A deadly Ebola outbreak in the DRC is spreading across borders, with no approved vaccine or treatment for this strain.
A fast-growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has crossed borders, raising alarms far beyond Central Africa. This time, the virus is a strain with no approved vaccine or treatment. As cases rise and governments scramble to respond, can the outbreak be contained before it spreads further?
In this episode:
Catherine Soi (@cate_soi), Al Jazeera Correspondent
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Marcos Bartolomé and Sarí el-Khalili with Spencer Cline, Tamara Khandaker, Jana Dabliz, and our host, Malika Bilal. It was edited by Tamara Khandaker.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Rick Rush mixed this episode. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer.
The June 2026 election has been dominated by a down-to-the-wire governor’s race that has been filled with drama, scandal and much national attention.
A large group of Democrats are vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in this very blue state. But the candidates have — until recently — struggled to generate wide excitement, and it’s far from clear who will win. On the Republican side, commentator Steve Hilton has benefited from the divided Democrats (and a Trump endorsement) to remain near the top of the pack in polls.
But the governor’s race is far from the only vital decision voters will make.
Los Angeles residents will vote for mayor in a race that is far from certain. And there are numerous state, county, local and judicial candidates to choose from.
Here is a breakdown:
When is the election?
The election is Tuesday, but early voting has already been already under way.
You can find your polling place here or by calling (800) 345-8683. All polling locations are open on election day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
What are the big statewide races?
Let’s start with the race for governor, of course. With Newsom term-limited, Democrats and Republicans are competing for California’s open gubernatorial seat in what could reshape the state’s political landscape. Democrats went in hoping for easy sailing, but a wide field and no superstar name has left the race something of a tossup, though Xavier Becerra has been rising in recent polls. On the Republican side, Hilton continues to poll strongly.
There is a possibility California could make history: The state has never has elected a woman as governor, and only once has a person of color held the office.
But there are many down-ballot statewide races as well,
(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
What are the big L.A. races?
The L.A. mayor’s race is grabbing all the attention. Polls show the leading candidates are Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and community activist and former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt. Those same polls show Bass has struggled in the aftermath of the 2025 firestorms, a big issue for Pratt. Another major topic is affordability, which Raman has taken up.
But there are several other competitive races plus ballot measures.
What are the big L.A. County races?
These contests don’t get the attention of the mayor’s and governor’s races, but L.A. County voters have a lot of choices to make.
When Congress passed the big, ugly bill known as HR 1 last year, most Americans understood it meant cuts to Medicaid, the safety net program millions rely on for medical insurance.
But few Californians realized just how much it will affect the Golden State when its provisions really kick in, starting after the midterms (the Republicans aren’t that dumb) and continuing on in cascading cuts for the next few years.
Millions of Californians — not just low-income folks — are going to feel the effects, whether through a loss of insurance, fewer providers able to keep their doors open, or rising premiums and costs.
“This problem trickles up,” state Senate leader Monique Limón (D-Goleta) told me. “This is not just going to impact the people that have a public healthcare plan. When you see a hospital close, when you see medical providers no longer being able to practice, it is absolutely going to impact everybody, the middle class included.”
Added to the loss of federal funds, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s most recent budget plan (which the Legislature has to debate in coming weeks) includes cuts at the state level. This is in part to contend with the loss of federal money, but also because healthcare costs keep rising and even in this wealthy state, we can’t afford the bills — at least not without some changes.
What those changes are — and who should bear the brunt of them — is a complicated and largely ignored debate happening right now. While our candidates for governor have been grilled on whether they support single-payer healthcare or not, (Becerra is a sort-of, Steyer is a yes) the real question isn’t how is the next governor going to expand access to care — but how are we going to keep the whole system from collapsing right now.
“This is not hypothetical, this is what’s coming down the line,” Limón said.
The problem
About 15 million adults and children, or about 1 in 3 of our state’s residents, rely on Medi-Cal, which is what California calls its Medicaid program.
Through a creative bit of state financing called the Managed Care Organization, or MCO, tax, the federal government has been paying for a big chunk of the costs of that insurance, about $7 billion a year. President Trump’s HR 1 makes that money go bye-bye by greatly reducing the MCO, leaving the state to figure out how to backfill that cash. And that’s just one of the ways the big, ugly bill hurts California. Yes, it’s complicated.
The number of Californians losing health insurance coverage could roughly double in the next four years. Above, a patient undergoes treatment for tongue cancer at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on March 6, 2026.
