Bournemouth manager Andoni Iraola says that the referee lost control of the game, with the Cherries losing three players for their next match to suspension in a 3-2 loss at Sunderland.
In less than five weeks, California voters will decide on Proposition 10, a ballot initiative that would allow cities and counties across the state to expand rent control.
For the record:
2:40 p.m. Oct. 3, 2018An earlier version of this article said that California has 9.5 million renters. California has 9.5 million renters who are burdened by high rents.
Supporters of the measure say it will offer relief for tenants during a time of unprecedented housing affordability problems in California. Opponents contend it will stymie housing construction — the levels are already low — and further increase costs.
Here’s a rundown of some of the difficulties renters face and how Proposition 10 would affect them and broader affordability issues.
Just how dire is the situation for renters in California?
Very. Nine and a half million renters — more than half of California’s tenant population — are burdened by high rents, spending at least 30% of their income on housing costs, according to a recent analysis of U.S. census data by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
Rents have jumped since the end of the last recession as many areas of the state have seen strong job growth but little housing production. In Los Angeles, the median one-bedroom rental is $2,370, according to real estate website Zillow — an increase of 43% over the last eight years. Similar rent hikes have hit San Francisco and the state as a whole.
Rents in California have far outpaced rents in the rest of the country. Nationwide, the median one-bedroom rent is $1,299, according to the Zillow data, increasing 25% over the same eight-year period.
Economists generally believe that when government limits the price landlords can charge for housing, there will be fewer houses produced, which in turn drives up prices.
“When you have a price ceiling, it induces a shortage,” said Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and coauthor of a study on rent control in Cambridge, Mass. “The common wisdom is that rent control reduces the quantity and quality of available housing.”
Instead of rent control, Palmer said, economic research contends the primary solution to housing affordability problems is to build lots more homes and have the new supply force prices down.
But what about California tenants who are struggling now?
But these goals will be very hard to achieve, and some researchers say rent control is necessary to protect tenants from the continued threat of rising prices. The UC Berkeley Haas Institute report contends that rent control is the only way cities and counties can keep costs down cheaply and immediately.
“This is really the one thing that can be implemented most quickly,” said Nicole Montojo, a coauthor of the report. “The building is not going to happen fast enough. It’s just not possible.”
Cities and counties can also tailor rent control rules to limit negative consequences for new construction and other potential downsides, said Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and author of a forthcoming review of existing rent control research.
“For the life of me, I can’t think why you would give up rent stabilization as a tool given the extent of the crisis,” Pastor said.
How would Proposition 10 work? And what is Costa-Hawkins?
Fifteen California cities have some form of rent control now. But local governments are hamstrung when it comes to implementing most new rent control policies because of a 1995 state law, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
That law restricts city and county rent control efforts in three ways. Local governments are not allowed to:
Implement rent control on single-family homes.
Take away the right of landlords to charge what they want for apartments after a rent-controlled tenant moves out.
Control rents on buildings constructed after 1995. The law also locked into place rules in cities with rent control when Costa-Hawkins passed. For instance, Los Angeles ties rent hikes to inflation on apartments built on or before Oct. 1, 1978, and is prohibited from applying its provisions to more recently constructed properties.
Proposition 10 does not change existing rent control policies — it simply repeals Costa-Hawkins. So passage of the initiative would not, in most cases, immediately lead to new rent control rules. Instead, it would allow cities and counties to craft policies without restrictions.
Proposition 10 also would be hard to undo in the future. The initiative includes a provision that says any effort to implement statewide restrictions on rent control would have to be approved by California voters. The authors of Proposition 10 say they wrote the measure that way to prevent state lawmakers from undermining it. But the provision has faced criticism from those who contend any negative consequences from the measure would be very hard to fix.
Among the biggest beneficiaries: longtime tenants who would have been forced out of the city without renter protections. The study found rent control especially helped older and black and Latino tenants from being displaced.
Landlords who weren’t able to charge higher prices lost out. The study also found that landlords responded to rent control in San Francisco by converting their rental properties to owner-occupied condominiums, which decreased available apartments in the city and increased prices overall. The research contends that the system added to gentrification in San Francisco by increasing the number of older rental properties being made into units that were typically sold to wealthier residents.
“It may seem like a solution in the short run, but in the long run it really hurts renters and the rental market,” said Rebecca Diamond, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford and the study’s lead author.
