Mayor

Aug. 24 (UPI) — A group of grocers filed two lawsuits Monday over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to open five city-run grocery stores, saying it would harm neighborhood supermarkets.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, an organization that says it represents owners of smaller stores, said in the filings that the city would violate business owners’ civil rights if the new stores open and that officials did not study how the planned stores would affect existing businesses.

Kenneth Roldan, the president of the coalition, said the plan would have a “devastating” effect on small grocery stores. He called it “a direct assault on minority business,” The New York Times reported.

The plan for city-owned grocery stores, which would sell some items at a 30% discount, was part of Mamdani’s platform as he ran for mayor. It calls for five stores, one in each borough of New York City, to open by 2029.

Mamdani said at a news conference Monday that the new stores are needed to address the high cost of groceries and that they would not offer significant competition in the city.

“I’m confident both in the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it,” Mamdani said.

The new stores would reevaluate prices once a month and set the cost for food items at 30% below retailers, The Hill reported. The city would own the land and cover the rent and construction costs. A private operator, selected through a request for proposals, would manage daily operations.

“We are talking about a reflection of a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30 percent over the last few years, and we’re also talking about delivering five city-run grocery stores in a city of 8.5 million people that has more than 1,000 grocery stores,” Mamdani said.

The first store is expected to open in 2027 in the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx. An East Harlem store is expected to open by 2029. The city has not yet selected sites in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Nithya Raman has made Los Angeles’ struggle to combat homelessness a key plank in her mayoral campaign, yet her own record on the matter has itself become an issue with her ouster as head of the City Council committee seeking solutions to the crisis.

Mayor Karen Bass is at the helm of the city’s battle against homelessness, but since 2023 Raman has been the second-most powerful official as chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. That changed this month, when council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a key Bass ally, split the committee in two and removed Raman as its chair, effective Sept. 1.

Raman claims that politics were at play, casting her removal as a hit job for her decision to challenge Bass. Harris-Dawson disputes that, saying Raman failed to lead the committee with the urgency needed to combat L.A.’s enduring homelessness crisis.

“The committee is behind in excess of more than 100 issues,” said Harris-Dawson in an interview. “There are very serious decisions to make over what happens with homelessness. We needed someone who could focus on that and get it done and get it done quickly and show ability to build consensus.”

Beyond the dispute over Raman’s leadership of the committee, there are clear policy disagreements between the mayor and the council member over the best way to combat the crisis.

A Metro bus passes by a man sleeping on the sidewalk on North Spring Street in downtown Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Raman contends that Bass’ signature program Inside Safe, which dismantles encampments and moves people living there into motels, hotels and interim housing, is overly expensive and unsustainable. On average, the cost of housing these individuals runs about $82,000 a year, according to city reports.

Raman has repeatedly signed off on funding for the program, but has become more critical of it in the last year.

Despite the city’s efforts, L.A.’s unsheltered homeless population — those living outdoors or in their vehicles — went up by 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

“The approach to homelessness that Mayor Bass has led and defended has brought us here,” Raman said after LAHSA’s report was released.

Raman has called for the use of time-limited subsidies, or rental vouchers, to house homeless Angelenos in private residences — at a city-estimated cost of $30,000, less than half the price of an average Inside Safe bed. Raman says she would “significantly expand” the city’s investment in the vouchers if she became mayor.

“For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services — housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes,” Raman says in her mayoral policy platform on homelessness.

Even so, the more than $60-million voucher program Raman has already pushed through her committee has so far struggled to get off the ground under a tight timeline, and Raman’s critics have seized on the delay as evidence of the council member’s ineffectiveness.

Pedestrians pass by a homeless encampment along the 101 northbound offramp, at right, near City Hall Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

A city consultant on the program set a goal of having 600 households moved into leases by July 1 of this year, and 2,000 households moved in by next April. But as of that July 1 date, only three households had moved into homes via the vouchers, housing officials said in a report.

By Aug. 13, however, the number had jumped to 54 households, “with new move ins happening nearly every day,” the housing department said in a report.

Bass’ campaign spokesperson, Alex Stack, cited the sluggish start to the program and said subsidies are only a small part of the fight against homelessness.

“It’s not the silver bullet Raman’s selling,” Stack said.

In an interview, Raman said that the contracting process slowed the start of the program, but that time-limited subsidies are a great way to free up space in city shelters by moving those people into private housing.

“This is a cost-effective program that has very good outcomes in the past in terms of percentage of people moving on to permanent housing,” she said.

Nithya Rama listens to a question at the mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Raman added that the council will continue to monitor data from the program and make fixes as needed if it doesn’t move fast enough.

Homeless services providers working with the city on the program said part of the challenge has been getting a completely new program off the ground.

“It’s definitely been slower than I think most people anticipated,” said Sasha Morozov, the regional director of supportive services for PATH, a nonprofit contracting with the city for the program.

But Morozov said the program is speeding up now and she believed the 2,000 slots will be filled on time.

A key plank in Raman’s platform

Raman said she ran for council largely to take on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. She says she is running for mayor for the same reason.

She’s cited a 49% drop in street homelessness in her district over the past year as a clear sign that she is equipped to bring down homelessness citywide. Bass counters it was her efforts through Inside Safe that brought homelessness down in Raman’s district.

People living on the street in downtown L.A. gather cardboard for shelter during a heat wave last month.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

While chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman established monitoring of all the city’s spending on homelessness and tracking of 35 key performance metrics to see how effective the city’s investments are. She also stewarded the creation of a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the city’s Housing Department that is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the city’s homelessness system.

Her critics say that Raman’s tenure atop the committee hasn’t adequately met the moment facing the city of Los Angeles — with the Trump administration and county both moving to cut funding from LAHSA, the joint city-county authority responsible for homeless services. Meanwhile, the city is still managing a landmark federal lawsuit settlement, which requires it to invest in thousands of new shelter beds in its response to homelessness.

“She’s been in this building … longer than Karen Bass,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who served on the committee under Raman. “It’s convenient now for her to saddle all blame on the mayor when she rubber-stamped Inside Safe and stood in lockstep with the mayor.”

Mayor Karen Bass, left, and City Council member Monica Rodriguez at City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Rodriguez has specifically accused Raman — as chair of the committee — of slow-walking Rodriguez’s proposal from 2024 for the city to study a plan to separate itself from LAHSA and form its own department that would directly contract with homeless services providers.

Rodriguez said it took Raman months to schedule her motion in committee and that, while it was pending, the county removed most of its funding from LAHSA.

“The city has been left flatfooted because she wouldn’t lead our conversation. She wouldn’t schedule our items. She set us up for failure,” Rodriguez said.

Raman tried until the last minute to get the county to remain in LAHSA.

While Rodriguez’s motion was waiting on a report, Raman made her own proposal to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the Los Angeles Housing Department to keep track of the city’s more than $1-billion annual investment in homelessness response.

The council moved that bureau forward last year, and a spokesperson for the Housing Department said that seven positions have been hired within the bureau handling contracts and data oversight.

Harris-Dawson said a seven-person bureau isn’t adequate.

Raman said the bureau was a starting point that could one day lead to a department, which she said would be expensive and take a long time to stand up.

“This was not precluding [the creation of a department],” Raman told The Times. “This was trying to speed up that staffing faster than the departmental process normally takes in this city.”

Raman said she talked to Bass about creating a department for homelessness in late 2023 or early 2024, but the mayor told her to move ahead with the bureau instead. Bass representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paige Sterling, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that Bass and Raman discussed the bureau in 2025, during the budget process. The mayor opposed a standalone department at the time because it “would add to the bureaucracy,” and the bureau was a compromise, Sterling said.

“The mayor signed a budget with funding and positions for the bureau, which begins to give the city the capacity it needs to start overseeing homelessness as we evaluate what the future governance of this issue looks like,” Sterling said.

Raman has touted the bureau as a success that provides clear oversight of how the city spends its money, but has also claimed that the mayor’s office has moved too slowly to staff the bureau. The Housing Department still hasn’t hired an assistant general manager to oversee it.

The rotunda at L.A. City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Canceled meetings and frustrated colleagues

Raman hasn’t been endorsed for mayor by any of her colleagues on the council, and some of those who served on her homelessness and housing panel say she did a shoddy job as its chair. They complain that she frequently canceled meetings and allowed hundreds of motions to pile up without getting moved through council.

“It had started to feel less like a policymaking body and more like a scholastic seminar — a lot of philosophizing, a lot of talk about feelings, but not enough substantive questions or direction on policy to present to staff,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said in a statement to The Times.

In response, Raman said her committee focused on data to make sure the city’s investment in fighting homelessness is paying off.

“That doesn’t feel scholarly to me, that feels like oversight and accountability — exactly what the public is asking for for one of our largest investments as a city,” she said.

The full council, meanwhile, has agreed to review its relationship with LAHSA and the county, and to study creating a new department to centralize homelessness oversight.

“This conversation that we’re having about this … is long overdue,” said Councilmember John Lee.

Raman will have a seat on the new homelessness committee, but it will be chaired by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado. Padilla was named chair of the new Housing Committee.

Raman’s final meeting as committee chair was supposed to be Wednesday.

She didn’t show up.

New York City, United States – Mayor Zohran Mamdani is challenging a new law that would give New York City’s teaching aides a one-time $10,000 bonus, arguing it goes against the city’s collective bargaining laws.

On Wednesday, the bill, which was passed by New York City’s City Council, automatically became law because the mayor had opted not to veto it. Instead, Mamdani filed a lawsuit to block it because the City Council had enough votes to override his veto.

