law

The government plans to enact a special law this year to designate special zones for investment projects related to artificial intelligence (AI), the presidential chief of staff said Monday, as Seoul seeks to accelerate their implementation.

Presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik unveiled the plan at a press briefing following a meeting presided over by President Lee Jae Myung to assess progress on the projects.

The Lee administration announced the “three megaprojects” in late June that outlined plans for large-scale investments in a semiconductor production cluster, physical AI and AI data centers in regional areas.

Under the chip cluster project alone, the two leading chipmakers — Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc. — have pledged to invest a combined 800 trillion won (US$564.9 billion), marking the single-largest investment plan to date in the southwestern city of Gwangju and the surrounding Honam area. The initiative also includes large-scale investments in Chungcheong Province and the southeastern Yeongnam region.

Through the envisioned special law on megaproject zones, the government will help streamline licensing and approval procedures, as well as environmental impact assessments, the chief of staff said.

The special law will also allow the government to swiftly establish infrastructure for electricity and water supplies, as well as living conditions for workers, including transportation, housing and education, Kang said.

At the start of the meeting, Lee urged the government to make every effort, including through deregulation, to implement the investment initiative as soon as possible.

Lee said all necessary administrative steps should be pursued simultaneously to shorten the time needed to implement the initiative while stressing that regulations should also be improved to ensure the implementation can be carried out as quickly as possible.

“We are in a situation where we must go beyond being speedy and move with the speed of lightning,” the president said.

He also instructed officials to transfer the functions of a military airport in Gwangju to other temporary facilities by 2028 to facilitate the speedy transformation of the regional airport into a semiconductor production hub.

The government earlier designated the military airport as the site for the envisioned chip cluster.

The ultimate goal of the investment initiative should be to distribute the pillars of growth across the country and make regional areas new centers of future industries, the president insisted.

“I hope that benefits from achievements garnered through the capabilities of the entire community will not be limited to certain companies or regions,” Lee said.

He said the following year should be a “golden time” that will open up a totally new world for South Korea depending on “how we prepare,” urging officials to make every effort.

Kang said that the government plans to complete the transfer of the Gwangju military airport’s functions to temporary facilities by 2028.

The government will also kick off the implementation of the investment projects in the Chungcheong and Yeongnam regions this year, worth 246 trillion won and 107 trillion won, respectively, he said.

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

Aug. 7 (Asia Today) — Four Republican members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee have asked South Korea’s media regulator for a briefing on how it plans to enforce the country’s revised Information and Communications Network Act, arguing the law could infringe on the constitutional rights of U.S. companies and users and be used to suppress politically disfavored views.

The lawmakers said the revised law, which took effect July 7, could expose U.S. companies such as YouTube and their users to penalties without sufficiently clear standards for determining what constitutes false information.

The request follows a House Judiciary Committee subpoena issued to Coupang in February and a July report in which the Republican-led committee accused the South Korean government of discriminating against U.S.-owned businesses.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio and Reps. Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin, Darrell Issa of California and Michael Baumgartner of Washington sent a letter to the Korea Media and Communications Commission seeking details about its enforcement plans. Jordan made the letter public on X.

The lawmakers described the revised law as a significant threat to online speech and expression. They argued that the commission could take action against American companies and users for exercising rights protected under the U.S. Constitution.

Their concerns center on the scope of the law and the standards that will be used to enforce it.

The legislation passed South Korea’s National Assembly on Dec. 24 and took effect July 7. Under the revised law, certain media outlets and content publishers with at least 100,000 subscribers can face punitive damages for knowingly distributing false or manipulated information. Repeat violations covered by separate provisions can result in administrative penalties of up to 1 billion won, or about $705,000.

The Korea Media and Communications Commission has said the law is intended to protect people from harm caused by illegal, false and manipulated information.

The Republican lawmakers, however, argued that the law does not provide sufficiently clear standards for determining false information or explain in enough detail how those standards will be enforced.

They warned that vague provisions could be used against “politically disfavored opinions” and could have a chilling effect on online expression.

“No foreign government should be able to pressure American companies to censor constitutionally protected speech,” Fitzgerald said, describing South Korea’s law as “vague, expansive, and ripe for abuse.”

The Judiciary Committee also argued that the law could affect U.S.-based platform operators such as Google’s YouTube and their users.

The lawmakers said South Korea is following the path of the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The House Judiciary Committee has previously issued reports arguing that European digital regulation can restrict free expression by Americans and hinder innovation by U.S. companies.

The committee has been examining whether foreign digital regulations pressure U.S. technology companies to moderate speech or create barriers to American innovation.

The U.S. State Department has also raised concerns since the legislation passed the National Assembly in December, warning that the measure could create unnecessary barriers to digital services.

The latest congressional action comes as scrutiny of South Korean regulation of U.S.-owned businesses has intensified.

Jordan and Fitzgerald issued a subpoena Feb. 5 to Harold Rogers, Coupang’s chief administrative officer and general counsel, seeking communications between the company and the South Korean government as well as testimony before the committee.

The committee said it was investigating whether South Korean laws, regulations and judicial orders discriminate against U.S. companies or infringe on Americans’ due process rights.

Republican committee members cited a Nov. 13, 2025, joint fact sheet issued after a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

They said the agreement committed South Korea to ensuring U.S. companies are not treated discriminatorily or subjected to unnecessary barriers in digital services, including regulations governing online platforms.

The lawmakers have argued that South Korea’s investigation of Coupang and the possibility of criminal penalties against American executives could conflict with that commitment.

According to the Judiciary Committee, South Korean authorities assigned about 400 investigators from 11 agencies to the Coupang customer information case.

The committee said the investigation involved about 150 face-to-face meetings, 200 interviews and more than 1,100 requests for documents and other materials.

It also said a former employee had retained limited, non-sensitive information involving about 3,000 customers and that the information was later recovered. The committee said Coupang had also agreed to compensate users.

In a footnote to its subpoena letter, the committee cited a report that Coupang had announced a compensation package valued at $1.18 billion.

The Judiciary Committee followed the February subpoena with an interim report July 1 accusing the South Korean government of discriminatory treatment of Coupang and other American-owned companies and of violating commitments made between the two countries.

Fitzgerald said Congress would continue examining what he characterized as efforts by foreign governments to export censorship and interfere with Americans’ First Amendment rights.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260807010002272

Aug. 6 (UPI) — Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has signed landmark legislation that provides what she says are the nation’s strongest protections from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents executing President Donald Trump‘s aggressive immigration crackdown.

At La Colaborativa, a Latina-led nonprofit economic development agency in Chelsea, Mass., Healey signed the PROTECT Act on Wednesday during a press conference while surrounded by immigrants, advocates, members of law enforcement and others.

“This is what makes Massachusetts special: It’s our people. And today, we, the people of Massachusetts, are standing up and fighting back because we know what we need to do,” she said. “We know that what ICE is doing is wrong and it needs to stop.”

The PROTECT Act, which takes immediate effect, is a sweeping bill that limits local cooperation with federal immigration authorities while giving individuals additional legal protections and remedies if detained, deported or victimized by ICE agents.

It specifically prohibits warrantless immigration arrests at sensitive locations, such as courthouses, schools, childcare centers and healthcare facilities, including hospitals; prohibits law enforcement agencies from entering formal partnerships with ICE; and prohibits state and municipal participation in federal immigration enforcement, while preserving state and municipal law enforcement agencies’ authority to investigate and prosecute crimes.

It also permits people to bring claims against government officials for violating constitutional rights and bolsters protections for those held at state or county correctional facilities.

Officials argue that the legislation is necessary to maintain public trust in law enforcement at a time when that trust is being threatened by the aggressive tactics being used by federal immigration enforcement officers.

“Strong public safety requires strong partnerships with the communities we serve,” Public Safety and Security Secretary Gina Kwon said in a statement.

“The Protect Act helps preserve the trust that law enforcement, prosecutors and community organizations rely on to protect victims, investigate crimes and keep neighborhoods safe. When people feel safe, our commonwealth is stronger.”

The PROTECT Act, which originated as as H.5158 and was enacted as H.5620, was introduced Jan. 28, four days after Customs and Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti and 21 days after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, both in Minneapolis, Minn., which was the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Massachusetts House Speaker Ronald Mariano, a Democrat, referenced the killings of Pretti and Good in announcing that the House had passed the legislation in March, saying their deaths, along with the separation of children from their families, were forcing immigrants in Massachusetts to live in fear.

“That’s why this legislation is so important, as it takes steps to ensure that all residents in Massachusetts are treated equally under state law, and to protect our communities through practical, thoughtful measures,” he said in a statement at the time.

Trump and many Republicans have been highly critical of jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, labeling them “sanctuary jurisdictions.” In April 2025, Trump ordered the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to publish a list of jurisdictions that the administration said obstruct federal immigration enforcement and to pursue legal remedies and other enforcement measures to bring them into compliance.

DHS, which oversees ICE, said in a statement Wednesday that “sanctuary politicians must stop putting politics above public safety.”

“When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities,” it said in a statement to WJAR.

Law enforcement in the US state of North Carolina has reported a fatal mass shooting in the city of Prospect Hill.

“Deputies arriving on scene found multiple people who had been shot. One person was transported to Duke University Hospital with a gunshot wound, and there are multiple other fatalities,” the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said in a statement on Wednesday.

“SBI Crime scene investigators are on scene processing evidence and conducting interviews. There is NO THREAT to the general public.”

More to come…

Many have commented on the recent reforms to the Venezuelan Hydrocarbons regime and its reach. Most people have focused on the irony of Delcy Rodríguez giving away the country’s resources after years of empty anti-US rhetoric and, of course, it is ridiculously tempting to do so. But the long-term questions beyond the political posturing of the US robbing Venezuelan oil linger: is the reform good for Venezuela? Was the previous regime really favorable to the country’s interest? Why has the reaction by major oil companies been rather slow or lukewarm, as the WSJ reported a month ago?

