The Antrim senior hurling squad have requested a meeting with the county board at Tuesday evening’s training session to address “significant concern” after they claimed they received conflicting reports about manager Davy Fitzgerald’s future.
In a letter to the county board, which has been seen by BBC Sport NI, the players say they were under the impression that a decision was made to remove Fitzgerald from his role following last weekend’s Joe McDonagh Cup defeat by Laois, only for the decision to be reversed.
However, the squad said they were subsequently informed “that no such action had taken place” and when the matter was brought to Antrim GAA chairman Seamus McMullan, he “indicated that he had no knowledge of it”.
In the letter, the playing group say McMullan’s response is “particularly concerning” given that Fitzgerald confirmed that “the sequence of events did in fact occur”.
“The contradiction between what occurred and what has been communicated has created uncertainty and a lack of trust among players,” read the letter.
The players added that if the board do not attend the meeting and engage with the squad, they will “not proceed with the scheduled training session and further action could be taken”.
BBC Sport NI has contacted Antrim GAA for comment.
While the run of poor results has led to disquiet among the playing panel and some Antrim GAA administrators, it is understood Fitzgerald has indicated a desire to remain in charge.
Situated along the UK coast is a county brimming with quintessential British villages and an array of scenic walking routes, and the most hygienic soft play centre for little ones
This UK county is brimming with pretty villages and scenic vistas (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A beautiful UK county with ample walking routes and picturesque villages has the ‘cleanest soft play’ centre.
Soft play centres, with their cushioned equipment, ball pits, mats, slides and climbing frames, are not only a great way to keep young children entertained, but they also support their development. Children can improve their social skills, enhance their coordination, and develop physical movement while stimulating imagination and creativity in a fun, safe and secure environment.
So it’s no wonder that soft play is popular among parents and their little ones. Yet parents not only want to ensure the soft play is suitable for their child, but also want to know it’s hygienic before planning a visit.
Luckily, the outdoor play specialists at Outdoor Toys have uncovered the cleanest soft play centres across 20 of the most popular UK counties, and there’s one that stood out from them all. Somerset ranked as the most hygienic soft play, according to the toy experts’ analysis of Tripadvisor reviews.
The experts revealed that fewer than 4 in 100 reviews mentioned hygiene issues at Somerset’s soft plays. Instead, unsanitary reviews made up just a mere 3.9% of all feedback on TripAdvisor, and parents praised the “clean and airy” environment at Space Adventurers Indoor Play in Taunton.
Other highly rated centres in Somerset include Play Haven SoftPlay, Ocean Adventurers Soft Play, and Safari Tots. But it’s not just the children’s play centres that warrant a visit to the county.
Somerset is packed with picture-perfect villages and picture-postcard landscapes, set against rolling hills, patchwork fields, dramatic gorges, coastal shores and ancient woodlands. Thanks to its acres of lush landscapes, the county is famously home to Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Pilton, and when the festival isn’t on, it offers ample walking opportunities, including to the summit of Glastonbury Tor.
Dunster is considered one of the prettiest villages in Somerset, with its preserved medieval architecture, more than 200 listed buildings and 17th-century Yarn Market, nestled within Exmoor National Park. There’s also the picturesque village of Selworthy, with its array of thatched cottages, All Saints Church, and scenic walking routes to Selworthy Beacon, a hill and Marilyn of Exmoor, which offer panoramic views across the coast.
There’s also the small village of Allerford, with its whitewashed thatched cottages and 15th-century packhorse bridge, located on the edge of Exmoor National Park. As well as the historic village of Mells, which has often been dubbed one of the prettiest in the UK, thanks to its ‘chocolate-box’ charm, with honey-coloured houses and walks along the Wadbury Valley and Mells River.
So why not combine a trip to the cleanest soft play centre with exploring the stunning vistas of Somerset? And with its position along the coast, you could even spend a day at the seaside during the warmer months.
Top 10 regions with the cleanest play areas
1.Somerset
Total reviews: 908
Unsanitary reviews: 35
Unsanitary reviews (%): 3.9%
2. South Yorkshire
Total reviews: 1,040
Unsanitary reviews: 57
Unsanitary reviews (%): 5.5%
3. Lancashire
Total reviews: 1,106
Unsanitary reviews: 65
Unsanitary reviews (%): 5.9%
4. Greater Manchester
Total reviews: 1,344
Unsanitary reviews: 87
Unsanitary reviews (%): 6.5%
5. Nottinghamshire
Total reviews: 401
Unsanitary reviews: 33
Unsanitary reviews (%): 8.2%
6. Essex
Total reviews: 1019
Unsanitary reviews: 87
Unsanitary reviews (%): 8.5%
7. Hampshire
Total reviews: 1,020
Unsanitary reviews: 96
Unsanitary reviews (%): 9.4%
8. Lincolnshire
Total reviews: 564
Unsanitary reviews: 55
Unsanitary reviews (%): 9.8%
9. North Yorkshire
Total reviews: 457
Unsanitary reviews: 50
Unsanitary reviews (%): 10.9%
10. West Midlands
Total reviews: 447
Unsanitary reviews: 49
Unsanitary reviews (%): 11.0%
Kim May, Creative Arts Therapist at ISP Fostering, revealed the benefits of soft play centres for young children. She told the Outdoor Toys team: “Spending time in play centres helps children to embrace the play and imagination stages of their development and is beneficial for socialisation and the development of physical and cognitive skills.
“When children are in their most infant years, development is about harnessing imagination and mobility skills, and lots of what they learn is through sensory experiences – soft play can positively contribute to this. For children under four years old in particular, they rely on their sensory memory a lot (taste, touch, sound, feel, and sight). Even if a child is too small to physically move or interact with toys or a play area, they are still learning and developing through their senses.”
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Former New Zealand all-rounder Doug Bracewell has admitted using cocaine after the first day of Essex’s final County Championship match last year.
Bracewell returned the positive test on 25 September – the second day of the match against Somerset at Chelmsford.
He was notified by the Cricket Regulator in November and responded on 8 December, confirming he had used cocaine after the first day of the fixture, into the early hours of the following morning.
Bracewell, who signed for Essex for the final three Championship matches of the season, opened the bowling on day one, claiming two wickets as Somerset moved to 339-6. He was not required to bat on day two and Essex eventually won the match by seven wickets.
After being notified of the positive test, Bracewell then retired from cricket on 28 December. The Regulator has still issued him with a two-year ban.
Part of a famous New Zealand cricketing family – his uncle John Bracewell played 28 Tests and cousin Michael is a current Black Cap – Doug played 69 international matches across formats.
He also previously served a one-month ban for cocaine use in 2024.
Bracewell has accepted the sanction, while Essex will not face punishment.
“Essex can confirm that Doug Bracewell failed a routine drugs test in September 2025,” said a club statement.
“The club supports the Cricket Regulator’s decision to impose a period of ineligibility of two years. All employees are required to meet the highest standards of professional conduct.
“While the club does not condone Bracewell’s behaviour, we are committed to supporting him through rehabilitation in line with our policies and procedures.”
Riverside County has been ordered to pay $2.25 million to a former sergeant who said he was pressured into early retirement in retaliation for reporting workplace harassment by a superior.
Sgt. Frank Lodes was forced to leave the job he loved in 2022 — penning a resignation letter in a Del Taco parking lot — while a high-ranking department official threatened him with mounting investigations, according to the complaint. On Tuesday a civil jury concluded that Lodes resigned involuntarily due to his reporting of a hostile workplace and was awarded the multimillion-dollar payment as compensation for his emotional damages.
Lodes’ attorney Bijan Darvish said the award was a “significant number” that adequately represents the harm inflicted on Lodes, noting that the period since his forced retirement has been the “darkest four years” of Lodes’ life.
He said that his client did not wish to comment on the verdict as discussing the events remained painful. The Sheriff’s Department and the county did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being a cop was his life; he lived and breathed it 24/7,” Darvish said. “It was his entire identity, and that’s why it was so difficult for him when it was taken away.”
The jury award comes amid a rare wide-open governor’s race that includes the head of the Sheriff’s Department, Chad Bianco, who is a leading GOP candidate for the seat. Bianco has staked his campaign on his lengthy career in law enforcement, which spans more than three decades, including serving as the elected sheriff of Riverside County since 2019.
Although high-ranking Sheriff’s Department officials were involved in Lodes’ case, Darvish said there was no evidence presented at trial that Bianco had direct knowledge of his client’s mistreatment. Bianco was not a defendant in the lawsuit. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Darvish argues that the case points to a departmental culture of covering up allegations of misconduct.
“When there’s a harassment complaint made against the captain and they never investigated, and they pressure someone to resign and withdraw the complaint,” he said, “then that’s a systemic issue.”
The retaliation began after Lodes, a 25-year veteran of the department, formally reported workplace harassment with human resources in March 2022, according to the complaint.
Lodes had been called mentally ill in front of his peers by a captain during a promotability meeting around October 2021. A few months later, he found degrading posters of his head on a child’s body shoved inside his uniform pockets and gun holster and plastered over the station walls, according to the complaint.
The department responded to his harassment report by launching an investigation into Lodes unlawfully using informants and threatening him with possible criminal prosecution, according to Darvish.
The jury agreed that these allegations were a manufactured excuse to cover up unlawful retaliation.
Within days of filing the workplace harassment complaint, a Internal Affairs sergeant packed Lodes’ personal belongings in a box and drove them to his house, according to the complaint. The sergeant spent hours pressuring Lodes, then 47, to accept early retirement.
The following day, Lodes was told to meet with a high-ranking official in the Sheriff’s Department in a Del Taco parking lot who instructed him to resign immediately and withdraw his harassment complaint.
The $2.25-million award in the civil case will come from the county’s coffers.
The award casts renewed scrutiny on Bianco’s Sheriff’s Department two weeks before primary election ballots land in Californians’ mailboxes.
