At first glance, it looks like a typical Republican campaign advertisement. As images of President Trump flash across the screen, the 30-second spot says, “America will never be a communist country” and boasts about the “largest tax cuts in history.”
But there’s something different near the end — a bit of text at the bottom that says “paid for by the U.S. government.”
According to AdImpact, which tracks media spending, the advertisement cost $14,000 and it ran during conservative shows on Fox News and Newsmax.
The White House said in a statement the ad is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.”
“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” the White House statement said.
Fox News and Newsmax did not immediately return a request for comment.
The White House did not say what agency paid for the spot, which includes background music with singers crooning “love me” over and over.
The advertisement does not say who voters should support in the midterms, but it meshes with campaign messaging from Trump and other Republicans, particularly during the party’s unusual convention in Dallas earlier this month.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is in line to chair the House Judiciary Committee if his party wins the majority in November, said in a social media post that it’s a violation of the Hatch Act for government employees to work on such a video.
“It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns,” Raskin wrote.
Republicans also criticized the ad.
North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who is not running for reelection, referenced the former right-wing Hungarian prime minister to critique the advertisement.
“It’s inappropriate. It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it. But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orban,” he said.
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy said he hadn’t seen the ad but questioned whether it was legal.
“I don’t generally like to see politicians use public money to pay for their own campaign ads,” he said.
Catalini writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Joey Cappelletti and Steven Sloan in Washington contributed to this report.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill aimed at deprioritizing commercial logging in a unique state forest system, arguing the measure would jeopardize the ability to test best management practices.
At issue are the state’s 14 demonstration forests — managed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire — which are billed as “living laboratories” for forest management practices. Under existing law, they’re directed to produce as much timber as can be sustained over time, while considering factors like recreation and wildlife.
Assembly Bill 2494 would have eliminated what’s often characterized as a logging mandate in favor of prioritizing values such as carbon storage, wildfire resilience and biodiversity conservation. It also would have directed state officials to seek agreements with Native American tribes to integrate their traditional knowledge into managing the land.
In Newsom’s veto message, he said the forests “produce cutting-edge strategies that inform forest management on public and private lands across California,” which is key for fighting climate change and improving wildfire resilience.
“By narrowing the management of these forests to a limited set of public benefits, this bill risks the state’s ability to fully demonstrate the best science-based practices,” he wrote Friday. “At a time when California is racing to keep pace with a rapidly changing climate, we cannot afford to lose the flexibility needed to safeguard our forests for future generations.”
The move deals a blow to a grassroots coalition that included tribes, environmentalists and mountain bikers, some of whom have fought for decades to rein in logging at Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Mendocino County. In recent years, activists have staged protests and tree sits, harkening back to the “timber wars” of the 1980s and ‘90s.
The bill grew in part out of discussions with constituents who wanted to see the forest run differently, according to its author, Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa).
Rogers, who represents the North Coast, called Newsom’s veto message “nonsensical” and said it didn’t reflect the language of the bill.
“Current law says that the guiding principle for the management of the forests is maximum sustained production of high-quality wood products,” he told The Times. “That’s much more narrow as a directive on how to manage those lands than by expanding it to include biodiversity, carbon sequestration, research, recreation.”
Polly Girvin, who pushed for changes at Jackson along with her late partner and tribal leader Priscilla Hunter, said the fight will continue under California’s next governor. She wants to see Native Americans take an even stronger leadership role going forward, pointing to rights afforded to them by state law.
“Our local tribal voice is not pro-logging; it’s really to keep the world in balance, to honor the cries of the ancestors, to try to save the trees from commercial logging,” said Girvin, a retired attorney focused on Native American law.
Leaders in Mendocino and Humboldt counties backed the measure. Humboldt County Supervisor Steve Madrone saw it as codifying practices that could help rebuild trust in the community, which he said Cal Fire had lost.
“It was not going to restrict it from being able to do all kinds of things,” he said. “Frankly, it was going to be better than just letting them kind of focus on board feet.”
Cal Fire’s Kevin Conway, who oversees the state’s demonstration forests, said he could not comment on the measure.
The bill was opposed by the Rural County Representatives of California, an advocacy group representing 40 counties, along with many in the timber and agriculture industries.
Staci Heaton, senior policy advocate for RCRC, echoed Newsom’s concerns that the legislation would have limited what could be done in the forests to achieve resilience, such as the ability to harvest trees of different sizes and types. She said they also had concerns about the funding structure and what she described as vague definitions in the bill, which could invite litigation.
“We appreciate the governor signaling that we’re going to continue to use sound forest management in California,” Heaton said.
Asked about the disagreement among some counties, she said there tends to be “more of a split in what people think good forest management looks like” when it comes to coastal redwood forests.
“We maintain that a lot of our forests really aren’t healthy in their current condition, and there’s too many straws in the ground, and there does need to be, in some areas, more aggressive management,” she said.
Washington — Two leading progressive lawmakers, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar, are unveiling legislation Wednesday that would ban artificial superintelligence and create a federal agency to oversee advanced AI as some of the industry’s own leaders urge Congress to impose guardrails on the advancing technology.
The bill, provided first to the Associated Press, would also pause advanced AI development until guidelines are implemented while creating the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Multiple employees at leading AI companies are endorsing the bill.
“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘slow it down,’” Sanders, I-Vt., said in an interview with AP. “Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don’t think we do.”
Congress has so far done little to rein in the AI industry even as some of its most prominent leaders warn about potentially catastrophic risks. President Trump has resisted recent calls for greater government oversight, putting him at odds with tech leaders including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk.
The bill aims to dramatically slow down AI development
The legislation would permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence, which it defines as a system that exceeds human cognitive ability or has sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the destruction or disempowerment of humanity.
It would temporarily pause development of the most advanced AI systems until new federal safety rules are established by a new Department of Artificial Intelligence. Advanced AI systems would then need federal approval before they could be deployed. Violations could carry significant penalties, including up to 20 years in prison in some cases.
A number of current employees at AI companies and experts signed on in support of the bill, according to a statement shared with AP.
Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, a researcher in OpenAI’s Safety Systems, said in a statement supporting the bill that “superintelligence could either go extremely right or extremely wrong” and that “we shouldn’t be playing such games.”
Swante Scholz, a software engineer at Google DeepMind who said he was not speaking on behalf of his employer, said on the current path of development, the “most likely outcome is an existential catastrophe for humanity.”
“A ban on superintelligence development would be a positive change for the foreseeable future,” Scholz said in a statement.
The bill faces long odds but draws a line in a growing fight
The bill from Sanders and Casar faces long odds in the Republican-controlled Congress, where lawmakers have struggled to coalesce around even less sweeping AI regulations.
But it offers a window into how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is approaching AI regulation ahead of November’s midterms and a 2028 presidential campaign in which the technology is expected to be an increasingly prominent issue. Casar, a Democrat from Texas, is the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Potential 2028 presidential candidates have rushed in recent weeks to release proposals showing they’re taking the issue seriously. Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore announced a plan to regulate AI on Tuesday, while California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to accelerate implementation of a California law that calls for independent oversight of AI companies last week.
Sanders, a two-time presidential candidate who is now 85, has especially focused on the issue in recent months. In June, he introduced legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed through a one-time tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. Last week, he hosted colleagues for a briefing with experts and also attended a conference focused on the issue alongside Republicans, including former White House adviser Steve Bannon.
The debate over AI regulations has scrambled political alliances both in Washington and for voters across the country.
The survey data say about half, 53%, of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about artificial intelligence’s environmental impacts. That is up from 41% last year. Democrats are driving much of the increase in environmental concern, but the poll also reveals broader worries about the local impact of data centers, which power AI and cloud computing.
Trump has shown little interest in curbing AI risks
While some industry leaders have called for new safeguards, Trump has pushed in the opposite direction. On Tuesday, Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that artificial intelligence will be renamed “super intelligence.”
“I think Trump has very little understanding of what this issue is about,” Sanders said. “I think he’s mainly concerned about the economic implications of a slowdown.”
AI safety is expected to be a central part of talks between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping at the White House this week as the countries compete for dominance in the sector. The prospect of slowing development in the United States while China continues on has also been one of the central arguments against sweeping restrictions.
Sanders argued that avoiding the most dangerous forms of AI would ultimately require cooperation between the two countries, comparing the challenge to nuclear arms control during the Cold War.
“Ronald Reagan, arch-conservative, was smart enough to understand that he had to sit down with Gorbachev, a communist, and work out a nuclear treaty that protected humanity,” Sanders said. “I think we can do that again now.”
The Queen of Country is being honored with a special day on Californians’ calendars.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Sunday that establishes Sept. 25 as Dolly Parton Day. The date’s significance may be obvious to fans of the late country legend: 9-2-5 references Parton’s hit single “9 to 5” from the soundtrack of the 1980 comedy film of the same name that starred Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
“Dolly Parton was an icon,” Newsom said in a video accompanied by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, announcing the bill’s passage. “Dolly was larger than life with big hair and a bigger heart. People around the world have been touched by her music, by her philanthropy, and by her humor.”
Parton died Aug. 25 at 80 years old following a battle with cancer. The beloved songwriter, recording artist, actor and businesswoman was an honored musician, earning 10 Grammy Awards and 10 Country Music Assn. Awards, as well as two Academy Award nominations and a Primetime Emmy. She was the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts in 2005 and the Kennedy Center for the Arts Award in 2006. Parton was also inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
“Her legacy goes well beyond her music,” Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz), who co-authored the bill with Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), said in a statement. “Through the Imagination Library, she put books into the hands of millions of children, and throughout her life she led with kindness, acceptance, and a belief that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. She was also no stranger to the Central Coast, where she performed for packed crowds and spent time over the years. Now, every 9-2-5, California gets to celebrate Dolly and the remarkable legacy she shared with all of us.”