The debate over the adequacy of Venezuelan oil regulations predates January 3. A statist vision has prevailed among political elites for almost half a century. Contrary to the chavista narrative, the oil industry in Venezuela was nationalized by Carlos Andrés Pérez fifty years ago. Up until the 1990s, the State, through PDVSA, performed exclusively primary oil activities: exploration and production. Then, due to the sharp drop in oil prices, the cash-strapped Rafael Caldera government, using a provision of the 1975 nationalization law, had to allow for private investment in primary activities through service agreements with foreign oil companies. These contracts were branded as the Apertura Petrolera, which became a bête noire for the Venezuelan Left, who even tried to stop the process via the Supreme Court.

Chávez put an end to this with his 2001 Hydrocarbons Law reform, migrating from the service agreements to joint venture companies where the Venezuelan state was the main shareholder. The refusal of some companies, like Conoco and Exxon, to migrate to the joint ventures led to several of the arbitration claims against Venezuela. Another contentious aspect of the Venezuelan oil business was that only State-owned companies could directly export oil. Joint venture companies could only sell oil to another PDVSA subsidiary, which led to PDVSA running up huge debts with foreign partners.

The Chávez 2001 model ruled until recently. Only PDVSA directly, or the JVs where PDVSA was a majority shareholder, could perform exploration and production activities and export oil.

The Executive also retained very discretionary power over what is called the government take (the percentage of oil or profits taken as a consideration in agreements with foreign partners in the joint ventures and applicable taxes), which can be used by the government to drive down the profits of its private company partners, a major deterrent for private investment in oil.

Up until very recently, the Chávez 2001 model was ruling: only PDVSA directly, or the joint ventures where PDVSA was a majority shareholder, could perform exploration and production activities and sell oil in international markets.

A similar regime was implemented in Colombia. In 2003, that country reformed its hydrocarbon regime to its current iteration, where it removed the exclusive primary activities rights granted to Ecopetrol, and established that this State-owned company would compete with private companies for exploration through contracts granted by a newly minted hydrocarbons regulator, the ANH. The ANH grants exploration rights under competitive bids where Ecopetrol competes with private companies under the same conditions. The purpose was to simplify the existing bureaucracy and award contracts under competitive, transparent bids, instead of having an all-mighty State company that both drills and decides who drills under very discretionary powers, as is the current case with PDVSA.

This model was behind past reform proposals by the opposition and have been part of the expert discussion on oil reform in Venezuela, and it is also included in María Corina Machado’s oil sector proposal, which received hypocritical criticism from people who remained mum about Delcy’s sweeping reforms. This model is seen as a true break from the previous one, as it takes power away from omnipotent PDVSA and turns it into just another player who has to compete with private companies in competitive bidding before a national, impartial regulator.

The reforms do represent a momentous formal break with the statist oil policy that has prevailed in the country for over 50 years. Under the new Hydrocarbons Law, private companies can perform primary activities through contracts with PDVSA subsidiaries and joint venture companies, and can export oil directly to international markets, paying the government take. The law, enacted on January 29, 2026,  also establishes that these contracts can include arbitration clauses, which can provide more certainty and guarantees for potential investors than submitting them to Venezuela’s infamously corrupt and dependent courts. The law also worryingly removes parliamentary oversight over the oil sector.

But the catch is that abiding by the law has never been chavismo’s strong suit, and they had been violating the Hydrocarbons Law since 2018. Under the aegis of the disgraced oil czar/soccer player Tarek el Aissami, PDVSA started signing contracts granting primary activities rights to private companies, as well as the right to directly export oil. This was done on dubious legal grounds under presidential emergency powers. Thus, the 2026 Hydrocarbons Law is only a regularization of a de facto situation that already existed.

The new regulations give a lot of discretionary power to the government to control the performance of the new contracts and to set the government’s take unilaterally.

As with everything in life, the devil is in the details, and the new law is very scant on the details of the new contracts, it seems to have been drafted in a rush. It defines very broadly the terms and conditions of the contracts (the new contracts pertaining to joint venture companies are only mentioned in passing) while at the same time giving the government wide discretionary powers to interpret them, and the last thing any international investor wants is to give chavismo discretionary powers over anything.

Delcy Rodríguez also enacted new regulations of the Hydrocarbons Law (which have not been updated since 1943) and two additional resolutions establishing some parameters for the government take. A centralized regulation of the government take is a welcome change, but the reaction to it has been mixed, as it gives a lot of discretionary power to the government to control the performance of the new contracts and to set the government’s take unilaterally.

The law also fails to incorporate any change to the current structure of the Venezuelan oil architecture. Unlike the reform in Colombia, the new law does not remove the elephantine, vastly discretionary bureaucracy that chavismo created.  PDVSA remains the almighty administrator of Venezuelan oil with no independent technical supervision of its role.

So, are the reforms good? They do signify a break from the statist vision of the oil industry, one that does not correspond with the wretched state of the Venezuelan oil sector. However, it is obviously a patched-up, limited instrument enacted by Delcy’s multiuse minions more to appease Donald Trump (even the reaction from American oil companies has been lukewarm) than anything resembling a definitive vision for the Venezuelan oil industry in an era of decarbonization.

The most likely outcome, already playing out according to the WSJ piece, is that the major oil companies (already traumatized by the previous experiences with chavismo expropriation frenzy over 20 years ago) remain skeptical or limit its investment due to the lack of clear guarantees and conditions and smaller, less known and less risk-averse companies are the ones who end up signing these contracts for a short-term gain. Chevron, who is now the most powerful player in the Venezuelan oil business, publicly signaled that the law doesn’t go far enough for them, and, considering their leverage with the Trump administration, it is possible that the Rodríguez regime is forced to further liberalize and refine the text of the law. But under the current conditions of legal uncertainty and arbitrariness no company, whether big or small, will risk investing the vast amount of money needed  (about 183 billion dollars) to recover the Venezuelan oil industry after decades of destruction and pillage. Oil companies may be evil, but never stupid. 

All of these scenarios have a limited effect on the recovery of the Venezuelan oil industry without a democratic transition because for any law to have a meaningful impact on the economy you need actual rule of law and independent courts, and you also need actual experts drafting the new laws. Not the very few lackeys of the most incompetent government in our history who happen to be proficient in English.

Chris Young grew up in Clarksville, Tenn., in the direst imaginable circumstances — unimaginable, in fact, to many of us.

He never knew his father. His mother was a crack addict with a habit of stabbing her romantic partners. While his mom was in prison, Young and his older brother, Robert, mostly fended for themselves, often in a home that lacked electricity and running water. Young, tormented by sickle-cell disease, saw many of those closest to him die by homicide or suicide.

The two boys weren’t totally bereft. They had a grandfather, cousins, friends and a stepfather. A neighbor provided showers, until his water bill got too high; another supplied hot meals. A woman known as Big Mama offered shelter and tough love. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Desperate for money, the teenage Young — smart, entrepreneurial, dreaming of a rap career — became a gun-toting drug dealer.

Young’s searing memoir, “The Wound Is Where the Light Enters,” chronicles this bitter childhood and its devastating consequences. The evocative title is a quotation from the 13th century Persian poet Rumi.

Unlike some prison memoirs, this isn’t an innocence story. But it is no less an indictment of the U.S. justice system — its laws, its courts and its brutal prisons. “The constant state of heightened agitation and awareness that it takes to survive a single day in a federal penitentiary is enough to drive a man insane,” Young writes. “At every turn, the system is designed to crush your humanity. You’re an animal in there and are expected to act like one.”

But not everyone does. “The Wound Is Where the Light Enters” not only reveals the system’s horrors, but also celebrates the redemptive power of hope, intellect and community.

By the time Young was swept up in a federal drug investigation, he already had two felony drug convictions. His involvement in the federal conspiracy case, as he tells it, was marginal. He was no kingpin and had never met most of the people being charged.

But he faced a zealous prosecutor, with only court-appointed attorneys at his side. Worse yet, he was up against a harsh “three-strikes” law that replaced judicial discretion with mandatory minimum sentences.

Young’s own pride and sense of justice also came into play. He could have pleaded guilty, perhaps even cooperated, and received a finite (though still hefty) prison sentence. Instead, determined to argue his case, he opted for a trial at which conviction was all but certain. Then, against advice, he presented a meticulously crafted and rehearsed speech at his sentencing hearing.

The 26-year-old Young, who’d already spent four years behind bars, had used that time productively. A former straight-A student who had dropped out of high school, he had embarked on a program of self-education, reading deeply in African American history, Greek philosophy, finance and other subjects. “Every day,” he writes, “I left the library with new language to put to my thoughts.”

Young told the court about his chaotic upbringing and his recent scholarly pursuits. “He spoke of the things he could do if he did not have to die in prison. He told me of the possibilities that would never be,” the trial judge, Kevin H. Sharp, writes in the book’s foreword. “It was impossible to listen to someone so full of compassion, intelligence, and, above all, promise, and not question the system that had not just allowed this to happen but required it.”

Sharp sentenced Young to life without the possibility of parole, as the law mandated. But two years later, he stepped down from the bench and joined Young’s defense team.

Young describes his childhood mostly from the perspective of a boy — alternately bewildered, hurting, depressed and “mad all the time.” His account of his incarceration, with its mind-numbing routines, gang hegemony and intermittent violence, is equally gripping.

At McCreary, the tense high-security federal prison in Kentucky known as Misery Mountain, Young meditated, adhered to a workout routine, read prodigiously, taught GED classes to fellow inmates and maintained ties to his few surviving loved ones. And he kept hoping. “The system’s control over my body was absolute,” Young writes. “Its control over my mind was not.”

In 2015, the sickle cell-related disintegration of his hips prompted Young’s transfer to a low-security prison, Federal Medical Center Lexington. Here the surroundings are less bleak, the library better, the prisoners friendlier. Young teaches himself to code and envisions an app that will focus on mental health and suicide prevention. Yet he still must fight to obtain the hip replacement surgery he so desperately needs.

By now, his case has attracted sympathetic press attention and more effective lawyers. Even so, his story takes a dark turn. From Lexington, he is sent to his most terrifying prison yet, known as Bloody Beaumont, where COVID-19 adds another layer of threat. A judge reduces his sentence, but, for reasons never entirely clear, he is suddenly thrown into the prison’s “hole,” its barbarous solitary confinement cells.