Rent control supporters believe the study unfairly blamed the system for fueling gentrification and said the city could have worked to lessen some of the negative effects.
“Even though the costs they found are substantial, those costs could have been contained by the city of San Francisco having tighter controls on condominium conversions,” said Stephen Barton, a coauthor of the UC Berkeley Haas Institute study.
If Proposition 10 passes, what happens next?
Expect a lot of new local battles over rent control.
Fights at the city and county levels are likely to be long and contentious. Mountain View, which in 2016 passed a limited version of rent control that’s allowed under existing state law, has had a continuous struggle over rent control policies for the last three years with no end in sight.
WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?
The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”
The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.
They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.
Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.
“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.
That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.
In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.
All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.
For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”
The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.
If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.
The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.
In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.
At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”
This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.
She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.
The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.
Voting rights advocates saw a violation.
“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.
Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.
He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.
The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”
The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”
Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court. Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.
Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.
The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.
“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.
They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.
Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.
On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.
“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.
“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.
In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.
Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.
The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.
I count nearly a dozen serious candidates, with possibly more to come. Why so many?
Opportunity.
This is the most wide-open race for California governor in decades. By comparison, you’d have to go back to at least 1998, when Lt. Gov. Gray Davis surged past a pair of moneybag candidates, Al Checchi and Rep. Jane Harman, in the Democratic primary, then stomped Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren in November to win the general election.
Now, as then, there is no one who even remotely resembles a prohibitive front-runner.
After making a bundle as a hedge fund manager, the San Francisco billionaire and environmental activist has been panting after public office for years. Running for president didn’t work out in 2020, even after Steyer spent more than $345 million on his effort. (That’s close to what the Dodgers spent on their 2025 payroll.)
Longtime readers of this column — both of you! — will know I make no predictions.
But California voters have never looked favorably upon rich candidates trying to make the leap from political civilian to the governorship or U.S. Senate. In fact, over the last 50-plus years, a gilded gallery of the well-to-do have tried and spectacularly failed.
Perhaps Steyer will display the policy chops or the razzle and dazzle they all lacked. But his launch video certainly didn’t shatter any molds. Rather, it presented a stereotypical grab bag of redwood trees, potshots at Sacramento, multicultural images of hard-working-everyday-folk, a promise to fight, a pledge to build more housing and, of course, a dash of profanity because, gosh darn it, nothing says “unbridled authenticity” like a political candidate swearing!
Winning gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia — not by a little, but a lot — and prevailing in down-ballot contests in Pennsylvania and Georgia had a remarkably transformative effect. (Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in sky-blue New York City was no big surprise once the democratic socialist prevailed in the primary.)
Literally overnight, Democrats seized the momentum heading into the 2026 midterm election, while Republicans have begun scrambling to reposition their party and recraft its messaging.
All that being said, even before their buoyant off-year performance those widespread reports of Democrats’ demise were greatly … well, we’ll leave that Mark Twain chestnut alone. As analyst Charlie Cook points out, 2024 was a deeply disappointing year for the party. But it wasn’t a disaster.
Democrats gained two House seats. There was no net change in any of the 11 gubernatorial races and legislative contests across 44 states ended in something close to a wash. The party lost four Senate seats — and control of the chamber — but three of those losses came in the red states of Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.
“This is not to argue that Democrats had a great night in November 2024, but it certainly wasn’t a massacre or a party-wide repudiation,” Cook wrote in a recent posting. “If voters had intended to take it out on the party as a whole, the results would have looked quite different.”
If you’re asking whether Democrats will win control of the House or Senate…
Yes?!?
…I haven’t a clue.
Democrats need to gain three seats to take control of the House and both history and Trump’s sagging approval ratings — especially as pertains to the economy — augur well for their chances. The president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the last 22 midterm elections and, according to Inside Elections, the fewest number of seats that flipped was four.
An appeals court last week tossed out a Republican gerrymander in Texas, putting Democrats in an even stronger position, though the legal wrangling is far from over. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the decision, pending review. And still to come is a high court ruling that could gut the Voting Rights Act and yield Republicans a dozen or more House seats nationwide.
So the fight for control is far from decided.
As for the Senate, Republicans stand a much better chance of keeping control, given how the seats contested in 2026 are located on largely favorable GOP terrain.
But until the votes are counted, nobody knows what will happen. That’s the thing about elections: they help keep wiseacres like me honest.