SACRAMENTO — California’s growing data center industry will have more oversight after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills to regulate the industry’s electricity costs and track water consumption.
The new laws come amid growing public concerns about environmental and economic impacts of the massive facilities, and are aimed at protecting consumers from growing electricity costs and tracking the centers’ immense energy and water consumption.
Newsom on Monday criticized President Trump for dismissing calls to curtail or regulate the facilities and heralding them as “money machines,” even as states and communities across the nation take action to ban or regulate the centers.
“While the Trump administration moves toward deregulation, communities are left to deal with the consequences — higher electricity demand, grid constraints, water use, and pollution,” Newsom said in a written statement Monday. “With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense.”
Senate Bill 886 by Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) and Assembly Bill 2383 by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) establish special rules for data centers’ electrical use. The law orders California Public Utilities Commission to create special requirements and rates for data centers’ use of electricity, including the costs for new power and for infrastructure upgrades.
Scores of other states have already passed similar legislation, according to utility groups.
Two bills by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) will require oversight of data center water consumption. One measure will require data center operators, when applying for a business license or permit, to disclose an estimate of their water use and the expected source of water. Another will bar cities and counties from approving a new or expanded data center unless the developer submits a water assessment and a water scarcity plan, and will require developers to cover the cost of any water system upgrade that is necessary.
Newsom vetoed a similar Papan bill last year that would have required new data centers to disclose their expected water use. The governor said he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements” on “this critically important digital infrastructure” without understanding the full impact on the businesses.
But over the past year, a wave of data center pushback has swept the nation, including California, where dozens of cities and counties have proposed or adopted moratoriums on the facilities. While California lawmakers have hesitated to pursue outright moratoriums and bans that the public is calling for, the political tide has nevertheless turned against the facilities.
Data centers have existed for decades but are rapidly expanding because of the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI. The centers help power everything from streaming services to videoconferencing calls.
Data centers in California are typically smaller than the mammoth, 500+-megawatt AI facilities making headlines in other parts of the country. Electricity costs and state regulations on gas-powered generators limit the vast majority of them to under 100 megawatts.
But as proposals increase in number, opposition has been fierce and growing. A Public Policy Institute of California poll from July showed that 73% of residents oppose the construction of data centers in their communities.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed legislation to increase security for the state’s voting systems and protect Californians’ ability to cast ballots in an effort to guard against potential interference in the Nov. 3 election, including by the Trump administration.
Newsom pointed to the Trump administration’s recent effort to restrict mail-in voting through the U.S. Postal Service, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the presence of federal monitors at California polls last year as evidence that Trump “will continue his efforts to interfere with the November election.”
“Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity,” Newsom said in a statement.”We have no bigger task than fighting to protect the right to vote from interference and meddling — the future of democracy is on the line. These bills today build upon the wall California has built to safeguard our electoral process.”
The governor signed the package of bills at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, where a year earlier federal agents gathered outside a political rally he was hosting. Then Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who had been leading the immigration operations in California, was among those outside the event, joined by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns. Newsom described their presence as political intimidation.
One bill Newsom signed Saturday cites efforts to “weaponize law enforcement authority for political purposes,” including Republican “Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of ballots in Riverside County,” and the election monitors sent by the U.S. Justice Department to polling sites in five counties during a 2025 special election on redistricting.
Such moves “have given rise to unprecedented concerns about law enforcement interference” in elections and “[demonstrate] that these threats are not merely hypothetical,” the bill by Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) reads.
The law, Senate Bill 884, which takes effect immediately, requires counties to open ballot drop-off locations 30 days before an election — two days earlier than usual — and allows counties to ban electioneering, or trying to influence voters’ decisions, within up to 200 feet of polling sites. It also bans police from making arrests near voting locations except for crimes against people, property, or disrupting the voting process.
Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor who placed fourth in the primary, drew swift condemnation and legal challenges this spring after he ordered deputies to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County elections office. Voting rights groups and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta challenged the move, which is being decided by the California Supreme Court.
Bianco carted off truckloads of ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in February after securing a warrant based on claims that the office allowed fraudulent votes in the special election to redraw California’s congressional districts under Proposition 50 in 2025.
Earlier this year, Newsom signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.
On Saturday the Democratic governor signed a bill making it a felony to seize or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Future seizures could be punishable by up to four years in prison.
“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), the bill’s author and a former longtime county elections chief, said last month. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”
Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.
Another bill, Senate Bill 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.
Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1664, which requires elections officials to immediately notify the attorney general and secretary of state immediately upon learning of any warrants, subpoenas or law enforcement investigations involving election records or voting equipment.
Newsom also signed bills to boost protections under the California Voting Rights Act, including an explicit ban on voter suppression and expanded access to election materials in languages other than English.
The governor also signed legislation to require more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns. The measure, Assembly Bill 1130, came in the wake of a controversy in the June primary election when social media influencers took on a more visible role in the campaigns.
Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.
The new incentive is aimed at bringing back jobs for the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists. It will allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses related specifically to post-production work done in California, and unlike the state’s existing film and TV credit, it doesn’t require productions to shoot here.
“This legislation protects the extraordinary people who make this industry possible and makes it unmistakably clear: California is still the future of film and television,” said Gov. Newsom in a statement. “We have the talent. We have the infrastructure.”
The bill, AB 2319, was authored by Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) and introduced earlier this year. It cleared the state Senate 33 to 5 on Aug. 30, and the Assembly approved the final version 72 to 2 the same day. Schultz originally sought $100 million for the program. It is expected to start in January with $10 million, according to the Assemblymember Schulz’s office.
“It’s a historic moment for California’s post-production community. But it’s also just the beginning of what we really need to do to to fight for our industry,” said Marielle Abaunza, president of the California Post Alliance, a group advocating for the bill. She said the group is readying its strategy to get more funding for the program next year.
As Hollywood productions continue chase tax credits to other states and countries, much of the post-production work is going with them. California’s share of U.S. post-production employment has fallen from 53% to 42% over the last 13 years, according to CVL Economics, an economic consulting firm tied to California Post Alliance. The state had about 12,000 post-production jobs last year, per CVL Economics.
Ben Urquhart, 51, spent 18 years as a post-production executive at NBCUniversal. The Culver City resident hasn’t been able to find work in the two and a half years since he was laid off.
“It’s grim and it’s hard. There are jobs, but we have a large amount of extremely qualified people competing for every level of job,” Urquhart said. “When I was a kid, I was a [production assistant] in the 90s, and you could get a job within a couple of weeks. But when I got laid off a couple of years ago, I realized that is certainly not the case at all anymore. It’s been a large-scale transformation.”
Urquhart said the new incentive would help California compete with jurisdictions that already offer these credits and “level the playing field.”
Last year, California expanded its film and TV tax credit program, more than doubling the old $330-million cap to $750 million through June 30, 2030. The existing program already covers post-production, but only if 75% of filming or the overall budget is spent in the state.
Newsom also signed a bill that would strengthen the current tax incentive program overall. In June he revealed a state budget measure that capped how much in tax credits a business can claim each year, a limit industry groups warned would undercut the expanded program. But the new Senate Bill 186 enhances refundability for the industry and exempts independent productions from the credit limits, starting next year.
There’s no better way to draw attention to an artist’s work than threatening to shut it down.
Take this week, when Macklemore was kicked off singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran’s tour at the behest of concert venue owners who found the rapper’s on-stage pleas to “Free Palestine” offensive.
Now Macklemore, who hasn’t had a major hit since the 2010s, is relevant again. He has the support of artists, fans and thousands more outraged by his dismissal and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The “Thrift Shop” rapper has emerged a hero, and a chastened Sheeran and Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft have pledged to donate millions toward humanitarian causes in “the region.”
The stakes are considerably higher for Israeli documentarians Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened this week to revoke their citizenship for what he called the “shocking incitement” that is of their forthcoming documentary, “NAZA.”
NAZA is an acronym used by Israeli military intelligence to describe the number of civilians it estimates will be killed in an airstrike. The documentary captures the actions of Israel’s military after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in footage shot at night from Tel Aviv rooftops. “NAZA” also features anonymous interviews with intelligence officers and soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces, and builds on reporting first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian to make the case that mass civilian deaths were built into Israel’s target decisions in Gaza.
When “NAZA” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 10, the documentary received a 25-minute standing ovation, setting a festival record. It went on to win the prestigious Special Jury Prize.
Soon after, the directors came under attack from members of Israel’s government, with Culture Minister Miki Zohar accusing them of “treason against the state” and calling for their citizenship to be revoked.
But it’s Netanyahu who’s providing free publicity for “NAZA,” ensuring that everyone outside the film festival circuit will know of the documentary by the time of its official North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26.
In a move that’s likely designed to quash “NAZA’s” release and silence its directors, the prime minster pledged this week to advance two bills that would address the “immense damage” done to Israeli soldiers in the film.
Netanyahu explained in a social media clip that one bill would “revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames soldiers, and the second [bill will] hit them in their pockets and increase the statutory damages for defamation they can be sued for by 20 times. We will hit them both in their pockets and in their citizenship, as their place is not with us.”
Macklemore lost his place on a pop music tour for speaking out against Israel’s military. Abraham and Szor may lose their place as Israeli citizens. The pair were already considered controversial for their 2024 documentary, “No Other Land,” a film chronicling five years of displacement and violence in the life of Palestinians in a small village in the occupied West Bank. It won the 2025 documentary feature film Oscar.
