Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — Federal immigration officers opened fire on a Dominican man in New York because he drove his car into officers’ vehicles and they believed their lives were in danger, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said Friday.

The 28-year-old man, whom New York City police identified as Oscar Belgal, was shot “superficially” in the neck as ICE officers attempted to arrest him, said Marcos Charles, head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. Authorities have not released details of Belgal’s condition.

Officers used their vehicles to block the man as he attempted to drive away, but he accelerated toward them, Charles said during a news conference with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in Washington. The Department of Homeland Security said the news conference was about the “dangerous consequences of sanctuary city policies.”

“Our officers, using their training and believing that their life and the life of the partners and the general public were in danger, used their training and fired weapons,” Charles said.

Belgal had his 5-year-old son in the car with him when the shooting happened, officials said.

Mullin said ICE agents didn’t know the child was in the car, but that Belgal “was aware” and chose to put the boy at risk by trying to evade officers.

ICE previously tried to detain Belgal, Charles says

Belgal was associated with a robbery crew that used mopeds and weapons, and was convicted of grand larceny last year and sentenced to five years of probation, Charles said, adding that he evaded officers in September when ICE tried to arrest him for deportation.

The Legal Aid Society, which was representing Belgal in an ongoing drug case, called Friday for a “full and transparent” investigation of the shooting, the officers involved to be held accountable and an end to “ICE’s escalating presence in New York City.”

Federal agents walk near the scene where a man was shot by an ICE officer during an operation in the Bronx borough of New York on Oct. 8, according to local media and police.

(Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

Belgal has pleaded not guilty to narcotics-sale charges in the drug case. The Legal Aid Society did not comment further.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, said late Thursday that they had pressed Mullin and Republican President Trump to release Belgal, but to no avail. They also urged the administration to immediately release ICE officers’ body camera footage of the shooting and to halt immigration enforcement operations in the city.

Mullin said Belgal was being held in a “highly secured” detention facility outside New York City but declined to say where.

Attorneys representing Belgal filed an emergency petition Thursday night calling for his release. A hearing is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

He also confirmed ICE officers were wearing body cameras that were activated, but didn’t say when any of that footage would be released. Under agency policy, bodycam video can be released within 72 hours if “determined that it is in the best interests of the agency.”

On Friday, New York City police released footage from its officers as they arrived at the scene following the shooting. The department previously said its officers were not involved in the arrest and not at the scene when the shooting happened.

The video shows a city officer responding to a chaotic scene where Belgal — sitting on the ground with his hands behind his back and head drooping to one side — was surrounded by several officials. The video shows officers lifting Belgal and placing him in a black SUV. Police said he was taken to a hospital.

“Yo put pressure. Put pressure,” an officer can be heard saying as the SUV reverses down the block.

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Belgal was pulling into a parking space when a federal officer in plainclothes approached with his gun drawn, followed by another federal officer who also wasn’t in uniform. Belgal started to pull the car forward, and at least one of the officers fired seven rounds, hitting the man below his left ear.

Protesters and local officials decried the shooting as an example of the dangers of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrives to speak to the media about the ICE shooting in the Bronx borough of New York on Oct. 8. Mamdani said he would ask President Trump to remove federal immigration agents from the city as tensions flared over the latest shooting involving ICE.

(Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin takes questions from reporters during a news conference at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters on Friday in Washington, DC. Mullin, joined by ICE officials, addressed Thursday’s shooting of a man in New York City by a federal immigration agent as he spoke out against sanctuary city policies.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

“There is no justification for what we have seen today,” Mamdani said late Thursday at the scene of the shooting.

Federal officers who surrounded the vehicle wore construction vests and masks, making it difficult to identify them as immigration officers, he said.

Mullin criticizes NYC’s immigration policies

Mullin devoted much of Friday’s news conference to criticizing Mamdani and New York City’s limits on cooperation with ICE. The Democrat, who took office in January, has restricted local cooperation with immigration enforcement operations and repeatedly called for the abolition of ICE.

“Sanctuary politicians, they create an environment for criminal activity to thrive, not for the American citizens to be safe,” Mullin said.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin takes questions from reporters during a news conference at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters on Friday in Washington, DC. Mullin, joined by ICE officials, addressed Thursday’s shooting of a man in New York City by a federal immigration agent as he spoke out against sanctuary city policies.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

ICE has asked local officials in New York to hold onto more than 14,000 people for federal officers to collect and place in immigration detention, he said.

“Silence. Absolute silence is what we have gotten back,” the secretary said. “Why would they release these individuals back onto the streets?”

“We’re enforcing our nation’s laws. We’re not picking and choosing,” Mullin continued. “Why is that controversial? We should all want law and order on our streets.”

ICE has justified other shootings with perceived threats to officers

During Trump’s second term, Homeland Security has often accused suspects of attempting to ram officers with vehicles or otherwise pose a threat and using that as justification for opening fire. But evidence from other shootings involving immigration enforcement officers has sometimes called into question that rationale.

In the Jan. 7 shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Homeland Security officials initially claimed an ICE officer opened fire in self-defense after Good attempted to run him over with her vehicle. Videos filmed from multiple angles challenged the administration’s narrative.

On July 10, ICE officers fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston as the Mexican national was driving his construction crew to a job site. DHS maintained Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, but the three men inside his vehicle disputed the narrative.

Last year in a Chicago suburb, immigration officers fatally shot Silverio Villegas González after they say the Mexican national drove at them and dragged one with his car, causing “serious injuries.” But body camera videos from local police showed the agent who shot Villegas González walking around afterward and dismissing his own injuries as “nothing major.”

Santana and Marcelo write for the Associated Press. Marcelo reported from New York. AP reporters Anthony Izaguirre and Jennifer Peltz in New York City and Ryan Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report.

The late-September postcard from the Monterey County elections office — with all-caps text saying “ACTION REQUIRED — rattled the denizens of quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea.

The notice said all residents needed to update their voter registration. It was sent days before ballots were mailed for the Nov. 3 election.

Carmel-by-the-Sea just got numbered street addresses for the first time in its 110-year history. After decades of debate — and months of nitpicking a draft map released earlier this year — every house, business and government building was assigned its final number in September.

Indeed, each resident will eventually have to update their street address on their voter registration. But not before the upcoming midterm election, which has already been fraught by nationwide confusion and concern over President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail voting that was blocked last month by the Supreme Court.

“We’re at our wit’s end,” Carmel-by-the-Sea Mayor Dale Byrne said of the city’s attempts to clear up confusion wrought by the county mailer, which led some people to think their registration had automatically been canceled. “The city continues to send out notifications to all our residents that you don’t need to re-register right away, that you can still vote.”

After collecting his mail, Hans Lehmann, 91, walks past a bank of post office boxes at the post office in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 12, 2024.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Monterey County Registrar Gina Martinez said in an email Thursday that the county began mailing ballots Oct. 1, including to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where there is no at-home delivery and locals pick up their mail — and ballots — from the downtown post office.

Voter registration records are based on a person’s physical residential address, which determines the districts where they can vote. The records can include separate mailing addresses, including post office boxes, where they receive ballots.

The county asked Carmel-by-the-Sea residents to update just their physical addresses.

“They can return their ballot without updating their information,” Martinez said. “If the voter prefers to vote in person and they haven’t yet updated their address, we will assist them with completing an address update form at the polling place.”

Since its founding in 1916, the 1-square-mile town has used directional descriptors — City Hall is on the east side of Monte Verde Street between Ocean and 7th avenues — instead of building numbers. And residents have given their homes whimsical nicknames such as Sea Urchin, Surf Song and A Whistle Away.

The address issue has long been contentious in the woodsy town of 3,200 people on the Monterey Peninsula, where residents once threatened to secede from California if they were forced to number their homes. They argued that the lack of addresses — along with other quirks, such as no streetlights or sidewalks in residential areas, which requires many to walk at night with flashlights — added to the vaunted “village character.”

But complaints about missed packages and mail-order medications, as well as trouble setting up banking accounts and utilities, persisted. And in the aging community — where the median age of 69 is nearly double that of the state — fears have grown that emergency responders may be unable to find people in the midst of a crisis.

The California Fire Code also requires buildings to have and display addresses, meaning the community has long been out of legal compliance.

New addresses, at long last

Last month, residents received city-issued postcards with final assigned building numbers.

While some opposed to street addresses fearing they would lead to at-home delivery and trigger the closure of the post office — where, locals say, serendipitous run-ins with neighbors are an essential part of the small-town charm — that won’t be the case. Residents will retain their post office box numbers and continue picking up parcels downtown.

Locals must now display address numbers visible from the street, at least 4 inches tall and 0.5 inches wide, and in a color that contrasts with their background. Residents who live in the wildland-urban interface, which is more prone to fire, have to post reflective numbers that can be seen in the dark.

“This is probably the most divisive thing in the city’s history,” Byrne said, adding that the rollout has included extensive community outreach and has, for the most part, gone smoothly.

While there are still some holdouts who worry the numbers are chipping away at traditions, the mayor said that “when you’re supporting a tourist economy, which we are, it’s almost punishment to people coming here to do that to them, when they can’t find anything, especially when there’s no parking.”

“‘Old’ is not a strategy,” Byrne said, “and public safety should take precedence over thinking it’s cute to not have addresses.”

In July, Byrne was visiting a friend’s house when the man turned pale and passed out at the table. When Byrne called 911, he spoke to multiple dispatchers, struggling to confirm the home’s location without an address (His friend was fine, just severely dehydrated).

Traditionally, residents locate homes and buildings by giving directional descriptors, such as being on the “west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue.” When Byrne spoke to the dispatchers, they told him they were accustomed to finding that house by using another cross street and a different direction of travel as a reference.

Due to the lack of addresses in Carmel-By-The-Sea residents post creative names to identify their homes in the seaside town, on January 12, 2024.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“I’m the mayor, and I know how this works, and I was confused,” said Byrne, who again had to call 911 to urgently describe his location a few months later when his wife broke her arm in the middle of the night.

“They got there within two-and-a-half minutes. But imagine if I were a 92-year-old woman and had dementia and my husband did this. I might not be able to describe where I am,” he said, adding that Carmel-by-the-Sea recently outsourced its ambulance service to the Monterey Fire Department and cannot guarantee every dispatcher is familiar with the quirky local addressing system.

Voter confusion

Brandon Swanson, the acting city administrator, said of the addressing process that “for this big of an institutional change, it’s going pretty smoothly.”

That is, he said, until the county sent its mailer saying voters had to re-register. The notice didn’t include a deadline for updating physical address information, and some local news outlets initially reported it had to be done before the election.

Swanson said the city has been scrambling to reassure voters. It has been sending out digital communications and created a detailed frequently asked questions website about registration that says: “Did you receive a postcard from the Monterey County Elections Office? You are still registered to vote.”

“We’re not happy right now with the county,” Mayor Byrne said.

Martinez, the registrar of voters, said in an email that “overall, voters indicated the information provided is clear and straightforward.” Asked when they need to update their information, she said they are being encouraged to do so “as soon as possible.”

Hans Lehmann, who is 94 and lives in a 1929 redwood cottage nicknamed Pine Gates, said he was surprised by the “giant postcard” from the county and worried he wouldn’t get his ballot in the mail. He tried calling the elections office the day he got the mailer, but it was a weekend and it was closed.

He’s been slightly confused but mostly amused by all the messages.

“We got a card saying, ‘You have to re-register!’ then City Hall said, ‘The mail ballot is fine. Forget all that other stuff!’” he said, laughing.

Lehmann, a longtime mail voter who says he is carefully reading up on the proposed statewide billionaire tax, was relieved to get his ballot at the post office, as always.

Lehmann’s house once was a downtown restaurant called Ella’s Southern Kitchen. In 1941, the whole house was put on rollers, pushed up a steep hill and plopped onto a foundation of beach sand. He recently made a trip to Ace Hardware to mark it with its new designation: a big, fluorescent No. 80.

A man sweeps the sidewalk along San Carlos Street, between 5th & 6th Streets, in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 10, 2024.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“Are the addresses popular? Who knows. Ask someone who voted one way, and they’ll change your mind; ask someone who voted the other way, and they’ll change your mind again,” said Lehmann, who loves the convenience of shopping on Amazon.

