WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — As a colossal manifestation of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated.
The ark stretches 1½ football fields long — “the biggest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.
It’s all designed to try to persuade visitors that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.
“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.
And with that, he furthers his goal to assert that the entire Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.
All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.
But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.
Bryan — a populist secretary of State, congressman, three-time presidential hopeful and fundamentalist champion — helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes monkey trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tenn.
Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s fanciful miracles and enigmas.
‘The history in the Bible is true’
For Ham, Bryan’s problem was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it well enough, interpreting parts of it metaphorically rather than literally.
“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.
“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham adds, speaking in the accent of his native Australia.
Ham is founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, zip lines and other attractions surrounding the ark.
Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Ky., where exhibits similarly try to make the case for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden.
The group also produces books, podcasts, videos and homeschooling curricula.
“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”
A commonly held belief
If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.
Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of U.S. adults agreed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.
“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”
Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”
The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution. A federal court in 2005 similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district to present “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.
Bill Nye, the alarmed guy
Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. The North Dakota Legislature this year debated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”
The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism; and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.
Such efforts alarm science educators such as Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.
“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”
Nye notes that the evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossil layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.
Varying religious views
One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).
“We are church-going, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public school curriculum permeated with evolution.
The Creation Museum, Van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught.”
Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.
Gallup’s survey found that among Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34%) than without it (24%). In the Roman Catholic Church, popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting that the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.
But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.
A wider debate
Just as Ham says the creation story is important to defend a larger truth about the Christian Gospel, critics say more is at stake than just the human origin story.
The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, promoting conservative views in theology, family and gender roles, and casting doubt on other areas of scientific consensus, such as human-made climate change.
Nye, too, says the message fits into a more general and ominous anti-science movement. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.
Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s large door, which analogizes that just as the wicked perished in the flood, those without Christ face eternal hellfire.
And there are more parallels to 1925.
Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, drugs and other social ills as resulting from belief in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.
More attractions planned
The protests that initially greeted the museum and ark projects, from secularist groups who considered them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.
When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter because of its religious nature, a federal court overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
And Ham’s massive ministry charges forward. Expansion is next, with Answers in Genesis attractions planned for Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Branson, Mo. — tourist hubs offering more opportunities to promote creationism to the masses.
Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Ariz., says he believes that the exhibit vividly evoked the safety that Noah and his family must have felt. It helped him appreciate “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.
“I think,” Bigelow adds, “God and science can go hand in hand.”
Smith writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Dylan Lovan contributed to this report.
Commentary: He’s just happy to root for the Dodgers again after almost dying during the last World Series
There was probably no Dodgers fan more grateful to see the Blue Crew lose badly in the opening game of the World Series than Conrado Contreras. See, the 75-year-old was happy to enjoy any Fall Classic at all.
A year ago tomorrow , the Zacatecas native suffered a heart attack and mild stroke in the moments after seeing his Dodgers win Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees. He spent three days in a medically induced coma at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood and regained consciousness to news from jubilant nurses that the Dodgers had won the championship.
The lifelong baseball fan had no idea what they were talking about. His passion for the sport was lost along with his memory.
When family members put on highlights from the 2024 championship during his rehabilitation at a clinic in Gardena throughout the end of the year, the former carpenter would shrug and change the channel. When someone told him that legendary Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela had died, Contreras swore that he had just seen his fellow Mexican pitch at the stadium.
It wasn’t until the 2025 baseball season came along that Contreras’ mind began to truly rebound. He watched games from his longtime home in the unincorporated Florence-Graham neighborhood and learned to love the Dodgers anew. But he didn’t cheer like before. Contreras followed doctor’s orders to stay calm when the Dodgers were losing instead of cursing like the past and quietly applaud when the team was winning when he would’ve previously roared.
He’s the father-in-law of my sister Alejandrina. And I wanted to hang out with Don Conrado for Game 1 of this year’s World Series to experience fandom in all its mortality.
Wearing a flat-brimmed fedora and a blue Dodgers 2024 World Series champion, I caught Contreras just as he was entering my sister’s Norwalk home holding on to his walker with the help of Alejandrina’s husband, Conrad. His father talks slower than he used to and can’t drive anymore, but Contreras is once again the same man his family knows: witty, observant and baseball-crazy.
A schoolyard pitcher in his hometown of Monte Escobedo, Contreras fell in with the Dodgers almost as soon as he migrated to the United States in 1970 to join a brother in Highland Park. He used to attend games every week “when $10 got two people into the stadium and you could also eat a hot dog,” Contreras told me in Spanish before Game 1 began.