It is from that hell that Young, more than a decade after his arrest, emerges to freedom — earning a degree in economics and public policy from Southern Methodist University, pursuing a consulting career and writing this indelible book. For his 2021 grant of executive clemency, he has his lawyers and reality-TV star Kim Kardashian to thank — as well as President Trump.

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

SACRAMENTO — Today we’re talking about California’s Proposition 39, a bid to turn Trump’s election conspiracy fantasies into California law, and a proposal so disingenuous it’s caused Democratic legislators to sue the Democratic secretary of state in an attempt to stop the misinformation surrounding it.

As these lawsuits move forward and the November election rolls closer, we’re going to hear a lot about Proposition 39 — a measure that would require in-person voters to present government-issued identification, among other provisions. I fear most if not all of this debate will revolve around the false claim that large numbers of undocumented people vote illegally in our elections.

“It’s directly a product of all of the rhetoric that Trump has been putting out there regarding election fraud and voting fraud,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the nonpartisan Center for Inclusive Democracy.

Romero stresses that there is not and has never been any evidence of widespread voter fraud in California, and the state already has a system that effectively checks voter eligibility.

Proposition 39 is “seeking a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, and a solution that actually could cause additional problems,” she said. “So in and of itself, it perpetuates this false and dangerous narrative that there has been voter fraud in California.”

That lie is part of the ongoing grievance-fueled Trump campaign against non-white “replacement” Americans, meant to undermine trust in elections — you may recall he’s gone so far as to say immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It’s a venal and dark vein of partisanship aimed at keeping the far-right in power even at the expense of democracy.

But also an effective lie. Because many folks don’t know exactly how their ballots are verified but do have ID, they don’t see the full impacts of Proposition 39.

The easy ID myth

I’ll tell you more about Proposition 39, but I’m starting with a story about an all-American teenager I’ll call “Sofia.” I’ve been helping Sofia,18, attempt to get her first government-issued identification. I stress attempt.

Folks, there’s been hoops, there’s been hurdles, there’s been Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

For people like Sofia that don’t have bills or jobs or even accurate student records (she’s moved a lot), scraping up enough documentation to convince the DMV you are who you say you are is tough. First, you really need a certified birth certificate.

Sofia wasn’t born in the county where she lives (it’s county recorders that keep them), which means she had to either drive hours or go through the state’s third-party online vendor to order one, at a cost of about $30. But here’s the catch — she needed proof of identity to order it.

So to get a birth certificate to get her ID, she needed ID.

Stuck in this circular nightmare, we found, after much effort, a loophole: I could appear in front of a public notary with Sofia, to testify using my ID that she was indeed Sofia. Strange, but whatever. We did it.

That wasn’t enough for the DMV. Sofia also needed two bills or other documents verifying her address. Because they will literally give a credit card to anyone, she applied to an online company, and got her first statement. One document down.

Again, scouring the DMV rules for days, we found another weird loophole: The second document can be a letter from a nonprofit with the person signing it vouching for Sofia’s identity. We got the letter, and Sofia’s Real ID was issued.

But then she had to move before it arrived. She tried to arrange mail forwarding with the postal service, but guess what? They required ID.

So the ID was lost in transit, and we are back to square one.

Who Proposition 39 really targets

That means Sofia is one of thousands of Californians, born and raised in the Golden State, who lack official identification because its not as easy to obtain it as some want you to believe.

And because she lacks it, she could be prevented from voting if Proposition 39 is passed, even though she is a legal citizen with every right to have her ballot counted, and California already has a system in place to ensure only citizens vote.

Sofia is exactly the kind of voter that Proposition 39 is actually aimed at. This is a voter suppression law, plain and simple, and it will harm women with name changes, naturalized citizens, young people, older people and virtually anyone who cares about not returning to Jim Crow-style laws that push people out of voting with subterfuge.

Proponents of the proposition would like you to believe it’s something very different from what I just described. Their fight about how we talk about this proposal has led to two lawsuits so far — one filed by the backers of Proposition 39 because they don’t like the official title the California attorney general put on it, and one filed by the leaders of the state Legislature because they argue the statements written by proponents for official voting materials aren’t truthful.

I’ll give you a taste of both of those arguments. Right now, the state is proposing to title the measure “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.”

State Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), the always-Trumper behind Proposition 39, helped lead a lawsuit claiming that is inaccurate.

DeMaio issued a statement claiming Democrats are “trying to deceive voters by putting a false ballot title on it and are now even distracting voters from their tampering of the ballot title with this frivolous lawsuit.”

That frivolous lawsuit he’s complaining about is the one where the Democratic leaders of the Legislature last week sued the Democratic secretary of state and others over the language included in the state voter guide. The Democrats aren’t really angry at each other, it’s just that Secretary of State Shirley Weber is in charge of voter materials, so she’s one of the folks they’ve got to sue to make their case.

The lawsuit alleges, among other complaints, that proponents are falsely framing Proposition 39 as making it “easier to vote” when in fact it does the opposite.

“Prop. 39 requires no burdens be placed on voters,” the materials at issue read, according to the lawsuit. “No additional documents (birth certificate, marriage license, etc.) are required.”

So I take you back to Sofia. Because while Proposition 39 might not ask her to bring her birth certificate to the polls, it would ask her to bring her ID, which required her birth certificate to get.

A distinction without a difference.

“The fact that Donald Trump has endorsed it tells you everything you need to know,” wrote the lawsuits’ plaintiffs, House speaker Robert Rivas and Senate pro Tempore Monique Limón, in a statement. “As Californians and Latinos, we will not let MAGA cronies take Constitutional rights away from voters.”

That lawsuit will likely have its first hearing in court this week. But whatever a judge decides, the ballot box is where the fate of Proposition 39 rests.

Though it seems like average Californians could see through this sham, there are big bucks backing it, and money always speaks loudly.

The donors in support read like the guest list for a White House dinner. So far, they’ve raised more than $15 million. That includes $4 million from Richard Uihlein, the Illinois billionaire and Trump supporter who often funds organizations and causes that promote election conspiracies and far-right candidates.

The crypto-billionaire Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, have each donated $250,000, along with other Silicon Valley types including former RFK Jr. running mate Nicole Shanahan, who ponied up $370,000 in support of Proposition 39.

Oh, and by the way, L.A. developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso has donated $25,000 to the effort.

That’s a lot of dough being poured into stopping certain Californians from voting. If they succeed, it won’t just be an inconvenience at the polls — but instead a double victory for Trump, both suppressing the vote ahead of the presidential election and legitimizing his election lies through law.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: FBI Escalates Trump’s “Voter Fraud” Crusade With Disturbing Move
The California angle: How Trump’s Endangered Species Act rollback is roiling Northern California
The L.A. Times Special: Trump running out of options to fix inflation, economic woes before election, experts say

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

—
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SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have earned at least $11 million since he took office, with most of their income coming from wineries, restaurants and other investments, according to tax returns from 2019 through their most recent filings for 2024.

The tax records show the couple has earned between $1.4 million and $3.5 million per year, putting them in the upper echelon of Americans when it comes to annual income.

Newsom allowed reporters on Thursday to view four years of the couple’s jointly filed tax returns after receiving criticism for not disclosing his filings since he last released the information for the tax year 2020.

The release of the tax records comes just weeks after Newsom accused the Department of Justice of launching — at President Trump’s request — a baseless and politically motivated investigation into him and his wife, including her business interests and charity work. The governor said the probes, which federal officials have not confirmed, were a personal vendetta launched because he’s considering a run for president in 2028.

Siebel Newsom leads the Representation Project, a nonprofit that advocates for gender equity through film and education programs, and Girls Club Entertainment, a for-profit production company she owns that holds the copyrights to her documentaries. The nonprofit has faced criticism for accepting donations from companies that lobby the governor, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and AT&T.

The tax records released Thursday showed that her salary from the Representation Project was $145,000 to $150,000 annually from 2021 though 2024, similar to prior years. While Girls Club paid her $100,000 in 2021, and $11,700 in 2022, she did not report any income from the production company in the two years that followed.

The governor’s office, in a summary of the tax returns provided to reporters, stated that financial documents contradict “the FALSE right-wing claims that the Newsoms ‘enriched themselves’ through new ventures and nonprofit organizations.”

The memo stated that their income has declined since Newsom became governor. The tax records also show that Girls Club Entertainment has been losing money in recent years.

The governor signed a law during his first year in office to require presidential and gubernatorial candidates to release five years of tax returns to appear on the primary ballot. Democrats passed the law in response to Trump’s refusal to make the information public.

Less than six months later, the California Supreme Court struck down the portion that required presidential candidates to comply with the law. Gubernatorial candidates are still required to disclose their tax filings during election season.

Though tax returns became a flash point in the California vs. Trump political saga, Democrats have for decades demanded that candidates for governor and president release their income tax filings.

Presidential candidates dating back to the Nixon administration routinely shared their filings, with only President Ford and Trump refusing to do so. Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his Republican opponents also declined to share their tax returns before the 2010 and 2014 California gubernatorial elections.

Newsom released his tax returns during his campaigns for governor in 2018 and 2022, again in 2020 and before he beat a recall election in 2021. California candidates, elected officials, judges and some public employees also file annual economic interest statements.

“In the interest of transparency, he’s now voluntarily making all remaining filed tax returns available — going beyond what the law requires — as part of his longstanding commitment to transparency,” said Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor, in a statement.

The governor and his wife put their investments in a blind trust when he took office. Their earnings, which have totaled more than $1 million per year since at least 2011, stem from investments in wineries, restaurants, bars, hotels and hospitality management companies based in San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Lake Tahoe, according to economic interest disclosures filed with the state.

The latest batch of tax returns covers 2021 through 2024. Reporters were allowed to view, but not copy, more than 700 pages of tax records at the governor’s office in Sacramento on Thursday. Their 2025 tax returns were not available because, as he has done most years, the governor filed for an extension with the Internal Revenue Service and he doesn’t expect to file until October.

The couple’s reported income was the highest in 2021, when they sold their home in Kentfield, a wealthy enclave in Marin County, for $5.9 million. The Newsoms reported receiving more than $55,000 in rent for leasing out the home that same year, but declared an overall loss for tax purposes of $70,000 due to their mortgage payments, taxes, legal fees and depreciation.

