investigate

The latest attack at a Jewish site in the UK capital occurs at Kenton United Synagogue and causes minor damage.

The United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police are investigating whether a recent spate of arson attacks on Jewish sites in North London could be linked to Iranian proxies.

Counter Terrorism Policing is leading investigations into the incidents, the Met Police said on Sunday, after an arson attack at the Kenton United Synagogue in northwestern London occurred overnight.

There have been no injuries in the blazes, the latest of which caused minor damage.

Vicki Evans, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said most of the attacks have been claimed by the Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia group (Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right), often shortened to Ashab al-Yamin.

She said the group has also claimed several incidents at places of worship as well as business and financial institutions in Europe in recent months.

Evans said police were aware of “public reporting that this group may have links to Iran”.

She added that she has spoken before about Iran’s “routine uses of criminal proxies” and police were considering whether this tactic of “recruiting violence as a service” was being used in London.

Ashab al-Yamin emerged online in March and has claimed responsibility for several attacks on Jewish sites in Europe. It also claimed responsibility for an attack on the Persian-language Iran International news channel in London.

Recent arson incidents in London have included a bottle containing accelerant being thrown inside the Finchley Reform Synagogue in North London on Wednesday and Jewish-owned Hatzola ambulances being set alight in the car park of a synagogue in Golders Green on March 23. On Friday night, a man tried to light a bag containing three bottles of fluid outside the former premises of the Jewish Futures charity in Hendon.

The UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said the Kenton fire was the third “cowardly” attack on Jewish sites in the British capital in less than a week.

“A sustained campaign of violence and intimidation against the Jewish community of the UK is gathering momentum,” Mirvis said on X. “Thank God, no lives have been lost, but we cannot, and must not, wait for that to change before we understand just how dangerous this moment is for all of our society.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by the recent attacks at Jewish sites and those responsible would be brought to justice.

“This is abhorrent and it will not be tolerated. Attacks on our Jewish community are attacks on Britain,” he said in a post on X.

California built its tradition of open government — including for citizen boards that set the rules for such functions as automotive repair and security guard licensing — precisely to keep well-funded corporate interests in check. Lobbyists and special interests are constantly scheming to defeat the will of the majority. Now they are able to do more damage using artificial intelligence to simulate fake grassroots opposition to clean air measures, and they are surreptitiously using the identities of real people to deceive regulators.

Last June, the South Coast Air Quality Management District received more than 20,000 comments opposing a pair of clean air rules that would have prevented 2,500 premature deaths and 10,000 new cases of asthma. A February investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that those comments were submitted through CiviClick, a Washington-based AI-powered comment generation platform, orchestrated by a local political consultant with ties to the natural gas industry. When the district’s cybersecurity team reached out to a small sample of commenters to verify their identities, a majority of respondents said that they had not submitted the comments in their names.

Even so, the flood of fake comments seemingly worked. These rules, vehemently opposed by the natural gas industry, already watered down by the district to near-toothlessness, were ultimately rejected by the board — apparently overwhelmed by the flood of fake opposition to even the mildest effort to limit pollution from gas-burning appliances.

This Southern California campaign was not an isolated incident. A recent investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle also revealed that an industry front group used Speak4, a platform that advertises its use of AI, to submit dozens of comments regurgitating talking points from the fossil fuel industry in an attempt to weaken and delay clean air rules in the Bay Area. The scheme was exposed when 10 residents whose identities were used on these emails said they absolutely did not send them, calling the messages “forged.”

In both cases, organizations submitted emails and comments to regulators using real people’s identities without their knowledge or consent. This playbook has been employed in other states: CiviClick was used by fossil fuel companies to support a gas-pipeline-expansion project in North Carolina last year. When elected officials reached out to a few respondents to verify the messages, some constituents stated they had no knowledge of the emails sent under their names.

The opposition campaign to South Coast’s clean air rules was run by one of the state’s most powerful lobbying firms. Its client list includes Sempra, the parent company of SoCalGas, which opposed the clean air standards, which would have encouraged the sale of pollution-free heat pumps and threatened the utility’s business.

The industry front group using AI to undermine clean air rules in the Bay Area, Common Sense Coalition, also has ties to fossil fuel companies. Common Sense Coalition is a project of the Bay Area Council, a local business group that features members such as the Western States Petroleum Assn., Chevron, Martinez Refining Co. and Phillips 66.

The question of whether fossil fuel interests financed astroturf AI campaigns to defeat clean air rules should be answered through full investigations, which also ought to address whether the campaigns committed fraud and identity theft.

Californians deserve to know what is going on — how AI was used, where the lobbyists got the names and addresses they attached to the robo-messages and who paid for the deceptive campaigns. What’s most concerning is the use of actual residents’ identities — without their knowledge or consent — to oppose life-saving clean air standards.

