leadership

BOSTON — Casting his life as an embodiment of the nation’s patriotism and principles, Sen. John F. Kerry vowed Thursday night to rebuild alliances and restore “trust and credibility to the White House” as he concluded the Democratic National Convention with a sweeping account of his personal story.

Seconds into his 45-minute speech, Kerry summed up the theme of the four-day event and the message he planned to carry into the fall campaign against President Bush.

“We’re here tonight united in one purpose,” he said, speaking in a hometown convention hall awash in red, white and blue. “To make America stronger at home and respected in the world.”

Questioning the strength of the economy, Kerry said, “We can do better, and we will.” Addressing terrorists around the world, he said, “You will lose and we will win.”

The senator from Massachusetts, unfamiliar to millions of voters despite more than two years of steady campaigning, had the challenge of delivering the most important speech of his 22-year political career. While polls have showed many voters are dissatisfied with Bush, many are not yet convinced of Kerry’s ability to lead the nation.

His closing speech to the convention and the roof-shaking response sent the nominee off to a battle against Bush that polls indicated had been a virtual dead heat for months.

Kerry and his running mate, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, are to set out today on a two-week, cross-country campaign swing that takes them through 21 states via plane, train, bus and boat.

After spending the week out of sight at his Texas ranch, Bush plans to resume his campaign today with a bus tour through four swing states, and Vice President Dick Cheney is to continue his campaigning in the West.

Kerry, working his way through a text he spent weeks drafting in longhand, stirred the 4,000-plus convention delegates with an address that was poetic in parts and blunt in others, broad in biography but stinting in policy details.

“I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war,” Kerry said, reminding the audience of his military experience in Vietnam. “I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a secretary of defense who will listen to the best advice of the military leaders. And will appoint an attorney general who will uphold the Constitution of the United States.”

On a night that bristled with martial talk and patriotic imagery, Kerry also sought to seize back the symbolism of the Stars and Stripes, which Republicans captured as their political totem in the 1988 presidential campaign, when they used patriotism as an issue to defeat the last Democratic nominee from Massachusetts, former Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Kerry pointed to a huge American flag painted overhead, and recalled the one that flew tattered from the gun turret on his aluminum Swift boat in Vietnam. “That flag doesn’t belong to any president,” Kerry said to roars, which turned to chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A!”

“It doesn’t belong to any ideology,” Kerry shouted. “It doesn’t belong to any party. It belongs to all the American people.” Conjuring memories of World War II, the Cold War and the civil rights movement — epochal events that have shaped the country, — Kerry said: “We have it in our power to change the world again. But only if we are true to our ideals — and that starts by telling the truth to the American people.”

Turning around a line from Bush’s 2000 campaign, Kerry continued, “That is my first pledge to you tonight: As president, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House.”

The response was ear-splitting inside the FleetCenter arena, just a few miles from Kerry’s residence on elegant Beacon Hill. People hollered as they filled the aisles to capacity, perched on ledges, hung over railings and sat on the floor of balconies, their legs dangling over the edge. Outside, hundreds more were turned away under the fire marshal’s order.

Kerry’s speech was intended to be more personal than policy-oriented, reflecting a strategic sense that it was most important for voters to develop a gut-level sense of the Democratic nominee.

So even as he mentioned his proposals for job creation, pledged to expand the availability of healthcare and promised a middle-class tax cut, the address broke no new policy ground.

Instead, Kerry sought to wrap his principles in a narrative of his 60 years.

He spoke of his decorated military service as a Navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. “I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can’t tell friend from foe,” he said.

“I know what they go through when they’re on patrol at night and they don’t know what’s coming around the next bend. I know what it’s like to write letters home telling your family everything’s all right when you’re just not sure that that’s true.”

As president, he said, he would put into practice the lessons he learned from that unpopular war. “Before you go to battle, you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say, ‘I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm’s way.’ ”

Kerry cracked the book on earlier chapters in his life, speaking of his parents, the Cub Scouts and “my first model airplane, my first baseball mitt and my first bicycle.”

“What I learned has stayed with me for a lifetime,” he said of living in occupied Berlin, where his father worked in the Foreign Service. “I saw the gratitude of people toward the United States for what we have done … I learned what it meant to be America at our best. I learned the pride of our freedom. And I am determined now to restore that pride to all who look to America.”