The family previously moved to a mansion in Fair Oaks that they purchased for $3.7 million in 2019 following a brief residence at the Governor’s Mansion in downtown Sacramento.

The family kept the Fair Oaks home and purchased another $9.1-million estate in Marin County in 2024, where they primarily live and their four children attend school. Newsom and his wife also spend time in Fair Oaks while working at the state Capitol.

During those four years, Newsom and Siebel Newsom paid a high of $1,253,187 in federal income taxes in 2021, and a low of $488,821 in 2023. Their state tax income bill ranged from $34,307 to $213,331 during that time. The annual property tax bills hovered between $48,000 and $64,300 over that span.

The governor’s income included his government salary, which ranged from $167,647 in 2021 to $192,087 in 2024.

Newsom also was paid more than $150,000 during that period as an author. In recent years, Newsom has published a book for children with dyslexia and a memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry.”

The tax returns showed the family paid from $154,000 to almost $200,000 each year for household employees from 2021 through 2024. The returns showed that they paid for Social Security coverage, Medicare and the state’s unemployment benefits fund as part of those expenses.

The governor and his family donated more than $200,000 to charity from 2021 to 2024. While most of those donations were in cash, they also gave $4,900 in “Armani Business Wear” to the Oakland nonprofit organization Restorative Justice, and toys, furniture, appliances, books and other goods to Goodwill in Sacramento.

Among their listed expenses in 2021 was $3,542 in storage costs for silver and platinum holdings. Previously, the couple made nearly a half-million dollars trading silver bars in 2011 alone.

WASHINGTON — The American Dream may not be dead for many Black Americans, but it is further away than at any point since the Civil Rights Movement, warns a report by the National Urban League.

Released on Thursday, the annual “State of Black America” report grimly describes Black Americans ‘ economic and political prospects as having worsened due to policy changes from President Trump’s administration, according to a copy obtained by the Associated Press.

The report contends that the challenges it highlights for Black communities are warning signs for the prosperity of all Americans.

“It may be the focus is us, but the impact is not just us,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. “While they have targeted and focused on Black Americans, these attacks are going to impact broadly working Americans, poor Americans, aspirational middle-class Americans, and this is what this report points to.”

Tracing the arc of American history, the Urban League describes Black Americans’ struggle for emancipation from slavery and equal economic and political rights as a gruesome but optimistic part of the American story.

Now, the report says, the Trump administration is at odds with the goals and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, citing the overhaul of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as the president’s focus on overhauling voting laws through the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, as examples of rollbacks of long-sought civil rights policies.

The report’s authors offer policy and strategy recommendations for civil rights groups aiming to combat the Trump administration.

“The civil rights community must consolidate its legal resistance and turn courtroom wins into durable policy,” the report says. “The movement must build economic infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of any one administration.”

The AP reached out to the White House for comment on the report.

Report contributors include a potential Democratic presidential contender

This year’s report includes contributions from members of Congress, and policy and legal experts, as well as some media personalities.

U.S. Senators Angela Alsobrooks, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Raphael Warnock all contributed to the report, as well as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey contributed a video message to the report.

Moore, who is widely viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, submitted an essay focused on closing the racial wealth gap and Black Americans’ history of economic advancement in the face of adversity.

“With wisdom and grit, my mom was able to lift me and my family to a higher rung on the economic ladder. But too often wisdom and grit aren’t enough,” Moore wrote.

He later called closing the racial wealth gap “a matter of moral clarity” but cautioned that “government alone cannot close the racial wealth gap. It’s going to take all of us,” referencing the private sector and civil society.

Report blasts ‘economic assault’ on Black Americans

Whether corporate America and major nonprofits are still willing to participate is an open question. The report condemns the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back diversity initiatives and economic advancement projects in the private sector, and expresses frustration with companies that cooperated with an “economic assault” on Americans, especially Black Americans.

“This has been a campaign of coercion and oppression directed at these institutions who have been out here working hard to, if you will, change America,” Morial said. “The important thing about companies is that every company has not bent the knee. Some may have done some cosmetic changes. Some have been in full and complete retreat.”

The DEI rollbacks are a jarring reversal for the Urban League, which held sway in the Biden White House on economic and social policies. The report lauds President Biden’s administration for signing a sweeping COVID-19 stimulus package, as well as laws supporting minority small businesses and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“Not every promise was kept, and the current administration is pushing to roll our wins back, but these wins serve as a blueprint for what is possible through sustained advocacy and a clear vision,” the authors write. The agenda, the Urban League declares, was “the most consequential federal investments in Black America since the Great Society.”

The organization and its civil rights allies now find themselves in a strikingly different political environment under the Trump administration.

“Looking at our current political landscape, the calls for racial healing and righting of this nation’s wrongs in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd feel like a fever dream,” the report reads.

But the study also acknowledges that Black Americans have overcome more dire and discriminatory moments.

Latest Black America report is the Urban League’s 50th edition

The Urban League’s inaugural 1976 report on the state of Black America was described by the New York Times at the time as “a profoundly depressing document” that laid out the persistent disparities between the economic outlooks of Black and white Americans, a decade after the Civil Rights Movement’s crowning achievements were signed into law.

The report was established as a response to that year’s State of the Union address by President Ford and the Democratic response, neither of which mentioned the economic outlooks for Black Americans. The report offered policy recommendations on crime, education, housing, social services and general economic policy.

“It is a document that does not attempt to cover up the seriousness of the situation black people find themselves in,” the authors wrote at the time. Several of its recommendations were later taken up by President Carter, who was elected to the White House months after the report’s release.

This year’s 50th anniversary document echoes the frustration found in the inaugural report. While Morial acknowledged that the Urban League’s assessments may lead to pessimism, he urged Americans concerned about civil rights and economic progress to respond at the ballot box and with their pocketbooks.

“We cannot be dejected. We cannot be cynical. We must act,” Morial said. “We have to fight to make sure that those that are really trying to kill the essence of the American dream don’t win.”

Brown writes for the Associated Press.

POP superstar George Michael’s estate is suing his former best pal over footage from the recording of a lost album.

Andros Georgiou, 63, faces court for charging fans to watch scenes which he recorded of the ex-Wham! star.

George’s former best friend said he would be “turning in his grave” after the pop singer’s estate sued him over video footage of a secret unreleased album.

The Wham! star’s lawyers are taking Andros to court after he released almost 90 minutes of unseen footage shot in 1992 and 1993.

Andros launched a website last month charging fans to watch the film Trojan Souls — The Greatest Album That Was Never Made.

The record was to feature Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Bryan Ferry, Seal and Sade.

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But the legal team from George’s estate has now lodged a case against him at London’s Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court, claiming its rights have been breached.

Furious Andros, 63, said the legal claim was “a case of sheer greed”.

On George, he said: “Yes, we fell out, but we loved and cared for each other deeply, and I find the baseless claims and the constant attempts to erase me from history both disrespectful and, frankly, a bit desperate.

“The film belongs to me.

“Trojan Souls belongs to me.

“They’ve opened Pandora’s Box.

“They won’t want me on the stand.

“I know way too much.

“Bring it on.”

Andros’s film shows the making of tracks for Trojan Souls: The Voice of Reason, a collaboration album with global superstars.

Pop fans are being asked to pay £4.99 for 48 hours of access to the 90-minute video online.

Tribe Media is also selling £19.99 VIP tiers, promising access to never-before-heard recordings of George’s unreleased songs from the record.

Andros shot the video using a camcorder given to him by Sony while they were in Japan on George’s Faith tour.

Andros said: “First and foremost — my brother in arms, my best friend, George Michael to you, Yog to me — would turn in his grave knowing what Russells (the estate’s lawyers) are attempting — and spending his money to do it.”

He went on: “It is well known Yog and I were working on Trojan Souls through my record label, Hardback Records.

“The film I have released was shot by me, with Yog’s full approval.

“This was a home video leaked over 30 years ago.

“It kept resurfacing on YouTube.

“So I decided, if you can’t beat them, put the film out myself, since others were already profiting from my home video.”

The legal case lists Andros and Tribe Media, the production house distributing the film.

The claimants are Robobuild Limited and Big Geoff Overseas Limited, the holding companies George used to manage royalties and world tours.

Andros and George were estranged before the star’s death on Christmas Day, 2016, but had been planning to reconcile.

They fell out after George’s arrest in an LA public toilet in 1998.

But Andros had spoken to his pal on the phone in the final weeks of his life.

The pair had a close friendship for decades after their fathers moved to the UK from Cyprus together in 1953.

Most of the one-hour 24-minute film shows George playing the piano, performing vocals with backing singers, grabbing a bass and talking to producers about his track list in an LA studio.

George lost interest in the album when his then-partner Anselmo Feleppa’s health declined.

Anselmo, who suffered from Aids, died in March 1993.

George never completed the album.

It can take up to two years for a case at the court to reach trial.

Lawyers for George Michael’s estate were asked to comment.

Modern conflicts are not just waged by state sponsored armed forces. In the last two decades there has been a rapid growth in the international recruitment of Private Military Companies (PMCs), used for everything from protecting top-level diplomats from harm in the Middle East to defending resource mining sites throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

These commercial security contractors are indispensable partners to states, NGOs and corporations the world over. The growth of privatized conflict presents structural issues for international law and diplomacy.

The Loopholes of Modern Legal Systems in War

Among the most consistent and frequent challenges to global peace and security is the glaring accountability vacuum relating to non-state actors. When a uniformed state soldier is found to have committed crimes they are subject to the rigorous legal structures of the military justice system, including the Geneva Convention. By comparison, PMC operators often exist in a legal grey area.

Host nations where such operators act, often experience a level of domestic instability where their own legal systems are overstretched, or politically weak to effectively take action against powerful private security forces. The nations routinely lack either the will or capacity to pursue legal action against heavily armed foreign PMC personnel. The home states of PMCs are never eager to prosecute for alleged offences committed abroad by the corporations which they sanction. This leads to an accountability vacuum.

Bringing the War-Zone Back Home

Attempts by domestic prosecutors to seek convictions for offenses such as murder or assault against their country’s PMC operators has led to lengthy and complex legal proceedings. Acts normally described a felony assault charge were made all the more difficult due to a defence team pointing to the hostile environment, self-defense and chain of command arguments during combat.

