administration

April 25 (UPI) — The scientists and engineers serving on the National Science Board received letters from the Presidential Personnel Office Friday telling them they have been fired.

The board, which was created in 1950 to be an independent entity to guide the National Science Foundation, is made up of scientists and engineers from universities and industry. Board members are appointed by the president but serve six-year terms to help ensure they cross administrations.

The NSF provides grants for scientific research and has helped develop technology used in MRIs, cellphones, LASIK eye surgery and more.

The letters they received, according to screenshots shared with The Washington Post, said, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the ranking member of the Science Committee, said in a statement, “This is the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. The NSB is apolitical. It advises the president on the future of NSF. It unfortunately is no surprise a president who has attacked NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the Foundation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won’t stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries? A real bozo the clown move.”

Marvi Matos Rodriguez, a senior vice president in the energy sector who works on fusion, received one of the letters Friday. She has been on the board since 2022.

“The idea of having six-year terms is you get to do something significant, impactful and go beyond administrations, political administrations,” she told The Post. “I serve the board at nights and on weekends,” Matos Rodriguez said.

It’s not clear how many members of the board were dismissed and if they will be replaced.

April 24 (UPI) — The Trump administration is working on a bailout of Spirit Airlines, which is in bankruptcy for the second time in a year, to keep it from shutting down.

President Donald Trump several times this week that the government may get involved in the situation — specifically highlighting his concerns about jobs and the airline industry — after increases in jet fuel cost made the airline’s situation even worse, CNBC and USA Today reported.

Spirit has not commented on the bailout negotiations, which would have to be approved by its creditors, but the administration has offered Spirit a $500 million loan, with the government receiving the right to own 90% of the company when it exits bankruptcy, CBS News reported.

“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it,” Trump said on Thursday.

“I’d love to be able to save those jobs,” he said. “I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines so it’s competitive.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has argued it is necessary for the government to step in and save Spirit because if it is shut down and liquidated during bankruptcy, at least 7,500 jobs will be lost.

The White House may use the Defense Production Act, which gives the government the ability to compel private companies to prioritize its contracts in the event of an emergency and to loan money to those companies, to give Spirit a loan.

The loan would make the government Spirit’s main debtor and, while the company is working its way through bankruptcy, the Department of Defense would use extra seats for transporting troops or moving other military cargo.

The union that represents Spirit’s ramp service employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, urged the administration to prioritize employees at the airline, The Hill reported.

“IAM Union members at Spirit, and all frontline aviation workers, did not cause this crisis,” the union said in a statement.

“They should not be the ones forced to pay the price. Any federal assistance must prioritize protecting jobs, preserving pay and benefits, and maintaining the affordable air service that millions of Americans rely on,” the union statement said.

Spirit filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2024 after a judge blocked its proposed $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue Airlines in March of that year, and filed for bankruptcy again in 2025.

Spirit’s current bankruptcy plan includes the cost of jet fuel, which has roughly doubled for the company since the United States and Israel launched the war in Iran. The cost of fuel has also tanked their current business model, according to reports.

Spirit missed an interest payment this week, leading to it being warned that it could be in default with its creditors — to which Spirit has warned they may only have days to operate, which spurred the bailout talks.

The federal government already is working with the company’s creditors and has made a loan offer, CBS News reported, and Spirit has said it continues to operate normally, which includes deeply discounted flights.

LOGAN, Utah — President Trump’s administration took the unusual step this week of sending a government plane to Cuba to return a 10-year-old from Utah who is at the center of a complicated and contentious custody fight involving the child’s gender identity.

The child’s parent, Rose Inessa-Ethington, a transgender woman, is accused of taking the child to Cuba without the permission of the biological mother. Federal and state authorities sought the return of the child after a family member expressed concern that Inessa-Ethington went to Havana to get the child gender transition surgery.

Inessa-Ethington, who had run a popular Utah political blog in the 2010s, was arrested along with her partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington, and charged in the U.S. with international parental kidnapping.

The couple traveled with the child to Canada ostensibly for a camping trip in late March with Blue’s 3-year-old child. However, the two adults turned off their phones after telling the older child’s mother they had arrived in Canada. They flew from Vancouver to Mexico and then to Cuba on April 1, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in federal court in Utah.

The charges don’t say if the couple actually planned on getting the child gender-affirming surgery in Cuba or how they would get it because that surgery isn’t legal for children in Cuba.

The FBI said that Blue Inessa-Ethington withdrew $10,000 from her checking account before leaving. Agents also found at their home a note with instructions from a mental health therapist in Washington, D.C., “to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender affirming medical care for children.” That note didn’t mention Cuba.

The use of the Department of Justice plane in a parental kidnapping investigation comes after the Trump administration sought to block access to gender-affirming care for minors and pressured healthcare providers over the issue.

The Associated Press left telephone and email messages with the court-appointed attorneys who represented Blue and Rose Inessa-Ethington in Virginia. The defendants will be returned to Utah to face one count each of international parental kidnapping, according to court filings.

Search began after child wasn’t returned as scheduled

The search for the child began on April 3 when they were not returned to the mother in Utah as scheduled, court documents show.

The 10-year-old’s mother, who was divorced from Rose Inessa-Ethington and had shared custody of the child, filed a missing-person report with police in Logan, Utah, a college and dairy farming town about 70 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Logan City Police Chief Jeff Simmons said his department’s initial focus was on the custodial interference allegations in the case, and he said investigators did not learn until later about concerns over gender-affirming surgery.

Logan police spokesperson Sgt. Brandon Bevan said those concerns were raised by one family member. He declined to say who.

“They just had the concern about it, no actual physical evidence,” Bevan said.

A Utah state judge ordered the return of the 10-year-old to the child’s mother on April 13. Three days later, a federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant for the Inessa-Ethingtons. On the same day, Cuban law enforcement located the group. They were deported to the U.S. aboard the government plane Monday and arraigned in federal court in Richmond, Va.

The 10-year-old was returned to the child’s biological mother, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Melissa Holyoak in Utah indicated in a statement. Representatives of the FBI and U.S. attorneys office in Utah declined to say what happened to the 3-year-old child who had been with the group.

Parents engaged in custody dispute

The custody dispute between the parents does not appear to be a new development. An online fundraiser created five years go by Blue Inessa-Ethington titled “Help a Trans Mother Keep Custody of Her Child” raised $9,766.

“Last week, Rose’s ex relocated several counties away, negatively impacting Rose’s parent-time with the child,” she wrote on the fundraising page. She said the money would be used to seek a court order that would keep the child “safe and stable throughout this process.”

Anyone who has spent time with Rose knows “how much care and thought she puts into parenting her gender open child,” she wrote.

Family members said the child was assigned male at birth but identifies as a girl because of what they believed to be “manipulation” by Rose Inessa-Ethington, according to an April 16 affidavit from FBI Special Agent Jennifer Waterfield.

Gender-affirming care for minors has been limited

The Trump administration moved in December to cut off gender-affirming care for minors, prompting a third of states to sue.

It was the latest in a series of clashes between an administration that says transgender healthcare can be harmful to children and advocates who say it’s medically necessary.

Gender-affirming surgery is rare among U.S. children, research shows. Guidance from several major medical organizations calls for caution around surgery for minors and says decisions about treatments are case-by-case. Fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents receive gender-affirming medications, such as hormones or puberty blockers.

In Cuba, gender-affirming surgeries are banned for minors and performed only for adults through the public health system under strict supervision in designated public hospitals for Cuban citizens. They must be authorized by a medical commission after a comprehensive review of the patient’s file. That process often takes years because it requires a wide range of medical and psychological evaluations.

Brown, Boone and Schoenbaum write for the Associated Press. Brown reported from Billings, Mont., and Boone from Boise, Idaho. AP journalists Eric Tucker in Washington, Cristiana Mesquita in Havana and Devi Shastri in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

Press freedom advocates have warned of hostile rhetoric towards journalists and increasingly restrictive policies under Milei.

The administration of Argentina’s Javier Milei has restricted access to the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, as part of an escalating feud with the country’s journalists.

Accredited journalists reportedly arrived at the Casa Rosada on Thursday and attempted to enter the building through fingerprint scanning, as they usually would.

But they were unable to pass the scan. As confusion hit the news corps, the head of Argentina’s Secretariat of Communication and Press issued a clarification that their press accreditation had not been revoked.

“The decision to remove the fingerprints of journalists accredited to the Casa Rosada was taken as a preventive measure in response to a complaint filed by the Military Household regarding illegal espionage,” Secretary Javier Lanari wrote on social media.

“The sole objective is to guarantee national security.”

Lanari’s post cites an incident wherein two journalists from the Argentinian channel TN were accused of secretly filming inside the government palace.

After their report was broadcast, the Milei administration accused the journalists of endangering government security by showing parts of the Casa Rosada that were reportedly off limits.

On Wednesday, Milei himself took to social media to call the journalists “repugnant trash”. He then challenged other members of the news media to justify their actions.

“I would love to see that filthy scum — the 95% who carry press credentials — come out and defend what these two criminals did,” Milei wrote on X.

Since then, the president has repeatedly reposted messages critical of the news media, often accompanied by the acronym “NOLSALP” or “NOL$ALP”. It stands for: “We don’t hate journalists enough.”

“Someday, that filthy journalistic scum (95%) will have to understand that they are not above the law. They abused legal precedent. It does not come without a price,” Milei added in one of his posts on Thursday, as he continued to slam the news media.

This week’s actions are the latest in a series of policy changes under Milei designed to tighten restrictions on journalists.

Last year, for instance, his government capped entry to certain rooms in the Casa Rosada and placed other areas out of bounds.

Critics say the policies are part of a wider broadside against journalism in Argentina. The media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said that, since Milei took office in 2023, the country has seen “a sharp decline in press freedom”.

And PEN International, an organisation for writers, warned last year of a “serious deterioration” in free-speech rights.

It pointed to legislation that further restricted which government documents could be made public and to Milei’s dismantling of public media, as well as the installation of a “mute” button to silence journalists during news conferences.

Already, the decision to bar journalists from entry into the Casa Rosada has faced pushback, including from Argentinian lawmakers.

