CONCORD, N.H. — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and their own personal hardships, their lawyer said.
“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”
The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, took on Trump’s executive order last year, amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law on banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had granted a court order allowing them to play as the case proceeded.
For Tirrell, it meant being able to keep playing on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it was having a chance to try out for different sports.
Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college athletic teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. It also said that barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
One teen and her family decided to move from New Hampshire
Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer following proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18.
“Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmelle’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”
Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies limiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limiting which school bathrooms transgender people can use, as well as sports restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
“The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
“But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
The other teen gave up playing soccer at high school
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.
“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.
“Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are we walking into, and we never kind of knew,” she said. “We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season.”
She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, she said.
“Parker didn’t talk about it a lot, but I think she could see that stress for everybody — for her, for her teammates, for her coaches,” Sara Tirrell said. “She felt kind of bad about pulling them all into that circus again. And so she ultimately said, ‘This isn’t fun anymore and I don’t want to do it.’”
Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.”
Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” Zach Tirrell said.
In the past, Parker also played soccer in a recreation league and could still do so.
“But I think it all kind of still sort of weighs on her,” her mother said. “It’s the same group of kids that she plays with who, honestly, have been very supportive and love to have her on the team and have expressed that to her many times over. But I think she still has that worry in her brain around, ‘What are other people going to say and do if I show up at a game?’”
Parker’s parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said. “In some ways she’s had to grow up a lot faster than some of her peers.”
McCormack writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J., contributed to this report.
The UFC White House event scheduled for Sunday, 14 June has been challenged by a federal lawsuit which alleges it is unlawful.
UFC Freedom 250 is set to take place on the White House’s South Lawn on US President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, as part of celebrations to mark 250 years of United States independence.
However, the Public Integrity Project has filed a lawsuit – seeking an emergency temporary retraining order – against the event billed as the first professional sporting event to be held on the White House grounds.
“We think that this is a profound misuse of our sacred national monuments for private gain. And we think that needs to be stopped because it breaks the law,” said Brendan Ballou, lead attorney for the Public Integrity Project.
The Public Integrity Project is a self-described anti-corruption law firm based in Washington.It is led by Democrats including former Senator Russ Feingold and politician Zephyr Teachout, and has brought several suits against Trump, including one to undo the sale of the social media app TikTok and another to stop a billion-dollar “anti-weaponisation” fund.
The group argues that Trump and the UFC believe they do not have to apply for a permit to use the National Mall, ask Congress to approve construction of “The Claw” at the White House, or conduct an environmental review, because the fight is part of special semiquincentennial celebrations.
But it says that the event does “not in any material sense” celebrate the anniversary of the country’s founding and is not being carried out by the federal government or the official commission steering the anniversary’s observance.
The Trump administration issued a response to the BBC: “This is an obstructionist, baseless and dilatory lawsuit brought simply to prevent President Trump from hosting what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most historic sporting events in our nation’s history during our semiquincentennial celebration.”
When Nithya Raman stepped up to a podium on the night of L.A.’s mayoral primary election, she thanked her supporters for standing up to the “powerful interests” who spent millions of dollars trying to “preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo.”
“At a time when so many people have written Los Angeles off or have lost hope in the future of this incredible city,” the democratic socialist L.A. mayoral hopeful said, “you are proof that Angelenos are hungry for change.”
But as election results rolled in, the movement for change was underwhelming, or at least divided. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was in the lead, advancing to the November runoff. That left Raman locked in a battle for a second spot with Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.
Bass is one of several high-profile establishment Democrats to emerge on top. In California’s gubernatorial race, centrist Xavier Becerra, a veteran of the Biden Cabinet, advanced to the runoff after being challenged from the left by billionaire green activist Tom Steyer and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter. Steyer is now behind Steve Hilton, a Republican, and battling to make the runoff.
Still reeling from the rise of Donald Trump, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling to figure out the future direction of the party.
Some progressives, inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory, saw 2026 as an opportunity to move the city further left. But the results have been mixed in key races, with veteran Democrats like Bass and Becerra eking out leads even as polls show dissatisfaction with status quo politics in California.
“This was supposed to be a change revolution, but voters clearly said no to the revolution,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “Voters want change,” she noted, “but it doesn’t appear right now that there has been an appetite for a major shift in the ideology of the city or the state.”
Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Becerra emerged as the Democratic favorite late in the election and won support from many establishment party leaders. Pundits said after a wild primary that included the implosion of Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign amid sex assault allegations, Becerra emerged as a “safe” choice.
Some opponents attacked his moderate views and his willingness to accept campaign donations from big oil companies like Chevron. But that did not stop his rise.
Bass was also beset with challenges, being an incumbent in a city beset with problems.
For her, election night marked a “victory with an asterisk,” Sadhwani said, noting that Bass is first incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades to face a runoff. “It would be wrong for Karen Bass to think that this victory … is a ringing endorsement of the work she is currently doing.”