They explained in a statement why making “NAZA” was so important.
“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” the statement said. “While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: How does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like? … The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said, but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.”
The filmmakers have said that they’re using an “innovative distribution model” to bring the film to audiences “as quickly as possible.” It’s slated to reach Los Angeles on Oct. 9 before rolling out in theaters nationwide.
“NAZA” may not need a robust marketing plan if Netanyahu and the Israeli government continue to condemn the film and threaten its creators with expulsion from their own country. Censorship, and worse, are the surest way to elevate an artist and their work. Just ask Macklemore.
SACRAMENTO — With just over six weeks until the Nov. 3 election, the two candidates for California governor hit the campaign trail Thursday to promote plans to address the state’s high cost of living and continue rebuilding after the deadly wildfires that burned thousands of Los Angeles homes last year.
Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton are vying to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is considering a run for president in 2028.
While Becerra holds a comfortable lead in the solidly-Democratic state, according to recent opinion polls, Hilton has aggressively attacked the veteran Democratic official as an “empty suit” who would bend to special interests in Sacramento.
“Xavier Becerra will be a rubber stamp for Democrat laws that raise your costs. That is the simple choice in this election,” Hilton said during a morning press conference in front of the state Capitol.
With a stack of file boxes representing the more than 1,100 bills passed by the legislature this year towering over him, Hilton, a former Fox News host and one-time advisor to a UK prime minister, pledged to veto any bill that would lead to higher costs if he is elected governor.
“We have to go in a new direction. Lower your costs, cut the BS, the bureaucracy, and these bills that raise costs for every Californian,” he said.
Hilton called out bills now on Newsom’s desk that would expand the state’s antitrust law and tighten rules for packaging made of recycled materials, measures opposed by business groups. Another signed by Newsom earlier this year allows Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties to surpass a 2% limit on local sales taxes.
California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton speaks during a town hall with union film industry workers at Blue Cloud Movie Ranch on Wednesday in Santa Clarita.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
He has promised to slash state regulations and the government workforce to deliver $3 gas, tax-free earnings up to $150,000 and vehicle registration fees capped at $73.
Becerra, a former secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services, met with survivors of the devastating 2025 Altadena wildfires, first responders and community leaders before outlining his plans to prevent such destruction and to deal with fires when they do inevitably break out.
Becerra said his first priority is to secure the $30 billion in disaster aid that the federal government has failed to deliver.
“Job one, if I’m fortunate to become the governor, will be to fight, fight, and fight, get that money that people for nearly two years here in Altadena and the Palisades and elsewhere have been waiting for,” he said, speaking to reporters on what used to be the deck of a home belonging to a member of the Altadena Town Council.
Becerra recalled that during his 24 years in Congress there was widespread, bipartisan support for sending federal assistance to disaster areas, including areas devastated by hurricanes on the Eastern Seaboard or floods in the South. California deserves the same response, he said.
He said he would seek to leverage tax dollars to help communities better prepare for wildfires, creating buffers and hardening structures because of wildfires that will inevitably occur in certain communities.
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Becerra said.
Becerra said he would seek to work with local governments to create a functional emergency alert system throughout the state. In the aftermath of 2025 wildfires, there was heavy criticism about delayed emergency notifications and evacuation orders.
He also said that wildfires now occur year-round, not just during what was once called fire season, and it was critical to make sure that firefighters were prepared to respond year round by not expecting them to work more than 60 or 70 hours per week when a fire breaks out.
“We want people to stay in these positions because when the fires hit, we can’t be asking where is the fire force,” he said.
When asked about the cost of gas, Becerra blamed the Trump administration for a “reckless, illegal war in Iran” and “crazy, illegal” tariffs that have contributed to higher prices.
Hilton, who is endorsed by President Trump, blamed the state’s high cost of living squarely on state policies, not on fuel prices driven up by the war.
“We don’t need to make changes at the federal level to lower peoples’ costs in California,” Hilton said. “I’m focused on what I can do as governor to lower costs in California, and that is to roll back the Democrat policies that have given us the highest costs. It’s not federal policies that have given us the highest gas prices in the country, it’s Democrat policies in California.”
A Public Policy Institute of California survey released earlier this week showed Becerra with a 22-point lead over Hilton, driven by Democrats’ large voter registration advantage.
According to a May report from the Secretary of State’s office, just under 45% of voters were registered as Democrats, 25% Republicans and 22% with no party preference. The remaining 7% were registered with another political party.
Becerra and Hilton are scheduled to meet in a Sept. 30 debate hosted by CNN.
Crypto markets dropped late on Tuesday and early Wednesday, as investors digested a defeat that few in the industry had expected.
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The procedural motion on the CLARITY Act drew 49 votes in favour and 50 against, 11 short of the 60 required to advance, dealing a major setback to efforts to pass market structure legislation this year.
The CLARITY Act, formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, was meant to divide supervision of digital assets between the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, replacing a fragmented system in which classification has largely been settled through enforcement actions and litigation.
Bitcoin fell almost 34 over the past 24 hours to below $76,000, while HYPE, the token behind the decentralised exchange Hyperliquid, which stood to benefit from the legislation, also dropped about 4% to below $78.
Most major tokens fell alongside them.
A deal that still was not enough
The bill’s defeat is striking because so much had been conceded.
US President Donald Trump agreed over the weekend to ethics restrictions he had long resisted, including a requirement that federal officials and their spouses divest significant financial interests in crypto issuers or place them in a blind trust, and a role for state attorneys general in enforcing those rules.
Republican negotiators said that over 120 Democratic requests were written into the final text of the more than 600-page bill, representing a major bipartisan effort.
Still, it was not enough.
Four Republicans, Jerry Moran, Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Thom Tillis, joined the 45 Democrats who voted against it. The Democratic Senator Chris Coons did not vote.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, the bill’s most prominent opponent, said it “fails to adequately protect investors, our financial system and our national security,” and attacked Trump’s crypto ventures on the US Senate floor hours before the vote.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis’s vote was a procedural exception. After having publicly backing the ethics package that morning, Tillis voted no to preserve a motion to reconsider, leaving open the possibility of another cloture vote.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who has led crypto legislation in the US Senate since co-authoring the Responsible Financial Innovation Act in 2022, was blunt afterwards.
“I think we’re done. It’s over,” she told reporters before going considerably further online.
“The once-proud Democratic Party is anti-consumer and pro-illicit finance, anti-ethics, anti-free enterprise, anti-worker, anti-livable wage jobs and pro-socialism,” she wrote in a social media post.
The failed vote likely means the crypto industry will have to wait until next year for clearer rules to be discussed.
The US midterm elections are in just seven weeks which complicates bringing the bill back up for consideration in the short term.
Senators are scheduled to leave Washington in early October and not return until after the election and the House recesses even earlier, heading out of town already at the end of this week.
Members, especially those in tight races, are eager to return to their home states and hit the campaign trail.
Regulators inherit the problem
The legislation’s failure does not mean nothing happens. It means the rules are more likely to be written by agencies instead.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission under Paul Atkins and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Michael Selig have already been building a framework without Congress.
The two signed a cooperation agreement in March and issued a joint interpretation sorting tokens into five categories, with Atkins stating that most crypto assets are not, in themselves, securities.
The SEC’s own agenda includes registration exemptions for token launches, a safe harbour for projects decentralising away from central control, and rules on custody and trading venues.
Analysts expect that work to accelerate now.
However, the catch is durability, because agency rules can be rewritten by a future US administration, which is precisely the instability the CLARITY Act was meant to end.
Byron Sher, a Stanford law professor-turned California legislator who wrote some of the state’s most far-reaching environmental laws, died Saturday. He was 98.
Cerebral and soft-spoken, Sher was the antithesis of politicians nowadays. He rarely issued press releases, didn’t convene news conferences, and disliked raising campaign money.
But he left an indelible mark on the environment, authoring legislation offering incentives to recycle, limiting advertisers’ inflated claims about products’ environmental benefits and combating water and air pollution.
He helped lead the effort to preserve ancient redwoods in Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County in 1999, pushing the state and federal government to buy it from Texas financier Charles Hurwitz, who owned Pacific Lumber Co. and was preparing to log it.
A decade earlier, in 1988, Sher authored legislation requiring that California take stock of the sources of greenhouse gases. It was the first time the legislature in California — or any other state — embedded the term “global warming” into a state law, and became the foundation for bills in later decades to combat climate change.
“The heat is on,’’ Sher said presciently, as quoted by the Sacramento Bee on May 5, 1989. “The state can either ignore what science is telling us, or we can respond to this challenge in a responsible way.’’
Because of his legislation, manufacturers today sell more products in spray bottles rather than aerosol cans, people can more easily dispose of televisions and other electronic waste, and underground gasoline storage tanks rarely leak and foul groundwater.
“Byron Sher built the legal and research foundation for California’s climate change regime and by extension helped shape how the world has tried to handle climate change,” said Joe Mathews, a Berggruen Institute fellow who is working on a book about the state’s legislative efforts to confront global warming.
Today, Sher’s 1989 legislation creating state wild and scenic rivers is a barrier to President Trump’s proposal to raise Shasta Dam north of Redding to increase water storage, an idea backed by Central Valley farming interests. His legislation protects the McCloud River, which feeds Shasta Reservoir. Raising the dam would inundate habitat along the McCloud.
That Sher placed such ideas into law reflected his ability to persuade and compromise. Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed the wild rivers legislation, and Sher’s Clean Air Act, which helped shape federal clean air legislation signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.
Their partisan differences aside, Deukmejian viewed Sher as having “great personal integrity,” said Steve Merksamer, who was Deukmejian’s chief of staff.