WASHINGTON — A federal court has blocked Texas from moving forward with a new congressional map hastily drawn in recent months to net Republicans up to five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections.
The ruling on Tuesday is a major political blow to the Trump administration, which set off a redistricting arms race throughout the country earlier this year by encouraging Texas lawmakers to redraw its congressional district boundaries mid-decade — an extraordinary move bucking traditional practice.
The three-judge federal court panel in El Paso said in a 2-1 decision that “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” ordering the state to revert to the maps it had drawn in 2021.
Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who at Trump’s behest directed GOP state lawmakers to proceed with the plan, vowed on Tuesday that the state would appeal the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court.
Californians responded to Texas’ attempted move by voting on Nov. 4 to approve a new, temporary congressional map for the state, giving Democrats the opportunity to pick up five new seats.
Initially, the proposal pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, known as Prop. 50, had trigger language that would have conditioned new California maps going into effect based on whether Texas approved its new congressional districts.
But that language was stripped out last minute, raising the possibility that Democrats enter the 2026 midterm election with a distinct advantage. The language was removed because Texas had already passed its redistricting plan, making the trigger no longer needed, said Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, who drew the maps for Prop. 50.
“Our legislature eliminated the trigger because Texas had already triggered it,” Mitchell said Tuesday.
Newsom celebrated the ruling in a statement to The Times, which he also posted on the social media site X.
“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom said. “This ruling is a win for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”
The new Texas redistricting plan appears to have been instigated by a letter from Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who threatened Texas with legal action over three “coalition districts” that she argued were unconstitutional.
Coalition districts feature multiple minority communities, none of which comprises the majority. The newly configured districts passed by Texas redrew all three, potentially “cracking” racially diverse communities while preserving white-majority districts, legal scholars said.
While the Supreme Court’s rulings on redistricting have been sporadic, the justices have generally ruled that purely political redistricting is legal, but that racial gerrymandering is not — a more difficult line to draw in southern states where racial and political lines overlap.
In 2023, addressing a redistricting fight in Alabama over Black voter representation, the high court ruled in Allen vs. Milligan that discriminating against minority voters in gerrymandering is unconstitutional, ordering the Southern state to create a second minority-majority district.
The Justice Department is also suing California to attempt to block the use of its new maps in next year’s elections.
Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.
The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block new congressional district boundaries approved by California voters last week, joining a court battle that could help determine which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026.
The complaint filed in California federal court targets the new congressional map pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to a similar Republican-led effort in Texas backed by President Trump. It sets the stage for a high-stakes legal and political fight between the Republican administration and the Democratic governor, who is seen as a likely 2028 presidential contender.
“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in an emailed statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”
California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that changes the state’s congressional boundaries to give Democrats a shot at winning five seats currentlyheld by Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.
The Justice Department is joining a case challenging the new map that was brought by the California Republican Party last week. The Trump administration accuses California of racial gerrymandering in violation of the Constitution by using race as a factor to favor Latino voters with the new map. It asks a judge to prohibit California from using the new map in any future elections.
“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50 — the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the lawsuit says.
Proposition 50 was Newsom’s response to Trump’s maneuvers in Texas, where Republicans rejiggered districts in hopes of picking up five seats of their own ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when House control will be on the line.
Democrats need to gain just a handful of seats next year to take control of the chamber, a win that would imperil Trump’s agenda for the remainder of his term and open the way for congressional investigations into his administration. Republicans currently hold 219 seats, to Democrats’ 214.
The showdown between the nation’s two most populous states has spread nationally, with Missouri, Ohio and a spray of other states either adopting new district lines to gain partisan advantage or considering doing so.
The national implications of California’s ballot measure were clear in both the money it attracted and the high-profile figures who became involved. Tens of millions of dollars flowed into the race, including a $5-million donation to opponents from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super political action committee tied to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Former action movie star and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposed the measure, while former President Obama, a Democrat, appeared in ads supporting it, calling it a “smart” approach to counter Republican moves aimed at safeguarding House control.
The contest provided Newsom with a national platform when he has confirmed he will consider a White House run in 2028.
Richer and Blood write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Chicago.
WASHINGTON — Time was — not that long ago — that after a mass shooting, gun rights advocates would nod to the possibility of compromise before waiting for memories to fade and opposing any new legislation to regulate firearms.
This time, they skipped the preliminaries and jumped directly to opposition.