He was also in the spotlight in March after seizing more than 650,000 ballots from the November election as part of an investigation to determine if they were fraudulently counted. He put the investigation on hold shortly before the California Supreme Court halted it pending further review.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
MINNEAPOLIS — An ICE agent is charged with assault for allegedly pointing his gun at people in a car while driving on a Minneapolis highway, prosecutors in Minnesota said Thursday.
An arrest warrant in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, says Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. is charged with two counts of second-degree aggravated assault. The warrant says Morgan was working as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in the Minneapolis area on Feb. 5 when he pointed a gun at the occupants of a vehicle on Minnesota State Highway 62.
Hennepin County Atty. Mary Moriarty said she believes it is the first criminal case brought against a federal immigration officer involved in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration enforcement that surged federal authorities into cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and New Orleans.
Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department officials didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment. The Associated Press called a number associated with Morgan and sent a message to his possible email address but did not receive any immediate response.
Moriarty said during a news conference that Morgan was driving a rented, unmarked SUV on the shoulder of the highway when a car on the road moved into the shoulder to try to slow Morgan down, not knowing he was a federal officer. After the car returned into the legal lane, Morgan pulled up alongside and pointed his service weapon at the people in the car.
Morgan, 35, and his partner, who was not charged, were on their way to the federal building to end their shift when they were caught in traffic. Charging documents note Morgan did not say the incident occurred during an enforcement action.
According to the charging documents, Morgan told a Minnesota State Patrol officer that he pulled up alongside the victim’s vehicle, drew his firearm and yelled “Police Stop.” The warrant says the victims couldn’t hear him because their windows were up.
Morgan is charged with two counts of assault because he threatened both people in the vehicle, and there is a warrant out for his arrest, Moriarty said.
The charges could intensify a clash between the Trump administration and Minnesota officials over the crackdown. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has warned that the Justice Department could investigate and prosecute state or local officials who arrest federal agents for performing their official duties.
Moriarty said she is not concerned about blowback from the Trump administration and that her office’s goal is to “hold people accountable if they violate the laws of the state,” she said.
She said Morgan’s actions were beyond the scope of a federal officers’ authority.
“There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the state of Minnesota,” she said.
In Minnesota, felony second-degree assault is punishable by up to seven years in prison, or up to 10 years imprisonment if the assault inflicted “substantial bodily harm.”
The Department of Homeland Security deployed about 3,000 federal officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area from December through February in what the agency called its “largest immigration enforcement operation ever.” The Minnesota operation led to thousands of arrests, angry mass protests and the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.
Backlash over the aggressive tactics mounted, and two of the crackdown’s most high-profile leaders were soon gone. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March shortly after the Minnesota surge ended. That same month, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief who led immigration operations in several large cities, announced his retirement.
In a letter to California officials last year, then-Deputy Atty. Gen. Blanche wrote that “the Justice Department views any arrests of federal agents and officers in the performance of their official duties as both illegal and futile.”
“Numerous federal laws prohibit interfering with and impeding immigration or other law-enforcement operations,” Blanche wrote. “The Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute any state or local official who violates these federal statutes (or directs or conspires with others to violate them).”
Sullivan and Bynum write for the Associated Press. Bynum reported from Savannah, Ga. AP reporter Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, contributed to this report.
L.A. County officials want to put $2.7 million toward beefing up the team of people investigating fraud within a deluge of recent sex abuse lawsuits, suggesting a broadening probe at the district attorney’s office.
The funding allocation, part of the county’s $48.8-billion budget proposal unveiled Monday, would bring on 10 new people to the small team prosecuting alleged fraud within the county’s historic $4-billion sex abuse settlement. L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman announced the probe last November following a Times investigation that found nine people who said they were paid to sue.
The county has agreed to pay billions to settle more than 11,000 claims of sex abuse in juvenile halls and foster homes, a flood of lawsuits spurred by a 2020 law changing the statute of limitations. Since those settlements, more than 5,000 new lawsuits have been filed with an average of 150 new claims coming in per month, according to the county, raising the prospect of future costly payouts.
Acting Chief Executive Joseph Nicchitta said Monday the new filings would continue to be an “anchor” around the county’s finances.
“It is something that’s going to weigh on us going forward,” he said at a news conference announcing the new spending plan.
Hochman said in a statement that the investigation was a priority for his office and the money would be used to “pursue every credible lead and hold fraudsters accountable.”
“It is our pledge to the real survivors of childhood sexual abuse that we will root out and prosecute those who manufactured false claims and profited or tried to profit from those lies,” Hochman said. “As for those who filed fraudulent claims of sex abuse, the time is growing short for you to turn yourselves in before you are arrested, prosecuted and punished.”
Nicchitta made a pitch for legislative change, noting the county was looking to Sacramento to “eliminate loopholes allowing abusive practices by attorneys that inject weak and potentially fraudulent claims into settlement pools.”
“These reforms that we are seeking are anti-fraud,” said Nicchitta. “They are not anti-survivor.”
The payouts are yet another cloud looming over the budget proposal, along with rising labor costs and federal funding cuts. The recommended budget represents a 7% decrease in spending compared to the current plan.
But Nicchitta said Monday it wasn’t all doom and gloom, with the county managing to stave off layoffs and program cuts.
The upcoming budget proposal, he said, represented the calm before the next big wave of potential rollbacks.
“Remember, we’re in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.
The budget forecast was notably rosier than last year’s, in which the county was saddled with $2 billion in new wildfire costs and had made the first round of slashes to finance the sex abuse payouts. The county froze hiring at the time and made most departments shrink their budgets by 3%.
Those cuts, Nicchitta said, went deep enough that they can avoid major slashes this upcoming fiscal year, though he warned the fallout from the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will soon wreak fresh havoc on the county’s finances. Health officials say they expect more than $2 billion to be cut from the budget for health services over the next three years.
Costs from wildfire will also continue to weigh on the county’s coffers. Officials say the federal government has yet to respond to a February request for rebuilding aid. Nicchitta said he was “optimistic” the money would soon be made available.
Growth from property taxes has given the county a small new pot of funds, which will be used largely to pay for increased salaries for county workers. An additional $12 million will go to public defenders, who say they’re buckling under untenably heavy caseloads, while the Office of Emergency Management will get roughly $10 million to add 44 positions, according to the proposal.
The office, which is responsible for coordinating during emergencies, was under scrutiny following the alert failures of the Eaton fire, and officials had promised in the aftermath to revamp the small office.
The supervisors will be briefed on the budget plan Tuesday.
STAYCATIONS are on the rise this year, and there’s one county in England that actually wants you to visit.
County Durham is attempting to lure tourists in for more than a day trip with its pretty beaches, great pubs, beautiful nature reserves and a famous ‘living’ museum.
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County Durham wants to see more visitors in 2026Credit: AlamyAside from the city, the county has beautiful countryside, and pretty beaches like SeahamCredit: Alamy
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County Durham sits in the North East of England and is known primarily for its city of Durham, home to a huge cathedral that’s over 930 years old – which is also where scenes for the first two Harry Potter films were filmed.
Aside from the city, the county itself has so much to offer, and officials are hoping that tourists will stick around to see more of it.
The latest data from 2024 recorded 19.93million day visitors to County Durham, but just 1.64million overnight stays in the same period.
The first is Slug & Lettuce in Durham’s Walkergate food and drink complex – it has a classic offering of cocktails and even a neon staircase.
Second is The Head of Steam on North Road, which is very near Durham Cathedral and the Riverwalk.
One happy customer said on Tripadvisor that it’s “hands down one of the best spots in the city.”
Outside of the city centre is the third pub in the list – The Royal George in Peterlee which serves up huge roast dinners on Sundays.
Another award-winning pub is Victoria Inn, which won Durham’s CAMRA Pub of the Year competition for 2026 and made an appearance in The European Bar Guide.
It’s a Grade II listed pub, first built in 1899 with a cosy snug and coal fires, and it hasn’t changed much since.
When it comes to exploring the county, another must-do is head to the coast.
It’s got pretty coastal spots like Blackhall Rocks Beach which is considered a ‘hidden gem’ and sits in front of huge limestone cliffs.
The village of Horden has an unspoilt beach with few facilities, but visitors say it’s lovely for a refreshing walk.
The sea treasure is man-made glass which has ended up in the sea, where it is then shaped by the water over several years before returning to the shore.
And plenty of beachgoers head there to try and find some.
From Seaham, it’s common to spot dolphins, one person wrote on TripAdvisor: “Staying on the beach gave us a prime viewing of the pod of dolphins that swam along the coast catching fish – great photo opportunity.”
The Victoria Inn has remained mostly unchanged and still has coal fireplacesCredit: Unknown
For more on staycations, here are some of our favourite UK hotels…
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Margate House, Kent
This stylish boutique hotel is in a seaside townhouse, a short walk from Margate’s coolest bars and restaurants. Decked out with plush velvet sofas, candles flickering and striking independent art, inside feels like a warm welcome home. Rooms are stunning, especially the ones that give you a glimpse of the sea.
The Alan looks extremely grand, being built into a beautiful Grade II listed building. Spread across six floors, with 137 rooms, each one looks like a fancy design magazine. From the concrete coffee tables to the pink plastered walls, the industrial-inspired designs perfectly replicate the history of the city.
This historic hotel has welcomed the likes of Charles Dickens and Lillie Langtry through its doors. Rooms have richly-patterned carpets with super soft bed linen and premium toiletries in the bathroom. Go for a superior room for extra goodies including bathrobes and snack boxes.
This Cambridge hotel is in the ideal spot, within walking distance to bars, shops and hotspots like the university colleges and Parker’s Piece. The inside couldn’t be prettier, with huge stained glass windows, grand chandeliers, and rooms with enormous clawfoot bath tubs.
