POLITICS

After appearing last year on a contentious political panel discussion in Washington, D.C., Jessica Tarlov, co-host of the the popular Fox News show “The Five,” was approached by a transgender woman from Alabama.

Tarlov had said that Democratic candidates in tough races might have to concede that transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas should not be competing against women assigned female at birth. But the matter never came up. Instead, the Alabama woman thanked Tarlov for making the case for Democrats against four conservatives on “The Five,” the most watched program in cable news and a favorite of family members who no longer speak to her.

“If more people talked like you, I might get my family back,” the woman said. “I’m just happy my parents can hear someone like you.”

Tarlov describes the encounter in her new book “I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends,” out Sept. 15. The part how-to book and part personal memoir is aimed at helping readers navigate the harsh political divisiveness in the culture. Her role on “The Five” has made her an advocate of going into not-so-friendly territory to debate issues rather than staying in comfort zones where views are unchallenged.

“I’m trying to show that a Democratic voice like mine can exist there, without an apology,” she writes of her Fox News position. “And that a person with strong liberal beliefs can bring that same perspective to a host of outlets and places.”

During a recent conversation at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan, Tarlov said the kind words of the fan from Alabama align with what she’s heard from children and grandchildren of the network’s loyal viewers. They are grateful their Fox News-loving families are exposed to a voice from outside the conservative media ecosystem.

Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov is the author of “I Disagree.”

(Penguin Random House)

Tarlov, 42, has been a sturdy liberal counterweight at “The Five,” which averages 3.5 million viewers daily, according to Nielsen. She comes to the panel’s table highly prepared with data-based talking points, forcing her often intractable co-hosts to engage and listen. She often does it while deflecting the mocking remarks of rambunctious colleagues Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld, who try to throw off her arguments.

“Interruptions are an indication that you’re winning,” said Tarlov, evoking the pithy chapter summaries in “I Disagree.”

Tarlov games out numerous scenarios with recommendations on how to deploy statistics and when to lighten up. She also explains the necessity of allowing the other side to blow off steam as she did when “The Five” co-hosts became emotional and overwrought over the shooting of right wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Tarlov believes the key to the success of “The Five” is the camaraderie the panel has off-camera. While the co-hosts will battle it out on set over President Trump’s policies or the excesses of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, they are supportive of each other once the show is over (three of them are represented by the same CAA agent).

“We don’t talk politics outside of work,” Tarlov said.

Tarlov has been an accepted part of the Fox News family, recently signing a three-year contract despite Trump’s suggestion that “The Five” would be better off without her.

But it has taken time for Tarlov to gain credibility among like-minded pundits and thought leaders on the political left. Most are dismissive of the network as its most popular hosts are unwavering Trump loyalists. Tarlov also resists being in lockstep with every Democratic position and trend. (She voted for Andrew Cuomo over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, citing the former governor’s experience.)

“Even in the last year I’ve been at big liberal gatherings, very clearly hosts on other big podcasts or show were not interested in talking to me,” said Tarlov, who has had many conversations that start with the question “Why are you on that network?”

But with younger news consumers getting their news and information through social media platforms, Fox News clips of Tarlov scoring points for the Democrats are gaining attention. Tarlov said she has felt more welcome in left-leaning circles since the 2024 presidential campaign when the digital accounts of Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris put her commentary in heavy rotation. (Scott Galloway, the author and social critic, partnered with Tarlov on a podcast, “Raging Moderates,” after seeing her come up repeatedly in his feeds and then meeting her on the set of “Real Time With Bill Maher”).

Tarlov didn’t start out seeking a career as a TV personality, although her family background likely helped her understand media and communication. Her parents were attorneys who met while working on the Warner Bros. lot in New York, and raised their two daughters in the hip lower Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca.

Her father, Mark Tarlov, was a onetime speechwriter for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger who went on to produce two of John Waters’ films and direct projects of his own. Tarlov and her sister Molly, an actor who co-starred in the MTV sitcom “Awkward,” traveled the world with their father to shooting locations. (Tarlov pays tribute to her father, who died in 2021 of 9/11-related cancer, by wearing his nerd-chic Oliver Peoples eyeglass frames made of buffalo horn).

A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the London School of Economics, Tarlov worked as a strategist on the London mayoral campaign of Boris Johnson. She talked Democratic pollster Doug Schoen into giving her a job. Schoen hired her and brought her to the attention of Fox News, which started using her as a guest on Sean Hannity’s program in 2016.

The ability to effectively volley with conservatives led Democratic Party leaders to approach Tarlov about running for Congress in the district representing Staten Island. (She has no desire to seek political office.)

Tarlov was named co-host on “The Five” in 2022. She and husband Brian McKenna, who works in finance, welcomed their first daughter in 2021, the other in 2024. She remains awed that the show’s viewers — most of whom don’t agree with her politics — have acknowledged her personal milestones with warm greetings and homemade gifts.

She is aware that she’s had a rarefied career. But in “I Disagree,” she goes beyond her impressive resume to reveal her insecurities — unusual in the ego driven TV news business — and tells readers how she’s tried to resolve them.

“I have a good amount of shyness to me,” she said. “I have a lot of imposter syndrome. I’m constantly in wonder that I ended up getting to do this and that hopefully, am the right person to do it.”

Long self-conscious about her raspy voice, which Trump once described as “grating and irritating,” she shares how a 2016 meeting with former Chief Executive Roger Ailes made her relax about it. He told her viewer criticisms were more aimed at her positions, at not how she sounded. “No matter what room the television is in, you want to make sure the person listening in the next room knows you’re on it,” he told her. “Don’t try to smooth your voice out. They may hate what you stand for and what you’re saying, but you want them to know it’s you on TV.”

Tarlov met with Ailes just months before he was ousted over sexual harassment allegations. While Tarlov was grateful for his advice, her book praises current Fox News Chief Executive Suzanne Scott for creating a workplace culture that is much more hospitable to women. Scott promoted Tarlov to co-host right before she was due to give birth to her first child.

“The knowledge that I’m supported allows me to take big swings and not be intimidated,” Tarlov writes. She knows that’s not the situation for all women; in her signature style, she presents the data and the narrative to back it up.

WAUSAU, Wis. — U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin governor, wiped away tears and laughed while sharing how thankful he was Sunday to survive a harrowing late-night emergency landing into a lake of the small plane he was riding in.

The pilot “said we are going down,” Tiffany told reporters at a downtown Wausau firehouse. “‘Pull your seat belt tight.’ I gave it a yank and pulled it good and tight. It was probably about 10 seconds later … we hit the water.”

Tiffany said he and the pilot, Leonard Boltz, remained on top of the plane in Lake Wausau until it began sinking. They decided on swimming to shore. He said they swam about 100 to 150 feet until they reached water shallow enough to stand in.

“We’re really fortunate that God was looking after us last night,” said Tiffany, 68.

The Marathon County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the emergency landing happened just before 9 p.m. Saturday. Boltz called 911 after the pair got out of the plane. They were rescued by emergency responders in a fire department airboat just after 9 p.m.

“The gravity of this is probably just hitting me at this point,” Tiffany said Sunday. “We were making jokes every step of the way last night. Though we knew it was a serious situation, we tried to keep it light through the whole thing.”

David Crowley, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, wished Tiffany a “quick recovery” in a post on X and lauded the “heroism of the pilot.”

Tiffany said he was returning from the La Crosse County Lincoln Day Dinner when the single-engine, four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft lost power as it approached Wausau Downtown Airport.

Tiffany said he had a cut above his right eye that required 12 stitches. Boltz, who Tiffany said is a retired Air Force pilot, also suffered cuts and received four stitches.

Tiffany said the incident will not affect his gubernatorial campaign.

A no-wake buoy was placed near the plane, which remained in the lake, and boaters were asked to avoid the area until the aircraft can be removed, the sheriff’s office said.

A Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson said the agency would investigate the incident. A National Transportation Safety Board spokesperson said that agency is waiting for the FAA to assess the plane as to whether the damage was substantial enough for it to get involved.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed an escalating federal investigation into his administration, including the donations that paid for his travel, saying it was retribution for his criticism of President Trump and his policies.

Newsom’s response Saturday comes after a report in the San Francisco Standard that subpoenas were issued in early September seeking records from the California State Protocol Foundation. The nonprofit pays for Newsom’s travel expenses and is funded primarily by corporate donations and run by a board Newsom appoints.

The latest legal development comes three months after Newsom accused the Justice Department of launching a baseless, politically motivated investigation of him and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The Democratic governor, who is considering a 2028 run for president, at the time said that federal agents had “knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” and were digging through years of records in a quest to find any kind of wrongdoing by him or his wife.

Newsom’s spokesperson Tara Gallegos called the latest developments part of a “baseless MAGA conspiracy theory.”

“There is just a sick man in the White House weaponizing the federal government to settle personal scores. It’s deeply upsetting to see innocent staff, friends, and family have their names dragged through the mud just because they’re associated with the Governor,” Gallegos said in a statement.

The subpoenas issued stated that the information sought was for an ongoing criminal inquiry and was signed by Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael D. Anderson, according to the Standard. The information requested included communications with Steve Kawa, who has served as head of the foundation and was Newsom’s chief of staff when he was mayor of San Francisco, and Rebecca Prowda, who works for the foundation and is the wife of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, the news report stated.

“We are not able to discuss any investigations at present, but the Protocol Foundation will continue its work, defraying costs from taxpayers while representing all Californians,” said Lily Becker, an attorney who provided a statement on behalf of the foundation.

The protocol foundation was created as a tax-exempt charity during Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration in 2004, and was intended to defray taxpayer costs for the governor’s travel.

When Schwarzenegger left office, his supporters turned the protocol foundation over to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s backers, who in turn handed it over to Newsom’s team. The foundation describes its mission in federal tax filings as “relieving the State of California of its obligations to fund certain expenditures of the Governor’s Office.”

Newsom appoints members to the foundation board, which determines what expenses to cover in the governor’s office.

The foundation covers the cost of Newsom’s international travel and certain domestic trips. His staff’s travel is also covered by the foundation. The foundation paid nearly $4,000 for his trip to Mexico City to attend the inauguration of Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and paid $15,200 for the governor’s 2023 trip to China, where he visited five cities in seven days.

In 2020, the foundation paid $8,800 for Newsom to travel to Miami for Super Bowl LIV — where he said he was representing the state as the San Francisco 49ers faced the Kansas City Chiefs.

Among the donors to the foundation are healthcare giants Centene and CVS Pharmacy. Others include the clean-energy nonprofit U.S. Energy Foundation, which donated $150,000 for the California delegation to attend COP30 in Belém, Brazil. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation donated $300,000 in a 2023 behested payment earmarked for the California delegation traveling to China for the meetings on climate change. UC Berkeley gave $220,000 for the governor’s office’s trip to the Vatican in 2024.

California lawmakers are calling for emergency legislation and criminal penalties for creators of rogue AI systems after top AI executives publicly claimed that their technology poses existential threats to humanity.

After Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei wrote in a Sept. 12 essay that they “must slow the pace” of the technology, Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) blasted him for not going “nearly far enough” to make sure artificial intelligence was erected with guardrails.

The answer, Khanna argued, was simple: Make the companies liable for the harm executives say looks increasingly inevitable.

“If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you should either face liability or criminal sanction,” Khanna said in a video posted to X on Saturday. “That is what we need to protect humanity.”

In July, officials from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that, unbeknownst to them, its AI models had hacked into rival startup Hugging Face.

Amodei said he believed that, within the next year, “given the accelerating rate of AI capability development,” a similar incident could lead to AI “taking over the entire internet.”

Amodei warned in his essay that AI was rapidly improving itself, through a process known as recursive self-improvement, which threatened to outpace humans’ ability to control it. Khanna argued that banning this capability was the “most obvious” thing Anthropic could do.

“We need to stop, ban self-improving AI,” Khanna said. “You can not have recursive self-improving AI that basically is able to improve itself and exceed human capability.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) expressed similar outrage over the weekend, calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson to call lawmakers back to Washington to pass guardrails on the technology now that he said multiple AI companies had conceded “what they are creating is not safe.”

xAI Chief Executive Elon Musk and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman joined Amodei’s call for a slowdown of the breakneck development Saturday.

The statements come after Jacob Coxon, who worked as a researcher at both Anthropic and OpenAI, said in a widely circulated post that he resigned from the company in protest after becoming convinced the tech giants were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment.

“This is a direct result of the trump Administration letting the AI industry run wild,” Lieu wrote on X. “That mistake has harmed America, harmed the industry and harmed the American people. November is coming.”

Former President Barack Obama urged Democrats this week to make AI oversight the core of their agenda and said presidential candidates in 2028 should have a “clear plan” for responding to concerns about the technology, the New York Times reported. Americans appear increasingly alarmed by the technology with seven in 10 polled in March opposing local construction of data centers that power AI technology, according to a Gallup survey.

During a Sunday appearance on CNN, Johnson rebuffed the idea that lawmakers should rush into an emergency session to consider erecting industry guardrails. Instead, he said lawmakers needed to be careful to “not smother American innovation.”

“We will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We don’t need everyone to panic right now.”

Trump said earlier this week that he is not concerned with the pace of AI progress, telling one reporter, “It’s going to be fine.” American AI companies have long argued too much government regulation would shackle them in a race with China.

Calls for a federal fix were echoed this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has argued the Trump administration needs to move on national legislation to prepare for fallout from the technology.

Newsom signed bills this week aimed at creating a pathway for outside audits of the top AI companies, many of which are based in California, and a registry for AI auditors.

“The scale and potential consequences of this technology demand sustained action from every level of government,” Newsom said in a statement. “The federal government must step forward with robust, national regulations that match the urgency of this moment.”

Efforts to impose state-level regulations have been mixed, with critics echoing Johnson’s fears that they will stifle innovation.

Late last month, California lawmakers passed sweeping new safeguards around social media, artificial intelligence and data centers, including the ones Newsom signed last week.

Newsom will now decide the fate of the rest of the bills. He has previously vetoed some bills aimed at restricting big tech.