His stories from those years were immaculate. Don Sutton throwing a shutout. The Cincinnati Reds always “ready to play to the death.” Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell hitting a home run out of Dodger Stadium in 1973 “and all of us just staring above our heads in awe.”
Contreras was such a fan that he took his pregnant wife Mary to watch Valenzuela pitch on the day in 1983 that Conrad was due because they were giving out “I (Heart) Fernando” T-shirts, an anecdote that left their son flabbergasted.
“What happened to the shirt?” Conrad asked his mom in Spanish.
“I threw it away,” replied the 61-year-old Mary.
“They’d cost a lot of money now!” he groaned.
“They were cheap! The color really faded fast.”
Los Angeles Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani hits a two-run home run during the seventh inning of Game 1 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays at Roger Centre on Friday in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Blue Jays won, 11-4.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The family continued to attend games through Conrad’s teenage years but stopped “when even the birds couldn’t afford to attend,” Mary said. Conrad, 42, thinks the last time he went to a game with his dad was “at least” 20 years ago. But they regularly watched games on television. It was he who administered the CPR a year ago that saved his dad’s life.
“He was walking around the house angry all that game,” Conrad said.
“No, well, Roberto was making me mad,” Conrado replied, his nickname for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “But I can’t get mad anymore.”
I asked how he thought this year’s series would go. He mentioned Shohei Ohtani, whom he kept calling el japonés in a respectful tone because, well, his memory can be fuzzy.
“He strikes out too much, but when he hits it, he hits it. If he plays like that, they win the series. But if Toronto hits, forget it.”
One more question before game time, the one too many liberal Latino Dodgers fans are belly-aching over right now: is it ethical to root for the team considering they haven’t been too vocal in opposing Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and owner Mark Walter has investments in companies that are profiting from it?
“Sports shouldn’t get into politics, but all sports owners are with Trompas,” he said, using a nickname I’ve heard more than a few rancho libertarians use for Trump. He shrugged.
“So what’s one to do? They kept la migra out of the stadium,” referring to an unsuccessful June attempt by federal agents to enter the stadium parking lot. “If the team had allowed that, then there’d be a huge problem.”
Mary wasn’t as sympathetic. “Latinos shouldn’t let the Dodgers off so easy. But when Latinos surrender, they surrender.”
It was game time.
Conrad slipped into a gray Dodgers away jersey to match his black team cap. My sister, an Angels follower for some reason, wore a Kiké Hernández T-shirt “because he stands with immigrants.”
“The only good thing about the Dodgers is that they aren’t winning with a gringo,” said Mary, who actually doesn’t care much about baseball because she finds it boring. “It’s someone [Ohtani] who doesn’t want to speak English who’s winning it for them.”
Her husband smiled.
“Let’s see if Mary gets into baseball.”
“That’ll be the real miracle,” she snapped back.
Contreras rubbed his hands in glee as the Dodgers went up 2-0 in the top of the third and merely frowned when the Blue Jays tied it in the bottom of the fourth while we were enjoying takeout from Taco Nazo. “His anger comes in waves, it’s a trip,” Conrad said. “He’s calmer but se enoja.”
“Who?” Conrado deadpanned.
When Dodger starting pitcher Blake Snell left the game with the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the sixth, Contreras shook his head in disgust but kept his voice calm.
“This is what gets me mad. They should’ve taken him out long ago, but Roberto didn’t. This is what I was afraid of. When Toronto get on, they get on. They won’t stop until they destroy.”
Sure enough, the Blue Jays erupted for nine runs that inning, including a two-run blast by catcher Alejandro Kirk, who had sparked the Jays’ initial rally a few innings earlier.
Earlier in the game, Alejandrina had told Conrado that Kirk was a Tijuana native. The pride in shared roots, albeit generations apart, took a little bit of sting off his home run, which made the score a humiliating 11-2.
“Thank goodness he’s Mexican,” Conrado told his son, patting his knee. “That’s what’s left for us” to be happy about the game.
An inning later, Contreras began to feel woozy. His sugar level was elevated. Mary took off his jacket to fix his insulin device. My sister’s corgi, Penny, jumped onto the couch and lay on his lap.
“They do know when someone someone’s ill, right?” he said to no one before scratching Penny’s tummy and cooing, “You know I’m ill, right? I’m ill!”
When the “massacre” finally ended, Contreras remained philosophical.
“It’s incredible that I’m able to see this. But I’m still malo. My feet hurt, my memory isn’t what it used to be, my sense of balance isn’t there. But there’s the Dodgers. But they need to win.”