The speed of that negative reaction provides the latest example of how, on one issue after another, the gap between blue America and red America has widened so much that even the idea of national agreement appears far-fetched. Many political figures no longer bother pretending to look for it.
A survey last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, showed that by 87% to 12%, Americans supported “preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns.” By 81% to 18% they backed “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks.” And by a smaller but still healthy 64% to 36% they favored “banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.”
The gunman in Uvalde appears to have carried seven 30-round magazines, authorities in Texas have said.
So why, in the face of such large majorities, does Congress repeatedly do nothing?
One powerful factor is the belief among many Americans that nothing lawmakers do will help the problem.
Asked in that same Pew survey if mass shootings would decline if guns were harder to obtain, about half of Americans said they would go down, but 42% said it would make no difference. Other surveys have found much the same feeling among a large swath of Americans.
The argument about futility is one that opponents of change quickly turn to after a catastrophe. It’s a powerful rhetorical weapon against action.
Esmeralda Bravo, 63, holds a photo of her granddaughter, Nevaeh, one of the Robb Elementary School shooting victims, during a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas, on Wednesday.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
“It wouldn’t prevent these shootings,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on CNN on Wednesday when asked about banning the sort of semiautomatic weapons used by the killer in Uvalde and by a gunman who killed 10 at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket 10 days earlier. “The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes — whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they’re going to figure out a way to do it.”
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a similar claim at his news conference on Wednesday: “People who think that, ‘well, maybe we can just implement tougher gun laws, it’s gonna solve it’ — Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”
The facts powerfully suggest that’s not true.
Go back roughly 15 years: In 2005, California had almost the same rate of deaths from guns as Florida or Texas. California had 9.5 firearms deaths per 100,000 people that year, Florida had 10 and Texas 11, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.
Obviously, factors beyond a state’s laws can affect the rate of firearms deaths. The national health statistics take into account differences in the age distribution of state populations, but they don’t control for every factor that might affect gun deaths.
Equally clearly, no law stops all shootings.
California’s strict laws didn’t stop the shooting at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods earlier this month, and there’s no question that Chicago suffers from a large number of gun-related homicides despite strict gun control laws in Illinois. A large percentage of the guns used in those crimes come across the border from neighboring states with loose gun laws, research has shown.
The overall pattern is clear, nonetheless, and it reinforces the lesson from other countries, including Canada, Britain and Australia, which have tightened gun laws after horrific mass shootings: The states with America’s lowest rates of gun-related deaths all have strict gun laws; in states that allow easy availability of guns, more people die from them.
Fear of futility isn’t the only barrier to passage of national gun legislation.
Hardcore opponents of gun regulation have become more entrenched in their positions over the last decade.
Mostly conservative and Republican and especially prevalent in rural parts of the U.S., staunch opponents of any new legislation restricting firearms generally don’t see gun violence as a major problem but do see the weapons as a major part of their identity. In the Pew survey last year, just 18% of Republicans rated gun violence as one of the top problems facing the country, compared with 73% of Democrats. Other surveys have found much the same.
Strong opponents of gun control turn out in large numbers in Republican primaries, and they make any vote in favor of new restrictions politically toxic for Republican officeholders. In American politics today, where most congressional districts are gerrymandered to be safe for one party and only a few states swing back and forth politically, primaries matter far more to most lawmakers than do general elections.
Even in general elections, gun issues aren’t the top priority for most voters. Background checks and similar measures have wide support, but not necessarily urgent support.
Finally, in an era defined by “negative partisanship” — suspicion and fear of the other side — it’s easy to convince voters that a modest gun control proposal is just an opening wedge designed to lead to something more dramatic.
That leads to a common pattern when gun measures appear on ballots: They do less well than polling would suggest.
Then, as now, polls showed strong support for requiring background checks for sales that currently evade them. But support for the legislation was sharply lower than support for the general idea, Pew found.
Almost 8 in 10 Republican gun owners favored background checks in general, they found, but when asked about the specific bill, only slightly more than 4 in 10 wanted it to pass. When asked why they backed the general idea but opposed the specific one, most of those polled cited concerns that the bill would set up a “slippery slope” to more regulation or contained provisions that would go further than advertised.
Faced with that sort of skepticism from voters, Republican senators who had flirted with supporting the bill mostly walked away, and it failed.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden led the unsuccessful effort to pass that bill. Nearly a decade later, the political factors impeding action have only grown more powerful.