He was vague about Iraq, reflecting the political bind he faced. Kerry voted to support the March 2003 invasion, which many Democrats opposed. Since then he has criticized Bush’s conduct of the war.

Kerry reiterated his call to reduce the U.S. cost in lives and aid by enlisting help from the country’s allies, but he said that could never come about under Bush.

“That won’t happen until we have a president who restores America’s respect and leadership so we don’t have to go it alone in the world,” Kerry said. “And we need to rebuild our alliances so we can get the terrorists before they get us.”

Much of the speech was an effort to turn away the criticisms that Republicans had leveled in tens of millions of dollars in advertising since Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination in March — that he was outside the mainstream, flip-flopped on issues and lacked the toughness to be commander in chief.

Latching on to a phrase often used by Bush and Cheney, Kerry sought to define “family values” in terms of economic stability.

“We value jobs where, when you put in a week’s work, you can actually pay your bills, provide for your children, lift up the quality of your life,” Kerry said. “We value an America where the middle class is not being squeezed, but doing better.”

Kerry said he would repeal the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 a year, “so we can invest in healthcare, education and job creation.”

He pledged to close the tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping jobs overseas, and vowed to cut the federal deficit in half in four years by imposing a “pay-as-you-go” system of federal budgeting.

He promised he would not raise taxes on middle-class Americans, calling that a false charge put out by Republicans. “Let me say straight out what I will do as president: I will cut middle-class taxes. I will reduce the burden on small businesses.”

Other issues such as healthcare and energy received passing mention. Kerry drew one of his biggest ovations by declaring: “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation — not the Saudi royal family.”

Kerry has made energy independence a central part of his domestic platform, calling for promotion of alternative and renewable energy sources so that by 2020, Americans would be getting 20% of their electricity from those fuels. He also has proposed a $20-billion fund to research new forms of energy.

Kerry presented vague details of his healthcare plan. He said it would allow Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and allow them to select their own doctors under any reform plan he approved.

Kerry has proposed extending coverage to almost three-fourths of uninsured Americans by allowing the working poor to obtain insurance through the existing federal-state partnership that covers children in their families. He would also seek to reduce insurance premiums for those with insurance by having the federal government assume the cost of the most expensive cases.

On foreign policy, Kerry pledged to wage war only as a last resort. But he said, “Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and a certain response. I never will never give any nation or any institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.”

He acknowledged those who had criticized him “for seeing complexities.”

“And I do,” he said. “Because some issues just aren’t all that simple.”

Swiping at Bush, Kerry went on: “Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn’t make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn’t make it so. And proclaiming ‘mission accomplished’ certainly doesn’t make it so.”’

As president, Kerry said, he would “not evade or equivocate,” but would immediately adopt the recommendations of the 9/11 commission to revamp the nation’s foreign policy and restructure its intelligence services.

Even before Kerry spoke, the last night of the Democrats’ four-day gathering included some of the convention’s most pointed attacks on Bush’s handling of terrorism and the war in Iraq. One after another, speakers tore into the president’s credibility and blamed him for souring relations with U.S. allies.

“Because we waged the war in Iraq virtually alone, we are responsible for the aftermath virtually alone,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who is one of Kerry’s closest foreign policy advisors. “And the price is clear: Nearly 90 percent of the troops and the casualties are American. And because the intelligence was hyped to justify going to war, America’s credibility and security have suffered a terrible blow.”

In one of the few departures from the week’s script, home-state Rep. Barney Frank delivered an impassioned defense of gay marriage.

“It is the Democratic Party — as opposed to our very right-wing Republican opponents — who support that agenda … of allowing us to marry, of allowing us to go forward as human beings with the rights of everyone else,” said Frank, who is openly gay and went beyond remarks vetted by the Kerry campaign.

The Massachusetts congressman, however, was consigned to an early speaking slot, well before the national television networks tuned in for Kerry’s speech.

The convention ended on the positive note Kerry had promised. He challenged Bush to join him in waging their campaigns as “optimists, not just opponents.”

Invoking the nation’s spirit of discovery — the first flight at Kitty Hawk, man’s mission to the moon, the invention of the computer chip — Kerry put forth a lyrical challenge: “What if?”

“What if we find a breakthrough to cure Parkinson’s, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and AIDS? What if we have a president who believes in science, so we can unleash the wonders of discovery like stem-cell research to treat illness and save millions of lives?