Seaham is famous for sea glass and you can even see dolphins from the shorelineCredit: Alamy
It’s not all beach though – County Durham also has lots of natural beauty inland.
The High Force Waterfall is found in the Forest-in-Teesdale in the Durham Dales and is around 70-feet tall.
One hiker who spoke to Sun Travel even said it’s “probably the most impressive waterfall in the UK.”
Just half an hour away by car is another impressive must-see – Raby Castle in Darlington.
Built in the 14th century, it was formerly the home of Cecily Neville – the mother of two kings of England – and is surrounded by a 200-acre deer park where the animals roam freely on the grounds.
There’s also pretty walled gardens, an adventure playground, and café.
Entry to the castle, deer park and gardens starts from £24 for adults and £23 for concessions. For children between 4-15 it’s £13 and under 4s go free.
High Force Waterfall has been called one of the most ‘impressive’ in the UKCredit: AlamyBeamish is the county’s ‘living museum’Credit: Alamy
County Durham is also home to a unique museum that visitors have said makes them feel like they’re ‘travelling back in time’.
Called Beamish, the ‘living museum’ allows people to see what life would have been like in the UK between the 1820s and 1950s.
Visitors can explore replica homes, pubs, shops, train stations – and it’s fully interactive.
Passes cost £35 for adults and £20.50 for children (it’s an unlimited pass so if you buy it once, you can return as many times as you like throughout the year).
The Bowes Museum is a beautiful and enormous art gallery set amongst 22 acres of landscaped parkland.
Inside the French-style museum holds world-famous art collections with pieces by the likes of Spanish artists, El Greco and Goya.
From now until September, it is holding an exhibition honouring fashion designer, Vivienne Westwood.
Day admission for adults is £20 – and under 18s, as well as full-time students and carers, go free.
When it comes to entertaining the kids – head to Adventure Valley which is a family adventure park.
It’s got everything you could possibly think of for an entertaining day out, from adventure golf to tractor rides, football, a huge outdoor playground, and indoor soft play.
It has farmyard animals too, from pigs to goats and alpacas. Tickets for both adults and children start from £15.95.
The Bowes Museum is home to thousands of objects including art and sculpturesCredit: Alamy
Here’s what one travel writer thought when he went to the city of Durham…
“Even for those muggles who are not Harry Potter fans, shouting out spells in Durham Cathedral doesn’t feel too out of place.
“Quite the opposite, in fact, given more Potter movie scenes than you can wave a wand at have been shot in this historic city.
“No1 filming location for fans of JK Rowling’s magical tales to visit is surely the Norman cathedral, dating to the 11th Century.
“It is this building that brought the fictional wizarding school of Hogwarts to life in the films.
“Durham is not all old hallways and ancient sites, though. Visiting with my partner Charlotte, on day one we set off to concoct some potions with Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore. OK, that’s not strictly true — but we did make our own bottle of gin at the Durham Gin Distillery, with managing director Jon Chadwick.
“With his wild, white hair and beard he certainly reminded us of a young Dumbledore.”
Living outside the community they want to represent can be a handicap for political candidates, but it’s not likely to be a problem for Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt, who until recently was living in Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County, analysts say.
That’s because Pratt’s home burned in the January 2025 Palisades fire, making him a sympathetic figure among many voters — especially those living in his Westside base, they say.
“I don’t think this is going to be electorally consequential,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles County supervisor and L.A. City Council member who now runs the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “He’s a victim of the Palisades fire that doesn’t have a home to live in because it burned down.”
Pratt filed to run for mayor in February and was in second place behind Mayor Karen Bass in a recent poll by the Luskin school. He was certified by the Los Angeles city clerk on March 2 as one of 14 candidates in the June 2 primary election.
While some observers have raised questions about his eligibility, a state memorandum following the fires said that voters who were temporarily displaced from their homes can use their prior address as their permanent residence as long as they “intend to return” in the future.
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt currently resides in a private community in Carpinteria, Calif.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said this also applies to candidates.
“In situations where a candidate has been temporarily displaced (such as the 2025 wildfires), their eligibility to run for office is not impacted, provided they maintain domicile in their district,” Sanchez said in a statement.
He explained that domicile is determined by a person’s primary residence and their intent to return to that residence. “Temporary relocation during rebuilding or recovery does not, by itself, change a person’s domicile.”
The Times asked the L.A. city clerk’s office last week about Pratt’s residency and eligibility.
“We cannot comment on the specifics of a candidate’s address due to confidentiality. Any matter concerning a candidate’s eligibility or residency, such as this situation, can be formally challenged through the court,” said Josue Marcus, a spokesperson for the city clerk’s office.
Any potential challenge to Pratt’s eligibility based on residency would turn on the question of whether he had intent to return, said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Marymount University law professor. “Those are tricky inquiries because it depends on someone’s state of mind,” she said.
Pratt and his campaign aides didn’t respond to requests for comment. Pratt released a video Monday, following inquiries from The Times, defending his decision to move to Carpinteria but saying he now intends to live in a trailer placed on his burned-out lot in Pacific Palisades.
The city of Los Angeles sprawls across roughly 500 square miles, creating logistical hurdles if nothing else for a candidate seeking citywide office from a remote location, noted Democratic political consultant Mike Trujillo.
“Anyone that has done the drive from San Pedro to Sylmar knows that L.A. is a big place,” said Trujillo, who isn’t affiliated with any of the candidates in the June 2 mayoral primary. “To add another hour and a half to the drive is not advantageous if you’re trying to campaign in every corner of the city.”
Pratt, a former reality TV star, has millions of followers on social media, but Trujillo said that Pratt will need to show a strong presence in the community to wage a successful campaign.
Pratt is a Republican running in a Democrat-majority city. Developer Geoffrey H. Palmer, a major campaign donor to President Trump, plans to host a reception for Pratt at his Beverly Hills home April 28, according to a document the Pratt campaign filed with the city Ethics Commission.
The UCLA Luskin poll released this month showed Pratt with the support of 11% of likely voters, behind Bass with 25% and ahead of City Council member Nithya Raman with 9%.
Mayoral candidate Adam Miller, who polled at 3% in the survey, said Pratt’s party affiliation is his biggest hurdle to winning the mayoral race.
“I sympathize with Spencer for losing his home and feeling outrage toward the city, but he is not a viable candidate. It doesn’t matter where he lives, a Republican hasn’t been elected mayor in 30 years in this city, and he isn’t going to change that now,” said Miller, a tech executive.
Others say party affiliation is less of an issue.
“This is a nonpartisan race,” said Roxanne Hoge, the chair of the Los Angeles County Republican Party. “There’s no letter accompanying anyone’s name. … I personally support him because he’s an intelligent alternative.”
Some think Pratt will also hold appeal for some Democratic voters.
“There are people I speak to who I know to be Democrats who really, really like him,” said Maryam Zar, who heads the Palisades Recovery Coalition. “To the extent that people are disappointed in this recovery, they pin their hopes on Spencer. That’s not a bad place for him to be.”
Jamie Smith, with a majestic 166, has now scored a century in each of Surrey’s opening two County Championship matches as he bids to hold on to his England Test place this summer.
And Ollie Pope, dropped during the winter Ashes series defeat in Australia, also hit 103 as Surrey piled up 412-6 against Leicestershire in front of a 5,000-plus day one crowd at the Kia Oval.
Smith and Pope put on exactly 200 for the third wicket, after Leicestershire had decided to bowl first on a green-looking pitch and initially reduced Surrey to 42-2.
Pope’s hundred, the 25th of his first-class career, was more of a workmanlike affair as he looked to spend time at the crease following two low scores in Surrey’s high-scoring draw at Warwickshire in the season’s opener last week.
Smith, however, looked in prime touch throughout his high-class innings after making a six-hour 132 on the final day against Warwickshire on Monday. Overall, he faced 240 balls and struck 19 fours and two sixes before edging seamer Ben Green to slip seven overs before stumps.
Intriguingly, Smith has been handed the number three specialist batter role by Surrey despite playing his 20 Tests to date as a wicketkeeper batting in the lower middle order.
In those Tests he averages a credible 41.48 with the bat, with two hundreds, but in Australia he managed only a disappointing 211 runs at 23.44, passing fifty just once and drawing criticism for the manner of several of his dismissals.
Surrey, who have Ben Foakes as their long-established number one keeper, clearly see Smith’s powerful stroke-making as a key asset in their top order – particularly when he can concentrate solely on his batting – as they start a quest to reclaim the championship after being pipped to a fourth successive title by Nottinghamshire last September.
Dan Lawrence briefly enjoyed himself with a 36-ball cameo of 31, smashing New Zealand Test spinner Ajaz Patel straight for six from the second ball he faced, and also swinging Green over the deep mid-wicket ropes before chopping on against Rehan Ahmed’s leg-spin.
Foakes, meanwhile, also showed he is in fine form with the bat, unfurling some lovely strokes in a poised unbeaten 62 to follow up scores of 128 and 36 not out against Warwickshire and add a further 105 with Smith.
Leicestershire, who won promotion from Division Two last year, struggled to contain the commanding Smith and a busy Pope once they came together in the 15th over.
That followed Dom Sibley’s second-over departure, leg-before for four to an inswinger from left-arm paceman Josh Hull, and Rory Burns chipping Tom Scriven’s medium pace to mid on after a largely untroubled cruise to 24.
Pope finally fell in the 60th over, caught behind pushing at one tossed up by slow left-armer Patel, and by the end of a long day in the field Leicestershire – who lost by 222 runs to Sussex last week on their return to the top flight – are up against it once more.
Report by ECB Reporters’ Network, supported by Rothesay.
Spectators have been told to stay away from Durham’s Riverside ground at Chester-le-Street after it was hit by Storm Dave overnight.
The start of the third day’s play in the County Championship Division Two match between Durham and Kent has been delayed.
A club statement said “damage has been caused within the venue” and fans have been advised to stay away.
