DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — President Trump’s comments Thursday suggesting the United States will restart its testing of nuclear weapons upends decades of American policy in regards to the bomb, but come as Washington’s rivals have been expanding and testing their nuclear-capable arsenals.
Nuclear weapons policy, once thought to be a relic of the Cold War, increasingly has come to the fore as Russia has made repeated atomic threats to both the U.S. and Europe during its war on Ukraine. Moscow also acknowledged this week testing a nuclear-powered-and-capable cruise missile called the Burevestnik, code-named Skyfall by NATO, and a nuclear-armed underwater drone.
China is building more ground-based nuclear missile silos. Meanwhile, North Korea just unveiled a new intercontinental ballistic missile it plans to test, part of a nuclear-capable arsenal likely able to reach the continental U.S.
The threat is starting to bleed into popular culture as well, most recently with director Kathryn Bigelow ‘s new film “A House of Dynamite.”
But what does Trump’s announcement mean and how would it affect what’s happening now with nuclear tensions? Here’s what to know.
Trump’s comments came in a post on his Truth Social website just before meeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In it, Trump noted other countries testing weapons and wrote: “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
The president’s post raised immediate questions. America’s nuclear arsenal is maintained by the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within it — not the Defense Department. The Energy Department has overseen testing of nuclear weapons since its creation in 1977. Two other agencies before it — not the Defense Department — conducted tests.
Trump also claimed the U.S. “has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country.” Russia is believed to have 5,580 nuclear warheads, according to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, while the U.S. has 5,225. Those figures include so-called “retired” warheads waiting to be dismantled.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute further breaks the warhead total down, with the U.S. having 1,770 deployed warheads with 1,930 in reserve. Russia has 1,718 deployed warheads and 2,591 in reserve.
The two countries account for nearly 90% of the world’s atomic warheads.
U.S. last carried out a nuclear test in 1992
From the time America conducted its “Trinity” nuclear bomb detonation in 1945 to 1992, the U.S. detonated 1,030 atomic bombs in tests — the most of any country. Those figures do not include the two nuclear weapons America used against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
The first American tests were atmospheric, but they were then moved underground to limit nuclear fallout. Scientists have come to refer to such tests as “shots.” The last such “shot,” called Divider as part of Operation Julin, took place Sept. 23, 1992, at the Nevada National Security Sites, a sprawling compound some 65 miles from Las Vegas.
America halted its tests for a couple of reasons. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. also signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1996. There have been tests since the treaty, however — by India, North Korea and Pakistan, the world’s newest nuclear powers. The United Kingdom and France also have nuclear weapons, while Israel long has been suspected of possessing atomic bombs.
But broadly speaking, the U.S. also had decades of data from tests, allowing it to use computer modeling and other techniques to determine whether a weapon would successfully detonate. Every president since Barack Obama has backed plans to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, whose maintenance and upgrading will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The U.S. relies on the so-called “nuclear triad” — ground-based silos, aircraft-carried bombs and nuclear-tipped missiles in submarines at sea — to deter others from launching their weapons against America.
Restarting testing raises additional questions
If the U.S. restarted nuclear weapons testing, it isn’t immediately clear what the goal would be. Nonproliferation experts have warned any scientific objective likely would be eclipsed by the backlash to a test — and possibly be a starting gun for other major nuclear powers to begin their own widespread testing.
“Restarting the U.S. nuclear testing program could be one of the most consequential policy actions the Trump administration undertakes — a U.S. test could set off an uncontrolled chain of events, with other countries possibly responding with their own nuclear tests, destabilizing global security, and accelerating a new arms race,” experts warned in a February article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
“The goal of conducting a fast-tracked nuclear test can only be political, not scientific. … It would give Russia, China and other nuclear powers free rein to restart their own nuclear testing programs, essentially without political and economic fallout.”
Any future U.S. test likely would take place in Nevada at the testing sites, but a lot of work likely would need to go into the sites to prepare them given it’s been over 30 years since the last test. A series of slides made for a presentation at Los Alamos National Laboratories in 2018 laid out the challenges, noting that in the 1960s the city of Mercury, Nevada — at the testing grounds — had been the second-largest city in Nevada.
On average, 20,000 people had been on site to organize and prepare for the tests. That capacity has waned in the decades since.
“One effects shot would require from two to four years to plan and execute,” the presentation reads. “These were massive undertakings.”
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Trump described his face-to-face with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday as a roaring success, saying he would cut tariffs on China, while Beijing had agreed to allow the export of rare earth elements and start buying American soybeans.
The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that the U.S. would lower tariffs implemented earlier this year as punishment on China for its selling of chemicals used to make fentanyl from 20% to 10%. That brings the total combined tariff rate on China down from 57% to 47%
“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with ten being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Trump said. “I think it was a 12.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China agreed to purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually for the next three years, starting with 12 million metric tons from now to January. U.S. soybean exports to China, a huge market for them, had come to a standstill in the trade dispute.
“So you know, our great soybean farmers, who the Chinese used as political pawns, that’s off the table, and they should prosper in the years to come,” Bessent told Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.”
Trump said that he would go to China in April and Xi would come to the U.S. “some time after that.” The president said they also discussed the export of more advanced computer chips to China, saying that Nvidia would be in talks with Chinese officials.
Trump said he could sign a trade deal with China “pretty soon.”
Xi said Washington and Beijing would work to finalize their agreements to provide “peace of mind” to both countries and the rest of the world, according to a report on the meeting distributed by state media.
“Both sides should take the long-term perspective into account, focusing on the benefits of cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation,” he said.
Sources of tension remain
Despite Trump’s optimism after a 100-minute meeting with Xi in South Korea, there continues to be the potential for major tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Both nations are seeking dominant places in manufacturing, developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, and shaping world affairs like Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs since returning to the White House for a second term, combined with China’s retaliatory limits on exports of rare earth elements, gave the meeting newfound urgency. There is a mutual recognition that neither side wants to risk blowing up the world economy in ways that could jeopardize their own country’s fortunes.
When the two were seated at the start of the meeting, Xi read prepared remarks that stressed a willingness to work together despite differences.
“Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other,” he said through a translator. “It is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have frictions now and then.”
There was a slight difference in translation as China’s Xinhua News Agency reported Xi as telling Trump that having some differences is inevitable.
Finding ways to lower the temperature
The leaders met in Busan, South Korea, a port city about 47 miles south from Gyeongju, the main venue for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
In the days leading up to the meeting, U.S. officials signaled that Trump did not intend to make good on a recent threat to impose an additional 100% import tax on Chinese goods, and China showed signs it was willing to relax its export controls on rare earths and also buy soybeans from America.
Officials from both countries met earlier this week in Kuala Lumpur to lay the groundwork for their leaders. Afterward, China’s top trade negotiator Li Chenggang said they had reached a “preliminary consensus,” a statement affirmed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said there was “ a very successful framework.”
Shortly before the meeting on Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the meeting would be the “G2,” a recognition of America and China’s status as the world’s biggest economies. The Group of Seven and Group of 20 are other forums of industrialized nations.
But while those summits often happen at luxury spaces, this meeting took place in humbler surroundings: Trump and Xi met in a small gray building with a blue roof on a military base adjacent to Busan’s international airport.
The anticipated detente has given investors and businesses caught between the two nations a sense of relief. The U.S. stock market has climbed on the hopes of a trade framework coming out of the meeting.
Pressure points remain for both U.S. and China
Trump has outward confidence that the grounds for a deal are in place, but previous negotiations with China this year in Geneva, Switzerland and London had a start-stop quality to them. The initial promise of progress has repeatedly given way to both countries seeking a better position against the other.
“The proposed deal on the table fits the pattern we’ve seen all year: short-term stabilization dressed up as strategic progress,” said Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Both sides are managing volatility, calibrating just enough cooperation to avert crisis while the deeper rivalry endures.”
The U.S. and China have each shown they believe they have levers to pressure the other, and the past year has demonstrated that tentative steps forward can be short-lived.
For Trump, that pressure comes from tariffs.
China had faced new tariffs this year totaling 30%, of which 20% were tied to its role in fentanyl production. But the tariff rates have been volatile. In April, he announced plans to jack the rate on Chinese goods to 145%, only to abandon those plans as markets recoiled.
Then, on Oct. 10, Trump threatened a 100% import tax because of China’s rare earth restrictions. That figure, including past tariffs, would now be 47% “effective immediately,” Trump told reporters on Thursday.
Xi has his own chokehold on the world economy because China is the top producer and processor of the rare earth minerals needed to make fighter jets, robots, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.
China had tightened export restrictions on Oct. 9, repeating a cycle in which each nation jockeys for an edge only to back down after more trade talks.
What might also matter is what happens directly after their talks. Trump plans to return to Washington, while Xi plans to stay on in South Korea to meet with regional leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which officially begins on Friday.
“Xi sees an opportunity to position China as a reliable partner and bolster bilateral and multilateral relations with countries frustrated by the U.S. administration’s tariff policy,” said Jay Truesdale, a former State Department official who is CEO of TD International, a risk and intelligence advisory firm.
Boak, Megerian and Schiefelbein write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Tokyo and Megerian reported from Busan, South Korea. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Seung Min Kim and Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
In recent years, it’s become abundantly clear this region’s war on smog hinges on the adoption electric vehicles. And, for the first time in a generation, we may be headed in the wrong direction.
If you’ve followed my coverage, you probably know that Southern California’s persistently sunny climate and mountains work together to form and trap smog over our region. And, that the leading source of smog-forming pollution is the same today as it was decades ago: gas-guzzling cars and trucks.
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State regulators have made tremendous progress in the last few decades when it comes to curbing tailpipe pollution; California, for example, was the first state to adopt engine emission standards and mandate catalytic converters, regulations that were later adopted nationwide. But Southern California has yet to achieve any federal air quality standards for smog.
And now, electric vehicles and hybrids face significant headwinds due to recent policy changes under the Trump administration.
Since President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has successfully campaigned to invalidate several California auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that would’ve required 35% of new vehicles that automakers supply to California car dealerships to be zero-emission or plug-in hybrid starting next year.
Separately, Trump’s budget bill terminated federal incentives at the end of September that made zero-emission vehicles more cost-competitive with gas cars. As I recently wrote, California saw record-high sales numbers of EVs and other clean vehicles as consumers scrambled to dealerships to take advantage of expiring deals.
But now, without these two crucial policy levers driving EV adoption, the industry is at an inflection point.
A new EV costs about $8,000 more on average than a gas car, according to Kelley Blue Book.
The overall cost of ownership for EVs can still be cheaper than for gas cars due to lower fuel and maintenance costs. However, the question is, will Americans accept a higher upfront price tag in exchange for fewer costs — and less pollution — down the road?
The auto industry doesn’t pivot on a dime. Car lineups are designed, produced and released years in advance. But, in the last year, amid a torrent of policy decisions coming from the Trump White House, car companies have announced many moves that signal a retreat from some zero-emission vehicles:
Acura discontinued its electric ZDX after just releasing one model year.
Ford scrapped its forthcoming all-electric three-row SUV program.
General Motors discontinued the Brightdrop van, an electric delivery van.
Ram pivoted from releasing an all-electric pickup truck to a plug-in hybrid model.
Stellantis shelved its hydrogen fuel cell program for commercial vans.
Volkswagen canceled the release of its ID.7 sedan in North America.
The loss of new or forthcoming zero-emission models is disheartening, said Joel Levin, executive director of Plug In America, a nonprofit that hosts events to advocate for more EVs. But, he added, most of these were fledgling models that did not make up a large share of sales.
“I think it’s that people are just being more selective about what they’re bringing to market, and are focusing in on the vehicles that they really feel like have legs,” Levin said. “So it’s a loss. I’m sad about it. But I don’t think that it’s an existential threat to the market.”
In the last decade, Levin has seen the national market share of EVs and plug-in hybrids compared with overall car sales grow from a fraction of a percent in 2015 to roughly 10% in 2024. In California, that number was even higher, at 25%.
Levin said that can largely be attributed to advancement of battery technology, which has allowed for drastically longer range. But EVs also offer technological amenities that gas counterparts do not.
“Ford has advertised how you can use your pickup truck as backup power for your house if the power goes out,” Levin said. “Or if you’re a contractor or rancher and you need to use power tools somewhere remote away from your house, you can just plug them into your truck. If you’re camping, you can set up your electric kitchen, or you can watch movies, or you can charge your equipment.”
Those features may help win over some drivers. But experts say government regulations are necessary to achieve California’s air quality and climate targets.
California is suing the federal government and Trump administration, alleging they illegally overturned the state’s auto emission standards. The state Air Resources Board has also proposed several ideas to boost EV sales, such as providing free access to toll roads to EV and hybrid drivers.
That said, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently ruled out one of the most powerful tools at his disposal to promote a clean fleet of vehicles in California, as he reneged on his commitment to restore a state rebate program for EV buyers that he had previously vowed to put into effect if Trump eliminated federal incentives.
Dan Sperling, a former CARB board member and UC Davis professor, said the state might consider a “feebate” program in which the state could impose fees on the sales of the most polluting cars, which would then be used to fund rebates for EV and hybrid purchases.
Meanwhile, as consumer sentiment and government policies vacillate in the U.S., demand internationally continues to grow. And American automakers will need to keep investing in EVs if they want to stay globally competitive. Sperling, who took my call while traveling to Paris, said he noticed Chinese EVs throughout the city.
“In China, 50% of all their vehicles that they sell are electric vehicles,” Sperling said. “They sell more electric vehicles in China than total cars sold in the U.S.”
“The vehicle industry is an international industry and so they can’t afford to just give up on electric vehicles, because that means they’re giving up on the rest of the world.”
Air news this week
Ten years after the disastrous Aliso Canyon gas leak, my colleague Hayley Smith spoke with residents about their recollections of the dangerous release of some 120,000 tons of methane and other toxic chemicals near Porter Ranch. Despite persistent environmental concerns, regulators have voted to keep the gas storage facility online, citing concerns over energy demand.
A judge ordered a Watts recycling facility to permanently shut down and pay $2 million in restitution and fines after the company and its owners pleaded no contest to illegally dumping hazardous waste that was polluting a nearby high school.
Environmental groups recently sued the Trump administration for lifting restrictions on dozens of chemical manufacturing plants, according to InsideClimate News reporter Keerti Gopal.
LAist’s AirTalk host Larry Mantle hosted a great conversation on how Los Angeles became the nation’s smog capital. He and Chip Jacobs, the author of “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles,” recounted the region’s first brush with toxic haze in the 1940s and pollution’s lasting legacy in Southern California.
Associated Press reporters Sheikh Saaliq and Sibi Arasu reported that officials in India are undertaking cloud-seeding experiments as a way to clear air pollution in New Delhi. The controversial approach involves using aircraft to spray chemicals into clouds above the city in hopes of triggering rainfall that would suppress the smog.
One more thing in climate news …
Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest hurricanes recorded to date in the Atlantic, killed more than 20 people as it barreled through Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, according to the Washington Post. The proliferation of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels undoubtedly contributed to the historically powerful storm. Because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and foster more intense storms, Melissa may be a harbinger of what’s to come.
Making matters worse, Bloomberg reporters Leslie Kaufman and Fabiano Maisonnave report that wealthy countries are not giving poorer nations the climate adaptation funding they need, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme. As climate risks in many of these countries increase, funding to adapt to climate change is shrinking.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more air quality and climate news, follow Tony Briscoe at @_tonybriscoe on X.
Paramount Chairman David Ellison’s latest offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery contained a twist:
Should Paramount, backed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, pull off the purchase, Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav could stay on to help lead the combined enterprise.
“They’re sweetening the pot,” Paul Hardart, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said of the Ellison family. “It just shows all the little arrows in their quiver they’re using to try to push this deal.”
David Ellison’ unexpected olive branch to Zaslav was contained in a letter this month to Warner Bros. Discovery’s board that offered $58 billion in cash and stock for the entire company. The move underscores the family’s determination to win the entertainment company that includes HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. film and television studios — and an obstacle in their path.
After hustling for decades to get to the big stage, Zaslav, 65, isn’t ready to relinquish the reins. He’s eager to prove critics wrong and complete a turnaround after three painful years of setbacks and cost cuts to reduce the company’s mountain of debt.
Warner Bros. Discovery board members, including Zaslav, have unanimously voted to reject Paramount’s three bids, viewing them as too low and not in the best interest of shareholders, according to two people close to the company who were not authorized to comment.
The board supports Zaslav’s desire to forge ahead with a planned split of the company next spring. But it also has opened the auction to other potential suitors, which is expected to lead to the firm changing hands for the third time in a decade.
Representatives of Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount declined to comment.
David Ellison’s audacious offer is being guaranteed by his father, Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest man with a net worth that exceeds $340 billion. The Ellisons’ proposal includes paying 80% cash to Warner shareholders and the rest in stock, according to two people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to comment. The most recent offer was $23.50 a share.
The Ellisons began their campaign last month, just weeks after David Ellison’s Skydance Media, along with RedBird Capital Partners, picked up the keys to Paramount, which includes CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon and the Melrose Avenue film studio, which has been depleted by decades of underinvestment.
The proposed addition of the more vibrant Warner Bros. would give the Ellisons an unparalleled entertainment portfolio with DC Comics including Superman, “Top Gun,” Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, “The Matrix” and “The Gilded Age.”
The family would control streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+, nearly three dozen cable channels, including HGTV, Food Network and TBS, and two legacy news operations — CNN and CBS News.
It would also accelerate the trend of uber billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, of owning prominent news, entertainment and social media platforms. Larry Ellison also is part of a U.S.-based consortium lined up by President Trump to buy TikTok from its Chinese owners.
“If a trade deal with China is imminent, and TikTok would be aligned, then it would create a new media colossus, the likes of which we haven’t seen,” said veteran executive Jonathan Miller, chief executive of the investment firm Integrated Media Co.