Newsom’s signal that he supports creating some regulation for AI comes two years after he vetoed SB 1047, an AI safety bill that would have required developers to submit safety protocols to the state attorney general, who could hold companies liable if the AI model they directly controlled were to threaten public safety. That legislation would also have required tech firms to be able to turn off the models they directly control if things went awry.

Newsom said at the time the bill would give the public a “false sense of security,” without making a sufficient distinction between the kinds of uses for which AI is deployed.

The bill was supported by a host of prominent AI researchers, but was opposed by Meta, OpenAI and industry groups.

DUBLIN — President Trump on Sunday again played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.

While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.

“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that … shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”

The president has made similar comments in the last week. His remarks Sunday came a day after Dario Amodei, chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other AI corporate leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, chief of OpenAI, publicly agreed with Amodei.

Asked by a reporter if the industry should slow down or be regulated, Trump said, after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg, that the United States is leading China in the development of AI, and, “frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to visit the U.S. next week to meet with Trump, and AI seems certain to be among the items they discuss.

AI has become a major election-year issue in the U.S. as some of the country’s largest companies seed small towns with a national network of computing warehouses while Americans from across the political spectrum increasingly voice concerns about less farmland and water supplies and rising electricity bills. Trump has kept up his support for data centers even as both Republicans and Democrats run from them and many communities try to block them.

Former President Obama said his party should make AI a campaign issue.

“I would talk about this, and I would say, ‘Here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this.’ … I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement. Where is that going to hit? How are we going to respond?” he said at an event last week with the top Democrat in the House, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, according to a transcript released by his office.

Next steps

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council at the White House, said he expects meetings will be held this week involving administration officials who oversee cyber and science and technology policy to discuss the next steps. Trump also could meet with members of Congress, some of whom have also been sounding alarms about the fast pace of AI development.

“I think the president wants to hear from them as well,” Hassett said.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged the need for “some guardrails, some safety measures” so AI “doesn’t run away.” But he echoed Trump’s position that he wants to ensure the U.S. does not “lose our edge in the global competition on this with China because that would be a national security threat.”

Johnson (R-La.) said industry leaders need to be summoned for “one big meeting and work this out together in the same room.” He said he has discussed the issue with Trump and believes a meeting held quickly should be the “next step.”

“So we’re going to pull everybody together and make sure we do this in the right way,” Johnson said, adding that it is a “top priority for me and for the Congress.”

“But we don’t need everybody to panic right now,” Johnson said.

Jeffries criticized Republican leaders for allowing members to go back to their districts for the final part of September.

“We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, … the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely,” Jeffries said. Action on AI will be a “high priority” when House Democrats meet Tuesday as a group.

Neither Johnson nor Jeffries provided concrete steps about what Congress might do. Lawmakers agree that more guardrails are needed, but even narrow attempts at imposing rules have fallen apart over the years, evidence of the congressional reluctance to regulate the technology industry.

Cooperation between U.S. and China urged

Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who resigned over AI concerns and has gone public with his fears, argued for international rules along with self-regulation by the industry.

Coxon said he has grown concerned that AI models would soon gain capabilities that could exceed human control.

“You’re building a human-level or superhuman-level mind, without understanding what it wants, or thinks, or the way it thinks,” Coxon said.

At a time of a fierce global competition for AI dominance, Coxon also urged cooperation between the U.S. and China, the two countries who are leading the race, to slow down and address safety.

“I do hope that the people in China who are looking at the same problems as we are, so they’re trying to build the same technology, will come to the same conclusion that it has to be done in a measured manner, and it should be easy to cooperate on some sort of mutual — of mutual slowing,” Coxon said.

Otherwise, he said, “we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous,.”

White House challenges AI leaders

Tech founder and investor David Sacks responded to the AI leaders’ calls for regulation with a social media post challenging them. Sacks, co-chairman of a White House advisory council on science and technology, said Amodei and others are the ones setting the pace for development.

Sacks said they have the power to slow development on their own.

“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” Sacks wrote.

Superville and Tang write for the Associated Press. Tang reported from Washington.

ATLANTA — Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.

The system’s vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough.

The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That is important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution, and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.

The development comes in an election season of uncertainty, as President Trump threatens to interfere with the midterms, and he has long demanded that states turn over voter rolls. Georgia has been a particular focus, as Trump continues to deny he lost the state in 2020 to Joe Biden. Earlier this year, the FBI seized ballots cast in that election from a Fulton County election hub.

While the flaw in Georgia has been known for a few years, the widespread adoption of AI tools and the blistering pace of its sophistication have election security experts raising alarms.

This is “a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.

Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Liberty Vote, which was known as Dominion Voting Systems before the company was sold. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.

Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm.”

“It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.

How does voting work in Georgia?

Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots voters insert into scanners to tally the votes.

Such cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized. But the software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.

Along with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.

Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who was not involved in the original research and studies AI, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia’s May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.

He then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. It was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.

In cases where ambiguity remained, he wrote, he got the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.

“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.

Why does ballot secrecy matter?

Georgia’s Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot,” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”

A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also is information that could be invaluable to political campaigns.

Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion was the goal and that it probably would be cheaper for campaigns to just increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than try to identify voters this way.

State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule during the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.

“Each [voter] has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”

In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, the implementation would take months, and the Legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs’ proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.

Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she pointed out that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.

“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.

What’s being done?

The secretary of state’s office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state’s office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.

Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.

While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, some have done what Georgia is now trying to do by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw.

Marilyn Marks is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability. She argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps need to be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.

“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.

With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press.

Gavin Newsom, the California governor who loves to heckle Donald Trump and talk about the “big swings” he’s taken at policy while in office, is now a lame duck.

Within a few short months, he will be termed out of office and return to being a regular citizen, if not an average one. Newsom’s presidential ambitions are stronger than ever, and there’s virtually no list of Democratic hopefuls that doesn’t include his name near the top.

But 2028 is a long way away, about a millennium in political time. Newsom has a tough road ahead to not just stay relevant, but also to forge a difficult path between keeping a national profile as a Trump-attacking defender of democracy and not getting pummeled (or worse, ignored) when he loses the safety and power of his elected office.

Our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak take a look at what the next few months, and the next year, may have in store after the governor becomes simply Mr. Newsom.

Chabria: Newsom is making the most of his last leg in office. Recently, he went on an election jaunt through the South, visiting the Carolinas and Alabama to help campaign and raise money in those states.

It is not his first out-of-state trip to lend a hand in campaigns, but likely one of his last as governor. He wouldn’t be the first elected official to have a gap year (or years) before being elected to the Oval Office — Ronald Reagan had more than five years off between being governor of California and winning the presidency — but it’s definitely a disadvantage.

How much do you think being out of office hurts Newsom?

Barabak: Loyal readers of this column — thanks, we appreciate both of you! — know I’ve long looked askance at our gallivanting governor and his extracurricular, eyes-on-2028 activities. I understand that preening and politicking is way more fun and ego-enhancing than the minutiae of government in Sacramento. At the same time, I’m old-fashioned enough to think a person should do the job taxpayers are paying them to do.

But, as you note, that will be a moot point soon enough.

I’m not certain being out of office will be all that great a hindrance. In fact, I think it offers advantages, the main one being Newsom’s freedom to devote his full time and energies to running for president.

You mention Reagan; I don’t think it’s an accident he made two failed tries for the White House while serving in Sacramento. Pete Wilson also attempted the leap from the state Capitol to Washington, and failed badly.

It’s tough to do both.

As Dan Schnur, a former Wilson strategist, once put it, “There aren’t any direct flights from Sacramento to Manchester” — New Hampshire traditionally being home to the first primary — “and you can’t run the state from a cellphone at O’Hare” airport.

So I don’t think exiting office will necessarily hurt Newsom. But I’m highly dubious of his presidential prospects nonetheless. You?

Chabria: This is definitely a wide-open race, with, I suspect, contenders not yet on any lists. It’s way too early to know if Newsom will make it in the primary, but I do think he’s positioning himself in a way that differentiates him from some of the folks he may run against.

Socialism is the right’s boogeyman, framed as a peril to democracy full of death panels and welfare fraud. More than one presidential aspirant has shied away from the label for fear of supposedly losing middle-ground voters or being dragged through the “communist” muck that MAGA media such as Fox News love to sling.

In a recent PBS interview, though, Newsom didn’t disavow some democratic socialist ideas, such as Medicare for all, pointing out that California has long had a powerful progressive faction and many of the ideas considered radical for the right are run of the mill here — and potentially popular across the country.

Newsom seems to be embracing some of those lefty stances, especially ones about affordability and opportunity. While affordability is going to be everyone’s platform, pairing it with big-swing policy like universal health insurance might appeal to voters tired of words without action.

It’s a smart lane, embracing MAGA’s labels instead of defending against them, with policies even middle-ground voters might appreciate in these increasing desperate days when ground beef averages nearly $7 a pound and coffee costs more than booze.

Barabak: While I’m skeptical the words “socialism” and “communism” are the talisman that President Trump and other Republicans believe, warding off what could be a dreadful midterm election for the GOP, I still believe the connotation — wacky, lefty policies — has potency among a not-insignificant slice of the electorate.

November’s election is going to be a referendum on Trump, as Newsom himself frequently says. The fight for the Democratic nomination is a contest of a whole other order.

We agree that no fellow Democrat is going to cede the $7-a-pound affordability argument to Newsom. But to offer some differentiation, many will doubtless portray him as being a bit too out there, especially when they start making the electability argument.

And that’s not to mention what awaits him if Newsom were to emerge as the Democratic nominee. (Fun fact: In 1988, it was a Democratic primary opponent, Al Gore, who first criticized Michael Dukakis over Massachusetts’ prison-furlough program. Republicans then seized upon the issue and used it as a bludgeon, to Dukakis’ great detriment, in the fall campaign.)

In a way, it’s interesting we’re even having this discussion about whether Newsom is too far left. There are parts of his record — his chummy ties to Silicon Valley, his light regulatory stance toward data centers, his making nice with the likes of Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, that make some Democrats question whether he’s too far right.

Chabria: It’s true that Newsom is more centrist than progressive, and equally true that most of America misses that point.

I think there is a version of the next election, though, where the Democratic Party has its own Tea Party moment, when a populist faction wanting social change carries power.

Call it the anti-Trump swing, the search for a Democrat who seems authentic and pugilistic. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker fit this mold.

Everything we know about elections and electability really is up for grabs in this new age of technology and billionaire influence, and the vein of frustration within the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party is only growing stronger because of it. If Republicans do lose out in the midterms — and I am not convinced they will — it changes the calculation on everything, including how far left the average independent voter may swing in the face of an economically crushing oligarchy.

But I would be remiss if I did not say this: Fears that Trump will interfere with the midterms or the next presidential election are justified. Even though things have calmed a bit — there is less talk of agents of some sort at polls — he is pursuing policies and pushing propaganda that could harm a fair election.

We need to safeguard elections, otherwise candidates don’t matter.

Barabak: We 100% agree on that. Candidates, and the campaigns they wage, matter only if elections are free and fairly conducted and all sides —looking at you, President Trump — acknowledge and abide by the outcome.

I wouldn’t, however, infer too much from the outcome in November. For many voters, it will be a chance to vent — about inflation, an unpopular war, Trump’s brazen money-grubbing, his blatant disinterest in the lives and livelihoods of struggling Americans and anything else that’s causing an irritating rash under their collars. That’s why it seems more likely than not Democrats will at least win control of the House.

But midterm results are notoriously unreliable barometers of the presidential election that follows. To give just a few examples, Republicans walloped Democrats in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections and yet Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each won reelection just two years later. In 2022, Democrats fared surprisingly well in the midterm election, and in 2024, well … you know what happened.

Chabria: I don’t think America has a past political moment that can be compared to this one. By nearly every independent measure, the United States is closer to an autocracy than we’ve ever been. We’ve lost the respect and trust of our allies, and a political party that has the support of only about 30% of citizens is reshaping our social and civic life under white nationalist principles.

We are in a high-stakes moment, and the next election won’t be a decision between Democrats and Republicans, but between democracy and something else. The sad truth is that in 2024, more Americans did not vote at all than voted for Trump. About 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot, and Trump received only 49.8% of those votes.

The next Democratic nominee can come with whatever message they want, but if Democrats don’t vote, their candidates don’t win. So for Newsom, or whoever the nominee is, the first victory may be the nomination — but the real test will be turning out the vote.

Barabak: It’s a long way — about a millennium, as you said — from here to November 2028. I agree, though, on the importance of not sitting out this or any election, for that matter. I recollect a button I once saw in a shop on Elm Street, the main drag through, yes, downtown Manchester! It read: “Didn’t vote? Don’t bitch.”

That pretty well sums it up.

DELANO, Calif. — The rows of candies and nuts at the Guadalajara Meat Market — tamarindo con chile, seasoned pistachios, spicy paletas — sat mostly untouched as customers filtered through this carniceria in the late afternoon heat.

“You see a lot of people consuming the minimum, what they need to get by through the week,” said owner Carina Murillo, 31, as she checked out customers on a recent weekday. “Instead of buying six items, they’re buying three items.”

While customers bypass extras, like the snacks at the front counter, Murillo’s costs have gone up. Imported goods from Mexico and Canada have become more difficult to source and sometimes carry tariffs, she said. Transportation fees have risen as diesel prices respond to the war in Iran. The market’s insurance costs have risen by about a third. All of it has forced Murillo to increase prices.

“You see a lot of people consuming the minimum,” says Carina Murillo, owner of Guadalajara Meat Market. “Instead of buying six items, they’re buying three items.”

As the area struggles, Murillo, a college graduate who years ago felt motivated enough to door-knock for political causes, is among those who have become disillusioned. Those in Washington, she said, don’t understand the lives of the working people who keep the country running.

There have been “years where I feel completely overpowered to the point where I’m not motivated to take part,” said Murillo, who didn’t vote in 2024 but plans to do so in November. “That’s what happens when you feel discouraged or like nothing’s going to change.”