“What if we … make sure all our children are safe in the afternoons after school? And what if we have a leadership that’s as good as the American dream, so that bigotry and hatred never again steal the hope and future of any American?”

Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Janet Hook, Maria L. La Ganga, Robert Schiff and Stephen W. Stromberg contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Politics vs. other stuff

Americans have more than politics on their minds these days. The top five Yahoo searches so far this week: Tour de France, Maria Sharapova, right, Britney Spears, NASCAR, and Usher. (The political satire Web cartoon at JibJab.com that lampoons President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry was No. 6, but the real Kerry and the Democrats didn’t crack the top 15.)

Source: Yahoo

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Convening on a budget

Although convention costs had risen steadily since 1984 as both parties’ political fests grew more elaborate, this year the Democrats reversed the trend. Their convention costs:

1984: $18.1 million

1988: $26.7 million

1992: $38.3 million

1996: $47.4 million

2000: $85.4 million

2004: $64.4 million

SOURCE: Campaign Finance Institute

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Safety team

Securing the convention involved no fewer than 27 agencies. In addition to biggies such as the Boston police and the Secret Service, those keeping politicians and others safe included: Massachusetts Turnpike Authority; North American Aerospace Defense Command; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; U.S. Northern Command; Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation and Construction.

SOURCE: United States Secret Service

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History on the block

Scores of vintage convention items have been put up for auction on EBay. Among them:

* A Georgia state seal from the 1912 Democratic National Convention, at $1,999.99

* A 2000 tambourine, right, that reads “Tipper Rocks,” at $9.99

* $3,000 worth of domain names in the event of a second vote recount, including UncountedVote.com

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Secret Service’s secret out

Kerry and Edwards enjoy at least one trapping of the presidency and vice presidency — Secret Service protection and cool code names.

John Kerry Minuteman

John Edwards Speedway

Teresa Heinz Kerry Mahogany

SOURCE: National Journal

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Plugged In

The Democratic National Convention website has turned into a virtual hot spot. Dems2004.org has received 50 million hits during the convention this week — more Monday and Tuesday alone than during the entire 2000 event in Los Angeles. There were 341,700 requests for live video streams in the 24-hour period after Sen. John Edwards’ speech.

SOURCE: Democratic National Convention Committee

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Eventually, Nov. 2

The Democratic National Convention has come and gone. The GOP’s is just weeks away — from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 in New York City. After that, debates will await:

Kerry vs. Bush: Sept. 30 in Miami;

Oct. 8 in St. Louis; Oct. 13 in Tempe, Ariz.

Edwards vs. Cheney: Oct. 5 in Cleveland

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A TALE OF RESCUE

“The hamster was never quite right after that.”

ALEXANDRA KERRY

Telling the Democratic National Convention about how her father, Sen. John F. Kerry, did CPR on a family pet that had fallen overboard.

The Trump administration has sanctioned members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA), accusing them of undermining peace efforts.

The move comes as more Western governments are openly criticising Israel, calling on the country to end the war on Gaza and move towards a two-state solution.

More countries have also announced their intention to recognise Palestinian statehood under certain conditions, including the disarmament of Hamas and PA reform.

So what’s behind the US sanctions?

Are they a bargaining chip to further peace talks, or a sign of more hurdles ahead?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Xavier Abu Eid – Former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization

Eli Clifton – Senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Firas El Echi – Journalist and host of the Here’s Why podcast

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Julia Wick, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Here you thought charter reform would be boring.

A 13-member citizens commission is just getting started on the painstaking, generally unsexy work of poring through the Los Angeles City Charter, the city’s governing document, and coming up with strategies for improving it. Yet already, the commission has had a leadership battle, heard allegations of shady dealings and fielded questions about whether it’s been set up to fail.

But first, let’s back up.

Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and former Council President Paul Krekorian chose a collection of volunteers to serve on the Charter Reform Commission, which is charged with exploring big and small changes to the City Charter.

The commission is part of a much larger push for reform sparked by the city’s 2022 audio leak scandal and a string of corruption cases involving L.A. officials. The list of potential policy challenges the commission faces is significant.

Good government types want the new commission to endorse ranked-choice voting, with Angelenos selecting their elected officials by ranking candidates in numerical order. Advocacy groups want to see a much larger City Council. Some at City Hall want clarity on what to do with elected officials who are accused of wrongdoing but have not been convicted.