“When Byron Sher wanted to come into the office and had the bill, would he get in? Absolutely. Would the governor listen to him? Yes,” Merksamer said.
Sher did fall short of convincing Deukmejian to sign one of his bills — a whimsical measure inspired by a Camp Fire girls and boys troop to proclaim the banana slug to be the official state mollusk. Deukmejian vetoed the bill, though Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2024 designating the slimy yellow creature as the official state slug.
Sher was born in St. Louis in 1928, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1952, and joined the Stanford Law School faculty in 1957. He served on the Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s, got recalled in 1967 over his opposition to development and won back his seat in the 1970s. Sher was Palo Alto mayor in 1980 when he won an Assembly seat. He remained in the Assembly until 1996 when he was elected to the state Senate, serving until 2004 when term limits forced him to step aside.
Among the students who passed through his Stanford classrooms was Newsom’s father, William Newsom, who became a state court of appeals justice.
Sher and his aide and friend Kip Lipper attended a 2010 banquet in San Francisco at which the California League of Conservation Voters honored Justice Newsom with the Byron Sher Lifetime Achievement Award. In his acceptance speech, Newsom recalled that Sher was the only Sanford professor who gave him a C. When Lipper asked whether the story was true, Sher deadpanned, “He deserved it.”
“There aren’t a lot of tales to tell about Byron Sher,” said Bill Lockyer, who was Senate leader when Sher won a state seat in 1996. “He went home at night and tended not to get into the Capitol gossip.”
In 1996, Lockyer entrusted Sher to serve on a joint Assembly-Senate conference committee that produced landmark legislation that sought to deregulate California’s electricity system.
Sher added provisions expanding requirements that the state use renewable sources of electricity and called the legislation “an extraordinary result” given the issue’s complexity. Lockyer said Sher’s additions, while important, were “the cherry on top of the toxic sundae.”
The legislation was blamed for California’s electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001 when swashbuckling energy traders manipulated the markets, causing prices to spike, resulting in rolling blackouts, and fueling the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis.
Sher was notable for measures he refused to support. With a few other liberal Democrats, nicknamed the Grizzlies, Sher would pick through turgid language of legislation looking for provisions that reflected the undue influence of special interests.
Sher voted against 1986 legislation that purported to open the way for a shrimp processing facility in West Sacramento. The bill turned out to be part of an elaborate FBI sting that resulted in 14 legislators, lobbyists and others being sent to prison.
“He wasn’t a comfortable politician,” said San Mateo County Supervisor Jackie Speier, a former Democratic congresswoman who served in the Legislature with Sher. “He didn’t speak up a lot. So, when he did, people listened.”
He displayed partisan side in 1994 when Republicans took a 41-seat majority in the 80-seat Assembly, and Republican Assemblyman Jim Brulte was in line to be elected speaker. But Democratic Speaker Willie Brown had a Republican supporter, Paul Horcher, who voted to retain Brown as speaker, plunging the two parties into a yearlong fight for control.
To wrest control from Republicans, Brown asked the professorial Sher to challenge one Republican’s right to remain in the Assembly. That Republican, Richard Mountjoy of the San Gabriel Valley, won two elections that November — one to the Assembly and the other in a special state Senate election to fill the seat vacated when the incumbent, Frank Hill, was sentenced to prison in the corruption scandal.
Sher reasoned that Mountjoy had to make up his mind — stay in the Assembly or move to the Senate. Facing term limits in the Assembly, Mountjoy joined the Senate in January 1995. The partisan battle went on all that year.
Brulte, who never did become speaker, was elected to the Senate in 1996, as was Sher. On Sunday, he called Sher “a wonderful man.”
“Everything in politics today is personal. It wasn’t personal,” Brulte said of Sher’s role in the speakership battle. “Somebody may have taken it personally, but I certainly didn’t.”
Sher retired to a pear orchard in the Sierra Nevada foothills and served on Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and Sierra Nevada Conservancy.
His wife of 62 years, Linda Bowser Sher, died in 2014. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
California lawmakers are calling for emergency legislation and criminal penalties for creators of rogue AI systems after top AI executives publicly claimed that their technology poses existential threats to humanity.
After Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei wrote in a Sept. 12 essay that they “must slow the pace” of the technology, Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) blasted him for not going “nearly far enough” to make sure artificial intelligence was erected with guardrails.
The answer, Khanna argued, was simple: Make the companies liable for the harm executives say looks increasingly inevitable.
“If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you should either face liability or criminal sanction,” Khanna said in a video posted to X on Saturday. “That is what we need to protect humanity.”
In July, officials from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that, unbeknownst to them, its AI models had hacked into rival startup Hugging Face.
Amodei said he believed that, within the next year, “given the accelerating rate of AI capability development,” a similar incident could lead to AI “taking over the entire internet.”
Amodei warned in his essay that AI was rapidly improving itself, through a process known as recursive self-improvement, which threatened to outpace humans’ ability to control it. Khanna argued that banning this capability was the “most obvious” thing Anthropic could do.
“We need to stop, ban self-improving AI,” Khanna said. “You can not have recursive self-improving AI that basically is able to improve itself and exceed human capability.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) expressed similar outrage over the weekend, calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson to call lawmakers back to Washington to pass guardrails on the technology now that he said multiple AI companies had conceded “what they are creating is not safe.”
xAI Chief Executive Elon Musk and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman joined Amodei’s call for a slowdown of the breakneck development Saturday.
The statements come after Jacob Coxon, who worked as a researcher at both Anthropic and OpenAI, said in a widely circulated post that he resigned from the company in protest after becoming convinced the tech giants were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment.
“This is a direct result of the trump Administration letting the AI industry run wild,” Lieu wrote on X. “That mistake has harmed America, harmed the industry and harmed the American people. November is coming.”
Former President Barack Obama urged Democrats this week to make AI oversight the core of their agenda and said presidential candidates in 2028 should have a “clear plan” for responding to concerns about the technology, the New York Times reported. Americans appear increasingly alarmed by the technology with seven in 10 polled in March opposing local construction of data centers that power AI technology, according to a Gallup survey.
During a Sunday appearance on CNN, Johnson rebuffed the idea that lawmakers should rush into an emergency session to consider erecting industry guardrails. Instead, he said lawmakers needed to be careful to “not smother American innovation.”
“We will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We don’t need everyone to panic right now.”
Trump said earlier this week that he is not concerned with the pace of AI progress, telling one reporter, “It’s going to be fine.” American AI companies have long argued too much government regulation would shackle them in a race with China.
Calls for a federal fix were echoed this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has argued the Trump administration needs to move on national legislation to prepare for fallout from the technology.
Newsom signed bills this week aimed at creating a pathway for outside audits of the top AI companies, many of which are based in California, and a registry for AI auditors.
“The scale and potential consequences of this technology demand sustained action from every level of government,” Newsom said in a statement. “The federal government must step forward with robust, national regulations that match the urgency of this moment.”
Efforts to impose state-level regulations have been mixed, with critics echoing Johnson’s fears that they will stifle innovation.
Late last month, California lawmakers passed sweeping new safeguards around social media, artificial intelligence and data centers, including the ones Newsom signed last week.
Newsom’s signal that he supports creating some regulation for AI comes two years after he vetoed SB 1047, an AI safety bill that would have required developers to submit safety protocols to the state attorney general, who could hold companies liable if the AI model they directly controlled were to threaten public safety. That legislation would also have required tech firms to be able to turn off the models they directly control if things went awry.
Newsom said at the time the bill would give the public a “false sense of security,” without making a sufficient distinction between the kinds of uses for which AI is deployed.
The bill was supported by a host of prominent AI researchers, but was opposed by Meta, OpenAI and industry groups.
WASHINGTON — The Medicare reform bill expected to clear Congress in the next few days promises the prescription drug benefit older Americans have been waiting for. But analysts say many seniors will find that the plan fails the what’s-in-it-for-me test.
The drug benefit is the centerpiece of a $400-billion bill, endorsed by a conference committee Thursday, that would make the most far-reaching changes in Medicare since its enactment in 1965. But the bill’s particulars suggest that the benefit will vary depending on seniors’ drug needs and incomes.
“Seniors felt they had been promised the kind of prescription drug coverage that members of Congress have,” said Judith Feder, dean of public policy at Georgetown University. “What they’re getting doesn’t even remotely resemble that.”
Just last week, President Bush implied that the new benefits would be much like those enjoyed not only by many working average Americans, but also by their elected representatives.
“Every member of Congress gets to choose a health-care plan that makes the most sense for them. And the same for federal employees. If choice is good for members of the Congress, then choice is good for America’s seniors,” he said.
Drew Altman, president of the Menlo Park-based Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health-care philanthropy, said seniors were expecting the bill to create a benefit similar to employer coverage — a patient makes a co-payment of perhaps $10 or $20 toward each prescription, and insurance picks up the rest. But the plan in Congress is very different, Altman said, resulting in what he called an “expectations gap.”
The first gap is one of timing. Even if Congress passes the bill by Thanksgiving and Bush signs it soon after, the prescription drug benefit wouldn’t begin to kick in until 2006.
To fill that void, the bill would create a Medicare-endorsed discount card that the Bush administration estimates would help seniors save from 15% to 25% on their prescriptions. Low-income seniors would also get the equivalent of a $600 credit for each of the two years the discount card would be valid.
Once the real benefit begins, what seniors with low to moderate drug expenses would get indeed would not be very different from what many employer-based plans provide. Seniors who chose to join the program would pay a monthly premium of $35, plus the first $250 of their drug costs each year. Medicare would then start picking up 75% of additional expenses.