Paramount is in talks to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times; Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
The drama is unfolding as Paramount on Wednesday slashed 1,000 workers in the first round of cuts since Ellison took over. A second wave of layoffs — affecting another 1,000 workers — is expected in the coming weeks, helping fulfill a promise made to Wall Street by Ellison and Redbird to reduce expenses by more than $2 billion.
Combining with Warner Bros. would bring more layoffs, analysts said, and a potential hollowing out of a historic studio.
“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” the Writers Guild of America West, said last week in a statement in opposition to the proposed unification. “Combining Warner Bros. with Paramount or another major studio or streamer would be a disaster for writers, for consumers, and for competition.”
Critics point to a long list of media merger misfires, including the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger a quarter century ago. Some critics contend Walt Disney Co.’s $71-billion purchase of much of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment holdings didn’t live up to expectations, and AT&T whiffed its $85-billion deal for Time Warner, handing it to Zaslav’s Discovery four years later for $43 billion.
The New York native, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, had spent 16 years running the Discovery cable channel group, a respectable business, but one that lacked Hollywood flash.
Zaslav grew up on the fringe of New York City, in Ramapo, N.Y., where he’d been a promising tennis player who proudly wore his athletic gear to middle school. Tennis was his identity — until he started getting beat by players he used to whip.
Zaslav’s coach sat him down, bluntly saying he wasn’t putting in the work.
“I vowed that day I would never be outworked again,” Zaslav said during a 2023 commencement address to Boston University graduates. Underlings have long marveled at his indefatigable work ethic.
The speech was meant to be his triumphant return to his alma mater. Zaslav had finally made it to Hollywood, where he was now holding court in an exquisite corner office that had belonged to studio founder Jack Warner.
Zaslav had big plans to turn around Warner Bros. But, in Boston, he suffered a beatdown.
The Writers Guild of America had just gone on strike against his and other Hollywood studios. Protesters heckled Zaslav. Students booed. A plane flew overhead, waving a banner that read: “David Zaslav Pay Your Writers.”
He had assumed control a year earlier, in April 2022, just as Wall Street soured on media companies that were spending wildly to build streaming services to compete with Netflix.
Zaslav inherited a venture bleeding billions of dollars to get into streaming. The merger itself saddled the company with $55 billion of debt. Warner’s stock plummeted.
He and his team spent the first few years slashing divisions, canceling TV programs and contracts, and shelving movies. To further reduce expenses, the company laid off thousands of workers. Hollywood soon viewed Zaslav with derision.
It didn’t help that Zaslav has long been one of the most handsomely compensated executives in America.
There were high-profile stumbles, including jettisoning staff of the tiny Turner Classic Movies channel and an ill-conceived rebrand of its streamer to “Max” before changing the name back to HBO Max.
“The Warner Bros. Discovery merger was a well-intended failure,” Hardart said. “The cable subscriber base shrank at a faster rate than most people had forecast. … Thousands have lost their jobs, the HBO brand has been reimagined and reimagined, films have been mothballed and the future of the Warner Bros. studio is today uncertain.”
Warner Bros. Discovery paid down $20 billion in debt, but $35 billion remains. The debt load has nearly suffocated the company, making it a vulnerable target.
“There was a lot of fixing that David Zaslav and his team had to do,” Bank of America media analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich said in a recent interview. “It’s been three years of incredibly heavy lifting — but that’s pretty much done now.”
In a note to investors last week, Ehrlich wrote Warner’s strong franchises, including DC Comics, and its voluminous library make it “an extremely attractive potential acquisition target,” one that could fetch $30 a share. Her firm carries a “buy” rating on the stock.
Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav and AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey shake hands on May 17, 2021, in New York City.
(Preston Bradford / Discovery)
Last summer, Zaslav announced plans to split the company in two halves.
Zaslav would run Warner Bros., which would consist of the Burbank studios, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service. Longtime lieutenant Gunnar Wiedenfels would helm Discovery Global, made up of the firm’s international businesses and basic cable channels, which face an uncertain future in the streaming era.
Those who know Zaslav believe he’s working to stave off the Ellison takeover, in part, because he wants the chance to bring the company back to its glory, which would ultimately make it more valuable for its investors and prospective buyers.
For Warner management, that’s part of the rub. The Ellisons showed up just as the company was displaying signs of a turnaround, including a hot streak by Warner Bros. that includes “A Minecraft Movie,” Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” James Gunn’s “Superman,” Formula One adventure “F1: The Movie,” and horror flick “Weapons.”
Larry, from left, Megan and David Ellison attend the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “Terminator Genisys” at Dolby Theatre on June 28, 2015.
(Lester Cohen / WireImage)
Ellison’s bidding was designed to thwart Warner’s planned corporate breakup.
For now, analysts said, Zaslav and the Warner board’s current strategy is solid because they have effectively driven up the stock price, which has doubled to $21 a share since the Ellison’s interest became known in mid-September.
“They are doing the right thing,” Hardart said. “In any sale, you try to beat the bushes and get as many people interested. But at some point the board is going to have to make a decision.”
Added one investor: “They’ve gotten Paramount-Skydance to bid against itself, and that only goes so far.”
Analysts expect Philadelphia giant Comcast, owner of NBCUniversal, and potentially Netflix, Apple or Amazon to take a look at the company’s studio, library and streaming assets.
But many see the Ellison’s Skydance as having the edge.
Paramount, in its recent letter to the Warner board, argued that it was the best and most logical buyer.
“What Skydance offers WBD, in many ways, is what it offered Paramount: The ability to be aggressive and push all aspects of the business in a way that most people or companies that have less capital just can’t do,” Miller said. “They are deploying real capital, and they are being the most aggressive folks in the industry right now.”
At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.
But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.
For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels and brass scales of justice.
The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.
Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.
That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black’s 13th Edition.
But, despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” was never far from his mind.
Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”
He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.
“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.
Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.
That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”
The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise sparred over the word.
In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.
This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.
States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”
“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onstage to deliver remarks as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”
Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.
Still, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to interpretive excesses of the past.
“The words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.
Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.
“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ or ‘no, there isn’t,’ so they say ‘the dictionary made me do it.’” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it didn’t.”
Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.
The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike past presidents, who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump deployed an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and surge military forces into American cities.
Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.
Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.
As of this week, appellate courts also remain sharply divided on the evidence.
On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”
The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.
The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.
“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.
A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.
For Garner, that decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.
As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”
Tuesday evening former Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to her second sold-out crowd in Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theater as part of a book tour promoting her memoir, “107 Days.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to decide if she’ll run for president in 2028. She’s also not going to dish on her former boss, Joe Biden. And her advice for a Brown-skinned person just getting into politics? There will be many situations when you walk into a meeting room and no one looks like you. Keep your chin up, your shoulders back and remember — all of us have your back.
“All of us” referred to the cheering, sold-out crowd at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening who’d come to see the former Democratic presidential candidate speak about her new book, the election-campaign memoir “107 Days.” The chanted “Kamala!” “Kamala!” as she walked on stage. The outbursts of adoration continued for the next hour in eruptions of applause and supportive shout-outs (“We love you!”) as she spoke about everything from the need to pass Proposition 50 to how she coped with the devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Moderated by actor Kerry Washington, “A Conversation With Kamala Harris” was one of nearly 20 stops on a tour that’s already seen Harris speak in New York, London and at the Wiltern last month. Zealous attendees paid anywhere from $55 to $190 on tickets to see Harris again following “one of the wildest and most consequential campaigns in American history” (the latter is an official descriptor for her book). The memoir details her historically short run for president, the whirlwind 107 days between the time Biden withdrew from the race and Harris become the Democratic nominee to her devastating loss on Nov. 5.
Harris fans flock to the Wiltern to see Kamala speak about her book, “107 Days.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Were there any great revelations or gotcha moments on stage Tuesday evening? Not really, but that’s not what this tour is about — at least for those who chose Harris over watching Game 4 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. The former attorney general of California shared her thoughts about the current Department of Justice — a “thin-skinned president” is using it as his own personal tool of “vengeance.” She explained how her loyalties to Biden may have cost her votes, and called out the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, whose “billionaire owners pre-capitulated” to Trump when they pulled their respective editorial boards’ endorsements for Harris. She drew a big laugh when discussing the importance of parsing fact from fiction in today’s mediaverse, and made up her own example of misinformation: “Circumcisions are causing autism!” And on a more serious note, she detailed the emotional fallout she experienced after losing the election: “For months [she and her husband, Doug Emhoff] never even mentioned it.”
Criticisms of Harris’ book have centered around a frankly tired refrain that she should accept more personal accountability for the election loss as opposed to blaming the influence of outside forces. On Tuesday she appeared willing to explore those themes when she said she constantly interrogated herself on the campaign trail: Are you doing everything you can to win this election? But before she could go much deeper, Washington told her that she needed to know that we, the audience, understood she did everything she could. The crowd erupted in affirming shouts and applause.
Clearly, a book tour attended by The Converted is not going to produce headline-worthy grist, especially with an interviewer who is an admitted Harris friend and supporter. That’s what debates and media interviews are for, and this was a fan event.
And her base was thirsty. Since Harris has largely stayed out of the spotlight since last November, the audience appeared ready to relive some of the joy they felt in the brief time she was running for office, and perhaps find a glimmer of hope in dark times for those who see the current administration’s actions as anti-democratic, at best.
Before “The Conversation With Kamala Harris” kicked off at 7 p.m., attendees who spotted Harris’ husband, Emhoff, in the first few rows of the venue lined up to shake his hand and take selfies with the former second gentleman of the United States. The close access to SGOTUS was surprising, given the heightened security around political figures after violent events such as the home-invasion assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event last month. Yet the atmosphere was casual and relaxed.
Despite heightened threats of politically-motivated violence, President Trump pulled Harris’ Secret Service detail, as he has done to many of those he sees as his enemies. But as a former state office holder, Harris’ security detail Tuesday was provided by the California Highway Patrol.
The conversation lasted a little over an hour, with a few prescreened questions at the end from audience members, such as the query from an attendee who identified himself as Ramon Chavoya, a proud Latino. He asked for Harris’ advice on getting into local politics. She was the first Black and first South Asian female candidate to be chosen by either party to run for the Oval Office. Her very presence was a reminder that the face of the nation is changing, despite a rise in xenophobic movements and legislation. She advised the aspiring young politician that he would likely stand out, but that he wasn’t alone. “We’re all in the room with you,” she said, a sentiment Harris’ supporters surely understood.
Bernard Dobranski is the dean and Leon Lysaght is an associate professor of law at the University of Detroit School of Law
There is an unfortunate trend these days to further erode the distinction between law and politics. The formation and enforcement of laws is, of course, connected with the political process. On the other hand, the interpretation of the law should be divorced from the political process as much as possible. The problem is that the Constitution has, more and more, become an arena for carrying on political contests. Where proponents see little hope of legislative success, they have sought to cast their claims in constitutional molds. As a result, there are those who are more concerned with a judge’s politics than with his or her view of the law and the role of the judiciary in our form of government. What is even more alarming is the growing tendency to interpret judicial decisions in political terms that only take account of results.
The blizzard of commentary surrounding the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork for the vacancy on the Supreme Court has obscured the legitimate issues and served to focus attention on the irrelevant and unknowable. We do not and cannot know whether Bork’s heart was pure on the day he fired Archibald Cox. What we can determine is whether his conduct was within, and indeed required by, the law. We cannot know precisely how Bork, now on the U.S. Court of Appeals, will vote on a variety of issues that will eventually appear before the Supreme Court. What we can reasonably expect to understand is Bork’s opinion as to the nature of the U.S. Constitution and his approach to interpreting it.
In a 1986 article in the San Diego Law Review, Bork sets forth his views on the proper role of the judiciary and the approach that it ought to take to constitutional interpretation. He discusses the problems created by the use of a concept like the “right of privacy” as the criterion for determining the result in Griswold vs. Connecticut. “My point,” Bork says, “is simply that the level of abstraction chosen makes the application of a generalized right of privacy unpredictable.” What concerned Bork was the trend toward generalization in judicial decisions even when the Constitution is silent on an issue, and what this might lead to as a source of unstructured judicial power.
The whole tenor of Bork’s article is strongly reminiscent of the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in the Griswold case. “Privacy,” Black said, “is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things . . . .” Black’s view of the manner in which the Supreme Court ought to interpret the Constitution has much in common with Bork’s as expressed in the San Diego Law Review article.
Both jurists take the position that the function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution by reference to the words that appear in it. Both believe that the words can and ought to be limiting factors on the discretion that judges have in making their decisions. Yet there is a growing group of law professors who think otherwise. And there appear to be a number of senators who believe that political ideology is the determining factor in judicial decision-making.
But political beliefs held before appointment to the Supreme Court have not been reliable predictors of judicial behavior. Hugo Black’s political background (which included membership in the Ku Klux Klan) would hardly have predicted a judicial record of preserving individual rights. Earl Warren’s performance surprised more than a few people.
More is known about candidates who have had judicial experience than those who have been selected from the political arena. But what is it that we know about current or former judges?
What we know is whether they view the law as a rational enterprise and whether, as judges, they are of the opinion that they must give good reasons for the decisions that they make. We can discover whether they believe that a judge is morally superior and, therefore, morally justified in substituting his or her opinion for the opinions of legislators or the general population. In short, what we can find out, and what we should want to know, is the degree to which the candidate for judicial office is committed to the rule of law.
It is appropriate to ask a political candidate what his or her opinions are in respect to abortion, prayer in schools, gay rights or any other matter within the political domain. What we should ask the candidate for judicial office is his or her opinion with regard to the law on these matters, and whether the candidate is prepared to faithfully apply the law. It is important to determine whether the judicial candidate differentiates between his preferences on matters of social policy and his view of the law on these same issues.
Bork has articulated his views on these matters in numerous law-review articles and judicial opinions. What he has said is neither unique nor radical. As previously noted, his position on constitutional interpretation bears striking resemblance to Hugo Black’s. The view that a judge must justify his decisions by reference to the established meaning of the words does not justify calling him a right-wing ideologue. The nomination, and confirmation, of Judge Bork will not mean substantial change in life as we know it, no matter who “we” are.
President Obama is running statistically even with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 12 key swing states and is slightly ahead of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, according to the USA Today/Gallup poll released Friday.
The poll, which looks at both national trends and at the races in what everyone considers to be the 12 battleground states that will likely determine the 2012 election, paints a picture of Obama facing a tougher road to reelection than an incumbent should.
But the president, a Democrat whose approval rating has been in the low 40-percent range in recent months, can take heart from the poll’s findings that he is running better against specific Republican candidates than he does against a generic Republican, indicating that when faced with a real choice, voters seem to prefer Obama to Romney, Perry or Cain.
According to the poll, Obama is tied among national voters with Romney at 47% and leads Perry 49% to 45%. In its first measurement of Cain, the poll found Obama ahead 48% to 46%. The poll was taken before reports surfaced that two women received financial settlements after complaining that Cain had sexually harassed them.
But overall, the results show all three GOP candidates running strongly against Obama. The national results are based on interviews with 1,056 adults taken Oct. 26-27; the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
But the American electoral system is based on indirect representation rather than direct democracy. The Founding Fathers feared the unmediated passions of the mob and wanted to ensure that wiser heads would have a greater role. Hence the creation of the presidential electors who actually vote for president based on the popular vote in their home states.
Because of the electoral college, where a candidate’s support exists is often more important than just how many people back him or her. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win, and in 2012, Obama can pretty much count on winning enough states to give him about 196 electoral votes, while the GOP candidate starts with about 191. In the center are 12 states, worth 151 electoral votes for which both parties will spend most of their money and resources fighting. Those states, all won by Obama in 2008, are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
According to the poll, Romney is at 47% to Obama’s 46% in those 12 states. Obama does better against Perry, 49% to 44% and Cain, 48% to 45%. Those results are based on interviews with 1,334 adults, from Oct. 20 to 27. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The polls generally show that the presidential race is extremely competitive at this point, a year before Election Day and two months before the GOP begins voting for its presidential candidate. But Republicans also have an advantage in the enthusiasm arena, according to the poll.
Overall, 47% of swing-state registered voters and 48% of all U.S. registered voters said they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting. But Republicans were more eager both nationally and in the swing states. Nationally, Republicans were ahead 56% to 48% over Democrats. In the swing states, the GOP was ahead in the enthusiasm race 59% to 48%.
WESTPORT, Conn. — A man contesting the handling of the will of the late U.S. Rep. Stewart B. McKinney disputes official reports that McKinney contracted AIDS from blood transfusions, saying that for five years he was the Connecticut congressman’s lover.
McKinney, 56, a liberal Republican who died in 1987 during his ninth term in Congress, left a car and a 40% share of his Washington house to the man, Arnold R. Denson, according to documents on file in Probate Court. Denson’s share of the estate is worth at least $59,200.
Denson displayed photographs, bills and other documents to support his claim.
Vic Basil, former executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, also said that Denson and McKinney were lovers. The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign Fund is the nation’s largest gay-lesbian political action group and lobbying organization.
McKinney’s wife, Lucie, denied that her husband was homosexual.
Denson, 34, a real estate agent, said the two lived together in McKinney’s Washington home. Lucie McKinney remained in Connecticut, where the congressman spent most weekends.
McKinney’s family learned of the affair when he was on his death bed, Denson says. He said he agreed not to reveal the relationship at the family’s request and was told that in exchange for his silence he would receive the property willed to him.
But Denson has not received his inheritance and is battling Lucie McKinney in Probate Court in Westport. He decided to speak publicly after a hearing Monday.
Cesar Caceres, McKinney’s physician, issued a statement the day of McKinney’s death on May 7, 1987, saying that McKinney had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion he received after coronary bypass surgery in 1979.
When informed of Denson’s statement, Lucie McKinney on Monday again denied that her husband was homosexual.
