POLITICS

Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city leader facing charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigned Monday after reaching an agreement to resolve the federal case.

Wang, who served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb, entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges that she acted under the control of the People’s Republic of China to promote propaganda in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022, according to court filings.

Wang, who was previously elected to the City Council in November 2022, stepped down as mayor on Monday hours after the plea agreement was unsealed. Arcadia officials and Wang’s attorneys said the conduct described by federal authorities occurred before Wang was elected.

Wang appeared in federal court in downtown Los Angeles during a brief hearing Monday, where a judge instructed her lawyers to set a date when she would formally enter a guilty plea.

The maximum sentence for the charge is 10 years in prison.

Dressed in a blue suit jacket and skirt and accompanied by four lawyers, Wang listened to the proceeding through a Mandarin interpreter. She sniffled throughout the hearing, wiping at her eyes and her nose with her hand and a tissue.

The magistrate judge ordered a $25,000 bond and for her to surrender all of her passports and travel documents. Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda B. Elbogen asked that the judge order Wang to refrain from any communication with the Chinese government, including consular officials in the U.S.

“Individuals in our country who covertly do the bidding of foreign governments undermine our democracy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli in a statement Monday. “This plea agreement is the latest success in our determination to defend the homeland against China’s efforts to corrupt our institutions.”

In a statement, Wang’s attorneys, Brian A. Sun and Jason Liang, said “she apologizes and is sorry for the mistakes she has made in her personal life.”

“Her love and devotion for the Arcadia community have not changed and did not waver. She asks for the community’s understanding and continued support,” her attorneys said.

The city of Arcadia’s website said Wang was “vacating her position” and the process of selecting someone to step in as mayor would begin at the next City Council meeting.

“We understand this news raises serious concerns, and we want to be direct with our community about what we know and where we stand,” City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a statement. “The allegations at the center of this case, that a foreign government sought to exert influence over a local elected official, are deeply troubling. We take them seriously.”

From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with Yaoning “Mike” Sun, her former fiance, to run a website called U.S. News Center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans, according to the plea agreement unsealed Monday. Both Wang and Sun “executed directives” from Chinese government officials, posting requested articles and reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, the agreement says.

On June 10, 2021, the agreement says, Wang received a message from a government official about “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue,” which included a link to a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times from the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. The consul general had been responding to a Times editorial supporting a boycott of products made with cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.

At the time, news reports were highlighting the Chinese government‘s campaign of incarceration, persecution and “reeducation” of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.

“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” read the message from the Chinese government official, according to the plea agreement.

Minutes after receiving the link, Wang posted the article on her website and responded to the Chinese government official with a link to the article on her website, according to the court filing.

“So fast, thank you everyone,” the government official responded, the court records show.

Prosecutors also say Wang edited articles at the request of officials and shared information showing the reach of the posts.

“Thank you leader,” she wrote on Aug. 20, 2021, after being complimented for a post that was viewed more than 15,000 times, according to the plea agreement.

Wang never disclosed that the Chinese government had directed her to post the content, according to court documents.

Wang’s attorneys stressed in their statement “that the conduct underlying the information and the agreement with the government relates solely to Ms. Wang’s personal life — i.e., a media platform that she once operated with someone whom she believed to be her fiancé — and not to her conduct as an elected public official.”

Prosecutors charged Sun, a resident of Chino Hills, in December 2024 with conspiracy and acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. Wang said her relationship with Sun ended in the spring of 2024.

Sun had also served as campaign manager for her City Council campaign to lead Arcadia, a landing spot for many Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants. Prosecutors accused Sun and his Chinese government contacts of cultivating Wang in hopes that she would rise in politics and help them strengthen China’s influence in California.

“We broke up the fiance relationship,” Wang told the City Council after he was charged. “We keep the friendship.”

Sun was sentenced in February to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty in October 2025 to one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government.

Sun worked as an illegal agent for the People’s Republic of China, submitting reports to high-level government officials about work he was doing on the government’s behalf, according to a federal sentencing memorandum. This activity included combating Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China, and supporters of Taiwanese independence. Sun also was accused of monitoring the then-president of Taiwan during her April 2023 trip to the U.S.

Facing calls for her resignation on the heels of her former fiance’s indictment, Wang vowed at the time not to step away from the council, emphasizing that she was “not responsible for the action of others.”

Wang said in a 2024 interview that she moved to Southern California from China 30 years ago. Her mother was a Chinese medicine and acupuncture doctor and her father was a physician in Sichuan province before working at USC, she said.

Wang appeared as usual at last week’s city council meeting, shepherding along discussions on street paving, the upcoming budget and a potential e-bike ordinance. Lazzaretto, the city manager, said in his statement that the city has conducted an internal review related to the charges and found no wrongdoing.

“We can confirm that no City finances, staff, or decision-making processes were involved,” Lazzaretto said in a statement. “We have found no actions that require reconsideration or that are invalidated as a result of these developments.”

Clara Harter contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is leaving access to a widely used abortion pill untouched until at least Thursday, while the justices consider whether to allow restrictions on the drug, mifepristone, to take effect.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s order Monday allows women seeking abortions to continue obtaining the pill at pharmacies or through the mail, without an in-person visit to a doctor. It prevents restrictions on mifepristone imposed by a federal appeals court from taking effect for the time being.

The court is dealing with its latest abortion controversy four years after its conservative majority overturned Roe vs. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

The case before the court stems from a lawsuit Louisiana filed to roll back the Food and Drug Administration’s rules on how mifepristone can be prescribed. The state claims the policy undermines the ban there, and it questions the safety of the drug, which was first approved in 2000 and has repeatedly been deemed safe and effective by FDA scientists.

Lower courts concluded that Louisiana is likely to prevail, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail access and telehealth visits should be suspended while the case plays out.

The drug is most often used for abortion in combination with another drug, misoprostol. Medication abortions accounted for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023, the last year for which statistics are available.

The current dispute is similar to one that reached the court three years ago.

Lower courts then also sought to restrict access to mifepristone, in a case brought by physicians who oppose abortion. They filed suit in the months after the court overturned Roe.

The Supreme Court blocked the 5th Circuit ruling from taking effect over the dissenting votes of Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Then, in 2024, the high court unanimously dismissed the doctors’ suit, reasoning they did not have the legal right, or standing, to sue.

In the current dispute, mainstream medical groups, the pharmaceutical industry and Democratic members of Congress have weighed in cautioning the court against limiting access to the drug. Pharmaceutical companies said a ruling for abortion opponents would upend the drug approval process.

The FDA has eased a number of restrictions initially placed on the drug, including who can prescribe it, how it is dispensed and what kinds of safety complications must be reported.

Despite those determinations, abortion opponents have been challenging the safety of mifepristone for more than 25 years. They have filed a series of petitions and lawsuits against the agency, generally alleging that it violated federal law by overlooking safety issues with the pill.

President Trump’s administration has been unusually quiet at the Supreme Court. It declined to file a written brief recommending what the court should do, even though federal regulations are at issue.

The case puts Trump’s Republican administration in a difficult place. Trump has relied on the political support of antiabortion groups but has also seen ballot question and poll results that show Americans generally support abortion rights.

Both sides took the silence as an implicit endorsement of the appellate ruling. Alito is both the justice in charge of handling emergency appeals from Louisiana and the author of the 2022 decision that declared abortion is not a constitutional right and returned the issue to the states.

Sherman, Mulvihill and Perrone write for the Associated Press. Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J.

SAN DIEGO — President Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton on Monday to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a surprising comeback for the former Navy SEAL who was fired from his role as FEMA’s temporary leader last year after he defended its existence.

His nomination comes as the Trump administration has increasingly signaled it is backing away from promises to dismantle FEMA, an agency that has faced withering criticism by the president. The nomination of Hamilton, who argued abolishing FEMA was not in the country’s best interests, is the latest indication of that change.

If confirmed, Hamilton would be the principal advisor to Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on emergency management and FEMA’s first permanent administrator in Trump’s second term. The agency has gone through three temporary leaders, including Hamilton’s brief tenure from January to May 2025.

He would take over an embattled agency still reeling from Kristi Noem’s turbulent leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, of which FEMA is part. FEMA’s workforce has been worn down by mass staff departures, policies that hamstrung operations and a 75-day-long Homeland Security shutdown that ended April 30.

Hamilton will need to ensure the agency is prepared for summer disaster season, just weeks away, while answering to Trump, who is likely to expect major reforms after a council he appointed recommended sweeping changes on Friday.

“Now is the opportunity to stabilize FEMA,” said Michael Coen, the agency’s chief of staff in the Obama and Biden administrations.

Fired after defending FEMA

Hamilton, who had never been a state or local emergency management director and who had publicly criticized FEMA in the past, was a controversial choice when Trump named him temporary leader in January 2025, just days before the president floated the idea of “getting rid” of FEMA.

His rupture with Homeland Security officials began as he defended a federal role in supporting disaster-affected states, tribes and territories.

“Once the conversation shifted to, ‘Now we’re going to abolish,’ I immediately expressed concern,” he said in September on the “Disaster Tough” podcast with John Scardena, a former FEMA incident management team leader.

Homeland Security officials even subjected him to a polygraph test, accusing him and other officials of leaking details of a private meeting. He passed but said he knew his dismissal was inevitable.

At a May 7, 2025, appearance before a House Appropriations subcommittee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, asked Hamilton if he believed FEMA should be abolished.

“I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” he replied. The next day, he was fired.

Hamilton will have to rebuild trust

Defending FEMA despite knowing it would probably cost him his job generated respect and trust among people whose job it is to lead communities through crisis, said Scardena, now president of the consultancy Doberman Emergency Management Group, which trains emergency managers.

“He won myself over and I think a lot of people by what he did,” Scardena said.

But multiple current FEMA employees who requested anonymity for fear of retribution for speaking publicly told the Associated Press they had concerns over some of the actions taken under Hamilton.

In 2024, Hamilton shared posts on X promoting misinformation about FEMA spending during Hurricane Helene.

During his temporary leadership, FEMA ceased door-to-door canvassing to reach survivors after disasters, and canceled a multibillion-dollar resilience grant program, since restored by a federal judge. The Department of Government Efficiency gained access to internal FEMA networks containing survivors’ private information. FEMA staff were fired for fulfilling a reimbursement payment to New York City for housing undocumented immigrants as part of FEMA’s Shelter and Services program.

Hamilton has said he believes FEMA needs major reform. He has said that he wants FEMA to move faster, that the agency is saddled with responsibilities he sees as outside its remit, and that some states have become too dependent on the agency. A Trump-appointed council last week urged sweeping changes to FEMA, which would require congressional action.

“I think he’s going to need to rebuild trust across the agency,” said Deanne Criswell, FEMA administrator under former President Biden, adding that she believes Hamilton cares about FEMA and she appreciated his outreach to emergency management directors and former officials during and after his tenure.

Senate confirmation process could raise questions of experience

Hamilton could face pushback in the Senate confirmation process over never having led an emergency management agency, a common stepping stone to becoming administrator of an agency with over 21,000 employees.

Federal law requires the FEMA administrator to have “a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security” and at least five years of “executive leadership and management experience.”

Hamilton trained as a Navy hospital corpsman before spending a decade as a Navy SEAL on SEAL Team Eight. He then became a U.S. State Department emergency management specialist handling overseas crisis response, then directed emergency medical services at the Department of Homeland Security.

Angueira writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The chair of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman requesting information about potential conflicts of interest between Altman’s personal investments and his operation of the company.

The letter, sent Friday, comes amid a high-stakes legal battle currently playing out in an Oakland federal courtroom between one-time partners Altman and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who in 2015 co-founded the AI company best known for creating ChatGPT.

The company was first established solely as a non-profit corporation and the letter sent to Altman by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Republican chair of the Oversight committee, indicates that the committee is “investigating potential conflicts of interest involving capital from nonprofit corporations invested in startups and other for-profit companies.”

Comer has requested by May 22 a briefing from the company official responsible for oversight of potential conflicts involving company officers and directors, including Altman, as well as all documents related to conflict of interest policies and guidance for those executives.

While OpenAI was created as a non-profit designed to responsibly harness the power of the emerging artificial intelligence technology, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 and three years later released ChatGPT, which jumpstarted widespread adoption of the technology.

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, left Open AI’s board in 2018, one year before the creation of the for-profit arm. He is arguing that Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, betrayed the original mission of the non-profit organization, driven by their desire to “cash in” on the technology.

Musk added Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI, to the lawsuit in 2024. OpenAI is rumored to be gearing up to go public later this year or early next, and was recently valued at $852 billion.

Musk has said that he invested $38 million in the OpenAI non-profit, but he does not stand to benefit from a potential OpenAI public offering.

He created a rival company xAI in 2023 that was later folded into his company SpaceX

In the lawsuit, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages, for Altman to be removed from the company and for the company to be fully returned to its non-profit status.

Musk’s complaint also alleges that Altman engaged in self-dealing by directing OpenAI to pursue deals with companies in which he also held a personal stake, including nuclear fusion power company Helion.

Comer’s letter cites reporting that Altman’s pursuit of a Helion deal, which is still ongoing, would come at a lofty valuation of the power-company, boosting the company’s worth, and the value of Altman’s investment.

Altman was briefly forced to step down from leadership of OpenAI in 2023 in part due to concerns about potential conflicts between his personal investments and his operation of the company, but was soon reinstated.

While the company’s board created an audit committee to investigate the potential conflicts of Altman and other officers, the findings were never disclosed.

