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Democratic and Republican candidates vying to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom have been sparring on televised debates and exchanging campaign attacks since April to garner the attention of voters statewide.

The candidates include a Riverside County sheriff, a former senior advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, a former Los Angeles mayor, a billionaire hedge fund founder and two former members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Recent polls showed that the leading Democratic candidate is Xavier Becerra, a former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services whose campaign is focusing on affordability and housing for what he calls “working Californians.” Vying for one of the top two spots in the June 2 primary are Republican contender Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator who was endorsed by President Trump, and Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, a hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior.

Here is what the top candidates have said on important topics such as immigration, housing and homelessness, affordability and the entertainment industry.

Immigration and ICE

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that began in California last summer have been hotly debated by Democratic and Republican candidates.

Here is what the candidates said during a debate in May or stated on their websites, as well as some criticism they have faced during the campaign.

• Xavier Becerra vowed to protect and lead the state against the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and marginalized communities. Becerra’s rivals have accused him of failing to protect migrant children when he served as Health and Human Services secretary under the Biden administration.
• Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco opposes “sanctuary city” laws that block local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration agents, calls for the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants and says the border must be secured. But he has also faced criticism from fellow Republicans for supporting a pathway to citizenship for lawful, working undocumented people and telling his constituents that his deputies were not taking part in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
• Former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who legally immigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom, opposes California’s state and local sanctuary policies, and said the state must cooperate with the federal government because the governor’s job is to enforce laws, whether the governor agrees with immigration enforcement activity or not.
• San José Mayor Matt Mahan plans to demand ICE officers be unmasked, vows to go after agents and immigration agency leadership when they violate the constitution and shield communities from unwarranted harassment.
• Former Congresswoman Katie Porter said California should enforce its sanctuary laws statewide, “so we don’t have crazy cowboys taking the law into their own hands.”
• Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer wants to strengthen California’s laws to ensure law enforcement agents can’t profile Californians based on their race, ethnicity, language, occupation or location. He also wants legislation that will grant the state attorney general the authority to hold ICE agents accountable for violent and illegal acts on the job. He supports abolishing ICE. But he has faced heat on the campaign trail for his former hedge fund’s investment in the Corrections Corp. of America, now known as CoreCivic, which operates private prisons around the nation that are housing people picked up by federal immigration agents. Steyer has repeatedly expressed remorse about his former firm’s ties with the company and said he personally ordered the divestment from private prisons before he sold his stake in the hedge fund.
• State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond says he plans to levy a new tax on companies that operate ICE detention centers, fight to abolish ICE, protect California’s sanctuary laws and work with Congress to establish a pathway to citizenship.
• Former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa supports helping law-abiding immigrants and said violent criminals have been deported under the state’s sanctuary laws, despite claims to the contrary by Republican candidates.

Housing and homelessness

Here’s what each candidate said about the need to address the state’s housing shortage and its stubborn homeless problem:

• Becerra said he plans to cut “unnecessary red tape” and speed up “approvals for projects that meet affordability and environmental standards.” On homelessness, Becerra said he wants to establish a $150-million annual homelessness prevention fund to pay rents and fight eviction or foreclosure.
• Bianco said he wants to end “overregulation of our building industry” and eliminate the California Environmental Quality Act, the California Coastal Commission and the California Air Resources Board. On homelessness, he wants cities to clear encampments and prioritize mental health and substance abuse treatment. He wants to force people to accept drug treatment “when necessary.”
• Hilton proposes to reform the California Environmental Quality Act so that only government prosecutors can sue, preventing private individuals and organizations from stopping or delaying new housing projects. He also said he believes rent control measures reduce the incentive to build housing and wants to restructure or eliminate them. On homelessness, Hilton wants to build more low-cost group shelters instead of permanent housing.
• Mahan said he wants to lower developer fees and taxes for infill housing. Mahan also said more homes should be built off-site in California-based factories, making them cheaper than building them on site. On homelessness, Mahan wants to make the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant permanent and fund it at $1 billion a year.
• Porter said she would “greenlight innovative building strategies, shred unnecessary red tape and create incentives” to build needed housing. On homelessness, Porter wants more interim housing, emergency rental assistance and rapid rehousing programs.
• Steyer is pledging to make it harder for large corporations to buy up the state’s housing stock and wants to encourage cheaper methods of home construction. On homelessness, Steyer wants to expand interim housing options and homeless services.
• Thurmond said he wants to build 2 million new homes for “working Californians,” on 75,000 acres of surplus land that local school districts own. On homelessness, Thurmond wants to increase the number of housing units that include mental health and substance abuse services.
• Villaraigosa said he wants to cut development fees and reform CEQA to speed housing development, particularly for infill housing. On homelessness, Villaraigosa wants to double the state’s investment in Newsom’s Homekey program to build an additional 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing over five years.

A comprehensive guide on the candidate’s full views on housing and homelessness is here.

What the candidates have said about affordability

The candidates offered their ideas for making California more affordable during debates in April and May as well as on their websites.

• Becerra said he will stand up to price gouging and unjustified rate hikes and use the power of the state to lower prices “where the market has failed.”
• Bianco says he wants to cut taxes for working families and businesses, stop the “over-regulation on California’s economy,” support job growth and unleash the state’s energy resources to lower the price of gas and utilities.
• Hilton said he wants to eliminate income taxes on people who earn less than $100,000 and on the first $100,000 for Californians who earn more than that. He also wants to end California’s current tax on tips to ensure tipped workers keep more of their earnings.
• Mahan said he wants to enact a “Gas Tax Holiday” that ends or reduces the tax on gas. He also wants to remove barriers to building affordable housing by putting a cap on fees charged for new housing construction.
• Porter supports single-payer healthcare, providing free child care and college tuition and making wealthy corporations pay their “fair share” in taxes. To pay for it, Porter would impose a progressive corporate tax, meaning more profitable businesses and corporations would pay a higher rate. She also supports ending income taxes for those who earn less than $100,000.
• Steyer called himself the only candidate who is “willing to take on the corporate special interests” that drive up the cost of living in the state. He said he would like to lower gas prices as well as streamline permitting, reform zoning and enforce laws to build affordable homes faster. He also supports single-payer healthcare.
• Thurmond wants to provide a tax credit to make it easier for Californians to pay for the rising cost of gas, groceries and housing. He plans to establish a universal childcare program and provide low-cost loans to help small businesses make improvements at their firms.
• Villaraigosa plans to support a California Fuel Affordability Guarantee to cap gas prices for working families.

The entertainment industry

Here’s what some candidates have listed on their campaign websites about their ideas to support California’s entertainment industry.

• Becerra supports state requirements that mandate productions disclose how AI is being used, cutting the “bureaucratic friction” of getting a filming location permit and vows to uphold the state requirement that ensures digital platforms share meaningful performance data with the cast, writers and directors.
• Hilton wants to restore California’s competitive edge as a place for productions by creating financial incentives for film productions, cover the initial and technical costs associated with the development of a film or television project and reserve funding for independent and mid-budget projects.
• Mahan said he plans to expand and modernize production incentives, make them more competitive and ensure the protections are for everyone who works on a film or television project from the technical crew to writers, directors and actors.
• Steyer said he would like to block corporate mergers in entertainment, defend and expand film tax credits and eliminate the regulations and hurdles for permitting and logistics that “slow down productions.”

Times staff writers Seema Mehta, Nicole Nixon and Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Democrats on Friday called former Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s interview with the House Oversight Committee about her handling of the Epstein files a “sham” and a “coverup,” and said she refused to answer numerous questions about President Trump in the closed-door session with lawmakers.

“It’s a sham in there. They’re not answering any questions,” Rep. Dave Min (D-Irvine) told reporters during a break from the interview.

Bondi was joined in her interview by attorneys from the Department of Justice, including Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who intervened to prevent answers to some questions about Trump, Democrats said.

“The DOJ is in there right now stopping questions about President Trump and about what happened in the release of these files,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the ranking Democrat on the committee.

He said Bondi, who was not under oath, declined to answer five questions he posed about the president.

The committee said it will release a transcript of the interview, which was not recorded on video.

The committee subpoenaed Bondi in March to appear for a deposition when she was still in office, but she didn’t initially comply, agreeing to the voluntary interview only after Democrats filed a resolution last month seeking to hold her in contempt.

Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and longtime Republican activist who has been floated as a potential future attorney general, wouldn’t say whether she expressly prevented Bondi from answering questions about Bondi’s interactions with the president.

“There were ground rules laid with the committee before we walked in there and we simply wanted to stick to those,” Dhillon said.

Garcia said that Bondi blamed Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, then her deputy, for problems with the release of the files.