As long as his electrician and plumber can find the place, he figured, he’s in good shape.

Karyl Hall, an 81-year-old preservationist who grew up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, has long fought addresses, saying they’re part of the push for convenience and modernity that is destroying the artsy soul of the community, where, she said, too many historic cottages are being plowed down and replaced by sleek, boxy new homes.

The addresses, she said, are “representative of the total degradation of all our historic places and maintaining something special versus Everywhere, USA.”

She was baffled by the notice from the elections office. She said she filled out a form with her information, then heard by word of mouth that the county’s message was “a mistake,” and then saw city messaging saying that residents didn’t have to do anything before the November election.

“It’s confusing,” said Hall, who always votes by mail. “We’re dealing with the bureaucracy of not knowing quite how all this should be handled.”

Hall lives in a house called Jollyhase, German for “Jolly Rabbit.” She said she often shops for her 6-pound Pomeranian, Bubbles, at Chewy.com and has never missed a package, even sans address.

She said this week: “I’m one of the rebels that is not going to put a number on her house.”

Oct. 9, 2026 1:21 PM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump said that he has struck a deal to obtain diesel from Russia, a stunning reversal of years of U.S. pressure on Moscow over its war with Ukraine and an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Trump said on social media on Friday that he struck the deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call in which he was expected to discuss a suspected case of plague in Russia. Instead, Trump announced that Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver another 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.

Trump’s shocking announcement comes after he signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law last month that aimed at clamping down on Russia’s energy economy, among other areas, that fuel its war against Ukraine.

His move casts doubt on the likelihood of the White House imposing sanctions on Russia this month, given that a bipartisan law passed by Congress directs the administration to target the top importers of Russian oil and gas.

Trump, in his announcement, did not address the sanctions or Russia’s war but said, “Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about who was paying for the diesel from Russia and when the fuel being supplied under the agreement would become available. It also did not clarify whether subsequent supplies of Russian diesel set to come next month would be supplied prior to Election Day on Nov. 3.

Gas prices globally have surged as the war in Iran upends the energy sector. The national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. was $6.23 on Friday, according to AAA, after hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22.

Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev reposted the Treasury Department’s announcement on X Friday and said that “Russia-US cooperation on diesel and energy will benefit the world.”

Rep. Don Beyer, the senior House Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, called Trump’s announcement, “infuriating.”

“This is what we warned anyone who would listen: Trump isn’t the slightest bit trustworthy when it comes to Russia,” Beyer said in a statement on X. “Giving him expanded tariff powers in hopes he would use them to help Ukraine was a mistake. Now he’s lifting sanctions on Russian fossil fuels.”

The law Trump signed last month envisions sanctions on Russian officials, banks and a shadow fleet of tankers and bans all new U.S. investment in Russia and the handling of sovereign debt.

It also directed Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top five importers of Russian oil or natural gas, with an exception for countries that import less than 15% of Russia’s natural gas exports and have taken significant steps to reduce those imports.

The U.S. has not imported Russian oil or gas since 2022, when the Biden administration banned them because of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Shortly after Trump made the announcement, the Treasury Department said it was immediately issuing a temporary license allowing Russian diesel to be supplied to the global market.

This is the latest in several licenses the U.S. Treasury has issued regarding Russian fuel shipments since the start of the Iran war earlier this year. But it is the first such license to ease sanctions on diesel for a period lasting longer than the standard 30-day window since the start of the Ukraine war.

The new so-called general license means U.S. sanctions will not apply until April 2027 on deliveries of Russian diesel that has been loaded onto tankers as of Friday. The department extended similar easing of sanctions in March and April even though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had ruled out such a move earlier in the year.

The extensions continue to underscore how the fallout from the Iran war has boosted Moscow’s ability to profit from its energy exports, which had been restrained by the U.S. and other allies since the invasion of Ukraine.

Price and Binkley write for the Associated Press. AP writer Will Weissert in Washington and Farnoush Amiri in New York contributed to this report.

Oct. 9, 2026 10:38 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the United States and its allies, including Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions Friday, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former judge at the ICC and other international courts whose selection was condemned by Israel. President Trump has coveted that prize for himself.

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video address posted to social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

The sanctions cut the court off from U.S.-based financial services, technology companies and even using U.S. dollars. They set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies and individuals that have business with the court to wind that business down.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the Pnyx hill, where ancient Athenians held democratic assemblies, with the ancient Parthenon temple atop the Acropolis in the background, in Athens,Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

The ICC denounced the step as an attack on the rule of law and the foundations of international order, themes that Rubio had appeared to embrace only two days ago in a speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens.

“It is an attempt to obstruct the course of justice and to prevent the court from doing what it was created to do,” the court said in a statement. “It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law.”

ICC President Tomoko Akane, a citizen of U.S. ally Japan, said the court would “continue to fully discharge its mandate, with independence and impartiality, acting only on the basis of the law and the evidence, for the sake of the countless victims of grave crimes.”

She also appealed to other ICC members for support. “This is not just about defending a single institution, but about safeguarding the international order grounded upon the rule of law.”

Rights groups also denounced the sanctions.

“This existential attack must fail,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, an Amnesty International senior director. “States must take concrete action to resist the imposition of these measures and actively protect the Court.”

A view of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 22, 2026.

(Karolina Janik/NurPhoto via Associated Press)

The court’s host country of the Netherlands has been preparing for weeks for the move. One possible measure to mitigate sanctions is the EU “blocking statute,” which could be used to protect European court staff by preventing European companies from complying with the U.S. measures. Dutch Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen has called the blocking statute the “nuclear option” in countering possible sanctions, but said the Netherlands has been in talks with the European Commission to ensure that if it is necessary it can be quickly enacted.

In a joint statement, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom expressed strong disagreement with the U.S. sanctions.

“We will continue to work together to support the court’s vital work, uphold the rules-based international system, and advance accountability,” the statement said.

“If put into effect, these sanctions will have a significant impact on the court’s work, its dedicated staff and their families. They work every day to bring those accused of the most serious international crimes to justice and to support their victims.”

Rubio said U.S. allies should join in the U.S. actions. “If they do not, the United States will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC, piece by piece, until Americans are threatened no longer,” he said.

A number of countries have withdrawn from the court this year, including Venezuela and Chad. The South Pacific island nation of Naoero was the most recent to announce it would quit.

Lee and Quell write for the Associated Press. Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands. AP writer Mike Corder contributed to this report from The Hague.

In confirming his plans to live-stream Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Malik Hasan’s military execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a “no brainer” punishment for a “radical Islamist terror attack” on U.S. service members.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand [that] there are serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview with the Real America’s Voice network.

Others across the country and around the world — Democrats and Republicans, human rights experts, legal scholars and military and religious leaders — condemned it as a barbaric throwback to an era when executions were cast as entertainment, and as the world’s leading democracy adopting a form of punishment carried out in modern times only by authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations.

Nidal Malik Hasan is shown in a courtroom sketch in 2013.

(Brigitte Woosley / Associated Press)

“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) wrote on X. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) wrote.

The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights said that “the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it would “further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

Matthew Robinson, a criminal justice professor at Appalachian State University and author of a book on U.S. capital punishment titled “Death Nation,” said he was “appalled” by the plans. “It strikes me as meant to be entertaining.” He said the last military execution was in 1961, and the last by firing squad was in 1945.

Soldiers hold a candlelight vigil at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, one day after Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people.

(LM Otero / Associated Press)

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist and major who in 2009 entered a medical building on the Texas military base with a laser-sighted handgun, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others. He has since spoken of being a “martyr” if executed.

President Trump, an outspoken proponent of the death penalty for years but also a past critic of public executions in places like Iran, has signed off on Hasan’s execution but not addressed Hegseth’s plans. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said Friday that people should remember that Hasan “brutally murdered a lot of innocent people.” But he also said he would not watch a live-stream of the execution, and expressed doubt that is “actually going to happen.”

On his first day in office this term, Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to restore the death penalty to prominence. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had taken steps to do so, including by “expanding the protocol” to include firing squads.

Five states currently allow firing squads to carry out executions: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly turned down appeals contending such executions amount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is barred under U.S. law. South Carolina executed three men by firing squad last year.

When the Supreme Court last year rejected an Alabama inmate’s request to be killed by firing squad rather than with nitrogen hypoxia, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor — joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, writing, “Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace.”

Kathleen Walter prays outside the Nashville, Tenn., prison where Christa Pike was set to be executed.

(George Walker IV / Associated Press)

Last week, a Tennessee inmate named Christa Pike survived what was meant to be a lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Other states have also struggled with executions by lethal injection in recent years.

Much of the criticism of Hegseth’s plan for Hasan has centered not on the method of killing, but on the live-streaming of it.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the center has “no record of any execution being live streamed,” and is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be live streamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public.”

Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz wrote: “I’m sensing revulsion on the left and right, not so much for killing a death row prisoner — although firing squad seems extreme in the modern age — but for the Pentagon to live-stream it, turning this into a horrifying TV show to entertain the masses. Is this America?”

Daniel LaChance, an associate history professor at Emory University and author of the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” said the last public execution in the U.S. occurred in 1936, when a Black man convicted of rape was hanged in Kentucky — which still allowed public executions after most states had abandoned the practice.

That execution was “by all accounts a grotesque carnival” and “sort of like a gladiatorial contest brought to life in the 20th Century, where the crowd was surly, shouting,” LaChance said. “It was a debacle.”

That the Trump administration is seeking to turn capital punishment into a public spectacle once more, LaChance said, is out of line with decades of thinking on the issue, but in line with Trump’s own ethos about crime and punishment.

“His whole brand is this kind of populist, anti-elitism. And when executions moved into the bowels of prisons in the early 20th century, they were really becoming bureaucratic affairs, run by experts, carried out in front of a small group of professionals and clergy,” LaChance said. “It was a denial of the public’s right to see a punishment that was carried out in their name, in part because there were elites who thought that the public couldn’t handle this kind of spectacle, that they were misbehaving, that it would generate more disorder when an execution is designed to do the exact opposite: to generate order.”

President Trump points to fans to as he walks to the stage at a political rally Wednesday in San Antonio.

(San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images)

Trump clearly thinks he is pushing back against elitism and expertise and giving people what they want, LaChance said, though the question many scholars have is whether doing so will “increase people’s bloodthirst” or force them to recoil — and ultimate decrease support for such punishments.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, said Trump has publicly mused about killing people by firing squad for years, so Hegseth’s plans to use a firing squad should not be surprising. However, the decision to live-stream the killing is clearly a source of “dismay” for many. “Even people who are resigned to the death penalty, who don’t have religious or other scruples about the death penalty, have real heartburn over this,” he said.

Fidell said “brutality” has become an “operating principle” for the Trump administration broadly, from its decision to host an Ultimate Fighting tournament at the White House to its immigration tactics across the country to, now, it’s plans to live-stream an execution — which Fidell said has “nothing to do” with deterring future crime.

“There’s a pathology going on here that is so out of keeping with the dignity that ought to characterize the taking of a life as a result of a legal process,” he said.

Robinson, of Appalachian State, said a student of his Friday morning asked what would happen when children tune in to watch the execution, which Robinson said he believes they will do, as if it’s a video game. He said the idea was appalling — and not just to him.

“I imagine the rest of the world, the civilized world, will see this and have the same response that I did,” he said. “They’ll respond with shock.”

Times staff writer David G. Savage contributed to this report.

ATLANTA — Not long ago, Georgia gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson eagerly compared himself to his fellow billionaire in the Oval Office. He promised to be Donald Trump “with a Southern tone.” And sharing a summer rally stage, Jackson pointed at the president and declared, “I’m going to be this man’s favorite governor.”

On the debate stage this week with his Democratic opponent, however, Jackson discussed Trump only when Keisha Lance Bottoms brought him up. And he assured his audience that he’d “stand up to anybody.”

Jackson is not alone in his recalibration: Republican nominees for Senate, the U.S. House and governor’s offices across the country are sidestepping President Trump or openly distancing themselves as they debate before Election Day.

Those tactics, not unlike Republicans scrubbing Trump from their campaign websites, are the latest signs of how much Trump’s standing has fallen because of voters’ frustration with inflation, the Iran war and other matters. And the dynamics highlight the perilous options many Republicans face as they try to stitch together winning coalitions that go beyond Trump’s core supporters.