The statement continued: “The club have been in discussions with the match officials and venue staff this morning and following the impact on the pitch and structures within the ground it is confirmed that play will not commence on time, and a further update will be provided in due course.
“The safety of all in attendance is our number one priority in any decisions we make.”
The extent of the damage at the Riverside, an international cricket venue, has not yet been disclosed.
SACRAMENTO — As Democratic leaders in California challenge President Trump’s latest effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, they also must grapple with a troubling development in the last election.
A significant number of mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted in the Nov. 4 special election for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful measure to reconfigure the state’s congressional districts, according to state data.
Ballots came in late at an average rate four times higher than that of the 2024 election, with rural counties seeing some of the biggest increases, according to a Times review.
“Something changed,” said Melvin E. Levey, who heads the Merced County Registrar of Voters. “We don’t like seeing late ballots and if someone has made the effort to vote, we want to count it.”
Merced saw almost a sevenfold increase in late-arriving mail ballots in the November election compared with the year before.
Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or do not arrive within seven days of election day.
The issue appears to be linked to the U.S. Postal Service, which last year reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas. Election officials warned before Nov. 4 that the Postal Service changes could delay the postmarking of ballots and lead to votes not being counted.
During the Nov. 4 election in California, an average of 8 out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected by counties because they arrived too late, according to Secretary of State data. In the 2024 general election, which included the presidential race, an average of 2 of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for being late.
In Kern County, for example, 3,303 mail-in ballots — or 1.95% of returned mail-in ballots — were not counted in the 2025 special election because they arrived too late. In 2024, that number was 332 — or 0.14%. And in Riverside County, 5,831 ballots — or 0.95% of those mailed in — were deemed too late to count, more than double the number of late ballots rejected in 2024.
Postal Service spokesperson Cathy Purcell recommended that voters mail their ballot a week in advance of when it must be received by election officials to ensure it arrives on time.
“You should never be mailing your ballot on election day,” Purcell told The Times.
Before last’s year’s special election, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber issued a similar warning about the delays. Anyone dropping off their ballot at a post office on election day should get it postmarked at the counter, she said.
“We don’t want anyone to just toss it into the mailbox as we have been able to do in the past and have it counted,” she said. “The Postal Service has said that they may not be counted in certain areas.”
California voter data expert Paul Mitchell expressed astonishment about the Postal Service’s guidance.
“We’ve had six, eight years of elections where people were feeling confident about mailing in their ballot,” said Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “Now the USPS is saying they have to mail it in a week early.”
“That is a dramatic change that can disenfranchise voters who are just following the same pattern that they’ve used in prior elections,” he added.
Democrats have been defending the vote-by-mail system in the face of Republican attacks. Trump recently signed an executive order to impose federal restrictions on mail-in ballots and, without evidence, has long criticized mail-in ballots as a source of fraud and a factor in his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The Nov. 4 special election on Proposition 50 was the Democrats’ attempt to counter Trump’s push for Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to redraw their electoral maps to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and upending his agenda. The ballot measure overwhelmingly passed.
Nearly 89% of votes in the Nov. 4 election were vote-by-mail ballots, according to Weber’s office. In addition to Proposition 50, tax measures were also on the ballots in some counties.
Postal Service changes
About a month before the Nov. 4 election, Weber and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta held a news conference to encourage California voters to vote early because of service changes at the U.S. Postal Service.
Bonta told reporters that voters living 50 or more miles from six large mail processing centers in urban areas who mailed their ballots on election day would not have those ballots postmarked in time. The centers are in Los Angeles, Bell Gardens, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Richmond and West Sacramento, according to Bonta’s office.
The changes at the U.S. Postal Service are part of a 10-year plan that kicked off several years ago aimed at improving services and reducing costs at the independent federal agency.
In the 17 counties that are mostly or entirely within the 50-mile distance from the mail facilities, the average rate of late ballots doubled in the November 2025 election compared with the election the year before — from 2.5 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2025.
But in counties that are entirely or mostly outside of the 50-mile radius, the average rate of late ballots quadrupled — from 2 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 9.3 per 1,000 in 2025, state election records show.
Similar complaints about late ballots because of the mail changes have been reported in other states, including in Snohomish County, Wash., according to the New York Times.
The U.S. Postal Services told the Times that there are “any number of factors” that may affect the timeliness of mail.
“The Postal Service has successfully delivered America’s election mail, and we are confident that we will do so again this year,” spokesperson Nikolaj Hagen said. “We rely on long-standing, robust and tested policies and procedures, which have proven successful in the secure and timely delivery of election mail.”
Hagen added that “adjustments to our transportation operations will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed.”
Postmarks are generally applied at those processing facilities, Hagen said, so the postmark date may not reflect the date the mail was collected by a letter carrier, dropped off at a retail location, or placed in a collection box.
While the U.S. Postal Service uses postmarking as an internal tool to track the place and date the mail was accepted, outside entities also use the postmarks for their own purposes, including the Internal Revenue Service, which requires federal tax returns to be mailed by April 15.
Several U.S. senators, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), sent a letter in January to USPS Postmaster Gen. Dave Steiner warning that changes to postmarking will make it more difficult for people, particularly those in rural areas, to vote by mail and pay tax bills on time.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to put new federal controls on voting by mail in states, repeating his long-held but unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots are a source of widespread fraud in U.S. elections.
The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to take control of mail balloting by designing new envelopes with special bar codes that will allow the federal government to ensure that such ballots go out only to eligible voters.
States must follow the USPS process if they plan to use the federal mail system for sending or receiving ballots. They also must submit to the USPS lists of eligible voters in advance of such ballots passing through the mail system.
Separately, the Republican National Committee is challenging a Mississippi law that allows ballots that arrive up to five days after election day to be accepted and counted. The case was argued before the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court in March.
Times staff reporter Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — President Trump is singling out the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority as a cautionary tale about Democratic mismanagement of publicly funded programs, using it to justify proposed cuts to homeless assistance services across the country.
Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, released Friday, asks Congress to eliminate the Continuum of Care — a federal program that funds housing and services for homeless Americans — citing concerns about “fraud and corruption” among local agencies that administer it.
The White House points to LAHSA, which manages many homeless services for the city and county, as the example of why the program needs to go.
“LAHSA has an abysmal record of reducing what is the highest number of street homeless individuals in the United States, and an independent audit issued in March 2025 found that the authority failed to accurately track billions of Federal and local dollars,” the budget says.
The local agency pushed back in a statement after the budget was released.
“Cutting this funding or destabilizing the Continuum of Care program would directly result in more tents on our streets, not fewer,” said Gita O’Neill, the agency’s interim chief executive, adding that under its leadership unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles has fallen 15% and that 90% of the program’s funding goes “directly to rental assistance.”
Local officials are already grappling with homeless service cuts at the state and county level given budget constraints and LAHSA warned Trump’s proposal would make matters worse.
“If anything, we need additional funding to cover rising costs, not fewer, to maintain our current momentum,” the agency said Friday.
The funding dispute over homelessness services is one front in a broader budget assault on California programs by the Trump administration.
Trump’s proposal also asks Congress to eliminate millions in funding from state initiatives the White House is characterizing as wasteful, ineffective or “woke.”
The cuts, if enacted, would cancel $4 billion in unspent funding for the state’s high-speed rail project, which the White house called a “boondoggle,” and strip grants from the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, which the budget criticized for “actively working to dismantle systems of power and privilege that favor whiteness.”
Smaller items are also targeted on the White House’s chopping block: a Los Angeles gelato festival, a dance building in Santa Cruz — which the White House dubs “one of the richest cities in the nation” — and a $3-million grant for a playground tied to an unspecified performing arts center in California.
Trump’s proposed cuts to California projects are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reshape federal spending priorities, largely by trading social programs for a massive military buildup.
The president is asking Congress to approve $1.5 trillion for defense and to slash $73 billion from domestic programs, a massive restructuring that would leave states, including California, to absorb costs Washington no longer wants to carry.
Trump made that vision explicit at a private Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, telling guests that the federal government should no longer be responsible for funding social programs that many Americans rely on.
“We can’t take care of daycare. We are a big country,” Trump said. “We are fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”
If states want to offer those services, Trump said, they should raise taxes to pay for them.
“Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
His proposed budget reflects that priority, which lawmakers will need to contend with as they grapple with the mounting costs of the Iran war and an economic fallout from a military operation that has left Americans paying more items, including gas pump.
Under the proposed budget, Trump is also seeking to make some investments in California projects.
The White House, for example, is seeking $152 million from Congress to turn Alcatraz back into a maximum-security prison, an idea the president has talked about for several years.
He also called on Congress to establish a National Center for Warrior Independence at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.
Times staff writer Andrew Khouri, in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.
Before the start, Yorkshire confirmed that Joe Root will play three Championship matches and fellow England batter Harry Brook two games as their preparations for the Test summer.
Glamorgan gave debuts to ex-Somerset batter Sean Dickson and New South Wales paceman Ryan Hadley, while Yorkshire’s new faces are Western Australia batter Sam Whiteman, born in Doncaster, and Dutch all-rounder Van Beek. Australian paceman Jhye Richardson was not pressed into early service.
Intermittent rain, combined with a chilly wind, meant that play did not begin in grey, windy and inhospitable weather until 16:15 BST.
Asa Tribe and Eddie Byrom, a rare bespectacled pair of batters, formed a new opening partnership for Glamorgan and Byrom hit his first ball back in the team to the square-leg boundary.
But Ben Coad beat him several times before forcing him to edge to slip where Finlay Bean clung on well.
In the next over, England contender Tribe feathered White through to Bairstow for 11, and the same combination accounted for Dickson without scoring as Bairstow took a good grab in front of slip.
The chaos continued as new captain Kiran Carlson flicked White to leg slip where Dom Bess clung on to take a catch above his head.