The bill, called the Respect Check Act, was backed by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a labour union representing teachers across New York City’s public school system and was championed by City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has often clashed with the mayor.

Teaching assistants are among the lowest-paid workers in the city’s school system, according to a statement released by Menin’s office on Wednesday. Their pay is as low as $32,000. According to MIT’s living wage calculator, the living wage in New York City is $79,469 for Manhattan, $67,558 for Brooklyn, $73,258 for Queens, $67,974 in Staten Island, and $60,341 for the Bronx.

When the bill passed in July, Mamdani argued that the law directly violated a state law called the Taylor Law, a nearly 60-year-old law that gives public sector workers the right to organise. The UFT, which endorsed Mamdani in July 2025 ahead of the city’s election, pushed back on the mayor’s claims. The group argued the City Council did not undermine collective bargaining.

“The City Council would not have introduced – let alone passed – this bill if it were illegal, and we would not have supported a bill that threatened our collective bargaining rights,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“This moment is an opportunity for Mayor Mamdani to create a new, fairer system and build the kind of city he said he wanted to lead. This administration must keep its promises, and we won’t stop until it does.”

The City Council crafted the law to avoid violating New York’s Taylor Law, a UFT representative told Al Jazeera.

Under a 2023 state appeals court ruling, additional payments to public employees are mandated to be independent of a worker’s regular salary and cannot be tied to collective bargaining, they argue.

“The Court of Appeals has found that the Taylor Law does not prevent a municipality from unilaterally providing an economic benefit,” Beth Norton, general counsel for the UFT, said in testimony in front of the City Council in 2025, provided to Al Jazeera.

Pushing back

New York City Hall sees it differently.

“Council labels these ‘stabilisation’ payments; they effectively function as stipends or salary bonuses and, regardless of terminology, are an additional form of compensation and, as such, a mandatory subject of bargaining,” the 18-page filing obtained by Al Jazeera said.

“I think the mayor is right that this sets a bad precedent,” Adin Lenchner, founder of the New York-based political consultancy Carroll Street Campaigns, told Al Jazeera.

“Him and his team are either posturing, negotiating, or using this as a moment to negotiate toward some other kind of deal. I think everyone would agree that, substantively and philosophically, this is aligned with the mayor’s public policy approach and his vision for the city,” Lenchner added.

“So, if I had to guess, this is, on the one hand, about not wanting to establish a bad precedent and, on the other hand, a step toward a longer-term negotiation.”

Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan think tank, urged the mayor in July to veto the bill, arguing that City Council should not make this decision. It says the now-law would add $325m in city spending.

“The City should continue to determine employee compensation at the bargaining table, not the legislative chamber,” vice president for research at CBC, Ana Champeny, said in a press release in mid-July.

Mamdani echoed that sentiment when he was asked about the law earlier this month.

“Conversations around compensation are better left at the bargaining table,” Mamdani said in a news conference on August 6.

However, the mayor voiced support on the campaign trail for legislation that would provide support payments to these paraprofessionals. That legislation supported recurring payments, not a one-time payment.

“The version he supported last fall made the payment recurring; what passed last month only guarantees it for one year. That’s the line between then and now, so not much of a flip-flop,” Lenchner added.

“We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table. The City is filing a lawsuit to protect the right of every union to negotiate on behalf of its members, to fight for the workplace they deserve and ensure that workers – not politicians – determine their own futures,” Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“We will work towards a quick resolution that respects workers, protects the City’s finances, and ensures that the Council does not interfere with collective bargaining in the future.”

Rauschenbach declined to provide further comment.

The mayor of Como has banned riding bicycles in certain areas of the historic Italian city after he was hit by an electric one.

Alessandro Rapinese said the ban was necessary to improve public safety. It means from September, cyclists will have to dismount through an area of around 30 streets.

He told Italian news agency Ansa: “People act based on their own experiences and I know what it’s like to be hit by one of these beasts.”

Several other local authorities around Europe, including in the UK, have restricted where and how e-bikes and other single-person vehicles can be used.

The measure put forward by Rapinese is part of a package of new traffic regulations, establishing a Limited Traffic Zone (ZTL) to manage tourist growth, and which impose stricter rules on cars and vans in the city centre.

Many of the roads covered by the ban are the widest in the old town and are popular with delivery drivers.

The measure applies to both electric and push bikes, as the Italian highway code does not distinguish between models.

Rapinese explained his decision in a video as part of a series of online videos he produces himself, known as RapiNews24.

He recounted an incident in which he had been leaving city hall in July and collided with an e-bike shortly after his administration had discussed traffic restrictions in the city centre.

The cyclist involved in the collision has not been identified.

“In this case, I didn’t even end up in the hospital,” Rapinese said. “I was hit by a bike. I gathered information, and that’s where the measure came from.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad reelection campaign just got worse after Wednesday night’s debate in Sherman Oaks.

Bass came in as the clear favorite after toying with City Councilmember Nithya Raman the two times they faced off on the debate stage during the primary, as easily as the Dodgers sweeping the Angels.

Her Honor just needed to do more of the same: hail her own accomplishments, deliver well-timed zingers and keep as cool as a cucumber while baiting Raman into self-immolation.

Bass did none of that, while Raman stepped up the way she needed to.

This time, the challenger offered concrete answers instead of word salads. She mostly stuck to the allotted time limits while Bass repeatedly whined that she wasn’t given enough time. Raman effortlessly turned the mayor’s rhetorical traps around like Bugs Bunny twisting Elmer Fudd’s rifle right in his face.

Take the moment when Bass pointed out that Raman had missed the second-most votes among councilmembers during her six years in office. Raman responded that she missed many meetings while representing the city on the South Coast Air Quality Management District and other governmental boards. Bass’ clap-back — that Raman’s colleagues also had other official responsibilities yet “they find their way to work” — drew “ooohs” from the audience at the debate, put on by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

If this were still the primary, Raman would have flustered her way to a non-answer. This time, she calmly said that she must not be such a bad councilmember, since Bass had appointed her to those boards.

“Well, we really need to look at that,” Bass stammered before asking Raman if she was “getting ready to resign” from them.

“I’m sorry?” Raman asked off mic as Bass challenged her to step down from all her boards. “No,” Raman then said firmly before shrugging and letting the moderator move on to the next question.

The moment was par for the mayor’s night.

Again and again, Bass went after Raman in the pettiest, most personal ways. She kept mocking the MIT graduate as a clueless egghead with no idea what’s going on in the city, stating twice that Raman governed as if L.A. were “an academic institution” — a line that sounded like a MAGA talking point and that was originally trotted out by Councilmember Imelda Padilla.

Bass tried to paint Raman as a member of an ineffectual city establishment, not a newcomer, which fell flat, considering that Bass has held one elected office or another for 22 years while Raman has been in politics only since 2020.

Bass frequently resorted to her trademark nervous laughter and repeated obviously crafted lines with all the enthusiasm of someone gulping down cod oil. Her furrowed brow and exasperated looks, which she had effectively used in previous debates, made her come off as embittered, tired and unable to defend the indefensible mess that has been her first term.

At one point, the mayor even compared street taco vendors to homeless encampments, with both supposedly disrupting the fabric of a well-run city.

Somewhere, Jonathan Gold is shaking his head in disgust.

“You have lots of plans and lots of ideas but have done very little,” Bass told Raman at another point.

And what have you done, Mayor Bass?

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks with a woman after the end of a mayoral debate against challenger Nithya Raman in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

I’ve really tried to like Bass. Her trajectory from South L.A. activist to nonprofit founder to Sacramento, Washington and City Hall is impressive and important. Yet when Angelenos needed her to rise and succeed as their city faced one crisis after another during these past four years, Bass stumbled and stumbled again. Her flop of a debate performance left her sounding like someone with no vision or kindness — career suicide for someone who has made her reputation on both traits.

At this point, the architects of Bass’ campaign need to burn sage to drive out bad spirits or just bow out altogether. Any time something could go wrong, it has.

Bass placed first in the primary with 34% of the vote — an abysmal number for a Democratic incumbent in a deep blue city. Her campaign’s cynical gambit to boost washed-up reality TV star Spencer Pratt into the general election, because he’d be an easier opponent than Raman, failed. The Lineage fire in Boyle Heights brought back memories of the deadly Palisades inferno, angering a voting bloc Bass desperately needs — Latinos.

Then came news this week that a poll the Bass campaign had promoted, claiming that she held a commanding lead over Raman, turned out to be fake. Bass came out looking like someone incapable of overseeing paint dry, let alone running America’s second-largest city.

And now, this debate.

The audience, which was heavily pro-Bass, eventually started applauding more and more of Raman’s responses. Bass, desperate to trip up her opponent, talked over her so much that the councilmember responded with the line of the night and possibly the race:

“You gotta let me answer, Mayor Bass. This is my time.”

Raman still faces an uphill battle. Nearly all of the city’s power structure — elected officials, labor unions, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, business owners and even the three other democratic socialist councilmembers — has endorsed Bass. The mayor has outpaced Raman in fundraising. Raman has to win over voters who supported Pratt’s conservative stances while not alienating her progressive base. She did herself no favors with the Democratic Socialist of America’s local chapter, which didn’t endorse her in the primary and will decide next week whether to endorse her in the general election, by stating that the city needs to maintain the current size of its police force.

But in Wednesday night’s debate, she offered voters a distinct choice between how she would run L.A. and how Bass has.

Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks with staff and supporters after a mayoral debate with incumbent Karen Bass in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

All the mayor could sputter in her closing remarks was that Raman “does not have the support of [any] of her colleagues” — yet another line she had repeated ad nauseum.

When it was her turn, Raman said she keeps hearing from residents “that this city feels rudderless.”

“I have news for you, Angelenos. You’re right,” she continued. “No one is in charge right now.”

Then, instead of launching another fusillade against Bass, Raman went for something few people associate with L.A. nowadays:

Hope.

“You have every right to expect more from your city,” Raman proclaimed, her voice strong and clear. She urged Angelenos to “raise our expectations” of what’s possible and strive for a city that’s “affordable, functional, safe, joyful, ambitious.”

A few months ago, that would have sounded like the delusional ramblings of someone with no chance at winning. After tonight’s debate, Raman seems like L.A.’s final, best chance.

When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass amplified the results last week of a favorable political poll that turned out to be fake, she was inadvertently following in the footsteps of conservative Detroit singer Kid Rock.

In 2017, as Rock — real name Robert Ritchie — publicly contemplated a run for U.S. Senate is his home state of Michigan, he posted on social media the results of a poll conducted by a firm calling itself Delphi Analytica that showed him leading Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow.

But those results were bogus. The people behind Delphi Analytica took down their website and refused to be identified, telling a local reporter: “Thanks again and go kid rock.”

Little is known about who was responsible for a poll supposedly conducted by an outfit calling itself Median Strategies showing Bass with a wide lead in the L.A. mayoral race over Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The group told The Times on Monday that its results were also fake.

But the episode has revived questions about whether political polling can be trusted, particularly in light of several recent high-profile primary races in which the polls seemed to have gotten the results wrong.

In the Michigan Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, a number of preelection polls showed progressive Abdul El-Sayed holding a commanding, double-digit lead over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), but on election night, El-Sayed eked out a one-point victory.

In Wisconsin, numerous polls showed progressive state Rep. Francesca Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley in the Democratic primary for governor. Crowley narrowly defeated Hong in the primary.

Median Strategies — the entity behind the fake Los Angeles poll — claimed on social media that it had also conducted polling in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial race and that it had also gotten it wrong about Hong.

Polling in primary elections can be particularly difficult, because it can be hard to know who will actually show up on election day, said Christian Grose, a USC political science professor. Both Michigan and Wisconsin also hold open primaries, meaning that any voter can cast a ballot in a race, regardless of party affiliation, making it harder for pollsters to predict exactly who will cast a ballot on election day.

Experts say fake polls are exceedingly rare but that these recent election results highlight the differences between high- and low-quality polls and how much easier it has become to conduct less rigorous polling.

“The barriers to entry are a lot lower now than they were 20 to 30 years ago,” said Charles Franklin, a professor of law and public policy at Marquette Law School who conducts the Marquette Law School Poll.

Put simply, a poll is a series of questions asked of a sample of people in a given locality, state or country whose opinions are supposed to represent the attitudes of everyone in the coverage area of the poll. Pollsters typically weigh the responses they receive — sometimes amplifying the voices of respondents from a particular ethnic group, for example — to ensure that the results are representative of the population they are surveying.

For decades, survey respondents were typically contacted by phone.

That work was expensive, Franklin said.

“You needed a call center, you needed to hire interviewers and you needed some sort of data processing,” he said.

But now as modes of communication have changed — many people have ditched landlines and are hesitant to answer calls from unknown numbers on their cellphone — polling operations have adopted a wide variety of methods to try to contact survey respondents, including e-mail, text-messages and online surveys, which sometimes offer incentives to encourage participation.

Online polls can be conducted much more cheaply than polling using other modes of communication, but the quality can also vary widely.

Historically, most polls randomly contacted survey respondents, backed by research showing that a random sample of the population — adjusted appropriately by demographics and other factors — would give a more accurate picture of the public’s attitude on a particular question.

But not all online polling relies on a randomly selected group of respondents, and when respondents are offered an incentive — such as cash — to complete an online survey, it can lead to inaccurate results.

The Pew Research Center released a report in 2024 showing that these so-called opt-in surveys did a particularly bad job of capturing the attitudes of adults under 30 and Latino adults. Researchers at Pew, for example, asked respondents in one survey if they were licensed to operate a type of nuclear submarine. In the survey, 12% of respondents under 30 said yes. In reality, the share of people under 30 holding such a license “rounds to zero,” the report said.

While even legitimate pollsters can get election results wrong — a poll represents public opinion at the time it was taken, and that can change — experts say there are a few key things to look out for when vetting the quality of a survey.

“The more transparent a poll is — in terms of its data and methods — the more you should believe it,” said Grose, who also conducts the California Elections and Policy Poll.

Franklin said that pollsters with a track record are typically more trustworthy, as their future business and reputation relies on their accuracy.

He said that polling conducted by upstart organizations is not necessarily bad, but that the people conducting it don’t necessarily have the training or expertise of more established outfits.

Inaccurate polling can misinform voters and lead to election night surprises, but it can also have a corrosive effect on elections themselves.

“Polling can drive outcomes,” Grose said. “Favorable polls lead to more fundraising. There’s a bandwagon effect.”

Aug. 14 (UPI) — A Massachusetts mayor was arrested Friday on charges of fraudulently obtaining more than $1.5 million in COVID loans for small businesses, federal prosecutors said.

Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena, 61, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly using the loans to fund his campaign, pay personal taxes and pay off other loans.

DePena applied for pandemic relief loans in 2020 and 2021 to support Tenares Tire Services, an auto shop he owned in Lawrence.

Prosecutors say he used nearly $900,000 of the loans to pay off mortgages, $85,000 for personal tax debts and at least $130,000 to fund his campaign.

“This was emergency financial assistance meant to be a safety net for struggling businesses, not Mr. Depena’s own personal ATM,” said Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, in a statement.

DePena was first elected mayor of Lawrence in 2021 and was reelected last November.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

“Mayor DePena was elected to be a leader for the City of Lawrence,” U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said in a statement. “He was looked up to and trusted by his constituents, but he betrayed that trust through his alleged corruption and lies,”

Rick Cole and his new employer, the city of Azusa, have one thing in common: an image problem.

Cole, who will start work as Azusa’s city manager in July, is a former Pasadena mayor known for his razor-sharp mind and switchblade tongue.

Azusa is an often overlooked town with a name derived from the Shoshone word for skunk. Landmarks include a landfill and a quarry, and its commercial core is so bleak that an AM/PM convenience store ranks among the city’s top sales tax generators.

“It’s really a desperate hour. We’ve become the caboose of the foothill communities,” said Cristina Madrid, mayor of the eastern San Gabriel Valley city of 45,000.

Madrid said the council needs to look beyond conventional solutions and people to turn the town around. She assesses Azusa’s condition with the raw honesty and resolve she says is needed, and many say Rick Cole exemplifies. “As the caboose, we want a jump-start, not incremental progress,” Madrid said.

In Cole, the council has picked an activist and politician who was a leader in turning Pasadena’s blighted downtown into one of Southern California’s most popular shopping and entertainment districts. They also are handing over the city’s management to someone who has never worked as a city administrator. But in the process they are saving money, paying Cole $30,000 less than the $130,000 his predecessor made.

It is a choice the council made with its eyes wide open, picking Cole from an applicant pool otherwise composed of career bureaucrats. “We went way out of the box,” Madrid said.

Cole’s lack of administrative experience has some wondering how he will handle the intricacies of managing a city staff of 265 while also answering to a City Council.

“It is a hard adjustment from assistant city manager or department head to city manager, it will be even harder for a guy with no experience,” said Alhambra City Manager Julio Fuentes, who was Azusa’s city manager in the late 1980s.

Before entering politics, Cole was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war activities, and had been a journalist. While city managers tend to be quiet and careful not to offend their council bosses, Cole has always been blunt about his beliefs.

*

As Pasadena’s vice mayor, he criticized the Tournament of Roses for appointing a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus as grand marshal of the 1992 Rose Parade. Citing the injustices of the 16th century Spanish conquest, Cole blasted the choice as one made by “an organization totally controlled by aging white men.”

But Cole has proven that he can compromise as well as provoke. A year after his swipe at the tournament, Cole lauded the group for including minorities and women in its executive committee.

Even in praising Azusa for selecting him, Cole reveals his distaste for the status quo. “I’m always amazed at how cautious and dull big institutions tend to be. When in doubt, they tend to promote mediocrity,” he said, contrasting Azusa’s boldness with what might be expected in most cities.

Since leaving the Pasadena council in 1995, Cole has been the regional director of the Local Government Commission, a nonprofit urban policy research group. As city manager, he will have a chance to practice the kind of community-building policies that he has been preaching. “It’s a chance to walk the walk,” Cole said.

Pasadena City Councilman and former Mayor William Paparian, who served on the council with Cole, said it will be a tough, if not impossible, move. Paparian doubted that he himself could make the switch to administration. “I could probably bluff my way through it for a while, but that’s about it.”

Paparian, who calls himself an “ex-friend” of Cole’s, nevertheless said Cole has helped to transform Pasadena and his vision could benefit Azusa. Paparian said that as an activist, Cole was a leader in bringing about district-based City Council elections, which enabled minorities to win council seats. “He brought social consciousness to the city that had been the conservative bastion of Southern California,” he said.

Born in Royal Oak, Mich., in 1953, Cole has lived in Pasadena since his childhood, and has captured public attention since his teens. At Blair High School he wrote for an underground newspaper called Iskra, named for a paper edited by Lenin, and was active in civil rights and antiwar protests.

He worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of antiwar Republican Rep. Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey and the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Brooklyn antiwar activist Allard K. Lowenstein.

Cole resigned from a job as a student liaison for the Pasadena Unified School District after conservative board members accused him of using his position to organize demonstrations, an allegation that he denies.

At 21, Cole entered American University in Washington, D.C. A year later, he transferred to Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

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As a student journalist, Cole and classmate John Hinrichs won a Los Angeles Press Club award for an investigative story on the denial of a promotion to the college’s only black professor. Cole and Hinrichs made headlines when the college accused them of stealing documents from the administration building. The students were eventually cleared.

After college, Cole earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and founded the Pasadena Weekly before winning election to the council in 1983.

Despite his seemingly radical past, Cole defies ideological categories. He has written columns expressing admiration for figures as disparate as Jonathan Jackson, his Blair classmate slain in a famous 1971 gun battle at a San Rafael courthouse in which a judge also lost his life, and the late Robert Finch, a Republican lieutenant governor and Nixon Cabinet member.

“I was raised in a Republican home, and my father always said ‘It’s not important what you think, but that you think,’ ” Cole said.

Cole sees his outspokenness and his background as a politician who had to rally public support as strengths that Azusa needs. “You have to tell people straight what the problems are, and include them in the solutions. That’s the Rick Cole approach,” he said.

Speaking of Azusa, Cole might well be addressing his own challenges in his new job. “There are real problems and image problems. The image problems are the tougher ones,” he said.

Azusa’s real problems are a $1-million-a-year deficit, a decaying downtown and lagging community involvement, Cole said.

Like several cities in the east San Gabriel Valley, Azusa’s population has soared in the last 20 years, growing 50% since 1980. Cole hopes to get more of the newer residents involved in civic affairs through such efforts as seeking neighborhood participation in developing a new general plan.

Cole has been a critic of depending on large retail stores for tax revenue, and wants to try other approaches.

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Instead of commercial real estate development, Cole wants to focus on improving Azusa’s downtown. He hopes to turn Azusa Avenue, the main thoroughfare, into a two-way street to provide easier access to the stores lining it.

The city also should find marketing niches for commercial development, he said. One such niche would be the city’s location abutting the Angeles National Forest. Cole wants to secure funding to reopen California 39 through the forest, which has been closed since the 1960s. Cole said that reopening the road would bring more people through the city and could fuel businesses such as ski and camping shops.

Cole may have a ready solution for some of the city’s woes. Rosedale, an 1,800-unit housing development, has already been proposed and is working its way through the approval process.

Azusa’s leaders hope that Cole also will be an ace in the hole. “He’s a high-risk, high-gain guy,” Paparian said. “Azusa’s gambling that with him they’ll come down on the gain side.”

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is expected to lose her leadership role on the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which she has chaired since 2023, according to people familiar with the situation.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is planning to announce this week that the committee will be split into a housing committee and a homelessness committee — neither of which will be led by Raman, the people said.

Harris-Dawson is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman is challenging for re-election. He declined to comment.

“It’s hard to imagine that it’s not related to politics. The timing of it would be too much of a coincidence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Councilmember and Los Angeles County supervisor who now serves as chair of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Raman’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the impending shakeup, which was reported earlier by the California Post.

The move comes at a pivotal moment in the mayor’s race on homelessness.

The city’s unsheltered homeless population increased this year after two straight years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

While the citywide number has increased, the number of homeless people living on the street in Raman’s district decreased by 49%, a fact she has touted as she challenges Bass.

Raman and Bass have presented starkly different takes regarding the situation citywide and in Raman’s district.

The mayor has posited that her signature program, Inside Safe, which addresses homeless encampments by moving homeless individuals into temporary housing, was largely responsible for the drop in Raman’s district and that federal and state budget cuts partially led to the increase citywide.

She also attacked Raman’s performance as the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee.

“While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect,” said Bass’ campaign spokesperson Alex Stack in a statement last month about the homeless numbers.

Raman claimed that there have only been three Inside Safe operations in her district and that her committee has been stifled by inaction from the mayor.

“Council can pass legislation… move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes, she said at a press conference last month.

OAKLAND — Mayor Lionel Wilson, a fixture in this city’s politics for three decades, was fighting off a nasty cold as he took his campaign for reelection to a hall filled with real estate agents recently.

In past years, Wilson could have stayed home to nurse his ailment. He long ago endeared himself to Oakland business leaders by presiding over a boom in downtown building that brought a glistening skyline to the city. As he seeks a fourth term, however, the soft-spoken mayor finds he can take no group for granted.

Concluding his speech to the agents, he pleaded, “Give me a chance to complete the job I started.” But on this day, in a city beset by a continuing drug crisis, crime, a troubled school system and the aftermath of last October’s earthquake, the applause for the mayor was polite, and nothing more.

At 75, Wilson is facing the toughest campaign of his career, challenged by politicians who barely were teen-agers when he began his government career in 1960. The most likely outcome is that no candidate will win more than 50% of the vote in the nonpartisan June 5 election, and the two leading vote-getters will face off in November. But a recent Oakland Tribune-Gallup Poll confirmed what local politicos have been saying for weeks: Wilson may not make it to the runoff.

Only 18% of the likely voters backed Wilson. Assemblyman Elihu Harris, a Democrat who is giving up the legislative seat he has held for 12 years to mount a well-heeled effort to unseat Wilson, led with 32%, the poll showed.

Harris’ closest rival was veteran City Councilman Wilson Riles Jr., liberal son of the former state superintendent of schools, who was supported by 22%. Five other candidates had lesser support. And 22% were undecided.

In a sign of Wilson’s past impact on Oakland, candidates Harris, Riles and City Councilman Leo Bazile all have been labeled his protege in the past. Now, though, they depict him as a figure whom time has passed by.

“It is sad,” Riles said of the sinking political fortunes of the city’s first black mayor. “He was probably the right person to break the color barrier. (But) I don’t know whether he should have gotten a second term, and certainly not a third term. . . . People are saying it is time for a change.”

The campaign has been mean even by Oakland’s fractious standards. Candidate forums routinely are interrupted by demonstrators, and campaign rhetoric frequently has been downright nasty.

At a recent candidates forum, Bazile, a city councilman since 1983, ignored a thoughtful question about the future of downtown and accused Harris of a cavalier attitude toward crack cocaine use because he has broached the prospect of legalizing drugs.

Harris restrained himself, answered the question about downtown, and waited until after the debate to respond. He said he did not advocate that crack be made legal, though he added that in the fight against drugs, “We should not be afraid to discuss all of the options.”

Such asides notwithstanding, the issues in Oakland are considerable. Last October’s earthquake hit the city hard; repairs to city-owned buildings may cost $250 million. Officials must negotiate with Caltrans over a replacement for the collapsed Nimitz Freeway.

Meanwhile, thousands of blue-collar workers could lose their jobs if a federal study recommending closure of Oakland-area Navy bases becomes reality.

Crack use is epidemic, straining the health care system and fueling crime. A city of 360,000 people, Oakland had a record 148 homicides last year. The murder rate was third-highest in the state last year for cities with populations of more than 100,000, and the overall crime rate was second-worst.

Oakland schools, though not the mayor’s responsibility, are a major campaign topic. A state trustee has been appointed to oversee the Oakland Unified School District, and a criminal investigation has led to the arrests of 13 district employees for theft and embezzlement.

“The solutions to those problems are going to have to come at a quickened pace,” said Alameda County Supervisor Don Perata, who is neutral in the race. “Rhetoric won’t get by. You’re going to have to have some very adroit leadership.”

Then, there’s football.

After initial reluctance, Wilson backed an ambitious plan to lure the Los Angeles Raiders back to Oakland with an unprecedented $600-million-plus package of loans, grants, guaranteed profits and a promise to rebuild the Oakland Coliseum, all to suit team owner Al Davis.

Politicians quickly discovered that while Oakland football fans may pine for the Raiders, they don’t miss Davis. This is the man who spurned them by moving the team to Los Angeles after the 1981 football season. The thought that the city would guarantee him profits angered so many that 31,000 residents signed petitions to place the plan to bring the Raiders back on the ballot. The referendum was put on hold after Wilson withdrew his support of the deal; city officials and the Raiders have reopened negotiations.

Wilson conceded that the proposal has been “a negative” for him. He added, “I got caught in the middle.”

Even Councilman Riles, who scored big by opposing the deal, was shocked at the reaction. The deal elicited more angry calls than any municipal issue Riles could recall. “I lucked out,” he said.

Riles, long Wilson’s nemesis, tried to unseat the mayor in 1985. An ally of liberal Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Berkeley), Riles battles the moderate Wilson on such issues as rent control and development. He contends that more should be spent on the city’s poor neighborhoods and less on big downtown projects.

Wilson encouraged interest in his job by strengthening the office. Under a 1988 City Charter change that he engineered, the next mayor will make $80,000 a year, up from the previous $30,000.

He also supported moving local elections to even-numbered years. For the first time, the mayoral campaign is being held in conjunction with major state races. Turnout could hit 50%; in the last two mayoral elections, it was less than 28%.

At the time the changes were being debated, Wilson was leaning against running. He changed his mind last summer, saying he concluded that no other candidate could see through to completion development of a major downtown retail center.

However, as many voters apparently see it, Wilson’s day is over.

Clinton O’Keefe Killian, a 32-year-old lawyer and Harris supporter, talks of Oakland’s “tremendous potential,” but points to opportunities lost under Wilson. He extols the lifestyle in his ethnically diverse city, though he has complaints with faulty city services and frets about sending his children to Oakland schools.