Diplomatic Fallout and Tensions

International Cooperation Needed for PMC Regulation

WASHINGTON — Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s most influential member prior to his retirement, has watched quietly for eight years as a new conservative majority took charge.

He was troubled by partisan gerrymandering, but a year after he stepped down, a 5-4 ruling closed the federal courts to challenges to state voting maps that allow one party to rig the elections in its favor.

Though he believed abortion was a moral wrong, he cast the crucial vote in 1992 to uphold Roe vs. Wade and the principle that a woman, not the government, had the right to decide on ending an early pregnancy.

Four years ago, that decision was overturned on a 5-4 vote.

While Kennedy has refrained from commenting on the current court or President Trump, he has written a memoir that tells his life story and explains the reasoning behind the major decisions of his era.

It has become common for the justices to write books, but they steer clear of writing about the work of the court. Kennedy’s book, “Life, Law & Liberty,” is, like the justice, the exception to that rule.

An Irish Catholic from Sacramento and a Reagan Republican, Kennedy had a generally conservative voting record over 30 years on the high court. But he had a distinct view of liberty and justice.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” he wrote in 2015.

Kennedy rejected the “rigid” view that the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equal protection of the law, as well as the protection against cruel and unusual punishment, were limited to their “original” meaning in the Bill of Rights of 1791 or the 14th Amendment of 1868.

After all, slavery and segregation were legal for much of American history, and women were not protected from discrimination by the promise of “equal protection” in the 14th Amendment.

Kennedy remained open to new rights and liberties. The goal, he wrote, was “a decent society in which the Constitution and the rule of law treat all with dignity and equality.”

He was the justice who made the difference in several areas of law, none more significant than in LGBTQ+ rights.

He wrote the court’s four major rulings rejecting discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2015, he spoke for the 5-4 majority to uphold same-sex marriages nationwide.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” he wrote. “Many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. And hundreds of thousands of children are presently being raised by such couples.”

They “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right,” he concluded in Obergefell vs. Hodges.

He also believed that teenagers who commit crimes are not as culpable as adults. He wrote a court opinion in 2005 ending executions for murderers who were under age 18 at the time of their crime.

Five years later, he wrote the court’s opinion holding it was cruel and unusual punishment for judges to impose a sentence of life in prison with no chance for parole for a teenager’s crime that did not involve homicide. In the case before the court, a Florida teen was given a life term for committing an armed robbery and a home burglary prior to his 18th birthday.

Kennedy marked his 90th birthday on Thursday and says his favorite topic of conversation is not the nine justices but his nine grandchildren. He still goes to the court some days and says he is worried by the tone in Washington and around the country.

“It is too partisan and confrontational,” he said in a recent interview with The Times. “I’m concerned that the divisiveness may be reflected at the court.”

Democracy requires “reasoned and respectful debate,” he said, not personal attacks and name calling.

Kennedy may be the last justice of his kind, said Washington University law professor Daniel Epps, a former Kennedy clerk.

“I don’t think we’ll see another justice who is so ideologically unpredictable and who votes against his party of appointment in some of the hugest cases in our lifetimes,” he said. Kennedy emerged from “an appointments process that was less polarized, where there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans and a Senate filibuster, which all made it possible for moderates to be appointed.”

While Kennedy describes himself at times as a small-town lawyer from Sacramento, he knew the two California governors, both Republicans, who reshaped the Supreme Court.

Kennedy’s father was a friend of Gov. Earl Warren, and young Tony played with Warren’s children. He also worked as a young page in the state Capitol when Warren was governor.

He was a high school senior in 1954 when Warren, the new chief justice, spoke for a unanimous court to strike down racial segregation in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education.

He and his father agreed the ruling was long overdue. It also provided an early lesson in how justices can uphold the fundamental principles of the Constitution despite intense opposition in much of the nation.

He said he later learned a second lesson. The Brown decision was “a historic step forward” but it “just a beginning” in the fight against entrenched racial injustice.

In writing the same-sex marriage case, Kennedy cited Warren’s opinion in the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia which struck down the bans on interracial marriages in 16 states.

As as young lawyer, Kennedy worked on special projects for Gov. Ronald Reagan and admired him greatly. He was just 38 years old when, at Reagan’s behest, he was appointed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

As president a decade later, Reagan had appointed Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court and elevated William Rehnquist to be the chief justice. But his third nominee — Judge Robert Bork — was voted down as too conservative by the Senate.

Reagan invited Kennedy to the White House and offered him the nomination. Kennedy recalled telling Reagan that he and his wife Mary were happy in Sacramento where all their friends and family lived. We don’t know anyone in Washington, he said.

President Reagan gestures toward Judge Anthony M. Kennedy’s family after nominating Kennedy to the Supreme Court in 1987.

(Dennis Cook / Associated Press)

In his best imitation of Reagan’s voice, he recounted the president’s response: “You know me. And you know Nancy.”

Kennedy accepted the nomination and was confirmed in February 1988 by a 97-0 vote, the last justice to win unanimous approval from the Senate.

His three decades on the court were shaped in part by his relationship with Scalia.

Kennedy and his wife bought a house in the same northern Virginia neighborhood where Scalia lived. In their early years on the court, they appeared to be friends and allies.

They broadly supported freedom of speech. To the surprise of many, they cast the deciding votes in 1989 to rule that the 1st Amendment protects the right to burn an American flag in protest.

A year later, Kennedy and Scalia dissented vehemently when the court ruled the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and its corporate supporters could be barred from advertising their support for state candidates.

The decision triggered a decades-long dispute that ended with the Citizens United ruling in 2010. Kennedy spoke for a 5-4 conservative majority to rule that corporations, unions and other groups were free to spend money independently to oppose or support candidates.

But when the court was closely split in major cases, Kennedy was likely to be in majority while Scalia wrote scathing and increasingly personal dissents.

“I would hide my head in a bag,” Scalia wrote in dissent in the same-sex marriage case, rather than join an opinion “couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”

Kennedy was put off by a different jab. Scalia said the justices do not represent the full country. For example, the court lacks a “genuine Westerner (California does not count),” he wrote.

Since Scalia’s death, his influence has grown especially with the younger generation of conservatives.

Two of Trump’s appointees — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — were clerks for Kennedy in 1993, but they are far more likely to cite Scalia and his views on interpreting laws or the Constitution. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third appointee, was a clerk for Scalia.

While Kennedy did not respond to Scalia’s harsh dissents, they hung over their last year together on the court.

One day in early February of 2016, Scalia stopped by Kennedy’s office to talk.

“Nino said he had come to regret deeply the tone of his Obergefell dissent and its personal references. He apologized for being intemperate,” Kennedy wrote. “Neither of us is big on hugging, but we hugged, both of us smiling.”

They agreed to get together for dinner with their wives when he returned from a hunting trip to Texas.

A week later, Scalia’s wife Maureen called to tell them of his death.

“Nino and I spent 28 years on the court together,” Kennedy wrote. “We sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed, but I respected him and miss him very much.”

On Tuesday, the Chairman of the Knesset’s Education Committee, Zvi Sukkot of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, arrived at a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem for a “surprise visit” – his second in two weeks. He did not come to evaluate pedagogy or classroom conditions or needs. Instead, he smashed the school’s entrance sign because it featured a Palestinian flag and publicly pledged to shut it down.

This storming of the school was more than just a publicity stunt meant to appeal to his political base ahead of Israel’s October 2026 elections. It was the physical embodiment of a sweeping state campaign targeting Palestinian education in unlawfully occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.

Sukkot is using his position to physically police Palestinian schools. This move comes on top of the Knesset’s aggressive legislative campaign to destroy Palestinian education in East Jerusalem that lawmakers have pushed in recent years.

One such law, passed in January 2026, bars graduates of Palestinian universities in the West Bank from working as teachers in Israel and in East Jerusalem. This law is based on racist ideology and extremist claims that graduates of these universities are inherently dangerous and morally unfit to be educators.

The motives of the law’s proponents were made clear during Knesset deliberations: advancing what several MKs called the “Israelisation” of the educational system and of the students, even at the expense of access to education. In a May 2025 Education Committee session, one Likud MK claimed that this law is needed as teachers who graduate from Palestinian universities “do not cultivate Israelisation” among their students.

The law passed despite the devastating consequences it is bound to have on the already fragile and disadvantaged Palestinian education system in East Jerusalem. This system is largely dependent on graduates of West Bank universities – who are overwhelmingly women – and it already has a serious shortage of teaching staff and classrooms.

Another law, passed in November 2024, which is widely referred to as the “Silencing Law”, gives the Israeli Ministry of Education full discretion to suspend or dismiss teachers through a fast-track administrative process. It targets speech the ministry deems to be “incitement to terrorism”, based on the ambiguous and arbitrary clauses of the Israeli Counter-Terrorism Law, which has become a catch-all mechanism to criminalise Palestinian speech.

The 2024 law also gives the ministry the right to revoke funding from schools on these same grounds, potentially leading to their closure.

Here too, the Knesset Committee’s deliberations on this law revealed an explicit targeting of the Palestinian education system in East Jerusalem and lawmakers’ views that this system is a security threat that must be dealt with. As a Likud MK said during an early 2024 Education Committee discussion on this proposed legislation: “It’s very important that they become Zionists… If I was an Arab from East Jerusalem, the first thing I would be is a Zionist. Above all”.

MK Sukkot’s pledge to shut down the school he attacked is not an idle threat. It follows the closure of six schools in East Jerusalem and its outskirts in 2025, which left 800 Palestinian children suddenly without access to formal education. These closures were the immediate result of the 2024 and 2025 anti-UNRWA laws passed by the Knesset.

The legislation and MK Sukkot’s physical vandalism of a Palestinian school demonstrate the state’s efforts to impose “Israelisation” on young Palestinian students living under occupation, and to erase any trace of Palestinian education and identity, even at the cost of trampling on every legitimate pedagogical need along the way.

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – is currently challenging all of these laws before the Israeli Supreme Court, with pending petitions against the ban on Palestinian university graduates, the “Silencing Law” targeting teachers’ political expression, and the anti-UNRWA laws.