The economic strife plaguing Americans is clear in this rural, majority-Latino Central Valley congressional district, home to the state’s most competitive House race, the closely watched contest between Republican Rep. David Valadao and Democrat Randy Villegas.

Democrats hope the national economic angst will translate into big turnout in the midterm elections, but some in this region worry that years of financial struggle may depress voters’ desire to participate rather than motivate them.

Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) presides over a congressional hearing in March. The Republican is in a race against Democrat Randy Villegas that is considered a toss-up.

(Allison Robbert / Associated Press)

And Republicans, who rely on their party turnout beating that of Democrats in rural areas, also face the risk that frustration with the current political climate could dampen enthusiasm.

“Before they can think about Valadao, before Trump or Gavin Newsom or who’s going to run, families are concerned with the immediate: paying the rent, having the food on the table,” said Eliseo Gamiño, who heads the Central Valley Leadership Round Table, a coalition of Latino community leaders and elected officials. “You can’t be thinking about voting when your kids are hungry.”

Few voters who spoke to The Times in this swing district were decided on which party to support in November — or whether to vote at all. Such undecided voters will likely decide the election outcome, and persuading them is the key challenge for both parties as November nears.

Alexa Lopez sweeps up at closing time on a slower than usual Friday that saw one dress sold at Christina’s Fashion in Delano.

In a district that is the third-youngest in population in the country, the simmering uncertainty among Gen Z and millennial voters in particular could affect turnout or results.

Thirty-one percent of its voting-age population is 29 or younger, according to the Tufts University research center CIRCLE, which tracks youth civic engagement, making it among the top swath of House races in which young people could swing the outcome.

California’s swingiest district

The 22nd District, carved from the state’s agricultural epicenter, is one of fewer than two dozen toss-up races nationwide that will likely determine which party controls the U.S. House in the second half of President Trump’s current term. It is also among several high-stakes races nationwide that will test progressive candidates.

Valadao’s seat has long been considered a vulnerable one; Democrats added about 100,000 Fresno residents to the district under Proposition 50’s new map in a bid to help their chances. The boundaries include swaths of Kern, Kings and Tulare counties, along with a very small piece of Madera County.

“It’s going to be crucial in an area that is more purple, more bipartisan, where it’s very clear it can go either way … that these candidates make an effort to get those voters on their team,” said Brittany Martinez, a California-based Republican strategist.

Valadao, 49, who comes from a dairy farming family, is well known in the district and has repeatedly secured victory in close races, retaking the seat in 2020 after losing it in 2018’s blue wave. He saw a close race in 2022, then won by nearly seven percentage points in 2024, outperforming Trump.

His biggest vulnerability this time around may be his vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included steep cuts to Medicaid. Local hospitals are bracing for funding cuts, though a carve-out may keep many valley residents from losing coverage. The district has the highest proportion of Medi-Cal recipients of any in the state, with 67% of residents enrolled as of 2025, according to the California Health Care Foundation.

Valadao spent part of the August recess touring the Central Valley for private meetings with local entities including a hospital, a housing program, a sawmill and a school district, and held a telephone town hall last week. Democrats have criticized him for not holding face-to-face voter events, including public town halls.

Democratic candidate Randy Villegas chats with residents during an August town hall in Hanford.

Villegas, 31, a professor and school board member who was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and is aligned with the Working Families Party, bested a Democrat backed by the party’s House campaign arm to win the nomination.

Villegas has banked on a more public-facing approach to win over swing voters — recently handing out popsicles from a pushcart he wheeled around a Labor Day event in Bakersfield, for instance — a strategy his campaign calls “going everywhere.” Republicans have criticized his record as too far left for the moderate district.

Both candidates have attempted to lean away from partisan narratives. Valadao rarely mentions Trump on social media and did not attend the president’s Republican convention in Dallas last week; Villegas has worked to frame the progressive issues he champions as an effort to help Central Valley voters rather than an ideology.

Trump carried the district as drawn now by less than 2 percentage points in 2024. Since then, residents say they have felt squeezed by housing, gas and grocery prices. The war in Iran has pinched Central Valley farmers — already struggling with water supply and other issues — by driving up fertilizer prices.

Ailyn Flores, center, picks up balloons for a party at Big Delano Discount store.

Tyler Stidham, 28, and her husband recently moved back to Lemoore from San José with their 1-year-old in order to live with family because they could no longer afford their own place.

“Rent got too high and having a family is expensive,” she said as the couple waited for their order from a food truck at the Hanford farmers market on a recent Thursday evening. They have cut out family trips and started meal-planning and budgeting to save money.

Stidham said she is planning to vote and hoping government leaders can make life more affordable. Her husband recalled a favorable impression of Valadao after once meeting him. Stidham isn’t sure who she’ll be casting her vote for.

“I haven’t done my research [yet],” she said.

Young voters said they felt frustrated waiting for a better economy that has yet to materialize.

“I feel like the government is playing in our face. I feel like everything is a show,” said Emma Woodward, 23, of Hanford.

The Sierra movie theater has closed down in Delano, Calif.

(Gary Kazanjian / For The Times)

A store manager at a coffee chain, Woodward bought a house last year to avoid throwing money at increasingly high rent payments, but it has been “hard to survive.” She got a roommate to help with costs, but the two of them sometimes find themselves using food drives for groceries. She has cut out “fun spending,” including concerts and travel.

Woodward said she wanted to vote in order to send the message to Congress that the economy needs improvement. She, too, wanted to research the candidates further; she leaned toward Villegas but was not yet convinced.

‘Whatever happens happens’

Valadao and Villegas must also battle to reach apathetic voters — those who may sit the election out or who are fed up with both parties. In one indication of voter fatigue, local organizers have found it a challenge to register new voters this year.

Dresses on display at Christina’s Fashion store after closing time on a quiet Friday night in Delano, Calif.

People who are unregistered often express mistrust in the government and the feeling that “nothing’s going to change,” said Biviana Camacho, 23, civic engagement program manager for Loud for Tomorrow, a youth organizing group based in Delano that runs voter registration events.

“A lot of folks have been in survival mode for such a long time,” she added, as the group worked on planning a fall event series on a recent afternoon. Their goal: 20 to 25 new registrations per event.

The group’s head of membership, Rosanai Paniagua, 28, agreed. “Here, there’s not a lot of hope because people haven’t seen what good policy could do for them,” she said. “A lot of apathy, for sure, because change hasn’t really happened here.”

Marco Estrada, 20, taking a break outside the Main Street barbershop where he works in Delano, said he wasn’t sure he could imagine anything Congress could do for him. He’s never voted and doesn’t plan to in November. His two co-workers said the same.

“Whatever happens happens,” Estrada said.

Valeria Valdez, a College of the Sequoias freshman, said she was planning to vote in her first election and said the government should help lower gas prices. The 18-year-old wasn’t sure, though, whether she would make a decision in the House race.

“It feels pretty far away from me, to be honest,” she said. “I just want to do what I can for our community and not focus on how corrupt the government is.”

That sentiment is part of what Villegas is aiming to target as he meets voters.

“It’s easy to feel cynical and apathetic in a moment where so many things seem stacked against us,” Villegas said in an interview. “But I tell people that … their vote and their voices do matter, otherwise we wouldn’t have billionaires and corporations spending millions of dollars trying to influence these election outcomes.”

A spokesperson for Valadao did not respond to a request for comment. Valadao said on a Washington Sun podcast in January that he “absolutely” worries about Republican voter enthusiasm, but noted it was a problem on both sides of the aisle. Earlier this month, he conveyed confidence about his race.

“I’ve won in these types of races. I can win again,” he told the Associated Press. “I think we should be fine.”

Inside Murillo’s market, business picked up as 5 o’clock neared. Murillo rang up tortillas, cuts of meat, and three-liter Mexican soda bottles. She advised a customer about treating a bug bite, helped a man wire money and cajoled a city worker about getting a sidewalk repair.

Congress should “definitely” be helping communities like hers, she said. She plans to research her voting options so she can participate in November. But trusting political candidates, she mused, can feel like a risk for voters.

“Whether they execute what they promise or not,” she said, “that’s shown with time.”

MEXICO CITY — He’s been called the “MAGA man” of Latin America, a brash political provocateur whose social media assaults boosted right-wing campaigns from his native Argentina to Central America.

His career as political consultant and co-founder of an ultra-right online outlet made him a rich man and helped elect Trump-aligned politicians across the region. The Economist gave him the “MAGA Man” label, while political commentators gave him another nickname — the “Steve Bannon of Latin America” — a nod to the longtime Trump ally and advisor.

Now, however, Fernando Cerimedo, 45, sits in a maximum-security prison in Bolivia, accused of masterminding a murder-for-hire plot: The attempted femicide of his pregnant mistress, Nadia Beller, 33, a Bolivian lawyer and activist.

It’s a stunning collapse for a onetime ad man with a dodgy reputation who rose to become the go-to digital campaign guru for Latin America’s ascendant right wing. Cerimedo’s signature boasts, exaggerations and peddling of false election-fraud narratives reflected those of his political model, President Trump.

Cerimedo also is another example of how right-wing political operatives outside the United States — as recently in Colombia and Germany — have adopted Trumpian tactics and messaging.

The fall of the “King Midas of the Latin American right,” said Daniel Matamala, a prominent Chilean journalist, stunned “the ecosystem of fake news, bots, trolls and disinformation that has taken this region by storm in recent years.” Speaking on his podcast, Matamala added, “The name of Cerimedo looms like a ghost over the summit of the radical right.”

The Aug. 17 attack on Beller was a seemingly well-planned ambush that was captured by security cameras, the grainy images widely disseminated on social media.

One of two would-be assassins dressed as fast-food deliverymen pulled out a pistol and shot Beller point blank outside a hotel in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. She fell to the ground and, according to her account, feigned death. The next day, at dawn, Cerimedo was arrested as he was about to board a plane to Buenos Aires.

Cerimedo set up the hit, prosecutors charge, in a nefarious attempt at damage control. Beller had threatened to expose his alleged criminal behavior and physically abusive behavior toward her while revealing Cerimedo, a married man with two children, as the father of her unborn child.

Cerimedo is also under investigation for alleged illegal enrichment and potential links to cocaine trafficking.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

Even before Cerimedo’s arrest, Latin American journalists had begun unmasking Cerimedo as a prodigious purveyor of fake news — about himself. New reports revealed that his frequent boasts about U.S. connections — that he attended Harvard, trained with U.S. Navy SEALs, worked in the Obama White House — were fanciful.

“He certainly exaggerated things,” said Damian Merlo, a Miami-based consultant who worked with Cerimedo on the 2023 campaign of Argentine President Javier Milei, a Trump favorite. “I never really got the impression that Cerimedo was ‘MAGA’s man in Latin America.’ The guy could hardly speak English! But that’s how he sold himself.”

Many times, the sales pitch worked. It was Cerimedo who helped broker then-candidate Milei’s celebrated 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, at the time a Trump confidant, an appearance that thrust Milei into the international spotlight.

Like Milei, Cerimedo seemed to relish any proximity to Trump-land.

In February, at the inaugural “Hispanic Prosperity Gala” — a right-wing pep rally held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Cerimedo was honored as “Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year.’” From the podium, he spoke of Latin America’s “culture war” and the need to ensure that “the left never again returns” to governments that have elected conservative leaders.

Switching to heavily accented English, Cerimedo gave a shout-out to Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, whom Cerimedo thanked for “believing [in] me all the time and giving me your technology.”

Parscale declined to comment.

Fernando Cerimedo, an advisor to the National Party, points at a map of Honduras on Dec. 1, 2025, one day after voters went to the polls to elect Nasry Asfura president.

(Moises Castillo / Associated Press)

Both Cerimedo and Parscale were involved in last year’s campaign that resulted in the election of Honduran President Nasry Asfura, whom Trump backed publicly.

Last year, Cerimedo was a key player in the election of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, the center-right, U.S.-educated son of a former president who transitioned from Marxist firebrand to moderate. The ascension of Paz broke almost two decades of leftist rule by the Movement for Socialism party of ex-President Evo Morales.

Cerimedo had no official capacity in Paz’s government, but he enjoyed insider status. He accompanied Paz in March to Trump’s anti-narco “Shield of the Americas” summit, a confab of mostly conservative leaders at Trump’s Doral resort in south Florida.

Among the items found in searches of Cerimedo-linked properties, authorities say, was a business card listing him as Paz’s “chief adviser” — a nonexistent post.

“Mr. Cerimedo never had the authorization to represent … the presidency, the government or my family,” a deeply discomfited Paz said in Facebook message last month.

How exactly Cerimedo got into politics — and how he became a right-wing rabble-rouser — remains somewhat opaque. According to media accounts, he worked a series of uninspiring jobs — including stints as a taxi driver, a schoolteacher and an employee of insurance and computer firms — before veering into advertising. In 2019, he assisted the campaigns of several leftist Peronist candidates in provincial races in Argentina, and later founded his own consultancy, Numen.

Cerimedo first gained prominence in neighboring Brazil. That’s where he championed false election-fraud narratives following the narrow reelection defeat in 2022 of President Jair Bolsonaro — a MAGA stalwart — in his reelection bid against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist. Cerimedo’s “Brazil Was Stolen” livestream exacerbated the sense of outrage among Bolsonaro loyalists, who took to the streets in mass protests.

The Brazil exposure helped catapult Cerimedo into successful presidential campaigns in Argentina (Milei), Honduras (Asfura) and Bolivia (Paz). His arrest prompted Chilean lawmakers to create a commission to investigate Cerimedo’s possible role in that nation’s recent electoral shift to the right.

With Cerimedo’s name now toxic, Paz, Milei and other former allies have distanced themselves.

Also ditching Cerimedo was his close partner, Javier Negre, a right-wing Spanish media entrepreneur who, in 2024, purchased 50% ownership of Cerimedo’s La Derecha Diario (The Daily Right), an online, Spanish-language MAGA megaphone. The site strongly backed Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella — who had Trump’s support — during his tight campaign this summer.