Comer has requested that Altman turn over all documents and communication related to that audit committee.

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

WASHINGTON — Democrats on Monday filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to halt a Virginia ruling invalidating a ballot measure that would have given their party an additional four winnable U.S. House seats.

The move came after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a constitutional amendment that voters narrowly passed just last month. The 4-3 state court decision found that the Democratic-controlled legislature improperly began the process of placing the amendment on the ballot after early voting had begun in Virginia’s general election last fall.

Democrats argued unsuccessfully that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that, even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until election day itself.

The appeal is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition. It was kicked off last year by President Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act.

“The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected,” wrote lawyers for Virginia Democrats and Democratic state Atty. Gen. Jay Jones. “The irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate.”

The filing is a sign of Democratic desperation after the Virginia decision. Democrats are still favorites to recapture the U.S. House of Representatives, but their GOP rivals have claimed to have gained more than a dozen seats through redistricting. The voter-approved Virginia map would have partly offset that.

Democrats are taking a legal long shot in asking the justices to reverse the Virginia court’s ruling. The Supreme Court tries to avoid second-guessing state courts’ interpretations of their own constitutions. In 2023, it turned down a request by North Carolina Republicans to overrule a state Supreme Court decision that blocked the GOP’s congressional map.

Politically, the appeal could help a party struggling to compete with Republicans in the unusual mid-decade redrawing of congressional boundaries by providing fodder for election-year messaging about a partisan Supreme Court. The court recently allowed Louisiana Republicans to proceed with redistricting after the justices struck down a majority Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Democrats have been set on their heels because, days after the Virginia ballot measure passed, the Supreme Court’s conservatives reversed decades of rulings and in effect neutered the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Southern states to eliminate some majority Black districts and further pad Republican margins in Congress.

The Virginia amendment had been launched long before that ruling. It was intended as a response to Republican gains in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, and to blunt a new map in Florida that just became law. Once the Virginia amendment passed, it briefly turned the nationwide redistricting scramble into a draw between the two parties.

That was unraveled by the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision. The justices are appointed by the legislature, which has flipped between the two parties in recent decades, and the body is generally not seen as having a clear ideological bent.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.

Photograph by Maxwell Briceño for Reuters, 2024.

Human beings invented States to protect themselves from catastrophe. You understand this in Lewis Mumford’s books on the first cities or in Jared Diamond’s on civilizational collapse: we went from nomadic tribal groups to organized societies of thousands of people because we learned to organize governments that, besides making some richer and more powerful than others, reduced the chances of dying from hunger, cold, disease, or enemy attack.

Until the mid-20th century, Venezuela did not have a State that significantly reduced the primitive precarity of its population, that defended it from catastrophe. As in so many other places on Earth, it was then that Venezuelans began to benefit from technology and institutions that saved them from dying of starvation or influenza. There had been previous efforts, from Páez’s first economic reconstruction programs and Guzmán Blanco’s compulsory education to Gómez’s road construction.

But it was with the López Contreras administration in 1936 that we began to see institutions functioning on a truly national scale, vaccination and literacy campaigns, a systematic effort to transform a dispersed, sparsely populated society with a very low life expectancy, where the vast majority of people were sick and malnourished, into a functional and productive one. During those decades, the governments of López Contreras, Medina Angarita, the 1945-1948 junta, Gallegos, and Pérez Jiménez took advantage of oil revenues to implement measures that benefited the people. With democracy, in 1958, came more public works and institutional innovations, such as the expansion of political rights.

With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.

Until that promise of development for all was broken, inequality began to grow, vulnerability began to regain ground, and a frustrated and confused society chose Hugo Chávez as its answer, precisely in the year, 1998, that marked five centuries since the first contact with Spain. It had taken us half a millennium to have a State that provided health, education, justice, and order. That year, that history of progress halted, and the long road traveled began to unravel.

Reversal and investment

As Paula Vásquez Lezama described it, since the Vargas tragedy in 1999, when chavismo appropriated the bodies of the survivors, everything the State gave demanded in return helping that State grow and maintain itself. As Mirtha Rivero recounts in La oscuridad no llegó sola, chavismo used every crisis to seize control of the entire State. Once it had it in its hands, it turned it upside down. The State that should have served society now only had to serve power, against society. 

With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.

Chavismo deepened all the vices of those previous governments to reverse the complicated history of our development and invert the role of the State. The long-standing culture of police and military violence expanded to turn the entire country into a checkpoint, where the armed forces behave like an army of occupation that treats all natives as enemies, on a scale that covers the entire territory, not just the slums riddled with bullets during the Caracazo. The perennial culture of corruption among civil servants was perfected to privatize the public administration, which does nothing unless its staff is paid personally, and to transform the bureaucracy into an industry for extracting wealth from citizens and the land, far more voracious than under any dictatorial or democratic government prior to 1999.

As long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela.

The elephantine State erected by Chávez had lost much of its muscle mass by 2020, but it remained, and remains, capable of subjugating a nation diminished by the miniaturization of its economy and mass migration. Maduro redesigned repression to maximize the yield of his limited resources. And so he reached the point where he discovered, especially after the 2024 electoral fraud, the efficiency of kidnapping a minor, because that means imprisoning an entire family and the community network to which the family turns to.

The method of subjugating society by harming entire families is evident in the Víctor Quero case. It wasn’t administrative chaos that prevented his family from knowing whether he was alive or dead, nor was it that the clerks couldn’t find the file with his name on it. It was terror, a set of practices that a regime, illegitimate and rejected by the majority of the population, implemented to minimize the chances of losing power. That State, which for decades attempted to be a welfare state, providing public goods to millions of citizens, now focuses on managing harm to those millions in order to provide private goods to the few thousand who control it.

Beyond the anger we feel over the story of Carmen Navas asking about her son from the cruel giant who killed him, the Víctor Quero case is causing such a stir because of how it exposes the way the Venezuelan State has become the very opposite of what it should be. Instead of saving people from misfortune, it inflicts misfortune to govern through fear. Instead of being accountable, it lies and sows confusion for months as a form of torture. Instead of being the state of law and justice promised by the Constitution that frames it, it is a criminal State where justice does not exist.

The great work of chavismo

This is the State that killed Víctor Quero and that forced an elderly woman, for more than nine months, to undertake the economic and logistical challenge of visiting courts and prisons, even outside Caracas, driven by the hope of seeing her son again before he died.

And this State is the main achievement of chavismo.

Previous governments, whose main task was to govern for better or for worse, left behind a legacy of buildings and institutions, from banks and State-owned enterprises to schools, museums, and universities, which were a mix of successes and failures. Chavismo will leave some buildings and infrastructure projects, far too few considering the revenue it received during almost three decades in power. But the main creation of chavismo is this gigantic state that serves only to subjugate society.

And as long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela. We will not be able to return to the path of democracy and development from which chavismo diverted us.

THE HAGUE — Venezuela ’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez told journalists Monday that her country had no plans to become the 51st U.S. state after President Trump said he was “seriously considering” the move.

Rodríguez was speaking at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the final day of hearings in a dispute between her country and neighboring Guyana over the massive mineral- and oil-rich Essequibo region.

“We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” said Rodríguez, who assumed power in January following a U.S. military operation that ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela is “not a colony, but a free country,” she added.

Speaking to Fox News earlier on Monday, Trump said he was “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state,” according to a post by Fox News’ co-anchor John Roberts on social media. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Trump has made similar comments about Canada.

Rodríguez went on to say that Venezuelan and U.S. officials have been in touch and are working on “cooperation and understanding.”

Before addressing Trump’s comments, Rodríguez defended her country’s claim to Essequibo at the United Nations’ highest court, telling judges that political negotiations — not a judicial ruling — will resolve the century-old territorial dispute.

The 62,000-square-mile territory, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana, is rich in gold, diamonds, timber and other natural resources. It also sits near massive offshore oil deposits currently producing an average 900,000 barrels a day.

That output is close to Venezuela’s daily production of about 1 million barrels a day and has transformed one of the smallest countries in South America into a significant energy producer.

Venezuela has considered Essequibo its own since the Spanish colonial period, when the jungle region fell within its boundaries. But an 1899 decision by arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States drew the border along the Essequibo River largely in favor of Guyana.

Venezuela has argued that a 1966 agreement sealed in Geneva to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the 19th-century arbitration. In 2018, however, three years after ExxonMobil announced a significant oil discovery off the Essequibo coast, Guyana’s government went to the International Court of Justice and asked judges to uphold the 1899 ruling.

Tensions between the countries further flared in 2023, when Rodríguez’s predecessor, Maduro, threatened to annex the region by force after holding a referendum asking voters if Essequibo should be turned into a Venezuelan state. Maduro was captured Jan. 3 during a U.S. military operation in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

Rodríguez did not address the referendum in her remarks, but she told the court that the 1966 agreement is designed to allow negotiations between Venezuela and Guyana to resolve the territorial dispute. And she accused Guyana’s government of undermining the agreement with the “opportunistic” decision to ask the court to address the dispute.

“At a time when the mechanisms established in the Geneva agreement were still fully in force, Guyana unilaterally chose to shift the dispute from the negotiating arena to a judicial resolution,” she said. “This change was not accidental; it coincided with the discovery in 2015 of the oil field that would become world-renowned.”

When hearings opened last week, Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Hilton Todd, told the panel of international judges that the dispute “has been a blight on our existence as a sovereign state from the very beginning.” He said that 70% of Guyana’s territory is at stake.

The court is likely to take months to issue a final and legally binding ruling in the case.

Venezuela has warned that its participation in the hearings does not mean either consent to, or recognition of, the court’s jurisdiction.

Quell and Cano write for the Associated Press. Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.

BATON ROUGE, La. — Thousands of Louisiana voters have already cast early ballots for congressional candidates in what soon could be the wrong districts. Alabama’s primaries are a week away, but the state could force a do-over for voting on U.S. House races. A new congressional map in Tennessee upended races that had been underway for months.

Republicans’ rush to gerrymander congressional districts across several Southern states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling hollowed out the Voting Rights Act is confusing voters and creating logistical headaches for local election officials. The changes are hitting while primary season is in progress.

The chaotic upheaval to an election season that could determine which party controls the U.S. House is the latest fallout from an intensely partisan gerrymandering battle initiated by President Trump last year to protect Republicans’ slim majority.

The Supreme Court’s decision last month severely weakening the Voting Rights Act required Louisiana to reconsider a map drawn in 2024 with two majority minority congressional districts that elected Black representatives. The GOP-controlled Legislature could eliminate one or both in a state where roughly 30% of the population is Black.

The ruling also encouraged Republicans in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee to consider eliminating four Democratic districts among them, three represented by Black lawmakers. Florida has a new map meant to cost Democrats four of their eight seats, out of 28.

In Louisiana, 66-year-old New Orleans resident Sallie Davis voted early last week. Her ballot allowed her to vote for Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, but a sign at her polling booth showed his race crossed off with a ballpoint pen. She was confused and frustrated — especially when a poll worker told her to go with what the sign seemed to convey. She’s now worried that her entire ballot will not be counted.

“I was supposed to believe a piece of paper with an X on it marking out the person I wanted to vote for,” she said, her voice breaking as she recounted her experience later. “I think I have been disenfranchised. I think my vote, that I just voted on, it’s not going to count or something. I think it’s illegal.”

Primaries postponed, deadlines compressed

Louisiana’s primary is on Saturday, and a week of early voting there began May 2, two days after the Republican governor declared an emergency and suspended congressional primaries to give lawmakers a chance to draw a new map.

Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry’s office said nearly 179,000 primary ballots had been cast as of Friday, including about 53,000 absentee ballots returned by mail. She said the ballots included U.S. House races, but votes in those contests won’t be counted.

In Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee, Republicans justified pursuing new maps by saying that electing more Republicans would better reflect their states’ conservative values. Alabama lawmakers passed legislation Friday allowing a do-over of congressional primaries.

Alabama’s primary is May 19, and voting in congressional races will occur then as planned, but with the old districts. Those votes would end up not counting if a court allows the switch to different districts.

Mississippi held its primaries in March, but a federal court has ordered it to redraw its state Supreme Court districts, and Trump is pushing Republicans to redraw the state’s four congressional districts.

A special session of its Legislature is set for May 20. Renovations of the House chamber will force members to meet at the Old State Capitol, where, decades ago, Mississippi lawmakers passed Jim Crow laws suppressing Black voting.

“Modern-day voter suppression relies on election administration errors and chaos, and that’s what we’re going to see play out in all of these states,” said Amir Badat, a Jackson, Mississippi, voting rights attorney and activist.

Tennessee continues yearlong fight

Tennessee was the first state to enact a new map since the U.S. Supreme Court decision, but Trump’s push for redistricting started in Texas last year. Democrats countered in California and tried but ran afoul of the courts in Virginia.

Before Tennessee’s GOP-controlled Legislature passed a new map last week, the state’s elections coordinator told county officials in a memo what that would mean: reprogramming election systems, retraining poll workers and possibly adjusting precinct boundaries, meaning some voters’ polling places could change.

Tennessee’s congressional primaries still will be held Aug. 6 as planned, and candidates have until Friday to qualify for the ballot. Those who qualified previously will get a pass if they can run in a new district with the same number.

In South Carolina, lawmakers could move all the state’s June 9 primaries to August, or just the congressional races. While mail balloting is limited because the state requires an excuse to do it, more than 6,800 mail ballots already had been sent to voters — with 260 returned — as of Friday, according to the state Elections Commission.