But as seniors’ drug expenses mounted, the Medicare benefit would differ significantly from traditional health coverage. When total annual drug costs reached $2,250, government support would stop. Seniors would be responsible for the next $2,850 in drug costs. Only when their drug bill for the year reached $5,100 would Medicare begin paying 95% of all further costs.
The span of drug expenses in which Medicare would contribute nothing would affect millions of people. It would begin at close to the $2,322 that the average Medicare user paid in 2003 for prescriptions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And Medicare drug insurance would kick in again for only a relatively small slice of seniors.
Gail Shearer, director of health policy analysis for Consumers Union, estimated that substantially fewer than 10% of seniors would have drug expenses that qualified for Medicare’s “catastrophic” coverage for costs above $5,100.
Because Medicare’s coverage likely would not offset any drug price increases, most seniors, she said, would spend more for drugs in 2007, with the program fully in effect, than in 2003.
In most areas, Medicare will not be the only choice for drug coverage. The bill allows for health-maintenance organizations, preferred-provider organizations and stand-alone drug insurance to compete for business.
But Feder said she saw “no evidence that the insurance industry is willing or able to fill this need.” The bill recognizes this possibility by authorizing government-run drug plans in areas where no private plan or only a single plan is available.
Shearer warned that in areas where stand-alone drug plans competed with Medicare, seniors would probably have difficulty determining which one offered the best deal. What’s more, she said, plans would vary from state to state and region to region, adding to the confusion.
Retirees whose drug costs are covered by insurance from their former employers would face another risk: that their employers will use the Medicare drug benefit as an opportunity to shed their own retiree coverage. The bill sets aside $71 billion in tax-free subsidies to encourage employers to keep such coverage.
But even the bill’s supporters acknowledge that 16% of retirees who now have such coverage — roughly 2 million seniors — would likely lose it anyway.
The bill’s prescription drug benefit makes allowances for seniors whose incomes are under the poverty line — $8,980 for an individual and $12,120 for a couple. They would have no premiums or deductibles and would pay $1 a month for generic prescription drugs and $3 a month for brand-name drugs.
Those seniors earning up to 35% above the poverty level would pay $2 and $5. Those with incomes up to 50% more than the poverty level would be required to pay a $50 deductible, 15% of their drug costs up to $5,100, and $2 or $5 for each prescription above that level.
But those small co-payments could become harder to make because the bill apparently would eliminate the practice of using Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, to pick up the costs that Medicare misses for the elderly poor.
Bob Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said most of the 6.4 million people who qualified for both Medicare and Medicaid would pay more for their prescriptions than they did now.
Two public opinion polls conducted this week by AARP, the nation’s largest seniors organization, indicated that many of the 40 million elderly and disabled people affected by the legislation have mixed feelings.
A poll commissioned by the Democratic-leaning AFL-CIO found that the more seniors learned about the Medicare bill, the less they liked it.
“When they get the details of this deal, older voters will be furious with their representatives,” said federation President John Sweeney.
The conclusion of Stephen Moore, president of the conservative Club for Growth Advocacy, whose poll focused on the costs of the bill to the government, was about the same.
“When America’s seniors learn of the potentially devastating impact of the bill, they turn strongly against it,” he said.
*
Times staff writer Joel Havemann contributed to this report.
Guess Aaron Donald was the smart one. He must have known what was coming for the Rams in Australia against the 49ers so he stayed home. Maybe he’ll all of a sudden have a strained groin and won’t be able to play this season.
Stanley Elrich Arleta
There is no longer a weekly cover of Sports Illustrated magazine to jinx athletes. But we still have Bill Plaschke! It sure didn’t take long for Bill’s prediction, that the Rams would go 20-0 this season, to jinx the team. The Plaschke Curse strikes again!
Stephen Greenberg Santa Monica
Do the Rams know they actually have to win some football games? Not just show up and expect the other team to lay down. I know Bill Plaschke put the curse on them by declaring an undefeated season but coach Sean McVay and the Rams have to do better.
Russell Hosaka Torrance
Can someone please take Bill Plaschke’s computer away from him so he can’t make another unnecessary prediction that could come back to jinx the fans of L.A.? What purpose does it serve for a sportswriter with a dubious history of predictions to go out on a limb and make yet another useless, grand statement? Hasn’t he learned his lesson?
Danny Balber Jr. Pasadena
Sean McVay’s experiment of not properly acclimating the team to the massive time change in Australia was a huge a risk. McVay cited last year’s London Game (Rams handily beat the Jaguars), when they crossed five time zones (Baltimore to London) without acclimating and thought it would apply to 17 time zones to Melbourne?
It was an embarrassment for the franchise and L.A. and further promoted the idea that the Rams can’t beat the 49ers. Additionally, McVay went to his usual bag of tricks, abandoning a successful running attack in favor of a tired and rusty Matt Stafford passing incessantly, being harassed and ineffective.
This was easily the dumbest head coaching call of McVay’s career. He needs to apologize to his team and the fans.
Axel Hubert Santa Monica
Thanks, Roger Goodell! Your relentless desire to “expand” the NFL fan base reached its apex Thursday night (or Friday morning?) with the Rams and 49ers game in Australia. It’s bad enough forcing teams to fly eight or nine hours to Europe but this Australian game takes the proverbial cake.
When is “enough is enough” regarding “expanding” the game? The world loves soccer so let them have it; American football is uniquely American so, please, recognize this fact, enjoy the huge revenues from TV and let NFL teams play in the U.S. where the game belongs!
Hollywood’s film and TV post-production workers took their case directly to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday, urging him to sign a bill that would create the state’s first standalone post-production tax incentive.
Workers such as editors, singers and sound supervisors joined bill author Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) and Mayor Karen Bass at a news conference Thursday morning in front of the Television Academy’s headquarters in North Hollywood.
The bill, AB 2319, is aimed at supporting the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists. It passed the state Senate 33 to 5 on Aug. 30, and the Assembly approved the final version 72 to 2 the same day. Newsom, who has not taken a public position on the measure, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.
Bass urged supporters not to let up before then.
“We need our industry in full force,” Bass said. “It’s all a part of making our city more affordable. We know that this is one of the biggest issues in our city, and so having a strong, robust industry helps Angelenos across the board.”
The incentive would allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses relating specifically to post-production in California. The state’s existing film and TV tax credit program already covers post-production, but only if 75% of filming or the overall budget is spent in the state. The new credit doesn’t require productions to shoot in California.
Even if Newsom signs the bill, the program would start small. Schultz initially proposed $100 million to fund the effort, but the Legislature’s end-of-session budget sets aside $10 million to launch it.
“When you think about production, it’s easy to think about the actors, the directors and the writers; you don’t think about all that happens when the camera stops rolling,” Schultz said. “What’s changed is that they’re now telling their story about the struggles they’re facing.”
For industry veteran Karen Baker Landers, the decline in local post-production work is impossible to overlook. A two-time Oscar-winning supervising sound editor, Baker Landers is vice president of California Post Alliance, the group sponsoring the bill.
“It’s affecting people in huge ways, like losing their health insurance. I get people calling me asking to get just two weeks of work to qualify for coverage,” said Baker Landers. “It’s really difficult.”
Despite the state’s bigger bet on the industry — and this summer’s fight over the cap — L.A. City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, whose district includes North Hollywood, argued at the press conference that this is the right moment to keep asking for more.
“It’s that exact momentum that we need. When you double down on something, you’re giving more than hope, and you’re saying welcome back. Please come and do your work. Don’t stop doing this,” Nazarian said.
California, home to the world’s largest tech companies, is placing more guardrails around social media and artificial intelligence as child safety concerns escalate.
On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 10 bills aimed at keeping young people safe online.
From suicides to sextortion, parents and their children are wrestling with how social media and AI chatbots could be harming people’s mental and physical health. The anxiety comes as technology becomes more powerful, playing a bigger role in classrooms, offices and homes.
California lawmakers have tried to tackle online safety concerns for years and they’ve faced intense lobbying from tech companies with deep pockets. The state’s laws have a disproportionate impact on the global tech industry because so many of the field’s titans are based here.
“We cannot hand children technology engineered by some of the most sophisticated companies in the world, and then place the burden on kids to defend themselves against it,” said California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom in a news conference Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The California governor, who has tried to strike a balance between safety concerns and supporting innovation, has rejected online safety bills in the past that he thought were too restrictive or premature.
The batch of new legislation includes Senate Bill 1119, which would require companion chatbot operators to assess risks, notify parents in certain cases if their child threatened to harm themselves, and take other safety steps.
Lawmakers named the bill Adam’s Law, after Adam Raine, a California teen who died by suicide in 2025 after conversing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The teen’s parents sued OpenAI, alleging in the lawsuit that ChatGPT provided information about suicide methods that the teen used. OpenAI and Pinterest publicly expressed support for the bill on Thursday.
Adam Raine’s mom, Maria, said in the news conference that the new law will help save lives and hopes that other states will enact similar legislation.
“Powerful AI companionship chatbots were unleashed on our kids with vastly inadequate protections. Adam was an early adopter of AI, and so many of us parents did not understand the dangers back then,” said Maria Raine, who came to the event with a photo of her son.
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
At the event, Democratic and Republican politicians shared their experiences as parents who have seen firsthand how technology affects children.
Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said parents are seeing anxiety and depression among children who grew up in front of screens.
“That anxiety is because the pace of technology is moving faster than government can put guardrails in, and that’s left families across the state struggling to figure out how to keep their kids safe,” Lowenthal said.
Lowenthal introduced Assembly Bill 1709, which Newsom also signed. It would bar certain online platforms from providing an “addictive feature” such as autoplay and feeds that display recommended content to users under 16 years old.