We will continue to do all that we can to legally resist the campaign against Palestinian education. But the state’s assault on Palestinian schools will not stop until there is genuine international pressure on the Israeli government to stop its violations of nearly all the human rights of the occupied Palestinian population in East Jerusalem, including the right to education and the right to dignity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A federal judge has halted California’s groundbreaking “Truth in Recycling” law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled.

California’s recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies. The bill was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021 and was to go into effect on Oct. 4.

A coalition of farming, forestry, restaurant and packaging organizations sued the state in March, arguing the law violates their right to free speech. They argued that Senate Bill 343 operates as “government-imposed censorship.”

Judge William Hayes agreed that their challenge has merit, and on Tuesday ordered California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the defendant in the case, to pause enforcement of the law “until further order of the Court.”

The industry trade groups, which include the Dairy Institute of California, the Flexible Packaging Assn. and the Western Growers Assn., applauded the decision.

The coalition “will continue to press the case that California can strengthen recycling without censoring truthful information on packaging and without adding unnecessary and significant costs for California families and businesses,” Californians for Affordable Packaging said in a statement.

The “ruling is a significant win, not just for our members, but for every business that wants to give consumers accurate information about the products they buy,” said Julie Landry, vice president of government affairs at the American Forest & Paper Assn. “The Court recognized what we’ve said from the beginning: California cannot fix consumer confusion by restricting truthful speech.”

Advocates of reducing the use of plastic disagreed.

“The court got it wrong, and I’m confident that the state will ultimately prevail,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “SB 343 does not violate the First Amendment; it requires companies to tell the truth when they make recyclability claims. Suggesting that the First Amendment protects misleading environmental marketing is inconsistent with the basic principles of consumer protection that states like California have implemented for decades.”

In January, CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency, issued a report showing that less than 10% of most single-use plastic materials in the state were being recycled.

Even yogurt containers and margarine tubs — made of ubiquitous polypropylene, or #5 plastic — are being recycled at a rate of only 2% in the state, the report said. Only 5% of colored shampoo and detergent bottles, made from polyethylene, or #1 plastic, are getting recycled.

Reports on abysmally low rates of recycling for milk cartons and polystyrene had been widely shared even before that.

Plastic materials that can’t be recycled are typically sent to landfills or sometimes illegally shipped overseas, where they are burned or end up in landfills, rivers and waterways.

A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that nationwide, taxpayers, governments and businesses are spending between $9.8 billion and $13.3 billion per year cleaning up plastic litter, and almost $3 billion is spent by local governments on landfilling plastic.

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 in California in 2023.

Single-use plastics, and plastic waste more broadly, are considered a growing environmental and health problem. In recent decades, plastic waste has overwhelmed waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health.

“It is a terrible decision which denies consumers basic information needed to make informed choices,” said Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. “Given the long history of the plastics industry deceiving the public about plastics recycling, this is an especially bad outcome. It is a reminder that the plastics industry has enough money to fight even the most modest policy designed to protect people and the planet.”

Scott Bryce, the actor best known for originating the role of Craig Montgomery on the soap opera “As the World Turns,” has died. He was 68.

Bryce died Sunday evening “surrounded by his loving wife Jodi Stevens-Bryce and loving son Jackson Bryce,” his agent Ken Melamed told The Times by email on Tuesday. “He was beloved by all!”

The actor revealed last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 esophageal and stomach cancer in 2024.

“This evening my father lost his long-fought battle with cancer. What began as stage three esophageal cancer eventually spread and became brain tumors that took his life away from him,” Bryce’s son, Jackson, wrote in a tribute posted Sunday to Instagram. He said his father approached his treatments with “pride and courage, and an unshakable belief that somehow, everything would work out.”

“May his strength and relentless belief forever live within me,” he added. “He fought the hardest and most honorable fight I have ever witnessed.”

Born Jan. 6, 1958, in New York, Bryce followed in the footsteps of his actor parents. His father, Ed, portrayed Bill Bauer on the daytime drama “Guiding Light” for years, while his mother, Dorothy, was known for her role on the hospital soap “The Doctors.”

Bryce made his television debut as Craig Montgomery on CBS’ long-running soap “As the World Turns” in 1982. He received two Daytime Emmy nominations for his portrayal of the charming but ruthless businessman, whom he portrayed off and on from 1982 to 2008. The character was known for his ambition and mysterious business dealings but also had a reputation for being unlucky in love. One early romantic interest was Betsy Stewart, who was portrayed by Meg Ryan from 1982 to 1984.

Finn Carter, who played Montgomery’s wife, Sierra Esteban, on the show, shared a tribute to Bryce on Instagram Monday.

“My sadness knows no bounds. My gratitude for Scott knows even fewer,” Carter wrote. “Scott was the best husband a woman could ask for. As an actor he was fearless, kind, generous and forever looking for ways to grow. And what a sense of humor!”

Over the course of his decades-long career, Bryce appeared on shows such as “The Facts of Life,” “The Golden Girls,” “Murphy Brown,” “L.A. Law,” “The Good Fight,” “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

He also portrayed Mike McQueen, the father of a cheerleader (Leslie Bibb) on the millennial teen drama “Popular.” McQueen marries the mother of his daughter’s high school rival (Carly Pope) in the series, which ended on a cliffhanger in 2001 after its cancellation.

“When asked what he wanted people to remember about him, he said, ‘I was a one-take actor. Two takes, max,’” Jackson Bryce wrote in his tribute. “In working with Dick Wolf on NBC, directors would schedule him at the end of the day because they knew it wouldn’t take long.”

In addition to his onscreen work, Scott Bryce was a theater actor as well as a director and a producer, with credits including the 2010 television movie “Frederick Douglass, From Slavery to Freedom” and the satirical web series “Steamboat.”

“My dad also made sure I knew his greatest accomplishment that came at 50 years old, becoming a Dad,” son Jackson said in his tribute. “He is a part of everything I’ve done and everything I will do.”

The largest single piece of federal housing legislation to come out of Congress in at least a generation is is now law.

It happened in the middle of night early Saturday, without fanfare — or even President Trump’s signature — and it might be a while before many Californians notice its effects.

That’s because the bill, though politically monumental — both chambers approved it overwhelmingly — doesn’t do one big thing. Instead, it does a lot of little things. Individually, none of the bill’s 56 regulatory tweaks, pilot programs and low-cost loans and grants are likely to move the needle on the nation’s housing affordability woes, nor on California’s specifically.

Supporters hope that collectively, they just might.

Even the law’s path to enactment had an under-the-radar quality to it. The White House abruptly canceled a planned signing ceremony late last month, with Trump vowing not to sign the bill until Congress first passed his restrictive national voter ID proposal. That bill has stalled out in the Senate.

Still, Trump did not veto the housing package, so it automatically became law Saturday just after midnight, as per the Constitution.

For all that, supporters say this is still a big deal: a major, bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at boosting housing construction from a hyperpartisan legislative body that doesn’t typically touch the topic.

“We don’t often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, said at a news conference Thursday. “I think the last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you were not even alive. … It is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

That’s thanks in part to a growing caucus of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement that helped push the bill into law. Many hail from California, a state that has had more experience than most contending with wildly unaffordable housing. But the cause of making housing more affordable, and attributing high housing costs to a lack of sufficient supply, has become a national and bipartisan concern. Case in point: The bill originated as a joint proposal by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), an ardent conservative, and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), among the most liberal members of the Senate.

While the constituent parts of the bill are relatively narrow and none is specifically focused on California, experts highlight a few provisions that could leave a notable imprint on the state.

Build now (or else)

For high-cost cities that don’t build much housing, as in much of urban California, the federal bill includes a novel carrot and stick.

This portion of the bill would change the Community Development Block Grant, one of the largest sources of federal funding for affordable housing and local economic development. Pricey cities — defined through a variety of data benchmarks like median prices and vacancy rates — with a track record of under-building that continue to see below-average housing construction will have their grant funds cut by 10%. The savings will go to their municipal counterparts that build at a faster clip.

That’s likely to have “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have traditionally lagged behind” in adding housing supply, said David Garcia, the deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

The city of Los Angeles received $48.4 million in its last award from the block grant program in 2024, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data. San Francisco received $18.9 million.

Those numbers aren’t enough to make or break the budget of either city.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which taken across the country could still have a good impact! Little nudges add up.”

More dramatic than the number of dollars involved may be the precedent the policy sets. Even in California, where the state government has aggressively incentivized cities to plan for more housing development and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never punished municipalities for failing to actually grow — an outcome that may not always be under a city government’s control.

Such an idea would have been “inconceivable in previous congresses,” Garcia said.

Despite that, the provision hasn’t engendered much public opposition from local government groups yet. In an online summary, Michael Wallace, a lobbyist with the National League of Cities, applauded the overall housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing partnership with local governments over preemptions.” He singled out other provisions of the bill that provide expanded flexibility for Community Development Block Grant spending, new incentive programs for adding supply, and new supports for local urban planning.

Chassis change

Manufactured housing units are often colloquially referred to as mobile homes, but they don’t tend to move around much. Built on assembly lines and shipped to where they’re needed, these naturally affordable houses — the likes of which lawmakers across California and the United States claim we need in droves — are often placed upon permanent foundations where a fewer than 1 in 10 ever move again.

Even so, the federal building code applied to manufactured housing includes a costly, vestigial reference to its mobile origins: a permanent chassis.

A giant steel frame with removable axles and wheels, the chassis ostensibly exists to make it easier to pick up and move a manufactured house by truck. In practice, it serves as a 10- to 12-inch-thick floor beneath the floor. Because it cannot be removed upon delivery, it just serves as “dead space and wasted money,” said Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade group. Aside from adding thousands of dollars in added costs per unit, it also makes it harder for manufactured units to be stacked into double story homes or multifamily apartment buildings.

The federal housing bill removes the permanent chassis requirement, something that manufacturers and some housing policy experts have been pushing for since the mid-1980s.