Her attorney, Lawrence J. Halloran, also disputed Denson’s claim. He said that McKinney and Denson were friends and business associates, that McKinney lived alone in Washington and that Denson rented an apartment attached to McKinney’s home.
Denson, a divorced father of two, said he believes McKinney was already infected with AIDS when they met in 1982, and said two previous lovers of McKinney have died of AIDS.
Denson said he has recently tested negative for the virus that causes AIDS and has abstained from sex since McKinney’s death.
The estate could be wiped out by a claim filed by Lucie McKinney, who is an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune as well as to an oil and railroad fortune. She testified Monday that her husband borrowed $432,552 from her trust fund and promised to pay her back.
CHICAGO — An appeals court intervened Wednesday and suddenly blocked an order that required a senior Border Patrol official to give unprecedented daily briefings to a judge about immigration sweeps in Chicago.
The one-page suspension by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals came before Greg Bovino’s first scheduled, late afternoon meeting with U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the courthouse in downtown Chicago.
Ellis had ordered the meetings Tuesday after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by government agents working Operation Midway Blitz. It has produced more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.
Bovino told Fox News that he was eager to talk to Ellis. But government lawyers, at the same time, were appealing her decision. Lawyers for news outlets and activists who say agents have used too much force, including tear gas, have until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond in the appeals court.
Ellis’ order followed enforcement actions in which tear gas was used, including in a neighborhood where children had gathered for a Halloween parade last weekend on the city’s Northwest Side. Neighbors had joined in the street as someone was arrested.
“Halloween is on Friday,” she said. “I do not want to get violation reports from the plaintiffs that show that agents are out and about on Halloween, where kids are present and tear gas is being deployed.”
Bovino defended agents’ actions.
“If she wants to meet with me every day, then she’s going to see, she’s going to have a very good firsthand look at just how bad things really are on the streets of Chicago,” Bovino told Fox News. “I look forward to meeting with that judge to show her exactly what’s happening and the extreme amount of violence perpetrated against law enforcement here.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors filed charges against Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congressional candidate, and five other people over protests at an immigration enforcement building in Broadview, outside Chicago. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, alleges they illegally blocked an agent’s car on Sept. 26.
Abughazaleh said the prosecution was an “attempt to silence dissent.”
The Chicago court actions came as groups and officials across the country have filed lawsuits aimed at restricting federal deployments of National Guard troops.
President Trump’s administration will remain blocked from deploying troops in the Chicago area until at least the latter half of November, following a U.S. Supreme Court order Wednesday calling on the parties to file additional legal briefs.
The justices indicated they would not act before Nov. 17 on the administration’s emergency appeal to overturn a lower-court ruling that has blocked the troop deployments.
In Portland, Ore., a federal trial seeking to block a troop deployment got underway Wednesday morning with a police commander describing on the witness stand how federal agents at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building repeatedly fired tear gas at nonviolent protesters.
In Chicago, Bovino, who is chief of the Border Patrol sector in El Centro, Calif., was to sit for a daily 5:45 p.m. briefing to report how his agents are enforcing the law and whether they are staying within constitutional bounds, Ellis said. The check-ins were to take place until a Nov. 5 hearing.
Ellis also demanded that Bovino produce all use-of-force reports since Sept. 2 from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz.
The judge expressed confidence Tuesday that the check-ins would prevent excessive use of force in Chicago neighborhoods.
Ellis previously ordered agents to wear badges, and she has banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. She subsequently required body cameras after the use of tear gas raised concerns that agents were not following her initial order.
Ellis set a Friday deadline for Bovino to get a camera and to complete training.
Lawyers for the government have repeatedly defended the actions of agents, including those from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and told the judge that videos and other portrayals of enforcement actions have been one-sided.
Besides his court appearance, Bovino still must sit for a videotaped Thursday deposition, an interview in private, with lawyers from both sides.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is initiating a leadership shakeup at a dozen or so offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bring more aggressive enforcement operations across the U.S.
Some of the outgoing field office directors at ICE are anticipated to be replaced with leaders from Customs and Border Protection, according to news reports. Among the leaders targeted for replacement are Los Angeles Field Office Director Ernesto Santacruz and San Diego Field Office Director Patrick Divver, the Washington Examiner reported Monday.
The stepped up role of Border Patrol leaders in interior enforcement — which has historically been ICE territory — marks an evolution of tactics that originated in California.
For the record:
9:27 a.m. Oct. 29, 2025An earlier version of this article said Gregory Bovino, who heads the Border Patrol’s El Centro region, led a three-day raid in rural Kern County in late December. The raid occurred in early January.
In early January, Gregory Bovino, who heads the Border Patrol’s El Centro region, led a three-day raid in rural Kern County, nabbing day laborers more than 300 miles from his typical territory. Former Biden administration officials said Bovino had gone “rogue” and that no agency leaders knew about the operation beforehand.
Bovino leveraged the spectacle to become the on-the-ground point person for the Trump Administration’s signature issue.
The three-decade veteran of Border Patrol, who has used slick social media videos to promote the agency’s heavy-handed tactics, brought militarized operations once primarily used at the border into America’s largest cities.
In Los Angeles this summer, contingents of heavily armed, masked agents began chasing down and arresting day laborers, street vendors and car wash workers. Tensions grew as the administration ordered in the National Guard.
The efforts seem to have become more aggressive after a Supreme Court order allowed authorities to stop people based on factors such as race or ethnicity, employment and speaking Spanish.
Bovino moved operations to Chicago and escalated his approach. Immigration agents launched an overnight raid in a crowded apartment, shot gas into crowds of protesters and fatally shot one man.
Now Bovino is expected to hand-pick some of the replacements at ICE field offices, according to Fox News.
Tom Wong, who directs the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego, said the leadership changes are unsurprising, given Bovino’s strategies in Los Angeles and Chicago.
“The Trump administration is blurring the distinction between Border Patrol and ICE,” he said. “The border is no longer just the external boundaries of the United States, but the border is everywhere.”
Former Homeland Security officials said the large-scale replacement of executives from one agency with those from another agency is unprecedented.
The two agencies have similar authorities but very different approaches, said Daniel Altman, former head of internal oversight investigations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
ICE officers operate largely inside the country, lean heavily on investigations and typically know when they set out for the day who they are targeting.
Border Patrol, on the other hand, patrols the borderlands for anyone they encounter and suspect of entering illegally. Amid the rugged terrain and isolation, Border Patrol built a do-it-yourself ethos within the century-old organization, Altman said.
“Culturally, the Border Patrol prides itself on solving problems, and that means that whatever the current administration needs or wants with respect to immigration enforcement, they’re usually very willing and able to do that,” said Altman.
White House leadership has not been happy with arrest numbers. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff who is heading his immigration initiatives, set a goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, which the agency has not been able to meet.
DHS says it expects to deport 600,000 people by January, a figure that includes people who were turned back at the border or at airports.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant public affairs secretary for the Homeland Security department, didn’t confirm or deny the changes but described immigration officials as united.
“Talk about sensationalism,” she said. “Only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’ If and when we have specific personnel moves to announce, we’ll do that.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The President’s entire team is working in lockstep to implement the President’s policy agenda, and the tremendous results from securing the border to deporting criminal illegal aliens speak for themselves.”
On Fox News on Tuesday, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said the administration is dedicated to achieving record deportations of primarily immigrants with criminal records.
“As far as personnel changes, that’s under the purview of the Secretary of Homeland Security,” he said. “I’m at the White House working with people like Stephen Miller, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, to come up with strategic policies and plans — how to get success, how to maintain success, and how to get the numbers ever higher.”
Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE and DHS official under the Biden administration, said the personnel moves appear to be an “attempt to migrate a Border Patrol ethos over to ICE.”
“ICE’s job has historically focused on targeting and enforcing against public safety threats,” she said. “Border Patrol has a much more highly militarized job of securing the border, protecting against transnational crime and drug trafficking and smuggling. That sort of approach doesn’t belong in our cities and is quite dangerous.”
Fleischaker said it would be difficult to increase deportations, even with Border Patrol leaders at the helm, because of the complexities around securing travel documents and negotiating with countries that are reticent to accept deportees.
In the meantime, she said, shunting well-liked leaders will sink morale.
“For the folks who are still there, everybody knows you comply or you risk losing your job,” she said. “Dissent, failure to meet targets or even ask questions aren’t really tolerated.”
On Tuesday, DHS posted a video montage of Bovino on its Instagram page set to Coldplay’s song “Viva la vida.” The caption read, “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.”
Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
GYEONGJU, South Korea — The United States and South Korea advanced trade talks on Wednesday, addressing details of $350 billion that would be invested in the American economy, after negotiations and ceremonies that included the presentation of a gold medal and crown to President Trump.
Both were gifts from the country’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who dialed up the flattery while Washington and Seoul worked to nail down financial promises during the last stop of Trump’s Asia trip.
Although both sides said progress has been made — Trump said things were “pretty much finalized” — no agreement has been signed yet. The framework includes gradual investments, cooperation on shipbuilding and the lowering of Trump’s tariffs on South Korea’s automobile exports, according to Kim Yong-beom, Lee’s chief of staff for policy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The announcement came after a day of adulation for the visiting American president from his hosts. There was a special lunch menu featuring U.S.-raised beef and a gold-adorned brownie. A band played Trump’s campaign anthem of “Y.M.C.A.” when he stepped off Air Force One. Lee told him that “you are indeed making America great again.”
Trump can be mercurial and demanding, but he has a soft spot for pomp and circumstance. He was particularly impressed by a choreographed display of colorful flags as he walked along the red carpet.
“That was some spectacle, and some beautiful scene,” Trump told Lee during their meeting. “It was so perfect, so flawlessly done.”
Earlier in the day, Trump even softened his rhetoric on international trade, which he normally describes in predatory terms where someone is always trying to rip off the United States.
“The best deals are deals that work for everybody,” he said during a business forum.
Trade deal with Seoul in process
Trump was visiting while South Korea is hosting the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the historical city of Gyeongju. He previously stopped in Japan, where he bonded with the new prime minister, and Malaysia, where he attended a summit of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations.
The Republican president has been trying to tie up trade deals along the way, eager to show that his confrontational approach of tariffs is paying dividends for Americans who are uneasy about the job market and watching a federal government shutdown extend into its fifth week.
South Korea has been particularly tough to crack, with the sticking point being Trump’s demand for $350 billion of direct investment in the U.S.
Korean officials say putting up cash could destabilize their own economy, and they’d rather offer loans and loan guarantees instead. The country would also need a swap line to manage the flow of its currency into the U.S.
Trump, after meeting with Lee, said “we made our deal pretty much finalized.” He did not provide any details.
Oh Hyunjoo, a deputy national security director for South Korea, told reporters earlier in the week that the negotiations have been proceeding “a little bit more slowly” than expected.
“We haven’t yet been able to reach an agreement on matters such as the structure of investments, their formats and how the profits will be distributed,” she said Monday.
It’s a contrast from Trump’s experience in Japan, where the government has worked to deliver the $550 billion in investments it promised as part of an earlier trade agreement. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced up to $490 billion in specific commitments during a dinner with business leaders in Tokyo.
For now, South Korea is stuck with a 25% tariff on automobiles, putting automakers such as Hyundai and Kia at a disadvantage against Japanese and European competitors, which face 15%.
Lee, speaking at the business forum before Trump arrived, warned against trade barriers.
“At a time when protectionism and nationalism are on the rise and nations focus on their immediate survival, words like ‘cooperation,’ ‘coexistence’ and ‘inclusive growth’ may sound hollow,” he said. “Yet, paradoxically, it is in times of crisis like this that APEC’s role as a platform for solidarity shines brighter.”
Trump and Lee swap praise
Lee took office in June and had a warm meeting with Trump at the White House in August, when he praised Oval Office renovations and suggested building a Trump Tower in North Korea.
He took a similar approach when Trump visited on Wednesday. The gold medal presented to Trump represents the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, the country’s highest honor, and Trump is the first U.S. president to receive it.
Trump said, “It’s as beautiful as it can possibly be” and “I’d like to wear it right now.”
Next was a replica of a royal crown from the Silla Kingdom, which existed from 57 B.C. to 935 A.D. The original crown was found in a tomb in Gyeongju, the kingdom’s capital.
Besides trade disagreements, there have been other points of tension between Washington and Seoul this year. More than 300 South Koreans were detained during a U.S. immigration raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia in September, sparking outrage and betrayal.
Lee said at the time companies would likely hesitate to make future investments unless the visa system was improved.
“If that’s not possible, then establishing a local factory in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies,” he said.
Asked Monday about the immigration raid, Trump said, “I was opposed to getting them out,” and he said an improved visa system would make it easier for companies to bring in skilled workers.
Trump-Xi meeting is expected Thursday
While in South Korea, Trump is also expected to hold a closely watched meeting on Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Washington and Beijing have clashed over trade, but both sides have indicated that they’re willing to dial down tensions.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday that he expects to lower tariffs targeting China over the flow of fentanyl ingredients.
“They’ll be doing what they can do,” he said. Trump added that “China is going to be working with me.”
Trump sounded resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t get to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on this trip. The president previously floated the possibility of extending his stay in South Korea, but on Wednesday said “the schedule was very tight.”
North Korea has so far dismissed overtures from Washington and Seoul, saying it won’t resume diplomacy with the United States unless Washington drops its demand for the North’s denuclearization. North Korea said Wednesday it fired sea-to-surface cruise missiles into its western waters, in the latest display of its growing military capabilities as Trump visits South Korea.
Trump brushed off the weapons test, saying, “He’s been launching missiles for decades, right?”
The two leaders met during Trump’s first term, although their conversations did not produce any agreements about North Korea’s nuclear program.
Megerian writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Kim Tong-hyung and Hyung-jin Kim contributed to this report from Seoul and Josh Boak contributed from Tokyo.
WASHINGTON — The White House pressed U.S. Navy officials to launch 2,000-pound live bombs instead of dummy explosives during an elaborate military demonstration for the service’s 250th anniversary celebration that President Trump attended, two people familiar with planning for the event told the Associated Press.
One person familiar with the planning said White House officials insisted to Navy planners that Trump “needed to see explosions” instead of just a “big splash” during the Oct. 5 demonstration.
Original planning for what the Navy dubbed the Titans of the Sea Presidential Review called for military personnel to use dummies and not live bombs, a third person familiar with the Navy’s planning said.
That person, who like the others was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not comment on why the Navy decided to switch to live bombs.
The White House said no switch was made. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly in a statement said: “Organizers always planned to use live munitions, as is typical in training exercises.”
The episode is the latest example of the Trump administration turning the military toward the president’s wishes in ways large and small — from summoning generals from around the world to Washington for a day of speeches to his lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
The Navy and other military branches typically use dummy, or inert, bombs for training and demonstrations. Dummies are cheaper than live bombs because they do not contain expensive explosives, fuses and other components. They’re also safer.
However, military officials often argue that the use of live ammunition for events like the 250th birthday celebration also fulfills a training purpose and that the ordnance would have been expended anyway at a later date. The Navy declined to comment.
The switch required Navy officials to change up detailed plans for the Norfolk military demonstration to ensure safety protocols were met, according to the three people familiar with the planning.
The White House pushed forward with the event despite a U.S. government shutdown, which has led nonessential federal workers to be sent home without pay and reduced operation of many non-critical government services.
A celebration for the Marines also used live artillery
Confirmation that the Navy decided to use live bombs instead of dummies at the Naval Base Norfolk event comes as the administration faces scrutiny over an Oct. 18 live fire demonstration at Camp Pendleton, in which a misfire of a live artillery round led to shrapnel spraying onto Interstate 5 in Southern California.
No one was injured when shrapnel struck two California Highway Patrol vehicles. That Camp Pendleton event marking the Marines 250th anniversary was attended by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Last week, 27 members of the California congressional delegation and the state’s two senators sent a letter to Hegseth asking whose decision it was to shoot live artillery over the busy freeway and how authorities planned for the safety risks.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who says he’ll weigh a 2028 White House run after the midterm elections next year, criticized the decision and closed a section of the roadway connecting San Diego to Los Angeles for hours during the Oct. 18 Marine showcase. The White House criticized him for closing the highway and said the Marines said there were no safety concerns.
Trump is a fan of military pomp
Trump hasn’t been shy about his fondness for pomp and pageantry that celebrates military might.
In his second term, he has pushed the U.S. services to hold big parades and demonstrations, an idea inspired by a Bastille Day parade he attended in France early in his first term. He was a guest of honor at the 2017 event, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I.
The Army included tanks in a June parade in the nation’s capital, requested by Trump, to mark its 250 years despite concerns from city officials that the heavy vehicles would damage the city’s streets. And he appeared to relish the massive military welcome he received last month during his second state visit to the United Kingdom.
At the Navy celebration this month in Norfolk, the president and first lady Melania Trump watched the military demonstration from the deck of an aircraft carrier before Trump delivered a speech in which he criticized his political opponents and attacked Democratic lawmakers.
At sea, the Navy had seven Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers fire a variety of their guns, including a large 5-inch gun. Four destroyers also launched the Navy’s Standard Missile 2 (SM-2). Each missile costs approximately $2 million.
Meanwhile, aircraft from USS Truman’s air wing fired missiles and general-purpose bombs and performed a strafing run with their gatling guns. The Navy’s MH-60S Seahawk helicopters also fired hydra rockets and guns.
Trump then spoke on a pier between two towering Navy vessels, an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault ship. The carrier displayed a Navy fighter jet that had the words “President Donald J. Trump ‘45-47’” printed on the fuselage, right under the cockpit window.
A Navy spokesperson told the AP shortly after the event that sailors put the president’s name on the aircraft for the visit and this was “customary for visits of this type.”
In addition to the live bomb demonstration, Navy destroyers launched missiles and fired shells into the Atlantic Ocean, and Navy SEALs descended from helicopters and fighter jets catapulted off vessels.
The shift to live bombs also required further spreading out of the guided missile destroyers in the waters off Norfolk for the military demonstration.