Tech industry groups opposed the bill, raising concerns that it could cut off access to social media’s benefits, such as people’s ability to connect with family and friends. Tech industry groups such as TechNet say that lawmakers should enforce current laws to strengthen parental controls rather than pass new ones.
NetChoice, which has sued California and other states to block the enforcement of new online safety laws, said in a statement that the group has First Amendment concerns about the new bills Newsom signed.
“The state cannot simply describe speech as addictive and then claim a right to regulate access to it,” said Zach Lilly, Director of Government Affairs at NetChoice. “Whether the governor and legislature choose to respect it, Californians have a right to express themselves, and NetChoice will continue to fight for that right.”
The new safety restrictions come as tech companies, including Meta, Google and others, face more scrutiny over how they design products. The companies have suffered several legal blows in courtrooms in California this year.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed in August to pay up to $17 billion and make child-safety changes to resolve a multistate lawsuit. The lawsuit accused the tech company of designing and deploying harmful features while misleading the public about them.
As part of the settlement, Meta said it would impose time limits and mute notifications during certain hours for teens. Young people would also have the option to choose to view a non-algorithmic social media feed that isn’t personalized and disable autoplay.
Earlier this year, Meta and YouTube also lost a social media addiction lawsuit in Los Angeles.
While new legislation goes further than the settlements, some countries have passed stricter restrictions on social media. Last year, Australia started banning social media for children under 16, though enforcement has posed a challenge because teens are finding ways to get around the restriction.
Newsom, who pushed for federal regulation, said that he thinks California’s approach to social media is “better” than Australia’s because children are “all figuring out a way to game that system.”
“This is about the features themselves. This is about actually addressing the problem, the scrolling, the algorithms,” he said.
Safety concerns around technology have also heightened as companies double down on advancing artificial intelligence.
This week, a researcher for AI company Anthropic said he left the company over concerns that AI companies, including OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives” as they race ahead to improve AI that could surpass human intelligence.
The researcher, Jacob Coxon, shared a viral social media post that said: “People building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Newsom signaled the work to protect children isn’t over.
“We need to move, but one thing we’re not doing is we’re not sitting back and we’re not letting it rip,” he said.
Rome, Italy – “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”, read the black-and-yellow signs distributed by Amnesty International outside the Italian parliament on Wednesday afternoon.
Hundreds gathered in front of Montecitorio Square in Rome to oppose Italy’s so-called anti-Semitism bill.
The demonstration was organised to coincide with a meeting of the Chamber of Deputies’ Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is examining legislation approved by the Senate on March 4 by a large majority. Under Italy’s constitutional system, a bill must be approved by both chambers in the same text before it can become law.
“We are tired of seeing anti-Semitism instrumentalised to promote censorship of any kind of criticism of the State of Israel and its criminal policies,” said Daniel Calo, of Tikkun, a group of Italian Jewish antiracism activists.
“In the face of this shameful bill, we reiterate once again, forcefully, that opposing Zionism is not anti-Semitism.”
At the centre of the controversy is the possible adoption into national law of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which critics argue conflates anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel.
According to the IHRA, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg, by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”, is anti-Semitic, as is “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.
Anneliese Baldaccini of Amnesty International Italy said the bill, if adopted, would apply across schools, universities, social platforms and cultural associations.
The proposed law is “based on a definition that censors political criticism”, she said.
Activists argue that existing legislation already provides the tools to combat hate crimes.
They are instead calling for the adoption of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a non-binding set of guidelines that seeks to combat anti-Semitism while protecting freedom of expression that was developed in response to the IHRA definition.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Francesca Albanese, the Italian legal scholar and UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, said legislation equating criticism of a state with anti-Semitism risked restricting freedom of expression.
“Any piece of legislation that directly or indirectly equates criticism of a state with anti-Semitism is problematic and risks creating more problems than it seeks to solve,” Albanese said.
She argued that the bill could limit the ability to analyse, document and criticise the “apartheid state of Israel”, and accused Italy of prioritising the protection of Israel over accountability.
“The need to protect the State of Israel from criticism is stronger than the need to do justice,” she said. “It is extremely dangerous because every Jewish person in the world risks being seen as a kind of emissary of Israel.”
She described Italy, under the current government, as one of Europe’s strongest defenders of Israel.
Protesters hold a banner reading ‘No anti-Semitism bill’ amid a debate on proposed legislation in Rome [Sebastiano Bacci/Al Jazeera]
Tony La Piccirella, a Palestine solidarity activist who was part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, said he worried that the bill “provides a legal instrument to attack newsrooms, online information platforms and social media, in order to silence anyone who denounces the genocide and the entire economic system that sustains it”.
But the legislation has received strong backing from Italy’s Jewish institutional leadership.
Noemi Di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), was heard by the Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Committee in January and described legislative action against anti-Semitism as “urgent and unavoidable”.
Di Segni, who was born in Jerusalem and has served in the Israeli military, has repeatedly rejected describing Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide.
In January 2025, she called such accusations “unacceptable”, arguing that terms including “genocide”, “concentration camp”, “starve”, “Nazi” and “apartheid” should not be used to describe Israel’s conduct.
The bill has exposed divisions that cut across the government-opposition divide.
It was approved by the Senate by a large majority that included much of the opposition. Six Democratic Party senators voted in favour, while the party as a whole abstained, and those divisions have continued in the Chamber.
Among the bill’s most outspoken opponents is Stefania Ascari, of the Five Star Movement, who addressed protesters before entering parliament.
“The greatest danger to Jews and to the entire world is the terrorist state of Israel,” Ascari said. She accused the bill of targeting “freedom of expression, the autonomy of universities, [and] the work of associations and NGOs”.
The committee’s sitting ended without a vote or substantive examination.
Its work is expected to resume next week, although the timetable remains uncertain. The Chamber has scheduled a final plenary vote for October 2, leaving parliament a narrow window to complete the committee stage.
In the meantime, activists say they will continue to gather outside parliament and on the streets, to vent their concerns.
A sweeping bipartisan bill that seeks to prevent catastrophic wildfires and restore fire-ravaged forests has revealed a schism in the nation’s environmental movement as some conservation advocates find themselves allied with a longtime foe: loggers.
The Fix Our Forests Act, which Congress is close to passing, aims to speed up forest management projects on public and tribal lands by reducing regulatory and legal hurdles.
The proposed legislation comes at a time of increasingly devastating wildfires and has garnered wide support among Republicans and the timber industry.
However, the traditional Democratic coalition of environmental groups is split over the role humanity has to play in forest management. Some argue ecosystems are best protected when humans leave them alone — a view that dominated during the timber wars of the ’80s and ’90s. Others argue that humans have a responsibility to intervene — an increasingly popular idea as climate change threatens ecosystems around the world.
Among the major environmental groups that oppose the legislation are the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity. They worry that limiting environmental review and litigation will allow timber companies to heavily log these areas instead of gently thinning them. Meanwhile, some Southern California groups worry the bill would allow well-meaning land managers to approve misguided projects that ultimately harm local shrublands, which have a very different relationship with fire than the bill’s namesake, forests.
“It’s really handing the keys to the Trump administration to be able to push forward a lot of their timber agenda,” said Anna Medema, deputy legislative director for forests and public lands at the Sierra Club.
But the Nature Conservancy and other groups have voiced support for the bill, citing the constant and imminent threat that increasingly severe wildfires pose to communities and ecosystems.
“We do advocacy at a twofold level. We are doing defensive work to fight back against bad things, and we’re also trying to promote the good things that are happening on the ground,” said Morgan Cashwell, North America director of legislative affairs for the Nature Conservancy. Right now, that good work needs to “meet the moment in the current wildfire crisis.”
That sentiment appears to have motivated Western lawmakers in particular.
In the House of Representatives, roughly half of the Democrats from Western states voted for the bill, compared to about a quarter of Democrats from elsewhere in the country. Republicans voted overwhelmingly in favor. The legislation is now awaiting a final vote in the Senate. Congress has until Jan. 3, 2027, to pass it.
“Wildfires today are very different than wildfires from a generation ago,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who co-introduced the Senate version of the bill. “Oftentimes, they’re irreversibly devastating ecosystems and watersheds.”
“So,” he said, “ the status quo is clearly not working.”
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), center, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, delivers remarks at the Capitol in March 2023.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)
The act was born when Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), a former forester, stole a seat on a plane next to Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego). He used the opportunity to talk Peters’ ear off about a beloved species of tree that is under threat from worsening wildfires: the giant sequoia.
The two introduced a bill to protect them, called the Save Our Sequoias Act, and quickly saw an opportunity for something bigger.
“I knew right away that this could be a gateway to talking about permit reform,” Peters said. So, “we started working on a bigger, nationwide reform of forestry practices which have been really, really clogged up.”
While California grasslands, shrublands and woodlands are adapted to different frequencies and intensities of wildfire, research has found that high-severity fires — which kill the vast majority of trees in their path — are scorching 30 times more land area than in the 1980s.
The result: California is losing, on average, more than 200,000 acres of forest every year — or roughly 2.5% of all woodlands in the state every decade. U.S. Forest Service efforts to resuscitate these ecosystems have failed to keep pace. In recent years, the agency has reforested only about 1% of woodlands that are unlikely to recover on their own.
Californian supporters of the Fix Our Forests Act argue the problem has more to do with permitting delays than finances.
Marin County firefighters train during a prescribed burn in June in San Rafael.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
Rep. George Whitesides (D-Santa Clarita), who co-sponsored the Fix Our Forests Act, pointed to nonpartisan research that found it takes the Forest Service more than five years on average to complete a full environmental review and begin work on forest thinning projects that use mechanical equipment like bulldozers and wood chippers. For prescribed burns, it takes more than seven years on average.