Bondi, who didn’t meet with reporters after her interview, disputed Garcia’s characterization.

“NOT TRUE. I praised Acting AG Blanche’s management of this Herculean task. I said his ethics are beyond reproach and that he is an incredible Attorney General,” Bondi wrote on X.

The department was criticized for not releasing the files as quickly as required under a law passed last year mandating release of all records from the department’s investigations into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019.

The department also came under fire for failing to redact the names of some of Epstein’s victims, while redacting the names of some of Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, as well as for its removal of some of the files it initially posted.

A group of Epstein victims who spoke with reporters in front of the closed doors of the Bondi interview criticized the department’s rollout of the files and the department’s lack of communication with victims.

“Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche have derailed the lives of so many survivors,” said Dani Bensky, who said she was abused by Epstein when she was a 17-year-old high school student in New York City.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M) said that in the interview, Bondi acknowledged she had never met with any of Epstein’s victims.

In Bondi’s opening statement, reviewed by The Times, she acknowledged issues with the rollout of the files, but defended the administration’s handling of the release.

“There were redaction errors,” Bondi’s opening statement said. “But since day one of this process, this Department has been committed to accountability and transparency.”

Bondi was fired by Trump on April 2 and faced questions throughout her tenure about the department’s investigations into Epstein.

In February 2025, she claimed on Fox News that she had a copy of Epstein’s supposed client list, showing the names of the financier’s high-powered friends that he had directed girls to have sex with.

But in July 2025, as Trump faced questions about his relationship with Epstein, whom he knew socially, the Justice Department closed its investigation into Epstein’s alleged crimes and said no such client list existed.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act soon after, requiring the Justice Department to release all of the records from its investigation into Epstein. Despite initially opposing it, Trump signed it into law on Nov. 19, 2025.

When asked about what Trump might have known about Epstein’s crimes, Bondi said she did not know, according to Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.)

“I’m not certain of the extent of his knowledge,” Bondi said, according to Walkinshaw.

Bondi responded to Walkinshaw’s claims, writing on X: “MISREPRESENTATION by Walkinshaw. What the world knows to be true is President Trump banned Epstein from Mar a Lago decades ago bc Epstein was a despicable creep!!”

Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said Democrats would seek to speak with Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel next about the handling of the Epstein files and the department’s investigations into Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) was the only Republican member of Congress to attend the interview and Democrats called out their Republican colleagues for not joining.

“I have an election in four days, a very important one,” said Min, the Democrat from Irvine. “But I’m here, rather than in my district, because this is important.”

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Friday that President Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center and blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard for its legal obligations.

“The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” he wrote.

Cooper also concluded that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by unilaterally adding Trump’s name to the center. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, he said.

Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, said Friday the institution is “confident that on appeal the court will uphold the Board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center.” She said the decision would be reviewed “carefully.”

“Though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration – a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges,” Daravi said. “With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress, the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy.”

Cooper held hearings in late April for parallel lawsuits challenging the project. One was filed by a group of cultural and historic preservation organizations. The other was brought Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board. He ruled in favor of Beatty’s request but rejected the other challenge.

Justice Department attorneys said renovation plans for the building are limited in scope and well within the board’s authority to make without needing outside approvals.

The plaintiffs worry the president and his board allies will flout preservation rules designed to maintain the building’s historic fabric. In earlier statements in court hearings, attorneys for Beatty and the preservation groups raised doubts about the limited scope of the project, pointing to Trump’s statements that he would “fully expose” the building’s steel skeleton. Beatty has said she was “very fearful that we’ll see what happened with the East Wing and what happened with the Rose Garden” if the center is closed and the renovations allowed unsupervised, referring to major changes the president has made at the White House.

Trump, a Republican, has taken a keen interest in the Kennedy Center’s operations since he returned to White House last year. He installed a handpicked board that named him chairman. His name was added to the facade of a building that is considered a living monument to President John F. Kennedy.

The Kennedy Center has kept up performances ahead of the closure, though at a much slower pace than in previous years. Trump attended the premiere of the musical “Chicago” in March and other shows, including “Moulin Rouge” are slated for June.

Bill Maher, the comedian who has had an up and down relationship with Trump, is expected to be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on June 28, an event that was anticipated to be one of the final big moments at the Kennedy Center before the closure.

Cooper was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Obama.

Kunzelman and Sloan write for the Associated Press.

ATLANTA — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that his department has prepared the design for a $250 bill featuring President Trump, anticipating the passage of stalled legislation in Congress to put the president on a new denomination of legal tender.

Bessent said at the White House that authorizing the currency will be up to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, but that “we’ve created the bill” because “we have to be prepared.”

The secretary downplayed the idea that the administration is pushing the matter, despite Trump’s penchant for infusing his name and likeness across the nation’s capital and into the observances of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Bessent also insisted there is nothing inappropriate about Trump’s visage being part of the seminal national celebration.

“The president doesn’t do it; the House and the Senate have to do it,” Bessent said at the White House, referring to legislation, introduced by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), that would direct the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to put Trump’s face on the new bill to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

A Treasury Department spokeswoman said the agency carried out “appropriate planning and due diligence” to implement a potential congressional mandate “to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation.” The spokeswoman did not mention Trump.

If passed and signed into law by Trump, Wilson’s bill would mark an extraordinary recognition for a sitting U.S. leader and comes as Trump has sought to place himself at the center of Independence Day commemorations. The Department’s preparation for the languishing legislation suggests some enthusiasm for the idea on the part of the Trump administration.

Report: Trump ally has pushed to expedite new currency

The agency’s explanation follows a Washington Post report stating that U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, a Trump appointee, has been pushing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the process for a new currency note. The paper also reported that the former BEP chief, Patricia Solimene, was reassigned after pushing back.

The Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on Solimene’s status but confirmed that Michael Brown, a top Beach aide, became acting director of engraving and printing May 18.

Beach did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

Wilson’s legislation, which so far has languished in Congress, is intended to create an exception to existing law that bars any living person from appearing on U.S. currency; the bill would allow current and former presidents to be featured.

Bessent confirmed the measure is designed for one person.

“Donald J. Trump,” he said emphatically, repeating the full name that the president himself often uses in the third person.

According to the Post report, Beach last fall provided the Bureau of Engraving and Printing with the design for the new bill. It featured Trump’s portrait — the same one that adorns banners hanging on some federal buildings in Washington — and a 250th anniversary logo. Trump’s signature also was included, a design element that would differ from other paper money.

British artist Iain Alexander told the Post he designed the bill and said he’d discussed it with the president. Alexander did not respond to an AP request for comment.

The newspaper also reported that Solimene resisted pressure from Beach and Brown and stressed to them the lengthy legal and procedural process required to issue new currency. Solimene was reassigned against her will, the Post reported, paving the way for Brown to oversee the bureau.

Trump has aggressively spread his name and likeness

A new currency note would be the latest example of Trump expanding his personal brand in his official capacity since returning to the White House last year.

Beach and Bessent already streamlined approval of a commemorative 250th anniversary coin featuring Trump. The Treasury Department has asserted that those special coins fall outside the prohibition on living presidents appearing on money. In 1926, the nation’s 150th anniversary, then-President Calvin Coolidge appeared on a commemorative half-dollar coin that was official legal tender.

The Trump administration has had banners featuring his portrait hung on the Department of Justice and other federal buildings. And his slate of appointees to the Kennedy Center governing board added his name to the national performing arts facility that Congress originally designated as a memorial to assassinated President John F. Kennedy. That renaming is being challenged in court because of the federal law establishing the center as the official memorial to the 35th president.

Bessent noted that unless Wilson’s exception passes, current law sets just two conditions for him to consider on currency: that “In God We Trust” is printed somewhere on it, and that only deceased individuals be depicted, with their names described below their portraits.

“It’s all up to Capitol Hill,” Bessent said. “We will stick to the law.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center is part of a “top-down” campaign of retribution against President Trump’s perceived political enemies and constitutes a vindictive prosecution that must be dismissed, lawyers for the nonprofit argued Tuesday in urging a judge to toss out the case.

The Alabama-based nonprofit was indicted in April on fraud and money laundering charges that accuse it of misleading donors by paying informants inside white supremacist and other extremist organizations to obtain inside information about their activities.

Lawyers for the SPLC already argued that law enforcement agencies have long known that the nonprofit paid informants to report on the movements of hate groups. They also said acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche made a false statement at a news conference and in interviews when he said the organization had not shared with law enforcement information it learned from informants. Blanche later appeared to walk back that claim in a television interview, saying it was true that the SPLC “selectively” shared information with law enforcement over the years.