Conrad went to the bedroom to grab his father’s walker.
“Do you want a Toronto shirt now?” he joked.
His dad stared silently. “No, that would give me another heart attack.”
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Joshua Allen dead: ‘SYTYCD’ winner struck, killed by train
Joshua Allen, the dancer who took home the crown on the fourth season of “So You Think You Can Dance,” has died after he was struck by a train in Fort Worth.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s database confirmed that Allen died early Tuesday morning at a local hospital. His manner of death and cause of death are pending, the database says. Allen was 36.
Police responded Tuesday around 1 a.m. to railroad tracks near the intersection of Millbrook Lane and Nuffield Lane, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Officers found Allen, who had been struck by a train, and took him to a nearby hospital where he died, police told the outlet. Police did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Wednesday.
Christina Price, who represented Allen, also confirmed his death, saying in a statement that “what stood out most about Joshua was his heart.”
“He had a natural gift for movement — no formal training, yet he could watch something once and his body just knew how to do it,” Price added.”Beyond his talent, he gave back, teaching kids in Texas through dance workshops.”
Allen’s family member confirmed the entertainer’s death to TMZ, which first broke the news. The family member did not disclose his cause of death and asked fans for “privacy and prayers.”
The Texas-based dancer auditioned for “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2008, impressing judges with his fluid movements, controlled popping and locking and springy leaps. Throughout the season, he proved his ability to take on a variety of dance styles ranging from contemporary to Bollywood. He remained a strong competitor, eventually besting fellow contestants for the grand prize.
Allen notably bested Stephen “Twitch” Boss, who died by suicide in December 2022. Boss was 40. Allen mourned Boss on Instagram, writing “NO WORDS will ever be enough to explain the LOVE I have for you Stephen.” At the time, he recalled connecting with Boss prior to their auditions and wrote, “This isn’t goodbye more so I’ll see you later.”
Price, who also represented Boss, said his death “weighed heavily on Allen” and that “it’s heartbreaking to now be grieving Joshua as well.”
After his “So You Think You Can Dance” days, Allen’s work included a McDonald’s commercial, a role in the debut season of “American Horror Story” and appearances in “Freak Dance,” “Step Up 3D,” and the 2011 “Footloose” remake, according to IMDb. He was also an instructor for several dance competitions.
Allen faced legal troubles in summer 2016, when he was accused of attacking his girlfriend at a coffee shop. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office charged him with two felony counts of willfully injuring his girlfriend, one felony assault with a deadly weapon and four misdemeanors related to battery, vandalism and violating a protective order, according to TMZ. Allen was poised to be a mentor on Season 13 of “SYTYCD,” but longtime host Cat Deeley announced his departure from the series on-air amid his domestic violence case.
He pleaded no contest in August 2016 and was sentenced to one year in jail.
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Utah governor says it’s too soon to be sure of Kirk shooter’s motive, but suspect had ‘leftist ideology’
WASHINGTON — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Sunday that investigators are not ready to discuss the motive behind the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But he said the 22-year-old suspect had left-leaning political beliefs and disliked the conservative influencer.
“Clearly a leftist ideology,” Cox told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” On CNN’s “State of the Union,” he said, “That information comes from the people around him, his family members and friends.”
Cox said that Tyler Robinson, who was arrested last week, is “not cooperating” and that friends paint a picture of someone radicalized in the dark corners of the internet. “Clearly there was a lot of gaming going on,” Cox said on NBC. “Friends have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.”
Cox, a Republican who has urged all partisans to tone down their rhetoric following the attack, added: “I really don’t have a dog in this fight. If this was a radicalized MAGA person, I’d be saying that as well.”
Cox stressed on several Sunday morning news shows, however, that investigators are still trying to pin down a motive for the attack on Kirk, a father of two and confidant of President Trump who was killed Wednesday while on one of his signature college speaking tours at Utah Valley University in Orem. The governor said more information may come out once Robinson appears in court Tuesday.
The governor said Robinson’s partner is transgender, which some politicians have pointed to as a sign the suspect was targeting Kirk for his anti-trans views. But authorities have not said whether it is relevant as they investigate Robinson’s motive.
“The roommate was a romantic partner, a male transitioning to female,” Cox said. “I can say that he has been incredibly cooperative, this partner has been very cooperative, had no idea that this was happening.”
Investigators have spoken to Robinson’s relatives and carried out a search warrant at his family’s home in Washington, Utah, about 240 miles southwest of Utah Valley University.
State records show Robinson is registered to vote but not affiliated with a political party and is listed as inactive, meaning he did not vote in the two most recent general elections. His parents are registered Republicans.