Despite some tentative shots early on, Ingram and England Lions all-rounder Kellaway settled in to stop the slide against the change seamers, with Ingram slapping Van Beek over point for the first Glamorgan six of the season.
The half-century partnership marked the first stage in Glamorgan’s recovery before Bairstow’s early exit for treatment, with Bean taking the keeper’s gloves.
Glamorgan survived a second blast from White and a token over of spin from Bess to reach the close with some batting resources intact, although Yorkshire will be more content with their work.
DENVER — A Colorado appeals court ruled Thursday that a former county clerk convicted in a scheme that sought to prove fraud in the 2020 presidential election should be resentenced because a judge wrongly punished her for statements protected as free speech.
Tina Peters is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted of state crimes for sneaking in an outside computer expert to make a copy of her county’s election computer system during a software update in 2021. A photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were later posted on social media and a conservative website.
Calls for Peters’ release have become a cause celebre in the election conspiracy movement. President Trump has sought unsuccessfully to pardon Peters and pressured Colorado to set her free.
Judges on the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld her conviction in a 74-page ruling that rejected the notion that Trump has authority to pardon her state crimes. But they said a lower court judge should not have considered Peters’ continued promotion of election fraud conspiracies when he sentenced her in 2024.
One of Tina Peters’ lawyers, John Case, said the court’s ruling affirmed the importance of free speech.
“Tina Peters was punished for words that she used to criticize our insecure and illegal voting system,” Case said. “The decision affirms that people are free to speak what they believe in Colorado as well as the rest of the United States of America.”
Case said he would likely ask at resentencing for Peters to receive the approximately 540 days she’s served already. That would allow her to be freed.
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who has been considering granting clemency to Peters, praised the court’s decision for rejecting Trump’s pardon but upholding her free speech rights.
“This case has been very challenging and a true test of our resolve as a state to have a fair judicial system, not just for people we agree with but a fair system for Coloradans that we vehemently disagree with,” Polis said in statement.
Peters was the former clerk in Mesa County, in the far western part of Colorado, and convicted by jurors in the Republican stronghold that has supported Trump.
She was unapologetic when she was sentenced by Judge Matthew Barrett and insisted that she tried to unearth what she believed was fraud for the greater good. He ripped into her, calling her a “charlatan” who had used her position to “peddle snake oil.”
The appeals court found that Barrett violated her rights to free speech by punishing Peters for persistently alleging fraud in the 2020 election. They noted that because Peters is no longer serving as an election clerk, she can no longer engage in the conduct that led to her conviction.
“The trial court obviously erred by imposing sentence at least partially based on Peters’ protected speech,” Judge Ted Tow wrote in Thursday’s ruling.
The court sent Peters’ case back to a lower court for a judge to issue a new sentence.
Trump has threatened to take “harsh measures” against Colorado unless the state releases Peters. In February, Trump said Colorado was “suffering a big price” for refusing to release her.
Colorado Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser, a Democrat who is running for governor, has accused the Trump administration of waging a revenge campaign by choking off funds and ending federal programs over the state’s refusal to free Peters.
Weiser said in response to the ruling that the original sentence had been “fair and appropriate.”
“Whatever happens with her sentence, Tina Peters will always be a convicted felon who violated her duty as Mesa County clerk, put other lives at risk, and threatened our democracy. Nothing will remove that stain,” Weiser said in a statement.
The Justice Department inserted itself into Peters’ bid to be released while her state appeal was considered. The federal Bureau of Prisons also tried to get Peters moved to a federal prison. After both efforts failed, Trump in December announced a pardon for Peters.
However, the appeals court judges said they could find no prior example of a president pardoning someone for a state crime. And they rejected her attorney’s claims that Peters actions had been carried out while “defending a federal interest.”
“We have found no instance where the presidential pardon power has been stretched in such a way as to invade an individual state’s sovereignty,” they said, adding that the president’s pardon has “no impact” on the state’s case against Peters.
The Associated Press left messages with the White House for comment.
She was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.
Peters’ lawyers didn’t deny that she used the security badge of a local man she pretended to hire to allow an associate of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to make a copy of the Dominion Voting Systems election computer server during an annual software update in 2021.
But they said she only wanted to preserve election data and find out whether any outside actor had accessed the system while ballots were being counted. They said she didn’t want the information made public.
NASHVILLE, N.C. — Ricky Brinkley has lived in rural North Carolina nearly all of his 65 years, and he likes it “out in the county,” past the street lights and bustle of the small towns that carpet the landscape.
But the former truck driver can feel left out when elections roll around in this battleground state.
“People don’t come out like they should and ask you how you feel about things,” Brinkley said while he manned the counter at his daughter’s beauty supply store down the street from the Nashville courthouse. “You want somebody to vote, but you don’t want to do nothing to get the vote. No, it don’t work that way.”
Brinkley is among the rural Black residents who Democrats have often failed to mobilize as they try to dent Republican advantages here. It’s an urgent demographic puzzle for the party, which is normally strong with Black voters but tends to fall short in rural areas.
Success could help former Gov. Roy Cooper win a hotly contested U.S. Senate race this year and tilt the balance of power in Washington. It could also reshape presidential elections, providing Democrats with a wider path to the White House.
“People want to look at the word ‘rural’ in North Carolina and equate it to the word ‘white,’” said state party chair Anderson Clayton, a 28-year-old who won her job three years ago promising to expand the party beyond cities. “In my vision of a Democratic Party, when you talk about reaching out to rural voters, you are talking about rural Black voters.”
The Rev. James Gailliard, a former state lawmaker who leads a large Black congregation in Rocky Mount, put it even more bluntly.
“You don’t win this state in Durham,” Gailliard said. “You win it in the east.”
It’s about more than Cooper’s Senate bid
North Carolina is known for the university-heavy Research Triangle that includes Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill, along with Charlotte’s banking hub. But it also includes large swaths of small towns and rural areas where Democrats have lost ground in recent decades.
That’s not just because of white voters realigning with Republicans. It’s also because Black voters who lean Democratic don’t vote as often as their urban counterparts. Those rural Black voters are concentrated east of the triangle, extending along winding state highways through small towns, flatlands and farmland toward the Atlantic coastline.
Cooper, 68, won two terms as governor and four terms as state attorney general. However, Republicans control the state courts and the legislature, and they’ve redrawn the congressional map to expand their advantage in the U.S. House. Donald Trump carried the state for Republicans all three times he ran for the White House.
A native of rural Nash County, Cooper already in recent months held roundtable sessions with Black farmers, business owners and civic leaders in eastern North Carolina, along with students from North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black school that draws students from across the state. His campaign promises a statewide organizing effort before November.
Gailliard wants a more intentional effort
But Gailliard wants more.
The founding pastor at Word Tabernacle Church, Gailliard was among the Black state lawmakers who lost seats after Republican-led redistricting. He said regaining ground will require neighborhood-level organizing and investment from national Democrats, something he struggled to get from Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.
“I couldn’t get any traction,” Gailliard recalled. “I begged them to bring her to Rocky Mount. I said, ‘Listen, Rocky Mount is the gateway to the East. If we crack Rocky Mount, we’ve cracked the East.’ Could not convince them to come. Two weeks later, guess who’s in Rocky Mount? Donald Trump.”
The Harris campaign sent former President Bill Clinton to the area instead.
Gailliard said Cooper needs people like him to get elected.
“Roy is a great friend, and I’m gonna run my butt off to help him in every way, but I’m not banking on his coattails,” Gailliard said. “I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to grow coattails for him.”
The state party tries to fill gaps
Clayton, the state party chair, said the national party and its donors haven’t prioritized North Carolina early enough in recent cycles.
She said she’s relied mostly on local money to finance 25 full-time staffers, more than three times what the state party had heading into the 2022 midterms.
Bertie County Democratic chairwoman Camille Taylor, whose hometown of Powellsville has fewer than 200 residents, said she’s felt the shift.
She speaks regularly with a field organizer in nearby Greenville, the city closest to the northeastern counties with large proportions of Black residents. But she said it’s especially difficult to persuade rural voters to care about voting beyond the presidency, even though she tells them “these are the races and the people that you’re going to interact with more.”
Democrats have recruited candidates in all 170 legislative districts — two are Democratic-aligned independents — and every U.S. House district. State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, a noted civil rights attorney and Black woman, is running statewide for reelection.
Gailliard said he’s identified a few hundred nonprofits, neighborhood associations and other groups that can do issue-orientated work in his district as the election approaches. He wants to match each of them to specific precincts, routing money for them to reach voters and persuade them to vote.
He wants volunteers to get training from Democratic and left-leaning organizations rather than have the outsiders themselves knocking on rural Black voters’ doors.
“We can’t have 21-year-old recent college graduates from Utah knocking doors at $22 an hour in the hood,” Gailliard said. “That just does not work. They’re not a trusted messenger.”
Marginal voting changes add up
About 2 in 10 North Carolina voters in the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections were Black, according to AP VoteCast, as well as in the 2022 Senate election.
Roughly 4 in 10 Black voters in North Carolina’s last presidential election said they live in small towns or rural communities, similar to the share who said they live in the suburbs. Only about one-quarter reported living in urban areas.
Small shifts in persuasion matter, particularly when races are close. In 2008, Barack Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina, by a margin of just 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million votes cast.
Voter turnout between the 2020 and 2024 elections declined more in North Carolina counties that have larger Black populations.
Counties where Black voters make up about 30% to 40% of the electorate saw the biggest drop, with turnout falling by more than 3 percentage points. Counties with smaller Black populations saw more modest declines of about 1 percentage point. Overall, turnout remains higher in counties with fewer Black voters.
An old Cooper schoolmate just wants to be asked
Gailliard said Democrats cannot underestimate how much it means for someone to simply get asked for their vote.
“Black and rural voters are not transactional,” he said. “They are relational.”