(David McNew / Getty Images)
Newsom’s budget plan relies in a not-small way on restructuring the MCO tax to fit HR 1’s new rules. But here’s the problem with that — any fix will require approval from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly shown the welfare of Californians is not a high priority. In fact, the Trump administration in March rejected California’s request to update another fee related to hospitals that also generates billions for Medi-Cal.
So maybe Newsom will be able to negotiate a plan that saves the MCO and California healthcare. But wouldn’t it be much better for the GOP, with a presidential election looming, to watch California (and her presidential-contender governor) tumble off a healthcare cliff? Few states rely on an MCO tax the way ours does, which means our pain is going to be far more visible and profound if we lose this funding.
That means if Newsom’s budget is approved by the state Legislature with the MCO fix, the state is taking a gamble. If the feds don’t approve some new version of the MCO tax, “it would have major implications,” Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto told me. She’s a senior policy fellow with the nonpartisan California Budget and Policy Center.
Sort-of solutions
What’s the fourth-largest economy in the world to do? Limón would like to see the state stop subsidizing corporations who pay so meagerly that their employees qualify for Medi-Cal.
“We don’t have the luxury of being able to provide these tax subsidies,” Limón said.
Turns out, 42% of Medi-Cal enrollees are full-time workers, according to a new report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Although most big corporations offer some sort of health insurance, it’s often tied to working a certain number of hours (which they then make sure not to schedule) or it has prohibitive costs or other barriers.
In 2022, the Labor Center found, 34% of low-wage workers received their health insurance through employers, compared with 69% of higher wage workers — meaning California is picking up insurance costs because low-wage employers are finding ways out of them.
“Over the decades, Medi-Cal has really undergone a significant transformation. It’s shifted from a program that primarily served the disabled and indigent and elderly folks to one that largely supports folks that work in low-wage industries,” Tia Orr, the executive director of SEIU California, told me. “Medi-Cal has now become a program where folks that work every single day have to rely on it. The idea that someone can work every day and qualify for food stamps and Medi-Cal, it should be eye-opening to folks.”
Right now, she points out, California taxpayers are paying about $7,800 a year for each person on Medi-Cal.
“The corporations that they work for don’t have to pay one dollar of that, right?”
Limón and her Senate colleagues would like to change that. They have proposed the “Fair Share” plan that would impose a tax on the state’s largest and wealthiest corporations whose employees rely on public assistance. It’s more of an idea than a fleshed-out policy at this point, but as ideas go, it ain’t a bad one. It’s been done in Massachusetts, and New Jersey’s governor has suggested it.
In California, it deserves more attention than it’s currently being given.
To be fair, Newsom’s plan also would also limit state corporate tax credits to $5 million, as my colleague Taryn Luna points out, or 50% of a firm’s tax liability, whichever is greater. That change could bring in $850 million next year to state coffers and grow to $1.8 billion by the end of the decade. That’s still not nearly enough to cover healthcare costs.
To add to the drama, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts all this will get worse — that the number of Californians losing health insurance coverage could roughly double in the next four years. The Newsom administration projects federal Medi-Cal changes could push off 44,000 people in 2026-27, growing to 1.3 million people by 2029-30.
That means more people getting sick and dying because they can’t afford a doctor. It means more doctors, clinics and hospitals losing income vital to keeping their doors open, and more emergency rooms being overloaded because it’s the only option.
“The worst is yet to come,” Rachel Linn Gish, interim deputy director at Health Access California, a consumer healthcare advocacy coalition, told me. “If you wait to take action until it gets bad, it’s already going to be way too late.”
She’s right, and however you look at it, a fix should include corporations paying their fair share.
After winning his first race for Congress in 1992, 34-year-old Xavier Becerra credited a wave of community supporters in Los Angeles, many Latino, for backing his upstart campaign, saying he hoped his win was proof that grassroots politics was more valuable than “heavy dollars.”
More than 30 years later, Becerra, 68, is again an upstart candidate — this time for California governor. Again he is facing monied competition — including from chief Democratic rival Tom Steyer, a self-funded billionaire — and relying on Latino and other grassroots support.
California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks during a campaign event in Los Angeles on April 18.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
“You are the people power that it takes,” he told a crowd of supporters at a recent “Fighting for the California Dream” town hall in Los Angeles. “California wasn’t built by billionaires. It was built by your families. It was built by our families.”
That Becerra is still fighting in the race — and drawing new people to his events — reflects a remarkable and hard-to-explain turnaround for a campaign that appeared all but dead less than a month ago, then bounded back into contention after Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped from the race and resigned from Congress amid sexual assault allegations.