“Oakland could be the town in California where blacks and other minorities can show they bring something to the table,” Killian said. But for all its promise of becoming “Atlanta-West,” Oakland won’t “go any further unless somebody is pushing it.”

Harris has tailored his message to such voters. While Wilson proved to any skeptics that “blacks could run the city,” Harris said, there’s a need now to move “beyond presence and become more aggressive.”

Harris has built his campaign around high-quality public schools. In some ways, it’s an odd issue to champion, given that the mayor has no say over the schools, which are run by an independently elected school board.

Still, Harris made a name for himself last year by pushing state legislation that led to the naming of a trustee to oversee the school district. The bill came after years of poor academic performance by students, studies critical of district management, and, finally, the criminal investigation.

Harris won popular support with the bill, but has taken his share of hits over it. Wilson charged that he pushed it merely to gain needed name identification.

The move also angered members of a black neighborhood group called the People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement. Using a variety of disruptive tactics, Uhuru adherents have been hounding Harris.

Their point: Harris backs “white colonialists” and “the U.S. government’s war against the black community” with his support of the school trustee.

Abigail Aguirre has been sleeping terribly.

Too many times, she said, residents of a nearby homeless encampment have partied late into the night — sometimes yelling, sometimes blasting music. The noise is especially hard on her husband, who frequently leaves for his job before 5 a.m.

“Oh my God, they don’t let us sleep,” said Aguirre, whose home sits just east of the 110 Freeway in South Los Angeles. “They do drugs in there. They play the loud music. They don’t care.”

Three years ago, workers with Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program moved dozens of homeless people from Aguirre’s neighborhood into nearby hotels and motels. Sanitation crews cleared the streets and sidewalks of trash.

But more people, and their tents, kept arriving, not just near Aguirre’s home but on many of the east-west streets that pass over the 110 south of downtown: 43rd, 49th, 51st and Vernon Avenue, to name a few.

Unsheltered homelessness — people living on the street or in their vehicles — went up nearly 8% citywide in this year’s homeless count, dealing a setback to Bass, who is running for reelection and has made homelessness a core part of her agenda.

The streets that line the 110 Freeway between 42nd and 58th are a potent symbol of the challenges facing Bass and her program. According to records obtained by The Times, outreach workers carried out Inside Safe operations 25 times on that one-mile stretch during her first three years as mayor, returning again and again to bring people indoors.

Frank Gordon, 51, has been living on Cahuenga Boulevard at the 101 Freeway in Hollywood. Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program has moved people indoors from that location several times since 2022.

During one operation, Inside Safe brought 42 people inside. A month later, 54 more people came indoors. On other occasions, progress was measured in single digits: two people during one visit, five on another, eight on the next.

Despite those efforts, many of the overpasses and side streets still have encampments. Things have been especially grim on the 51st Street overpass, where tents, makeshift structures and huge mounds of trash lined the sidewalks. In the street, a refrigerator missing a door was on its back, overflowing with garbage.

Joel Galarza, who lives in a house nearby, said the encampment has brought crime, fires, prostitution, open-air drug use and other problems. In May, a man was found stabbed on the overpass.

Galarza said his family has called the city and the LAPD many times, only to see the situation get worse.

“It feels like there’s no more hope, that your voice doesn’t matter,” he said.

Since taking office, Bass has made the removal of street encampments a top priority, arguing that they are unsafe both for unhoused residents and for the neighbors. She said early on that Angelenos will not view her work as a success until their communities are free of tents.

Inside Safe, her signature homeless program, has moved more than 6,200 people into hotels, motels and other interim housing. But by June 30, 43% of them were back on the street, with some getting kicked out and others walking away.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park, left, and residents of Venice thank Mayor Karen Bass in 2023 for overseeing efforts to move more than 100 people into temporary housing from sidewalks in Venice.

Bass, in an interview, said she understands the frustration of people who live near the encampments. She said she hopes to overhaul the city’s approach to the crisis in the coming months by securing greater control over services such as medical care, addiction treatment and case management.

At the same time, she contends that her administration has made major strides, keeping about 80% of the locations visited by Inside Safe free of tents in recent weeks.

“Inside Safe has been a success in terms of getting people off the streets and clearing encampments,” Bass said. “What Inside Safe has not been able to do is reach the scale that is needed.”

Bass said Inside Safe has conducted 137 encampment operations so far, when many more are needed. To expand the program’s reach, the city will need to move away from expensive hotels and motels and toward high-quality homeless shelters, the mayor said.

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1. A man sits with his belongings on Cahuenga Boulevard under the 101 freeway in Hollywood. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times) 2. A torn copy of a notice announcing a cleanup of homeless encampments hangs from a stop sign along Grand Avenue at 51st Street in South Los Angeles. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The repopulation issues have not been limited to the 110 corridor. By December, the end of Bass’ third year, 23 Inside Safe areas across the city — about a fifth of the total at that time — had received at least five visits from the mayor’s outreach team, records show.

Inside Safe went to a handful of streets just east of MacArthur Park 10 times over two years. In Hollywood, around Franklin and Argyle avenues, the program conducted eight operations over 18 months.

By the fourth quarter of 2025, 80% of Inside Safe encampment operations — 36 out of 45 — involved areas that had repopulated, records show. Nine were new to the program.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against Bass, said Inside Safe is ineffective and too expensive, forcing taxpayers to pay a premium to “shuffle people around rather than get them housed for good.”

“When 40% of the people who participated in the program return to homelessness, and some locations need repeat outreach visits five, 10, even 25 times, it tells us that something is wrong,” she said in a statement.

Bass and her team said many of the most problem-plagued Inside Safe locations are at freeway overpasses, which are attractive to homeless people because they provide shelter from scorching summer sun and the winter’s pouring rain. Freeways and industrial areas are also popular because they provide some degree of privacy, they said.

In some cases, people move to an Inside Safe location hoping to be offered housing, just as previous residents were, Bass said.

In other cases, she said, people have returned to the street because they need intensive care, such as a psychiatric bed. Those beds, which are provided by L.A. County, are not always available, Bass said.

Estela Lopez, head of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which represents businesses in Skid Row, said repopulation happens for a simple reason: a lack of enforcement. Once an encampment is cleared and people are moved indoors, police should be allowed to enforce city laws and make sure an area stays clear, she said.

A pedestrian walks into the street to get around a homeless encampment on Alameda Street. The Inside Safe program went to that area 12 times over a single year.

Lopez said she regularly receives complaints about a row of encampments on Alameda Street between 4th and 6th streets. Inside Safe visited that two-block stretch 12 times last year, records show.

Last month, the area had about a dozen tents, which forced pedestrians to leave the sidewalk and walk on Alameda, where large trucks travel to and from nearby industrial businesses.

Lopez offered another reason that homeless people keep coming back.

“That’s where the drugs are,” she said. “It’s Skid Row, and Skid Row is where the drugs are, and has the fewest consequences for open-air drug use and sales.”

Bass’ first Inside Safe operation, more than three years ago, hit a stretch of Cahuenga Boulevard under the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, an area represented by Raman.

Inside Safe went to Cahuenga and the 101 six times over 18 months, according to the city’s records. Two blocks south, the program made five separate visits to Franklin and Cahuenga.

Frank Gordon said that he and his girlfriend lived in an RV on Cahuenga next to the 101 during the COVID era, when the streets were lined with encampments. Outreach workers eventually moved them into the Stuart Hotel in Westlake, he said.

From there, the couple relocated to the Highland Gardens, a hotel in Raman’s district converted into homeless housing. Gordon said they left the facility after one of their rooms was destroyed in a fire, going to yet another interim housing site.

Last month, they were back at Cahuenga and the 101. He called it “familiar ground.”

Sanitation crews remove belongings from a homeless encampment during an Inside Safe operation on Laurel Canyon Blvd. in North Hollywood in March.

Kevin Paz, who has been sleeping on the 51st Street overpass in South L.A., said he used to live a few blocks away. He still has friends in the area, including high school classmates.

“It made more sense to stay here than to live anywhere else,” he said.

Seated on the overpass on a swelteringly hot day, the 32-year-old said he picked his particular strip of sidewalk for the shade it gets from the elevated 110 Freeway carpool lane. He said he would accept a motel room if offered one.

“Honestly, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Hey, I wanna go live on that street,’” he said.

Bass’ team has highlighted the scores of locations where encampments have not returned. They pointed to the success of an Inside Safe operation at 6th and Fairfax, where the sidewalk was later narrowed and new landscaping was planted, making it difficult to camp there.

West of downtown, streets and sidewalks also remain clear around Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, where 48 people were brought indoors in April 2025. To keep people from living in their cars at that location, city crews turned a stretch of Washington Boulevard into a no-parking zone, Bass’ team said.

Even some places that had severe repopulation issues are now clear of tents.

In Harbor City, Inside Safe went to the same intersection a dozen times between 2023 and 2025. That location has been free of encampments for 17 months, said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who represents the area.

McOsker credited the mayor’s team, as well as his staff, for going to the location over and over to offer interim housing to new arrivals. He also asked a group that delivers glass pipes and clean hypodermic needles to relocate, saying the service was attracting newcomers to an area that had been cleared.

In Baldwin Hills, Inside Safe workers went to Jim Gilliam Park 14 times over three years. Last week, encampments no longer occupied the grassy area around the tennis courts on La Brea Avenue or the sidewalks along the nearby Michelle and Barack Obama Sports Complex.