Marcela Pagano, a former journalist turned deputy in Argentina’s legislature, announced on Thursday that she had filed a criminal complaint against Milei.

“The Casa Rosada is not private property,” Pagano wrote in a statement.

“Still less does a head of state — or his henchmen officials — have the authority to decide whether the press may access the building.”

She called Thursday’s incident “an unprecedented occurrence since the return of democracy” in Argentina in 1983.

“Prohibiting journalists from exercising their freedom of expression is the first step toward silencing any dissenting voice — a situation that we in Argentina have experienced during our country’s darkest moments,” she added. “THEY WILL NOT SILENCE US.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.

The order signed by Todd Blanche does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law. But it does change the way it’s regulated, shifting licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. It also gives licensed medical marijuana operators a major tax break and eases some barriers to researching cannabis.

The Trump administration also said it was jump-starting the process for reclassifying marijuana more broadly, setting a hearing to begin in late June.

Trump told his administration in December to work as quickly as possible to reclassify marijuana. On Saturday, as the Republican president signed an unrelated executive order about psychedelics, he seemed to express frustration that it was taking so long.

Blanche said Thursday that the Department of Justice was “delivering on President Trump’s promise” to expand Americans’ access to medical treatment options. “This rescheduling action allows for research on the safety and efficacy of this substance, ultimately providing patients with better care and doctors with more reliable information,” he said in a statement.

What the marijuana reclassification order does

Blanche’s action largely legitimizes medical marijuana programs in the 40 states that have adopted them. It sets up an expedited system for state-licensed medical marijuana producers and distributors to register with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

It makes clear that cannabis researchers won’t be penalized for obtaining state-licensed marijuana or marijuana-derived products for use in their work, and it grants state-licensed medical marijuana companies a windfall by allowing them, for the first time, to deduct business expenses on their federal taxes.

Any marijuana-derived medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration is similarly listed in Schedule III, it said.

Since 2015, Congress has prohibited the Justice Department from using its resources to shut down state-licensed medical marijuana systems. But the order nevertheless represents a major policy shift for the U.S. government, which has continued its long-standing marijuana prohibition — dating to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 — even as nearly all the states have approved cannabis use in some form.

Two dozen states plus Washington, D.C., have authorized adult recreational use of marijuana, 40 have medical marijuana systems, and eight others allow low-THC cannabis or CBD oil for medical use. Only Idaho and Kansas ban marijuana outright.

The regulation of medical marijuana has come a long way since California became the first state to adopt it in 1996, Blanche wrote.

“Today the vast majority of States maintain comprehensive licensing frameworks governing cultivation, processing, distribution, and dispensing of marijuana for medical purposes,” Blanche wrote. “Taken as a whole, they demonstrate a sustained capacity to achieve the public-interest objectives … including protecting public health and safety and preventing the diversion of controlled substances into illicit channels.”

The president of the American Trade Assn. for Cannabis and Hemp, Michael Bronstein, called it “the most significant federal advancement in cannabis policy in over 50 years.”

“This action recognizes what Americans have long known, cannabis is medicine,” he said in a written statement.

Critic calls the order ‘a tax break to Big Weed’

The Trump administration’s decision drew derision from marijuana legalization opponent Kevin Sabet, the chief executive of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. Sabet said that while marijuana research is necessary, “there are many ways to increase our knowledge without giving a tax break to Big Weed and sending a confusing message about marijuana’s harms to the American public.”

“With this move, we are now confronted with the most pro-drug administration in our history,” Sabet said in a text message. “Policy is now being dictated by marijuana CEOs, psychedelics investors, and podcasters in active addiction.”

Marijuana or marijuana-derived products that are not distributed through a state medical marijuana program will continue to be classified in Schedule I.

Schedule III drugs are defined as having moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Some critics of the industry have suggested that legalization in the states has led to stronger and stronger cannabis products, which need to be researched rather than categorized less strictly than before.

The efforts to reclassify marijuana

The Justice Department under President Biden had proposed to reclassify marijuana, eliciting nearly 43,000 formal public comments. The DEA was still in the review process when Trump succeeded Biden, and Trump ordered that process to move along as quickly as legally possible.

Blanche’s order sidestepped the review process by relying on a provision of federal law that allows the attorney general to determine the appropriate classification for drugs that the U.S. must regulate pursuant to an international treaty.

It was unclear how the order might affect operations in states where licensed recreational marijuana shops also sell to medical patients. In Washington state, which in 2012 became one of the first states to legalize the adult use of marijuana, 302 of 460 licensed stores have endorsements allowing them to sell tax-free cannabis products to registered patients.

Many Republicans oppose loosening marijuana restrictions. More than 20 Republican senators, several of them staunch Trump allies, signed a letter last year urging the president to keep the current standards.

Trump has made his crusade against other drugs, especially fentanyl, a feature of his second term, ordering U.S. military attacks on Venezuelan and other boats the administration insists are ferrying drugs. He signed another executive order declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.

Richer and Johnson write for the Associated Press. Johnson reported from Seattle.

It has long become clear that those of us who saw a glimmer of hope in President Trump’s appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as secretary of Labor got snowed.

It wasn’t just, or even chiefly, the miasma of sleaze and corruption that seemed to surround her wherever she went. Or her slavish sucking up to Trump in public, notably at a Cabinet meeting in which she pleaded with Trump to send his immigration goons into Portland, Ore., to “crack down.” (“Thank you for what you’re doing with your agents on ICE,” she said at the August 2025 session.) Fun fact: She had represented a Portland suburb as a Republican for a single House term.

No. It was the gulf between the expectations, even among Democrats, that she might be a decent pick for the job, and the reality.

After all, she had been one of only three Republicans in the House to vote in favor of the so-called PRO Act, which would significantly strengthen collective bargaining rights. (The measure passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but hasn’t gotten out of committee in the current Congress.)

As I reported after her nomination, labor activists and pro-labor politicians made encouraging noises about her. Among them was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.): “It’s a big deal that one of the few Republican lawmakers who have endorsed the PRO Act could lead the Department of Labor,” Warren said. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as Labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power, she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

She received an explicit endorsement from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize,” Weingarten tweeted. “I hope it means the Trump admin will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices from Teamsters to teachers.”

The betting was that Chavez-DeRemer would be, at the very least, an upgrade from Trump’s previous appointee as Labor secretary during his first term. That was Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court justice, who had been a lawyer for big corporations fighting unions and resisting workplace regulations.

The most commonly expressed doubt about Chavez-DeRemer was whether she would have the fortitude to maintain a pro-labor stance in the face of the open hostility to workers displayed by Trump and the rest of his administration.

Within months, the answer was clear, and it was no. In May, she ceased enforcing a Biden administration rule that had discouraged businesses from designating their workers as independent contractors, depriving those workers of the legal protections and wage and hour benefits they would have received as employees.

The budget she submitted to Congress last year would slash her agency’s discretionary funding by more than 35%, to $8.6 billion from $13.2 billion, and cut its workforce by nearly 4,000 full-time workers, or more than 26%. In July she announced a plan to rescind 63 regulations that had been designed to help workers.

With language that sounded cribbed from the MAGA playbook, she said her goal is to “eliminate unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity.” Most of the regulations facing the guillotine related to worker health and safety protections.

Brief as it was, Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure wasn’t the first time that the Department of Labor was ill-served by its management. Republican presidents have displayed a decades-long tendency to fill the top spot with political cronies or pro-business activists masquerading as worker advocates, or worse.

Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor secretary, recalled having to clean up the agency — not just morally and ethically, but with broom and bucket, when she took over from William Nuckles Doak, Herbert Hoover’s appointee.

The Labor Department was located in a converted apartment building, its interior dark and foreboding, its shadowy corners occupied by silent, hulking men whom Perkins mentally labeled “cigar in the corner of the mouth types. Stale ashtrays and spittoons were everywhere, along with wastebaskets surrounded by mounds of misaimed and crumpled papers. (Its current Washington quarters are in the Frances Perkins Building.)

Doak didn’t seem inclined to leave the premises. Perkins got rid of him by sending him to lunch and packing up his personal effects while he was out.

Perkins’ first step as secretary was to disband an anti-immigrant squad that shook down foreign-born laborers for cash and helped employers harass labor organizers. She set a high standard for the agency, pushing forward legislation establishing the 40-hour workweek and the National Labor Relations Board — and also creating Social Security.

Many of Perkins’ Democratic successors have watched sadly as their efforts have been undone with a change in administrations. Robert Reich, who served under Bill Clinton (and is now an emeritus professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and an assiduous blogger), wrote Tuesday of having loved the agency’s mission: “to protect and raise the standard of living of working Americans.”

With Reich at Labor, the Clinton administration raised the federal minimum wage in 1997 from $3.35 an hour, where it had been stuck since 1980, to $5.15 (albeit still a cheeseparing $10.69 in today’s buying power). “We fought against sweatshops,” Reich recalled. “We took on big corporations that were cheating their employees. We kept workers safe.”

That the agency has been “treated like crap is an insult to generations of hardworking DOL employees, to American workers, to America,” Reich wrote.

Under Trump, the Department of Labor has become just another pro-business front pretending to advocate for workers. Genuine labor advocates are infuriated by its decline, which has proceeded under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

The budget for its all-important wage and hour division, which enforces laws governing the minimum wage, overtime and prohibitions on child labor, has shrunk by 26% over a decade, according to David Weil, who headed the division under Obama and whose appointment by Biden to head the division was derailed by opposition from Big Business.

“There were 1,050 investigators working for the agency when I had the honor to lead it in the Obama administration,” Weil, who is a professor of social policy and management at Brandeis University, wrote last year. “It has barely over one-half that number now. The agency had 63 times more investigators per workplace in 1939 than in 2024.”

Trump poses as a pro-worker force, but his policies are atrocious for the laboring class. His Labor Department “walked away from a rule that expanded overtime protections to millions of workers,” Weil observed.

“While Congress’s ‘big beautiful bill’ boasts its worker-friendly removal of taxes on overtime, that provision benefits only a small slice of workers and revoking the overtime regulation further reduces the number of workers eligible for overtime protections when working long hours,” he wrote. “Or take the administration’s attack on low-paid workers whose employers hold federal contracts, by rescinding a $15 minimum wage for contractors covered by a Biden-era executive order, which benefited construction workers, purportedly a key Trump constituency.”