Following Cerimedo’s arrest, Negre announced that he had bought out his former partner in La Derecha Diario.

In Bolivia, the Cerimedo scandal has taken on the character of a Latin American telenovela.

A recovering Beller, shot three times in her upper body, granted interviews from her hospital bed, dishing on her lover’s alleged brutality and criminality.

According to Beller’s testimony to authorities, Cerimedo tricked her into the near-fatal rendezvous outside the hotel. He told her that a source was waiting to share details about the purported rape of a 13-year-old, she said. The supposed rapist? Bolivian ex-President Morales — a despised figure on the Latin American right.

The case has seen the once high-flying Cerimedo reduced to a slumping presence in a hoodie as authorities have shuffled the baldish, heavyset figure to hearings and lockups. Last week, he was transferred while awaiting trial to Bolivia’s maximum-security Chonchocoro prison, infamous for its high-altitude, ill-heated confines.

“I want to see my children!” a sobbing Cerimedo declared at one point in earshot of the media.

His legal team has pushed back. A defense lawyer, Margarita Arce, questioned whether Cerimedo had impregnated Beller and asserted to reporters that Beller staged a “self-inflicted attack” to smear Cerimedo and undermine the Bolivian government.

But prosecutors have sided with Beller, who told the Argentine daily Clarín: “Fernando Cerimedo wanted to kill me because I can tell everything that I know.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington and special correspondents Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

California prison towns made a grim bargain decades ago.

They built their economies around an industry that relied on an ever-growing prison population, mostly from California’s major metropolitan areas. Then, about 15 years ago, legislators changed sentencing laws in ways that caused the prison population to drop, and the prisons started going away.

Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw massive reductions in California’s prison population in the 2010s. Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed five prisons since taking office in 2019. Now, some of those towns face difficult choices if they’re going to survive. One prison town is still fighting the closure, one is betting on businesses to make up its losses and a third — the town of Susanville — is remote, isolated and in deeper trouble than the rest.

Perched on one of the last major stops before Reno and the desert deep in the Lassen National Forest, Susanville has always been the kind of place California puts the things it doesn’t want to see, hear, smell or really even think about.

“Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that are desperate economically,” said Dan Newton, who worked for the city of Susanville for 20 years and was its city manager until recently. “That would describe this area.”

The city’s management was informed in 2021 that the prison was scheduled for closure. They went to court to challenge the closure, arguing the state’s environmental review process hadn’t taken into account the prison closure’s impact on the town. Newsom had a solution: A budget bill that exempted correctional facility closures from the environmental review process.

“There was initially a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went on the market. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.”

Since the closure announcement, the population of Susanville has fallen from a peak of about 16,000 in 2021, the year Newsom announced the prison would close, to 14,000 in 2024, the last year for which American Community Survey data were available.

Not all of the 1,100 former prison employees left town. Some transferred to a nearby prison, and some retired and stayed in the area. The elementary school lost 10% of its enrolled students between 2021 and the 2025-2026 school year.

The town’s remoteness is also one of its attractions. The surrounding area offers some of the most stunning vistas in far Northern California, sweeping views from highway lookout points over miles of desert rimmed by the mountains of the Cascade Range where it meets the Sierra Nevada.

The history of this area is one of the state or federal government telling its residents that it needs them — to mine for gold, to cut down trees for timber, to guard all the people they sent to prison — and then coming along later to tell residents that their services are no longer needed.

Susanville, the spot on the map, is an immutable intermingling of unique geologic formations. Susanville, the incorporated city, is running out of time.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said before he resigned as city manager to take a position in Tehama County government.

The prison building boom

When the state’s three-strikes law still imposed mandatory life sentences on anyone with two or more prior convictions for violent felonies, California needed places like Susanville to put its skyrocketing prison population.

According to Brown University’s Prison Proliferation Project, states and the federal government operated 511 prisons in 1970. By the end of the prison building boom in 2000, that number had risen to 1,663.

The prison guards who lived in Susanville coached Little League and bought bread at the bakery downtown. They had steady jobs with top-tier health and retirement benefits; today experienced correctional officers earn $9,650 a month in base pay.

The town benefited from carceral policies that pulled prisoners hundreds of miles from their families, even as Lassen County counted those inmates as residents until 2022 and built around a prison boom that showed no signs of ending.

Until, of course, it did.

In 2006, overcrowding forced some of the state’s 170,000 prisoners to sleep in hallways and multipurpose rooms. But sentencing policies changed in the early 2010s to put more people in jail than prisons, and when people went to prison, they went for shorter sentences. Now, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is down to 90,000 prisoners, and has 8,000 more beds available than it has people in custody.

An emergent field of research in the last 15 years has focused on the era of the “prison bust,” when prison closures have outnumbered prison openings. Criminal justice policy researchers have found that the proposed economic benefits of prisons to small, rural communities were probably overstated to begin with.

“A large portion of prison jobs (were) filled by residents of neighboring towns,” wrote the authors of a 2024 article in the journal Punishment & Society. “Even those who moved to the area for prison jobs often settled in adjacent communities, providing little direct benefit to the local economy.”

Not only might prisons not be engines of economic growth, according to a seminal 2010 study from researchers at Washington State University, they might have stymied the development of other industries warded off by the presence of the prison.

Brown University associate sociology professor John Eason, whose book “Big House on the Prairie” focused on a prison in the rural South, found that the economic fate of prison towns is most closely correlated to when they were built, more than where they were built.

“Towns that adopted prisons earlier in the prison boom received a short-term boon compared to those that did not build, but the effects were not lasting,” Eason wrote.

Towns that built a prison early in the boom saw increased median home values and median income, Eason wrote, with reduced poverty and unemployment, but those effects did not last longer than a decade, which he called “a decay effect.”

But the residents and leadership of the city of Blythe, where the shuttered Chuckwalla Valley State Prison was built in 1987, are certain that their economic problems began and ended on the day in 2022 when the prison closed down.

Desert town tried to keep prison open

“We still haven’t got nothing from the state,” said Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “I hate to say it, but Blythe’s in the middle of nowhere, we’re the furthest from Sacramento, I just hate to say it again, we’re only a few votes out here.”

The mayor of the small desert city in Riverside County near the Arizona border watched the failed lawsuit over the Susanville prison closure and decided against filing their own litigation after Newsom ordered the Blythe prison closed just before Christmas 2022.

Instead, Blythe chose honey over vinegar and launched a lobbying effort to convince state legislators and the governor that the town needed some kind of economic rescue.

It has, so far, failed to produce results.

“We took these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” DeConinck said. “And we adapted to them because they became a strong economic generator for our area.”

Blythe’s population of 18,000 in 2022 had fallen to 17,400 by 2024, the last year for which census statistics are available. A drop of just 3% of the population might not sound drastic, but Blythe was in trouble long before the prison closed.

The population has been dropping since a peak of about 20,000 in 2010. A Riverside County civil investigation in June 2022 found that the city can’t pay its bills, its population is fleeing to Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and neither the city nor its residents have bright prospects.

Six months after that investigation, Newsom announced the prison closure.

DeConinck said city leadership flew to Sacramento and tried, in vain, to get any traction. He recalled one meeting between the Blythe city manager and representatives of the governor in which he said the city itself was promised direct financial assistance.

The era of sweet-talking the state is over now, DeConinck said.

“They wouldn’t even have a conversation with us,” said Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez. “They’re not doing anything to assist us because they have this political mantra that all prisons are bad.”

Rodriguez said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of General Services sent representatives to a meeting on the future of the shuttered prison site. It didn’t go well.

“We had just one meeting with a potential developer who had some interest in it, and all the state provided was, what you can’t do, what they won’t do,” Rodriguez said. “They won’t give a timeline when they would start talking about it, so what’s that going to do?”

Newsom’s office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Will Matthews, a corrections spokesperson, said in a statement after this article first published that the state sent $995,000 to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in August 2024.

“State representatives met with local leaders in July 2024 to discuss these resources and other available assistance,” Matthews said. “There was no commitment to providing direct financial assistance to the City of Blythe.”

Matthews said until the Blythe prison site’s infrastructure is separated from neighboring Ironwood State Prison and its bond obligations are resolved, the property can’t move through the state’s process for dispensing with surplus property.

In a March hearing before a Senate budget subcommittee, Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber said he’s eager to end his agency’s control over closed prison sites.

“I don’t want to hold on to closed facilities,” Macomber said. “Believe it or not, I have to provide a little bit of staffing. It’s unpopular, there’s security risks. We have people break in because who doesn’t want to run in, to break into a closed prison?”

Newsom began closing prisons with the deactivation of the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, followed by the prison in Susanville, and then a prison in Blythe near the Arizona border. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a site now being operated as an immigrant detention center. A prison in Norco, also in Riverside County, is scheduled to close in October.

More prisons probably will close. The Legislature this year passed a budget that called for the state to shut at least one more. Its passage reflected Democratic lawmakers’ desire to save money — about $150 million a year per prison — by eliminating underused correctional facilities.

And some state prisons have astronomical deferred maintenance bills. The state auditor recently released a report estimating that five of them need repairs that would cost $2.4 billion.

Rodriguez is still fighting for a prison on the shuttered site. He has plans to pitch the federal government on opening a women’s prison there to account for the closure of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, which closed after 10 guards were charged with sexually abusing the prisoners.

“Closing Chuckawalla was a mistake,” said Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican. “For our rural communities, these facilities are critical employers that support local families and local economies.”

Ready for change on edge of Bay Area

If any town was prepared for a prison closure, it was Tracy.

Optimism abounds, even on the city website, which promotes it as “one of the fastest growing suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.” The city has for decades been a bedroom community for commuters to the East Bay Area and San José.

The offers are pouring in to fill the abandoned prison site, said San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who was mayor of Tracy from 2016-2020.

“We’ve been in contact with folks in the agricultural industry, the education industry and even some of them who are interested in opening a casino,” Rickman said. “I would say [the prison closure] was neutral. The property isn’t sitting forgotten. South county is a very prosperous portion of our county.”

Prison guards and support staff mainly transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, Rickman said.

“I guess you’re never really prepared for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good thing is that nobody lost their jobs.”

Tracy has the advantages that Susanville does not: It’s next to Interstate 5 along a busy commercial corridor in a populated and growing section of the state. Tracy also doesn’t have the drawbacks of Blythe and the Inland Empire desert — the weather never gets too hot, and there is reliable access to water.

Instead of challenging the state government like Blythe, Rickman gets to play host and pitch man to businesses.

Back in Susanville, it’s been a struggle to get any business to return calls.

Hard choices in Susanville

“For the last two years, we’ve adopted deficit budgets,” said Newton, the erstwhile city manager. “We’re deficit spending in order to fill public safety vacancies, and expenditure increases are outpacing our revenue increases.

“It’s going to start eating at our cash reserves.”

The town is hoping some industry — any industry — can come in and save it. City leaders have little hope for state assistance. But the city also has its own limitations.

First, Newton said, it’s hard to make a businesses on the border of California and Nevada choose California, with its higher taxes and stern regulatory environment. That choice in finance terms is known as regulatory arbitrage.

Second, industry needs power, and Susanville doesn’t have a lot of power on the grid, nor the infrastructure to support it. A bad thunderstorm can knock out the lights to half the city. The city’s transmission lines can’t handle the wattage demanded by heavy industry.

Third, the city and county’s limited population is working against it. Prisons force people to work and live in an area, and the state supplies the workforce. But there is no big workforce base on which to draw for any industry. When the prisons close, the guards transfer to new locations or retire and leave the rural, geographically isolated area.

The pandemic didn’t help. Downtown businesses were already struggling when people started buying more retail goods online, a trend that didn’t abate when lockdowns ended, Schuster said.

Now, some of the largest tax generators in town are on sales from online shopping and fuel taxes — people stop in town to get gas because Susanville has the only gas stations for 20 miles in any direction.

A baseball grandstand burned down last year, and in March, a lumber mill that employed about 30 people caught fire. No one was injured, but the mill burned to the ground.

Now the 8,000 people in this remote corner of California have to ask themselves what more they can wring from the land, what more they can take and what more it can yield. One idea includes a new truck stop.

Whatever salvation comes for the town, if any salvation comes at all, won’t be at the hands of the state government that built a prison and then took it away, Newton said.

“No one is coming to save us.”

This article was updated to include information that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shared after publication.

Duara writes for CalMatters.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ruled that a plan by the Trump administration to slash staffing at the federal agency tasked with responding to disasters by 50% was unlawful.

The opinion issued late Friday marked a victory for labor groups who had sued the agency. The labor organizations had argued that plans by the Department of Homeland Security, which was then led by Secretary Kristi Noem, violated congressional protections that were designed to safeguard the independence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The issue of the FEMA staffing was part of a much larger lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees and other labor groups, contesting efforts by the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in her opinion that top Homeland Security officials late last year directed FEMA’s leadership to submit a staffing plan that included a 50% staffing cut even though the agency’s own supervisors objected.

“Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air,” wrote Illston.

FEMA responded in a statement late Saturday saying that while it does not comment on personnel matters and ongoing litigation, “DHS and FEMA are ready for the 2026 hurricane season.”

“We’re ensuring workforce stability and a strong, deployable force for upcoming national events and potential disasters; making the agency leaner, faster and laser-focused on supporting state, local, tribal and territorial partners before, during and after disasters,” the statement said. “FEMA continues to maintain a roster of experienced leadership and support staff across headquarters and regional offices.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the opinion, Illston wrote that it was clear that the government violated rules established after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina that put decisions on staffing levels squarely in the hands of FEMA, not the Department of Homeland Security, and that prevented Homeland Security from “substantially” reducing the “functions” of FEMA.

Illston didn’t order a specific remedy to carry out her opinion but directed the two sides to meet and decide on a course of relief.

Although FEMA has experienced terminations, the 50% staffing cuts ultimately were not carried out. In recent months, after top leadership changes at FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, the agency has rehired some staffers who were let go.