Madhani, Toropin and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.
GYEONGJU, South Korea — The United States will share closely held technology to allow South Korea to build a nuclear-powered submarine, President Trump said on social media Thursday after meeting with the country’s president.
President Lee Jae Myung stressed to Trump in their Wednesday meeting that the goal was to modernize the alliance with the U.S., noting plans to increase military spending to reduce the financial burden on America. The South Korean leader said there might have been a misunderstanding when they last spoke in August about nuclear-powered submarines, saying that his government was looking for nuclear fuel rather than weapons.
Lee said that if South Korea was equipped with nuclear-powered submarines, that it could help U.S. activities in the region.
U.S. nuclear submarine technology is widely regarded as some of the most sensitive and highly guarded technology the military possesses. The U.S. has been incredibly protective of that knowledge, and even a recently announced deal with close allies the United Kingdom and Australia to help the latter acquire nuclear submarine technology doesn’t feature the U.S. directly transferring its knowledge.
Trump’s post on social media comes ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country possesses nuclear submarines, and after North Korea in March unveiled for the first time a nuclear-powered submarine under construction. It’s a weapons system that can pose a major security threat to South Korea and the U.S.
As Trump visited South Korea, North Korea said Wednesday it conducted successful cruise missile tests, the latest display of its growing military capabilities.
Pentagon officials didn’t immediately respond to questions about Trump’s announcement on sharing the nuclear sub technology with South Korea.
Megerian and Boak write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Tokyo. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report from Washington.
PHILADELPHIA — After waiting more than four decades to clear his name in a friend’s 1980 killing, Subramanyam Vedam was set to walk free from a Pennsylvania prison this month.
Vedam and Thomas Kinser were the 19-year-old children of Penn State University faculty. Vedam was the last person seen with Kinser and was twice convicted of killing him, despite a lack of witnesses or motive.
In August, a judge threw out the conviction after Vedam’s lawyers found new ballistics evidence that prosecutors had never disclosed.
As his sister prepared to bring him home on Oct. 3, the thin, white-haired Vedam was instead taken into federal custody over a 1999 deportation order. The 64-year-old, who legally came to the U.S. from India when he was 9 months old, now faces another daunting legal fight.
Amid the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations, Vedam’s lawyers must persuade an immigration court that a 1980s drug conviction should be outweighed by the years he wrongly spent in prison. For a time, immigration law allowed people who had reformed their lives to seek such waivers. Vedam never pursued it then because of the murder conviction.
“He was someone who’s suffered a profound injustice,” said immigration lawyer Ava Benach. And “those 43 years aren’t a blank slate. He lived a remarkable experience in prison.”
Vedam earned several degrees behind bars, tutored hundreds of fellow inmates and went nearly half a century with just a single infraction, involving rice brought in from the outside.
His lawyers hope immigration judges will consider the totality of his case. The administration, in a brief filed Friday, opposes the effort. So Vedam remains at an 1,800-bed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in central Pennsylvania.
“Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email about the case.
‘Mr. Vedam, where were you born?’
After his initial conviction was thrown out, Vedam faced an unusual set of questions at his 1988 retrial.
“Mr. Vedam, where were you born?” Centre County Dist. Atty. Ray Gricar asked. “How frequently would you go back to India?
“During your teenage years, did you ever get into meditation?”
Gopal Balachandran, the Penn State Dickinson Law professor who won the reversal, believes the questions were designed to alienate him from the all-white jury, which returned a second guilty verdict.
The Vedams were among the first Indian families in the area known as “Happy Valley,” where his father had come as a postdoctoral fellow in 1956. An older daughter was born in State College, but “Subu,” as he was known, was born when the family was back in India in 1961.
They returned to State College for good before his first birthday and became the family that welcomed new members of the Indian diaspora to town.
“They were fully engaged. My father loved the university. My mother was a librarian, and she helped start the library,” said the sister, Saraswathi Vedam, 68, a midwifery professor in Vancouver, British Columbia.
While she left for college in Massachusetts, Subu became swept up in the counterculture of the late 1970s, growing his hair long and dabbling in drugs while taking classes at Penn State.
One day in December 1980, Vedam asked Kinser for a ride to nearby Lewisburg to buy drugs. Kinser was never seen again, although his van was found outside his apartment. Nine months later, hikers found his body in a wooded area miles away.
Vedam was detained on drug charges while police investigated and was ultimately charged with murder. He was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to life without parole. To resolve the drug case, he pleaded no contest to four counts of selling LSD and a theft charge. The 1988 retrial offered no reprieve from his situation.
Although the defense long questioned the ballistics evidence in the case, the jury, which heard that Vedam had bought a .25-caliber gun from someone, never heard that an FBI report suggested the bullet wound was too small to have been fired from that gun. Balachandran only found that report as he dug into the case in 2023.
After hearings on the issue, a Centre County judge threw out the conviction and the district attorney decided this month to not retry the case.
Trump officials oppose the petition
Benach, the immigration lawyer, often represents clients trying to stay in the U.S. despite an earlier infraction. Still, she finds the Vedam case “truly extraordinary” given the constitutional violations involved.
“Forty-three years of wrongful imprisonment more than makes up for the possession with intent to distribute LSD when he was 20 years old,” she said.
Vedam could spend several more months in custody before the Board of Immigration Appeals decides whether to reopen the case. ICE officials, in a brief Friday, said the clock ran out years ago.
“He has provided no evidence nor argument to show he has been diligent in pursuing his rights as it pertains to his immigration status,” Katherine B. Frisch, an assistant chief counsel, wrote.
Saraswathi Vedam is saddened by the latest delay but said her brother remains patient.
“He, more than anybody else, knows that sometimes things don’t make sense,” she said. “You have to just stay the course and keep hoping that truth and justice and compassion and kindness will win.”
CHICAGO — A Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois has been indicted for blocking a federal agent’s vehicle during September protests outside an immigration enforcement building in suburban Chicago, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
The felony indictment, filed last week by a special grand jury, accuses Kat Abughazaleh and five others of conspiring to impede an officer.
“This is a political prosecution and a gross attempt to silence dissent, a right protected under the First Amendment. This case is a major push by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish anyone who speaks out against them,” Abughazaleh said Wednesday in a video posted to BlueSky.
Protesters have been gathering outside the immigration center to oppose enforcement operations in the Chicago area that have led to more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.
Greg Bovino, who is leading Border Patrol efforts in Chicago, was ordered this week by U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis to brief her every evening about the operations, beginning on Wednesday. It is an unprecedented bid to impose real-time oversight on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the city after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by agents.
Federal prosecutors accuse Abughazaleh and others of surrounding a vehicle driven by a federal agent on Sept. 26 and attempting to stop it from entering the facility.
Among the others named in the indictment are a candidate for the Cook County Board, a Democratic ward committeeman and a trustee in suburban Oak Park. The charges accuse all six of conspiring to impede an officer.
Abughazaleh is scheduled to make an initial court appearance next week. A message left with her campaign wasn’t immediately returned. Her attorney called the charges “unjust.”
The indictment said the group banged on the car, pushed against it, broke a mirror and scratched the text “PIG” on the vehicle, the indictment said.
Abughazaleh at one point put her hands on the vehicle’s hood and braced her body against it while staying in its way, the indictment says. The agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators,” it says.
Abughazaleh is running in a crowded Democratic primary to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schawkosky.
Protesting the immigration crackdown around Chicago has emerged as a top issue on campaigns in Illinois’ March primary. Elected officials and candidates in the Democratic stronghold have often showed up for demonstrations outside the Broadview federal facility.
“As I and others have exercised our First Amendment rights, ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and teargassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors, and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal,” Abughazaleh says in the video.
“As scary as all of this is, I have spent my career fighting America’s backslide into fascism,” she says. “I’m not gonna stop now, and I hope you won’t either.”
Tareen and Seewer write for the Associated Press. Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.
Federal prosecutors announced charges Wednesday against 12 people who allegedly engaged in violence during demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The charges, part of an effort dubbed “Operation Bridge Too Far” by federal authorities, largely centered on demonstrations that erupted on a freeway overpass near an immigration detention center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, the first day the National Guard was deployed to the city.
What started as a small, peaceful protest on Alameda Street exploded into a series of tense clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. After National Guard members and U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials used tear gas and smoke bombs to try and disperse a crowd outside the detention center, more protesters flooded the area.
A number of Waymo self-driving vehicles were set on fire near Olivera Street, and a group of California Highway Patrol officers on the 101 Freeway were pelted with items from protesters on the overpass above. At times, they returned fire with less-lethal rounds and tear gas. At least one protester had previously been charged in state court with throwing a flaming item at a CHP vehicle from the overpass.
Authorities announced that 10 defendants charged in connection with the incident were in federal custody this week. Another is in state custody and expected to be handed over to federal authorities, and one remains a fugitive.
Among those charged tied to the June 8 protest are Ronald Alexis Coreas, 23, of Westlake; Junior Roldan, 27, of Hollywood; Elmore Sylvester Cage, 34, of downtown Los Angeles; Balto Montion, 24, of Watsonville; Jesus Gonzalez Hernandez Jr., 22, of Las Vegas; Hector Daniel Ramos, 66, of Alhambra; Stefano Deong Green, 34, of Westmont; Yachua Mauricio Flores, 23, of Lincoln Heights; and Ismael Vega, 41, of Westlake.
Prosecutors also charged Virginia Reyes, 32, and Isai Carrillo, 31, who they say are members of “VC Defensa,” an immigrant rights group that has been documenting raids in the region.
Yovany Marcario Canil, 22, of Boyle Heights, was charged with assault on a federal officer for pepper-spraying members of an FBI S.W.A.T. team who were inside a government vehicle leaving the site of a raid in the downtown L.A. Fashion District on June 6.
A protester lobs a large rock at CHP officers stationed on the 101 Freeway below.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“Acts of violence against the brave law enforcement officers who protect us are an attack on civilized society itself,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a news release. “Anyone who engages in such disgusting conduct will face severe consequences from this Department of Justice.”
The FBI offered up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of 10 other unknown individuals accused of engaging in similar attacks from the overpass.
“A group of violent protesters threw rocks, pieces of concrete, electric scooters, and fireworks at officers and patrol cars” on the 101 Freeway, the FBI said.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, has aggressively pursued charges against those who clashed with law enforcement during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids over the last few months. On Wednesday, Essayli said that his office has charged 97 people with assaulting or impeding officers.
Of those, Essayli said, 18 have pleaded guilty and 44 are set to go to trial. His office has taken two defendants in misdemeanor assault cases to trial, but both ended in acquittals.
Earlier this year, a Times investigation found Essayli’s prosecutors have failed to convince grand juries to secure indictments in a number of protest-related cases.
Prosecutors face a much lower legal bar before a grand jury than they do in a criminal trial, and experts say it is rare for federal prosecutors to lose at that preliminary stage. Prosecutors in Chicago and Washington have faced similar struggles, court records show.
The defendants who have pleaded guilty in L.A. include a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who hurled a molotov cocktail at L.A. County sheriff’s deputies during a June rally against immigration enforcement.
“CBS Saturday Morning” co-hosts Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson are among the nearly 100 news division employees cut as part of a massive round of layoffs at parent company Paramount.
The program is getting a new format that will align it closer to the weekday show “CBS Mornings,” according to people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to comment publicly. Brian Applegate, the executive producer of the Saturday program, is out as well.
CBS has also canceled “CBS Mornings Plus,” an extension of its morning program that ran in several markets including Los Angeles. “CBS Evening News Plus,” a streaming program anchored by John Dickerson is also being shuttered. Dickerson announced Monday he is leaving the network.
Several correspondents have already been laid off, including Debora Patta, who covered the Gaza war for the network; Janet Shamlian; and Nikki Battiste. A CBS News representative declined comment.
The cuts are part of parent company Paramount’s reduction of 1,000 employees across all of its divisions. New owners Skydance Media are looking to reduce cots by $2 billion across the company, with a second round of cuts expected later this year.
Miller was a prolific correspondent for CBS News in addition to her Saturday co-host duties, contributing pieces to “CBS Sunday Morning” and “48 Hours.” She also was a frequent fill-in for Gayle King on the weekday morning program.
Miller, 52, is a Los Angeles native and the daughter of Dr. Ross Miller, a trauma surgeon who served on the city council in Compton. She worked at the Los Angeles Times in the early 1990s.
Miller covered a wide range of stories at CBS News, and paid special attention to issues or racism and social injustice. She is married to Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans who is currently head of the National Urban League.
Jacobson, 52 has been with CBS News since 2015. She previously spent a decade at ESPN, where she appeared on “First Take” and “SportsCenter.”
Miller and Jacobson have served as co-hosts of “CBS Saturday Morning” since 2018 when it was called “CBS This Morning Saturday.”
WASHINGTON — The Senate approved a resolution Tuesday evening that would nullify President Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, including oil, coffee and orange juice, as Democrats tested GOP senators’ support for Trump’s trade policy.
The legislation from Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, passed on a 52-48 tally.
It would terminate the national emergencies that Trump has declared to justify 50% tariffs on Brazil, but the legislation is likely doomed because the Republican-controlled House has passed new rules that allow leadership to prevent it from ever coming up for a vote. Trump would almost certainly veto the legislation even if it were to pass Congress.
Still, the vote demonstrated some pushback in GOP ranks against Trump’s tariffs. Five Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — all voted in favor of the resolution along with every Democrat.
Kaine said the votes are a way force a conversation in the Senate about “the economic destruction of tariffs.” He’s planning to call up similar resolutions applying to Trump’s tariffs on Canada and other nations later this week.
“But they are also really about how much will we let a president get away with? Do my colleagues have a gag reflex or not?” Kaine told reporters.
Trump has linked the tariffs on Brazil to the country’s policies and criminal prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. ran a $6.8 billion trade surplus with Brazil last year, according to the Census Bureau.
“Every American who wakes up in the morning to get a cup of java is paying a price for Donald Trump’s reckless, ridiculous, and almost childish tariffs,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
Republicans have also been increasingly uneasy with Trump’s aggressive trade policy, especially at a time of turmoil for the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last month that Trump’s tariff policy is one of several factors that are expected to increase jobless rates and inflation and lower overall growth this year.
In April, four Republicans voted with Democrats to block tariffs on Canada, but the bill was never taken up in the House. Kaine said he hoped the votes this week showed how Republican opposition to Trump’s trade policy is growing.
To bring up the votes, Kaine has invoked a decades-old law that allows Congress to block a president’s emergency powers and members of the minority party to force votes on the resolutions.
However, Vice President JD Vance visited a Republican luncheon on Tuesday in part to emphasize to Republicans that they should allow the president to negotiate trade deals. Vance told reporters afterwards that Trump is using tariffs “to give American workers and American farmers a better deal.”
“To vote against that is to strip that incredible leverage from the president of the United States. I think it’s a huge mistake,” he added.
The Supreme Court will also soon consider a case challenging Trump’s authority to implement sweeping tariffs. Lower courts have found most of his tariffs illegal.
But some Republicans said they would wait until the outcome of that case before voting to cross the president.
“I don’t see a need to do that right now,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, adding that it was “bad timing” to call up the resolutions before the Supreme Court case.
Others said they are ready to show opposition to the president’s tariffs and the emergency declarations he has used to justify them.
“Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive, “ said Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former longtime Republican leader, in a statement. ”The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule.”
His fellow Kentuckian, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, told reporters, “Emergencies are like war, famine, tornado. Not liking someone’s tariffs is not an emergency. It’s an abuse of the emergency power. And it’s Congress abdicating their traditional role in taxes.”
In a floor speech, he added, “No taxation without representation is embedded in our Constitution.”
Meanwhile, Kaine is also planning to call up a resolution that would put a check on Trump’s ability to carry out military strikes against Venezuela as the U.S. military steps up its presence and action in the region.
He said that it allows Democrats to get off the defensive while they are in the minority and instead force votes on “points of discomfort” for Republicans.
DAKAR, Senegal — Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka said his non-resident visa to enter the United States had been rejected, adding that he believes it may be because he recently criticized President Trump.
The Nigerian author, 91, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to do so.
Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Soyinka said he believed it had little to do with him and was instead a product of the United States’ immigration policies. He said he was told to reapply if he wished to enter again.
“It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”
Soyinka, who has taught in the U.S. and previously held a green card, joked on Tuesday that his green card “had an accident” eight years ago and “fell between a pair of scissors.” In 2017, he destroyed his green card in protest over Trump’s first inauguration.
The letter he received informing him of his visa revocation cites “additional information became available after the visa was issued,” as the reason for its revocation, but does not describe what that information was.
Soyinka believes it may be because he recently referred to Trump as a “white version of Idi Amin,” a reference to the dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 until 1979.
He jokingly referred to his rejection as a “love letter” and said that while he did not blame the officials, he would not be applying for another visa.
“I have no visa. I am banned, obviously, from the United States, and if you want to see me, you know where to find me.”
The U.S. Consulate in Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, directed all questions to the State Department in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to immediate requests for comment.
Trump’s comments on nuclear testing upend decades of U.S. policy. Here’s what to know about it
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — President Trump’s comments Thursday suggesting the United States will restart its testing of nuclear weapons upends decades of American policy in regards to the bomb, but come as Washington’s rivals have been expanding and testing their nuclear-capable arsenals.
Nuclear weapons policy, once thought to be a relic of the Cold War, increasingly has come to the fore as Russia has made repeated atomic threats to both the U.S. and Europe during its war on Ukraine. Moscow also acknowledged this week testing a nuclear-powered-and-capable cruise missile called the Burevestnik, code-named Skyfall by NATO, and a nuclear-armed underwater drone.
China is building more ground-based nuclear missile silos. Meanwhile, North Korea just unveiled a new intercontinental ballistic missile it plans to test, part of a nuclear-capable arsenal likely able to reach the continental U.S.