Texas school shooting
The recent string of devastating shootings has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions. But as Kevin Rector reported, a loosening of gun laws is almost certainly coming instead, largely because of an expected decision from the Supreme Court, which is likely to strike down a broad law in New York that doesn’t allow individuals to carry guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.
For all the impassioned speeches and angry tweets, for all the memes and viral videos of gun control proponents quaking with rage, most of the energy and political intensity has been on the side of those who favor greater gun laxity, Mark Barabak wrote.
Biden marked the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer by signing an executive order aimed at reforming policing at the federal level. As Eli Stokols reported, Wednesday’s order falls short of what Biden had hoped to achieve through legislation. It directs all federal agencies to revise their use-of-force policies, creates a national registry of officers fired for misconduct and provides grants to incentivize state and local police departments to strengthen restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants.
Sluggish response and questionable decisions by the Food and Drug Administration worsened the nation’s infant formula shortage, agency officials told lawmakers at a congressional hearing. “You’re right to be concerned, and the public should be concerned,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. The agency’s response “was too slow and there were decisions that were suboptimal along the way,” Anumita Kaur reported.
Only a couple of months ago, U.S. and European officials said a renewal of the Iran nuclear deal was “imminent.” But with little progress since then, and a shifting global geopolitical scene, the top U.S. envoy for the Iran negotiations testified Wednesday that prospects for reviving the Iran deal are “at best, tenuous,” Tracy Wilkinson reported. “We do not have a deal,” the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Cuba will not attend next month’s Summit of the Americas, a major conference to take place in Los Angeles, after the U.S. refused to extend a proper invitation, the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced Wednesday. As Wilkinson reported, the decision throws the summit, which is crucial to the U.S.’ ability to demonstrate its influence in the Western Hemisphere, into further disarray.
The latest from California
GOP Rep. Young Kim would seem to have a relatively easy path to reelection in November — the national mood favors her party, she has a lot of money and the newly drawn boundaries for her Orange County district give her more Republican constituents. But Kim is suddenly campaigning with a sense of urgency, Melanie Mason and Seema Mehta report. She’s unleashed $1.3 million in advertising, and outside allies are coming to her aid with more spending. Most of it is aimed at fending off Greg Raths, an underfunded GOP opponent who has been a staple on the political scene in Mission Viejo, the district’s largest city.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and top legislative Democrats pledged Wednesday to expedite gun legislation. Among the bills are measures that would require school officials to investigate credible threats of a mass shooting, allow private citizens to sue firearm manufacturers and distributors, and enact more than a dozen other policies intended to reduce gun violence in California, Taryn Luna and Hannah Wiley reported. “We’re going to control the controllable, the things we have control of,” Newsom said during an event at the state Capitol. “California leads this national conversation. When California moves, other states move in the same direction.”
The Los Angeles mayor’s race has seemingly devolved in recent days into a rhetorical brawl between two of the city’s richest men, Benjamin Oreskes wrote. Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supports Rep. Karen Bass, says Rick Caruso’s history of supporting Republican candidates and being registered as a Republican a decade ago disqualifies him from being mayor. That came after Variety published an interview with Caruso in which he attacked the former Walt Disney Studios chairman for “lying” about him in ads by a pro-Bass independent expenditure committee predominantly funded by Katzenberg.
The growing corruption scandal in Anaheim has cost the city’s mayor his job, endangered the city’s planned $320-million sale of Angel Stadium to the team and provided a rare, unvarnished look at how business is done behind closed doors in the city of 350,000. Read our full coverage of the FBI probe into how the city does business.
EXCLUSIVE: With the Celebrity Traitors final just hours away, a PR expert has revealed which stars are coming out to TV opportunities – and which have been left worse off
17:37, 06 Nov 2025Updated 17:40, 06 Nov 2025
The Celebrity Traitors real winners and losers have been revealed by an expert(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry)
The Celebrity Traitors airs its huge finale tonight on BBC One – and while fans are asking whether the Traitors or Faithful will win the game, others are wondering what’s next for its viral stars. Tonight’s episode will see finalists Alan Carr, Cat Burns, David Olusoga, Nick Mohammed and Joe Marler compete for the chance to win up to £100,000 for their chosen charities.