“Republicans right now are facing a voter turnout problem” in their own party, said GOP pollster Paul Shumaker, and must win “unaffiliated voters” who care most about the economy.

“You have to have something significant to change this narrative,” Shumaker said. But, he explained, that means “a significant victory in Iran” and seismic economic improvements — not something any Republican midterm candidate can force from behind a debate podium.

There’s a Trump tightrope on Iran, tariffs and rhetoric

Some Republicans are taking specific positions at odds with the president.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers said in his debate Thursday with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed that he’d urged the White House privately to reach a trade deal with Canada and end the president’s tariffs. Canada is Michigan’s largest trading partner, as it is for many Great Lakes and Midwestern states.

Days before, Rogers unveiled a new ad in which he said, “We know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end the tariff war — now.”

That’s a noticeable departure from Rogers’ earlier, less specific statements praising Trump’s “America First” economic agenda while saying tariffs are not a “one-size-fits-all” solution.

Another Michigan Republican, Rep. Tom Barrett, already had bucked the president by voting for a war powers resolution intended to assert congressional authority over military actions in Iran. But debating Democrat Will Lawrence in their central Michigan district, Barrett added a criticism of Trump’s rhetoric Monday in Nebraska, where he floated the possibility of Iran attacking San Diego and Los Angeles.

The president mentioned those cities as part of his argument that higher gas prices because of his Iran war are a “small price to pay” to keep the country safe. But Democrats seized on the remarks, some insisting that Trump was calling for Iran to attack U.S. cities.

Barrett was asked whether Trump’s words were acceptable. Given the opportunity to echo the White House explanation that Trump was offhandedly mentioning a worst-case scenario he was trying to prevent, Barrett offered no defense.

“Nope,” he said flatly.

Many Republicans prefer a more generalized stiff arm

Reflecting the complex electoral balance, most Republicans have attempted to separate themselves without naming any firm difference with the president.

Running for a promotion to the Senate, Iowa U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson tried in her debate Wednesday against Democrat Josh Turek to reconcile her earlier promises to be a Trump ally in Congress’s upper chamber. She said it would be “really easy” to keep her word and still be bipartisan — a buzz word she’s already been featuring in her campaign.

“I’ll be President Donald Trump’s ally when it is important for Iowa, but I will push back on him — he knows this, because I talk to him regularly — on things that are wrong for our state,” she said. “That’s true no matter who’s in the White House. That’s true no matter who is governing and who has the gavel.”

That’s the same path Jackson took in Georgia, as he pivoted away from Trump by embracing outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who has clashed with the president, starting with Trump’s false claims that he won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.

“I will stand up to anybody, just like Brian Kemp has done,” Jackson said.

Another Republican House member, Mike Lawler of New York, made a point of name-checking a Democratic colleague, New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer, and discussing bills they’d work on together. It was part of his argument that he’s able to challenge Trump and the party line.

“When I agree with the president I say it. When I disagree with the president, I say it,” he said in his closing remarks.

Hinson, meanwhile, referenced bills she’s worked on in the House that have been signed into law by both President Joe Biden and Trump.

But she also avoided criticizing Trump when asked about the president sending Affordable Care Act rebate checks to some Americans and promising a $5,000 bonus after the midterm elections if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate.

She said she “cares very deeply” about making sure Congress maintains the power of the purse and thinks it’s important to “live better within our means.”

Democrats pounce on either approach

Regardless of the Republican efforts, Democrats have continued peppering them with attacks and retorts about Trump. The most heated moments came when Democrat Cait Conley repeatedly said Lawler always voted with Trump.

“No matter how many times you say 100% of the time,” the congressman answered, “it’s provably false.”

When Rogers conceded in his back-and-forth with El-Sayed that the administration “probably” made errors in its mass deportation strategy, the Democrat answered swiftly.

“He said it was probably not right. I mean, it’s definitely not right,” El-Sayed said. “They killed two people.”

And while Georgia’s Jackson seemed uncomfortable talking about Trump, Bottoms was more than happy to mention him.

“I’m not running to be his favorite governor,” she said. “I’m running to work on behalf of people like you.” ___ Associated Press reporters Joey Cappelletti in Washington; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Arlington County Board in Virginia filed a lawsuit Thursday opposing the construction of the Triumphal Arch, becoming the first governmental body to take legal action against President Trump’s planned monument.

The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, criticized the speed at which the project slated for Memorial Circle has moved without going through the full review process.

“The National Park Service, the agency responsible for projects on national park land such as Memorial Circle, is proceeding full-speed toward ground-disturbing construction,” the lawsuit said. “Although the agency has claimed that a final decision to construct the Arch has not yet been made and purports to be engaged in a routine decisional process, that rushed process appears to be a pretext designed to shore up justifications for building the Arch in accordance with the President’s repeated marching orders.”

The lawsuit asks that “the agency’s feverish pace toward construction of the arch” be halted to ensure that the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act be followed and proper analysis and testing be done.

“The Arlington County Board has filed this lawsuit because our community has the most to lose from this egregious and unlawful proposed project,” Arlington County Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said in a statement. He added that the county has acted in good faith in the review process, pointing out the “severe, unique, and wide-ranging negative impacts” the project will have on the county and its residents, only to see them ignored.

Memorial Circle sits on federal parkland west of the Potomac River across the Memorial Bridge and immediately adjacent to Arlington County.

The county is being represented in the lawsuit by legal advocacy group Democracy Forward.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle said the Trump administration and White House have been “fastidiously compliant with all procedural and legal requirements and are certain this meritless and dilatory lawsuit will be dismissed.”

The arch will become one of the world’s most iconic landmarks, he added. “It will enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery for veterans, the families of the fallen, and all Americans alike.”

The lawsuit came a day after the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA President Sara Nelson expressed concerns that the 250-foot arch compounds multiple safety issues that she said have gone unaddressed since a deadly January 2025, crash over the Potomac River that killed 67 people. Nelson also criticized Trump’s plan to turn the arch into “a top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition.

Though the arch has received early approval from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were all tapped by Trump, a group of three veterans and an architectural historian sued in federal court in Washington, D.C., saying the project needs to be approved by Congress. The judge in that lawsuit said the administration must give the court 48 hours before undertaking any activities related to or in preparation for construction of the arch.

The arch is one of several projects around Washington that Trump has undertaken as he remakes the city, from renovating one of its storied public golf courses to threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

The White House is expanding its campaign against international workers, targeting elite study and work visa holders with restrictions and a new investigation.

On Thursday, the Trump administration announced a probe into whether Stanford, Caltech, UC Davis and other universities across the country have been abusing a special visa used by international scholars and students to do research and work in the U.S. It is also suspending Microsoft, Adobe and six other tech companies from how they sponsor employees who are in the country under a highly skilled worker visa program.

The White House’s concern is that schools and companies are too quick to bring in people from outside the U.S. The moves rattled Silicon Valley executives and California educators who see easy access to the smartest, hardest-working people in the world as one of America’s greatest competitive advantages.

Vice President JD Vance said the universities being investigated are overusing J-1 visas to bring in students and researchers from abroad. The international scholars then take jobs and grants that could go to Americans.

“They are using these visas way too much,” he said. “They are using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”

Harvard, Yale, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, Arizona State and MIT will also be investigated.

Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas have been served and “nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building.” Many universities have buildings named for foreign donors.

While most of the companies targeted for the tech visa restriction were Indian, Vance called out Microsoft.

“There’s been no company, unfortunately, in the United States that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance told reporters at a White House news conference.

Vance said the company has abused the permanent labor certification program, which he argued has enabled Microsoft to hire international talent that is then paid less to replace American workers.

The new development suspends Microsoft from applying for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. on H-1B visas and later apply to become permanent residents.

American technology giants have relied on the H-1B visa program for decades to bring in thousands of skilled foreign workers they cannot find locally. Critics have accused the program of being riddled with fraud and abuse.

The administration’s power move came the same day President Trump awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to two prime examples of international talent who came to the U.S. on student and work visas: Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini were also on the list of companies that will no longer be able to apply for permanent residence status for their H-1B employees.

Microsoft defended the use of H-1B and said in a statement that it looked forward to sharing additional information with the administration. In a post, it said that of the thousands of H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.

“They equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country,” the company said. “Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category.”

There’s a limit of 85,000 H-1B visas issued in a fiscal year, and they are selected through a lottery system. Last year, Microsoft was the third-largest beneficiary of the program, with 6,258 H-1B visas, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon led the list, employing more than 13,000 H-1 B visa holders; Adobe had 777 approved applications.

The Thursday announcement has sparked confusion among technology workers and companies. Immigration lawyers point out that the action is not a blanket suspension of green card applications for all employers, but a targeted enforcement freeze on the Permanent Labor Certification program for the eight named corporations.

Proponents of H-1B note that Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies are founded or run by immigrants, and the efforts to thwart H-1B have already started stifling talent flow and startup creation.

“It’s only going to probably hurt some companies and hurt the best and the brightest that are coming here,” said Devashish Mitra, professor of economics at Syracuse University. “It’s like throwing the baby with the bathwater.”

The J-1 investigations follow other actions, making it more difficult for international students to come to U.S. campuses. This year, the Department of Homeland Security said it wanted to end a “duration of status” visa policy that lets students stay in the U.S. through the completion of their programs and limit stays to four years. A federal judge blocked the change, and the government is appealing.

The Trump administration has also proposed charging colleges $70,000 per student for Optional Practical Training, which lets international students work in their fields of study for a limited number of years after graduation. Students now pay about $500.

In a statement, a Stanford spokesperson said the campus “complies with all applicable visa laws, including those relating to J-1 visas. We will cooperate with the investigation.”

A UC Davis spokesperson said the university “carefully complies with all federal laws and regulations for visas and looks forward to working with our federal partners to confirm compliance.”

A Caltech spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

About 275,000 people started J-1 programs in 2025, down from 301,694 in 2024, according to State Department data. Trainees and temporary summer workers, such as au pairs and summer camp counselors, also use the visa to enter the U.S.

Most were not at universities, with a majority working summer jobs.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has started to dissuade students from coming to the U.S., with experts expecting a drop in their registration when data for 2025 are released next month.

New research scholars fell 27% from 2024 to 17,622, about half the 2015 total. Most new research scholars in 2025 came from China, followed by South Korea and India.

California drew the most research scholars, 3,211. It ranked second behind New York for all new J-1s in 2025, with 23,167.

The State Department vets applicants and approves sponsors. Research scholars can stay up to five years

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, said she had found little information about what the new probes would cover. But she said the federal government already has tools “to identify fraud, both in the granting of the visa and then also tracking the person through the Department of Homeland Security.”

“I think that all of these things are focused on bringing fewer international students into the United States, and we have been seeing that impact,” she said, expecting “a huge drop in our international enrollment this year, given everything going on.”

Oct. 9, 2026 8:06 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump opened another chapter in his effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook Friday by establishing a “committee of inquiry” to investigate allegations that she made false statements in mortgage applications.

The inquiry will include a hearing at the White House Nov. 5, Trump said in a written memo, that Cook “shall” attend to answer questions from the committee. The hearing wouldn’t be public but a transcript would be published, the memo said.

Trump’s extraordinary demand that Cook testify before the committee will likely renew concerns about threats to the Federal Reserve’s independence as the president demands the central bank cut its key interest rate. Just last month, the Fed raised its key rate instead, led by Chairman Kevin Warsh, whom Trump appointed earlier this year.

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote in the memorandum.

Trump and some of his economic advisers have blamed the Fed’s broader rate-setting committee, which includes 12 voting members and 19 officials in total, for the rate hike. Cook is one of the 12 participants on the committee that votes on interest-rate decisions. The vote to lift rates Sept. 16 was unanimous.

The move follows a Supreme Court ruling in June that Cook could keep her job after Trump sought to fire her last year. That ruling included a footnote that said nothing prevented Trump from “trying again” as long as she was given proper notice and an opportunity to respond to the charges.

Cook has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.

Rugaber writes for the Associated Press.