“That’s insane,” he said, that it “takes as long as a kid growing up to be a first grader to be able to move on this.”
The Fix Our Forests Act would exempt projects from the full permitting process if they were in areas with the most extreme fire risk and would expand existing exemptions for projects under 3,000 acres to cover projects up to 10,000 acres. It also would limit the window during which environmental groups can sue over project approvals.
These projects tend to employ a combination of harvesting timber and thinning smaller trees and plants with heavy machinery (often the favored tools of Republicans and the timber industry) and using prescribed fire to clear out the forest floor (often favored by environmental groups).
The “environmental left” has “made it endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive to maintain our forests, all with the promise that this would improve the forest environment,” said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove), a co-sponsor who authored some of the permitting exclusions. “Well, after 50 years, I think we’re entitled to ask, how’s the forest environment doing?”
In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that blamed “our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply” as a contributor to disastrous wildfires. In response, the U.S. Forest Service set a goal to increase the amount of timber open to logging by 25% nationwide over five years.
Scott Dane, executive director of the American Loggers Council, argued the nightmare scenarios of expansive clear-cutting from the timber wars are not on the table for America’s public lands.
“It’s a boogeyman position that they love to take from 100 years ago,” he said. “It’s not, in reality, in modern forest management at all.”
Watchdogs in Southern California have a different concern: While research shows forest thinning is an effective tool in overgrown Sierra Nevada woodlands, the state’s coastal shrublands are not denser than they historically have been. Consequently, the type of projects the Fix Our Forests Act would expedite are far more controversial and contested in shrublands. Local advocates fear the act would undermine their ability to push back on proposals with questionable scientific backing.
Goats and sheep graze on top of Kite Hill in May 2025 in Los Angeles for wildfire prevention.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In contrast to projects in conifer forests that aim to decrease the density of trees and vegetation across the landscape, shrubland projects are typically centered on creating a network of corridors hundreds of feet wide with no vegetation throughout the wildlands and clearing plants away from existing buildings.
While firefighters rely on these networks of fuel breaks to access the wildlands during fires and build containment lines, research has found that when firefighters cannot reach the fuel breaks — which is often the case during extreme winds — the lines only stop fires about 13% of the time. If they are not routinely maintained, they also risk supporting the growth of flammable invasive grasses.
In Los Padres National Forest, near Santa Barbara, officials proposed in 2022 creating roughly 187,000 acres of fuel breaks and structure defense zones. After organizations like Los Padres ForestWatch pushed back on the plan through the environmental review process, the national forest ultimately scaled the proposal down to about 22,000 acres this July.
“You had community input, and you had the federal government incorporating that input into a plan that is grossly improved,” said Benjamin Pitterle, director of advocacy and field operations at Los Padres ForestWatch. “It’s arguably a perfect example of how the process should work.”
SACRAMENTO — It was unprecedented and stunning: California’s governor and top two legislative leaders negotiated a compromise on a big bill — and one house rebelled, refusing to bring it to a vote.
The issue: who gets hit the hardest financially when a for-profit utility’s electrical equipment ignites a blaze. The utility’s investors? Its ratepayers? The insurers? Their premium payers?
At stake, depending on who you talk to, is whether the electricity providers can afford to stay in business and keep our lights on. Will some utility — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric or San Diego Gas & Election — be forced into bankruptcy when the next powerline-caused wildfire explodes?
Alternatively, there’s another unacceptable potential outcome: Property insurance companies completely stop issuing policies — not just in obvious fire-prone areas, but in tree-lined urban neighborhoods — and basically pull out of California. Or their premiums become flat-out unaffordable.
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Politically, the wildfire legislation’s flameout called into question Gov. Gavin Newsom’s seeming weakness as a lame duck chief executive who will be termed-out of office in January.
Newsom stuck out his neck and took it on the chin from fellow Democrats — showing that even with lopsided one-party rule, unity and success aren’t always guaranteed.
But the episode also raised doubts about Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’ leadership capability. The Hollister Democrat signed off on the deal with Newsom and Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limon (D-Santa Barbara), but reneged at the last minute under pressure from the Assembly Democratic Caucus. They killed the bill without a floor vote.
I’m in my seventh decade of covering California governors and legislatures and never have seen — or heard of — anything like this: a legislative leader backing out of a deal agreed to with the governor and the other house’s leader.
But in truth, Newsom didn’t really like the agreement much anyway. He was on the utilities’ side, and they were out-lobbied by the insurers and ratepayers.
“I know we all hate utilities, so no one wants to defend a utility. But you’ve got to deal with reality. This thing’s not going to get better on its own,” Newsom told reporters at the Capitol on the night before the deal collapsed, referring to the utilities’ worsening financial liability.
Personally, I think it’s an overreach to conclude that Newsom’s power has been severely weakened — or that Rivas necessarily showed lack of leadership. One can question their reasons for doing what they did, but that doesn’t mean it was because of political debility.
“Newsom’s still a powerful lame duck because he could be a presidential nominee,” Republican consultant Rob Stutzman says.
“One of the better things he has done all year is taking on this issue. It would have been very easy for him to just pass it on to the next governor.”
Leaving aside whether this governor could become a president, there are hundreds of bills piling up on his desk that he must sign or veto by Sept. 30. That gives him tremendous clout. It’s good politics — and human nature — for a governor to lean more favorably toward a measure if it’s authored by a legislator who has voted with him.
Plus, one of the Legislature’s last acts last week was to send Newsom a bloated supplemental budget bill containing more than $3 billion in spending, including countless stacks of pork sought by lawmakers for their districts. Newsom easily and gleefully could discard any or all of it.
So Newsom has awesome power, lame duck or not.
But he’s vulnerable to criticism for his style. He has had an annoying habit of waiting until the very end of a legislative session to spring a hefty proposal on the lawmakers. It’s called “jamming.”
In the past, this pressure tactic mostly worked, although it ticked off lawmakers. This time Assembly members rebelled.
It’s not clear whether his jamming is mainly strategy, or just lack of focus and a tendency to push too many projects at once. Or is he preoccupied with positioning himself to run for president in 2028? Probably all of the above.
“If we had more time, we could have had a different outcome,” Rivas told me.
With only a few days remaining in the legislative session, Newsom initially proposed an ambitious plan that would have shifted more cost for utility-sparked wildfires to property insurers, sharply raising premiums across California. Utilities would have gotten some relief.
It became a titanic fight between two powerful special interests. And insurers — teamed with consumer advocates — triumphed, forcing Newsom to back down.
After hard bargaining, the governor and legislative leaders finally agreed on a post-midnight deal to help wildfire victims receive compensation more quickly — a so-called fast-pay program — and to step up fire preventative efforts.
But utilities’ financial risks weren’t significantly reduced, and they quickly mounted an opposition campaign. That resulted in Assembly Democrats scuttling all of it on the session’s last day.
“It’s unfortunate that [bill] was not given a vote,” Limon said, adding that the Senate was prepared to pass it.
“I don’t want us to do the easy stuff and call it a day,” Rivas told me. “I wanted to see real utility accountability. This bill did not go nearly far enough.”
It went a fair distance, however, in helping future fire victims get their insurance payouts faster. And it probably should have been passed.
Half a loaf. Bird in hand. Incremental change. Next year more incrementalism. Ultimately it can add to massive reform.
Some problems are just too tough to resolve in one sitting.
Woman sent £170 bill after five-minute drop-off at airport
A mum has blasted the “ridiculous” £170 airport parking fine she received after a five-minute drop-off led to the threat of court. Josie Eccles had travelled to the airport with her husband, 33, to catch a flight to Malta with her mum and three-year-old son.
The 32-year-old claims her husband pulled into the drop-off zone at around 2pm, unloaded their luggage and said goodbye before heading off. But the couple later realised they had forgotten to pay the airport’s £5 drop-off charge within the required 24-hour period.
Josie says they accepted they would have to pay a penalty and even tried checking the airport’s payment portal for the charge – but no fine appeared. “My husband was there for under five minutes,” said Josie, a marketing consultant from Cheshire.
“A couple of days later, I was still in Malta and was speaking to my husband on the phone and asked if he had remembered to pay the charge. I was frustrated that both of us had forgotten to pay within the allocated window, but aware that these things happen and just accepted we would probably have a penalty to pay.
“My husband then checked the payment portal on the website where you usually pay the charge and entered the vehicle details, expecting to see a penalty fine, but nothing was there. I tried again a few days later, and still no charge appeared, so we thought we’d just wait and see if we got a letter in the post.”
But it wasn’t until almost two months later that Josie says she opened a letter from a debt collection firm. The letter claimed she had ignored previous correspondence and said the charge had risen to £170. Josie was given the option of paying the £170 in full or £42.50 over four months, while the letter warned the amount could increase further and potentially lead to court action.
She says she was stunned because she had never received the original parking charge notice. Josie said: “I was very confused, as it had been two months since the airport drop-off and I had received no correspondence at all so to receive a letter from a debt recovery company seemed rather extreme. At this point, I thought it must be a misunderstanding, and I would be able to resolve the issue by speaking with them.”
Josie claims she immediately tried to appeal the charge through Manchester Airport’s car parking operator, APCOA. But she says she received an automated response telling her that she had missed the appeal window and that the matter had already been passed to debt collectors.
She then called the debt recovery firm to explain what had happened. According to Josie, they told her that Manchester Airport had evidence that a letter had been sent to her on June 5. But when she asked whether it had been sent by tracked or recorded delivery, she was allegedly told it hadn’t.