Holding a separate election for congressional primaries would cost $3 million and the time for preparations would be compressed, Conway Belangia, the commission’s executive director, told lawmakers Friday.

“It will be difficult, but it will be possible,” he said.

Activists see problems ahead for voters

Michael McClanahan, president of the NAACP’s Louisiana State Conference, is hearing “total confusion” as voters call him and ask, “Is there an election?”

“People say, ’I ain’t going to vote because the governor’s suspended the election,’” he said. “But he didn’t, he only suspended one aspect of it.”

In Alabama, Senate Democratic leader Bobby Singleton said he has been fielding calls from public officials who also are confused.

“These are the people who are the head of elections,” he said. “They don’t know what to do.“

Voting rights activists see problems that arose in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2022, when Republican legislators divided the state’s capital city into three congressional districts to take a seat from Democrats, as a harbinger of what Memphis voters could face this year. A state report said more than 3,000 Nashville-area voters were assigned to incorrect districts and more than 430 cast ballots in the wrong races in the November 2022 election.

“It’s going to be really hard for the election commissions to be able to keep up with this short timeline,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights nonprofit Civic TN, said during a conference call Friday with other voting rights activists in the South.

Some fear confusion will lead to distrust and apathy

Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, which provides support to voting and civil rights groups, said people will lose trust in elections if they believe the rules can change every two years.

“Once people stop believing that the process is stable and fair, disengagement is going to increase, and that’s one of the biggest dangers here,” she said. “Democracy doesn’t just depend on voting systems existing but really on people believing that their participation matters.”

At least a few Democratic voters who went to the Louisiana Capitol on Friday to protest the gerrymandering expressed doubt about whether they still have a political voice.

Davis came to the State Capitol in Baton Rouge and had a bullhorn with her for a protest in which she yelled, “Whose vote? Our vote!”

David Victorian, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran from Baton Rouge, said: “I’m concerned for the survival of the democracy that we’re supposed to be living in.”

Hanna and Brook write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. AP writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Kim Chandler, in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — A man accused of storming the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner while armed with guns and knives pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges that he attempted to kill President Trump and fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer who tried to stop the attack.

Cole Tomas Allen was handcuffed and shackled and wearing an orange jail uniform when he appeared in federal court for his arraignment. Allen didn’t speak during the brief hearing. One of his attorneys entered the plea on his behalf.

Allen’s lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden to disqualify at least two top Justice Department officials from direct involvement in prosecuting him because they could be considered victims or witnesses in the case, creating a potential conflict of interest.

Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro were attending the event when Allen ran through a security checkpoint and fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer, authorities said. In a court filing last week, Allen’s attorneys argued that it creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest for Blanche and Pirro to be making any prosecutorial decisions in the case.

McFadden, a Trump nominee, didn’t rule from the bench on that question but asked Allen’s attorneys to elaborate on the possible scope of their recusal request. Defense attorney Eugene Ohm said the defense likely would seek to disqualify Pirro’s entire office from involvement in the case. Ohm acknowledged that a bid to disqualify the entire Justice Department would be unlikely.

“That would be quite a request,” the judge said.

McFadden gave prosecutors until May 22 to respond in writing to the defense’s request. The judge asked the government to specify whether it believes Pirro and Blanche could be considered victims in the case.

“That might add some clarity here,” McFadden said.

In their filing, Allen’s attorneys suggested that the appointment of a special prosecutor might be warranted.

Allen is scheduled to return to court on June 29.

A Secret Service officer was shot once in a bullet-resistant vest during the April 25 attack at the Washington Hilton hotel, which disrupted and ultimately prompted an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. The officer fired five shots but didn’t hit anybody, authorities said.

Allen, 31, of Torrance, was injured but was not shot.

Besides the attempted-assassination count, Allen also is charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and two additional firearms counts. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the attempted assassination charge alone.

Allen was placed on suicide watch after his arrest, but jail officials removed him from that status after several days. Allen’s attorneys complained that he had been unnecessarily confined in a padded room with constant lighting, repeatedly strip searched and placed in restraints outside his cell.

Allen told FBI agents that he didn’t expect to survive the attack, which could help explain why he was deemed to be a possible suicide risk, a Justice Department prosecutor has said.

Allen was outfitted with an ammunition bag, a shoulder gun holster and a sheathed knife when he took a photo of himself in his room at the hotel just minutes before the attack, according to prosecutors. In a message that authorities say sheds light on his motive, Allen referred to himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and alluded obliquely to grievances over a range of actions by Trump’s Republican administration.

Authorities have alleged that Allen on April 6 reserved a room for himself at the Hilton where the event would be held weeks later under its typical tight security. He traveled by train cross-country from California, checking himself into the hotel a day before the dinner with a room reserved for the weekend.

Trump was rushed off the stage by his security team at the Saturday night event and appeared at the White House two hours later, still in his tuxedo, to talk about the attack and the suspect.

“When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone,” the president said. “They seem to think he was a lone wolf.”

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO —  Here’s what the Democratic candidates for governor aren’t telling us: While promising the moon, they’ve avoided saying how they would keep paying for all of Sacramento’s current costly programs.

Termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-controlled Legislature have dug the state into a deep financial hole, and it faces severe deficit spending through the next governor’s first term.

The only honest solution is an unpopular mix of program cuts and tax increases, plus a focused, earnest and unlikely effort at making government more cost-effective and efficient.

The worst option would be the easy one that got Sacramento into its current mess: gimmicky budgeting that includes excessive borrowing, program delays rather than outright eliminations and fudged numbers.

Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek recently estimated “the state faces structural deficits running from $20 billion to $35 billion annually.”

He warned the state’s financial commitments funded by its revenue “[are] not sustainable” and added that mopping up the red ink “will likely require at least some — if not significant — spending reductions.”

The analyst pointed out that since 2019, under Newsom, state general fund spending has risen by $100 billion to $248 billion in the governor’s latest budget proposal in January. About 70% of the growth went to maintaining existing services and 30% was for expanding or creating new programs.

“In retrospect,” Petek continued, “the state could not afford to sustain its existing services while funding … expansions and new programs.”

Last week, the analyst reported some good news coupled with bad. He estimated a $25-billion boost in unanticipated revenue, driven by artificial intelligence enthusiasm and “the related stock market boom.” But, he added, “these surging revenues likely are not sustainable.”

The analyst said the stock market appears to be “in a speculative bubble, rivaled only by the dot-com boom” (that led to the Great Recession) “and the Roaring ‘20s” (that ushered in the Great Depression).

“The state should be prepared for revenues to be tens of billions lower within one or two years.”

Newsom will get another crack at legitimately balancing a budget on Thursday when he revises his spending proposal for the next fiscal year.

You can’t really blame the governor’s wannabe Democratic successors for dodging this fiscal thicket. Program cuts and higher taxes don’t attract voters. Moreover, the subject is weedy and boring. For that reason, I suspect, moderators didn’t even delve into it during three recent televised gubernatorial debates.

Regardless, budget-crafting is a governor’s most sacred duty and the source of much of their power. It would help voters to know where the candidates stand. Right now, they’re in hiding.

Former state Senate leader Don Perata, a Democrat, posted this last week about the chronic deficits:

“Apparently, candidates find this untroubling or maybe someone else’s worry. None … even mentioned it during those juvenile television ‘debates’ and the hundreds of millions spent on campaign commercials.”

Instead, various contenders have been promising voters a Santa’s sleigh of goodies: state-run single-payer healthcare, free childcare, partial no-tuition college, suspension of the gas tax, no state income tax for people earning under $100,000 and generous subsidies for Hollywood filmmaking.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer and former Orange County congresswoman Katie Porter have been touting single-payer healthcare, an idea pushed by politically potent nurses unions and Democratic progressives. Private insurance would be eliminated and, under most proposals, so would the popular Medicare. The state would manage all medical insurance — more efficiently and at less consumer expense, advocates insist.

But this concept seems far beyond the state’s financial reach and operational capability. Its cost could exceed twice the current state budget. And I shudder to think of our state bureaucracy trying to handle healthcare for 39 million people. First, get the DMV working right and the botched bullet train rolling.

For many years, underdog gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa — a former Los Angeles mayor — has called the single-payer notion “snake oil.” In a CNN debate last week, he termed it “pie in the sky.”

Centrist San José Mayor Matt Mahan chimed in, asserting: “The candidates who are fighting for single-payer don’t know how to pay for it, and they’re not being honest about it.”

Practically everyone jumped on new Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra — former state attorney general and U.S. health secretary — for seemingly being unable to specify whether he’s for or against single-payer.

“I’ve been consistent for over 30 years,” he said, trying to explain that he favors Medicare-for-all as “the most efficient way that we can do healthcare.”

It was a silly waste of debate time. They were arguing over oranges and lemons — both citrus, but different. Becerra should have just made clear that he’s opposed to single-payer and supports a separate version of universal healthcare: Medicare-type coverage with a supplemental private insurance option for all Californians. If that’s indeed what he favors.

Mahan bragged that he’s “the only candidate in this race who is calling for a suspension of the gas tax.” It’s a highlighted Republican talking point. But no other Democratic candidate advocates suspending the tax because it’s a screwy idea.

The roughly 60-cent-per-gallon state gas tax pays for filling potholes and more serious road repairs and improvements. Moreover, the next governor won’t take office until January. Suspending the tax then — even if the Legislature approved — wouldn’t reduce today’s soaring pump prices.

My take on the debates:

Becerra survived. He’s refreshingly calm but needs to be more crisp.

Steyer was articulate and may have attracted Bernie Sanders fans.

Porter is a talented debater, but seemed overly defensive about her past hot temper.

Mahan was fine, but he just got off the bench and it’s late in the game.

Villaraigosa was straightforward as usual, and finally had a broad audience.

All should bone up on budget-balancing and tell us their thinking.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: How MAGA Sheriff Chad Bianco is shaking up the 2026 California gubernatorial primary
The other must-read: Tom Steyer tries to sell voters on his own personal change
The L.A. Times Special: Abortion access just took another blow. California wasn’t spared

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

CHONGQING, China — Three years ago, in the idyllic town of Woodside south of San Francisco, the United States and China held their first high-level talks on the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. President Xi Jinping and his longtime foreign minister appeared serious in their conviction that a channel should be a established between Beijing and Washington — a red phone for AI in case of emergencies.

They authorized a diplomatic effort that would begin in 2024 in Switzerland, only months before the U.S. presidential election. A large U.S. delegation arrived with high hopes that were abruptly dashed, according to four sources who attended the talks. The Chinese contingent dismissed American concerns over runaway AI as academic, almost theoretical, quickly turning the conversation to export controls seen in Beijing as yet another U.S. effort to hold China back.

“They naturally view any American diplomatic initiative involving limitations or restrictions of one flavor or another on a capability as being a trap,” Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security advisor under President Biden, said in an interview.

Despite the distrust — and Democrats losing the White House to Donald Trump — an accord was struck in November of that year in Peru, where both sides agreed to keep AI out of the command and control of nuclear weapons.

“It was a breaking of the seal that we could actually do something on AI,” Sullivan said. “In the transition, I told the incoming Trump team that they should really pick up that dialogue. But the Trump administration’s view was just far more laissez-faire, and they didn’t seem particularly interested in it.”

“That’s all changed in the past few weeks,” he added.

A Trump administration once eager to gun for technological supremacy is now, for the first time, reckoning with the power AI could unleash if left unchecked.

In a surprise reversal, quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump’s state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times, prompted by shared alarm in Beijing and Washington over the debut of Mythos, Anthropic’s powerful new model.

One senior administration official told reporters Sunday that the White House was looking to create a channel of communication for AI like others that they have “in many areas that have intense focus with the U.S. and China.”

“I think what that channel of communication looks like, its formality and what that looks like, is yet to be determined,” the official said, “but we want to take this opportunity with the leaders meeting to open up a conversation. We should establish a channel of communication on that matter.”

Mythos’ capabilities are seen across the industry and government as those of an unprecedented cyberweapon, able to infiltrate and exploit digital communication systems — including government databases, financial institutions and healthcare programs — with untold consequences.

Whether an announcement will come to fruition this week is not yet clear. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations — designing some kind of arms control agreement governing the use of a technology that neither side fully understands or controls — will be fraught with suspicion, misunderstandings and risk, experts say.

“Right now, there is almost no support from U.S. policymakers to engage in formal discussions on AI governance with China,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The logic is that this is a winner-takes-all race,” Mehta said, “and that it’s imperative to accelerate AI progress to ensure that the United States wins that race.”

America in the lead

China would enter those discussions with a powerful argument, that U.S. leadership in AI — and the prevailing strategy of American AI companies — is propelling the world to a fraught frontier.

Every major U.S. player in the arena — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta Platforms — is racing to be the first to build a model capable of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a threshold without a common definition, but that most agree will require a model to perform any intellectual human task.

The prevailing theory is that the first to achieve AGI will secure a prize that multiplies itself: a self-training, recursively improving intelligence, growing exponentially and leaving all competitors in its wake.

Chinese companies, by contrast, are following a state-sanctioned strategy focused on integrating AI into siloed industries and systems, training models to improve individual tasks and accelerate growth in a more tailored approach.

“The Chinese believe there is no single race, but multiple races,” said Scott Kennedy, senior advisor on Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “The U.S. is focused on achieving AGI, while China is focused on diffusion and applications of AI into the rest of their economy — manufacturing, humanoid robotics, all aspects of the internet of things.”