Tech scion David Ellison spent three years doggedly pursuing his dream: acquiring Paramount, then Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison pulled off his bold feat this week by completing Paramount’s $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros., uniting two industry pioneers and a wealth of cherished properties — Batman, Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Maverick of “Top Gun,” as well as CBS, HBO, Comedy Central and CNN. All will be tucked under a corporate umbrella that Ellison is calling Skydance — the name of the studio he formed two decades ago.

The mogul and his lieutenants celebrated their victory in style, ringing the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on Thursday, capping a bruising battle to secure approval of a deal that had sparked protests across Hollywood over fears of looming job cuts.

Ellison and his team must braid together two huge film studios (housing nine film labels), four streaming services, three TV production studios, three animation units and more than 50 television networks, including two prominent news organizations. That could be a daunting task, particularly based on how previous Hollywood mergers have fared.

“Now, the real work begins,” David G. Fubini, a Harvard Business School senior lecturer, said in an interview.

Anxieties were evident Tuesday — the day the deal closed — when Ellison held a town hall meeting at Warner Bros., which drew nearly 500 employees.

During the session, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quizzed his new bosses, including about anticipated layoffs and news independence.

“Do you stand with CNN and our effort to completely restore access to covering President Trump?” Cooper asked, referring to CNN’s legal fight alongside MS Now and Politico to reverse the president’s ban on the three organizations.

“Of course,” Ellison replied.

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, pictured here in 2021, quizzed his bosses at a Burbank town hall.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

Hours later, Ellison parried with reporters in Paramount’s darkened Stage 3, recently revamped with laser projection capabilities to simulate fantastical and far-flung settings for TV shows, such as the streets of New York.

“This was a turbulent process, and, at times, a really ugly process, to actually get this deal over the finish line,” Ellison acknowledged to reporters. “What I want to be able to do now is turn the page, and actually make sure that we are in the business of rebuilding trust.”

To do that, Ellison intends to make more movies and TV shows than rivals. He wants to ensure the Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, which will be kept separate for now, remain talent-friendly destinations.

Ellison has taken an opposing view from his predecessors who confronted crumbling industry economics by cutting expenditures to boost their corporate bottom lines.

The 43-year-old executive, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, proudly views his family as “owner-operators,” unshackled by quarterly earnings expectations or the need to dole out dividends to keep investors happy. The Ellison family controls the company’s voting stock, allowing David Ellison to take a long-term view as he charts Skydance’s course.

The goal is to “win in storytelling,” Skydance said in an investor presentation. It intends to build the media industry’s most “technologically capable” firm, which uses artificial intelligence to speed work flows. Skydance plans to spend at least $30 billion a year on film, television and video game content.

Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, Sarah Ellison, CEO David Ellison and investor Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital Partners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)

The realities of Ellison’s big swing will soon sink in as he and his team turn their focus to integrating the myriad operations and about 55,000 employees.

In some ways, Ellison is behind the curve.

Most major mergers are consummated after executives have dedicated months to quietly drafting detailed operational plans and organizational hierarchies. Ellison, in contrast, has spent the last nine months in a pitched battle for Warner Bros. — ultimately vanquishing Netflix, hundreds of vocal merger opponents, and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his coalition of 11 other state attorneys general who filed an antitrust lawsuit in July in an attempt to derail the deal.

Ellison and Bonta resolved their legal fight Sept. 21. A week later, a federal judge cleared the way for the merger to close.

The lawsuit settlement with Bonta requires that the combined company produce at least 30 movies a year for five years. It also must maintain the studio facilities in Los Angeles, making “reasonable efforts to operate the lots in a manner consistent with past practices,” according to the agreement.

Skydance has committed to maintaining operations on the Warner Bros. lot, pictured here, and at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Ynon Kreiz, former chief executive of Mattel toys in El Segundo, has been tasked with leading the integration. The 61-year-old executive joined Ellison at Skydance as his co-CEO earlier this week. Day One of the combined company marked Kreiz’s second day on the job.

“They have a whole new management team that will be expected to immediately lead this massive integration,” Fubini, a former partner at consulting firm McKinsey, said. “The clouds have cleared, and they are at the base camp of Mt. Everest facing this enormous undertaking.”

In a report this week, TD Cowen Global Research maintained its “hold” rating on the newly constituted Skydance, expressing some doubts about Ellison and his team’s ability to “avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

Hollywood has had a history of failed mergers, including Discovery’s 2022 takeover of WarnerMedia from AT&T, which led to years of cost cuts that ultimately seeded the ground for Ellison’s takeover. AT&T’s purchase of the same assets in 2018 also quickly unraveled, some 20 years after the epic failure of AOL Time Warner.

Ellison now must grapple with the hefty acquisition costs for Warner Bros., which climbed as the deal was delayed. The company emerged from the transaction with $86.8 billion in total debt; with most of that going toward buying out Warner Bros. Discovery’s stockholders at $31.17 a share.

The debt burden also includes more than $18 billion in obligations leftover from past mergers. Skydance has nearly $7 billion in cash on hand.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison and executive producer David Ellison arrive at the L.A. premiere of “Star Trek Into Darkness” at the Dolby Theatre in 2013.

(Eric Charbonneau / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter)

The Ellison family brought in foreign investors, including royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi as passive owners, to contribute equity to the deal. Gerald Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, a longtime Skydance stakeholder, added $4 billion, bringing its total investment in Skydance deals to $6 billion.

The deal’s financial terms pose deep challenges, analysts said. Fitch Ratings this week downgraded Skydance credit, citing “materially higher leverage after the acquisition and significant execution and integration risks,” according to its report.

“Interest rate increases made financing this transaction far more expensive than anyone anticipated,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School. “Those lenders are going to start expecting their interest payments — Skydance executives won’t have the luxury of time.”

The company could struggle, Talley said, to “generate the cash flow needed to easily service that debt unless they can significantly cut costs.”

Skydance has promised investors that it will make $6 billion in cost cuts over three years. It anticipates $2 billion in reductions within a year, with the bulk of the rest occurring in the second year of the merger.

“They are going to be firing a lot of people,” TD Cowen Global Research media analyst Doug Creutz said.

During the press briefing, Kreiz sought to downplay the expected workforce toll, saying Skydance would achieve savings by combining technologies that support streaming services and marketing expenditures. It plans to save costs on real estate by locating employees at Skydance-owned properties in Santa Monica, Hollywood and Burbank.

HBO could move from Ivy Station in Culver City, its home for the last five years, to one of the studio lots.

Ellison and Kreiz said they would jointly manage the new colossus.

“Where David will focus on creative, technology, long-term strategy, including especially as it relates to the creative part of the business, I will focus more on the operations and the day-to-day management of the business,” Kreiz said.

Kreiz was named to Skydance‘s expanded board this week along with Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision.

The new leaders expressed confidence they could expand and integrate their two major streaming services to drive growth. HBO Max and Paramount+ combined will reach more than 200 million subscribers.

The plan, they said, is to combine the two streamers within a couple of years, but the company may offer subscribers a bundle with the two offerings sooner.

Skydance, according to sources, also expects to bolster its free, ad-supported service Pluto TV, which offers more than 200 channels. The service hasn’t had much corporate attention in recent years amid the cuts and deal-making.

The executives have not disclosed which teams would soon be affected or how they will structure overlapping business units.

For example, the company’s three TV studios each have their own leader: Channing Dungey runs the largest, Warner Bros. Television; David Stapf has long managed CBS Studios; and Skydance executive Matt Thunell has been president of Paramount Television Studios since last year.

Integrating CNN and CBS

Anxiety over whether CNN and CBS News would be mashed together was quelled, at least for now.

Skydance announced that it was retaining CNN Worldwide Chairman Mark Thompson as head of the larger news organization. CNN journalists had worried that CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, who has presided over a year of turmoil at the network, would be put in charge of both.

Any news consolidation could take years, in part, because CBS News is largely unionized while CNN is a non-union shop.

“We are going to spend the next several months basically getting under the hood,” Ellison said.

CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, pictured here in 2023 in Los Angeles, has had a turbulent tenure at CBS.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Another challenge will be stabilizing the Warner Bros. film unit, which has had a rough year at the box office. This month, the top two Warner Bros. film executives, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, exited abruptly, clearing the way for longtime Ellison lieutenants Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein to oversee both film studios. The co-heads of DC Comics, James Gunn and Peter Safran, segued to the new Skydance.

Skydance also will have to deal with the NFL, which could demand substantially higher fees for CBS to keep its Sunday games.

The current contract allows the league to reopen negotiations because of the ownership change. Skydance is hoping it can wait three years until the contracts of other broadcasters also are up for discussion.

Skydance will be a major player in sports. Last year, Paramount agreed to spend $7.7 billion for UFC fights. The combined company also has rights to professional golf, including the Masters tournament; National Hockey League; Major League Baseball and NCAA basketball, including March Madness, as well as European rights to televise the Olympics.

“Until you actually get inside the company, there are things you won’t know,” Creutz said. “But they are going to have to come up with answers pretty quick.”

In March 2025, when California ran out of Medicaid funds to pay doctors and hospitals, the state borrowed $3.4 billion to keep the program afloat. It was, as a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted, nothing new. Indeed, a handful of times over the years, the state had taken out internal, short-term loans to sustain its healthcare program for poor and disabled people.

The unprecedented move came a few months later, when Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers agreed to pay down the loan — which grew to $4.4 billion — over 10 years instead of later in the year. California’s healthcare safety net, it seemed, was buckling.

Rising healthcare costs systemwide were partly to blame. But so were several state-led expansions that made California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, one of the nation’s most generous.

Now, with congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, California and dozens of other states must contemplate the limits of their generosity. The problem is particularly acute in the nation’s most populous state, which spends more on Medicaid than New York and Texas combined.

“We know we can’t afford to serve everybody we want to serve in the model that we have today,” said Mark Ghaly, the former top Newsom health official who now co-chairs the Future of Medi-Cal Commission, a 29-person panel with the goal of modernizing and sustaining California’s Medicaid program for those who need it. “What can we do differently? What can we do smarter?”

The 2025 law that Newsom, a Democrat, has dubbed President Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill” is expected to leave millions more Americans without health insurance, mostly because of new work requirements. It also curbs the use of healthcare provider taxes and other strategies states have deployed to maximize federal funds. Some state lawmakers and consumer advocates have argued the federal cuts, along with rising costs, present an opportunity for the next governor to overhaul a program plagued by long appointment wait times, low reimbursement rates for healthcare providers, and volatile financing.

“If we continue to just give millions and millions into the same system and expect something different — I’m sick and tired of that,” said Caroline Menjivar, a Democratic state senator representing a Los Angeles-area district where roughly half of constituents rely on Medi-Cal.

Democratic lawmakers, who have often clashed with Newsom on Medi-Cal rollbacks, succeeded in getting him to delay a number of painful cuts until 2027 in hope that a new governor might reverse them.

So far, neither of the gubernatorial candidates running in the November election to replace Newsom has offered substantive proposals for a program that covers 1 in 3 Californians — roughly 13.6 million people.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, wants to pare back Medi-Cal eligibility and has promised to end coverage for immigrants without legal status, citing that benefit as an example of “wildly unsustainable” state spending. Democrat Xavier Becerra, who has spent decades trying to expand government-funded healthcare, has promised to protect Californians from the massive federal cuts and find and cut billions in administrative waste.

Expanding coverage

President Johnson signed the law that established Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 to cover certain low-income groups, such as families with children, older people and those with disabilities. Over the last six decades, states have substantially widened that pool, most notably under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to childless adults.

Starting in 2024, California offered healthcare coverage to all low-income residents, regardless of age or immigration status, although lawmakers scaled that back this year. At the same time, the state opted to cover a slew of non-mandated benefits such as physical therapy, hospice care and housing assistance.

“California has always struggled with wanting to have as broad a program as possible but then having to figure out a way to pay,” said Jennifer Kent, who oversaw Medi-Cal under Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. “There is no population that we have met that we don’t want to offer coverage to, and we’ve never met a benefit that we don’t like.”

Since 2010, California’s Medi-Cal enrollment has nearly doubled while spending has ballooned from $50 billion a year to $222 billion. It now makes up more than 40% of overall state spending, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Conservatives argue the program is bloated and rife with fraud. They say the federal changes will force states to refocus resources on the neediest.