Back in Nashville at the beauty supply store, Brinkley agreed.
“You get to be a big wheel, and you can forget where you came from,” Brinkley said. “I ain’t gonna say Roy forgot. He’s a hometown guy, so to speak, but I don’t expect to see him out here walking.”
Brinkley made it clear that if he votes, it would be for Cooper and other Democrats — but only if he votes.
“I could. I could. I may vote,” he said. “There’s just so much going on.”
Barrow and Sweedler write for the Associated Press. Sweedler reported from Washington. AP journalist Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco says he’d like to be our governor, but more and more, it’s looking to me like the real goal for the far-right provocateur is just to be MAGA-famous.
That’s cool. That’s fine. Honestly, who in Southern California hasn’t dreamed of their 15 minutes? And he certainly has the cop-stache to play the role of rogue Wild West lawman.
But Bianco’s bid for celebrity may help extremists take down American elections, and that is a problem — one California needs to deal with quickly, before the midterms suffer from his antics. There are two separate issues at play here, both of which state courts will be asked to weigh in on in coming days — Bianco apparently is putting his so-called investigation on hold until those cases bring some measure of clarity, and hopefully sanity.
The fact that these two issues are coming up now — together— is no accident. President Trump’s election fraud claims have been moving toward this moment for years, largely out of the consciousness of mainstream voters, but very much intentionally pushed by those who would like to see MAGA officials remain in power, even at the cost of democracy.
The real question being answered right now in Riverside — the one we should all be clear on — is, if Republicans want to invalidate election results that don’t go their way this November, what’s the nitty-gritty of actually doing that?
Bianco is attempting an answer.
“This is about more than just what Sheriff Bianco is doing,” said Matt Barreto, faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “… It shouldn’t happen. And again, it doesn’t matter if Democrats are winning or Republicans are winning, no sheriff should come in and take over possession or counting of ballots.”
Bianco claims he has the right to seize these ballots and investigate as he sees fit — and it’s not our business or anyone else’s, not even state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who ordered Bianco to stop what he was doing until Bonta could review it.
Bianco has largely ignored that order, instead scooping up even more ballots late last week — all but giving Bonta a certain finger reserved for simple communication. Fox News loved it. Bianco’s admission Monday that he is pausing his effort is the first hint that even he may see he’s gone too far.
But Bianco’s hubris is in line with the attitude of many so-called constitutional sheriffs, a national movement by some far-right elected lawmen that Bianco has been associated with, though he’s never claimed outright affinity.
These extremist sheriffs misguidedly believe that they are above both state and federal law, and get to decide for themselves what’s constitutional or not in their jurisdictions — and therefore what’s law and what’s not.
Since about 2020, empowered by successes in ignoring pandemic restrictions, these sheriffs have dived deeper and deeper into the election fraud movement that Trump loves so much, claiming increasing rights to investigate alleged fraud. Though their national organization doesn’t publish its membership list, media and other tracking show there are at minimum dozens of these like-minded lawmen across the country, likely closely watching Riverside County.
Some election experts now worry that if Bianco is successful in the courts in retaining the right to take ballots, it will give a dangerous legal precedent that empowers other constitutional sheriffs to do the same at the midterms. Only then it would be fresh, uncounted ballots — leaving these far-right sheriffs in charge of providing results instead of trained, trusted elections officials.
“What happens if the ballots have not been properly counted by the right people yet and a sheriff decides they want to go confiscate them?” said Chad Dunn, co-founder of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project and the trial lawyer who successfully halted Texas’ gerrymandering effort, for now anyway.
“Once the chain of custody … is broken, as they have been with these, you’ll never count them in a way that you’ll be able to get reasonable confidence from the public,” Dunn said. “It puts the entire election process in jeopardy.”
The constitutional sheriffs would become the boots on the ground for Trump’s election deniers to implement their will, seizing ballots as they see fit and creating such a crisis of confidence that it’s likely we the voters would never accept the results, Republican or Democrat.
It could even give Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson a plausible reason — an ongoing fraud investigation — not to seat elected Democrats, stalling as he did with Arizona’s Adelita Grijalva last year after she won a special election.
The Voting Rights Project, along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, filed a lawsuit last week asking the state Supreme Court to uphold the laws that govern how ballots are handled in California — basically protecting that chain of custody and making it clear sheriffs can’t ignore it and are not part of it.
“They do not, under California law, have the right to take ballots away from the Registrar of Voters, and they do not, under California law, have the right to count or handle ballots,” Barreto said. “There’s no question that it violates California election law.”
Separately, Bonta’s office filed its own action, with that issue of constitutional sheriffs front and center. Bonta is asking courts to tell Bianco that he’s not a law unto himself, and does in fact answer to the state attorney general.
This issue of whether sheriffs have any legal duty to listen to the state’s top law enforcement officer has long been one of Bonta’s fights — he argued about it with then-L.A. Sheriff Alex Villanueva in another public corruption fiasco over then-L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.
I’m guessing Bianco will refer Bonta back to that simple communication of a single finger, much the same as Villanueva did.
But it’s long past time that the state decide just how powerful sheriffs are, for the good of the country this time. The state Legislature has repeatedly kicked the can on clarifying the issue, a failure on their part.
Legislators could amend the state Constitution to make sheriffs appointed instead of elected — the same as police chiefs. Then boards of supervisors could hire and fire them just like other law enforcement leaders.
With the Legislature’s resounding absence on the issue, we have to rely on courts. That’s likely to be a long battle.
In the meantime, Bianco is up to his mustache in attention. This has become a national story, boosting his profile throughout the MAGA-verse as a champion of election deniers everywhere.
Whether Bianco wins or loses these legal battles, resumes his investigation or not, he’s won the attention battle — he’s even polling at the top in the gubernatorial race, thanks to the 8 million Democrats who refuse to drop out.
Riverside County, once as red as it comes, is increasingly purple, Barreto points out. Bianco’s tenure as elected sheriff may not last forever. His shot at governor, despite the polls, is unlikely.
But maybe Fox News will be so impressed with his aggressive rants that he’ll get an offer. Maybe Trump, known for watching it, will like what he sees. So many possibilities from the publicity.
Nine years on, Flynn is anxiously watching on as a fan, having left the world of football for a new job in media and marketing in the Newport office of CDM Media, his city centre base just across the River Usk within spying distance of his old club.
Christian Fuchs’ team are two points above the relegation zone after Saturday’s crucial 1-0 win over Shrewsbury Town and, with six games to go, Flynn hopes there will be no need for a repeat of his final-day rescue act.
“I hope Christian can keep them up because there will be a big after-effect if things go wrong,” said the 45-year-old, who was born in the city and played for County before managing them from 2017 to 2021.
“My son is in the academy at Newport and if we go down… that could go. That would be catastrophic in terms of how we’re going to bring young players through.
“I think football in the city will drop. It would hit hospitality around match days. It’s going to leave a bad aftertaste.
“If they go down, I think it could be a long, long road back.If they get back.”
Flynn, though, is optimistic about their survival hopes. After all, they’re not 11 points adrift of safety as his 2017 side were after he accepted what looked an impossible survival mission by replacing the sacked Graham Westley as boss.
ATLANTA — Attorneys for Georgia’s Fulton County and President Trump’s administration squared off in court Friday over the county’s demand that the FBI return seized ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney representing Fulton County, noted that the January raid was “unusual” because it involved an old election and allegations that have already been investigated in the years since Trump, a Republican, lost the county and the state to Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Lowell contended that the Trump administration seized the materials because it grew impatient with litigation the Justice Department filed to obtain them last year. “There’s abundant law that the left hand of the department needs to know what the right hand is doing,” Lowell told U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee.
Michael Weisbuch, representing the federal government, replied that the separate civil litigation wasn’t “relevant in any respect.” He said the administration has already provided Fulton County with digital copies of everything taken and needs to retain physical copies to carry out its own investigation.
Boulee wrote in a scheduling order that the hearing was needed after the two sides failed to reach an agreement in court-ordered mediation.
Trump’s actions alarm Democrats and election officials
The Jan. 28 seizure from a warehouse near Atlanta targeted the elections hub in Georgia’s most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of Atlanta. Fulton County has been at the center of unfounded claims by Trump and his allies that widespread election fraud cost him reelection.
The FBI’s move was among several actions by the Trump administration that have alarmed Democrats and many election officials who are concerned it’s using law enforcement to pursue the president’s personal grievances and is planning ways to interfere in this year’s midterm elections. The FBI also used a subpoena earlier this month to obtain records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona, another battleground state Trump lost that year.
At the same time, the Justice Department is fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.
Justice Department says it’s investigating 2020 ‘irregularities’
Lawyers for Fulton County argued in a court filing that the seizure of its documents was “improper and unjustified” and demonstrates “callous disregard” for the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The Justice Department seeks to “set a precedent that would grant the federal government unchecked power to interfere with the local administration of elections,” it wrote.
Justice Department attorneys argued that preparing a detailed affidavit and presenting it to a judge “is the exact opposite of ‘callous disregard’” for those constitutional rights. “Their goal to disrupt an ongoing federal criminal investigation is clear,” they wrote of Fulton County officials.
The Justice Department said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in the County” and identified two laws that might have been violated. One requires election records to be maintained for 22 months, while the other prohibits procuring, casting or tabulating false, fictitious or fraudulent ballots.
The filing said the FBI is looking into whether Fulton County properly retained ballot images; whether some ballots were scanned and counted multiple times; whether unfolded, unmailed ballots were counted as mail-in absentee ballots; and potential irregularities concerning tabulator tapes from the scanners used to count ballots.
Fulton County’s lawyers wrote that the “deficiencies” or “defects” in the county’s handling of the 2020 election cited in the affidavit are the kinds of human errors that commonly occur without any intentional wrongdoing and cannot establish probable cause.