China scholars, AI industry insiders and successive administrations have questioned Beijing’s strategic thinking and forthrightness.

“It’s so baked into the community here that AGI will have this transformative potential that people can’t believe China isn’t focused on this, as well,” said Matt Sheehan, a scholar of global technology issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a focus on China. “It says it’s focused on applications, but is that a fake out for an AGI program hidden in the mountains somewhere?”

But most insiders believe that Beijing’s guidance to Chinese companies reveals its true intentions.

“They are not as AGI-pilled as the United States is, and I think that remains the case today,” Sullivan said, “so they regarded a lot of the conversation in the U.S. around extreme frontier risk — misalignment and loss of control — as a bit abstract, and not really as relevant to how they saw AI diffusing in China.”

President Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Woodside, Calif., in 2023.

(Doug Mills / Pool Photo)

Although China’s progress has exceeded U.S. expectations — especially since DeepSeek released its model over a year ago — the state has focused computer power on specific applications rather than the broad strategy needed to develop more powerful models capable of advancing toward AGI.

“It’s not just chips. It’s money,” Sheehan added. “China’s leading companies are much more financially constrained than U.S. companies. There’s concern over a bubble here, but OpenAI is valued at something near $800 billion. Leading Chinese companies that have gone public are valued at $20 billion. There’s just an orders-of-magnitude gap in available financing.”

Still, some in the U.S. government fear China won’t need comparable computing power if it simply steals the technology wholesale.

Doing so isn’t simple. But last month, in a memo, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy accused Chinese actors of “industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” in effect replicating the performance of the most advanced existing models “at a fraction of the cost.” The memo did not accuse Beijing of endorsing the activity.

In the process, the memo added, carefully constructed security protocols are deliberately stripped away.

China’s negotiating advantage

Whatever its strategic calculus may be, China would enter talks with the Trump administration trailing in the race — while disagreeing on the nature of the finish line.

AGI, in theory, could reach a stage of recursive self-improvement that results in a loss of human understanding or control. But if it is only the Americans, and not the Chinese, seeking to reach that threshold, then who is responsible to stop it?

Daniel Remler, who led AI policy at the State Department during the Biden administration and took part in the Geneva talks, cast doubt on Chinese claims of disinterest in AGI and ignorance of its risks. China falling behind in the race is no strategic design, he said.

“Chinese technologists are close observers of the U.S. AI ecosystem, and sometimes they say what they think,” Remler said. “Many were impressed by the [Mythos] model to the point of despair. Leaders in China’s top AI labs have been vocal in recent months, even before Mythos, about how compute-constrained they are at the frontier. Some have said they may never catch their American competitors.”

Talks at this point in the race could follow a familiar pattern in the recent history of U.S.-China diplomacy, in which Beijing claims it is behind the United States in development, ultimately securing a handicap and greater concessions at the negotiating table.

In other competitive domains — such as with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and in cybersecurity negotiations between Beijing and the Obama administration — agreements were ultimately reached that Washington believes in hindsight disadvantaged American companies.

The Trump administration, Remler added, “needs to approach AI diplomacy with China with clear-eyed expectations anchored to our own national interests.”

Silicon Valley itself is divided over regulating AI. Anthropic, which was founded on concerns that other AI companies were failing to take safety and alignment concerns seriously, raised alarms over Mythos, its own model, to the Trump administration, a moment that has prompted reflection at the White House on the best path forward.

Spooked after meeting with leaders from America’s top banks over their vulnerabilities, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent internally advised U.S. government reviews of future model releases — a practice already underway in China, where the training parameters for models, known as “weights,” have been publicly released.

Even the suggestion of government oversight sparked backlash from Silicon Valley. Last week, the White House sent out a memo to reassure industry allies that submitting new models for federal review would be strictly voluntary.

If talks ultimately resume between Washington and Beijing on AI, experts believe the negotiations would be far more complex than those that resulted in arms control agreements governing nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

The superpowers would not only be discussing threats of instability to the global financial system, but also fears of proliferation — advanced AI tools getting into the hands of bad actors interested in using bio- or cyberweapons that could target both countries.

And they ultimately would have to decide whether to discuss regulating the integration of AI into the Chinese and U.S. militaries, an almost unfathomable goal between the world’s biggest adversaries, where trust is lowest and verification would be hardest.

Those in the industry who most fear what artificial superintelligence could bring have told the Trump administration that talks with China are an existential necessity.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at an event in New York in 2025.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

But even within Anthropic, which has championed diplomacy, there are concerns that Beijing could exploit its current disadvantage to entangle American industry at the cusp of its crowning achievement.

Rather than pushing for a single sweeping agreement, industry insiders are advising the administration to pursue targeted deals with Beijing to mitigate specific risks, like the pact on nuclear command and control, two industry sources said.

In private, both Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi seemed to understand that the gravity of the emerging technology before them required some form of cooperation, Sullivan said.

“At a conceptual level, I believe they had a conviction on that and authorized it,” Sullivan said, “but I believe their level of urgency was considerably lower than ours, and saw this as a longer-term process that would play out over time.”

“Their level of urgency and their stake in it has gone up,” he added.

It’s a showdown that — regardless of the outcome in the June 2 primary election — probably won’t have Republicans in a celebratory mood.

The battle for the 40th Congressional District representing a swath of inland Orange County and portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties is happening in one of Southern California’s only remaining solidly red districts. But that doesn’t provide much solace, experts say.

The shuffling of districts following the passage of Proposition 50, which gave Democrats in Sacramento the authority to redraw the state’s congressional districts in favor of Democratic candidates, is pitting two current members of Congress — Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) and Ken Calvert (R-Corona) — against each other in a bid to keep their seat.

The two are also fending off challenges from a host of Democrats and an independent candidate who says she hopes to win votes from those disenchanted by deeply partisan politics felt across the country.

But even if a Republican keeps the seat, California’s Republican congressional delegation is still down by another member.

“It was all part of the Prop. 50 effort,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative strategist. “Not only did they reduce the number of seats that Republicans have, they got to shove a couple of incumbents into one seat and eat popcorn and watch the food fight.”

And the gloves are already off.

Kim launched a $3.7-million ad blitz last month with a video boasting her support of President Trump, saying that she’s a “trusted Trump conservative.”

Calvert’s campaign responded in an attack ad that referred to Kim as a RINO, or Republican in name only, a pejorative term frequently used by Trump and others in the GOP to describe conservatives perceived as being disloyal to the party and a “Trump traitor.”

The television advertisement, which began airing last month, called attention to Kim co-sponsoring legislation with other Republicans to censure Trump in 2022 after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Democrats widely criticized the move as a slap on the wrist.

“I believe censuring the president after his actions helps hold him accountable and could garner wide bipartisan support, allowing the House to remain united during some of our nation’s darkest days,” Kim said at the time.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists the 40th District, which extends from Villa Park south to Mission Viejo in Orange County and into Corona, Murrieta and Menifee in the Inland Empire, as being solidly Republican.

It’s the only House seat that was competitive under the old congressional district map that is now fairly safe for the GOP. Trump would have won the district by 12 points in 2024.

As the two incumbents trade jabs, Democrats Esther Kim Varet, an art gallery owner; Lisa Ramirez, an immigration attorney; Joe Kerr, a retired fire captain; and Claude Keissieh, an electrical engineer; are hoping to garner enough support among the progressives in the district to advance to the November election.

Nina Linh, who entered the race early on as a Democrat but has since identified as an independent, is hoping to make inroads with voters disenchanted by both parties.

“When I look at our political climate, I have never in my adult life witnessed or experienced anything so polarized,” she said in a recent interview. “And people, including myself, are just exhausted from this back-and-forth rhetoric for over a decade that has gotten us into a culture of just hyper-divisiveness and extreme partisanship that is prioritized over what everyday people are concerned about.”

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine, called the race in the 40th District a “classic matchup between the two Republican parties — the pro-Trump party and the pre-Trump party.”

Kim, who in 2020 was one of the first Korean American women elected to Congress, does vote to advance Trump policies, but her biography is more consistent with an earlier era of conservatism. Calvert, the longest-serving Republican in California’s congressional delegation, has much more aggressively positioned himself in line with Trump, Schnur said.

The district is representative in a lot of ways of the two types of Republicans that make up much of the party’s base — MAGA supporters and traditional Republicans who have either come to accept Trump or quietly resent him.

“Not only is this district reflective of the challenge that the party is facing around the country this year, it could be an early precursor of what Republicans will face in the 2028 presidential primary,” Schnur said.

In Congress, Katie Porter’s blunt, combative style helped rocket her to progressive stardom. It has also become her biggest vulnerability as she campaigns to be California’s next governor.

Her brusque approach, prosecutorial instincts and suburban mom appeal fueled Porter’s rise during her three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she rattled CEOs and Trump administration leaders and batted away GOP challengers in a competitive Orange County district.

Her tack, however, made her a polarizing force within her own party, where fidelity remains an essential currency of success and power. In Congress, Porter clashed with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and L.A.’s Rep. Maxine Waters.

The same rough edges that endeared Porter to many voters have also alienated some Democratic insiders and interest groups whose support could prove critical in the race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Then-Rep. Katie Porter meets with parents, doctors and diabetic patients in her Irvine office in 2019.

(Mark Boster / For The Times)

“She came in [to the governor’s race] as an outsider, as a mom, as a fighter. She wasn’t pulled into the establishment,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “I think that’s why she’s popular with voters, because they want somebody who’s going to fight, and sometimes that ruffles feathers.”

In the campaign for governor, Porter, a single mother of three, has struggled to convert grassroots popularity into broader institutional support. Even after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race amid allegations of sexual assault, she has yet to see a major surge in support or endorsements from Democratic power brokers.

A pair of embarrassing videos continue to hang over her campaign. The videos, which surfaced in October, showed Porter yelling at a staff member and threatening to walk out of a television reporter’s interview.

As former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has ascended and she remained stagnant in polls following Swalwell’s exit, Porter has increasingly sought to redeem her image. She poked fun at the incident with her staffer in an ad, smilingly asking a group of whiteboard-wielding supporters behind her to “please get out of my shot.”

In recent debates, Porter has sought to play up the qualities that made her a standout among resistance-era progressives, needling former hedge fund executive Tom Steyer over his past investments in private prisons and the pressing Becerra for a “yes” or “no” on statewide single-payer healthcare. Porter emphasizes her support for single-payer healthcare, providing free child care and college tuition and making wealthy corporations pay their “fair share” in taxes.

Porter said she wants to increase taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents but doesn’t support the proposed billionaire’s tax ballot measure because it is a “one-time tax” that won’t solve the state’s underlying budget issues.

During a particularly chaotic debate last week, she scolded her opponents’ incessant interruptions and called out what she considered a double standard over her behavior.

“I can’t believe, with [the] interrupting and name-calling and shouting and disrespect for everyone up here who’s stepping into public service that anyone wants to talk about my temperament,” she said during the May 5 debate on CNN.

Though she acknowledged she mishandled both caught-on-tape situations and said she apologized to the staffer, the videos hindered her early momentum and have undercut her efforts to make inroads with potential allies in the race.

Porter speaks at a gubernatorial candidates forum on Sept. 28, 2025, in Los Angeles.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Influential lawmakers, labor groups and party insiders have coalesced behind Becerra and Steyer, her top Democratic rivals.

Porter has scored some key endorsements. She is one of three candidates backed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, along with Steyer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. She also has support from Teamsters California, the National Union of Healthcare Workers and progressive groups such as Emilys List and California Environmental Voters, which dual-endorsed her and Steyer.

Union support is pivotal for Democratic candidates in California, sending a clear signal that they support the priorities of working-class voters. For Porter, who has proudly refused to accept corporate donations throughout her political career, the labor endorsements also help her attract the small-dollar donations that are essential to her campaign.

While in Congress, Porter proved to be a prodigious fundraiser. In her last reelection campaign for the House of Representatives in 2022, she raised more than $25.6 million in contributions — the second-most in Congress, behind only Bakersfield’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was then the House Republican leader.

Still, her backing from elected Democrats remains comparatively thin. Along with her mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), just three members of Congress have endorsed her gubernatorial bid: Reps. Robert Garcia of Long Beach, Dave Min of Irvine and Derek Tran of Huntington Beach. She also picked up an endorsement from Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine) after Swalwell dropped out.

Though none would speak publicly, multiple sources who work in and around the state Capitol expressed concerns about Porter’s temperament and her willingness to work collaboratively with people she disagrees with.

“Katie Porter hurt herself big time because she needs anger management and she doesn’t have the temperament” to be governor, Democratic former Sen. Barbara Boxer said during a recent interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert.

Through her campaign spokesperson, Porter’s declined to be interviewed for for this story.

Porter questions Tim Sloan, president and chief executive officer of Wells Fargo, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington in 2019.

(Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg)

Defenders argue the backlash reflects a double standard for women in politics — a salient point in a state that, despite its liberal reputation, has never elected a woman as governor.

“Sacramento sizes up every gubernatorial candidate the same way: Can they win, and is this someone I actually want to work with?” said Elizabeth Ashford, a Democratic consultant who is not working with any of the candidates running for governor. “The videos showed an angry woman, and for a lot of people that translated to ‘I don’t want her as my boss.’

“It’s a double standard that dogs women in politics. Jerry Brown was famous for his loud, unfiltered outbursts and nobody questioned whether he was up to the job,” said Ashford, who served as the former governor’s deputy press secretary.