However, celebrity PR specialist Kayley Cornelius has revealed who the real winners from the BBC One series are – as well as who hasn’t come of as well as they had hoped. One of those coming out on top is ex rugby player Joe Marler, who is rumoured to be taking on a big presenting role with the BBC after the show.
Speaking on behalf of Online Casino provider Slingo, Kayley said that Joe has gained a whole new fanbase thanks to the Celebrity Traitors. “He has a lot to gain from this show – he’s recently retired from his sporting career and stepped into this new chapter of his life,” she said.
“Celebrity Traitors was his first bash at giving a reality career a try and he’s going to attract a lot of new listeners to his podcast. People have been so impressed with how clever he’s been throughout the process. He’s proven himself as being entertaining, clever, he comes across very well on screen.
“I can see him being lined up for every show under the sun – he’s probably going to be on Strictly next. He would be perfect for the glitz and glam. He’s such a good team player and he’s from sport so has discipline. He’s going to be a very booked and busy man.”
However, he’s not the only finalist who’ll be going on to bigger and better things – Kayley reveals that Cat Burns’ brand awareness has shot up thanks to the show. “She entered as this quiet underdog among line-up of really well known names. This show was a great opportunity for brand awareness for her,” she said.
“She’s just had to push back her tour but I have no doubt that it is going to sell out in no time. She’ll be able to headline bigger stages, do more arena-based shows. She might get a support slot on a stadium tour. It’s an exciting time where she’s going to be in demand.”
Kayley added that Cat could also go into fashion after showing off her style on Celebrity Traitors. “Some of her looks from the show, she came across as like quite cool, quite grungy and I think that aesthetic from an editorial sense, she’ll probably make thousands off the back of that.”
While there are rumours that the treacherous Alan Carr could become the next host of Strictly Come Dancing, Kayley doesn’t think it would be the right fit for the standout star. “When I think about what he will realistically do next, I can’t imagine it being Strictly,” she said.
“I think with the position that Strictly Come Dancing is in at the moment, as they’re recovering from these scandals, I think they want to keep two female presenters so I don’t know if I can quite see him taking Strictly on, even though it would be brilliant.
“I suppose for Alan, he’s just made a nation fall in love with him again and there’s chats of Chatty Man being revived – I can see it.”
As for the stars who haven’t found success from the show, YouTube star Niko Omilana is one of them thanks to his early banishment. The influencer was the first person to be accused of being a Traitor on the show and left in episode two.
“Niko unfortunately has lost out on quite a lot from doing this show,” Kayley said. “This is the kind of move that should have been a massive career break for Niko as he goes from online reality star into a mainstream celebrity. Like what we’re witnessing with George Clarke on Strictly at the moment.
“Unfortunately, with him being on the show for such a short amount of time, he wasn’t in there long enough to make much of an impact on this new audience.”
“I think Paloma might have some damage control to do,” Kayley says. “She’s quite angry with Alan Carr and how the game panned out. People might see her as a bit petty and a bit pathetic. Originally, the public said, ‘We need Paloma back – she was done so dirty.’ They’re now turning on her and saying she’s been a sore loser.
“From that perspective, she just needs to be a bit cautious and careful about how she speaks about her experience on the show and there might be more behind the scenes than we’re being let on to know at the minute, but I think if she is going to be a bad loser about this situation, it’s not going to go down well with viewers at home.”
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped to the microphone at the state Democratic headquarters in mid-August with the conviction of a man certain he was on the right side of history, bluntly saying California has a moral obligation to thwart President Trump’s attempt to tilt the balance of Congress.
Over the next 2½ months, Newsom became the public face of Proposition 50, a measure designed to help Democrats win control of the U.S. House of Representatives by temporarily redrawing California’s congressional districts.
Newsom took that leap despite tepid support for a gerrymandering measure in early polls.
With Tuesday’s election, the fate of Proposition 50 arrives at a pivotal moment for Newsom, who last week acknowledged publicly that he’s weighing a 2028 presidential run. The outcome will test not only his political instincts but also his ability to deliver on a measure that has national attention fixed squarely on him.
From the outset, Newsom paired his conviction with caution.
“I’m mindful of the hard work ahead,” Newsom said in August, shortly after lawmakers placed Proposition 50 on the ballot.
It was familiar territory for a governor who has built a career on high-stakes political bets. As San Francisco mayor, his decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses in 2004 made him a progressive icon. It also drew accusations he’d energized conservative turnout that year in the presidential election that ended with George W. Bush winning a second term.