The attorneys for the center expanded on those arguments Tuesday, saying in a motion to dismiss the case that the prosecution was the “culmination of a top-down, retributive campaign” in which Trump pushed the Justice Department “to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.”

Defense says indictment fits broader retaliation campaign

The motion was filed against the backdrop of other politically charged prosecutions that have raised concerns that the Justice Department is operating as a weapon to target Trump’s opponents. It aims to draw a parallel between the SPLC indictment and the human smuggling prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which was dismissed Friday on similar vindictive prosecution grounds by a judge who called the case an “abuse of prosecuting power.”

The SPLC has said its now-defunct program of paying informants to infiltrate hate groups was developed to glean key insights into their activities so that potential victims could be protected. An earlier federal investigation into the practice was closed without charges, but the motion paints the current Justice Department as pursuing the case with renewed — and rushed — vigor.

The department decided to pursue the indictment without interviewing any current SPLC employees and did not seek any documents from the group until after it told defense lawyers that criminal charges were coming, the defense motion states. During a meeting requested by defense lawyers who hoped to avert to indictment, Justice Department officials informed them that the decision already had been made to pursue charges, according to the motion.

“These procedural irregularities show that the charges against the SPLC were a foregone conclusion based on prosecutorial vindictiveness — driven by the White House and FBI leadership’s retribution campaign — rather than the result of a good faith examination of the evidence,” the motion states, saying the indictment was “premised on conclusory accusations but devoid of provable facts or a proper statement of the law.”

The motion also cites whistleblower accounts that accused top Justice Department officials of rushing forward with an indictment despite internal concerns about the merits of the case and the strength of the evidence.

“For weeks, we have been arguing against these false allegations levied against the SPLC — an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multiracial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” Bryan Fair, the interim president and chief executive officer of SPLC, said in a statement. “The government can’t prosecute the SPLC as payback for its protected speech — it violates basic constitutional rights.”

The administration has painted SPLC as partisan

Founded in 1971 as a civil rights organization, the SPLC over the decades has used litigation to fight white supremacist groups. It also tracks the activities and locations of domestic extremists. But its work has made it a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The center, for instance, received fresh attention last year after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk because the SPLC had included a section on the group that Kirk founded and led, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced in October that the bureau would be severing its relationship with the SPLC, saying it had turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged antigovernment and hate groups inside the United States.

The defense motion says “animus” from senior levels of the administration helped shape the indictment.

It cites, among other comments, a statement from Trump deriding the SPLC as “a total scam run by the Democrats,” as well as a news media interview in which Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, said the indictment was “personal” to her because she had “a lot of journalist friends … and groups that I’ve represented who have been targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

NEW ORLEANS — At least four states have adopted laws this year making it a crime to disrupt worship services, a reaction to a high-profile protest inside a Minnesota church that prompted outrage from faith leaders.

The Republican lawmakers sponsoring most of the legislation say those gathering at sacred sanctuaries deserve protection beyond what existing trespassing laws provide. They also say these new laws will prevent escalating clashes between congregants and protestors as many churches, mosques and synagogues remain on edge over recent mass shootings and acts of violence targeting religious groups.

“People should go to church to be able to sit in peace, worship as they please, without having to worry about people coming in and harassing them,” said Idaho Sen. Mark Harris, a Republican who co-sponsored legislation criminalizing protests inside places of worship. “I think the thing that happened in Minnesota was kind of a shock to some of us, that churches would be used as a place to berate people.”

Critics in both parties have warned that the laws infringe on free speech rights.

Here’s a look at the situation.

The laws make it a crime to interfere with worship

Bills have been signed into law in Republican-dominated Idaho, Louisiana and Oklahoma. In Kansas, a bill is becoming law without the signature of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

Similar bills have been introduced for this year’s legislative sessions in at least seven other states and in Congress. Nassau County, New York, passed a similar measure this year. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a law making it a federal crime to intentionally injure or interfere with or intimidate someone entering a place of worship or a reproductive health facility.

The details in the bills differ, but they all make it a crime to interfere with religious assemblies.

Laws against trespassing already apply to disruptions on the grounds of churches or other private property. But legislators say the new laws would boost penalties and bar other protest activity like holding signs near places of worship.

The penalties could be harsher than for trespassing. In some states, people could face up to a year in prison and fines as high as $10,000 for first offenses. The laws also give the states a way to prosecute cases if local authorities decline to do so.

A protest in Minnesota touched off the call for action

Thirty-nine people, including two journalists, were charged in February for roles in a protest during a St. Paul, Minnesota, church service. The protesters had learned that one of the church pastors was also an official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who had been overseeing an intensive Minnesota operation.

The U.S. Department of Justice charged the protesters with conspiracy against religious freedom and interfering with the right of religious freedom. The protesters and journalists have pleaded not guilty and the cases are pending in federal court.

Louisiana Rep. Gabe Firment, a Republican, said he was inspired to introduce legislation that allows protestors to be forcibly removed from churches and other places of worship after seeing videos showing the fearful expressions of children at the Minnesota church.

“The first thought that came to my mind was those poor kids,” Firment said. “You certainly have a right to protest, but just like you don’t have the right to come into someone’s home and act like that, you don’t have the right to come into private church property to do that.”

Oklahoma Sen. Todd Gollihare, a Republican, wrote his bill after anti-abortion protestors disrupted his church service last year. His law bars blocking highways within one mile of a service or approaching someone to hand them a flyer within 100 feet of a place of worship.

His Republican colleague, Sen. Kendal Sacchieri, described the law as extreme and said she was afraid of the precedent it would set.

Court challenges could await the laws

The Nassau County ordinance is already facing a court challenge from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which says there’s no history of residents facing intimidation, harassment or violence outside places of worship — and that the statute denies people their constitutionally protected rights of expression in public places.

Kevin Goldberg, vice president at Freedom Forum, which advocates for First Amendment rights, said that if the laws are challenged in courts, governments would have to show there’s a need for them. “You can’t be guessing, you can’t be speculating,” he said. “There has to be some evidence that there’s an actual threat going on — that there’s been a problem there, that you can reasonably forecast there will be a problem.”

In Louisiana, Democrats raised concerns about mandatory jail time for disrupting services and warned that the laws were too arbitrary, suggesting that they could be applied against a congregant for singing out of turn as a pastor delivers a homily.

“If the spirit just hits me and I start singing during the middle of his homily, and it disrupts his homily in a way where he’s got to say ‘Hey, take a seat’, I mean that would materially disrupt his service and now I’m going to jail for 30 days,” Rep. Edmond Jordan said during a March hearing in the Louisiana Legislature.

The law’s proponents said police officers and judges would have discretion about how to apply the law.

Brook and Mulvihill write for the Associated Press. Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J.

REBEKAH Vardy insists that “hell will freeze over” before she ever apologises to former pal Coleen Rooney over their Wagatha Christie row.

The wife of footie star Jamie said she must live with her libel loss to Wayne Rooney’s missus.

But Becky, 44 — accused of leaking stories about Coleen — said: “I’m never going to apologise for something I didn’t do. Hell will freeze over before I do that.”

Rebekah says her Wagatha Christie beef with Coleen is “done, it’s over” — and does not care what her ex-pal thinks about her.

The wife of former Leicester striker Jamie insists her own “peace” is more important amid the fallout to their legal battle.

In new ITV reality show The Vardys, she admits to still suffering from a public backlash after losing her libel case against Wayne Rooney’s missus.
Becky, 44, had taken legal action after Coleen claimed stories about her were leaked from her Instagram account.

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And she says: “I’m living with the judgment the judge made but, still to this day, I believe she was wrong.”

The mum of five goes on: “People constantly go, ‘Well, it’s not going to change anything unless you apologise’ — but I’m not apologising for something I didn’t do. Like never, ever, going to apologise for something I didn’t do — it’s never going to happen. Hell will freeze over before I do that.

“It’s over, it’s done, I’m not going to carry on living in the past. I’m so f***ing bored of it.”

The Sun revealed last year that the Vardys had signed a deal for a tell-all reality series, and the cameras followed them as Jamie, 39, left Leicester for Italian Serie A minnows Cremonese.

But before Becky packed her bags, she opened up about the High Court battle which finally ended last May, when she was ordered to pay Coleen’s legal fees of around £1.2million.

She says: “I don’t have any negative feelings towards her whatsoever. Some people might go, ‘That’s bull’, but whatever, that’s your opinion. If I ever saw her or bump into her, people will assume it’ll be like handbags at dawn, or ‘Birkins at dawn’, whatever they want to say. ‘Wag War 4’. I’ve forgotten how many headlines have been ‘Wag War’, but my peace is too important.”

She adds of her one-time friend: “I’ve got no idea what she thinks of me, but I’m not bothered.”