“You are not one of those commissions that shows up every few years to fix a few things here or there,” said Raphael Sonenshein, who served nearly 30 years ago as executive director of the city’s appointed Charter Reform Commission, while addressing the new commission last week. “You actually have a bigger responsibility than that.”

The real work began on July 16, when the commission took up the question of who should be in charge. Many thought the leadership post would immediately go to Raymond Meza, who had already been serving as the interim chair.

Instead, the panel found itself deadlocked.

Meza is a high-level staffer at Service Employees International Union Local 721, the powerful public employee union that represents thousands of city workers and has been a big-money spender in support of Bass and many other elected city officials.

Meza, who was appointed by Bass earlier this year, picked up five votes. But so did Ted Stein, a real estate developer who has served on an array of city commissions — planning, airport, harbor — but hadn’t been on a volunteer city panel in nearly 15 years. Faced with a stalemate, charter commissioners decided to try again a few days later, when they were joined by two additional members.

By then, some reform advocates were up in arms over Stein, arguing that he was bringing a record of scandal to the commission. They sent the commissioners news articles pointing out that Stein had, among other things, resigned from the airport commission in 2004 amid two grand jury investigations into whether city officials had tied the awarding of airport contracts to campaign contributions.

Stein denied those allegations in 2004, calling them “false, defamatory and unsubstantiated.” Last week, before the second leadership vote, he shot back at his critics, noting that two law enforcement agencies — the U.S. attorney’s office and the L.A. County district attorney’s office — declined to pursue charges against him. The Ethics Commission also did not bring a case over his airport commission activities.

“I was forced to protect my good name by having to hire an attorney and having to spend over $200,000 in legal fees [over] something where I had done nothing wrong,” he told his fellow commissioners. The city reimbursed Stein for the vast majority of those legal costs.

Stein accused Meza of orchestrating some of the outside criticism — which Meza later denied. And Stein spent so much time defending his record that he had little time to say why he should be elected.

Still, the vote was close, with Meza securing seven votes and Stein picking up five.

Meza called the showdown “unfortunate.” L.A. voters, he said, “want to see the baton passed to a new generation of people.” The 40-year-old Montecito Heights resident made clear that he supports an array of City Charter changes.

In an interview, Meza said he’s “definitely in favor” of ranked-choice voting, arguing that it would increase voter turnout. He also supports an increase in the number of City Council members but wouldn’t say how many. And he wants to ensure that vacant positions are filled more quickly at City Hall, calling it an issue that “absolutely needs to be addressed.”

That last item has long been a concern for SEIU Local 721, where Meza works as deputy chief of staff. Nevertheless, Meza said he would, to an extent, set aside the wishes of his union during the commission’s deliberations.

“On the commission, I am an individual resident of the city,” he said.

Stein, for his part, told The Times that he only ran for the leadership post out of concern over the commission’s tight timeline. The commission must submit its proposal to the council next spring — a much more aggressive schedule than the one required of two charter reform commissions nearly 30 years ago.

Getting through so many complex issues in such a brief period calls for an experienced hand, said Stein, who is 76 and lives in Encino.

Stein declined to say where he stands on council expansion and ranked-choice voting. He said he’s already moved on from the leadership vote and is ready to dig into the commission’s work.

Meza, for his part, said he has heard the concerns about the aggressive schedule. But he remains confident the commission will be successful.

“I don’t think we have the best conditions,” he said. “But I do not believe we’ve been set up to fail. I’m very confident the commissioners will do what’s needed to turn in a good product.”

State of play

— STRICTLY BUSINESS: A group of L.A. business leaders launched a ballot proposal to repeal the city’s much-maligned gross receipts tax, saying it would boost the city’s economy and lower prices for Angelenos. The mayor and several other officials immediately panned the idea, saying it would deprive the city’s yearly budget of $800 million, forcing cuts to police, firefighters and other services.

— INCHING FORWARD: Meanwhile, another ballot proposal from the business community — this one backed by airlines and the hotel industry — nudged closer to reality. Interim City Clerk Petty Santos announced that the proposed referendum on the $30-per-hour tourism minimum wage had “proceeded to the next step,” with officials now examining and verifying petition signatures to determine their validity.