The threat is starting to bleed into popular culture as well, most recently with director Kathryn Bigelow ‘s new film “A House of Dynamite.”
But what does Trump’s announcement mean and how would it affect what’s happening now with nuclear tensions? Here’s what to know.
Trump’s comments came in a post on his Truth Social website just before meeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In it, Trump noted other countries testing weapons and wrote: “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
The president’s post raised immediate questions. America’s nuclear arsenal is maintained by the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within it — not the Defense Department. The Energy Department has overseen testing of nuclear weapons since its creation in 1977. Two other agencies before it — not the Defense Department — conducted tests.
Trump also claimed the U.S. “has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country.” Russia is believed to have 5,580 nuclear warheads, according to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, while the U.S. has 5,225. Those figures include so-called “retired” warheads waiting to be dismantled.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute further breaks the warhead total down, with the U.S. having 1,770 deployed warheads with 1,930 in reserve. Russia has 1,718 deployed warheads and 2,591 in reserve.
The two countries account for nearly 90% of the world’s atomic warheads.
U.S. last carried out a nuclear test in 1992
From the time America conducted its “Trinity” nuclear bomb detonation in 1945 to 1992, the U.S. detonated 1,030 atomic bombs in tests — the most of any country. Those figures do not include the two nuclear weapons America used against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
The first American tests were atmospheric, but they were then moved underground to limit nuclear fallout. Scientists have come to refer to such tests as “shots.” The last such “shot,” called Divider as part of Operation Julin, took place Sept. 23, 1992, at the Nevada National Security Sites, a sprawling compound some 65 miles from Las Vegas.
America halted its tests for a couple of reasons. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. also signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1996. There have been tests since the treaty, however — by India, North Korea and Pakistan, the world’s newest nuclear powers. The United Kingdom and France also have nuclear weapons, while Israel long has been suspected of possessing atomic bombs.
But broadly speaking, the U.S. also had decades of data from tests, allowing it to use computer modeling and other techniques to determine whether a weapon would successfully detonate. Every president since Barack Obama has backed plans to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, whose maintenance and upgrading will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The U.S. relies on the so-called “nuclear triad” — ground-based silos, aircraft-carried bombs and nuclear-tipped missiles in submarines at sea — to deter others from launching their weapons against America.
Restarting testing raises additional questions
If the U.S. restarted nuclear weapons testing, it isn’t immediately clear what the goal would be. Nonproliferation experts have warned any scientific objective likely would be eclipsed by the backlash to a test — and possibly be a starting gun for other major nuclear powers to begin their own widespread testing.
“Restarting the U.S. nuclear testing program could be one of the most consequential policy actions the Trump administration undertakes — a U.S. test could set off an uncontrolled chain of events, with other countries possibly responding with their own nuclear tests, destabilizing global security, and accelerating a new arms race,” experts warned in a February article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
“The goal of conducting a fast-tracked nuclear test can only be political, not scientific. … It would give Russia, China and other nuclear powers free rein to restart their own nuclear testing programs, essentially without political and economic fallout.”
Any future U.S. test likely would take place in Nevada at the testing sites, but a lot of work likely would need to go into the sites to prepare them given it’s been over 30 years since the last test. A series of slides made for a presentation at Los Alamos National Laboratories in 2018 laid out the challenges, noting that in the 1960s the city of Mercury, Nevada — at the testing grounds — had been the second-largest city in Nevada.
On average, 20,000 people had been on site to organize and prepare for the tests. That capacity has waned in the decades since.
“One effects shot would require from two to four years to plan and execute,” the presentation reads. “These were massive undertakings.”
Gambrell writes for the Associated Press.
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Trump cuts tariffs on China after meeting Xi in South Korea
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Trump described his face-to-face with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday as a roaring success, saying he would cut tariffs on China, while Beijing had agreed to allow the export of rare earth elements and start buying American soybeans.
The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that the U.S. would lower tariffs implemented earlier this year as punishment on China for its selling of chemicals used to make fentanyl from 20% to 10%. That brings the total combined tariff rate on China down from 57% to 47%
“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with ten being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Trump said. “I think it was a 12.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China agreed to purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually for the next three years, starting with 12 million metric tons from now to January. U.S. soybean exports to China, a huge market for them, had come to a standstill in the trade dispute.
“So you know, our great soybean farmers, who the Chinese used as political pawns, that’s off the table, and they should prosper in the years to come,” Bessent told Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.”
Trump said that he would go to China in April and Xi would come to the U.S. “some time after that.” The president said they also discussed the export of more advanced computer chips to China, saying that Nvidia would be in talks with Chinese officials.
Trump said he could sign a trade deal with China “pretty soon.”
Xi said Washington and Beijing would work to finalize their agreements to provide “peace of mind” to both countries and the rest of the world, according to a report on the meeting distributed by state media.
“Both sides should take the long-term perspective into account, focusing on the benefits of cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation,” he said.
Sources of tension remain
Despite Trump’s optimism after a 100-minute meeting with Xi in South Korea, there continues to be the potential for major tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Both nations are seeking dominant places in manufacturing, developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, and shaping world affairs like Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs since returning to the White House for a second term, combined with China’s retaliatory limits on exports of rare earth elements, gave the meeting newfound urgency. There is a mutual recognition that neither side wants to risk blowing up the world economy in ways that could jeopardize their own country’s fortunes.
When the two were seated at the start of the meeting, Xi read prepared remarks that stressed a willingness to work together despite differences.
“Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other,” he said through a translator. “It is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have frictions now and then.”
There was a slight difference in translation as China’s Xinhua News Agency reported Xi as telling Trump that having some differences is inevitable.
Finding ways to lower the temperature
The leaders met in Busan, South Korea, a port city about 47 miles south from Gyeongju, the main venue for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
In the days leading up to the meeting, U.S. officials signaled that Trump did not intend to make good on a recent threat to impose an additional 100% import tax on Chinese goods, and China showed signs it was willing to relax its export controls on rare earths and also buy soybeans from America.
Officials from both countries met earlier this week in Kuala Lumpur to lay the groundwork for their leaders. Afterward, China’s top trade negotiator Li Chenggang said they had reached a “preliminary consensus,” a statement affirmed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said there was “ a very successful framework.”
Shortly before the meeting on Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the meeting would be the “G2,” a recognition of America and China’s status as the world’s biggest economies. The Group of Seven and Group of 20 are other forums of industrialized nations.
But while those summits often happen at luxury spaces, this meeting took place in humbler surroundings: Trump and Xi met in a small gray building with a blue roof on a military base adjacent to Busan’s international airport.
The anticipated detente has given investors and businesses caught between the two nations a sense of relief. The U.S. stock market has climbed on the hopes of a trade framework coming out of the meeting.
Pressure points remain for both U.S. and China
Trump has outward confidence that the grounds for a deal are in place, but previous negotiations with China this year in Geneva, Switzerland and London had a start-stop quality to them. The initial promise of progress has repeatedly given way to both countries seeking a better position against the other.
“The proposed deal on the table fits the pattern we’ve seen all year: short-term stabilization dressed up as strategic progress,” said Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Both sides are managing volatility, calibrating just enough cooperation to avert crisis while the deeper rivalry endures.”
The U.S. and China have each shown they believe they have levers to pressure the other, and the past year has demonstrated that tentative steps forward can be short-lived.
For Trump, that pressure comes from tariffs.
China had faced new tariffs this year totaling 30%, of which 20% were tied to its role in fentanyl production. But the tariff rates have been volatile. In April, he announced plans to jack the rate on Chinese goods to 145%, only to abandon those plans as markets recoiled.
Then, on Oct. 10, Trump threatened a 100% import tax because of China’s rare earth restrictions. That figure, including past tariffs, would now be 47% “effective immediately,” Trump told reporters on Thursday.
Xi has his own chokehold on the world economy because China is the top producer and processor of the rare earth minerals needed to make fighter jets, robots, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.
China had tightened export restrictions on Oct. 9, repeating a cycle in which each nation jockeys for an edge only to back down after more trade talks.
What might also matter is what happens directly after their talks. Trump plans to return to Washington, while Xi plans to stay on in South Korea to meet with regional leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which officially begins on Friday.
“Xi sees an opportunity to position China as a reliable partner and bolster bilateral and multilateral relations with countries frustrated by the U.S. administration’s tariff policy,” said Jay Truesdale, a former State Department official who is CEO of TD International, a risk and intelligence advisory firm.
Boak, Megerian and Schiefelbein write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Tokyo and Megerian reported from Busan, South Korea. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Seung Min Kim and Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
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The great EV retreat of 2025
In recent years, it’s become abundantly clear this region’s war on smog hinges on the adoption electric vehicles. And, for the first time in a generation, we may be headed in the wrong direction.
If you’ve followed my coverage, you probably know that Southern California’s persistently sunny climate and mountains work together to form and trap smog over our region. And, that the leading source of smog-forming pollution is the same today as it was decades ago: gas-guzzling cars and trucks.
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State regulators have made tremendous progress in the last few decades when it comes to curbing tailpipe pollution; California, for example, was the first state to adopt engine emission standards and mandate catalytic converters, regulations that were later adopted nationwide. But Southern California has yet to achieve any federal air quality standards for smog.
And now, electric vehicles and hybrids face significant headwinds due to recent policy changes under the Trump administration.
Since President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has successfully campaigned to invalidate several California auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that would’ve required 35% of new vehicles that automakers supply to California car dealerships to be zero-emission or plug-in hybrid starting next year.
Separately, Trump’s budget bill terminated federal incentives at the end of September that made zero-emission vehicles more cost-competitive with gas cars. As I recently wrote, California saw record-high sales numbers of EVs and other clean vehicles as consumers scrambled to dealerships to take advantage of expiring deals.
But now, without these two crucial policy levers driving EV adoption, the industry is at an inflection point.
A new EV costs about $8,000 more on average than a gas car, according to Kelley Blue Book.
The overall cost of ownership for EVs can still be cheaper than for gas cars due to lower fuel and maintenance costs. However, the question is, will Americans accept a higher upfront price tag in exchange for fewer costs — and less pollution — down the road?
The auto industry doesn’t pivot on a dime. Car lineups are designed, produced and released years in advance. But, in the last year, amid a torrent of policy decisions coming from the Trump White House, car companies have announced many moves that signal a retreat from some zero-emission vehicles:
The loss of new or forthcoming zero-emission models is disheartening, said Joel Levin, executive director of Plug In America, a nonprofit that hosts events to advocate for more EVs. But, he added, most of these were fledgling models that did not make up a large share of sales.
“I think it’s that people are just being more selective about what they’re bringing to market, and are focusing in on the vehicles that they really feel like have legs,” Levin said. “So it’s a loss. I’m sad about it. But I don’t think that it’s an existential threat to the market.”
In the last decade, Levin has seen the national market share of EVs and plug-in hybrids compared with overall car sales grow from a fraction of a percent in 2015 to roughly 10% in 2024. In California, that number was even higher, at 25%.
Levin said that can largely be attributed to advancement of battery technology, which has allowed for drastically longer range. But EVs also offer technological amenities that gas counterparts do not.
“Ford has advertised how you can use your pickup truck as backup power for your house if the power goes out,” Levin said. “Or if you’re a contractor or rancher and you need to use power tools somewhere remote away from your house, you can just plug them into your truck. If you’re camping, you can set up your electric kitchen, or you can watch movies, or you can charge your equipment.”
Those features may help win over some drivers. But experts say government regulations are necessary to achieve California’s air quality and climate targets.
California is suing the federal government and Trump administration, alleging they illegally overturned the state’s auto emission standards. The state Air Resources Board has also proposed several ideas to boost EV sales, such as providing free access to toll roads to EV and hybrid drivers.
That said, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently ruled out one of the most powerful tools at his disposal to promote a clean fleet of vehicles in California, as he reneged on his commitment to restore a state rebate program for EV buyers that he had previously vowed to put into effect if Trump eliminated federal incentives.
Dan Sperling, a former CARB board member and UC Davis professor, said the state might consider a “feebate” program in which the state could impose fees on the sales of the most polluting cars, which would then be used to fund rebates for EV and hybrid purchases.
Meanwhile, as consumer sentiment and government policies vacillate in the U.S., demand internationally continues to grow. And American automakers will need to keep investing in EVs if they want to stay globally competitive. Sperling, who took my call while traveling to Paris, said he noticed Chinese EVs throughout the city.
“In China, 50% of all their vehicles that they sell are electric vehicles,” Sperling said. “They sell more electric vehicles in China than total cars sold in the U.S.”
“The vehicle industry is an international industry and so they can’t afford to just give up on electric vehicles, because that means they’re giving up on the rest of the world.”
Air news this week
Ten years after the disastrous Aliso Canyon gas leak, my colleague Hayley Smith spoke with residents about their recollections of the dangerous release of some 120,000 tons of methane and other toxic chemicals near Porter Ranch. Despite persistent environmental concerns, regulators have voted to keep the gas storage facility online, citing concerns over energy demand.
A judge ordered a Watts recycling facility to permanently shut down and pay $2 million in restitution and fines after the company and its owners pleaded no contest to illegally dumping hazardous waste that was polluting a nearby high school.
Environmental groups recently sued the Trump administration for lifting restrictions on dozens of chemical manufacturing plants, according to InsideClimate News reporter Keerti Gopal.
LAist’s AirTalk host Larry Mantle hosted a great conversation on how Los Angeles became the nation’s smog capital. He and Chip Jacobs, the author of “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles,” recounted the region’s first brush with toxic haze in the 1940s and pollution’s lasting legacy in Southern California.
Associated Press reporters Sheikh Saaliq and Sibi Arasu reported that officials in India are undertaking cloud-seeding experiments as a way to clear air pollution in New Delhi. The controversial approach involves using aircraft to spray chemicals into clouds above the city in hopes of triggering rainfall that would suppress the smog.
One more thing in climate news …
Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest hurricanes recorded to date in the Atlantic, killed more than 20 people as it barreled through Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, according to the Washington Post. The proliferation of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels undoubtedly contributed to the historically powerful storm. Because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and foster more intense storms, Melissa may be a harbinger of what’s to come.
Making matters worse, Bloomberg reporters Leslie Kaufman and Fabiano Maisonnave report that wealthy countries are not giving poorer nations the climate adaptation funding they need, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme. As climate risks in many of these countries increase, funding to adapt to climate change is shrinking.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more air quality and climate news, follow Tony Briscoe at @_tonybriscoe on X.
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Warner Bros. Discovery is up for sale. Why CEO David Zaslav isn’t ready to give up the reins
Paramount Chairman David Ellison’s latest offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery contained a twist:
Should Paramount, backed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, pull off the purchase, Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav could stay on to help lead the combined enterprise.
“They’re sweetening the pot,” Paul Hardart, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said of the Ellison family. “It just shows all the little arrows in their quiver they’re using to try to push this deal.”
David Ellison’ unexpected olive branch to Zaslav was contained in a letter this month to Warner Bros. Discovery’s board that offered $58 billion in cash and stock for the entire company. The move underscores the family’s determination to win the entertainment company that includes HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. film and television studios — and an obstacle in their path.
After hustling for decades to get to the big stage, Zaslav, 65, isn’t ready to relinquish the reins. He’s eager to prove critics wrong and complete a turnaround after three painful years of setbacks and cost cuts to reduce the company’s mountain of debt.
Warner Bros. Discovery board members, including Zaslav, have unanimously voted to reject Paramount’s three bids, viewing them as too low and not in the best interest of shareholders, according to two people close to the company who were not authorized to comment.
The board supports Zaslav’s desire to forge ahead with a planned split of the company next spring. But it also has opened the auction to other potential suitors, which is expected to lead to the firm changing hands for the third time in a decade.
Representatives of Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount declined to comment.
David Ellison’s audacious offer is being guaranteed by his father, Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest man with a net worth that exceeds $340 billion. The Ellisons’ proposal includes paying 80% cash to Warner shareholders and the rest in stock, according to two people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to comment. The most recent offer was $23.50 a share.
The Ellisons began their campaign last month, just weeks after David Ellison’s Skydance Media, along with RedBird Capital Partners, picked up the keys to Paramount, which includes CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon and the Melrose Avenue film studio, which has been depleted by decades of underinvestment.
Since then, the 42-year-old Ellison has led Paramount on a buying bonanza, paying $7.7 billion for UFC media rights and $1.25 billion over five years to Matt Stone and Trey Parker to continue creating their cartoon “South Park.” It also wooed Matt and Ross Duffer, the duo behind “Stranger Things,” away from Netflix with an exclusive four-year deal. This week, it announced a planned East Coast expansion, signing a 10-year lease for a film and TV production center under construction in New Jersey.
The proposed addition of the more vibrant Warner Bros. would give the Ellisons an unparalleled entertainment portfolio with DC Comics including Superman, “Top Gun,” Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, “The Matrix” and “The Gilded Age.”
The family would control streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+, nearly three dozen cable channels, including HGTV, Food Network and TBS, and two legacy news operations — CNN and CBS News.
It would also accelerate the trend of uber billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, of owning prominent news, entertainment and social media platforms. Larry Ellison also is part of a U.S.-based consortium lined up by President Trump to buy TikTok from its Chinese owners.
“If a trade deal with China is imminent, and TikTok would be aligned, then it would create a new media colossus, the likes of which we haven’t seen,” said veteran executive Jonathan Miller, chief executive of the investment firm Integrated Media Co.
Paramount is in talks to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times; Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
The drama is unfolding as Paramount on Wednesday slashed 1,000 workers in the first round of cuts since Ellison took over. A second wave of layoffs — affecting another 1,000 workers — is expected in the coming weeks, helping fulfill a promise made to Wall Street by Ellison and Redbird to reduce expenses by more than $2 billion.
Combining with Warner Bros. would bring more layoffs, analysts said, and a potential hollowing out of a historic studio.
“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” the Writers Guild of America West, said last week in a statement in opposition to the proposed unification. “Combining Warner Bros. with Paramount or another major studio or streamer would be a disaster for writers, for consumers, and for competition.”