Becky was heavily pregnant when Coleen publicly revealed in 2019 she had turned detective to find out who was leaking stories about her.

Becky’s Prem-winning hubby has stayed silent on it, until now.

He says: “Becky’s a strong woman. If she wasn’t, it would definitely have broken her 100 per cent. But that’s not her.”

He adds: “People thinking that Bex was a villain, it’s just a load of s but everyone close to her knows, that’s all she needs. It was really tough seeing Bex in pain, obviously with all the crap coming her way. As a husband, the only thing you can do is be there for her.”

The couple celebrate their tenth anniversary today — and their close bond is evident during The Vardys’ opening episode.

Whether it’s playfighting in their home gym, Jamie’s disdain for her “banana breath” or Becky’s utter bewilderment at how “chilled out” her husband is, they are perfect reality TV material.

Becky says: “We have five kids, but if you include Jamie in that, we have six.”

Jamie is seen telling his young children about him leaving Leicester after 13 years.

But the transfer was far from straightforward — as he was initially bound for a Dutch club.

Becky rants: “The last 24 hours has been a total s*** show. Yesterday morning we were all on holiday in Portugal, chilling, rosé, life couldn’t get any better. And then Jamie tells me, ‘I’m going to sign for a Dutch team.’ I ask him, ‘Are you sure?’ And he seems pretty sure at that point.

“So I thought, ‘OK, that’s fine then, we’re going to Holland’ and literally, just as we’re boarding a flight home from Portugal, he changed his mind — standard Jamie.

“We landed back in the UK at 3pm, dropped the kids off, went straight back to the airport and back out on a flight to Italy.”

• The Vardys starts on ITV, June 2, 9pm, with all episodes on ITVX.

Sometimes it seems as though the only thing that stands between a functioning democracy and a full-on Trump autocracy is a thin, black-robed line.

Although the Supreme Court, in general, and conservative appellate courts, in particular, have bowed and granted President Trump permission to do pretty much anything he wants, they haven’t thoroughly capitulated to his endless grasping for ever more power. (The way invertebrate congressional Republicans have.)

At the lower-court level, judges have repeatedly ruled in ways intended to check Trump, most notably when it comes to violating civil and constitutional rights in pursuit of his indiscriminate immigration dragnet.

The tendency to slow-walk his administration’s response to those rulings — and ignore others that Trump thinks he can safely snub — only contribute to the perception of presidential lawlessness and a sense that our judicial system is being strained to something approaching a breaking point.

Go ahead, if you’d like, and dismiss those concerns as just so much overwrought hand-wringing, or the mindless anti-Trump blathering of your friendly political columnist. A new survey of legal experts — including federal judges, top-tier lawyers and scores of professors from some of the country’s leading law schools — finds widespread concern about the brittle state of our legal system.

And it’s not just the fears of a lot of shaggy-thinking liberals.

“The nation is strong as is its commitment to the rule of law,” said one appellate judge, a Republican appointee. “The current president presents the greatest threat in decades.”

The survey was conducted by Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan academic group that monitors the health and resilience of American democracy, in conjunction with the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s School of Law.

Conducted between mid-February and early March, the poll anonymously surveyed 21 federal judges, 113 lawyers, 193 law professors, 652 political scientists and a nationally representative sample of 2,750 Americans.

What leapt out to UCLA’s Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, was that “across the ideological spectrum and across judges, lawyers and law professors, there was considerable agreement that the rule of law in the U.S. is under tremendous stress.” That consensus, he said, suggests “a real risk to democracy.”

Most legal experts agreed that Trump is using executive power excessively, with a majority doubting the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would handle cases involving the Trump administration impartially. The experts also expressed concern about politicized law enforcement — Trump seeking to persecute his perceived enemies — executive branch overreach, and the failure of Congress or the Supreme Court to do more to rein in the rogue president.

Eight in 10 of those surveyed said federal officials fail to comply with court orders somewhat or very often, and nearly 9 in 10 said political appointees in Trump’s Justice Department mislead federal judges somewhat or very often.

Talk about contempt of court — not to mention our vital system of checks and balances.

There was, unsurprisingly, a split among conservatives and liberals who took part in the survey. (The study defined legal conservatives as those saying the Supreme Court should base rulings on its understanding of what the Constitution meant as originally written. Liberals, who made up most of the respondents, were defined as those saying the court should base its rulings on what the Constitution means in current times.)

Conservatives, for instance, were more likely than liberals to see former President Biden as a greater threat to the rule of law than Trump. Liberals were more likely than conservatives to see evidence of Trump politicizing the Justice Department.

There were also differences between legal experts — those most intimately involved in the judicial system — and the public at large. The experts were more concerned about Trump’s excesses and threats to the rule of law, which, Hasen said, stands to reason.

The legal system is not something most people encounter daily in the same way they do, say, gasoline prices or the cost of groceries. “Yet,” Hasen said, “it’s one of these background things that really matters.”

Why?

Hasen put it this way: “Imagine that a person had a dispute with their neighbor and it ended up in small claims court before a judge and the judge made the decision not based on the merits of the case but based on whether he was friends with one of the parties, or didn’t like people who were similar to one of the parties.”

Now imagine that kind of corrupted, perverted system of justice writ large.

If, for instance, “people know that the government can successfully seek retribution from people who criticize it, people will be less likely to criticize the government,” Hasen said, leaving the country worse off by muzzling those who would hold their elected leaders to account.

Or if, say, rioters overran the U.S. Capitol and tried to steal an election and, instead of being punished, received cash payouts from the federal government, what incentive would there be to follow the law?

Happily — and who couldn’t use a bit of good cheer right about now — all is not lost.

People “can demand that their elected representatives take steps to assure that the rule of law will be followed,” Hasen said, and can insist “that the government [not] play favorites or seek retribution against perceived enemies.”

That’s the power people have, come election time. That’s why voting matters.

There are lots of things riding on the outcome in November, not least the sanctity and integrity of our legal system.

Bear that in mind when you cast your ballot.

WASHINGTON — A political influencer has filed a complaint against Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor, saying the committee failed to notify her of disclosure requirements, as required by law, when she was paid to meet with Steyer in March and later produced social media content from the meeting.

What’s more, she said the Steyer campaign falsely accused her of posting paid content in support of Steyer’s chief Democratic rival, Xavier Becerra, and failing to disclose it in a complaint filed by the billionaire’s campaign this week.

Maggie Reed, who regularly posts satirical takes on politics to roughly half a million followers on Instagram and TiKTok under the username mermaidmamamaggie, said she was actually paid by Steyer’s campaign and signed an agreement that barred her from disclosing the payment.

She posted, and later deleted, a video from her meeting with Steyer in March.

“In plain terms: the Committee paid for political content, structured it to look like an ordinary creator’s organic opinion, and used a non-disclosure agreement to keep the public from learning the truth,” says the complaint, filed Thursday with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.

Steyer’s campaign disclosed in a campaign filing that it had paid the agency that represents Reed $5,000 for digital advertising, but didn’t indicate that the payment was connected to Reed’s meeting with Steyer or her production of content.

The Steyer campaign said that while it did pay to meet with Reed, it left the decision of whether to create content entirely up to her.

Since then, Reed has produced several videos expressing support for Becerra, the former California congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, but she said that she was not paid to produce those videos and that they reflected her genuine support for Becerra’s campaign.

Becerra has been the top Democrat in recent polling in the race, maintaining a narrow edge over Steyer and a firm grip on one of the top two spots in the June 2 primary that would send him to the general election in November.

Reed’s complaint is the latest volley in a back and forth involving the use of paid influencers in the gubernatorial race.

Two influencers who support Becerra — but were not paid by his campaign — filed a complaint last week saying that a number of influencers had created paid content in support of Steyer, but failed to disclose so in their posts.

Steyer’s campaign then filed a complaint earlier this week in which it leveled accusations against Reed and another influencer named Jay Gonzalez, who is now a paid staffer on the Becerra campaign. The complaint alleges that Gonzalez made several pro-Becerra posts after joining the campaign and belatedly amended them to include disclosure that they were sponsored.

The Becerra campaign has maintained that it does not otherwise pay influencers to produce content on its behalf.

Steyer’s complaint included screenshots of an email sent to Reed’s talent agency by a gubernatorial campaign gauging her interest in producing paid content.

While the screenshots produced in Steyer’s complaint did not disclose who had sent the inquiry, Reed said in her complaint that the request had come from a staffer for the gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Disclosure of paid political content by social media creators is required in California thanks to a law passed in 2023.

Influencers themselves are required to disclose that a post they created was sponsored, but campaigns are required to notify them of the requirement.