Ammunition found with the weapon used to kill Kirk was engraved with taunting, antifascist and meme-culture messages. Court records show that one bullet casing had the message, “Hey, fascist! Catch!”
Robinson grew up around St. George, in the southwestern corner of Utah between Las Vegas and natural landmarks including Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks.
He became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known widely as the Mormon church, at a young age, church spokesperson Doug Andersen said.
Robinson has two younger brothers, and his parents have been married for about 25 years, according to social media posts. Online activity by Robinson’s mother reflects an active family that took vacations to Disneyland, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Alaska.
Like many in that part of Utah, they frequently spent time outdoors — boating, fishing, riding ATVs, zip-lining and target shooting. A 2017 post shows the family visiting a military facility and posing with assault rifles. A young Robinson is seen smiling as he grips the handles of a .50-caliber heavy machine gun.
A high school honor roll student who scored in the 99th percentile nationally on standardized tests, he was admitted to Utah State University in 2021 on a prestigious academic scholarship, according to a video of him reading his acceptance letter that was posted to a family member’s social media account.
But he attended for only one semester, according to the university. He is currently enrolled as a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George.
Riccardi and Boak write for the Associated Press and reported from Denver and Washington, respectively.
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Schools to open with unprecedented protections for children and their parents amid ICE raids
Los Angeles public schools are opening Thursday for the new academic year confronting an intense and historically unique moment: They will be operating in opposition to the federal government’s immigration raids and have set in motion aggressive moves to protect children and their immigrant parents.
School police and officers from several municipal forces will patrol near some 100 schools, setting up “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods, with a special concentration at high schools where older Latino students are walking to campus. Bus routes are being changed to better serve areas with immigrant families so children can get to school with less exposure to immigration agents.
Community volunteers will join district staff and contractors to serve as scouts — alerting campuses of nearby enforcement actions so schools can be locked down as warranted and parents and others in the school community can be quickly notified via email and text.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass spoke about “how profound this moment is in U.S. history” during a Monday news conference with local officials.
“Here you have an entire array of elected officials, appointed officials, education leaders, people committed to our children, and we are gathered here today to talk about protecting our children from the federal government,” Bass said.
L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said recently that the nation’s second-largest school system will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children. We are standing on the right side of the Constitution, and years from now, I guarantee you, we will have stood on the right side of history. We know that.”
High school boy mistakenly handcuffed
The worries among school officials and parents are not without cause.
On Monday federal agents reportedly drew their guns on a 15-year-old boy and handcuffed him outside Arleta High School. The confrontation ended with de-escalation. Family members persuaded federal agents that the boy — who is disabled — was not the person they were looking for, Carvalho said.
The situation was largely resolved by the time the school principal realized what was going on and rushed out to assist. School police also arrived and scooped up unspent bullets dropped on the ground by the agents, Carvalho said.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday that Arleta High was not being targeted. Instead agents were conducting “a targeted operation” on a “criminal illegal alien,” they described as “a Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 pledge with prior criminal convictions in the broader vicinity of Arleta.”
At a Tuesday White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, responded to a question that referenced the L.A. Times reporting about the incident.
“I’ll have to look into the veracity of that report,” Leavitt said. “I read the L.A. Times almost every single day, and they are notorious for misleading the public… This administration wants to ensure that all school children across the country, in every city, from Los Angeles to D.C., can go to school safely.”
LAUSD will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children,” said Supt. Alberto Carvalho recently.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
School communities in fear
The incident outside Arleta High is among the ongoing confrontations across the region that have provoked public protests and prompted the Trump administration in June to deploy troops to Los Angeles. Enforcement actions have included masked agents arresting people at parking lots, in parks, on sidewalks and next to bus stops.
Litigation, including a temporary restraining order, appears to have slowed down local immigration raids, but federal officials have strongly affirmed that they have not stopped.
Trump administration policy is that no location — including a school — is off limits for enforcement actions in his drive to deport at least 1 million immigrants a year.
“People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way. And that’s not pleasant,” Trump said in a video posted to a White House social account.
“A big part of it is to create the sense of fear so people will self-deport,” said Jimmy Gomez, a Trump critic and Democratic member of Congress representing Los Angeles.
The ripple effect is that school communities are experiencing fear and trauma, worried that agents will descend on or near campuses.
Most in the state’s public school systems, including in L.A. Unified have embraced a counter mission, protecting the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education. That right to an education is, so far, protected by past U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
For most school officials up and down the state, a necessary corollary to that right is safeguarding students’ guardians and close relatives.