Critics point to a long list of media merger misfires, including the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger a quarter century ago. Some critics contend Walt Disney Co.’s $71-billion purchase of much of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment holdings didn’t live up to expectations, and AT&T whiffed its $85-billion deal for Time Warner, handing it to Zaslav’s Discovery four years later for $43 billion.
The New York native, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, had spent 16 years running the Discovery cable channel group, a respectable business, but one that lacked Hollywood flash.
Zaslav grew up on the fringe of New York City, in Ramapo, N.Y., where he’d been a promising tennis player who proudly wore his athletic gear to middle school. Tennis was his identity — until he started getting beat by players he used to whip.
Zaslav’s coach sat him down, bluntly saying he wasn’t putting in the work.
“I vowed that day I would never be outworked again,” Zaslav said during a 2023 commencement address to Boston University graduates. Underlings have long marveled at his indefatigable work ethic.
The speech was meant to be his triumphant return to his alma mater. Zaslav had finally made it to Hollywood, where he was now holding court in an exquisite corner office that had belonged to studio founder Jack Warner.
Zaslav had big plans to turn around Warner Bros. But, in Boston, he suffered a beatdown.
The Writers Guild of America had just gone on strike against his and other Hollywood studios. Protesters heckled Zaslav. Students booed. A plane flew overhead, waving a banner that read: “David Zaslav Pay Your Writers.”
He had assumed control a year earlier, in April 2022, just as Wall Street soured on media companies that were spending wildly to build streaming services to compete with Netflix.
Zaslav inherited a venture bleeding billions of dollars to get into streaming. The merger itself saddled the company with $55 billion of debt. Warner’s stock plummeted.
He and his team spent the first few years slashing divisions, canceling TV programs and contracts, and shelving movies. To further reduce expenses, the company laid off thousands of workers. Hollywood soon viewed Zaslav with derision.
It didn’t help that Zaslav has long been one of the most handsomely compensated executives in America.
There were high-profile stumbles, including jettisoning staff of the tiny Turner Classic Movies channel and an ill-conceived rebrand of its streamer to “Max” before changing the name back to HBO Max.
“The Warner Bros. Discovery merger was a well-intended failure,” Hardart said. “The cable subscriber base shrank at a faster rate than most people had forecast. … Thousands have lost their jobs, the HBO brand has been reimagined and reimagined, films have been mothballed and the future of the Warner Bros. studio is today uncertain.”
Warner Bros. Discovery paid down $20 billion in debt, but $35 billion remains. The debt load has nearly suffocated the company, making it a vulnerable target.
“There was a lot of fixing that David Zaslav and his team had to do,” Bank of America media analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich said in a recent interview. “It’s been three years of incredibly heavy lifting — but that’s pretty much done now.”
In a note to investors last week, Ehrlich wrote Warner’s strong franchises, including DC Comics, and its voluminous library make it “an extremely attractive potential acquisition target,” one that could fetch $30 a share. Her firm carries a “buy” rating on the stock.
Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav and AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey shake hands on May 17, 2021, in New York City.
(Preston Bradford / Discovery)
Last summer, Zaslav announced plans to split the company in two halves.
Zaslav would run Warner Bros., which would consist of the Burbank studios, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service. Longtime lieutenant Gunnar Wiedenfels would helm Discovery Global, made up of the firm’s international businesses and basic cable channels, which face an uncertain future in the streaming era.
Those who know Zaslav believe he’s working to stave off the Ellison takeover, in part, because he wants the chance to bring the company back to its glory, which would ultimately make it more valuable for its investors and prospective buyers.
For Warner management, that’s part of the rub. The Ellisons showed up just as the company was displaying signs of a turnaround, including a hot streak by Warner Bros. that includes “A Minecraft Movie,” Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” James Gunn’s “Superman,” Formula One adventure “F1: The Movie,” and horror flick “Weapons.”
In addition, HBO returned to its winning ways at last month’s Emmys, collecting an industry-leading 30 awards, tied with Netflix.
Larry, from left, Megan and David Ellison attend the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “Terminator Genisys” at Dolby Theatre on June 28, 2015.
(Lester Cohen / WireImage)
Ellison’s bidding was designed to thwart Warner’s planned corporate breakup.
For now, analysts said, Zaslav and the Warner board’s current strategy is solid because they have effectively driven up the stock price, which has doubled to $21 a share since the Ellison’s interest became known in mid-September.
“They are doing the right thing,” Hardart said. “In any sale, you try to beat the bushes and get as many people interested. But at some point the board is going to have to make a decision.”
Added one investor: “They’ve gotten Paramount-Skydance to bid against itself, and that only goes so far.”
Analysts expect Philadelphia giant Comcast, owner of NBCUniversal, and potentially Netflix, Apple or Amazon to take a look at the company’s studio, library and streaming assets.
But many see the Ellison’s Skydance as having the edge.
Paramount, in its recent letter to the Warner board, argued that it was the best and most logical buyer.
“What Skydance offers WBD, in many ways, is what it offered Paramount: The ability to be aggressive and push all aspects of the business in a way that most people or companies that have less capital just can’t do,” Miller said. “They are deploying real capital, and they are being the most aggressive folks in the industry right now.”
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What makes a rebellion? Trump troop deployment may hinge on definition
At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.
But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.
For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels and brass scales of justice.
The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.
Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.
That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black’s 13th Edition.
But, despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” was never far from his mind.
Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”
He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.
“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.
Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.
That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”
The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise sparred over the word.
In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.
This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.
States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”
“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onstage to deliver remarks as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”
Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.
Still, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to interpretive excesses of the past.
“The words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.
Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.
“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ or ‘no, there isn’t,’ so they say ‘the dictionary made me do it.’” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it didn’t.”
Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.
The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike past presidents, who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump deployed an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and surge military forces into American cities.
Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.
Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.
As of this week, appellate courts also remain sharply divided on the evidence.
On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”
The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.
The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.
“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.
A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.
For Garner, that decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.
As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”
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Commentary: These are thirsty times. No wonder Kamala Harris’ book tour is a fan fest
Tuesday evening former Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to her second sold-out crowd in Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theater as part of a book tour promoting her memoir, “107 Days.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to decide if she’ll run for president in 2028. She’s also not going to dish on her former boss, Joe Biden. And her advice for a Brown-skinned person just getting into politics? There will be many situations when you walk into a meeting room and no one looks like you. Keep your chin up, your shoulders back and remember — all of us have your back.
“All of us” referred to the cheering, sold-out crowd at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening who’d come to see the former Democratic presidential candidate speak about her new book, the election-campaign memoir “107 Days.” The chanted “Kamala!” “Kamala!” as she walked on stage. The outbursts of adoration continued for the next hour in eruptions of applause and supportive shout-outs (“We love you!”) as she spoke about everything from the need to pass Proposition 50 to how she coped with the devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Moderated by actor Kerry Washington, “A Conversation With Kamala Harris” was one of nearly 20 stops on a tour that’s already seen Harris speak in New York, London and at the Wiltern last month. Zealous attendees paid anywhere from $55 to $190 on tickets to see Harris again following “one of the wildest and most consequential campaigns in American history” (the latter is an official descriptor for her book). The memoir details her historically short run for president, the whirlwind 107 days between the time Biden withdrew from the race and Harris become the Democratic nominee to her devastating loss on Nov. 5.
Harris fans flock to the Wiltern to see Kamala speak about her book, “107 Days.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Were there any great revelations or gotcha moments on stage Tuesday evening? Not really, but that’s not what this tour is about — at least for those who chose Harris over watching Game 4 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. The former attorney general of California shared her thoughts about the current Department of Justice — a “thin-skinned president” is using it as his own personal tool of “vengeance.” She explained how her loyalties to Biden may have cost her votes, and called out the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, whose “billionaire owners pre-capitulated” to Trump when they pulled their respective editorial boards’ endorsements for Harris. She drew a big laugh when discussing the importance of parsing fact from fiction in today’s mediaverse, and made up her own example of misinformation: “Circumcisions are causing autism!” And on a more serious note, she detailed the emotional fallout she experienced after losing the election: “For months [she and her husband, Doug Emhoff] never even mentioned it.”
Criticisms of Harris’ book have centered around a frankly tired refrain that she should accept more personal accountability for the election loss as opposed to blaming the influence of outside forces. On Tuesday she appeared willing to explore those themes when she said she constantly interrogated herself on the campaign trail: Are you doing everything you can to win this election? But before she could go much deeper, Washington told her that she needed to know that we, the audience, understood she did everything she could. The crowd erupted in affirming shouts and applause.
Clearly, a book tour attended by The Converted is not going to produce headline-worthy grist, especially with an interviewer who is an admitted Harris friend and supporter. That’s what debates and media interviews are for, and this was a fan event.
And her base was thirsty. Since Harris has largely stayed out of the spotlight since last November, the audience appeared ready to relive some of the joy they felt in the brief time she was running for office, and perhaps find a glimmer of hope in dark times for those who see the current administration’s actions as anti-democratic, at best.
Before “The Conversation With Kamala Harris” kicked off at 7 p.m., attendees who spotted Harris’ husband, Emhoff, in the first few rows of the venue lined up to shake his hand and take selfies with the former second gentleman of the United States. The close access to SGOTUS was surprising, given the heightened security around political figures after violent events such as the home-invasion assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event last month. Yet the atmosphere was casual and relaxed.
Despite heightened threats of politically-motivated violence, President Trump pulled Harris’ Secret Service detail, as he has done to many of those he sees as his enemies. But as a former state office holder, Harris’ security detail Tuesday was provided by the California Highway Patrol.
The conversation lasted a little over an hour, with a few prescreened questions at the end from audience members, such as the query from an attendee who identified himself as Ramon Chavoya, a proud Latino. He asked for Harris’ advice on getting into local politics. She was the first Black and first South Asian female candidate to be chosen by either party to run for the Oval Office. Her very presence was a reminder that the face of the nation is changing, despite a rise in xenophobic movements and legislation. She advised the aspiring young politician that he would likely stand out, but that he wasn’t alone. “We’re all in the room with you,” she said, a sentiment Harris’ supporters surely understood.
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Bork Believes in the Words : Reliance on the Constitution Doesn’t Make Him an Ideologue
Bernard Dobranski is the dean and Leon Lysaght is an associate professor of law at the University of Detroit School of Law
There is an unfortunate trend these days to further erode the distinction between law and politics. The formation and enforcement of laws is, of course, connected with the political process. On the other hand, the interpretation of the law should be divorced from the political process as much as possible. The problem is that the Constitution has, more and more, become an arena for carrying on political contests. Where proponents see little hope of legislative success, they have sought to cast their claims in constitutional molds. As a result, there are those who are more concerned with a judge’s politics than with his or her view of the law and the role of the judiciary in our form of government. What is even more alarming is the growing tendency to interpret judicial decisions in political terms that only take account of results.
The blizzard of commentary surrounding the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork for the vacancy on the Supreme Court has obscured the legitimate issues and served to focus attention on the irrelevant and unknowable. We do not and cannot know whether Bork’s heart was pure on the day he fired Archibald Cox. What we can determine is whether his conduct was within, and indeed required by, the law. We cannot know precisely how Bork, now on the U.S. Court of Appeals, will vote on a variety of issues that will eventually appear before the Supreme Court. What we can reasonably expect to understand is Bork’s opinion as to the nature of the U.S. Constitution and his approach to interpreting it.
In a 1986 article in the San Diego Law Review, Bork sets forth his views on the proper role of the judiciary and the approach that it ought to take to constitutional interpretation. He discusses the problems created by the use of a concept like the “right of privacy” as the criterion for determining the result in Griswold vs. Connecticut. “My point,” Bork says, “is simply that the level of abstraction chosen makes the application of a generalized right of privacy unpredictable.” What concerned Bork was the trend toward generalization in judicial decisions even when the Constitution is silent on an issue, and what this might lead to as a source of unstructured judicial power.
The whole tenor of Bork’s article is strongly reminiscent of the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in the Griswold case. “Privacy,” Black said, “is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things . . . .” Black’s view of the manner in which the Supreme Court ought to interpret the Constitution has much in common with Bork’s as expressed in the San Diego Law Review article.
Both jurists take the position that the function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution by reference to the words that appear in it. Both believe that the words can and ought to be limiting factors on the discretion that judges have in making their decisions. Yet there is a growing group of law professors who think otherwise. And there appear to be a number of senators who believe that political ideology is the determining factor in judicial decision-making.
But political beliefs held before appointment to the Supreme Court have not been reliable predictors of judicial behavior. Hugo Black’s political background (which included membership in the Ku Klux Klan) would hardly have predicted a judicial record of preserving individual rights. Earl Warren’s performance surprised more than a few people.
More is known about candidates who have had judicial experience than those who have been selected from the political arena. But what is it that we know about current or former judges?
What we know is whether they view the law as a rational enterprise and whether, as judges, they are of the opinion that they must give good reasons for the decisions that they make. We can discover whether they believe that a judge is morally superior and, therefore, morally justified in substituting his or her opinion for the opinions of legislators or the general population. In short, what we can find out, and what we should want to know, is the degree to which the candidate for judicial office is committed to the rule of law.
It is appropriate to ask a political candidate what his or her opinions are in respect to abortion, prayer in schools, gay rights or any other matter within the political domain. What we should ask the candidate for judicial office is his or her opinion with regard to the law on these matters, and whether the candidate is prepared to faithfully apply the law. It is important to determine whether the judicial candidate differentiates between his preferences on matters of social policy and his view of the law on these same issues.
Bork has articulated his views on these matters in numerous law-review articles and judicial opinions. What he has said is neither unique nor radical. As previously noted, his position on constitutional interpretation bears striking resemblance to Hugo Black’s. The view that a judge must justify his decisions by reference to the established meaning of the words does not justify calling him a right-wing ideologue. The nomination, and confirmation, of Judge Bork will not mean substantial change in life as we know it, no matter who “we” are.
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Obama, Romney even in 12 swing states, USA Today/Gallup poll says
President Obama is running statistically even with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 12 key swing states and is slightly ahead of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, according to the USA Today/Gallup poll released Friday.
The poll, which looks at both national trends and at the races in what everyone considers to be the 12 battleground states that will likely determine the 2012 election, paints a picture of Obama facing a tougher road to reelection than an incumbent should.
But the president, a Democrat whose approval rating has been in the low 40-percent range in recent months, can take heart from the poll’s findings that he is running better against specific Republican candidates than he does against a generic Republican, indicating that when faced with a real choice, voters seem to prefer Obama to Romney, Perry or Cain.
According to the poll, Obama is tied among national voters with Romney at 47% and leads Perry 49% to 45%. In its first measurement of Cain, the poll found Obama ahead 48% to 46%. The poll was taken before reports surfaced that two women received financial settlements after complaining that Cain had sexually harassed them.
But overall, the results show all three GOP candidates running strongly against Obama. The national results are based on interviews with 1,056 adults taken Oct. 26-27; the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
But the American electoral system is based on indirect representation rather than direct democracy. The Founding Fathers feared the unmediated passions of the mob and wanted to ensure that wiser heads would have a greater role. Hence the creation of the presidential electors who actually vote for president based on the popular vote in their home states.
Because of the electoral college, where a candidate’s support exists is often more important than just how many people back him or her. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win, and in 2012, Obama can pretty much count on winning enough states to give him about 196 electoral votes, while the GOP candidate starts with about 191. In the center are 12 states, worth 151 electoral votes for which both parties will spend most of their money and resources fighting. Those states, all won by Obama in 2008, are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
According to the poll, Romney is at 47% to Obama’s 46% in those 12 states. Obama does better against Perry, 49% to 44% and Cain, 48% to 45%. Those results are based on interviews with 1,334 adults, from Oct. 20 to 27. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The polls generally show that the presidential race is extremely competitive at this point, a year before Election Day and two months before the GOP begins voting for its presidential candidate. But Republicans also have an advantage in the enthusiasm arena, according to the poll.
Overall, 47% of swing-state registered voters and 48% of all U.S. registered voters said they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting. But Republicans were more eager both nationally and in the swing states. Nationally, Republicans were ahead 56% to 48% over Democrats. In the swing states, the GOP was ahead in the enthusiasm race 59% to 48%.
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Man Fights Will, Says He Was Lawmaker’s Lover
WESTPORT, Conn. — A man contesting the handling of the will of the late U.S. Rep. Stewart B. McKinney disputes official reports that McKinney contracted AIDS from blood transfusions, saying that for five years he was the Connecticut congressman’s lover.
McKinney, 56, a liberal Republican who died in 1987 during his ninth term in Congress, left a car and a 40% share of his Washington house to the man, Arnold R. Denson, according to documents on file in Probate Court. Denson’s share of the estate is worth at least $59,200.
Denson displayed photographs, bills and other documents to support his claim.
Vic Basil, former executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, also said that Denson and McKinney were lovers. The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign Fund is the nation’s largest gay-lesbian political action group and lobbying organization.
McKinney’s wife, Lucie, denied that her husband was homosexual.
Denson, 34, a real estate agent, said the two lived together in McKinney’s Washington home. Lucie McKinney remained in Connecticut, where the congressman spent most weekends.
McKinney’s family learned of the affair when he was on his death bed, Denson says. He said he agreed not to reveal the relationship at the family’s request and was told that in exchange for his silence he would receive the property willed to him.
But Denson has not received his inheritance and is battling Lucie McKinney in Probate Court in Westport. He decided to speak publicly after a hearing Monday.
Cesar Caceres, McKinney’s physician, issued a statement the day of McKinney’s death on May 7, 1987, saying that McKinney had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion he received after coronary bypass surgery in 1979.
When informed of Denson’s statement, Lucie McKinney on Monday again denied that her husband was homosexual.
Her attorney, Lawrence J. Halloran, also disputed Denson’s claim. He said that McKinney and Denson were friends and business associates, that McKinney lived alone in Washington and that Denson rented an apartment attached to McKinney’s home.