Johnnie Raines III, who serves on the local neighborhood council, knows some of the people Inside Safe brought indoors. He said the program has been “life-changing” for them.

Still, Raines, 79, has no illusions about the challenges the city faces.

“If you house these three people that are in this space today, three more will show up,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that you were not successful in housing the first three people. That just means that three more people come.”

Elmer Roldan, who lives in South Los Angeles, points out the spot where an encampment burned on Grand Avenue near 54th Street.

In the neighborhoods that abut the 110 in South L.A., some residents have lost patience.

Elmer Roldan, who lives on 55th Street, said some of his homeless neighbors have been causing fires — sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. Earlier this year, he called 911 after seeing a man set fire to vines hanging from the freeway’s sound wall.

Roldan, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in June, said he sees plenty of people living in their vehicles, but fewer tents. Still, he said, it’s been demoralizing to have so many come back.

“I certainly don’t want it to get worse,” he said.

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

Mayor Karen Bass said Thursday that the LAPD should stop working with Flock Safety, warning that the company, which operates AI-enabled license plate readers that allow authorities to monitor vehicles around the city, had lost public trust.

In her most forceful comments to date on the topic, Bass said while she supports license plate reading technology generally as a tool for law enforcement, Flock had “lost the trust of Angelenos and residents across the country, especially in immigrant communities targeted by the federal administration.”

“There are many companies that provide this technology to cities nationwide,” Bass said in a statement. “The LAPD needs to identify another company that doesn’t share data.”

LAPD officials have said Flock’s technology enables investigators to solve crimes, helping to find vehicles that have been reported stolen or linked to suspects. Last month, the department announced it was pausing its relationship with Flock, but police officials later said they were in the process of negotiating a new deal with the company that would include more data sharing and collection safeguards.

Dozens of mostly smaller cities have deactivated their Flock cameras or ended their contracts with the company over concerns that it provides data to the Trump administration that can be used to track down immigrants for deportation.

Bass joined the chorus of activists and local officials calling for the LAPD to end its relationship with the company outright.

Her opponent in the November mayoral election, Nithya Raman, said last week on the social media platform X that the city should “cut ties with Flock Safety.”

“Cities across the country are canceling their Flock contracts over the risks its license plate readers pose to privacy, civil liberties, and immigrant communities,” Raman’s post read.

Last month, Bass signed an ordinance that prohibits city personnel from providing anyone outside local government access to data that can be used to determine someone’s immigration status.

A recent Washington Post report uncovered at least 50 instances nationwide in which law enforcement officials were accused of misusing their access to the cameras, largely to stalk former romantic partners or citizens.

A report issued last month by the LAPD inspector general’s office found numerous “limitations” in the department’s existing agreements with its three plate reader vendors — Flock, Axon and Motorola — including a lack of clear language about how long the data are retained and how they are shared with third parties or other law enforcement agencies.

The inspector general recommended that the department update its current license plate reader contracts to address data security and privacy concerns, conduct regular audits and develop standardized rules for traffic stops based on plate reader hits.

Flock has said its customers decide who can access data from their cameras. The company said it doesn’t have contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, adding that has taken other steps to assuage public concern, such as barring federal agencies from its lookup tools and restricting immigration-related searches to ensure compliance with laws in California, Washington and other states.

In an interview with ABC7 last month, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company had to “tighten up the police and make sure everyone’s aligned and then turn it back on. He said the company retains the data from its plate readers for only 30 days and denied that its cameras employ facial recognition software as some of its critics have suggested.

During a virtual listening session hosted last week by the inspector general’s office, dozens of people sounded off on the department’s use of Flock cameras.

Some speakers, mostly from the fire-ravaged community of Pacific Palisades, supported the use of cameras to deter burglars who have repeatedly hit homes and construction sites in the area.

Jennifer Wolfe, who identified herself as a teacher in Altadena, another community devastated by the 2025 wildfires, urged Flock’s supporters to consider how “surveillance systems can grow far beyond their intended purpose.”

Locating stolen cars is important, she said, but people should be more concerned by this newfound and unchecked ability for the government to collect “vastly more information, with far less effort.”

Aug. 5 (UPI) — Social media platform X said it was challenging a Turkish court order to restrict access to the official presidential candidacy office account of jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

X’s global government affairs team said in a Tuesday statement that the order requires the platform to block the account in Turkey while leaving it accessible to the rest of the world.

“Although Turkey’s laws force us to comply with the order, we are challenging the order in court and, in the spirit of full transparency, are sharing the court order,” the team said, adding that it is challenging the order “because we believe keeping the platform accessible in Turkey is vital to supporting freedom of expression and access to information.”

Not complying with the order could trigger “severe sanctions,” according to X, including throttling the entire platform in Turkey.

According to the order shared by X, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office was investigating allegations of of public disseminating misleading information.

“As a result of open-source research, it was determined that the account identified below had shared content alleged to constitute the offense under investigation and that the content was of a nature capable of disturbing public peace,” the document said. The content in question was not specified.

Though the election is not scheduled until 2028, Imamoglu is widely seen as the main political rival of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian president, who has been in office for nearly 12 years, after previously serving as prime minister for 11 years.

Imamoglu’s presidential candidacy office X account was created in November 2025 and has more than 225,700 followers.

Access to his personal account, which has more than 9.4 million followers, was restricted in May 2025.

Turkish authorities detained Imamoglu and more than 100 people on March 19, 2025. He was formally arrested and remanded in custody four days later on suspicion of unlawfully recording personal data, accepting bribes, rigging tenders conducted by public institutions and establishing an organization for the purpose of committing crimes.

Prosecutors allege that an organization led by Imamoglu defrauded public institutions of about $3.9 billion since 2015. If convicted, he faces 1,929 years in prison.

Imamoglu and his Republican People’s Party have denied the allegations.

Human Rights Watch has described his initial detention as “a politically motivated move to stifle lawful political activities.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered city agencies on Friday to delay the processing of rebuilding permits for the Lineage burned-out cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights until regulators have found ways to subject the project to strict environmental review.

In an executive order, Bass said the city’s planning and building and safety departments must also determine whether the application to rebuild the Lineage facility — which was destroyed in June, leaving behind an estimated 85 million tons of smelly, rotting food — should be subjected to a lengthy “discretionary review” process.

The mayor also asked the council to approve a moratorium on large cold storage facilities in proximity to residential neighborhoods and sensitive uses, such as parks and schools.

The moratorium, depending on the actions of the City Council, can be kept in place for up to two years, according to the mayor’s team.

Clean-up continues at the Lineage cold storage warehouse on Friday in Boyle Heights.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“They shouldn’t even think about rebuilding until they’ve cleaned up the mess they’ve created,” Bass said at a Friday news conference. “This is why I am directing city departments to put their plans up on a shelf while a thorough investigation of the property and any future use is conducted.”

Bass stood in front of a display that accused Lineage of refusing to provide sufficient support to help nearby residents relocate to other parts of the city. The display also said the company had refused to address unsanitary conditions, including odors and the spread of flies and rodents into nearby properties.

Bass’ team said 3,800 complaints about Lineage have been lodged with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which has issued 19 violation notices to the company.

The city and county secured $1.6 million for emergency housing relocation through Airbnb and housing nonprofits, sheltering more than 1,300 residents and hundreds of pets. Bass said Lineage provided only $100,000 for those efforts.

“That’s less than 7% of what we’ve provided,” she said Friday.

Silvia Corona joins Boyle Heights residents to voice her frustration during a rally Friday demanding Lineage permanently shut down the facility and leave Boyle Heights.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

In a series of statements posted to Lineage’s website Thursday and Friday, the company said it disagrees with the characterization of its cleanup efforts, and company officials said they submit daily reports to authorities and regulators and post frequent updates online.

“Since gaining full access to the site on the evening of July 6, Lineage has removed more than 60% of food waste and continues to execute the fastest and safest possible cleanup,” the company said. “Lineage has been going door-to-door to the nearly 800 households closest to the warehouse — those designated by the city and county as closest to the site.”

In doing so, the company maintains that it has provided hundreds of air purifiers, air conditioning units, N95 masks, drinking water, grocery vouchers, cash assistance and relocation support to 85% of those households.

Amid this week’s recovery efforts, Lineage representatives filed permits with the city to rebuild the warehouse to its “pre-fire condition” Monday. The move drew swift condemnation from locals and Bass, who decried the application as “a slap in the face” to Boyle Heights families.

Bass said the Friday directive will not be her last executive order mobilizing resources for Boyle Heights following the fire.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said she felt like she “was in a war zone,” after visiting the warehouse site.

Solis said that she was planning to present a motion at a Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting aimed at increasing consequences for businesses that commit public health violations, and expanding support for affected residents.

The county is also taking steps to expand access to landfills beyond normal operating hours to allow Lineage to remove noxious debris around the clock.

“We know that the money is going to run out in terms of Airbnb and providing assistance,” Solis said. “That has to come in right away.”

A day earlier, city officials announced that cleanup efforts at the Lineage cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights were nearing the halfway mark, six weeks after a fire at the depot left millions of pounds of rotting food to pollute the Los Angeles neighborhood.

The city’s focus is shifting from providing immediate relief to removing noxious debris, reducing foul odors and tainted air, and putting affected residents into interim housing, said Jon Brown, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department.

Lineage states the fire started during rooftop solar testing by subcontractor Altus Power. Altus has denied responsibility, stating that the cause is undetermined and accusing Lineage of finger-pointing instead of focusing on community relief.