FEMA was one of the agencies targeted for staff reductions in the federal government as part of a broad Trump administration plan to reduce the size of government. The embattled agency has been buffeted by mass staff departures, disruptions of grant programs and delays of disaster aid.

In May, a Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council submitted a final report recommending sweeping changes to how the agency supports states, tribes and territories in disaster.

The final version backed away from the recommendation to cut the FEMA workforce by 50%, which was included in a December 2025 draft reviewed by the Associated Press.

The council instead recommended the agency conduct a “strategic review” to determine “appropriate staffing levels.”

In an August report, the Government Accountability Office said it found that the departures of thousands of staff in 2025 resulted in a “loss of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel” and “exacerbated longstanding workforce challenges.”

More than 4,300 employees, or about 17% of FEMA’s workforce, separated from the agency in the 2025 budget year, with over 1,500 through voluntary reductions. The agency also made about 2,900 new hires.

The GAO recently recommended to Congress that it “consider requiring” FEMA to base “significant workforce decisions” on a more strategic planning process.

Without it, the GAO found, “FEMA cannot be assured that the agency is positioned to effectively meet its mission needs.”

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

ANCHORAGE — Alaska prosecutors are dropping voter misconduct cases against a group of residents born in American Samoa after a state appeals court threw out felony charges against a woman who wrongly checked a box saying she was a U.S. citizen.

The state’s Department of Law announced the decision Friday, after a three-judge Court of Appeals panel ruled a week earlier that state law requires proof that defendants who erroneously filled out voter registration forms had a “consciousness of wrongdoing” and intended to break the law.

The panel found flaws with a state trooper’s questioning of Tupe Smith, the woman involved in the case that was thrown out, as well as with the grand jury process that led to her indictment. It overturned a lower court’s decision that had kept the charges against her alive.

Acting Alaska Atty. Gen. Cori Mills said in a statement that after reviewing the decision and applying it to the facts, prosecutors concluded that they could not prove cases against Smith and the others beyond a reasonable doubt. Her husband, Michael Pese, had also been charged.

“We respect the role of the courts in interpreting Alaska law and will faithfully execute our duty to apply the law and carefully evaluate our prosecutorial decisions,” Mills said.

In a statement Saturday, Smith’s lawyer Whitney Brown said the dismissal would allow the community “to put this ordeal behind them and begin moving forward.”

Earlier in the week, she heralded the Court of Appeals decision, saying it “establishes an important safeguard against imposing felony liability for an honest mistake.”

The court “made clear that Alaska law requires more than simply showing that a statement was false — the State must prove a person acted with a consciousness of wrongdoing,” Brown said. “That distinction makes a world of difference to Ms. Smith and helps ensure that Alaska’s voter-misconduct statute is applied as the legislature intended going forward.”

Neil Weare, part of the legal team representing Smith and Pese, said Saturday that the decision to drop charges “raises questions about why this prosecution was even brought to begin with.”

“It’s clear that all along, they really had no evidence of any consciousness of wrongdoing on the part of Michael, Tupe or the other defendants,” said Weare, co-director of the nonprofit Right to Democracy.

In all, 11 people from the small community of Whittier, about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage, were charged with falsely claiming U.S. citizenship either when registering or trying to vote. Messages seeking comment were left for their lawyers.

American Samoa is the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship by being born on American soil and instead are considered U.S. nationals. Paths to citizenship exist, such as naturalization, though that process can be expensive and cumbersome.

American Samoans can serve in the military, obtain U.S. passports and vote in elections in American Samoa, but they cannot hold public office in the U.S. or participate in most U.S. elections.

Smith was arrested after winning election to a regional school board in 2023. She has said she relied on erroneous information from election officials in Whittier when she identified herself as a U.S. citizen on voter registration forms.

Smith said she marks herself as a U.S. national on paperwork. But when there was no such option on voter registration forms, she was told by city representatives that it was appropriate to mark herself as a citizen, according to court papers.

Prosecutors contended that Smith falsely and deliberately claimed citizenship, pointing to warnings on voter registration forms she filled out in 2020 and 2022 that noncitizens “are not eligible to vote.”

The Court of Appeals panel said in its ruling that toward the end of a police interview, a state trooper asked Smith “a long compound question that implied that Smith actually knew she was not eligible to vote” but wanted to be involved in the school board.

When Smith, whose native language is not English, did not respond right away, another state trooper clarified, “He’s asking you,” and the first trooper again presented his question, which the panel described as “a lengthy and complex statement containing four individual questions.”

Smith answered “Yes,” the panel said, leading to her arrest and indictment on two counts of felony voter misconduct.

For an issue that received so much publicity at its peak — images of prisoners in triple bunk beds and overflowing into multipurpose rooms — the end of California’s prison crisis came quietly last week, when the state brought home the last of its inmates held in a private lockup northwest of Tucson.

Making good on a pledge by Gov. Gavin Newsom to finish the process begun in 2012, state prison officials have wrapped up the contracts with all out-of-state prisons. California’s prison overcrowding problems are now a thing of the past.

“At one point, at the height of our overcrowding, we had nearly 10,400 inmates out of state,” said Ralph Diaz, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “To me, that meant 10,400 inmates away from their families, away from California. It was just a place we didn’t want to be.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed his first budget. Here’s where the $215 billion will go »

The use of private prisons — six facilities in states as far away as Mississippi — began in 2006. Inmates were shuttled away at various intervals over the 13 years that followed, a cost that was unavoidable to help resolve a problem that was years in the making.

Lawsuits challenging conditions inside California’s crowded prisons resulted in a fixed cap on the inmate population, one imposed by federal judges in 2009 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 and again in 2013. Those decisions came in the wake of a 2006 announcement that outside experts would run the state’s prison healthcare system. Some of that independent oversight continues, though the state has made strides to resume control of health services.

Prison spending in the state’s new fiscal year will total some $15.7 billion — a $2.6-billion increase in the last four years and only slightly lower, by percentage, than what the budget earmarks for colleges and universities.

How the inmate population came down, though, is a story of criminal justice programs that sought to limit prison time to those convicted of the most serious and violent felonies. In the year before a major realignment of criminal justice services to California’s counties, 58% of new prison sentences were for property or drug crimes.

But the changes that shifted many of those crimes away from prison — keeping more offenders in local jails, reducing penalties for property crimes and a sweeping expansion of parole — have not come without controversy. Critics have said too many lower-level offenders have been responsible for new crimes. And a vocal coalition of victim advocates drafted a plan for voters to change those parole rules through a measure that has qualified for the November 2020 ballot.

State prison officials said last week the total population across 34 facilities now stands at just under 126,000 inmates — below the maximum number allowed by the courts. But the room for growth is not sizable enough to return to the era of long prison sentences, a shift that would require the state to do something almost unheard of in recent years: build more prisons.

Nor will it be as cheap to house those inmates in California. Corrections officials said it cost an average of $31,106 per inmate sent out of state last year — but those in state cost an average of $82,910 a year.

Still, the end of the out-of-state transfers marks an important moment. Diaz, who was appointed by the governor in March to run the prison system, said it sends an important message about accountability.

“It feels a lot better when I’m able to pick up the phone and send someone directly within a day to a prison under my care,” he said.

john.myers@latimes.com

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WASHINGTON — The Medicare reform bill expected to clear Congress in the next few days promises the prescription drug benefit older Americans have been waiting for. But analysts say many seniors will find that the plan fails the what’s-in-it-for-me test.

The drug benefit is the centerpiece of a $400-billion bill, endorsed by a conference committee Thursday, that would make the most far-reaching changes in Medicare since its enactment in 1965. But the bill’s particulars suggest that the benefit will vary depending on seniors’ drug needs and incomes.

“Seniors felt they had been promised the kind of prescription drug coverage that members of Congress have,” said Judith Feder, dean of public policy at Georgetown University. “What they’re getting doesn’t even remotely resemble that.”

Just last week, President Bush implied that the new benefits would be much like those enjoyed not only by many working average Americans, but also by their elected representatives.

“Every member of Congress gets to choose a health-care plan that makes the most sense for them. And the same for federal employees. If choice is good for members of the Congress, then choice is good for America’s seniors,” he said.

Drew Altman, president of the Menlo Park-based Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health-care philanthropy, said seniors were expecting the bill to create a benefit similar to employer coverage — a patient makes a co-payment of perhaps $10 or $20 toward each prescription, and insurance picks up the rest. But the plan in Congress is very different, Altman said, resulting in what he called an “expectations gap.”

The first gap is one of timing. Even if Congress passes the bill by Thanksgiving and Bush signs it soon after, the prescription drug benefit wouldn’t begin to kick in until 2006.

To fill that void, the bill would create a Medicare-endorsed discount card that the Bush administration estimates would help seniors save from 15% to 25% on their prescriptions. Low-income seniors would also get the equivalent of a $600 credit for each of the two years the discount card would be valid.

Once the real benefit begins, what seniors with low to moderate drug expenses would get indeed would not be very different from what many employer-based plans provide. Seniors who chose to join the program would pay a monthly premium of $35, plus the first $250 of their drug costs each year. Medicare would then start picking up 75% of additional expenses.

But as seniors’ drug expenses mounted, the Medicare benefit would differ significantly from traditional health coverage. When total annual drug costs reached $2,250, government support would stop. Seniors would be responsible for the next $2,850 in drug costs. Only when their drug bill for the year reached $5,100 would Medicare begin paying 95% of all further costs.

The span of drug expenses in which Medicare would contribute nothing would affect millions of people. It would begin at close to the $2,322 that the average Medicare user paid in 2003 for prescriptions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And Medicare drug insurance would kick in again for only a relatively small slice of seniors.

Gail Shearer, director of health policy analysis for Consumers Union, estimated that substantially fewer than 10% of seniors would have drug expenses that qualified for Medicare’s “catastrophic” coverage for costs above $5,100.

Because Medicare’s coverage likely would not offset any drug price increases, most seniors, she said, would spend more for drugs in 2007, with the program fully in effect, than in 2003.

In most areas, Medicare will not be the only choice for drug coverage. The bill allows for health-maintenance organizations, preferred-provider organizations and stand-alone drug insurance to compete for business.

But Feder said she saw “no evidence that the insurance industry is willing or able to fill this need.” The bill recognizes this possibility by authorizing government-run drug plans in areas where no private plan or only a single plan is available.

Shearer warned that in areas where stand-alone drug plans competed with Medicare, seniors would probably have difficulty determining which one offered the best deal. What’s more, she said, plans would vary from state to state and region to region, adding to the confusion.

Retirees whose drug costs are covered by insurance from their former employers would face another risk: that their employers will use the Medicare drug benefit as an opportunity to shed their own retiree coverage. The bill sets aside $71 billion in tax-free subsidies to encourage employers to keep such coverage.

But even the bill’s supporters acknowledge that 16% of retirees who now have such coverage — roughly 2 million seniors — would likely lose it anyway.

The bill’s prescription drug benefit makes allowances for seniors whose incomes are under the poverty line — $8,980 for an individual and $12,120 for a couple. They would have no premiums or deductibles and would pay $1 a month for generic prescription drugs and $3 a month for brand-name drugs.

Those seniors earning up to 35% above the poverty level would pay $2 and $5. Those with incomes up to 50% more than the poverty level would be required to pay a $50 deductible, 15% of their drug costs up to $5,100, and $2 or $5 for each prescription above that level.

But those small co-payments could become harder to make because the bill apparently would eliminate the practice of using Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, to pick up the costs that Medicare misses for the elderly poor.

Bob Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said most of the 6.4 million people who qualified for both Medicare and Medicaid would pay more for their prescriptions than they did now.

Two public opinion polls conducted this week by AARP, the nation’s largest seniors organization, indicated that many of the 40 million elderly and disabled people affected by the legislation have mixed feelings.

A poll commissioned by the Democratic-leaning AFL-CIO found that the more seniors learned about the Medicare bill, the less they liked it.

“When they get the details of this deal, older voters will be furious with their representatives,” said federation President John Sweeney.

The conclusion of Stephen Moore, president of the conservative Club for Growth Advocacy, whose poll focused on the costs of the bill to the government, was about the same.

“When America’s seniors learn of the potentially devastating impact of the bill, they turn strongly against it,” he said.

*

Times staff writer Joel Havemann contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — Actor Clint Eastwood rode back into politics Tuesday to take on the timber industry.

The former mayor of Carmel and longtime conservative Republican joined forces with environmentalists to cut a television commercial promoting Proposition 130, the “Forests Forever” initiative that would halt clear-cutting in California’s forests.

“Let’s save the ancient redwoods,” the actor says as he sits in a chair holding a copy of the ballot pamphlet.

With a week to go until Election Day, Eastwood became the latest to join a battle of the airwaves being waged by environmentalists and industry groups over four ballot initiatives affecting the environment.

Spending millions of dollars on television time, the environmentalist and industry campaigns are relying on celebrities, emotion-charged ads, pocketbook appeals and, at times, exaggeration in their last-ditch efforts to win on Tuesday.

For campaigns that have spent months raising money and discussing complex scientific and regulatory issues, the election now comes down to its final–and most important–stage: a series of 30-second television ads.

Eastwood is just one of a number of celebrities appearing in commercials to promote one of two initiatives sponsored by environmentalists–Propositions 128 and 130. Actors Ted Danson, Michael Landon, John Ritter and “Twin Peaks” stars Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean are lending their celebrity status to the environmentalist cause.

Environmentalists also are promoting their initiatives with heart-tugging ads that feature a 10-year-old leukemia victim whose friends died of cancer and a young boy who goes camping with his father only to find the redwoods gone.

The campaign against Proposition 128 has countered with a commercial featuring former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop opposing the initiative and other ads portraying average Californians worried about the cost of the sweeping environmental measure.

The timber industry is running an ad contending that its countermeasure, Proposition 138, will save the state’s ancient forests. Farmers are airing a spot maintaining that their initiative, Proposition 135, seeks an end to aerial malathion spraying.