Before Swalwell’s collapse, Becerra’s biggest splash in the race came in March, when USC excluded him and other low-performing candidates from a planned debate. The criteria left every candidate of color out, and after Becerra and others complained, the forum was canceled.
A California Democratic Party tracking poll, released in early April before the Swalwell scandal broke, showed Becerra near the bottom of the field with 4% support among likely voters. In a party poll taken after it broke, Becerra’s support jumped to 13% — the biggest increase of any candidate.
Certainly some of Swalwell’s supporters shifted to Becerra, but political observers are still pondering why so many did — and not to Steyer, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter or other Democrats with single-digit support, such as former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San José Mayor Matt Mahan.
Whatever the answer, Becerra’s surge has sparked fresh interest in his candidacy. It also has raised questions about his time as California attorney general, when he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times, and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, when he backed the Biden administration’s strict COVID-19 rules and oversaw the agency’s response to a massive influx of unaccompanied minors at the southern border.
It has also put a growing target on Becerra’s back — including at Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate, when rivals criticized him as a “D.C. insider” with poorly detailed plans for the state — and sparked hope among many Latinos that California will elect one of them as governor for the first time in state history, sending a strong message of resistance to the intensely anti-immigrant Trump administration.
Of course, Becerra faces hurdles. Steyer, a hedge fund founder who has donated more than $130 million to his own campaign, has been ahead of him in polling, as have two Republicans: Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who has President Trump’s endorsement, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. Only the top two candidates in the June 2 primary advance to the November election.
Still, Becerra now has a path to victory, one that did not exist even a month ago, and new funding. Many Democratic voters remain undecided, and many — shocked by the Swalwell scandal — are looking for another Democratic front-runner to back.
In an interview with The Times, Becerra said he’s the man for the job, because “California needs a work horse, not a show horse.”
Xavier Becerra, left, gathers with other candidates for Los Angeles mayor in 2000.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Rising wave of Latino political power
A Sacramento native and the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a Mexican American father, Becerra graduated from Stanford Law School and served as a deputy to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp before being elected in 1990 to the California Assembly.
In 1993, Becerra entered Congress on a rising wave of Latino political power and the heels of a fractious presidential election in which former White House aide Pat Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary on a stridently anti-immigrant, “America First” message — one Trump repurposed in both 2016 and 2024.
It was a defining political moment for Latinos across the country, and for Becerra personally, said Fernando Guerra, founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
“He certainly has been and is part of the incorporation of Latinos into California history and California politics, and it really begins in the early ’90s,” Guerra said. “His rise and political career is really a reflection of the rise and political incorporation of Latinos.”
In 1994, Becerra helped oppose Proposition 187, a state initiative to deny undocumented immigrants access to public education and healthcare. In 1996, he sharply criticized the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which cut federal benefits for many legal immigrants. By 1997, Becerra — just 39 — was chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the first Latino member to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
By 2016, Becerra, 58, was the highest-ranking Latino in Congress when then-Gov. Jerry Brown tapped him to replace a Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California attorney general. There, Becerra played a key role in defending the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, against Republican attacks.
Then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arrives for a hearing to discuss reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.
(Greg Nash / Associated Press)
Criticism and praise
In a rush of endorsements in recent days, Becerra’s supporters have lauded his executive experience, calling him a “proven leader” who, amid constant threats from the Trump administration, is “ready to fight back on day one.”
Becerra’s critics also have pointed to his leadership record, but to highlight what they contend are glaring failures.
Steyer spokesman Kevin Liao alleged Becerra was “absent, ineffective, or too late” in responding to COVID-19 and other public health crises as health secretary, and that California “cannot afford incompetence, or someone who disappears when things get hard.”
The remarks echoed others made during the pandemic, including by Eric Topol, who is executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, a professor of translational medicine and a cardiologist. During the pandemic, Topol accused Becerra of being “invisible” in the fight to control it. In a recent interview, he said he still believes that.
Topol said the Biden administration’s COVID response was defined by poor data collection and “infighting” among agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, including on vital issues such as when Americans should receive booster shots and how long they should isolate after infection.
Becerra “basically took a very absent, low profile — didn’t show up, didn’t harmonize the remarkable infighting,” Topol said. “The buck stops with him.”
Dr. David A. Kessler, the Biden administration’s top science official on COVID-19 and now a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at UC San Francisco, fiercely defended Becerra, crediting him with rolling out some 676 million vaccines and steering the nation out of a wildly unfamiliar health crisis with substantial success — what Kessler called a “historical achievement” that proved government “can do big things.”