As the state’s newly elected governor, he suspended the death penalty in 2019 despite voters having twice rejected measures to do so, calling it a costly and biased system that “fails to deliver justice” — a move that drew fury from law enforcement groups and victims’ families. His decision to take on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a 2023 prime-time debate hosted by Sean Hannity on Fox News was intended to showcase his command of policy and political agility, but instead fell flat amid an onslaught of insults.
“You know, not everybody would have done it,” veteran Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman said. “He saw the risk and he took it.”
If approved by voters, the ballot measure would redraw California’s congressional maps to favor Democrats beginning with the 2026 midterm elections in hopes of discounting Republican efforts to gerrymander more seats for themselves. California introduced the measure in response to Trump and his political team leaning on Republican-led states to redraw their district lines to help Republicans retain control of the House.
The balance of power in the closely divided House will determine whether Trump can advance his agenda during his final two years in office — or face an emboldened Democratic majority that could move to challenge, or even investigate, his administration.
And while critics of the governor see a power-craving politician chasing headlines and influence, supporters say this is classic Newsom: confident, risk-tolerant and willing to stand alone when he believes he’s right. He faced intense backlash from his political allies when he had conservative personality Charlie Kirk as his inaugural guest on his podcast this year, on which Newsom said he believed it was “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. After Kirk was killed, Newsom regularly brought up that interview as a point of pride, noting the backlash he received from his own party over hosting a Trump ally.
“In so many ways, he is not a cautious politician,” said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School. “His brand is big, bold decisions.”
With Proposition 50, Newsom has cast the redistricting counterpunch as a moral imperative, arguing that Democrat-led states must “fight fire with fire,” even if it means pausing a state independent redistricting process largely considered the gold standard. The measure upends a system Californians overwhelmingly endorsed to keep politics out of the map-drawing process.
Levinson said Newsom’s profile has been rising along with the polling numbers for Proposition 50 as he has booked national television shows like ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and appeared in an ad in favor of the ballot measure with former President Obama, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats that ran during the World Series.
“We are talking about Proposition 50 on a nationwide scale,” Levinson said. “And it’s really hard to talk about Proposition 50 without saying the words ‘Gov. Newsom of California spearheading the effort to pass.’”
California Republicans have called the effort misguided, arguing that the retaliatory response creates a slippery slope that would erode the independent redistricting process California voters have chosen twice at the ballot box.
“When you fight fire with fire, the whole world burns,” said California Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), whose district is among those that would be overhauled under Proposition 50. “Newsom is trying to claim that Texas did a bad gerrymandering, but what California is doing is a good gerrymander because somehow it’s canceling it out … I just think gerrymandering is wrong. It’s wrong in Texas and it’s wrong in California.”
Kiley said Newsom never has been one to shy away from national attention “and for pursing explicitly partisan goals.”
“He’s certainly used this as an opportunity to do both of those things,” Kiley said.
Out of the gate, the redistricting plan had lackluster support. Then came the flood of ads by proponents peppered with talking points about Trump rigging the election.
Supporters of Proposition 50 took in more than four times the amount that opponents raised in recent weeks, according to campaign finance reports filed with the state by the three main committees campaigning about the measure. Supporters of Proposition 50 raised so much money that Newsom told them “you can stop donating.”
Political analysts said the redistricting fight has given Newsom what every ambitious politician craves: a narrative. It’s allowed him to cast himself as a defender of democracy while reenergizing donors. That message sharpened when Trump administration officials said they’d monitor polling sites in several California counties at the state GOP’s request, prompting Newsom to accuse the Trump administration of “voter intimidation.”
Republican strategist Rob Stutzman said the campaign gave Newsom something he’d struggled to find: “an authentic confrontation” with Trump that resonates beyond California.
“And I think it’s worked well for him nationally,” Stutzman said. “I think it’s been great for him in some ways, regardless of what happens, but if it does lose, it’ll hurt the brand that he can win and there will be a lot of disgruntled donors.”
While Newsom has framed the measure as good for the country, Stutzman said it’s clear that Proposition 50 has been particularly good for the governor.
“He’s used it for his own purposes very, very effectively,” Stutzman said. “If he becomes the [presidential] nominee, you could look back and say this was an important part of him getting there.”