“The role of the safety net programs was just that — to be a safety net,” Hilton said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s a particularly positive boast to say 40% of Californians should be on a program that was designed for people living in poverty.”

Becerra declined an interview request.

Nelly, a 59-year-old from Los Angeles County, was one of millions who have benefited from the state’s Medi-Cal expansion, but she was initially reluctant to sign up.

For years after she left her corporate job to care for her ailing mother, Nelly said, she didn’t consider applying. She remained uninsured until three years ago, when she woke up and couldn’t see out of her left eye.

She enrolled in Medi-Cal in the emergency room. It now covers her appointments with specialists and transportation to and from. While her condition may exempt her from the new Medicaid work requirements, Nelly said, she’s still worried about losing coverage after experiencing numerous paperwork hiccups simply trying to renew.

Nelly, who asked that her full name not be used because she hasn’t told her family about her condition, said she understands not everyone on the program may need it. But, she added, “it should be there for someone like me.”

Tough choices ahead

When Republican state lawmakers got wind of Newsom’s plan to stretch the debt repayment over a decade, they accused Democrats of trying to “paper over” the state’s structural deficit.

“This leaves future governors and legislatures to clean up the mess,” stated a July 2025 memo from GOP senators. The Legislative Analyst’s Office later called the maneuver “unusual.” That could leave Becerra, the favorite to succeed Newsom in the overwhelmingly liberal state, as the face of staggering changes to a program he spent his career defending.

More than 2 million Californians under age 65 could lose health coverage over the next four years as a result of the state and federal policy changes, according to recent estimates by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. At least 730,000 residents have already disenrolled since June 2025.

State agencies are scrambling to implement new federal work requirement rules for adult Medicaid enrollees under 65, hoping to automate as much verification as possible to blunt coverage losses. And in 2028, states will be required to charge some enrollees fees for many services, making it harder for them to maintain coverage.

Disability rights activists say new asset limits will prevent Californians from getting needed home care, which they say is more cost-effective and humane than nursing homes. Counties, deemed by state law to be healthcare providers of last resort, say they need immediate funding for the millions of uninsured patients they anticipate in the new year.

Hospital administrators have urged policymakers to help them keep their facilities stable, and the state’s most recent budget included some $390 million to assist public and distressed hospitals.

Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles treats five times the patients it was designed to serve, and 80% of patients are uninsured or on Medi-Cal. Demand is so high in the chronically underserved area, MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor said, that the hospital has erected tents in the parking lot. Most emergency room patients are now treated there.

“We already have an extremely overcrowded, overburdened emergency department,” MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor said. “Insured care will turn into uncompensated care, and the financial burden for that will fall on providers.”

Becerra has said he opposes the state’s recent freeze on enrollment for adult immigrants without legal status, as well as new monthly premiums set to take effect next year, saying such moves will only saddle taxpayers with higher bills for ER care.

If elected, Becerra will probably need to wade into the politically toxic debate over whether to raise more revenue, cut benefits further, or do both.

Aside from promising to find and eliminate billions in administrative waste from the industry, the nation’s former top health official has not explained how he would cobble together the tens of billions of dollars the state is likely to need just to maintain status quo.

The next governor must tread carefully, Kent warned. “When people come and say, ‘Well, you should just do this because it’s the right thing,’ ” she said, “all of those right things have fiscal consequences.”

Mai-Duc writes for KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism.

SACRAMENTO — Over the last week, gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has created the exact kind of media kerfuffle he loves best by attacking his rival Xavier Becerra for Becerra’s description of his parents as “immigrants.”

Although Becerra’s mother, Maria, was born in Mexico, his father, Manuel, came into the world in Sacramento, in 1928. Soon after, Becerra’s grandparents moved their young family back to Mexico, where Manuel was raised until he returned to the U.S. as a young man to work.

As my colleague Gustavo Arellano said in a must-read column, this border back-and-forth has been more the norm than the exception for California’s Mexican American population for decades, if not centuries. Manuel Becerra’s luck at being born on U.S. soil may have given him an advantage, but it didn’t make him any less of an immigrant, Arellano explained, especially in an era when Sacramento’s Mexican population was below 2,500 and racism remained openly practiced and disturbingly accepted.

Hilton, however, has seized on Manuel Becerra’s U.S. citizenship to brand the younger Becerra a liar, allegedly falsely framing himself as the son of immigrants to gain identity-politics points in a state of immigrants. Whether one or both of Becerra’s parents qualifies as an immigrant might seem like minutiae to most voters, but Hilton’s accusation has thumped on the nerves on both the left and right — including my own, as the daughter of a South Asian immigrant.

Dog-whistle politics

Scratch the surface of Hilton’s attack and it becomes about something far more than Manuel Becerra’s citizenship — it’s a thinly veiled dog whistle about how a “good” immigrant behaves and how we should handle the “bad” ones. Here’s where all that gets messy for me: I agree with Hilton that being born in the U.S. is a big deal, and being a citizen is a point of pride. It does matter. I also agree with Arellano that Hilton’s attack is despicable.

Somewhere between those points are truths about immigration in America at this fraught and ugly moment, and just how different California is from the rest of the country when it comes to understanding the issue — and why that matters.

California’s Latinos, through numbers, history and hard work, have built political and social power on a scale that few, if any, other immigrant groups anywhere in the U.S. have managed. That unique position in the Golden State has allowed for what I call the magical realism of immigration myths to flourish, a wonderful gift to generations past and present that does not have the same widespread acceptance in other parts of this great country.

I firmly believe there is no such thing as a “true” immigration story.

Many, if not most, immigrants are leaving something painful behind — maybe it’s family, maybe it’s war or abuse. But carrying that burden forward with nothing more than hope to balance it, passing it on to future generations, explaining it to strangers, is too much. So immigration stories get softened over time, with trauma turning into adventure and hard facts blurred into entertaining myths.

That doesn’t make the tellers liars. It makes them human.

In the case of my father’s myth, he would have told you that his journey to America started with Humphrey Bogart. As a teen, he’d cut school to watch black-and-white movies like “Casablanca” in a theater in Ahmedabad in northern India, so long ago that there was an intermission to change the film reels. Enamored of white tuxedos and cool blondes, he started applying to scholarships for college in America — eventually winning a full-ride at a Utah school for his skiing acumen, a sport for which he claimed great skill but in reality had never tried.

My aunts and uncles variously dispute or embrace this tale, which my father loved to tell. I don’t know how true it is, but I do know this. My father’s journey to the U.S. did not begin with Bogart. It began in the city of Karachi, which was in India until the British drew a line on the map and created Pakistan. War broke out, with Hindus killing Muslims and Muslims killing Hindus. My father, a kid, got lost in a crowd with his grandfather. He watched as a mob killed his grandpa, then escaped by himself walking hundreds of miles to safety. He was eventually reunited with his family in a refugee camp, but his India was gone forever.

In its place, he dreamed of Bogart’s America. And when he finally got here, he buried his past under the Utah snow, became such a good skier he was on ski patrol, and didn’t mention his grandpa for nearly 35 years.

Like nearly every child of an immigrant, I love both the truth and the myth of my dad because combined they are the story of my family and of America. But my father was Indian and eventually settled in Ohio, much different than California. There was no larger Indian community back then (though it’s grown significantly, including dozens of family members who followed my father), and little tolerance for anything but assimilation. That was fine by my father. He wanted nothing more than to be American — though he would remain a green card holder for decades, until fear under the first Trump administration pushed him to get citizenship.

Hilton’s audience

Just like for Becerra’s dad, being an immigrant was a state of mind for mine, an experience, not an official status. Had my dad been in California, maybe he would have kept more of his Indian identity. Had Becerra’s dad been in Ohio, maybe he would have kept less of his past.

Neither viewpoint made either man more or less American — but the different myths these two men told about who they were define the difference between California and the rest of the country.

Hilton’s attack on Becerra’s dad was never meant for a California audience, where the Latino experience of fluidity in geography and identity holds center stage. It was always meant for places such as Ohio, and Fox News, where the expectation of assimilation still reigns supreme (just ask the Haitians of Springfield) and where Hilton’s media audience — and his future — resides after he loses in November, which he almost certainly will. Hilton, after all, was the host of his own conservative television show for years.

What seems like an out-of-touch attack by Hilton on brown immigrants in California is actually thoughtful pandering to his people — the right-wing Americans who prefer “good,” deferential, grateful immigrants (like Hilton himself) over the confident California Latinos who take pride in every part of their identity.

Sorry, California Latinos, but this MAGA moment in immigration has nothing to do with criminal records or even legal status. It’s all about attitude, and MAGA hates that you have so much of it. Hilton’s attack hits the target with his right-wing crowd because, to them, not centering his father’s U.S. citizenship is a rejection of the United States, a treachery they not-so-secretly fear all immigrants share.

And here’s the twist — MAGA is right, immigrants are complicated.

My dad may have been one of the “good” immigrants, embracing all things American and quiet about his past. But he always held deep pride in his family and his origins, and he passed that on — as do so many of the other “good” immigrants.

It’s possible, common even, to fully embrace being American while also valuing the myths and truths of immigration. It’s possible to to love this country while also keeping another one in your heart, loudly or quietly. There is no one immigrant experience, no one way to be a real American. Hilton, an immigrant and the son of immigrants, surely knows this.

But where immigrants see complexity, MAGA followers see only perfidy, disloyalty, and that makes them afraid and angry — and ripe for the exploitation of those emotions by someone who can sugarcoat it, twist it, just enough to seem reasonable.

And Hilton is excellent at seeming reasonable.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: California wine glut sends premium bottles to Costco, Aldi and Kroger at bargain prices
The California angle: Denise Brown recalls her sister Nicole’s abuse by O.J. Simpson: ‘We were there’
The L.A. Times Special: The LAPD busted a secret network of brothels — but hasn’t arrested the owner
Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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The LAPD’s legal bills keep piling up.

The city of Los Angeles has shelled out nearly $480 million over the last five and a half years to end legal disputes involving the Police Department, including claims of excessive force, litigation over traffic accidents and cases filed by employees who allegedly faced retaliation after reporting misconduct.

The soaring legal costs have come under greater scrutiny in recent years as Los Angeles’ financial problems have gotten worse. The city faced a $1-billion budget shortfall in 2025 but, after various cost-cutting measures, managed to set aside funding for the LAPD to hire more than 500 new officers in the coming year.

The LAPD’s annual lawsuit costs more than doubled from 2019 to 2025. The payouts peaked in 2024, when the city spent $178.6 million to resolve more than 300 police-related lawsuits and civil claims, before dropping to just over $100 million in 2025, according to a Times analysis of city attorney’s data.

The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and analyzed data from the city attorney’s office released through a public records request showing nearly 2,000 payouts dating to January 2019.

Through the first six months of this year, the city has paid out $20.3 million in legal settlements and court judgments involving LAPD officers. Several recent big-dollar verdicts aren’t included in that tally because they hadn’t yet been approved by the City Council.

The surging cost of LAPD payouts depriving the cash-strapped city of money for pressing needs such as fixing roads and sidewalks, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

“There’s a reason why your streetlights are out and they’re not fixed for a year, there’s a reason why your sidewalk won’t get fixed or your animal shelters are understaffed or underfunded,” said Mejia, whose office is conducting an audit of the city’s risk management strategies, the results of which will be released this year.

Experts are still untangling the reasons for the explosion of legal payouts involving police — which stretches far beyond L.A.

This year, a legal defense organization found that New York City has paid more than $796 million since 2019 to settle lawsuits involving accusations of police misconduct — including $117 million in 2025. In Chicago, the city is on track to blow past the $252 million spent last year to resolve police lawsuits, mostly involving plaintiffs who went to prison based on faulty evidence, according to local news reports.

In Los Angeles, the surge has come under the watch of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, who has blamed the rising costs on the way the office handled litigation of all kinds before her administration — as well as a national legal trend of so-called nuclear verdicts.

“The system is getting inflated in a way that is unhealthy and it creates, I think, incentives to sue and to do pie-in-the-sky settlements,” Feldstein Soto said in interview with The Times earlier this year. She said her office evaluates each claim case by case, deciding when it makes more sense to settle rather than go to trial, at which juries can issue decisions based on emotion or differing perceptions of what occurred. Feldstein Soto has lobbied for years to change state law to limit “non-economic” damages.