Gonzalez agreed, arguing that women who stand up for themselves “are often labeled as ‘difficult.’ Probably a lot of people think I’m difficult,” the labor leader added with a laugh.

Born in Iowa, Porter often connects her politics to her family’s financial struggles after losing their farm during the 1980s farm crisis. She earned degrees from Yale and Harvard, where she studied bankruptcy law under Warren. In 2012, while working as a law professor at UC Irvine, Porter was appointed by then-Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to oversee California’s $18-billion mortgage settlement.

After defeating Republican incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters in 2018, Porter quickly emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most recognizable progressives. Armed with a whiteboard and other visual aids in congressional hearings, she confronted banking and pharmaceutical executives over drug prices, consumer debt and corporate profits.

The props, theatrical at times, seemed to aggravate Waters, then the Democratic chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee. On several occasions, Waters sided with Republicans who challenged Porter’s use of visual and audio aids during hearings.

“Please do not raise your board. We’ve talked about this before,” the chairwoman scolded when Porter tried to hold up a “Financial Services Bingo” card during a 2019 hearing on debt collection. (She later got to show the board on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”)

Eager to force change they campaigned on, Porter and other freshmen, including members of “The Squad,” at times clashed with Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.

Porter speaks to volunteers while campaigning in Mission Viejo in 2018.

(Victoria Kim / Los Angeles Times )

Porter has slammed lawmakers, including Democrats, for stock trading and funneling earmark funding to their home districts, arguing that such practices breed corruption and mistrust in Congress. The critiques irked Pelosi, a powerful force in California politics.

In her second term, the Orange County Democrat lost her coveted spot on the Financial Services Committee after she listed it as her third choice and requested a waiver to stay on it. Typically, members prioritize such high-profile committees and request waivers to serve on lesser ones in addition. The move was seen as a risk, the result a check on Porter’s ambition.

“So many of us, regardless of ideology, run on ‘shaking up Washington.’ But then when you actually come here, there’s a lot of consequences for doing that,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Times after Porter lost the committee position.

Porter’s willingness to buck party norms also raised eyebrows during her Senate campaign, when she entered the race for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat before Feinstein had announced retirement plans in early 2023. Although then-Rep. Adam Schiff also launched an early campaign, he did so only after privately seeking Feinstein’s blessing. She ultimately finished third in the primary.

Her decision to run for Senate did not ingratiate her with Washington’s Democratic leadership. The party was forced to spend millions to ensure another Democrat was elected to her contested Orange County congressional seat, and Schiff, her top rival in the race, was a close ally of Pelosi — who endorsed him — and helped lead the first impeachment effort against President Trump.

Controversy surrounding Porter’s personal relationships have also surfaced during previous campaigns. In 2024, she obtained a five-year restraining order against a former boyfriend who she said bombarded her and her children with threatening messages.

When a whisper campaign about the end of her marriage threatened her first House run, Porter shared details of her 2013 divorce with the Huffington Post, including that her ex-husband, Matthew Hoffman, physically intimidated and verbally abused her. Hoffman also claimed to be the victim of abuse, including an incident in which Porter allegedly threw hot mashed potatoes at him. Both filed for restraining orders and sought anger management during the divorce.

Former employees have also rallied to her defense. In an open letter last month, 30 former staffers described Porter as a “workhorse” who “asked of us what she expected of herself.”

“She demanded a lot, but she also fought for us, mentored us, and stood by us when life got hard,” the former aides wrote. “We believe the public should understand the full person we know, not a caricature built from a few clips on a bad day.”

Porter has argued that voters are looking for someone willing to challenge powerful interests rather than accommodate them.

Katie Porter is interviewed after the California Gubernatorial debate at Skirball Cultural Center on Wednesday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“It’s on me to keep campaigning and keep demonstrating that,” she told reporters after a recent gubernatorial debate in San Francisco. “It’s also not lost on me that the last time the Democratic Party had a woman nominee for governor was 1994, when I was in college.”

The affordability crisis is at the forefront of the race to replace term-limited Newsom. As a single parent, Porter argues she is acutely aware of gas and grocery prices — as well as higher-stakes consequences.

She described feeling shocked when, during a recent conversation with her 17-year-old son, he asked if she would visit him if he moved to another state.

“I said, ‘Paul, you love California, why would you leave California?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m thinking I might want to have a family and I might want to have a house, and I know that means I’ll have to leave California,’” Porter recounted at a March forum hosted by the California Assn. of Realtors. “We need to be a state that doesn’t just retain people like my son … but welcomes new families.”

The centerpiece of her proposed “affordability solutions” are free child care, free tuition at UC and CSU schools for students who complete two years of community college, and ending income taxes for those who earn less than $100,000 — an idea she acknowledges she “stole” from Republican candidate Steve Hilton. “I will take a good idea anywhere I can get it,” she said at a recent forum.

To pay for it, Porter would impose a progressive corporate tax, meaning more profitable businesses and corporations would pay a higher rate. A less than 1% tax hike on businesses that earn hundreds of millions in profit would bring in around $8 billion, according to her website.

“I think she deeply and personally understands the everyday struggles that so many Californians are grappling with right now,” said Petrie-Norris, who last month became the first state legislator to endorse Porter.

While Petrie-Norris describes herself as more politically moderate than Porter, the Irvine assemblywoman praised her as a “pragmatic problem-solver” and “proven fighter” who has taken on corporate interests and the Trump administration.

For a while, Porter was one of four women among the major candidates running for governor. One by one they have dropped out of the race, citing difficulties raising money and support.

After sharing the debate stage with five men recently, Porter was asked whether California is ready for a female governor.

“I sure as hell hope so,” she said.

Voters in California may get a chance to remake the state’s open primary system in two years.

Political consultant Steve Maviglio filed an application Friday with state officials that seeks to alter California’s voting system by reverting to a traditional primary. Under the proposal, the top candidates from each party would advance to the general election in November.

The current system allows the top two candidates, regardless of party, to move on to the runoff. That has led to instances in which two Democrats or two Republicans have faced off in the general election.

The state’s gubernatorial election, for example, has prompted concern that two Republicans could shut out the Democratic candidates. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton have polled high in various surveys and are facing a large field of Democrats.

Democratic voters vastly outnumber Republicans in California, yet some political consultants said they feared there were so many Democrats running that voters wouldn’t coalesce around one candidate and the field would be split. Those fears have eased somewhat in recent months as some Democratic candidates advance from the pack.

The state’s top-two primary system has been in place since California voters passed Proposition 14 in 2010. The goal was to help end partisan gridlock in Sacramento and force candidates in primaries to appeal to a wider range of voters, rather than just those in their own party.

Proposition 14, as well as the state’s once-a-decade redistricting process, has led to some dramatic races, including the 2012 face-off between Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman and Howard Berman for a congressional seat in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Amid aspersions and attack ads, the pair nearly came to blows at a community debate.

Maviglio described the ballot measure as a simple repeal of Proposition 14, and said he was inspired by the governor’s race.

“It was extremely scary to envision the November ballot for governor with Republicans on it,” Maviglio said.

The New York Times first reported on the ballot measure proposal.

A news release from Maviglio states that the proposed repeal of Prop. 14 “is fueled by concerns that California’s primaries are disenfranchising a majority of California voters by limiting choice to candidates from one party.”

A website for the effort includes criticisms of the current primary system by Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks and Ron Nehring, former chairman of the California Republican Party.

Maviglio’s ballot initiative proposes to appear on the 2028 ballot and take effect in 2030.

Talk of changing Proposition 14 has been swirling in Sacramento for months.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber told reporters at an unrelated news conference last week that she had voted years ago against Proposition 14. She questioned whether it had actually succeeded in creating more diversity.

“I did not like the open primary,” Weber said. “I didn’t think it would solve any problems. They had a list of problems it would solve, and none of those have been solved.”

The National Science Foundation suspended at least 18 research grants to UC Berkeley last month despite a court injunction restricting such suspensions, according to an attorney representing university scientists in a class-action lawsuit.

The NSF declined to comment on the suspensions.

The grants include at least one that the NSF had previously canceled and was compelled by a federal court order to restore, for a series of mixed-reality exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of Science showcasing Indigenous Ohlone knowledge about the natural world, said one of the project’s leaders, Jedda Foreman.

Foreman, an associate director at the Lawrence Hall of Science, said another researcher on her team received an email from UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor of research, Katherine Yelick, notifying them that the National Science Foundation had suspended the $1.4-million grant. Foreman said she viewed the email, which said the university had received a letter from the NSF raising concerns about “foreign funding.” The email did not provide a copy of the letter or explain further, she said.

Foreman said the Lawrence Hall of Science had not received any foreign funding for the project.

“The grantees were given near-zero information about what was problematic in the execution of their grant,” said Claudia Polsky, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law who is representing Foreman and other researchers in a suit they filed last year contesting a previous round of grant cancellations by the Trump administration.

Polsky said her legal team was seeking more information about the 18 suspensions, but was concerned that the freezing of Foreman’s grant may violate a court order a federal judge issued in that case restoring the defunded projects.

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement that the university “is engaged with the government on matters pertaining to research grants, and remains committed to compliance with all federal laws, rules and regulations.”

He declined to comment on the types of grants affected, the amount of funds at stake, or the potential effect on the campus.

One of the Lawrence Hall of Science exhibits, which were co-designed with Ohlone youth, is scheduled to open Sunday, with another set for the fall of 2028. Researchers also are studying whether participating in creating exhibits sparks more interest in science among Indigenous young people and makes them more likely to pursue STEM careers.

“We’re doing a lot of hoping and finger-crossing that something works out,” Foreman said. “It was such a powerful project and we really want to be able to share what we’ve learned.”

National Science Foundation turmoil

The University of California received $525 million in National Science Foundation grants in the 2024-25 budget year. But that funding source has become increasingly volatile under the Trump administration as the federal agency has terminated nearly 2,000 grants nationwide that it said did not align with its priorities — including those focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion — and has been slower to approve and disburse new awards.

In late April, President Trump fired all 22 members of the independent board of scientists that oversaw the NSF. He is also proposing to cut the agency’s budget by more than half in 2027, though Congress rejected a similar plan last year.

Other federal agencies also terminated research grants en masse last year. Some of the cancellations have been reversed by the courts.

UC researchers are contesting grant reversals by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities in the class-action lawsuit, filed last year. The University of California is not a party to the suit.

Last June, the researchers won a key legal victory when U.S. District Judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction restoring grants canceled by the NSF, EPA and NEH — including for the Ohlone-focused exhibits co-led by Foreman, one of six named plaintiffs in the case. The judge barred the agencies from revoking funds using form letters that didn’t include an explanation specific to the grant at stake, or because of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

Judge Lin stepped in again after the NSF froze hundreds of grants to UCLA in August, amid attempts by the Trump administration to secure a $1-billion settlement from the university over allegations of campus antisemitism. Indefinitely suspending a grant was the same as terminating it, Lin said in a ruling requiring the agency to reinstate the funds.

Polsky said last month’s suspension of Foreman’s grant raised concerns that the Trump administration was seeking a way around those orders. “It seems to us like something that should not have been canceled on the merits and raises suspicion that this was just a different way to cancel the grant,” she said.

UC looks to state for alternative funding

The University of California is ramping up efforts to find alternative funding for its multibillion-dollar research enterprise as federal support becomes less reliable. On Monday, UC President James Milliken spoke alongside state Sen. Scott Wiener and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain at a Sacramento rally in support of state legislation to create a $23-billion fund for scientific research.

If successful, the bill will place a bond measure on the November ballot. Money from the bond would go toward research in wildfire and pandemic preparedness, new medical treatments and other areas, with revenue from inventions shared with the state. The state Assembly’s appropriations committee is set to consider the bill Thursday.

“If the federal government is going to continue to attempt to reduce funding for the research that has been so important to UC — that saves lives, that drives the economy — then the state of California, I hope, will be able to step up,” Milliken said at a meeting of the university’s Board of Regents on Wednesday.

UC Provost Katherine Newman told the regents she has been meeting with leaders of the Russell Group, a consortium of the United Kingdom’s top universities, to discuss collaborating on research in climate change, clean energy and public health — all areas that have seen federal funding threatened under the current administration.

Mello writes for Berkeleyside, which originally published this story. It was distributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.

Pity poor California.

It’s not just the eye-watering price of gasoline, the absurd cost of housing, the rising price of utilities and groceries, the Trump-led assault on the state’s immigrant population and his attack on California’s long-cherished values of tolerance and diversity.

No, on top of all that voters have been subjected to — the horror! — a dull and drab gubernatorial campaign, burdened by a surfeit of C- and D-list candidates with all the electricity and elan of a tepid bath.

Where are the A-listers? Where are the lights? The cameras? The action?

That, anyway, is the perspective one gets reading a certain genre of campaign dispatch, written from the perspective that all of California, Land of Reagan and Schwarzenegger, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, incubator of the Next Big Thing, is a stage. Woe unto those who fail to entertain, animate or amuse.

The fact that those dreary assessments have very little to do with the actual wants and needs of the vast majority of Californians — not to mention the state’s history of electing mostly dull and drab governors — should give their authors pause.

It hasn’t.

Contra all the stifled yawns and thinly veiled condescension, the contest — now in its final stretch — is the most compelling California gubernatorial campaign in decades. And not just because one of the leading contestants torched himself and his political livelihood in a bonfire of hubris and stupidity.