The Labor Department plays a role not only in regulating current workplace conditions but looking ahead at the “long-term prospects of our labor markets,” Weil told me Tuesday. “For example, the discussion of ‘affordability’ is rooted not only in rapidly rising price levels but also the low level of long-term earnings growth. Equally, our beliefs about the future prospects of employment and opportunity for college-educated workers are being upended by the potential impacts of AI.”

He added, “Questions like these require that the Labor Department be led by serious and knowledgeable individuals who place the interests of workers as their focus. So far, this administration has shown contempt for this mission,” as is shown by the decline and fall of Chavez-DeRemer.

Sometimes, the departure of an underperforming executive or official presages improvements ahead. That hasn’t been the pattern under Trump, and sadly, it’s not likely to happen at Labor.

Xavier Becerra, a former cabinet secretary in President Biden’s administration, appears to be surging in the curiously unsettled California governor’s race.

Until recently, the former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary had been mired in the single digits in polling to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom and lead the nation’s most populous state.

But after former Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Dublin) dropped out of the race earlier this month amid accusations ofsexual assault and other misconduct Becerra has seen a boost in polls, fundraising and endorsements.

On Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas endorsed Becerra alongside 14 Democratic members of the legislative body.

Arguing that Californians are under constant threat from President Trump’s policies, Rivas cited Becerra’s decades-long record in public office, including defending Obamacare and young immigrants, or dreamers, to argue that Becerra is best positioned to lead the state.

“There’s no time to learn on the job — we need a governor who’s ready to fight back on day one,” Rivas said in a statement, noting that Becerra sued the Trump administration 122 times while he was California’s attorney general. “We have a strong Democratic field for governor. But right now, we need someone ready on day one. Xavier Becerra is that leader.”

Becerra said he was honored to receive the legislators’ backing.

“I look forward to working with the Speaker and legislators on Day One to tackle the problems Californians care about most — from the skyrocketing cost of groceries and housing to our unyielding fight against the Trump Administration’s disastrous policies,” he said in a prepared statement. “Californians need an experienced and trusted leader who doesn’t need on-the-job training.”

Despite Becerra’s long tenure in state and federal office, the unflashy politician is not well-known among California voters. He was among the underdogs in the 2026 gubernatorial race. Swalwell, by contrast, was among the leading Democratic candidates.

Amy Thoma, a former Republican strategist who is no longer affiliated with a political party, noted that Becerra’s surge comes at a critical moment in the election, shortly before ballots land in Californians’ mailboxes.

“Voters are starting to tune into the race. Yes, they want someone who will stand up to Trump, but it also seems they want someone with experience who can address the very real issues facing the state,” Thoma said.

She added that Becerra’s life story is “incredibly compelling.”

“The word authentic is overused, but every time he talks about his love for this state, for his family and wanting to make California work for everyone, it comes across incredibly sincere,” Thoma said. “Voters can see through candidates who fake it.”

Becerra was respected by colleagues across the aisle, including former GOP legislative leader and state Republican party chairman Jim Brulte. Both men were elected to the state Assembly in 1990 and though their politics often sharply differed. However, they had a warm relationship.

“He was progressive and I am a conservative,” Brulte said. “We never agreed much on policy, but he is a good man with a great heart.”

The 2026 governor’s race has been unlike any in recent memory, with no clear front-runner in a crowded field of candidates and voters just beginning to pay attention to the contest shortly before the June 2 primary.

There were two prominent Republicans and eight prominent Democrats in the race, leading to fears among Democratic leaders in the state that their party’s candidates could be shut out of the governor’s race in the general election because of California’s unique primary system. The two candidates who win the most votes in the June 2 primary will move onto the November general election, regardless of party affiliation.

Democratic leaders remain concerned that despite California’s sapphire-blue tilt, the number of their party’s candidates in the race could lead to a splintering of Democratic voters that results in two Republicans advancing to the November ballot.

Six prominent Democrats remain in the race, after Swalwell and former state Controller Betty Yee dropped out.

The race — lacking a global superstar such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or the scion of a storied political family and former governor like Jerry Brown — is ephemeral. Anything can happen before the June 2 primary.

But Becerra is having a moment. In addition to the new endorsements, he has seen notable movement in polls, most recently in a survey released Monday by the state Democratic party. Becerra jumped nine points from the party’s last poll, tying with billionaire Tom Steyer at 13%.

While Becerra will never be able to match Steyer’s deep pockets, he raised more than $1 million on ActBlue, the top Democratic fundraising platform, in the week ending on April 18, making him the biggest fundraiser on the site in the nation.

“Ninety-seven percent were first-time donors,” Becerra’s campaign said in a statement. “This is not a donor base being recycled. It is a movement being born.”

WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center says it’s the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and faces possible charges over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

The civil rights group made the announcement on Tuesday, saying President Trump’s administration appears to be preparing legal action against it or some of its employees.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.

The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

The SPLC previously paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities, often sharing it with local and federal law enforcement, Fair said. It was used to monitor threats of violence, he said, adding that the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

He said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The SPLC regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.

The SPLC came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The SPLC included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the SPLC, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the SPLC had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.

House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”

Binkley and Richer write for the Associated Press.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third high-profile female official to leave the Trump administration after recent departures of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi.

US Secretary of Labour Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving her post in the administration of President Donald Trump, the White House has said.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third woman to leave the Trump administration since March, when the president fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the wake of federal immigration raids in Minnesota that led to the deaths of two protesters. Trump also ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month.

Chavez-DeRemer has done a “phenomenal job” protecting American workers and is set to “take a position in the private sector”, White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung said in a post on X late on Monday, announcing the labour secretary’s departure.

“Keith Sonderling will take on the role of Acting Secretary of Labor,” Cheung added, referring to the current deputy labour secretary.

While Cheung did not give a reason for Chavez-DeRemer’s departure, the New York Post reported in January that she was under investigation for “pursuing an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with a subordinate” and drinking in her office during the work day.

Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify the allegations.

From the beginning of her tenure, Chavez-DeRemer had some notable differences with other members of Trump’s inner circle.

She had voiced support for the pro-union Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), earning support for her nomination from some Democrats.

Her appointment was also seen as favoured by Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who notably spoke in support of Trump’s re-election campaign at the Republican National Convention in July 2024.

However, as the labour secretary, Chavez-DeRemer’s positions have more closely aligned with the Trump administration’s overall anti-regulatory policies, according to US media outlets. During her tenure as secretary, the Labor Department stalled on responding to calls for limits on silica exposure from Appalachian coal miners suffering from the occupational black lung disease.

Chavez-DeRemer is not the first top official to leave the Labor Department during Trump’s second term.

In August 2025, Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, who was appointed by previous President Joe Biden, after a report showed that hiring had slowed in July and was worse in May and June than had previously been reported.

Chavez-DeRemer had supported the president’s move at the time.

“I support the President’s decision to replace Biden’s Commissioner and ensure the American People can trust the important and influential data coming from BLS,” Chavez-DeRemer said in a post on X following McEntarfer’s removal.

WASHINGTON — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is out of President Trump’s Cabinet, the White House said Monday, after multiple allegations of abusing her position’s power, including having an affair with a subordinate and drinking alcohol on the job.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third Trump Cabinet member to leave her post after Trump fired his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March and ousted Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi earlier this month.

Unlike other recent Cabinet departures, Chavez-DeRemer’s exit was announced by a White House aide, not by the president on his social media account.

“Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said on the social media site X. “She has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives.”

He said Keith Sonderling, the current deputy labor secretary, would become acting labor secretary in her place. The news outlet NOTUS was the first to report Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation.

Labor chief, family members faced multiple allegations

Chavez-DeRamer’s departure follows reports that began surfacing in January that she was under a series of investigations.

A New York Times report last Wednesday revealed that the Labor Department’s inspector general was reviewing material showing Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides and family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young staff members.

Chavez-DeRemer’s husband and father exchanged text messages with young female staff members, according to the newspaper. Some of the staffers were instructed by the secretary and her former deputy chief of staff to “pay attention” to her family, people familiar with the investigation told the Times.

Those messages were uncovered as part of a broader investigation of Chavez-DeRamer’s leadership that began after the New York Post reported in January that a complaint filed with the Labor Department’s inspector general accused Chavez-DeRemer of a relationship with the subordinate.

She also faced allegations that she drank alcohol on the job, and that she tasked aides to plan official trips for primarily personal reasons.

Both the White House and the Labor Department initially said the reports of wrongdoing were baseless. But the official denials became less full-throated as more allegations emerged — and when Chavez-DeRemer might be out of a job became something of an open question in Washington.

At least four Labor Department officials have already been forced from their jobs as the investigation progressed, including Chavez-DeRemer’s former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, as well as a member of her security detail, with whom she was accused of having the affair, the New York Times reported.

She enjoyed union support — rare for a Republican

Confirmed to Trump’s Cabinet in a 67-32 vote in March 2025, Chavez-DeRemer is a former House GOP lawmaker who had represented a swing district in Oregon. She enjoyed unusual support from unions as a Republican but lost reelection in November 2024.

In her single term in Congress, Chavez-DeRemer backed legislation that would make it easier to unionize on a federal level, as well as a separate bill aimed at protecting Social Security benefits for public-sector employees.

Some prominent labor unions, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, backed Chavez-DeRemer, who is a daughter of a Teamster, for Labor secretary. Trump’s decision to pick her was viewed by some political observers as a way to appeal to voters who are members of or affiliated with labor organizations.

But other powerful labor leaders were skeptical when she was tapped for the job, unconvinced that Chavez-DeRemer would pursue a union-friendly agenda as a part of the incoming GOP administration. In her Senate confirmation hearing, some senators questioned whether she would be able to uphold that reputation in an administration that fired thousands of federal employees.

She was a key figure in Trump’s deregulatory push

Aside from reports of wrongdoing in recent months, Chavez-DeRemer had been one of Trump’s more lower-profile Cabinet picks but took key steps to advance the administration’s deregulatory agenda during her tenure.