Denson, a divorced father of two, said he believes McKinney was already infected with AIDS when they met in 1982, and said two previous lovers of McKinney have died of AIDS.
Denson said he has recently tested negative for the virus that causes AIDS and has abstained from sex since McKinney’s death.
The estate could be wiped out by a claim filed by Lucie McKinney, who is an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune as well as to an oil and railroad fortune. She testified Monday that her husband borrowed $432,552 from her trust fund and promised to pay her back.
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Appeals court blocks order requiring Bovino to brief judge on Chicago immigration sweeps
CHICAGO — An appeals court intervened Wednesday and suddenly blocked an order that required a senior Border Patrol official to give unprecedented daily briefings to a judge about immigration sweeps in Chicago.
The one-page suspension by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals came before Greg Bovino’s first scheduled, late afternoon meeting with U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the courthouse in downtown Chicago.
Ellis had ordered the meetings Tuesday after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by government agents working Operation Midway Blitz. It has produced more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.
Bovino told Fox News that he was eager to talk to Ellis. But government lawyers, at the same time, were appealing her decision. Lawyers for news outlets and activists who say agents have used too much force, including tear gas, have until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond in the appeals court.
Ellis’ order followed enforcement actions in which tear gas was used, including in a neighborhood where children had gathered for a Halloween parade last weekend on the city’s Northwest Side. Neighbors had joined in the street as someone was arrested.
“Halloween is on Friday,” she said. “I do not want to get violation reports from the plaintiffs that show that agents are out and about on Halloween, where kids are present and tear gas is being deployed.”
Bovino defended agents’ actions.
“If she wants to meet with me every day, then she’s going to see, she’s going to have a very good firsthand look at just how bad things really are on the streets of Chicago,” Bovino told Fox News. “I look forward to meeting with that judge to show her exactly what’s happening and the extreme amount of violence perpetrated against law enforcement here.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors filed charges against Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congressional candidate, and five other people over protests at an immigration enforcement building in Broadview, outside Chicago. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, alleges they illegally blocked an agent’s car on Sept. 26.
Abughazaleh said the prosecution was an “attempt to silence dissent.”
The Chicago court actions came as groups and officials across the country have filed lawsuits aimed at restricting federal deployments of National Guard troops.
President Trump’s administration will remain blocked from deploying troops in the Chicago area until at least the latter half of November, following a U.S. Supreme Court order Wednesday calling on the parties to file additional legal briefs.
The justices indicated they would not act before Nov. 17 on the administration’s emergency appeal to overturn a lower-court ruling that has blocked the troop deployments.
In Portland, Ore., a federal trial seeking to block a troop deployment got underway Wednesday morning with a police commander describing on the witness stand how federal agents at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building repeatedly fired tear gas at nonviolent protesters.
In Chicago, Bovino, who is chief of the Border Patrol sector in El Centro, Calif., was to sit for a daily 5:45 p.m. briefing to report how his agents are enforcing the law and whether they are staying within constitutional bounds, Ellis said. The check-ins were to take place until a Nov. 5 hearing.
Ellis also demanded that Bovino produce all use-of-force reports since Sept. 2 from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz.
The judge expressed confidence Tuesday that the check-ins would prevent excessive use of force in Chicago neighborhoods.
Ellis previously ordered agents to wear badges, and she has banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. She subsequently required body cameras after the use of tear gas raised concerns that agents were not following her initial order.
Ellis set a Friday deadline for Bovino to get a camera and to complete training.
Lawyers for the government have repeatedly defended the actions of agents, including those from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and told the judge that videos and other portrayals of enforcement actions have been one-sided.
Besides his court appearance, Bovino still must sit for a videotaped Thursday deposition, an interview in private, with lawyers from both sides.
Fernando writes for the Associated Press.
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ICE officials in major cities replaced with Border Patrol
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is initiating a leadership shakeup at a dozen or so offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bring more aggressive enforcement operations across the U.S.
Some of the outgoing field office directors at ICE are anticipated to be replaced with leaders from Customs and Border Protection, according to news reports. Among the leaders targeted for replacement are Los Angeles Field Office Director Ernesto Santacruz and San Diego Field Office Director Patrick Divver, the Washington Examiner reported Monday.
The stepped up role of Border Patrol leaders in interior enforcement — which has historically been ICE territory — marks an evolution of tactics that originated in California.
For the record:
9:27 a.m. Oct. 29, 2025An earlier version of this article said Gregory Bovino, who heads the Border Patrol’s El Centro region, led a three-day raid in rural Kern County in late December. The raid occurred in early January.
In early January, Gregory Bovino, who heads the Border Patrol’s El Centro region, led a three-day raid in rural Kern County, nabbing day laborers more than 300 miles from his typical territory. Former Biden administration officials said Bovino had gone “rogue” and that no agency leaders knew about the operation beforehand.
Bovino leveraged the spectacle to become the on-the-ground point person for the Trump Administration’s signature issue.
The three-decade veteran of Border Patrol, who has used slick social media videos to promote the agency’s heavy-handed tactics, brought militarized operations once primarily used at the border into America’s largest cities.
In Los Angeles this summer, contingents of heavily armed, masked agents began chasing down and arresting day laborers, street vendors and car wash workers. Tensions grew as the administration ordered in the National Guard.
The efforts seem to have become more aggressive after a Supreme Court order allowed authorities to stop people based on factors such as race or ethnicity, employment and speaking Spanish.
Bovino moved operations to Chicago and escalated his approach. Immigration agents launched an overnight raid in a crowded apartment, shot gas into crowds of protesters and fatally shot one man.
Now Bovino is expected to hand-pick some of the replacements at ICE field offices, according to Fox News.
Tom Wong, who directs the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego, said the leadership changes are unsurprising, given Bovino’s strategies in Los Angeles and Chicago.
“The Trump administration is blurring the distinction between Border Patrol and ICE,” he said. “The border is no longer just the external boundaries of the United States, but the border is everywhere.”
Former Homeland Security officials said the large-scale replacement of executives from one agency with those from another agency is unprecedented.
The two agencies have similar authorities but very different approaches, said Daniel Altman, former head of internal oversight investigations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
ICE officers operate largely inside the country, lean heavily on investigations and typically know when they set out for the day who they are targeting.
Border Patrol, on the other hand, patrols the borderlands for anyone they encounter and suspect of entering illegally. Amid the rugged terrain and isolation, Border Patrol built a do-it-yourself ethos within the century-old organization, Altman said.
“Culturally, the Border Patrol prides itself on solving problems, and that means that whatever the current administration needs or wants with respect to immigration enforcement, they’re usually very willing and able to do that,” said Altman.
White House leadership has not been happy with arrest numbers. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff who is heading his immigration initiatives, set a goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, which the agency has not been able to meet.
DHS says it expects to deport 600,000 people by January, a figure that includes people who were turned back at the border or at airports.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant public affairs secretary for the Homeland Security department, didn’t confirm or deny the changes but described immigration officials as united.
“Talk about sensationalism,” she said. “Only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’ If and when we have specific personnel moves to announce, we’ll do that.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The President’s entire team is working in lockstep to implement the President’s policy agenda, and the tremendous results from securing the border to deporting criminal illegal aliens speak for themselves.”
On Fox News on Tuesday, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said the administration is dedicated to achieving record deportations of primarily immigrants with criminal records.
“As far as personnel changes, that’s under the purview of the Secretary of Homeland Security,” he said. “I’m at the White House working with people like Stephen Miller, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, to come up with strategic policies and plans — how to get success, how to maintain success, and how to get the numbers ever higher.”
Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE and DHS official under the Biden administration, said the personnel moves appear to be an “attempt to migrate a Border Patrol ethos over to ICE.”
“ICE’s job has historically focused on targeting and enforcing against public safety threats,” she said. “Border Patrol has a much more highly militarized job of securing the border, protecting against transnational crime and drug trafficking and smuggling. That sort of approach doesn’t belong in our cities and is quite dangerous.”
Fleischaker said it would be difficult to increase deportations, even with Border Patrol leaders at the helm, because of the complexities around securing travel documents and negotiating with countries that are reticent to accept deportees.
In the meantime, she said, shunting well-liked leaders will sink morale.
“For the folks who are still there, everybody knows you comply or you risk losing your job,” she said. “Dissent, failure to meet targets or even ask questions aren’t really tolerated.”
On Tuesday, DHS posted a video montage of Bovino on its Instagram page set to Coldplay’s song “Viva la vida.” The caption read, “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.”
Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
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Trump scores golden gifts as United States and Seoul advance trade talks
GYEONGJU, South Korea — The United States and South Korea advanced trade talks on Wednesday, addressing details of $350 billion that would be invested in the American economy, after negotiations and ceremonies that included the presentation of a gold medal and crown to President Trump.
Both were gifts from the country’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who dialed up the flattery while Washington and Seoul worked to nail down financial promises during the last stop of Trump’s Asia trip.
Although both sides said progress has been made — Trump said things were “pretty much finalized” — no agreement has been signed yet. The framework includes gradual investments, cooperation on shipbuilding and the lowering of Trump’s tariffs on South Korea’s automobile exports, according to Kim Yong-beom, Lee’s chief of staff for policy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The announcement came after a day of adulation for the visiting American president from his hosts. There was a special lunch menu featuring U.S.-raised beef and a gold-adorned brownie. A band played Trump’s campaign anthem of “Y.M.C.A.” when he stepped off Air Force One. Lee told him that “you are indeed making America great again.”
Trump can be mercurial and demanding, but he has a soft spot for pomp and circumstance. He was particularly impressed by a choreographed display of colorful flags as he walked along the red carpet.
“That was some spectacle, and some beautiful scene,” Trump told Lee during their meeting. “It was so perfect, so flawlessly done.”
Earlier in the day, Trump even softened his rhetoric on international trade, which he normally describes in predatory terms where someone is always trying to rip off the United States.
“The best deals are deals that work for everybody,” he said during a business forum.
Trade deal with Seoul in process
Trump was visiting while South Korea is hosting the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the historical city of Gyeongju. He previously stopped in Japan, where he bonded with the new prime minister, and Malaysia, where he attended a summit of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations.
The Republican president has been trying to tie up trade deals along the way, eager to show that his confrontational approach of tariffs is paying dividends for Americans who are uneasy about the job market and watching a federal government shutdown extend into its fifth week.
South Korea has been particularly tough to crack, with the sticking point being Trump’s demand for $350 billion of direct investment in the U.S.
Korean officials say putting up cash could destabilize their own economy, and they’d rather offer loans and loan guarantees instead. The country would also need a swap line to manage the flow of its currency into the U.S.
Trump, after meeting with Lee, said “we made our deal pretty much finalized.” He did not provide any details.
Oh Hyunjoo, a deputy national security director for South Korea, told reporters earlier in the week that the negotiations have been proceeding “a little bit more slowly” than expected.
“We haven’t yet been able to reach an agreement on matters such as the structure of investments, their formats and how the profits will be distributed,” she said Monday.
It’s a contrast from Trump’s experience in Japan, where the government has worked to deliver the $550 billion in investments it promised as part of an earlier trade agreement. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced up to $490 billion in specific commitments during a dinner with business leaders in Tokyo.
For now, South Korea is stuck with a 25% tariff on automobiles, putting automakers such as Hyundai and Kia at a disadvantage against Japanese and European competitors, which face 15%.
Lee, speaking at the business forum before Trump arrived, warned against trade barriers.
“At a time when protectionism and nationalism are on the rise and nations focus on their immediate survival, words like ‘cooperation,’ ‘coexistence’ and ‘inclusive growth’ may sound hollow,” he said. “Yet, paradoxically, it is in times of crisis like this that APEC’s role as a platform for solidarity shines brighter.”
Trump and Lee swap praise
Lee took office in June and had a warm meeting with Trump at the White House in August, when he praised Oval Office renovations and suggested building a Trump Tower in North Korea.
He took a similar approach when Trump visited on Wednesday. The gold medal presented to Trump represents the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, the country’s highest honor, and Trump is the first U.S. president to receive it.
Trump said, “It’s as beautiful as it can possibly be” and “I’d like to wear it right now.”
Next was a replica of a royal crown from the Silla Kingdom, which existed from 57 B.C. to 935 A.D. The original crown was found in a tomb in Gyeongju, the kingdom’s capital.
Besides trade disagreements, there have been other points of tension between Washington and Seoul this year. More than 300 South Koreans were detained during a U.S. immigration raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia in September, sparking outrage and betrayal.
Lee said at the time companies would likely hesitate to make future investments unless the visa system was improved.
“If that’s not possible, then establishing a local factory in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies,” he said.
Asked Monday about the immigration raid, Trump said, “I was opposed to getting them out,” and he said an improved visa system would make it easier for companies to bring in skilled workers.
Trump-Xi meeting is expected Thursday
While in South Korea, Trump is also expected to hold a closely watched meeting on Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Washington and Beijing have clashed over trade, but both sides have indicated that they’re willing to dial down tensions.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday that he expects to lower tariffs targeting China over the flow of fentanyl ingredients.
“They’ll be doing what they can do,” he said. Trump added that “China is going to be working with me.”
Trump sounded resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t get to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on this trip. The president previously floated the possibility of extending his stay in South Korea, but on Wednesday said “the schedule was very tight.”
North Korea has so far dismissed overtures from Washington and Seoul, saying it won’t resume diplomacy with the United States unless Washington drops its demand for the North’s denuclearization. North Korea said Wednesday it fired sea-to-surface cruise missiles into its western waters, in the latest display of its growing military capabilities as Trump visits South Korea.
Trump brushed off the weapons test, saying, “He’s been launching missiles for decades, right?”
The two leaders met during Trump’s first term, although their conversations did not produce any agreements about North Korea’s nuclear program.
Megerian writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Kim Tong-hyung and Hyung-jin Kim contributed to this report from Seoul and Josh Boak contributed from Tokyo.
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White House urged firing live bombs, not dummies, for Trump’s visit to Navy celebration: AP sources
WASHINGTON — The White House pressed U.S. Navy officials to launch 2,000-pound live bombs instead of dummy explosives during an elaborate military demonstration for the service’s 250th anniversary celebration that President Trump attended, two people familiar with planning for the event told the Associated Press.
One person familiar with the planning said White House officials insisted to Navy planners that Trump “needed to see explosions” instead of just a “big splash” during the Oct. 5 demonstration.
Original planning for what the Navy dubbed the Titans of the Sea Presidential Review called for military personnel to use dummies and not live bombs, a third person familiar with the Navy’s planning said.
That person, who like the others was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not comment on why the Navy decided to switch to live bombs.
The White House said no switch was made. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly in a statement said: “Organizers always planned to use live munitions, as is typical in training exercises.”
The episode is the latest example of the Trump administration turning the military toward the president’s wishes in ways large and small — from summoning generals from around the world to Washington for a day of speeches to his lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
The Navy and other military branches typically use dummy, or inert, bombs for training and demonstrations. Dummies are cheaper than live bombs because they do not contain expensive explosives, fuses and other components. They’re also safer.
However, military officials often argue that the use of live ammunition for events like the 250th birthday celebration also fulfills a training purpose and that the ordnance would have been expended anyway at a later date. The Navy declined to comment.
The switch required Navy officials to change up detailed plans for the Norfolk military demonstration to ensure safety protocols were met, according to the three people familiar with the planning.
The White House pushed forward with the event despite a U.S. government shutdown, which has led nonessential federal workers to be sent home without pay and reduced operation of many non-critical government services.
A celebration for the Marines also used live artillery
Confirmation that the Navy decided to use live bombs instead of dummies at the Naval Base Norfolk event comes as the administration faces scrutiny over an Oct. 18 live fire demonstration at Camp Pendleton, in which a misfire of a live artillery round led to shrapnel spraying onto Interstate 5 in Southern California.
No one was injured when shrapnel struck two California Highway Patrol vehicles. That Camp Pendleton event marking the Marines 250th anniversary was attended by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Last week, 27 members of the California congressional delegation and the state’s two senators sent a letter to Hegseth asking whose decision it was to shoot live artillery over the busy freeway and how authorities planned for the safety risks.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who says he’ll weigh a 2028 White House run after the midterm elections next year, criticized the decision and closed a section of the roadway connecting San Diego to Los Angeles for hours during the Oct. 18 Marine showcase. The White House criticized him for closing the highway and said the Marines said there were no safety concerns.
Trump is a fan of military pomp
Trump hasn’t been shy about his fondness for pomp and pageantry that celebrates military might.
In his second term, he has pushed the U.S. services to hold big parades and demonstrations, an idea inspired by a Bastille Day parade he attended in France early in his first term. He was a guest of honor at the 2017 event, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I.
The Army included tanks in a June parade in the nation’s capital, requested by Trump, to mark its 250 years despite concerns from city officials that the heavy vehicles would damage the city’s streets. And he appeared to relish the massive military welcome he received last month during his second state visit to the United Kingdom.
At the Navy celebration this month in Norfolk, the president and first lady Melania Trump watched the military demonstration from the deck of an aircraft carrier before Trump delivered a speech in which he criticized his political opponents and attacked Democratic lawmakers.
At sea, the Navy had seven Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers fire a variety of their guns, including a large 5-inch gun. Four destroyers also launched the Navy’s Standard Missile 2 (SM-2). Each missile costs approximately $2 million.
Meanwhile, aircraft from USS Truman’s air wing fired missiles and general-purpose bombs and performed a strafing run with their gatling guns. The Navy’s MH-60S Seahawk helicopters also fired hydra rockets and guns.
Trump then spoke on a pier between two towering Navy vessels, an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault ship. The carrier displayed a Navy fighter jet that had the words “President Donald J. Trump ‘45-47’” printed on the fuselage, right under the cockpit window.
A Navy spokesperson told the AP shortly after the event that sailors put the president’s name on the aircraft for the visit and this was “customary for visits of this type.”