Top law enforcement officials should be investigating — including Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins.
If the law on using a person’s name in a scheme to thwart action by a public agency is not clear enough to support prosecutions, then the law needs to be tightened up — and there is legislation, Senate Bill 1159, aiming to do that.

If this seems like a niche issue, I can assure you it is not. I spent 17 years at the helm of the California Air Resources Board, and I am deeply disturbed by the potential co-opting of public input processes using forgery through automated tools. Gathering public input is fundamental to the legitimacy of regulatory agencies.

We frequently heard from individuals or business associations concerned about the cost or burden of proposed regulation, and we worked hard to understand and tailor our rules to make them as streamlined and cost-effective as we could, while still making progress toward reducing the air and climate harms of a wide array of equipment and activities.

The destruction of meaningful public input through deceit isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a democracy issue — and it demands urgent attention and accountability. California should draw the line to protect our democratic institutions.

Mary Nichols was chair of the California Air Resources Board, where she occupied the attorney seat. She is distinguished counsel to the Emmett Institute on Climate and Sustainability at UCLA Law School.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday that it has launched an investigation into two California women’s prisons to determine if they unconstitutionally provided housing and preferential treatment to “biological male prisoners.”

In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon — who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — said investigators will look into “widely reported allegations of deprivation of female prisoners’ rights” at the Central California Women’s Facility in Madera County and the California Institution for Women in San Bernardino County.

The Justice Department said in a news release that there have been allegations “of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison.”

Newsom’s office referred The Times to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. A spokesperson for the agency said it is “committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people.”

The Department of Justice also notified Maine Gov. Janet Mills of an investigation into allegations that the state “has allowed a biological male inmate to remain housed with women despite complaints that the male inmate has assaulted or harassed several female inmates.”

Dhillon said in a video posted on X that the investigations are part of a new project called the “single-sex prisons initiative” to look for potential civil rights violations in which female inmates are forced “to be in the same rooms with men who are posing as women to get access to the female prisons.”

“In California there are reports of many dozen such men housed in women’s prisons which of course is exposing these women to sexual assault and other forms of violence and harassment that, if true, are extremely troubling and could violate the civil rights of these women,” Dhillon said.

In 2020, Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 132, which gives transgender, nonbinary and intersex inmates at state prisons the right to be housed at either men’s or women’s facilities. Opponents of the law sued the following year, alleging that it was unconstitutional and created an unsafe environment for women in female facilities, with some plaintiffs claiming they were assaulted.

At the time, LGBTQ+ advocates slammed the suit as baseless and damaging.

“The way they wrote [the complaint] is saying that trans women are men and they are putting men in women’s prisons, which is completely false,” Bamby Salcedo, president and chief executive of the TransLatin@ Coalition, which cosponsored SB 132, previously told The Times. “They’re making a claim that is not accurate and not respectful towards trans women specifically.”

In an interview with the Times Thursday, Salcedo said that while there may be instances in which people have abused the law, she stressed “it is the responsibility of the CDCR to protect people who are incarcerated.”

“They should be able to not just follow the law, but also to be able to screen people appropriately,” Salcedo said.

Salcedo said she was not surprised to hear about the new Justice Department investigation, calling it “an effort for this administration to continue to deny opportunities and access to trans people in our society.”

The Women’s Liberation Front, which brought the lawsuit, announced this week that a federal court had dismissed the case but that they planned to appeal. In an emailed statement, Elspeth Cypher, Women’s Liberation Front board president, called the Justice Department investigation “welcome and long overdue.”

“I hope that this investigation provides the women in prison with some hope that finally someone is listening,” Cypher said.

Under the bill enacted in 2021, 1,028 inmates housed at male prisons have requested to be moved to female facilities, according to data as of March 4. The department had granted 47 requests and denied 132. Another 140 applicants “changed their minds,” according to the department.

State officials said that 84 inmates sought to be transferred into men’s facilities from women’s prisons. Of those, seven were approved.

According to the corrections department, 2,405 inmates identify as nonbinary, intersex or transgender. Those populations are said to experience excessive violence in prison. A 2007 UC Irvine study that included interviews with 39 transgender inmates found that the rate of sexual assault is 13 times higher for transgender people, with 59% of those surveyed reporting experiencing such encounters.

The Justice Department said Thursday that its investigation was just getting underway and that it “has not reached any conclusions regarding allegations in these matters.”

“I’m very determined to ensure that no woman who’s incarcerated in the United States is subject to potential rape, sexual assault or other violations of her civil rights as a condition of incarceration to satisfy some woke ideology by the state,” Dhillon said. “If these states are violating these rights and they don’t stop, we will make them through litigation.”