Feldstein Soto’s critics contend that she has pursued a hard-line approach in recent years, refusing to settle except in cases where it is clear the city is likely to lose in court.

That tough stance has led to mixed results. The city has lost some jury verdicts that could have been avoided if it had been willing to settle. It has also prevailed in several high-profile cases, including this year when a jury ruled that an officer was not liable for the 2021 death of a 14-year-old girl killed by a wayward bullet fired during a hasty confrontation with a suspect at a North Hollywood department store.

The city attorney’s office said in a statement to The Times that while it is proactively working to curb rising litigation costs “by every means possible,” it could not “control the number, timing or claimed damages of lawsuits filed against the City.”

“Nor does the Office have control over the alleged root causes of these liabilities: the City Attorney’s Office is not responsible for LAPD policies or personnel,” said the statement, adding that the number of lawsuits filed against the city has risen by roughly 20% in each of the last four budget years, straining the office’s resources.

Zachary Powell, an associate professor of criminal justice at Cal State San Bernardino, said that although data suggest that use of force by police has decreased since 2020, the public has become “much more aware of police abuses and conduct than they ever were before.”

“I think people also ask a lot more questions in a jury setting,” he said.

Other explanations, he says, are the passage of statewide police accountability measures and the fact that a backlog of cases from the pandemic years are finally coming due.

The Times’ analysis found that hundreds of legal battles involving officer-involved traffic incidents make up nearly a quarter of all payouts. Since 2019, the city has paid $125 million for the thousands of accident claims, just under a third of which stemmed from cases in which officers were found to have failed to stop or yield at crossings before crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian. Pursuit-related claims and suits stemming from cases in which officers made improper left turns have also cost the city millions.

Other legal costs date back years — and in some cases decades.

The city is still paying $7,410 a month to Clarence Chance, who in the early 1990s was awarded a large payment over a wrongful arrest that led him to spend 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Nearly $40 million has gone to people whose homes were damaged after the LAPD bomb squad botched the detonation of seized fireworks and leveled part of a city block in 2021.

One of the biggest payout categories was $104.6 million spent since 2019 on claims related to police shootings — more than three-fourths of which involved people who were reported to be under the influence of a substance or in the midst of a mental health crisis, according to The Times’ analysis. Roughly $38.4 million was paid out after police shot someone wielding an edged weapon, such as a knife, the analysis found. Shootings involving gang officers cost the city nearly $4 million in that span.

Dozens of lawsuits remain pending, including claims related to the handling of mass pro-immigration protests since last year, likely putting taxpayers on the hook for more large payouts in the future. Police use of hard foam projectiles, house-mounted officers and other tactics against crowds have already cost the city at least $22 million in the last seven and a half years — just over half of which stemmed from the department’s response to the 2020 mass protests over the murder of George Floyd.

Such totals may not always include lawyer fees that are negotiated after a settlement is reached — or if a case is appealed.

Jonathan Evans, a civil rights attorney who has sued the department, thinks the big payouts show that greater public awareness of mental health issues is a factor. Recognizing this, he said, municipalities are agreeing to higher settlements than in years past.

“The decision to use lethal force is being more heavily scrutinized,” he said.

Tens of millions of city dollars have in recent years gone to disgruntled police officers who sued over workplace injustices such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination and retaliation. Since 2019, at least 27 LAPD employees have won million-dollar-plus jury verdicts or settlements from the city; many more have seen five- or six-figure paydays.

To clamp down on future legal costs, the department last year brought back a former senior official, Arif Alikhan — at a monthly salary of $20,000, paid for by a private donation — to study how to reduce the number of costly lawsuits. Alikhan did not respond to a call requesting comment.

The department maintains an early intervention system that flags officers based on risk factors, such as a relatively high volume of civilian complaints, frequent use force, and involvement in preventable traffic collisions or pursuits. The system is used to determine whether they need additional training or should be reassigned or placed on a performance improvement plan.

Within the LAPD, some officers and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the rank-and-file union, argue that the city should fight back harder against claims with no credibility, instead of settling. They say officers who are most often sued tend to come from specialized units that do the type of proactive policing that the department and most of of the public wants: targeting gangs, drugs and guns.

Attorneys who represent officers that have sued the department over whistleblower retaliation dismiss the claim by Chief Jim McDonnell and others that some cops are exaggerating their claims in pursuit of a big payday. If anything, they contend, the continued large payouts are a product of entrenched racial and gender bias and inconsistent discipline — and the LAPD’s unwillingness to learn its lessons from past lawsuits.

Greg Yacoubian, a labor attorney, said there is little incentive for the current system to change because the costs of lawsuits are passed on to taxpayers — not the officers involved in misconduct and their bosses.

“The person responsible for the error never feels the pinch,” Yacoubian said.

Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.

If I ever need to humble myself — if my head inflates with grand visions of becoming the next Steve Lopez or Bill Plaschke — I pull up the transcript of the secret recording that upended Los Angeles politics after The Times broke the story exactly four years ago.

It’s like a modern-day version of “Ozymandias,” except far more vulgar, nowhere near as poetic and a better warning against hubris than anything Shelley could have penned.

“The thing for us is to exercise our power,” said then-City Councilmember Gil Cedillo, about halfway through an hourlong conversation he was having with three of the city’s most powerful political figures.

Oh, did they ever — and nowhere near the way they intended.

Nury Martinez and Ron Herrera, the president of the City Council and head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, respectively, quickly resigned for their roles in the racist, homophobic drivel on the recording. Cedillo — who was finishing out his term — and Councilmember Kevin de León refused to step down, besmirching their well-earned reputations as progressive lions.

The L.A. they sought to create — where Latinos ascend at the expense of the Black community, and anyone who gets in the way is crushed — never came to be. And the recording that exposed their machinations ultimately destroyed the type of ethnic politicking that made the careers of too many self-serving power grabbers, including this quartet.

The transcript of their back-and-forth now reads as prophecy — and we’re far better for it.

Much of the discussion, which happened in October 2021 at the headquarters of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, was devoted to whining that L.A.’s Latino-majority council districts, and some cities elsewhere in the county, were represented by Black leaders instead of Latinos, even as Latino residents far outnumbered Black ones.

“F—, the way I see it, all of the seats are Latino,” said Herrera, who hailed the rise of a “little Latino caucus of our … own” that he felt should reign permanently.

He and the others predicted a future in which vengeful Black politicians would try to sabotage future Latino leaders on their way out of office, creating “poor Latino districts with nothing,” as Martinez put it.

She was referring to redistricting proposals that would chop off assets like the Coliseum and Exposition Park from South L.A.’s District 9 — the most Latino district in the city, represented by a Black council member, Curren Price.

“So they f— a future Latino for CD 9,” De León whined. “That’s how arrogant, just how arrogant it is.”

That’s not what ended up happening.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León at a council meeting in December 2022 after a two-month absence following his role in that year’s audio leak scandal.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

District 9 didn’t lose any assets. Black leaders saw the writing on the wall and didn’t run a serious Black candidate to replace the termed-out Price this year. That created space for two Latinos — Estuardo Mazariegos and Jose Ugarte — to make it to the general election. No matter which candidate wins in November, the City Council will have fewer than three Black members for the first time in 63 years.

Both Mazariegos and Ugarte say that the anti-Black scheming of the audio leak villains inspired them to run campaigns focusing on Black and Latino residents as one constituency, reflecting how life is actually lived in South L.A., not how Latinos from elsewhere in the city imagine it to be.

Mazariegos attended the first City Council meeting after The Times dropped the audio leak bombshell in October 2022. He remembers Cedillo peeking at the angry audience and temporarily returning to the council’s back room.

“No community should have to lose power for another to gain it,” said Mazariegos, who would become the first Central American immigrant to serve on the council if he were to win. “Our power grows when we build it together.”

Ugarte, formerly one of Price’s top aides, agreed. He argued that the best way to lead in South L.A. as a Latino council member is “with respect for those who came before us, the humility to listen to those doing the work today, and the understanding that District 9 is strongest when [Black and Latino residents] move forward together.”

Born in Oaxaca, Ugarte would become L.A.’s first Indigenous council member if he wins. That would be a rich coda to the audio leak, considering that Oaxacans received some of the nastiest insults. Martinez described them as “ little short dark people” who were feos — ugly. Cedillo joked that they were “little ones,” while Herrera cracked that they were “indios.”

Who’s laughing now?

The Feos Four also spent time kvetching about Nithya Raman, who was finishing her first year on the council. In 2020, she had upset an incumbent to become the first democratic socialist council member.

At the time of the recording, rivals were trying to diminish Raman’s power by drawing boundaries that would put her district “in the blender and chop [it] up, left and right,” as De León described it.

“She’s not our ally,” Cedillo said. “She’s not going to help us. Her district is not a district we can count on.”

Give credit to Cedillo and his pendejo pals: They were already seeing Raman and other democratic socialists as an emerging force, even while downplaying the DSA’s chances. De León said that Raman’s politics were “about just her as an individual.” Herrera dismissed Hugo Soto-Martínez, then a no-name union organizer aiming to unseat Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, as a “kid.” Nury Martinez blithely mispronounced Eunisses Hernandez’s name while cackling about the first-time candidate’s challenge to Cedillo.

If Cedillo and De León weren’t so convinced of their own political immortality, they could have helped check the DSA’s rise that has so vexed L.A.’s liberal leaders. Instead, Hernandez beat Cedillo in a shocking upset in 2022, while Soto-Martínez won in the fall. And fellow democratic socialist Ysabel Jurado took out De León in 2024. Those triumphs paved the path for DSA-LA-backed candidate Marissa Roy to make a strong run for city attorney this year. Mazariegos is also endorsed by DSA-LA, which is backing Raman for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass.

Then-Councilmember Gil Cedillo at the Los Angeles City Council meeting on Oct. 11, 2022, two days after the release of explosive audio involving him led to protesters demanding his resignation.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The group should send Cedillo and De León bouquets of red roses as gracias for assisting their ascendancy. All of us owe the foursome a thanks for hastening the demise of the old Latino political machines that birthed them and kept the city stuck in tribalism for too long.

Now, Latino politicians must run on their bona fides for all Angelenos, instead of just their latinidad. Soto-Martínez and Hernandez won reelection outright in the June primary because their constituents appreciated their sewer socialism approach, focusing on quality of life issues instead of ideological revolution. Meanwhile, Chicanosauruses are wheezing with diminished power as they urge Latinos to back Bass. The message doesn’t seem to be landing: A recent Berkeley IGS/Times poll found that 45% of Latino voters favored Raman to Bass’ 21%, with 34% undecided.

Gone are the days when Latino voters blindly believed Latino leaders. Why bother, after Martinez and her crew proved the folly of ethnic politics?

Near the start of the recording, Martinez complained that voters and the media always seemed to forgive Black politicians caught up in scandal, while Latinos didn’t get the same treatment.

“They’re never done,” she complained. “They never close a chapter on us.”

L.A. did close the chapter. Now, the Feos Four’s only legacy is “that colossal wreck” of their conversation, to quote the finale of “Ozymandias,” left to rot forever.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be “public.”

Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice News on Wednesday, said the execution of Hasan will take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3. Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth spoke to the outlet aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier while visiting the long-deployed crew, who supported the Iran war, before their arrival at their home port in San Diego.

When asked if Hasan had made any final requests or reached out to the Trump administration, Hegseth simply replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.”

Officials in the Pentagon clarified Thursday that the execution will be livestreamed and that more details would follow.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell had said Monday that President Trump had approved the execution of Hasan.

Trump has previously been critical of public executions in Iran, at times using the possibility of protesters being killed by the Iranian government as a possible rationale for military action. Those warnings preceded his ultimate choice to attack Iran at the end of February over its ballistic missiles and the risk of it developing nuclear weapons.

“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 14 of this year. “It’s stopping and there’s no plan for executions.”

He repeated that claim on Jan. 20 at a White House press briefing, saying: “We let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. And they decided not to do it. They didn’t hang the people.”

Slightly more than a month later in his State of the Union address, Trump said, “We stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence.”