The results underscore Bass’ unpopularity as an incumbent, garnering just 35% of the vote so far. If Raman can catch up and eventually surpass Pratt in the vote count, she could pose a considerable challenge to Bass as more young voters come to the polls in November.
Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member who leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said if Bass exceeded expectations it was because they were very low.
“Coming in first in a runoff isn’t a huge victory for an incumbent mayor,” he said. “Two-thirds of the city did not vote for her. That’s not a position of strength.”
James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis, said that Becerra and Bass coming through indicates the centrist Democratic candidates were in a stronger short-term position than their rivals. But problems loom ahead, he said, as the longtime Democratic establishment that’s been governing California for the last 15 years failed to make notable progress in solving problems with affordable housing, homelessness, public transportation and education.
“I think the Democrats’ prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans’ dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,” Adams said. “But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they’re setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state’s problems while getting reelected anyway.”
Democrats in California, he said, were suffering from being in power too long.
“Whenever one party gets into a long-term, dominant position, usually because the other party is just in the midst of self-destructing … the whole thing ends in tears, because the party that is in a dominant position, they don’t have to be that good.”
As the vote count continues in the mayor’s race, democratic socialists in Los Angeles already have some wins down-ballot.
“We are gaining momentum,” said Leslie Chang, a co-chair of the 5,000-member L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a decentralized anti-capitalist group that advocates for rental protections and defunding the police. Over the last six years, Angelenos have elected four DSA-backed City Council members and a DSA-recommended city controller.
The DSA did not officially endorse Raman, because she entered the race after the group had issued endorsements and another DSA candidate was also running for mayor. However, three of the six DSA-backed candidates for citywide office were projected to win outright.
DSA Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez were reelected by such large margins they avoided runoffs. In the city attorney’s race, DSA-endorsed Marissa Roy was in the lead and the mainstream Democratic incumbent became the first city attorney ousted in a primary in nearly a century. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a progressive anti-establishment candidate who is not a DSA member but an ally of the group, led by nearly 20 percentage points.
When Chang knocked on doors, she said, some voters asked: “Well, what’s the difference between Nithya and Karen Bass?”
A few voters told her that after reviewing Bass’ and Raman’s websites, they found their platforms similar. Chang was surprised. She thought Raman articulated a clear and novel strategy for how to get L.A. out of the housing crisis, but she said some on the left took issue with her working with housing developers to reduce red tape.
Neel Sannappa, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said Raman was stymied by getting into the race late and having only a few months to campaign. It also didn’t help that a more left-wing challenger, Rae Huang, already had some momentum — not enough to win, but enough to split the left.
“Nithya does represent something real and growing in Los Angeles,” Sannappa said. “There is a hunger for more progressive, left-leaning candidates that want to make sure that we’re investing in people and not so much investing in just police … and being able to build things that are new and innovative.”
Supporters watch election results come in on their phones during Nithya Raman’s election night party at Boomtown Brewery on Tuesday.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Some have criticized Raman’s coalition-building, noting she was not endorsed by her fellow DSA-backed City Council members. Others said the MIT and Harvard graduate, who has been a councilmember for six years, performed tepidly in a May televised debate and suffered from Pratt’s attempts to tie her to the establishment.
“If you’re a part of the institution, which she is,” Sadhwani said, “then you can’t exactly claim that you’re going to bring massive change.”
Sadhwani said that California’s left, in contrast to New York’s, appears to have a charisma deficit. While Pratt and Hilton had an advantage with their television backgrounds, they also spoke “in plain terms about the real problems that the state faces.”
Part of Bass’ success can also be attributed to assembling a coalition that included the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the L.A. police officers union, the L.A. County Democratic Party and immigrant rights groups.
In the mayoral race, Sadhwani said, “the dominant political coalition still has power, money, the organization.”
“If you can garner the support of the unions, then having a broader message, maybe it’s less important,” she said. “You don’t have to work quite so hard, because the unions have the base machine.”
People attend Mayor Bass’ election party for the California 2026 primaries at the LINE Hotel on Tuesday.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
Yusef Robb, a longtime Democratic strategist who is an advisor to Bass, attributed the mayor’s lead to her campaign’s success in building a broad coalition and communicating across the political spectrum. Most voters, he said, tend to think less about ideology — and whether a Democrat was mainstream or DSA-supported — than candidates’ positions on bread and butter issues.
“Mayor’s races are first and foremost about what people see outside of their front doors, when they walk their kids to school, when they drive to work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the voters look at the field and say, ‘OK, who do I trust to keep my kids from having to skip around a tent on the way to school?’ ‘Who can I trust to hire more officers?’ … and ‘Who can I trust to fight back against ICE in court through executive action and even in the streets?’ And that’s Karen Bass.”