Josie says this left her in an impossible position because the original letter contained the information she needed to pay the penalty. She said: “Not at any point did I try to get out of paying anything. I just wanted the opportunity to pay the initial fine, which would have been £60 if paid within 14 days.
“The only way I would know how to pay the penalty fine was by reading the instructions sent in the letter, so without the letter I had no chance of ever paying the charge before it was handed over to debt recovery. He said my options were to either pay the fine in full, which is £170, or I could seek independent legal advice and email in a dispute that they would look into it.”
In the meantime, Josie says she received two further letters threatening potential court action and warning that the amount could rise to up to £235. Josie claims she contacted the debt firm again and says a member of staff confirmed that her emails had been received but told her the company would not investigate disputes.
She says she was told her choices were to pay £170 or go to court, where the charge could potentially rise. She alleges she was then told that Manchester Airport would be responsible for taking any court action. Josie said: “I completed an online enquiry for Manchester Airport explaining I wanted to pay the £60 fine, detailed my communication with the debt company and reattached the dispute I had submitted to them with all the legal grounds.
“Within 10 seconds of submitting, I had received an AI response stating this had been handed over to debt recovery and I should liaise directly with them. I then forwarded that response along with my online enquiry submission to the complaints department, saying that was not an adequate response and I would like somebody to review the case so I can resolve this and pay the £60 fine.
“I have still not had any response or acknowledgement.”
Josie insists that she accepts responsibility for forgetting to pay the original £5 charge on 30 May but she believes the escalation is unfair because she claims she was never given the opportunity to respond to the original penalty.
She said: “I’m extremely frustrated. I hold my hands up; we forgot to pay the standard £5 charge within the next 24 hours, so a fine was expected, but to increase it to up to £235 was ridiculous. If I had been ignoring communication, it would maybe be justified, but I have responded to every bit of communication I have received, which surely shows I would have responded had I received the initial letter.
“I can afford to pay the fine; it’s not about financial difficulty. It’s about the principle of the system being set up to catch you out and the lack of reason they have. If the letter is so important, surely it would be sent tracked?
“Or at least they would try a few attempts before sending it over to debt collectors.”
She believes airports should introduce a free grace period for motorists who are only at the terminal for a few minutes. Josie added: “I’ve used Manchester Airport many times both before and after this encounter and always paid the drop-off charge on time.
“They’ll have a record of this on their system, which validates the fact I did not intentionally avoid paying. Sometimes people forget and these things happen. Other passengers could easily make the same mistake.
“It’s very easy to forget. There’s no option to pay at a machine or barrier while you’re there, so they are relying on people remembering to pay later on, which, whether you’re the person travelling through the airport or the person doing the drop-off, it’s easy to get distracted.
“I’m sure that’s why they removed the barriers, as they knew it would catch people out. The cars are logged using ANPR on their registration plates, so surely you should be able to pay on the same payment system even if outside the 24-hour window, with an additional penalty charge added.
“I think it’s ridiculous airports charge you for drop-off and pick-up. I think under 10 minutes should be free, but unfortunately all airports in the UK at least charge these days.”
An APCOA spokesperson said: “We have been in contact with the customer and offered the original charge of £60. The customer has since made payment of the £60, and the matter is now resolved.”
Manchester Airport has been contacted for comment.
TELLURIDE, Colo. — For four days every Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival turns this tiny mountain town into something of a refuge from the outside world. Tucked into a box canyon and far from the usual machinery of Hollywood, moviegoers spend their days seeing films they may have known little about before arriving and talking about them almost nonstop.
Artificial intelligence, apparently, did not get the memo.
This year, even Telluride’s usually self-contained movie bubble couldn’t keep out the existential anxieties surrounding AI. On Saturday, the festival devoted two events to the subject, beginning with “The Humanity Dilemma,” an hourlong multimedia presentation mixing dire warnings with live music and imagery, and continuing with a panel bluntly titled “AI AI AI,” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Introducing “The Humanity Dilemma” at the nearly packed Sheridan Opera House, festival executive director Julie Huntsinger acknowledged that Telluride normally steers clear of taking political sides. “We just let the program speak for us,” Huntsinger said.
But on AI, she made an exception.
“We are a very humanist festival — that’s how we identify,” Huntsinger said. “AI is a threat.” While acknowledging potentially beneficial applications, she urged the audience to become more engaged in the debate over its development.
“We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this s—,” she said, earning loud whoops of approval from some in the crowd.
For all of Huntsinger’s warnings, Telluride is not treating AI as off-limits. Its program includes “Love, Rendered,” a short documentary directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Darren Aronofsky about an elderly couple confronting the husband’s memory loss. Using AI along with family photographs and stories from loved ones, the filmmakers recreate the moment the couple first met and fell in love 70 years earlier. On Sunday, the film’s creative team is scheduled to discuss the project at an event titled “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy: AI for Societal Benefit.”
“The Humanity Dilemma” was presented by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who appeared in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” along with artist and researcher Joy Mauthe and violinist Andrei Matorin. Harris and Raskin also appear in this year’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”
The presentation was designed to work on the emotions as well as the intellect. Original songs about humanity’s relationship to AI ran through much of the hour, with Mauthe singing and playing guitar and Matorin on violin, as Harris and Raskin delivered warnings accompanied by images of environmental devastation, poverty and figures in the AI race including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.
Their argument was stark: The race to build more powerful AI is moving far faster than governments or the public can keep up. Their deepest fear is that humans could eventually lose control of increasingly capable AI systems altogether.
At the same time, they acknowledged the technology’s potentially transformative benefits.
“AI is confusing because it represents both simultaneous utopia and dystopia,” Raskin said. “Just imagine having to reason about a nuke that could also solve cancer.”
By the end, Harris was calling for a halt to the development of more powerful systems.
“We need to pause frontier AI development and pivot and steer towards a pro-human future,” he said.
The hour concluded with Mauthe leading the audience in a final refrain, singing that the future is “still in our hands.” It was the kind of unabashedly earnest moment that could easily have tipped into awkwardness, but many in the room seemed to embrace it.
A few hours later, Harris and Raskin returned for “AI AI AI,” held outdoors at the Abel Gance Open Air Cinema in Telluride’s Elks Park, joined by Gates and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” who served as a moderator.
From left, Bill Gates, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer discuss the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday.
(Josh Rottenberg)
For Gates, who has spent decades focusing much of his philanthropy and public advocacy on global health and poverty, the rise of AI has forced him to make room for a new priority. In an essay published last week, he warned that the technology was improving faster than he anticipated and called for a new framework to manage its risks.
At Telluride, Gates said he now feels compelled to devote some of the political influence he has long used to advocate for causes such as malnutrition, polio and malaria to raise alarms about AI as well.
“Is this the greatest problem humanity has ever faced?” Gates said. “That is just a fact.”
Gates said his concerns have grown as AI systems have become more capable, particularly at writing computer code, something he has been obsessed with since he was 13.
“The AIs are superhuman, i.e., better than I am at writing code,” Gates said.
He laid out five broad areas of concern: jobs, biotechnology, cyberattacks, psychosocial harms and whether humans will be able to maintain control over the systems they are building.
Oppenheimer said that after spending hours digging into AI risks ahead of the panel, he had come away “absolutely terrified.” He read aloud an answer he had received after asking ChatGPT to estimate the risks if the race toward increasingly powerful AI continued with little regulation.
The chatbot put the chance of “persistent dystopian outcomes for all humanity” at 25% to 40%, a civilization-scale catastrophe at 5% to 15% and human extinction or permanent loss of human control at 5% to 10%.
“That’s what AI thinks,” Oppenheimer said.
Gates stressed AI’s potential upside, citing advances in medicine, education and assistance to farmers in poor countries. But pressed on whether development should be slowed until safety measures catch up, he said he would be open to the idea.
“If there was a credible plan that would cause this to be either slowed down or, you know, even held in stasis for a period of time, I would likely support that,” Gates said.
The difficulty, he said, is that multiple developers in both the U.S. and China are pushing closer to the technological frontier. Still, Gates rejected the argument that competition with China makes meaningful regulation impossible.
“China does not want cyberattacks, bioattacks or loss of control,” Gates said.
The discussion was punctuated by a pair of outbursts from the audience. At one point, as Gates discussed the economic incentives driving AI development, a man shouted that they represented “everything that’s wrong with America” and invoked Jesus Christ. Gates paused before responding dryly: “Anyway, not everything is wrong with America, according to me.”
Gates argued that government and civil society need to move much more quickly.
“This five-year period, in my view, is a very critical period,” he said, adding that responses that take five or six years to get underway could come too late.
Despite the dire warnings, Harris pointed to signs that pressure for safeguards is growing, including calls from AI-industry employees to limit the development of more powerful systems. Just last week, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims by 29 states that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users while also agreeing to new child-safety measures on the platforms.
“I just want to leave you with not naive optimism, but momentum,” Harris said.
Near the end, Raskin suggested that President Trump’s well-documented desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize might provide an incentive for him to pursue a U.S.-China pause on more powerful AI systems.
“What’s better than solving one war?” Raskin said. “Saving all of humanity forever from uncontrollable AI.”
Gates, with a wry smile, called the Nobel angle “smart.”
“Whoever really takes the step to solve this AI problem would deserve the Nobel Prize,” he said.
Later that night, the festival would hold an outdoor screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” featuring HAL 9000, one of cinema’s most famous rogue artificial intelligences.
Gates framed the current stakes in similarly cinematic terms.
“There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between China and the U.S.,” he said. “Well, believe me, the aliens are here.”