In attempting to win passage of Proposition 128, environmentalists have taken the detailed, complex measure they call “Big Green”–which affects the state’s food, water, air and coast–and boiled it down to very simple terms.

This week, the campaign began airing a commercial featuring 10-year-old Jennifer Shepherd, a leukemia victim from the San Joaquin Valley town of Fowler, which has been hard hit by cases of childhood cancer.

“I’m really angry,” says Jennifer’s father, Dan. “Five of my neighbor’s children have died of cancer. My little girl still has to live with it.”

Showing the Fowler cemetery and raw sewage spilling out of a pipe, the commercial says, “Prop. 128 is not complicated. It’s about cancer and kids like Jennifer Shepherd and phasing out dangerous toxic chemicals.”

To counteract the appeal of the anti-pesticide initiative, opponents are airing the ad sowing Koop, retired and out of uniform, sitting behind a desk and criticizing the initiative.

“I’ve spent my life urging Americans to do things to protect and enhance their health,” Koops says. “But public policy should be based on science, not scare tactics. If I thought Proposition 128 would protect the health of mothers and children, as its backers claim, I’d be with them. I’m not.”

Advertisements on both sides of Proposition 128 have tended to overstate the measure’s effects, with environmentalists at times exaggerating its environmental benefits and opponents emphasizing high costs that may never come to pass.

For example, the campaign in favor of Proposition 128 has run ads depicting the measure as a smog fighter even though it does not target air pollution. Rather, the proposition would combat global warming, and cleaner air would result only because many of the changes needed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, also would reduce smog.

Opponents of Proposition 128, who call it “The Hayden Initiative,” have responded with ads charging that the wide-ranging measure will cost too much. “Nearly every section is full of complicated restrictions that end up raising costs for electricity, gasoline, water, food . . . products we use every day,” says a woman in one ad, standing in the driveway after a shopping trip.

Hefty price hikes for gas, electricity, water and food are one possible scenario, but not the only one. Supporters counter that the measure could save the state billions of dollars, primarily because of lower energy consumption.

To negate the pesticide provisions of Proposition 128, the agricultural industry is promoting Proposition 135. Among other things, the farmers’ initiative would leave regulation of pesticides largely in the hands of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, often criticized by environmental groups for favoring agricultural interests.

The commercials for Proposition 135, like those on Proposition 128, tend to exaggerate its environmental effects. One ad says the measure “seeks an end to aerial Medfly spraying.”

In fact, backers of Proposition 135 have defended aerial spraying of malathion over the Los Angeles Basin while many of the proponents of Big Green have fought to halt the spraying. The commercial’s claim is based on provisions in the farmers’ measure that would increase production of sterile Medflies to reduce the need for future aerial sprayings.

Environmentalists have responded with ads featuring actor John Ritter and the “Twin Peaks” stars charging that chemical companies designed Proposition 135 to mislead the voters.

The assertion that chemical companies are behind Proposition 135 stems from a proposal last year by pesticide manufacturers to come up with an initiative to invalidate Big Green’s pesticide provisions. However, Proposition 135 has been financed by the agricultural industry, and donations from pesticide manufacturers have been returned.

The environmentalists’ campaign for Proposition 130, the “Forests Forever” measure, scored a major coup by recruiting Eastwood, whose tough-guy image in numerous films could help boost support for the environmental measure. Showing he is a conservationist as well as a conservative, Eastwood urges voters to “save the last 5%” of California’s redwoods.

The Eastwood spot and a similar ad featuring “Cheers” star Danson are designed to help voters distinguish between Proposition 130, the environmentalist measure, and Proposition 138, the industry-sponsored initiative.

In his ad, Eastwood notes that Proposition 130 has the backing of the Audubon Society and National Wildlife Federation, while both major candidates for governor, Republican Pete Wilson and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, oppose Proposition 138.

Although the fast-paced ending of the ad could leave the impression among some viewers that both gubernatorial candidates favor Proposition 130, Feinstein has taken no position on the environmentalist measure while Wilson opposes it.

Wilson campaign director George Gorton said Tuesday that the senator objects to any ad suggesting that he supports Proposition 130. He stopped short of calling on the campaign to pull the ad, joking, “Who wants to tangle with Clint Eastwood?”

In a confusing television battle between competing forest initiatives, the timber industry also is portraying itself as seeking to protect the environment.

In its commercials, the timber industry contends that Proposition 138 would protect the forests and wildlife. One ad shows a section of forest that has been clear-cut– and by industry’s loggers–and proclaims the measure would ban such harvesting practices.

Environmentalists, however, contend that the measure is riddled with loopholes that would allow timber industries to continue clear-cutting forests and harvesting trees faster than they grow.

Paddock reported from Sacramento and Dolan reported from Los Angeles.

A trespasser tried to enter former Vice President Kamala Harris’ cliffside home in Malibu on Friday evening, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and a Harris spokesman.

Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were not home at the time, according to Eduardo Negrón, a spokesperson for Harris. He did not respond to a question about the couple’s whereabouts.

“Last night, security personnel stopped an individual who illegally entered Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Emhoff’s property before the individual reached the home,” he said in a statement. “They are grateful to the security and law enforcement personnel who responded swiftly.”

Harris’ on-site security contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has jurisdiction over Malibu.

Lt. Jason Duron, a watch commander at the Malibu/Lost Hills sheriff’s station, said his department was contacted by Harris’ security detail when a woman made it to Harris’ front door. Sheriff’s deputies responded around 10:30 p.m., and the woman, who has not been identified, agreed to leave voluntarily. She was not arrested.

“We are stepping up patrols of the property to be safe,” Duron said.

Harris’ level of security has previously been scrutinized. Former vice presidents typically receive six months of Secret Service protection after leaving office, but former President Biden extended the coverage. President Trump, who beat Harris in the 2024 election, revoked the extension in August 2025.

That led Los Angeles and California law enforcement agencies to scramble to protect Harris. The Los Angeles Police Department quickly discontinued its involvement amid criticism that shifting manpower to protect the former vice president was hampering the agency’s ability to fight crime.

It’s unclear whether the California Highway Patrol is still helping to guard Harris, or whether the security personnel who called the Sheriff’s Department were private guards.

The U.S. Justice Department failed to secure felony convictions against most of the 102 protesters arrested in Los Angeles and three other major cities last year on charges of assaulting federal authorities — a record far below the norm in federal assault prosecutions.

All of the dozen cases that made it to trial, mostly in L.A., ended in acquittal, mistrial or dismissal. Experts say that’s surprising for a department known for its ability to win at trial. The last three felony assault cases, in L.A. and Portland, Ore., will go to trial this fall.

The dismal record has raised questions about rushed investigations and aggressive charging tactics by prosecutors under pressure to show the Trump administration is cracking down on people who assault law enforcement. It comes as the Justice Department is facing broader setbacks in politically charged investigations, with grand juries repeatedly refusing to return indictments and trial juries granting acquittals.

“Prosecutors tend to win because they control what cases they pursue and they have a lot of resources and discretion,” said Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at the University of Washington.

The fact that the government failed to win any felony assault convictions at trial calls into question “whether or not these charges should have ever been brought in the first place,” she said.

Tracking the outcome of 167 arrests

The Associated Press’ analysis focused on arrests made during protests last summer and fall in L.A., Chicago, Portland and Washington, D.C. — cities with significant protests where President Trump deployed the National Guard or tried to.

Then-Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said those who interfered with federal law enforcement would face “severe consequences.”

Most of the arrests — 102 — were for felony assault on a federal officer, which can carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Of those cases, 41% were dismissed and 34% were pleaded down to misdemeanors. Ten people pleaded guilty to felony assault. Nine people got prison time.

Of those arrested on other charges, seven were sentenced to prison for offenses including arson and obstructing law enforcement. A few defendants have diversion agreements, meaning their cases will be dismissed if they demonstrate good behavior.

The AP’s analysis shows that the Justice Department’s record failed to meaningfully improve since December, when an initial assessment showed early struggles to prosecute people on the charges for which they were arrested.

The Justice Department said in a statement that federal prosecutors are right to prioritize cases against people accused of assaulting federal officers and that “each case is based on the facts.”

“If there are mitigating factors identified in a case, then prosecutors must also act appropriately to inform the court, and in some cases downgrade or drop charges,” the department said.

Prosecutors failed to persuade

It’s rare for federal prosecutors to lose at trial. In 2024, 82% of defendants charged with felony or misdemeanor assault were convicted at trial or with a plea deal, according to data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. AP’s analysis found that less than half of the protesters charged for either felony or misdemeanor assault were convicted.

In Portland, a jury couldn’t reach agreement on felony assault charges for Oriana Korol, who was playing clarinet in a marching band demonstrating outside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building last October when a scuffle involving officers broke out. Officers pepper-sprayed her and pushed her to the ground, where she struck one with her foot, according to court documents.

After a mistrial, prosecutors filed a reduced misdemeanor assault charge. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced Sept. 1 to time served and one year of supervised release.

Her attorneys wrote in a court filing that she “has accepted responsibility for the bad choices she made over a few seconds that caused no injury.”

Jonathan Caravello, a lecturer at California State Channel Islands, was acquitted of assault on a federal officer after a three-day trial. He was accused of throwing a tear gas canister deployed by immigration agents back at them while protesting a raid at a Camarillo cannabis farm.

Caravello said he was trying to get the canister away from the crowd. Videos showed he had tossed it high above officers’ heads and it landed far behind them. The jury acquitted Caravello after a quick deliberation.

“They’re trying to get a chilling effect out of these charges,” said Caravello, who turned down a misdemeanor plea deal.

Michael Rabbitt was among six co-defendants accused of felony conspiracy to impede a government vehicle from accessing an ICE facility near Chicago last September.

The vehicle slowly advanced despite being surrounded by protesters, leading some to put their hands on it, Rabbitt said.

After the government dismissed charges against two of the defendants, defense attorneys requested transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the conspiracy indictment. The government eventually dropped the conspiracy charge and proceeded on misdemeanor counts of impeding a federal officer.

The judge later reviewed the unredacted transcripts and admonished prosecutors for improper behavior before the grand jury. The charges were dismissed days before trial.

Rabbitt said he was proud they fought the charges.

“This case was bigger than us,” he said. “I’m proud that we won this case, not just for us, but for protesters across the country.”

Many pleaded down

Though many federal criminal cases end in plea deals, some legal experts say it’s rare for felony assault to be pleaded down and may signal overcharging — filing a more severe initial charge so defendants will be more willing to plead guilty to one with a lighter sentence.

“I think when prosecutors bring charges ethically, they should be prepared to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The U.S. Attorney’s office overseeing Los Angeles said it brought the prosecutions in response to a “wave of violence against law enforcement officers who were doing their jobs.” It voluntarily dismissed charges against some defendants after further investigation, it said.

L.A. prosecutors have arrested three additional people for felony assault at immigration-related protests this year. One pleaded guilty to a felony and two to misdemeanors.

In Chicago, all but one of 19 felony assault cases were dismissed. The U.S. Attorney’s offices in the Northern District of Illinois, District of Columbia and Oregon did not respond to requests for comment.

Some DOJ convictions

A man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at a hotel outside Los Angeles where federal authorities were staying was sentenced to five years in prison. Two others were sentenced to more than three years after pouring lighter fluid on a burning California Highway Patrol vehicle.

Federal judges sentenced eight people to decades in prison for their participation in a demonstration outside a detention center in Texas in July 2025 where a police officer was shot in the neck.

Three people were convicted at trial of conspiracy to impede or injure an officer for protesting outside a detention facility in Spokane, Wash., in June 2025. The Spokane and Texas cases were not included in AP’s analysis because they did not occur in one of the four cities where Trump deployed troops or attempted to.

Ding and Rush write for the Associated Press. Rush reported from Portland. AP writers Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.

Labor Day is behind us, election day is less than two months away, and the question before Los Angeles voters is this:

Can anyone run this city?

Two fires at abandoned properties, one in Studio City and the other on the eastern edge of Larchmont, offer windows into City Hall dysfunction as Mayor Karen Bass defends her job against a challenge by City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Let’s start on Babcock Avenue, just south of Moorpark Street, where, for roughly five years, neighbors of a vacant house begged City Hall for attention to what had been a dumping ground, a fire hazard and a homeless hangout.

To no avail.

When they received any response at all, they got the runaround.

Resident Jon Manzanares told me he has supported Bass and Raman in the past. But in a spring 2025 email to City Hall, he said both “should be ashamed and resign in disgrace.”

Well, they didn’t. And following an Aug. 26 fire at the Babcock property, which damaged the rear of an adjacent home, Bass and Raman went after each other for not having addressed all those pleas for help.

“Nithya Raman wants to lead the whole city,” said a Bass campaign social media post, but after six years in office “she can’t even get a single lot cleaned up in her own district.”

Raman shot back, saying she had alerted the mayor’s office about the nuisance property 10 months earlier.

“I cannot call her about the 200-plus issues that we’re dealing with that are at this level of risk,” Raman snapped.

The finger-pointing doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?

At least, said Manzanares, a retired lawyer, L.A. found out what it takes to get a response from the two mayoral candidates.

“The news crews showed up” to cover the fire, Manzanares told me, “and it finally got some attention because of the election.”

But festering eyesores are everywhere, as Bass herself indicated when she called in to KTLA-TV.

Fire damage is seen at an abandoned Studio City property following a overnight blaze on Aug. 26.

(KTLA-TV)

“You know,” she said, “this is a situation that unfortunately exists all over the city.”

A for honesty. F for failing to clean up all those messes, regardless of whether the problem is departmental failure or communications breakdowns with council members.

The fire in Studio City spread to a neighboring property and damaged a structure that Kayt Miranda uses for storage and as a home office. I spoke to Miranda on the front porch of her home, and she said she had filed multiple complaints about the nuisance property over a five-year period.

Five years.

“And we never heard back,” Miranda said, telling me she had seen people set up camp at the property, bringing in mattresses, book shelves and clothing racks. “Then we went to Raman’s office … They would send responses, but … we never saw any action.”