In addition to the live bomb demonstration, Navy destroyers launched missiles and fired shells into the Atlantic Ocean, and Navy SEALs descended from helicopters and fighter jets catapulted off vessels.
The shift to live bombs also required further spreading out of the guided missile destroyers in the waters off Norfolk for the military demonstration.
Madhani, Toropin and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.
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U.S. will share tech to let South Korea build a nuclear-powered submarine, Trump says
GYEONGJU, South Korea — The United States will share closely held technology to allow South Korea to build a nuclear-powered submarine, President Trump said on social media Thursday after meeting with the country’s president.
President Lee Jae Myung stressed to Trump in their Wednesday meeting that the goal was to modernize the alliance with the U.S., noting plans to increase military spending to reduce the financial burden on America. The South Korean leader said there might have been a misunderstanding when they last spoke in August about nuclear-powered submarines, saying that his government was looking for nuclear fuel rather than weapons.
Lee said that if South Korea was equipped with nuclear-powered submarines, that it could help U.S. activities in the region.
U.S. nuclear submarine technology is widely regarded as some of the most sensitive and highly guarded technology the military possesses. The U.S. has been incredibly protective of that knowledge, and even a recently announced deal with close allies the United Kingdom and Australia to help the latter acquire nuclear submarine technology doesn’t feature the U.S. directly transferring its knowledge.
Trump’s post on social media comes ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country possesses nuclear submarines, and after North Korea in March unveiled for the first time a nuclear-powered submarine under construction. It’s a weapons system that can pose a major security threat to South Korea and the U.S.
As Trump visited South Korea, North Korea said Wednesday it conducted successful cruise missile tests, the latest display of its growing military capabilities.
Pentagon officials didn’t immediately respond to questions about Trump’s announcement on sharing the nuclear sub technology with South Korea.
Megerian and Boak write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Tokyo. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report from Washington.
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43-year prisoner whose conviction was overturned now faces deportation
PHILADELPHIA — After waiting more than four decades to clear his name in a friend’s 1980 killing, Subramanyam Vedam was set to walk free from a Pennsylvania prison this month.
Vedam and Thomas Kinser were the 19-year-old children of Penn State University faculty. Vedam was the last person seen with Kinser and was twice convicted of killing him, despite a lack of witnesses or motive.
In August, a judge threw out the conviction after Vedam’s lawyers found new ballistics evidence that prosecutors had never disclosed.
As his sister prepared to bring him home on Oct. 3, the thin, white-haired Vedam was instead taken into federal custody over a 1999 deportation order. The 64-year-old, who legally came to the U.S. from India when he was 9 months old, now faces another daunting legal fight.
Amid the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations, Vedam’s lawyers must persuade an immigration court that a 1980s drug conviction should be outweighed by the years he wrongly spent in prison. For a time, immigration law allowed people who had reformed their lives to seek such waivers. Vedam never pursued it then because of the murder conviction.
“He was someone who’s suffered a profound injustice,” said immigration lawyer Ava Benach. And “those 43 years aren’t a blank slate. He lived a remarkable experience in prison.”
Vedam earned several degrees behind bars, tutored hundreds of fellow inmates and went nearly half a century with just a single infraction, involving rice brought in from the outside.
His lawyers hope immigration judges will consider the totality of his case. The administration, in a brief filed Friday, opposes the effort. So Vedam remains at an 1,800-bed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in central Pennsylvania.
“Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email about the case.
‘Mr. Vedam, where were you born?’
After his initial conviction was thrown out, Vedam faced an unusual set of questions at his 1988 retrial.
“Mr. Vedam, where were you born?” Centre County Dist. Atty. Ray Gricar asked. “How frequently would you go back to India?
“During your teenage years, did you ever get into meditation?”
Gopal Balachandran, the Penn State Dickinson Law professor who won the reversal, believes the questions were designed to alienate him from the all-white jury, which returned a second guilty verdict.
The Vedams were among the first Indian families in the area known as “Happy Valley,” where his father had come as a postdoctoral fellow in 1956. An older daughter was born in State College, but “Subu,” as he was known, was born when the family was back in India in 1961.
They returned to State College for good before his first birthday and became the family that welcomed new members of the Indian diaspora to town.
“They were fully engaged. My father loved the university. My mother was a librarian, and she helped start the library,” said the sister, Saraswathi Vedam, 68, a midwifery professor in Vancouver, British Columbia.
While she left for college in Massachusetts, Subu became swept up in the counterculture of the late 1970s, growing his hair long and dabbling in drugs while taking classes at Penn State.
One day in December 1980, Vedam asked Kinser for a ride to nearby Lewisburg to buy drugs. Kinser was never seen again, although his van was found outside his apartment. Nine months later, hikers found his body in a wooded area miles away.
Vedam was detained on drug charges while police investigated and was ultimately charged with murder. He was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to life without parole. To resolve the drug case, he pleaded no contest to four counts of selling LSD and a theft charge. The 1988 retrial offered no reprieve from his situation.
Although the defense long questioned the ballistics evidence in the case, the jury, which heard that Vedam had bought a .25-caliber gun from someone, never heard that an FBI report suggested the bullet wound was too small to have been fired from that gun. Balachandran only found that report as he dug into the case in 2023.
After hearings on the issue, a Centre County judge threw out the conviction and the district attorney decided this month to not retry the case.
Trump officials oppose the petition
Benach, the immigration lawyer, often represents clients trying to stay in the U.S. despite an earlier infraction. Still, she finds the Vedam case “truly extraordinary” given the constitutional violations involved.
“Forty-three years of wrongful imprisonment more than makes up for the possession with intent to distribute LSD when he was 20 years old,” she said.
Vedam could spend several more months in custody before the Board of Immigration Appeals decides whether to reopen the case. ICE officials, in a brief Friday, said the clock ran out years ago.
“He has provided no evidence nor argument to show he has been diligent in pursuing his rights as it pertains to his immigration status,” Katherine B. Frisch, an assistant chief counsel, wrote.
Saraswathi Vedam is saddened by the latest delay but said her brother remains patient.
“He, more than anybody else, knows that sometimes things don’t make sense,” she said. “You have to just stay the course and keep hoping that truth and justice and compassion and kindness will win.”
Dale writes for the Associated Press.
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Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh indicted over ICE protests outside Chicago
CHICAGO — A Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois has been indicted for blocking a federal agent’s vehicle during September protests outside an immigration enforcement building in suburban Chicago, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
The felony indictment, filed last week by a special grand jury, accuses Kat Abughazaleh and five others of conspiring to impede an officer.
“This is a political prosecution and a gross attempt to silence dissent, a right protected under the First Amendment. This case is a major push by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish anyone who speaks out against them,” Abughazaleh said Wednesday in a video posted to BlueSky.
Protesters have been gathering outside the immigration center to oppose enforcement operations in the Chicago area that have led to more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.
Greg Bovino, who is leading Border Patrol efforts in Chicago, was ordered this week by U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis to brief her every evening about the operations, beginning on Wednesday. It is an unprecedented bid to impose real-time oversight on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the city after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by agents.
Federal prosecutors accuse Abughazaleh and others of surrounding a vehicle driven by a federal agent on Sept. 26 and attempting to stop it from entering the facility.
Among the others named in the indictment are a candidate for the Cook County Board, a Democratic ward committeeman and a trustee in suburban Oak Park. The charges accuse all six of conspiring to impede an officer.
Abughazaleh is scheduled to make an initial court appearance next week. A message left with her campaign wasn’t immediately returned. Her attorney called the charges “unjust.”
The indictment said the group banged on the car, pushed against it, broke a mirror and scratched the text “PIG” on the vehicle, the indictment said.
Abughazaleh at one point put her hands on the vehicle’s hood and braced her body against it while staying in its way, the indictment says. The agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators,” it says.
Abughazaleh is running in a crowded Democratic primary to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schawkosky.
Protesting the immigration crackdown around Chicago has emerged as a top issue on campaigns in Illinois’ March primary. Elected officials and candidates in the Democratic stronghold have often showed up for demonstrations outside the Broadview federal facility.
“As I and others have exercised our First Amendment rights, ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and teargassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors, and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal,” Abughazaleh says in the video.
“As scary as all of this is, I have spent my career fighting America’s backslide into fascism,” she says. “I’m not gonna stop now, and I hope you won’t either.”
Tareen and Seewer write for the Associated Press. Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.
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Feds charge 12 in alleged arson, attacks during immigration protests
Federal prosecutors announced charges Wednesday against 12 people who allegedly engaged in violence during demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The charges, part of an effort dubbed “Operation Bridge Too Far” by federal authorities, largely centered on demonstrations that erupted on a freeway overpass near an immigration detention center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, the first day the National Guard was deployed to the city.
What started as a small, peaceful protest on Alameda Street exploded into a series of tense clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. After National Guard members and U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials used tear gas and smoke bombs to try and disperse a crowd outside the detention center, more protesters flooded the area.
A number of Waymo self-driving vehicles were set on fire near Olivera Street, and a group of California Highway Patrol officers on the 101 Freeway were pelted with items from protesters on the overpass above. At times, they returned fire with less-lethal rounds and tear gas. At least one protester had previously been charged in state court with throwing a flaming item at a CHP vehicle from the overpass.
Authorities announced that 10 defendants charged in connection with the incident were in federal custody this week. Another is in state custody and expected to be handed over to federal authorities, and one remains a fugitive.
Among those charged tied to the June 8 protest are Ronald Alexis Coreas, 23, of Westlake; Junior Roldan, 27, of Hollywood; Elmore Sylvester Cage, 34, of downtown Los Angeles; Balto Montion, 24, of Watsonville; Jesus Gonzalez Hernandez Jr., 22, of Las Vegas; Hector Daniel Ramos, 66, of Alhambra; Stefano Deong Green, 34, of Westmont; Yachua Mauricio Flores, 23, of Lincoln Heights; and Ismael Vega, 41, of Westlake.
Prosecutors also charged Virginia Reyes, 32, and Isai Carrillo, 31, who they say are members of “VC Defensa,” an immigrant rights group that has been documenting raids in the region.
Yovany Marcario Canil, 22, of Boyle Heights, was charged with assault on a federal officer for pepper-spraying members of an FBI S.W.A.T. team who were inside a government vehicle leaving the site of a raid in the downtown L.A. Fashion District on June 6.
A protester lobs a large rock at CHP officers stationed on the 101 Freeway below.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“Acts of violence against the brave law enforcement officers who protect us are an attack on civilized society itself,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a news release. “Anyone who engages in such disgusting conduct will face severe consequences from this Department of Justice.”
The FBI offered up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of 10 other unknown individuals accused of engaging in similar attacks from the overpass.
“A group of violent protesters threw rocks, pieces of concrete, electric scooters, and fireworks at officers and patrol cars” on the 101 Freeway, the FBI said.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, has aggressively pursued charges against those who clashed with law enforcement during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids over the last few months. On Wednesday, Essayli said that his office has charged 97 people with assaulting or impeding officers.
Of those, Essayli said, 18 have pleaded guilty and 44 are set to go to trial. His office has taken two defendants in misdemeanor assault cases to trial, but both ended in acquittals.
Earlier this year, a Times investigation found Essayli’s prosecutors have failed to convince grand juries to secure indictments in a number of protest-related cases.
Prosecutors face a much lower legal bar before a grand jury than they do in a criminal trial, and experts say it is rare for federal prosecutors to lose at that preliminary stage. Prosecutors in Chicago and Washington have faced similar struggles, court records show.
The defendants who have pleaded guilty in L.A. include a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who hurled a molotov cocktail at L.A. County sheriff’s deputies during a June rally against immigration enforcement.
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‘CBS Saturday Morning’ co-hosts Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson out in Paramount layoffs
“CBS Saturday Morning” co-hosts Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson are among the nearly 100 news division employees cut as part of a massive round of layoffs at parent company Paramount.
The program is getting a new format that will align it closer to the weekday show “CBS Mornings,” according to people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to comment publicly. Brian Applegate, the executive producer of the Saturday program, is out as well.
CBS has also canceled “CBS Mornings Plus,” an extension of its morning program that ran in several markets including Los Angeles. “CBS Evening News Plus,” a streaming program anchored by John Dickerson is also being shuttered. Dickerson announced Monday he is leaving the network.
Several correspondents have already been laid off, including Debora Patta, who covered the Gaza war for the network; Janet Shamlian; and Nikki Battiste. A CBS News representative declined comment.
The cuts are part of parent company Paramount’s reduction of 1,000 employees across all of its divisions. New owners Skydance Media are looking to reduce cots by $2 billion across the company, with a second round of cuts expected later this year.
Miller was a prolific correspondent for CBS News in addition to her Saturday co-host duties, contributing pieces to “CBS Sunday Morning” and “48 Hours.” She also was a frequent fill-in for Gayle King on the weekday morning program.
Miller, 52, is a Los Angeles native and the daughter of Dr. Ross Miller, a trauma surgeon who served on the city council in Compton. She worked at the Los Angeles Times in the early 1990s.
Miller covered a wide range of stories at CBS News, and paid special attention to issues or racism and social injustice. She is married to Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans who is currently head of the National Urban League.
Jacobson, 52 has been with CBS News since 2015. She previously spent a decade at ESPN, where she appeared on “First Take” and “SportsCenter.”
Miller and Jacobson have served as co-hosts of “CBS Saturday Morning” since 2018 when it was called “CBS This Morning Saturday.”
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Senate votes to block tariffs on Brazil. It shows some pushback to Trump trade policy
WASHINGTON — The Senate approved a resolution Tuesday evening that would nullify President Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, including oil, coffee and orange juice, as Democrats tested GOP senators’ support for Trump’s trade policy.
The legislation from Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, passed on a 52-48 tally.
It would terminate the national emergencies that Trump has declared to justify 50% tariffs on Brazil, but the legislation is likely doomed because the Republican-controlled House has passed new rules that allow leadership to prevent it from ever coming up for a vote. Trump would almost certainly veto the legislation even if it were to pass Congress.
Still, the vote demonstrated some pushback in GOP ranks against Trump’s tariffs. Five Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — all voted in favor of the resolution along with every Democrat.
Kaine said the votes are a way force a conversation in the Senate about “the economic destruction of tariffs.” He’s planning to call up similar resolutions applying to Trump’s tariffs on Canada and other nations later this week.
“But they are also really about how much will we let a president get away with? Do my colleagues have a gag reflex or not?” Kaine told reporters.
Trump has linked the tariffs on Brazil to the country’s policies and criminal prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. ran a $6.8 billion trade surplus with Brazil last year, according to the Census Bureau.
“Every American who wakes up in the morning to get a cup of java is paying a price for Donald Trump’s reckless, ridiculous, and almost childish tariffs,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
Republicans have also been increasingly uneasy with Trump’s aggressive trade policy, especially at a time of turmoil for the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last month that Trump’s tariff policy is one of several factors that are expected to increase jobless rates and inflation and lower overall growth this year.
In April, four Republicans voted with Democrats to block tariffs on Canada, but the bill was never taken up in the House. Kaine said he hoped the votes this week showed how Republican opposition to Trump’s trade policy is growing.
To bring up the votes, Kaine has invoked a decades-old law that allows Congress to block a president’s emergency powers and members of the minority party to force votes on the resolutions.
However, Vice President JD Vance visited a Republican luncheon on Tuesday in part to emphasize to Republicans that they should allow the president to negotiate trade deals. Vance told reporters afterwards that Trump is using tariffs “to give American workers and American farmers a better deal.”
“To vote against that is to strip that incredible leverage from the president of the United States. I think it’s a huge mistake,” he added.
The Supreme Court will also soon consider a case challenging Trump’s authority to implement sweeping tariffs. Lower courts have found most of his tariffs illegal.
But some Republicans said they would wait until the outcome of that case before voting to cross the president.
“I don’t see a need to do that right now,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, adding that it was “bad timing” to call up the resolutions before the Supreme Court case.
Others said they are ready to show opposition to the president’s tariffs and the emergency declarations he has used to justify them.
“Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive, “ said Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former longtime Republican leader, in a statement. ”The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule.”
His fellow Kentuckian, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, told reporters, “Emergencies are like war, famine, tornado. Not liking someone’s tariffs is not an emergency. It’s an abuse of the emergency power. And it’s Congress abdicating their traditional role in taxes.”
In a floor speech, he added, “No taxation without representation is embedded in our Constitution.”
Meanwhile, Kaine is also planning to call up a resolution that would put a check on Trump’s ability to carry out military strikes against Venezuela as the U.S. military steps up its presence and action in the region.
He said that it allows Democrats to get off the defensive while they are in the minority and instead force votes on “points of discomfort” for Republicans.
Groves writes for the Associated Press.
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Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says U.S. visa was revoked after Trump criticism
DAKAR, Senegal — Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka said his non-resident visa to enter the United States had been rejected, adding that he believes it may be because he recently criticized President Trump.
The Nigerian author, 91, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to do so.
Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Soyinka said he believed it had little to do with him and was instead a product of the United States’ immigration policies. He said he was told to reapply if he wished to enter again.
“It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”
Soyinka, who has taught in the U.S. and previously held a green card, joked on Tuesday that his green card “had an accident” eight years ago and “fell between a pair of scissors.” In 2017, he destroyed his green card in protest over Trump’s first inauguration.
The letter he received informing him of his visa revocation cites “additional information became available after the visa was issued,” as the reason for its revocation, but does not describe what that information was.
Soyinka believes it may be because he recently referred to Trump as a “white version of Idi Amin,” a reference to the dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 until 1979.
He jokingly referred to his rejection as a “love letter” and said that while he did not blame the officials, he would not be applying for another visa.
“I have no visa. I am banned, obviously, from the United States, and if you want to see me, you know where to find me.”
The U.S. Consulate in Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, directed all questions to the State Department in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to immediate requests for comment.
Mcmakin writes for the Associated Press.
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