On Tuesday, 30 school board members from L.A. County — which has 80 school districts — convened in Hawthorne to emphasize their own focus on protecting immigrant families.
“We’re about to welcome students back to schools, but we’re very concerned that these fears and anxieties may potentially have an impact for students not wanting to come back,” said Lynwood Unified school board member Alma Castro, an organizer of the event.
She called her district a “safe haven.” Among other measures, her district has trained staff to “restrict the sharing of any student files, any student information, and there’s been some work with thinking about our facilities to ensure that we have campuses that are closed off, that people can’t just walk in.”
L.A. Unified, along with other school districts, has embraced a mission to protect the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Protecting immigrant families
L.A. Unified, with about 400,000 students, has been layering on protections for months, recently working to incorporate ideas advocated by the teachers union and immigrant-rights groups.
A major ongoing effort is building safe-passage networks one, two and three blocks out from a campus. Participants include paid outside groups, district employees and volunteer activists. School police — though diminished in numbers due to staffing cuts — are to patrol sensitive areas and are on call to move quickly to where situations arise. Some anti-police activists want the protective mission accomplished without any role for school police.
A safe-passage presence has expanded from 40 schools last year to at least 100 this year, among about 1,000 campuses total, Carvalho said.
“It is virtually impossible, considering the size of our community, to ensure that we have one caring, compassionate individual in every street corner in every street,” Carvalho said. “But we are deploying resources at a level never before seen in our district.”
Other various efforts include:
Carvalho and leaders of other school districts reiterated that K-12 campuses and anything related to schooling, such as a school bus or a graduation ceremony, will be off limits to immigration agents unless they have a valid judicial warrant for a specific individual — which has been rare.
“We do not know what the enrollment will be like,” Carvalho said. “We know many parents may have already left our community. They may have self-deported… We hope that through our communication efforts, our awareness efforts, information and the direct counseling with students and parents, that we’ll be able to provide stable attendance for kids in our community.”
Reason to be afraid
Mary, a Los Angeles mother of three without legal status, was terrified, but more or less knew what to do when immigration agents came to her door twice in May for a “wellness check” on her children: She did not let them in to her home. She did not step outside.
And, eventually, the agents — at least eight of them who arrived with at least three vehicles — left.
Mary had learned about what to do in this situation from her Los Angeles public school.
Mary, who requested that her full name not be used, has three children, one of whom attends an Alliance College-Ready charter school, a network of 26 privately operated public schools.
Like L.A. Unified, Alliance has trained staff on the legal rights of immigrants and also trained parents about how to handle encounters with immigration agents and where to go for help.
Alliance largely serves low-income, Latino communities and the immigration raids affected attendance in the school last year. Normally, attendance runs about 90% at the end of their school year. This June, average daily attendance at 14 Alliance high schools had dipped below 80%. Six fell below 70% and one dropped as low as 57.5%.
Alliance also attempted to gather deportation data. Nine families responded in a school network that enrolls about 13,000. In two cases, students were deported; three other students had family members deported; one student and a sibling were in a family that self-deported; one student was detained; two families reported facing deportation proceedings.
While these numbers are small, the reports are more than enough to heighten fear within the community. And some families may have declined to be candid about their circumstances.
“What’s happening now is that no one is safe anywhere, not even in your home, at work, outside, taking a stroll,” L.A. school board member Rocio Rivas said in an interview.
Still, Rivas is encouraging families to send children to school, which she considers safer than other places.
Alliance is focusing heavily on mental-health support and also arranging carpools to and from school — in which the driver is a U.S. citizen, said Omar Reyes, a superintendent of instruction at the Alliance charter group.
Carvalho, a onetime undocumented immigrant himself, said that students deserve a traditional and joyous first day followed by a school year without trauma.
Children, he said, “inherently deserve dignity, humanity, love, empathy, compassion and great education.
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.
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State sues SoCal real estate tycoon, alleging widespread tenant exploitation
Alleging widespread and egregious violations of housing and tenant laws, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sued Southern California real estate tycoon Mike Nijjar in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday.
In the lawsuit, Bonta accused Nijjar, family members and their companies of subjecting tenants to vermin infestations and overflowing sewage, overcharging them and violating anti-discrimination laws.
The suit says that Nijjar is one of California’s largest landlords, operating multibillion dollars in holdings. Nijjar family companies, commonly known as PAMA Management, own 22,000 rental units, primarily in low-income neighborhoods in Southern California.
The suit follows a more than two-year California Department of Justice investigation into Nijjar’s holdings, Bonta said.