Come November, voters could elect the first female governor in state history, or possibly the first Latino governor in more than 150 years. (They might also install California’s first billionaire governor, a considerably less uplifting and monumental achievement, but historic nonetheless.)

Depending on the result, the election could also solidify a notable shift in California’s political power balance, from the long-reigning San Francisco Bay Area (think Govs. Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom and U.S. Sens. Alan Cranston, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer) to Southern California (think Sens. Adam Schiff, Alex Padilla and, possibly, Gov. Xavier Becerra or Katie Porter.)

True, there’s no pyrotechnic personality in the expansive field of gubernatorial hopefuls. But this is no group of slouches.

“Look at the resumes of these people. There’s nothing embarrassing,” said Jim Newton, a UCLA historian who’s written a shelf-load of biographies of Californians as disparate as Earl Warren and Jerry Garcia. The contenders, he noted, include a former state attorney general and Biden Cabinet member, a high-profile ex-congresswoman, the aforementioned hedge-fund billionaire and men with experience running two of the state’s most populous cities. “That’s a pretty good range of backgrounds in candidates for governor.”

With no glitz, no glamour, what’s a star-seeking, celebrity-hungry voter to do? If you believe the stereotype, Californians take their political cues more from Variety and In Touch magazine than, say, their voter guide or the flood of TV ads and campaign mailers that inundate the state every two years.

In truth, the Hollywood stars elevated to the governorship, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been the exception — spaced nearly four decades apart — and far from the norm. Both political insurgents were elected under extraordinary circumstances. Reagan amid the tumult and tectonic fracturing of the 1960s Civil Rights and Free Speech movements. Schwarzenegger in an unprecedented, rapid-fire recall of an enormously unpopular governor.

Far more typical are the likes of George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis. Each was a career politician who spent decades laboriously climbing the government rungs before being elected governor. Collectively, they were featured on the cover of People magazine precisely zero times.

The three were, to use Newton’s description, “mainstream, politically tested, not flashy.” Which also happens to describe several of those currently aspiring to be governor.

Drab, but true.

Boring as it may seem, most Californians want someone who’ll focus on their workaday concerns, not jollification. For all the talk of the “attention economy” — the hearts and minds won by jokey memes, viral videos and other snackable morsels on social media — voters are much more focused on the real economy, which is to say putting food on their table, maintaining a roof over their head and keeping their car fueled and home at a bearable temperature.

“It’s not virtual reality,” said Mike Madrid, a longtime California Republican strategist and one of the state’s most astute political observers. “It’s reality reality.”

“That may not be interesting to the punditry and the East Coast,” Madrid went on, “but it still matters. Reality still matters. The performative nature that has dominated our discourse for 10 years in the Trump era is fading away.”

Imagine, for a moment, if former Vice President Kamala Harris had jumped into the governor’s race, as contemplated. The contest, for all intents, would have ended then and there, save for months of airy speculation on which Democrat or Republican would make the November runoff en route to eventual defeat. That would have been boring.

In Harris’ absence, the sprawling field of candidates has been a good and healthy thing, yielding the most competitive California gubernatorial contest in a quarter century. Fears of a Democratic shutout in June’s top-two primary and a fluky Republican being elected — which were always overwrought — have faded dramatically. Even if they hadn’t, would it really be better for politicians in Sacramento and Washington to anoint the Democratic favorite and cut voters out of the equation?

(While we’re busting myths, another is the fanciful notion that the state party or Democratic grandees like Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry or Willie Brown could have cleared the field with just a phone call or two.)

This wide-open fight for governor may not be boffo entertainment or dazzling to those looking in from the outside, but it’s absorbing nonetheless. It’s destined to be remembered as one of the most volatile and surprising political contests modern-day California has ever seen.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A resolute Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the White House lectern Tuesday and declared the United States, under President Trump’s leadership, had launched a bold new operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, based on the principle that international waterways must remain free.

An hour later, Trump walked it all back, ending the complex military endeavor after less than a day.

It was just the latest evidence to America’s allies that the word of the U.S. government is subject entirely to the president’s whims. And such is the worry fueling concerns in Taipei ahead of Trump’s state visit to China this week.

Privately, senior administration officials have assured Taiwanese leadership ahead of the trip that Trump has no intention of changing long-standing U.S. policy on the island, two sources familiar with the discussions said — a stance of “strategic ambiguity” that has avoided any declarative statements on Taiwanese independence since it was coined by Henry Kissinger 55 years ago.

A White House official was definitive that U.S. policy toward Taiwan “remains the same as the first Trump administration.”

“The U.S. One China policy, as our cross-strait policies are collectively known, is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances to Taiwan,” the official said. “There is no change to our policy with respect to Taiwan.”

But Chinese officials told The Times that their president, Xi Jinping, intends to raise the matter as a top priority, knowing that only one person — Trump himself — speaks for the administration today.

Whether Xi can leverage the intimacy of a private audience to shift Trump’s stance, potentially linking it to other U.S. objectives, is the source of significant concern here.

Taiwanese officials fear even the most subtle rhetorical change in policy from Trump could imperil a delicate status quo that has held, to its benefit, for decades. They have similarly sought assurances that the administration will follow through on a pending U.S. arms sale worth over $10 billion, which received approval from Taiwan’s legislature on Friday.

“The most serious scenario would be if President Trump were to make an impromptu statement, such as, ‘I oppose Taiwanese independence,’ particularly if he were to link this to trade, the Iran issue, or a summit agreement,” said Chienyu Shih, of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan. “This would constitute a rhetorical concession of substantial significance to Beijing.”

Rubio told reporters at his news conference Tuesday — with a similar confidence he expressed on the Iran file — that China understands Washington’s long-standing position on the island.

“I’m sure Taiwan will be a topic of conversation. It always is. The Chinese understand our position on that topic — we understand theirs,” Rubio said.

“I think both countries understand that it is in neither one of our interests to see anything destabilizing happen in that part of the world,” he added. “We don’t need any destabilizing events to occur with regards to Taiwan, or anywhere in the Indo-Pacific. And that’s to the mutual benefit of both the United States and the Chinese.”

Trump has suggested a willingness to shift U.S. policy on Taiwan before.

During his initial campaign for the presidency in 2016, Trump openly questioned the One China policy, drawing ire from Beijing for suggesting he might endorse Taiwanese independence. He accepted a call from Taiwan’s president after his victory and would later support significant arms sales to Taipei.

And yet, at a 2017 meeting with Xi, Trump vacillated, telling the Chinese leader he could “deal with” the Taiwan issue in “a matter of months,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Chinese were reportedly so flabbergasted by the comment that they dismissed it as rhetorical flourish.

“There is concern that the conversation between the two leaders could veer into sensitive territory on the topic of Taiwan,” said Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “but there are many in the administration who would still appreciate the importance of general continuity in U.S. policy.”

U.S. support for Taiwan’s democratic movement used to be a matter of principle. Today, Washington sees it as a matter of national security. Over 60% of semiconductors are produced in Taiwan, including 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. And it is viewed as the clasp of the first island chain guarding against Chinese maritime expansion.

A robust debate between Taiwan’s Cabinet and the opposition in parliament ended Friday not over whether to accept U.S. defense equipment, but over how much to spend. The Legislative Yuan approved $24 billion in purchases — including a defense package passed by Congress in December and the pending arms sale — falling short of Taipei’s $40-billion proposal.

Anticipation for the president’s state visit is high here in the capital city, where local news is filled with questions over the influence Trump’s war in Iran might have on his appetite for supporting Taiwan.

Chinese defense analysts have seen the war as a sign of U.S. weakness. But Taiwanese defense experts have taken away a different lesson: cheap equipment from a lesser military, such as dumb mines thrown in a strait, may just be enough to paralyze a superpower.

The latest U.S. National Security Strategy, released by the Trump administration in December, emphasized the importance of support for Taiwan and the status quo.

But the Taiwanese took note that the strategy also called for an end to forever wars in the Middle East, offering little preview of the president’s sudden strategic pivot on Iran in February, launching a war few saw coming.

What Trump chooses to say in China “might be difficult to predict,” said Jyh-Shyang Sheu, a scholar of Chinese politics and military capabilities based in Taiwan.

But “in Taipei, we are still focusing on the U.S. policy,” he added, “more focusing on what he does instead of what he says.”

TUCSON — Tucson migrant advocates have designed a new tool to help track immigration-related enforcement in and around the city as arrests surge under President Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

Tucson Migra Map allows people to document and visualize enforcement activities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. While revealing patterns, the tool also raises questions about safety, transparency and the limits of public tracking tools.

“It indicates the level of chaos and how disruptive it is to our community,” activist Lucia Vindiola said in a statement. Vindiola launched the mutual aid group La Bodega to provide groceries and other help to people affected by increased enforcement.

“We are seeing firsthand the impact on families, limiting them from shopping for groceries and supplies,” Vindiola said.

Since Trump took office, immigration-related detentions have more than tripled in fiscal year 2025 — surging from fewer than 200 in late 2024 to more than 800 by June 2025. The response in communities nationwide has been swift, with groups such as the Tucson Rapid Response network organizing to monitor and track federal immigration action on the street.

Geographer Dugan Meyer, one of the map’s creators, is a PhD student at the University of Arizona who volunteers with Tucson Rapid Response and related organizations.

“This project came out of the documentation work that Rapid Response is doing, but also around the city,” Meyer said. “It is a community research project, community mapping project.”

The data are pulled from spreadsheets maintained since January 2025 that tracks and documents federal enforcement actions in greater Tucson such as raids, vehicle stops and aerial surveillance.

Included is the December raid at one of several targeted Taco Giro locations where Democratic U.S. House Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper-sprayed by federal agents.

Incidents on the map are vetted and classified as “confirmed” or “credible but unconfirmed” based on the level of evidence.

“If we have photographs of, say, an agent wearing a tactical vest that says ‘ICE,’ that’s confirmed,” Meyer said. “Credible unconfirmed, we’re very confident something happened.”

Meyer said a trained Rapid Response observer witnessing an event, even if they had not photographed it, would be an example of a credible unconfirmed event.

“Their testimony about that would be enough for us,” he said.

Hundreds of people, including noncitizens, have contributed their eyewitness accounts of immigration enforcement to the map and the database it draws from, according to the Tucson Migrant Map website. Information from the local news is included, along with reports collected by Rapid Response and other neighborhood networks such as Migra Watch, and information shared on social media and in WhatsApp groups.

Rapid Response member Steven Davis has documented five incidents, including one in which he was pepper-sprayed by law enforcement. He says having these incidents recorded and published furthers his efforts to better show people what ICE is doing in their community.

“The value of the observation is that we take this out of the shadows and get it out into the public,” Davis said. “The Migra Map is a public-facing map that makes visible this activity that is mostly behind the scenes.”

Davis said knowing the data he collects will be used for Migra Map makes it more important for him to document diligently.

“There’s the saying, garbage in, garbage out. I want to make sure that the information that I’m providing is the most accurate information that I can possibly provide,” Davis said.

Meyer said that as of late April, the team had reviewed around 562 incidents, with about 300 meeting the threshold to be included. The goal is to review reported incidents within a week, then add qualifying cases.

“We know that the map is an undercount by any estimation,” Meyer said.

The map also includes police facilities and immigration detention facilities, along with flight paths of various federal agencies’ surveillance flights.

The accuracy of the reporting has been confirmed as more data is gathered, said Meyer. For example, repeated vehicle reports often confirm instances of surveillance.

Meyer said he hopes that the map will ultimately become a platform for information accessible to the public.

He said he thinks the map “can show in a way that people may know intuitively already.”

“It really helps us think about directly when we can see these things in relation to each other,” he added.

Meyer said that makes it easier to identify trends and point out hotspots like El Super grocery store on Tucson’s south side, which is frequented by mostly Latino customers and has seen a high concentration of enforcement.

“It’s used as a hunting ground for that, but there are others as well,” Meyer said, such as specific apartment complexes targeted by ICE or other agencies.

The Tucson Migra Map was not the first of its kind.

Last year, an initiative called People over Papers was used nationally to track immigration enforcement before being shut down by its host site, Padlet, for violations of its content policy.

Federal officials have said such tracking puts officers at risk, and other tracking sites, including ICEBlock, were previously taken offline after the Trump administration called for their removal.

Meyer said that he hopes the Constitution’s protection of free speech will protect Migra Map from a similar fate, and that people in other places will be encouraged to launch their own initiatives.

Davis, the observer, said that unlike the earlier trackers, the Migra Map doesn’t attempt to alert people to events occurring in real time, but reports enforcement actions after the fact.

“It doesn’t tell you where ICE is active right now. It tells you where ICE has been active in the last months,” Davis said. “You could file a Freedom of Information Act for the Tucson District Office and get the exact same information that we’re providing on the map.”

Meyer also noted that he and the other developers have been public about the project.

“It’s not a crime to collect this information and share this information,” said Meyer.

Nonetheless, some contributors opt to report anonymously out of fear.

“I think that anyone paying attention is at the very least concerned” about the current administration, Meyer said. He said he feels privileged he can publicly associate with the project.

But he allowed that Migra Map is far from perfect.

“The important thing is that it doesn’t tell us a lot,” Meyer said. “While many people would like it to be a real-time alert system, this map can’t be that.”

Cuellar writes for Arizona Luminaria, where this story was originally published. It was distributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For 21 years, Steve Fowler and Sam Wilson have performed together in a band on Memphis’ renowned Beale Street. And for the last decade, the men have been neighbors on a quiet, leafy avenue.