“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said at the Thursday news conference.
Maxcy said he doesn’t expect the end of the chassis requirement to trigger an overnight building boom in the manufactured home industry. But especially in California, where, due to the high price of land, new single-family homes are more likely to be built stacked on small lots, the regulatory change “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”

Recovering after disaster

In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal dollars have come and gone, Congress has provided communities with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery program. Over the last three decades, the program has spent more than $100 billion on the long-term work of recovery, like home construction, infrastructure repair and rental and relocation assistance. That money tends to be reserved for low-income people and communities “who are not going to bounce back without the funds,” said Marion McFadden, who used to run the program under the Biden administration and now works at the disaster preparation and recovery consulting company IEM.

Unfortunately for California, the program only kind of exists. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been stood up and funded on an ad hoc basis, one appropriation bill at a time. That presents a challenge for communities planning in the middle of post-disaster planning. It also means the rules that govern the program — when the money goes out, to whom, under what conditions and for what purposes — are redrafted with each political administration. That’s had the effect of slowing things down considerably. No program funding has gone to Los Angeles in the wake of the 2025 fire storms, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Congress has yet to appropriate any.

The new housing bill would officially write the program into law for at least three years.

“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” McFadden said.

What the housing bill doesn’t do: provide fresh funding. Disaster-prone communities will need to wait for Congress to take that up later.

A ‘bottleneck’ removed

For the last two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been turning to the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to help repair and upgrade their aging stock of increasingly dilapidated public housing. The program works by switching up funding sources in a way that gives locals more flexibility to borrow money and attract private investment dollars.

Until the new law took effect this weekend, the federal government was only authorized to permit 455,000 of these conversions. The law raises the cap by an additional 100,000.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years and that bottleneck just got removed,” said Russell with the San Diego Housing Federation.
Not all affordable housing advocates are cheering the development. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expansion of the program on the grounds that the change in funding source could weaken existing tenant protections. It’s unclear whether and to what extent that might be true. A study from last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to more evictions.

Wall Street out of suburbia

If you’ve heard only one thing about this housing bill, it’s that it bans “large institutional investors” from buying up more single family homes.

Caveats apply in the final version of the law. The bill defines “large” as any of a number of business structures with control over more than 350 single-family homes. It doesn’t apply retrospectively, so current investors with portfolios brimming with houses need not divest. Exemptions exist for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other major investors do not play a significant role in the housing market, the effect is likely to be muted.

The measure “takes a hyper-salient issue for lots of people across the country and does a pretty modest intervention to address it,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy advisor to President Biden.

Even so, the provision has plenty of bipartisan appeal. Earlier this year, Trump called for an even stricter crackdown on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit the same week.

The anti-investor language was considerably watered down from earlier this year, when a related provision threatened to undermine “build-to-rent” projects: well-financed subdevelopments of single-family homes reserved for renters. That prompted a revolt by many developers and YIMBY activists who had otherwise enthusiastically supported the bill, who argued that such communities are one of the fastest growing sources of the U.S. housing stock and provide some of the few opportunities for renters to live in suburban-style, family-sized housing.

After the build-to-rent provision was left on the cutting room floor of Congress, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who is now running for Congress, introduced a bill that picked it back up again. SB 880 would have banned the bundled sale of multiple single-family homes, striking at the heart of the build-to-rent business model. That bill died in the Assembly Judiciary committee in late June.

Christopher writes for CalMatters.

July 11 (UPI) — A housing bill passed by Congress became law at midnight Saturday when President Donald Trump refused to sign it, but didn’t veto it.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a comprehensive law that was designed to make housing more affordable and increase housing supply. Trump refused to sign it because he wanted Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill that would require those registering to vote to provide proof that they are U.S. citizens.

But Congress doesn’t have the votes to pass the SAVE Act.

On Friday, Trump announced that he again would not sign the ROAD to Housing bill.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” he said on Truth Social.

The housing bill includes measures that modernize building standards, encourage renovating older homes, encourage communities to build more housing with funding and grant programs, local governments to reform restrictive zoning policies around building housing and effectively ban private equity from buying up single-family homes. Critics of the bill say it doesn’t go far enough, but they acknowledge it’s a good first step.

“This bill becoming law is a genuine milestone — and I don’t use that word lightly,” Dennis Shea of the Bipartisan Policy Center told the BBC. “Getting Congress to move on housing supply and affordability has been a long time coming, and the American people made clear they were ready for it.”

Earlier this year, a BPC survey found that 89% of voters wanted congressional action to make housing more affordable.

Congressional leaders had planned a bill signing ceremony last month, ready to show voters that they are trying to bring down costs, a key issue to Americans. But hours before it was scheduled to begin, Trump canceled it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized Trump’s ongoing refusal to sign Friday.

“At the stroke of midnight, a huge bipartisan bill to lower housing costs became law without the President’s signature. Why did President Trump sit on the landmark housing bill for more than 2 weeks? Maybe because there was nothing in it for him personally – no gold-encrusted ballroom, no Qatari jet, no $2 billion crypto deal. Nothing in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing except ways to make housing more affordable,” she said in a statement. “Donald Trump couldn’t pick up the pen because he just isn’t interested in lowering costs for American families.”

At 4 a.m. Saturday, she posted on X: “BREAKING: the clock struck midnight and our bipartisan housing bill is now law. Trump refused to sign it, but he couldn’t stop it.”

“This law is GROUNDBREAKING. It will build more housing, bring down costs, and for the first time, stop private equity from buying up homes,” she said.

Trump had called the housing bill “so unimportant” and “a yawn.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., defended the bill without criticizing Trump’s comments.

He said, “the president has a lot going on, and I think it’s safe to say he’s not read through every line of that piece of legislation.

“What he was saying is in comparison to ensuring election integrity, which is now represented by the SAVE America Act, nothing is as important,” Johnson said. “That’s not to say that there are not also incredibly important issues, and the cost of living and affordability is among them. It’s top of mind.”

“So I hope he does sign it. If he doesn’t, it’s still law; we’ll still celebrate it,” Johnson said. “But he’s trying to make a point and I think he’s making it very effectively.”

On Friday, a group of retired judges stepped off a tour bus in a ritzy Michigan suburb after three days of barnstorming through corn fields, cities and coal towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania. They carried with them a message.

In courthouses and public squares, they marked the nation’s 250th anniversary with a dire warning: The rule of law in America is in grave danger. They delivered a similar message at a library in Grosse Pointe just outside Detroit — the last stop on an extraordinary tour to defend judicial independence and bolster trust in courts.

Americans’ confidence in the court system and democracy has dipped in recent years. The country is more polarized, and President Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the fairness of the judicial system.

Some judges on the tour said in phone interviews this week that the United States was at a precipice.

“Looking back in history, we have teetered,” former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly said. “This is a moment where we can decide to reinstill those beliefs that we are a country of laws and not of men.”

Judges step off the bench

The four-day tour through the Rust Belt is a sharp departure for a typically reserved and insular branch of government. Federal judges in particular largely limit their comments to the courtroom and written decisions, focusing on the facts of individual cases.

But that restraint is loosening amid a barrage of attacks by Trump and other White House officials, the administration’s rampant defiance of U.S. district court orders and its expansive view of executive power. Trump has called a district judge who ruled against one of his immigration moves “crooked” and suggested with no evidence that Supreme Court justices who struck down his tariffs were motivated by foreign interests.

More federal judges have recently begun talking about receiving death threats and profane messages, though they have not blamed Trump or any other officials. Some have blasted administration policies in sharply worded opinions that strayed beyond the legal dispute before them. Even U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has weighed in.

In an appearance in March, Roberts said personal criticism of federal judges was dangerous and had to stop. The rare rebuke from the head of the nation’s top court came two days after Trump’s remark about a “crooked” judge, though Roberts didn’t mention Trump or anyone else by name.

The U.S. Marshals Service reported 564 threats against federal judges in the government fiscal year that ended in September, up from 509 the year before.

“I don’t want to say we have moved into an era of lawlessness, but it sometimes feels that way,” said former U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts, who joined the bus tour in Michigan.

Timothy Lewis, another former federal judge on the tour, said his concerns about the politicization of the judicial branch reached a tipping point a decade ago, when Senate Republicans thwarted President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Today, the rule of law is facing an “existential threat” from an ongoing breakdown of norms, according to Lewis, who spent seven years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“I have fundamental concerns,” he said, “about where we are headed as a nation.”

Their route has been varied

The tour started Tuesday in the western Pennsylvania town of Greensburg — once the hub of a thriving coal industry that now lures visitors from nearby Pittsburgh for highland recreation and a historic downtown.

Judges mingled with customers at a coffee shop before speaking at the domed, ornate Westmoreland County Courthouse. Then it was off to Washington, also in western Pennsylvania. The town of 13,000 people, where about 15% of the population is Black, was a key stop on the Underground Railroad and a regional base for the civil rights movement.

From there, the bus headed west for events Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, and the city of Wooster in Amish country. The judges stopped at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on the way. They spent Thursday in Cleveland before circling Lake Erie north to Michigan.

The two groups that planned the tour — dubbed “Justice in Motion” — say they were inspired by a similar campaign in Poland in 2021 after that country’s governing party took control of key judicial institutions.

Independent Polish judges visited scores of towns to promote the rule of law and teach voters about the country’s constitution. The U.S. tour also aims to educate people.

An effort to combat misinformation about what they do

Maureen O’Connor, a former chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, said judges risk ceding the narrative about their roles and motives to “voices of misinformation” if they don’t speak up.

A letter she received years ago, and still keeps, reminds her of that danger. The writer accused O’Connor, a Republican, of betraying her party when she repeatedly struck down Republican-drawn legislative maps as illegal gerrymanders. “There was just a basic misunderstanding of what my role was as a judge,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor is among roughly 30 judges, including two former federal judges and two current federal judges, who participated in the tour. One of the federal judges was nominated by a Democrat, the other three by Republicans. The state judges, some of whom are also still on the bench, represented both parties.

They were joined by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, former Ohio attorneys general and a few lawyers. The event was put together by the Democracy Rising Collaborative and Keep Our Republic, nonpartisan advocacy groups.

Organizers say they chose stops that would get the judges in front of as many people as possible to build connections and trust. The judges embraced that mission.