For instance, the Labor Department last year moved to rewrite or repeal more than 60 workplace regulations it saw as obsolete. The rollbacks included minimum wage requirements for home healthcare workers and people with disabilities, and rules governing exposure to harmful substances and safety procedures at mines. The effort drew condemnation from union leaders and workplace safety experts.

The proposed changes also included eliminating a requirement that employers provide adequate lighting for construction sites and seat belts for agriculture workers in most employer-provided transportation.

During Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure, the Trump administration canceled millions of dollars in international grants that a Labor Department division administered to combat child labor and slave labor around the world, ending their work that had helped reduce the number of child laborers worldwide by 78 million over the last two decades.

The Labor Department has a broad mandate as it relates to the U.S. workforce, including reporting the U.S. unemployment rate, regulating workplace health and safety standards, investigating minimum wage, child labor and overtime pay disputes, and applying laws on union organizing and unlawful terminations.

Kim writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Cathy Bussewitz in New York and Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — NASA recaptured the world’s attention with Artemis II, which took astronauts to the moon and back for the first time in half a century. But the agency’s scientific projects could again be under threat as the Trump administration makes a renewed push to drastically cut their funding — including at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The cuts, proposed in the Trump administration’s 2027 budget request to Congress, would pose further challenges to the already weakened Caltech-managed lab and could be broadly damaging to American efforts to bring back new discoveries from space. They echo last year’s attempt by the administration to slash NASA funding, which Congress rejected.

Though the Artemis project is billed as laying a foundation for a crewed NASA mission to Mars, exploration of the Red Planet is among the endeavors that could be slashed. The rover currently exploring Mars’ ancient river delta and a mission to orbit Venus are among projects with JPL involvement targeted for spending cuts, according to an analysis of the NASA budget proposal by the nonprofit Planetary Society.

“This isn’t [because] they’re not producing good science anymore. There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which led opposition to the administration’s similar effort to cut NASA funding last year.

Storm clouds hang over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 7, 2024.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

This time, the administration is asking Congress to cut NASA funding by 23% — including a 46% cut to its science programs, which are responsible for developing spacecraft, sending them into outer space to observe and analyzing the data they send back.

The proposal would cancel 53 science missions and reduce funding for others, according to the Planetary Society analysis. The effort to pare down NASA Science comes amid the Trump administration’s broader effort to cut scientific research across federal agencies.

The plan swiftly drew bipartisan criticism from members of Congress, who rejected the administration’s similar 2026 proposal in January. Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, indicated last week that he would work to fund NASA similarly for 2027, saying it would be “a mistake” not to fund science missions.

Moran plans to hold a hearing with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman before the end of April to review the budget request, a spokesperson for his office said. The president’s budget request is an ask to Congress, which ultimately holds the power to allocate funding.

But until Congress creates its own budget, NASA will use the plan as its road map, which could slow grants and contracts. The proposal “still creates enormous chaos and uncertainty in the meantime for critical missions, the scientific workforce, and long-term research planning,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), whose district includes JPL.

A NASA spokesperson declined to comment Friday. In the budget request, Isaacman wrote that NASA was “pursuing a focused and right-sized portfolio” for its space science missions in order to align with Trump’s federal cost-cutting goals.

The budget “reinforces U.S. leadership in space science through groundbreaking missions, completed research, and next-generation observatories,” Isaacman wrote.

Jared Isaacman testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the NASA administrator in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3, 2025.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

At JPL — which has for decades led innovation in space science and technology from its La Cañada Flintridge campus — questions had already swirled about the lab’s role in the future of NASA work.

Multiple rounds of layoffs over the last two years, the defunding of its embattled Mars Sample Return mission and a shift by the Trump administration toward lunar exploration and away from the type of scientific work that JPL executes had pushed the lab into a challenging stretch.

It has had a steady stream of employee departures in recent months, and those left have been scrambling to court outside funding from private investors, sell JPL technology to companies and increase productivity in hopes of keeping the lab afloat, according to two former staffers, who requested anonymity to describe the mood inside the lab.

“If we’re not doing science, then what are we doing?” asked one former employee, who recently left JPL after more than a decade there.

A spokesperson for the lab declined to comment, referring The Times to the budget proposal.

The NASA programs marked for cancellation or cutbacks support thousands of jobs at JPL and other centers, said Chu, who has led a push for increased funding for NASA Science. After last year’s layoffs, JPL “cannot afford to lose more of this expertise,” she said in a statement.

Among the JPL projects that appear to be slated for cancellation are two involving Venus, Dreier said. One, Veritas, is early in development and would give work to the lab for the next several years, he said.

The project would be the first U.S. mission to Venus in more than 30 years, Dreier said, and aims to make a high-resolution mapping of the planet’s surface and observe its atmosphere.

The Perseverance rover, which is on Mars collecting rock and soil samples, could face spending reductions. The budget request proposes pulling some funding from Perseverance to fund other planetary science missions and reducing “the pace of operations” for the rover.

Though how the Mars samples might get back to Earth is uncertain, the rover is still being used to explore the planet and search for evidence of whether it could have ever been habitable to life.

Researchers hope the tubes of Martian rock, soil and sediment can eventually be brought back to Earth for study. The team has about a half a dozen more sample tubes to fill and the rover is in good shape, said Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and Arizona State University professor who leads the camera team on Perseverance, which works daily with JPL.

He said NASA’s spending proposal put forth “no plan” for the future of the agency’s work.

“Are people just supposed to walk away from their consoles,” Bell asked, “and let these orbiters around other planets or rovers on other worlds — just let them die?”

The NASA document did not clearly show which programs were targeted for cuts and did not list which projects were targeted for cancellation. The Planetary Society and the American Astronomical Society each analyzed the proposal and found that dozens of projects appeared to be canceled without being named in the document.

Across NASA, other projects slated for cancellation according to the Planetary Society’s analysis include New Horizons, a spacecraft exploring the outer edge of the solar system; the Atmosphere Observing System, a planned project to collect weather, air quality and climate data; and Juno, a spacecraft studying Jupiter.

The administration’s plan also doesn’t prioritize new scientific projects, Bell said, which further jeopardizes long-term job stability and space discovery at centers like JPL.

“We’re going through this long stretch now with very few opportunities to build these spacecrafts,” Bell said. “All of the NASA centers are suffering from the lack of opportunities.”

Last year, the Trump administration proposed to slash NASA’s 2026 funding by nearly half. Instead, Congress approved funding in January that provided $24.4 billion for the agency — a cut of about 29% rather than the proposed 46%. The 2027 budget request asks for $18.8 billion.

Congress kept funding for science missions nearly steady, allocating $7.25 billion for science missions, about a 1% decrease from 2025. The administration had proposed cutting the science investment down to $3.91 billion. This time, the budget requests $3.89 billion.

Under the Trump administration, NASA has put an emphasis on moon exploration, including this month’s successful Artemis II mission. Isaacman, who defended the proposed cuts on CNN last week, touted the agency’s lunar plans, including a project to build a base on the moon.

The agency has indicated commitment to some existing science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the to-be-launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Dragonfly spacecraft set to launch for Saturn’s moon in 2028, and other projects.

“NASA doesn’t have a topline problem, we just need to focus on executing and delivering world-changing outcomes,” Isaacman said on CNN.

Scientists have urged the government not to choose between funding science and exploration but to keep up investment in both.

“It’s ultimately kind of confusing, especially on the heels of the Artemis II mission,” said Roohi Dalal, deputy director for public policy at the American Astronomical Society. “The scientific community … is providing critical services to ensure that the astronauts are able to carry out their mission safely, and yet at the same time, they’re facing this significant cut.”

WASHINGTON — In a rare bipartisan moment, the House passed legislation Thursday that would extend temporary protections for Haitian immigrants, a long-shot effort fighting back against President Trump’s attempts to end the program.

The bill, pushed forward by House Democrats with a group of Republicans over the objections of the GOP leadership, would require a three-year extension of temporary protected status for Haitians by the Trump administration. That would allow hundreds of thousands of qualifying immigrants to remain in the United States without fear of deportation.

The vote was 224-204, drawing applause in the chamber. But it faces uncertainty in the Senate, and the Republican president would almost certainly seek to veto it.

“I know firsthand how important our Haitian neighbors are to our communities, to our civic life, to our culture, to our workforce, to our economy,” said Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who is co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus and represents one of the largest Haitian communities in the country.

During the debate, she recounted the number of Haitian immigrants working in healthcare, housing construction and other industries. Haitians with temporary legal status “are not the problem, quite the contrary, they are part of the solution,” she said.

Pressley has said deporting Haitians back to the troubled Caribbean country would be a “death sentence,” given the effects of natural disasters and gang violence. “Congress can do the right thing,” she said.

Ten Republicans, many from districts with large numbers of Haitian residents, joined all Democrats and one independent in voting for passage.

Congress tries to act before the Supreme Court does

The effort to help 350,000 Haitians living lawfully in the United States comes as the administration is working to end the temporary legal status for several groups, exposing them to deportation.

In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court is prepared to consider a fast-track case that would end the protected status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants in a challenge widely seen as threatening the broader program. The administration filed emergency appeals after lower courts stopped the immediate end of the program.

It is part of the administration’s efforts to strip certain immigrant groups of legal status as the White House works to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of conducting the largest mass deportation operation in history. Some 1.3 million people fleeing countries around the world have been granted temporary protected status in the U.S.

The protections for Haiti, first approved after a devastating 2010 earthquake, have been extended multiple times. The State Department warns Americans not to travel to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest.”

Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy organization, fought back tears as she described the fear of deportations coursing through the community.

“We are asking, where will you be? On the right side of history?” she said at a news conference outside the Capitol. “Or continuing to cause trauma to people who are asking for nothing other than safety and protection?”

Trump has described migrants from poorer countries in vulgar terms, and he has falsely accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.

The conservative majority court has allowed the end of temporary legal status for a total of 600,000 people from Venezuela while lawsuits play out, leaving them to face potential deportation.

Lawmakers debate whether to help Haitians or stick with Trump

Rep. Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) whose district includes Long Island’s Haitian community, said she promised constituents she would work to protect their status. She introduced the legislation with Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York as soon as she took office last year.