But as of Thursday, they will no longer cast the same ballot despite living across the street from each other.

That’s because Tennessee’s Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the congressional district of Memphis, which has long enjoyed its own Democratic-leaning U.S. House seat. Now, the city is split into three Republican-leaning districts, its majority-Black population sliced up and bound to mostly white, rural and conservative communities along lines that branch away from Fowler and Wilson’s East Memphis neighborhood.

A line runs down the middle of the street, placing Fowler in the 8th Congressional District, which runs hundreds of miles to central Tennessee across a dozen counties. Wilson is zoned for the 9th District, which extends across most of the state’s southern border before curving up to encompass the largely white and affluent Nashville suburbs.

“I think it’s horrible,” said Fowler, who is white. “This isn’t just going to be bad for Black folks in Memphis, but poor whites in these new districts also aren’t going to get services. How are any of these congressmen going to serve all these different counties?”

A national competition

The redraw was sparked by a ruling from the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that may be a death knell for congressional representation of majority-Black Southern communities such as Memphis.

For 60 years, a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act required mapmakers to prove they were not discriminating against racial minorities in how they drew districts, often leading to political boundaries that allowed some minority communities to vote for their preferred representative rather than having their vote diluted by white majorities surrounding them.

The rule had the greatest effect in Southern states, where neighboring Black and white communities remain highly polarized in partisan politics.

On April 29, the justices severely weakened that requirement, ruling that the way courts had handled it improperly injected racial matters into redistricting in violation of the Constitution. Republicans across the South immediately leaped at the chance to redraw their maps before the November elections to eliminate as many Democratic-held, majority-minority congressional seats as possible.

Tennessee’s Legislature was the first in a GOP-controlled state to finalize a new map. But it is one of several Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina among them — engaged in a broader partisan redistricting competition sweeping the country.

Republicans have long complained that the Voting Rights Act prevented them from doing to Democratic, majority-Black districts what Democrats in states they control do to conservative-leaning, white and rural areas — scatter their voters for partisan gain.

That is what Tennessee Republicans did in their initial congressional map in 2021 to the state’s other large reservoir of Democrats in Nashville, where they did not have to step gingerly because that city is majority white.

“Tennessee is a conservative state and our congressional delegation should reflect that,” said Republican state Sen. John Stevens, who shepherded the bill for a new map that made all nine congressional districts solidly Republican.

The nationwide gerrymandering wars began after President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its map to favor Republicans. Some Democratic states, including California, countered by redrawing their congressional maps for partisan advantage. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling reining in the Voting Rights Act and the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to toss out voter-approved maps that favored Democrats in that state, the GOP has gained the upper hand.

A ‘central place’ in pursuit of racial justice

Wilson, the Memphis musician who is Black, was less distraught by the carving up of his neighborhood for partisan purposes. He saw the move as just another trial facing the city after a surge of federal agents sent by Trump to combat crime and amid narratives about Memphis’ safety from neighboring suburbs and Republican state lawmakers.

“It’s a hustling community. We’re going to make ends meet for our families,” Wilson said. “The legacy of Memphis is music and our civil rights history,” he said, adding the two were intertwined. “Hard times mean you’re going to try and find your gift. That’s what we do here; music in Memphis is a way of life.”

The Memphis district predates the Voting Rights Act. For at least a century, well before Congress acted to protect minority voting rights, Tennessee has believed it made sense for its metropolis on the Mississippi River to have its own U.S. House district. But since that law was passed in 1965, anyone who tried to split up the district for partisan gain could be sued and have the maps thrown out. Now, legal experts say that is not much of a risk.

Nonetheless, Democrats and civil rights groups are suing to block the map. The symbolism is especially sharp as the city is home to the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. When the Legislature passed the new maps, Democrats and protesters shouted, “Hands off Memphis!” and waved signs accusing Republicans of bringing back Jim Crow.

“Memphis is not just any city; it holds a central place in the national story of our quest for racial justice in this country and how, over time, we have increasingly achieved civil, voting, and economic rights for all Americans,” said Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Black citizens protested, marched and died there for the right to vote.”

A city-state divide

Memphis has faced dual stories in recent years. Billions of dollars in private investment and federal dollars have flooded into the area in recent years, but many local businesses still express concerns about a lagging regional economy.

Residents who spoke with the Associated Press expressed concerns about safety and public services but bristled at stereotypes about rampant crime. The twin stories are often on display in the river city, where pothole-filled streets run from empty storefronts to ornate mansion-filled neighborhoods and leafy college campuses only blocks away.

The city has long had a contentious relationship with the rest of the state, which voted for Trump in 2024 by a roughly 2-1 margin.

The conservative Legislature in Nashville has clashed repeatedly with Memphis and accused its leaders of broad mismanagement. Legislators passed a law blocking many police overhaul efforts in Memphis that were put in place after the death of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of city police officers in 2023. It passed another measure seizing control of Memphis’ airport board and those of other cities across the state, and gave the state attorney general, also a Republican, the power to remove Memphis’ elected district attorney.

“The state Legislature is trying to take it over,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the white Democrat who still represents the city in Congress until the new lines kick in after the midterms. “And that’s absurd. It was all partially because it’s a majority Black city.”

Lack of representation seen

Thomas Goodman, a politics and law professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, says the new congressional districts may lead to greater friction over who receives attention — and funding — from lawmakers. Memphis residents will soon share districts with Republican towns with starkly different economies, geographies and demographics. Whoever holds those congressional seats will have an incentive to pay attention to those voters and not to Memphis’ population.

“It would not only deprive Black Tennesseans of proper representation,” Goodman said. “These changes also break up the city of Memphis as an entity into multiple districts, thereby removing a dedicated agent in government who knows the people, who understands their concerns and can speak for them and deliver on behalf of their interests and desires.”

Chris Wiley’s house sits in what was, before last week, a quiet street in Midtown Memphis dotted with duplexes, tidy lawns and sports fields. Now his neighborhood will be carved apart at the intersection of three congressional districts. That is not surprising, he said, because “Tennessee is all about the dollar” rather than residents.

“Memphis is majority Black, so if you mess with that, what’s the point of even voting in Tennessee?” said Wiley, a 29-year-old sports stadium worker who is Black. “Whatever the congressional numbers, whatever that is, we don’t count on the scale as high, anyway.”

Brown writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and videojournalist Sophie Bates contributed to this report.

Addressing reporters on a recent flight to Algeria, Pope Leo XIV invoked the Gospel, called himself a peacemaker and pledged to keep speaking out on behalf of the downtrodden.

“Too many people are suffering in the world today,” he said. “Too many innocent people are being killed, and I think someone has to stand up.”

Pontiffs have a tradition of weighing in on global strife, and Leo’s words were in keeping with long-standing church teaching. Appearing in front of reporters in this fashion was also not new: Pope John Paul II began taking questions from journalists on the papal plane in the 1970s.

But the first American pope was in fact wading into an unprecedented political tempest — responding to a series of broadsides from President Trump that drew Leo into debates over the war with Iran, immigration policies and more, all while Catholics in the U.S. and around the world looked on.

Missionaries from Austin, Texas, gather for prayer in St. Peter’s Square on May 11, 2025.

(Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images)

With no permanent peace deal in sight to end the war, two of Trump’s top lieutenants — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both Catholics and potential 2028 presidential candidates — have also been pulled into the fray. On Thursday, Rubio met Pope Leo at the Vatican in what he said was a long-planned diplomatic visit. Next month, Vance will release a memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” detailing his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.

Trump’s invective has not abated, even in the week his chief diplomat met the pontiff. Ahead of Rubio’s visit, Trump repeated his claim that Leo was “just fine” with Iran developing a nuclear weapon. In response, Leo said that his critics should go after him “truthfully,” noting that the Catholic Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons.

Against the backdrop of this sparring, Rubio sought to downplay the drama after his official visit to the Holy See, which lasted about two hours. On X, he said the meeting with Leo focused on their “shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.”

The episode has revealed the unique power Leo holds on the U.S. stage, with his inherent understanding of the country’s politics and an ability to deliver his message in an accent that at times reveals his Chicago roots.

“He’s speaking in English and he’s American,” said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, most recently of the memoir “Work in Progress.” “People can’t dismiss him as not understanding the United States.”

For weeks, Leo has been asked to respond to a cascade of insults from Trump, including accusations that he is “weak on crime,” that he was chosen as pope because of Trump, and that the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics should “get his act together.”

In measured tones, Leo has repeatedly said he does not want to fight with the president. He counters that he is merely preaching the Gospel. On that flight in April, the pope told journalists: “I do not look at my role as being political, a politician. I don’t want to get into a debate with him.”

He added: “I will continue to speak out loudly, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships.”

He may not be a politician, but Leo’s preaching, ranging from Iran to immigration and global warming, has touched a nerve with Trump. In the U.S., Catholics often serve as a powerful swing vote and hold a wide range of views on those issues. But even in a time of deep division and political malaise, enthusiasm for the pontiff, born and raised in the Chicago area, is hard to dismiss.

Leo’s ascendancy comes as engagement with the Catholic Church appears to be growing in the United States. Though comprehensive data are hard to come by, parishes are reporting renewed interest.

Mark Gray, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, said there was evidence of an increase in baptisms, a trend that appeared to predate Leo’s election as pope last May.

Some of the new American converts lean more conservative, experts said, part of a broader rise in traditionalism. Amid tensions over whether the church should focus more on traditional issues of morality, such as abortion and marriage, or global concerns like war and migration, Leo has stressed that all are welcome and that he wants the church to function as a big tent.

Making history

U.S. presidents have long sought to court the pope, mindful of the country’s sizable Catholic population and its potential as a swing vote in elections. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to meet with the pope, in 1919, during talks after the end of World War I. Since Dwight Eisenhower made a trip to Rome in 1959, every president has traveled to meet the pope, some more than once.

That includes Trump, who traveled to see Pope Francis in 2017, accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump. He also attended Francis’ funeral in 2025.

Asked if there was any precedent for Trump’s clash with the pope, Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, invoked an English king who changed the course of church history: “Henry VIII invites a comparison,” he said. Henry rejected Catholicism in the 1500s and founded a new church in order to ratify a divorce rejected by the pope.

Though Trump — who is not Catholic — has not suggested any such schism, he certainly appears to have discarded most niceties. The president has not apologized for any of his comments, though he did, after widespread backlash, take down a social media post that appeared to depict him as Christ.

Trump is constitutionally blocked from seeking another term, so picking a fight with Pope Leo may not have lasting political implications for him. But it’s a different story for Vance and Rubio, both of whom may need to appeal to the country’s Catholic voters to further their ambitions.

In the 2024 election, the Catholic vote tilted more decisively to the right, with 55% supporting Trump compared with 43% for Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Four years earlier, Catholics were evenly divided, with 50% supporting Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, and 49% backing Trump.

Rubio noted as he headed to Rome that “obviously we had some stuff that happened” between the White House and the Vatican. Vance, who has frequently expressed his support for the pope but is also known for his often-punchy defense of the president’s positions, drew some derision in April when he was asked at a conference about Trump’s comments and suggested that Leo should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Pope Leo XIV exchanges gifts with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the pope’s private library at the Vatican on Thursday.

(Vatican Media via Associated Press)

He later modified his tone, posting on X: “Pope Leo preaches the gospel, as he should, and that will inevitably mean he offers his opinions on the moral issues of the day. The President — and the entire administration — work to apply those moral principles in a messy world. He will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”

Still, the rift could cloud the upcoming release of Vance’s memoir, overshadowing a book meant to burnish a potential 2028 bid with questions about Trump’s antagonism toward the pontiff.

Two Catholics have served as president — Biden and John F. Kennedy. During an era of stronger anti-Catholic sentiment, Kennedy famously gave a speech as a candidate emphasizing the separation of church and state. Biden was more openly devout, attending Mass every weekend and quoting Catholic hymns in his speeches. Vance is the second Catholic vice president, following Biden’s two terms as President Obama’s deputy.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Trump’s social policies were a boon for U.S. Catholics and alluded to electoral politics without mentioning the pope. “President Trump has great respect for the more than one billion Catholics around the world, especially the Catholic Americans who helped power his landslide election victory in 2024,” she said.

The Midwestern pontiff

It’s been a year since the man born Robert Prevost in 1955 stepped out onto the Vatican balcony as pope, a role that predates the United States by nearly 2,000 years. The first American pope’s compatriots quickly seized on his Midwestern upbringing (he’s a White Sox fan) and relatable family dynamics (one of his two brothers supports Trump). In a nod to his Chicago roots, an Iowa-based clothing store, Raygun, began selling a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Da Pope.”

Leo also served for years as Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, building a global profile that helped propel him to the papacy. It hasn’t stopped Chicagoans from claiming him as one of their own — even showing up at the Vatican with Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.

Known as “Bob” before becoming Pope Leo, the new pontiff chose a name that clearly signaled his intentions as a leader, invoking memories of Leo XIII, an intellectual considered a pioneer of modern Catholic social teaching and an advocate for workers. Millies said the choice signaled that Leo wants to refocus on justice and care for others as well as the rising threats around the globe. Leo has cited artificial intelligence as one of those challenges.

With a more low-key presence than his predecessor, Pope Francis, some observers have labeled Leo as quiet. But as his tug of war with Trump shows, his messages are frequently not subtle. In fact, his reserved style may be a reflection of his Midwestern roots.

Pope Leo XIV presides over the Prayer Vigil for Peace at St. Peter’s Basilica, on April 11.