Residents served Lineage a lawsuit seeking medical damages, noting a similar rooftop solar fire occurred at the facility in 2024.

Bass clarified that the investigation into who is responsible for the fire is still underway, but said Lineage needs to answer for what followed. She accused the company of failing to properly disclose that meat products were stored at the site to begin with, and said the company has been too slow to remove the waste.

She remains skeptical that she’ll ever allow the company to operate in Los Angeles in the future.

“It would be very hard for me to imagine the day that we would welcome Lineage back,” Bass told a Times reporter Friday.

Solis and Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado concurred with the mayor’s assessment, with Jurado going as far as to say she definitely” [wants] to stop any rebuilding permit” for Lineage.

As the mayor’s news conference came to an end, Boyle Heights residents rallied outside the Lineage warehouse facility, briefly shutting down a stretch of Olympic Boulevard just north of the disaster site.

Protesters demanded Lineage’s unconditional removal from the community and said that aid from the city, county and local nonprofit organizations has dried up.

“We’re asking for Lineage to leave our community now and forever,” Estuardo Mazariegos, a candidate for City Council District 9, said at the rally.

At the protests, dozens chanted slogans, including “afuera Lineage! (Lineage out)” and toted signs reading “clean water over profits” and “you’re poisoning us.”

Many at the rally called for Lineage to pay every bill that comes out of the crisis, including waste remediation, interim housing costs and lofty medical bills. Emergency room visits for smoke inhalation and throat pain spiked following the first days of the fire, and residents want the company held financially responsible.

Antonia Montes, an area resident, said she was relieved that Bass was stepping up, but more needs to be done.

“I’m glad she’s now saying that she doesn’t want them here, but we’re saying, ‘what’s the plan to make sure they’re not here?’ ” Montes said. “The next step is to stop it right there and not let them renew their permit and make sure they’re gone.”

July 30 (UPI) — Seattle Police Department Chief Shon Barnes resigned on Thursday, as city officials have come under criticism following a mass shooting Sunday at the Bite of Seattle food festival that left three people dead and four others wounded.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she had accepted Barnes’ resignation and said he “served this department and this city with dedication.”

“I share Chief Barnes’ hope that we can return our focus to addressing youth gun violence and ensuring that every family can feel safe in their neighborhood and across the city,” Wilson said in a Thursday afternoon press release.

His exit comes as city officials face mounting criticism over their response to the shooting, particularly the lack of communication with the public in its immediate aftermath. Barnes also faced criticism for being out of town when the shooting occurred, renewing scrutiny of how frequently he was away from Seattle.

In a statement issued to local media by his attorney, Barnes said Wilson had requested his resignation on Wednesday. Though he was “surprised” by the request, he believed that the city should be focused on investigating thee shooting, securing justice for the victims and helping the community heal.

“I want to emphasize that it has been one of the greatest honors to lead the Seattle Police Department and to serve the citizens of the City of Seattle,” he said.

Deputy Chief Andre Sayles has been named interim chief, according to the mayor’s office. Wilson said a thorough search will be conducted to find a permanent replacement.

In a recorded statement published to social media later Thursday, Wilson addressed criticism of the city’s lack of communication with the public, stating that a review “revealed real gaps.”

“Information could and should have gone out much faster through social media, the emergency alert system, the SPD blotter and-or an off-site press conference,” she said.

“The public should have heard sooner about outstanding suspects and the status of the Seattle Center campus.”

She vowed her office would work with the police department ensure that, if a similar situation arose again, information would released more quickly.

She acknowledged that she had been wrong to defend the city’s decision not to use its emergency system, saying the review revealed a miscommunication between departments that resulted in no alert being issued. She also cited a miscommunication between her office and the police department over the timing of a Sunday night press conference.

Following the shooting, SDP issued a statement on its social media platform. No further information was released by the department until a late-night press conference. The Seattle Fire Department provided UPI with an update on the shooting.

“What I did not fully understand in that moment was how little information had reached the public or the press since the incident began at 6 p.m.,” she said.

“Had I known that, I would have pushed for an immediate briefing, rather than waiting for a press conference to be organized.”

MyNorthwest, KING 5 and Fox 13 Seattle, citing unnamed sources, had earlier reported that Barnes had been dismissed.

Barnes, 51, was reportedly not in Seattle when the shooting took place. During a press conference on Monday, reporter Connor Nash of The South Seattle Emerald asked Barnes about reports that he is often out of town, leading to a heated confrontation.

“I don’t have to tell you where I go,” Barnes responded. “I have been working as hard as I can for this city from the day I got here. Do you got that?”

Barnes was at the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Conference in Dallas on Sunday when the shooting took place, he said.

Barnes was scheduled to give an interview with KING 5 on Wednesday but the interview was canceled about 30 minutes before it was set to begin.

Three people were killed and four others were wounded, including a 2-year-old, during the shooting at the food festival. Police say it was a targeted, gang-related shooting.

A 15-year-old was arrested at the scene. A 19-year-old suspected to have been involved in the shooting was among those killed. The 15-year-old was charged on Wednesday with one count each of assault in the first degree with a firearm enhancement and unlawful possession of a firearm in the second degree.

The Seattle Police Department has published Barnes’ 2026 schedule to date, showing four trips to Chicago and some trips to conferences.

Barnes was appointed Seattle’s police chief in 2024 by then-Mayor Bruce Harrell. Wilson retained Barnes when she became mayor on Jan. 1. He was the police chief in Madison, Wis., from 2021 until taking the position in Seattle.

Barnes has overseen reductions in violent crime during his tenures in Madison and Seattle.

Prior to Sunday’s shooting at the food festival, there had been 15 homicides recorded in Seattle. The city also recorded its first June since 1970 without a homicide. Homicides have decreased in Seattle each year since recording 74 in 2023.

Barnes also oversaw an increase in female representation during his tenure with the Madison Police Department. The rate of female staff increased to 28%.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass, seized on significant decreases in street homelessness in her district Friday while blasting increases citywide.

Street homelessness — people living outdoors or in their vehicles — went down by 49% in Raman’s district compared to the previous year, she said at a press conference Friday.

Citywide, street homelessness increased nearly 8%, while overall homelessness, which includes those living in shelters and other temporary facilities, increased 3.4%, according to numbers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s January point-in-time count that were released Friday.

The contrast between her district and the city overall offered Raman an angle to present herself as more effectively handling the homelessness crisis than Bass.

An estimated 45,194 homeless people live in the city, with about 36% of them in shelters, according to LAHSA.

“Far fewer people living outside. Far more people indoors,” Raman, who has served on the council since 2020 and is chair of the City Council’s housing and homelessness committee, said at the press conference. “As mayor, that is the approach, and the results, that I want to deliver citywide.”

The numbers across the city were a setback for Bass, who has made homelessness one of her signature issues and previously touted two straight years of drops in street homelessness.

Raman cited her office’s homelessness team and their “aggressive interventionist” approach as reasons her district — which extends from Los Feliz and Silver Lake into Studio City, Sherman Oaks and other parts of the San Fernando Valley — did not suffer the same increases as other parts of the city.

She said her team is very familiar with homeless individuals in the district and knows many by name. The team tracks homeless encampments on a map and makes sure that empty shelter beds are filled, she said.

Bass’ campaign said Raman was attacking the mayor’s Inside Safe program, which moves homeless people from the streets to shelter and motel beds, at the same time that it contributed to the decreases in her district.

Raman has critiqued Inside Safe as too costly and insufficiently transparent.

“Nithya Raman is taking credit for the results of Inside Safe while campaigning against it,” Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign, said in a statement. “While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect.”

Raman responded to those critiques at her press conference, saying that her district only had three Inside Safe operations over the past four years — fewer than some other districts.

She deflected when asked Friday about her responsibility for citywide homelessness, as chair of the city’s housing and homelessness committee.

“Council can pass legislation … move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes,” she said.

Citywide, Inside Safe has moved more than 6,000 people into hotels, motels and other types of interim housing since Bass took office in December 2022. But by May 31, 41% of those people had returned to homelessness, according to LAHSA figures collected separately from this year’s homeless count.

Bass attributed the citywide homelessness increases in part to funding cuts by the state and federal government. She also said the county has not provided adequate mental health or substance counseling services.

“This crisis was ignored by city leaders for decades, it’s only now that we’ve seen a historic decline,” she said in a statement Thursday. “I will never stop fighting until we end street homelessness, because no Angeleno should be sleeping on the street.”

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

Mayor Karen Bass’ press relations office communicates through WhatsApp messages that auto-delete every 24 hours, potentially shielding the messages from public records requests, according to three sources familiar with the office.

The press office is under scrutiny over its use of an unpaid consultant as a spokesperson for the first half of the year. Just weeks after the consultant, Yusef Robb, ceased working as a spokesperson for the city, he took a job doing crisis communications for Lineage, whose cold food storage facility in Boyle Heights caught fire last month, spreading smoke and foul odors. Robb continued to work for Bass as an informal advisor until The Times and other outlets reported his dual roles.

Even though he was no longer a spokesperson, Robb remained in several WhatsApp group channels with mayoral press staffers, all set to auto-delete, until at least a week after he started working for Lineage, said two sources, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. L.A. Material first reported Robb’s presence in the channels.

The Times has filed a public records request for all messages that Robb received or sent to the mayor or her press office between June 1 and July 10, including WhatsApp messages. The city administrative code requires records to be retained for at least two years.

The Bass administration declined to comment on the press office’s use of disappearing messages on WhatsApp.