“It’s cruel to expect Haitians to be forced to return to these deadly, dangerous conditions,” she said at a news conference. “Human lives are at risk.”

Lawler said there are differences of opinion on immigration policy, but that Haitian immigrants have become vital to his community and forcing them out would be unjust and unwise.

“They are small business owners, they are nurses, they are caregivers, they participate in our economy and take care of American citizens,” he said. “Congress has a responsibility to act.”

But Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) decried the number of immigrants, including Haitians, who have entered the U.S., and cited Democratic efforts to halt funding for enforcement and deportation efforts.

“Make temporary permanent,” he said, “that’s their plan.”

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) said the program was “backdoor amnesty” for foreigners.

To Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), the temporary status first granted under the Obama administration has become “an open-ended invitation” for immigrants to enter the country, including some illegally, and remain.

“The Trump administration has heeded the cries of the American people,” he said.

Using a discharge petition to force votes

The vote was the latest effort by House Democrats to maneuver past the Republican majority using a discharge petition — once a rare tool, but now used increasingly to form bipartisan coalitions.

The discharge petition process forces the bill to the House floor for consideration, powering past House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leaders. It was used to help pass legislation that required the Justice Department to release the files of the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and are typically able to swat back such efforts from Democrats. But Democrats and Republicans have formed bipartisan alliances to reach the majority needed on the discharge petitions.

Pressley’s effort to discharge the bill won support from four Republicans on the initial petition, and several more once it came to the floor vote.

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday faced federal lawmakers for the first time since September as he sought to defend a more than 12% proposed cut to his department’s budget and dodge arrows from angry Democrats along the way.

In his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, kicking off an expected sprint of seven budget hearings he’ll attend across congressional committees and subcommittees over the next week, Kennedy emphasized the administration’s work to reform dietary guidelines and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Republicans on the committee praised Kennedy as a “breath of fresh air” and asked him to promote his department’s recent actions. Democrats, who have been furious over Kennedy’s sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, largely had a different agenda.

They needled Kennedy on what they viewed as the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on fraud, demanded to know why he was cutting budgets for various programs and slammed his efforts to pull back vaccine recommendations and messaging, which they said have caused unnecessary deaths.

Kennedy fired back, often raising his voice as he accused the Democrats of misrepresenting his work and past statements.

Here are three standout moments from Thursday’s hearing:

A standoff over measles

One heated exchange early in the hearing came between Kennedy and Rep. Linda Sanchez. The California Democrat decried recent measles outbreaks across the U.S. and asked Kennedy to answer for the fact that under his leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back public health messaging supporting vaccination.

“As a mother, this horrifies me,” Sanchez said. “Did President Trump approve your decision to end CDC’s pro-vaccine public messaging campaign?”

Kennedy repeatedly refused to answer, saying first he wanted to respond to the “misstatements that you’ve made” and later praising the Trump administration’s record on preventing measles, although protections against the disease have eroded in some parts of the country as vaccination rates have dropped.

“That’s not answering my question,” Sanchez said as the two talked over each other.

But Sanchez also got Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics, to acknowledge that a 6-year-old who died of measles last year in West Texas could have potentially been saved with vaccination.

“Do you agree with the majority of doctors that the measles vaccine could have saved that child’s life in Texas?” she asked.

“It’s possible, certainly,” Kennedy said.

RFK Jr. denies talking about Black children being ‘re-parented’

A fight erupted between Kennedy and Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama, when Kennedy vehemently denied making remarks he’d said in 2024.

The comments dated back to when Kennedy was a presidential candidate. On the “High Level Conversations” podcast last July, he said, “Psychiatric drugs — which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

“Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a Black child?” Sewell asked, as her staff held up a poster featuring an abbreviated version of the quote.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say.”

“You’re making stuff up,” he later claimed.

A recording of the podcast shows he made the comments during a conversation about free rehabilitation facilities he was proposing opening at the time in rural areas around the country.

Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Kennedy before joining the administration was referring to spaces where young people facing alienation, mental health challenges and despair could get re-parented, which she said was a psychotherapy term for “developing the emotional regulation, discipline, boundaries, and self-worth that may not have been established in childhood.”

For Kennedy and his former party, civility is the exception

Kennedy spent most of his life as a Democrat, the scion of one of the nation’s most famous political families. Both Republicans and Democrats during the hearing began their remarks by expressing their admiration of Kennedy’s relatives, among them former President John F. Kennedy.

But again and again throughout Thursday’s hearing, the fraying of bonds between Kennedy and his former party was on full display as spiteful comments were passed back and forth.

The Health secretary grew defensive and visibly agitated. He repeatedly criticized Democratic lawmakers for not giving him a word in edgewise.

“They’ve all shut me up,” Kennedy said at one point. “They give a little speech that they can go and market, you know, for fundraising, and they don’t allow me to answer the question.”

On a few rare occasions, the exchanges were civil. One representative, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, used humor to make that happen.

“I promise to give you easy, comfortable questions if you don’t yell at me and hurt my feelings,” she told Kennedy. He promised he wouldn’t.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — If the U.S. and Iran aren’t able to soon come to a deal to end the war or extend the ceasefire that expires next week, the Trump administration is setting the stage to shift its war campaign toward a more economic-focused effort aimed at choking Tehran into submission rather than relying on bombs alone.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at a White House briefing Wednesday that the U.S. plans to ramp up economic pain on Iran, and said the new moves will be the “financial equivalent” of a bombing campaign.

The threat of secondary economic sanctions on countries doing business with people, firms, and ships under Iranian control — including allies like the United Arab Emirates and competitors like China — represents an escalation of sanctions that the U.S. is already employing.

Bessent said the administration has “told companies, we have told countries that if you are buying Iranian oil, that if Iranian money is sitting in your banks, we are now willing to apply secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure. And the Iranians should know that this is going to be the financial equivalent of what we saw in the kinetic activities.”

Treasury Department warns China, Hong Kong, the UAE and Oman

The warning comes the day after the Treasury Department sent a letter to financial institutions in China, Hong Kong, the UAE, and Oman, threatening to levy secondary sanctions for doing business with Iran, and accusing those countries of allowing Iranian illicit activities to flow through their financial institutions.

It’s part of an economic playbook that President Trump still can use to pressure Iran to accept U.S. proposals to limit its nuclear ambitions, a person familiar with the administration’s thinking told the Associated Press. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private discussions on the record.

Privately, the argument being made to Trump is that the Iranians think they can weather the storm — but if they cannot pay their loyalists, that could pressure Iran to the table.

And some in the administration believe there are still more economic targets that can be hit that would put the economic hurt on Iran, including bonyads, the charitable trusts that account for a significant percentage of the Iranian economy.

Bessent told reporters that two Chinese banks have received warnings about handling Iranian money. Trump is preparing to visit Beijing next month for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Bessent also said that Iran’s Gulf neighbors are now willing to look at freezing Iranian money in their banks because of Iran’s aggression during the war.

Daniel Pickard, a sanctions attorney, said imposing secondary sanctions could result in “diplomatic and economic blowback” from allies that could hurt efforts to build coalitions against Tehran.

“A lot of our trading partners have been outspoken in regard to their opposition to the conflict in Iran,” Pickard said. “Most economic sanctions professionals would agree that when you get more people on the team, the chances of your economic sanctions being effective are greater.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. imposed sanctions on an oil smuggling network connected to the deceased senior Iranian security official Ali Shamkhani, who was a close advisor to the former Supreme Leader of Iran. Sanctions include dozens of individuals, companies, and vessels involved in secretly transporting and selling Iranian and Russian oil through front companies, many of which are in the UAE.

“Treasury will continue to cut off Iran’s illicit smuggling and terror proxy networks,” Bessent said in a statement. “Financial institutions should be on notice that Treasury will leverage all tools and authorities, including secondary sanctions, against those that continue to support Tehran’s terrorist activities.

The administration believes the momentum has shifted

Trump administration officials have also signaled growing confidence that the ceasefire and a blockade of shipments from Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz have shifted momentum in Trump’s favor.

Iran has endured tens of billions of dollars in damage during the bombardment to the country’s infrastructure — including setbacks to its oil industry, the heart of its fragile and long-isolated economy — that could take years to repair.

Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday said Trump “doesn’t want to make, like, a small deal. He wants to make the grand bargain.”

“That’s the trade that he’s offering,” Vance said. “If you guys commit to not having a nuclear weapon, we are going to make Iran thrive.”

The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, offered a more caustic assessment of the moment, suggesting that Trump had “played the checkmate move” on Iran by implementing the blockage in the strait.

“If Iran chooses the path of a deal that’s great for the world, that’s great for everybody. If Iran chooses the path of economic strangulation by blockade, then the world will pass Iran by,” Miller said in a Fox News appearance Tuesday evening. “New energy routes will be established. New supply chains will be established. Other nations throughout the region — throughout the world, and especially America — will power the world and Iran will become a footnote.”

Some Republicans are skeptical that more sanctions will work

Some Republicans believe that any tactic to exert more pressure on Tehran is worth trying.

“I would support anything,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “If the administration came up with the ideas, I would support all of the above. More pressure, the better.”

Others were skeptical, noting that Tehran was already facing a litany of economic penalties that had little impact on its behavior.

“I’m not sure if it’s sanctions that’ll do it. I think we’re putting some pretty heavy sanctions on right now,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a member of the Banking and Armed Services Committees. “I personally am just not optimistic that we actually can fix this thing without a regime change.”

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that has been critical of Trump’s decision to launch the war, says that Trump had been “politically cornered and strategically constrained” before he announced the ceasefire. But now, Parsi argues, Trump may have altered the difficult dynamic and created a situation where “Iran now appears to need an agreement more than the United States does.”

“The window now open offers Tehran a chance to convert battlefield leverage into lasting strategic gain,” Parsi wrote in a new analysis. “To let it close would mean forfeiting not just incremental progress, but the possibility of reshaping its economic and geopolitical position. By contrast, the United States, having already secured a tenuous exit ramp through the ceasefire, has less at stake in the short term.”