Manzanares showed me an email from a Raman staffer last month that said, “unfortunately, there is not a clear and expeditious path forward on this case.”

Why not? Was it going to take another five years?

Miranda said exasperated neighbors had banded together to put up more lighting and cameras to protect their properties, “but it really did feel like this is forever, because nothing was going to happen.”

When I was done in Studio City, I drove across town to meet with construction worker and pastor Juan Galicia, whose house was torched in March when fire jumped from an adjacent abandoned property.

I had first heard about Galicia in April, when I toured a nearby Hollywood neighborhood for a column about a homeowner who had hired her housekeeper to report illegal dumping, help bag up the daily mess and try to reduce the fire risk around encampments. The city wasn’t doing its job, Stefanie Keenan had told me, so she was spending her own money to protect herself and neighbors. And she still is.

Galicia didn’t get the protection he needed, despite multiple contacts with police and city offices — by him, relatives and neighbors —regarding the empty dwelling next door to his on North St. Andrews Place. Galicia said squatters were in and out of the house, with periodic fighting and drug use. Police would come, he said, but when they left, the trouble would return.

Galicia was preaching at his church in South L.A. when flames engulfed his home, where he lived with an extended family of 10.

“Eighteen years,” he said of his time in the house. “And in 10 minutes, you have nothing.”

I followed him into the house, with its charred walls, ceiling and flooring. Galicia wore a somber expression, as if still suffering from the shock, and he saw new evidence of trespassers, along with some fresh graffiti.

Galicia told me, as he told The Times’ Seamus Bozeman in July, that he intends to rebuild. But his insurance settlement won’t cover the cost of rebuilding, and he’s still paying $2,000 a month on the mortgage, plus $6,200 for temporary lodging in a rented house.

Meanwhile, as he struggles with a crushing financial problem he did not create, he’s aware that millions are being spent on homelessness without significant progress.

Aerial view of Larchmont home belonging to Pastor Juan Galicia that was destroyed by a fire that began at a vacant property next door.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“I don’t understand,” Galicia said.

A spokesperson for City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez told me his office became aware of Galicia’s issue in January, but because of paperwork and the complexity of legal records, could not track down the owner of the adjacent property before the fire.

In L.A., people trip and fall in droves and successfully sue the city for millions. I wondered if Galicia might have a liability case against the city, but two attorneys told me going after the next-door property owner could be more fruitful.

In a Sept. 5 press release, Bass said she was directing city crews to clean and secure nuisance properties citywide. OK, fine, but what took her so long?

Bass also said she had earlier signed legislation initiated by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez to speed the process of cracking down on negligent property owners and to hit them with stiffer penalties.

Those fines ought to go into a fund to assist Juan Galicia and others like him.

Between 2018 and 2024, according to the L.A. Fire Department, homelessness was a factor in about one-third of all fires in the city.

“I feel for these people, I really do. I’m not unsympathetic,” Jon Manzanares told me in Studio City. “But by the same token, we need to do something constructive and not have these encampments that start fires.”

With less than two months to go before the election, it’s on Bass and Raman to convince voters they can make a difference.

The finger-pointing is useless.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was the place to be — at least, if you were a local politician.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass put herself on the agency’s 10-member board in 2023, saying direct oversight would help her confront the region’s homelessness crisis. L.A. County Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger joined that year as well.

Those who follow local politics — and the travails of the region’s beleaguered homeless agency — know what happened next.

Barger left the board, comprised of city and county representatives, after a single year. Horvath lasted two. Both spearheaded the effort to shift more than $300 million out of LAHSA and into a new county homelessness department, saying they had lost confidence in the agency.

On Wednesday, Bass finally stepped down too, offering the latest and perhaps most crucial sign that LAHSA’s days could be numbered.

Bass, now in a tough reelection fight, portrayed her resignation partly as a scheduling issue, saying she recently became chair of the board that oversees the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

But Bass also said she has concluded that the city needs direct control over homeless services, replacing the joint city-county governance structure that has existed for three decades.

“To me, it is not functional at this point,” the mayor told reporters on Wednesday.

Bass was in fact Metro’s board chair when she joined LAHSA three years ago, juggling the two roles. But things are different now. LAHSA, long a subject of criticism, is under attack from all sides.

The Trump administration has spent months trying to strip LAHSA of its federal funding. Federal court battles have highlighted weak oversight at the agency. L.A. City Council members have voiced renewed frustration with LAHSA’s handling of the yearly homeless count. All of this follows years of critical news coverage and unflattering audits.

Paul Rubenstein, a LAHSA spokesperson, said the agency remains focused on its work — moving unhoused Angelenos indoors, managing public funds and “ensuring transparency and accountability across our rehousing system.”

Bass and her opponent in the mayor’s race, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, tried without success last year to dissuade county officials from pulling their funding out of LAHSA. At the time, they sent a letter telling the supervisors they were “going backwards into a silo.”

Now, LAHSA’s core responsibilities are up for grabs. County officials plan to compete for those duties, including management of the homeless count.

Bass and Raman want the city to compete as well. Asked this week if that process spells the end of the homeless agency, Raman hedged a bit.

“I don’t know what moment will be the death knell of LAHSA,” Raman said. “What I am saying right now is that the city … should be able to take greater control over the dollars that we are investing.”

Bass said Friday that she can envision a scenario where LAHSA continues to exist but is much, much smaller.

“Our $300 million would stay within the city,” she said.

Traci Park unloads on Raman

Raman has been taking her campaign to Pacific Palisades, talking to residents about her recovery plan for the community, which was devastated by the January 2025 wildfire. During one recent appearance, she told an audience that the city has let them down.

“I don’t want to let you down. I feel an urgency to show up,” she said.

That appearance — and Raman’s social media posts on the issue — drew a testy response last week from Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades. Appearing on KFI’s The John Kobylt Show, Park said Raman never spoke with her one on one about the disaster or what her constituents needed in the aftermath.

Park said she had council members tour the burn area with her early on, to help them understand what would be required during the recovery. Although most of her colleagues took her up on that offer, Raman did not, Park said.

“The Palisades have been through enough,” Park said. “They don’t need politicians discovering their suffering, and the challenges they’re dealing with, only when it becomes politically useful.”

Raman, through a campaign spokesperson, said she did tour the Palisades both before and after launching her mayoral bid — and signed on to multiple council motions dealing with wildfire prevention and disaster recovery.

In a statement, Raman also offered praise for Park, saying she has “worked tirelessly to support the rebuilding of the Palisades.”

“As mayor, I’ll be the strongest partner to her and Palisades residents to help them rebuild and return home as quickly as possible,” Raman said.

Park remains the only council member who has not endorsed in the mayor’s race. Thirteen others are backing Bass.

Dueling controllers unite for Raman

Raman has picked up endorsements from something of a political odd couple: two city controllers who have not always had kind things to say about each other.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who recently won reelection, stood with Raman in Chinatown on Wednesday as she called for L.A.’s nonprofit homeless providers to be paid based on their success rates.

A day later, Raman appeared in the San Fernando Valley with former City Controller Laura Chick as the two spoke out against the city’s $2.6-billion upgrade of the Convention Center.

The back-to-back appearances brought back memories. Chick had tough words for Mejia back in 2022, calling him “unfit for public office.” She pointed to his tweets calling then-President Joe Biden a rapist and a racist, and his decision to pose for a photo with a poster of Hillary Clinton photoshopped to look like she was behind bars in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Mejia responded by blasting Chick, a former City Council member, as a career politician who recycled lies and “exaggerated attacks.”

Chick, who served as controller from 2001 to 2009, went after Mejia again this year, endorsing his opponent, real estate executive Zach Sokoloff, in the run-up to the June 2 primary. This time, she said Mejia was not producing enough reports to fulfill his office’s watchdog role.

In many ways, Chick was the Mejia of her day, railing against the status quo and turning a spotlight on the city’s shortcomings, drawing the ire of other elected officials.

So could the Raman campaign bring about a detente between the two?

Chick, in an interview, said she hasn’t spoken with Mejia but would gladly take his call. She said she wishes him well now that he has another four years in office.

“I think she’s trying to get us together,” Chick said, referring to Raman.

Chick said she’s hoping that Raman, as mayor, will receive “lots of vigorous audits” from the controller and then implement the findings.

“I yearned for a mayor, as city controller, that I could turn to and say, ‘Here. Here are the findings of my audit. Please do something about it.’ She’ll have that with Mejia,” Chick said.

We should point out that Bass has picked up support from at least two former city controllers: Rick Tuttle, who served from 1985 to 2001, and Wendy Greuel, a former city councilmember who succeeded Chick in 2009.

State of play

— STICKER SHOCK: A long-promised makeover of the Veteran Administration’s historic Building 13 in West L.A. will create 24 units of housing for homeless veterans, at an estimated cost of $1.25 million per apartment. “It must be one of the most unaffordable projects ever undertaken,” said Bobby Shriver, the former Santa Monica mayor.

— LINEAGE LAWSUIT: Lineage, whose cold storage warehouse recently burned down in Boyle Heights, leaving behind the stench of rotting meat, said in a new lawsuit that a company that operated a solar array on the building’s roof is to blame for the fire. Altus Power, the solar company, said it would fight the allegations in court.

— BOTHERED BY BUSES: Business owners in Eagle Rock are worried about a dedicated bus lane coming to Colorado Boulevard — and the potential impact on customer visits.

— SETTING A SCHEDULE: The City Council voted this week to draft legal language that would require fast-food restaurants to give employees notice of their work schedules at least two weeks in advance. The move would build on an existing city ordinance that currently applies to retail employees at large companies.

— BACKING A BILL: Hollywood film and TV post production workers stood with Bass and Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) on Thursday, urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would create the state’s first standalone post-production tax incentive.

— LIFE AFTER PRATT: Bass or Raman for mayor? In Spencer Pratt’s Pacific Palisades, some say that’s no choice at all.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Skid Row, an area represented by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado.
• On the docket next week: A House subcommittee holds a hearing Tuesday to discuss waste and fraud in L.A. County’s homelessness response system — one that won’t be attended by Bass.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

SACRAMENTO — SEIU United Healthcare Workers West President Dave Regan allegedly tried to “extort” an SEIU state council endorsement of the billionaire tax ballot measure from other California union leaders, according to an investigation commissioned by Service Employees International Union.

The investigation and a second inquiry conducted on behalf of SEIU California found that Regan allegedly threatened and intimidated women who worked for the state council, and in one instance, physically assaulted a former executive director of the labor organization.

Regan, in an interview with The Times, denied the allegations that he attempted to extort from union officials. He also denied assaulting the executive director and said he did not threaten female labor leaders. He repeated a counterclaim he made to the union: The allegations against him are retaliation for his advocacy for Proposition 40, the proposed wealth tax that will be on the Nov. 3 ballot.

“They are internally contradictory, they are fundamentally biased, and maybe most importantly, they are politically motivated,” Regan said about the probes.

The law firm hired by the national union investigated Regan’s claim of retaliation but found the allegation could not be substantiated.

David Huerta, the president of SEIU United Service Workers West, and three other labor leaders filed a rare formal union charge against Regan in February.

The national union of SEIU has ultimate authority to resolve charges filed under its constitution and hired the New York labor law firm Cohen, Weiss and Simon to independently investigate the claims. The firm interviewed 18 current and former SEIU leaders and others in the California labor movement over nearly three months, according to its report.

The law firm’s report, reviewed by The Times, supported Huerta’s claim that on Dec. 3 Regan suggested the state council could be investigated for “governance issues” if the council did not endorse the billionaire tax on the November ballot. Huerta was then president of SEIU California.

“During the investigation, Huerta reported that he left the conversation with Regan feeling ‘extorted’ and believing that Regan might report unspecified governance concerns to the U.S. Department of Labor, which is known to be unfriendly to labor unions under the Trump administration, if state council did not support the billionaire tax,” the report said.

The law firm’s investigation substantiated an allegation that on the same day, Regan threatened Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, over the council’s position on the ballot measure. The SEIU probe found an allegation that Regan also assaulted one of Orr’s predecessors in the job, Courtni Pugh, in 2009, to be credible.

“SEIU California leaders filed charges against Dave Regan alleging a pattern of bullying, threats, abuse, harassment, physical violence and attempted extortion,” Christopher Calhoun, a spokesperson for SEIU California, said in a statement. “Initial investigations pertaining to these charges substantiated most of SEIU California leaders’ allegations.”

State union officials have temporarily banned Regan from the offices of SEIU California, a council of union leaders that coordinates political operations for all SEIU-affliated unions in the state, to protect female employees, according to the state council’s report.

Democratic National Committee delegate Courtni Pugh speaks at the California Democratic Party breakfast in Chicago on Aug. 20, 2024.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“Sufficient evidence was also found to substantiate that Regan has engaged in a pattern of subjecting former and current SEIU California female directors to intimidating and threatening physical behavior and verbal abuse,” the report commissioned by the state council said.

Leaders and workers within the labor movement describe Regan’s alleged behavior as an open secret at SEIU, which represents more than 2 million members nationwide and is the largest union in California.

The law firm hired by SEIU submitted its investigation report on July 28. Regan remains in his job as an administrative process moves forward with hearings. Regan will get a chance to make his case before SEIU determines any appropriate disciplinary action.

SEIU President April Verrett has the power to temporarily suspend Regan as the process plays out.

“SEIU is deeply committed to the safety and well-being of all people, including our members, staff, and the public, and takes these matters seriously,” said Dan O’Sullivan, a spokesperson for SEIU. “As soon as these concerns were raised, we initiated a deliberate and thorough process and retained independent, outside investigators to look into these allegations. Our process is active and ongoing, and the next steps include appointing a hearing officer and holding an evidentiary hearing through which all parties will be afforded due process.”

At a California Federation of Labor event on Dec. 3, Regan told Orr that “state council better endorse this measure by Jan. 1 or I’m coming for you,” she told investigators in both probes.

Regan rode to the airport with Orr and sat next to her on the plane “as part of a continued effort to intimidate her into providing state council’s support for the billionaire tax,” Orr told the investigators. As they left, Regan tapped his watch to suggest her time was running out, the report stated.