(Antonio Masiello / Getty Images)

This mild manner comes across in public statements that nonetheless make a lasting impact.

Last fall, Leo questioned Trump’s decision to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War. “Let us hope it is just a way of speaking,” he said. More recently, he took aim at the president’s preferred method of communication, his social media site Truth Social. Asked about Trump’s vitriol on the platform, Leo said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

Perhaps no message has been clearer than the pope’s decision on how to spend the Fourth of July this year. For the nation’s 250th birthday, as Trump hosts a giant celebration, the pope will be an ocean away. His plans? Visiting Lampedusa, an Italian island that serves as a stop for migrants traveling to Europe.

Lucey writes for Bloomberg.

One member calls for a Presidential Medal of Freedom for a baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Another calls for court interventions by the Department of Justice on behalf of Amish parents fighting New York vaccine requirements and Catholic nuns challenging that state’s requirement that they accommodate hospice patients’ gender identities.

And the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission is calling for a federal hotline with this automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.”

These are just some of the recommendations that members of the advisory panel formed by President Trump last year want to see included in the commission’s final report.

That report is still in the works, but commissioners had an opportunity to describe their wish lists during their most recent meeting in April. There was little dissent as the commissioners, most drawn from Trump’s base of conservative Christian supporters, covered the items they want in the report.

Their ideas reflect the prevailing perspectives on the definition of religious liberty among many conservative Catholic and evangelical activists: increasing avenues for religious expression in public schools, expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money, and allowing for religious-based exemptions in areas ranging from labor law to classroom lessons to healthcare mandates.

Such views have also been reflected in Supreme Court decisions issued in recent years by its conservative majority.

Commission’s views criticized

Critics of the commission say it embodies a one-sided perspective of Trump’s supporters and is threatening a well-established constitutional separation of church and state.

A lawsuit by a progressive interreligious coalition argues that the commission fails to comply with federal law requiring advisory panels to feature diverse members and viewpoints.

The lawsuit echoes criticism that most commissioners are conservative Christian clerics and commentators; one is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. The coalition says members have asserted that America is specifically a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation and notes that most commission meetings took place at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, an institution with Christian leadership.

The Republican administration is asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit. The government is citing legal technicalities and contending that the law does not define how a commission should be fairly balanced or whose viewpoints should be represented.

Another entity created by Trump — the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias — issued a report saying Christians faced discrimination under the administration of President Biden in areas such as education, tax law and prosecution of antiabortion protesters. Progressive groups said that report failed to document systemic discrimination, focused on causes favored by conservative Christians and amounted to advocacy rather than an investigation.

In a further interlocking of Trump-related initiatives, several members of the Religious Liberty Commission are scheduled to take part in a May 17 prayer event marking the country’s upcoming 250th birthday. Several also participated in a recent Bible-reading marathon staged largely at the Museum of the Bible.

Harmony and tension

The commission has mostly featured agreement among members, with one dramatic exception. One commissioner, Carrie Prejean Boller, was ousted in February after a contentious hearing on antisemitism.

Commission Chair Dan Patrick said Prejean Boller sought to “hijack” the hearing, in which she had sharp exchanges with witnesses about the definition of antisemitism and defended commentator Candace Owens, denying her record of antisemitic statements. Prejean Boller, a Catholic, contended that she was wrongly ousted for expressing her beliefs.

In other hearings, witnesses described how they defied workplace regulations that they said conflicted with their conservative religious values on gender, abortion, COVID-19 vaccines and more. Some said they were prevented, at least temporarily, from displaying a religious symbol at work or trying to sing a Christian song at a school talent show.

At the hearing devoted to antisemitism, Jewish witnesses spoke of being harassed and threatened at campus pro-Palestinian protests against Israel. The commission has also heard from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other witnesses.

Even so, critics said the commission mostly focused on conservative Christian and right-leaning political grievances.

The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of the progressive Interfaith Alliance, one of the groups suing over the commission’s composition, said the panel’s omissions are as significant as what it focuses on.

He said the commission has failed adequately to address such issues as anti-Muslim efforts in Texas and elsewhere, and also the rise of antisemitism on the right, not just the left.

Separation of church and state

Raushenbush said he is especially worried about the commission chair’s challenging the very notion of church-state separation.

Patrick, a Republican who is the Texas lieutenant governor, repeatedly denounced a concept that is embedded in Supreme Court precedent.

“We need to say there is no separation of church and state,” Patrick said at the April meeting. “That’s a lie.” He suggested printing “a million bumper stickers” to that effect.

No one at the commission meeting disagreed.

Trump made similar comments at a prayer event at the White House in 2025. “They say separation between church and state,” he said. “I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.”

While the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution, 20th century decisions by the Supreme Court cited Thomas Jefferson’s description of the 1st Amendment as creating “a wall of separation between church and state.” The court applied the 1st Amendment’s prohibition of any church “establishment” to the states in addition to the federal government, citing the 14th Amendment’s ban on states denying citizens’ rights.

Courts have since wrestled with how to balance freedom of religion and freedom from government-sponsored religion.

Schools, vaccines and workplaces

Patrick has advocated for prayer and Ten Commandments postings in public schools.

“I don’t have any malice towards anyone that doesn’t believe in any type of faith,” Patrick told fellow commissioners. “That’s fine. That’s what America is about. But these organizations that are pushed by some ideology and pushed by someone’s bank account who wants to remove God from our country? We need to push back.”

On other issues, various commissioners called for requiring schools and workplaces to post notices of the rights of religious expression and exemptions.

Some called for restoring full pay and pension benefits for military service members who were discharged for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.

Bishop Robert Barron of the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minn., called for allowing religious groups such as Catholic Charities to receive federal money without compromising on traditional church teachings about the family.

He also said Catholic immigrants in detention should have humane treatment and access to sacraments and that immigration agents should not disrupt worship services in enforcement actions. The administration last year eliminated a policy against immigration enforcement in sanctuaries, which other religious leaders said should not occur at any time.

Kelly Shackelford, president and chief executive officer of the legal organization First Liberty Institute, called for new requirements that governments pay all legal bills if they lose a religious liberty case. He said many individuals lack the money to challenge the government in court.

“That would be a huge shifting of power in favor of citizens,” he said.

Smith writes for the Associated Press.

The White House’s newly released strategy for tackling the nation’s drug and addiction crisis calls for a number of ambitious public health approaches that some experts say are laudable but will be hampered by the administration’s own actions.

The sweeping 195-page National Drug Control Strategy, published May 4, advocates for making access to treatment easier than getting drugs, preventing young people from developing addictions in the first place, increasing support for people in recovery, and reducing overdose deaths.

Those broad goals are widely supported by public health researchers, addiction treatment clinicians, and recovery advocates.

But accomplishing such goals will be difficult in the face of the administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees, cancellation of research and community grants, attacks on organizations and practices that serve people who use drugs, and cuts to Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people that is the largest payer for addiction and mental healthcare nationwide.

Many components of the National Drug Control Strategy are “things that we would agree with and that we fully support,” said Libby Jones, who leads overdose prevention efforts at the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, a public health advocacy group.

But there are “disconnects in what the strategy says is important and then what they’re actually going to fund,” she said of the Trump administration. “Those inconsistencies feel particularly loud in this strategy.”

The White House’s National Drug Control Strategy, released every two years, is a touchstone document meant to lay out the federal government’s coordinated approach to what in recent decades has been one of the country’s defining problems.

Since 2000, more than 1.1 million people have died of drug overdoses. Although deaths have decreased recently, the numbers remain elevated compared with earlier decades, and research suggests overdose death rates among Black Americans and Native Americans are disproportionately high.

The strategy document published this week is the first of President Trump’s current term. In keeping with the administration’s approach to addiction issues, it places heavy emphasis on law enforcement efforts to reduce the supply of illicit drugs. The document repeatedly refers to the ongoing “war” against “foreign terrorist organizations” — the Trump administration’s term for drug cartels — and touts increased enforcement at U.S. borders.

It also outlines plans to implement artificial intelligence technologies to screen for illicit drugs brought into the country and wastewater testing to detect illegal drug use nationwide.

The second half of the strategy focuses on reducing the demand for drugs through public health prevention efforts, addiction treatment, and support for people in recovery. It promotes the role of religion in recovery and calls for the widespread use of overdose reversal medications, such as naloxone.

In a news release, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy called the document a “roadmap” that will “continue dismantling the drug supply and defeating the scourge of illicit drugs in our country.”

The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment about how the strategy aligns with its other actions.

In December, Trump signed a reauthorization of the SUPPORT Act, which continues several grants related to treatment and recovery and the requirement for Medicaid to cover all FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder. In January, he announced the Great American Recovery Initiative, including a $100-million investment to address homelessness, opioid addiction, and public safety.

However, few details have been provided about the initiative, and in January, about a month after the SUPPORT Act passed, billions of dollars in addiction-related grants were abruptly terminated and reinstated within a frantic 24-hour period.

That “whiplash” left “a sense of instability and uncertainty in the field,” said Yngvild Olsen, a national adviser with the Manatt Health consultancy. She led substance use treatment policy at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, under the Biden administration and left about six months into Trump’s second term.

That insecurity was exacerbated by the president’s 2027 budget request, which proposes cuts to several addiction and mental health programs and the consolidation of key federal agencies working on those matters. Jones’ group and nearly 100 others in the field have signed a letter asking Congress to reject the proposals, as it did with similar requests last year.

The national drug strategy adds new, potentially contradictory information to this confusing landscape.

Increasing Access to Treatment

One of the most significant public health goals in the strategy, mentioned at least half a dozen times, is to make it easier to get treatment than it is to buy illegal drugs.

National data underscores the necessity: More than 80% of Americans who need substance use treatment don’t receive it.

The administration’s actions on health insurance may make it difficult to improve that statistic.

Medicaid is the main source of healthcare coverage for adults with opioid use disorder. When implemented, the Medicaid work requirements in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act are projected to strip that coverage from about 1.6 million people with substance use disorders.

The last time Medicaid rolls were purged — after COVID-era protections expired — many people who had been receiving medication treatment for opioid addiction stopped it and fewer people started treatment, according to a study published last year.

Olsen, who is also an addiction medicine doctor, said she loves the strategy’s emphasis on making treatment readily available to anyone who wants it. But she said that’s “hard to really imagine when now people may have to pay for it themselves because they may be losing their Medicaid insurance coverage.”

One analysis estimated the upcoming Medicaid changes could lead 156,000 people to lose access to medications for opioid use disorder and result in more than 1,000 additional fatal overdoses per year.

People with private insurance may be affected too.

The Trump administration has refused to enforce Biden-era regulations aimed at bolstering mental health parity, the idea that insurers must cover mental illness and addiction treatment comparably to physical treatments. And recently, the administration said it would redo those regulations altogether, raising fears that addiction treatment could become increasingly unaffordable.

The administration did not respond to specific questions about how it reconciles its actions on Medicaid and parity with the goal of increasing treatment.

Prioritizing Prevention

The strategy highlights preventing addictions before they begin as one of the keys to reducing demand for drugs. It calls for “promoting a drug-free America as the social norm” and implementing school and community-based programs that are backed by science.

“Investing in primary prevention, before drug use starts, saves lives and resources,” it says, citing several studies about the cost-effectiveness of such programs.

Yet, the president’s budget proposes cuts to these types of programs, and federal layoffs have decimated the agencies that would implement such work.

The White House’s most recent budget request proposes cutting roughly $220 million from SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and nearly $40 million from the Drug-Free Communities program.

Since the new administration started, SAMHSA has lost about half of its staff, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is down about a quarter.

“It’s not clear to me that they’re really going to be able to have the funds or the people to be able to carry that out,” Olsen said of the strategy’s prevention goals.

Another wrinkle appears in the strategy’s discussion of marijuana. The document points to marijuana use as one of the drivers of increasing drug use disorders and reports that “convergent evidence from multiple sources” suggests cannabis use increases the risk of psychosis. It calls for developing new tools to treat marijuana withdrawal and addiction.

However, just two weeks ago, the White House moved to reclassify medical marijuana to a lower tier of scheduled substances and is moving to hold a hearing to do the same for marijuana broadly.

“The administration, on the one hand, is moving in a direction of liberalizing access to cannabis,” Jones said, “but at the same time, in the strategy, it talks about the dangers of doing so.”

“There’s a disconnect there that just makes you question: Which one do you believe?” she added.

The administration did not respond to specific questions about its marijuana policies.

Stopping Overdose Deaths

One of the more surprising elements of the National Drug Control Strategy comes in the last paragraph of the final chapter. It focuses on public drug-checking programs, which often involve using test strips to help people who use drugs determine whether there are more-dangerous substances, such as fentanyl or xylazine, in the batch they bought. That helps them determine whether or how to safely use those drugs.

“Rapid test strips and similar technologies that detect fentanyl and other drugs are an important tool that should be legal,” the strategy document says.

However, SAMHSA announced in a recent letter that it would no longer pay for test strips, as part of the Trump administration’s “clear shift away from harm reduction and practices that facilitate illicit drug use.”

The administration has similarly attacked harm reduction programs in an executive order and its budget requests. It did not respond to specific questions about how this position interacts with the drug control strategy.

Regina LaBelle, a Georgetown University professor who served as acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Biden administration, wrote about the contradiction in a blog post: “It is the height of rhetoric over reality to champion a tool while simultaneously cutting off the funding used to acquire it.”

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