Hussein, Madhani, Weissert and Kim write for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — Beverly Hills-based Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary faced a bruising courtroom loss Wednesday after a federal jury found that the company operated a monopoly over concert venues.

The verdict by a Manhattan, N.Y., jury came after a five-week trial and caps a closely watched case that could have far reaching effects across the music industry, potentially leading to the breakup of the companies.

Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket seller for live events, while Live Nation is a dominant force in the concert business.

The civil case began when the federal government alleged that Live Nation used its clout to engage in a variety of anticompetitive practices, including preventing venues from using multiple ticket sellers.

“It is time to hold them accountable,” Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for the states, said in a closing argument. He called Live Nation a “monopolistic bully” that drove up prices for ticket buyers.

Jurors agreed. They found that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. The judge will assess damages later.

Live Nation, which owns and operates hundreds of venues, countered that it did not violate U.S. antitrust laws, arguing that artists, sports teams and venues decide prices and ticketing practices.

“Success is not against the antitrust laws in the United States,” Live Nation attorney David Marriott said in his summation.

Live Nation said in a statement that the “jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter,” noting the court had yet to rule on a motion it had filed to challenge its liability in the case.

The trial revealed some embarrassing internal communications, including emails from a Live Nation executive who called customers “so stupid” and said the company was “robbing them blind, baby.” The executive, Benjamin Baker, testified that the messages were “very immature and unacceptable.”

The original lawsuit, led by a cadre of interested parties including the federal government, 39 states and the District of Columbia, dates to 2024. It alleged that Live Nation and Ticketmaster monopolized various aspects of the live music industry, such as concert promotion, venue operations, artist management and ticketing services.

Live Nation manages more than 400 artists and controls more than 265 venues in North America, while Ticketmaster simultaneously controls around 80% of the primary ticket marketplace and also is increasing its involvement in the resale market, according to the lawsuit.

Last month, Live Nation secured an unexpected tentative settlement with the Department of Justice in which the company agreed to several structural changes to its business, including adjustments to ticketing deals with venues, capping service fees and paying a $280-million fine.

However, more than 30 states, including California, decided to proceed with the trial. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta praised these state-led efforts to protect consumers, even amid dwindling antitrust enforcement from the Trump administration, he said in a statement.

“This is a historic and resounding victory for artists, fans, and the venues that support them,” Bonta said. “We are incredibly proud of today’s outcome … this verdict shows just how far states can go to protect our residents from big corporations that are using their power to illegally raise prices and rip-off Americans.”

Though a verdict has been reached, remedies for how Live Nation will be held accountable for its actions are still being decided by the judge.

One possibility is that the companies could be split up, an outcome favored by critics.

National Independent Venue Assn. Executive Director Stephen Parker said Ticketmaster and Live Nation need to be separate for the industry to see change.

“Live Nation and Ticketmaster must be broken up now. Ticketmaster should not be permitted to participate in the ticket resale market. Live Nation should not be able to promote more than 50% of artists’ tours,” Parker said in a statement. “And the damages paid to the states should be remitted to the independent venues, promoters, festivals, and fans that have suffered under Live Nation’s monopolistic reign over the last 15 years.”

Serona Elton, attorney and interim vice dean at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, said that the separation of Live Nation and Ticket master seems to be “on the table,” but she said it’s too early to assess the verdict’s fallout on the music industry.

Elton said fans might notice small changes in pricing, but there are factors other than Live Nation that are contributing to high ticket prices, such as the secondary ticket market as well as supply and demand challenges.

The verdict, Elton said, “sends a message of support to music companies and professionals working in the live space who have felt like they have suffered financial consequences because of Live Nation’s behavior.”

The ruling is a small but necessary step toward achieving a balanced and competitive ticketing industry, said Hal Singer, a managing director of economic consulting firm Econ One, who specializes in antitrust and consumer protection issues.

Forcing a Ticketmaster sale probably is the only remedy that will bring real change, Singer said.

“We’re not out of the woods quite yet,” Singer said. “We’ve kind of tilted the probability.… It could change the competitive balance. But that requires that a meaningful remedy follows the liability. You need both.”

Fans and some artists have long groused about Ticketmaster, which was founded in 1976 and merged with Live Nation in 2010.

Dustin Brighton, director of government relations for the Coalition for Ticket Fairness, agreed that although the verdict is a landmark moment for fans, “it’s not the end of the road.”

“As the court considers remedies, the focus must be on restoring competition, increasing transparency, and ensuring fans have real choice,” Brighton said in a statement.

Times staff writer August Brown and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Caracas, April 15, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued two new general licenses on Tuesday facilitating transactions with Venezuelan state institutions.

 for Venezuela on Tuesday: a commercial license (No. 56) and a financial license (No. 57), signaling a partial easing of restrictions while maintaining key controls.

General License 56 (GL56) authorizes US entities to negotiate and sign “contingent contracts” for future commercial operations in Venezuela. This allows firms to move forward with agreements, investments, or projects, though their final execution remains subject to separate OFAC approval.

The waiver maintains important restrictions, including a ban on payments in gold or cryptocurrencies, as well as prohibitions on transactions involving China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. It likewise forbids transactions involving Venezuelan debt and does not unblock currently frozen Venezuelan assets.

For its part, General License 57 (GL57) permits a broad range of financial operations with the Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV), as well as Venezuela’s public banks: Banco de Venezuela, Banco Digital de los Trabajadores, Banco del Tesoro, and entities in which these institutions hold a 50 percent or greater stake.

The allowed transactions include opening and managing accounts, conducting US dollar transfers, issuing loans, and providing banking services. The BCV was sanctioned in April 2019, effectively isolating Venezuela from international financial circuits and increasing costs for basic transactions.

The latest sanctions waivers are expected to facilitate financial flows to the Venezuelan economy, including the transfer of Venezuelan oil revenues that are currently controlled by the Trump administration. US authorities have returned a confirmed US $500 million out of an initial deal estimated at $2 billion, while US and Venezuelan officials have confirmed the purchase of US-manufactured medicines and hospital equipment using Venezuelan funds.

Analyst Hermes Pérez warned that reincorporation into the SWIFT system and establishment of US-based accounts could take several months due to security and technological requirements. Other economists argued that GL57 could allow the Central Bank to stabilize the Venezuelan foreign exchange system.

For several years, a parallel exchange rate between the US dollar and the Venezuelan bolívar has coexisted with the official one set by the Central Bank, often with a gap above 50 percent that fueled distortions in retail activities and currency speculation.

Since the January 3 military strikes and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has issued several licenses to expand US influence in the Caribbean nation, particularly in key economic sectors such as hydrocarbons and mining.

In parallel, Venezuelan authorities have promoted several pro-business reforms, while multiple Trump officials and corporate executives have come the South American country and held meetings with the acting government led by Delcy Rodríguez.

The latest waivers coincided with the visit to Caracas of a US Department of Energy delegation led by Assistant Secretary Kyle Haustveit. Rodríguez hosted the official on Wednesday in a work meeting at the presidential palace.

During a short, televised intervention, Rodríguez argued that OFAC licenses do not provide sufficient “legal certainty” and reiterated calls for Trump to lift unilateral coercive measures against the country.

“An investor requires greater legal certainty. A license does not provide long-term legal guarantees because it is subject to temporality,” she argued. Rodríguez claimed Washington and Caracas have “enough maturity” to establish “long-term” energy cooperation ties.

“We are working very hard on changes that can attract investment, and which can build an energy cooperation agenda with the United States,” she said.

Rodríguez additionally disclosed recent meetings with representatives from ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, stating that authorities have “taken into account recommendations” from oil majors in recent legislative overhauls. Both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused to accept hydrocarbon reforms under former President Hugo Chávez in the 2000s, later securing multi-billion-dollar arbitration awards against the Caracas as compensation for the nationalization of their assets.

Haustveit and the Energy Department delegation were also present on Monday during the signing of agreements with Chevron that granted the Texas-based conglomerate an increased stake in the Petroindependencia joint venture and awarded an additional extra-heavy crude bloc for exploration to the Petropiar mixed company. Chevron owns minority stakes in both joint enterprises with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.

Shell, Eni and Repsol are among the other energy giants to have recently advanced in deals with the Venezuelan government under the improved conditions of the new Hydrocarbon Law.

US Chargé d’Affaires in Venezuela Laura Dogu was also present at the Chevron deal-signing ceremony and the meeting with Haustveit’s delegation. However, the White House announced Wednesday that her post will be taken over by veteran diplomat John Barrett.

Barrett, who previously served as chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Guatemala since January 21, 2026, was recently accused by Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo of interference during judicial elections for the Constitutional Court held in March.

Edited by Ricardo Vaz in Caracas.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge must end his “intrusive” contempt investigation of the Trump administration for failing to comply with an order to turn around planes carrying Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador last year, a divided appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.

Chief Judge James Boasberg abused his discretion in forging ahead with criminal contempt proceedings over the March 2025 deportation flights, according to the majority opinion by a three-judge panel from U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

President Trump’s administration has a “clear and indisputable” right to the termination of the contempt proceedings, Circuit Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

“The legal error at the heart of these criminal contempt proceedings demonstrates why further investigation by the district court is an abuse of discretion,” Rao wrote. “Criminal contempt is available only for the violation of an order that is clear and specific. (Boasberg’s March 2025 order) did not clearly and specifically bar the government from transferring plaintiffs into Salvadoran custody.”

Rao was nominated by Trump, a Republican. Boasberg, chief judge of the district court in Washington, D.C., was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama.

On March 15, 2025, two planes transporting Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. to El Salvador were in the air when Boasberg ordered the administration to turn them around.

Administration officials claim Boasberg is biased and overstepped his authority.

Boasberg has said the Trump administration may have acted in bad faith by trying to rush Venezuelan migrants out of the country in defiance of his order blocking their deportations to El Salvador. In an April 16, 2025 order, the judge said he gave the administration “ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions” but concluded that “none of their responses has been satisfactory.”

Trump has called for impeaching Boasberg. Last year, the Justice Department filed a misconduct complaint accusing Boasberg of making improper public comments about Trump and his administration. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts publicly rejected calls for Boasberg’s impeachment.