Violation of the law doesn’t trigger civil, criminal or administrative penalties, but the FPPC has the right to take violators to court and request that a judge force compliance with the law.

The agreement Reed signed with Steyer’s campaign, which was attached to her complaint, indicated that she needed to follow all applicable state, federal and local laws, but made no specific mention of her requirement to disclose that content she produced was sponsored.

The agreement did specify that Steyer’s campaign might need to disclose the payment.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Thursday broadly upheld lawsuits by U.S. companies whose property was seized in Cuba prior to 1960, including claims against cruise ship lines that docked there in the past decade.

These suits do not seek compensation from Cubans but from those who “traffic in property which was confiscated by the Cuban government.”

In a 8-1 decision, the justices revived a $400-million judgment against four cruise lines whose ships stopped in Havana between 2016 and 2019.

All of them used docks that were built early in the 20th century by the Havana Docks Corporation, an American company.

Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to a rarely enforced 1996 law that authorized suits against those who “use property tainted by a past confiscation.”

Past presidents had suspended enforcement of the law, but President Trump allowed such claims to go forward.

That change in policy exposed “traffickers in confiscated property of United States nationals” to brings claims in federal courts, Thomas said.

The four cruise line companies — Caribbean Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, Carnival Corporation, and MSC Cruises — transported nearly a million paid passengers to Cuba, he wrote.

They paid the Cuban government tens of millions of dollars to do business in Cuba. They collectively earned hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from voyages that included a stop in Havana, he said.

A federal judge in Florida ordered each of the cruise lines to pay $100 million in damages, but the U.S. appeals court in Atlanta blocked the decision by a 2-1 vote. It said Havana Docks Corporation had a contract to run the docks had expired in 2004.

Justice Elena Kagan made the same argument in dissent.

She said “the docks belonged to the Cuban Government — not Havana Docks — all along. What Havana Docks owned was only a property interest allowing it to use those docks for a specified time. And that time-limited interest expired in 2004 — more than a decade before the cruise lines ever used the docks.”

Still pending before the court is a similar claim from Exxon Mobil Corp., which was argued on the day in late February.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday moved to withdraw his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns after reports that his administration was poised to create a fund to compensate some of his allies.

The disclosure was made in a filing in federal court in Florida, where the lawsuit was filed last year.

ABC News first reported last week that Trump was prepared to drop his lawsuit as part of a deal that would create a $1.7 billion fund to pay allies of the president who believe they were wrongly investigated and prosecuted.

The court filing did not mention terms of any potential deal.

News that the Trump administration was contemplating a fund to pay Trump allies drew an immediate backlash from Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, who called the idea “unconstitutional.”

“This, of course, is a political grievance fund that Donald Trump can use to pay off his friends,” Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“If these people have a valid cause of action, they should bring it to the court like every other American does, and use the system of due process, and proving things by clear and convincing evidence, or a preponderance of evidence, go and prove it. But the idea that Donald Trump can just pass it out like a pardon is absurd,” he added.

It was not immediately clear who precisely will stand to benefit from the fund but its creation reflects Trump’s long-running claims that the Biden administration Justice Department was weaponized against him.

He has cited as proof the since-dismissed criminal charges he faced between his first and second terms of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he lost and of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Several aides of his were also prosecuted, as were hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Merrick Garland, who served as attorney general during the Biden administration, has repeatedly denied allegations of politicization and has said his decisions followed facts, the evidence and the law. His Justice Department also investigated Biden for his handling of classified information and brought separate tax and gun prosecutions against Biden’s son Hunter.

Nonetheless, Trump’s current Justice Department has actively pursued the president’s retribution campaign and grievances, bringing criminal charges against some of his perceived adversaries and initiating a wide-ranging investigation that aims to establish a years-long conspiracy between law enforcement and intelligence officials to destroy Trump’s political prospects and keep him power.

No charges have been brought in that investigation and it is not clear that any ever will be.

Trump filed a lawsuit earlier this year in a Florida federal court, alleging that a previous leak of his and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are also named plaintiffs in the suit.

Hussein, Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press.

DENVER — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday commuted the sentence of election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters following pressure from President Trump, the latest instance of the president using his influence to reward those who echoed his baseless claims of mass fraud as the cause of his 2020 election loss.

Trump has championed the case of Peters, a 70-year-old former county clerk who was sentenced to nine years behind bars after being convicted in a scheme to make a copy of her county’s election computer system. She will be released June 1.

In April, a Colorado appeals court upheld her conviction but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud, a decision that Polis praised.

In a letter to Peters, Polis wrote that she was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes,” the governor wrote.

He added that Peters’ application “demonstrates taking responsibility for your crimes, and a commitment to follow the law going forward.”

Trump posted around the time of the announcement on his social media platform: “FREE TINA!”

Jeany Rush, 76, wears a We the People pin along with numerous Free Tina Peters stickers during the Colorado Republican State Assembly on April 11 at Massari Arena on the Colorado State University Pueblo campus in Pueblo, Colo.

(Timothy Hurst/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

‘Affront to the rule of law’

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold criticized the decision by the governor — a fellow Democrat — saying that “it was a dark day for democracy” and that ”selling out our state’s justice system for Trump is an affront to the rule of law.”

“A clear message is being sent to those willing to break the law and attack democracy for the president — they will likely not face consequences for their actions,” Griswold said at a news conference.

Peters has been serving her sentence at a prison in Pueblo after being convicted in 2024 by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump.

Peters sneaked in an outside computer expert, an associate of MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — a fellow election denier — to make a copy of her county’s Dominion Voting Systems election computer server as state officials updated it in 2021. Peters joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof of election rigging, after which video and photos of the update, including passwords, were posted online.

After the commutation announcement, Peters issued a statement through her attorney thanking Polis and apologizing.

“Five years ago I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong,” Peters said. “I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past.”

She also condemned threats and violence against voters, county clerks and election workers.

Gubernatorial candidates weigh in

Polis is ineligible to seek reelection due to term limits, and the candidates running to succeed him weighed in on his decision.

Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat in the race, said that he vehemently disagreed with the commutation and that Peters knowingly broke the law, undermined elections and was convicted by a jury.

“Lawlessness only breeds more lawlessness,” Bennet said. “With President Trump continuing to attack Colorado, we must do everything we can to stand strong for our institutions and the rule of law.”

A Republican candidate, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, said she would have preferred that the trial judge revisit Peters’ sentence as ordered by the appeals court before the governor considered any commutation.

“A commutation or pardon by a governor should be reserved for truly extraordinary circumstances,” Kirkmeyer wrote in a statement. “The governor has a responsibility to apply justice fairly, consistently, and without bias.”

Trump’s influence

Peters was convicted of state, not federal, crimes, which put her beyond the reach of Trump’s pardon power, which he used to free those convicted of crimes for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. So the president championed her cause through the media.

Trump has lambasted both Polis, calling him a “Scumbag Governor,” and the Republican district attorney who prosecuted her, Daniel Rubinstein, for keeping Peters in prison. He has referred to Peters as “elderly” and “sick.” Earlier this year, Trump uninvited Polis from a White House meeting with governors over the case.

The president had said Colorado was “suffering a big price” for refusing to release her. His administration has been choking off funds, ending federal programs and denying disaster aid. It also announced the dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command from the state to Alabama.

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Assn., said the commutation “signals that it is open season on our election and election officials.”

“Gov. Polis is bending the knee to the same political voices and conspiracy theories that are undermining belief in our democratic institutions,” Crane said. “This is now Gov. Polis’ legacy. He will not be able to run from it.”

Peters’ health

Peters’ lawyers have said her health has declined in prison. Peters, who had part of her right lung removed in 2017, started coughing frequently after the prison’s heating system was turned on for the winter and has had trouble sleeping due to chronic pain from fibromyalgia, her lawyers said.

In January, Peters was involved in a scuffle with another inmate but was found not guilty of assault following a prison disciplinary hearing, Colorado Department of Corrections spokesperson Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia said. Peters was found guilty of being in a location without authorization.

The federal Bureau of Prisons tried but failed to get Peters moved to a federal prison. In January, Polis said he was considering granting clemency for Peters, calling her sentence “unusual and harsh“ for a first-time, nonviolent offender. In March he repeated those arguments in a lengthy post on the social media platform X.

Polis defended his decision Friday in a social media post.

“I’ll always stand for free speech and to make sure that we live in a country that no matter what your viewpoints are, you are not incarcerated longer because of them,” Polis said.