“PAMA and the companies owned by Mike Nijjar and his family are notorious for their rampant, slum-like conditions — some so bad that residents have suffered tragic results,” Bonta said in a statement. “Our investigation into Nijjar’s properties revealed PAMA exploited vulnerable families, refusing to invest the resources needed to eradicate pest infestations, fix outdated roofs and install functioning plumbing systems, all while deceiving tenants about their rights to sue their landlord and demand repairs.”
Bonta is seeking penalties against Nijjar and his family business entities, restitution for tenants, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and injunctive relief barring Nijjar and PAMA from continuing unlawful business practices.
A representative for Nijjar said he forcefully rejects the claims in the lawsuit.
“The allegations in the complaint are false and misleading, and its claims are legally erroneous,” Nijjar attorney Stephen Larson said in a statement. “We look forward to demonstrating in court that Mr. Nijjar and his companies are not only compliant with the law, but they provide an extraordinary service to housing those disadvantaged and underserved by California’s public and private housing markets.”
Nijjar’s real estate empire has long been on authorities’ radar.
In 2020, LAist detailed wide-ranging dangerous conditions at Nijjar’s properties dating back years, including a fire at a PAMA-owned mobile home in Kern County that resulted in the death of an infant. The mobile home was not permitted for human occupancy, according to the report and Bonta’s lawsuit. Two years later, The Times wrote a series of stories about Chesapeake Apartments, a sprawling 425-unit apartment complex in South L.A., where Nijjar’s tenants complained of sewage discharges, regular mold and vermin infestations and shoddy repairs. Chesapeake had the most public health violations of any residential property in L.A. County over the previous five years, according to a Times analysis at the time.
Prior attempts at accountability for Nijjar and his companies have been spotty and ineffective. After the 2016 mobile home fire that killed the infant in Kern County, the California Department of Real Estate revoked the licenses associated with Nijjar’s company at the time. In response, Nijjar and family members reorganized their business structure, the suit said.
The L.A. city attorney’s office resolved a nuisance abatement complaint against PAMA at Chesapeake in 2018, only for the widespread habitability problems to emerge. A similar case filed by the city attorney’s office against a PAMA property in Hollywood remains in litigation more than three years after it was filed. In the meantime, Nijjar’s companies have settled multiple habitability lawsuits filed by residents.
Bonta said that PAMA has taken advantage of lax and piecemeal accountability efforts and its low-income tenants’ vulnerability. Most residents, he said, have low or fixed incomes with few alternatives other than to endure the shoddy conditions in their rentals.
The lawsuit alleges that the habitability problems at PAMA properties are “ongoing business practices” — the result of decisions to make cheap repairs rather than necessary investments in maintenance, the use of unskilled handymen, lack of staff training and failure to track tenant requests.
“Nijjar and his associates have treated lawsuit after lawsuit and code violation after code violation as the cost of doing business and have been allowed to operate and collect hundreds of millions of dollars each year from families who sleep, shower, and feed their children in unhealthy and deplorable conditions,” Bonta said. “Enough is enough.”
Besides tenants’ living conditions, the suit alleges Nijjar and PAMA have induced residents into deceptive leases, discriminated against tenants on public assistance programs and issued unlawful rent increases.
The suit contends PAMA’s leases attempt to invalidate rights guaranteed under law, including the opportunity to sue and make repairs the landlord neglected and deduct these costs from the rent. The company has told Section 8 voucher holders that there are no units available when others are being rented to applicants without vouchers, the complaint said.
The case alleges that PAMA has violated California’s rent cap law on more than 2,000 occasions. The law limits rent increases to 5% plus inflation annually at most apartments. PAMA, the suit says, shifted mandatory shared utility costs, which used to be paid by the landlord, onto tenants’ bills in an attempt to evade the cap. The combination of the new utility costs and rent hikes resulted in total increases of up to 20%, more than double the allowable amount, according to the suit.
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Deportation of family of man charged in Boulder firebombing halted
BOULDER, Colo. — A federal judge issued an order Wednesday to prevent the deportation of the wife and five children of an Egyptian man charged in a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo.
U.S. District Judge Gordon P. Gallagher granted a request from the family of Mohamed Sabry Soliman to halt deportation proceedings of his wife and five children who were taken into federal custody Tuesday by U.S. immigration officials.
The family members have not been charged in the attack on a group demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Soliman faces federal hate crime charges and state charges of attempted murder in the Sunday attack in downtown Boulder.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Wednesday that they are being processed for removal proceedings. It’s rare that family members of a person accused of a crime are detained and threatened with deportation.