The White House on Thursday immediately referred questions about the plans for the livestreamed execution to the Pentagon.

However, experts on military law said Hasan could choose to resist execution and file a habeas petition in civilian court, which could significantly delay the execution.

“It frankly might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building where soldiers were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.

During the trial it was revealed that Hasan spent weeks planning the deadly attack, and his preparation included videotaping a sales clerk showing him how to change the magazine on the pistol that he purchased. He would later go to a gun range outside Austin and ask for advice on how to reload with speed and precision from an instructor.

Soldiers later testified that Hasan’s rapid reloading made it all but impossible to stop the shooting. Investigators recovered 146 shell casings inside the building and dozens more outside, where Hasan shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.

Hasan said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. A military judge barred him from presenting that as a defense during his trial. Hasan made almost no effort to defend himself in court, telling jurors when he acted as his own counsel that evidence would show he was the shooter and describing himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”

Hegseth said the military hasn’t executed a servicemember by firing squad since World War II. The last military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security publicized the arrest of a Nigerian man for indecent exposure this week, it included a political attack that’s drawing complaints from Democrats and a nonpartisan government watchdog.

The department’s news release alleges that the man worked for a Democratic congressional candidate in a Pennsylvania battleground district, an unusual reference to a high-profile midterm contest.

“It’s unbelievable that Janelle Stelson would employ an illegal alien to work on a congressional campaign, let alone a pervert who exposed himself in public,” Charles Wall, deputy director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in the news release.

A police report said the man had fliers for Stelson in his vehicle. Stelson denied that the man was a campaign employee.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how it established the man worked for Stelson. Its news release cited a news report quoting a conservative activist who asserted the connection.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, calling the department’s attack on Stelson a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their official positions to influence elections.

Donald Sherman, who leads CREW, said he’d never seen anything like the department’s statement, where a law enforcement agency “goes out of its way” to reference a campaign affiliation in a news release that has nothing to do with election-related crimes.

The news release is “consistent with the message that the administration and that the president has sent from the top that ICE is to be involved in elections, regardless of what the law says,” Sherman said.

Stelson, a former local television personality, is running for the second time against Republican Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District. It’s expected to be one of the races that determines control of the U.S. House in the November midterms.

“If he is an illegal immigrant who committed a crime he should be deported,” Stelson’s campaign said. “We never heard of him prior to the news of his arrest. We are grateful to law enforcement for acting swiftly to arrest him.”

President Trump’s administration is already under scrutiny for using federal resources for political purposes. The Department of Homeland Security has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on advertisements glorifying Trump and promoting his campaign messaging, drawing a pair of lawsuits and bipartisan backlash.

According to a police report obtained by the Associated Press, Chimaobim Adedayo Igbojekwe was arrested by an East Pennsboro Township police officer on Sept. 27 after a report of a suspicious vehicle parked next to a public park on a residential street in the Harrisburg suburb.

The officer wrote that, when Igbojekwe opened the door to talk to the officer, he noticed that Igbojekwe’s “genitals were exposed.”

Igbojekwe told the officer he was “in the neighborhood for work and that he was waiting to hand out [fliers] for Janelle Stelson’s political campaign,” according to the report. Igbojekwe produced a stack of fliers, the officer wrote.

It’s not clear whether the man was working as a paid canvasser for another organization.

Igbojekwe was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, courts records say, and later was arrested by ICE.

Homeland Security said Igbojekwe entered the country legally in 2017 but remained past his “authorized period.” He was granted deferred action in 2021.

Igbojekwe’s public defender did not return a call about the case.

Levy writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 8, 2026 9:48 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that he will not order a resumption of military strikes on Iran before the Nov. 3 midterm elections in the United States.

Trump, while stumping for Republicans this week, has hinted that he was confident that an endgame to the war could come in the days before or after the election, while also hinting that he remained open to resuming full-scale military operations against Iran.

For weeks, Trump has been threatening that a post-midterm election escalation in the seven-month-old war remains a viable option, despite his initial promises to Americans of a military campaign that would last a matter of weeks.

But Trump in a social media post on Thursday said the U.S. “will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd.”

Trump added that his team has been “having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Negotiations had appeared at a standstill since Trump late last month publicly rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the U.S. met certain conditions.

Iran, however, said last week it had received a U.S. counterproposal. And Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Thursday said he expected Tehran would offer a formal reply within days.

Trump’s post comes as the military has dispatched more resources to the region. U.S. officials have said a third aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and thousands of troops aboard it and accompanying ships could arrive as early as the end of October.

Trump’s announcement was made the same day the USS Abraham Lincoln was due to arrive to its home port in San Diego after a record-long deployment in support of the Iran war. There have been reports of crew stress and poor mental health, as well as supply shortages, including food and hygiene products.

The USS George Washington, which is usually based in Asia, relieved the Lincoln in August. The other aircraft carrier in the Middle East, the USS George H.W. Bush, has been deployed for about six months, but it pulled into Phuket, Thailand, for a port visit several days ago.

Boak and Madhani write for the Associated Press.

Oct. 8, 2026 11:31 AM PT

PHOENIX — An Arizona congressional candidate says she was knocked unconscious and sexually assaulted this summer when repairing campaign signs overnight.

Bernadette Greene-Placentia told investigators that two men raped her, and she kicked her feet up at one point to try to fight back. She said she felt the weight of one of her attackers on her body, and had bruises on her arms from being held down, a bump on her head and other injuries, according to police reports.

“I knew that I had been knocked out,” Greene-Placentia told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Greene-Placentia, 52, is a Democrat who is challenging incumbent Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh for the 8th Congressional District seat representing parts of metro Phoenix that are reliably red. She said she told her husband and campaign staff about the mid-August attack in Sun City days after it happened. The Phoenix New Times first reported on it Wednesday.

Greene-Placentia told the AP she was disgusted that two men took control of her body and she had no say in it. She said she decided to speak out publicly when she realized she was telling voters she would advocate for them when she was not advocating for herself.

“My takeaway is that I have a lot more empathy and understanding of why so many women don’t come forward,” she said. “And, and I’m hoping that I can encourage them.”

Greene-Placentia said she couldn’t recall many details of the Aug. 14 assault, including the exact location or a description of the men, though she said one wore black boots and had small feet. She told investigators one of the men used an expletive to describe her, and she believes he referenced her political party.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on its investigation of the attack.

Greene-Placentia is a former long-haul trucker and later ran a small transportation company, according to her campaign.

In a social media post supporting Democrat Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 run for the presidency, Greene-Placentia called herself a former Republican and a “never Trumper,” and said she voted Libertarian in 2016. Greene-Placentia later became more engaged in Arizona Democratic politics.

She said she often put up and repaired campaign signs overnight because it was cooler than the blistering summer days and there was less traffic.

Arizona Democratic Party treasurer Greg Freeman said he got a call from Greene-Placentia, a friend who ran his 2024 campaign for a county assessor, the morning of Aug. 17. She told him she had been sexually assaulted by two men, Freeman said, and he could tell she wasn’t ready to go to the police or share it publicly.

“Obviously she was processing it on the phone,” Freeman said. “She was just in shock. She was just horrified by what happened.”

Greene-Placentia said she wishes she had called police immediately and gone to the hospital. After the attack, she took multiple showers and washed the clothes she was wearing, police reports state.

The embarrassment and anger made it hard for her to come forward, she said. She reported the attack to police in late August.

Billeaud and Yu write for the Associated Press.

DAKAR, Senegal — In Miami, Daniela Fuentes styled hair for clients and performed in drag at a nightclub called Azúcar. She wore her blond wig in public and dressed as the woman she had known herself to be since adolescence in Cuba.

Now, more than 6,000 miles away in the Central African Republic, she wears men’s clothes, lowers her voice and tries not to draw attention to the breasts she developed after beginning hormone treatment as a teenager. As part of U.S. efforts to deport people to countries other than their own, authorities sent her Aug. 29 to a place where she has no ties and where advocacy groups have reported arbitrary detention, torture, and other rights violations of sexual and gender minorities.

“Everything is difficult here because I have to hide who I am,” said Fuentes, a 32-year-old transgender woman living on a compound she rarely leaves, sharing a room with four Cuban men also deported from the U.S. “I don’t know this place, the people or the language, and I have no idea what will happen to me.”

The Central African Republic — one of the world’s poorest countries, a place with a history of conflict that the U.S. State Department advises American travelers to avoid — is one of at least 12 African nations that signed agreements to accept “third-country” deportations, a policy the U.S. Supreme Court last month allowed to continue, at least temporarily.

In the Central African Republic — where transgender people have little to no legal protections and are marginalized in much of society — Fuentes dons her wig only in the privacy of her bathroom. She described disguising herself as protection, first in U.S. detention and now in a country she first heard of when she was already headed there on a deportation flight.

“My whole life, my whole identity, was taken away from me,” Fuentes said.

Public records say a judge ordered Fuentes to leave the U.S. but offer no other information. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not reply to emailed questions.

Tens of thousands of people have been deported to “third countries”

Fuentes’ compound in the capital, Bangui, is an apartment complex where the government houses male deportees.

Fuentes said she can leave but that officials have advised her and others to avoid it — they have no identification, which could lead to issues with the police. It also means they can’t work, she said, and she’s waiting on travel documents that would allow her to leave the country. The International Organization for Migration, an agency associated with the United Nations, has provided food, and the migrants say they’ve crowdsourced for donations to buy groceries.

The U.S. — via agreements often not made public — has deported about 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries that aren’t their own, the vast majority to Mexico, according to a tally by Third Country Deportation Watch, a partnership of Refugees International and Human Rights First. The U.S. has not released numbers or details.

From January 2025 to August 2026, more than 500 were sent to countries in Africa, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday — including at least 12 people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and were deported to places that criminalize same-sex relations or public same-sex romantic conduct. Some advocates say the number is likely higher.

“These are not bureaucratic errors or isolated incidents,” said Bridget Crawford, of the group Immigration Equality. “They are the predictable result of policies that purposefully abandon our legal and moral obligation to protect LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing persecution.”

The U.S. government says the policy is lawful and that receiving governments provide assurances deportees won’t be persecuted or tortured.

Daniela Fuentes says ICE detained her with men before deportation

Fuentes grew up in La Lisa, on Havana’s outskirts, and said she understood from childhood that she was different. She began living as a woman in adolescence and started taking hormones at 18.

She ran a salon from her home, coloring and cutting hair. She said she was harassed because of her gender identity and attacked at least twice, leaving scars on her arm and head. Police also questioned her about operating a private business, she said — though housefront businesses are common in the area.

In 2023, Fuentes sold her home and left amid a deepening economic crisis and a crackdown on dissent — even as Cuba, one of Latin America’s most progressive countries for LGBTQ+ rights, adopted new inclusion laws. Making her way to the U.S., she said, she presented as a man traveling through Central America; she believed it was safer.

After seven months in Mexico, she said, she entered the U.S. through Texas via CBP One, a President Joe Biden-era online appointment system that allowed migrants to live in the country for two years on humanitarian grounds. Then she went to Miami.

There, she began living openly as a woman again. She found work styling hair and performed at Azúcar. Though she lacked permanent legal status, Fuentes said Miami offered something she’d rarely experienced: the freedom to move through daily life as herself.

That ended when officers encountered her outside a motel. Fuentes said they learned she had missed an immigration court hearing in Texas. She said she asked that the case be moved to Florida but received no response.

Fuentes said she was taken into custody and later placed in immigration detention with men. Officials confiscated her wig and gave her a male detainee’s uniform, she said.

Such treatment is in line with a January 2025 executive order directing officials to exclude transgender women from women’s prisons and detention centers.

“When I learned that they were going to put me with men, I almost fainted,” Fuentes said.

Deportees said they boarded a flight without knowing the destination

Fuentes was held at two detention facilities in Florida, then transferred to Texas. When armed officers arrived there, she said, she suspected she was facing deportation, but they didn’t reveal she was being sent to Africa until about five hours into the flight.

Other deportees on the flight told AP they also weren’t told the destination until they were on the plane. Dozens have been sent to the Central African Republic, including an Iranian woman facing persecution in her home country and an Afghan whose brothers worked with the U.S. military.

Fuentes said she does not understand why she was sent to Africa rather than Cuba. She told AP she has no lawyer.