The case is assigned to Rao and Circuit Judges Justin Walker and J. Michelle Childs. Walker, also a Trump nominee, wrote a separate opinion concurring with Roa’s. Childs, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, dissented from the majority.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — President Trump’s administration this week acknowledged it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program, a glaring mistake that undercuts a federal campaign to tackle waste, mostly in Democratic-led states.

The error, which the administration admitted first to the Associated Press, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration’s sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings. One of a few mischaracterizations the administration made about New York’s Medicaid program, the error also reflected a common criticism that’s been made of Trump’s second administration — that it tends to attack first and confirm the facts later.

“These numbers could have been cleared up in a phone call, so it’s really slapdash,” said Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan, whose recent analysis called attention to the Trump administration’s inaccurate claim.

The mistake appeared in comments made last month by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, in a social media video and in a letter to New York’s Democratic governor announcing the fraud investigation.

Oz claimed that New York’s Medicaid program last year provided some 5 million people with personal care services, which assist people in need with basic activities like bathing, grooming and meal preparation. That would add up to nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees.

“That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in the video, adding in his post that New York needs to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”

But the real number of New Yorkers who used those services last year was about 450,000, or between 6% and 7% of total enrollees, CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP this week. He said the agency misidentified New York’s approach to applying billing codes and had since refined its methodology.

“CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” he said in an emailed statement.

Krepich said the probe was ongoing as the administration still has concerns with New York’s oversight of personal care services and the Medicaid program and is reviewing the state’s response to last month’s letter. CMS had raised other flags about New York’s program, including that it spends more per beneficiary and per resident than the average state, has high personal care spending and employs so many personal care aides that the job category is now the largest in the state.

Health analysts said the state’s high spending reflected both high costs for services in New York and a policy choice to provide robust at-home care. Cadence Acquaviva, senior public information officer for the New York Department of Health, called Oz’s initial mischaracterizations “a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.”

“New York State remains committed to protecting and preserving vital Medicaid programs that deliver high-quality services to New Yorkers who depend on them,” she said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “The initial claim by CMS was patently false, and we are glad they now admit it.”

“Governor Hochul has been clear that New York has zero tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, or any other state programs, and will continue her efforts to root out bad actors, protect taxpayer dollars, and safeguard the critical programs that New Yorkers rely on,” spokesperson Nicolette Simmonds said.

New York probe is part of a larger crackdown

The Trump administration’s investigation into New York comes as it has similarly approached at least four other states, including California, Florida, Maine and Minnesota, with investigations into potential healthcare fraud. The anti-fraud effort appears to be expanding as voters in the upcoming midterm elections say they’re concerned about affordability.

Trump last month signed an executive order to create an anti-fraud task force across federal benefit programs led by Vice President JD Vance. As part of that project, Vance announced the administration would temporarily halt $243 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota over fraud concerns, a move over which the state has since sued.

Kinnucan, the analyst with expertise in New York’s Medicaid program, said he’s concerned that the Trump administration’s adversarial approach to targeting fraud in some states “politicizes” a conversation that should be a team effort.

“We want to think collaboratively among all the stakeholders in the program about how we can actually fix it,” Kinnucan said. “We don’t want to have fraud be this political football.”

Oz made other claims New York advocates say are inaccurate

In his video, Oz made at least two other claims about New York that Medicaid advocates and beneficiaries say distorted the facts.

In one instance, he said the state recently made its screening for personal care eligibility “more lenient by allowing problems like being ‘easily distracted’ to qualify for a personal care assistant.”

Rebecca Antar, director of the health law unit at the Legal Aid Society, said the opposite was true — that the state in a rule change that went into effect last September instead made its program requirements more stringent. She said being “easily distracted” doesn’t appear anywhere among them.

Krepich said the administrator was referring to whether New York’s standard for personal care services was “sufficiently rigorous.”

“When standards are overly permissive, it risks diverting resources away from individuals with the highest levels of need and placing long-term pressure on the sustainability of the Medicaid program,” he said.

Oz in the video also referred to personal care services as “something that our families would normally do for us, like carrying groceries.”

Kathleen Downes, a 33-year-old who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and uses personal care services in New York’s Nassau County, said she was offended by the notion that all Medicaid beneficiaries have family members who are willing and able to help.

Downes, who has been disabled since birth and needs personal care help for things like showering, using the toilet and eating, said she hires both her mother and outside assistants for personal care services, so her aging mother doesn’t have to take on those tasks full time. She said her mother did the labor unpaid for years, precluding her from pursuing other career opportunities.

“He’s assuming that everybody wants to and can just do it for free forever,” Downes said. “And that’s not feasible for a lot of people.”

Swenson writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.

MIAMI — President Trump shared video of a deadly attack allegedly by a Haitian immigrant accused of bludgeoning a woman with a hammer at a Florida gas station, portraying the killing as justification for his administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Rolbert Joachin, 40, was arrested and charged with killing a woman on April 2 in Fort Myers, about 160 miles northwest of Miami. Authorities said the man was from Haiti and arrived in the U.S. in 2022. The woman who was killed was identified as a 51-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh and a mother of two adult daughters.

Trump, who posted the video late Thursday to his Truth Social account, has often sought to portray immigrants as bringing crime to the U.S., and the video emerging from the Florida attack presented him with a new, particularly graphic opportunity to do so. Trump also often paints Democrats and his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, as allowing in immigrants who posed a criminal or national security threat to the U.S.

Critics say the president unjustly paints all immigrants as criminals in an effort to bolster his immigration agenda, when studies have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

“The video of her brutal slaying is one of the most vicious things you will ever see,” Trump said in his post, describing the man as an “animal.”

Graphic video captured woman’s killing

The woman who was killed was working as a clerk at the convenience store of the gas station, according to court documents. The killing happened outside the store and the man was arrested the same day.

In security camera footage of her killing posted on the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed, the man can be seen repeatedly slamming the hammer into a black vehicle parked in front of the gas station. Eventually a woman in black pants and a pink shirt comes out and appears to question him.

The man, wearing a yellow shirt and black shorts, walks up to the woman and immediately swings the hammer at her head. The woman falls down on the sidewalk in front of the gas station’s front doors. The man attacks the woman with the hammer multiple times before stepping over her unmoving body and walking away, out of the frame of the camera.

The victim was later identified in a police report as Nilufa Easmin, 51. A GoFundMe started by Samir Bahadur Syed, the President of the Bangladesh Association of Southwest Florida, described her as a “devoted mother who worked tirelessly to provide for her two young daughters.”

Syed said that Easmin arrived in the United States about three decades ago and resided in Miami and Palm Beach before moving to Florida’s west coast. She was a single mother, and her two daughters — one 23 years old and the other about 26 — were born in the U.S., Syed told the Associated Press.

He added that Easmin had been working at the convenience store for nearly five months and that she also held another job.

Fort Myers police said they responded to a report of a woman being hit with a hammer at a Chevron gas station. When officers arrived they found a woman on the ground with blood around her head and multiple cuts.

Officers later located Joachin walking on the street and took him into custody. The police said he has confessed. He was charged with murder and property damage and appeared in court on Wednesday. His arraignment is set for May 4.

An email message sent to the public defender listed in court records as Joachin’s lawyer seeking comment was not immediately returned.

Trump administration criticizes temporary deportation protections

Trump blamed Biden for granting the man temporary protection to stay in the U.S.

Kelly Walker, acting field office director for ICE enforcement and removal operations for the Miami field office, said during a news conference Friday that Joachin arrived in a “water vessel” near Key West, Fla., in August 2022. He was arrested and given Temporary Protected Status in 2023. That status was revoked this week, Walker said.

The Trump administration has harshly criticized the use of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which can be granted by an administration to citizens of a country going through turmoil or strife. Immigrants who qualify are allowed to stay in the U.S. and work for a temporary period, although Republican critics contend that the Biden administration misused its TPS authorities to broadly allow hundreds of thousands of people to stay in the country.

There are several lawsuits at the federal courts challenging Trump’s efforts to terminate TPS for more than one million people, including 350,000 Haitians. In March, a federal appeals court sided with a lower judge’s ruling against the end of temporary status for Haiti and the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on April 29.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration have often highlighted crimes committed by immigrants and created a website where one can look up people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the crimes they’ve committed in the U.S.

The administration often highlights “Angel Families” who have lost family members to crimes committed by immigrants.

On Thursday, ICE held an event marking the one-year anniversary of the reopening of an office dedicated to assisting those families, including emotional testimony from some of the surviving family members.

Salomon, Bellisle and Santana write for the Associated Press. Bellisle reported from Seattle and Santana from Washington.

NEW YORK — In his first 100 days in office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has governed with a star power unusual in politics.

Crowds of supporters show up to his news conferences. Basic municipal services have been infused with newfound excitement. Celebrities help him promote his agenda.

In the process, he’s been able to notch a few notable early wins. And he’s reached a detente, at least for now, with President Trump, a mercurial leader with an affinity for celebrities.

But as Mamdani, a Democrat, marks an early milestone in his mayoralty, it remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to leverage his fame into achieving the progressive policy proposals that propelled him to office.

Though he still has staunch critics, many of whom still view his past criticisms of the police department and Israel as major problems, Mamdani has been able to ease concerns among at least some skeptics.

“It’s early but so far, so good,” said Jay Jacobs, chair of the state’s Democratic Party, who made waves for not endorsing Mamdani during the election. “We may not agree on everything philosophically, but he is getting the job done.”

‘The biggest needs and the smallest needs’

As the mayor approached his 100th day — long a benchmark for judging an administration’s opening vision — his team has moved to highlight the administration’s commitment to the everyday responsibilities of the job.

While much of those duties are typical for his local office — picking up trash, plowing snow and filling potholes — the 34-year-old mayor has leaned on his knack for viral content creation to drive interest and awareness of government programs.

To hype up his child-care program for 2-year-olds, Mamdani recruited Cardi B to help judge a jingle contest that will determine the initiative’s theme song. His slick social media videos helped recruit thousands of new snow shovelers as a storm bore down on the city. A public service announcement he made brought more than 50,000 new subscribers to the city’s emergency alert system in a single week.