Election tech expert cites problems in the affidavit
To support their claims, Fulton County officials submitted a sworn declaration from Ryan Macias, an election technology and security expert who advised the county during the 2020 election. He said the affidavit contains “a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions” and offered explanations for the alleged “deficiencies.”
Investigations by the Georgia secretary of state and independent reviews contradict the core allegations of the affidavit, which is “rife with statements from witnesses lacking credibility, with extraordinary and undisclosed biases,” Fulton’s lawyers argued.
Georgia’s votes in the 2020 presidential race were counted three times, including once by hand, and each count affirmed Biden’s win.
Federal government lawyers rejected the idea that the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit “intentionally or recklessly misled” the judge, writing that “the supposed misrepresentations and omissions flagged by Petitioners are illusory and/or immaterial.” They also asserted that a lapse of the statute of limitations on the potential crimes does not negate probable cause.
The Justice Department also noted that a federal magistrate judge reviewed the FBI affidavit and signed off on the search warrant. Fulton County sought to have the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit testify at Friday’s hearing, but the Justice Department objected and the judge sided with the federal government.
Brumback writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
THE must-visit destinations across the UK have been revealed and North Yorkshire has made the list.
With sweeping beaches, beautiful towns and movie backdrops – it’s no wonder Condé Nast Traveller as one of the ‘Best Places to Go in the UK in 2026’ – and here are some of our favourite spots to go in the county.
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Robin Hood’s Bay is a must-visit for anyone heading to North YorkshireCredit: AlamyScarborough is considered a cheap seaside breakCredit: Alamy
Knaresborough
Along the River Nidd is this beautiful town which is often described as being ‘postcard perfect’, or looking like a ‘fairytale’.
It’s a few miles away from Harrogate and is known for having a huge viaduct as well as pretty riverside restaurants and cafes.
“There are a lot of pubs in Knaresborough – so many, I always lose count. I found 15 online, but I’m sure there’s more. There are traditional pubs with rich history, such as Blind Jack’s in the market square.
“One of my favourite pubs is Carriages, with its cosy atmosphere and tasty food. The outdoor area is great in summer, with views of pretty Knaresborough train station.”
Some of her other favourite things to do is heading up to Knaresborough Castle which is where you’ll get the best view of the viaduct.
Get onto the river itself in a row boat and get a bite to eat from Marigolds and an ice cream.
One popular attraction is Mother Shipton’s Cave which is named after the Yorkshire prophetess.
Whitby
The charming seaside town of Whitby has red-roofed houses, winding streets as well as huge cliffs.
Of course the nearby Gothic Whitby Abbey was Bram Stoker’s inspiration for his book, Dracula.
If you want to feel like you’re in the novel, walk up the 199 steps from the Old Town to St Mary’s Church and the Abbey ruins.
Travel Reporter Jenna Stevens who visited Whitby said: “In my trip to the North Yorkshire town, I ticked off all the staple activities. A Mr Whippy enjoyed by the harbour, spare change spent in Funland’s Amusements, and fish and chips for tea.
“Plus my stroll along the sands, backed by spectacular moss-green cliffs, was an ideal way to soak up those breath-taking views of the rugged Yorkshire coast.
One of the things that makes Whitby stand out amongst other seaside spots is its connection to a famous explorer, Captain Cook and the ‘House on the Harbour’ museum is a must-visit.”
Another must-visit in Whitby is Trenchers – which is the best fish and chip shop in the UK.
A takeaway cod and chips will set you back £13.50.
Here’s where to stay in Whitby…
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Whitby, North Yorkshire
With a history of sailors and vampires, a dramatic coastal path, and the very best in pints and scampi, it takes a lot to beat Whitby. Pop in the amusements, eat award-winning fish and chips, and board the all-singing Captain Cook boat tour on the harbour. The Royal Hotel overlooks the harbour with stays from just £68 per room.
She continued: “In summer, you’ll find dogs sprinting along the sands, while owners tuck into fresh crab sandwiches from the beachside hut and little ones fish for treasures in the rock pools.
“I prefer the village in winter, though, when visitors can stroll the rows of higgledy-piggledy boutiques and cafes dishing up wedges of homemade cakes piled high with buttercream.
“What’s more, there’s a restriction on visitor vehicles and cars are even banned from the harbour area, making it a great place for a car-free
Scarborough
Scarborough, which is known as England‘s first seaside resort, is split into two bays – the South and North Bay.
Each is worth exploring with the South Bay having most of the shops, restaurants and amusement arcades.
Meanwhile, the North Bay is much quieter and is a great place to simply enjoy the beach or go for a surf.
She described it as the “perfect family day out” where you spend “hardly any money.”
You can rent out a beach chalet from £50 a day and have a go on the cliff-railway for £2.50.
If you’re lucky enough, and bring a pair of binoculars you might spot bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and minke whales.
There is plenty of entertainment too and Alex explored the South Cliff Gardens, a hillside adventure playground and the arcades at Olympia Leisure.
Yorkshire Dales National Park
The Dales are known for glorious views and dramatic scenery and it is seeing a boom in popularity thanks to its appearance in Wuthering Heights.
The new film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi certainly had Brits talking when it came to cinemas last month.
Travel Writer Tracey Davies explored the gothic region and said: “Heathcliff is not the only mysterious, brooding beast in Yorkshire. The scenery provides just as much drama as the Wuthering Heights character.”
She added: “Largely shot on location in the Yorkshire Dales National Park — amid the landcapes of Swaledale and Arkengarthdale valleys and the peaceful village of Low Row — the movie shines a well-deserved spotlight on this glorious corner of England.
“With its scarred limestone hills, scattered with rocks, and rolling green pastures, criss-crossed with drystone walls and peppered with honeyed-stone villages, this region is the picture of a period drama.”
The sweeping Yorkshire Moors appeared in Wuthering HeightsCredit: AP
The Best Places to Go in the UK in 2026
Here are ‘The Best Places to Go in the UK in 2026’ according to CondéNast Traveller…
REDDING — At a Board of Supervisors meeting in rural Shasta County last month, Clint Curtis dropped a bombshell: A sheriff way down in Riverside was going to confiscate all the ballots from a recent election.
Curtis, the county registrar of voters, was the first to announce the planned ballot seizure. Even the sheriff himself, Chad Bianco, had not publicly revealed his intentions.
Later, as Bianco’s move grabbed headlines — he is a leading Republican candidate for governor — Curtis’ behind-the-scenes maneuvering remained largely unknown. The registrar had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations had sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.
Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis poses last month in the new election observation room at the elections office in Redding.
In his short time in Shasta County, Curtis, whose claims about rigged voting machines stretch back to the early 2000s, has solidified his position as a torchbearer of the election denialism movement, vowing to take his message about untrustworthy machines and potential fraud across California and beyond.
Critics here say he has steadily disenfranchised voters. He has eliminated nine of the vast county’s 13 ballot drop boxes, telling The Times he did not trust ballots in the hands of “little old ladies running all over” to collect them. And he has advocated for a local ballot initiative that would limit elections to one day, eliminate most voting by mail and require voter ID as well as a hand count of ballots.
Curtis also has accused his predecessors in the registrar’s office, without evidence, of election fraud and has called for federal authorities to raid the office he now runs.
“Do I think ballots were stuffed? Yes. Have I contacted the DOJ? Yes,” Curtis said at the Feb. 24 Shasta County supervisors’ meeting just before announcing Bianco’s planned ballot seizure.
Curtis, a 67-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County supervisors last April. He lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area and had never run an election.
He got the job based largely on two stated qualifications: He wanted to hand-count votes. And he had worked with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.
In his public job interview, Curtis promised to grill local elections staffers to “find out what they know.”
Now Curtis is running for election himself, trying to keep his job in this Northern California county where a majority of the supervisors were so swept up in President Trump’s discredited election fraud claims that they ditched their Dominion voting machines in 2023 and opted to hand-count ballots (quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so).
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Curtis says he is running to make elections more transparent by questioning the status quo and hanging cameras everywhere to capture election workers’ every move.
“Republicans love me,” Curtis told The Times. “The Democrats are pretty good. And then I have these crazy socialist people that just hate me.”
Beliefs aside, Curtis has quickly become a colorful local character.
He took a lie detector test to attest that he didn’t rig the November election. He chose as his number two a heavy metal guitarist from San Francisco — stage name “Turmoil” — who is a progressive Democrat.
And last September, surveillance cameras captured him pushing an antique metal safe through the Shasta County elections office on a Saturday while his wife assisted with a pulling harness. Curtis wore blue jeans — and no shirt.
He said he moved the safe, which contained odds and ends, on a hot day to make more room for election observers.
Curtis first gained national attention for election skepticism in December 2004, in testimony before Congress.
He had been working as a computer programmer in Florida and was brought in as an expert witness by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who were reeling over President George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry a few weeks earlier and furious about an error with an electronic voting machine that gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.
Curtis claimed that he had written “a prototype” of software that would allow cheaters to alter votes using “invisible buttons” on touch-screen balloting machines. His claims were largely dismissed. But he continues to tout his congressional testimony to cast himself as an expert on election malfeasance.
A woman passes by a “Greetings From Redding” mural on Feb. 25.
After testifying, he unsuccessfully ran for office multiple times in Florida. He refused to concede after one loss, alleging the machines were rigged.
In Shasta County, he saw a chance for redemption.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board of Supervisors gained a hard-right majority supported by anti-vaxxers, secessionists, members of a local militia and pro-Trump election deniers.
In 2022, someone hung a trail camera — the kind hunters use to track wildlife — behind the elections office to monitor the staff. Some observers yelled at staffers and got in the face of Cathy Darling Allen, the longtime registrar, who installed a 7-foot metal fence to keep them at bay.
Joanna Francescut, who worked in the elections office for 17 years, is running to be county registrar.
Darling Allen clashed with the supervisors as they pushed to hand-count votes, a process she argued would be slow, expensive and prone to error. She retired in 2024, citing health reasons.