The U.S. does repatriate Cuban citizens, as part of agreements to resume deportation flights in 2023, despite tensions in relations between the countries. Charter flights have arrived in Havana regularly.

Yasmany Moreno, another Cuban deportee in Bangui, said that upon arriving, the group had no visas or documents establishing their legal status in the country. Officials spoke of providing assistance for 90 days, he said, but the deportees didn’t know what would happen afterward or where they would live.

Several told AP their longer-term status remained unclear and that U.S. authorities had taken their identity documents.

A policy officer at the Central African Republic’s Foreign Ministry said the deportees are in “good hands” and are being monitored by the International Organization for Migration. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The U.S. this year committed to $85 million in funding to IOM for Central African Republic operations including “assistance to migrants” and “community stabilization.”

IOM says migrants can seek asylum in the country, request assistance to return home or get help traveling to another place they’re authorized to enter. It referred questions about the deportees’ status and individual cases such as Fuentes’ to Central African Republic officials. A government spokesperson didn’t reply to phone calls and text messages seeking comment.

Human Rights Watch’s report says some people deported to third countries face detention, abuse and the prospect of persecution. Eswatini has held deportees in a maximum-security prison without charges. Equatorial Guinea has held them against their will at a hotel owned by the president’s family.

“Several of these African governments are not only complicit in U.S. abuses but have violated the human rights of these deported people themselves,” Michael Garcia Bochenek, of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Fuentes and other deportees say they can’t work, with most days spent at the compound

Fuentes said the Cuban men in her room know she is a woman and look out for her. She rarely feels safe enough to leave. Once, at a supermarket, workers pointed at her breasts and initially refused to sell her fruit, she said. Other people in Bangui have mocked her and pointed at her.

“My personal appearance is awful,” she said. “I look like a different human being.”

Moreno described restrictions on the group’s movements, saying officers accompanied them to the market and on occasional outings but restricted them from going out at night.

Fuentes and Moreno said they have no passports or other identification and cannot work. Most days, Fuentes remains at the compound, looking at her phone and waiting for travel documents.

She said Cuba has agreed to accept her return — a Cuban embassy document shows she is authorized.

But Fuentes said she hopes to seek asylum elsewhere, possibly Canada.

“The harassment and economic hardship that caused me to flee still remain,” she said.

Banchereau writes for the Associated Press. Jean Fernand Koena in Bangui, Central African Republic; Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis; and Cristiana Mesquita in Havana contributed to this report.

Oct. 8, 2026 10:14 AM PT

ATHENS, Greece — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio flatly refused to comment on a new report alleging that U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle engaged in improper and possibly illegal conduct before taking up her post.

Rubio told reporters that he would not discuss the allegations contained in a Wall Street Journal story that said Guilfoyle had asked a donor and supporter of President Trump to pay a $100,000 credit card bill just before her confirmation hearing, promising him access to administration officials if he did.

He spoke before leaving Greece, where he delivered a speech calling for European countries to return to what he described as their civilizational roots.

Rubio said he was aware of The Wall Street Journal’s report, which was published late Wednesday, but had no idea if it was true and he would not address it.

“You guys walk around thinking that because some source told you something and you reported it, it’s the gospel. It’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel for me. That’s not the way we do things,” he said at the foot of his plane as Guilfoyle, who was there to see him depart Greece, looked on.

At a joint news conference with the Greek foreign minister on Wednesday, Rubio said he would not address the allegations while visiting a foreign country, but added, “Suffice it to say our embassy here is doing a great job. Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador here.”

The top two Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees have called for an investigation into Guilfoyle, but Rubio would not say if he was prepared to open one.

Congressional Democrats already were looking into claims reported last month by the Wall Street Journal that Guilfoyle acted improperly while serving as the top U.S. envoy to Greece.

The Journal reported that Guilfoyle told guests at a reception that the U.S. could undermine the Greek government if it chose to, promoted the business interests of one particular Greek construction and energy company, and allowed its lobbyist into private diplomatic meetings.

Guilfoyle, a former Fox News Channel host and California prosecutor who was once engaged to Trump’s son Donald Jr., has denied any wrongdoing and Rubio has defended her before.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Six years after he was released from a California immigrant detention facility, Wilfredo Gonzalez Mena has to sleep with his back propped up by pillows, nearly in a seated position, to avoid gasping for air.

He blames his lasting medical issues on the 10 months he spent in custody until September 2020 at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, during which guards sprayed him and fellow detainees nearly around the clock with a concentrated disinfectant meant to guard against COVID-19.

Now Gonzalez Mena, who is one of six named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2023 over the use of the cleaning solution, is expected to get a six-figure payout as part of a proposed settlement in the case, which was given preliminary approval on Sept. 25 by a federal judge in Riverside. The settlement applies to around 2,700 people detained at the Adelanto facility between March 11 and Sept. 30, 2020, who were exposed to the disinfectant called HDQ Neutral.

“When you least expected it, you would feel the mist,” Gonzalez Mena said. “They would spray us like we were animals.”

The Adelanto facility is operated by the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison corporation that has faced criticism for years over conditions at its immigrant detention facilities. The company has also pushed back against California laws seeking to increase oversight of its facilities and inform the public about health and safety shortcomings.

Under the settlement, GEO Group and Spartan Chemical Co. Inc., the company that manufactures HDQ Neutral, acknowledged that HDQ Neutral — which is classified as a pesticide — can cause symptoms including blistering, chemical burns, vomiting, permanent eye damage, and damage to the respiratory tract, throat and stomach.

Those findings can now be used by class members who weren’t named plaintiffs and may pursue their own lawsuits, the settlement says.

Neither GEO Group nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment. After the lawsuit was filed, GEO Group denied its allegations and said cleaning products are used safely and securely, in accordance with the manufacturer’s guidelines and sanitation standards, at all detention centers.

At the time, a GEO Group spokesperson called the allegations “part of a radical politically motivated campaign to attack ICE contractors, abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention.”

The company later swapped HDQ Neutral for a different cleaning product.

Lawyers from the Los Angeles-based civil rights nonprofit Trial Impact Project who are representing the former detainees called the settlement a victory.

Executive Director Sara Haji referenced other pending lawsuits addressing allegations such as medical neglect, retaliation and substandard food and water. Each one is a different lens into the same problem, she said.

“When a company like GEO settles instead of defending itself at trial, and when it admits that the pesticide it sprayed everywhere can cause serious health problems, it should cause us all to sit up and pay attention to what detained people have been telling us about the everyday cruelty of immigration detention,” Haji said.

The lawsuit alleged that GEO Group engaged in a “months-long poisoning” of detainees when its employees sprayed HDQ Neutral inside the facility. Before the pandemic, staffers had used it as a cleaning product. But as COVID-19 spread, they began spraying the concentrated solution across wide areas, “directly into the air and on all types of surfaces,” the lawsuit said.

Detained immigrants quickly began experiencing the effects, the lawsuit claimed, including nosebleeds, headaches and dizziness.

Spartan Chemical warns that inappropriate exposure can cause the types of effects detainees experienced. Long-term exposure has been linked to asthma and, in laboratory studies on animals, reproductive issues and birth defects.

In 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency found that GEO Group had violated federal law by misusing HDQ Neutral. The report found that staff and detainees were instructed to apply the pesticide inside the facility as often as every 30 minutes, without proper ventilation and at a dilution rate of 2 ounces per gallon of water, which is double the amount allowed for disinfectant use.

In September 2021, a federal judge ordered GEO Group to discontinue use of HDQ Neutral at the Adelanto facility, writing that it had been used “with a callous disregard for the safety of Adelanto’s detainees.”

Among the more than 100,000 pages of documents released during discovery for the lawsuit was an email from a nurse at the facility to Wendy Baca, who was acting health services administrator at the Adelanto facility for Wellpath, the company providing its medical care at the time.

The nurse wrote that patients were arriving with headaches, rashes and blisters, “we believe, due to the chemicals being used to spray.”

“Some of the officers have also reported ‘feeling burned’ after touching their skin with the same gloves that were used to handle the chemical. Please look into this so we do not endanger everyone we are trying to protect,” the nurse wrote.

Baca appeared dismissive of the nurse’s concern. She forwarded the email to GEO Group’s chief of security, asking him to look into it.

“Please also remind them not to put metal into light sockets, run with scissors, or anything usually avoided with a little common sense,” she wrote.

Mark Anthony Ferretiz, a former GEO Group cook supervisor who worked at the Adelanto facility for 14 years until March 2025, wrote in a declaration that his team was told to spray the red chemical “like Lysol.”

“I could taste the spray in my mouth when I used it, and it felt heavy in my lungs,” he wrote.

At some point, the facility’s safety manager brought men from HD Supply to talk to the staff about HDQ Neutral. After learning how often the chemical was being sprayed, one of the men told Ferretiz that it was “rat poison” and that “you’re going to kill someone like that,” he said.

Years later, former detainees such as Gonzalez Mena say they’re still living with the fallout. The former long-haul truck driver said his health deteriorated so significantly while he was detained that, afterward, he could no longer pass the required physical assessment because of his vision and breathing issues.

To make ends meet, he has turned to online resale.

“My wife says that after I was released, I didn’t go back to being the same person,” he said. “I’ve had depression and I often dream that I am there, in that place, and I want to get out.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump says his administration will make one-time payments of $90 per person to help more than 20 million Medicare enrollees pay for their Part B premiums. It will cost about $2 billion.

Less than one-third of all Medicare recipients are eligible for the payments, which are expected to be sent out this week. Not eligible are roughly 35 million Medicare Advantage enrollees, millions of people with disabilities who get premium assistance and low-income Medicare recipients.

The election-year promise that the Republican president made over the weekend comes as the Nov. 3 midterms are fast approaching, with the cost of living and healthcare expenses among the top issues for voters.

Some questions and answers about the payouts:

Who will benefit?

Some 20.8 million people in the original Medicare Part B who are living in the United States, not receiving premium assistance from Medicaid or not paying an income-related monthly adjusted amount.

Medicare Advantage enrollees, who make up more than half of the eligible 64.2 million Medicare beneficiaries, will not receive a payment, according to KFF, a healthcare research nonprofit. Nor will 12 million low-income older adults and people with disabilities who get premium assistance.

The Part B program covers expenses such as doctor’s visits, ambulance services and lab tests. Total monthly costs generally start at about $200 and vary with income.

Allison Schuster, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration “is enabling Americans to take control of their health by putting money directly back in the hands of Medicare patients.”

When will the payments go out and how will they be disbursed?

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website, eligible beneficiaries will receive one $90 rebate this month, with most getting a direct deposit on or around Friday. Others will receive a paper check from the Treasury Department later in October.

Juliette Cubanski, director of KFF’s program on Medicare policy, said the payment will be automatic.

“As far as a benefit goes, people don’t have to call or sign up — it’s just money they receive directly, but not everybody on Medicare will receive this money.”

A White House fact sheet says people can call (800) MEDICARE ([800] 633-4227) to check their eligibility for the premium rebate. To check on payment status, people should call the Social Security Administration at (800) 772-1213.

What is the source of the money?

Payments will come out of the Medicare Improvement Fund created by Congress in 2008 and intended to make improvements to the Medicare fee-for-service program.

The fund was created to improve program management and conduct oversight of contracts and contractors, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but its purpose has expanded after various legislative changes.

This is not the first time the fund has been used.

President Obama’s administration, along with Congress, redirected $20 billion to expand healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

But under Trump, it is the first time that the fund has been used to directly pay recipients.

What are critics of the plan saying?

Critics of Trump’s promise characterize the $90 payments as a preelection stunt designed to sway voters rather than address structural problems in healthcare costs and administration.

The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, said in a statement that “this is another desperate attempt by a failed president to escape Americans’ revulsion with his failed agenda, amounting to one tank of Trump-inflated gas.”

Trump recently promised $500 rebate checks to an estimated 1 million Obamacare enrollees across 30 states whom the White House alleged were overcharged by the Biden administration for some fees.

Cubanski said the Medicare rebate payments were being doled out when Americans were feeling the bite of higher food, energy and gas prices. Surging healthcare costs are only compounding those pressure, she said.

“This might be helpful for people but it might not go very far.”

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.