“The lifeblood of the judiciary is public confidence,” Donnelly, the former Ohio Supreme Court justice, said. “If you lose that, it’s very difficult to get it back.”

Thanawala writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump will let the bipartisan housing bill approved by Congress become law without his signature, saying Friday that he was refusing to put his name on it because of the little progress made in passing a strict voter ID bill that he has been pushing.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump posted on social media.

Trump had 10 days until the Friday deadline to sign the bill, issue a veto, or allow the measure to take effect without his signature. He has chosen to let the measure become law without his express approval, undercutting his administration’s claims that he considers it a priority to combat inflation.

Trump’s rejection of the bipartisan housing legislation exacerbates tensions with his own party in a midterm election year and cuts short their efforts to address a key voter concern about rising costs. His post comes more than a week after he canceled plans to sign the bipartisan legislation, announcing he was using it as leverage in his push for a strict voter ID bill.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims to lower the cost of housing and spur more home construction. It’s the broadest federal effort in decades to address America’s housing affordability problems, as state and local regulations have made it difficult to build in many of the communities that are also sources of job growth and economic opportunity. White House economists estimated earlier this year a national shortage of 10 million homes and the bill could help to close a portion of that gap.

But Trump called the bill “a yawn” and “so unimportant” compared to legislation that would require proof of citizenship for all voters.

He surprised Republican lawmakers on June 24, when, shortly before a planned signing ceremony at the Capitol, he announced he would not approve the bill until lawmakers first passed the voting legislation.

That bill, the SAVE America Act, doesn’t have enough Republican support to pass.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said after submitting the housing bill to the White House that he told Trump he should get the “fattest black marker you have, and sign your name really big on that.”

“I hope he does sign it,” Johnson told reporters at the time. “If he doesn’t, it’s still law. We’ll still celebrate it.”

He said he also understood Trump was trying to make a point that the elections bill is the top priority. “And I think he’s making it very effectively,” Johnson said.

Still, Trump’s decision not to sign the bill gave Democrats an opening to criticize him on the issue of affordability.

“His priorities couldn’t be clearer: higher cost for families and more power for himself,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on X.

The housing bill passed the Senate on an 85-5 vote and the House approved it with an 358-32 vote.

That legislation seeks to cut federal housing rules, slim-down environmental reviews, make it faster to build homes and limit the ability of corporations to buy single-family homes.

The bill does not address all of the causes of the country’s housing woes, including a shortage of construction workers, climbing insurance costs and wages that have not risen fast enough for renters and buyers.

But the bill has drawn support from the real estate industry and housing advocates.

The U.S. housing market has been a driver of recent affordability challenges as skyrocketing prices have kept aspiring buyers out of the market. The National Association of Realtors said Thursday that the median sales price increased 1.8% in June from a year earlier to $440,600, an all-time high on data going back to 1999.

Price and Boak write for the Associated Press. AP reporter Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

CONCORD, N.H. — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and their own personal hardships, their lawyer said.

“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”

The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, took on Trump’s executive order last year, amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law on banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had granted a court order allowing them to play as the case proceeded.

For Tirrell, it meant being able to keep playing on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it was having a chance to try out for different sports.

Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college athletic teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. It also said that barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.

One teen and her family decided to move from New Hampshire

Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer following proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18.

“Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmelle’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”

Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies limiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limiting which school bathrooms transgender people can use, as well as sports restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender.

“The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.

“But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”

The other teen gave up playing soccer at high school

Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.

“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.

It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.

“Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are we walking into, and we never kind of knew,” she said. “We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season.”

She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.

Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, she said.

“Parker didn’t talk about it a lot, but I think she could see that stress for everybody — for her, for her teammates, for her coaches,” Sara Tirrell said. “She felt kind of bad about pulling them all into that circus again. And so she ultimately said, ‘This isn’t fun anymore and I don’t want to do it.’”

Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.”

Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” Zach Tirrell said.

In the past, Parker also played soccer in a recreation league and could still do so.

“But I think it all kind of still sort of weighs on her,” her mother said. “It’s the same group of kids that she plays with who, honestly, have been very supportive and love to have her on the team and have expressed that to her many times over. But I think she still has that worry in her brain around, ‘What are other people going to say and do if I show up at a game?’”

Parker’s parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said. “In some ways she’s had to grow up a lot faster than some of her peers.”

McCormack writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J., contributed to this report.

Fox News declined to broadcast an ad Sunday about the violence that law-enforcement members faced as they tried to stop the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to the creators of the political commercial.

“We couldn’t have fathomed in our wildest imaginations that even a Fox News would reject an ad that simply condemns the insurrection, and condemns people who support the insurrection,” said Ben Meiselas, one of the co-founders of MeidasTouch, the liberal Political Action Committee that created the 60-second ad. “What Fox has really become is a fascist echo chamber gatekeeper for their base.”

Broadcast and cable networks have discretion in refusing to air ads by political campaigns and advocacy groups. A Fox News spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Meiselas and his two brothers, Brett and Jordan, said they placed the ad buy as they have in the past, but were informed over the phone on Friday that the cable network would not air the ad and were not given a reason. Fox News has never before refused to air one of their ads without offering suggestions for edits, they said.

The commercial features law-enforcement officers testifying in Congress and speaking to the media about their experiences during the insurrection, including getting sprayed with bear mace, engaging in hand-to-hand combat and being called “traitors.”

“It’s been very difficult seeing elected officials and other individuals whitewash the events of that day or downplay what happened,” DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone says in a clip from a CNN interview as images of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP elected officials are shown on screen.

The ad ends with block letters that say” “The GOP Betrayed America. We Will Never Forget.”

The ad has gone viral on social media, racking up more than 1 million views on Twitter.

Fox News is the target of multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits by voting system and software makers over its coverage of the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic accused Fox News of irresponsibly broadcasting falsehoods that their technology and equipment were used to rig the election. The fraud claims are among the factors that led to the insurrection as lawmakers were voting to certify the election results.

Fanone, who suffered a heart attack after rioters beat him with a flagpole and repeatedly stunned with him with his Taser gun on Jan. 6, is among the law-enforcement members who have been vocal critics of Republican lawmakers who blocked the creation of a commission to study what happened that day.

The House of Representatives approved a plan to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection on a 252-175 vote; but in the Senate, it received 54 votes in late May, six shy of the number required to bring the proposal up for debate.

A spokeswoman for President Biden on Thursday ruled out creating a presidential commission to study the matter, aligning the White House with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the belief that such an inquiry needed to be instigated by Congress.

MeidasTouch booked nearly $185,000 of air time to play the ad on Fox News between June 6 and 15, starting with Chris Wallace’s Sunday show and continuing for seven days on “Fox and Friends” as well as two spots on daytime programs and one more on Wallace’s show next weekend.

Brett Meiselas noted that many shows on the network routinely talk about “cancel culture.”

“The fact they want to cancel and censor the voices of law enforcement who bravely guarded the Capitol. It’s the height of hypocrisy, and it’s un-American,” he said.

MeidasTouch is a liberal political action committee formed in 2020 by the three brothers, who have notable ties to Hollywood. Their father is a prominent attorney who represents musicians including Lady Gaga.

Ben Meiselas is a lawyer whose clients include former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Brett Meiselas was an editor on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show. Jordan Meiselas, a former marketer, is now working full time on the PAC.

The PAC made anti-Trump videos during the 2020 presidential race and supported Democrats during the special Georgia Senate races earlier this year. The PAC did not receive as much attention as anti-Trump groups such as the Lincoln Project; it spent about $4.2 million last year.

July 10 (UPI) — A bipartisan housing bill that swept the House and Senate is set to become law at midnight Friday if President Donald Trump doesn’t veto it, and he said Friday morning on social media that he won’t sign it.

The 21st Century Road to Housing Act was passed on June 29 by a wide margin of Democrats and Republicans in both chambers of Congress, but the president canceled a signing ceremony at the last minute and said he wouldn’t sign it until Congress passed Trump’s pet project, the SAVE America Act, which they don’t have the support to do.

On Friday, he posted on Truth Social that he refuses to sign it.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” he wrote.

He didn’t mention a veto, but it’s still a possibility.

“The Act states, quite simply, that to Vote a person must show PHOTO VOTER I.D., PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP, AND THAT THERE WILL BE NO MORE CROOKED, CORRUPT, & DESTABILIZING MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPTIONS for Military, Disabled, Illness, and Travel!). THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it! If the Dumocrats, or any RINO (or worse!) working with them, do not allow a positive Vote on SAVE AMERICA, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and pass this, and every other Bill that true Republicans have ever dreamt of (In addition to the upcoming Budget BOMB and the 1929 catastrophic style DEBT CEILING BILL!). The Dumocrats will TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, if and when they ever get the chance to do so, in their very first hour – And I will no longer be able to call them Dumocrats again! The title of DUMB will revert to the Republicans who allowed this horrible calamity to happen to our Party, and our Nation, itself! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote.

If the president vetoes the bill, Congress will likely have the votes to override it. It would need a two-thirds majority to pass the override in the House and Senate.

“This is the exact kind of bill they want to point to and say Republicans are working on issues that their voters care about, and Democrats would want the same,” Julian Zelizer, a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University, told The Washington Post. “That’s not the signal that the administration is sending.”

Since the bill passed and Trump refused to sign it, he has called it “a yawn.”

“To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, everything is a big yawn,” he said.

The SAVE Act is an election bill that would require voters to prove they are citizens when registering to vote. Critics argue that it would disenfranchise too many voters because of the types of proof it would require.

The housing bill includes measures that modernize building standards, encourage renovating older homes, encourage communities to build more housing with funding and grant programs, local governments to reform restrictive zoning policies around building housing and effectively ban private equity from buying up single-family homes. Critics of the bill say it doesn’t go far enough, but they acknowledge it’s a good first step.

It’s the first bipartisan measure that’s passed this Congress.

Some Democrats have been publicly pushing the president to sign the bill.

“It’s been sitting on President Trump’s desk long enough. Sign the bill,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., posted on X.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said on X, “Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass a bill to build more housing and stop hedge funds from buying up single-family homes, but Trump is holding it hostage. He needs to stop playing games and sign the bill so more Americans can finally afford homes.”