Soliman’s wife, 18-year-old daughter, two minor sons and two minor daughters all are Egyptian citizens, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
“We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it,” Noem said in a statement.
Noem also said federal authorities will immediately crack down on people who overstay their visas in response to the Boulder attack.
Soliman told authorities that no one, including his family, knew about his planned attack, according to court documents that, at times, spelled his name as “Mohammed.”
Earlier Wednesday, authorities raised the number of victims in the attack from 12 to 15, plus a dog.
Boulder County officials who provided updates on the number of victims said in a news release they include eight women and seven men, ranging in age from 25 to 88. The Associated Press left an email message Wednesday with prosecutors seeking more details on the newly identified victims and the dog.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, had planned to kill all of the roughly 20 participants in Sunday’s demonstration at the popular Pearl Street pedestrian mall, but he threw just two of his 18 Molotov cocktails while yelling “Free Palestine,” police said. Soliman, an Egyptian man who federal authorities say has been living in the U.S. illegally, didn’t carry out his full plan “because he got scared and had never hurt anyone before,” police wrote in an affidavit.
His wife and five children were taken into custody Tuesday by U.S. immigration officials, and the White House said they could be swiftly deported. It’s rare that family members of a person accused of a crime are detained and threatened with deportation in this way.
“Anyone who thinks they can come to America and advocate for antisemitic violence and terrorism — think again,” Noem said in a statement. “You are not welcome here. We will find you, deport you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.
Soliman told authorities that no one, including his family, knew about his plans for the attack, according to court documents that, at times, spelled his name as “Mohammed.”
According to an FBI affidavit, Soliman told police he was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people” — a reference to the movement to establish and protect a Jewish state in Israel. Authorities said he expressed no remorse about the attack.
A vigil was scheduled for Wednesday evening at the local Jewish community center to support those affected by the attack.
Defendant’s immigration status
Soliman was born in el-Motamedia, an Egyptian farming village in the Nile Delta province of Gharbia that’s located about 75 miles north of Cairo, according to an Egyptian security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media.
Before moving to Colorado Springs three years ago, he spent 17 years in Kuwait, according to court documents.
He has been living in the U.S. illegally, having arrived in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X. She said Soliman filed for asylum in September 2022 and was granted a work authorization in March 2023, but that it also expired.
DHS did not respond to requests for additional information about the immigration status of his wife and children and the U.S. State Department said that visa records are confidential. The New York Times, citing McLaughlin, said his family’s visas have since been revoked and they were arrested Tuesday by ICE.
Hundreds of thousands of people overstay their visas each year in the United States, according to Homeland Security Department reports.
The case against Soliman
Soliman told authorities that he had been planning the attack for a year and was waiting for his daughter to graduate before carrying it out, the affidavit said.
A newspaper in Colorado Springs that profiled one of Soliman’s children in April noted the family’s journey from Egypt to Kuwait and then to the U.S. It said after initially struggling in school, she landed academic honors and volunteered at a local hospital.
Soliman currently faces federal hate crime charges and attempted murder charges at the state level, but authorities say additional charges could be brought. He’s being held in a county jail on a $10-million bond and is scheduled to make an appearance in state court on Thursday.
His attorney, Kathryn Herold, declined to comment after a state court hearing Monday.
Witnesses and police have said Soliman threw two incendiary devices, catching himself on fire as he hurled the second. Authorities said they believe Soliman acted alone. Although they did not elaborate on the nature of his injuries, a booking photo showed him with a large bandage over one ear.
The attack unfolded against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, which continues to inflame global tensions and has contributed to a spike in antisemitic violence in the United States. The attack happened at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot and barely a week after a man who also yelled “Free Palestine” was charged with fatally shooting two Israeli Embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington.
Six victims hospitalized
The victims ranged in age from 25 to 88, and the nature of some of their injuries spanned from serious to minor, officials said. They were members of the volunteer group called Run For Their Lives who were holding their weekly demonstration.
Three victims were still hospitalized Tuesday at the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, spokesperson Kelli Christensen said.
One of the 15 victims was a child when her family fled the Nazis during the Holocaust, said Ginger Delgado of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, who is acting as a spokesperson for the family of the woman, who doesn’t want her name used.
Slevin, Bedayn and Santana write for the Associated Press. AP reporters Eric Tucker in Washington; Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Mo.; Samy Magdy in Cairo; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.
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A century after Scopes trial, creationism proponents persist
WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — As a colossal manifestation of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated.
The ark stretches 1½ football fields long — “the biggest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.
It’s all designed to try to persuade visitors that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.
“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.
And with that, he furthers his goal to assert that the entire Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.