— GRIM GPS: The Los Angeles County Fire Department had only one truck stationed west of Lake Avenue in Altadena at a critical moment during the hugely destructive Eaton fire, according to vehicle tracking data analyzed by The Times. By contrast, the agency had dozens of trucks positioned east of Lake. All but one of the deaths attributed to the Eaton fire took place west of Lake.

— CHANGE OF PLANS: On Monday, Bass nominated consultant and Community Coalition board member Mary Lee to serve on the five-member Board of Police Commissioners. Two days later, in a brief email, Lee withdrew from consideration. Reached by The Times, Lee cited “personal reasons” for her decision but did not elaborate. (The mayor’s office had nothing to add.) Lee would have replaced former commissioner Maria “Lou” Calanche, who is running against Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez in the June 2026 election.

— SEMPER GOODBYE: The Pentagon announced Monday that the roughly 700 Marines who have been deployed to the city since early June would be withdrawing, a move cheered by Bass and other local leaders who have criticized the military deployment that followed protests over federal immigration raids. About 2,000 National Guard troops remain in the region.

— HALTING HEALTHCARE: L.A. County’s public health system, which provides care to the region’s neediest residents, could soon face brutal budget cuts. The “Big Beautiful Bill,” enacted by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, is on track to carve $750 million per year out of the Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and roughly two dozen clinics. At the Department of Public Health, which is facing its own $200-million cut, top executive Barbara Ferrer said: “I’ve never actually seen this much disdain for public health.”

— HOMELESS HIRE: The commission that oversees the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority selected Gita O’Neill, a career lawyer in the city attorney’s office, to serve as the agency’s interim CEO. O’Neill will replace Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who stepped down Friday after more than two years in her post.

— THE JURY SPEAKS: The city has been ordered by a jury to pay $48.8 million to a man who has been in a coma since he was hit by a sanitation truck while crossing a street in Encino. The verdict comes as the city struggles with escalating legal payouts — and was larger than any single payout by the city in the last two fiscal years, according to data provided by the city attorney’s office.

— LOOKING FOR A LIAISON: Back in May, while signing an executive directive to support local film and TV production, L.A.’s mayor was asked whether she planned to appoint a film liaison as the City Hall point person for productions. “Absolutely,” Bass said during the news conference, adding that she planned to do so within a few days.

That was two months ago. Asked this week about the status of that position, Bass spokesperson Clara Karger touted the executive directive and said the position was “being hired in conjunction with industry leaders.” She did not provide a timeline.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program did not carry out any new operations this week. However, her Shine LA initiative, which aims to clean up city streets and sidewalks, is heading out this weekend to Wilmington, Harbor Gateway and a stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard in South L.A.
• On the docket for next week: A bunch of stuff! The City Council returns from its summer recess, holding its first meeting in nearly a month. The Charter Reform Commission heads to the Baldwin Hills library to study planning and infrastructure. Meanwhile, county supervisors are scheduled to take up a proposal to bar law enforcement officers from concealing their identities in the county’s unincorporated areas, including East L.A., Lennox and Altadena.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

In his first major shake-up since taking over the Los Angeles Police Department in November, Chief Jim McDonnell has given new assignments to more than a dozen officials from the upper ranks.

Faced with ongoing struggles to woo new recruits and uncertainty around his plans to overhaul the LAPD, McDonnell gave the first indications about how he intends to reorganize by elevating three deputy chiefs — Emada Tingirides, Michael Rimkunas and Scott Harrelson — to top positions and resurrecting a long-dormant bureau.

The moves were announced in a departmentwide email last week but aren’t expected to take effect until later this month.

Tingirides, who lost out to McDonnell in a bid to become chief last fall, becomes assistant chief in charge of the Office of Operations, which oversees patrol functions. She was recently announced as a finalist for the same job in Fort Worth, according to local news reports. Her recent promotion is seen by some inside the department as a move to convince her to stay. She becomes the highest-ranking Black woman in the department’s history.

Harrelson will now be in charge of the department’s training and recruitment efforts as the head of the Office of Support Services, replacing Assistant Chief Daniel Randolph, who is expected to retire in the coming weeks.

Filling out McDonnell’s inner circle are two other holdovers from the administration of former Chief Michel Moore: Rimkunas and Dominic Choi, who served as interim chief until McDonnell took over in November. Choi remained an assistant chief but was named McDonnell’s chief of staff — in effect the department’s No. 2.

