, said in a floor speech that Kent had “dedicated his career to fighting terrorism and keeping Americans safe.” On Tuesday, Cotton said that he disagreed with Kent’s “misguided assessment” on Iran.

“Iran’s vast missile arsenal and support for terrorism posed a grave and growing threat to America. Indeed, the ayatollahs have maimed and killed thousands of Americans,” Cotton said. “President Trump recognized this threat and made the right call to eliminate it.”

Other conservatives — including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and commentator Candace Owens — called Kent an “American hero.”

Ilan Goldenberg, a former Biden administration official who dealt with the Middle East, wrote on X that while he disagrees with the Iran war, Kent claiming that Israel pressured Trump into the conflict is “ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes.”

“Donald Trump is the President of the United States and he is the one ultimately responsible for sending American troops into harms way,” he said.

An acclaimed author and historian of the libertarian movement fell to his death last week, his employer confirmed.

The body of Brian Doherty, 57, senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, was found Thursday “after a fall” in the Battery Yates park portion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the publication wrote.

The National Parks Service law enforcement agency confirmed it responded to an incident at Battery Yates on Thursday “involving a male visitor who reportedly fell from the cliffside into the water.”

“The individual was recovered and pronounced dead,” said Scott Carr, parks service spokesperson, in an email. “We do not have any further information to share at this time.”

The Golden Gate Bridge is seen from the Fort Baker Marina in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco. Doherty was found in the Battery Yates park portion of the recreation area.

(Los Angeles Times)

Doherty was the author of several books, with Reason saying his most notable work was the 2007 study “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.”

“Doherty has rescued libertarianism from its own obscurity,” the Wall Street Journal wrote of the work, “eloquently capturing the appeal of the ‘pure idea.’”

Libertarianism’s role in gun control and the courts was the subject of his works, and Doherty had no shortage of admirers.

Loren Dean, chair of the Libertarian Party of California, said it was Doherty’s work at Reason that brought him into the liberty movement.

“Brian Doherty was the best kind of libertarian: one who holds true to the principles of liberty as they are,” Dean said in an email. “He was a tireless champion of both gun rights and police reform who wrote books on both [former U.S. Rep.] Ron Paul and Burning Man; his work did not sit on either the ‘left’ or ‘right’ side of the authoritarian box, but delightfully outside that tired frame, where libertarian principles truly sing.”

Doherty began working at Reason in 1994, according to the publication’s obituary, left the company and returned in 2000 at the behest of Nick Gillespie, then editor-in-chief.

“What I liked most about Brian was his abiding interest in things happening on the margins of American culture, politics, and thought, and his deep appreciation for the prodigious bounty that markets deliver reliably and without moralizing,” Gillespie wrote in his farewell to Doherty, who had many opinion pieces published in The Times.

Far from just heady subjects, Doherty covered “both libertarian and whimsical” subcultures, according to the obituary, including New Hampshire’s Free State Project and the Seasteaders, a growing community of individuals dedicated to living on the seas.

The Seasteading Institute tweeted its condolences and noted the group had “appreciated his coverage of seasteading over the years.”

Doherty was a native of Queens, majored in journalism at the University of Florida and joined the college’s libertarian group in 1987, according to Reason’s obituary.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s and joined a group known as the Cacophony Society, a gang who “inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and ‘Santa Rampages,’” according to the obituary.

One of those projects translated into the formation of the annual Burning Man festival, the obituary stated. Doherty later chronicled the famed artsy, hippie-like festival in his book “This Is Burning Man.”

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both,” Reason Editor-in-Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward said in his obituary. “His weird, colorful life — filled with comics and festivals and music and books — was a model of life lived freely and openly.”