All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.
But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.
Bryan — a populist secretary of State, congressman, three-time presidential hopeful and fundamentalist champion — helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes monkey trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tenn.
Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s fanciful miracles and enigmas.
‘The history in the Bible is true’
For Ham, Bryan’s problem was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it well enough, interpreting parts of it metaphorically rather than literally.
“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.
“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham adds, speaking in the accent of his native Australia.
Ham is founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, zip lines and other attractions surrounding the ark.
Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Ky., where exhibits similarly try to make the case for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden.
The group also produces books, podcasts, videos and homeschooling curricula.
“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”
A commonly held belief
If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.
Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of U.S. adults agreed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.
“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”
Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”
The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution. A federal court in 2005 similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district to present “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.
Bill Nye, the alarmed guy
Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. The North Dakota Legislature this year debated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”
The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism; and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.
Such efforts alarm science educators such as Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.
“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”
Nye notes that the evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossil layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.
Varying religious views
One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).
“We are church-going, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public school curriculum permeated with evolution.
The Creation Museum, Van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught.”
Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.
Gallup’s survey found that among Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34%) than without it (24%). In the Roman Catholic Church, popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting that the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.
But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.
A wider debate
Just as Ham says the creation story is important to defend a larger truth about the Christian Gospel, critics say more is at stake than just the human origin story.
The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, promoting conservative views in theology, family and gender roles, and casting doubt on other areas of scientific consensus, such as human-made climate change.
Nye, too, says the message fits into a more general and ominous anti-science movement. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.
Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s large door, which analogizes that just as the wicked perished in the flood, those without Christ face eternal hellfire.
And there are more parallels to 1925.
Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, drugs and other social ills as resulting from belief in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.
More attractions planned
The protests that initially greeted the museum and ark projects, from secularist groups who considered them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.
When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter because of its religious nature, a federal court overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
And Ham’s massive ministry charges forward. Expansion is next, with Answers in Genesis attractions planned for Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Branson, Mo. — tourist hubs offering more opportunities to promote creationism to the masses.
Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Ariz., says he believes that the exhibit vividly evoked the safety that Noah and his family must have felt. It helped him appreciate “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.
“I think,” Bigelow adds, “God and science can go hand in hand.”
Smith writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Dylan Lovan contributed to this report.
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New U.S. ambassador, former senator and business executive David Perdue, arrives in China
BEIJING — The new U.S. ambassador to China, former senator and business executive David Perdue, arrived in Beijing on Thursday, just days after China and the U.S. agreed to a temporary break in their damaging tariff war.
Perdue said on X that it is an honor to represent President Trump as ambassador.
“I am ready to get to work here and make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” he wrote.
Perdue, 75, had a long career as an executive in firms from clothing to retail. He was based in Hong Kong as head of the Asia operations for Sara Lee Corp. and later was president of the Reebok athletic brand and chairman and CEO of Dollar General stores.
A Republican, he was a senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021 and ran for governor of the state as a Trump-backed candidate in 2022 but lost in the Republican primary.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said China was ready to “provide convenience” for Perdue to perform his duties.
“We have always viewed and handled China-U.S. relations based on the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation. We hope the U.S. side will work with China in the same direction,” Lin said at a daily news briefing.
The U.S. reached a weekend deal with China to reduce sky-high tariffs on each other’s goods, an agreement Trump has referred to as a victory.
The U.S. agreed to cut the 145% tax Trump imposed last month to 30%. China agreed to lower its tariff on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%. The lower tariff rates came into effect on Wednesday.
Worldwide, markets have responded to the agreement with gusto, rebounding to the levels before Trump’s tariffs, but many business owners remain wary.
Along with tariffs and China’s massive trade surplus with the U.S., the two have tangled over security in the South China Sea, which China claims virtually in its entirety.
The U.S. has also been a harsh critic of China’s crackdown on human rights in ethnic areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang and in Hong Kong, and is a strong supporter of Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that China says is its own territory and threatens to invade.
With the 90-day tariff suspension being a notable exception, relations have hit lows not seen in decades. A reminder of that was Perdue’s predecessor Nicholas Burns’ order this year banning American government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, a throwback to the Cold War.
Perdue was confirmed by the Senate on April 29. While in the Senate, he served on the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Banking, Budget, and Agriculture committees. He also chaired the Subcommittees on Sea Power and State Department Oversight and “traveled extensively to strengthen U.S. partnerships across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe,” according to his official biography.
He was born in Warner Robins, Ga., and grew up on his family’s farm. He and his wife have two sons and three grandsons.
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