In contrast to some other Democratic governors, Polis, who portrays himself as a political iconoclast, has at times taken an accommodating stance toward Trump. Though he criticized the president’s tariff and immigration policies, the governor praised earlier moves by Trump such as creating the Department of Government Efficiency, which was run by billionaire Elon Musk, and the choice of vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Slevin and Riccardi write for the Associated Press. AP writers Ali Swenson in New York, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — In recent weeks, several social media influencers have popped up in online feeds touting the California gubernatorial campaign of billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer.

Some complain about the price of gasoline. Others mention environmental concerns. One cites her newfound sobriety as evidence that people can change — a nod to Steyer’s self-proclaimed metamorphosis from hedge fund titan to scourge of big corporations.

“I did not expect the most progressive governor candidate to be a billionaire, but look at the policies you guys,” said one content creator on TikTok with the user name Jaz R. “Hear me out. I know Tom Steyer is a billionaire, but he also is for the people.”

The posts include direct-to-the-camera appeals, with personal details interwoven into messages of support for Steyer. An influencer goes for a stroll as onscreen text touts Steyer’s policies. Some seek to convey authenticity, if occasionally ham-fistedly; one influencer mispronounces Steyer’s last name.

What they do not include is a disclosure that their creators were paid by the Steyer campaign to produce the videos, according to a complaint filed this week with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission and a Times review of the posts.

The complaint alleges that the Steyer campaign failed to notify the influencers it hired of their obligation to inform their audience when their posts have been sponsored by the campaign.

California passed a law in 2023 requiring that influencers disclose if they have been paid to create promotional content for or against a candidate or ballot measure, one of the few jurisdictions in the country with such a requirement. There is no such requirement at the federal level.

“Every time there’s a new technology, you have to create legislation that requires them to disclose,” said state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange), who sponsored the bill.

Violating the law doesn’t carry criminal, civil or administrative penalties, but the FPPC can take influencers who break the law to court and ask a judge to force them to comply.

The complaint was filed by two California women — political influencers themselves — who said they noticed a number of new accounts that suddenly started posting similar-sounding videos promoting Steyer earlier this month.

“They had the exact same language, they had the same talking points,” said Beatrice Gomberg, who worked with Kaitlyn Hennessy in their digital sleuthing efforts.

The FPPC did not comment on the complaint.

Steyer’s campaign appears to have relied on paid influencers more than any candidate for governor, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

That spending represents only a small fraction of the massive campaign war chest Steyer has seeded with nearly $180 million of his own money. But the complaint highlights the growing degree to which political candidates have come to seek out the authenticity that social media influencers seem to offer.

Steyer campaign spokesperson Kevin Liao said the campaign had properly followed the rules in hiring influencers and that the campaign is “confident” that Gomberg and Hennessy’s complaint is “baseless.”

“Creators make their living generating content. The campaign believes in compensating people for their time and work product and has paid creators to generate content,” Liao said in a statement. “Payments for creator content are disclosed in campaign finance reports, and we notify creators we directly work with of their disclosure requirements.”

While many of the new Steyer influencers have few followers, Steyer’s campaign disclosed in its most recent campaign finance report that it had paid thousands of dollars to numerous social media influencers with massive audiences, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Several of the videos produced by these popular social media personalities also failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign, according to the complaint and The Times’ review of the content.

But even accounts with few followers can still have a big impact if they are producing a steady stream of content supporting Steyer, said veteran California political strategist Mike Madrid.

“What they’re trying to do is trip the algorithm,” he said. “It looks like it has a bigger audience than it really does. It’s taking the concept of astroturfing into the digital age.”

Gomberg and Hennessy said they became friends after meeting at an April campaign event for Xavier Becerra, Steyer’s chief Democratic rival in the race, who holds a narrow advantage over Steyer in several recent political polls.

The pair have been prolific social media supporters of Becerra’s campaign ever since, though they insist they are not being paid for their efforts.

They said they discovered that many of the new pro-Steyer accounts seemed to be run by influencers — mostly women — who had previously created different social media accounts to hawk other products.

One of the pro-Steyer influencers had an online portfolio listing numerous clients, including the Steyer campaign and a gummy designed to boost arousal, according to the complaint and the Times review of the publicly accessible website.

The pair said they stumbled on an advertisement placed by a vendor for the campaign on a platform used by creators to find work. The advertisement indicated that creators would be paid $10 for each post, with bonuses for posts that amassed large viewership.

The vendor who posted the ad did not respond to a request for comment.

The advertisement has since been updated to say that it pays $1,000 per month and that creators will have to disclose that it is paid content.

As Gomberg and Hennessy dug deeper, they determined that some of the influencers promoting a candidate for governor weren’t even based in California.

A TikTok account using the handle jess.votes, for example, appears to be connected to a woman registered to vote in Florida. Other accounts were connected to women who indicated elsewhere that they were based in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Michigan.

Several influencers who created seemingly paid content promoting Steyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Times.

The brouhaha over paid social media content is just the latest instance of the growing political impact of online creators.

Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor — and congressional career — came to an end after multiple women accused him of sexual assault. A pair of influencers had publicly raised concerns about Swalwell’s behavior and helped connect victims with journalists who produced highly detailed reports of the allegations.

The California law requires influencers to disclose in a political post’s audio or text that it was sponsored and who paid for it.

The onus is on the creators to make the disclosure, but campaigns are required to tell them that they must do so. Despite passage of the law, the issue has so far remained largely under the radar.

“I have dozens of candidates and campaigns and I have not heard this issue come up one time,” said a campaign finance lawyer who requested anonymity because they represent numerous candidates with active campaigns.

Gomberg and Hennessy said that they were driven to call attention to potential violations of the disclosure requirements because of their concern about the corrosive influence such paid content could have if left unchecked.

“You have people who have trust in these creators,” Hennessy said. “You have a responsibility to your audience.”

The Hague in the Netherlands hosts the world’s most powerful international courts, where judges speak for the conscience of humanity. Yet we consult them only after atrocities have erupted – after wars have shattered communities and legal battles begin.

In theory, law can hold power to account. But has it been enough? Can it truly confront militarism, prevent atrocities, and protect people before disaster strikes?

Join Ali Rae for episode two of All Hail the Military, a five-part series that reveals the systems, power, and hidden complicities that sustain global militarism – and the profound impact it has on us all.

In some cases, people could be hit with hefty fines

A UK airport has issued a warning as travellers may be unaware they could be risking a £5,000 fine after taking sandwiches on board a flight. Many passengers purchase food at airports, or pack their own, and carry it onto planes without any trouble.

However, London Luton Airport has highlighted what the law actually states. And if you’re heading abroad anytime soon, it’s well worth taking note.

A post on X from the airport’s official account reads: “It is illegal to bring meats such as lamb, pork or beef or dairy products from the EU into GB in your luggage. This means items such as cheese, cured or raw meats, sandwiches and milk, including duty free purchases.”

The guidance applies to all airports across England, Scotland and Wales. Should you be caught carrying any prohibited items – including sandwiches containing meat or dairy – and fail to declare these to Border Force officers at customs, you could face prosecution, or a £5,000 fine (in England only).

Rules around bringing in meat, dairy, fish and other animal products differ depending on the country of origin. If you are travelling back from the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, you are banned from bringing in any of the following:

• cheese, milk and dairy products like butter and yoghurt
• pork
• beef
• lamb
• mutton
• goat
• venison
• other products made from these meats, for example sausages

You can bring in the following for personal use:

• fish
• poultry, for example chicken, duck, goose and any other products made from these meats
• other animal products, for example eggs and honey

You may also bring in up to 2kg per person of powdered infant milk, infant food, or special food required for medical purposes. This is only allowed if it does not require refrigeration before use, and is in branded, unopened packaging (unless currently in use).

If you are travelling from a country outside the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, you are prohibited from bringing any meat or meat products, or milk or milk-based products, with the exception of powdered infant milk, infant food or special food needed for medical reasons.

You are, however, permitted to bring in up to 2kg per person of:

• honey
• powdered infant milk, infant food, or special food (including pet food) needed for medical reasons – you can only bring it in if it does not need to be refrigerated before use, and is in branded, unopened packaging (unless in current use)
• live mussels or oysters
• snails – these must be preserved or shelled, cooked and prepared
• frogs’ legs – these must be the back (hind) part of the frog with the skin and internal organs removed
• insect protein

You may bring in up to 20kg per person in total of fish, including:

• fresh fish – must be gutted
• fish products
• processed fish – must be dried, cooked, cured or smoked
• lobsters
• prawns

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Presenting a utility bill as a valid form of identification at a voting precinct in West Virginia has gone the way of the tavern polling place and the punch-card ballot.

State lawmakers tightened an existing voter identification law by requiring photo ID at the polls, with some exceptions. The law was used for the first time in Tuesday’s primary election, and officials said they’ve seen very few glitches.