For Democrats in this robustly blue state, part of the challenge in figuring a path forward is that every candidate — even those already in power — pitches themselves as a bona fide progressive against the status quo.
“We have led a grassroots campaign because we want to bring change to our city,” Bass said on election night. “And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”
Raman also tried to tout herself as a change candidate. Articulating her platform in broad strokes rather than bread-and-butter detail, Raman said she wanted L.A. to be a place “where government actually functions and delivers every day on this city’s beautiful bighearted values, where we stand up against ICE, where we show up for our gay and trans siblings.”
But as she talked of neighborhoods “full of trees and shade … and people and good food,” she seemed low-key and equivocal. Her message was a far cry from the pressing one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward in his presidential campaigns, highlighting the millions of Americans working for “starvation wages” and a young single mother in Nevada struggling on $10.45 an hour.
Ultimately, the fight between Bass and Raman, as a struggle between mainstream and progressive Democrats, is complicated by the fact that Bass came up through the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, founding the grassroots Community Coalition in South L.A. in the 1990s.
Campaign worker Khai Dombroe prepares balloons before Nithya Raman’s election night party.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
And even though Raman is a DSA member, she has tacked to the center during the campaign, distancing herself from past calls to defund the police by saying she did not want the LAPD to lose more officers.
While Raman and Bass have much in common, the most significant difference between them is on homelessness, Sannappa said. Even though Bass comes from a political tradition of not wanting to criminalize the unhoused, he said, she understood her voters include people wanting to move homeless people off the streets.
“Brass tacks is that we need people that are going to be willing to fight for mental health services,” Sannappa said.
“I think Nithya more so represents the direction where the Democratic Party is going to have to go.”
As L.A. becomes less affordable and homeownership becomes out of reach for many Angelenos, young renters have become a rising political constituency — a shift that many say will likely propel the city leftward.
Bonin said he expected the next new rising Democratic coalition in L.A. to be a labor-renter coalition. He cited Councilmember Soto-Martinez, a renter and union organizer, as probably the best avatar of that.
But as the middle-class splinters along generational lines, other political experts warn that many ordinary Angelenos feel increasingly shut out of L.A. politics.
“Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, and today it has become the party of the educated elites,” Sadhwani said. “Perhaps one of the gifts that Donald Trump has given to Democrats is to force them to contend with the everyday issues of voters, which they seem to have distanced themselves from.”
As many Angelenos feel worse off now than four years ago, Chang said Bass was not directly responsible for every problem. Still, she said, she could have done more to move the city in the right direction.
Delaying the wage boost tied to the 2028 Olympics, she said, was a move that failed working people at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.
“My fear, of course, is people pivot away from corporate Democrats and they choose the MAGA Republican, because that is the most visible fight,” Chang said. “Or because they think, ‘Oh, well, a democratic socialist running on the Democratic Party line, this is just more of the same status quo.’ ”
Nope, it’s not AI. It’s just a really big flag with bright lights, draped on Hoover Dam for the next several weeks.
As a display to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, the states of Nevada and Arizona and the federal Bureau of Reclamation teamed up to hang and illuminate an enormous American flag on the dam on Memorial Day.
The display, scheduled to be in place through July 4, is visible to anyone crossing between Arizona and Nevada on U.S. Route 93, which goes across the top of the dam. The flag is 150 feet tall and 300 feet long, spread on the south-facing side of the dam and lit by 550 LED lights (powered by dam-generated electricity).
A wider view of the illuminated U.S. flag at Hoover Dam.
(Michael Bittle)
It’s a spectacle that comes at a challenging moment for Hoover Dam, as experts warn that Lake Mead’s dwindling water levels could threaten the dam’s ability to generate hydropower. “Slap a flag on it, that’ll fix it,” suggested one of several Reddit commenters who were moved to snarkiness by the flag image.
The dam, a frequent day-trip destination from Las Vegas, stands 35 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, about 295 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The site features a visitor center and overlook, and guided and self-guided tours.
Installation of the display involved dozens of riggers and two cranes. The flag, which is roughly the dimensions of a football field, has been previously used for celebrations at Indianapolis Colts and Las Vegas Raiders football games.
Within two days after it was hung, gusts of wind up to 50 mph prompted organizers to lower the flag last Wednesday as the National Weather Service declared a wind advisory for the area. Organizers raised the flag again late Friday.
Strong winds are not uncommon in the area. Organizers said weather “may periodically require the flag to be temporarily lowered.” Updates on the flag’s status can be found on the Hoover Dam Facebook page.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority paid for the display. A spokeswoman said the cost, including flag, production, installation costs and six weeks of lighting, will be between $750,000 and $1 million.
The dam, a five-year construction job that was completed in 1936 during the depths of the Great Depression, is often hailed as one of the nation’s most impressive works of infrastructure. Though this is not the first time a flag has been draped on it, organizers have called the display “the most ambitious long-duration installation ever attempted at Hoover Dam.”