Kessler said Becerra rightly assessed that the country needed to hear from medical experts, not politicians, and so deferred at times to the doctors, epidemiologists and vaccinologists he smartly surrounded himself with and trusted — but he was never absent. “He enabled us. He was there. Anything I needed, he helped deliver,” Kessler said.
Becerra said there were a lot of people involved with the COVID-19 fight, including a White House team launched before his confirmation as health secretary. Still, it was his agency that ultimately led the response, and helped bring the pandemic to an end, he said.
“At the end of four years, when we had put some 700 million COVID shots into the arms of Americans and pulled the country and our economy out of the COVID crisis, it was HHS — and I was the secretary of HHS,” he said.
Becerra’s rivals in the governor’s race also have attacked him for how he responded to an influx of unaccompanied immigrant minors during the pandemic. They allege Becerra rushed their release to relatives and other sponsors while ignoring concerns from career health staff that some of those placements weren’t safe — resulting in thousands of kids being lost to the system, forced into child labor or trafficked.
The criticism stems in part from a sweeping New York Times investigation that found the health department couldn’t find some 85,000 children it had released, that Becerra had relaxed screening processes for sponsors and that placement concerns from career health staff went ignored or were silenced.
The investigation by reporter Hannah Dreier found that thousands of the 250,000 or so migrant children who arrived in the U.S. between early 2021 and early 2023 had “ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws.”
Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra holds a news conference in Border Field State Park in San Diego in 2017.
(Francine Orr/ Los Angeles Times)
It found there were many signs of “the explosive growth of this labor force,” and that staff had repeatedly flagged concerns about it in reports that reached Becerra’s desk. It also reported that, during a staff meeting in the summer of 2022, Becerra had pressed staff to move children even more quickly through the process, comparing them to factory parts.
“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” Becerra said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the newspaper.
Danni Wang, another Steyer spokesperson, said children “were handed to gang members, traffickers, and abusers because [Becerra] stripped the background checks that had protected them for years.”
Becerra said the controversy is one he has addressed publicly for years, including in multiple congressional hearings. He said his team worked diligently to properly vet sponsors and do right by the thousands of children in their care, despite Congress failing to provide the budget needed to restore a system of licensed care facilities that the first Trump administration had dismantled.
“It was a wreck. They had closed facilities, they had fired the licensed caregivers. And remember, this was during COVID, [when] you didn’t want anyone to be near each other,” he said. “How do you take care of thousands of kids in a center that could house maybe 50 kids?”
He said he led an aggressive push to stand up temporary facilities — including in places like the San Diego Convention Center — while rebuilding the licensed care facilities Trump had dismantled and working to place kids into the community as quickly and safely as possible.
Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s chief of staff for the first two years of the administration, said Becerra helped lead the administration out of the crisis by being “an outspoken advocate” for the children in its care.
“Xavier was very, very insistent in meetings and very outspoken on the risk that some of these people [the kids] were being placed with were not the proper people to place them with, and pushed hard for more rigor in the process,” Klain said.
Becerra also has faced criticism and questions related to the federal indictment of his former chief of staff Sean McCluskie, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after authorities accused him of stealing some $225,000 from Becerra’s dormant state political campaign account.
Becerra was not implicated in the scandal — which he’s previously described as a “gut punch” — and said he did everything he could to ensure McCluskie and others were held accountable once it came to light, including by providing “testimony and documents” to the FBI and federal prosecutors.
Hilton has said the scandal, which also implicated a former aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, showed that “corruption has become totally ingrained and systemic” under Democratic rule in California.
Looking ahead
Experts said Becerra’s long resume will help him stand out in a race with less experienced competitors and no household names — and that Californians electing a Latino for the first time, as the Trump administration conducts one of the largest ever deportation campaigns, dismantles immigrant rights and targets people on the street based largely on their looking and sounding Latino, would be a major political moment.
Becerra said his extensive experience should matter to voters, because such experience will be necessary in the pivotal and no doubt chaotic Trump years ahead, when “pizzazz and dazzle” will matter less than steady competence from “someone who’s actually been in the midst of that hurricane” before.
“It helps to have gone through these things. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’ve done it successfully,” he said. “I’ve proven that, whether it was taking on Donald Trump toe to toe as the [attorney general], whether it was getting us out of COVID working closely with the White House to deploy the resources and get that done, we made it happen.”