“The whole point of the law is just making sure you are who you say you are,” Secretary of State Kris Warner said Monday.

Voters will nominate candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. House and state legislature. They also will elect two new state Supreme Court justices.

During the in-person early voting period that ended Saturday, Warner said his office hadn’t heard of anyone who demanded to vote without a photo ID. He said the state had asked residents to use photo IDs for the past few elections, so “it was not a big shock that it was now law.”

During his statewide travels over the past two weeks, Warner said he was told of some instances where people returned to their vehicle to retrieve a photo ID after entering a polling place. Another voter used an exception to the law by filling out a form that was verified by a poll worker who has known them for at least six months. There also were exceptions for first-time voters.

Most states either require or request some form of ID for in-person voting at the polls.

Proponents say the West Virginia law will cut down on voter fraud and that a photo ID is already required for everyday tasks such as getting on an airplane or buying alcohol.

The bill sailed through the Republican-supermajority legislature last year. All votes against it were cast by Democrats, some who argued it would suppress access to the polls. State Democratic Party Chair Mike Pushkin said no credible evidence was shown during legislative debate that West Virginia had a widespread problem with ineligible voting. Pushkin said the legislation was “designed more for political messaging than solving actual problems.”

But Warner said it allows senior citizens to use expired driver’s licenses, as long as it was valid on their 65th birthday

“I wanted to make sure it didn’t prevent anyone from voting,” Warner said.

Forms of identification that are no longer accepted at polling places include utility bills, bank statements, hunting and fishing licenses, bank or debit cards, and concealed carry gun permits. Acceptable forms of photo IDs include a driver’s license, U.S. passport, military ID, employee ID issued by a government agency and a student ID from a high school or college.

Monongalia County Clerk Carye Blaney said for several years her county has used an electronic system to scan bar codes on the back of driver’s licenses to check in voters at polling places.

“I think that it makes voters feel more secure, or it confirms for the voters the security of our elections when we are verifying a photo to a person,” Blaney said.

Raby writes for the Associated Press.

Rights groups warn that the bill makes the death penalty easier to impose and strips fair trial protections.

Israeli legislators have approved a bill to establish a special tribunal with the power to impose the death penalty on Palestinians accused of involvement in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.

The bill passed 93-0 in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, late on Monday.

The remaining 27 legislators were absent or abstained from voting.

Israeli and Palestinian rights groups warn that the bill will make the death penalty too easy to impose while also doing away with procedures safeguarding the right to a fair trial.

Muna Haddad, a lawyer with Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, told Al Jazeera that the bill intentionally lowers the legal protections to a fair trial to secure the mass conviction of Palestinians.

“The bill explicitly permits mass trials that deviate from standard rules of evidence, including broad judicial discretion to admit evidence obtained under coercive conditions that may amount to torture or ill-treatment,” Haddad said.

“This constitutes a severe violation of fair trial guarantees that falls well short of international law requirements.”

In a departure from standard Israeli judicial practice, which typically prohibits courtroom cameras, the bill mandates the filming and public broadcasting of key moments in the trials on a dedicated website.

This includes opening hearings, verdicts and sentencing.

Haddad warned that this provision effectively “transforms proceedings into show trials at the expense of the accused’s rights”.

“The provisions governing public hearings… violate the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the right to dignity,” Haddad explained. “The framework effectively treats indictment as a finding of guilt, before any judicial examination has begun.”

Israel has been holding an estimated 200-300 Palestinians, including those captured in the country during the October 7 attacks, who have not yet been charged.

The Hamas-led assault on Israeli communities along Israel’s southern fence with Gaza killed at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics. About 240 others were seized as captives.

Israel’s subsequent genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 72,628 Palestinians, including at least 846 since a United States-brokered “ceasefire” came into effect last October.

The war, which United Nations experts say could amount to genocide, has left the Palestinian territory in ruins.

Several Israeli rights groups – including Hamoked, Adalah and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel – said on Monday that while “justice for the victims of October 7 is a legitimate and urgent imperative”, any accountability for the crimes “must be pursued through a process which includes rather than abandons the principles of justice”.

The bill is separate from a law passed in March that approved the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis, a measure harshly condemned by the international community and rights groups as discriminatory and inhumane.

That law applies to future cases and is not retroactive, so it could not apply to the October 2023 suspects.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said the new law “serves as a cover for the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza”.

The International Criminal Court is probing Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war and has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, as well as ‌three ‌Hamas leaders who have all since been killed by Israel.

Israel is also fighting a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.

It rejects the allegations.

POP star Dua Lipa is suing Samsung for £11million after the tech giant allegedly used her face to sell £300 televisions without her permission.

A picture of the Levitating singer was on the packaging of Crystal 43in ultra-high- definition sets to promote its XITE Hits music channel.

In legal paperwork obtained by The Sun, Dua’s attorneys say she owns the copyright to the photo — taken backstage at a 2024 festival.

She claims it appeared on a “significant portion” of the tellies sold in the US — and her fans even flocked to buy them in the belief she had endorsed them.

The filing, made in the Central District of California Federal Court, reveals that Grammy- winner Dua is demanding a minimum $15million (£11million) in damages — but a jury could decide to award far more.

South Korean firm Samsung is said to have ignored several legal warnings from her team.

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Her lawyer Christine Lepera wrote: “Samsung used a copyrighted image of Ms. Lipa without authority or licence and prominently featured it on the front of boxes containing Samsung-manufactured televisions for retail sale.”

She added “The substantial revenue made on the sale is inextricably tied to the false message conveyed to consumers that Ms. Lipa has endorsed the Infringing Products when she has not.”

One fan is said to have put a photo of the box online with the caption: “I wasn’t even planning on buying a TV, but I saw the box so I decided to get it.”

Another in Miami who spotted it in a store wrote on Instagram: “I’d get that TV just because Dua is on it. That’s how obsessed I am.”

A third said: “I’ve always said if you need anything selling, just put a picture of Dua Lipa on it.”

Ms Lepera added that Dua would not have agreed a Samsung deal anyway as she is “highly selective in her commercial partnerships”.

The London-born star, 30, is one of the world’s biggest pop stars, cracking America and winning three Grammy Awards.

She has signed a number of advertising deals to take her net worth in excess of £100million.

Dua is the face of Nespresso, alongside George Clooney, and also the frontwoman for Yves Saint-Laurent’s beauty products.

In 2023, she signed a seven- figure package to become the face of sports car brand Porsche, and she is in a multi-year partnership with sportswear giant Puma.

Samsung had yet to file a defence to the court. Both Samsung and Dua Lipa’s legal firm, MSK, were asked to comment.

A UNUSUAL temporary ban is being rolled out in days at a popular vacation hotspot.

The law will impact all residents, tourists, and even cruise lines.

Alcohol sales will be completely banned across all islands in the Bahamas due to the general election, officials have confirmed.

Polls open on May 12 and between the hours of 8am and 6pm, no alcohol will be available for purchase, per a government notice.

This includes even on private islands that are owned by cruise lines.

Royal Caribbean said it will be abiding by the local laws at Coco Cay, it’s private island in the Bahamas.

“Royal Caribbean is respecting and complying with all local laws and regulations, as we do with every destination we visit,” a Royal Caribbean spokesperson told PEOPLE.

Both the Wonder of the Seas and the Oasis of the Seas ships will be visiting the island on that day.

It’s beach bars Perfect Day and Royal Beach Club Paradise Island will still be open, the cruise line confirmed, and noted that passengers will still be able to get alcohol on board the ships.

Despite this, passengers are fuming about the sudden announcement.

“We scheduled a trip with stops in the Bahamas for our 40th anniversary,” one customer wrote on X.

“We are going with 26 of our friends. Planned activities at CocoCay and Nassau.

“The general election has banned all alcohol for the two days we are there. And we find out only two days before we leave? Not a way to treat customers who cruise four times a year.”

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes suspends use of law to reduce prison sentences, pending further review.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has barred the implementation of a law that could dramatically reduce the prison sentence of former President Jair Bolsonaro for involvement in a coup plot after his loss in the 2022 election.

De Moraes ordered the law’s suspension on Saturday until the Supreme Court can convene a full hearing to consider appeals challenging its constitutionality.

Bolsonaro’s conviction for involvement in a plot to remain in office after losing to left-wing rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022 has become a cause celebre for the country’s political right, which has pushed for Bolsonaro’s release from prison.

The Supreme Court sentenced the former far-right president to 27 years in prison in September, but a law passed by Brazil’s conservative-majority Congress in December would apply to Bolsonaro and others convicted in the plot, paving the way for reductions in their sentences.

President Lula vetoed the bill in January, but a vote led by Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress overrode the veto in late April.