Her successor resigned after less than a year. The supervisors appointed Curtis in a 3-2 vote, passing over Joanna Francescut, who had worked in the elections office since 2008 and was Darling Allen’s number two.
Days later, Curtis fired Francescut. She is now running against him in the June 2 election.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called Curtis a “nationally known conspiracy theorist.”
“I can’t imagine bringing in someone who is neither an election administrator nor a Californian for a job like that and basically chasing out experienced election officials whose work had withstood scrutiny for decades,” Becker said. “The voters of Shasta County, unfortunately, are paying the price.”
Curtis has accused Francescut and other elections staffers of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans.
“I want to laugh because it’s that ridiculous,” Francescut, 43, said of the allegations.
“People that work in this field, they’re doing this work because they care about elections,” she said. “They want the community to be better. They want what both sides want — transparent and accurate elections.”
During her 17-year tenure, the elections office got little public attention. But “once 2020 hit, people went from completely trusting us to, the day after election day, calling and yelling at our staff so much that we couldn’t get the work done to count ballots,” she said.
Curtis was a favorite of then-board chairman Kevin Crye, a hard-right supervisor who enlisted Lindell to support the county’s crusade against Dominion. Crye had survived a 2024 recall effort by just 50 votes.
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1.Carl Bott, co-owner of KCNR 96.5 FM, interviews Joanna Francescut on Feb. 25, 2026, in Redding, Calif.2.Joanna Francescut’s campaign manager, Mary Williams, wears an orange button that reads “Vote for Jo for County Clerk” as Francescut waits in the offices of talk radio station KCNR.
Citing that close margin, Curtis said he believed recent elections were rigged because Republicans were not winning by large enough margins in a county where registered Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats.
In a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, Curtis said he had learned of lax security and potential ballot stuffing in 2024, the year of the attempted recall against Crye. Curtis sent a copy of the letter to Trump and requested a federal investigation because “the destruction of these ballots is nearing.”
In 2019 and 2024, a Shasta County grand jury investigated local election procedures and found no wrongdoing.
“How does it make me feel? Really angry,” Darling Allen, who is advising Francescut’s campaign, said of Curtis’ allegations. “It calls into question the integrity and character of every single person who worked in the elections department.”
To replace Francescut, Curtis hired Brent Turner, the guitarist from San Francisco. He is a longtime election reform activist who has pushed for nonproprietary open-source voting systems with software code that can be examined by anyone.
Turner described their partnership as: “Republican and Democrat team up to fight outdated software for elections. Oh, my!”
“We have to have the adult conversation in the United States that if the systems are loose enough to allow people — in this case, we’re talking about even people internal to the system — to cheat, they might cheat,” Turner said.
Last October, Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to Curtis, asking him to detail planned changes to voting procedures. He responded with a 15-page letter.
Election observers, he wrote, were “treated like invaders … corralled behind spiked fences.” And drivers who picked up ballots from drop boxes sometimes left them in their vehicles. Under his watch, he wrote, “no detours or even bathroom breaks are allowed.”
A woman exits the Cottonwood Post Office in Shasta County.
Curtis told Weber that someone had carved death threats on his vehicle and left “antifa” business cards on his windshield wipers.
Weber’s communications team said in an email that her office “continues to monitor new election processes proposed by Shasta (or any county) County to ensure they do not violate state law.”
In his letter to Weber, Curtis promised to take a lie detector test after each election. Answering pre-written questions he had submitted, Curtis said in a January polygraph test that he did not change the results of the November election and believed a predecessor had rigged previous contests, according to a summary obtained by The Times.
The examiner wrote that he “was likely telling the truth.”
Inside the elections office, Curtis created a large room, decked out with American flags, for citizens to observe the vote-counting process.
More than a dozen large TV monitors display close-up video, also streamed online, of election workers’ hands inserting ballots into machines. On June 2, those workers will sit beneath iPhones hung overhead to record them while observers are positioned on barstools a few inches behind them.
The new public observation room at the Shasta County elections office is decorated with American flags.
Curtis has been traveling across California to tout his methods. He told The Times he has spoken about his video setup in Kern and San Joaquin counties and discussed it with candidates for state office.
And he advised the Riverside County citizens group that claimed to have found an overcount of 45,896 ballots in the November election for Proposition 50, which redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats.
Art Tinoco, the Riverside County registrar of voters, has refuted that number — saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
After Bianco last week announced that his office had seized more than 650,000 ballots, Curtis appeared on the social media broadcast of a right-wing election integrity advocate who called him “the stealth behind the scenes in making that happen.”
Curtis smiled and repeated what he has been espousing since the early 2000s: “You can’t really trust a computer.”
Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted a former waitress in 1972 after escorting her to one of his shows, a civil jury in California concluded Monday, awarding the woman $19.25 million in damages.
The verdict was the latest turn in a series of legal battles the disgraced entertainer, now 88, has faced since allegations that he repeatedly drugged and raped women exploded publicly about a decade ago. Since then, he served about three years in a Pennsylvania prison on sexual assault charges before the case was overturned in 2021.
Donna Motsinger, now 84, said in her lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Cosby had given her wine and a pill that left her unable to move, and that she woke up in her house wearing nothing but her underwear, according to court records, and that “she knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”
Cosby has denied the allegations, as well as those brought by dozens of other women who claimed they had been drugged and raped. Coming in the early years of the #MeToo movement, a broad social media-inspired campaign to name and prosecute men accused of sexual misconduct, Cosby’s attorneys painted him as an unfair target of mass vigilantism gone awry.
Motsinger sued Cosby in 2023, alleging that, at the time, she was working at a Sausalito restaurant called The Trident that was popular with celebrities, including Cosby, according to the complaint her attorneys filed Sept. 27 of that year. One night, Motsinger accepted Cosby’s invitation to go with him to his show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos. Cosby picked her up at her home in a limousine, according to her complaint, and, on the way to the venue, gave her the wine and a pill that she thought was aspirin.
“Next thing she knew, she was going in and out of consciousness while two men attending to Mr. Cosby were putting her in the limousine,” the complaint said. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger recalls were flashes of light,” before waking up in her house in nothing but underwear.
Motsinger didn’t consent to Cosby’s sexual contact and, having been rendered unconscious by drugging, she couldn’t consent to it to begin with, according to the complaint. As a consequence of her ordeal, her complaint says she suffered lost wages, medical bills, pain and suffering and emotional distress.
Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff and a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election as part of an investigation that he called a “fact-finding mission” to determine if they were fraudulently counted.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the state’s top law enforcement official, has sharply criticized the probe, which he called “unprecedented in both scope and scale.”
In a March 4 letter to the sheriff, Bonta said the seizure of the ballots “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.” He threatened to seek legal recourse if Bianco does not halt his investigation.
Bianco said Friday that his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have emphatically rejected.
Here is what we know.
Why were ballots taken?
According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 took about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.
Bianco said that it’s his “constitutional duty” to investigate a potential crime and that he is not trying to change the election results.
The investigation includes all of the ballots cast in the county, where Proposition 50 passed with 56% of the vote, a margin of more than 82,000 ballots. Statewide, it passed with 64% of the vote, a margin of more than 3.3 million ballots.
Bianco said he had been contacted by “a group of citizen volunteers” that said it performed an audit finding that 45,896 more ballots were counted than were cast. He did not name the group, but the allegations match those made by a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team.
In a February presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco disputed the group’s allegations and said they were based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes — a variance of 0.016%.
How did the sheriff get the ballots?
Bianco said his department served the registrar with a warrant “approved and signed by a judge” on Feb. 9.
According to Bonta’s office, an additional warrant was issued on Feb. 23. Bianco said the warrants are now sealed.
In the March 4 letter to Bianco, the attorney general said he had “serious concerns” about whether the sheriff had probable cause to seize the election materials.
Bonta questioned whether Bianco had concealed information from the magistrate judge who approved the warrants, including details from the registrar’s analysis of the citizen group’s allegations.
An official from Bonta’s office told The Times that the attorney general “found out in the middle of the week that [Bianco] was going to execute the warrants on a Friday.” Bonta’s office asked the sheriff to slow down and share information about the investigation, but “instead of waiting, he actually moved it up” and seized the ballots sooner than planned, said the official, who would only speak on background.
Bianco said a Riverside County Superior Court judge ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the ballot count. His investigators had already begun counting, but the tally would start over under the court’s guidance, Bianco said.
The ballots would have soon been destroyed
California law requires county officials to keep election materials — including ballots and voter identification envelopes — for 22 months for elections involving a federal office and for six months for all other contests.
The materials must be sealed and then destroyed at the end of the retention period.
The Proposition 50 election took place on Nov. 4, so the ballots are scheduled to be destroyed in May.
Why investigate now?
Political observers say that Bianco — a leading gubernatorial candidate — appears to be vying for attention from President Trump and his supporters.
Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State, said the investigation appears to be “an electoral ploy.”
“At this stage in the election, most voters haven’t really tuned into the gubernatorial race, and there are a ton of candidates,” she said. “People who don’t know his background will know now. This is clear signaling.”
Trump has repeatedly called on the federal government to “nationalize” state-run elections. He remains fixated on his 2020 election loss and has falsely claimed widespread fraud.
In January, the FBI raided the elections office in Fulton County, Ga., seizing 2020 presidential election records. And this month, the Republican leader of Arizona’s state Senate said he had handed over 2020 election records to the FBI, complying with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to a controversial audit of the election in Maricopa County.
Bianco is an outspoken Trump supporter.
A poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading the crowded field of gubernatorial candidates by slim margins, with the Democratic vote split among multiple candidates in a left-leaning state.
The top two vote getters, regardless of party, will advance to the November election.
Bianco said the investigation was “not a recount” for Proposition 50 and had nothing to do with his campaign for governor.