Bass herself has also communicated through disappearing messages.

In response to a public records request from The Times for Bass’ texts in the aftermath of the January 2025 Palisades fire, her office initially declined to turn over any messages. City lawyer David Michaelson told The Times that “texts are ephemeral types of electronic communication” that aren’t subject to the city record retention requirement.

He also said Bass’ phone was “set not to save text messages.”

The city ultimately recovered more than 100 messages to and from Bass during that period and released them to The Times.

The Times still sued the city, alleging that it unlawfully withheld and deleted the mayor’s text messages and other public records from the catastrophic wildfire.

“Their contention is they don’t have to retain them, and our contention is they do,” said Kelly Aviles, outside counsel for The Times in the lawsuit, in an interview Thursday.

In a court filing, attorneys representing the city argued that keeping work-related messages for up to two years was “absurdly impractical.”

“The Times’ proposed rule requires a degree of intrusion into City employees’ personal sphere that is, at the very least, offensive if not violative of California and federal constitutional rights,” wrote Reuben Camper Cahn, an attorney for the city.

In the past, some city employees communicated with each other each other through Google Chat messages that auto-deleted after a day.

In January 2025, the city stopped that practice and required that Google Chats be saved “indefinitely.”

Retention of messages has also been an issue in the federal government, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio setting some of his Signal chats to auto-delete.

July 22 (Asia Today) — Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon was fined 10 million won ($6,600) Wednesday after a court found him guilty of having a political supporter pay for opinion polls he commissioned before the 2021 mayoral by-election.

Oh would lose his position as mayor if the sentence is upheld by the Supreme Court. He rejected the ruling and said he would appeal immediately.

The Seoul Central District Court also ordered Oh to forfeit 21 million won ($13,900).

Former Seoul Vice Mayor for Political Affairs Kang Chul-won, who was indicted with Oh, was fined 3 million won ($2,000). Businessman and political supporter Kim Han-jung was fined 5 million won ($3,300).

Prosecutors accused Oh of receiving the results of 10 private opinion polls from political broker Myung Tae-kyun before the April 7, 2021, Seoul mayoral by-election.

They alleged that Oh instructed Kang, then his chief of staff, to have Kim pay about 33 million won ($21,900) in polling costs.

The court found Oh guilty of arranging payment of 21 million won for five polls, including three that were not intended for publication and two that were released publicly.

The court said Oh complained when poll results were unfavorable and sought to delay their release to minimize their negative effect.

“The commissioning and payment of the polls were also connected to an effort to publish and report candidate-commissioned opinion polls prohibited under the Public Official Election Act,” the court said. “The nature of the offense is serious.”

The court said Oh had previously served as Seoul mayor and should have been familiar with the purpose and requirements of the Political Funds Act.

It also said he led the offense but repeatedly attempted to avoid responsibility during the trial by presenting arguments the court found difficult to accept.

Oh disputed the ruling after leaving the courthouse.

“The court found five opinion polls unlawful today, but I cannot accept that conclusion,” Oh told reporters. “The correct decision would have been to find me not guilty on every count.”

Oh said the conviction was based on Myung’s statements and circumstantial evidence rather than direct evidence.

His legal team said in a statement that it regretted the court’s decision to convict Oh without objective evidence.

“It is difficult to accept a conclusion reached by piecing together some of Myung’s exaggerated statements and various circumstances,” the statement said.

The defense said it would file an immediate appeal.

The case is governed by an expedited trial provision requiring a first-trial ruling within six months of indictment and appellate and Supreme Court rulings within three months of the preceding decision.

A final Supreme Court ruling is expected by January at the latest.

— 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=20260722010008156

July 18 (UPI) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mandani on Saturday said his government is reviewing whether it could legally arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over accusations of war crimes.

Netanyahu is expected to visit the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the prime minister’s arrest over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including starvation and attacking a civilian population.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”

Mandani said his legal team is reviewing the city’s options.

“We’re not talking about a personal assessment of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the mayor told The Times. “We’re talking about the International Criminal Court and the fact that they have a warrant out for this prime minister’s arrest, and I think it’s important to talk about the weight that that has as a charge and that also, as the mayor of New York City, I’ll be following the laws of New York City.”

Netanyahu has denied the ICC charges and disputes the court’s jurisdiction.

In a previous interview, the prime minister claimed without evidence that Mandani is a Hamas supporter.

“He is with the terror actors,” he told WABC. “I think, secretly, he hates America.”

Michael Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., called Mandani’s comments “pure political theater.”

“The U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute that underlies the ICC,” he wrote on X, adding, “The U.N. Headquarters Agreement grants diplomatic protections to visiting heads of government.”

An informal advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass handled communications for her office for free while simultaneously working on a three-year contract with Los Angeles World Airports worth nearly $600,000.

Yusef Robb, who runs the firm tk/Communications, was an unpaid spokesperson and advisor for Bass from February through the beginning of June.

On June 19, Robb began working for Lineage Logistics, whose cold food storage facility in Boyle Heights burned for more than a week last month. He continued to serve as an unpaid, unofficial advisor to the mayor, though no longer as a spokesperson, until The Times and other outlets reported on his work for Lineage on Saturday.

Robb said the airport contract was unrelated to his work for the mayor. But a legal expert said the arrangement raises questions about whether his free labor was a gift to the mayor and whether working for the city and private clients creates conflicts of interest.

“This was done through a transparent and public competitive bidding process,” Robb said in an email to The Times. “I provide communications support and training.”

The Bass administration said Robb’s unpaid assistance was “for the benefit of the city. It’s not a gift.”

In 2024, Robb signed the contract with Los Angeles World Airports, or LAWA — the city department that operates Los Angeles International Airport and the Van Nuys Airport — for $450,000 over three years.

He won the contract, which involved “executive media training” as well as “crisis communications,” over 10 other firms. It was updated in April to include additional work for $137,500.

A report from LAWA in support of the contract update said that “executive management at LAWA have benefited from successful, professional media training as well as support for LAWA crisis communications and response.”

Because tk/Communications has subcontracted to at least two other companies, Robb said his firm has earned no more than $315,000 over the three-year contract.

“There is no connection between the work Mr. Robb performs for LAWA and the assistance he provides for Mayor Bass’ Office,” said a spokesperson for Bass’ office. Bass is running for reelection against City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The LAWA contract was Robb’s second with the city during the Bass administration. The city paid a total of $75,000 in 2022 and 2023 to Robb’s firm to provide “various communications services related to the start-up of the administration,” according to a contract.

Tk/Communications has worked for government agencies as well as political campaigns and private businesses, including the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the music and entertainment company AEG, according to the company’s website.

“We develop powerful narratives and engagement to accelerate and amplify our clients’ messages, whether they’re grounded in an investment proposal or a political campaign,” the website states. “We author and tell stories that build deep connections and lasting relationships that deliver more than you asked for.”

Robb has worked in and around City Hall for decades. He was a press aide in Mayor Jim Hahn’s administration, then worked for Eric Garcetti when Garcetti was a city council member and then mayor. He left Garcetti’s office in 2015.

Robb said he has provided “unpaid help to all sorts of people and businesses, to advance criminal justice reform, organize community movements, or just to find the right words.”

“I feel it’s important to help the city if I can,” he said.

Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and former president of the city’s Ethics Commission, said the airport contract shows how valuable Robb’s labor is, raising the question of whether he is providing a gift to Bass by working for her for free.

Another concern for the public, Levinson said, is that Robb is working for Bass at the same time that he has other clients and could potentially use his position at City Hall to advance those clients’ interests. His work for Bass could also make him more desirable for clients who believe he has the mayor’s ear, she said.

“What we’re worried about is undue influence, preferential access and backroom deals that benefit certain people, as opposed to the public,” said Levinson. “We don’t want public officials serving two masters.”

Still, Levinson said she does not believe that Bass has violated any laws by using Robb pro bono.

“This is an unusual setup,” she said. “That does not mean it’s illegal.”

A top spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass left her administration Monday after a brief tenure, joining a growing list of communications aides who have departed over the past nine months.

Kolby Lee, who started as Bass’ director of communications in February, said he was resigning to spend time with family and loved ones.

“I’m very grateful to Mayor Bass for giving me the opportunity to be part of her team and serve the people of Los Angeles,” Lee said in a statement.

Bass’ communications office said in a statement to The Times, “We thank Kolby for his contribution to the office and wish him and his family well.” Bass is running for reelection against City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The departures began in October, when Zach Seidl, Bass’ longtime deputy mayor of communications, left for the private sector.

Press secretary Clara Karger left in January after working for the mayor for nearly three years.

Bass then brought on Amanda Crumley to replace Seidl. But Crumley lasted little more than a month, leaving in March.

Lee started as communications director shortly before Crumley’s departure, serving for about five months.

During Lee’s time in the administration, Bass was also receiving pro bono communications help from Yusef Robb, an outside consultant who worked on her 2022 campaign.

Robb was not paid by the city for his work and served in an unofficial role providing comments on important issues, including Bass’ involvement in damage control surrounding the 2025 Palisades fire.

Lee provided comment to The Times in a story published Saturday about Robb’s work for the Bass administration at the same time that he is a crisis communications consultant for Lineage Logistics, the company whose Boyle Heights warehouse erupted in flames last month, inundating the area with toxic smoke and rotting food odors.

Emergency crews are searching for survivors after a Russian air strike on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia killed at least one person and injured 29, including two children. The city’s mayor says Russian troops have advanced to just over 20 kilometres away.