The head of the bureau that includes internal affairs, Rimkunas will now run the Office of Special Operations.

McDonnell also resurrected the department’s Human Resources Bureau, which was shut down in 2004 when McDonnell he was a senior official under former Chief William J. Bratton. He didn’t immediately say what the new bureau’s responsibilities will be.

It’s unclear whether McDonnell will have to submit parts of his reorganization plan to the City Council, which in the past has had to sign off on changes to the department’s structure.

When he took the job last year, McDonnell initially said he wanted to spend at least three months studying the LAPD to understand how it had changed since he came up through the ranks. He left in 2010 to become the top cop in Long Beach, then served a term as L.A. County sheriff. His early review timeline was thrown off, he told reporters at a news conference last week, because of the fires in January and the recent protests over federal immigration raids.

The series of major incidents, McDonnell said, presented an unexpected opportunity to evaluate his senior staff to see how they performed “in crisis mode.”

The chief added that he had delayed his realignment for the “outcome of the budget to see where we were” and the completion of a monthslong study of the department by Rand Corp., a global policy think tank brought in last year to conduct a top-down review. The study was recently finished, and McDonnell said he was reviewing its recommendations, as well as those made by the numerous internal working groups he had convened to look at recruitment, discipline and other workplace issues.

Without offering details, McDonnell hinted that another one of his priorities will be beefing up the department’s detective ranks and overhauling the system that handles misconduct complaints against officers, long a source of controversy and frustration.

“I have in rough form what I think it could look like, but I certainly want to get the input from those who are dealing with it on a day-to-day basis on how do we best deal with the nuances of doing the job today with the number of resources that we have,” he told reporters.

McDonnell has come under growing pressure from critics who have said he is moving too slowly to make changes, with more urgency required as the city gets ready to host events such as the next year’s World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games.

In other personnel moves announced last week, McDonnell moved Deputy Chief Marc Reina from the Training Bureau to South Bureau, where he previously worked as captain, and promoted German Hurtado, the department’s immigration coordinator, to deputy chief over Central Bureau, which has been the epicenter of recent protests.

Hurtado has been named in at least two pending lawsuits by LAPD officials accusing him of covering up unjustified uses of force by officers during the 2020 protests. The city has denied wrongdoing and is fighting the cases in court.

“As far as I know, I’m only named as a witness in those cases, and I’m not at liberty to talk about ongoing lawsuits,” Hurtado said when reached Monday by The Times.

McDonnell also demoted Assistant Chief Blake Chow to his civil service rank of commander — a similar trajectory to McDonnell, who was made to drop a rank during the tenure of former Chief Charlie Beck. Capt. Ray Valois, who helped oversee the department’s response to the Palisades fire, was elevated to commander in the Valley Bureau.

SEOUL, July 21 (UPI) — South Korea’s special prosecutor is intensifying its probe into the Unification Church, focusing on its top leadership over allegations of financial crimes and unlawful political activities.

The team led by Special Prosecutor Min Jung-ki conducted a second raid Monday at the church’s headquarters in Seoul’s Yongsan District, during which investigators seized additional internal records and digital data.

The operation followed a broader crackdown Friday, when authorities searched more than 10 church-affiliated sites, including the Cheon Jeong Gung palace in Gapyeong and the private residence of former church executive Yoon Young-ho.

According to the Hankook Ilbo, the search warrants identified several senior officials as criminal suspects: Han Hak-Ja, the church’s current chairwoman; Jung Wonju, executive secretary to Hak and vice president of the Cheon Mu Won, the church’s highest administrative body; and Lee Cheong-woo, director of the Central Administration Office.

Jung Wonju has emerged as a central figure in the case, with prosecutors focusing on her behind-the-scenes coordination of operations, reportedly enabled by her close ties to Han.

All three are being investigated for alleged violations of the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes, particularly involving brokered bribery and influence peddling.

Yoon Young-ho is accused of offering cash and luxury gifts to lawmaker Kweon Seong-dong in return for political favors. Rep. Kweon, a close ally of then-presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, allegedly played a key role in facilitating the candidate’s appearance at an event hosted by a Unification Church-affiliated organization on Feb. 13, 2022.

Yoon Young-ho served as the co-organizing chair and delivered the opening declaration at the event, raising suspicions that Kweon may have acted as an intermediary between Yoon Young-ho and the Yoon presidential couple.