Regan told investigators that he learned last year that Orr was working behind the scenes to undermine his billionaire tax proposal. If approved by voters, the measure will retroactively apply a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of billionaires who were residing in California as of Jan. 1, 2026.

Regan denied that he threatened Orr, calling the claims “completely fabricated.”

“And again, the source of that is somebody who is not in favor of Proposition 40, and somebody who has not been leading the state council with practices of good governance,” Regan said in an interview.

Regan also denied intimidating Orr to investigators hired by the national union, but offered a different perspective on the SEIU California executive director. He said he traveled with Orr as a friend that day, had previously supported her professionally and offered her a job, according to the report.

The law firm said Orr believed that Regan was a “bully” who mistreated women of color and made it difficult for them to do their jobs at SEIU and had even “fought someone” when he didn’t “get his way.” Regan denied those allegations, including that he mistreated women of color.

“Orr therefore took Regan’s statement that he was ‘coming for’ her as a threat to her job security and her physical safety. She contemporaneously shared this fear with a colleague. Moreover, her response to Regan’s statement is reasonable because three interviewees — both current and former employees of state council — corroborated that Regan has verbally berated and at times physically intimidated or assaulted former state council executive directors,” the report stated.

The investigation commissioned by the national union concluded that UHW then launched a “fishing expedition” into the state council’s finances under Orr’s leadership, but did not substantiate a claim that Regan defamed her to allies of the labor movement.

The SEIU investigators also wrote that the claim that Regan assaulted Pugh was substantiated.

Pugh told investigators that Regan kicked open her office door and “jacked” her against the wall, according to the investigative report. While she was “pinned,” Regan pressed his finger into her chest and screamed that she was a “dumb ass,” the report said.

When he left her office, Pugh fell to the ground and began to hyperventilate, according to the report. Two colleagues found her, helped her breathe into a paper bag and walked her home, the report said.

Regan denied the allegation.

“It is a complete fabrication and a fiction made by somebody who has all of the incentive possible to critique or trash or criticize UHW generally, and me specifically, and no, there was no mention of it for 17 years,” he said.

The report also concluded that Regan recently threatened to sue SEIU Local 221 President Crystal Irving in an attempt to silence her from warning others about the alleged assault against Pugh.

Regan said the national union’s investigation was “fundamentally flawed” because it stated that Pugh “had nothing to gain from sharing her story” with Irving. Pugh, now a political consultant, has worked against the billionaire tax ballot measure, something Regan said gave her a reason to lie about him.

Pugh called Regan’s response “offensive to the women” who she said objected to his behavior. She said she detailed the alleged incident at the time to board members who oversaw her work and SEIU leadership. The encounter, she said, was well-known.

“I told my colleagues and organization leaders when it occurred,” Pugh said in a statement. “I was asked to participate in the later investigation because so many people had heard about the 2009 incident over the years. I chose to participate in the investigation because I saw that his behavior had continued and in hopes that no one else would have to endure this kind of treatment from him.”

Regan, in his interview with The Times, also denied the allegation that he attempted to force the state council to support the billionaire tax.

David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW, speaks during a Memorial Day action in Los Angeles on May 21.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“Huerta then asked Regan if it was his intention to initiate an investigation,” according to the report. “Regan replied, ‘I don’t have to; there are others who would.’ In that conversation, Regan demanded a full endorsement of the billionaire’s tax initiative measure by the state council by Jan. 1.”

Regan told investigators he raised governance issues with Huerta and could not remember if he demanded the council’s support for the billionaire tax during the conversation, though he said he had been seeking the endorsement for months, according to the national union’s report.

“The investigation found that Regan likely suggested he would cause the DOL to investigate state council,” the report said. “According to Regan, he did discuss with Huerta that an investigation was possible.”

The executive board of SEIU California later voted in July to remain neutral on Proposition 40, marking a blow to Regan’s efforts to overcome an onslaught of opposition from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, billionaires and liberal groups concerned that the measure could backfire and reduce state tax revenue collected from the ultra wealthy.

Regan filed a counterclaim with SEIU in April, alleging that the state council initiated the complaint and launched its own investigation into him as a retaliatory “character assassination” for his advocacy for the billionaire tax, something the SEIU report said was not substantiated.

The investigative report submitted to the national union raised questions about Regan’s tactics to earn support for his causes.

Investigators said their probe “revealed that Regan has been associated with similar extreme efforts to secure political endorsements in the recent past.”

The firm reported that it reviewed text and email messages in which a representative for Regan offered to drop part of his counterclaim “in exchange for the state council’s endorsement of Tom Steyer for governor.”

“In an email response to that offer, a State Council representative stated they have ‘no interest in a behind-the-scenes trade involving dropping internal charges of misconduct in exchange for the making of a political endorsement.’”

The person working with Regan who sent the offer denied to the law firm that the conversation constituted extortion.

“This denial is not credible,” the firm wrote in the report. “The Regan Offeror stated that they were ‘extremely careful’ with their language when conveying Regan’s offer, as they were aware that what they said could be misconstrued as extortion. That the Regan Offeror took such care suggests that the offer was likely extortion.”

Regan also denied the claim, which he called a “complete fabrication.”

A second investigation by the Los Angeles law firm Barboza & Associates, which was hired by SEIU California, found sufficient evidence to substantiate a complaint that Regan bullied Jessica Bartholow, the council’s government relations director.

Bartholow reported to her superiors at SEIU California that Regan stood uncomfortably close and hovered over her at the bar at a fundraiser for the state Senate leader in San Diego in March as tensions flared over the billionaire tax. He then screamed an expletive at her in front of a crowd of lawmakers and lobbyists when she walked away from him, according to the state council’s report.

“Bartholow was scared and her heart was pounding,” investigators wrote in the report for the state council that was reviewed by The Times. “Bartholow had heard that Regan could be violent, and she did not know what he was going to do.”

Regan told investigators and The Times that he swore at Bartholow but denied that he physically intimidated her. Regan said he was upset with her over an allegation that she previously threw “four staff members of UHW out of the state council office.” The report commissioned by the state council discredited his claim and said “Bartholow did not throw UHW staff out of the SEIU California office or treat them rudely or disrespectfully.”

Lawyers hired by the state council said Regan intimidated another woman within the union during their investigation.

The state council investigation included an allegation that Regan physically and verbally intimidated Susan Li, an assistant director of external organizing for SEIU Local 721, on April 30 after a meeting with the Assembly Speaker’s Office and the California Primary Care Assn. Regan was allegedly upset with David Green, president of SEIU Local 721 who had just left for the airport, and began randomly screaming at Li, according to the investigative report on the probe commissioned by the state council.

Regan described the encounter as a conversation and said he did not scream at Li.

The state report said Regan “attacks female staff members instead of taking his concerns to the individuals who had the authority to make decisions.”

“Time and again, Regan unleashed his hostility toward the women who worked for SEIU California, and one from Local 721, in a physically intimidating and verbally abusive manner,” the report concludes.

Regan vigorously denied this assertion.

The state council report said Regan often berated Pugh when she worked at SEIU.

“Every week it was, ‘What the f— were you doing in this meeting? Why did you say that? You dumb ass bitch,’” the SEIU state report said. “Every time Regan called Pugh, she put him on speaker phone so everyone could hear him call her a f—up and tell her to f— off. Not one person said anything.”

Pugh told investigators hired by the national union that Regan continued to belittle her in meetings until she eventually resigned from the state council. She said she believed he formed a coalition to force her out of her job and that she would have been fired if she had not stepped down.

Terry Brennand, director of pensions, revenue and budget at SEIU California, told investigators that he and Mary Gutierrez, now deceased, heard Pugh sobbing in her office after Regan allegedly assaulted her.

“Brennand believed Pugh was in shock and traumatized,” the state SEIU report stated. “Pugh seemed frozen, terrified and not quite clear-headed. It was not the usual Pugh, who was direct, thoughtful and expressive. She was shaking and clearly traumatized.”

Three current and former SEIU California executive directors, all women of color, told Brennand that Regan had bullied them, the report said.

“That’s his forte,” Brennand said to investigators. “That’s his wheelhouse.”

Regan denied that he has a problem with women, or women of color.

“It is 100% false,” he said.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of California Labor Federation, said Regan’s union is overwhelmingly composed of women and women of color, who just reelected him to a position he’s held for 16 years.

“Ultimately they have the ability to make this determination of whether he’s an appropriate leader, which they just made again,” she said. “I think what’s most important is that we have to keep our eyes on the fact that Medi-Cal is being cut and we have no solution but the billionaire’s tax to fill that cut.”

Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

Sept. 11, 2026 5:29 PM PT

WASHINGTON — An Afghan woman who was accused of supporting an Islamic State-inspired plot in the United States and whose case was the first for an obscure and long-dormant court has been deported, the Justice Department said Friday.

Nazira Haji Zada, 47, was arrested in July at her Fort Worth home and brought before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court on a Justice Department application to deport her from the U.S. On Friday, the department said that she had waived her rights to challenge her detention and had agreed to be deported to Afghanistan.

Haji Zada’s attorneys said her decision to consent to removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.”

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” the defense lawyers said in a statement Friday. “We are confident that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court will be struck down as unconstitutional as soon as a judge is asked to address the issue.”

Court filings about Haji Zada’s deportation, including a judge’s Aug. 20 removal order, remained under seal until after she reached her destination.

The swift resolution averts what could have been a protracted legal fight testing the authority of the court, which was established in 1996 but until July had not received any petitions, as well as the strength of allegations against Haji Zada.

Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said the case’s outcome is “a win for national security and the rule of law.”

“Those who support and condone terrorism should not be living in the United States, and this first-ever case before the [court] shows how the Department will use every tool at its disposal to protect our country,” Blanche said in a statement.

The Justice Department has described Haji Zada as a supporter of the Islamic State and identified her at the time as the mother and mother-in-law of two Afghan men who were convicted in Oklahoma of plotting an attack in the U.S. on election day in 2024. The plans were foiled before any attack took place.

Her lawyers at the time of the deportation had been pressing the court to force the Justice Department to share information and other evidence to support the allegations in the case.

The court has specific authority to conduct deportation proceedings for people whom the Justice Department classifies as “alien terrorists.” The court is composed of five federal judges from different districts across the country who are appointed by the U.S. chief justice.

“Those who plot acts of terrorism against the United States have no place in our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “We will find them, and we will use every lawful tool available to remove them.”

On July 30, Judge Joan Ericksen presided over the first hearing for the court’s first case since its creation 30 years ago.

One of Haji Zada’s attorneys argued at the hearing that the Trump administration’s activation of the court violates her constitutional rights. Attorney Matthew Farley urged the judge to dismiss the case and immediately release his client.

An FBI memo dated July 15 said it “developed information” that Haji Zada is an Islamic State supporter who had her children pledge their loyalty to the terrorist group. Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, was sentenced in November to 15 years in prison and court records show he previously agreed to be removed from the U.S. after his release.

Her son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, previously worked as a security guard for an American military installation in Afghanistan. He pleaded guilty to conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group. Prosecutors have said he took steps to advance his attack plans by ordering AK-47 rifles, liquidating his family’s assets and buying one-way tickets for his wife and child to travel home to Afghanistan.

Tucker and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Labor leader Dave Regan claimedFriday that he was the victim of a “smear” campaign orchestrated in part by wealthy Californians and said he has been falsely accused of attempting to “extort” an endorsement of the billionaire tax ballot measure and of physically assaulting a female union leader.

Investigations commissioned by the Service Employees International Union and SEIU California, and conducted by outside law firms, determined the allegations against Regan were credible, along with reports that he threatened and intimidated other female labor leaders. Regan, who is president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, vehemently denied the allegations, which were first reported by The Times Friday morning.

During a video news conference hours after the allegations were published, Regan claimed the probes were launched by opponents of Proposition 40 — the billionaire tax measure he helped place on the Nov. 3 ballot — as well as members of the SEIU California labor council with whom he had clashed in the past.

Regan, joined by other SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West union leaders and members, also criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom for opposing the proposed one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets.

Newsom is “trying to curry favor with the richest people in the state to fund [his] presidential campaign,” Regan said. “That is shameful behavior.”

Newsom and other opponents of the measure, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the California Teachers Assn., have expressed concern that Proposition 40 could push many of the state’s biggest taxpayers to relocate and destabilize state finances.

“The Governor supports a national tax on billionaires and is proud to stand with teachers, firefighters, reproductive health clinics, and others in opposing this poorly written state measure that will harm California,” said Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon.

Regan also criticized The Times’ reporting on the allegations, and an editorial opposing Proposition 40. He alleged that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Times’ owner, influenced coverage about the measure because he is a billionaire.

“We stand by our reporting,” said a Times spokesperson.

David Huerta, president of SEIU-United Service Workers West, and three other labor leaders filed a rare formal union charge against Regan in February. The SEIU investigation report, which was reviewed by The Times, supported Huerta’s claim that in December, Regan suggested the state council could be investigated for “governance issues” if the council did not endorse the proposed billionaire tax. Huerta was then president of SEIU California, which along with their national arm, did not endorse Proposition 40.

In July, the executive board for SEIU California voted to take a neutral position on the proposed wealth tax.

The investigation and a second inquiry conducted on behalf of SEIU California substantiated allegations that Regan threatened and intimidated women who worked for the state council. The investigation also determined an allegation that Regan physically assaulted a former executive director of the state labor organization, Courtni Pugh, in 2009, was credible.

Regan called the allegation that he assaulted Pugh a “complete fabrication.” Regan and other SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West members downplayed Pugh’s allegations against him because of her political consulting firm’s role opposing Proposition 40.

Pugh called his remarks “offensive” to the women who participated in the independent investigation.

“My testimony and the testimony of the other women were substantiated by investigators,” she said. “His claims were not.”

Regan remains in his job as the SEIU administrative process moves forward with hearings. Regan will get a chance to make his case before SEIU determines any appropriate disciplinary action.

Times Staff Writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.