A few weeks ago, alongside Natasha Cloud of the New York Liberty, Mamdani announced a bracket-style competition in which people could vote on small projects for him to come and personally fix on his 100th day.

On Friday, Mamdani selected a winner — a garbage-filled lot in the Bronx — and helped pick up some of the junk with a sanitation crew, following a celebratory event that featured an overflowing trash can mascot and a cheerleading squad.

“I think every single day it’s an opportunity to meet the needs of New Yorkers,” he said. “And what we’ve seen over the course of this 100 days is that New York City wants to see a city government that is able to meet the biggest needs and the smallest needs.”

The celebrity status, though, can also prompt backlash. During a bitter cold snap, his surprise appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” was seen by some as insensitive at a moment when the death toll of homeless New Yorkers was rapidly rising.

“Too much styling and profiling,” said Curtis Sliwa, a Republican who ran against Mamdani during last year’s election, noting longstanding problems with street homelessness, public housing and infrastructure.

Still, Sliwa, who hammered Mamdani during the campaign but recently appeared in a comedy skit with the mayor during the City Hall press corps’ annual roast, appeared to give Mamdani some credit, even if it came with a caveat.

“We just had Eric Adams, swagger man who’d party to the break of dawn, and now we have a guy who seems like he’s got a normal working schedule,” said Sliwa, referencing the city’s previous mayor. “So having Zohran as the alternative, I think for a lot of people even if they disagree with him, there’s some stability.”

Still a star among supporters

On the night of Mamdani’s election party, hundreds packed the streets, some spontaneously, waiting for a glimpse of the mayor-elect leaving the venue. Departing campaign aides were cheered, by name, well after midnight. One attendee likened the street party to Beatlemania.

“I feel like I’m at a presidential inauguration,” said Medhavie Agnihotri, a 25-year-old tech consultant. “This is the first time in a while I’ve felt this hope.”

His star power has not appeared to wane since then.

Outside City Hall, New Yorkers and tourists frequently stop for selfies, peering through the iron gates in search of the mayor.

This week, on the mayor’s 97th day in office, a crowd gathered in the lobby of the busy Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan to watch as Mamdani announced the city would start transferring Rikers Island jail detainees with serious medical illnesses to a specialized unit at the hospital.

He entered to woos and applause from the onlookers, as many held up cellphones to record videos of the mayor. Dozens more watched along from a set of elevated walkways.

One man, Ricardo Granados, a 67-year-old retiree, was on his way to take his son to a medical appointment but stopped to see what all the hubbub was about just before the news conference started. He appeared delighted to learn the mayor was going to show up, saying he met Mamdani previously when the mayor was campaigning in his neighborhood.

“I’m extremely fond of him. I think he’s going to make a real difference,” Granados said. “He wants to find out who needs what and he wants to help.”

Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jake Offenhartz contributed to this report.

U.S. abortion opponents are increasingly frustrated with the lack of action by President Trump’s administration to stem the flow of abortion pills prescribed online that they view as undermining state abortion bans.

A court ruling this week in a lawsuit the Louisiana attorney general brought against Trump’s Food and Drug Administration cast a spotlight on the simmering tension. The judge said the state has a strong case while declining to block telehealth prescriptions to the pill mifepristone for now.

Anti-abortion groups are pushing the FDA to move faster with a review that they hope will result in restrictions on the abortion pill, including blocking its prescribing via telehealth platforms. The administration says the work takes time.

The groups have focused mostly on the health agency and not the Republican president whose three U.S. Supreme Court appointees were instrumental in the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed the state bans in the first place. But the administration’s requests in the Louisiana lawsuit and similar ones elsewhere to delay rulings until it finishes a review have sparked anger for some activists.

“The stall tactics are beyond frustrating,” Kristi Hamrick, a spokesperson for Students for Life of America, said in an interview. Hamrick said the administration could also block the pills from being mailed by changing its interpretation of a 19th century law and enforcing it.

A judge opened the door to pushing the administration

U.S. District Judge David Joseph, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, gave a mixed ruling Tuesday in a case brought by Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill and a woman who says her boyfriend coerced her into taking mifepristone to end a pregnancy.

Their overall aim is to roll back FDA rules that have made the pills more accessible. Murrill, like officials in other states that have filed similar lawsuits, contends that the availability of the pills via online providers takes the teeth out of the bans in the 13 states that bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions.

Surveys of abortion providers have suggested that its availability through telehealth is a reason the number of abortions in the U.S. has not dropped since the overturn of Roe. While state abortion bans include prohibitions on abortion using the pills, some Democratic-controlled states have adopted laws that seek to protect medical providers who prescribe them over telehealth and mail the pills to states with bans. Those so-called shield laws are being tested through civil and criminal cases.

In the Louisiana case, Joseph declined to grant Murrill’s request to block telehealth prescriptions to the pills while the case moves through the courts. But he said he could do that eventually and the plaintiffs in the case are likely to succeed on the merits of their arguments because the state has demonstrated it’s suffered “irreparable harm.”

He also ordered the FDA to report to him within six months on the status of its review of the drug.

On Wednesday, Murrill filed a notice that she’s taking the case to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in hopes of forcing faster action.

The politics aren’t simple

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, an influential conservative voice who is also a former Louisiana lawmaker, applauded Murrill’s step.

He said people he meets are often shocked to learn that the number of abortions has not dropped since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling.

“Bewilderment sets in,” he said. “We’re already seeing an enthusiasm gap between the parties. What the Republicans do not need is a dampening of enthusiasm in their base.”

He’s hoping the administration will restrict abortion pills rather than risk losing support from conservative, anti-abortion voters in November’s midterm elections.

Other groups are being more cautions.

Madison LaClare, director of federal government affairs at National Right to Life, said her group trusts the administration to review mifepristone. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, avoided harsh words for the president: “The Trump-Vance administration has an important opportunity right now to prioritize women’s safety,” she said in a statement.

Still, recent electoral results suggest that voters seeking to keep abortion available have the political momentum. Since Roe was overturned, abortion has been on the ballot directly in 17 states. Voters have sided with the abortion-rights side in 14 of those questions.

“There seems to be an emerging consensus in the country that people don’t want to ban abortion,” said Rachel Rebouche, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law who studies abortion.

The FDA says it’s working on it

In a statement Wednesday in response to questions from the Associated Press, the FDA said it’s reviewing the safety of mifepristone, “including the collection of robust and timely data, evaluation of data integrity, and implementation of the analyses, validation, and peer-review.”

After that, the agency said, it will decide whether to make changes to the rules about how the drug can be prescribed.

It said this kind of study can take a year or more to complete by academics but the agency is trying to move faster than that. A spokesperson did not answer questions about when the work began.

Mifepristone has been a political priority for anti-abortion activists and their allies in Congress since Trump returned to office last year. In his January 2025 confirmation hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was repeatedly asked about the drug by Republican lawmakers and said the president had requested a safety review.

Frustration over signs that the FDA isn’t prioritizing curbing abortions flared last fall when the FDA approved an additional generic version of mifepristone.

The drug is most often used for abortion in combination with another drug, misoprostol.

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 as a safe and effective way to end early pregnancies.

Because of rare cases of excessive bleeding, the FDA initially imposed strict limits on who could prescribe and distribute the pill — only specially certified physicians and only after an in-person appointment where the person would receive the pill.

Both those requirements were dropped during the COVID years. At the time, FDA officials said that after more than 20 years of monitoring mifepristone use, and reviewing dozens of studies involving thousands of women, it was clear that women could safely use the pill without direct supervision.

Mulvihill and Perrone write for the Associated Press.

The US president has lashed out at European partners for declining to contribute military forces to the war on Iran.

United States President Donald Trump has reportedly discussed withdrawing from NATO, the transatlantic alliance that has been a central pillar of Western security for decades.

At a news briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the US and Israel’s war on Iran as a “test” that the alliance had failed.

Despite Trump’s pressure, NATO allies had declined to contribute military forces to the war, outside of defensive manoeuvres.

Leavitt’s comments came shortly before Trump met with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House.

“I have a direct quote from the president of the United States on NATO, and I will share it with all of you. They were tested, and they failed,” Leavitt said.

“I would add, it’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people over the course of the last six weeks, when it’s the American people who have been funding their defence.”

Trump, she continued, was preparing to have “a very frank and candid conversation” with Rutte that afternoon.

In an interview with the news outlet CNN after their meeting, Rutte likewise described the encounter as “frank and open”. He reiterated his support for Trump, but added that NATO allies had offered support through logistics and access to bases.

“Did the president say he was going to try withdraw from NATO or, at the very least, not support NATO as much as other presidents have,” CNN host Jake Tapper asked Rutte.

“There is a disappointment, clearly. But at the same time he was also listening careful to my arguments of what is happening,” Rutte replied, before pivoting to praise of Trump’s leadership.

The US president has had a mixed relationship with NATO, sometimes threatening to pull US support and, at other times, reassuring allies of the US’s continued commitment to the alliance.

Since returning to the presidency in 2025, Trump has renewed his pressure campaign for NATO’s European partners to step up their defence spending.

Last June, at the 2025 NATO summit, he largely succeeded. The NATO members agreed to nonbinding commitments to increase their defence budgets to 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035.

But Spain sought an exemption, leading Trump to denounce the country repeatedly over the past year.

Tensions between the US and its European allies were further strained last year when Trump threatened to use military force to seize the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland, claiming that its ownership was essential for national security.

The US has eased away from those threats. But Trump has continued to assert that US ownership of Greenland is necessary, despite strong protests from the territory’s residents and European leaders.

After the US and Israel unilaterally launched a war against Iran on February 28, Trump lashed out at European countries for their lack of interest in contributing to the campaign.

Many legal scholars consider the war an act of aggression, in violation of international law.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Trump administration is considering whether to close US bases or move troops out of countries such as Spain and Germany as punishment for their stance on the war.

When asked by reporters if Trump was considering leaving NATO, Leavitt said it was something the president “has discussed” and could address after his meeting with Rutte.

Trump and Rutte are considered to have a close relationship. Rutte has visited the White House multiple times during Trump’s second term, including in March, July, August and October of last year.

In the past, Rutte has warned that NATO “will not work” without US support.