Beyond the financial and political charges lies a deeper theological rift within the church. According to multiple former insiders, a group of church leaders and members who remained faithful to the original teachings and spiritual mission of founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon were systematically expelled by the current leadership.

These reformers opposed what they described as opportunistic reinterpretations of Rev. Moon’s core teachings — altered, they argue, to legitimize the centralization of power and the silencing of dissent, while elevating Han to a quasi-divine status.

Prosecutors are now examining three years of financial records and digital evidence seized during the raids, seeking to trace suspicious financial flows and uncover evidence of systemic wrongdoing.

Analysts say the outcome of the investigation may determine not only the legal future of the Unification Church, but also its spiritual legitimacy in the eyes of its followers and the public.

Lloyd Howell has resigned as executive director of the NFL Players Assn., citing distractions his leadership has caused in recent weeks.

“Two years ago, I accepted the role of Executive Director of the NFLPA because I believe deeply in the mission of this union and the power of collective action to drive positive change for the players of America’s most popular sport,” Howell said in a statement released late Thursday night. “Our members deserve a union that will fight relentlessly for their health, safety, financial futures, and long-term well-being. My priority has been to lead that fight by serving this union with focus and dedication.

“It’s clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day. For this reason, I have informed the NFLPA Executive Committee that I am stepping down as Executive Director of the NFLPA and Chairman of the Board of NFL Players effective immediately. I hope this will allow the NFLPA to maintain its focus on its player members ahead of the upcoming season.”

Howell has come under scrutiny since ESPN reported he has maintained a part-time consulting job with the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that holds league approval to seek minority ownership in NFL franchises.

That followed the revelation that the NFLPA and the league had a confidentiality agreement to keep quiet an arbitrator’s ruling about possible collusion by owners over quarterback salaries.

The latest issue was an ESPN report Thursday that revealed two player representatives who voted for Howell were not aware that he was sued in 2011 for sexual discrimination and retaliation while he was a senior executive at Booz Allen.

“I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish at the NFLPA over the past two years,” Howell said. “I will be rooting for the players from the sidelines as loud as ever, and I know the NFLPA will continue to ensure that players remain firmly at the center of football’s future.”

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services held a hearing recently about diversity, equity and inclusion. Fewer than five of the 90 minutes were spent talking about healthcare or anything related to money. Instead, conservative lawmakers wasted time and taxpayers’ dollars advancing an anti-DEI agenda with which they have become obsessed. Anecdotes were more interesting to them than were evidence-based truths about the Americans whom discrimination most harms.

Because the GOP comprises the majority in the House, all but one of the four expert witnesses in the hearing were theirs. Like the three other times I had testified on Capitol Hill, I was the lone Democrat. The Republicans’ strategy was familiar: ask a series of yes/no questions that would require contextualization to answer adequately, then interrupt as the witness attempts to provide a nuanced response.

One question for me from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas): “Should people be treated differently based on their race?” As I had done in my written testimony, I tried to explain to him that Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Latino American people have long been mistreated because of their race, which has led to persistent and pervasive racial inequities that disadvantage them relative to white people. But he apparently did not want to hear any of those facts, because he kept cutting me off, repeatedly declaring that this was a yes or no question.

Gill posed another question to which he did not allow an informative answer: “Do you believe that race should be considered in employer hiring practices?” For centuries, racism and white supremacy have been powerful determinants of who works where, what they are paid, and their opportunities for advancement to leadership in workplaces across industries. Race should not influence employment outcomes, but it too often has and still does.

Because of both implicit and explicit biases, race influences hiring processes across industries. Research makes painstakingly clear, though, that it is white applicants who most often and most lucratively benefit from preferential treatment. People of color and job seekers with ethnic-sounding last names have long been and continue to be routinely discriminated against, a highly cited University of Chicago study shows.

I do not believe that the remedy for discrimination is more discrimination. Instead, strategy and intentionality are both necessary and required to right past and present wrongs in hiring processes. Because the inequities are racialized and gendered, programs and practices ought to deliberately address the mindsets, structures and systems that have routinely locked irrefutably qualified people of color and women out of well-deserved opportunities. Perhaps had I been allowed to answer fully, Gill and I would have found common ground in our opposition to unlawful workplace discrimination.