Plaintiffs have subsequently asked the Supreme Court to overturn the bill, stating it is unconstitutional.

Lawyers for those convicted must file individual requests for sentence reduction. The ruling by de Moraes essentially suspends such requests until the court has had the opportunity to decide on the law’s constitutionality.

Lawyers for the 71-year-old Bolsonaro filed a new appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday, asking it to overturn what they called a “miscarriage of justice”.

Bolsonaro’s conviction and sentencing remain a matter of controversy in Brazil, where his allies have decried it as a political witch-hunt.

Opponents have welcomed it as a necessary form of accountability, from which not even former presidents are exempt.

NEW YORK — President Trump’s 10% global tariffs were declared unlawful by a federal trade court in a fresh blow to the administration’s economic agenda, several months after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated earlier levies he’d imposed.

A divided three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade in Manhattan on Thursday granted a request by a group of small businesses and two dozen mostly Democrat-led states to vacate the tariffs. Trump imposed the 10% duties in February under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which had never previously been invoked.

The court for now only immediately blocked the administration from enforcing the tariffs against the two companies that sued and Washington state, making clear that it was not issuing a so-called universal injunction. The panel found that the other states that sued lacked standing because they aren’t direct importers, instead arguing that they were harmed by having to pay higher prices for goods when businesses passed on tariff costs.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the ruling would mean for now for other importers that had been paying the contested levies.

The majority of the panel rejected the administration’s stance that “balance-of-payments deficits” — a key criterion for imposing the Section 122 tariffs — was “a malleable phrase.” They concluded that Trump’s proclamation imposing the levies failed to identify that such deficits existed within the meaning of the 1974 law, instead using “trade and current account deficits to stand in the place.”

The decision is the latest setback for the president’s effort to levy tariffs without input from Congress. Earlier duties — overturned by the Supreme Court on Feb. 20 — were issued under a different law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. In that case, the justices ruled Trump had exceeded his authority, kicking off a legal scramble by importers for almost $170 billion in refunds.

The U.S. Justice Department could challenge the trade court’s latest ruling by taking the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which ruled against the Trump administration during the last tariff fight.

Section 122 allows presidents to impose duties in situations where the U.S. faces what the law defines as “fundamental international payments problems.” Even before Trump issued the tariffs, economists and policy experts debated whether the president would be able to build a solid legal framework using the statute.

In a proclamation declaring the use of Section 122, Trump said that tariffs were justified because the U.S. runs a “large and serious” trade deficit. He also pointed to the negative net flows of income from investments Americans have overseas and other things that showed the U.S. balance-of-payments relationship with the rest of the world was deteriorating.

Under the law, presidents have the ability to impose tariffs on goods imported into the U.S. on a short-term basis to address concerns about how money is flowing in and out of the country. Those concerns include “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” and an “imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar.”

Unlike other legal options Trump might pursue to impose tariffs, Section 122 can be invoked without waiting for a federal agency to conduct an investigation to determine whether the levies are justifiable. But they can still be challenged in court.

The small businesses and states that sued argued that Section 122 became outdated when the U.S. ditched the gold standard decades ago. They say Trump improperly conflated “balance-of-payments deficits” with U.S. trade deficits in order to justify using the law.

They also allege that Trump’s order announcing the Section 122 tariffs was “riddled with omissions and mischaracterizations” around the meaning of a balance-of-payments deficit. The trade deficit cited by Trump is just one part of calculating the country’s balance of payments position, the states say.

Under Section 122, the president can order import duties of as much as 15%. The executive action can last 150 days, at which point Congress would have to extend it. Trump has said he would aim to increase the rate to 15% from 10%.

The states argue that Trump’s new tariffs violate other requirements in Section 122, including that such duties not be discriminatory in their application. The states argue that Trump’s new tariffs improperly exempt some goods from Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

According to the complaint, the Trump administration conceded during the previous litigation over his IEEPA tariffs that trade deficits “are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”

The clash over Section 122 emerged just as the legal fight over refunds from Trump’s IEEPA tariffs began to heat up. A different judge in the Court of International Trade, U.S. Judge Richard Eaton, is overseeing the massive refund effort and ordered Customs and Border Protection to give him regular updates on a largely automated process the government will use to issue most refunds.

Larson and Tillman write for Bloomberg.

Within days of California’s long-anticipated single-use plastic law going into effect, environmentalists, anti-waste activists and the packaging industry reacted with anger and frustration.

Anti-plastic activists say Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and CalRecycle inserted exemptions favoring the plastic industry into the law’s regulations that weaken it and undermine legislative intent.

“These new rules create huge loopholes for plastic packaging that violate the law,” said Avinash Kar, senior director of the toxics program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On the other side, the packaging industry has sued over similar laws in other states. “Our members have real concerns about cost, compliance, and constitutionality,” said Matt Clarke, spokesman for the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors, which sued Oregon earlier this year over a similar waste law.

CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency, did not respond in time for publication. The final regulations putting the law into effect were released May 1 and posted for review Tuesday.

The environmental organizations say the law’s new final regulations open the door to what is known as “chemical recycling,” which produces large amounts of hazardous waste. The law also contains problematic exemptions for certain categories of plastic foodware, they say.

The language of the law forbids any kind of recycling that would produce significant amounts of hazardous waste. The new regulations allow for these recycling methods if the facilities are properly permitted.

The new regulations also exempt certain products if they are already covered by federal law. For instance, a packaging company, retailer or distributor can claim that they have such a preemption, Kar said, and CalRecycle might not immediately review that claim. “And as long as they don’t review it, they’ll get the exemption for as long as CalRecycle doesn’t review it,” creating a potential “forever loophole.”

“Californians were promised a system where producers take real responsibility for the waste they create,” said Nick Lapis, advocacy director for Californians Against Waste. “When regulations introduce broad exemptions and redefine key terms, that promise starts to erode. The details matter here, and right now they don’t line up with the intent of the law.”

Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, was signed by Newsom in 2022. It was considered landmark legislation because it addressed the scourge of single-use plastics, requiring plastic and packaging companies to use less of them and ensuring that by 2032, all food packaging is either recyclable or compostable.

Accumulating plastic waste is overwhelming waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health.

The law’s intent was not only to reduce it, but also to put the onus and cost of dealing with it on packaging producers and manufacturers, not consumers and local governments. It was supposed to incentivize companies to consider the fate of their products and spur innovation in material redesign.

According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale, or distributed during 2023 in California.

Similar laws have been passed in Maine, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington. Oregon’s law, however, is on hold while a lawsuit by the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors works its way through the courts.

“We see a lot of the same problems in California that we flagged in Oregon,” said Clarke, the trade group spokesman. “Given California’s scale, the cost implications are going to be even larger. Our legal counsel has noted that California’s proposed fees are already higher than what other states have put forward.”

Jan Dell of Last Beach Cleanup, an anti-plastic waste group based in Laguna Beach, doesn’t believe the law will work — irrespective of the final regulations — and said the “exorbitant” cost of its implementation will either spur producers to sue, or they’ll end up passing the higher costs onto consumers.

She referred to a report from the Circular Action Alliance, the state-sanctioned group established to represent and oversee the implementation of the law on behalf of the plastic and packaging industry. It finds the law will increase the cost of disposal between six and 14 times for common products, such as Windex bottles, made of polyethylene terephthalate.

“If the producers don’t successfully sue to stop the fees, this will certainly add to product inflation for CA consumers,” she said in an email. “Californians already have to pay exorbitantly high curbside collection fees for trash, recycling, and organics … so, starting in 2027, our groceries will cost a LOT more but we won’t see a reduction in our waste bills.”

Christopher “Smitty” Smith, a partner at law firm Saul Ewing in Los Angeles, who councils companies and interest groups on SB 54 and other Extended Producer Liability laws, said that although he could see areas of the law that “could be sharper and avoid the legal challenges … you can’t stop people from suing.” Environmentalists and anti-waste activists say they are preparing a lawsuit.

Smith said the law already has sparked changes in how companies think and respond to concerns about waste.

One of his national fast-food chain clients has realized that if its brand name is on plastic packaging, it’s that company’s responsibility, he said, so “they’ve spent the past year mapping out their franchise agreements, their supply chain agreements, their producer agreements, to figure out” what it needs to do to comply.

He said in the past, companies have paid little attention to these details and just let their franchisees figure this kind of thing out. Now, they’re spending a lot of time and money “to wrap their arms around what their supply chain looks like and like, what post consumer use of their plastic products looks like and what their regulatory obligations are.”

It’s bringing a new dialogue within companies. And that, Smith said, is what could make this law so powerful.

Times staff writer Meg Tanaka contributed to this report.