Corporations, universities and other organizations need high-quality professional learning experiences that help employees who are involved in hiring processes understand how and why white job applicants are typically presumed to be smarter and more qualified than applicants of color. Gill and other opponents of diversity programs need to learn about these particular manifestations of white supremacy too. They also could benefit from exposure to research that shows how workplace racial stratification systems cyclically route the majority of employees of color into the lowest-paid, lowest-authority jobs and lock them out of leadership positions.

Federal statistics show that 77% of managers across all industries are white. Furthermore, 84% of executive-level leaders at Fortune 100 companies are white, according to a Heidrick & Struggles report. If our positions had been reversed and I were the one posing questions, I would have asked Gill about those statistics: Is it that most white people are just that much more talented and deserving than people of color, or could it be something else? In the midst of our chaotic crosstalk, I was able to make the point that I do not believe that white candidates are the only qualified people for jobs.

“I didn’t say that, nobody said that,” Gill replied. “And you’re not going to intimidate me by slandering me as a racist.” I did not say or imply that he was. However, his mistaken presumption is revealing and unsurprising. It sometimes happens — especially among white people — when simplistic or otherwise problematic positions on race are challenged. I was able to make this clear: “And you’re not going to intimidate me by insisting that I called you a racist.” I reminded him that a hearing transcript confirming what I actually said would be made publicly available.

Gill was in search of yes/no responses to his questions. Racism and racial inequities in employment, university admissions and other processes are far more complicated than that. But if he was indeed only interested in simple truths, there are at least two. First, professionals of color and women are systematically passed over for job opportunities and promotions because of their race and gender considerably more often than are their white male counterparts. Second, diversity policies and programs aim to redress such inequities accrued to employees because of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability, weight, accent, sexual orientation and other traits.

Shaun Harper is a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California and the author of “Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.”

SACRAMENTO — California’s state Democrats are shaking up leadership, with the Senate Democratic Caucus pledging unanimous support to Sen. Monique Limón (D-Goleta), who will take over as Senate president pro tem in early 2026.

Limón, who was elected to the state Senate in 2020, is chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and the Senate banking committee. The 45-year-old Central Coast native served in the Assembly for four years before her Senate campaign and worked in higher education at UC Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara County School Board before entering politics.

She highlighted the importance of the moment, noting that the caucus, amid ICE raids led by the Trump administration targeting minorities in Los Angeles and across the state, elected her — the first woman of color to hold the position.

The uncertain times, she said, were “a reminder of why leadership today, tomorrow and in the future matters, because leadership thinks about and influences the direction in all moments, but, in particular, in these very challenging moments. And for me, it is unbelievably humbling to be here.”

Recently, Limón has been vocal on the Sable Offshore Pipeline project, which aims to repair and reopen a pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara County that spilled 21,000 gallons of crude oil in 2015. This year she wrote a measure, Senate Bill 542, in response to the project that would require more community input on reopening pipelines and better safety guidelines to find weak points that could lead to another spill.

“No one has fought harder to make college more affordable than Monique Limón,” said current Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), who also applauded her work on wildfire recovery. “She is a tireless voice for the Central Coast in rural parts of this great state.”

McGuire took leadership of the Senate in a unanimous vote by Democrats with former speaker and gubernatorial candidate Toni Atkins’ blessing in February. He pledged to protect the state’s progressive ideals ahead of a problematic state budget that continued to bubble over, with the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress supporting cuts in federal aid to the state for heathcare for low-income Californians, education and research and other essential programs.

The Sonoma County Democrat’s takeover was part of a wider change — both legislative houses were led by lawmakers from Northern California this year, leaving Southern California legislators with limited control. Limón’s district covers Santa Barbara County and parts of Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.

McGuire terms out of office next year and may be planning a run for insurance commissioner in 2026 but wouldn’t confirm his plans despite collecting more than $220,000 in contributions so far this year.

With rare access to the governor of Ramallah and el-Bireh, this film offers an intimate portrait of life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Over one month, Governor Laila Ghannam navigates her city, which is marked by protests, mourning, celebration and resilience.

Amid political tensions, she reveals how Ramallah functions under occupation – how it breathes, resists and supports its most vulnerable. Moving between high-level politics and everyday encounters, Ghannam reflects on the emotional and political landscape of her people, offering a powerful glimpse into the quiet strength and steadfastness of Palestinians.

One Month in Ramallah is a documentary film by Sawsan Qaoud.